Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

'So this is how it ends for me—stuck on a crappy space shuttle with a moron with delusions of grandeur, trying to stop the backstabbing Second in Command of an intergalactic band of terrorists. At least it's not a maths class? Very realistically, it could have been maths class. In fact, it almost was maths class.'

In a extremely short period of time (about thirty hours, all told) it had been revealed to mankind that they did not stand isolated in the infinite cosmos, that other beings did indeed lurk behind the light of the endless stars, who were themselves watching in enduring amusement. These revelations were the stuff of antique stories, superstitions rooted at the heart of human culture—spaceships, and aliens, and foreign worlds beyond description. Mankind stared into the uncanny vastness of the abyss and was at last granted the jarring revelation that it was not merely a void but a pupil.

All of this sounds considerably less impressive if one takes in to account that 'mankind' in this particular circumstance really means 'four deeply confused children', and the aliens they discovered were just three different breeds of untenable git who all proceeded to pick fights with said children. 

Fights they lost. All three of them. To children.

Or rather, to a single child. (This is not better.)

Phil Eggtree—saviour of Earth, puzzle extraordinaire, all round wise-guy, and C-grade student—was understandably irritated by the fresh hell of terrible circumstances being draped ceremonially about his head. The adulation of a heroes' welcome was being pushed incrementally further away from him, a cosmic cat paw edging his victory ever nearer to the edge of the table. 

For the last half-hour, Phil had been asking the all important questions of 'what the hell happened to my life?' and 'where did I go wrong?', and for the life of him he couldn't put his finger on it. He kept running through the sequence of events, as though, at any moment, some key detail would fall out and make the whole thing make sense.

First, he had escaped school—a stunning move to make on an egregiously slow Thursday with only the results of a failed spelling test to look forwards to. Then... well, he did it again, a couple more times after that. Several times. Perhaps even a lot. Perhaps he escaped so many schools so many times it felt like the reason he was alive at all.

Ultimately, he escaped school so brilliantly, he ended up aboard a spaceship, where an evil telepath dictator had, for reasons unknown, decided dealing with disobedient children was a productive use of his time—not a normal punishment for truancy, but he'd dealt with it admirably if he did say so himself. What had happened after that? He'd saved his friends. He'd killed a man. He escaped again. 

Then, because things apparently just weren't weird enough, they were all captured by budget Men In Black and locked up in a cryptozoologist's wet dream. He escaped again. And, after all that struggle, all that strife, where did he end up? In fucking school. With a second evil alien, presumably to ensure he wasn't getting bored.

Quiz had been far less stressful to defeat that Viz had been, which was something of a relief to Phil, who had spent the hours wandering familiar corridors taunted by the half-remembered, philosophical image of a snake eating its own tail. None if it made sense—none of it should have happened at all. He had no idea how to make it stop happening.

Case in point: Now.

Phil glared across the divide at his latest tribulation; a third evil alien. The endless cavalcade of silly buggers was becoming... wearing. In an ideal world, this would not have happened. In an even incrementally kind world, it would at least be over quickly and easily.

Alas, the world is not kind at all. In came Quiz, with absolutely shocking timing and a spoonful of terrible news:

"What do you mean we don't have weapons?" Phil demanded. This, he thought, was the sort of thing that should have been discussed before coming all this way to challenge the a homicidal alien he suspected was likely at least a little unstable.

Certainly, a lack of firearms was something Quiz should have considered before placing them right in front of an actual death ray. They were hovering right in front of the massive V.I.Z.ion ship, a prime target for the frigid plasma a mere button press away from discharging; Diz wouldn't even need to aim.

Made slightly indistinct by two layers of space-proof glass, the mutinous pilot stood in his place at the helm and frowned at them, his distant incredulity palpable. Phil gave him a half-hearted wave, feeling a need to impress to Diz that this was not his idea; he wasn't a fan of senseless audacity either, but Quiz didn't seem to have any other plan...

... Perhaps, before coming up here, he should have made sure Quiz had a plan.

Undeterred by the obvious perils of their situation, Quiz tapped something into a control panel. Not being someone with a great deal of knowledge on the inner machinations of spaceships, Phil could only say that the efficient bleeps sounded professional enough, and that seemed to be the best Quiz could manage.

"This ship was built to transport the components for the death ray," Quiz explained. "We have three battle ships: that one about to vaporise us is Diz's; you, um... well you blew Viz's up; and the last one is still aboard the mothership where you and your friends woke up. It's also not mine." 

When he stopped without reaching a useful conclusion, Phil gave in to temptation and let his eyebrow achieve its dreams of climbing high enough up his forehead to touch his nonexistent hairline. Oblivious, the alien continued tapping at the controls with an air of great determination; the lights behind the buttons were growing... paler, dimmer in the harsh face of the death ray's violent effulgence. It was getting brighter outside, frost creeping across the viewport window. Slight concern and not so slight exasperation morphed to a begrudging sense of anxiety in Phil's more-than-slightly unsettled blood.

"Soooo... I hate to press you Quiz but this is kind of an important question: what are we gonna do?"

Opening communication comms...

"We're going to talk to him."

Begrudging anxiety suffered a stroke and was replaced with mild panic. Maybe he would have been better off in maths class.

"Close communication comms. Close, Alphimn rot you! Quiz, what's the meaning of this?" Diz's already-nasal voice was tinny and distant over the transmitter, like a horde of irritable wasps that had somehow learnt the alphabet, a staticky buzz blurring the consonants. Phil would never claim to be an expert (Phil was eleven years old) but he had a general impression that radio transmitters were probably supposed to be more... functional. The mechanical mangling of Diz's voice was the sort of sound that gave nails-down-a-blackboard and squeaky-wet-rubber-gloves a run for their money.

"We need to talk Diz." Very suddenly and far too late, Quiz seemed to have realised how horrible his plan was. He had gone rather pale, all sixteen fingers quivering at the console. "I've temporarily overridden your controls."

"Why?"

"... Because... we need to... talk? You seem..." Quiz swallowed, eyeing the distant figure apprehensively and discarding some illustrative adjectives. "Upset."

Diz's eye twitched.

"You're in my way. Move."

"... I thought we all agreed we wouldn't destroy Earth..." Quiz was doing his utmost to be a voice of reason in a situation that stridently Did Not Want One. It was admirable, if you admire pointless heroics.

"Plans change Quiz! I've changed the plan. Learn when to stop meddling, please, before I get it in to my head to teach you myself!" From the way Quiz flinched, Phil could guess that lessons with Diz would be of the unpleasant and permanent variety.

Seeing as there didn't seem to be much he could add to the argument, Phil cast somewhat dismally about the cramped shuttle for something else to occupy himself with in the increasingly scant minutes that would surely precede his demise. There weren't many options, which, when considering one's last acts, is a shame. With all the attentiveness of his high-school-self doodling in class, he began to fiddle with some buttons he hoped did nothing important. Elsewhere, the argument continued; dispassionately, Phil noted that Diz and Quiz quarrelled in the overlapping, unproductive manner of people who do so often, so familiar with the motions of fighting each other they have no interest in what the other is actually saying. Oh well—he wasn't their therapist; he was here for buttons.

Alas, like everything else that day, the buttons betrayed him. The red ones looked inexplicably like Viz (not an aspirational visage by any means) and the green ones were far too reminiscent of Diz, who was trying to kill everyone. The blue button had the potential to elevate the situation but fell tragically in to the crater sized pitfall that was having any sort of relation to Quiz, Patron Saint of Useless Things. There were no other colours. 

Phil let his shoulders slump. 'Third evil alien. Deadly orbital laser. No plan. No weapons. Disappointing buttons... this plan has it all...' 

Meanwhile, Quiz was pleading fruitlessly with Diz, leaning over the speaker as though hoping to glimpse his old comrade somewhere amid the harsh words and harsher static.

"This is ridiculous!" He cried, puncturing Phil's inattentive bubble. "Why change the plan? What changed?!"

"We were wrong; there's nothing here worth sparing." Diz's voice was toneless and sour as bottled lemon juice. "That planet declared its intentions clearly enough when it attempted to capture me. They ensnared me in some military base like a common experiment."

Beside him, Phil saw Quiz flinch guiltily and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose; why couldn't Quiz's dumbass takeover have been constrained to a measly elementary school? Why did he have to get Diz involved? Next it was gonna come out that Quiz had pissed off Viz's ghost too.

"Surely it wasn't that bad?" The blue alien tried, his wavering little voice deeply unconvincing; Diz's only comment on the matter was a raspy hissing sound like a cat being trodden on. "I don't see why Earth has to die just because... someone hurt you."

"This is precisely your problem, Quiz—you're never ready when things start to head in a direction you don't like. Anyway, you should know by now that it's never just one evil act. If it smells of rot, it's rotten; that's just the way it is. Stop being difficult. I'm going to talk to Viz and you know he'll see things my way, eventually."

Quiz did seem to know this; he looked out into the divide between him and his old friend the way a man who knows nothing about chess looks at the game responsible for his life. Disdain crawled its way across the vacuum from the other ship, the crackling silence over the comm tasting of emptiness, of well-aged scorn. When Diz spoke again, his voice had softened almost imperceptibly, something weary creeping in to the unsettling mania. It wasn't the softness of affection or acceptance, just gently exasperated dismissal, the tone of someone recognising that being angry at their dog for eating their shoes will not miraculously un-eat the shoe.

"Just... just go back to the main ship, Quiz. Put the child back on Earth and go back to where I told you to stay while I finish this. I won't mention your insubordination to Viz. Everything can go back to normal and we'll vanish. Just like we planned." 

Tempting offer though it was (and it was written clearly on the alien's face that this was a tempting offer) Quiz was given no time to consider it before Phil launched in.

"Viz is alive?" Somehow that hadn't registered the first time (then again, Diz seeing ghosts would only be the second most insane thing he'd done that afternoon.) Phil could feel the satisfaction of victory drip, drip, dripping away with caustic glee and a middle-finger salute. 

Diz snorted. Even with the distance, Phil could see the slightly cruel shape of his mouth turning towards a patronising smile; he was torn between indignation and the sensation of dead fingers counting the bones in his spine.

"You really thought you'd won, didn't you?" Diz murmured, eerily gentle, almost pitying but not at all kind. "Well you didn't. Last transmission from the remains of Viz's ship has it that he's on a nearby asteroid. His remote is intact. He will contact me again when he manages to return to the mothership. This whole sequence of events would have played out much more smoothly if someone—" Cue a pointed look at a shuffling Quiz "—Had done the one thing I asked of them, but no matter. Face it Phil, you didn't defeat V.I.Z.ion. You barely scratched us. Everything Quiz had no hand in has gone according to plan."

To understand how Phil felt at that moment, a person would be best advised to envision that feeling of a seemingly solid floor suddenly dropping from beneath them—no warning, no transition phase between 'floor' and 'not floor', only heart-pounding absence. With that same jarring sense of whiplash disillusionment, Phil saw every instance of victory he had scraped thrown into a perspective that rendered it less than worthless. That made it amusing. Something similar to despair took him over, the desire to find someone responsible and shake them until answers fell out.

"Why Diz? Why are you doing this?"

There was no pause between question and answer, and it was that immediacy which stirred unease in Phil's blood, the sense that the alien didn't have to pause and consider the why of destroying a planet. The sense that this answer, this endeavour, was older than him. Beside him, Quiz's eyes unfocused slightly, looking at something beyond the material world of metal, and glass, and luminous dust. He had heard this before; Phil wondered if he'd once asked Diz the same question.

"Because it needs to be done! Because I have seen, time and time again, that evil refuses to recognise itself, refuses to end what it starts, refuses to learn from its mistakes. This universe is imbalanced, Phil, and the only way to save the good is to destroy the impure. I will have peace. I don't care how long it takes or what I have to do to get it." 

There was nothing insane about the way he spoke, nothing unreasonable about the voice saying such horrible things. Phil felt a small shock of fear creep its icy way down his spine. Diz was reminiscent of the extremists and madmen he had seen on television at dream-college. 

"You know who you sound like, right now? This weirdo I saw on TV a few years ago—he wanted to get rid of bits of countries to make them all perfectly circular. Said it would make the world look neater. Guy was a cult leader—it's not a great look."

Suddenly and briefly horrifically deranged, Diz slammed his fist against the dashboard, the impact audible through the transmitter.

"I am a cult leader, Eggtree! I am leader of Project V.I.Z.ion! I will make things right, and there is nothing you can do to stop me!"

Incoming transmission...

"I think you'll find that untrue, Diz." Phil sighed and debated the merits of a dramatic exit via the airlock. The whole gang of quasi-terrorists was back together. Wonderful; frying pan, meet fire.

Viz's grating voice crackled grimly through two sets of transmitters, somehow just as irritated, self-satisfied, and cynical as it had been in person. Quiz was looking less like a confident martyr and more like a child caught in the act of doing something very stupid by the second. Had this whole situation not been Kind Of, Sort Of, Entirely his fault, Phil might have felt sorry for him.

"Beam me on board. We've wasted enough time."

"Yes sir." Moving from his position at the helm, Diz leaned away to input something into a control module to the right. In a low voice clearly meant for Quiz's ears only:

"Last chance Quiz; come back to the ship and we can pretend none of this ever happened." Diz sounded different now, furtively pleading, as though Quiz being out of place had become dangerous. It was a strange, near pitiful contrast to the mad dictator of before, and Phil struggled to reconcile the two sides in his mind. Beside him, Quiz gave a sigh of such unending weariness that it seemed to deflate him; as though the tribulations and stress of these past few days were all that was keeping him together, and without them, he'd simply wither away.

"I'm not moving until you turn the CryoBeam off." It was the first thing he'd sounded certain about. "This isn't something worth killing millions over. Innocent millions... you saw that before."

Before Diz could offer any response, there was a bright, static snap over the comms and a searing flash of blue-white light from the opposing ship. Behind Diz a shadow unfurled. With the same sneering arrogance he had displayed during their first meeting, Viz stalked up to the viewport and smirked down at the Transport Ship with all the disdain of someone watching a worm crawl into their dropped sandwich. Phil wondered if Quiz was familiar with the phrase 'sweating bullets'.

"So this is what you've decided is more important than doing your job, is it Quiz? Playing with the other children? Pathetic. And you—" He turned to Diz. "—I expected better. I told you to take four children to Earth, not disappear entirely."

"I didn't—"

"Enough. I didn't ask for insipid excuses—I asked you to keep things running smoothly and perform one exquisitely simple task. I expect disappoint from Quiz, not you. This day has been such a waste."

Buttons were pretty great; Phil stared in to them and pretended he didn't feel like he was stuck in a friend's house while their parents argued.

"And why is Zone 5.1 complaining about a security breach? We've not used that facility in years. Nothing important could have gotten out, but every five minutes they message me complaining that 'Project V.I.Z.ion Data Retrieval' has been critically compromised. I never ordered a data retrieval, which means either those jelly-brained fools finally got a clue or one of you did something stupid. Well? Diz?" Viz trailed off. He was looking at Diz; everyone, Phil realised, was looking at Diz, who had gone very, very still.

Or rather, almost everyone was looking at Diz; Diz himself was staring directly at Quiz.

There's a moment in every detective film worth its salt where the intrepid investigator, having gathered their clues and followed their leads, stands before the ensemble and reveals the criminal among their number in a lengthy monologue. Never before had Phil considered how it might feel to be the villain in that moment, surrounded by cogs falling in to place, just waiting for the one that would smash your skull. The vastness of space, reduced to a few meters, was not distant enough; he could see the realisation dawn in Diz's eyes, the shock, the slow smoulder of rage.

"You," he said, almost too quietly to hear.

Quiz, ever stalwart, held up under the pressure like a wet piece of bread under an anvil.

"Diz, look, I c-can explain, I-I swear—I d-didn't mean—"

"You." Whatever softness had been in Diz's voice, whatever humanity it had had, was gone. Utterly gone. There was a considering note in it that sounded the way a snake looks when it moves.

"L-look—I didn't th-think it through that w-well I kn-know but—"

"You kidnapped me." Diz's black eyes seemed to burn through the vacuum of space separating them.

"Diz please just—"

"You used that machine to churn my mind to bits." His hands were white knuckled on the ship's wheel. Well, pale green, but the sentiment was both present and terrifying.

"Listen to me! I—"

"You tried to kill us both!" The last was delivered in a harsh scream, effectively silencing Quiz's verbal scrabbling. Phil was looking determinedly at the dashboard, certain that looking up at the enraged alien would provoke some apocalyptic form of judgement.

The silence that fell between them was a deadly, fragile thing made of fractious glass, fraught with the ragged sounds of both Diz and Quiz breathing. The atmosphere closed around them all like damp swaddling; the seething gush of static from the comms, the asthmatic wheeze and groan of systems freezing, the creaking of the vessels as some indeterminate cosmic force started to exert itself against the hulls.

"There had better be a good reason for all this screaming." It wasn't quite a threat; Viz didn't sound quite so sure of himself now.

"I told him!" Diz howled, rounding on his commander, "I said 'stay with the ship, Quiz, I'll go to Earth. Viz will establish contact soon and you need to be here to activate a teleportation device' and what does the imbecile do? Galavants off to Earth, leaving everything up here unguarded! He even took Nitwit, though only Eyes know why, that lumbering fool was never good for much. 

"I was taking the subjects back to Earth when our descent was interrupted by a force I couldn't identify. We were taken hostage, held in a facility. They hooked me in to an early variant of our mind reading technology... I didn't know how they'd gotten ahold of it or who they were. For a minute I was certain we'd been caught... but it was you."

The mixture of horror and hatred in his voice was nauseating.

"You tricked us! You trapped us!" Even from that distance, Phil could see that Diz was shaking. "You were going to betray us, weren't you Quiz? You were going to take our projects and run like the coward you truly are."

Quiz was quiet now, breaths not even a whisper, such a contrast to the laboured gasps of before that Phil had to look closely to convince himself that the alien was still alive. One of his blue-skinned hands had drawn into a tight fist, blackish blood leaking from between the fingers. When he lifted his head to meet the accusing stares of his old friends, his eyes were wet. His once quavering voice had darkened and hardened into something bitter and twisted, like a blackened blade digging into stone.

"I was going let you out eventually," Quiz bleated in a tone that wasn't so much defensive as it was churlish. For all his accusations, for all the force of his rage, Diz reeled back as though he'd been struck. "You and Viz have been calling the shots ever since we started this mad campaign—is it really so wrong that I wanted a chance? You never tell me anything!  You never let me do anything—I hardly ever even get to leave the ship! Every single time we set out to do something, I'm left in the dark looking stupid and I hate it. It's not my fault you're too paranoid to tell me anything. It's not my fault the only way to get any information out of you is to rip it out—"

"Enough." Surprisingly, it was Viz's anger strained voice which cut Quiz's ramblings short this time (though, looking at Diz, it may have simply been because rage had pushed the lieutenant past the point of speaking.)

"But I—" Quiz's tottering helplessness returned in record time, dust in the spotlight of Viz's commands.

"Diz, bring them both on board."

The transmitter cut off with a hard choke, and no amount of button pressing would convince it to turn back on. Slowly, the transport craft was brought broadside to the battleship.

Surrounded by the inescapable green light of the tractor beam, with the creaking of metal growing ever louder as they were drawn forcefully towards the other ship, Phil gave a cynical huff that he hoped was sufficient to cover up his mounting worry. Wasn't there a saying about this? Frying pans and fire? No. Both an understatement and already used. Fire, meet the utterly broiling hell that is the molten core of the Earth. That was better. That about summed it up. Why did Quiz have to chose now to develop a spine?

Aside from his hitched breathing, Quiz was unresponsive once more, staring helplessly down in to the depths of his shoes. This seemed to be new record for him in terms of letting people down; allies, enemies, strangers who had no idea he existed, all in one fell swoop... despite himself, Phil felt a twinge of pity.

Opening cargo bay doors...

With a deep, metallic groan, the ship was admitted in to the belly of the larger vessel, where the occupants were confronted with a set of metal doors. With a wretched sound of labour, they heaved themselves apart. The scene beyond was taken straight from a thousand sci-fi movies, which gave everything the sense of surreal unreality usually enjoyed by those still awake in the middle of nowhere at five in the morning. 

Viz was standing central, arms—all four of them—folded behind him in a coldly stately fashion. Diz had abandoned the helm and stood instead slightly behind Viz, merciless attention fixed on Quiz. Both wore calculating looks, expressions that openly considered your imminent demise and dared you to challenge that authority; Viz wore his with cold, supercilious amusement, but Diz had the empty-eyed stare of something cornered and half-savage. Subtly (or, rather, 'in a manner Quiz likely interpreted as subtle) the alien moved to stand between Phil and his coworkers.

"Now then," purred Viz in a voice like churning gravel. "What should be done with you two?"

This was never decided and, all things considered, that is likely for the best.

When the Battle Ship lurched badly enough to set them all stumbling, Phil initially dismissed it as a quirk owed to the fact that the ship was a pieced-together mess, a bedraggled collection of past shipwrecks hammered in to a single entity. He was no starship connoisseur, and this Frankenstein's-monster of a craft could have subjected him to far worse before it registered as reason to panic. 

It was the other three reactions which ticked him off, sent the first stirring of nausea to prickle the base of his spine; the agitation of the aliens was immediate, their quarrel silenced.

"What was that?" More irritated by the interruption than unnerved at first, Viz's triumphant expression was marred by a frown as he spun to glare at his lieutenant.

Reluctantly Diz returned to the helm and tapped at something on the dashboard, where a screen of glowing letters and numbers was fluctuating wildly between three different displays. By the gleeful, neon light, the way the alien paled was almost sickening.

"Oh no..." With the frantic speed of someone arriving far too late to fix something, Diz began pressing buttons in what seemed to be a particular sequence, incurring a negatory noise from the machines every time. He did this again, and again, and again, hands a little shakier each time. "We've gotten too close to Earth." Somewhere from within the ship, a siren began to wail, a dreadful banshee sound unheard of outside wars and nightmares. "We're entering its gravitational field."

Mild panic called it a day, tagged in blind terror, and left for a farm in the countryside.

"Well get us out!" It was the closest Phil ever heard Viz come to fright and it was that more than the siren that convinced him the danger was real. Horrifically, it was starting to seem like they might have been safer when the only problem they faced was being directly in front of an unstable death ray helmed by a maniac.

"I can't."

"Put up the shielding then."

"I can't. The mechanics are beginning to freeze because of the CryoBeam."

"Well turn the damn thing off!" More buttons—treacherous buttons that did nothing helpful—and the quaking was joined by an icy, sweet-voiced drone, a winter noise which crept into the nerves behind one's teeth. Another flipped lever and the ship lurched as though trying to throw them off. Quiz, never surefooted, staggered and Viz reached out to steady him, his ire entirely forgotten.  "Diz what's happening?"

"The CryoBeam is taking up the majority of power in the ship's electrical systems." In another of his eerie reversals, Diz sounded calm once more, with just a faint quiver in the background of his words revealing how little control he actually had. "I... I am unable to discharge the weapon and I'm also unable to stop the energy build up. Attempting to power up anything more, say re-entry fields or back-up thrusters, will push the battery into critical condition. The same will happen if I push the reactors any harder."

Again, Phil couldn't help the sense of detachment that swept over him, as though he was watching this unfold on television or in the theatre. That this nightmare could happen to ordinary, well meaning people was fundamentally inconceivable. That things like this could happen to Phil Eggtree, specifically, was slightly more believable, but still enough to disorientate him to the point that, when he finally spoke up, it took a second for him to recognise his own voice.

"Is there anything you can do?" 

Diz bit his lip, hand hovering anxiously over the keys.

"I can hold us here. We have, estimated, ten minutes before our position becomes too unstable to hold and we plummet to Earth."

Slowly, Viz nodded. Discerning his precise expression was never easy, but he seemed to be thinking hard.

"If we reroute all nonessential power to one of those time-stop mines, we may be able to buy ourselves enough time to drain the power from Quiz's vessel to this one. Could we could put up re-entry fields after that?"

"Are you sure that would work?"

"Have you got a better idea?" The lieutenant and commander stared at each other, mutually belligerent and searching. 

All around them, the struggle between the ship and the surrounding atmosphere was becoming more evident; the metal walls were shuddering under unseen pressure, errant clatters and innocent dropped-penny sounds of things coming loose sounding from all around them. There wasn't a better plan—there wasn't time to think of a better plan.

"Quiz get over here and help with this."

Partially ignoring Viz's order, Quiz looked between Phil and the distant orb of Earth. Every thought that crossed his mind was written starkly across his face—including the startlement of Phil suddenly seizing his wrist.

"You don't have to stay with them." 

Quiz gave a smile that was as fond as it was bitterly cynical.

"Yeah I do."

"Why?"

"Well, first off, that escape pod is meant to carry one person only." Quiz began to usher Phil towards the now-familiar escape capsule. "Secondly, Viz and Diz are my friends Phil. You wouldn't leave your friends stuck here, would you?" 

Phil opened his mouth to argue that point before realising it was pointless, that he had wandered around two separate facilities with his life in an ambiguous amount of danger, refusing to leave until he found all his friends. Any argument he could make was kneecapped before he could even begin.

In worried silence, he let Quiz input Earth's coordinates. Looking somehow smaller and more vulnerable than before, the alien patted Phil's shoulder, uncomfortably aware of how final the gesture felt. 

"We'll, ah, continue this conversation later?"

"How much later we talking Quiz?"

A second siren started screaming. Both boy and alien made an effort to Not Look.

"I don't know. But we'll be back."

Phil studied the alien's face, each squamous, dull scale, the slightly uneven nasal slits, the liquid, black eyes. Behind Quiz, he could see the alarm's strobing light reflect off Viz's angular glasses, hear Diz calling out a nonsensical jumble of orders and figures with near-military efficiency. Reaching up, Phil squeezed the stubby-fingered hand.

"... I'll count on it, Quiz."

The last thing Phil saw as he was jettisoned from the Transport Vessel was Quiz hurrying over to assist Viz with a nondescript box that he could only assume was to be the craft's salvation. Then everything was lost to fire as he hurtled back to the real world.

Chapter Text

Seven years passed. Each one did so a little faster than the last, a little more blurry, a little more harried. They were unremarkable, but, to four very specific people, there was an intractable undercurrent of a deep and inexplicable unease.

Phil knew something had changed the second the V.I.Z.ion craft landed. Perhaps it was a change in the flavour of the air, a hint of smoke like a bonfire's shadow, a negligible detail that fell slightly out of place...

... Or perhaps it was the fact that birds kept freezing in place in the sky; that the scientific news facilities were having a field day raving about an 'unidentifiable flying object speeding towards earth at an incredible velocity'; or that, at roughly ten in the evening, a massive, blazing wreck took the opportunity to ruin the perfect burnished blue of the sky and crash in a nearby wood with all the inherent grace of a drunk passing out on a park bench. Phil watched it all from the balcony of his apartment building, thoughtfully pairing together his basket of mismatched socks.

Seven years. Seven years of blissfully monotonous, uninterrupted normalcy. Phil took a smoke-tinged breath and felt a sharp pang of apprehension and anticipation shiver keenly through his blood. It was the rust-red sheen of familiar adrenaline, the bitten-tongue tang of his adventurous youth. Despite everything, the intervention of almost a decade, he could do nothing to stop the grin taking over his face as he snatched up his phone and selected the pinned contact at the top. 

The phone only got through two rings before Smiley picked up, her voice still bright and vibrant despite the hour; their friends sometimes teased that she sounded like a fancy secretary, but Phil had held a secret fondness for that invariable bubble-brightness.  

"Smiley? They're back. The aliens I mean, not the goose."

Everyone sounds farther away on the phone; Smiley, situated in a university only just out of town, sounded to be more distant than the stars. Phil would always tell himself it was because he missed her, and that it was definitely not because his beyond-ancient phone and unreliable network made every call sound like it came from a bygone era.

"Oh? Oh! Really? Are you sure? No, no; of course you're sure... alright, alright." He could hear her drawing a determined breath, the scuffle of desk items being shuffled about, the felt-lined whumpf of a heavy notebook falling closed. "I'm on my way."

He could see her in his mind's eye, snatching her keys from the counter near the door of her university suite, throwing her coat on and bolting out in to the night. It was an hour long drive to his place, maybe less if traffic was good. She would be able to see the fresh scar burned in to the sky, smell the charred clouds. A not inconsiderable part of him wanted more than anything to keep her on the line, to know what she thought of it, how she felt, what bit of coursework she was putting off to rejoin a game seven years postponed, but there were more important things to be getting on with.

"Alright, text me when you're close. I'll leave my location on so you can find me. Love you."

Another call to Zach, who lived a few streets away, and one to Phred to let him know that Smiley would pick him up, and Phil felt he could relax. The cavalry was on its way. Feeling invincible and detached from reality, Phil slipped out of his apartment complex and in to the chill, gliding dance of shadows, in pursuit of the runaway calamity.

He remembered Smiley's convoluted explanation of how time would function—or rather cease to function—on board the ship. Because it was a moving object, orbiting the Earth at a high speed, time would pass more quickly for the people inside. One year on earth could be only an hour ship-time. Add to that the fact that they were using an unspecified temporal device to do strange things to the space-time continuum, and it could be years before anything actually happened. "Best to leave it for now," she had said, with the strange wisdom of an eleven year old who has quite literally seen the world. "We just have to look out for it when it happens."

As it turned out, he didn't have to look particularly hard. 

Just outside the city where the buildings grew destitute and scattered, there was a disused football field that was bordered on its far side by a small forest. Admittedly, 'forest' was something of a generous description; it was a vast but scraggly collection of greyed trees, with gnarled branches that twisted and clutched at each everything in reach in a vain attempt to keep upright. Barren for as long as Phil could remember, crisp packets became their poisonously vibrant leaves, discarded bottles their fallen fruit, scraps of wet newspaper the dank clumps of moss that clung to the shrivelled trunks. Everyone Phil knew avoided the place, even the underage smokers and the punks with their spray paint; it exuded the despair of eras past in the same way a ruin did, the empty shell of something that had been dignified and enjoyed left to rot. Old cheers and victory chants still echoed from the empty stadium and the trees had a nasty habit of taking the sound and twisting it in to peoples' names.

All of this was why Phil stood alone now, examining shattered branches and gouged ground, following a burnt-black path like a child following a ribbon trail. All of this was why, despite the immense disturbance the crash landing had caused, no one had come to gawp. It was a corner of the world everyone else had managed to forget and so no-one cared to see its destruction. 

Shadows writhed in the dying light, the wax and wane of it setting the stage for a spectral rave that Phil felt more than a little uninvited to. There was a sense of intrusion to his careful wanderings, an awareness of his position as an interloper in this dark, secretive, abandoned world. He was not wanted here. He was not needed here. He cast his troubled gaze back towards the blinking city lights and wondered if he should wait until the others arrived...

No. This couldn't wait. After all these years, Phil could recall, clear as day, Viz's obvious, calm satisfaction at the thought of Earth's outright obliteration; Diz's snakeskin strangeness and frothing, choking rage, his love of random destruction; even Quiz had attempted the subjugation of in innocuous Elementary School simply to feel important. Of the aliens, not one of them could be trusted—not fully—and it would be a serious oversight to let any of them slip the net.

Besides, it wasn't as though Smiley and the others stood a chance of overlooking the crash site; short of a neon sign proclaiming 'Over Here!' in bold capitals, there wasn't a way to make it more noticeable. Phil checked the time: 22:28. They would be along soon enough.

With that fortifying thought, Phil set off, following the path of carnage and hoping to whatever deity willing to listen that, if he died, it was because of world-conquering aliens and not some druggie with a pocket knife.

And there, at the end of the path, he found it.

✯

The ship was on fire.

That was just one of the many things happening that was not part of the plan.

Metal has many wonderful qualities, but it's tendency to heat up is one that has a number of noticeable drawbacks. For example, in a ship whose predominant component is metal, conductivity is something that becomes a noticeable issue rather swiftly. Particularly if the ship in question is hurtling through the atmosphere at an ever-increasing speed. Particularly if said ship happens to be on fire. 

Despite his prodigious tolerance for heat, Viz felt like a dead thing stuffed in to a furnace; he could feel his skin tightening, flaking off in cracked scraps, boiling blood forcing its ways through the splits. Attempts to imagine the conditions endured by his less prepared companions were forcefully discarded after a whispered suggestion that they might give out under hyperthermia long before the collision had a chance to kill them.

Being able to hold on to Quiz was a mild comfort in all this, a bandage on the seeping, pustulant wound that was the rending of the world around them. Quiz, who had, admittedly, managed to hold his nerve for a good while, had clasped tightly about Viz's waist, seemingly desperate to be in firm contact with something that didn't threaten to melt his flesh. Three of his hands had bunched the fabric of Viz's shirt to the point where it was tearing at the seams, and the fourth was still diligently pressing the hastily added button on the time-mine made to extend the field. The machine had shorted out during the tumult of the entry burn but, as this was also the point at which Quiz had started hysterically screaming, Viz didn't think Quiz had noticed.

There was no way of telling if the circuitry issue was localised specifically to that one, mangled piece of machinery, or if it had also affected the equipment Viz was supposed to be overseeing. He could hardly see the switches through the smoke, hardly feel them with his burned fingers. He had no way of knowing what was going on.

Another jolt. Another scream of abused metal. Blackness punched another hole through Viz's understanding of the world. Quiz gave a high, guttural shriek and threw his fourth arm around Viz's ribs.

All about them, the walls of the ship were convulsing, buckling under the strain, splitting wide open and allowing nubilous smoke to pour through in thick rivers that tasted of metal. It was thick enough to bubble in the lungs, to wind in to the passages of the nose and throat and sit there like chunks of gelatine. It was thick enough that, despite the fact that the helm was only a few feet away, Viz could no longer see Diz at all. The only indication of the other he had was the sporadic coughs and occasional, hoarse fits of cursing as the ship swayed and lurched. Hardly audible over the multitude of other random noises and absent for nearly five minutes now, it was only the fact that they were still airborne—a miracle whose swift and violent end Viz was beginning to anticipate—that kept the commander convinced his helmsman was still standing.

Of course Diz was still standing. There could be no version of this where Diz was not standing; Viz would not allow it. Because, no matter how dreadful it was, this landing was not that landing. That landing was resolutely consigned by time to the evermore distant past, unable to do more than reach its shadowy claws into his mind.

Which it currently was, with a vicious fervour usually reserved for dreams. 

It couldn't be said that this was the crew's first crash, and certainly it wouldn't be their last. Their machines were all patchworks, pieced together from other wrecks, cannibal constructions held together with spit and spite. They had suffered through more than their fair share of system failures and impromptu stops when something fell off or refused to work. In the end, it became a matter of practicality to drill crashes on all their projects; Diz proudly kept a scoreboard of how many successful landings each craft had managed under stress ('success' in this case meaning 'broke in to less than three pieces'.) Viz was uncomfortably aware of the fact that these precautions were the only things keeping them from their untimely demise.

For this was, without a shadow of a doubt, the roughest landing any of them had experienced recently (determinedly forgotten past aside.) Caught woefully off guard, they had been left with only the barest security measures and scraped a handful of improvised minutes to prepare. Hardly helping matters was the fact that this particular vessel—designed for the sole purpose of utilising the CryoBeam—was not really built for something as stressful as breaching an atmospheric boundary, much less the trauma of re-entry itself. Zone 5.1 had dragged it through the first trip to Earth, and though Diz had managed to put up the protective shielding on the way back into space, both attempts had sustained damage.

'How much had been too much?' Viz wondered, watching yet another unidentified fragment of the ship fly past his face. 'What pushed us past the point of no return? If we had reacted sooner, would we be okay? If Quiz hadn't interfered, would we be better off now?'

Quiz's body was shuddering with airless sobs; absently, Viz ran an idle finger over the curve of the smaller alien's skull, watching his blood paint shapes on the blue skin. 'I wonder if this is how you get us killed.'

Wires cackled with electricity's mocking laughter; vents bellowed steam; walls, floors, and ceiling grated and screamed in a symphony of agony; the red alert wailed; glass shattered; the battery, somehow audible from its position elsewhere in the ship, was emitting an increasingly worrying hum, threatening to build to a crescendo and vaporise them all. If chaos took on the form of sheer noise, with the intention of beating all order into helpless submission, this was at least an element of that hideous symphony, the waltz that would play at the end of the world.

Very faintly, a discordant sound shot through all the other discord, a distant gunshot in a blizzard. By the time whatever he had heard registered—regrettably it had been rather important—Viz had time for little other than folding his head to his chest, curling an arm over his eyes, and praying that whatever happened next did so quickly.

"Brace for landing!"

Given an eternity to prepare for impact, they would have still been jarred by that rending collision. If one were to be poetic about the sheer force of it, they might say it was enough to smash the stars from their places in the heavens and send them crashing to Earth. If one were to be much more practical in description, they would have to emphasis the sensation of cracked bones attempting to follow the momentum and spear their way through flesh, the sudden exertion of pressure bursting every vein, setting free whole oceans of blood to roll through ruined flesh. Every nerve ending flared as it was thrust violently out of its assigned place in the body, a vast network of viscera reduced to garbled noise, unintelligible meat; sensation meant nothing, the material world made of dribbles and smears, eyes sightless as burst stars.

It was a miracle that all three crewman survived.

The ship rocked in its crater for a second before settling, moving not because the molten underbelly had found any give in the earth below, but because the steel supports had worn thin enough to wobble like constructions of wet paper. Witnessing it, any sensible viewer would have fled for the hills. Mind you, most people watching the landing would have left long before that point, most people having a fairly high regard for personal safety.

With a sound like something dying, the ship split open, like an overripe piece of fruit, like the sides of a rotting corpse, it's melting guts exposed to the open air and sending a plume of smoke spiralling laughingly into the blue of the night. Nothing inside moved.

✯

Well... he'd found the ship. Or rather what was left of it.

Which wasn't much, in the general scheme of things.

In the half-light of a late, summer evening, combed through with flickering ribbons of amber flame, everything took on a harsher guise; it was inordinately difficult to tell what was a warped blade of shrapnel and what was a piece of shattered wood. Phil's shadow stretched out behind him, lengthening, shortening, then falling under his feet altogether, as though darkness wished to keep him close. There was a picture book quality to the starkness of everything, the absolutes of red, and black, and gold. Phil blew out a breath and watched the strange air billow and the sparks dance.

The ship had crumpled in on itself like a tin can, or a lawn chair, or some similar item of little use or consequence. Unlike these items, the V.I.Z.ion battle ship didn't just become an unsightly blemish; it seeped danger, leaking blazing tongues of fuel to lap at nearby trees, it's last breaths full of ozone. Somewhere towards what had once been the spaceships nose cone, the CryoBeam was whining in confusion, concertinaed upon itself in an attractive mess of lethal frost and glowing circuitry. Winter and summer had collided head on, burning summer heat presiding over fractals and lace-works of snow, orange and gold braided breathtakingly in to white and silver. 

For a good few seconds, it was all Phil could do to stand in awe of the utter carnage. Everything about the mutilated vessel seemed to have raised its voice in protest against the rough treatment it had received. Next to it, the tentative crunch of trainers on dirt seemed frail.

"So." Phil's voice was unnaturally human amongst the slew of random, shorted electronics. "This is how you choose to make an entrance, huh? Preferred the lava myself—surprisingly less upsetting."

There was no response. Phil found a rock to kick.

"Not talking to me? Rude. Nothing, not a word for seven years, and you think you can just turn up unannounced and we'll not mind? It's just bad manners. I'm not big on etiquette, but still... a phone call, at least, would have been nice. Maybe leave a card with my butler the next time you want to drop by..."

Another three trees caught fire. A badger ambled past; this was the only sign of life, as badgers do not care for trivialities like death or fire; almost certainly, it is death who should be afraid of badgers.

"... Get it? 'Drop by'? Like dropping out of the sky?"

Silence. Even the crackle of fire seemed to be trying to get away from him, hoarse-voiced and consumed with its own misery. His levity and life were an unforgivable intrusion.

"You've kinda ruined the park. I mean, I'm not mad—no one comes here anymore. I don't know if anyone ever came here actually. It's a place no one likes but I guarantee, now there's a hole in it, people are gonna get real upset. They'll do a newspaper segment, and people with nothing better to do will write into the local council. They'll have to turn it into a duck pond to shut them all up." Phil considered this for a second. "Hey, that's not a bad idea..."

Footsteps sounded behind him, an uneven trio, some hurried, others leisurely. Phil didn't bother turning to greet his friends; the scene before him wasn't one that required an introduction of explanation.

"Wow... just... just wow. How the hell did they manage this?" Far from disturbed, Phred sounded mildly impressed. Phil shrugged, feeling tension slip silently from the air as the darkness, recognising that it was outnumbered, conceded and bade a respectful retreat.

"Don't know. But first contact has been a literal smash hit."

"Second contact. Third? I know they were doing shit behind the scenes before us."

"We'll go with fourth to be safe."

"Never mind all that—look at this. They must have been going for some kind of record." Zach scuffed his shoe over a disembowelled piece of machinery, it's silver entails glistening. "Did anything survive this?"

"The field didn't. This place is looking real dead."

"It's looked this way since before our parents were born, this is just the vibe."

"Nah, it's definitely gotten deader in the last half hour or so."

Fiddling nervously with her hair, a habit she had picked up shortly after growing it all those years ago, Smiley piped up, hesitantly edging in to the field of light. As usual, she was the only one focused on the task at hand.

"Do you think they're alright?"

"Real question Smiley; is this really how we're spending Saturday night?"

"Zach, you knew this was coming." The young man gave a derisive snort, flames jetting from the crown of his head and dancing like an emperor's wreath.

"Yeah, but I don't have to be happy now it's here. These guys were the freakiest thing about my childhood, hands down. Don't tell me I'm the only one who considered just toasting their glorious demise and getting back to the ol' nine to five."

In Phil's opinion, that assessment was a little extreme, if not grandly exaggerated. To put it obfuscatingly simply, their childhoods had been a mess, and the interference of alien life had been a significant—nay, superlative—part of that... but that wasn't to say he resented all of those memories. There had been a certain amount of inescapable wonder to it; standing above the world, looking down at the clouds and countries, had stirred something irrepressible in his blood. Didn't everyone dream of being so dynamic, so powerful, their that decisions formed the cat's cradle holding up the entire world?

Nothing in the past seven years had been even fractionally as interesting as three violent weirdos from space; Phil was refusing to examine the fact that he resented the trio for that more than anything else they'd done.

"Freakiest? Nah. Try coolest."

"You want cool? Look at this—" Zach held out a demonstrative hand, rolling up the sleeve of his beat-up leather jacket to reveal a lightly smoking forearm. "—I can boil pots with this shit. My housemates cook instant ramen on me when I sleep. Most people get their first kitchen porter job as a dishwasher—they have me working as a plate warmer because it's faster than putting them in the oven. Nothing about me is cool. That is their fault."

Phil snorted. Phred, however, took a contemplative standpoint that was as rare as it was unhelpful.

"He's got a point... like, twenty eight percent of a point. What if they want carry on with their whole 'destroy the world' scheme. I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly in a hurry to spend my whole adult life playing superman, saving the Earth and all that jazz. Sounds stressful."

"So the solution is to let three people burn alive..." Smiley frowned, eyes firm as drill-bits. "Because you think in twenty years you might get bored."

"Twenty years is giving me way too much foresight. Call it at like... twenty days. Twenty days of insane alien shenanigans. I work minimum wage, I'm too broke for nonsense."

"And it's not as if they're innocent people to burn," Zach cut in, in a helpful tone of voice. "Hell, it's almost a pity they couldn't hold off until November—this would make one hell of a Guy Fawkes display."

Smiley whirled around, visibly appalled.

"Zach!"

Smartly, the boy beat a retreat, hands placatingly raised scattering sparks like handfuls of coins.

"Just trying to lighten the mood."

It made little headway; once Smiley had something in her grasp, she rarely let it go until she was satisfied. This steadfast dedication had served her well in every endeavour, but did make her resolution an immobile thing. 

"There's nothing funny about people being on fire," she said in a slow, firm voice, like someone impressing upon a toddler how vital it is to not touch the stove. Zach, a man who had been on fire since the age of ten, gave a sage nod.

"Well said and thank you, Smiley." He turned to Phred with the attitude of a person, long married, who has just been handed an ally in a long-running, petty quarrel with their partner. "When my dad said my life was a joke, he meant something completely different."

Still on track, Smiley continued.

"I'm not saying we should save them because they necessarily deserve saving," she said crisply, looking to each of them in turn, finally making eye-contact with Phil and holding it. "But I'm better than just... leaving it to happen. No one deserves to die like that, not even them." 

"So it's a solid 'no' to the pyre. How do you feel about hanging them?"

"Zach." Smiley's voice was schoolteacher stern.

"What? We can turn the basketball hoop in the park into a gibbet and everything; I'm just staying on theme. You love retro."

"I don't love killing people. That's literally why I'm standing here."

Sighing, Zach put an arm around the girl's shoulder; he was a full head taller than her, all extruded limbs and bony joints.

"Really? Damn. I wildly misread this event. I'm here for s'mores—y'want one?"

Ambiguously sourced and partially melted marshmallow in hand, Zach dodged away cackling as Smiley swiped at him, laughter studiously bitten back but scribbled over her lips. Chronically unserious, he had made an art form over the years out of getting her to stoop to his level, and this was how most debates between them ended.

"Phil?" Phred was watching him sideways and, slowly, Phil came back to his body, which was sweating on one side and freezing on the other.

Still avoiding his friends' eyes, Phil was silent for the longest time. 

Seven years was a long time to reflect. With all the doubt and distrust he had harboured stacked to towering heights made monolithic by memory, it was surprisingly difficult to actually commit to a course of action. Sure, it had been fun, but was it truly worth starting it all again? He wouldn't even have to stop them this time—all he had to do was walk away and leave them there.

It would be so easy to leave them in their grave, put the mistakes of the past to rest.

Almost too easy. Too boring. This almost-decade had been so boring.

"Look, whatever we're doing, we need to hurry up." Phil sniffed and straightened, regarding his motley crew (Phred half-asleep but listening, Smiley and Zach frozen in a slap fight.) "People might be willing to ignore the arrival of alien life, but a fire's gonna catch someone's attention, and I don't want to be here when they show up." 

As though waiting for its cue, a siren started up somewhere in the distance. A fire engine, perhaps. Time was running out.

Nobody moved.

They stared at the blazing wreck. Belligerently, it stared back, dripping, oozing, red-hot and ruinous. In a word: uninviting.

"You know what we need? A really, really long set of barbecue tongs."

Smiley snickered, glared, then bit her lip and squared her shoulders, steeling herself in a way that seemed almost a threat. Rigid with determination and backlit by flames, it was the most impressive Phil had seen anyone look in faded pyjama bottoms and an old woollen jumper emblazoned with greying pink kittens. Head held high with martyr-like fortitude she marched towards the wreckage. Loyal as knights and wordless, the others followed suit.

("You coming Zach?"

"Of course I'm coming—I showed up, didn't I? Here, let me go ahead; you're all stupidly flammable.")

When they reached the breached hull, the group faltered and became more cautious. Carefully, Zach edged his way past the broken shell rim, pushing aside a fringe of trailing wires. The heat inside was like a blow, hung with a heady, chemical scent that threatened poisoning. Even the air seemed malicious, shot through with energy and drier than dust as it bit and scratched at exposed hands and faces. Everything was shrouded in a chokingly dense smog that poured from every possible surface and outlet. Mercifully, from what Phil could tell, the lava pit was damaged but closed, though for how long...

The distant sirens were growing louder.

Phred nudged his side—everyone had taken an unspoken oath not to speak in the spacecraft, which seemed to be looking for a reason to collapse further—and pointed; Phil followed the direction of his finger. Conveniently close, there was a section of collapsed roofing, still smoking from where the suffocation of collapse had quashed the fire. Protruding from under that, and at an angle Phil would rather forget existed, was a blue skinned arm.

'Well Quiz, you kept your promise.'

Oblivious to the fire climbing his shirt—that fire being somewhat cooler than the man himself—Zach dragged the support beam to one side, indelicate and mouthing expletives throughout. With considerably more care, the other three began dragging the exposed figures from the wreck, stumbling over extra limbs in the process. Phil could feel his heart beating in a way it hadn't since he was a child, each pulse a miniature thrill.

Outside, the shadows leaned back in, reaching long-fingered hands in to their hair and eyes. Phil was deliberately operating on automatic, leery of looking too closely at anything. Whatever he was carrying seemed determined to snag on every corpse of every bush and every shrub. Roots reached up from the ground with the sole intention of catching at his feet. Next to him, he could hear Phred's relentless, whispered swearing. 

There was an alley at the edge of the abandoned field, the beginning of a labyrinth that wound its way deep in to the suburbs. This is where the little group converged, sprinting across the overgrown pitch, feet soaked by the long grass, feeling the skyscrapers leaning in to peer at them with the scornful disinterest of people watching bugs.

When they reached the alley entrance, engulfed by the absolute darkness offered by the shadows of rundown houses, Phred dropped his share of the burden without ceremony and doubled back to help the others. Phil sheltered behind a dumpster that was clustered with enough bins to fill a house, listening intently for any signal that they had been followed and shuffling the bodies out of sight.

Zach and Smiley straggled in a few seconds later, tripping about the myriad of bins in a strange dance as they tried to avoid the alien limbs dangling all over the place. Phred followed them loudly whispering that they should hurry.

The sirens were even louder...

Crouched amongst the refuse and feeling like criminals, the quartet watched as cars flashed past—Police, Fire Department, and a bevy of unidentifiable black vehicles. Sound followed the excitement and the four were swiftly left to the void of their own thoughts.

Feeling around, Phil felt unduly thankful for the near absolute darkness; whatever limb he was holding felt broken, the fabric of the shirt wet. The alien—whichever one it was—was deadweight in his grasp. Strangely, he was reminded of the immobile weight of his school bag, a remnant of events from a lifetime ago. Such was the power of association, was briefly transported through time, in a manner more thorough than any machine could hope to manage; a return to a place of peeling wallpaper, an overpoweringly strong scent of stale coffee, and an underlying seam of raw, untapped disappointment that made later life a millionaire in misery. The ringing of a school bell was all he could hear, the end of another day...

A car swished past, speeding wheels spinning arcs of filthy water, and the illusion was broken. They were stuck in a reeking, piss-soaked alley, huddled like disobedient children, rubbish less 'littered about' more 'pressed into a particularly grotesque carpet'. The alien in Phil's grip shifted, a ragged gasp tearing from its chest, and Phil felt the sharp edge of its glasses dig in to his arm. Viz; he was almost tempted to drop him in the muck and let him be the floor's problem.

But the others were looking at him, expectant, troops before a leader who would take them in to battle. Smiley had Diz pulled half over her shoulder in a surprisingly genuine attempt at supporting a figure rather taller than herself. Zach and Phred bore Quiz between them, one apathetic, the other frowning in mild consternation. All of them seemed wide-eyed and blank, nervous without being jittery, determined without much motivation. Phil sighed heavily, the adrenaline wearing off, well aware of what was expected of him and half-glad he had three scapegoats.

"Come on. We all know the plan. Let's get outta here before people find the spaceship and start wondering what asshole decided to park it there."

With that, and four identical, cynical smiles, they skittered clumsily through the dark and vanished into the maze of suburban alleyways, dragging their kidnappers behind them. The city awoke the next morning to a ruined field, confused scientists, and black blood dotted on the pavement. In all the world, only six people knew what to make of it all. 

For a peaceful life, that is already far too many.

Chapter Text

The plan was going to fail.

Not only that, but the plan was going to fail embarrassingly. Possibly fatally. It was the sort of plan, Phil realised, that should only have been pulled off the drawing board to be laughed at and forgotten. It was a plan that should only be enacted as a quality jape, taken to the board directors of madcapery to be lauded with rapturous applause before being shoved ceremoniously in the bin. But no, here they were, standing on the doorstep of ignoramus failure, ringing the doorbell wearing the silliest hats they could find, waving a banner which proclaimed in large, holographic text 'WE ARE DUMB AND BAD AT PLANNING'.

These revelations all came to Phil a shade too late; they were all crowded in the pool of light before the Sundae residence and footsteps were sounding from inside. The handle was turning.

"This is gonna be good," murmured Zach in an undertone, the star at the centre of a solar system of moths.

Smiley's mother opened the door. On the step, bold as tarnished brass, stood her daughter, her daughter's friends, and three bloody strangers. Somewhere in the distance, a clock rang midnight.

Now, it was not altogether uncommon for Smiley to return to her mother's from time to time, and it wasn't unheard of for her friends to accompany her. It wasn't even that strange for them to turn up late at night without warning—the city being what it was, it was oftentimes safer to crash there after a night out than it would be for everyone to straggle their disparate ways home. In short, none of this was unusual.

Except the air tonight smelled of boiling tin, and there was alien blood streaked across her chest, and her shoulders ached from dragging an unconscious adult for several blocks. Like an inexperienced actor in a quickly improvised scene, Smiley stood in the limelight and tried to remember her practiced lines.

As the mind will always manage in a delicate situation, hers drew a blank. 

Smiley stared at her mother, who was peering at the scene around her with an air of increasing wariness. The resemblance between mother and daughter was uncanny, and she had always rather liked the certainty of knowing her face would one day resemble the one before her. Now, however, standing before her own, older countenance, feeling the uncertainty of her own, black eyes boring in to her, that familiarity made her feel smaller. It was as though she were withering before a phantasm of judgment from some future version of herself.

"Smiley?"

In a spur of the moment decision, Smiley decided that, of all the possible ways to explain the situation to her mother, the best course of action was to avoid it all together. With that incredibly illogical thought bouncing in her frazzled brain and flare born in the heat of the moment, Smiley gave her perplexed mother the widest smile she could manage. It looked a little psychotic.

"Hi mum! Lovely night, isn't it?"

Even before the crash, the night had been average at best. Now, the only thing remarkable about it was its sudden ugliness. The fumes of the crashed spaceship had painted the attractive navy of the sky with liberal streaks of grey and black which less swirled, as smoke is expected to do, and more splattered like a thick, cloying ink. It was about as attractive as a biro moustache scribbled on the Mona Lisa. Mrs Sundae blinked in the very deliberate manner of someone who is wondering, in the politest possible fashion, what the hell is going on.

"Hello sweetheart." She leaned out of the door, casting an appraising eye over her daughters friends and the ragged strangers they were carrying. "Smiley darling, you know I'm always happy to see you but... what is this?"

The older woman sounded patently baffled and, had he not been as tired and fed up as he was, Phil might have felt sorry for her. As it was, he was couldn't help but be exasperated by another delay; Viz was heavier than his build would suggest and his motivation for keeping the mad dictator off the ground was dwindling. As surreptitiously as he could manage (which wasn't very, standing, as he was, in the spill of light from the open door) Phil lowered Viz to the ground. The alien hit the top step with a toneless thud but remained completely catatonic. Phil whistled his innocence.

Looks were not the only commonality shared between Smiley and her mother; nobody could call the old woman foolish. She was a small, bird-like figure—dexterous and quick—and the grey hairs at her temples and the pinched marks on the bridge of her nose lent her a permanent affectation of shrewdness. Certainly, she knew well enough to know when her daughter was attempting to hide something—not that Smiley was making that deduction particularly hard. Her voice sweet with something stern and something protective, Mrs Sundae cut easily to the heart of the matter, neat as a surgeon with a scalpel.

"Who are your friends?"

Smiley blanched.

"You know them mum. Phil, Phred, and Zach, same as last time."

Her mother's smile was dry. She did indeed know them—had known them all since their shared childhoods. In many ways, she considered the miscellaneous three as bonus family. This was not, however, her question, as her dear daughter knew damn well.

"Your other friends, Smiley."

Smiley chanced a glance behind her, vaguely hoping the scene waiting for her had changed to something less incriminating. It Had Not; aliens aside, her friends were coated in soot and worryingly ambiguous grime. Without her permission, her eyes lingered on the limp shapes, her clever words sapping from her throat.

"They're... friends."

Mrs Sundae widened her eyes in comic surprise. Phil silently hoped she was a better doctor than she was an actor.

"Oh? I've never seen them."

"... They're from... out of town." Smiley gave a cheerful laugh that bordered on hysterical, an uncomfortable stock sound that did not belong in the scene at all. "We met quite a while ago, you see."

'When we were in Elementary, actually. They kidnapped us to see if Earth was worth obliterating. I thought we killed one of them. They probably hate us. Good times...'

"I see..." Mrs Sundae delivered in the slow, pensive tone of someone who does not, in fact, see.

Smiley took her third Very Deep Breath. Behind her, she could hear the scuffling of Phred and Phil trying to swat away Zach's small army of moths without tripping off the porch steps. It was the sort of mundane shenanigans that followed the little group everywhere and, for a moment, she tried to pretend it was a night no different from any other. Just another night out which ended in them at her mother's front door asking to be let inside. Then the taste of metal caught at the back of her mouth, a gulp of molten copper that coated her insides in an unhealthy iridescent sheen and dragged her roughly back to a present where she was to dredge up her mother's past as a surgeon to minister to enemies who had quite literally fallen out of the stars.

"So... here's the thing; they got a little... beat up—totally nothing weird! Like, it was a completely normal... mugging." 'Why is that my excuse? Is that really what I'm going with? They look like they were hit by a car. Multiple cars. And a bus.' "We...we were kinda hoping they could... stay with us... for the night..." 

With moth-wing frailty, the end of the request gave out under its own inherent ridiculousness and Smiley fell silent. There was a gulf between her and the nice, normal, real world her mother inhabited, and she could feel the languid stretch of it, the faux-tired yawn as years of watchful pretence fell away. 

'Here are the things I never told you about, my ravens home to roost,' she thought self-pityingly. 'Why couldn't it have been something normal like shoplifting?'

Silence leant back and kicked off its shoes, and nobody said a word—aside from the unutterable truth, there was very little else to say.

Squinting slightly to fully appreciate the gallery of weary, worried faces presented to her, Mrs Sundae began a careful process of consideration:

First and foremost was the issue of the strangers; they didn't look dangerous—they looked dead. Having said that—to address the technicolor elephant in the room—there was obviously something... off about them. The minor fact that two of them had four arms, for example, or the small matter of one of them being blue. 

Second was the recent commotion, the meteorite that had frenzied every news outlet with a voice. Sirens continued their hollow-throated wails in the distance, not far enough away to be completely uninvolved in whatever this odd development was. Mrs Sundae was far from being a fool and her daughter's lies were as gossamer is to scissors. 'Out of town, indeed.' It was as colourfully clear as a stained window that these were not human strangers.

Were it offered to her by any other, she would have dismissed the situation with a blithe flick of her head and a door locked in triplicate; she was not unfeeling, nor was she without a sense of charity or compassion, but aliens is a very reasonable place for a person to draw The Line.

But this wasn't a stranger, this was her daughter asking. Smiley. And perhaps she was being asked to leap blind in to some unidentifiable trench, but the hand stretching from those dangerous depths was one created to fit in hers, one she had held since its infancy, and she could not leave it unanswered.

"Smiley, are you in trouble?"

All the deep breaths were released in a single sigh, and Smiley, much deflated, looked at her mother with defeated eyes. She still couldn't think of anything else to say or a better way to plead their situation without announcing the full, bewildering impossibility of it right there on the doorstep, but as she met her own, black eyes, staring back at her with worry, she realised she didn't need to. 

"Sort of..." Her voice had lost its mad vibrancy, the late hour finally exerting its ponderous weight. "it's hard to explain, mum."

Well, that decided it. Had it ever really been a choice? All the good sense and reason in the world seems very trite in the face of one's child. This is a fact as immutable as it is unfortunate.

Coming to her inevitable decision more swiftly than she would have liked and certainly more swiftly than was advisable under the circumstances, Mrs Sundae stepped out of the doorway and opened up her home.

"I need to know who they are," she stipulated, frowning at the figures on the floor. "And I need to know why they're here." Somehow, without any actual emphasis, the word 'here' had stretched to encompass both the general suburb and the wider world beyond. Smiley felt her throat tighten with gratitude and a convulsive urge to embrace the woman before her.

"... Yes mum. I'll explain. Everything."

With the feeling they they had been committed to some indelible, invisible contract, the group dragged into the house (in the cases of the aliens, this was literal.)

Now, the idea to take the aliens to Smiley's was not some simple whim. Originally, when they had anticipated three mostly functional hellions, they had planned to coax them back to Phil's for parley and chips, but the unprecedented mangling had rather scuppered those designs. Collectively, the total medical knowledge shared by the group amounted to a decently sensible awareness of how to apply plasters, and that wasn't going to cut it this time. Mrs Sundae, however, had a solid chance of knowing what to do; in her youth, the woman had been an army doctor who worked in the field hospitals in Europe. A vet might have been even better for dealing with non-human biology, but Phred's cousin was something of a blabber mouth.

It was also somewhere out of the way, a nondescript neighbourhood of a reasonably respectable community where the most interesting thing that happened, on a general basis, was a fight between tomcats, or the bin-man tripping over his trade. All in all, it was the last place you would expect to find alien terrorists. It was the last place you would expect to find anything.

Entering the living room, Phil was struck by the supreme normalcy of the place. Outside, there was a wrecked, alien ship and federal scientists running amok. In here there was a fake Persian rug, beige walls, and a multifaceted lamp with one dead bulb. They heaved the disorder of the evening in to the room with them and still the normalcy persisted, unaffected, their interruption as reprehensible and yet ultimately ineffectual as a bad jazz band in a cathedral.

With the same surprisingly genuine consideration with which she'd dragged him through the streets, Smiley tried to lie Diz across the sofa. The alien seemed to seize up, hissing in pain but still refused to wake. Smiley flinched guiltily and stepped away as if burned. Following suit, Phil shrugged Viz to the side once more, lying him untidily across his lieutenant. Quiz completed the awkward lattice of unconscious bodies. All three were still, entirely still.

Stood grimly in the cheerfully lit living room, splattered with greyish fluid and reeking of smoke, chemicals, and the thick mulch that gathered in the corners of the alleyways, the four humans surveyed their bounty. Improved lighting did the aliens no favours and finally being able to put a visual to the anonymous bits of 'slimy', 'wet', and 'squirming' his fingers had discovered in the dark was making Phil feel rather sick.

Smiley's mother bustled in after them, her face still sternly set, cast an appraising glance over the room and somehow seemed to address everyone at once with the commanding air of a schoolmistress. If the sight disturbed her or gave her any more pause than it had initially, she gave no sign.

"Names. I need their names." 

Phil almost sighed in relief. That question, at least, was easy to answer—it was the whys and the how's and the where-for-afters that he was hoping to avoid. After a brief conference of glances, during which he was nominated speaker, he gave a concise summary that offered as few specifics as could be managed.

"The red one's called Viz—he's kind of the leader. Umm... he's kinda mean, kinda snarky. That one's Diz, he's—" 

Apparently unable to resist, Zach helpfully cut in:

"A lying, treacherous arsehole." 

Phil waved a hand, sweeping the statements to one side but not bothering to deny it. There were few better ways to describe Diz.

"He's the second in command, from what I know. Both of them might be kinda bitchy and... agitated if—when—they wake up. Just... just call me; I'll handle them."

Thoroughly unimpressed, Mrs Sundae looked deliberately from the slumbering pile of burn tissue to the boy making bold claims, and raised a slightly incredulous eyebrow. Belatedly, Phil realised it was a little presumptuous to assume she couldn't look after herself in the face of three almost-corpses, be they otherworldly, world-conquering corpses or otherwise. Regardless, he felt better for having made the offer.

"... Right." Mrs Sundae jabbed a sharp finger at the last, unconscious lump. "And that is?"

"Quiz. We like Quiz." Thankfully, she seemed to accept that as fact so Phil didn't have to elaborate; besides irritating his co-workers, he wasn't entirely sure what Quiz actually did.

There was a little more poking, a few more questions. Then, with the manner of someone chivvying their brood, she chased them off to bed. It was a little humiliating, a little humbling, and they would have ribbed each other about it for hours had they not been rather tired.

And that's how Phil Eggtree and his assorted cronies ended up wearing borrowed pyjamas, sat on a half inflated air-mattress in Smiley's mother's house at one o'clock in the morning, discussing possible ways for aliens to conquer the world and impossible ways to retaliate. 

"So what do we do with them?" Phred asked. It was the fourth time one of them had posed that question.

"Gear up for the next round of Space Invaders IRL," Zach suggested, eyes glassy with tiredness. He pulled idly at a loose thread in the stripy sleep shirt he'd been given. "'Earth Goes Boom 2: Electric Boogaloo."

This was the fourth time the question had been answered in a chronically unserious fashion. Vigour and sense, having been kept up too late, were seeping out of the room; Phil was beginning to feel they might all pass out before reaching a resolution.

"Cut the jokes Zach," he mumbled, massaging his eyelids until red and purple stars burst inside his eyeballs. "We're trying to actually plan things here."

With an immense sigh of lethargy and scorn, Zach turned his leaden, husky-blue stare to the ceiling for a moment before looking at them all again, playfulness gone. He spoke flatly, factually, as though they were all stupid for needing him to explain.

"Fine, you want it real? We're fucked. You think someone like Viz is gonna stop if you ask him pretty please? No; all we've done here is brought dangerous madmen in to Smiley's home."

Phred waved a grim hand, sprawled on his back with his legs perpendicular, feet propped on the door handle. "He's got a point. I mean, even Quiz took some convincing to give V.I.Z.ion up. Viz and Diz actively want to continue the project. What can we do about that?"

Phil sighed. There was the problem underscoring every other issue: what can we do? They hadn't considered that. Now that the world was settling from its adrenaline fizz, he was realising there were a lot of things he hadn't considered.

"I don't know... Threaten to turn them in to the authorities, I guess." He shifted in the mattress dip, reaching out to brush his knuckles over Smiley's fingers. "Diz seemed pretty freaked out by being stuck in that facility—pretty sure the prospect of being vivisected by scientists would give him a pause."

"Oh yeah, oh that'll work." Zach put his hand to his face in a facsimile of a phone. "'Excuse me, emergency services? Hi, yeah, so we brought a bunch of crazy spacemen home and now the whole neighbourhood is incredibly dead. Can the cops come put them in time out? No it's not a prank. Yes I can hold.'"

Phred laughed; without looking, he tried to offer Zach a high-five and succeeded in slapping the other boy in the stomach.

"I now desperately want someone to give Viz the riot hose." With a sigh, Phred folded the arm back beneath his head. "I'd still say it's the best long term solution we have."

"No point in long term when short term is coming for our asses."

One second. Two... Three...

"So what are we gonna do?"

Up to this point, Smiley had been silent, but at this fifth repetition of the age old question, she gave a shivery little sigh. With a creaking of springs, she heaved herself upright on her bed and, with a lightly shaking hand, reached under the frame. There was an air about her now, of tearful determination, as though she were preparing to do something awful but utterly necessary; the delirious jocularity bled from the air as she pulled out a shoebox and threw it gently down on to the carpet. The thing inside made a leaden, metallic chuckle.

Phil flipped the lid off and immediately felt a liquid, electric shudder course down his spine. Phred flinched back as though electrocuted, falling off the mattress. Zack uttered a hushed curse, both prayer and condemnation.

Lying in the box with a coy, sneering strength was a well-worn revolver, the wooden grip smooth and polished, the barrel greased and glimmering. In the small apertures of that barrel, Phil could see the confident gleam of six, silver bullets. All at once the room felt too hot, too cold, too large, and suffocatingly cramped; it was as though the massive contradiction of someone as mild as Smiley owning a weapon was attempting to cram itself into that one space.

"Smiley," Phil said slowly, his voice so steady it came out as guarded, almost irritated. "Why do you have that?"

Smiley didn't look at any of them; she was staring solemnly in to the box. Her lips wobbled, but when she spoke, her voice was unwaveringly firm and she was stone-faced when she finally did turn to look each of them in the eye.

"It was dad's." The airless atmosphere tightened a little further; Smiley never spoke about her father, a dead paratrooper she had never met. The invocation of him now cranked the severity of their situation to an unbearable degree. "I found it under the stairs—I think it's for burglars. Mum doesn't know I have it."

"... But why?"

"In case they make trouble." Very tenderly, she reached out and ran a finger over the metal shape, tracing it the way a lover would trace a photograph, her face doleful and bitterly resolute. "I don't want anyone to get hurt this time around."

They looked at the gun and it, with dreadful arrogance, looked back. It was the severity of their situation manifested, without any varnish or nicety to disguise it's ugly edges or awful potential. Slowly, carefully, Phil placed the lid back on the box.

"Look... I think we're all getting ahead of ourselves. This isn't going to go horribly wrong... at least not right away. What were aren't going to do is panic. We beat these guys before; doing it again will be easy." His voice, though not resonant with certainly, was firm enough to convey some confidence in his words. Their history with the aliens stood behind him like a shadow, not reassuring but a solid reminder that not everything was yet lost.

"Sure," Phred whispered.

"Yeah," Zach nodded, sarcasm muted if not gone entirely. "These punks couldn't handle us in Primary. I'd like to see 'em try now."

Silently, Smiley tucked the shoebox back under her bed and lay back down. The look on her face was that of someone very far away from her body and she stared in to the ceiling as though the plaster had thinned in to translucence to let her see the equations in the stars. As he lay down, Phil imagined that he could feel the cold eye of the muzzle trained on them, like a pin-prick pupil watching as they slept. Phred's muffled voice spoke up in the dark, apprehension burnt there in black.

"Easy, huh?"

The night passed in contemplative silence. Nobody got much sleep.

✯

Downstairs in the dark living room, Ada Sundae surveyed her surprise patients. She had drawn the curtains to avoid prying eyes and had switched off the downstairs lights to avoid drawing attention to the house. Normal houses had their lights off at this hour, and she wanted more than anything to seem normal. Outside, faintly, she could still hear the warbling drift of sirens and speeding cars. From the sound of it, there were even more now than the last time she bothered to listen, like carrion birds flocking to a corpse. Every breath tasted of verdigris and river water, and she knew instinctively that it was the scent of blood, despite the fact that no earthly creature had blood that smelled that way.

Under close inspection, it became very clear that, had the strangers been human, they all would have been dead. Perhaps they were—perhaps the shallow rise and fall of their chests was not the result of breathing but the failing convulsions of some unknown organ. How would she know? She attempted to take an average of their pulses but found no steady beat, only veins flinching against her fingers in strange, liquid ripples. All the little signifiers she could have relied upon were gone, plunging her headlong in to the dark. The exposed meat and muscle inside them was the colour of bruised orchids. Her hands were quickly coated in a fine, sticky film of that strangely scented blood and it was cold, as though it came from something already dead. That alone was enough to reignite the arthritically nervous twitch of her fingers.

'Focus. Calm down. Assess and prioritise.'

There was once a time when she could do this without thought, she remembered. A lifetime ago, in memories baked hard under burning sun, she had strode about a dilapidated camp, plucked bullets from bodies, flooded veins with morphine, and flirted shamelessly with blood flecking her face. Strange how much the years can take away, All the easy, little things, so reliable, so integral, falling out of your proverbial pockets like loose change and lint.

She spent a little time making immediate fixes to whatever seemed sufficiently urgent (what would have been deemed urgent on a human patient) before sitting back and assessing the tools at her disposal.

Courtesy of her experience and a certain amount of paranoia, Ada's first aid kit was extensive, full of everything one could find in a pharmacy and many things not offered commercially—surgical masks, non-latex gloves, absorbable sutures, medical clamps, and more medications than it seemed advisable for one person to have. She retrieved it from its place on the bottom shelf in her office down the hall, it's weight and solidity as grounding as it was frightening. In that same office sat an angle poise lamp that had potential to substitute for a surgical light, so she grabbed that too.

It was likely unwise to conduct procedures in a living room, she decided eventually. Lacking a bathtub, the linoleum floor of the kitchen was her next best candidate for a temporary surgical suite if she would be willing to clean it quickly with bleach. As its windows faced the back of the house, looking out only in to her own garden, she would also get away with having the lights on.

Moving them was not itself a difficult task, but doing it delicately took some struggling, their long, weirdly slender limbs antagonistic and discordant as they dragged along the carpet and caught on the skirting board. None of her impromptu patients so much as stirred as she worked, and perhaps that was for the best. She had no idea what she would say to them if they woke: 'what are you?' rather than 'who are you?' would likely be first from her lips, followed closely by an endless cavalcade of 'is this supposed to do that?'

Finally her makeshift set up was complete, the scent of strange blood replaced by an astringent, lemony Clean, and she had exhausted her supply of delays. Ada felt her clinical demeanour fell back in place, as though it had never left, a worn pair of boots, broken in and intimately familiar. The slight but ever-present quivers of her fingers stilled.

The first patient to fall beneath the now-steady knife was the green one. There was something slightly curious about the figure's sides. In the places where a second arm should have sat, the naked sides of his torso were thick with scrawls of scar. Feeling for a chest injury, she pressed delicately in to his ribs (or where his ribs should be) and found things her fingers didn't understand. It didn't feel entirely organic, but she had no frame of reference to assure her one way or another.

A little exploration through a cut in his chest revealed it to be a material she didn't recognise grafted in to the skeletal structure, very clearly old and deliberately done, half healed in to the bone. It wasn't anything she had to concern herself with or remove.

This established, she turned her attention to the wound in his stomach, full of glass and metal like teeth in a predatory mouth. 'No time like the present.' 

Fire from the gas hob sterilised the tools, and the savoury reek of burned blood soon joined the verdigris and bleach. Each shard clinked as Ada deposited it in the pyrex bowl she had designated for foreign objects and for a while all sound shrunk to just that; the musical sound of glass on glass, the small, snappish sound of the tweezers, and the labouring of the lungs she could faintly see nestled in the cut-open chest. Then— 

"Wow, that is horrifying." In a gesture almost violent, Ada's head snapped up; Phil Eggtree stood in the doorway looking, as most people do, a little soft and comical in his borrowed pyjamas. He raised his hands placatingly, but his eyes remained transfixed on the body. "Sorry." 

"Oh good." After coaxing the last shard free, Ada switched to unpacking a box of sterile, catgut stitches. "You can be my nurse."

Phil blinked. In the absolute, night-dark quiet, she could hear the wet click of his eyelids meeting.

"I don't suppose I can get away with just grabbing some water?" His voice was slightly weak, but he was already casting about for a place to put down his glass. He scrubbed his arms with soap and antiseptic up to the elbow without instruction or complaint.

"No—I need a second set of hands for this mess." Ada threw a packet of sterile gloves at the boy, which he caught with a slightly resigned expression. "And anyway, I wanted to talk to you. I know you had a hand in this."

Looking slightly affronted (an expression impressively conveyed around the mask), Phil gave her a performative 'who, me?' gesture that might have been more convincing in literally any other circumstance.

"Whoa, what makes you think this is my doing?"

"Because it always is, Phil." 'And you just told me, you ridiculous boy.' "You're never not in the middle of things, particularly when it's the four of you. You're their ringleader—now I've been roped in to the circus and I think I deserve to know what act we're on."

"Fair enough." He paused, watching as she ran the length of a long, curved needle through a blue flame. "Just to warn you, it will not make sense."

"That's fine. Pinch these edges closed—harder, there you go."

Phil wasn't wrong; the explanation, told in between instances of Ada guiding his hands, did not make a single, solitary lick of sense. But as unlikely a tale as it was, she didn't think he was lying; wrist deep in a man's split open torso, the boy was as green as his favourite hoodie and she doubted he had the capacity for such elaborate dishonesty. There were a few details she could feel being left on a mental cutting room floor, but they could be chased up later, at a more opportune, less grisly time. Several times he paused, and she couldn't always tell if it was because he was hurriedly filling in some gap in his tale of if he were trying to calm his errant nerves. 

Still, Phil was doing very well for a novice, and she had the distinct impression that having to focus on speaking was one of the few things keeping him from some violent rejection of a dinner hours past.

The smell was the worst thing—thick, warm, and damp, the gamey reek of something living mixed with the memories of rotting copper wishes lying at the bottom of a well.

"If you vomit in my incisions I will be deeply unimpressed."

"Doing my best here, doctor." Obediently, he let her move his hand to clamp down on a squiggle of vein buried in a jagged slash of muscle so she could stitch it back to the torn end nestled under some sort of organ. "Oh god, oh god, that is... that is a texture that I can experience... ohhh this is the worst. Fuck, it's moving. You better not just die after all this, Diz, I swear to god."

In that fashion, they progressed from wound to wound, bone to bone. Eventually the story was over and 'Diz' was as stable as she could manage without medications. Ada gave Phil a minute to breathe as she reshuffled the bodies beneath the lamp, deliberately turning her back in dismissal to let him sneak out if he felt like it. When she turned around, however, he was still standing there waiting and, with a slightly nauseous set of finger guns, he rejoined her to work on the red alien where they were met with much of the same. More torn flesh, more evidence of incredible violence (both past and present), more thick, black blood.

Phil kept up a constant gabble as they worked, desperate to distract himself from the sights and sensations of alien viscera. In the face of the silent strangers, with their inexplicable, chill anatomy, he was reassuring to a degree that was almost necessary. Alone, Ada had the suspicion she would have started jumping at shadows and sirens; her charges were still breathing, but she felt as though she were standing in a dreamlike mortuary modelled on her own home.

Blood was dribbling from beneath the alien's staring glasses. Any attempt to remove them was met with stiff resistance until she found the catch that latched them onto the side of his face, at which point they fell away easily. Beneath lay an open black eye, vacant and peppered with dust, and an empty socket crammed with varied pieces of unidentifiable tech, with a long, trailing wire like an artificial optic nerve. Ada set the apparatus gently to one side and carefully wiped the blood pouring from a cut just below the hollow eye.

"They're part of his head?!" Phil stepped away, gagging slightly, staring aghast at the motionless red figure. "Someone ought to tell him there's such a thing as taking A Look too seriously."

Ada ignored him in favour of feeling over the stranger's skull. No breakages—none that she could find at any rate. Carefully, she rinsed the open eye with a saline solution and slipped it closed.

"Actually, someone ought to tell Viz there's such a thing as going too far in general."

"Why did you go back for them?" Ada asked, in a rare moment of quiet; they were taking a short breather after the exertion of reorienting the broken leg. Phil was stood by the alien's head, staring down at him with a peculiar expression which said the boy didn't recognise him at all. "Why bring them to me at all?"

"I... I don't really have a good answer for that." Sighing, Phil scrubbed a hand over his face, promptly cursed, and went to fetch a fresh mask, set of gloves, and rewash his hands. "Look, I got tossed in the deep end with these guys showing up and I did what I did partly 'cause it was a cool space adventure, but also 'cause I didn't want anyone to die. And, unfortunately, that apparently includes bastard aliens." His eyes met hers, terribly frank. "I don't really want anyone to die if I can help it."

"How noble," she snarked. 'How human' she thought fondly.

"You know, you and Viz are probably gonna get on—that is exactly what he's gonna say about all this."

Finally they came to the blue alien, who seemed to have gotten off comparatively lightly—which is to say he only looked to have been put through a meat grinder once compared to the other two's twice.

"You like this one?"

"Think so." Phil had stopped complaining about the feeling of flesh under his nails, though he was still rather pale in the brightening light. "The other two were a lot more aggressive. I think I can work with Quiz and if I can convince him, he can maybe sway the other two. Or at least, he can sway Diz, who then influences Viz... we're going for dominos here."

He snapped the alien's lower arm back in to place with a resolution of manner which said this injury in particular had been bothering him.

'Convince him to what? Sway them to what?' She did not ask and he did not answer. Her tongue and mind felt like glue, lathered with tiredness. Later, she would ask him later; there would be time to figure this out later, when people weren't dying and her hands didn't smell of blood.

By the time it was over, the hour had gotten so late it had looped right back around to being early, and the little clock on the mantlepiece in the living room sweetly told out five chimes, the conductor to a growing chorus of birds. Exhausted, the pair surveyed their macabre works: the sink was full of bloodied tools and surrounded by basins filled to the brim with shrapnel and discarded gauze packing; despite valiant efforts, the false tiles of the linoleum were tacky underfoot with flaky blood; debrided flesh from a colourful variety of scorch wounds had been collected in a Tupperware and both parties were somewhat at a loss for how to discard it; cleanest of everything were the vials of medication, ultimately unused after Ada realised she had no way of estimating their effects. Before them lay three bodies, still breathing, looking somehow more peaceful in the predawn light.

Silently, Ada took Phil's filthy gloves and worn mask and set them aside in the pile of things to quietly dispose of. She helped him find a clean shirt from the linens cupboard, and gently wiped a smear of something dark and sticky from his forehead. This is as close as she would come to telling him 'well done' but she thought it many times. 

"Back to bed," she told him mutedly, and he agreed with a languorous stretch that cracked every bone in his spine.

Phil paused at the stairs, spoke without turning; the rising sun cast him in honey pale gold.

"You know, for nearly a decade now, I've been waiting for this to happen. It's like a game I never finished and couldn't find again for the longest time; I've just been thinking about it for so long. Is it awful that I'm kinda stoked to finally have a chance at getting answers?"

Her tongue and mind felt like glue. 'Later, later, later...'

"... Goodnight Phil."

"Good morning Doctor."

Silently, Ada crossed over to the kitchenette's window, drew the blind and watched the world turn grey with daylight. Like a statue, a monument to a life long ago, she stood, once again, amongst the bodies of strangers, the scent of damning copper heavy in her nostrils and her mind thick with half-forgotten sounds. She hoped she had done the right thing. She hoped her daughter knew what she was doing. She hoped Phil's game was the sort a person could win.

Morning took those hopes and turned them hazy, the sun a white jellyfish drifting damply in to the wet paper sky, trailing its promises behind it.

Chapter Text

It is a fundamental fact, throughout all of time and space, that The Morning After is dreadful.

It does not actually matter what event The Morning After follows—it will suck regardless. Of course, the conventional unwise tryst with its walk of shame is well known, as is the hangover with its ritual self-flagellation of scrolling through unremembered messages and compromising photos, but these are not the limits. The Morning After an argument, for example, with its brittle, icy air and shattered glass silence, or The Morning After grief, with its rinsed out, blank sky inertia. Even joy has its Morning After; the debt of happiness, the emptiness in the absence of anticipation, the lassitude of plans come to pass.

Phil's Morning After ironically came several days after the event, and he felt somewhat cheated by this; he would have much rather have gotten it over and done with quickly.

There is nothing quite like being the subject of disapproval for a significant other's parent—the instinctual defensiveness, the moment of affronted recognition, the sting of insecurity, the slight sense of loss as this nascent strand in your relationship tremors and dies, the hesitant desire to please. Having a meal in that sort of atmosphere is one of those Character Building moments that could qualify as mild torture in the right circumstance. What is less commonly acknowledged is that this dire strait can, in fact, be made worse if one is bold enough to drag three heavily injured aliens in to said parent's house in the dead of night. Particularly if said aliens seem to be recovering at a worryingly expedient rate for would-be world-enders.

A normal human would have never recovered from the injuries inflicted by the crash, their body irreparably mulched. Only four days had passed since the disaster, however, and the V.I.Z.ion crew were already starting to look significantly less like minced meat. 

On the second night following the crash, with the sun setting bloodily in the living room window and casting strange shadows in the hall, Viz dragged himself briefly back to wakefulness in an effort as Herculean as it was unprecedented. 

With nothing else to dress the trio in, it had been deemed best to leave the aliens in their ragged, navy-grey uniforms. They had a great resemblance to limp Halloween decorations, all multicoloured and wrapped in bandages, and were hauntingly alive with twitches and stricken noises. Against their direction, Mrs Sundae had lingered in their midst, monitoring each involuntary flinch and hitch in breath, her lined face pinched; everyone else crowded supportively in the doorway.

Finally, Viz came to, disorientated and dazed. Mrs Sundae, with calm born of wary caution, knelt down in front of him.

"I want to give you pain meds," she told him in a clear, slow voice. "I know it's a long shot, but if I draw out the molecules, would you be able to recognise what you can have?"

It took a full minute for Viz to cobble together an answer. Black blood dripped from between his cracked lips when he did.

"'M a ch'mt'ch," he croaked. "Y's."

'Chemtech?' That was new; Viz apparently had a life outside of being a massive prick. The new fact sat oddly in Phil's mind, like a pebble in his boot; it made Viz three dimensional in a way he hadn't been before. Indeed, it seemed too small a thing for the shift in perspective it wrought. The phantom sensation of alien viscera was still slick and sickening beneath his fingernails.

Still, the result of that was they could (thankfully) knock the aliens out completely, thus putting an end to the disquieting zombie shuffles from the far end of the kitchen that had made cooking feel like a haunted stealth operation. The three of them had spent the intervening days medicated into a placidity reminiscent of piles of socks.  

Now, though, it was morning again, and, against all ordnance of sense, reason, head injuries, and drugs, the bastards were beginning to actually wake up.

There had been a vague but unified effort to ensure Smiley's mother would not be left alone with the aliens, half-dead and helpless though they were. Today, this fell to Phil—Smiley had dashed out in the early hours of the morning, running late for her plethora of university classes; Zach had vanished in a comedically literal puff of smoke and was hanging around a lamp post outside, Walkman in hand; Phred, having used up all his leave several months ago for a prank, had been forced to return to work. Phil was reluctantly coerced into remaining behind by scraps of honour he didn't know he had and a chronic lack of other places to be.

Which might have been a mistake, because now, quite unfortunately, Mrs Sundae seemed to be expecting him to do something.

So here he was, doing Some Thing.

Staring is, in all contexts except an optometrist's office, a bold move. Assertive at best, rude far more often—a not inconsiderable number of people would consider it a direct challenge. With this in mind, Phil made the fact that he was doing it as obvious as possible as he watched Viz's various attempts to reorient the fingers of one of his hands. Unfortunately for this endeavour, Viz seemed to be doing an equally excellent job at ignoring him, assisted by his not inconsiderable blind spot, and so the two were at something of an unequally awkward impasse. To keep himself entertained in the meanwhile, Phil found himself carefully studying the alien.

Viz, he decided, looked faintly bizarre without his glasses—and, considering the glasses in question, that was saying something. His lonely eye was a large and perfectly round, a glossy, black sphere that seemed somehow more out-of-place in that hard face than the machinery filling the other socket. Viz being somehow made of metal made more sense than the prospect of him being organic and vulnerable. Whenever he blinked, which seemed a slightly painful affair that he did as infrequently as possible, the conduits flared with a small volley of sparks. The wide split of his mouth was too uneven a rictus to look natural and, without the angles of the glasses, it threw everything else into a faintly disturbing unbalance. There was something about him reminiscent of a button-eyed voodoo doll. The stitches twisting his lips into their discordant snarl were messy and genuine, unlike Quiz's neat fakes. 

(Because they were fakes—tidy little loops of thread that weren't holding together wound or keeping anything in place. They sat either side of his mouth like snakebite piercings, like a poor attempt to imitate Viz.)

Phil wondered about that, sometimes... the blue alien was so out of place... Where the hell did he fit in to this enterprise?

"How long?"

"What?" Suddenly wrong-footed, Phil blinked himself back into the room to find Viz meeting his gaze. He wasn't sure how long they had been looking at each other, but it had made something instinctive in him feel slightly uneasy.

"How long," Viz wheezed, barely comprehensible. "Has it been... since we saw you?" One of those grimly determined blinks, a small spasm of circuitry. "You look older."

"Oh. About seven years."

That single eye briefly unfocused and Viz nodded slowly to himself; Phil could see him shuffling a deck of cards in his head, a plan written on the back of each one: Nine of Diamonds, Four of Clubs, Ace of Spades...

Sensing he had been discarded, Phil resumed his examination. Altogether, the aliens cut a fairly forlorn and desolate picture, slumped in the far corner of the kitchen by the bucket of recycling, and one being awake did little to remedy that. They exuded a general air of exhausted misery that Phil was certain was not warranted this early in the day, regardless of how many failed landings you had recently been involved in.

"Is there something you want, human?" Viz's expression of disdain was steady as a heat mirage but still indelibly there. "You're staring."

"Yeah, actually. I got a list if you're not going anywhere?" With a touch of mockery, he left a considerate pause, as though Viz might announce a desire to head to the shops or drown himself in a river, but there was nothing. "First off, it's Phil. Phil Eggtree, if I'm feeling pedantic—and I am. It's gonna get real confusing real quick if you try and call everyone 'human' or 'earthling' or some other weird, slightly derogatory nickname." 

"Noted," the red alien sneered.

"Secondly... why Earth? Of all the places to destroy, why here? Why because of me? I was a kid! I didn't know any better than to not leave early... but also why the hell is that the metric for ending the world?! What's wrong with you?! Of all the planets, in all the universe, with all the reasons in the world, why did you come here? Why am I the one stuck with you?"

There was a tinny scrape of chair leg on lino and Phil felt his guts wilt slightly. Ah yes—Mrs Sundae, sat just behind him; the one person he hadn't wanted to mention the doomsday scheme in front of. And certainly not so cavalierly; that the strangers in your kitchen had attempted planeticide was the sort of news to be broken gently and at arm's length. A burn of glaring eyes started at the base of Phil's skull.

Either unconcerned or ignorant to this development, Viz considered the question for a second, exposed eye darting involuntarily to his crewmates and lingering on their sleep-still faces. When he spoke, he did so slowly, each word as clear as it could be through scorched lips, and Phil wasn't certain if that was because Viz was attempting to impress upon him the severity with which he spoke, or if the weight were the result of the effort it took to speak at all.

"Earth was never in serious danger... or at least, it wasn't intentionally. We were using you to see what humans would do... when placed under various degrees of stress... you were selfless, inquisitive, without... judgement. Promising ambassadors for your species. The CryoBeam... misfired. Diz's inventions don't always... work as they should." Phil absorbed this all uneasily. He believed him—or he believed parts of it... he believed Viz trusted what he was saying. In this instance, however, Phil had the darkling suspicion that Diz's device had worked precisely as intended. "The rest is private."

"I'm asking you why you wanted to explode my world and you're really hitting me with 'confidential'?"

"Yes." Viz was better at staring than Phil; this seemed incredibly unfair for a guy with such mismatched eyes.

Shrugging, Phil adopted a nonchalant air designed to aggravate.

'We have other ways of making you talk.'

"Alright, well it's not like you're going anywhere. I'll get it out of you eventually."

"You will not." Apparently done with the matter, Viz lay back against the cabinets and closed his eye.

"I'll ask Diz," Phil persisted. "Or Quiz."

For some reason, Viz found this prospect very funny. The fit of hysterics took him with the violence of a seizure, limbs rattling against the floor, his gash of a mouth a rotted pumpkin grin. Laughing was probably not advisable in his condition; this did not seem to be enough to stop him though. Hacking coughs broke through the hilarity and Viz doubled over, still smiling; Mrs Sundae's agitated help was shakily waved off.

The rough noise bounced from cabinet to cabinet, and Phil could feel his nerves tightening with every reverberation, but there was a second inclination buried there too—the urge to somehow pick Viz apart and understand the joke.

"As... as if th-they'd tell you!" A dribble of blood ran down Viz's chin and began falling in droplets to darken his jacket. Jagged amusement lit up his black eye like a point of metal appearing through dark waters to impale a swimmer; Phil considered the possibility that Viz was still high. "Q-Quiz doesn't even... know... th-the whole story."

Frowning, Phil filed that little bit of information away into that small, analytical corner of his brain that was constantly looking over his shoulder for shiny bits of clue like a particularly judicious magpie. If Viz wasn't going to play ball, and Quiz was his usual ignorant self... well that left Diz. He didn't really want to have to ask Diz; he had a feeling asking Diz would be a very bad thing to do.

For a long moment, Phil considered the prospect, turning it over in his mind like a coin with the numbers worn off... and then he made the executive decision to drop it. The question he'd wanted answered since childhood could wait a little longer... he wasn't going to beg.

"So, what happens after this?" He asked instead, after Viz had gasped himself into silence. "You can't just stay here."

"I assure you, I have no intention of that." Viz sounded slightly offended by the suggestion. "We had already remained in your star system... far longer than I'd have liked." A dry sigh rasped through the burned gulch of his throat, a noise like tearing paper and his eye shuddered closed. "Once we get back in to orbit... we'll be gone."

Mollified, Phil nodded and let the subject drop for more vital matters.

"Who were the guys Quiz was with?" When Viz only looked confused, he elaborated. "When Quiz came to be our new overlord, he showed up with two purple dudes I literally never saw again. Buddies of yours?"

"Oh." Viz closed his eye again. "Holograms."

"You have those?"

"We certainly had them... before Quiz wandered off. Were the two projections identical?"

"I think so. To be honest, I was more focused on Quiz and the multiple laser guns he installed in our classroom."

"Unbelievable... four hundred settings and he uses it to make copies..."

"That's what you want to focus on? You do realise you've nearly died since then—maybe be a little more worried about that. Also, you're really lively for a guy whose guts I was poking seventy hours ago, what gives?"

"Tissue repair nanites... standard issue injection."

"You got inoculated against spaceship crashes? Wild. You can get splattered across six miles of tarmac and be fine, but I get three different flu jabs and still wind up sneezing come winter. Life is unkind."

"My heart... bleeds for you."

"You joke, but that is actually a thing that happened last night. Also your lungs fell out. Like, at least three times. I put them back in back to front at first, but they should be good now."

"Stop talking... about my... lungs."

"You got it. Hey—if you're all aliens, how comes you all speak English."

"Do you ever shut up?" Viz groaned. The laughing seemed to have exhausted him.

"I'm a curious guy. I've got seven years worth of questions here, Viz, and a captive audience. You sure you don't want to tell me why blowing up Earth was on the To-Do list?"

"Rot," Viz instructed bitterly.

"Your funeral. So, why English? Did the gits colonise space? Are you from the dark and distant future where the upside is we traverse the stars, but the downside is everyone is British? Second question; are you guys ants or lizards? You seem like both. Is being English part of the identity crisis?"

Viz started to respond (though that response was far more likely to be 'fuck off' than anything constructive) but a voice beat him to it. It wasn't a voice that sounded as though it knew it was answering a question, for it didn't speak with any of the inflection one would associate with such a thing, and the words were blurry and soft. It sent chills skittering along Phil's nerves.

"All language is... endlessly recycled..."

Diz—awake again, at last. Awake and speaking, which was altogether more conceptually worrying than 'awake and staring blankly at a wall for four hours' (his previous best effort.)

Though he had succeeded in lifting his head, Diz didn't seem to actually be looking at any of them. There were bruised, plum-hued smudges across the visible angular eye, the other covered by the bandage which had been holding his head together. Like this, he was Viz inverted, a mirror self. Once more, his voice was eerily calm, apparently unruffled, thick like a bitten tongue and full of the drowsy, molten clouds of someone still half asleep. He didn't sound like something that would kill you; he didn't sound like anything particularly alive either.

"... We had to learn... your dialect and... grammar patterns..." Diz continued. "But it's... not that different, really..." 

A slither was working its way down Phil's spine at a decent clip, a sensation like stepping barefoot on a hurrying snake. The thought of Diz lying there, silently, listening disturbed him far more than it ought have.

A megalomanic Viz might be, but at least Phil knew for certain he was nuts; Diz was a liar, and Phil was full of the uneasy awareness that he really didn't understand the green alien at all.

"Heyyy, Diz... how long have you been awake, exactly?"

"Oh, a while... a while... I could hear you... talking..."

Having the alien confirm every one of his suspicions was, unsurprisingly, not a reassurance. Indeed, Phil took it as his cue to bow out momentarily and let captain and lieutenant deal with each other.

(Besides, if Diz and Viz were both awake, there was a chance Quiz might be too and, with the ratio of crazy to sane in the room coming in at a solid 2:1, Phil felt sorely in need of decent company. Which wasn't an option, so Quiz would have to do.)

A person is at their least stealthy when sneaking somewhere, but this was fortunately no impediment for Phil, who had lost Viz's attention entirely the second Diz started speaking. Still, the staring of their laser point eyes caught about his legs like tripwires, like something physical.

"You kept your arms. Congratulations." Sarcasm dripped liberally from Viz's words, other emotions insignificant under the mockery. "You couldn't really afford to lose any more."

Diz's vacant gaze sharpened considerably beneath the bandages, his eyes focusing keenly on a spot slightly to the left of Viz. When he responded, a great deal of the mistiness had seeped from his voice leaving it cold and clean-cut like something newly made. There was no personality to it. There wasn't even anger.

"I could survive losing... another arm. Lose one more eye... and you're finished." A smile split the calm facade then, a crazed and awful thing of bloodied teeth, and peeling gums, and hate. "I'm winning."

"Treachery," Viz snarled, the semblance of humanity dropping out of his voice; there was something strange and subvocal clicking in the base of his throat. "Mutiny. Insubordination. Slimy, murderous wretch—you really think yourself a leader? You think you can take my works from me?"

Picking his way around the absurdly long alien legs sprawling over the floor, Phil was struck with a sudden sympathy for mice, crawling along the skirting board, oblivious of and yet subject to the inscrutable whims of foreign monsters who would smite them if they saw them. Each inch in his journey to Quiz felt like it might invite the attention of the aliens, about whom the air was suddenly peppery and volatile.

Diz calmed, as though sanity were an item in exchange between them.

"You were not... aboard ship. I was the... highest c-commanding... officer. I was leader... of V.I.Z.ion."

"Commanding Officer in a crew... consisting of a useless nobody, a simpleton, and a beast. Don't be stupid—I've enough of that with Quiz... playing 'Abandon Ship'." Had circumstances not been what they were, Viz would have been shaking his lieutenant. As it was, his eye was once more slipping closed. "You've not got the temperament for leadership... and you know it. You'd destroy everything for petty satisfaction... and then wonder why everyone was on fire. You've never made a long term plan in your life."

(Phil was close enough to nudge Quiz's skinny ankle, and he did so with as much subtlety as such an action can command. Less subtle was Quiz himself, who sat bolt upright with a yelp like a stepped-on dog toy, which Phil found funny until the alien curled up with a groan. Both his coworkers ignored him, entirely fixated on each other like animals with their teeth buried in flesh.)

"You would be nowhere without me," Diz whispered, and suddenly—dreadfully—he sounded like himself again. Snarling, Viz kicked his lieutenant with his unbroken leg. 

"I'm stuck in this fool's kitchen on a worthless mudball with you. You've yet to offer me anything of value. I thought I at least had your loyalty, even if it meant dealing with everything else. You disappoint me." 

His voice had no emphasis, nor was it louder than that which should be warranted in casual conversation, nor was that the harshest thing he had said that afternoon. But those words struck with the weight of lead, branding-iron orange and heavy. Quite suddenly, Diz looked distressed, as though he had somehow missed a step on an emotional level and was struggling to regain equilibrium. Then a claw shot out of its lair behind his eyes, seized the stray feeling, and dragged it back in to the void, leaving the face beneath the bandages serene as a doll's once more.

A silence fell between them, one that started with some expectation of being filled, as though Viz had anticipated a vitriolic refutation, but stretched out and went cold. Still they watched each other, unmoored and drifting, uncomprehending and inscrutable.

Fascinated, Phil settled against the wall and let Quiz lean his head against his legs. Staring at Viz and Diz was no longer something provocative—it was almost compulsive. An almost indecent fascination with the grimy inner-workings of whatever friendship this was, the immediate lack of empathy the spectacle engendered. Memories of sitting alone in a friend's living room while their parents ignored him and screamed about divorce were making an unwanted yet searing resurgence. 

Perhaps in an attempt to dispel this tension (or perhaps a natural consequence of so recently having had rebar removed from his throat) Quiz coughed, genteel and unobtrusive (as genteel and unobtrusive as one can feasibly be after having metal shove itself rudely through one's neck.) Almost immediately, tiny crystals began to form in the air, the atmosphere shifting its weight, a ponderous disapproval turning its leaden gaze upon the little corner Phil had unwisely sequestered himself in. 

'Thanks Quiz. Really wanted them to remember me. Is this what you do? You interrupt them before they kill each other? What part do you play in this mess?'

Silence reigned in iron. Nobody seemed to even be breathing. There was recognition in that silence, a mutual awareness of each other and all the emotions that came alongside—relief at seeing each other alive, dull surprise, old anger, resentment, reassurance, dismay, affection. Phil could feel the tension growing like thick, flowering vines, a blossoming abundance of what could only be described as hostile awkwardness.

Finally, Viz spoke up; what had once been cold command had a bite to it now, a bitter petulance like over-boiled pride.

"We will need s-some form of transmitter to... to contact the mothership."

"C-couldn't we... j-just use a remote?" Quiz helpfully volunteered between coughs. "Isn't... isn't th-this exactly t-the sort of thing you... b-built them for?"

"Mine's broken, clod."

"And mine is aboard the main ship. Any more bright ideas, Quiz?" Quiz frowned and touched something in one of his pockets before hurriedly sweeping the expression away. Anyone looking his way would have seen through the paper-thin poker face, but nobody except Phil was paying any attention to Quiz at all. "Diz, seeing as you're so endlessly capable, I'm leaving this to you. Contact the ship. Do it quickly."

"I—"

"Questioning my orders, soldier?"

Whatever Diz had been about to say died on his tongue, and he wrestled in its absence for a long second, looking quite as though he would choke on the corpse. With spitting bad-humour, he thrust out a shaking hand, the arm trembling uncertainly in the air between him and Viz, long fingers twitching spasmodically.

"... I was going to ask for your glasses. I need something to work with." When Viz seemed tempted to refuse, that slight, sinister smile started to ease its way back in to the blankness of Diz's face. "I'll give them back good as new... promise."

With visible reluctance, the shades were handed over and Diz snatched them up with a vengeful, vulturous delight. He began to reel the fine, golden wires out from their housing in the frame, looping them about his bandaged fingers in a manner that was as childishly spiteful as it was brokenly clumsy. Somehow the pettiness was as unsurprising as the violence.

Several seconds passed before Phil realised Quiz wasn't choking any more—the muffled wheezes and bony creaks were the result of the alien laughing.

"What's the joke?" Phil asked out the side of his mouth.

Quieting his snickering best he was able, Quiz eased part of his jacket from the bandaging bound about his middle. He reached awkwardly into his pocket and, after a few attempts, extracted something. Something rectangular, regularly indented, and obviously metallic. Something Phil had once seen in the possession of Diz...

A remote. A damaged remote certainly, but Phil could see a red light blinking from within the depths of Quiz's jacket, so the thing had to be in some working order. 

There was a puckish mischievousness to Quiz's little smile, a very brief flash of childish, spiteful glee and, amid it, something searching, as though he were looking for Phil to approve or enjoy the little joke. And Phil did appreciate it—mildly inconveniencing an already deeply inconvenienced Viz was very funny. The unwise sort of funny, like dressing up as a hotdog and giving a lion a striptease. It was the sort of joke Phil wanted to watch blow up from a distance... relocation to the living room might be wise.

With the same stealth he had used to reach Quiz, Phil backed carefully out of the kitchen; Diz's alterations to the glasses were becoming increasingly violent, and the air in there had taken in the dry-weather crackle of a storm front. 

In the living room sat Mrs Sundae, who he had rather forgotten about but who had, unfortunately, not returned the favour. She sat by the window, and the book open on her lap did nothing to dispel the impression that she was standing sentinel. Something about the erectness of her head, the straight line of her spine, and the marble stillness of it all reminded Phil of a statue that had come alive to wait for him. 

"You didn't tell me they were trying to end the world."

"No—forgive me, That Was Wrong." Feeling both a need to reassure and a little like he'd been called to the principle's office, Phil sat in the opposing armchair and did his best to look reasonable. "However, they are now all considerably less dangerous than they were seven years ago, at which point they were beaten by an eleven year old who went on to fail calculus... so how scared are we really?"

'Kinda scared actually. But also... not at all. Like distant thunder, a faraway storm; I am very scared, but it's happening somewhere else, to someone else.'

"Hm." Mrs Sundae's searching black eyes scraped at the meat of his head in a fashion he hoped Smiley would never inherit. "Did you used to escape school often?"

"Oh, every Wednesday." 'And more often in my dreams.' "Not going to hold it against me?"

"I trust you've matured." Apparently satisfied, the old woman turned her head back to her book, sunlight glistening on the web of fine lines about her eyes. "Smiley never missed a single day. One hundred percent attendance. Thirteen years and counting."

"See, I had that too, after I hacked admin."

Mrs Sundae laughed, a rough, singular sound like a cough. Phil smiled back and elected to ignore the loony-tunes level of crashes and bangs happening in the room he'd just left. 

The joke had reached its punchline.

✯

While he was deliriously pleased to have gotten a rise out of Viz, Diz was considerably less pleased when the incensed captain threw himself at him and knocked him to the tiles with all the delicacy of a collapsing building. Diz choked on the mirth lodged like a shard of glass in his chest, and the burst of breath tasted like bruises. Viz's panting was loud in his ear, sandpaper and smoke, second only to the wet pounding of his own heart. Diz grappled blindly with his attacker; his mangled fists were numb, his eyes leaking down his cheeks, and he wasn't sure he was breathing at all anymore. None of this mattered—he scrabbled at Viz as though he could kill him with his lifeless hands.

His thoughts were swimming at the bottom of a black hole, dividing and multiplying in the blackness like the endless echoes of water droplets inside a cave. Whisper, whisper, whisper, went the back of his head, nonsense languages and singsong snatches—fragments of memory and feelings. He couldn't understand any of it. He wished it would just be quiet. He wondered if he could divorce his own mind.

"Give... them... back," Viz demanded in a strained hiss. 

Ignoring the lancing pains that shot through his chest, the grating in his elbows, Diz waved his fingers tauntingly in front of Viz's functioning eye. They continued to clench and coil long after he'd stopped the conscious effort to move them.

"Have... haven't... got them!" And he hadn't—he had no idea where they'd been flung to. He barely knew where he was.

Even those few words winded him, but it was worth the world to see Viz knocked off the gilded pedestal he'd created for himself. A savage sort of satisfaction that nothing else could provide, seeing someone with the arrogance of a god beaten to the floor. 

'Not so above it all now, are you? Just like me, just like me...'

The brutal joy of it was almost enough to make him forget that he was lying in the mud with his leader. Almost enough to make him forget that, when all was said and done, they would help each other to their feet, carry on as normal...

Almost, but not quite.

He hated that he could remember a time when he had admired his captain. He hated that he could never escape the echoes of that old respect, the antique urge to listen and obey. More than anything, Diz hated the warm sense of camaraderie he felt even now, as Viz raised his hand to strike his recalcitrant friend—

"Viz! They're here. I've got them, come on... get off him..."

A smoky shape swum in to the white glow of the ceiling behind Viz's head like a cloud or strange, ineffective god. It's upper set of arms were flapping placatingly at Viz, the lower pair skittering, feather-light and fretful, over Diz's chest and shoulders.

Quiz to the rescue. How quaint. It had been the other way around when they were children. It had been the other way around most of their adult lives too.

Still draped inelegantly about the floor, Viz snatched the proffered shades. With some difficulty, he dragged himself upright, jamming his glasses into their usual position where they connected with a serviceable click. Eyes hidden, he managed to look a little more intimidating, eternal scowl bolstered by the exaggerated glare lent by the machinery. Not wanting to be beaten by Viz's pitiful effort, Diz dragged himself into something that might have glanced at a sitting position sometime, several years ago. Quiz, secure in his mediocrity, remained curled up on the ground, the most comfortable of the three.

"Establish a connection with... with what you've got. The humans must have... some viable substitutes lying around—work with that."

Diz smiled in response and resisted the urge to point out that Viz's glasses had been replaced lopsidedly.

"Whatever grievances you two have, whatever complaints you gave to air—forget it. We won't get anywhere if you insist on acting like children." The fractured lenses glared in to them both. "This is more important than your whining."

Diz tried to speak and felt something tear wetly in his throat. 'Complaints—where do we keep the list? Do you want them chronologically or alphabetically? In order of importance or how much I despise you for it?' Viz was staring guardedly at him and only continued when it became clear that the irritable movements of Diz's mouth wouldn't yield any actual speech.

"Contact the ship."

Then to Quiz:

"Stay out of the way."

This would have been a dramatic and appropriate juncture for Viz to storm out of the room, but that was a little more than  he could manage; he settled for claiming the corner space, unassailable in the juncture between the two walls.

Little as he wanted to admit it, Diz had to concede that Viz made a very good point. This solar system was closing in about them like like a noose and, though he couldn't quite remember how long they had spent among these stars, he did have the sense that they had turned in to eyes. There were matters more pressing than decades old resentment, an endless pursuit which would tear the three of them from space if they abandoned it.

So yes. He would play along. He would get them all out of here. And then he would rend his captain apart at the seams.

'Everything will be fine, Viz,' those smiling, shadowed eyes seemed to promise.

What a shame it is, that Diz doesn't keep his promises, and that Viz doesn't learn.

✯

"Sir, we've found something."

Stood stiffly at attention, as he always was, the Guard-Agent approached the figure silhouetted grimly in the chair at the window, who spoke to him without looking.

"Is the something useful?"

"We don't know sir."

"... Can you make it useful?"

"We don't know that either, sir."

"Well what am I supposed to do?"

"You... you should come take a look sir..."

There was a theatrically heavy sigh.

"Alright then."

With an irritable huff, Nitwit rose from the window seat he'd been enjoying and flopped carefully after the Guard-Agent, bemoaning the inconvenience of this mysterious 'something'. Their progress was slow; a single foot and one, half-blind eye did not make for exciting top speeds, but the featureless metal walls of the complex were simple enough to navigate and, after seven years of residence, the alien was beginning to get used to where things were.

Much had changed in those years. Deciding to succeed where his parents had failed—with the same amount of success enjoyed by Hitler succeeding Napoleon—Nitwit had decided to give himself a title which made him seem intelligent.

He was now know as Dr. Nitwit. Not 'doctor'—that was far too many letters and syllables.

He had also assumed complete control of Zone 5.1. With the aid of one of Viz's chameleonic devices and some synaptic dampening tools, he was able to sneak in to the facility and pose as an eccentric funder who wanted to be more involved in the process. But this was an achievement that paled in comparison to the grandiose addition to his name and he could never quite recall why he'd gone to the trouble. A sense of nostalgia, perhaps, a loyalty to a memory of three weirdos who broke him and a hundred others out of a convict ship headed to the Gallows Belt. Or maybe he was bored.

Ah well—the why didn't matter. All 'whys' eventually disappear; his simply did so faster than average.

They reached the Screens with minimal complaining. It took him a few seconds of squinting, head tilting, and near overbalancing before Nitwit worked out what was presented to him, but that was less a commentary on him and more a result of the state of the thing itself. Really, it was impressive he realised what it was at all.

The main screen displayed a grimy mass, a split-open ball of metal all dark with char and earth, strapped to the bed of a hauler truck. A time stamp near the bottom indicated, with its constant scrolling of figures, that this was live footage from somewhere with a name Nitwit couldn't pronounce. The pixilation of the image, the distortion of digital miles, left an indescribable amount up to the imagination, but it was obvious that this new 'thing' was unrecognisable. Still, it was quite interesting to look at, and so he spent a good deal of time changing the angle of the footage, sending it to different screens, the Guard Agent stood patiently besides him.

Something stirred, after a while, in Nitwit's empty head. Murky memories spun through the dreary greyness of his mind: a grating voice and endless plans; cool blue skin and heedless ambition; black eyes, rough hands, and rage. Nights spent handing tools along a chain of arms in companionable quiet. Nights spent watching stars fall out of the sky every time the red one yelled 'FIRE'. Nights spent helping make the thing before him, now so terribly ruined...

"That's the bosses' ship." 

He knew then that he had to have it, even if he didn't know why, or how to get it, or why, or what to do with it, or why, or why, or why...

To miss people you don't remember is a very strange thing. The image of that ship, made of wavering pixels, was stuck to the back of Nitwit's eye like so many contact lenses before it, and it wouldn't come back out. He would have the ship, and maybe then it could explain to him why he wanted it.

All good things happen with time (and money.) Zone 5.1 had amassed quite the fortune during its years of inactivity, and Nitwit put it all towards purchasing the ship over dark channels which were flogging the craft to the highest bidder; by the closing of the week, the V.I.Z.ion ship was carefully tucked away at the facility, and Nitwit was left wondering how to get back to his window seat.

Chapter Text

Hovering patiently above Earth like an monstrous, metal spider, surrounded by drifting debris, the V.I.Z.ion mothership turned over in its sleep. There was something bored about it, an air of restlessness in its flashing lights and chrome, like an abandoned arcade machine full of ghosts flickering at the back of an old theme park. It didn't look abandoned—it didn't look like something that had expected to be abandoned either. The lights were on, datapads blinking 'low charge' warnings to absent readers, doors left open as though someone had hurried through them in a rush; a weighty uneasiness sat in a smog upon the creaking bones of the structure, it's delicate metal spindles brittle with tension. Unacknowledged in the world below, a hundred eyes wondered at this strange new star and never guessed at its air of apprehension, it's slow-moving seas of dread.

Someone ought to have returned by now, and they hadn't. Now, there lay an open invitation...

Just over the horizon—if the endless blanket of space could be said to have a horizon—there was a second shape, one smaller and sleeker, for all that it was indistinct. Lazily it edged forwards, and as it did so it crept in to the radius of the V.I.Z.ion ship's sensor array. It did this with a deliberation that was almost coy, and it was disquietingly apparent that this was some form of test that nobody was present to either witness or prevent.

On board the V.I.Z.ion ship, something in the labyrinthian mass of circuit boards and processors clicked. Whatever vast, mechanical brain operated that place was now intimately aware that it was being watched. Banks of unattended monitors surged to life with a unified groan of synth, each running through their own list of figures before flashing a code. Had Phil been present, he would have recognised it immediately; it was a code he had hacked from those computers, a time that had been, all at once, a minute and seven years ago.

4   7   0   1

The sequence for the ship's chameleonic devices.

But there was nobody onboard to activate such measures and the warnings went unheeded. In a manner almost smiling, the unidentified ship eased its way closer, a cosmic crocodile in a night sky river, and, with every inch it gained, more V.I.Z.ion systems roused themselves with soundless screams. Soon, the control room was a frenzy of neon and white light, the low note of an alarm the wailing lungs to counterpart a strobing heartbeat.

Behind the first ship trailed a thousand siblings, each of them an identical twin. Above the defenceless Earth, a million look-a-like mockeries converged on the V.I.Z.ion mothership in silence, splitting open at the belly and disgorging metal cables that moved with a dreadful liveliness. They bound themselves to the larger ship in a net—in a shroud—a stranglehold of knotweed which drew itself tighter and tighter. It squirmed its way in to every crevice until, with a final, wretched screech, the alarm fell silent and the light of the V.I.Z.ion star went out.

✯

Another week passed, and with time came a new normalcy. Tension cannot last indefinitely, stretched in to the infinite; the sinews of a person's worry will become accustomed to the strain and adjust. Of course, it was still deeply weird to come downstairs in the morning to be told 'good morning' by aliens, and nothing would ever prepare Phil for the sight of Quiz and Diz doing the dishes together, but the fear had gone out of the situation. They'd all had worse roommates—the aliens didn't play drum and bass at 3am, didn't cultivate bacteria cultures in the communal fridge, and none of them had weird, hobo boyfriends who showed up and conducted questionable deals in the living room. As far as housemates go, a failed attempt at world domination isn't an insurmountable drawback. 

It was early evening, an 'almost' hour, the sky having entered a wonderful lilac phase in its slow waltz towards dusk, and Phil was sat, once more. at the kitchen table in Smiley's mother's house. As the old woman had commented in a slightly pointed voice, the four of them were well on the way to becoming permanent boarders (an apologetic offer to relocate had been refused, so Phil didn't think she actually minded.) In slightly more usual times, the kitchen was a communal space, designed for socialising. It had an expectant aspect to it, an air of anticipation for parties Mrs Sundae was too austere to throw. 

In a fashion, Phil was there to socialise; for whatever peculiarity of architecture decides such things, the kitchen had the best internet of anywhere in the house.

"Guys? Chubb's back on the line!"

Phred's cheering echoed from upstairs as he was hoisted back inside the window he'd been hanging out of to try and get the lost signal back, followed by a series of comical crashes from the stairway as the absent members of the group made their way downstairs: Smiley in a librarian-esque sweater and skirt, complete with superfluous glasses on a necklace chain; Zach in a pair of singed jeans, a hot new style he'd invented and popularised himself; and Phred, his work shirt on backwards (but not inside out, which was an improvement.) Without grace or regard for personal space, they clustered around Phil and, consequently, a laptop, where a gently flashing screen and jaunty ringtone were heralding a call from the username 'Fat_Man43V3R'—Last Online 2 Weeks Ago.

When everyone was settled, Phil joined the call, and the monitor began broadcasting a video feed of Chubb, taken from a terrible low angle which gave him approximately seventy chins.

"—llo? hello, hello? Can you hear me now?"

"Loud and clear, Chubb, we're back online."

By virtue of the small size and geographical irrelevance of their little city, many of the people from Phil's Elementary had wound up attending his High School and, consequently, his Sixth Form. Chubb had been one of them. Several years ago he had ventured Europe for a convention on frankfurters and wursts and had enjoyed the food there so much he'd made the move permanent. He had amassed quite the online following for his review-based blog, which detailed the highlights of every restaurant he visited during his various travels. 

Every so often he called home, and this was one of the calls he made.

"So how's life?" Zach asked, his very presence throwing the brightness value in the viewfinder off. The crowding of friends in the camera's eye looked as though they were sitting around a campfire. Chubb was standing on a balcony in early afternoon light, squinting against the sunbeams, face crinkled in a warm smile.

"Not bad, you?" 

There was a second where the group froze, took an introspective look at the weeks prior, and decided to let Phil handle it. There was another second where Phil recognised this delegation and mentally gave them all the middle finger. Altogether, it made for something of an awkward pause.

"Oh, just the usual..." 

Chubb laughed, the synchronicity of the sound and movement decoupled by distance. 

"Something really weird?"

"What makes you say that?"

"It's always something weird with you guys. Remember Year Twelve? With the raccoons and the air vents? And the vending machine heist? And the jelly baby funeral that got the science wing closed down for a week?"

"Lies," Phred protested. "Lies and slander. None of that was anything to do with us, you can't prove it."

"Alright—what are you up to, then?"

"Oh, you know..."

Without quite meaning to, Phil glanced above the laptop screen to Diz, who was sat at the opposite end of the island and was watching the exchange with something that bordered on suspicion. They made eye contact, Diz's curiosity cool and smooth as marbles inside Phil's head. Never taking his eyes from the alien, Phil gave Chubb a halfhearted shrug.

"... Nothing much. Meeting old acquaintances, catching up—playinghousewiththosepsychoaliensfromthatonetimeschoolwasinvaded—trying to get Saturday off. You?"

"Uh huh, repeat that last one?"

"'Trying to get Saturday off'?"

Chubb snorted fondly and muttered something that sounded like 'idiot' under his breath. 

But he didn't pry further. Instead, he launched happily into a story about his new favourite restaurant and Phil, having no use for the specifics of authentic French cuisine and still locked in a staring contest with Diz, was excused from the conversation.

Government agents still surrounded the suburbs with all the grace and innate secrecy of children playing hide and seek. Completely oblivious to the aliens directly under their noses as they were, they still presented a significant threat. Randomly lethal and entirely confused, their unpredictability made them a constant difficulty; it was impossible for the aliens to go outside, impossible for the quartet of humans to talk about the situation outside, impossible for any of them to throw away bandages and syringes without inviting the possibility that scientifically curious raccoons would claw the secrets from between the potato peelings come bin day. Planning their departure was something of a ballroom dance, with partners that were determined to stay as completely separate from each other as possible. 

The aliens were—as far as Phil could tell or be bothered to work out—near enough fine to begin their plotting again. Or, more accurately, Viz and Diz had returned to plotting; Quiz seemed cautiously exasperated with them both. After being given the medical 'all clear' to move again, the three had taken to avoiding each other as best they could in the cramped accommodations; often, this simply meant inhabiting different corners of the same room and stubbornly ignoring the others' existence, like a bunch of cats sitting on the same, incrementally-elevated object. Phil was slightly depressed by the fact that megalomaniac alien dictators giving each other what was essentially the silent treatment no longer surprised him. 

Precisely what plans were being concocted Phil didn't know, but he could sense them, their sticky, spiderweb strands catching feather-light against his awareness of the world. They spun out in reams between Viz and Diz, in watchful and expectant silence. He hadn't seen either of them actually talk to each other in days, but that had yet to impact the sense that the two were somehow synced. Every limited interactions had the tenor of two people who are so accustomed to each other's way of thinking that they can work around the other mind without direction or instruction. 

Quiz sat on the outside of this, placidly oblivious.

It made Phil nervous, a crackle of electricity prickling the base of his tongue. There was something the aliens were hiding. There was something they weren't telling him—there were things they weren't telling each other. And even in Phil's own little group, there were hairline fractures, thin but deep, inside which nestled unsaid things. Everything was so very calm, and yet, just over the horizon lay a hundred things that had yet to happen, and he could hear it coming like the marching of a hundred feet. He felt that, at any second, something would—

Something shrieked. Back in the kitchen, a hideous, garbled roil of static boiled the air, and Phil woke from his reverie as though from a brief, clammy nightmare.

"Whoa, what the hell? We losing signal again?"

"You're all good Chubb. That was just the radio." Reaching over Phred, Smiley fiddled with the laptop and turned the volume all the way up. Her manner was one of determined normalcy, like a bright sun, the sort of affectation one would use to ignore a disruptive child. "So what did the chef do, after you asked for barbecue sauce on the crepe?"

For several days now, things had been going missing and appliances had stopped working: light bulbs had vanished from lamps; the guts of the toaster disappeared; the microwave stopped working for no visible reason; the buttons and batteries vanished from the remotes; all the chargers and bits of wire were spirited away for some unknown purpose. All of it culminated in this—a machine sat on the table before Diz, the source of the growing racket. Once, it had been a portable radio. Now, there were cables hooking the contraption into the mains (exposed through inadvisably unscrewed sockets) and the casing had been cracked open to admit all manner of additions. The result was a spectacular malformation of metal, sinister in its ambiguity, in its bulges and spindles and strings, it's breached boundaries and ill-defined confines.

During the last few hours it had sat silently as it's odd angles were cobbled together by Diz's unsteady hands, and now it had started to scream.

With none of the caution one should express in such situations, Zach confronted the alien and Phred pulled out his phone. There was a sizeable video folder on said phone titled 'Play These At My Funeral'—so named because he and Zach both fully expected at to die pissing one of the aliens off. Phil wasn't sure this jovial acceptance (and, indeed, embrace) of one's imminent demise was healthy, but it was going to make for one hell of a eulogy.

To this end, Phred dutifully began filming as Zach draped himself over the island to ensure his face was as uncomfortably close to Diz as possible. Doing this also put him in worryingly close proximity with the erstwhile radio, which was emitting a tingly heat that quickly numbed his cheek. 

Zach ignored this. Zach had ignored far worse than potential radiation poisoning for The Bit.

"What are you doing?" He asked in a throaty hiss, like a small, indignant cobra. 

"I'm fixing the radio."

"No you're goddamn not. Look at it. None of that is what fixed looks like." All eyes (bar Chubb's) were briefly directed to the radio, barely box shaped, pouring coils, and wires, and lights like bulging eyes. Something deep within it was vibrating, causing the mangled whole to shiver with a frightened animal vigour. In a conciliatory fashion, Diz turned a dial until the shrill wail shrunk to a whine, but this didn't help the fact that the thing existed at all. "What is it really? Some kind of bomb? A mind control device? An improvised tiny robot servant?"

"It's a radio, Zach," Diz replied with surprising patience. "Nothing more, nothing less."

Now that the chaos had simmered down, Diz was back to his calm, collected self, which was terrifying in light of what was lying just beneath the mask's surface. Phil had never expected to miss the half-crazed psychotic who had stared him down as though he could reach across the vacuum of space and kill him through sheer force of will, but there was something to be said about the value of certainty. That creature, in it's antipathy and violence, was coiled like a snake within Diz's skull, waiting to strike—he just couldn't see it anymore. It was the difference between a large spider being nice and visible on the wall, or having it be hidden and probably in your shoe or pants. The spider not being in the room with you wasn't an option. Phil could feel the lieutenant's brutal malignancy crawling over him in the dark and it made him shudder in a way Viz, in all his callous and grandeur, could never hope to achieve.

"Yo, who's the new guy?" Chubb asked, having overheard the hissed discussion. He waved, though nobody new had appeared on the screen. "Hi new guy."

"He's nobody," Phred dismissed hurriedly. "Besides, we haven't told you about the old guys yet. I saw Ritchie last week—guy gave me a ticket for walking too fast. It was written in crayon. I think that means the bastard's all good."

"Greg's fallen back asleep," Phil offered, leaping on the attempt to steer the conversation away from the 'new guy' as possible. "He passed half his driving test this time. Job office has decided he has a bright future in tax returns."

"Hannah's doing well, she seems really happy." Smiley idly twirled a lock of hair around her fingers. "She says she and Harrison want to start trying IVF for a baby next year... I told her I think it's a little soon because saying 'Hannah you married a fire axe and should probably not have children with it' seemed a little mean."

"It was a beautiful wedding, though."

"Oh, it was."

"What is this?" Diz's bemusement meant that it wasn't quite a snap, but it was a question asked sharply enough to trigger the animal instincts just under Phil's skin.

"Just catching up with friends," he placated, feeling very much as though he were asking a bomb to not go off. "What, you don't have that in space?"

"You say that like he has friends to catch up with," Zach muttered, not under-his-breath enough to go unheard.

A clicking sound like snapped fingers sounded from somewhere in Diz's throat. Nothing about his expression changed. He didn't blink. He didn't take his eyes off of Phil.

"Your lunacy is... irritating."

"Ha!" Zach slapped the alien on the shoulder, a terrifyingly inadvisable thing to do. "I get it. Like the moon." Everyone stared at him (Chubb included.) "Luna-cy? See it?"

"Ahhhhh, alien jokes—classic." With tact and good humour born of nerves, Phred hauled Zach upright again and encouraged him away from the suddenly very still maniac. "But seriously, I think that was Diz's creepy way of telling us to shut up before he throws a planet at us or something."

"Can he do that?" Turning to Diz before anyone could either answer or stop him. "Can you do that?"

The alien had the completely calm, yet slightly calculating expression of someone who is considering precisely that question themselves. Hurriedly, Phil put himself back in Diz's metaphorical crosshairs.

"Besides the point guys. The point is the radio." That black, basilisk stare slithered back over Phil's skin. "Are you trying to create a device to induce strokes, because I'm feeling kinda aneurysm-y right now. What the hell have you done to it?"

As if to demonstrate the abominable tech further, Diz twisted the dials through the stations, every frequency home to its own wretched, tuneless song. Each note was plucked from some hellish harp whose hit singles were comprised of yowling cats, tinnitus, and the hollow-throated boom of the atom bomb. From the pleased expression on his face, it seemed this outcome was anticipated, even promising.

"Nothing irreparable, and nothing I won't fix later, don't worry."

"I'm worried."

"I engineered all our other equipment. You should trust me to know what I'm doing."

Zach laughed, Phred scoffed, Phil raised his eyebrows as high as they would go.

"You are the least trustworthy thing in this room. And that's saying a lot in a room with an microwave that spontaneously combusts."

"And a guy that spontaneously combusts."

"That is accidental and due to allergies," Zach exclaimed in an exaggeratedly aggrieved tone. "Smiley deliberately has a gun."

(Everything in Phil turned to cold gel, and he slowly turned to look at Diz. The alien—who had, until this juncture, returned to following the conversation with flickers of his eyes—was staring raptly at him, something victorious and vibrant pulling faintly at the corner of his mouth. A visceral shimmer coursed through the air between them, seizing Phil by the collar and dragging him nose to lack-of-nose with Diz. Of all the things he would have wanted the aliens to know, that was not one of them—particularly if the alien that found out was Diz, someone whose mental stability he was not fully convinced of. Quiz might steal the gun to have the upper hand; Viz would shoot anyone he thought capable of getting in his way; Diz was an volatile unknown quantity, and Phil fully believed the alien would shoot people for the cathartic fun of it.)

Beyond this inner turmoil, The Japes continued.

"You sneeze napalm."

"Only because you mistake my antihistamines for mints and eat them all. Pick on Phil, he attempted homicide when he was eleven."

"Yeah, on a scale of one to ten."

"We all know you just scored one twice."

"Excuse you, I was saving the world."

"Cool motive, still murder."

"Why are you harping on my dark transgressions? Go back to Phred."

"It's hard to beat murder accusations—lotta funny jokes in homicide."

"We have a friend who married a fire axe. You're telling me there's no material in that?"

"Do you have to do this here?" Diz interrupted, now very clearly exasperated. For someone who dealt with Quiz on a daily basis, the alien had a surprisingly low threshold for nonsense.

"Yeah. This room has the good wifi." Which, Phil realised, seconds later, was likely why Diz had chosen it for his centre of operations. "Who are you trying to listen to anyway? Elvis?"

Diz's face, still mask-like, lost some vital something that had made it look alive, the brightness behind his eyes hollowing out in to nothingness. There was a stark impression of a door being slammed in one's face.

"Classified," he said blankly. "Go back to your... conversation."

This was an order rendered impossible to obey by the next alteration made to his machine; a tightening of a bolt, a tentative prodding of a piece of wire, and—

To say that it was white noise would be an indescribable understatement. Though it had no substance and no structure, and it was certainly noise, it wasn't mindless static. It was a concentrated assault from a vengeful army of sound, a buzzing, vibrant hurricane that swirled and gibbered without end. Voices—that did not sound at all like voices, but like shoes on wet gravel and tearing paper—raved in millions of languages, speaking over each other, arguing and screaming. Electronic sounds fought with organic on every frequency imaginable in a way which disturbed the blood and forced the heart to dance to a maniac tempo. It seemed to stamp against the eardrums with a savage glee. A fire was lit within the mind, the damp electricity of the brain coming frightfully alight, and everything in the world was reduced to noise.

No. No, it couldn't have just been noise; noise which isn't ear-splittingly loud isn't supposed to hurt.

"What the fuck?!" Phred mouthed, eyes blown wide with horror. Well, no—he probably wasn't mouthing. In any other circumstance, a less loud circumstance, he probably would have been shouting. "Turn it off!"

Despite his closeness to the epicentre of this audiological assault, Diz did not seemed phased; perhaps there were some benefits to having no outer ear.

"Oh, relax," the alien exclaimed, all exasperation. "I just need to narrow the margins. Honestly—" Long, clever fingers turned dials with impatient expertise. "—children."

What followed was hardly any better; there was only one voice, sure, but that voice was harried and garbled beyond comprehension. It spoke some twisted version of English that even the strangest of gutter-slang and outdated vocabulary couldn't have comprised, with words that seemed to sit precariously on the verge of being understood. 

There was something very familiar about it... something in the accent, about the crisp way the consonants clicked. 

Very slowly, the little group unfurled, full of shudders.

"Satan," Zach whispered, staring wide-eyed and haunted. "Satan in the radio. Satan is a radio."

Slowly, Phil lowered his hands from where he'd instinctively clasped them to his ears, puzzle pieces falling in to place in his head. They formed a picture he didn't much like.

"You weren't programming the radio for Earth frequencies, were you?"

A glimmer of derisive amusement appeared briefly in Diz's eyes before dying again. Very slowly, with the gentle condescension of one humouring a slow child, he shook his head.

"I never claimed to be." Rasping a knowing chuckle, the alien waved a dismissive hand and turned back to his work. "Now, either be silent or get out. I need to hear this."

'Don't need to tell us twice, creepy git.' Time to beat a strategic retreat. Stealthily, Phil took Smiley's hand and it squeezed his own tight. Nobody tried to argue or express a desire to remain in the kitchen.

"C'mon, Chubb." Phred seized the laptop and walked backwards out the door. "We're taking this party to the roof."

"Alright. Bye, new dude. Hope you fix your stereo... or whatever was going on over there... man, that made my bones hurt."

They filed out. Phil was the last to leave, and he maintained firm eye contact with Diz—who, despite his own assertion, was paying the radio very little attention—until the closing door came between them. In its own way, the gesture had been a struggle for power and, even as he moved from one battle to the next, Phil couldn't have said who won.

On their way to the roof, they passed through the living room, where the heavy curtains had been drawn to allow the alien inhabitants their freedom. Taking full advantage of this, Viz was sprawled inelegantly across one of the sofas, legs draped off the arm, crossed at the ankles in arrogant repose. As he had been since Diz broke them, the captain was toying with his shades; all he really seemed to be doing was unplugging and splicing wires together but no one had quite gathered the nerve to question him on it. There was a dent in the seat of the nearby armchair, a sure sign that someone had vacated it recently, the day's newspaper folded over the arm—either Mrs Sundae or a particularly brave Quiz had been sat there until recently. Viz glanced up as they entered, decided he was better off ignoring them, and went about it with such efficiency that the gang may as well have never existed. 

They made their way up to the second floor and, from there, they climbed, one by one, out of the office window and on to the roof. The brickwork and gutters were sunlight-warm beneath Phil's hands, the tiles rough and familiar. This had been their clubhouse as teenagers, the site of many summer sleepovers and nighttime picnics where they cooked marshmallows over the fires of Zach's head.

With a showman's flourish, Phil laid out his hoodie and offered Smiley the best seat in the house in the lee of the chimney stack; she accepted this gallantry with a playful curtesy, a hand to her face to disguise a slight blush. Zach and Phred made the appropriate exaggerated gagging sounds.

They remained there for a while, painted purple by the light through the lavender clouds, laughing with a slightly distorted voice from the other side of the world until Chubb had to sign off. Smiley left not long after.

"I'd love to stay longer, but the library closes in half an hour, and I have to get there quickly if I want to be locked in." She wasn't looking at any of them, busy rifling through her shoulder bag for books and keys. She pressed a dry kiss to Phil's cheek. "I need to get going."

"Thought you were all caught up on coursework?"

"Oh, I am, but there's no harm in trying for extra credit!" Smiley bit her lower lip, something she'd been doing too often recently—Phil could see the faint indentations her persistent teeth had made in the soft, pink surface. There was a brightness fixed to her face, as obviously counterfeit as a TV presenter's perfect teeth; it was the kind of hopeful, reassuring look that only required the slightest of alterations to become frightened. "I'll see you later."

Tenderly, Phil picked a leaf from a stray tangle of windswept hair. He wanted to reassure her, but there wasn't time—he hardly knew which worry was making her smile so shadowed.

"I'll be waiting," he promised instead, and, just like that, Smiley's warmth was real again, something eased in her dark eyes.

"I'll be snogging Phil in your absence."

"I'll be filming as Zach 'falls' off the roof."

"Goodbye, everyone!" Smiley shouted as she slipped back in through the window. A minute later, Phil heard the front door slam and saw her slight figure, made further diminutive by distance, jogging towards the bus stop by the main road. Before it was lost from sight, the figure turned and raised its hand in a wave, sunlight streaming in gold ribbons through its fingers; Phil was too slow to return the gesture. By the time he tried, the shape of his girlfriend had vanished between the houses.

Another breath of wind sighed it's chill through Phil's bones, and he folded his arms back around his body, like a bird sheathing its wings. The fading summer was full of a contradictory cold warmth, a tepidness that tasted of mango and marigold, and the world felt like an old memory, simultaneously finite and infinite. He would never be here again; a part of him would be here always. He tilted his head back and admired the empty sky, the smokescreen behind which hid so many stars. How strange it was to think he'd once been up there among them; if he strained his memory, he could recall the pressure on his bones as the world swallowed the escape pod down a throat laden thick with cloud.

How strange to think he'd once held the fate of this wondrous blue marble in one hand.

Phil looked again to the streets. All those houses, stretching miles in to the distance, full of people who had no idea they'd all almost died horribly seven years ago. That they had won an unholy gamble on the scratch-card luck of one tenacious child being in the right place at the right time. 

And there was such a taste of old exhilaration in that thought, finely aged in to something almost heady. For a second, Phil understood why people might think it fun to jump off cliffs.

He wondered what it was like to not know. What was it like to sit so entirely outside such a pivotal point in world history? What was it like to not have memories of searing blue light and marrow-deep cold? What was it like to live a peaceful existence, too stupid to care you'd been saved?

"Which is worse, d'ya think—ignorance or apathy."

"Don't know," Phred answered. "Don't really care, either. You thinking of leaving us plebs and joining Smiles in Philosophy 9000?"

"Hell no, you know that professor only speaks Latin."

Like the sea, silence lapsed over them and Phil gently released his thoughts. That was where they stayed for an undetermined amount of time—sprawled across the roof as the sun went down like a battleship and the lovely world was doused in night. The street lamps donned their golden hats and went gaily about their trade, and the lanes once enjoyed by pedestrians were ballrooms for bats and foxes. 

Then, from inside, came a voice, scratchy and hard-edged with lethargy: 

"Viz!" It barked. "Quiz! Come here; I have news."

With the sleepiness instilled in him by darkness thoroughly dissipated, Phil hurried to the window and leaned carefully out over the edge of the roof. Through the half-drawn curtain, he saw two distinctive, four-armed shapes march in the direction of the kitchen, where they had earlier abandoned Diz to his devices.

Studiously, Phred and Zach said nothing. They lay on their backs, faces turned towards the stars, beloved by courts of moths and fireflies. Neither looked after Phil as he left.

Back in the warmth of the house, Phil felt the gooseflesh of his forearms grow keener. His every nerve shimmered like moonlight on water and something slightly nauseous rolled in his stomach. With his ear pressed against the softwood of the kitchen door, Phil could just barely hear the birds-wing flutter of voices, the hushed conversation happening in the room beyond and, beside it, the low, eager thrumming of his own blood-red heart.

✯

The light through the kitchen window had long since faded, from lavender, to periwinkle, to royal, to navy, to nothing. Diz sat in the dark, the malformed radio cradled between his hands as it struggled through its relays. Beside him lay a notepad and a pen, the former filled with illegible scrawlings (this is to say both that the alien's language was indecipherable by human standards and that Diz had terrible handwriting.) Over the course of several hours, Diz had noted down every transmission the monitoring system spat out and it hardly mattered now that darkness had stolen the specifics of the letters from him; he could remember them perfectly. He saw no reason to turn the light on.

At long last, the machine gave in and the feed churned itself to meaningless hissing sound like crumpling paper, a glitter of sparks flaring from splintered wires. No matter; he had what he needed.

Raising his voice was not a prospect he relished, but he needed the others so—

"Viz. Quiz. Come here, I have news." Wincing, Diz raised a hand to his throat where rusty needles had worked their way in to tender flesh. His words tasted broken and metallic.

He was still rubbing at his neck when his crew mates entered; Viz with his ubiquitous scowl, Quiz scuttling behind him with his quartet of arms braided about his chest.  

"This had better be good Diz," Viz snapped, striding in to the room with a brisk arrogance, recovered enough that his scratchy bark was only a shade softer than usual. Protocol demanded that Diz stand as his captain entered, and so he did, though it did nothing to improve his temper. He felt... disjointed, like a doll that had been poorly put back together.

Still, he would mend. He always did.

Viz sneered about the darkened room, and flicked the light on. Doing this brought into hideous visibility the metal mass crowding the table and Viz's sneer listed quickly into disdain. "What is that?"

"It's a radio—"

"Doesn't look like a radio," Quiz interjected in a dubious voice, leaning warily out of range. "Are you sure it won't explode?"

Diz bit his tongue and pretended this accounted for the taste of blood in his mouth.

"Do you want to know what I've found, or not?" Already looking rather sick of the matter, Viz waved a hand for him to proceed. "I have been monitoring the radiation activity of our ship—from what I can tell, nothing's set any of the sensors off. Some of the signals cut off before I could receive a full transmission, but that's nothing new."

So much of their equipment was old, repossessed from other derelict vessels and cobbled together in to new machines, it was never a surprise when something ceased to work as it had been designed. Their long-range scanners had a nasty habit of being more mid-range, and both sonar and radar had wildly different opinions on just about everything. Still, Diz had gathered enough evidence from enough sources that he was confident in saying theirs was the only ship up there.

"Were you able to access the database? The command console? Controls?"

"Nothing so helpful, but I can say that I don't think we're being followed."

Predictably, Viz face twisted.

"'Think' isn't good enough. If you can't contact our ships, how do you propose we get out of here? That was the job I gave you, was it not?"

It was, but the reminder nettled. He didn't often try to placate Viz, but he was tired. And if he gave in to the hurricane swirling at the centre of his being and screamed, Viz would join him and then everything really would be lost.

(He hated that too. He hated how petty and small the rage made him feel in the face of his captain's chill distaste. He wanted them both to be screaming, even if it wouldn't get them anywhere.)

"We have time, Viz."

Agitation took Viz over, as sudden and brief as lightning; he slammed his open palms down on the tabletop. He seemed restrained from pacing only by the desire to glare in to his subordinate.

"Have you forgotten Atsilon 12? The firefight at Nox Anmarr? The gutting of Satellite Station 47? Have you somehow remained oblivious to every atrocity we've committed these past twelve years? Every officer we've killed, every ship we destroyed, everything we've stolen? This is the moment they've been waiting for; we've not stood still like this in a decade at least. We are lying on a serving dish and you have the nerve to tell me we can wait."

'Forget? How could I ever forget?'

Diz ground his teeth; of course he remembered. The evidence stacked against them all was insurmountable, and with every action they added to it, the accumulation of their eventual punishment daunting to consider but persistent in the back of all their thoughts. He despised it, the perpetual reminder of how precarious their position in the stars truly was. To Diz's mind, judgment was theirs to mete out to the rest of the universe, and the thought of receiving it before they had seen their purpose to its end was bitterly galling.

"I am aware that we don't have infinite time—" Viz cut him with a sharp rap of knuckles against tabletop.

"So get on with the report," he spat, and Diz felt something in his jaw crack. "Why can't you access the ships' remote controls? I know you built them with the capability."

'Just finish the report. Just get through it one more time.'

"Automatic systems engaged as a safeguard after our absence extended beyond five days. We'll need to provide retinal scans to disengage the system locks on almost everything."

"Have you tried to hack through it?"

"One false step and our firewall will signal the magnetic coils in the engine to flare and fry every motherboard and hard drive on-board. If you're alright with the idea of me reducing our whole enterprise to dead metal, I'll be sure to give it a go."

The air in the room was full of dry-weather static, the sort that precedes either storms or forest fires. Viz finally gave in to pacing in the limited space—four steps to the wall, four steps back, the action repeated over and over in tense, harried movements that ratcheted an invisible wire to a cutting edge. Silent, as he was during most confrontations between leader and lieutenant, Quiz stood off to one side and followed the movements with damp, worried eyes. He glanced occasionally towards Diz with something similar to appeal and impatience flickering in his face; 'do something' he seemed to say.

Diz ignored him. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven Quiz's disaffection. Finally, Viz returned to the table, appearing no calmer than before.

"You didn't call me here to tell me you have nothing."

"I didn't." His notes were crisp and expectant under his fingers; he shuffled them in search of the specific readout and, finding it, pushed it towards Viz. "When I was panning for radiation signatures operating on our wavelengths, I found that there was something of ours operational on Earth. It's my ship, it's still online."

"Where is it?" Viz snatched the piece paper up, scowling at the barely legible script.

Despite himself, Diz hesitated.

"You won't like it."

"Just tell us, damn you."

"Signals are coming from inside Zone 5.1."

Viz swore bitterly. Beside him, Quiz wilted, suddenly refusing to meet Diz's eye at all. 

Which was an altogether reasonable move—there was no way to be ignorant of the fact that Diz blamed him for the entire situation.

'If you had just stayed where I told you to...'

Silently, Viz began sorting through the sheaf of papers related to the Earthbound ship. Though the glasses forbore any real change in expression, as seconds turned to minutes, his silence grew gradually darker.

"That's okay, isn't it," Quiz finally piped up, a guilty quirk at the corner of his smile. "Zone 5.1 is ours."

"Was ours," Viz corrected grimly. "It's been nearly a decade, and there was really no one left in charge of the place. Anything could have happened to it."

"So we should sneak in," Quiz suggested, still sounding hopeful. "Steal the ship back."

Everything was so very simple in Quiz's world. Sometimes Diz envied him for it. How nice it would be, to be so utterly undeterred by simple things like reality and consequence. It fascinated him sometimes, that over a decade had passed and Quiz still had that offensive innocence, that security in his old invulnerability.

(The worst of it was the trust. The belief that he and Viz could do anything. The absolute faith in a lie, and the fact that such a lie was the only good thing Quiz could believe of his teammates.)

Finding no answers in the notes, Viz turned back to their writer.

"... Has that base been compromised?"

"Unclear." Diz scrubbed a hand over his face, suddenly very tired. "Their admin system indicates they acquired a new director, but I can't find mention of a name."

"You're telling me your best idea is to wander over there with no idea about what we'd be walking in to?" And there was the anger again, flaring like candlelight given air. "Useless. No ship, no weapons, sending us in to an ambiguous situation on the off-chance it gets us out. Are you trying to see us caught by The Enquiry?"

And Diz snapped. In the end, it never took much.

"Might I remind you that I have done everything?" Suddenly Viz was close, very close; Diz didn't remember moving, but he could hear Quiz skittering away like a mouse. "When you have a skill set half as useful as mine to bring to the table, I'll give you full permission to critique my ideas. Until then, keep your mouth shut."

'This better. This is familiar. We've been here before.'

"I don't need your permission, soldier." With his usual roughness, and a surprising amount of strength given his recent injury, Viz seized his lieutenant by the collar and threw him backwards. His stitched sneer was full of genuine disgust. "You forget your place."

"You forget that you need me." Quickly, the two were nose to nose again; Diz could see his own snarling face reflected dully in Viz's angular lenses. "I'm the only one of us capable of getting a starship out of the galaxy."

"Do you want a medal?"

Diz didn't answer. His spit tasted bitter with the vehemence of the things he wanted.

"Um... I-I think you've both forgotten the point of this." Quiz, querulous and uncertain, was pressed as deeply as he could manage into the far corner, twisting all four of his hands together in a terrified lattice. The look he directed at them both was one of flinching revulsion.

"Shut it Quiz," Viz snarled. But the reprimand came too late and the tension was broken.

For a long moment, though they were no longer fighting, they remained close enough to feel each other's breath. The implicit knowledge that they—all three of them—were snared together through necessity struck Viz like a visible blow. Even Quiz, arguably the most useless member of V.I.Z.ion, was now integral to any escape they might attempt to make.

Finally, Viz conceded ground, stepping back and pinching the bridge of his nose. 

"There is no other option?" He ground out.

'Stay here and argue until we die.'

"Not that I can find." Unwilling and unable to offer comfort, Diz begrudgingly continued. "As it currently stands, we are alone in the solar system—how long that will last, I can't say. Zone 5.1 is no less safe than anywhere else and it is the only place on Earth with a starship. Whatever we do... we need to get it done quickly."

Silence. Knowing silence.

"Well..." As usual, Quiz's ambivalent stammerings were cut in half like a length of ribbon by the harsh mouth of a pair of scissors.

"We'll do it."

In another life—a less complicated life—that would have been it for the V.I.Z.ion crew. They would have left in the night, vanished from that quaint suburban house as though they had never existed, and attacked the facility alone. The inevitable failure would have seen them spirited away to laboratories and prison cells, and nobody would have ever known or cared. Phil would have been left with his mysteries and his questions but, like the V.I.Z.ion project itself, they would have burned themselves out eventually; a human life is, after all, only so long...

But that isn't how the story goes.

Behind Diz, the door creaked on its hinges, a long, deliberate note that rubbed the scales on the back of his neck the wrong way. An immediate alertness shot through all three, though Diz and Viz were the only two to react—the former by snatching up a screwdriver and the latter by pushing the weaker two back.

With the drama of a dead showman, the door swung inwards.

Phil. Phil Eggtree, the child they had stolen, and tested, and tried to kill, all grown up and watching them. His narrow frame filled up the doorway as efficiently as a brick wall. The boy's mouth had cut a sharp quirk in to his cheek, a smile of both distaste and amusement at a joke Diz could only guess at. Lights danced in his eyes, reflections of some greater glory nobody else could see. He looked in to the midst of their beings as though they were the most fascinating things in the world

"Oh, you can bet you've got explaining to do."

✯

"So... who's after you, exactly?"

They were seated about the island, one at each edge with Viz and Diz doubled up on the left side. Interrogating the aliens was a disconcerting experience, Phil found; none of them were forthcoming in any fashion. It was like shifting puzzle pieces in the dark and trying to guess what picture they would grow to be.

Didn't mean he'd stop, though.

"You don't need to know that, Eggtree. Just accept that we have been here for far too long already." Viz was acting as the group's reticent spokesman, grinding out each sentence as though it were being torn forcibly from his chest.

"You think these 'somebodies' are catching up, though?"

"They might be. It's something we risked by lingering about Earth for our experiment. Suffice to say, we expected to get away with it. Some people—" Quiz flinched as both aliens turned to glare at him. "—Have compromised that recently, but if we act swiftly there remains a chance of escape."

"In Diz's death ray ship? You know that one crashed, right? Hard. It was pretty beat up and... on fire the last time I saw it. You really think that's your best bet?"

"It's our only bet," Diz answered quietly. "Scans say it's online. If it is at the facility then, regardless of condition, I will likely be able to repair it enough with the equipment we stored on Earth to get us back in to space."

Phil contemplated the people before him. While the notion of them leaving earth was appealing, a vestigial part of him—something which may have been honour, may have been compassion—baulked at the idea of leaving the aliens to their own mismatched devices. It was unfortunately obvious that none of them were up to much and, while that might not have mattered if they were to simply summon a ship remotely, breaking into a guarded facility was a different matter entirely. Phil didn't fancy their chances if they went at that alone—together, they could hardly endure a ten minute conversation, let alone a lengthy espionage.

In some ways, it made sense. For him, the argument that a particularly timely near-death experience had interrupted was seven years old. For the aliens, it was a fresh, gaping hole in whatever dynamic they had that, presumably, didn't ordinarily involve them nearly killing each other.

Then there was the issue of the unidentified 'other party'. Whatever nameless group had the ability to put the deadly V.I.Z.ion agents on the run were not people Phil wanted near the earth. If their fight made its way to the surface... Phil imagined the damage the V.I.Z.ion three had managed on their own and multiplied it a hundredfold. In his mind, forests flooded with blazing engine fuel and vanished into abstract sculptures of ash; seas crystallised, full of rainbows and and bits of bone; the entirety of humanity were reduced to dreamers, prisoners in nonsensical labyrinths studied by cold-eyed oddities. An army would spell the end of all life on Earth.

(And, underneath all that, there was something else, something insistent like an eager little dog trying to dodge about his legs and out the door. He wanted to know. Once upon a time, the whole world had hinged upon him and, though the prospect of such pressure was unbearable... so was the thought of abandoning his part in everything.)

"So, when do we leave?"

The three froze in their own, individual fashions: Viz like a twist of blackened metal; Diz cold and cruel as a glass skull; Quiz like something hunted.

"'We'?" Viz's whipcrack voice snapped over Phil's head.

"What, you really thought I'd just let you waltz off into the abyss? Nah. I'm coming with you to Zone 5.1. You can drop me back here before you sod off back in to space." He pretended to examine his nails, his heart quick beneath his shirt. "Think of it as me very graciously showing you the door before the cops arrive. Besides, I remember the place pretty well, which means I'm already doing better than Diz."

Viz pursed his scarred lips in consideration. Phil could feel Quiz's strange, soft eyes monitor his every move.

"Very well. I suppose you're cannon fodder, if nothing else." Viz regarded Phil for a second longer before spitting a curse in garbled Not-English and sweeping from the room. "Diz, Quiz; we need to pinpoint the ship's new location. Bring that damned radio system."

Almost immediately, the other two followed, a definitive direction restoring a sense of urgency and purpose that had been lost in the crash. A green-skinned hand snuck back in to the room and flicked the light switch off.

The 'almost' of the equation was Quiz, who took a second to brush past Phil before departing. The small act of secrecy was performed awkwardly, clumsily, and would have been noted immediately had the other two aliens not already left and the room not been dark. 

Phil felt a rectangular weight drop into the pocket of his hoodie. 

A careful finger found clean, metallic lines and a series of regular indents. When he was certain he was alone, he slipped the whatever-it-was free of the confines of his jacket and stared at it in the dim light coming from the hallway. It was familiar, and knowing what it was but not why it had been given made the whole night seem suddenly stranger.

It was Quiz's remote to the ship.

Whatever game he had just involved himself in was, he realised, disturbingly intricate; he was playing chess in the dark with the trump card of an ace up his sleeve.

Chapter Text

"Status report; give me the recent data regarding Case File 006."

Responding... Report: All Project V.I.Z.ion Ships In The Vicinity Have Taken In To Enquiry Custody. These Include: A Modified V. 004 Mothership; Two Minor Class Transport Vessels, Both Deviated From Standard; And Ten Lifepods Of Various Construction In Varying States. A Full Inventory Of Seized Items Can Be Located In File φ 1.6—Last Updated: 6.3 Hours Ago

"And what of the planet?"

Responding... Report: Locally Identified As Terra, The Third Planet From The Star Sol. Natively Identified As Earth

Information... The Planet Hosts Carbon Based Life Forms Identified As Homo Sapien. Dominant Population Currently Numbers 7.6 Billion. No Allies. No Territory. No Notable Achievements. Estimated Time For The Planet's Complete Destruction—4.6 Hours. Optimum Projectile—UD-73/5 Incendiary Missile. Requesting Instruction For Incendiary Unit 099 To Begin Launch Procedures  

"That will not be needed. Scan for V.I.Z.ion technology on Terra."

Order Accepted...

Scanning...

Responding... Technology With Radiation Signatures Similar To Those Observed In Weapons Used By Project V.I.Z.ion Can Be Found In Terra's Northern Hemisphere In Divided Sector 006b

Action... Highlighting Sector 006b On Enquiry Mapping Systems

Information... Area Is Structurally Unremarkable And Largely Uninhabited. Energy Signature Is Emitting From Independent Research Facility Zone 5.1. Requesting Permission To Access The Data Systems Of Facility Zone 5.1

"Granted."

Accessing...

Information... The Technology Operating Within Zone 5.1 Is Far Superior To Anything Else Located In Scans Of Terra And Bears Similarity In Construction To Project V.I.Z.ion Equipment. Facility Contains One Median Class 1810-4 Battle Ship With Heavy Damage, Recently Crashed. Radio Waves And Data Found Aboard Ship Systems Match Material Recovered From Previous Captured V.I.Z.ion Ships

"Mobilise ground unit 719 and dispatch them to Zone 5.1. Have them transmit all and any findings directly to the system, full surveillance. Anything involving Project V.I.Z.ion should be given priority: data, tech, any suspects. Recovered items should be brought back to the ship for inventory."

Order Accepted...

Transferring Instructions...

Responding... What Is The Policy Regarding Local Interference

"Shadow operation: do not engage, remain out of sight. If any prove an active threat, they are to be disposed of quietly. Any seen to be assisting in Project V.I.Z.ion shall be brought to the ship for questioning. Preferably unharmed, but this is not priority."

Order Accepted...  

Transferring Instructions...

Responding... Requesting Policy Regarding Project V.I.Z.ion members

"Their lives are not a priority."

Order Accepted...  

Transferring Instructions...

Ground Unit 719 Has Been Prepared For Deployment. Requesting Permission To Launch...

"Permission granted."

Enquiry Ground Unit 719 Has Been Deployed To Zone 5.1

✯

Dawn skulked in like a stray cat, dirty and unwelcome. The light was wet, sticking to things in smears and streaks, and the chill, twilit air was clammy cold and thick with mist. Though the distant sun was rising, most of the light came from the flickering street lamps, their red-burning wires dull with weariness.

It was by this meagre illumination that the aliens were attempting the unattempted—hot wiring a car.

(Well, unattempted on Earth. It was something they were all adept at in concept, the tangled artistry of wires very familiar to people who had no other conduit for keeping their more experimental equipment functioning. Stealing, too, was something very ordinary. But Earth, now, Earth was new, and this little suburb didn't seem at all the place for extraterrestrial grand theft auto.)

The three of them crowded in to a single, particularly dense point of shadow around the car, far away from the light pooling at the base of each streetlight. They had about them an air of illicit guilt, like children sneaking off to smoke, and all three of them were very tired, doused in the damp listlessness of a too-early morning.

As the most technologically capable, Diz had been elected to perform the necessary mutilation of the wires. Ultimately, this turned out to be a rather poor delegation on Viz's part, as both of Diz's hands had been completely shattered and, hands being rather complex devices, had yet to heal fully; Diz's progress was clumsy and faltering, his complaints constant.

"... Of course, there couldn't be a simpler way... we couldn't steal someone else's vehicle... that old woman's going to kill us... ruined my damn hands..."

In a similar vein of bad choice, Quiz and Viz were acting as watchmen. With his glasses partially destroyed, Viz couldn't see further than a few feet with any accuracy and had access to none of his usual visual augments. Quiz, despite a genuine desire to be of use, had no idea what they were supposed to be looking out for, and wasn’t about to reveal that by asking.

Viz was always, in some sense, bitterly miserable. There was, however, something about standing, half-blind, in unfamiliar, wet surroundings wearing a tattered uniform that made the snappish tension drag on his every nerve. Never one with much patience for error, his tissue-thin temper had stretched to breaking point, each frayed strand lashing his crew mates with vengeance when it snapped. The fact that he had been dragged awake several hours too early on Viz's abrasive command and folded into a small space had left Diz equally sour.

Not much consideration had gone to how Quiz might feel about the situation.

Finally, Diz sighed and unfolded himself from the confines of the car, blinking hard to dispel phantom cables from the backs of his eyelids; his face, as it so often was, was inscrutable, mask-like and shadowy in the half-light.

"Quiz, would you go fetch the boy?" He spoke softly, polite and gentle; it prickled at the back of Viz's neck. 

It was pathetic, really, the immediacy with which Quiz brightened. Indeed, it made for a succinct summary of the differences between them all—Quiz heard a request to do something useful; Viz heard a dismissal so his lieutenant could speak to him alone.

Ignorant and happy to have been tangibly involved, Quiz vanished back up the front path and into the house, and Viz and Diz waited watchfully until the smaller alien was well out of sight. It was only once they had both determined he was gone that they started The Real Conversation.

"Do you think he understands the dangers we might be facing here?" Diz asked in a deliberate, neutral tone. With one hand, he continued to fiddle with the wires pulled out from under the dashboard, an idle, fretful gesture.

There was no question in Viz's mind about who 'he' referred to. This conversation was nothing new—just another visitation of a spectre which refused to leave them in peace, a twelve-year headache. A decade-long paranoia that one of them had been bound to voice eventually.

In a very muted way, Viz was surprised; usually it was him bringing up Quiz's potential for betrayal.

"He'd better. What is there to misunderstand at this point? He is dense, but I doubt he's so thick that he can't understand a life and death situation when it strikes."

Diz sniffed, slanted eyes narrow and mistrustful. "He's never had to deal with them as an adversary. The last time he faced the Enquiry, they parted as friends."

"Of the three of us, Quiz has the best understanding of the forces they'll use to capture us. Whatever partnership they had in the past was destroyed when he came with us. There is no way that he could be unaware of that." Agitation spasmed through his fingers, clenching his hands in to fists. "If he defects, I'll gut him."

"He won't," the lieutenant said, with a particular insistence. "He would never."

It was at this point that Viz started to wonder if he and Diz shared the same concerns at all. How long had passed since those days of knowing exactly what was on his second's mind? Once upon a time, the two had been cut from the same cloth, and Viz was not quite astute enough to recognise when that had all started to unravel...

"What are you so worried about, then?" He snapped, wishing he could shake the secrets out from behind that shadowy false smile.

"There'll be no mercy." Those dark, empty eyes bore in to him, mine shafts in to barren veins. "For any of us."

Mercy, in any form—lacking or otherwise—was the last thing Viz wanted to consider.

He liked the lines of the world to be neat and arrow-straight, everything tidily divided in to even columns like guidelines in a ledger. Recent events, however had very much shaken that understanding. 

There had been no reason for Doctor Sundae to offer them aid, no reason at all beyond that foreign concept of forbearance. And it was obvious the woman didn't trust them; she stared at them with knife-point eyes and a mistrustful tension at the corner of her lips like a bunched fist, and her politeness was guarded and steely. Regardless, she had shown them all infinitely more grace than they were owed by this world they had threatened to annihilate and he didn't know what to do about it. Viz didn't like debts. He liked even less the inability to understand how he had incurred them.

They could have died. None of them could have made it out of the wreckage alone.

Uneasy with these thoughts, Viz mentally batted them away, feeling them feathery and squirming like fat moths against his mind. The motivations of Phil Eggtree himself were an uncomfortable enigma.

With as much dismissal as he could manage (an almost lethal amount) Viz directed his recalcitrant lieutenant back to his work, feigning distraction with something far down the fog flooded road.

"We're not dead yet, Diz."

With an uneasy air about him that said he had not said all he meant to, Diz returned to his work. Those unasked questions lingered in the air like interlopers looking through a window, intangible but intrusive, skittering across the mind's unconscious awareness of its surroundings. Viz fought the urge to snap at his pilot; questions, no matter how silent, would not buy their freedom, and he hadn't the time or patience to be playing cryptographer.

'You never were talkative... it's a pity your silences aren't more illustrative, old friend. Making me guess is disrespectful and unnecessary.'

In a series of drawn out clunks, complete with a hearty burst of steam, the motor coughed itself to life. Not, perhaps, in the fashion it's supposed to, but alive nonetheless—alive in the Frankensteinian way of the word. From within the shadows of the dashboard, dials began to glow an increasingly concerning green, every indicator light ablaze at once. Diz slid himself awkwardly from beneath the wheel and bowed mockingly to Viz. Both pretended not to notice the fact that he stumbled as he rose. 

"Brilliant," Viz sneered at his lieutenant, determined not to offer any credit. "Now we have nothing to while we wait for Quiz."

"You mean I have nothing to do; how exactly did you think you were helping here?" Diz snipped. Ignoring Viz's renewed snarling, he peered at something behind the leader. "Anyway, it looks like you've spoken too soon—as usual. They're coming back now."

Indeed, the unlikely pair were headed back down the front path. Quiz was taking immense care to be quiet, his exaggerated movements comical, bordering ridiculous. He was not helped any by Phil, who had stepped out perfectly normally, the spitting image of calm. His air of cynical dispassion was admirably unaffected by the vestiges of sleep clinging about his eyes and the tension of a yawn lingering in his cheeks. 

(For the span of a very brief second, Viz thought he saw a sliver of something metal slip between the folds of the boy's pocket. A blink to clear his vision—and it was gone. Between the fog and the way the rising sun glimmered in the fissures of his glasses, between the static of split wires and the flashes of his display attempting to reload, Viz was struggling to tell, from moment to moment, what was and wasn't real. The metallic flicker went unquestioned.)

By the light of dawn, which was swiftly brightening, Viz studied the young man who had hatched from the child they had kidnapped. He was tall enough to look in the eye now—those unsettling, complicated human eyes with their rings of colour like the bands of a geode. How strange it was to think that only few weeks ago the young man had been a child Viz was capable of picking up off the ground with one hand. No longer was Phil skinny, scrawny, and inconsequential, but Viz was still struggling to think of him as a lynch pin.

Everything about the situation unnerved him slightly, but that most of all—the fact that, after everything the three of them had survived, it had taken only one child to bring them crashing to their knees. And here he was, the source of their downfall, aged and unfamiliar, standing over them as they lay in their ashes.

'What is it that keeps you here? Valour? Cruelty? Curiosity? Some strange obligation? Do you think you're invulnerable? Do you think the things trying to kill us will show your meaninglessness mercy?

'What do you stand to gain here? Nothing—surely you must understand this wins you nothing?'

He said none of this. Much like Diz, Viz rarely actually spoke about the things on his mind. He held every thought close to his chest like a gambler with his fistful of cards, speculative and defensive.

"You're late," he said instead, as Quiz slotted back in to his customary place at his side. Unmoved, Phil stretched, languid and complacent, chest heaving around a suppressed yawn.

"Well, 'good morning' to you too Viz! How are you on this fine day? The birds are signing, the dewdrops are glistening, the—" His eyes fell on the car, on the wires snarled beneath the wheel, and he froze. "—Car is... broken. Yep. Car's broken. Great. Left you alone for five minutes. You do realise I have the keys?" 

He held them out and, as if that was not enough proof, danced them about so they clattered irritatingly. 

Viz ground his teeth. He could feel time grating against his skin like grains of sand rasping over each other as they passed through the throat of an hourglass. Every lost second was sent to slice away at the rope holding the sword above their heads aloft—he could see it.

"Enough." Even to him, the word sounded like a glass shard pulled from concrete. "We are wasting time that we don't have. Eggtree; you will take us directly to the facility, without delay. I've had enough nonsense for one day."

"Are you sure? 'Cause the day's only just started and—"

Something in Viz's jaw cracked. Phil finally fell silent.

"Get in the car."

"You got it."

✯

Terrestrial geography having never been a strong suit, Viz was very quickly lost; with every jolting corner and sweeping roundabout, his comprehension of where he was in relation to the rest of the world fractured a little more. Several hours had passed and yet the journey seemed no closer to being over. The satellite-based navigational device attached to the dashboard relayed each direction with an indifferent cheer, sending them ever-further afield of landmarks and main roads with robotic efficiency. It was all too easy to imagine a nightmare version of their journey, where the voice never stopped its instructions, and the road never ended, and they drove pointlessly into oblivion until time finally ran out.

Very deliberately, Viz took a deep breath, then slapped Quiz's hand away from where it was nudging at his side.

He shifted his position for what had to be the millionth time. As before, it relieved none of his discomfort and served as a needless reminder of how uncomfortably close his crew mates sat either side. Due to their obviously inhuman appearances, Phil had suggested that the aliens take the passenger seats of the car, leaving the 'shotgun' unoccupied, which was almost an excellent idea... until one took into consideration the fact that Mrs Sundae's small car had been selected for single-occupancy convenience rather than capacity. Three adult-sized figures (two thin but rather tall, one short and round) with strange limb configurations Did Not Fit in the backseat space. Stuck in the middle seat, Viz had become more thoroughly acquainted with his companions’ sharp elbows than he ever thought possible.

Never being people to neglect an opportunity to twist the (usually metaphorical) knife, the forced closeness had inspired a medley of tussles, jabs, and discreet shoves. Every corner taken too fast was an excuse to dig a little harder at someone's side, every emergency stop a cover for a slap or kick to the shin. Phil's poor driving skills meant that the back of the car was a place of almost constant violence—petty, childish, spiteful violence. This was the way of things for hours.

(Safe from all this in the front, Phil could only wonder how the aliens survived with each other on a day to day basis, let alone manage to run a criminal organisation. The rear-view mirror was filled with a multicolour collage of annoyed faces.)

With something best described as gay abandon, they whirled around a roundabout six times. Diz winced slightly, the expression barely perceptible as it flitted over the side of his face visible to Viz. He felt his lieutenant move, pressing a hand against his side, just below his left arm. 

What had the crash done to the support structures in his sides? How badly were those cybernetics damaged? The Sundae woman had offered more aid than they had expected or deserved, but Viz still didn't feel entirely easy about someone else digging around in his teammates' injuries. She couldn’t have known what she was looking at, let alone how to repair it. He would have to put them both through a full exam panel when they had once again secured their freedom.

For the time being though, in an act of courtesy he would never admit to, Viz shifted so his weight leant against Quiz rather than his lieutenant. He ignored the faint look of gratitude he received in return.

"On the way back," he hissed. "You're taking the middle seat."

"On the way back," Diz whispered back. "We will have the spaceship, and I will be too busy piloting to care what seat you take."

Neither mentioned the potential scenario where the three of them did not go back at all. 

Another period of time stretched out with the warm unconcern of a cat on a windowsill and nothing changed in the car. The road ahead of them unspooled like a length of yarn unraveling endlessly from the ball of world. Other cars passed them in coloured blurs, whisked away on other journeys to other places—bound for homes, or holidays, or services far away. The motorway was a place of resolve and commitment and they, in their pointlessness, felt slightly misplaced. The rattle of the engine took on the drumming of impatiently tapping fingers and the sat-nav, silent at last, felt expectant.

Against all advice and good sense, Viz stared at the sun in apprehension.

"How much further?"

Phil laughed. Rather, Phil shouted 'HA!' at the top of his voice and punched the car's ceiling. There was a sense of something being crossed off an invisible list.

"I have been waiting for that! God, I knew it wouldn't be long before one of you hit me with 'are we there yet?' And I am delighted to tell you, if you keep asking, I will honour the timeless threat of turning this shit around."

Which wasn't an answer to the question. In fact, it wasn't really an answer to anything at all.

"... Well, are we there yet?" Asked Quiz, sounding a little curious and a little indignant, as though he personally were being held up by these circumstances. 

"Has the car stopped? When the car stops, we're there." Momentarily taking his attention off the traffic, Phil toggled the rear view mirror about so that his reflection looked at them each in turn. "Sit quietly like good horrible children until then."

Viz lunged forwards, strangled by the seatbelt, and tilted the mirror so that he could glare at the boy.

"You have no idea where we are or where we're going, do you?"

"I do!" Phil exclaimed defensively, prodding the irritable alien back into place with the hand not occupied with steering. "We are... kind of, almost, sort of there. It's around here somewhere."

"Can you bear to be a little more specific?"

"... It's definitely in a field... somewhere..."

Quiz, the crew's resident navigator, gave a morose laugh.

"Wonderful."

Sundial shadows were drawn on the ground in towering lengths like obelisks. Daylight had turned the colour of honey, boiled thick with afternoon warmth. The sun was high in the sky, a golden blossom against milk-white clouds; Viz could have sworn he heard it laughing.

✯

In the end, it turned out they needn't have worried so much. 

Zone 5.1 was situated in the middle of nowhere, the neighbour of military training areas and industrial wastelands. It emerged from its surrounding airfield like a breaching submarine looking precisely as Viz remembered it—which is to say it appeared less like a high-tech research facility, and more like a warehouse that had been forcefully combined with whatever odd ends a person could find inside an electrical box. It looked like a power station made out of cardboard, a computer-generated 'boring building', a setting in a low-budget cartoon.

Therein lay the particular genius of the disguise; the last place one expects to find aliens is in the direction indicated to by a rabid looking man wearing a tinfoil hat and inside-out clothes, holding a cardboard sign that says 'THEY ARE AMONG US.' It was a ruse Viz was still quietly pleased with.

The car drew slowly to a halt in the shadow cast by the leviathan of metal and steel, where the warmth of the day had yet to permeate. Eager for escape, all three aliens attempted to exit one door at the same time, knotted together in a too-small space like silly string in a can.

This, as one can imagine, went badly.

Elsewhere (mere feet away), Phil leapt from the driver's seat and stared up at the imposing building and the jagged, dark scar it scored across the forget-me-not blue sky. Half-remembered, half-foreign, the facility made for an ugly and childish scene, a far cry from the sinister professionalism had been his lingering impression of the place for so long.

The few satellite images they had gleaned from the internet somehow hadn't prepared him for the reality of the place. It's sense of familiarity was haunting, like the face of a childhood acquaintance, or a photograph blotched featureless but still recognisable, and it was that element of remembrance that disquieted more than anything else. Even the cold hearkened back to the hitherto forgotten fact that it had been a brisk spring day that, all those long years ago, had seen them dragged across this asphalt in chains.

Long abandoned memories started to flicker in the depths of Phil's mind like minnow shadows.

There was a scar on the back of his neck. It began just to the left of his cervical spine and continued for two inches towards his jaw, the width of his pinkie finger, a dash of sunset pink like a bit of leftover sunburn. He hadn't thought about it for years, but it itched now. It was a distant, impersonal sort of prickle, like a fly walking up and down the seared senseless skin.

'Last time I was here, I was running for my life.' 

There was nothing to soften the blow of that thought. Nor had there been any previous indication that it would bother him as much as it did. Like the beam of laser fire that scarred his neck, the memory had come from nothing and, though it didn't hurt, it left a sick streak of discomfort in its wake.

'This isn't how I remembered it. This wasn't how it was supposed to be.' He felt like he had come across a fragment of his childhood and it had somehow let him down.

Still, Phil was determined to see it through—a lifetime bad habit of never knowing when to quit wasn't something he was giving up just as life got interesting again. If looked at with a tilted head, the slightly sick sense of anticipation curdling his stomach reminded him of how he felt looking at his least favourite rollercoaster, The Throngler; Zach had once bet him he couldn't go on it fifteen times in a row and, while Phil had proved him wrong (and won all of the latter's soap), he had since avoided looking at the thing.

This, he reassured himself, was just like that—Zone 5.1 was a rollercoaster. If a rollercoaster were more like a haunted house... or an escape room. Where you and your friends almost died. After being abducted by malevolent beings from a hostile foreign world. Because you played truant that one time.

Just like that.

Balling up his determination and fixing his gaze on the way forwards with a laser focus usually reserved for sniper rifles, Phil began a resolute march towards the silver slash of the front doors—

And promptly found himself horizontal, having tripped over the tangle of aliens sprawled messily on the ground. Being credibly dramatic is a lot harder when your mouth is filled with gravel. In 'Top Ten Ways To Ruin A Mood' it featured at number seven, losing to 'Wet Shoes On Linoleum' by the narrowest of narrow margins. 

'Alright,' Phil thought at the distant, daylight-veiled stars, 'laugh it up. Bet you'd look pretty funny if you fell too.'

With a little difficulty, he followed the tangle of limbs along an arm until he was raising his eyebrows at Quiz's faintly perturbed looking face.

"... All three of you failed to get out of the car? The thing that isn't even 'step one' on the To Do list because it's so overwhelmingly simple? You all ballsed that up?"

"All four of us, you mean," Quiz pointed out helpfully. "You are also on the floor."

"Yeah, but I didn't want to rule the world. There's no stakes in me being bad at things." Phil made an aborted attempt at rising, hands braced on things that protested and yelped. "C'mon, let's get this over with—this place skeeves me out, and imagining a future without your awful faces is the one thing keeping me going."

"Get off us then," Diz sneered from somewhere near the bottom of the pile. "You're not the company we'd choose to keep either."

"You literally kidnapped me and made me the centre of your whole, weird surveillance thing," Phil scolded, pushing himself upright courtesy of a foot dug in to Viz's chest. "Don't pretend you don't love me, you're embarrassing yourselves enough already."

Sneaking up on anything is a difficult business to master and, without their equipment, it was a skill the V.I.Z.ion crew lacked. Grim and austere even in its destitute ugliness, the facility stared down at them as the little group crept its way up the front path. Despite the absolute emptiness of the place, Phil couldn't shake the sense of doing something slightly illicit that someone would materialise to be mad about at any moment.

The facility front doors were not, perhaps, any larger than the average set of double doors—the sort would Phil recognise from his school days. They were, however, cast in a forbiddingly solid-looking, white-silver metal and sealed with heavy electronic locks that looked as likely to open as the brick walls themselves. An innocuous keypad blinked idly on a panel set to the left.

"Ok." Phil began to inspect the setup. "Years of experience tell me that this thing probably wants a number. Do you guys still know it?" No response. "Any important dates it could be? I feel like a bunch of ones is always a good bet..." 

He trailed off; the V.I.Z.ion crew were glancing between themselves with faint smirks curling their lips like cat tails. Phil got the sneaking suspicion that he had been excluded from some monumentally unfunny joke, and he was quite sure that uncovering said joke would not be satisfying enough to warrant the dent to his pride. Still...

"Alright." With a sweeping gesture, he stepped back from the keypad. "You do it."

With that infuriatingly superior expression still welded on to his face, Viz stepped forwards. His fingers hovered over the keypad... then reached for the side of the panel and slid it in to the wall to reveal a shallow recess, home to a single red button with 'DOORS' written on it, presumably in case anyone ever forgot what it did.

Phil pressed his lips together to keep from smiling—he could always appreciate a gambit, no matter the mastermind. Didn't mean he had to tell them that.

"Expectation: subverted," Diz intoned smugly.

"You guys really think you're clever, huh?"

"We're still alive aren't we?"

"Not your strongest argument Diz, but sure. You are, technically, still alive."

Together, everyone pretending to everyone else they weren't nervous, they peered into the darkness. The corridor the doors revealed looked more like a horizontal lift shaft than anything designed for people to walk down. A light breeze, gritty with dust and reeking of cold oil, sighed from somewhere deep within those distant depths, accompanied by a host of abstract, mechanical wheezings. There were lights inset in to the ceiling, infirm, firefly points of luminescence, but only a few of them seemed to be working, leaving vast, languorous pools of shadow in the interim between each one. As they entered, these shadows peeled away the warmth and freshness of the day outside, and then the facility itself was clamping damply down upon them.

Through the narrow, unlit corridors they walked, their steps echoing in a harsh staccato no matter how carefully or delicately they placed their feet. Leery of the whole building, Phil lingered behind Viz, between Diz and Quiz, despite his offer to lead—anything wanting to get a piece of him would have to fight an alien first.

'Unless they come at us from behind...' Vast nails scraped down the chalkboard night sky as the doors wrenched themselves closed behind them. 'No turning back now. At least you guys are the scariest things down here...'

As it happened, this wasn't true.

During a section of corridor lit only at its beginning and end, Phil bumped in to something in the dark. It felt like solid flesh, a cold slab of meat from a butcher's fridge stuffed in to a blazer. Phil reeled, throat clenching around the world's most undignified scream, a sound partway between a sneeze and the noise a cat makes if you tread on its tail. He ricocheted off all three increasingly startled aliens until five different hands seized him and held him steady. 

"What the hell is that?" Phil demanded. "Who's got a light?"

"If any of us had a torch, do you not think we'd already be using it?"

"Not a torch, here—hold on, I've got—" Wriggling his fingers to the bottom of his jeans pocket, he dredged up a lighter that had only been through the wash twice and came aflame after a few shaky clicks. "Here, now we can—holy dog bollocks in a tin can, why are you here?!"

In the middle of the corridor stood one of the guard-agents, perfectly upright and stationary as a mountain.

If it weren't for the fact that he could see the man's chest rise and fall, Phil would have assumed the figure to be a mannequin, some sick doll stationed here to spook him. The iconic movie spy aviators covered his eyes, but did so so completely that Phil's burgeoning superstition started to whisper that there was no eyes beneath them—just smooth, unmarked skin. All the signifiers of humanity and thought that should have been present in a face were hauntingly gone.

"What's up with this guy?" Phil whispered, hoping that speaking would inspire some twitch or flicker in the agent's aura of consciousness. It didn't, and the empty unease deepened.

A buzzing noise fizzed from somewhere within Viz's glasses—not an intentional or purposeful buzz, but the sound of some electrical malfunction under stress. Biometric scanners, Phil assumed; one of the many functions Viz's ruined glasses used to enjoy.

"No neural activity... and yet, he lives."

"Not really how that works. Care to explain?" His nerves felt both hot and shivery under his skin, and his grip on his iron nonchalance was growing slippery. Viz paused before answering, tilting his head this way and that as though there were something beyond the physical he would see if he only found the right angle. When he spoke, his words came slow and careful.

"When this facility was in use, we couldn't have anyone from Earth knowing we were aliens. To that end, we devised something that would keep our subjects from noticing any... physical deviations."

"Aww man, did the bright red skin, lack of nose or ears, and four arms give the game away?"

"The synaptic dampening tools turned out to be extremely effective," Viz continued, ignoring Phil. "Nobody ever noticed us or suspected anything out of the ordinary but there were side effects... we miscalculated. None of us considered long term effects or understood enough about your species to know what would constitute irreparable damage. We are... infinitely more durable than you are. 

"Sustained exposure to dampening over a long period caused damage to the memory centres of the human brain, disrupting the connective abilities of the neurones—it killed the brain's ability to form memories and structure thoughts. The greater the period of contact, the more accelerated the deterioration. By the time we realised what the problem was, the guard-agents were resorting to writing notes for themselves—and forgetting what they had meant to write by the time they had found a pen."

Phil thought of boards of blank post-it notes, a room of boxes labelled 'empty', muttered passwords and TV screens broadcasting door codes; he said nothing.

"That is why," Viz concluded, face unaccountably grave. "By the time you arrived, the facility was no longer operating under us. Or, at least, not under me. We had abandoned it years ago."

"So wait, how much brain damage do I have?" Phil asked, feeling a distant, building dread in his blood, like some undiagnosed infection building into sepsis. He wondered, in a horror like awe, that he might have spent the last seven years letting his mind turn to mash potatoes unawares. "Am I going to be okay after this? Am I okay now, during this? Please tell me I'm not gonna end up like this guy. I have no jokes about that, I'm dead serious."

The glasses' glare turned on him, head still tilted at that curious angle.

"We stole and studied corpses to get a better understanding of human neural-cerebral anatomy. The Dreamscape Experiment was actually the fourth and safest iteration of our plans for Earth." The absolute severity was as discomforting as the announcement that they had accidentally made collapse-your-brain rays and turned a whole workforce to soup with. "I know you have no reason to trust me, but at least believe that there was no value in hurting you directly. We needed you alive and healthy, and we took every precaution to ensure those conditions."

This was such a poor attempt at reassurance that Phil almost wanted to remain anxious in protest but, against his will, his heart began to quiet its pace and his blood stilled.

"Thank you? But also you are horrifying at comforting people, please never do it again." Discreet in the darkness, he attempted to wipe the sweat of his palms off on his shirtfront, only to find it already damp and warm where it lay against his chest. "Is there anything we can do for him?"

"It wasn't this bad when I was here last." Diz murmured, sounding a great deal calmer about that experience than he had the last time it was brought up. "They reacted to verbal and physical stimuli. They followed orders to bring down the ship and lock us up. This one's completely catatonic." 

As if to demonstrate, he reached an arm out and snapped long fingers before the agent's face. There was no response; he was as implacable as a brick wall and a great deal more eerie. One expects a brick wall to do nothing, to think nothing; to impose those characteristics on a person was ghastly. 

"So that means..."

"That means someone or something has been keeping this place running."

Phil swallowed; the agent had a plasma gun clasped in unmoving fingers that looked like clay.

Viz paused... then removed the weapon from the limp grasp of those not-dead hands. He checked it was loaded and calmly clipped it to his side.

Throat suddenly thick and uncooperative, Phil took a breath and willed the jitters out of his fingers. The taking of the gun seemed to mark an inflection point in the tone of their investigation, and there was to be no reversal or return to more placid spirits. 

"Come on." Gently—timidly—Quiz clasped a hand around Phil's elbow and pulled him along. "The agents can't hurt us without orders. It's best if we just let them be."

They proceeded with more caution after that. At first, Phil tried to count how many men and women they passed in the dark—'one, two, three... five... ten... twenty'—but, as the number climbed, the endeavour grew oppressive. He settled candidly for 'too damn many'. That seemed a reasonable estimate.

Looking at them turned his stomach. It wasn't, he realised, just their stillness, their lack of anything either aware or human, but what they had once represented. In the reflection of their glasses, he didn't see someone who was almost an adult; the figure melted and blurred and shrunk, reverting to a bald boy in an oversized hoodie running for his life.

✯

None of them could have said with any degree of precision how long they spent wandering the unmapped guts of their old enterprise, that labyrinth of veins long bled dry and left to rot. Each tunnel seemed to lilt gently downwards, ultimately flowing back towards the elevator shaft at the facility's heart. The deeper they went the colder it became and the distance between each functioning beacon of light grew longer. Impelled by the sensory deprivation, Phil was quietly convinced that that they had reached the limits of reality, that the tangible world would vanish completely if they ventured any deeper into blackness that felt increasingly like the fringes of someone else's coma.

Such was the quality of the darkness that the slightest change up ahead was registered instantly. Such was the extent of the delusions blindness and cold cast on the mind that the four argued about what that change actually was until they were mere feet away from its source.

There was a flickery distortion in the corridor, a fluttery moth's-wing of light that hadn't quite decided if it wanted to exist yet. The source was what could have been a half-open door, but could also have been any variation of nameless, rectangular structures—there wasn't enough definition to say. It seemed to fade with nearness, as though they had ruined the trick of it's existence by approaching, and it was sulking itself into shadow.

"Should we go in?" Phil whispered. No response. "Guys?"

After a longer-than-usual span of silence, Phil glanced behind him to where a peculiarity of architecture allowed a corner to hoard a collection of particularly dense shadow, three technicolor faces sticking, disembodied, out of the gloom. They were all preoccupied with something glitchy in Diz hand.

"A minute, Eggtree." The green alien fiddled with a dial, face squeezed with disquiet. "This signal is... strange."

Whatever he'd done made the distortion louder, a noiseless noise that twanged the blood like a guitar string in molasses; Phil frowned dubiously at the contraption.

"What's wrong with it?"

"Can't tell—there's too much interference."

At this juncture, Phil could have remained behind with the aliens, huddled in to the dark recess of a corner and, while things likely still would not have gone well, they might have gone better—which is a crucial distinction in situations where one's life is on the line. But the scrambled signal was worming its way under his skin in its inaudible torn-atom wail, and it was making some obscure region of his throat and tongue ache in a way it really shouldn't. Mentally, Phil flipped a coin and decided pressing forwards was preferable to The Racket of whatever Diz was doing.

What harm could come from listening at keyholes and spying through cracks in a door? He'd faced worse.

The room inside the strobing rectangle was no better defined than the door itself. It could have been any shape known to man, have any dimension imaginable. All at once, it was a broom cupboard and a ballroom. Only one thing was certain; it was entirely colourless, a monochrome nightmare of bright strobe. The centre of the room was dominated by a circular table, at which a large number of figures crowded, and the walls were host to five large monitor screens, held aloft by diode-corded wires. Each was playing a different scrap of footage—a few ship-side rooms Phil recognised and far more that he didn't; open expanses of space and stars; pieces of the past all documented with date stamps. Fascinated, he leaned in for a closer look.

(Phil took very little notice of the people, struck, as he was, by the film playing out on one of the large monitors lining the far wall. This marks another point at which his circumstances could have been improved but weren't.)

"Guys, come here—Viz is about to get his head kicked in."

Unsurprisingly, this went ignored. Crowded around the mangle of a radio, the three didn't even look up.

"We have more important things to think about, child."

"Hey, this was a big moment for me, alright? I thought I killed a guy. I thought I actually killed a man right after I got done pretend killing my friends in a hyper-realistic simulation that was my life for six years. That's a milestone very few accomplish."

Alone, he widened the gap in the door and peered intently through. Projected on to the largest monitor was footage from the last few minutes before Viz's 'defeat', as seen from the bridge by some desiccated security system. Phil could see himself—'couldn't be be me, I was never that small'—a scrawny kid in an oversized hoodie, working laboriously to turn a ship's wheel that was twice his size. On his child-self's face, what little of it was visible, there was a triumph that made the elder Phil feel queasy given everything that happened after.

'I thought there would be a button or something. Everything else had a button.'

It would have been a lie to say he had expected the laser to fire of its own accord—which wasn't to say he regretted how the affair went down, but is to illustrate that it was something of a shock. Maybe Viz had deserved to die, but that didn't mean Phil deserved to live with the fact that he'd killed someone.

The wiring of the gun flashed white in preparation to fire, and then the camera view changed; they were looking, now, in to a room Phil had never seen before, one with walls made of wires, full of monitor screens which cast everything in an aqua blue that leeched away colour. A label at the bottom of the recording listed it as 'CBTS–6455: CENTRAL CONTROL'. Quiz was seated at the main console, presiding over four different computers, Diz leaning over his shoulder to watch. There was a degree of companionability to the scene that had been thoroughly absent in every interaction between them Phil had actually witnessed.

“I told you he'd figure it out!" Crowed a smiling Quiz. "You and Viz owe me—wait."

 And then the weapon fired.

Static doused the footage like a wave washing over sands as strange radiations sleeted through the fabric of the V.I.Z.ion battleship in the wake of the icy discharge, the recording eaten up by pixels and memories of snowstorms. When the room returned to the big screen, it's two occupants had thrown themselves into a very restrained sort of chaos. Quiz was tapping hurriedly at the many keyboards scattered over the desk, all four hands a blur. Stood beside him, Diz was holding something that bore a strong resemblance to their remotes. Both wore identical expressions of shocked horror; in Diz's, there was a shadow of belligerent disbelief, as though he could force everything to undo itself through sheer will.

"Viz, are you alright? What's happening?"  

There was a sound like a world of china plates smashing, and then the radio in Diz's hand went dead. The two stood in the control room went still with appalled surprise, like esteemed guests who have just had a door slammed in their faces.

"Was that the plan?!" Quiz whisper-shrieked, four fists clasped to his face in horror. "Was that how this was supposed to go?!"

"Quiz, please be quiet." With a distracted, icy firmness, Diz leant over Quiz and accessed the ship's radio systems. "Viz, respond. Do you copy?"

The console transmitter spat mindless static. Diz licked his lips.

"Open visual link to Vessel V8-θ 998-111. Lower system communication barrier. Viz, report status. Do you copy?"

The static of the speakers spread to one of the overhead monitors like gangrene. The image was small and grainy, but Phil was certain the green alien was shaking.

"Move, Quiz. I want to see..." Diz's voice hadn't changed from its level, calm, unnervingly polite tone (Phil was beginning to get the impression that Diz's voice didn't change until he started screaming) but it was a brittle sort of smooth. The kind that might break in to all manner of jagged edges at the most unexpected provocation. Quiz darted away from the keyboards and hovered over the lieutenant's shoulder, wringing both pairs of hands in a way which made them seem boneless.

"This wasn't the plan," he whispered, desperation painful in his tone. "This can't have been the plan."

Diz accessed a different mainframe on the main screen, input a code, and scrolled down several pages of heavily encrypted information. Hastily, he flitted through a number of links, going from page to inscrutable page until he found what he was looking for—precisely what that was, Phil didn't fully understand. A number of graphs dominated the screen within a screen, all alive with motion, some making jagged, up-down patterns of speeding lines, others cycling in neat curves—'alive' seemed to be the operative term. Phil could only just read the labels on the eight-bit display; Viz, Diz, Quiz, Nitwit, Oswald.

"His neural interface for the implant is still running," Diz murmured, more to himself than Quiz. He pulled back from the screen and pressed his fingers into his temples, eyes shut tight. Phil could feel the angry relief of the scene.

"Does that mean he's okay?"

"It means he's alive." 

Unseen by Diz, just behind his back, Quiz raised a hand as though to clasp the taller alien's shoulder, hesitated, and lowered it back to his side without making contact. Now that the fear was passed, the concerns of the material world were leaning back in, the pressure of everything that had, until that point, been going so well.

"I need to return the subjects to Earth. They can't be left alone on the bridge..." It was obvious to Phil that Diz did not want to leave the situation, and it was deeply odd to consider the green alien as someone who could be worried. "Wait here for a signal while I'm gone—Viz will need someone to activate the transit beam."

"Sure Diz." Quiz mumbled, eyes still fixed on the dancing lines of the monitor. "Sure..."

'Ahhh. Now that is the face of someone who has just decided he's never going blindly with another nonsense plan. Good job guys—you freaked him out enough he committed a small atrocity. Have fun getting your mind reamed to bits, Diz—you earned it!'

Phil shivered as Recording Diz turned towards the door leading to the main cabin. Perfectly captured by the dithery security system was the too-precise, serene smile Diz had been wearing when he 'congratulated' them for their victory. Only now, watching the expression slip in to place like a hand in to a well-worn glove, did he realise how much of a mask it was. It smoothed away any concern or contrary emotion, a smile hovering beneath two cold, dead eyes like a crescent moon beneath twin black holes.

"Remind me to give him hell for throwing me through the door like that."

With that, Diz stepped through to the cabin and there the video paused. One might have expected the watchers stood about the room to mutter conspiratorially, to make notes, or otherwise react to their study. Instead, there was an awkward pause, as though someone had been anticipated to say something, before—seconds later—the video feed resumed. Nobody had moved. Nobody had spoken. But something had taken place, Phil was almost certain. He could feel the fizz on conversation in the air, the lemonade canopy of an excitable crowded room, despite the silence and stillness.

This was the point at which he actually inspected the newcomers: bald; large, black eyes without sclera or iris; humanoid but not quite the right proportions to be human; six long, slender limbs—two legs, four arms; grey uniforms; a disc-like medallion in the centre of the forehead, between where the eyebrows should be; snakelike slits for noses; apparent absence of ears...

"Hey, the new weirdos look like you lot—is this the rest of your unit or something? Guys?" When his whispering failed to gain to draw a response, he didn't think much of it—the aliens had, after all, proven to be proficient at ignoring him.

Then Phil turned around. And, as he was blinking blackness from the back of his eyes, he saw, in the corridor beyond, something that turned his every nerve to ice, his skin to something wet and crawling. He looked to the aliens themselves and found himself facing three pantomime masks of pure terror.

That was when he realised and, in that single second, that flashbulb burst of complete comprehension, Phil understood everything—never before had understanding been so dreadful. He felt like the diver who, with utmost clarity, realises that they must exhale their last breath at a moment fast approaching, or the man crossing the street who looks up just in time to register the closeness of the car and understand the inadequacy of the human body to get away in time.

Too late, Phil understood what had happened to Diz's radio.

'So... who's after you?'

'Classified.'

'We've been here too long already.'

Pieces, previously disconnected, fell perfectly in to place in the world's worst jigsaw puzzle. For reasons he was unable to specify with the matter brought to light, Phil had assumed the pursuing aliens would be a different type of alien—vigilantes angered over their planet's destruction, or a dedicated sherif from half-destroyed world. He had never internally made the steps to connect the trio with a race and people of their own; the three of them were isolated figures, their own little sect without allies, or a species, or a home world to go back to...

But humans hunted humans—why should things be any different in space?

Here they were, those pursuers, with everything V.I.Z.ion had cultivated at their disposal.

Phil's hand felt too heavy when he raised it; it caught against the empty air as though it were honey, and he could feel the swirls of breeze against his cheek more keenly than the floor beneath his feet. Trapped in that moment of knowing his own death lurked nearby, it seemed to Phil that the world may not have existed—that he may not have existed—save for that fragile, human hand waving like a white flag.

In the corridor stood fifty guard-agents, massed in ranks amid the dense shadow. They did not wave back. Every blank, bespectacled face was lit ghoulishly from below by the lime-green glow of their plasma guns, which were directed at the intruders' chests.

He'd had dreams like this, he realised. Not ones he remembered after waking, but dreams nonetheless. Dreams of those anonymous metal halls burrowing ever-deeper in to the Earth, pursued by unsmiling faces and the static zap of laser fire—sometimes alone, sometimes joined by his friends and classmates, who would flee and fall at his side...

The burn at the base of his neck itched.

(Those imaginary scenes never really contained the aliens. Not until the ones where he looked up to where the roof of the tunnel was supposed to be—to where gaping holes in the ceiling opened their mouths to a sky punctured with a million stars like light refracting off of camera lenses. And there the three were, made massive in unreality, watching him. Their keen eyes and laughter followed him—followed all the little rats—as they ran through the maze of their devising.)

(It was strange to have them here now. Strange how reassured he was by the sense of them, solid and hostile and horrified, at his back.)

A sheepish laugh bubbled unwillingly from some vestigial region of Phil's throat, a strained noise that sounded like a sarcastic sob.

"Is it too late to say 'wrong room'?"

There was the sound of a gun being cocked and all hell broke loose in that claustrophobic, subterranean corridor, and hell was neon, and metal-scented, and it burned.

Chapter Text

"Smiley! Smiley, where's my car? Did you borrow it? You should have told me, you silly girl. We need more milk. I don't care what kind of milk. I suppose if you got me one of every type of milk they do now, the eight of us could all have our own."

This was the greeting Smily received upon her return home, a considerable deviation from the standard "hello, how are you? How was your day?". Having no clue what had happened to her mother's car, she was a little confused. The milk debacle went entirely ignored.

"Mum, I took the bus," She disengaged from the embrace to look her mother in the eye. "I always take the bus."

Unaware of any ill-doing—at least, any beyond the pale—Mrs Sundae gave her daughter a small smile and brushed a strand of Smiley's hair from her forehead before returning to her work.

"Ah well, must have been that boyfriend of yours—haven't seen him all day." She raised her voice so that it echoed out from the kitchen, disembodied teasing turning pointed. "Your 'guests' are also mysteriously absent. Zach and Phred said they don't know anything, but they also said they didn't take the last of the semi-skimmed, so..."

She let the statement hang, certain that her daughter, ever reliable, would fill the blank. No such response came.

Smiley hurtled up the stairs. It would have been nicer—easier—to say she took them two, three at a time, but the girl wasn't that neat with where she placed her feet; it is accurate to say she somehow managed to fall up the stairs. 

Into her room—the door was open, not closed as she had left it. She thrust a hand under her bed and into the shoebox, hoping for the silent reassurance of metal on her fingers...

Instead, there was a crackle of something thinner, more brittle. Something decidedly not a revolver. Tactile and shallowly indented with whorls and swirls of writing.

Hesitantly, unsure if she truly wanted to see, Smiley pulled the note from beneath her bed. A note. Not the weapon she had stolen and squirrelled away.

An innocent note, folded to oblivion, with the space in-between the creases stamped clumsily with three letters:

I   O   U

Zach answered his phone immediately. Phred picked up on the third call, having had to dig his phone out of his sofa. 

Phil didn't pick up at all.

✯

"Run!"

There was no real way to be sure who shouted. Maybe it was Viz, who shoved Phil behind him and out the way. Maybe it was Diz, who seized Quiz by the wrist and sprinted in to the blackness of the corridor. Maybe it was Phil, who dragged Diz to his feet when he tripped. Maybe it was Quiz, who snagged Viz by the back of his coat and forced him to join the mad dash away from the firing squad.

Whoever had issued the command was swiftly made irrelevant, as it echoed and reverberated about the metal walls, becoming a many-throated chant—run, run, run... it swelled to a crescendo and pounded against the very nerves, mirroring the increasingly frantic beating of a heart. Then one of the agents fired, and the chorus fell dead as the air was slowly shattered by the subtle fizz of laser fire, a sound like a synthesised dying breath.. 

That first shot breeched a dam, and suddenly the narrow, unlit space was flooded with deadly bolts. Quick and clumsy with adrenaline, the quartet turned and fled, pursued by light and a hundred pounding feet. 

Through the dark they charged, through blackness that was intermittently banished by laughing neon light as cuttingly radiant as dawn. Where the plasma rounds struck the metal walls, they exploded soundlessly, and the pannels became shattered sculptures limned in a sickly glow. Everything Phil could see was lit up in green and broken. He could hear the others running, but the only sign that they remained alongside him was the occasional flash of gunfire that illuminated a limb or wide-open eye, or the occasional push of a hand at his back, someone tugging on his arm and hauling him forwards.

They were running blind, Phil realised with stricken clarity, as though he were a passive observer of this plight and not a participant. This was not a passage they had been through before, nor was it one he recalled from his previous visit. In a mad bid to compensate, he stretched his arms out before him, some vague, unthinking thought deciding it would help.

(Realistically, he knew that if he collided with anything, he would be shot before he could realise what had happened; unhelpful thoughts like that were stuffed into a dark recess of his mind that was quickly becoming cramped.)

In an ideally dramatised world, their chase would be scored with music, something frenetic and electronic. Instead, there was nothing but the slap and clang of many feet against metal, the whisper-heave of panting, and the hiss of laser fire. Most people being gunned down would at least have the crass assurance of going out with a bang; Phil was about to become the only person in the world to get shot with a non-facetious 'pew pew'. He was leaving with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a fireworks fizz, a susurration like scissor teeth in velvet. It was awkward—bizarrely awkward. It gave the mind opportunity, in the blank spaces between weird sounds, to consider its mortality.

Phil struggled through another heave of breath, his lungs bursting. Lasers smelt differently too; of ozone, hot metal, and chlorine. Custom dictated that hell smelled of sulphur and was lit up in red, but Phil was starting to have his doubts. Hell was this—boiling, swimming-pool-scented air and the too-close walls of a convoluted passage coated in tar-thick dark. His body and blood was drenched with it and he couldn't get enough air.

They turned a corner at breakneck speed. Then another, another, another. For quite a while there was nothing but corners. The tunnel was one endless corner that they were bound to turn from then until judgement day. The whirlpool world sucked them down and ushered them ever closer to a more permanent sort of blackness.

Then there appeared a bright square of light at the end of the corridor, a patient halo in the dark. Phil could have screamed in relief; the elevator, running from the basements of the facility to the upper floors. 

If they could get inside, they would be safe.

If they reached it before the guard-agents, they could get away.

Phil risked a glance over his shoulder and found himself staring into his own eyes, reflected in aviator shades that were far too close for comfort. Unable to scream, he settled for a dry croak of disbelief and willed his burning legs to carry him faster.

They couldn't—the legs were already doing their best. It was impossible to tell if that would be enough.

Drawing a ragged breath, Phil squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to keep running towards the point of dull vermillion wobbling about behind his eyelids. Blindness was a comforting alternative to the sight of those blank faces foaming behind him—it wasn't like his sight had been doing much good anyway, what with the lime flames and shredded metal. Not good for the nerves, all that death.

It is said that removal of one sense heightens all the others; while this may be generally true, it was decidedly Not this time. Everything was a slurry of sensation with singular, occasional jabs of clarity, like a pillow with a needle in it. Something exploded underfoot. A pocket of hot wind scalded his cheekbone. Laser fire whispered sweet nothings. A high, sharp voice screamed once. The floor became slippery for a few paces. He was kicking something like a deflated football down the corridor, and every time his foot struck it it squelched. Phil's heart thundered in his ears, it's beating combined into a singular, ceaseless thrum.

The point of redness in the shut-eyed dark grew larger.

Without seeing it, Phil slammed into the back wall wall of the lift and bounced off with the same noise a dodgeball makes after being flung violently at someone's face. There was an indent where his forehead had collided with the wall and a smear of blood on the metal from his freshly bleeding nose; concussing himself by running into a wall had never felt more like victory. 

He lay on his back, wet copper on his lips, the lights swirling a waltz in twins, feeling the world sway up and down as though resting on someone's chest. This, of course, was a result of the blow to the head and not an effect of the lift; they had yet to press any buttons that would convince the carriage to convey them to safety.

Phil would think of this in a second—presently, he was dazedly pleased to have made it inside and was considering that Job Done for now.

Hardly a step behind, the aliens joined him, bouncing off of the walls and each other like brightly coloured pinballs. Six hands (four of them Quiz's) mashed at the elevator keypad, uncaring of where they went so long as they left the subterranean nightmare of those lowest floors. Somewhere high above, the motors for the lift whirred to life and pulled tentatively at the worn cables in their grip.

'No hurry gents, take your time... not in any rush down here, you lazy sodding machine.'

With a bone-deep groan, Phil hauled himself to his feet, his brain swaying in his skull like a bit of seaweed in a current, like something that wasn't supposed to be thinking. Through the entryway to his little, boxy haven, he could clearly see the ranks of advancing agents—black and white blurs on black. Stumbling to his feet, he pressed a destination button and held it down with as much force as he could muster, locked in the conviction (as we all have been, at some point) that pressing the button harder would somehow make things happen faster.

The lift doors began to close with the blithe unconcern of a deaf, old woman crossing the road, in happy oblivion to the car speeding her way.

An arm looped about his waist and yanked him into the relative safety in the lee of the door; Diz was one side and Quiz had taken the other, squeezed out of the way of laser fire. Phil was clasped tightly against Quiz and Diz was angrily snatching at Viz, still stood boldly in the door.

Gun still in hand and immovable despite his pilot's desperate efforts, Viz was still taking careful aim in to the encroaching hoard. Despite his grim determination and proficiency with the weapon, the odds were... not promising. A number of his shots were only landing in a body because of the sheer quantity of pursuers, going wide as though the alien were seeing double or triple. The gun in his hand was glowing a low, warning red about the power module. Bodies littered the corridor like a barrier of macabre sandbags, but fresh agents simply clambered over and kept on coming, pouring acid-green fire which barely missed the brash figure stuck in their sight line. Viz, in his arrogance, was spared only by the funnelling of the corridor that sent the hurrying masses knocking in to one another, jostling their collective aim.

Still, with his efforts to keep them pushed back—however maniacally foolhardy those efforts were—it was looking like they might, by the skin of their teeth and several miracles, make it out alive. If everyone just stayed away for five seconds more...

(Viz shot a man dead through the head and he, with hydra-like efficiency, was immediately replaced by three others.)

Four seconds more...

(The gun in Viz's hand began to strobe slowly, entering a low power cycle to preserve function.)

Three... 

(Another part of Viz's glasses snapped off as a laser beam scorched by, vaporised in a small shower of black filaments and sparks; a million tiny cuts peppered his cheek and temple, and his next shot hit the ceiling.)

Two...

(Phil could see their faces—blank, immobile, human faces, authoritarian and anonymous but alive and full of stories. He could hear them panting too, imagined their hearts beating as hard as his own. They were two meters away and he was filled with the terrified wish that they all just disappear.) 

One—

And a lone man broke ahead of the seething frenzy, charging forwards alone, the white-light reflecting off his glasses. 

Calmly, with the demeanour of someone flicking lint off a jacket sleeve, Viz shot the stray in the leg. A neat hole burrowed through his kneecap and rendered the joint useless. Propelled by forward momentum, the agent skidded forwards on his knees like an old rockstar across a stage, then fell forwards. His head caught between the closing lift doors.

Now, normally, an obstruction between closing lift doors only causes calamity in the sense that the doors, obstinate and pathetic, Do Not Close, leaving everyone feeling slightly exasperated by the Wonders of Modern Technology. They open and half-close and open again with an attitude similar to that of a particularly slow child trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. But those are doors designed by nice, normal people.

Diz was not nice, normal, or (in the traditional sense) a person; Diz was the designer of the mechanisms behind these elevator doors. Just as he was the designer of other such hits like the V.I.Z.ion ship's bulkhead doors, the blast doors in the testing bay, the starship airlock doors...

Point is: when Diz made something designed to close, it bloody well closed. Regardless of petty inconveniences like unfortunate people's heads.

It would be nice and neat to say the man's head burst like a balloon. The reality was that it was more like a watermelon—an affair of chunks, and pulp, and odd, stringy, fibrous bits of connective tissue. A thick slathering of brain splattered itself over the floor, the walls, and the occupants, hot, dark, and awful. Nothing inside the newly dead man's head looked the way one might imagine living tissue to look; beyond the pale spears of bone, which were pink rather than white, the flesh was a stew of burgundy, maroon, and purple. The blood looked black in the nightmarish neon of emergency lights, like a Jackson Pollock from hell.

But the doors were closed and (most) of the guard-agents were on the wrong side. Smooth and uncaring as pearl, the elevator heaved its bulk upwards and in to the light of the higher floors. They had gotten away with it. They were safe.

Dripping liberally with the inside of a man's head, Phil wondered a little hysterically if this was what 'safe' was supposed to look like. Every nerve in his body was aflame and his lungs were a juddering, shuddering, uncooperative engine in his chest, a force he had lost control over. His conscious mind could hardly hear over his heartbeat but, in that higher, analytical quarter of his brain that remained absolute in its awareness of the world, he was faintly aware of music playing on a speaker somewhere:

~ I hear the drums echoing tonight, she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation ~

Nobody in the lift carriage spoke. The aliens were too busy fighting for air and Phil was occupied with the struggle of not being violently sick. He breathed deeply through his mouth, nausea sleeting through the fabric of his very being. The elevator was filled with the corrupted scent of something recently alive, and he could feel it settling on him, on his clothes, on his skin. He could taste the warmth of an extinguished life in the air like steam. He made the mistake of glancing towards the doors, where the majority of the mess lay congealed; the centre was still pouring blood, and ambiguous bits of red were still alive with the subtle writhing gestures of worms...

Fighting a retch, Phil stared down at his shoes. Nice, sensible trainers with no connection to homicide. Black, red, and silver, unbranded, new three months ago, laces replaced twice due to his dog, already deeply creased across the—

Something round and gelatinous stared up at him from his left toe. Bile rose like magma in his throat.

Phil was sick before they reached the chorus.

✯

At least the place they arrived was somewhere familiar.

The green corridor of the third floor looked somewhat worse for wear; not in the manner of a place which had been subject to any rigours of activity, but in the fashion of something abandoned to decay, a place rinsed thin by apathy. Plaster flaked from the ceiling, lights crackled and convulsed, tiles wobbled underfoot, and the wallpaper was damp and sagging. Despite all this, the layout was welcomely familiar, and they set off towards the aircraft hanger without hesitation.

Behind them, the lift began its arthritic descent back to the lower floors, summoned by the agents waiting below. It's bell rang wildly, screaming ‘TIME'S UP!’

Fresh adrenaline doused the ache of abused muscle. Newly terrified, desperately hopeful, the four raced down the corridor, closing whatever doors they could behind them in the hopes that it would buy them even a few more seconds of time. There was no way to lock them without a keycard, but Diz and Quiz took the time whenever they could to splice the few wires that protruded from the mechanism. They spilled through the final door in to the airy warehouse as a singular force and, without so much as a glance around the room, set to barricading the entryway with scraps of metal left lying around and a stick welder stolen from a maintenance cupboard. 

Only then, with the hunt briefly stalled, did they look at the place they had ended up. As remembered, the aircraft hanger was immense and, though it hadn’t escaped the progress of rot entirely, it seemed in better condition than everywhere else, perhaps due to its scale; lightbulbs hanging by wire threads were swallowed up by the shadows lining the cathedral-like ceiling and the faded colour of the walls was a fact secondary to their immensity. The portal to outside set high in the wall had been left open, admitting a breeze that took away the choke of mould and damp and replaced it with the brisk freshness of the sky. Still, there persisted a note of char...

(In one of the far corners there sat Nitwit's body, already dissected and disposed of. This went unacknowledged.)

With slow, spellbound steps, the quartet approached the centre of the room and the structure it hosted. Dry leaves, blown in through the vents, clustered in its sheltering corners, rustling like scattered bits of rattlesnake. Had any of them looked down, they would have noted that they were following the path left in the dust by a familiar, one-footed tread, flanked either side by a two-footed human gait, but they didn't look. In slack disbelief, they all stared at the prize lying brazenly at the end of their harrowing quest. 

There it lay, their last chance, the culmination of their collective hopes.

It looked only vaguely like a spaceship, and a great deal like a head on collision between two freight trains. What wasn't broken was irreparably burnt, and much of it managed to be both. In one word, it was unsalvageable. In two; devastatingly unsalvageable. Upon seeing it, many would have had reasonable ground to disagree that such a complete mess ever had the power of flight to begin with.

If a person ever managed to find themselves in a situation where their entire survival depended on finding a glass of cold Coke, and someone handed them a mug of lukewarm Pepsi, gave them the finger, and ran off into the sunset with their mother, they would have a decent idea of how the V.I.Z.ion aliens were feeling at that juncture.

How the hell that situation would come about is as much a mystery as what the three would do now that they were all so thoroughly doomed.

"Can you fix it?" Viz asked, in a leaden voice that already knew the answer.

Diz, who was staring at the vessel he had created and destroyed with an expression of betrayal and forlorn bleakness, exhaled sharply.

"... Given enough time and full access to the facility... no." He slowly shook his head. "I didn't think the landing went this badly..."

Phil hadn't realised, until that moment, how much he had been relying on the aliens' own belief that their spacecraft would still have the essential elements of 'spacefaring' and 'craft'. They had pooled together their scraps of hope and purchased a dream, a patchwork picture of a miraculously functional ship, and chased after it with such conviction that it was jarring now to discover it false. He had thought that his recollection of events was wrong, that the fire had maybe made it look worse than it really was, that the details in his mind were blurred by haste and horror, but no—he had been right the first time. It had been as bad as it seemed. And this disappointment was the price for getting caught up in the aliens' delusions.

Around him, he could feel that ardent belief in an impossible escape burn through and die.

To Phil, now was the perfect opportunity for a second plan, the wheels of invention ever-turning in his mind starting to pick up the pace once more. For the aliens, now was the opportunity for an absolute crisis.

"What do you mean you can't fix it?!" Wailed Quiz, suddenly looking very frightened, like man dunked into icy rapids. He had, Phil realised, up to that point had full confidence in Diz and Viz's ability to fix things. "You have to!"

"What is there to fix?" Diz murmured, voice cloudy with defeat and soft in the way of worn out things. "We're finished. It's done."

For the first time in a short and not-so-pleasant history, Phil agreed unreservedly with Diz. The old plan was dead—long live the new plan. Unfortunately nobody else—not even Diz, his mind as silvery and practical as a trap—seemed ready to share this pragmatism. Quiz started to wring his fingers hard enough that the bones cracked, his breaths shallow and frantic, bordering on hyperventilation.

"No, no, no, no." He seized ahold of Viz's bicep and shook it plaintively, terrified. "One of you do something."

Viz turned, face scrunched up in a snarl, and shoved the smaller alien away, his hands making agitated, angry gestures at nothing. Compared to Quiz, he didn't seem to be breathing at all.

"Shut up, both of you!" Wildly, he cast about the empty room in search of something, anything. He looked as though he wanted to tear the ruined spaceship aside like a particularly solid magician's curtain to reveal a different one. "It can't be over. It won't end like this, it can't!"

Phil's emotional investment in the situation had always been contingent on the prospect that the aliens would leave. As such, he was not emotionally devastated to discover their path to freedom not so much blocked as blown to smithereens—disappointed, yes, and certainly he was afraid, but he was still in a temperament to think of things logically. Which is why he was the only one to hear it when, all the way down the corridor, numb, senseless feet, wielded like clubs, kicked the first of the locked doors in.

The chase was afoot once more.

"I'm pretty sure this conversation can happen somewhere else, if you guys don't mind," Phil called out, voice forcibly chatty, conversationally hysterical. "Y'know, in one of those many places where death is less imminent..."

And here, it slowly dawned on him that, in a teamwork situation, there are significant disadvantages to being surrounded by deeply unbalanced psychos who have just experienced an extreme emotional shock after having the worst week of their lives for a while. All around him, the three aliens fell apart.

"I'm sorry," Quiz gabbled tearfully, his wet black, eyes huge with terror. "I'm so, so sorry. I never meant for this to happen, I wouldn't have done it if I'd known I swear—"

"It's all over," Diz whispered, and he didn't speak again. With the tenderness of someone stroking the wing of an injured bird, he reached out and ran a finger over the fractured patters cobwebbing the viewport.

"You useless, feckless, cowardly, spineless—" Viz paced the length of the wreck, jerking around like a crazed puppet with half its strings cut. It wasn't clear who this rant was directed to—Quiz, Diz, Phil, the situation generally, Viz himself, the ship. It didn't seem to matter. It certainly didn't help.

At the entrance, the battery continued, the volume of footsteps increasing in a series of hollow-throated 'BOOM's as the stampede broke through sheet metal with the power and diligence of people who couldn't feel their hands. Swallowing dryly, Phil tried to count how many of their meagre barricades remained; surely it couldn't be many now...

"Guy I am dead serious—we have to leave now."

Nobody moved. Viz ranted; Quiz apologised; Diz was cenotaph silent. If Phil had been blessed with hair, he was pretty sure that would have been the moment he tore it out.

And then there was a calamitous sound of rending, and they were down to their final line of defence, the warehouse door itself. Through the gaps in their barricade, Phil could see the final, flimsy piece of industrial strength steel shuddering in its frame from unseen blows dealt by a hundred fists. In a roll like thunder, the commotion was echoing through the ventilation ducts, the scuffling sound of jostling bodies without the accompanying voices issuing apologies, rebukes, and non-verbal acknowledgements of nearly falling over—all the sounds of a crowd except the sort which make it human.

Beyond that door was nothing that could be reasoned with. Beyond that door was an army with its heart hollowed out, led about by a kill-order like a good dog on a leash. Beyond that increasingly unstable door was a foam frenzy of black-suited piranhas, jaws champing, eyes full of mindless misery...

Still nobody moved. Phil felt his last nerve snap like a handful of raw spaghetti.

"LISTEN UP, YOU EXTRATERRESTRIAL FUCKWITS." 

It was the kind of shout that echoed at least twice. Everything stopped—the multiple crises, the banging at the door, the sense of inescapable doom. Even the leaves shut up. All three aliens turned to Phil with identical, aghast expressions, all thought of their imminent death suspended. Phil cheered himself on, feeling his body reel more air in to continue its shouting, the words wrenched from somewhere deep inside him, the dark hole into which he had stuffed all the doubts and fears of the day.

"I have come too damn far to be taken down because you arseholes couldn't get your shit together when it counted. In case you didn't realise, I've got a life here! I've got people to go home to, and like hell am I letting you stop me! Maybe you ruined your own lives—maybe you fucked yourselves and each other over in obscure and unimaginable ways—but you're not getting me, do you fucking understand that?

"This is not how it goes! This is not how the story ends for me!

"So you sorry sons of alien bitches had better get your fucking acts together, because I swear on the soul of my fucking left toe that I will cast the lot of you in to the goddamn sun if I die here. I will haunt you. Do you hear me? Do you sad sacks get it? WE NEED TO LEAVE NOW!"

Silence rang like a crystal bell, fractured in to snow splinters, and shattered softly. Phil felt his head break through deep waters, a lacework of sea foam breaking over his head, leaving him gasping in what was, suddenly, very open air. The aliens stared at him as though he'd somehow become someone different; he felt very exposed, slightly shuddery, and stuffed full of red-ribbon wrath at their helplessness. Every breath felt cold and mint-crisp in the bubbles of his lungs—he was suddenly painfully, vibrantly alive.

"We can't leave," whispered Quiz, his voice full of something damp and apologetic—things Phil did not have time for.

"Fine, you can't leave the planet and you're fucked. We can still leave this room. Your whole thing was about leaving rooms in strange and unexpected ways."

Technically, this had been Phil's thing, but the alien simulations had been meticulously designed to facilitate those adventures, five programmed pennies in the hall and everything. He knew he could work it out if they just gave him something to work with, anything—

"Oh," Diz said tonelessly, before vanishing. 

He was gone for only a few minutes, but it felt like an age. When he returned, he was dragging a bundle of spindly, metal somethings that clattered.

"Repair bays have ladders."

It took several ladders welded together to span the distance to the exit shaft, the whole, unruly conglomeration laid precariously against the wall and shored up with the movable scraps of melted 'spacecraft'. Halfway up the structure already by virtue of being its builders, Viz and Diz were the first to make it to open air, followed closely by Quiz (who was surprisingly fast.) When Phil attempted to follow, his limbs moved in jagged, uncooperative ways, having lost all knowledge of ladders and the mechanics of climbing one.

Mistakenly, Phil glanced over to the door; through the barricade (which now stood alone) poured blindly waving arms, like sea creatures extruded from a blistered wall of coral in the deep; they were zombie-like in their torn suits and bruised, bloodied knuckles, and horrific in their multitude. A fresh thrill shimmered down Phil's spine in bloody colours.

Suddenly climbing was easier; the taste of outside was tainted by the sour tang of metal and oil.

When designing the chute, it's ability to be climbed was not something anyone had kept in mind, and that was woefully evident to the poor sods struggling through the ascent. Phil's trainers slipped and slithered in all manner of unhelpful ways and he realised, far too late, that it would have been prudent to remove them entirely. Sticky grease and a sheen of oil coated the walls, nestling in the spiralling indents and bolt holes that would have otherwise made for ideal handholds. Very quickly, Phil's hands were rank with sludge, his nails filled with opaque slime in amber and black. In the warehouse below, the barricade finally gave way; in a move borne more of panic than plan, Phil kicked their makeshift tower over, where its shoddily welded seams came apart on impact with the floor.

Tumbling out in to uncaring daylight was the most painful way to greet that afternoon, and Phil hated his adoration of it, how vital it felt in that moment of escaping death to have the skin scraped off his hands and knees. The asphalt of the roof sandpapered every inch of exposed skin and chewed his hoodie to pieces of gummed felt as he rolled down, down, down, until at last he bounced off the gutter and spiralled towards the ground proper. 

Hands caught him, which was both a surprise and a relief—he had not been eager to add a broken arm to his combined concussion and nosebleed.

When they returned to Mrs Sundae's stolen car, which looked now terribly inadequate and a little silly in the face of the facility and all it represented, everyone spent several long seconds frantically yanking on their respective door handle before realising that Phil needed to disable the locks. This took the better part of a minute, one filled with fumbling and yelling. The group tumbled inside—Phil in the driver's seat, Quiz beside him, Viz and Diz sprawled across the backseat—all panting like racehorses, considerably worse off than they had been when they left only hours earlier.

Across from them, at the other end of the car park, a graffiti covered panel was scrolling slowly upwards like the curling lip of some slowly smiling mouth revealing the gleam of black teeth. Cars—at least a dozen of them.

"Drive!" It was a day of orders, that one—who was giving them, and who was obeying, were secondary concerns.

With a jerk, Mrs Sundae's stolen car stumbled forwards and began to amble placidly down something that Phil was now recognising as an airstrip. Inverted in the rear view mirror, the agents' cars eased from the darkness of their garage and swarmed after them like a hoard of flies after a lump of rotting meat on a string.

Something in Phil's hands cracked, sweat-slick and slippery on the wheel.

Snarling—almost screaming—Viz ripped his shades away from his face, single eye blinking rapidly in the sudden light, and removed a rectangular component from its housing. He forced it in to the depleted gun; immediately, the weapon's power-level leapt from 'LOW' to 'FULL'.

Diz hesitated for a stretch, before reaching into his coat. From it, he pulled a sleek, silver revolver; one with six, silver bullets, and a wooden stock stained with something dark.

Smiley's gun.

Phil filed that neatly away under Things To Scream About Later.

"So," he ventured, wrestling with the uncooperative gearstick. "Seeing as you guys are seasoned criminals, d'you have any good advice for someone driving a get away car? It's my first time."

Surprisingly, Diz's answer was candid.

"Yes, actually. One: nothing is worth getting caught over."

There were implications to that Phil would have quibbled over, had his attention not been riveted by the road.

"Two: if you can't be faster than your pursuers then at least be more reckless. Ideally, be both."

Phil risked another glance at the rearviews; a sleek, black machine, all gleaming bodywork and snarling engine, was approaching with the ease and grace of a predator. Hungry black. Funeral black. Mrs Sundae's car rolled sedately along, like a shopping trolley drifting down an isle.

"Three: know your surroundings. If possible, drive at night or in the dark."

Nothing could stuff the sun back in to its place below the horizon, and its light was was glorious, radiant, and really fucking unhelpful. The little car making its uninspired getaway was as conspicuous as ink stains on a wedding dress. Daylight beat down on them like a judge's gavel, unmarred and blinding.

'Where are we? Where the flying hell are we?!' Despite a decent amount of flailing, the Sat-Nav touchscreen remained blank. Ahead was the motorway which had initially delivered them, still teeming with cars full of ordinary people with their tidy lives and normal problems. And here they were, about to crash in to them with drama dragged straight from a B-movie.

"Basically, Phil..." Diz concluded, clicking the safety switch off the revolver and lining it up with the cars in the back window. "I advise you to drive like you don't mind dying."

Viz smashed one of his elbows into the glass of the rear view the same second Phil floored the accelerator and sent them hurtling forwards in to the melee of traffic waiting on the long road to freedom.

✯

Metaphorically speaking, there are two types of backseat drivers; the first is your mother, sat in the passenger seat like a malcontent duck, yelling because you happened to edge over the speed limit in a twenty zone.

The second was a megalomaniacal alien sprawled over several seats to steer a car going at a ridiculous speed, screaming at you because your brain had finally caught up with the situation and you had folded in upon yourself like a particularly distressed lawn chair with a quiet 'holy shit' and refused to continue driving. You only still have you foot slammed as far down on the accelerator as it will go because your body is doing a particularly inspired rendition of that one time you took too many shrooms and forgot how to move and speak. 

As they barrelled down the motorway at speeds the designers of the small car had never envisioned—voices raging, laser guns sparking, and car tyres screaming—Phil pondered the fact that these things aren't always metaphorical.

'I never passed my test. I don't have a license. Do these guys count as illegal aliens? I should ask Quiz if they have passports. If we get pulled over, they're going to have to write a new book to throw at me. We need to stop and get petrol on the way back, or The Doctor’s gonna be pissed.’

As car chases went (in the general scheme of both historical and contemporary car chases) theirs was probably not the most dramatic. Indeed, it likely didn't even make the honourable mentions. Blackout drunks had wrought worse in a single terrible night than them, elaborate domino sequence of disaster though they were. It would later make the news more for the novelty of it all than its list of casualties.

But, as a person subject to car crashes could testify, even the smallest incident felt monumental when your life lay on that thin line between continued, painless existence, and the slow death of being mangled by a careless lump of hot metal. Sliding into a ditch feels like plummeting off a cliff. Losing control on icy roads feels like a roller coaster from some sick nightmare. Airbags sucker punch the unsuspecting with force that would make Muhammad Ali proud. And this...

There was no comparison to what this was—parts of other cars spiralling past the windows; collisions happening, left, right, and centre; weaving their way through the fabric of disaster like a particularly capricious needle with death chasing them in convoy—

Holy shit.

Not helping was the fact that Diz was driving. Diz drove like a man who's having a seizure paints—badly. He drove as though there was a bomb strapped to the car which would detonate if he didn't switch gears every five seconds. If there was a vehicular equivalent for throwing yourself bodily down the stairs, this was it. Apparently, contorting yourself enough that your head is under the dashboard as you drive severely hinders performance. Who knew?

Quiz was helping—

"Roundabout!"

Another series of screams. A Sudan to their left swerved into the dividers.

Phil amended: Quiz was trying to help. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Quiz's version of help was... unhelpful. Communications between between Diz and Quiz were being held at the top of both their voices, and Quiz's pitchy screech was getting lost in the symptoms of a stress headache.

"Go left!"

"Left?"

"Right!"

A yank of the wheel sent the car veering merrily into oncoming traffic.

"You said right!"

"The other right! As in, you were—" Quiz pinched the bridge of his flat nose. "Just—just go left."

"THERE IS NO 'OTHER RIGHT'!"

"Diz—"

"YOU WERE A NAVIGATOR FOR THE ENQUIRY, FOR ALPHIM'S SAKE! YOU KNOW THERE'S ONLY ONE RIGHT!"

If one were hoping to experience something similar, they would be advised to imagine a bad soap opera and a comedy going at 95 mp/h, because that's pretty much what it was.

Viz was still shooting at whatever was happening behind them, and this was what was causing most of the issues behind them. The fact that he was the epicentre of disaster didn't seem to encourage him, in any way, to stop.

Finally, its reserves run quite dry, Mrs Smiley's car gave a noncommittal splutter and a heaving, shuddering lurch. With the abstract air of smugness held only by inanimate objects doing things they weren't meant to, the engine gave a last, hearty cough and settled into long overdue retirement.

"... Car's gonna stop..." Phil croaked. 

All three aliens swore profusely in their nonsense language.

"Get us off the road," Viz commanded roughly.

Phil complied, in a fashion. Through the bollards they went, like so many other cars before them on that day—through railings, through a thicket of gorse deep as a festival crowd, and down a sharp incline into a ravine where they finally came to a halt. They were out the car in the next second, struggling through the brambles and tangled thorns until they fell into the gulch of a ditch. From there, they crawled through the mud, dismal, damp, and gritty, following the waterlogged channel along until it shallowed and concluded in a field where sheep watched them flee. They hopped hedges and fences, ran past the derelict remains of old farm buildings and the gaping mouths of abandoned mines, sprinting towards the edge of the sky where the clouds were growing grey and aged. They were racing the end of the day and, by degrees, they were winning. 

"Can... we... stop... now?" Phil asked around gasps. None of the others answered him but, when he tried to slow his pace, a hand reached back and hauled him along. He had the vague idea that they were searching for something.

Their day ended the way their night began; in a forest.

Finally, the punishing pace let up and Phil was given opportunity to appreciate the fact that he truly couldn't feel his legs anymore. Twilight had sucked all the warmth out of the world—both colour and temperature—and, as they stumbled over roots and fallen branches, he reflected that this was an awful way to spend what was likely a very pleasant evening indoors. Autumn had yet to cast its change over the woods, but the possibility was palpable in the chill of the air and the dusky, brittle whisper in the leaves above. Another time, Phil might have wondered if there was something portent in all this happening at the end of summer, but right then he only really cared that it was cold.

They walked until they found a clearing and then, at long last, they stopped.

This is the place where explanations happened and Phil found his answers—both the sort he had waited seven, long years for, and the ones that had screamed in to existence since then, during their charge through mayhem and death. All his childhood disillusionment fell away like the pieces of a dried husk—the obsolete chrysalis, the too-small shell. It was a process as old and necessary as the universe, but that didn't mean it didn't leave him feeling lost; he felt there should have been some more monumental setting for it than those old woods with their ageing emerald crowns.

But no. Here they sat. And here, in the evening of the year, the story was told over a campfire made of damp, spitting wood, with a distinct lack of bonfire related niceties such as marshmallows.

As with the 'backseat driver' situation, these things are usually more metaphorical.

Chapter Text

"Are we safe?"

The skulking shapes slithering just beyond the reach of light paused their stride only long enough to answer. 

"For now."

The fire they had cobbled together out of leaf mould and brushwood cast strange shadows, a pantheon of weird, midnight gods come to flail their many limbs in dance. It lent the lightened woods a sinister, crimson air. Recent rains meant that everything was slightly damp and they hadn't the expertise or light to discern what was and wasn't good firewood, so the dull red flames popped and spluttered around mouthfuls of sap. Historically, there had been been far better fires but, lacking Zach's expertise, Phil had decided this was good enough—certainly it wasn't going to improve. His eyes stung with the bitterness of a smoke he couldn't smell.

He sneezed a blood clot and swore as every nerve in his skull jangled. Though his nose had stopped bleeding, it had also rather stopped being a nose in all the useful ways a person anticipates: smelling, breathing, staying helpfully out of one's peripheral vision...

The minor concussion was likely not helping matters.

"Ow." Blindly and a little impudently, Phil reached out and snagged Viz's arm. Both flesh and coat were cold beneath his fingers. "Is my nose broken?"

With a sigh and very little gentleness, the alien reached out and tilted Phil's head about to peer at the swollen, blotchy blob plastered across his face, single eye squinting in the gloom. The dead glasses with all their glitchy augments remained held tightly in one hand—'no biometric scanners for me...'

"You'll live," he decided after a moment, which Phil gallantly extrapolated to mean 'yes, Phil, your nose is absolutely fine.' 

Mollified, Phil moved to the next item on his itinerary for 'When We Escape', and seized ahold of Diz's arm. Startled, Diz returned the favour, clamping down on the bones of Phil's forearm with just enough force to suggest he could break them—Phil didn't even blink.

"That gun. You stole it."

"I did." The grip on his arm did not soften.

"That's Smiley's dead dad's gun."

"It doesn't matter to me whose gun it is. It was more useful here with us than under that girl's bed."

"Fuck you." It came out with less vehemence than he intended, his lungs still aching from the run. "Give it back."

Diz did so. In Phil's hand, the metal was unsettlingly tepid, the weight of it lighter than it had been. It reeked of oil and spent powder; feeling slightly ill, he clutched it tighter.

Disputes finally at rest, the four finally settled around the fire in a twisted facsimile of campers. With the looming shadows swaying in their obscure masquerades and their newborn fire already weak and world-weary, the quartet sat down, each taking one side of an invisible square. Viz and Quiz were opposite: the former turned his irreparably mangled glasses over in his hands, handling them as gently as one would a living thing; the latter had melted in on himself like a blob of candle wax.

Phil opposed Diz. In the dark, lit up in a warm red which left his skin dead and grey, the alien looked like a knife blade, perfectly still and rigidly straight. Phil would have liked to think he looked the same, limned flatteringly in copper, the centre of a corona of spectral trees; the drama of the situation, he felt, required some heroic appearance on his part. 

(The reality of the matter was that he looked like an exhausted eighteen year old in an oversized hoodie, squinting streaming eyes against the sting of flames, face blotched with bruises the colour of aubergine. He looked precisely as he was, and reality was damning.)

There are certain people who it is only wise to trust once the barrel has been scraped right down to its hoops, and Diz was one of them. He was a last resort, a Hail Mary, fraying rope with which one could potentially haul oneself out of some icy gulch. He was dishonest, unreliable, and unalterably sly.

He was also the only one Phil could demand answers of.

'The less you're aware of the better, as far as I'm concerned...'

'Quiz! He doesn't even know the full story...'

Diz was the last person he wanted to ask, but they were coming to the end of the road and the world was growing dark; Phil had nowhere left to go.

"Alright. Talk." The alien slowly tilted his head in an unasked question so Phil elaborated, filled quite suddenly with a fervent restlessness. "I want to know everything—what's chasing you and why the hell did you come here? Why me? You owe me that much."

"Is that really what you want?" Diz asked in a rasp like a rattlesnake drawing itself defensively in a bow. Chills wracked the back of Phil's neck, even as the skin on his face ached pleasantly from the searing heat of the fire

Was this what he wanted?

Of course it was. 

"The full story," he said, with a spirit of determination seven years old—a fine, heady vintage.

"Ahhh, the story." Diz ducked his head slightly, like someone who has been told a particularly good Bad Joke. His voice was a low, lyrical hiss. "And how do you want me to tell it? It's been so long, I'm not really sure. 'Once upon a time,' perhaps? Or is this to be some kind of confession? 'Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned...' Is that what you want to hear?"

What did he want to hear? Phil had no idea. Nothing and everything, he supposed; desire to know and understand was a shapeless one. It was the mechanics of the matter that had retained his fascination all those long years, the cause and effect of it all, the culmination of a hundred disparate details into one, crystalline moment—the nonsensical why. He had arrived late to a party where the microwave was on fire, four people were duck-taped together, and a small terrier wearing a tag reading 'DJ' was the only sign of life, happily sat on a still spinning vinyl of 'Cotton Eye Joe'—it was not mad to wonder how things had gotten to that state.

It was human nature, after all, to look at the stars and wonder what part—if any—one's life held in some Great Plan.

"Just tell me," he asked again, slightly softer now. "Please."

In an undefinable, unquantifiable way, Diz's eyes looked like black rock pools, full of trapped things that darted within confines that grew shallower and deeper based on the whims of something unaccountable to him. Those eyes stared at Phil through reams of smoke for minutes that felt like years, the rest of his face stern and absolutely inscrutable. Finally, with all the good humour of a condemned prisoner, he relented.

"I suppose," he began. "I ought to start at the very beginning, if we want you to understand at all. Our home planet is located in the Andromeda Galaxy and, for as long as anyone can recall, we have been at war with another planet in our solar system. Alphim. It has been... centuries. The conflict is older than anyone alive on either side of it.

"I don't remember how it started—history was never my strong suit. I think there was a quarrel about the ownership of one of our trans-orbital moons..."

He looked to Viz, as though waiting for confirmation, but his captain's attention was still fixed upon his glasses and he failed to even look up at the pause. Eventually, Diz continued, but there was a slight uneasiness about it, as though he had recognised he would be doing this unaided.

"Conscription has been in place so long that some kind of military service is demanded of everyone. Munitions is the biggest force in civilian employment by miles. Hatchlings are taken to training facilities to begin basics as soon as they're medically cleared to do so. From there, proficiency is determined in a particular field and we are sorted. Specialisation and segregation continues until we leave and are sent to our stations, be that active duty on one of the fronts or support work elsewhere.

"Quiz and I met during training. We… were friends. We shared a module in Navigation for several years until I was evaluated to be most suited to a role as a pilot. Quiz was kept on and was eventually taken in to The Enquiry."

Here, he paused again and took a breath, seeming to change subjects ever so slightly. His words were carefully placed, like the steps of someone edging past a large and dangerously reactive beast.

"I suppose I should explain The Enquiry."

"They started as a small branch of interrogators working for the military government—which replaced the regular government around the same time the rules for conscription were extended to hatcheries. It was The Enquirers jobs to know things... and, as the war progressed, their knowledge base grew. They quickly became the central force of Military Intelligence.

"These days... The Enquiry is the government. An infallible conglomerate responsible for every turning wheel in the war. They know everything." 

"Thought history wasn't your strong suit?" Phil interjected. The alien's mouth sketched the outline of a laugh without bothering to add sound, no humour in his eyes.

"Oh, it's not," he murmured with a tired smile. "But everyone knows how The Enquiry stepped in to power and saved us from losing. I knew that story by heart before I could spell my own name."

At the very fringe of Phil's conscious memory some vestigial tatter still held on to vague impressions of a fat hand, under loving instruction, clumsily forming the shapes 'P-H-I-L', with the 'L' upside-down to make it neater. Those shapes meant him. They were the signifier that held his whole world. With a slightly wary sense of sympathy, he wondered what it was like to know political history before being able to fully appreciate one's own name.

Outside these thoughts, the story continued.

"Do you know what interstellar warfare is like?" Diz asked, in a conversational tone of voice that suggested he thought this a perfectly reasonable thing to ask an eighteen year old as they sat in the mud. Phil restrained himself, in the nick of time, from pinching the bridge of his nose.

"Obviously no, Diz."

"It's a mess." This was said with something that was almost a nostalgic smile. "Everything is moving constantly—planets, debris, stars. Navigating regular space already requires the use of specialised computers, but it's damn near impossible when everything is actively changing at the rate it does in war. Mobile mines, wandering missiles, patrolling fleets. Things can change in an instant and, with no centralised system of communication and information, one half of a battalion can be on fire while the other remains completely unaware.

"Enquiry Control Navigators were created to rectify that problem. Informed directly by spies and monitoring services, the Navigators would know which routes were safe, where fleets were being directed, what sections of space fell in to our territory—everything. Every ship was assigned to someone in the Enquiry, from the cargo ships to the fighter jets. In time, everything that could be monitored was put under them. The ship's themselves only had local navigational capabilities—the rudimentary systems critical for manoeuvres with very few long-range uses. For anything else, including information on the whereabouts of other ships, we were reliant on Control Navigators. 

"Quiz was one of them. Weren't you, Quiz?"

Quiz didn't answer. Fire caught oddly about the scales of his face, making the skin pitted and shadowed. For some reason—perhaps his detached expression—he suddenly looked quite unlike Quiz. Once again, after an uncomfortable period of silence like a children's TV character waiting expectantly for audience participation to materialise from an empty room, Diz carried on.

"Due to a shortage of fighter pilots, I was shipped out soon after completing my course to our primary frontier, a series of asteroid belts and uninhabited planetoids.

"My commander there was Viz. He was captain of the dreadnought vessel Invincible. We fought on that front and a hundred others for fifteen years. When they weren't using us for direct, frontline attacks, we carried out transportation missions through pockets of our enemy's forces. There were nine of our sister ships in our sector."

Diz didn't blink. Firelight caught in the protruding orbs of his eyes where blurs of radiance moved through the black like lava-lamp fluid through an inky soulless sea.

""17-13-18-54. 1200 hours."

He spoke very, very quietly. Soft as the grey smoke that curled above the flames like a great, tame cat, whose thick pelt hid claws. Something snapped sharply within Diz's glassy eyes, the warm iridescence borrowed from the fire gone. His next words had an air of recital about them, metallic and very nearly toneless. It no longer felt as though he were dictating the history to Phil, and the deliberation in every letter was both impersonal and filled with memories.

"All ten ships were issued an Enquiry officiated order to run a reconnaissance mission over some territory on the western flank that we had allegedly regained in a recent push. Our Control Navigators supplied us with patrol coordinates, mapping simulations, weather data—the usual routine."

"We trusted them."

It seemed such a pointless, discordant thing to announce at that time; Phil got the feeling he had been handed a corner piece to the story and was suddenly very wary of the picture it would have a hand in forming.

"Our job was to check the perimeters and surveil the damage done to the land that was now ours. As was usual for missions where we would be out of the visual range of the other ships, we kept in internal communication through radio comms. We... we were told the area had been cleared out. None of us needed to be rigged for a fight." 

A steadying breath. He was looking through Phil now—Phil, who had a thousand new questioned teeming at his very membranes and just enough sense and self-restraint to keep them at bay.

"We lost contact with the lead ship, Valiant." The whisper had the dull, empty resonance of a falling body.

"When we queried the situation with our Navigators they cited interference from a worsening dust storm, which was enough of a truth that we all kept calm. A desert planet recently home to major sites of conflict... it was hardly far-fetched—issues with radio communications in such circumstances were common. We trusted them.

"Nobody panicked when signals from Gladiator also went silent. Then Warrior. Then Imperial and Dauntless.

"It was only when they took Champion that we realised. Some idiot aboard Destroyer defied the order to make fast the ship and weather the storm, and went outside to smoke. They heard the crash as she went down and went back inside to send out an alert to the bridge crew, who sent the signal on to the rest of us. Destroyer informed us all of their position and went out to Champion's last recorded marker to offer assistance... and then she was gone too."

"It was Alphim. They were picking us off, ship by ship. They weren't gone at all. The Enquiry lied to us."

The rattlesnake was back in his voice and this time it was looking for something to sink its teeth in to, its venom seeping through lips that were still thinly smiling beneath eyes mad with hatred. Phil could feel cold, needle-point teeth in his muscle. It wasn't his usual rage, nor was it an emotion the human could have put a name or value to. It was a depth that fell beyond all oration or explanation, something utterly, wretchedly consuming. It was something deeper than anger.

Phil didn't like to think what it might be. Even the campfire seemed to be trying to get away from the alien now.

Sparks fluttered in to the night, heaved end over end by the breath of the flames like autumn leaves in a swirling breeze, all burnished bronze. In their almost dreamy lightness and variety of burning shades, Phil could envision the ten starships flying out in to the black in all their glory, streaks of gold in the vacuum, before their excellence turned cold, dead, and grey, and they vanished. For a few moments, the vessels and the lives within them were tangible to Phil—real and tiny—and then they faded and he realised that everyone he had imagined aboard those spark-ships had been dead for decades.

"By the time we realised, there was just three of us left—Invincible, Saviour, and Excellence. In the little time we had left, we attempted to find each other—we thought, perhaps, if we had three ships we could put up a little bit of a fight. Allegedly, the other two managed it, but we never saw. Alphim got to us first.

"We had offloaded most of our heavy artillery and munitions stock to make us lighter, in case we came across any salvage in recon... we didn't think there would be any need for them—we were supposed to be inside our own territory, after all. Half a fleet came after us. Twenty battleships, fully equipped. Invincible didn't stand a chance.

"We went down. I woke up in an Enquiry holding cell."

With a crackle of burnt-through branches, the structure at the heart of the campfire collapsed, taking its warmth and light with it. Having receded a great deal during the telling of the story, the pool of golden light shrunk its last few inches and fell off the faces of its congregation. Without the gleam reflecting off his eyes to prove he was something living, Diz's face resembled nothing so much as a skull scraped of its softness. The shadows pooled in the hollows of him.

Calmly, Diz took a handful of twigs from a pile they had scraped together earlier and, in an almost contemplative quiet, he set to coaxing the flames back to vigour. This took some effort, and it never reclaimed its golden lustre or previous warmth. There was something hesitant, now, about its weaving, something meek and watery. In the fresh light, Phil could see the green fingers quiver.

"Nobody would tell me anything," Diz resumed." Not for want of me asking—I practically begged them... I recognised where I was, you see—The Oubliette, a prison facility run by The Enquiry Eyes, a place for dissenters, political prisoners, radicals, and traitors. We grew up hearing stories of what happened to people thrown in there… Research and Development always need new subjects—weapons don't test themselves, after all. But I couldn't understand why I was there... I hadn't done anything...

"I met the other survivors when we were being transported... elsewhere. Never did find out where. We never arrived—there were about thirty of us, all told, enough for a breakout. Viz and I were the only surviving crew members from Invincible... several of the men were from Excellence, a few from Saviour... but none of ours... hardly anyone had made it out. And the escape killed more still.

"In the end, four of us got out alive; Viz and myself, one of the engine crew from Champion, and the commander of the Valiant. He... he died shortly after... two days into the fortnight we spent wandering..."

A moment of silence passed between them, in honour of those nameless, faceless crew members.

"Which is where Quiz comes back into the story." Diz looked again to the other alien, who seemed somehow further wilted but did look up at the invocation of his name. "He and I had stayed in touch during my deployment, so I knew his address. The Enquiry were unlikely to initiate a search on one of their own, at least not at first. So—"

"So you turned up on my doorstep at an absolutely horrid hour," Quiz interrupted, sounding both sad and fond. "Do you know, I thought you were all a bad dream for the first twenty minutes? Three, bloody soldiers raving in my living room about warships made of dust... quite the shock at 2200. I thought you were a ghost."

"—Quiz helped us," Diz continued, apparently unbothered by the interruption. "He let us stay. He also told us what had happened..."

This latest in a long and proud lineage of tense pauses was the worst yet—Diz's face was still dreadfully blank, but whatever emotion lay in his eyes had moved beyond bitterness, beyond wrath, beyond anything so simple as hate or grief. It was ugly and raw and Phil felt strangely captivated by the sheer mania of it.  The whole, hideous hurricane of it was pulsatingly visible in a manner reminiscent of an exposed heart.

Phil could feel his nerves stirring beneath his skin, adrenaline starting up its snake charmer tune once more. Though his legs still ached and his blood had not fully recovered its breath, he felt like running again; he felt he might do anything if it got him away from that dark cleaning and the madman telling a story he no longer wanted to hear. 

From those either side of him, there was no response, no movement: the only sign that Viz was paying attention at all was the fact that he had stopped playing with his broken glasses; stripes of wet painted Quiz's cheeks, and they glistened in the fire.

"The news outlets... were celebrating," Diz whispered tonelessly, voice carefully measured and smoothed table-cloth flat with the care of one who is undertaking minimal tasks to distract from something larger, something awful. "'A heroic sacrifice made by the ships of Sector Seventeen, who lured the forces of Alphim's western flank away from critical sites, allowing them to be raided freely by a squadron of the new Class M Cruisers.' We had been a distraction. A diversion. Fifteen years of service, and we wound up being the bit of feather on a piece of string to convince the cat's paw to swipe. 

"Fifteen years—" The open wound of a smile made its return, jagged and empty. "—and that was the thanks we got."

If life were a film, or book, or play—some medium where the elements bend themselves to the contours of a narrative like vines about a trellis—it would, at that point, have started raining. But life is the ugly half-sibling of those lofty examples, and has none of their keen sensibility for the dramatic; the air remained dry and light, with all its winter spirits constrained to that autumnal bite, and the sky high above was dark but cloudless. There were no weeping clouds, no howling winds to scream through the heavens, no thunder leant the moment the immensity of its pathos. 

Instead, the fire, even as it dwindled once more, crackled with the same dutiful cheer with which it lit grand halls and devoured forests. In the undergrowth, the midnight denizens of the forest began to rustle about their trade and, somewhere in the distance, an owl offered up a fluting call. It was ordinary; without context, it was close to pleasant. 

During their second year of college, Smiley, a literature student at the time, had dragged Phil along to a performance of 'King Lear'. He hadn't understood the ornate, obsolete language (relying instead on the whispering, excitable encyclopaedia sitting next to him) but the story was simple enough: a once-great man reaches an inflection point and fucks up until he dies—the fundamental building blocks of all tragedies. He hadn't cared much for any of it, but the storm... something about it had stuck with him—the simulated sound of raindrops on corrugated steel, the sudden dampness of the air as fog machines sighed to life, the fake glisten of wet on the actors' clothes. Yelling at an unlistening God to strike you down because everything’s gone wrong and you’ve been abandoned to the physical manifestation of your spiritual failures. It was moving stuff; it was what Phil thought of now.

'Where's the rain? There should be rain for dramatic scenes. How did that speech go again? I am more wronged than... wronging? Is that even a word? This feels like that, though—that's how you think, isn't it?

'Lear still fucked up badly enough that he had to die at the end, though. I remember that bit.'

"We had to do something." There was a dreadful agitation to that statement that set warning bells jangling in the back of Phil's mind. "They had pulled this trick before—there were so many times where we had been sent in to situations where our enemy was conveniently elsewhere. Other things too—ships that go missing and show up again without their crews; front lines that moved without battles being publicised; top secret information that wound up leaked only for us to snatch a pyrrhic victory from a pool of blood. There were so many others... we had to do something..." 

"Couldn't you tell someone?" Phil asked cautiously. 

"Who? The Enquiry?" Diz tilted his head in a faux innocent gesture, eyes haunted and dark with loathing. "And be discovered and terminated after we tried so hard to escape?"

"You said there must have been others." Feeling like the worst kind of gossip, Phil cast anxiously between Viz and Quiz, neither of whom would look a him. "Did none of them ever tell?”

"I imagine, if they did, they found themselves in the Oubliette like us. Dissent is dangerous—a threat to morale is a threat to the war effort itself. A story like that would be discredited by the papers before you could finish telling it." 

In his ears, the pulse of his heart was like beaten velvet.

"So what did you do?"

"We all agreed," Diz said in a tone so absolutely reasonable Phil knew the conclusion he had reached was obligated to be completely insane. "Well, Viz, Quiz, and I all agreed—Champion's engineer decided against coming along. We agreed... The Enquiry is like a cancer, too widespread to remove and too powerful to kill, so we... we would have to wipe it all out. Everything. We—"

"You destroyed your own planet," Phil stated flatly. 

It made sense—a few knocked dominos down the line from 'arguing about the moon' lay 'genocidal peace-keepers'. There was no doubt in Phil's mind at that point; the aliens were capable, they were well-trained. They had perfect motive for their maniac conviction that they could rid the world of malice through a campaign of murder.

Fifteen years and a hundred thousand lives had knit together it's articles of revenge. Here was retribution. Here was justice: three faintly maniacal terrorists hell-bent on destruction for the most arbitrary reasons sat around a miserable campfire. Was the tragedy contained within the deaths themselves or the uselessness of everything that followed? Would they have wanted this, those helpless dead? Perhaps. Perhaps they would have done the same.

Despite everything he'd heard, it was such an ugly thing to make sense. He was beginning to wish he'd never asked for the full story—half of it would have been fine.

"Not yet." Diz muttered, sounding a little abashed by the admission. "Our world has spent the last few millennia being fortified against whatever Alphim could throw at it. All our efforts would have hardly made a dent."

Phil blinked. He could hear his eyelids click together as they met.

"So what? You decided to go find somewhere else that sucked just as much and kill all of them? For what? Closure?"

"To secure our forces," Diz agreed quietly. "To test our weapons' capabilities. We can't go after The Enquiry until we're certain an attack will stick."

Unbidden, Phil imagined a clearing, much like the one in which they all sat. He imagined beaches like the ones he had grown up going to, the air tasting of salt and freedom. He remembered the feeling of sitting on Smiley's roof and looking out over the neighbourhood as he grew taller and it stayed the same. He imagined them and, in his mind, they burned.

Other worlds. Just another thing he’d never really thought about, another connection he’d never made.

"... How many?" He asked, watching planets form and burst into rosettes of black in the darkness where those cinder-ships had once been. He was too tired to feel horrified at the prospect, too worn-out for anything other than an abstract sense of resentment. "How many planets have you destroyed?"

"Well, as of right now, none." Not buying that for a second, Phil frowned at the alien until he continued. "I wasn't lying when I told you Earth was our first stop. The Enquiry kept us running well enough that we never stopped anywhere long enough to complete an evaluation."

The impersonal relief was not something Phil had anticipated, but it struck through his sternum like a fist knocking on a door, sending ripples through all the recriminatory things he had intended to say and leaving him wordless. Diz seemed to take this silence as a demand to explain further, and he did after some slight hesitation.

"We... underestimated how fervently The Enquiry would chase us, and the lengths they would go to to get us back." There was a note of indignation in that, which seemed madly out of place. "At first, we thought if we made it out of Empire Regulated Airspace we'd be safe, but they kept sending forces. So we left our own solar system and found a new one, but they chased us there too. Eventually we left our own galaxy altogether... 

"We thought that had to be enough to stop them—even for The Enquiry, there are no maps drawn of space this far outside of our own galaxy. Cartography ships have very little interest in territory that will not be dominated by our empire. Of course, that meant we had no idea what we'd be flying in to either. There was no way for us to tell what, if anything, was really out this way; only the long-range scanners to keep us aware of objects in space and thermal sensors to tell us what sort of region we were passing through. Everything else was a guessing game. We made our own maps as we strayed further and further afield... until, eventually, our ship began to fail.

"No maintenance vessels, no wrecks to salvage, very little fuel, no other signs of life... we almost lost hope."

'Maybe you should have just quit. Maybe you should have just stopped.' There had been so many chances for everything to just Not Happen. A one in a million lottery that Earth had won.

"And then, at the very limits of our ship's capabilities, we found you. Humans."

Suddenly, it struck Phil, in a way it never had before, that the thing he was talking to wasn't human. It wasn't a difference whose vital components lay the obvious little differences like the green skin or translucent, blue bones filled with thickly pulsing veins; it was the analytical fascination in Diz's eyes as he looked at him now. It was in the way Phil felt, quite suddenly, small and foreign under the scrutiny of those black eyes. The gulf of the difference between them gaped open its maw and drank up the familiarity the closeness of the last few weeks had fostered. This was an alien and he didn't fully understand It.

(This was true for both of them.)

"And, with The Enquiry finally stuck far behind us, it was time to continue Project V.I.Z.ion in the way we had originally intended.

"We had no particular design to take you specifically. As Viz said, you and the other children came in as part of one of our later plans. There was no conspiracy—you weren't observed, or specially selected, or someone we had our eye on. But you—" Witch-fingers slithered over Phil's spine. "—saw us. You left school early, wandered off, got yourself lost, and you saw us. And what's worse is, you tried to tell people you'd seen us."

'Ah, yes, that does sound like something I would do—which is to say it sounds like a perfectly reasonable reaction.'

"So we had to take you. From there, for the sake of restraining our influence to one area, we moved to watching your school. We took your three friends to prevent them causing a stir.

"The four of you were perfect for testing human instincts. A child isn't something fully socialised—it is raw and unrefined. What you decided to do when pushed to make hard decisions under stress would reveal the core of human behaviour as a whole.

"We used the dreamscape to train you in daring escapes, each increasing in difficulty, all culminating in you getting out of the prison ward on our mothership. The challenge was intended to destabilise your sense of security so that we would be seeing your most reactionary choices, but was not impossible or unfamiliar—you always knew you had a chance. If you simply saved yourself and not your friends, we would see humanity revealed as cowardly and self-serving, unworthy of sparing…

"But you didn't do that at all. You won. You saved your friends."

He said it so almost-softly, almost-fondly—like a man whose dumb pet had performed some sweet, simple trick. The way he looked at Phil was not without affection, a twinge of warmth; it was real, Phil knew, and it did nothing to ease the sinking in his chest. 

"Your decision to blow up Viz's ship was unexpected and unappreciated, but perhaps not entirely undeserved. Despite it, we really were planning on leaving. If everything had gone according to our original plan, we would be long gone by now..."

Downy reams of shade clung like soot to the world and everything in it. A bat began an investigation of the silvered, lowest boughs, a strobing bit of cloth, quieter and more frantic than any bird; heavy things invisibly shrugged their bulk through the foliage, trailing their wakes of shivers and rustles like cloaks. In the clearing itself, nobody moved. Swallowed by the encroaching darkness until only their merest impressions were left upon the black, the aliens were stone-faced monoliths, broken statues; all that remained were the curves of naked scalps, the twitches of long, bony fingers, the points of crooked elbows. They looked like gargoyles—nightmares.

The fire curled up in its earthen cradle and went to sleep. Nobody moved to relight it.

There was blame in the situation, and it found a channel as a river finds a bed; slowly, Diz turned.

"But, of course, things didn't go that way... did they, Quiz?"

Almost as though he had been waiting for this, Quiz came alive again with a howl of something shrill and negatory. Viz said and did nothing, locked in a staring competition with his own broken emblem. Diz, against all reason, smiled.

Feeling something vital turn glossy gold and chill within his diaphragm, Phil stared in to the abyss and found that it had eyes as dark and plentiful as a spider; he turned his gaze upwards, from the campfire and its many miseries, and beheld a smoke streaked sky where the damp autumn breeze had blown out all the stars.

Chapter Text

Their history would suggest that fighting was what the V.I.Z.ion aliens did best and, certainly, they went about it with enthusiasm. 

Or, at least, one of them did. Quiz's arguments, for all their vehemence, were clumsy as handfuls of cake, smearing blame on everyone but himself. As could perhaps be expected, Diz wielded his words a little more like knives or needles. Viz spectated, in the way a bored parent 'spectates' their child's fortieth trip down the slide—they don't, and he wasn't.

("It's not my fault you're the lowest ranked officer here. If you'd done a little better in testing, you could have made Enquiry too."

"You think that's what I would have wanted? To be indolent and complacent like you?"

"At least I wasn't being blown to pieces on a daily basis!"

"No, you were killing us.") 

There was more to the argument, infinitely more, but if you had asked Phil Eggtree to regale you with the specifics, he would be hard pressed to tell you, having vacated the scene shortly after the whole thing started—he had enough to think about, thank you very much, and learning the alien word for 'lying bastard' wasn't going to improve his fortunes. 

He didn't go very far, only walking until distance had carved away the shape of words in the Quiz-noises behind him, and there he stopped. In strange silence, in striped darkness, Phil began an earnest contemplation of his trainers and the earth they stood on.

Many things could have been discovered during what promised to be an intensive period of rumination. Phil could have been granted the sort of revelations that alter one's entire perception of the world entirely, and yet are forgotten after a good night's rest, a temporary transcendence of the normal like a spectacular sunrise. It promised to be an experience incomparable... and it was very quickly forfeit by the insistent blare of a nearby phone. Phil's phone.

(Secretly, he was glad of this—it was a little late in the day for soul-searching, and sunrise was a long way off. He didn't want to think anymore.)

19 missed calls

107 new messages

The incoming call was from Smiley's phone. Had he persevered and thought just a little more, Phil would have recognised the warning signs that indicated, in big, red letters, that this was assuredly not a casual sort of phone call. This was the Other Sort Of Phone Call, the sort you got after cheerfully making a missing person's case of yourself all day. The sort of Very Concerned phone call that is almost inevitable if you make the questionable choice to ghost your loved ones under suspicious circumstances. 

Phil, maker of all these grand moves, considered none of this, and so, upon answering the phone with a fairly standard 'yo', was surprised when the response wasn't an answering 'hi', or a 'how are you?', or even an 'I miss you', but instead—

"PHIL EGGTREE, where the HELL have you been?!"

This slightly hellish, many-voiced shriek, distorted by volume and poor reception, was in fact such a surprise, the brave adventurer dropped his phone. It shouted at him as his clumsy attempts to fumble it back in to his hands buried it deeper in leaves. By the time he succeeded in picking it up, the voices had cooled and separated in to their distinct and familiar three strands; Phred was apologising to someone for the racket, Smiley was embroiled in an upset monologue of epic proportions. From the sound of it, a distant Zach was making an effort to be consoling.  

"Okay, okay, ease down now. It's over, it's fine, it's all cool. Unless this is your phone with a line to the recently deceased, he's fine." To address Phil, he raised his voice (despite Mrs Sundae's shushing.) He couldn't take phone calls longer than two minutes by himself without the heat from his head melting the screen. "Back me up here mate; you're fine aren't you?"

"Better than ever," Phil lied fiercely. This reassurance made lamentable headway in pacifying the enraged girlfriend tapping her foot on a roof many miles away. "How long have you been trying to reach me for?"

"Eighty four years."

"All my life."

"Since this afternoon," Smiley said firmly. "You had me really freaked out."

To say Phil felt wretched was an understatement. Finding out his absence had been noted in the worst fashion was like coming home after a gruelling day of work to find he'd left every light in the shared house on, left every faucet running, and the drains were clogged. And he'd forgotten his friend's birthday party. He felt defeated, unworthy, deeply guilty, but also like he could collapse on a dripping wet sofa and not move for a month.

No sofas, dripping wet or otherwise, existed in the forest; he folded down on to a tree stump soft with rot and moss instead.

"I'm so sorry. I turned my phone off to save the battery in case something went wrong... then things went really fucking wrong and there was no time to call. I never meant to worry you."

"'Never meant to worry us?!'" Phred interjected, a hybrid of exasperation, bewilderment, and frustration. "Phil, mate, we almost called the police."

'We took your three friends to prevent them causing a stir.' Best as he could, Phil brushed off the cobweb-clammy strands of imaginary-Diz's voice. He didn't want to think about the aliens—he definitely didn't want one of them to have a point.

"I'm sorry."

"You stole my mum's car!"

"I did." It had seemed such an inconsequential thing to do at the time... less so now, when his certainty in getting it back was shaky at best. "I did do that. In my defence, I had every intention of giving it back."

"Where is it? Where are you?"

Phil looked at the anonymous forest where the surrounding shrubbery did nothing to introduce itself; if this place had a name, he'd long since plunged too deeply into its heart to discover it.

"In a ditch, and in the woods very far away from said ditch, respectively."

"And my dad's revolver? If you've lost that too, I-I—I won't kill you, but, oh god Phil, will I be mad." Smiley's tone trembled with the sort of tremors that could easily transition into either tears or the sort of slap that might conceivably span the distance between them that was making the phone crackle.

"It's safe, Smiles, I've got it right here." Reassuringly, Phil rattled the gun close to the microphone; this didn't actually reassure any of them.

"So you did take it?" Zach whistled. "Wow. And here I was defending you like a fool. Word of advice—you're fucked mate."

"Hey, I never said I took it," Phil protested. "Diz stole it."

"Diz? Less surprising. But he is definitely still fucked; the Doctor's on the warpath."

"What happened?" Smiley asked, and her voice was forceful, all hard-edges, despite the wavering that suggested that it might break. It sounded like slammed doors and torn pages.

For once, Phil held all of the careful gathered jigsaw pieces and was at a complete loss as to what to do with them. Bewilderingly, he felt a little betrayed—not by his friends, but by the situation at large; 'it didn't happen like this last time. It didn't go this wrong, back then, I would have remembered. What happened? What changed?'

"I..." His mouth was coated in a moth-wing concoction made from the dust of old thoughts. "I don't... have a short answer for that. A lot. I really wish there was an easy way to summarise this shit, but, honestly, if you want the full explanation, you're gonna need some notepaper. And alcohol. God, I wish there were shots in the woods... I'd let the fae have me if they came offering Malibu."

Immediately, the atmosphere on the other end of the phone changed in a subtle but vital fashion. It was still frantic, but there was something questing in it now, something to the high energy that made it urgent rather than just frightened.

"Are you safe?”

"I mean, I am now. I wasn't, but we've done a lot of running since then. The aliens aren't getting out of this one, though; you remember I told you they thought they were being followed? Yeah, well, turns out that wasn't paranoia, that was real—it's their government. Apparently all three of them are war criminals."

"Career path checks out, I suppose," Zach muttered in an undertone before raising his voice to yell again. "Did you find the ship."

"Bits of it." Grimly, he recalled the ravaged husk languishing in an aircraft hanger which seemed to be slowly fading from existence, and the observation chambers filled with weird, multi-armed puppeteers now pulling the enterprise's strings. "Like I said, they're probably not getting out of this one."

A beat of silence like an old computer catching up with the rigours of a new game.

"Shit," Zach swore, before getting into an argument with someone on the street below about why he shouldn't have to be quiet at a time like this.

"You need a ride?" Phred offered instantly. He was speaking with the slightly projected tone of someone trying to shout a delivery order over the clamour of an eager party. "We'll come get you."

"You've not got a car."

"We'll get the bus."

"I don't think there's a service running to the middle of nowhere at this hour."

"Yeah... when I said we'd get a bus, I meant we'd nick one and come find you. It's illegal, but it's for a good cause."

Startled by a burst of affection, a sensation like being shot in the chest with a warm paintball, Phil laughed. It hurt slightly to do so. Far away on a rooftop that was cold without the sun, Phred joined in, and the sound settled in to a space beneath Phil's ribs that had been hollowed out by the evening's trials. His eyes ached like a leftover bit of headache had lodged there.

Why hadn't he brought his friends along on this final venture? It wasn't something he had particularly thought about—their absence wasn't something consciously constructed it was just... there (or 'not there', depending on one's perspective of such things.) He felt their distance now, like cold wind blowing through a house he had been foolish enough to build without walls.

He wanted to apologise for leaving them behind. He wanted to tell them everything that had happened, everything he had learnt—he wanted to say a lot of things. If he could unknit history and have his time again, he would do it differently and they would all be there, surrounded by looming dark and misery absolute but Together. 

Instead, he clung to a phone line full of cheerful, teasing voices and laughed until the cryptic threats from the undergrowth, Mrs Sundae, and a handful of sleepy passersby succeeded in shutting them all up.

"What do you want to do Phil?" Smiley asked eventually, with the same readiness for instruction she had once turned on her teachers. Around her, everyone else fell into attentiveness. He could sense them—loyal and unflinching as knights of old—just a few miles of phone line away. "What do you want us to do?" 

They meant well, and he loved them more than words for that, but, suddenly the object of their collective expectation, Phil felt insurmountably lost. He waited for that reliable burst of inspiration that had served him so steadfastly since the misadventures of his youth, but the seconds of waiting stretched out like inches of rope lowering a bucket into a once-bountiful well. Nothing returned from the pit.

"I... I don't know." It was what he had wanted to say earlier. It was easier to do so now. "I don't know anymore Smiley. I don't know what to do."

There was a pause. A quiet pause that nonetheless had the sentiment of someone going 'oh'. Not really realisation, but it did, perhaps, have the immediate sympathy of recognition.

Carefully, tenderly, Smiley took the question off of Phil, inverted it, and gave it back: 'what do I want Phil to do?'

"Come home," she instructed tenderly, all her ire gone.

And the world crumpled as though it had been constructed from cards, all the trees in the forest around Phil turning flat and receding gently like fold-outs in a pop-up storybook. The world as a whole felt less real, as though he could put his foot through it.

Go home.

Forget it all.

Leave everything awful behind to wilt among the trees. Rot for the rotten.

Phil shut his eyes. Faintly, he could hear the snappish voices hidden from him by a layer of woods growing louder, harsher. His nose was numb and pulsing.

She said it so simply... and perhaps it was.

Once upon a time, Phil had envisioned himself a hero, a knight in shining armour who had managed feats mundane eleven-year-olds could only dream of. He was King Arthur at the head of the round table, his knights ranked before him. He was King of a naive and unappreciative kingdom, but a King nonetheless. He'd held on to this fact as he grew older and the world grew duller.

It wasn't that he was wrong—Phil had, indeed, done heroic things—but heroism itself is a fickle thing. 

Heroism is really a bunch of positive traits shoved in a trench coat and stuck up on a pedestal. It is resilience, and selflessness, altruism, and dedication and, while Phil was in possession of all these qualities, they weren't the impetus behind his adventures. Ultimately, at the bare bones of the matter, he had been being selfish: he wanted to go home early; he wanted to go home in general; he needed Diz to fly the spaceship.

The fact of the matter was, Phil hadn't been a hero; Phil had been eleven years old.   

And the Phil of seven-years-later, though not cruel or indifferent, was a pragmatic man who had been given permission to stop. He had his answers. He had reached the end of the game. Save Game. Log Out. Turn Off Computer.

Briefly, he considered the weight of the alien remote still hidden in his pocket. It would make, he thought idly, an interesting parting gift, a two-finger salute made physical—'Here you go, here's a new choice; you can wait for The Enquiry to find you, or you can call your ship, dox yourselves, and end it right now.' It would be a little bitter, a little funny, thoroughly miserable—precisely how Phil felt about the whole affair. It would have been a cruel thing to do, however, and even in defeat, Phil was not cruel. In the end, he left the little lump of metal where it lay, warm against his belly. 

Even a horrible trip deserves a souvenir. He would keep it, he decided, as a memento, some unhappy thing to sit in the back of a cabinet gathering dust. A memorial, of sorts, for a childhood that had felt so much brighter and more triumphant than the reality of this world he was stuck in. The only tombstone the doomed aliens would get, one without flowers or mourners.

With a departing glance back towards the source of the muffled shouting, and the subtle awkwardness of a man ducking out of a party early, Phil set off in the direction his phone indicated should, eventually, lead to a highway.

His regrets minimal, his musings quiet but endless, Phil started the long walk home.

Chapter Text

Unaware that Phil had gone, the aliens continued their fight. Or, more accurately, Diz fought, Quiz protested, and Viz sat staring at his broken glasses like they were the only things left in the world. 

Of the aliens, Viz was the only one still seated; Diz and Quiz were stood nose to nose, melded by the dark into a singular entity at war with itself. One combatant was a stealthy, sneaking, squeezing thing; the other was small and scrabbled like a rat, filled with the viciousness inherent to the trapped, digging claws into flesh and tearing with a hapless compulsion to get away.

One was Diz and one was Quiz—you can work out the rest for yourself.

Neither would cede any ground to the other, and so the subject of argument at hand tumbled about like a ball of fighting cats, every personal grievance, petty trifle, and damning indictment of character built up over decades of companionship dragged out and screamed into the forest. The opportunity for things to be resolved quietly was long gone, and the chance for resolution in general was slipping slowly off into the dark, leaving the two combatants locked with their jaws about each other's throats in a stalemate that would only end when one was broken. 

Diz was determined, even in these inconsequential circumstances, that it wouldn't be him. He wouldn't break—he refused to. Breaking got you killed and Diz was far too spiteful to die.

Quiz, on the other hand, was as mortal and breakable as they came, fortified by none of his opponent's vicious will and phlegmatic bile.

"They found us very quickly, don't you think Quiz? Considering I couldn't find any sign of them just a few days ago." The green alien looked black in the dark, a knife-slash body with glaring, gleaming eyes, panting for breath between words. "How do you think they managed it?"

"What are you implying, Diz? " Quiz bridled back.

There was very little doubt in Quiz's soft-shell mind about what he was being accused over; he asked the redundant question not because he really wondered what conclusion his once-friend, once-crewmate had drawn, but because he was offering him a chance to say something else—anything else. 'Just once Diz, please, take it back just once...'

Diz did not.

He never did. He'd learnt the hard way what yielding earned you.

(Had Quiz not been distraught, he might have noticed something wrong with Diz—which is to say, more wrong than usual. A different thing that had gone wrong within the lieutenant, as opposed to the vast multitude of things which were usually wrong with the git. Despite his volume and savage words, there was none of the mania that usually ate him up in those times where rage claimed him, none of the senseless, rabid enthusiasm. He was poised, calculated, precise, deftly chipping away at Quiz's defences; the assault was deliberate and considered, a filleting knife as opposed to a cudgel. That was important but Quiz, consumed with being yelled at, missed it completely.)

"What did they promise you?" Diz asked, lowering his voice and softening it into something saccharine and poisoned. "Your old position? Did they say they would acquit you if you turned us in? You—" 

Like rubber stretched past its limit, Quiz finally snapped.

"You're insane! They probably used a long-range cloaking device to hide their radio presence, you can't blame me—"

"Why should I trust you?" Diz asked, satisfaction glimmering blackly in his eyes. "Last I recall, you were the one holding me prisoner."

"Oh please," Quiz snapped. "If you'd given me anything to do in our plans these last few years, that wouldn't have happened! I want to be part of things, why would I ever hand you over to Enquiry?"

"You want to be useful. How far would you go to feel that way again, Quiz? Hm?" Diz tilted his head, having gotten precisely what he wanted. "Admit it; you would do anything. It's why you joined us in the first place— you were going to lose everything so you threw your lot in with us, but we were always going to be second best. Now, you could hand the Enquiry their two Most Wanted on a platter. Wouldn't that be useful? Wouldn't that get you back everything you left behind? All it would take is a knife in our backs—and you've just proven to be very good at that."

A long silence with the weight of amber followed, the moment in which things broke held, and suspended, and preserved in all its ugly, spider-leg-fracture glory.

For the first time in years Quiz looked at Diz—actually looked at him; through his eyes and into the twisted, fire blacked heart of his old friend. Whatever love still lay there was a mechanical thing full of biting gears, armoured in charcoal and bleeding oil; trust and loyalty smoked bitterly in their ruined castles; hope was a burned, white flag and ashes on the wind. He was not unrecognisable, and perhaps that was worse.

Shakily, Quiz did the inevitable and stepped down, feeling alone, unloved, and enraged. More than anything, he wished there was some damning refutation he could offer in defence of his character that would make the accusations go away; there weren't any, but the emptiness on his tongue, the inability to lay claim to morals better than a weasel's, wasn't the worst of it.

'You're supposed to know me better. I'm not supposed to have to defend myself to you. You're supposed to love me enough to not say those things.'

Diz was his oldest friend. He had been there every day since the beginning, since the earliest days of academy training. Diz was the one who had told Viz he could stay, who vouched for him whenever their captain’s paranoia raised its ugly head. And after all of it, he still thought Quiz was a monster.

"I... I'm going to find Phil." Quiz didn't look at either of his former companions. His eyes remained fixed on his shoes as they carried him in retreat towards the shadows of the tree line. It seemed a conscious effort to stop them before he vanished entirely; on the edge of the night, Quiz paused, fists clenched tight. His voice wobbled as he spoke. "I came with you because you were my friend and I was worried you would do something stupid. Remember that Diz? Remember being friends? Sure, we've changed since then... but I'm still here. I'm not your enemy."

Face set chill and hard as stone, Diz defiantly raised his head. His lips were pressed into a thin, hard line.

"We never asked you to be here. Nobody asked you to come."

Quiz stiffened, not as though he had been struck but as though he'd suddenly stopped existing in a living capacity. Then he was gone, and only two were left around the fire. Diz deflated, his proudly set shoulders dropping an inch, and returned to his place by the dead fire, dropping heavily to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. Viz's glasses looked up at him and solemnly asked 'what now?'

'I don't know,' he told them. 'I don't know.' That, of course, was a lie, but some things are better left as such.

Because he knew Diz better than anyone else in the universe, and he had, as always, been the only one to pick up on the thing Quiz had missed. Quiz had heard the unbottling of a lifetime's worth of hatred; Viz had heard the perfect calculations coming together to form a combination of insults that would send their weakest crew member running away to lick his wounds. 

Cruel and callous though he was, Diz wouldn't lure Quiz out as some sort of sacrificial decoy, and that meant he'd been sent away to spare him something. Whatever happened tonight would be happening here. It would be happening to them and them alone. 

He had a feeling he knew what it was, but he wasn't quite ready to face it yet. And so he sat, staring into his own disembodied eyes, their omnipresent gaze finally blind.

"Did you mean any of that?"

"Do I ever?" When Viz had no answer for that, Diz just sighed and stared off into the empty spaces between the trees. "Of course he didn't betray us—he was always an awful communications operator, I would have noticed the second he tried."

"So none of that mess was necessary?"

"It got him to leave."

"Will he be back?"

Very slowly, Diz's eyes dragged themselves away from the woods.

"Eventually."

We'll be gone by then; neither of them said it, but the sentiment was smoke-thick on the air. Viz cast leadenly about for something else.

"You actually told the boy."

"Of course I did. He might as well know why all this happened—it doesn't actually change anything." 

Of course it wouldn't—nothing could change their lot at this stage—but there was something unnerving about having their shared history laid out in full, like walking across a beach and, just before being cut off by the tide, looking back across the beach to observe one's own footsteps. It was hearing their record being recounted before sentencing.

'On the charges of desertion, abduction, multiple counts of piracy...'

Viz returned his attention to his glasses; Diz stared blankly off into the woods. Neither looked up from their individual fascinations. If they had, they might have seen, mirrored, their own knowledge that trite reassurances, something so foolish as optimism, was a pretty lie and no better, and neither could have stood for that. In the end, they both knew that their best hope—their only hope—was that whatever happened did so swiftly, but that was just another thing that couldn't be said.

"You worked out how they found us," Viz said instead. It was a question, but he didn't feel the need to phrase it as one. Perhaps 'question' is an inaccurate term; it was a request for information he already knew Diz had.

"Yes." Diz blinked back into his body, straightening his posture back to its usual, upright rigidity. "They must have reconstructed some of the equipment they've taken from us over the years enough to observe our radiation wavelengths. They're not at all similar to anything else on Earth, so The Enquiry would have been led straight to the ship. It wouldn't have worked in space but... well, we aren't in space."

"Hm." With one finger, Viz traced the splintered, shattered edge of his glasses, pressing hard enough that the shard sliced his finger. "Everything we use operates using the same system, doesn't it?"

For a long moment, Diz was silent, as though unwilling to answer. When he spoke, his voice was deathly quiet, a doctor's apology.

"It does."

Numbness prickled out from behind Viz's sternum and crept down his arms and through his belly like moss on a statue on a grave. Space unspooled above him in an infinite, star-studded ream, the distant mouth of a well he was stuck at the bottom of, with the moon swimming placidly in ice-cold waters that would drown him before they let him escape. Instinctively, he searched for the red-tinted star that meant home, but the cosmic multitudes and his own half-blindness conspired against him to turn the sky into soup; he looked until the spinning made him sick, and he looked in vain. His blood-smeared glasses needled at his fingers.

Viz sighed. The accusing eyes of polyglass were slipped back into his pocket where they couldn't look at him anymore. He wouldn't be needing them again. 

"Well," he muttered grimly. "It's a nice night for it, I suppose."

The ashes of the fire went dark at long last. Cold sank its needle talons into the world and began to pull it apart. Both men were invisible in the dark, except for the wet glisten of their unblinking eyes as they stared at each other over a battleground of years of accusations and grudges. There were a million things they could have said to each other, teaming in the isles. But Viz wasn't interested in hauling those splinters out now; there was a new line of thread woven through the thoughts of over a decade, one sown there by the past fortnight and tangled bloodily with everything he had once understood about himself and his purpose.

It didn't matter, of course—nothing could change for them now—but Diz had been the sounding board for his mind for far longer than this doomed dream.

"Do you think we were wrong?" He asked idly. The lieutenant stiffened, his eyes turning sharp.

"What?"

"Project V.I.Z.ion," Viz clarified. "Were we wrong to think we could fix anything that way?"

"What's gotten in to you?" The look Diz was giving him was uncertain and unsettled, as though his captain had grown another head. There was another note in it, too—something speculative as though Viz were a puzzle to be figured out. "Isn't it a little late to be asking me that?"

Because it was late; the sun had long since set in a blaze of orange filament and the world had become a ballroom for moths and bats. It was late in another sense too; this was the sort of question it might have been prudent to ask many years ago, before they acquired criminal records in the majority of Andromeda's populated space. Before they ended up sat, cold and persecuted, in a forest on some backwater planet in a solar-system no one had ever heard of, waiting for it all to be over.

"We should never have survived that crash." Having seen the state of the ship, Viz was bluntly certain of that now. "We never would have if not for... why? Why did he do it?"

"You're not questioning the work of a decade because of the actions of one, soft-hearted child, are you?" Agitated—though, for Diz and his muted reactions, this would be a facet easily overlooked by most—he began fiddling with the detritus surrounding him on the floor.

"Four. Four children. And that doctor woman. None of them had any cause to help us. So why did they do it?"

"I don't know." Diz selected a single leaf and inspected it in a manner which suggested he didn't want to look at Viz. Carefully, he began tearing it into even strips. "Anyway, we all agreed to spare Earth. What does it matter?"

"An agreement you almost broke, might I remind you. And I would have let you, in a heartbeat... it all seems such a waste." A waste of what, precisely, he didn't say—the saving of them, the near-destruction of Earth, the universe of violence. "We wouldn't have saved us, if we were in their shoes..."

"You're not allowed to get cold feet after you named the whole bloody enterprise after yourself." With an attitude of finality, Diz scattered the neatly shredded pieces of leaf over the remains of the fire. "It was the only way. We decided that a long time ago."

 "Of course it was. I know that," Viz insisted, in a tone like knuckles rapping on a desk. "But were we wrong?"

Talking to Diz these days was like trying to nail a scuttling insect to a board in the dark using a spotlight the size of a pinhole. But this caught him; he looked up once more, and Viz saw a flash of something uncertain flit through his lieutenant's eyes like a bit of speared gossamer wing. 

"What do you want from me?" Diz asked quietly. There was no mockery, no hostility; it was a genuine question. At that moment, he would have offered Viz any answer—any lie—the captain desired. Any response that would let him squirm away from the implication that they might have been leading themselves astray. To Viz, the aversion was clear as day, and yet he couldn't for the life of him figure out why; his second had never felt restraint necessary before, had never taken pains to be delicate with his critiques, would rarely even wait for invitation. He dug the needle in to that pinned wing, leaning over the remains of the fire.

"Honesty. For once."

"Of course it was... but that's how the universe works. The only thing every creature in existence shares is a right to be indiscriminately slaughtered. Nobody cared when it was us on the other end." Diz tilted his head slightly. "What would you have us do instead?"

'... Murder, criminal conspiracy, intergalactic terrorism...'

"Perhaps I should have just listened to you." Studiously, Viz began to pick blades of grass from his boots—he would at least meet his end looking neat. "Perhaps we should have just gone straight after The Enquiry.”

"No," Diz disagreed sharply. "It wouldn't have been enough, we weren't prepared. It wouldn't have made a difference."

"You were far more optimistic about our chances back then."

"I wasn't optimistic, I was angry. We would have died."

"We're about to die now. We still have nothing to show for it. What a waste."

Conversation trailed off and Viz and Diz looked at each other. More specifically, Diz looked hopelessly into the well of Viz's empty eye socket—though empty is, perhaps, a false description; the hollow that had once housed an eye was filled with the glitter of computer chips, battery components, and sensors, a treasure trove with a radiation footprint as unique as a fingerprint.

Reality cascaded back over the pair and, with it, the internal sense of a ticking clock, of a heartbeat telling out an unspecified but limited number of beats, liable to stop at any time.

"Is there anything I can do?" Diz asked softly.

"No." Short of cutting off his head, there was no quick or easy way to get the circuitry out of him; there was half a mile of splinter-thin wire and twenty control chips delicately laced into Viz’s brain. The electricity of all those components had been a constant companion to the workings of his mind since he'd lost the eye, and the cybernetics were as much a part of him as flesh.

In a word, he was doomed; the prospect was almost novel.

He studied his lieutenant. The mechanics in Diz's sides were purely that—mechanical, without sensory feedback or internal connection with his nervous system. No electronics, no radiation. There was no danger to him, no way to track him through the implants. If he ran, he'd likely escape undetected.

"You're dismissed, lieutenant," Viz told him gently, "you can go."

There was nothing kind about it, nor was there anything cruel. There was no change to his voice, the calm inflection of it. Nothing. It was the tone of voice a person might use to apologise to a stranger on the street, not to speak what may be their final words to someone who had been so vital for so long, someone who had been there for every disaster, every monstrosity, every agonising second of every torturous year. The impersonal altruism tasted strangely on his lips, like fresh blood from a desert-sapped wound.

The look Diz offered him in return was withering, dead-thing dry, tinged with something amused and condescending.

"No thank you," he sniffed primly. "I'm where I want to be."

"Suit yourself." Viz didn't thank him for it, though he was deeply grateful—if he had, Diz would have quarrelled, and he didn't want to argue. Not now, not when they had come to the end. "Will Quiz stay away?"

"Until it's over." This was said in a tone that was almost reassurance.

Against his will and all ordnance of reason, Viz was reassured. He wasn't alone, and there was a strange selfish satisfaction in the neatness of both guilty men dying side by side. The part of Viz that loved numbers was quietly contented by the prospect of being able to close that account at last.

But there were things to be said. Things that should have been said long since—things that stuck harshly in the alien's throat and pulled at his vocal cords, tangled in the fine fibres of him until the words couldn't be said without tearing something. But at the end of the world, what does a little gutting matter?

"Do you have any regrets?" Viz asked instead to stall for time—an unfair question, considering the circumstances and the person. Diz blew out a long breath, brow furrowed in consideration which was almost discomfort.

"I never got around to completing that new engine," he said softly at last. "I'd finished the last part for it as well, just never had time to construct it and install it in the old one's place." With something narrow and searching, he squinted at his commander. Diz did not return the question, perhaps for fear that Viz would list the whole project under a bottomless list of regrets.

Viz answered anyway. Not honestly, but honesty was not a prerequisite for conversations between them.

'I once knew you as well as I know myself... I regret that I don't actually understand you anymore.'

"There is a nebula nearby filled with compounds I've not seen before," he said instead. "I was intending to sift through it and isolate its materials for use in my studies. Some of them seemed quite interesting."

Nothing about Diz's face changed, and he did not smile, but something fond tugged at the fabric behind his eyes, the slightest twinge of affection that was more humour than anything else. Old softness, some immortal thing he kept trying to kill, mutilated and mutated but ever gone. Viz wished they weren’t sat so far apart from each other.

Silence settled on them both, like incense-scented dust on the statues inside a mausoleum, made of dead roses and bones. In the distance, the unseen skyline heaved a sigh. A wind, hot as all the days of summer condensed and reeking of hot acid, billowed through the trees hard enough to rattle the branches in a single, draconic exhalation; a handful of leaves pattered over their heads, green mottled with a dour shade of amber, a confetti shower of bygone things. It was not so very late, but the hour itself—the point of time they occupied—felt old, as though every second was clocking in to do its duty for the last time.

Both soldiers were far too experienced to pretend not to recognise the signs of a ship attempting stealthy manoeuvres nearby. There was a beat where they carefully didn't look at each other and, when it passed, they both wore perfectly even expressions with all the frightened creases fastidiously ironed out. 

"I... I'm glad it was you," Diz began without preamble or context. "I don't think we'd have made it this far if it had been someone else. I know we don’t always see eye to eye, but I know you’d never lead me falsely—even if your insistence on moderation is infuriating. You were a good captain... I'm... I'm proud to have followed you. I wouldn’t have followed anyone else."

Viz dipped his head in the barest acknowledgment, aware that any overt commentary would be taken as an attack, and any meaningful last remarks would be forced back down his throat. 

How precisely could he summarise so many years of wretched desperation, of harried flight across the universe, of madness, fury, and cruelty? What is there left to say when staring down the fact that it has all been for naught? 

Viz's intelligence lay in battle stratagem and the bloody viscera of warfare—not people. He had no idea what to say. But the time was upon him, and he would do his best.

"You… aren't who you used to be," he stated slowly. "And I won't say that I've never grown weary of how bitter and cruel you can be. At times, you're almost unbearable. And yet, I can't think of anyone else I'd rather be here with. I don't know where I'd be without you. Sometimes I hate the fact that you're not the man I knew years ago but...

"I'd miss you if you were gone, whatever you are now. I'm glad I met you. I'm glad we're still here."

Diz responded in kind—a simple inclination of the head. Like the owls around them settling in for their vigils, the night shuffled its vast wings and enveloped them in an air of downy resignation.

'... On all counts, this court finds the accused guilty...'

Something cracked in the undergrowth. Time's careless passing was no longer told out by the gentle susurration of sand against the bottle-neck of a glass or the tick tock of clocks, but by stealthy footsteps and broken branches.

Nerves suddenly alight, Viz stood up, full of jitters; his night vision had started to clear, and he could see the lean, bony trunks of the trees surrounding them, the ruffled satin of the canopy high above. After brushing his hands over himself to disperse a collection of burrs and twigs, he extended one to the dark blot still sat by the scorch mark on the floor, and drew it upwards until it stood as a knife-slash cut through the canvas of the world before him. At his full height, Diz was slightly taller than his commander, and at close quarters Viz had to tilt his head slightly to meet his eyes. 

Together, they looked up. Past the branches with their pleated leaves, and the smoke and smog of Earth, there lay the velvety blackness of the sky, punctured with glistening stars like teeth. Transfixed by the home they had known and loved, both aliens stood in silence, mapping out the stars they knew—the ones they had been to, the ones they wouldn't visit again, the ones they had planned to venture to in the future. One of them could have drawn an intricate and expert map of them in seconds; the other knew their compositions and could have explained what their colours meant. Had there been longer, they might have said something on it, might have spent a minute or so enjoying each other's company and watching the world drift by. As it was, they looked up and felt the insignificance of their persons and the magnitude of their mistakes multiply in full; the screaming desire to exist coiled tightly in their hearts burnt brighter until it was painful, then went out altogether.

"What do you suppose Quiz will do with himself now?" Diz murmured without taking his eyes from the stars.

"Not sure." Viz clicked as he thought, subvocal components in his chest rasping over each other like wooden gears. "He did enjoy collecting those animal oddities when we were running the facility—perhaps he can find some purpose in that."

Quiet stretched out—no, that's a lie. The two stood in the clearing didn't speak to each other, but the forest around them was full of creaks and shudders, like an old house settling, it's rafters full of ghosts.

"He didn't really deserve any of what I said, did he?" Diz asked in a voice small enough that Viz almost didn't notice he'd said anything at all. There was no need to ask who 'he' was.

"No." Viz tightened his grip on the hand he had yet to let go of. "You can apologise when we see him again."

There was no judgement or blame in Viz's voice. As before, he spoke in the tones used for some casual, daytime conversation about the weather, or the menu, or something equally trite. He felt, quite suddenly, deeply, coldly calm, as though he had broken through the film of the ocean into the empty air far from any civilisation. Every breath of air was new and crisp as newly fallen snow or a fresh bank note.

Finally, with the tired fondness of an old friend, the sky let them go, and the pair looked away. They were a few inches from each other, hands still clasped between them, the last of the warmth in the world cradled in their conjoined palms. Diz's grip was bruising. 

Solemnly, Viz scanned each feature of his lieutenant's face, each scale, cataloging every variance of colour in his countenance, committing to memory every moth-wing flicker of expression. Almost feverishly, Diz did the same. The breath in their lungs felt airless but vital—useless, but shared, as though they were one body. 

The rustling grew louder—it came from all directions. It might have been the wind. In a more lenient world, a world with less in the way of teeth and claws, it would have been the wind.

"It's a pity the pistol died," Viz commented. "If I'd planned this a little better, I'd have kept two bullets in reserve."

The careful blankness broke and Diz's face lapsed back into a smile; a real smile, one totally devoid of the trappings of pleasantness, bitter and slightly cruel. He exhaled a laugh, singular and humourless.

"As always, it falls to me to make up for your inadequacy. What would you do without me?"

From somewhere within in his jacket, Diz withdrew two large kitchen knives, silver and wickedly sharp—much sharper than simple kitchen use necessitated. He pressed them both into Viz's hands before producing another and keeping it for himself. Three stolen knives; Viz swallowed a smile and it tasted bitter.

"Together," Diz whispered, hypnotically calm. It wasn't a contented calm, but the sailor's calm of knowing he wouldn't weather a storm and being at peace with it. His grip on Viz's hand somehow squeezed harder, fingers moulding around the bones. "We do this together, alright? Then we'll go find Quiz and figure out how to get off this planet."

There was no panic, no horror—not anymore. The comforting lies curled through the corridors of his brain and invited him to the fate that had been pursuing them since their escape from the facility as though it were some grand party. Viz squeezed the hand in his before letting it go; this was not, he supposed, such a bad way to die.

"Together," he agreed, savouring the finality—for there was something so very final about that last assertion that they would not be alone.

The bushes cracked their knuckles. Neither fugitive blinked.

"We'll be alright," Diz lied, "I promise."

Viz just smiled.

As one, they turned from each other to face the woods, which were full of eyes—hundreds of them, all pitch black, all staring unblinkingly; a hundred blank, slit-nosed faces with metal disks in their heads watching from the trees. They stood together. For a few, valiant minutes, they fought together.

And when the enemy's plasma bolts struck them, they fell together too. Side by side, they lay in the dirt, their eyes wide open.

'... Sentenced to public execution by firing squad before dawn. Long Reign The Imperial Inquisition.'

✯

Somebody watched from the bushes. Somebody close enough to see everything, but far enough to be easily missed in the tumult. Somebody unnoticed—somebody the Enquiry personnel avoided as a river diverts about a rock in a stream. Some significant insignificance that everyone had forgotten.

It stood very still, frozen through to its core with horrified disbelief, as the tree-streaked tableau played out in flashes of gunfire. Fighting. Failing. Falling. Fallen. The very foundations of the watcher's world shuddered and wailed, but they remained silent, still as the stars above with their blazing cores.

Only when the Enquiry had departed—taking the limp forms of Viz and Diz with them—did Quiz take off running.

✯

Phil hadn't found the road, so much as the road had found him. One minute, he'd been stumbling along through a forest that seemed increasingly determined to keep him—with brambles crawling sinuously up his legs, deceptive moss sinking his feet deep into the Earth, branches raking over his scalp with soft claws—and the next his feet were on solid ground. The tarmacked snail-trail of humanity boldly announced itself, self important and solid, and promising. Late to the party, the rain he had anticipated an hour previously had finally recognised its cue, and a light drizzle had glossed the asphalt to a shine. Phil's slow progress towards civilisation was stalked by an invisible shadow with transitory, matte footsteps.

Unbeknownst to him, he was being stalked by more than that.

Nestled securely within the fabric cavern of Phil's pocket, the treacherous remote blinked, it's red light tolling out as slowly and steadily as a heartbeat. The keepsake was a beacon; the gift—hastily given, kept in confusion, an ace, a shield that turned out worthless like so, so many schemes—had completed its metamorphosis and finally become a trap.

'It wouldn't have worked in space but... well, we aren't in space.'

'Everything we use operates using the same system, doesn't it?'

'It does.'

Phil heard something. A scuffle—no a shuffle. It was a whisper that sounded as though the wind had gained feet and risen up to walk behind him.

Then, there was a sudden jolt, a pain that numbness registered as pressure at his temple. The road gave a great, weary exhale and shrugged him off its back, and into darkness that smelled red and shadows that rose up to be his dancing partners.

Chapter Text

"Day four on base. Tensions are high. Morale is low. We lost contact with Phil Eggtree approximately seven hours ago after he left for the facility. He was supposed to be coming home. Currently, it is suspected that—"

"Phred, you've been in there for twenty minutes. It's my bathroom, not yours. Start paying rent or get out."

Sat quite miserably on the toilet lid, Phred fell quiet and deleted the voice recording. Leaving the bathroom as the stern voice dictated was the last thing he felt like doing. Out there, mere feet away in the living room, was the reality of the situation: a vanished friend, a furious Smiley, and a frightened Zach. Here, well... it wasn't like the rolls of toilet paper were going to rise up with their problems and hate him for making a joke of things to cope.

"Yeah, ok Miss Sundae, I get it... I'll be out soon..."

All good things come to an end, Phred supposed, taking more meticulous care in washing his hands than he had at any point prior in his life, dismally counting each bubble as it popped. Every cell was squeaky clean by the time he shut the faucet off and decided to brave the tangible horror waiting in the living room.

Mrs Sundae was waiting outside, her expression analytical and moderately sympathetic; neither quality stopped her slamming his sanctuary door behind her and clicking the lock shut. 

The living room was exactly as he had left it, which is to say depressing and unsettled. Anxiety cobwebbed the air so thickly that it was impossible to exist there without becoming coated in its gluey strands. Smiley was pacing, each step an act of violence. Zach smoked and sparked on the carpet, surrounded by a neat circle of cinders. Phred did what he did best; stood gloomily in the middle of the room, let the atmosphere form a crust around him, and hoped no one asked him to do anything more complex than that.

This was how it had been since Phil's last call.

Phred was no fatalist—that would require a degree of personal severity that went beyond his pay grade—but after the fifth hour of waiting, of nothing on the phone, no response to the texts, his mind had begun to wander, and now there was no retrieving it from the paths it weaved through. What was he supposed to do? How was he supposed to reconcile with the fact that his final conversation with his best friend had ended with a half-joking demand that he pick maccies up on his way back from wherever he'd ended up?

You don’t get to pick your last conversation with someone. Somehow that was the hardest thing to swallow about the situation. Now he was standing here with words he hadn't said like cold marbles in his hands, and they slipped and slithered in his grip so that he could never quite remember which ones were important; how could you be just as desperate to tell someone you wouldn't be the same person without them as you were to explain your latest theory on the teleporting cat in their apartment building?

Phil couldn't be dead. Phred still had things to say.

Feeling more awkward than usual, Phred cast about for somewhere to sit—standing felt stiff and formal, and he didn't want anyone trying to speak to him. This was a slight problem, as there were precisely no actual seats left. Mrs Sundae had unearthed enough armaments from the basement to furnish a small militia and piled them on the sofa. This was on his list of Things To Not Think About because it said concerning things about the sanity of his friend's mother, and quite frankly there was enough going on in life, what with the aliens, the crushing reality of the world he was growing in to, the potentially dead best friend, and the teleporting cat.

("Were you ever going to tell me about this, mum?"

"No, darling. You are my child. It's my job to keep you safe from everything, and part of that is not frightening you with the things I can’t let go of. I'm sorry it's come to this. Don't drop the rifle—it jams easily.")

There was a spot on the floor by the door that was out of Smiley's war path, and it looked comfortable enough. Incidentally, it was actually quite In The Way, but seeing as it avoided Smiley, Phred really didn't consider that.

Which was why it came as quite a shock to both of them when Quiz slammed open the door and tripped over him.

"I can't believe them!"

This announcement was all the warning anyone got before the living room was filled with hysterical alien, all flapping blue limbs and shrill proclamations of disbelief. It was something worthy of commendation that the highly strung Smiley didn't pick up one of the mystery guns and shoot him for surprise's sake if nothing else—and she had thought up many more potential reasons during her multiple hours of pacing.

(One hundred and four, to be precise, all of which would hold up in court. Which they wouldn’t have to go to. Because Quiz was an alien and that sort of thing is really above a judge’s pay grade. A nice ditch would do for a dead Quiz, thank you very much.)

Of course, not shooting him immediately didn't mean she wouldn't shoot him eventually. Several seconds passed, and when Phil didn't follow through the door with some sort of terrible one liner, Smiley, cold as glass, stepped in front of Quiz. She had decided she was not above many things during those five hours of walking a hole in her mother’s carpet and murder was one of them.

Fear does funny things to a person’s priorities.

'I never should have left, I never should have left, I never should have—what did I even learn in school today? What was so important that I couldn't stay? My fault, my fault, my fault. I'll fix it; I would do anything to fix this.'

(Even so, the hands that picked the ambiguously sourced gun off the sofa, though still and steady, were intimately aware of just how cold the trigger was beneath their fingers, how chill that little ball of metal must be in its hollow cylinder. They were not hands that wanted to hold a gun and they knew it.)

"Where's Phil?"

For all the personal gravity Smiley was instilling in the question, Quiz didn't seem to notice. Or care, for that matter. His voice was so shrill the neighbourhood dogs were wondering if they should be getting involved.

"How could they do this?! After everything—everything we went through!—how could they just let me walk away, pretty as you like it, then go and do that? I told him not to do anything stupid! I specifically requested it!"

Smiley edged the gun closer. Quiz batted it away the way someone would a gnat, if gnats happened to be made of metal, explosive, and proffered as a threat by people who may very well want them dead. Smiley didn’t look surprised by the action so much as she looked appalled and offended.

“Quiz, where’s Phil?!” Phred joined the inquisition and enjoyed the same rousing success Smiley had—which is to say he was completely ignored.

"Oh, I am going to kill them. I hate them!"

Talking was not working. Smiley decided that slapping would have to do.

Now 'slapping' is not a language. You can’t learn it; it’s emotive, intuitive, and it’s meaning is constrained to the moment alone. 'Being slapped' however comes with a wide vernacular of surprised, confused, offended noises, and Quiz was putting all of them to good use.

"Where is Phil?!"

Quiz looked up at her in wet confusion. He was small, Smiley realised, with a slight jolt in her stomach. In her mind (and, in the cases’ of Diz and Viz, actuality) the aliens loomed over her but that just… wasn’t the case with Quiz. Stood nose to nose like this, the blue face, round and soft looking, was a full inch closer to the floor than her own. For a long moment his lips made querulous movements of not-speech and their sudden shared helplessness made her feel sick.

Quiz was supposed to have answers. Scrap that, that wasn’t true—Quiz was supposed to come back with people who had answers. He wasn’t supposed to be here alone.

“Where's everyone else, Quiz?” Smiley asked, softer now, and the alien just shook his head, dismal. A damp sort of chill was seeping softly in to the air, like moss moisture in to jeans.

“They didn’t even give me a chance to say goodbye…” and that sick feeling spread from Smiley's stomach to her veins like poison.

“What happened?” Zach asked from somewhere behind her. He was giving Quiz a guarded sort of look that said he wasn’t really sure he wanted to hear the answer.

Quiz deflated, looked at his hands like they might be holding an answer and, when they weren't, took as deep a breath as his body could hold.

“Oh boy, this is… kind of a long story. I’m actually not even that good at telling it—“ 

Sensing that what was coming was the sort of explanation that spanned several years and not the past five hours, Smiley cut him off. 

“We’re not asking you for your life’s story, Quiz. What happened recently?”

He looked fairly relieved, but there was a confused light in his face that somehow spoke of someone looking at a tangle of yarn wondering how to give someone one very specific knot.

“Oh, ok! So, we did some stuff, had to leave our home planet—none of us were supposed to; I didn’t even sign out of the mainframe—and apparently that is also illegal (the leaving thing, not the mainframe thing—although I do have some theories about that.) So, now, wherever we go we have to be careful because there’s a squadron of military police following after us with permission and intent to blast us out of the sky. And now they’re here, and I don’t know what to do, I never thought we’d actually have to deal with them again—“ Smiley put her hands on his shoulders when there was no reaction to other attempts to shush him.

"Even more recently than that, Quiz." 

He looked at his hands again—no answer had materialised there since last time.

"Umm...the—the Enquiry invaded your planet. They found us... th-that's as simple as I can make it?"

Which, as simple stories go, is not especially insightful. The short story is an art form and Quiz was failing woefully. Smiley was saved from another round of ‘squeezing the right kind of information out of the hysterical alien with limited filter’ by Zach, who sauntered over from his place on the floor with the easy gait of someone who had not burnt through several layers of clothes worrying that evening. Acting is another art form, and Zach was being held up as a shining example.

"On the subject of 'invaders' and 'things people never wanted to see again', where's the other two? No offence, but your whole Terrible Trio dynamic doesn't really work when it's just you—and not just because it's numerically wrong, really cause... well, it's you."

Quiz stopped. He went very, very still. He looked at the empty spaces by his side as though just now feeling the cold air sifting through the gaps. His face was trying very hard to retain its neutrality, but something was beginning to twist about his mouth like distressed hands knotting themselves in a skirt hem. His black eyes were horribly wet. Quite suddenly he was awful to look at.

"Viz and Diz are... they're gone."

"Gone?" At this vital moment, the word had lost all tangible meaning. People in this context only ever meant it in one sense, and surely Quiz couldn't mean that, Viz and Diz could not be—

"... Dead." The word was a soft, grey whisper, as final as ashes.

"Dead?” A great hand had swiped something from Phred; he wasn’t certain what it was or whether he wanted it back, but he was intimately aware of its absence. “Wait, like, actually dead? How... wait, how could—what killed them?" Somehow, even at their weakest, the aliens had seemed indomitable, cursed with insectile vitality, up and moving again moments after being crushed. "You don't really mean dead, do you?"

Quiz gave an upset little laugh, a bubble of helpless sound, his wet eyes beginning to drip. He spread his answer-less hands in a helpless gesture.

"What else is there to mean?" His eyes cut quickly up to the left, where Viz's face should have been but wasn't. "Viz said we'd stayed too long. The Enquiry found us—I should have been smarter; they always find us—and now..."

"Is Phil dead?!" Phred asked with a sudden, seizing urgency, and that cold that had abated itself in complete shock for the reveal of the alien's deaths swooped back over them all. It was a chill that longed for bad news, desired more than anything an opportunity to pierce through their bodies like a fingernail spearing through a grape. But it was to be disappointed, for Quiz was shaking his head.

"No, they won't have killed him." 

All three of them deflated in equal sighs of relief.

"Oh, that's good."

"They'll want to examine him. You're a new species, there's nothing like your kind in the databanks. He has to be alive for that."

Less good. "Really shouldn't have left that pause between those sentences, Quiz, it's misleading." Zach's voice was twisted in to a tight, smiling croak, levity without any joy. Quiz slumped, looking exhausted and deeply sorry.

Silence, with a corpse-like weight, fell over them all, dead, cold flesh suffocatingly heavy. It embraced them, clung to them; it would fight before letting them go.

Even now, with the words sinking in, the mind persisted in its simple, defiant refusal to believe them. After all, Quiz was an idiot; he had been wrong about a million things. He was probably wrong about this too. Viz and Diz were both monumental assholes, too spiteful to die but mean enough to play a trick on their gullible friend. This was probably some stupid, alien prank. You know, one of those jokes you play on your mates that involves military police and your deaths. One of those long-running gags that has you frantically running to the backwaters of the universe without enough time to pause and tie your hypothetical shoes for fear of being blasted out of the sky. One of those jokes, an absolute classic. Any minute now, they would call the bit and pop back up, and it was going to be hilarious...

They didn't. Phred realised he was more willing to believe that Viz and Diz had a mutually shit sense of comic timing than he was to believe them both dead.

(He kept considering these things. It was easier than trying to picture what a strange alien race, who had not had the best ambassadors to begin with, would want with his best friend. Too many sci-fi movies had made a business out of detailing the clinical brutality of military scientists upon uncovering alien life; he had always loved those films, but now the boot was on the other foot the memories of their brightly coloured gore was turning his stomach. And if these alien academics did add Phil to their compendium of intergalactic life, they would never know the things that mattered—they would see that he had two hundred and six bones, but not that he'd once broken his arm surfing at midnight when he was sixteen. They could name all of his organs and never know he'd had his appendix removed when he was nine and eaten nothing but banana ice cream for a week afterwards. 'Homo Sapien', the label would say—not 'Phil Eggtree'.)

There had never, Phred realised, been any doubt in his mind that Phil would pull it off; there had been no fear when he woke that morning and found everyone gone. To his dawning horror, he had been wrong—terribly, deeply, intrinsically wrong.

Silence deepened its deadweight slump, pulling the four of them deeper in to its tenderly dulcet embrace. Mourning cracked its knuckles and preened, kept—for now—at bay by that desperate, translucent hope that things would turn out okay, but confident that it would very soon be called upon to enact its reign of tears. They stood in a circle, heads bowed like apostles, the vast fields of language stretching between them made meaningless and grey. Somewhere in the middle of it, Quiz seemed to recognise that he was the authority; this was not something he was at all prepared for. He swallowed and folded his four hands together in to a miserable origami.

There had always been someone smarter. There had always been someone more certain. Sadly, they were dead and he would have to do.

"It’s ok—“ It was not. Phred's eyes stung for some reason; Quiz's voice was painfully gentle. It was the sort of gentle tone that people use to speak of agonising things and he wasn't prepared to hear it. “—I'm back going up there. Viz and Diz would rather be thrown into the sun than left in Enquiry custody. I’ll send Phil down before they find me and..." 

The sentence just got quieter and trailed off instead of ending, but it wasn’t delivered in the tone used for sentences that have a happy ending, so maybe that was for the best. Or maybe ambiguity made it worse. Phred found himself swallowing with difficulty.

This wasn’t right. Phil couldn’t die. Quiz shouldn’t die. Hell, even Viz and Diz weren’t supposed to die. Phred still had things to say. 

How did everything go so wrong?

"You don't have to...” Absolution was awkward on his tongue. “If they didn't notice you before, there's probably a way out for you. You could leave—" He broke off as Quiz shook his head with a sudden vehemence he’d never seen before.

"Phil said that! None of you get it—I can't just leave them." He cast wildly about himself for something, grappling just as unsuccessfully for a way to explain himself as he had for explaining a story succinctly. He looked to the twin empty spaces by his sides, head still tilted at the angle that once upon a five hours ago would have had him looking at faces. Reassurance and answers didn’t come; Quiz swallowed and spoke carefully, as though measuring each word would ensure it was the right one. Phred did his best to understand.

"Sometimes, your life doesn't go the way you think it should. Sometimes your friends are horrible, terrible people, and that's one of the few things in your life you can live with! Because they are your friends, even if they're awful. Even when they’re trying to convince you to let go. Viz and Diz were both cruel, and grotesque, and unbalanced, but so am I and they were everything to me. We were all awful, all three of us. They never cared that I was a bad person. Or a bad friend. If I were dead up there, they would have come to get me without a second thought—shrapnel and stars, they have before!"

Smiley made a gentle, negatory sound, her eyes crinkled with awkward sympathy.

"You... you aren't a bad person—" Quiz laughed again and though it was no happier before, there was a note of real amusement in it. It was an old sound, a tired sound.

"I was a Control Navigator for the Enquiry." Okay, well that meant less than nothing. Probably an issue of context—Quiz seemed to think it pertinent. "I helped send whole fleets to their deaths, and I did it knowingly. Willingly." And that was the sort of thing you didn't really need context for, and you wished it meant nothing. "I'm nice, not good—I've killed more people than both of them and they were soldiers... I'm just bad at doing it face to face. It's different when it's something you're looking at." Bitterness took ahold of the smile and gave it a wrench. "Diz was right really; I did love being useful. I was good at my job. I miss being good at that job."

Phred felt all his well constructed understandings of the world fall apart. Quiz was a murderer. Quiz was worse than Viz and Diz. He scrubbed a hand roughly over his face, wishing for some sort of reset button. Scrap today—let's take it from the top and get it right this time. They could get it right next time. Where was the option to try again?

(There wasn't one—there never is. You get one chance. Every second is individual and unique, and there is no replacing them. Eternity is composed entirely of inimitable moments, every one of them without peer. There was only one of each and once it was gone, that was it; second chances are a social construct, a child's plaything meant to pacify. We can never really try again. And sometimes we get it wrong; this too cannot be changed.)

Zach gave a rough sounding sigh and clapped his hands together too hard; he was dragging his features in to an expression of resolve that looked mask-like but determined.

"Well, this has been a horrifying evening. You really came through with that one, Quiz, good job." Quiz looked momentarily very pleased, before realising that was a Bad Thing.

Someone else was supposed to say something after that, but no one did. The people who were supposed to talk were gone, their absence eating the reality they left behind. Finally, Smiley sighed.

“How do we get on to an Enquiry ship?” From the expression on his face, the words on Quiz's tongue were not the sort that would answer her question, and so she cut him off pre-emptively; she hadn't the patience for arguing. “Quiz, save it, I’m not in the mood: obviously I’m coming. Phil is my best friend—I don't need to tell you how I'd feel if I lost him.” 

Even as she said it, her mind was twinging with harshness, but it did the trick; Quiz stood down without argument.

“I'm going too,” Phred added quickly. Smiley shot him a smile that was appreciative and apologetic. 

“I am also Spartacus.” Zach agreed, scrubbing ash from his head as he did so. Phred shot him a thumbs up. Quiz and Smiley looked equally confused. “It means I’m coming.”

“‘Means you’re going’ where?” Interrupted an angular voice which appeared cuttingly out of nowhere like a scissor blade through a swathe of fabric. Everyone gave the simultaneous, startled flinch of the chronically guilty and whipped around; Mrs Sundae had materialised in the hall doorway, as curiously and monumentally unyielding as ever in a well-worn dressing gown and mismatched slippers, embodying the statuesque magnitude of the stone guards at a castle gate even though she was having to squint slightly without her glasses.

Smiley looked at her mother. With very little warning, her heart was speared through its soft, red-beating core with an  absoluteness of love, all its malleable insides disgorged in to her chest so that she couldn't breathe. And then the moment was over and she was left hollowed out and blinking back tears. She wished she were little again. She wished she could crawl in to her mother's arms and make the whole world go away.

"Where are you going, Smiley?" The shrewd, bird eyes traveled along the awkward, huddled line. "Phred? Zach? ... Quiz?"

All four of them, unwilling to commit to saying it, awkwardly pointed upwards in an expansive ‘that way’ fashion. 

Mrs Smiley narrowed her eyes, sizing up something beyond the realm of seeing. Her gaze fell to where Phil should be standing and an invisible decision was made, like a key turning in a lock. “Oh no, not without me.”

“Mum—“ Smiley's mind was suddenly too full of protestations—it's dangerous, it's insane, it's a very bad idea and we have no plan, we're following an idiot in to a galaxy of stars and nightmares—but Mrs Sundae had crossed the distance between them before she could get any words out. Hands enclosed both of her own—warm, strong, calloused hands, holding on as tightly and as certainly as they had in those bygone days where this home and this woman had been Smiley's whole word.

“No. No, you went to space one time without my knowledge and got involved with criminals. I told you not to speak to strangers. I thought I’d done such a good job on that front, but then you turn up with the strangest people you could find. You literally discovered alien life to have strangers strange enough to disappoint me; you never did anything by halves, my girl….” There was a tiredness to that, but also a fierce warmth, a stubborn pride. Absolutely resolute, Mrs Smiley reached out and plucked a strand of hair from her daughter's face and smoothed it behind her ear. “We are going. We are going together. We are staying together. And if I’m not back here in time for ‘Bargain Hunt’ then there will be trouble.”

Smiley laughed a little damply and nodded. Phred, who had been doing his utmost to unify with the wallpaper, did something foolish and let his mouth get to work before something more useful, like his brain.

“It’s on prerecord—“ 

Mrs Smiley gave him a pointed look and Phred decided that, actually, he wanted more dignified last words. He did something very clever and shut up. Zach, having never done a clever thing in his life, took up the baton with magnificent aplomb and kept taking. 

“I really feel that we’re overlooking a rather important factor in all this ‘going to space’ business; namely the 'going' and the 'space' part. We have a significant lack of spaceship. Those things are kinda hard to acquire last minute.”

“Actually…”

“Are you about to tell me you know a guy?”

“Well… We don’t have a spaceship…”

(Quiz paused just long enough for Zach to think of stepping in to remind him that: ‘yes, we know—that is, in fact, the problem’)

“But they do.”

The pause and quiet left in the wake of that declaration let everyone know that they were supposed to understand what he meant, and that Quiz was standing in what he assumed to be awed silence. Unfortunately, nobody present knew enough to ascribe a unifying identity to an ambiguous ‘they’, and so the silence was just sort of confused. 

“… They?” Zach finally asked, with enough exasperated confusion that Quiz should have realised that he was the only one who knew what was going on. Not often finding himself in that unique position, Quiz did not understand at all.

“The Enquiry.”

…

“Who?”

… Perhaps it was time for that life’s story after all…

Chapter Text

After a long, productive discussion on the compelling topic 'what the fuck is Quiz on about?'—during which the parameters for extraterrestrial warcrimes were established, the role of the nefarious Enquiry was elaborated, and the image of the empire overall grew clearer and more horrifying—conversation turned again to the 'how' of the rescue. Not the minor issue of getting in to space; this was the deeper and more intrinsic question of how precisely to traverse urban infrastructure without a vehicle. This debate in its entirety is best surmised by a single line spoken by Mrs Sundae as she was agitatedly locking up the house: 

“We could drive. I’ll get my car—oh no, wait, it’s in a ditch somewhere.”

Echoes of that line of thought had persisted all the way to the bus stop and proceeded to follow them on to the bus itself, like a damp wrapper being blown down the street which refuses to do the decent thing and unstick itself from one's leg. Here they all sat, competing at Olympic level in the extreme sport of Looking Innocuous, and Mrs Sundae and Quiz were still having their whispered argument, squashed side by side in seats towards the back.

“Diz was driving!" Quiz defended himself with his usual ineffective shrillness and mild aura of guilt. "Well, he was trying… it’s still not my fault! All I did was say left and right.”

“So your job was simple and you still failed?” Quiz looked for a second as though he would have liked to defend himself, but the bluntness of the statement, the slight sardonic humour, stole a huff of laughter from him before any argument could take place. Instead of outrage or petulance, his face took on a thoughtful expression a little wistful and deeply sad; he spent a few minutes watching something inside his own head before sending it away with a wet blink. Ada watched him carefully. In a fashion that appeared deliberate, she faced away from him before speaking again, and her voice when she did was absolutely neutral. "Your friends were military?"

"Frontliners," Quiz agreed, voice an odd mix of mournfulness, pride, and amusement. "They... they were good. But their ship was old, damaged... it... it was easier to use it as bait than it would have been to fix it up and the crew wasn't exceptional enough to save. All hands went down. Well, all but two." Shifting guiltily, Quiz looked at Ada out the corners of his eyes... or, at least, she assumed that was what he was doing; it was hard to tell without benefit of cornea and iris. There was a discomforting plaintiveness to his tone as he said: "It was a logical decision. The Enquiry likes logic. Fifteen years was a long tenure for soldiers, anyway."

Was it wise to talk about these things on a bus? Yes and no. A bus is a public space, and that is an advantage and a disadvantage in and of itself—disadvantage because, of course, the public is there, and an advantage because nobody cares less about you than the general public. Have the decency to look mostly normal and the glazed eyes of the slouching, self-absorbed masses will graciously allow you to pass by unremarked and unremembered. Alien war crimes rank somewhere between 'angry python in tote bag' and 'person with regrettable haircut attempting to disguise it with an equally regrettable hat' on the specific scale of public interest that applies to people on the bus.

"And now they're destroying worlds?"

"They haven't actually destroyed any planets yet," Quiz defended. He waved an explanatory hand in the air, the second set of arms hidden under the coat twitching. "This was the first time we'd been in one place long enough to try. It's more the idea that they could that appeals." He announced all of this in the tone of voice of someone who has completely failed to recognise that this news was not especially reassuring.

"And you followed them?" Ada's face had the carefully controlled blankness of someone trying not to look too surprised or judgemental; her voice was strained with disbelief. Beside it, Quiz sounded far too reasonable.

"I had to. I couldn't stay on as a Control Navigator, not after I helped them. Even if no one ever caught me aiding defectors, I couldn't... But I'm not really good at this. I want to be, but every planet we find I just... see it as more death. Maybe it's because I've not actually got a good reason to want revenge but this can't be the way to fix things.”

There was a pause in the hushed conversation as a tweaker struggled his way onboard. He and his rendition of 'Mr Brightside' was infinitely more interesting to the general public than a hushed discussion of judgement, death, and morality.

"If you don't mind me asking, why did none of you ever just go in to hiding? Why was becoming instigators of doom and desolation the immediate way forwards?" Mrs Sundae asked as the bus got moving again.

"It was their idea—though Viz would call it his idea. Hiding was never really an option, and even if it were Diz would never agree to it; he never was any good at backing down. And Viz likes the idea of winning too much. The universe owes him, and this is his chance to get even. He never had any doubt that we would get even...

"I... I like being important here. Even if I'm not good at it." Quiz was speaking very carefully, stretching his stubby fingers out, looking at his hands and the lives they had once held. "Being part of The Enquiry is the most respected position a person can hold in our world and even if I don't want that job anymore, I could never just go back to being nobody. I like having power of life or death over strangers... I just also really like the part where I let them live."

Quiz looked at her, dreadfully earnest. Mrs Sundae stared back in replete incomprehension. For the first time, it fully registered to her in stark completeness that this was an alien, who had come from a thousand light years away, from the forefront of control in an intergalactic war, to sit beside her on a bus which smelled like the feet of the woman in row three who had, beyond all reason of God, seen it fit to remove her shoes. This (Quiz, not the foot woman, though she was on thin ice) was something inhuman, something disconnected entirely from the Earth, absent from that nexus which is the universal human experience.

There was just enough familiarity for the realisation to twinge.

People. Inhuman people, but people nonetheless. Inhumane and inhuman, and yet, simultaneously, neither of those things. The existential totality of the concept was momentarily impossible to fit in her brain, odd corners of it sticking out the sides of her mind leaving her grappling for words, any words, as her mouth hung slightly open like a door ajar, waiting for someone to walk through.

"... Have the three of you considered therapy?" She finally got out.

"What's that?"

With an owlish lack of guile, Quiz blinked at her, all soft incomprehension with a weary crease of curiosity. He had no idea what she was talking about, and Ada supposed that explained the aliens' situation very well. The rest of the journey progressed in aggressively foot-scented silence, an introspective trek in to the abyss.

✯

There was something soothing about the lurching roll of the bus, so very different from the frenetic jolting of the car chase or the sinuous glissade of a spaceship easing its way through the astral currents. Leaning his head against the glass, Quiz watched the world pass by in an ugly reel of blotches and blurs, the rumble of the engine vibrating through his skull. With a sort of passionless fascination, he stared up through the spotted glass in to the indifferent eyes of a grey sky, it's stars hidden between thin, pressed-closed lips. 

Perhaps it was maudlin to think of his return to The Enquiry in terms of marching willingly in to a mouth, but as the world scrolled by he could think of no alternative. Very soon he would drop off the edge of reality, come untethered from the march of time and vanish in to whatever gloom took the souls of those who meant nothing to history, and he was unable to compare the prospect of Enquiry forces to anything other than teeth and throat. There would be a moment of pain as they bit in to him, and then tight, damp, blackness seething slowly in to eventual, abyssal nothing.

With that same lack of passion, Quiz plucked at the fantasy of leaving, of escape. If his theories were correct, the low level Enquiry personnel here on Earth would allow him to pass without conflict or comment, absorbing him back in to their ranks like a pebble in a river busy with rushing its way back to the wider sea. He could slip in and out, and then the cosmos would be open to him, unshackled from the weight of Enquiry and V.I.Z.ion, from the deadweight corpses whose grim heaviness dragged on his soul. The mere thought was exhausting.

Perhaps even those higher up offices would welcome him, once again, with open arms, the prodigal son returned. Perhaps he could allow the river to drown him, to take him back home and let him pretend he had never left. He could slot back in to the place in that great machine he had occupied for so long, absolved of all sins by the shining coronet that was his unimpeachable position.

Yes. Perhaps he could take the clock by the hands and drag time back, scrape the last decade from the canvas of existence like so much wet paint, sponging out the detail of the people he had spent so many years alongside. All the angry lines, all the old warmth, all gone...

Quiz shut his eyes. So many options. So many chances to run away as he had always been expected to... but no.

He didn't want to leave, not really. He held the possibility and rotated it with the fond amusement with which one might regard a photo album full of beloved, bitter memories; it was something other, something separate, something he could never touch or have again. This had been his freedom, this mad, pointless dash across the cosmos. He had loved it, and he had hated it, and it was time to let it slip peacefully from his grasp. There was no meaning to it anymore.

It was a shame he had to die with his last experience of the once-lovely sky being this drear, grey daylight; he should have liked to see the stars again. A tiny kernel of bitterness, red-hot flak, nestled against his heart, lamenting the unfairness that Viz and Diz got to die beneath a night sky, but thoughts like that quickly cooled back in to smooth, numb nothing.

So much of everything was unfair; how very like Viz and Diz it was, to hand him tangles of incomprehensible, untenable feelings before vanishing off together. How very like him to be the best only by virtue of everyone else being disqualified. He wanted to laugh that he was the last man alive. He wanted to gloat that he was the de facto leader of the V.I.Z.ion project. He wanted the other two to be alive to care that he was mocking them. He had won; he had lost everything.

For the first time in years, Quiz was riffling through his memories, the box of keepsakes and mementos hidden away in a dusty attic in his mind to make room for more practical things. He remembered his time at The Enquiry, the monotony and prestige of it all, without fondness for the person he had been or the things he had partaken in. Nothing but the desire to be necessary remained of that man, and there was something daunting in how he had died without notice, without fanfare; Quiz felt a little cheated to have changed so much without knowing. He felt he should have recognised sooner—he would have liked to have had the chance to be smug about it.

It hurt to know concretely that the time he had spent so long clinging to meant nothing to the person he had become, to know he really had nothing to go back to.

When he reached for his treasured memories, he didn't find the old fizz of joy at his selection, or the pride and love he had felt when presented with his old charges. Instead he was confronted by the long hours that Viz had taken to teach him to shoot; assisting Diz in his labs, helping draw up new star charts and doing whatever simple construction tasks could be convinced to come his way; the pair of them, never offering a word of praise or gentle encouragement, but always at his side, always keeping him just out of harm's way. Never an overt demonstration of trust, but always as much training as they could furnish him with, their backs turned to him while he handled scalpels and screwdrivers, turns at watch duty when they were planet-bound. Viz smiled at him when he had done good work and would bring the success up whenever he felt particularly disheartened. Diz would look at him with a solemn, calculating face but would ever say something to the effect of “we’ll make something out of you yet,” and a new thing would be added to his list of Things Quiz Can Do.

Bitterness tinged the amusement. His precious memories were trite and commonplace, and there was no one to laugh at him for it.

It didn’t change anything. It didn’t change the fighting, or the bitterness, or the mutiny, or the hurt. But they had cared, and nothing could change that either. And even if it could, if all the little injuries they'd done to each other over the years had managed to do away entirely with that clumsy, maladapted love, it didn't touch the unalterable fact that Quiz needed them. He had wanted them and their hard, ugly angles to chip pieces off of him and mould him into something useful, and the absence of them and that future left him feeling reduced and half-finished.

'I really thought you could do it, you know? I thought you could do anything. I thought you could get us out of here—I never even considered that you couldn't. Do you know what I didn't expect? What I wouldn't have guessed in a million years? You to die. I thought you could do everything except die. I thought the worst thing you could ever do to me was leave me out.

'And I was wrong. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about that—you certainly wouldn't be.'

The recognition that nothing would ever matter from now on was crushing. He could take over this dirt ball planet and feel nothing. He could be promoted to the head of Enquiry, above all his old peers, and it would be meaningless. Even winning the war against Alphim, something he had been hatched to want, would be the most perfunctory of victories. Nobody would be there to smirk at him from the sidelines, and he was coming to the somber understanding that it was that and not the success that mattered. He was never supposed to be the last one. He had never wanted to do this on his own.

How bitter it was to realise at last that the adulation of entire worlds was worthless when compared against the cold fact that he would never win the respect of two dead men. How awful to have it occur too late that he had wanted that all along.

✯

The Enquiry's arrival on Earth was everything the V.I.Z.ion aliens' appearance hadn't been; it was sleek, and stylish, and utterly secret. In a nondescript field an hour's walk outside a village that huddled itself about a church and post office, there was a patch of air that wibbled. This was the grand sum of evidence a casual observer would receive that alien life had arrived on Earth. 

Cold mud was seeping in to Phred's knees. With an unreasonable amount of determination, like a man thoroughly convinced of his nonexistent telekinetic powers, he stared at the heart of the field where absolutely nothing was happening. Grey grass swayed under a grey sky, it's vague motions listless and dreary, chittering to itself in a dry voice. Or, at least, this was what his eyes wanted to see. If he quarrelled with the idea, if he contorted his mind in to a certain shape, if he managed to peer down the pinhole of the Real in just the right way, he found something of such spectacular difference the shock made him lose focus and let it vanish. The whole scene was a bit of popcorn lodged in his back tooth—able to be found, after an exercise in dexterity, by his tongue, but nonexistent the second he tried to put a finger on it.

In the centre of the field, there was a spindly, metallic structure, that rose above the ground in spires like an angular cathedral haunted by sunlight and spectres of glistening silver. The entirety of it was alive with inorganic movement; glints of sharp white light danced at every edge, diodes blinked in epileptic patterns, and the flat edges seemed to be undergoing some constant undulation, as though made of something other than stalwart metal. Nothing about it even remotely resembled a conventional spaceship—it barely looked like a vehicle at all. It's appearance had a sinister ambiguity to it, and he suspected seeing it in motion might do something irreparable to his nerves.

Stationed around the spaceship in an circle, still as stone and the same dolorous grey as the surrounding grass, were a series of stern, narrow figures. They were less lively than the metal monstrosity they guarded, their faces vacant, the hands loyally gripping their guns attentive but nonchalantly slack. They looked like dolls, toy soldiers. The apprehension of the scene came not so much from the soldiers themselves, but from the sense that, at any moment, a titanic hand might descend and tidy them away. 

"... What exactly is the plan, again?" Phred called quietly down the line. Quiz had tried to explain it before getting on the bus (and a second time on the bus) but, as with most things Quiz attempted, results had been questionable at best. It was gracious to allow him a third chance and, fortunately, having something to point at seemed to help.

"You see those discs?" Quiz jabbed a helpful finger at the large, obvious, metal circles adorning the soldiers' foreheads. "Neural implants. Unified control of a whole non-autonomous army. I remember seeing plans for something like this on Flyth's desk back in the day, but I never thought I'd see it implemented..." With a slight wince, an idea seeming to strike him, he proceeded to non-sequitur in a slow speculative tone. "It's... entirely probable that after losing control of two of their soldiers and watching them rampage their way across the stars The Enquiry decided it was time to switch to a stricter model of control."

Beside him in the hedge, Phred felt Mrs Sundae recoil in disgust, and a flare of sudden heat from Zach burnt at his back. From across the field, eyes as dead and cold as black rhinestones stared then down without recognition or agency.

"You mean, they aren't... sentient?" Prickles were running down Phred's spine, hundreds of hard-edged tingles like crab legs needling at the space between his neck and hairline.

"Not precisely. Not anymore." If Quiz recognised the implicit distress of the question, he gave no sign. "Drones are much more efficient, much more logical. They'll do exactly what The Enquiry asks of them."

Nausea rippled through all the soft organs in Phred's belly, a dread so deep it reverberated through the jelly of him. Half of him wanted to ask Quiz if these strangers were aware of their internal captivity, but the possibility of his sort-of-acquaintance knowing the answer was ghoulish.

"... How does that help us?" Mrs Sundae asked eventually, weary with disgust.

"When I was surrounded in the forest, none of them actually attacked me. They saw me—they looked right at me—but they never did anything." He watched the still figures across the field with calm speculation. "I... tend to stay with the ships on missions; I'm not sure they know who the third member of V.I.Z.ion is. If they found Nitwit, they might have assumed it was him. Also, I never actually signed out of my mainframe back on base, and complete system updates aren't exactly prioritised. 

"See, I don't think I count as V.I.Z.ion personnel to them... I think I still count as Enquiry."

"And that means you can give them orders," Smiley murmured, comprehension cloud-pale in her voice. 

With all the conviction of someone doing something very cool, Quiz left the relative safety of the bush and strode across the field towards the tangles of spaceship. He did this without acknowledging his co-conspirators or offering any indication that they should follow. After a second (during which some faintly alarmed glances were exchanged) the motley rescue team followed suit, mud-splattered and stumbling from stiffness. Quiz, Phred decided, was not very good at leading.

By the time the little group caught up with him, the alien was engaged in conversation with one of the soldiers. They were tall, with an athletic build clothed in a weirdly familiar uniform the colour of battleship hulls, with skin the red-orange shade of ripe pumpkin. Like Quiz and Viz, they had four arms, and the lower pair were clasped around a white-silver pistol alight with butter yellow lights.

Was there something shifting in the soldier's black eyes, some muted, underwater emotion bleeding in to the dark? Phred shuddered as the corpse-cold gaze dragged over them all in turn before refocusing on Quiz.

"Unauthorised. State Clearance Code And Intention." They had the flat, dead voice of an automaton but the resonance of something organic.

Stood before this anonymous official, something changed in Quiz, something intrinsic deeper than blood and bone. It was an unpeeling of silicone niceties to reveal hard, utilitarian metal, a flash of a dagger hidden within a noble's plush sleeve. He grew no taller but, as he straightened his spine and set back his shoulders, he seemed to tower over the guard who correspondingly became somehow less; there was a collapse of the other's mystic and strangeness, and it no longer seemed to matter that they were another alien, that they were a member of an intergalactic order, that they were the cat's paw of a deadly force. Quiz—useless, fugitive, feckless Quiz—had taken the deathly reputation of his old position and donned it like a lord's cloak. Everything else was immaterial.

This is what Quiz had been; jaded, cold, and powerful. It was so incongruous, so dissonant, it was almost farcical; a slip of the present in to the distant past, into a surreal, inside-out world in which Quiz had been dangerous.

"Enquirer Quircus, ident number 786-008, clearance code NAV-65429." His high, whining voice had gone cold, and had the bored, supercilious bite of long-held authority. Then he made eye contact with his stunned 'captives' and lost it completely. "Um, these... are my prisoners. I am escorting them back to the ship for processing as part of... the current mission."

The soldier shook their head in a slow, submerged motion that sent shivers racing down Phred's back. There was a dreamlike quality to it, the bare bones of stubbornness and disapproval that said that something was still alive in there. Something knew it was being lied to, but the blinking computer chip embedded in their forehead had already accepted Quiz at his word. In the war between that somnolent consciousness, stirring now in irritation, and the manacles of Enquiry control the machine had won... and, in a way beyond material definition, the soldier was livid.

"All Prisoners Accounted For," they snapped (or rather, said in monotone with the spirit of a snap.) "No Further Captives Required."

"Special orders from, oh... Enquirer Myiku 811-457." When this went unquestioned, Quiz relaxed with a small sigh—the ruse seemed to be working. "Where is our current human prisoner being held?"

"Subject 003 Is Detained In Experimental Procedure With Item L-3754, Unknown V.I.Z.ion Equipment." 

There was a few seconds of pause, during which everyone present was invited to imagine the full range of things that ambiguous assertion could entail. 'Unknown Equipment', after all, is a designation that can apply to a whole host of objects, malevolent to benign and a thousand categories in between. An unfamiliar shower can count as 'Unknown Equipment', as can a particularly uncooperative coffee machine when hungover. A medieval torture device is sat in that far reaching category, right alongside the third Victorian condiment pot and effigies to gods that no longer exist. A transitory Phil floated in the abyss, in a hundred different potential situations, Schrödinger's lab rat, before eventually Quiz's tongue came unstuck. Much of his surety had abandoned him.

"And... what is that supposed to achieve?" His high-pitched voice warped the words; they sounded like they were being squeezed from a particularly anxious mouse. Several seconds passed; nothing in the guard's face actively changed from its mask-like visage, but there was a belligerence in it's silence, an exertion of whatever minimal agency remained in defiance of The False Enquirer Quiz.

"It Is Demonstrating V.I.Z.ion Project 'Dreamscape'," they eventually capitulated and Quiz visibly deflated in relief. Everyone else was forced to trust this as a good sign.

"Oh, that's good!" That unseen something, the eel in the abyss, stirred again and Quiz was swift to backtrack. "I mean, understood, thank you soldier. Um, as you were?"   

But the soldier did not return to 'as they had been'; though they offered no reaction to Quiz slipping around them, they came alive again to prevent the group from doing the same. Phred found himself in abrupt confrontation with the ugly end of a pistol, and the world rushed out of his ears; in anticipation of his oncoming fate, the life dropped out of his limbs, and he barely felt Zach elbowing him out of the way for the privilege of being held at gun point (shortly replaced by Mrs Sundae.)

"Unauthorised. Additional Personal Are Not Cleared For Entrance." The emotionless voice was blotted out by Phred's heartbeat, which was helpfully announcing its continued vitality with the subtlety of an explosion in a library.

"I said they're with me!" Quiz yelped, a mixture of artificial outrage and very-real panic driving his voice to frankly piercing octaves. In an act of what was possibly bravery but might have just been overconfident foolishness, the alien stepped decisively between the soldier and the humans. This garnered no reaction except perhaps a deepening of the emptiness behind the guard's eyes and the slightest twitch of the gun to be aimed directly at Quiz's throat, dropping the barrel to point at the neck beneath that pugnaciously raised chin. "Stand down, Infantryman 472-340. That is an order."

The gun lowered painfully slowly, descent fraught with tiny jolts as though reluctant to submit. Behind his eyes, somewhere buried deep in the endless dark, a soul was thrashing about in a metal cage sealed with a single, blinking disc. In it’s own way, that was more frightening to Phred than the gun. His heart continued its cacophony in his eardrums.

"Conflict Notice. Current Orders Issued By Enquirer 174-221: Admit No Further Personal. Retreat Imminent. Mission Complete."

"Override code: additional 001—under authority of Enquirer 786-008, acting on new information which necessitates the presence of these prisoners."

"Security Risk. Clearance Code Violation," argued the soldier.

"Prisoners will be under constant observation provided by Enquiry Personnel. Prisoners will be covered under Clearance Code NAV-65429 as temporary additions," Quiz shot back coolly. 

Faces set, the pair stared each other down, the atmosphere between them the tense, impersonal tenor of a late stage game of Atari 'Pong'. Finally, the soldier capitulated, resentment thick in the monotone voice, changing its texture from cool, disaffected steel to ice. This was not a thing which could hate, but the desire to was sat in its blood like poison.

"Clearance Accepted. Welcome: Enquirer Quircus 786-008, And Prisoners. Your Presence Has Been Recorded In The Database Of I.S.S Victory." Phred got the impression the soldier should have liked that to be a threat, but the news brought a crooked smile to Quiz's face. "Glory To The Enquiry. Long Reign The Imperial Inquisition."

"Yes, yes—glory to the meddlers, we're doing a magnificent job, all that nonsense—don't you have somewhere else to be? Go there." 

'I despise you, False Enquirer,' said the swirling, black maelstrom of disgust in the soldier shell's eyes. 'I hope you rot.' But there was nothing they could do now but step aside and admit the little group in to the circle. The humans passed them in the suspicious, guarded fashion that children adopt when asked to walk past a mannequin they aren't convinced will remain inanimate.

As they walked free, Quiz's cleverness wore off like cheap gilding. Just as abruptly as he had changed, the Quiz they knew was back again, small, harried, and tired. With the guard dealt with, he looked deeply gloomy, staring in to space as though someone were still speaking to him. "Glory to the Empire," he murmured, eyes fixed on the spaceship the way a condemned hangman would eye the familiar noose. "Praise Be To The Eyes That Watch, The Hands That Guide, And The Mouth That Bites."

"You going through something here, pal?" Zach's voice was harshly jovial, the angry, cheerful edges of it bright; he flung a heavy, companionable arm over Phred's shoulder where it seared a welcome line of warmth into his back. In his ears, the heartbeat finally softened and subsided back to its usual, unobtrusive patter.

"Yes." Quiz sighed heavily enough that it should have blown away the world, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Many things. You're a prisoner, Zach—prisoners don't talk."

"Right. Understood. Lead on, O' magnificent gaoler."

And lead on he did; there was nothing else to do and nowhere left to go but towards the spaceship.

Chapter Text

At thirty paces, Phred felt the stirrings of deep apprehension like a pike in a lake; at twenty, cold sweat began its fretful prickling at his palms and shoulder blades; at ten, he was suddenly struck by the vastness of the sky. He had never really considered it before. All that open air and absolute freedom. The sky had always been an untouchable attic, dust grey, a place to store clouds and birds. It wasn’t tangible in any way that mattered. The idea of going beyond it—beyond that realm of cloud and rain and in to a place of stars, and sun, and dark—was a nonsense impossibility. It was something famous strangers did in neatly packaged tabloid stories. He had been too young and disorientated the first time to appreciate the gravity of the occasion. Phred didn't go to space; space mysteriously and unceremoniously materialised around Phred and, at the earliest opportunity, Phred went home—that was how that story went.

Swallowing, he wished he could go back to sleep and wake up again when the world had stopped playing silly buggers with him. 

This close to the ship, the air smelled of salt and violet lightning and the light breeze suffered a silent death from all the static, leaving the world forbiddingly still. With a dulcet, smoke-soft sigh, it's entryway spiralled agape, it's insides petal-purple and tender.

In a manner both confounding and disappointing, the atmosphere inside the spaceship was precisely the same as it was on the bus. There was no grandeur, no industrial mystic, just a bored inertia that had oozed out of the passengers and settled into the hardware and the constant rush of impersonal, cold air from the ducts. It was cramped, with a low ceiling and crowded ranks of empty benches filling most of the space, the remainder dominated by a glowing console marked in obscure symbols and diodes dark with dormancy. Quietly, Quiz instructed them to sit, before heading over the controls and beginning the launch procedures.

The benches were rounded and slippery with a strange, pinkish silk fabric, running in long, horizontal lines lengthwise through the belly of the ship. There were no seat belts but pressing a shallow button built in to the underside generated some sort of static field to hold the occupants in place; Smiley and Mrs Sundae sat amidst their frozen hair which hung still in slow-moving, sea-creature shapes.

Now that Phred was sitting still, the apprehension was having a grand old time worming its way in to him, it's sinuous song curling through his blood. Nervousness spilled through his veins in syrupy dribbles, spreading in increments towards his heart, claiming a little more of him with each and every beat. Space, he was beginning to realise, was quite far away. He might go so far as to say 'very' far away. Perhaps even 'extremely'. What if he got half way up and his courage gave out? How was he supposed to get home then?

"So, if you were Enquiry, what were you?" With absolutely no sign of discomfort or nerves (a decent sign that he was, in fact, slightly uncomfortable and nervous), Zach posted up beside Quiz at the console. "I'm thinking Eyes?"

"Navigational Personnel—a division of 'Hands' in terms of the Empire's body politic," Quiz answered without looking at him. "We moved things, communicated with ships to reposition them, oversaw the army personnel. Senior Navigators commanded whole battalions at a time rather than the individual ships. I... I had three. Three ships." There was a beat of silence in which Quiz traced the three names stamped across the gravestones he carried in his head. 

Absently, he flapped a hand vaguely in Zach's direction, muttering at him again to get to his seat and, this time, the boy complied. When he froze, all the incandescent flames spouting from the top of his head hung in a fiery mane. Quiz continued, speaking a little louder to be heard above the clunks and whirrs of the console accepting whatever commands he had fed it.

"The spy network was Eyes, and they were in everything, not just Alphim's politics—in our academia, in our own ranks, posing as ordinary citizens. Nothing escaped the Eyes, at least not for long. Senior war councils made up 'Mouths', but they only had authority of Enquiry as that group. They made up broadcasters, publishing industries, schooling institutes, stuff like that."

"What were Diz and Viz?" Smiley asked quietly, her moving mouth a weird flutter in a static face. Quiz tensed.

"Nothing." He jerked his head away, but nothing could disguise the lemon-bitter venom he had dipped in to. It was impossible to say who lay speared on the mordant point of that ire. "Ultimately, they were nothing at all."

With the same weary dispassion he had expressed on the bus, Quiz stared out the window. For once, even Zach had nothing to say.

✯

It didn't feel like flying; it felt like the world had unfolded itself around the spaceship until the vastness of space was finally disgorged from its hiding spot within some deep crevice. All told, Phred felt slightly ill and never wanted to experience it again.

Using Quiz's falsified status the group had made it from the sleek, imperious halls of the various Enquiry vessels to the V.I.Z.ion command ship, which welcomed them with a comparatively unkempt air, the patchwork metal of its corridors and mismatched colours of its equipment lending it a wrong-footed, dishevelled quality beside the immaculate machines holding it captive. The halls were largely deserted, with the few Enquiry soldiers left aboard melting in to the shadows created by the greenish phosphorescence of the overhead lights, and they passed by unobstructed. Quiz's stride was brisk with a mixture of purpose and nerves, and he called back to them in a low undertone as he walked:

"Okay, Phil should be just through here. After we get him, the escape pods are through the doors down on the left—you should all get out as soon as—"

He broke off abruptly; across the hallway lay the door to something labelled as the 'Life Transference Station'. Smaller text below that read 'for Oswald emergencies and Thursdays ONLY'.

"I have an idea," Quiz announced suddenly, in a worryingly determined tone. "You lot head over to the simulation suite—it's just over that way. Go through the door on the left and down the hallway—there are signs." Then, to a guard standing watch over a control board, with the same unfamiliar bluster that had gotten them so far. "You: fetch me an engineer."

"What about the plan?" Smiley hissed, looking nervously at the gimlet-eyed soldiers restrained from shooting them all dead only by the circlet of metal inside their heads. All of them stared back, unblinking.

Quiz left. Quiz didn't even seem to realise she'd said anything. Those left stared at each other, then at the guards (who remained uninvolved and at their posts), then looked about the dim halls they had been abandoned in, which themselves seemed to be shrugging at their predicament.

"He never said it was a good idea."

Bereft of their plastic shield, they walked more closely together. Nothing could ease the tension positively bleeding from how claustrophobically inescapable their position was; they were a group of deer painted with stripes heading in to a den of tigers, and the cold, black eyes of the soldiers said they knew this, in a fashion as intangible as it was indelible. Every time they came to a guarded door, there was a universal expectation of obliteration, but it never happened. Again and again, the group were permitted entry, but Phred could feel the loathing of shackled souls scraping the inside of his skin. Zach had become a constant presence at his side, the air boiled and breathless, comforting for its familiarity. Slightly ahead of them, Mrs Sundae and Smiley walked close together, having taken each other fiercely by the hand on the way up and having not let go.

After a couple wrong turns, they at last came across the correct door, one with two guards stationed either side. Above it was a sign which proclaimed, in a glassy, pink light with no clear source, 'Central Simulation Suite'.

"Um, hello?" Tentatively, with a broad step that put her solidly in front of the children, Mrs Sundae addressed the alien to the left. They were a statuesque example of extraterrestrial life—bald, snake-featured, black-eyed—with Quiz's sapphire skin and only sporting their upper pair of arms. "Enquirer... Quircus says we have permission to enter this room. So... if you could stand aside, we'd like to go in."

"State Your Clearance Code." The blue-skinned speaker had a woman's high, sweet voice and a corpse's eyes.

"Ok, alright, give us a second." Zach shuddered as her black stare fell on him, flames spluttering briefly out. "It was... it-it had a six in it."

"Clearance Code NAV," Smiley spoke over him in a clear, frightened voice. "Six—five—four—two—nine." The pebble gaze fell on her, and she admirably bore it without flinching. "Don't mind him; he's stupid."

"Very stupid."

"Clearance Identified," the soldier said, ignoring them entirely. She seemed to be staring at Smiley but when the girl moved the eyes didn't follow, though they remained as intently focused as they had been when they had an object to focus on. "Welcome, Guests Of Enquirer Quircus. Your Presence Has Been Recorded In The Database Of I.S.S Victory."

"Thank you." It felt wrong to thank her, but it would have been worse to say nothing.

The soldiers stood aside. The door swung open. Frigid steam poured out, white as snow and scented with electricity. Phred felt the pulsing of his faithful, nervy heart stop. Zach's hand took his, too warm and too tight but just enough of an anchor to keep him from turning right the fuck back around and jumping in an escape pod.

The Simulation Suite was... eerie; it was a large room, with walls lined with ambiguous pipes that converged on the ceiling to feed in to a machine set in the centre, a humming contraption like an old boiler outfitted with a monitor screen currently blinking in idleness. Surrounding this device were what ominously appeared to be operating tables, each one made of flat metal and fitted with restraints and railings. Phred's breath misted in the air before him. Three unmoving bodies had been laid on these tables like corpses on the coroner's slab. 

One of them was Phil, who lay in the centre, looking peaceful as though asleep. ECG electrodes in a variety of poisonous colours were clinging to his forehead, the resulting rat's nest of wires trailing down in to a hole at the the table's head. Eyes closed, face slack, breathing deep, even, and gentle, in his silence and sanctity he seemed to ask them, with a jauntily raised eyebrow, 'what took you so long?'. An incredulous laugh bubbled up in Phred's throat, and he discovered that pure relief had the cool, clean taste of rain. Beside him, Smiley made a noise a little like a sigh, a little like a sob, a little like a breathless smile, and surged forwards to gather the comatose body in an embrace. She was swiftly seized by a hand of lightning and flung at the group like a Smiley-shaped bowling ball—this time it was Zach who laughed and he did so with full enthusiasm.

More carefully this time, the four humans crowded around the prone form of the fifth. Hovering a finger just above the electric shimmer of the barrier, Smiley traced Phil's face; it was lightly marred by small scrapes, the tip of his nose and one cheekbone purplish with bruise. There was the ghost of a smile drifting at the corner of his mouth, diaphanous and only half-there. Any minute now he'd wake up and tell them the joke.

Phred was so focused on the fact that Phil was still alive and well that it took him several minutes to actually look at the figures lying on their own tables off to one side.

At first, obscured by shadows, they seemed to be wearing the same, grey uniform as the guards outside. In drawing closer, Phred realised they weren't... precisely the same uniforms. These were faded and patched, ragged and singed, their grim sense of office worn through. One had been neatly altered to remove the lower two sleeves instead of being made that way. There was a rough 'V', wrought in twisted, tarnished metal, stitched in to the left breast.

Viz and Diz lay next to one another, unrestrained and un-breathing. They didn't look dead, which is to say they both appeared unmarked. As someone who had personally scraped ambiguous bits of gut tissue back into Diz's abdomen could attest, they had both looked considerably worse and pulled through just fine. And yet... there was something about how indelibly still they were that said, in letters as gravely certain as a date on a headstone, they wouldn't be waking up ever again.

Their eyes were open. A patina of dust had settled across the surface, glued there by residual, living wet. Their skin was pallid and drained looking beneath their coloured scales. Both of them seemed smaller, crumpled though they had been laid out with fastidious and impersonal neatness.

Everyone made a conscious effort to remain at the end of the room that didn't have the corpses in it. Still, they drew the eye, the way a black hole draws in the universe itself.

Phil didn't tell them what to do. Phil, being unconscious, didn't tell them anything at all.

Nothing the group did to rouse him had any effect, not even the application of a biro moustache, a party favourite and the usual fail safe. They were still crowdsourcing new ideas from one of Phred's online group chats (surprisingly functional despite his screen being split into coloured bars) when Quiz returned.   

"Oh good, you made it."

"No thanks to you!" Furious, Zach reached across and slapped the alien. Quiz didn't react at all to this until Zach muttered a quiet 'shit' and he realised his jacket was smouldering, at which point he became quite panicked. "What's the big idea? Literally—what the hell sort of plan has you running out on us, you fucking flake?"

A good sort of plan, as it turned out. It had to be—Quiz was positively bubbling, his moonlike face glowing with the reflected joy of whatever it was he'd dreamed up.

"I wanted this—" Quiz held his prize aloft. It was a box. A metal box with no obvious identifying features. Nobody was impressed that this is what their lives amounted to in Quiz's head—at least, not until he explained a little further. "It's the nexus core for the life transference machine!"

"... Oh no."

"I'm can bring them back!"

"Oh dear."

With indecent eagerness and shaking hands, Quiz set about wiring the box into the cabling that sprouted from the tables, splitting the casing apart to reveal a tangle of leathery diodes, wires topped with rubber ducts, and conductors with bolts at their heads. His hands faltered slightly, apparently unsure what to do with all the transference innards, and he immediately diverted himself to strapping the corpses into the table. He did this with a frightful vehemence that suggested he genuinely thought the limp bodies might escape him if he didn't hold on tightly enough to leave imprints.

"Doesn't transference imply that someone else will die?" Phred queried in a wide-eyed voice. 

"Yes, yes." Impatiently, Quiz waved him off with an unoccupied hand. "I've sorted that bit—you don't have to worry about the guards outside anymore. The potential energy of their life forces are contained in these—" Two crystalline blobs were held aloft with none of the care which should ideally be taken with a person's soul made manifest. "—And if I connect them here, like this..."

"I don't love that you're doing this, Quiz." Zach chewed his lip, watching Quiz wrestle ECG headbands on to his crew-mates' lolling heads. "What if it doesn't work? Wasn't Diz the scientist?”

"Diz was an engineer—science was Viz's thing."

"My questions stands, stop dodging."

"It'll be fine!" With that indifferently manic wildness, Quiz slammed the crystals into place on the headsets. The glow they cast across the pairs' death-sunken faces was distinctly ghostly. "Alright, maybe this thing wasn't actually built for use on people—Diz made it because it's hard to keep meat fresh in deep space and this helped revitalise it. But it's not like it can make them worse!"

Images of zombified aliens began to meander from the abstract realms of bad sci-fi comics. Subtly as he could, Phred attempted to back away, only to find the wall at his back gently ushering him to remain in place, pressing his shirt into the curves of his spine where it stuck to a sheen of cold sweat.

"Hey Smiley, which stage of grief is this?"

Quiz ignored the aside, returning to the box with a renewed eagerness. The cables rattled against each other as he clutched them; they were full of shivery, metallic sounds like glassy fingernails drawn gently down a mirror. With the rubber caps removed, the cables were all tipped with crocodile clips whose throats housed long, hair-thin wires, which Quiz plunged happily into his crew-mates' flesh. Neither Diz nor Viz could blink, but suddenly their wide-open eyes and empty faces seemed more vital, more of a violence. Suddenly, they both seemed far more dead.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Smiley asked, in the doubtful voice of someone who knows the answer should be a resounding 'no'.

"Why wouldn't it be?" Quiz's eyes were full of brilliant stars, the sort that exist very far away from anything even remotely human. "Alright now, how do I do this... connect the positive conduits to to power lines... negatives to the siphons... primary modules... are they supposed to connect to the same colours?"

The box started to hum. Little spasms of light began worming their way through the cables. Static fussed beguilingly at every available hair on the bodies of those mammals unfortunate enough to be stuck in the room with a madman and his favourite corpses.

Had he more interest in classic literature, Phred might have wondered if this was how Frankenstein's laboratory mice felt, captive and captivated by the workings of something abominable far beyond their paltry understanding of the world but for the sense it was horrific. Phred did not have any investment in the classics, however, and could only think that he desperately didn't want to be there.

"What if it doesn't work?" He called over the sound of silver rivers and rain made of burning tin. Clamped into dead flesh, secured by serrated teeth, the cables began a slow, swaying dance.

"I'll try again!" Quiz called out, as the machine's noisy spasms grew, still screwing the bolts into the main console's power module. "They can't exactly get deader, and I have a whole ship full of subjects. I'll get the hang of it eventually!"

Phred went to lick his lips; his tongue felt like sandpaper.

Dead bodies have nothing about them that is innately scared, much like most of the things people imbue with meaning—cathedrals, and homes, and keepsakes. The violation of them is nothing so much as butchery, which is to say it is meaningless; death is indelible, built in to the universe, woven into that vast, inescapable tapestry, and nobody is special for succumbing. A thing Shall die: this is inevitable. Another thing Shall violate the dead thing with teeth and claws: this is also inevitable. There is nothing inherently desecratory about sticking a needle in a bit of meat.

And yet, looking at the still-open, dust-covered eyes and peacefully blank faces of two people who had never looked that way in life, what Quiz was doing seemed suddenly vile. Phred had never had much use for the phrase 'I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy', but it now seemed awfully appropriate.

Quiz moved to complete the process and, as one, everyone moved to stop him.

"Quiz, enough!"

With a degree of force no one had expected, Quiz snatched the device back from their reaching hands, a vicious twist making a snarl of his usually placid mouth. The surprise was like a slap to the face, but it shouldn’t have been. Despite everything that had gotten them here, it was all too easy to forget that Quiz had also been part of the brutal, alien military he had described; not a soldier who took part in combat like his comrades, but a man who had killed nonetheless. There was something about the slightly wild look in his eyes that said he'd stopped seeing the humans as they were—as flesh and blood, as people. He looked at them now as though they were nothing more than bureaucratic lines in a tally that he might strike off with a few blithe swipes of his pen.

"No." It wasn't the whining bite of Enquirer Quircus. It wasn't Diz's adder-tongue hiss, or Viz's scornful command. It was Quiz's voice and it sounded very calm. "No. It’s not ‘enough’.  I am doing this. This is something I can do. Please don't be difficult. I like you all, but you won't win if you want to try and get in my way."

Being threatened by Quiz was an odd experience, like finding out your cushions have opinions about you, or that a harmless garden snail has teeth.

Quiz had always rather fallen into a league of his own in the minds of those with the misfortune to know the trio, a nondescript place like the gulch between 'sofa' and 'sofa cushion'. He was 'The Other One', the add on, the mini-boss on the second disc. People saw him in the back and assumed had been dragged along, when the reality was that he was always running to catch up.

What nobody had really considered was that, right then, Quiz was the only one, and the mantles of responsibility usually borne by the other two had fallen to him by default. He was The Nice One; that didn't mean he was nice.

There was a moment where they all stared at each other like duellists in the world's most literal space western. Then Quiz flicked the 'ON' switch and white light punched a hole through the fabric of reality and everything became an outline. 

A particularly experimental animator took over the portraiture of the world, and the colours all turned pale and split apart. Then, the Life Transference Nexus Core exploded, and everything returned to normal with a jarring sensation like being dropped from a great height. The astral animator was beaten away from the desk by their level-headed co-workers who began setting things to right.

If one says that their ears are ringing, the world at large has an immediate general comprehension of what they mean. Phred's entire body was ringing like a struck gong, long, drawn out vibrations undulating through every nerve. His legs staggered off in two different directions, and he sunk unceremoniously to the floor. Around him, everyone—Quiz included—did much the same.

"Ohhhh," the alien mumbled, looking a little shell shocked. "... That's why that was behind protective shielding."

Compelled by necessity and fear of their eventual discovery rather than desire, everyone picked themselves off of the ground, which was cold as winter and loathe to let them go, quiet quickly. Black spots bulged in Phred's vision like amorphous sea creatures; he staggered through their ranks on an instinctive, unthinking quest to go make sure Phil was alright.

 Behind him, from the tables, came the gentle, steady sound of breathing.

For all his efforts and good intentions, touching Phil still had the effect of sending Phred hurtling across the room under the propulsion of electric shock, a journey which succeeded in clearing his head but left him, once again, stuck to the frost-glazed wall pipes. It also gave him an excellent vantage of a situation he had been too dazed to appreciate before.

Zach and Smiley were in wobbly pursuit to help him down. Mrs Sundae was stood cautiously between Quiz and everyone else, looking at the alien with an expression that, even on one of Phred's better days, would have been indecipherable. 

Quiz himself was stood in between the two tables that held the bodies of his friends, his hands resting on the surface but not quite touching them. His fingers played gently by their wrists, where the restraints had cut a series of shallow lacerations during some unseen convulsions.

They were breathing. Their faces were no longer empty. Their eyes were still open and, where before it had seemed unsettling but peaceful, it was now nothing short of ghastly.

Slowly, Phred raised his gaze from the inexplicably alive forms of Viz and Diz to Quiz. The look on his face was a perfect demonstration of 'stunned', all wide eyes and half-open mouth, good enough to be featured in a catalogue on expressions. Something approaching a smile was beginning to slide in just behind the awe. 

"Oh!" He breathed, surprise, rage, delirious joy, and a healthy spoonful of mania making him sound frighteningly close to screaming. "I am going to kill them for worrying me!"

✯

They had barricaded the door. Or rather, an earnest attempt had been made to barricade the door; several errant pipes has been artfully repurposed from where they languished on the floor to be inexpertly welded in to the doorframe by Zach. It had made the atmosphere approximately 2% more bearable for everyone involved, which was considered a solid win. The door frowned at them from within its new cage; it knew it was full of horrors which would be getting through without resistance the second they found it in themselves to want it. Everyone was ignoring this.

Once again, Quiz was fiddling inscrutably with a piece of unknown machinery; bright, liquid light poured out of the screen in a consistency like gel, a resonant thrumming sound pulsing through the central column. The others had pragmatically spent this time to discover what they couldn't do: they couldn't sit too close to Phil without being zapped clean across the room; they couldn't get too close to Quiz and the console without being in the way; they couldn't secure the door in a more meaningful fashion; they couldn't touch the metal walls without losing a layer of skin; they couldn't poke Viz or Diz; they couldn't get the pen they had tried to poke the aliens with back from where it had gotten wedged in the ceiling pipes. The four humans sat quietly on the empty tables; this, as it turned out, was all they materially could do.

They had closed Viz and Diz's eyes and unbound their limbs. Nobody had spoken about this.

"So... they aren't dead."

"Nope!" The delight of this had yet to wear off for Quiz.

"They are now in comas."

"Yep!"

"As is Phil?"

"Correct!"

"And we're going in to get them all out of their respective mind hells?"

"When I get the system up and running, yes!"

"Cool. Just checking that the plan is still horrible and I hadn't misremembered."

Happy to have been helpful, Quiz returned to his arcane works (pushing weird buttons) and quiet of the restless, humming variety lapsed back over them.

"Oh!" He exclaimed, after another minute of tapping. Mrs Sundae's, eyes fixed on the silently frowning door, shushed him furiously, and, in apology, he continued much quieter. "That's why I couldn't find the operating system—there isn't one. He's not been placed in a program, he's just... stuck. In his head. You know, for a system demonstration, that’s actually pretty terrible."

"So we're not going back to school?" If one were to be a pendant, they might note that Smiley sounded faintly nostalgic and a little disappointed.

"Nope! I... I actually don't know where you'll be going. Could be anything really."

"Okay." Zach swung himself to his feet and clapped his hands. "I'd call dibs on Phil, but I'm sensing that won't work so... Rock, Paper, Scissors?" Four fists—Mrs Sundae's, exasperated and amused, included—jabbed their way in to the middle of the circle, combatants in an impromptu battlefield. "Quiz, pal, you getting in on this?"

"I would, but somebody needs to stay and monitor the pneuma-streams for irregularities—it would be a pretty terrible rescue mission to end with you all getting your brain stems fried."

(A slight pause as everyone digested the fact that this was, apparently, something that could happen.)

"Good call," Smiley said eventually. "You sure you got this?"

"I'm not Diz, but this system is simple enough. Just need to keep an eye on these gauges here, siphon away the electrical surges, maintain the specified wavelengths... it's stuff I've done before, when we were testing the machine the first time around."

"Alright, cool." Attention was returned to the juvenile war ground. "The rest of us... fight to the death for the privilege of invading our dear friend's head? Losers get the aliens." 

Rock, Paper, Scissors is, unfortunately, not really a game meant to be played by more than two people at a time. More of a gentleman's duel than a brawl through which an ultimate victor can be declared. After several inconclusive matches and a fair amount of slapping ("Phred, gun is not an option... I don't care what house rules Phil has.") there began a discussion on other, more appropriate ways to select candidates. This discussion was, naturally, coloured with disappointment because, if a matter cannot be solved through a rousing match of Rock, Paper, Scissors, is it really worth solving at all?

"I say this fully recognising it's an insane thing to think about, but Phil got to go inside all of our minds and murder us. It's our turn. He owes us."

"What is wrong with you?" Mrs Sundae, who, throughout the failed game, had been staring in to the void with increasing bewildered existentialism, roused just in time to hear that and turn, appalled and incredulous, to Zach, who replied with finger guns.

"Funny story! When I was eleven, my classmate killed me during band practice, and then I woke up on a hostile alien spaceship orbiting Earth. Then I was stuck in a cell with just a whole bunch of stuffed monkeys I'd seen in a dream this one time. Then I had to go back to school for seven years like none of it had ever happened. We've been friends ever since." Mrs Sundae blinked. Everyone else was nodding in solemn accord. "You know what it's like, sitting and doing trigonometry with the knowledge that your weird, genetic quirk could power a doomsday device? Look—" Zach raised both hands in a placatory gesture of reason. "I do not want to kill Phil. That's not what I'm saying at all. But the three of us know the game here. I don't think we should volunteer, or pick straws, or vote on it; I think all three of us should go."

There were other ways to phrase that—better ways; ways that involved the inevitable intimacy of entering another person's mind; the desire for tact, understanding, and friendship in such circumstances; the inherent unity of an incredible shared experience—but Zach didn't think of these ways. These ways were not Zach Ways, and so they didn't matter.

"I get it. Still messed up, but I get it. And I agree." Looking harried and dishevelled, Smiley squeezed the bridge of her nose and rather wished Zach and all his infinite wisdom would shut up. "The three of us go fetch Phil."

'Fetch' was a nice way of putting it—it made it sound like a trip to the grocery store and not a deadly reanimation, the work of a hitman Herbert West stuck in the matrix.

"Fine." Mrs Sundae didn't look happy about it, but she did look like she wouldn't argue further. "Can I do something while you're gone? Can I help them?"

She pointed at the aliens with an impertinent boldness Viz certainly wouldn't have tolerated had he been awake.

"... I can put you through to one of them." Quiz shuffled awkwardly (the only way Quiz could shuffle.) "Do you… do you want to pick, or...?"

"Who's least likely to be a pain about it?"

Quiz made a face that succinctly said 'neither'. For a long moment he stood and frowned at the two bodies as though they were quarrelling with him from beyond the veil. When he spoke, he did so slowly, consideringly as though his own opinion on the matter were hard to grasp. 

"Diz has the most experience with this machine—there's a chance he's conscious of what's happened to him." 

"Conscious of the bit where he's in a coma, or conscious of the bit where he died and came back to life?" Phred interrupted.

 Quiz took a pause from being useful to look slightly more sketchy than usual.

"Both, I guess. Or neither—I really don't know how this works." Without acknowledging the inherent horror of these concepts, Quiz moved on. "If he is aware, I imagine he'll cooperate."

"If he isn't?"

"... It might be difficult," Quiz conceded, not meeting anyone's eye. "Neither of them are known for good dreams. Or making things easy."

Mrs Smiley looked at him in a way which managed to convey swearing-under-one's-breath without ever delving in to profanity, then gave a sharp, decisive nod. "Diz first, then."

After that, things proceeded with an efficiency Phred hadn't thought Quiz capable of, a flurry of odd diodes, odder buttons, and tiny, purposeless levers that made noises like clucking tongues. Together, the group helped each other in to wired headsets, pressing tacky nodes to each other's skin: foreheads, temples, the back of their necks, the base of the spine, the soft spot behind the ears. There was something comfortingly childish about it, an echo from a half-sunk memory of being much smaller and helping each other in to winter coats for break time.

Phred lay down and the metal seeped in to him like damp. Already he felt heavier, more distant from his body, the cold vitrifying him. Every breath bled a little more of his warmth in to the air and, feeling a little detached, a little dreamy, he watched pale, translucent dancers billow from between his lips and move in rippling waltzes up to the ceiling. It was peaceful, spectral, a window to a place somewhere between the waking world and a dream.

Quiz's voice (was it Quiz's voice? The words appeared in Phred's head muffled and tasting of poppy) drifted to him through the ever-increasing dark.

"Are you ready?"

What was there to say but yes? It was too late to go back home now.

Chapter Text

ENTERING DREAMSCAPE 7893: PRISONER 003

✯

Phred peeled his eyes open with some trepidation, the impatient sound of electricity fading from inside his ears. Wind patted at his face with clammy hands, in a rush to get somewhere far away, always running, never arriving. All around them, the air was locked in a giddy, ballroom twirl, too enthralled with its perpetual spinning to be fully breathable. There was a sense of immensity to wherever it was they had all ended up, a sense of everything in every direction being incredibly far away. 

"Oh! Huh."

Clouds surrounded them. Not the staid, white clouds of a typical summer day, but a full rainbow of sunset shades—tangerine, and peach, and dulcet plum—soft and sweet looking as drifts of spun sugar. Spearing through them with its appropriate if situationally perplexing grandeur was Big Ben, affixed to nothing, hanging in the heavens like an ornament on a celestial child's mobile. Around and around it they went, borne on the back of a spectacularly ugly magic carpet. 

And there, sat on said carpet, was the source of the 'oh!' himself. Phil Eggtree, unhurt, untouched, doing his best to keep his smile dignified and failing terribly.

"You know, I've been sat here this whole time wondering what I'd say when you guys showed up. I had some pretty great lines figured out too. But honestly, now you're here, all I can really think about is the fact that I never doubted for a second that you would show up. Powerful. Humbling, even."

With none of the unsteadiness afflicting everyone else who had suddenly appeared on a thin, airborne object, Phil launched himself towards the group and messily engulfed them in a hug. Or an attempt at a hug—a haphazard clashing of limbs and bodies, more affection than logic. A functionally terrible, tripping hazard of an embrace, with eight different pairs of arms slapping lovingly against backs and the tops of heads, warm with honesty. 

"'Sup Phil? So weird seeing you here. We've been trying to reach you about your coma's extended warranty," Zach mumbled from where he'd been mashed against someone's shoulder; he had also been working on his lines and wasn't about to let sentiment get in his way. "You ready to die, brother?"

"God, please—I've been going in circles for hours now, I'm so sick of clouds."

"Aren't you going to offer to show me the world?" Asked Smiley in a tone of playful faux innocence. Phred could feel her fluttering her eyelashes against the bare skin of his neck.

"She's got a point, Phil, pretty sure this is the bit where you show the lady the world. Maybe sing us a little song?"

"Breaking news: Philip Eggtree sang. Fourteen dead, twenty injured, nine unrepentant raccoons summoned."

Phred's eyes were damp for some reason. Definitely the fault of the wind. Absolutely not the bittersweet triumph of banter he had almost lost forever. That would be a ridiculous thing to cry over.

"So what did I miss?" Disentangling slowly from their embrace, the reunited quartet sat in the centre of the rug in a manner reminiscent of children at story time.

"Oh, not much." Zach waved a deliberately blithe hand, his tone tea-party light. "Smiley's basement is a small armoury. In unrelated news, Viz and Diz got shot. Quiz told us a bunch of weird stories about why all this shit is happening, so now we know obscure alien lore—and I mean a bunch, the guy does not know when to shut up and there are, like, so many war crimes. The whole alien army is a hive mind C.O.D lobby that Quiz never logged out of, and we are abusing the hell out of his admin privileges. And now we're here to murder you nicely."

"Thank you," Phil said, with sincerity that was either devastating or hysterical depending on one's perspective of dreamscape homie-cide. "So what sort of comeuppance am I in for from my three dipshit executioners—not you Smiley, I'm sure you'll do a great job. The rest of you are here for a laugh, I just know it."

"Oh yeah, this is one hundred percent payback. You ever been turned to ice and shattered? Not fun."

"You sent me to hell. Like, literally sent me to actual, non-metaphorical hell. I wasn't even aware that was something a person could do."

With her usual excellent restraint, Smiley refrained from commenting on her own demise which, while not unexpected, was something of a shame due to all of the jokes that could have been made about unorthodox ways to give one's girlfriend the world.

"Karma's a bitch." Phil was grinning, but there was a palpable, flinching tension crackling in the air, the atmosphere typically found surrounding those about to be tickled. "Please be gentle."

"No promises," said Zach, but his voice held a wink.

Peace sighed from the billowing towers of clouds and seeped in to the four of them, their skin and souls warmed by pillars of caramel coloured light. Whatever urgency had plagued them in reality was being tenderly leeched away. They spent a few, pleasant minutes in idle conversation, all the years falling away until they had returned to a place worn soft with time, a distant summer land from the heart of their childhoods.

And then the weirdness stuck its comically long nose back in to the situation.

"Weren't we orbiting Big Ben a second ago?"

Indeed they had been. Now, however, stood serenely in its place was the Empire State Building.

"Oh yeah, don't worry about that, we just reached the top." There was a pause during which Smiley tried to find a sensible way to ask if her boyfriend knew that, at the top of London Tower, there was not in fact an infamous piece of Art Deco architecture. Phil beat her to the punch. "You know the infinite falling dream? Well, I was stuck in that for a while. It got pretty boring. Then I thought 'hey, what about infinite rising?' And BOOM! Weird buildings I don't always recognise and a magic carpet. Way more fun."

Everyone watched in polite silence as, demonstratively, the last spire of the clock tower sank beneath the clouds like the topmast on a sinking ship. "What's great about this is that I actually don't choose any of these places, so I'm just as surprised as you when it happens."

"I mean, it's cool and all, but..." Zach shrugged. "I don't know, it feels weird to kill you here. Can you magic us away to, like, a Macdonald's or something, carpet boy?" 

"You feel weird murdering me at the top of the Empire State Building, but you think it would go better in a Maccies?"

"Something about the memory of all those times you stole my nuggets makes me think I could do it."

"Either there or a Prezzos," Phred chimed in. "Prezzos has a suitably threatening vibe."

"That's 'cause Prezzos is a mob front."

"How do you want to do this, Phil?" Smiley cut in before the discussion could spiral too far afield, her black eyes worried and kind. "We... we want to make it easy. For all of us."

Smiley's unwavering pragmatism was something of a downer on the whole 'killing a friend' experience. A necessary downer, but a downer nonetheless.

"See, I tried jumping like forty times." Phil gave a phlegmatic shrug. "Doesn't work. There's some 'Alice In Wonderland' bullshit that makes me float, and I just drift very gently down until I find the flying carpet again. Very dream-like, very surreal, pretty cool and fun—not great for suicide."

"Wait, no fall damage? For real?" 

Before anyone could say anything, Zach, without hesitation or restraint, performed his very best impression of a bird; not the pecking part, or the shitting on nice cars part, but the part where they gracefully soar off into the pale abyss of a brightening horizon. He scored a solid seven.

One second of silence. Two. A decent amount of the numbers that follow.

"... I'm staring to get the feeling that infinite falling is the sort of glitch that only works for the dreamer."

"… Yeah, probably." With a decent amount of aplomb and suavity, Phill pulled the old Yawn And Stretch and draped an arm around Smiley. "You mind going and checking on him? I'd hate to wake up with Zach stuck sky-diving in, like, my frontal lobe or something."

"Is this your way of asking for some alone time?" Phil waggled his eyebrows cheerfully. "Gross. But I got you, mate. Zach and I can go and off Viz while you two..." He grimaced, regretting the sentence, waving his hand in a vague, explanatory gesture (which he also regretted.) "Start the astral plane club, or whatever."

"You're a real one. See you in a bit, Phred."

"Yeah sure. Hey, Phil?" It was only natural to drag his friend in to a second hug, neater and more concise than the first. "I'm really glad to see you again. For a second, I thought... well, yeah, you get it. I'm glad you're alright. I love you, man."

"Love you too, dumbass." Phil squeezed him tight, solid snd real in Phred's arms. After a long minute they gently separated, and he looked up at his friend. "See you in a bit?"

"Don't take too long," Phred warned, stepping back and standing on the very edge of the rug like a diver on a diving board. "Quiz seemed to be expecting something bad to happen. It's not actually done it yet, but I'd rather not wait around."

Phred did a backflip off the edge; Phil and Smiley applauded until the falling dot vanished beyond sight.

Together, the pair returned to sitting in the centre of the rug. Dusk began to bleed its way into the sky beyond the clouds, the tender beginnings of a deep, rich mauve that tinted the beautiful vortex rose and raspberry. Sighing, Phil leaned over and rested his temple against the top of Smiley's head. Now that they were alone, they spoke to each other in lowered voices, a midnight hush as though something existed in etherium to be disturbed by them.

"Are you okay?" She had been waiting to ask that question and it slipped out with the easy eagerness of a held breath.

"I was so damn sure they were actually gonna do it." Phil's voice didn't tremble, but there was a brittleness to how completely even it was, like something stretched stretched flat being pulled too thin. "Something hit me over the head and I just..." He mimed collapsing forwards, pantomiming his hands through the graceless crumple of a falling body. "I woke up here and it was honestly like something from a nightmare—like I'd never gotten out the first time, and being alive this whole time was another dream. I swear, if I'd woken up here as a twelve year old, I'd have just lost it—I am not doing puberty a third time."

"That sounds horrifying." Commiserative and contrite, she squeezed the long fingers in hers. "I'm so sorry. I should have come with you to the facility, it was awful of me to let you go alone like that."

"This isn't your fault. None of us knew it would go this wrong."

"Doesn't matter. This should have been my priority, not school; I was sticking my head in something I knew I could do to make myself feel smart instead of helpless, and I left you to deal with them by yourself. I found my dad's gun when I was fourteen and I spent the next five years wondering 'is this what it's going to take to make sure everyone survives? Is that really how I want to remember the story ending?' It's the one question I could never answer, and that terrified me, so I hid it. And now we're here."

'Here in your mind. Here where you could have died.’

"Here together. That's a win, just like old times." A ghost of a laugh huffed from between Smiley's unsmiling lips, and Phil nudged her until she looked at him. "For whatever it's worth, I forgive you."

"Thank you."

A comfortable silence fell upon them like a dusting of icing sugar. Notre Dame cathedral, in its grim glory, it's dark magnificence, slipped grandly into existence and hung in the air like a ragged scar, it's gothic crenellations limned in gold. It's broad shadow revolved around its base in a lordly fashion, stealing the sunlight from the pair in intervals like the hand of a clock briefly eclipsing numbers.

"Are you ready to go back?"

"In a minute. I just..." Phil huffed and scrubbed a hand across his face. "I've been sat here for... God knows how long, just... thinking about things. My life. Your life. The cosmic fuck-ups' lives.

“I was wondering why I didn’t bring you all to Zone 5.1 with me—or even tell you I was going; wouldn’t have been hard to just… leave a note.” He kicked a leg off the edge of the rug, trailing his foot through the clouds. “I think it’s because I wanted everything to be like it was before—exactly like it was before, back when I was a kid; a bit of a thrilling adventure I come home to tell you about. Escape class and brag about it the next day. Escape aliens and get home before lunch. Save Earth and still have to hand homework in the next day.

“It’s not an excuse, but I really thought I could pull a hat trick with this one too. And I couldn’t.”

Smiley watched her boyfriend out of the corners of her eyes. Now the party was over and the guests were gone, an element of mournfulness had slipped in behind his half-smile, a little wistfulness, a little pain.

"Talk to me?"

Quiet seconds fell off the blade of Father Time's scythe and lay before them in neat, transparent slithers. Notre Dame cathedral, in all its macabre glory, rotated in the sky like a rotisserie chicken.

"I was eleven and I saved the whole goddamn world. And then I waited seven years for something to happen again, and in those seven years, what happened? Finished Primary, finished Secondary, finished College, decided I didn't want to do uni yet, so I got a job. Nothing has happened. And I have all these memories of being a kid and having just... so much fun, even when it was terrifying...

"You have this idea, right, of what things were like? And you think 'if I could just do all of that again, everything would make sense'. Like, it would be better if things were the way they were before.

"But when you go back to those things and they don't feel the same, how do you not feel like you've lost something? Especially this—I was brave, I was smart, I made great jokes... how am I supposed to feel now that I'm older and I just... can't do it all again? Not in the same way, at least.

"When I was a kid, life was 'fighting aliens', and 'escaping school', and a bunch of fun Sci-fi bullshit. Now I'm older and the genocidal aliens are defecting soldiers with a metric fuckton of issues, and my girlfriend has a gun, and the Space Government has committed Space War Crimes and I might be a casualty of the cover-up. 

"You start getting older and you think life's gonna be so great. Well, I'm older and I'm left thinking, is this it? If I can't be the hero anymore, but I can't be normal either... what am I supposed to do?"

With a sigh of immense lethargy Notre Dame collapsed in to the bottom of the Eiffel Tower like a meringue in the rain. Smiley mulled the matter over, turning it over within her mind like a smooth pebble, testing its cool weight against her fingers. When she responded, she spoke delicately, tenderly, a voice used for stroking the petals of a crumpled flower.

"I suppose it's a little different, but when I was a little girl, mum and I would go on holiday a couple times a year, just exploring the country—resorts, and camping sites, and borrowed houses. It was my favourite thing about summer. As a kid, it all seemed so easy; I'd fall asleep in the car and wake up somewhere brand new. I'd eat ice cream and play on the beach. I'd run along historical trails and let mum shout the guide information after me—I always wanted to find things before she did.

"And now I'm older, and I look at doing stuff like that again, and it almost impossible—cost, travel, time off, a million little things. And some of the places I discovered as a child, places I loved, they're gone now, and I can't go back ever. There was this adventure park made up of gardens connected by little steam trains—they destroyed it all to build a highway... I'm still mad about that, actually."

Phil frowned and took a second out of his sincere attentiveness to try and manifest a steam train.

"But I'm not a kid anymore! And that means that I can discover new places—I can go further inland, or abroad, or out to sea. There are so many things out there for me to find. Sure, there are issues, there are difficulties, but I'll work through them, and I'll find things I enjoy again. Even if I can never go back.

"So, yeah. I know it's not the same, but I get it. You get older and you lose things. Sometimes special things. Things you loved. Parts of you you loved. And that's okay. It just means you have to find new things. And there's a whole world out there that you can find them in.

"You can't laugh your way out of danger anymore—and that's okay. You're different, you changed, and the world changed with you. That's not a good thing, or a bad thing, it's just the way life works." Gently, she nudged his shoulder. "You'll find new ways to be the person you remember. Or, you'll find out how to enjoy being someone else."

Phil gave a damp laugh, bowing his head briefly in something that was almost a nod.

"You are so goddamn smart. How'd I get this lucky?"

"You made me laugh. And you saved my life. But mostly you made me laugh."

"I am never telling the aliens they're partially responsible for the best relationship in my life. Never." The smile faded. "Are all three heralds of disaster and dumbfuckery here?”

“Yeah. Quiz and mum are trying to wake Diz and Viz up.”

“Sleeping? At a time like this?”

“They died, actually. Quiz's fixed it now, but they did die. He was surprisingly torn up about it."

Phil thought of death—the stillness, the cold, the pale—and tried to fit the various memories of the aliens into alignment with it, like a man trying to cobble together pieces of two entirely separate jigsaws. 

"Huh..."

"Yeah." 

"Wild." Carefully, Phil raised his arm above his head, stretching it until something clicked. "I honestly thought those two would survive the sun blowing up. I also sort of assumed they would be the ones to make the sun blow up. They actually died?"

Smiley hummed an agreement.

“Quiz told us the story.”

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Around them, the world swirled slowly like candy-floss in a machine, a deep, royal blueness creeping through the clouds.

"We still need their help to escape, don't we?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Mmm. It's kinda terrifying that they're nice by their species' standards, though."

"I know what you mean. I'm not really sure what to think about everything right now. I've reached the point where I don't really want them here, but I don't think I want them dead either."

"It's genuinely amazing they lasted this long by themselves. They're so fucking dysfunctional Smiley."

"I nearly shot Quiz," Smiley nodded, in solemn agreement. "He didn't care. I'm not even sure he noticed."

"Didn't know you had it in you. And now you've come for me. My girlfriend: the serial killer." They were circling higher now, drifting in lazy spirals around the crest of the Eiffel Tower. "Speaking of murder, we gonna do this or what?"

"Are you ready?"

"Eh, maybe." He didn't feel ready. He didn't think he'd ever feel ready. "Does it hurt?"

"It's quicker and easier than waking up."

"Come here then." Pushing himself very carefully to his feet, Phil edged his way to the corner of the rug. The spire of the infamous scaffold rose with them through sherbet coloured clouds towards the burnished summer sky. It's icicle splendour refused to fade in to the feet of another building. This was it, the top of the world. "This is the part where you sweep me off my feet—literally. Let's see how far we get before the falling wakes me up."

And so they fell. All the way down through infinity, their bodies painlessly unravelled by the wind.

Chapter Text

ENTERING DREAMSCAPE 7179: PRISONER 002

✯

For the second time, the rushing of electric rivers faded, the stream that rinsed them from their own heads and washed them in to another person's dream running quietly dry. 

There was something to the arid air that was almost a taste, the confused sweetness of a bitten tongue. It felt foreign in the throat and lungs and Zach instinctively knew that, were it not only a dream, it would be unbreathable to him. Dust and warmth rolled across the senses in heavy waves, bringing with it a strange, staticky buzz that pooled in the layers between the skin. 

He and Phred stood on the lofty scaffolding of an airship dockyard that leant out over a dizzying precipice. Orange sands stretched far away in every direction, uninterrupted, unimpeded but for the intrusion of this metal spider and the visiting flies that bobbed on wire tethers in a sky the colour of daffodil petals. It was a clear day (or a clear night—there was no immediate context for the planet's celestial rhythms so it could have been either) and, high above, stars hung in the sky, a dull, unfamiliar array of blue, green, and purple specks like tangles of old sequins.

Zach drew a deep breath of unfamiliar air, stretching in an unconcerned fashion like a cat in a patch of sunlight; he wasn’t sure what he had expected but… this hadn’t been it. He wasn’t sure yet whether or not to be relieved.

 "This is nice,” he said to Phred, to see if verbalising it made a difference. “You know, we never work on projects together anymore."

"I mean, I gotta go get my phone fixed later. You want to come with?"

"What's broken about it?" 

"It's full of rice. The Do-It-Yourself fix was woefully unclear." Zach raised an eyebrow so Phred elaborated. "You're supposed to put the phone in the rice, not—"

They both stopped dead, having come quite abruptly to something almost familiar. Viz. Viz, with two black eyes and a mouth that wasn't a lopsided, stitched-shut gash, leaning against the railings and idly watching the ships. He didn't seem to see either of them, not even when Phred, in a moment of curiosity, waved his hand through the alien's head.

"Ohhh, that was weird." He shook his hand out as though to dispel pins and needles. "Stick your fingers through his face."

Never one to pass on a bad idea, Zach did so.

Memories sluiced over him in a manner not precisely like water but perhaps a little like silk, glossy and cool, sliding over some ephemeral sixth sense in a patchwork parade of strange certainty: he was a captain, he had just returned from a tour in Zone 79a, a new line of ships had just been introduced and he was here to meet his new pilot. The old one was dead.

And there he was, weaving neatly through the bustle.

Viz (or this strange Almost-Viz) didn’t recognise the man, but Zach and Phred did. It was Diz. Or what used to be Diz, before he became a shadow; the same lanky shape, narrow face, cat-like eyes, fathomless black and liquid. He moved with Diz's easy, silent grace, head up, shoulders back, all pebble-cool pride and self-assurance. But at his sides were four arms and there was a faint but persistent liveliness to his manner. It was deeply surreal to see.

"Pilot 896-455, reporting for duty, sir." There was no doubt it was him—his voice was a little higher, with none of the glacial smoothness it would one day accumulate, but it was definitely Diz. "I was told you would be my commander?"

"Commander 717-960, I.S.S Invincible." Young Viz sounded different—different enough that it was difficult to believe it was still him. His rough, guttural snarl was gone, that bitter raspiness like a man gargling coal smoothed out. This Viz had a deep, amused drawl, nothing like the ruined voice Zach knew. "You look a little young to be my new helmsman."  

"I graduated top of the programme," Young Diz said, in a tone that managed to be both deferent and stern. Young Viz quirked a non-existent eyebrow at the polite defiance.

"Maybe you did. But it's different out there. You expect me to trust my men to your hands after a few years of classroom education?"

("So he was always kind of a hardass," Phred mumbled to Zach, in the undertone one uses at the cinema when wishing to not disturb other patrons. Zach nodded without taking his eyes off the scene where Diz was setting his jaw and teetering on the verge of glaring at his Commander-to-be.)

"I passed every simulation they put me through on the first try. I aced every single test. I was top of my class for all five years. I am the most qualified person to be flying this class of vehicle." Throughout the little rant, Young Diz had edged closer, counting his points off on his fingers. Viz just smiled. Diz cut his mild tirade off with a sharp hiss of breath, stepping back a pace and smoothing the creases out of his sleeves. "I appreciate your concerns, Captain, but, respectfully, if you want someone better than me they don't exist."

"And if I sent you back? If I told the academy I don't want you?"

The whisper of Viz Thoughts in Zach's mind had yet to cease their murmuring. ‘His helmsman was the one member of the crew he had to be certain of, that he had to trust implicitly with the safety of the ship and the lives of his crew. The engineering personnel came with the vessel, his own men were familiar, and navigation was handled by The Enquiry; the helmsman was the fragile link. He commanded the crew, the helmsman commanded the ship, and confidence between them was paramount. This was the one person he had to be able to rely on.

His old one was dead. It had not been long enough for that to feel normal.’

"That would be your right as commander," Diz answered coolly. "But I imagine The Enquiry would reprimand you for wasting time—I'll be quickly reassigned and your unit will have to wait for the next batch of recruits to be processed. I was placed here; everyone else is taken."

Is fate still fate if it has been so meticulously designed by mortal hands? Perhaps. Perhaps there are voices other than our own narrating our thoughts, an infinite chain of meddling stretching invisibly out across the galaxy like links of a necklace between the pendants of stars. Certainly, though Zach could never have said if it were inherent or the result of his own foreknowledge, there was something portentous in the way Young Viz smiled; it was in the warmth, the cat-smile satisfaction, the glint of something that was prepared to become fondness.

"Hm. Clever, aren't you?" Before Young Diz could reply, the commander held out his hand. "Captain Vlyanad, pleasure to meet you soldier. I think you and I are going to get along perfectly."

For a second, Young Diz simply looked rather surprised, but he recovered quickly. Another point in his favour.

"Deianacht." Young Diz (for it was impossible, now, to think of him as anything else) took the offered hand in a firm shake, a smile tugging at his mouth, a bright, hopeful expression that was almost impossible to imagine as something Diz was capable of. "I'll not let you down, sir."

The two humans drew away after that, finding it too strange to stand so close to versions of Viz and Diz that weren't insane.

"... They had other names?! Diz and Viz aren't their real names?!"

"You heard Quiz call himself 'Quirky' or whatever it was, you knew they had other names."

"It's not weird for Quiz. I trust Quiz to not know his own name." Doing his best to look unsuspicious, despite the fact that no one could see or interact with him, Phred frowned over his shoulder to where Viz and Diz stood discussing the specifics of their new ship. "Anyway, how do we kill him?"

"I don't think we kill that one. That's not 'our' Viz. I think we have to find the real one."

"… Okay, no, that makes sense... any idea on how we manage that?"

"Nah, not re—oh, that’s interesting."

Instead of storing normal, sensible, conventional things behind the doors (the usual fare, things like rooms or stairwells) Viz's mind seemed to think it perfectly reasonable to branch out. This stunning rejection of all traditional logic meant that Zach opened a door professing to lead to offices and found himself staring instead down the length of a comet, the dry cold clawing at him with frostbite-stained hands. Sticking his head over the threshold resulted in him being doused in the knowledge that this was part of an assignment: the ball of ice and glass had been hollowed out and filled with explosives. The resulting detonation would involve six similarly afflicted projectiles and take out four of Alphim's warships. He was Vlyanad 717-960, and this was his first mission with the Incendiary crew he would one day lead.

Curious, Zach tried other doors, each yielding a similarly nonsensical result: marching drills across a beach made of tiny pebbles of coloured glass; a lab of inscrutable bubbling contraptions, lit only by globes of argon and hot flickers of flame; a cliffside where Viz and twenty other aliens watched in awe as a moon split apart in the black sky with a noise like god dying; teaching Quiz to shoot, a mixture of exhilaration and delight on the smaller alien's face; a vast ceremony hall, wrought in elaborate spirals of white metal, where Viz was promoted to commander by a creature twice his height; a jungle of incomprehensible trees where the familiar trio waded through a waist-deep river whose waters were alive with writhing snakes. Each door he opened was accompanied by a brief wave of sentiment like a cloud of heat from an oven.

"... So, the doors lead to other points in time?" Phred closed a door on a quarrelling Quiz and Diz, giving a long, low whistle. "Gotta hand it to Viz, that's a pretty cool set up for a mind. How’d you want to do this?”

”Well this cupboard inexplicably has screaming in it. I feel like Viz'll be somewhere with screaming."

"Honestly, if I were trapped inside my own infinitely concentric memories by my worst enemies, I'd be screaming too. It's the only reasonable thing Viz has done."

The stepped from the strange security of an otherworldly planet to the familiar eeriness of the V.I.Z.ion ship's low-lit halls. The sudden cessation of noise and memory was jarring, like a temperature change for the soul.

"This is weird man," Phred muttered, with the nervy temperament of a man in a haunted house. "Crazy weird."

In a rush of appreciation, Zach decided that Phred was probably the best person be be stuck in a mind with. Good old Phred, with his dependable lack of fancifulness or wonder—you never had to tell Phred something was strange. He was as dependable and sensible as a block of wood. If the vibes were off, Phred was the first to say. It's the little things that worm their way in to the heart in a friendship.

At the end of the hall, there was a doorway pouring light and the scuffling sounds of a fight, the labour of heavy, wet breathing like something mortally wounded. The screaming was still faintly audible, as though ghosts were warring next door.

Together, with small, determinedly quietened steps as though something might hear them, Phred and Zach crept over and peered in; the room beyond was spartan, the only hint to its function contained in the thin sheet of ragged padding stretched out over the floor. It was some sort of training room or, at the very least, a storage room designated for sparring. Viz and Diz stood in the centre—though this is, perhaps, not an accurate description; Diz lay panting on the floor, Viz standing over him.

"Get up." Viz kicked Diz's limp hand, encouraging it to curl into a fist.

"I... I need a... a minute." Blackish blood was dripping from Diz's mouth to the floorplates in disconcertingly resonant plinks. Once again, he was reduced to two arms.

Deeply weirded out by the whole affair and morbidly curious, Zach dabbled a hand through Viz's ghost's back... 

And all he could see was death. The mountains of bodies and rivers of blood, landscapes of corpses and suffering. It stretched for miles in every direction. Months had passed, but he could still see it, still smell it.

They had gotten away—they had just barely gotten away. And now he was stuck. Stuck in a spacecraft stolen from salvage with two liabilities: an Enquirer who had never had to hold a pistol, who couldn't recognise the rhythms of a starship, who stared at him with a mixture of belligerence and terror; and this, the grief-stricken corpse of his once dear friend, who stared at the sky without seeing it, who flinched whenever the engines made a sound even faintly dissonant.

Here he was, with nothing. Here they all were, persecuted and perishing. Stuck with an emblem of everything that had put them here in the first place with the bleeding remains of his most capable friend. Useless and hopeless and helpless, and he hated him. He hated him. Why couldn't he be better, stronger—why couldn’t he act like he was still alive? Why couldn't he be what he used to be?

Why did he have to lie there like something already dead and damned?

"No. Get up." There was a damp, sandbag thud as Viz drove his foot in to the collapsed figure's side. "You think they'll go easy on you?"

"I..." Diz levered one arm beneath him and shakily raised his chest off the deckplates.

Snarling, Viz started pacing. Despite their intangibility, both Phred and Zach, scattered hastily out of his way; there was a stormy agitation swirling about him and it was steadily consuming the room. Violence bled through the air in crackles of scarlet lightning.

"You need to learn to fight again," he ranted in his rasp-riddled voice. "You've got weak spots a mile wide. You think they'll go easy on you because you're a cripple?"

"I AM NOT CRIPPLED!" Diz shrieked, surging to his feet in a movement catlike not for its grace but it's sudden violence. In an unprecedented display of fierceness, he made an attempt to strike Viz, but it did little good; the red alien sidestepped with scornful ease, took ahold of Diz, and shook him until his wilting body crackled like a glow stick.

"You are, and you fight like it." Fingers digging viciously into flesh, Viz wrenched the boneless Diz close to his face, every word a guttural, brutal snarl. "They'll kill you first if they catch us."

"I hate you," Diz whispered, the words strangled and malformed. His eyes were huge, wet, and unseeing. He was shaking like something about to shatter. "I'm going to kill you. I hate you."

"Good." With dreadful casualness, Viz threw his friend back to the floor. "Get up. Get up and face me properly."

He'd have Deianacht back—the capable, bright-eyed pilot he had so relied on. He hammer him back in to shape if it fucking killed them both.

All this was very interesting and very unsettling, but wasn't bringing them any closer to finding Real Viz and so Zach resumed his search for screaming doors. If that search took them out of the room with its air thick with sweat, and blood, and rage, and if they departed sharply the very second they realised they could leave... there was nobody to call them out on it.

"So glad they're not aggressively fucked up all the time," Zach complained sarcastically, brushing his hands off on his jeans to dispel phantom shivers. "So glad destroying the whole entire Earth was an outlier. Would be a real shame if they were completely, mentally unbalanced—"

"Through here," Phred interrupted, waving him over to where he was leaning in to a patch of blackness towards the end of the corridor. "It's loudest in this corner." 

They dragged a vent panel open and a faint misting of howls poured out like cold air.

"Ladies first," said Zach, before crawling in to the gap. Phred waited a couple seconds before following, and spent the brief crawl threatening to steal Zach's shoes if he didn't go faster.

Time spat them out in the distant past again, before that unseen inflection point which changed everything and sent the V.I.Z.ion aliens spiralling off through the stars. Zach and Phred straightened up on a gantry, surrounded by the machinations of an engine room at rest. Steam filled the air in a dense mist, punctured through with clicks and creaks of cooling metal, heavy with the flinty taste of coal. 

This was the Invincible in her heyday, and she was magnificent.

In an open court down belowdecks, one of the auxiliary engines was being tended to, it's gleaming innards exposed to the light of the immense argon globes populating the maintenance bay like fat bubbles of soap, plentiful and multicoloured. Silhouetted by the gantry railings was a tall fine-boned figure who, it appeared, had once been going over Enquiry maps on a datapad but was now staring rapt at the machinery below. Nearby stood Captain Vlyanad, who watched the figure for some time before speaking.

"It's not in your job description to oversee engine repairs, soldier."

Deianacht glanced over his shoulder, saw the interloper was his captain, and smiled very slightly. It was not enough of an expression that anyone could call him on it, but the degree of warmth that slipped in to his manner was incriminatingly undeniable.

"Am I needed elsewhere? My communicator is online—anyone missing me can summon me to the bridge."

"No need. You're off duty, after all." Deciding it wouldn't hurt to take a break, Vlyanad joined the pilot at the railings and took a breath of the coppery heat that surrounded the engine even in dormancy. "I simply hadn't expected that you would spend your hours off watching machine parts be cobbled together. This is routine maintenance, the engineers can do it without an audience."

"It's fascinating," Deianacht defended, mouth turning upwards in a crooked, half-smile. "What did the good commander expect me to do with my time off?"

‘I don't know. I had no idea and so I had to come and find you. I'm standing here beside you and I'm still not sure I understand.’

"You?" He stared uncomprehending at the sculptures of gold the pistons made as they were disgorged from the body of the machine. "I admit, I was half convinced you just folded up in to a cupboard until you're needed again." 

"Ah." A small, self-depreciating smile flickered across Deianacht's face. "Only on weekends."

In the background of this moment of quiet companionship, a comedy of errors ensued, with Zach and Phred opening anything that even remotely resembled a door in search of the illusive whiff of screaming: a vent hatch; a turbine propeller; a loose bit of plating they accidentally ripped off the wall.

("Why did we decide to follow the screaming?"

"You got a better plan?"

"Kill all of the Vizs until we reach Ultimate Boss Viz, at which point we have an epic battle ending in his glorious defeat."

"And then we snog?"

"And then we snog.")

Blowing a tendril of fire out of his eyes, Zach took a step back and glared at the wall where there quite resolutely Was No Door. Over by the railing, Vlyanad and Deianacht were still stood talking—just talking; not plotting, or trying to kill each other, or meeting for the first time. Their voices were quiet, barely audible from where he was standing ... and yet, there was some significance to the scene, something more than his simple participation that tied Viz here. Squinting, Zach abandoned the search and returned to the pair, trying to work it out...

Why was this memory important?

"I wanted to be an engineer," Deianacht said suddenly. It was announced quickly, furtively, as though he were rushing the words out before his better sense stopped them. "Before... in the academy, I mean. I did three years in a mechanics course before they switched me over to aeronautics—there was a greater demand for skilled pilots and... I was good."

A stiffness submerged the scene, as though a gelling agent had somehow coagulated the air, making it thick and impossible to breathe. It was immediately apparent that Diz had done something wrong but precisely what that was remained a mystery to Zach. 

"You're an excellent pilot. It was very kind of The Enquiry to permit your transfer," Captain Vlyanad responded stiffly. He wasn't looking at Deianacht and that seemed to be something he Very Deliberately wasn't doing. Beside him, the pilot paled a touch, his mouth making a tiny, convulsive movement of fright before smoothing in to its usual neutral line. He wasn't as accomplished at it as Future Diz; his eyes said worry and were full of a nervous tension. Captain Vlyanad spoke with the impenetrable weight of a steamroller. "How fortunate that The Eyes caught your error."

"Of course," Deianacht agreed quickly, clearly fumbling. "They were correct to reassign me, obviously. I'd never question—they chose well for me. I don't mean to sound ungrateful."

"They know what the empire needs."

"And their judgement is just and fair," the pilot finished as though completing a mantra. He shifted his feet in awkward indecision, shame coloured with disappointment. "Forgive me for over-stepping sir, I meant no disrespect."

In the newly tense quiet that fell between the two, Zach poked the invisible knot of thoughts attached to the memory. The recollection of instinct, emotion, and intention was a spider's egg, spilling thousands of many-legged, creeping sensations that shivered across his skin the way they had once flitted through the halls of Vlyanad's mind.

Dissatisfaction with one's selected place was grounds to be declared a dissident, the centre of some malignancy which, if unchecked would bleed in to the ranks and turn the army on its head. There were measures to be taken with possible insurgents—report them to Enquiry, and the problem would be summarily removed. Peacekeeping was paramount, worth the lives of a hundred potential insurrectionists. It would matter very little if he made a mistake and condemned a loyalist.

And this—announcing dissatisfaction with Enquiry decisions, interest in another field, individual aspirations—was more than enough evidence to turn Deianacht over as a potential problem. He had signed others over for less—competitors whose vigilance slipped, petty rivals, other officials who posed a threat to his crew. It wasn't entirely selfish; failure to to report insurrection, if discovered by The Eyes, would be grounds for his own dismissal. 

And yet… there was something about it that touched his heart, this clumsy, naive proclamation of trust. Deianacht had handed over his throat without an ounce of hesitation, though his captain's hands were, by their very nature, clawed and bloodied things.

It was a stupid thing to do, undoubtably, but Deianacht was a good soldier, an excellent pilot, and, in his private estimation, a dear friend. And...

Zach could taste the words on Vlyanad's tongue, his own secrets drawn there sudden as blood to a paper cut. Though his captain was no longer listening, Deianacht was speaking again, his perfectly even tone determined but pained, his eyes fixed forwards.

"I'll comply with whatever measures you implement in light of this, but I swear I meant noth—"

"A scientist." There. He had said it. Zach vicariously felt the sort of adrenaline rush usually obtained from jumping off cliffs shudder down his spine. 

"… What?"

It was a few minutes before either of them spoke again, but Zach could feel the anticipation of it in the flavour of the memory, the held-breath tang of Waiting.

"When I was an Infantryman I was part of a unit stationed out at Research Station 16. We were there for three years." Vlyanad spoke deliberately but without emotion, his voice very quiet. "I was placed in a lab where I could watch the chemical technicians work. Every single one of them was brilliant. I wanted to understand what they were doing more than anything else in the world. I collected enough overtime stood watching them that The Enquiry fast-tracked my career to commander, in light of my dedication to duty."

There—we are even, said the secret. There—you are safe with me. There—we are the same. Young Diz looked like he had been handed something unbearably precious and was only now recognising the weight.

"They were well chosen."

"So were we." 

Quiet reigned once more, no longer anxious but still not entirely easy. Both aliens stood at the railings, faces pensive. They remained like this long enough for Zach to grow bored. Without more creepy '1984' nonsense to keep him captivated, he returned to poking about the scene, feeling conflicted in ways he couldn't quite explain.

No screaming in the metal slats of the gantry; no doorway to elsewhere hidden up Diz's sleeves; nothing to be gained by leaning out over the railings far enough to make his head turn dizzy at the drop.

"Nothing here," Phred reported, looking up from his own fruitless investigation and walking over in an easy lope that was a touch too carefree for the weird atmosphere. "I'm gonna try looking down the corridor—you take left, I take right?"

"Right."

"Left."

"Left?"

"Right."

"Got it. See you in five."

Far enough down the corridor that he could no longer hear the clamour of the engine room, and still Zach had found nothing; none of the doors opened on to anything unusual, none of the vents contained anything other than darkness, and there were no other hidden fissures he could crawl through. He was about to turn back when he caught it—not a screaming but, perhaps, a squeaking. A sound like an outraged dog toy, or a hamster's battlecry.

Zach stuck his head through the door of what seemed to be a utility closet, full of space-mops and space-buckets and ionising plasma coils; from somewhere in the very back came the pitchy sound of Quiz shouting.

"Ow!"

"Hold still Quiz."

Once again, time had flung itself asunder, dropping Zach in to the future; Quiz present and correct, his companions mutilated into familiarity. They were aboard a ship Zach didn't recognise, cramped and grimy, full of the rasp and rattle of its engines. The aliens were sat about a table made of metal crates, Viz holding a vocally disagreeable Quiz still with one set of hands and plucking a sewing needle through his cheeks with the other.

"You try holding still with someone stitching up your mouth!" Quiz snapped, his voice a little muffled by how stiffly he was holding his jaw. He eyed Viz's chronically unamused, stitched-up, patchwork sneer and gave a contrite wince. "Sorry."

Ignoring him, Viz continued to stare sceptically down at the smaller alien, his appraisal of his own handiwork palpably dissatisfied—whatever effect he had hoped to achieve had resulted instead in something like snakebite piercings. After a long minute he turned to Diz; even as he did it, more instinct than thought, Zach could feel his regret—talks with Diz were no longer something that eased his mind.

"How does he look?"

Diz sighed heavily, pulled from his examination of the star charts. His eyes looked like stones.

"Like Quircus with sewing thread stuck to his face," he snapped. Far more roughly than warranted, he took Quiz's jaw in hand, long, bony fingers squeezing hard enough to make the faintly belligerent Quiz stop fidgeting. "How's he supposed to look?"

"Different." 'Different enough without involving surgery; neither of us are qualified as medics, never mind plastics.' "We don't want him getting caught. He's far too distinct from the two of us."

The problem was, Quiz looked like a Nav—all soft, and distant behind the eyes, shoulders rounded by desk work. He acted like Enquiry too, full of comfortable self-importance and naive vanity. Even with his white uniform replaced by anonymous greys, what he was was unmistakable, Enquiry through and through.

And, though that didn't particularly matter in the case of their Imperial pursuers, it presented a massive problem for fugitives hoping to escape through a solar system unnoticed. Enquiry personnel were recognised, feared, and despised, no matter their status. If caught, Quiz would likely be sold for ransom by idiots not knowing he was a defector. Diz nodded thoughtfully, still squeezing Quiz's face.

"Well, if we're going for imitation, we could always rip off an arm. Scanners tell me my silhouette is unrecognisable."

Quiz squawked in alarm, blue skin pale under the pressure of the relentless fingers. He cut his eyes to Viz, half-plea half-demand to make the Second In Command stop.

"Diz..." Viz warned. The new name was still unfamiliar on his tongue, but it fit this thing wearing his old friend's skin, with its hidden ugly angles and newly empty smile.

"Or we could gouge out an eye if you're looking to fool facial recognition." Diz grinned mirthlessly. "You certainly don't look the same anymore."

Viz wished he would just scream. Anything would be better than this sick, glacial rage that lashed out indiscriminately without reason or recall. Something in him was splintered, and Viz had no idea if it was repairable or if this burningly cold wrath was a permanent furnishing to his helmsman's personality. There was nothing recognisable behind his eyes anymore.

At least he wasn’t dead. At least he wasn’t lying on the floor pretending to be a corpse.

With a frankly daunting amount of difficulty, he eased Diz’s cold, long-fingered hand away from the divots it had created in the ex-Enquirer's plump cheeks and placed it flat down on the table; aware he was taking a slight liberty, he left his own hand where it was, curled about his First Mate's wrist in something only partially a restraint. Quiz was warm about his side where he'd drawn in close for protection.

He didn't hate Quircus—Quiz—and he didn't think he could force himself to. The smaller alien had slipped in under the radar during those months of hideous numbness that immediately followed their escape, and it was impossible now to make him leave; he was an idiot, but he was trying. He was a liability, a constant aggravation, but he had willingly sat still as Viz sewed.

"... Let's just stick with the stitches."

Zach poked around a little further before concluding he had come to a dead end. Defeated, he pulled himself out of the cupboard, sending mops and brooms falling from his shoulders where they had crowded in to watch the scene themselves.

Back in the past, three figures were still stood at the observation deck's railings; Phred and the ghosts of what had once been Viz and Diz. The mammoth pieces of machinery surrounding them had taken up their industry once more, and the air was golden and smokey with heat and oil. It seemed that several years had passed.

"We would still work together," Deianacht was saying as Zach approached. Stood by their side, Phred was staring at them both with an almost analytical fascination, something soft and sorry hovering about the corners of his mouth. 

"Hm?" Vlyanad made a distracted, questioning sound, absorbed in a datapad. They were both speaking normally, voices crushed into anonymity beneath the leaden pound of metal.

"Chemtechs work with engineers all the time." Deianacht grinned, his uncertainty around his commander a thing of the past. "In another world, you still would have been stuck with me."

"Hm." A rougher, more amused sound. Finally, Viz deigned to turn his head. "Do you enjoy your job?"

"Flying? I love it. I love seeing the stars." The stars. The stars hidden behind a hundred years of battleground dust, the stars which exploded like technicolor fireworks with every pointless violence the warring planets hurled at each other. The pale, dying stars they saw maybe once or twice a year. Young Diz's face was wistful. "I love knowing that I could take us anywhere, that this beautiful piece of machinery is mine... in the ways that matter, at least. Everyone listens to you—we'd be nowhere without you—but I'm the only one who can fly Invincible. I love being a pilot, I just..." Wish I'd had a choice? Perhaps. The sentence went unfinished.

"Maybe when the war is won in our favour, you and I can work together again."

The smile on Diz's face didn't belong there; it was tender, and warm, and real.

"It would be an honour, Captain."

("Is this the inherent homoeroticism of war?"

"Oh definitely." Phred led him to a crevice in the side of the now functioning engine, where the shrieks were muffled by the roaring motors. "Come on—there's a gap between these pipes here."

"Lead on mate.")

The blistering heat of the working engine gave way to the equally blistering if rather more organic rigours of a scorching wind, full of teeth in the form of a million granules of desert sand. Had the humans been there in the flesh... well, they very quickly wouldn't have been; it would be their sandblasted skeletons, singed ochre instead of red, and not their wet, flesh eyes that bore witness to the next scene in the world's worst pantomime. 

They had emerged somewhere arid and dark as organ meat, red expanses of sand arcing far away, speared through by towering structures of melted glass. The place was meaninglessly cruel and host to nothing alive. Or native to nothing alive—four out-of-place figures clustered in a pool of shadow beneath one of the glass sculptures, a blot of something not-quite-shade fraught with mirage rainbows like sunlight stuck in smears of petrol. Above them, the magenta sky hung like something physical, like something which might collapse.

Looking at the little group was inevitable, but, with slightly nauseous consideration, Zach avoided examining any of them too closely; at first they appeared like Halloween mummies, bound in loose loops of ragged bandages... but then the eye noted the glisten of the bandaging, the living wetness slowly drying into crust that cracked and dribbled further wetness. By the time one had looked long enough to realise that the dressings were actually hanging reams of rent and rejected flesh… suddenly it was impossible to think of anything else. Quick as he could, Zach picked out Viz, nudged Phred into following him, and started a campaign of ignoring everything in his peripheral vision, trying to scrub the thought of cooked meat from his mind.

Vlyanad looked little better than his comrades; the remains of his face were something nightmarish. Almost trepidatiously, Zach swiped a hand through him, in a gesture like a cat trying to swat something off the edge of the table. There was part of him that hoped the alien would disappear in a puff of smoke but he didn't.

He felt... calmer than he should have. His eye was gone. He should probably be upset about that, at some point. He'd have to remember for later. He had to trust that there would be time for such things later. So many other things to think about, so many distractions from the glaring fact that his whole world had been neatly sliced in half. So many reasons to think of anything other than the sear of skin and boil of blood and the clinical clean of cold, white walls.

Something was stuck in his throat, something tangled in tendons as dry and flaky as old leather, a scribble of something that pulled at every twitch of his head. It was indistinct knot of ligament that seemed determined to strangle him and he kept moving his head in a masochistic bid to let it do so; better to think of that, and not the gentle, careless smile of the Enquirer who told him not to worry, that it would all be over soon. 

... The desert was going to kill them, wasn't it? He'd heard stories of people who stayed to long in the Sirragon; he'd seen the glass sculptures medics pulled from inside his dead comrades' lungs, the very air vitrified by layer upon layer of melted mineral. How dismal to escape the impossible only to bake to death. But he was Incendiary—it had always been presumed that heat would kill him somehow. Such was the fate of most crews. Not like this though... never like this...

And this wasn't his crew. 

No. No. They weren't going to die. It was his job to make them Not Die.

With an ugly twist of a limp, Viz crossed to a figure sat on the floor, one that seemed slightly more attentive than the others, it's glazed, wan face focused on him. There was little doubt about who it was, and even those few hesitancies were chased away by the way the not-stranger straightened at Viz's approach; some traits are immutable, painfully so. 

"You friend, the one who was selected for Enquiry... what was his name?" Had Zach not been inside Viz’s head, he wouldn’t have had a clue what the alien was saying; his scorched tongue made a miserable mangle of every syllable.

Diz blinked slow as molasses. When his eyes closed, they did so in a manner that suggested they might not open again. "... Quircus..."

"What sector was he?"

"... Nav... Hands..." Another blink, accompanied by a grimace as the pilot tried to focus. "Quircus would help us."

"You're certain?" Diz tried to nod his head and succeeded in giving himself a nosebleed. Viz dredged up half-sunk memories of Tertiary Navigation headquarters, constructions crafted partly from his own recollections but mostly from Diz's descriptions of the letters he received. The city of Monolin—not the capital by any means, but a centre of industry nonetheless. Getting there would be a minefield. "... Do you have any better ideas?"

Diz shook his head. Blood collected at his pointed chin and began to drip in rivulets down his throat. No attempt was made to stem it.

"Alright then." Viz offered his hand and, after a few failed attempts, Diz took it and dragged himself to his feet. "We should start walking... there's still six hours to go until dawn..."

The Something caught in his throat wound tugged and, with fingers he couldn't feel, Vlyanad struggled to dislodge it. He barely understood the sensation of tearing, leathered scales crumbling in to his shirt where they itched like sand. Whatever it was—some small, blackened rectangle with a scorched-fragile chain—fell heavily in the dust before him. The letters left on it were best discerned by feel and not sight and, given that Viz currently had neither, it was fortunate he knew them by heart.

Vlyanad 717-960

I.S.S. Invincible

Zone 64c

With shaking fingers, Former Captain Vlyanad traced his ruined identifying tag. There was a scratch that scored across the plate, destroying almost all the letters. Almost all of them.

In a movement rough with rage and pain, Viz stuffed it in to the pocket of his ruined coat. Trailing blood and pieces, the motley crew moved on across the windswept plains, headed to the elusive (and, potentially, illusive) grey blemish on the horizon.

For a time, Zach and Phred simply followed the group, eyes fixed firmly on the ever-shifting sands. Indeed, they followed them for so long that the scene dissolved around them without the need for doors, melting into streaks which faded from the plane of existence like smears of mist on a window pane. All the redness of the desert disappeared, replaced by the mundane fixtures of a kitchen, the usual assortment of cupboards and sinks. Zach and Phred stood there like deer in the headlights, if those deer-in-headlights had somehow managed a successful B & E into B & Q.

Viz was there, asymmetric eyes highlighted with a disappointingly un-piratical medical eyepatch. Quiz stood in the doorway, dressed in a pristine white uniform, watching his strange guest... well, quizzically.

From the direction of the living room doorway came a high, hysterical voice:

"... Reactor pits overflowed, and the bulkheads blew... My beautiful girl, my ship... Oh storms and stars, they're all dead, aren't they?"

It dissolved into soft sobbing, which the disgraced captain tiredly tuned out with the ease of long exposure. A second, more familiar voice was attempting to offer condolences, but it was steeped in its own endless miseries and made little headway before falling silent.

"Thank you for letting us stay," he said after a time, a small distraction from the lament next door. Quiz jumped in the way a person might if their favourite TV Soap suddenly addressed them during a tense moment. 

"It's fine." The thanks were waved away with the impatient swiftness of someone who has more important things on their mind. The Enquirer had small, soft hands that he fidgeted with constantly. "Is... is it true? Is it true that you didn't know? We... they didn't tell you where we were sending you?"

"No."

"God..." Quircus whispered, something hollowing out of his soft face. "I didn't... I thought... I was only low-level, I never..." 

Things were registering to Viz only very slowly; it took a long minute of processing for it to realise what the Enquirer meant. 

"You didn't know?"

"Oh no, I did—I just thought you knew too." Though he was looking at Viz, it was obvious the Enquirer's apology was directed at someone else, someone beyond hearing. "I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry."

Those rust-caked gears in Viz's head struggled through the motions, choking on the threads of thought. A low level Enquiry Nav would be responsible for anywhere up to five ships at a time; Viz wondered how many Enquirer Quircus had Controlled, how many he had sent unknowing on their final, suicidal missions. 

The space in his chest where emotion should sit was empty, a shelf bereft of its contents, and he couldn't bring himself to care for the Enquirer's words or deeds, past, present, or future. Quircus felt like a toy or prop, something to boo in a pantomime, a helpless, toothless caricature; he couldn't even summon the will to wish he could hate him. The apology beaded against his mind and rolled off, disappearing into an abyss. 

Where was the paper towel? Numb and filled with static, Viz returned to his ministrations, doing his best to ignore the lingering shape of Quircus hanging in the blurry, foreshortened space of his peripheral vision.

"Where will you go?"

"Not sure."

"Ah." Another nervy flutter of the soft, small hands. "We should probably start working that out, then."

It took a few beats for Viz's heart to stop in its tracks but, once the words permeated the fog, it stilled entirely.

"We?"

"I'm coming with you." Quircus spoke with the Enquiry's ever-ready certainty. "They'll kill me too, if they find out you were here and I said nothing. It's only a matter of time before Eyes fall on me, I'm not staying here." With a familiar sense of imperiousness, Quircus raised his chin—more than he had to already to look the taller alien in the eye. "You owe me."

He could kill him, The Former Captain Vlyanad recognised very distantly. Indeed, it would be be a very easy thing to do—one good, hard strike to that soft, unprotected throat to knock him down and then... but he couldn't make his hands move.

"What do you expect us to do?"

"I’m not really sure..." Looking not so much awkward as dissatisfied, Quiz cast around his kitchen. "Do you... is there a plan?"

Was there? He knew there should be—it had been three days—but his thoughts were still sizzling under ion fire and the dry heat of a desert sun. The final part of the plan (the bit where he made everyone pay) was a given, but the middle was badly muddled and the beginning was nonexistent; as three part plans go, that's pretty ruinous. It was highly unlikely they would be able to remain planet-bound...

... A navigator from the Enquiry, even one with ostensibly low seniority, would know enough to get them out of the solar system and in to another one.

Matter decided, Viz shut the cupboard with a sharp snap.

"Get us far away from here, and I'll tell you."

Both aliens left to other rooms. Neither Zach nor Phred commented on this, moving about the now empty kitchen in silence. They followed the worsening clamour through the cupboard under the kitchen sink, feeling very much like oversized children in the world's worst playhouse. 

Time spat them out once again aboard the V.I.Z.ion ship, it's patchwork halls dark but for a slice of white light too far down the corridor to offer any distinction.

"We've bloody been here!"

And indeed they had. They hadn’t enjoyed it the first time. It was the same training room with the same sparring partners, but time had marched on and done its work on both the ship and its occupants. The grey metal was dark stained in splatters and splotches, and the aliens were moving frighteningly quickly.

The sparring progressed with its usual violence (which is to say far more violence than a usual sparring session would warrant) and, after last time, the aggression was not a surprise. What was a surprise was that Diz appeared to be winning, and that Viz was pleased by this.

Without remorse or restraint, Viz delivered a blow to Diz's unprotected side, the kind that, mere weeks ago, would have left his lieutenant struggling for breath and coughing blood, but was this time, to his brief sense of surprise, shaken off. Whatever modifications Diz had done to himself seemed to be working this time around. If they were fortunate, this would mean no more surgeries lay in their immediate future; it would be good to get out of the operating theatre, to end this cycle that revolved them both between the medical bay and this dismal arena…

In that moment of pleased distraction, Diz moved behind his captain. Retrospectively, Viz understood that this was where things had gone wrong, and Zach shuddered as that knowledge coiled between the bones of his spine. 

Diz had been hiding something up his sleeve. He slipped it out now and Viz could feel the burning cold edge of it against his throat. A plasma cutter. The little knife he used for everything from surgeries to indelicate bits of machinery. And now it's icy smile was pressed against the soft dip in Viz's neck where his blood beat quick against his skin. Diz’s body was pressed flush against his back, his head dropped to Viz’s shoulder, watching him best he could.

"Say it," Diz hissed, mouth twisting, when he spoke, in to an awful rictus before going flat with silence. "I'm not worthless."

Viz could feel his heart beat in every vein. How strange it was, he recognised distantly, to be so entirely aware of every inch of the life that wove him together, all the cording that bound up his blood and made it useful. How pointless it was, to be so aware of such things now.

"If you need me to tell you you're worth something then all I have to say is you've lost the self respect I admired you for."

"Giving up?"

"I'm not entertaining a tantrum from someone who should know better." Slyly, he tested the strength of the arm pinning his own limbs to his torso; it held firm, but if he twisted one of the lower pair just right… there was only so much one against four could manage. "Get off me or get it over with. Your dramatics are tiresome. What do you think you're going to prove?"

Diz's eyes flickered, considering—losing focus. Viz didn't give him the chance to get to the end of whatever thought it was; in that second of hesitation, he pushed his lower left hand up through the blade and leveraged it away from his throat, sending the little knife skittering across the floor. In retaliation, Diz kicked the back of his knees in an effort to knock him to the floor; certain that the knife would be retrieved the second Diz was free, Viz held grimly on to the arm which had been restraining him, and the pair of them tumbled inelegantly to the floor. Locked together, they rolled pointlessly about. Forced to grapple with twice the number of arms he himself had, Diz lost, but Zach could feel the visceral struggle of putting him down as a phantom burn in his own muscles.

Eventually, Viz succeeded in throwing his lieutenant from him, leaving them both lying separated on the bloodstained mat. Diz stayed still where he had been shoved, that considering expression seared in to his face, making no attempt to fetch his blade. The two combatants knelt on the floor, hands frozen on each other. Stunned, hazy with adrenaline, Viz looked at his palm, split neatly between his second and third fingers. He couldn’t feel it.

He wasn’t angry, Zach realised with a sensation like a gulp in his gut. Wary, certainly, and there was something dark under the shock… but he wasn’t angry.

If he restarted the fight, Diz would kill him. If he gave him the option to hurt something, he would take it. Viz very carefully did neither of those things, and gradually the sediment in the room settled and their breathing cooled.

"Would you have done it?"

"Perhaps." Diz’s face bore the expression of someone whose playing field had abruptly changed. Someone who had, after a life time of playing draughts, recognised that the board could also be used to play chess. It was the face of someone who had realised nothing mattered to them anymore and could not yet work out if that was a bad thing. Certainly, it was not an unhappy expression, but perhaps it should have been. "I'm not helpless."

"No. You're not." There were too many complicated feelings attached to that for Viz to parse. He was finally certain that Diz would survive whatever came after them, but how could that certainty feel so much like loss? It was too late to reach out and put an arm around the man beside him, and Viz was no longer the sort of person who could have managed such a thing. The urge was swallowed, more bitter than the blood. Perhaps it had always been too late. "And for what it's worth, you have my respect. You have always had it. I advise you not to lose it." 

They sat there until the automatic lights went out. Whatever could have been said, whatever words could have passed between them, went unremarked—neither spoke to the other for the rest of the night. Zach couldn't tell which thoughts were ones Viz had had at the time and which were retrospective; every single one had the melancholy bite of coming years too late—'I miss you. I'm sorry. I know you're long gone. I know I'm sat here with a dead man. I think I might have killed you. I hate you. I'll never leave you. I wish I'd never met you. I wish we had both died. I want us to see the stars. I'm dragging your corpse around the galaxy so I don't have to be alone. You'd have found that funny. I miss you... I'm sorry.'

"C'mon, let's go," Zach said softly, tugging lightly at Phred's sleeve. He was eyeing the pair with a sort of horrified pity, something very close to revulsion.

Into the cracks in the tile they went, squirming through the chill, rough passage as though deep within a cave, their breath clammy cold on their faces. Gradually, by scant degrees that seemed to take eternity to take effect, the dim, purple glow at the faraway mouth of the cave widened and brightened, opening up in to an arched doorway.

The pair emerged on the V.I.Z.ion ship, in a dark, sparsely furnished laboratory, all three aliens sat at the benches. They had managed to refuel at an unattended outpost station meant for cargo ships. No one had noticed them, and so no one had died; their hands were clean for once. It was the end of a good day, a quiet day. Everything was peaceful, so very peaceful. The sort of stillness and calm he had never expected to enjoy again. 

At one of his tables, one they had unceremoniously cleared for the purpose, Quiz and Diz were playing some sort of card game from their academy days; to his mild surprise, Quiz was winning, and Diz was taking the time between turns to recount a story about a game that involved the entirety of their campus and lasted full a month. Professor Tresbane had been enraged to discover such frippery but had never suspected its ringleaders—high test scores and Quiz's selection for Enquiry had put them both beyond reproach.

Zach observed the scene in silence, feeling strangely sorry. Not sorrow of the personal kind, the kind he experienced at the prospect of Phil's death, but a breed of sadness nonetheless. The universal humanity of witnessing some endless, inevitable tragedy. With Viz's complete understanding of the past and future within his own mind, he knew circumstances such as this were rare. It was the way he'd felt that one time Smiley had dragged them all to a production of King Lear; he hadn't understood the play at all, but he had felt obliquely bad for everyone else who was sat in the theatre hall as the dark was ruined by his bonfire head—a nice night ruined.

That's what this was; a nice night destined to be ruined over, and over, and over again, and again, and again, and again. This was the high point of the wheel.

Zach stood for a time, urgency unheeded, and simply watched the game: Quiz won the first, and the second, then Diz gloatingly won the third. During the fourth Viz threatened to set the cards alight if he wasn't allowed some space to work and the other two laughed at him without a trace of fear. Quiz gamely offered to deal him in on the next round and, though the gesture was refused, it was as gentle a rejection as Viz was capable and it did nothing to dampened the spirit of the evening.

By the time the fifth game had started up, Phred had found the sliver thin gap in space time that would take them to whatever memory lay next in line to Viz's heart. Another tunnel admitted them, and the further along its length they walked, the more violent the noises grew. Phred, who had been walking ahead, doubled back to Zach's side with a quiet 'nope'.

They emerged aboard the Invincible one last time; the hallway was lit only by the dull sear of emergency lights and the air smelled of brine and old-ten-pence. 

Here it was, the Eye of the screaming.

Usually, when one invokes the phrase 'the eye of the storm', it is to give a sense of calm amidst the ultimate disorder, an abolition of all the chaos of rending air and writhing cloud for a pillar of dove-calm peace. An oasis, of sorts. In this instance, however, it is to indicate the zenith, the point of origin, the dark, twisting heart of a tornado which commands bastions of destruction with a cool-eyed grace unparalleled. 

The ship that Diz had been so proud of was visibly aged. The intervention of so many years had left it worn, all that had once been gleaming left dull and lightless, the pipes lichen-spotted with verdigris, the grating of the deckplates blooming with patches of rust. 

The air was peppery with ozone and terror. None of the lights were working with any consistency, the corridors full of ink dark flickers. Wires were bursting from the walls. Trembles ran rife through the whole structure; Zach could feel them in his bones. From somewhere outside the ship came a succession of great, leathery whumpfs like the extinguishing of massive candles. The floor shuddered and lurched, the walls trembling, the entire ship throbbing like a frightened heart.

And through it all—from every direction, even louder than the omnipresent, heaving churn of the engines—came the screaming. A thousand throats shredding themselves with senseless, anguished, agonised noise.

All those ancient animal instincts that lie dormant and buried in the folds of the human psyche came alight, whispering instruction to the fear swirling smokily in the blood; run, it breathed in an inscrutable language, run and hide. Run and fight, run or die. Zach's hand found Phred's and they gripped each other tight.

"What the fuck?" Phred whispered as they crept forwards. "What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck—"

Up ahead was the door to the bridge, slightly ajar and clattering on its hinges as the ship groaned and swayed. Shrieks spilled out alongside the glare of emergency lights, hot and bright red. 

They had spent the entire walk there wondering, in their own nervously oblique ways, who was screaming. As it turned out, this was the wrong question; it would have been better to ask 'who isn't screaming?'

Beyond the splintered viewport, the vast sky was an open wound in burgundy, mammoth shapes heaving their vast, ambiguous bulk through blood thick air, wreathed in violet lightning, fat sparks flying from them and striking the ship. Explosions battered against the hull, massive scraps of debris hurled through the air outside like leaves in a storm. Strange radiations sluiced through the fabric of the room, rinsing out the flesh; even detached from true sensations by the tacky film of dreaming, Zach could feel the energies worming into his teeth and making them ache. Every console was a mass of electronic shrieking and strobing lights, spasms of failing machinery visible beneath cracked casing. Panicking aliens were running from disaster to disaster, flung about by explosions like dolls, tripping over bodies sprawled across the floor. In the centre of it all stood Captain Vlyanad, yelling orders above the calamity.

Several of his officers were lying dead. As the humans watched, another explosion outside caused an overhead pipe to burst, sending a bolt of shrapnel into the head of the woman beside him; her body crumpled across the controls and yet another alarm added its voice to the dreadful chorus, every indicator light on that panel beginning to flash red.

"Bring us about!" Vlyanad roared in the direction of the helm and, when Zach whirled around to look, he saw a pale-faced Deianacht frantically complying in the seconds before everything exploded.

The centre of a ball of fire, the ship gave a titanic heave. Every inch of its mass raised its voice in insurrection to these barbarous rigours of physics and all other noise was lost in its cataclysmic, metal bellow, until the ears of the listening phantoms gave out. Nothing that happened after had any sound at all—that ever-present scream, singular and undulating, had finally ceased. Quiet filled the ears, a quiet full of heartbeats like the black shapes on sun-blotted vision

The wheel did its best to rip itself from Deianacht's tangled hands and, for its efforts, partially succeeded. When at last it completed its mad revolutions, the world dipping hideously under its exertions, Zach found to his rising nausea, that two of Deianacht's arms were still attached to their place at the helm, though the alien himself had been sent clean across the room in the initial jolt. With an absolute lack of comprehension, Deianacht stared at his post, at his own dangling limbs. Immediately he began making attempts to regain his feet and return to them, and seemed dreadfully confused when that didn't happen. His lips shaped words Zach neither heard nor understood.

Alongside the children he could not see and would not know for years yet, Deianacht turned his desperate gaze to his commander...

Of whom, there were now two.

A lump of unidentifiable debris had flown into Captain Vlyanad's eye, the black jelly oozing around its intrusion and dripping down his face in clumps like thick tears. Shards of something else peppered his cheeks, with the largest destroying one side of his mouth and part of his throat. His jawbone poked out of a twist of ruined flesh, translucent and full of veins and teeth; it twitched as his ruined mouth attempted to continue forming words.

And there, standing over the destroyed captain, was the person Phred and Zach had come to find; Viz, the older one—the real one—stitched together and snarling, his face half-hidden by angular shades. He raised his head to meet the stares of the humans who shouldn't be in his head; he did not move and he did not speak. His face gave nothing away at all.

Phred took the gun from Commander Vlyanad's prone form and shot Ultimate Boss Viz. The plasma round sizzled a neat hole straight through the alien's sternum, a hole that bled smoke and cinders until, still expressionless, he collapsed into a pile of burnt tatters, and the dream started to dissolve. With a rasping wheeze, Vlyanad finally went limp at their feet, fading in to blackness with his crew.

The two humans stood together, in the heart of desolation, in the dying embers of the screams, and looked wordlessly at each other. The world burned through to abyssal, white ash before either of them could think of something funny to say.

Chapter Text

ENTERING DREAMSCAPE 8964: PRISONER 001

✯ 

Darkness was suffocating. Oil thick and tarry, it flooded in through the nose, mouth, and eyes, pouring itself endlessly in to the pliant vessel of the body and filling its sacred halls with that singular, enduring blackness. There was an abstract sense of vastness to the place, not in the way the sky is vast but the way the ocean is; it exerted the crushing pressure of miles against every inch of Ada's body until she could hardly draw breath. She felt like she had been transported from the safe haven of her own body to the bottom of the sea, where the crushing, lightless depths could crush the frail crepe of her soft tissues down into her bones. An intermittent pulsing reverberated through the jelly cradled between her ribs with an intensity that ached. It felt like the sort of place that killed the things that lived within it.

And yet, there was… something down there with her. She could feel it; a shimmery, invisible presence drifting just out of reach... 

"I'm too fucking old for this shit," Ada growled in to the void, and the void, long-suffering and slightly bored, looked at her in askance. Was there a right age for this shit? Was ‘age’ really the quantifier she was looking for, or was it simply shorthand for something she didn't want to confront, like 'close-minded' or 'tired'? An eleven year old boy had apparently managed this just fine; was a child the optimum for something so unavoidably disturbing?

When the void stops taking one's screaming and frustrations and decides instead to open a dialogue with you, it is often a sign you have spent too much time with it and should probably move on, so Ada did precisely that.

The Something in the deep slithered, drawing closer to where she hung helplessly suspended like a drowning sailor. Darkness clung to It too, swallowing up Its details even as It dragged its immense bulk forwards. It grew no clearer, no more distinct; knowing It was approaching was more a matter of instinct than sight, and yet Ada could feel the shape of it surrounding her. It was a thing of drifting chains all tangled and interlocked with each other; It had nothing in the fashion of eyes, or a centre, or a head, but Ada could feel It peering at her with a sense of appraisal. 

With more instinct than thought, Ada attempted to propel herself away from the encroaching reach of the chains, each of which, she now realised, was as thick around as a man, but the blackness offered no purchase and her agitation seemed only to spur the Thing on. It's lazy, indifferent approach gained speed if not urgency. Tendrils enveloped her, not touching but surrounding her on all sides, engulfing her in the outermost fringes of a monster that stretched on for miles. Ada felt the loss of the wider outside as though she'd stepped into a trap; she had lost entirely that first sort of blackness and was enclosed by a second, one that was thicker and more ponderous. The other darkness had been the dark of a pitiless night sky; this was the dark of a prison cell.

Where before there had been a pressing, stifled sort of silence, there was now a constant, low susurration like the low chittering of seed pods gossiping in the wind. The whispers slithered against her—not in through her ears, but coldly across her face like hoards of hair-thin snakes that made her gasp and flinch, terrified that they would begin to invade her airways as the darkness had. They spoke soothingly of a thousand murderous things, terrific acts of violence, scandal, outrage, and oblivion, all told in the rocking cadence of a foreign lullaby. 

It was the darkness itself, she realised after a beat. It was a million thoughts and feelings and dreams and memories, and it all belonged to whatever lay in the inky sea around her.

(Somewhere far away, Ada could still faintly feel her body. Thick and heavy in her ears, her heart placidly tolled out her life, unaffected by the spasming of these imagined nerves and this hypothetical body’s fear of suffocation. 'All will be well,' it whispered, but it was hard to hear above the creature.)

Which resembled, Ada realised, nothing so much as a deep sea denizen patterned like the night sky. Her eyes had cleared and adjusted and she saw now robin's-egg speckles of green-blue glow patterning, coating the far horizons of her new enclosure, shifting slowly as the monster moved. The nodular lengths of chain were home to a thousand bulges of dim, blueish bioluminescence like half-dissolved ghosts. There was nothing even slightly human about It; all three aliens—but this one especially—had at least had about them the illusion of something mundane, the bipedalism and mannerisms of a man. None of that had translated in to this... Thing.

But when It spoke, it did so with Diz's quiet, perfectly even, slightly nasal voice.

"You're not who I expected to see." There was no singular point from which the voice came, no mouth—nothing that looked like Diz at all. Nothing that looked like anything at all. "Sundae, wasn't it?"

Startled, Ada struggled through an underwater attempt to whip about and face her nonexistent observer, and succeeded only in sending herself spinning in slow cartwheels. 'Amused,' the whispers rustled, and she made a reflexive attempt to bat them away; the shadow sibilance laughed harder.

"Where the hell are you?" Ada called, chilled by how flat and heavy her voice sounded. Around her, the creature rippled.

"Everywhere. I am everything." The delirious, dreamy joy in that voice was not something that belonged to anything sane, and it set the hairs on Ada's neck prickling. "I expected better hallucinations. Go away… or at least bring the other ones back."

"I'm afraid I'm real." Cautiously, Ada peered into the gloom and found nothing she recognised. "Quiz sent me to get you out of here."

As it turned out, this was the wrong thing to say. Ada was borne violently upwards on the back of a sudden swell of feeling, like a wave rushing into the mouth of a cave and filling the dark recess brimful with swirling, silver cold. It filled her lungs and she choked on it. For a singular instance, she understood everything so completely the emotions of it were her own... and then that moment was was gone, the wave receding, leaving her hollow and shaken.

'—Soft, simple, culpable Quiz—Why is he here? Why didn't he leave, why is he here?—How dare he show up to play saviour after everything he did, how dare he act the hero now—(A mixture of despair, anticipation, betrayal, and relief that the long wait for Quiz to defect would finally be at an end)—(A wave of misery that this was how a decades long friendship ended)—Quiz is going to die, I cant fix it this time—The last thing I said was awful... the last conversation we had was an artificial argument... the last thing I did with this life was send Quiz away—Quiz never apologised, I'm never going to get to forgive him now—He was never going to apologise; he’d do anything to be useful—‘

"Oh, Quiz!" Spat the voice, so densely filled with unhappiness its words struck like a blow, like a whip crack. The weight of all those thoughts condensed into that one word. "Of course it's him interfering again. He never bloody leaves anything alone!"

Swallowing and shivering, feeling half-drowned, Ada struggled to remember who she was and why she was there; all her memories felt scattered, like bits of loose paper a hurricane had blown from a binder. The slow sway of the lights above her desperately upturned face was as hypnotic as it was eerie.

"He is trying to save your life," she sternly told the ungrateful stars, feeling irrationally defensive on the behalf of Quiz and that earnestness he had exposed on the bus.

(Even so, she was palpably aware, however, that she had only the oddments left in the drawer, the outline of their lives together, and had very little recourse for rectifying that. It mattered very little; her investment in the situation was Diz’s, and vice versa. They were, against both their wills, indivisibly meshed.)

"I didn't ask him to." In a movement like the clenching of a fist, the chains spasmed. "Maybe I should have—that would have put him off! He never does the things I ask."

Another raw bolt of emotion went through Ada's heart; it didn't belong to her, but it stirred her blood all the same, jangled loose words that tasted like hot pennies.

"He risked everything to come and fetch your goddamn corpse! God only knows why. What you've done to earn that loyalty has yet to be seen."

Violence suffused the air with a hot heaviness like thunder and, this time, it did not leave.

"Don't you dare talk to me about loyalty." Another ripple, and the bulges of light heaved with angry pulses of brightness. "Quiz isn't innocent!” 

"I never said that he was. I will say you’re insane.”

There was no denial to this but the air shifted its weight in a manner like a boxer limbering up before pulling away; it had no refutation, and now it was close to sulking. The pressure didn’t ease. Being stuck in Diz's head, Ada reflected, was a lot like being stuck in a nightmare; the clammy, cloying, claustrophobic sensation of something rotted sour and too small. Every inch of darkness had the stretched, strained aspect of something that might, at any second, explode.

In the moment of heavy quiet that fell, Ada studied the construction of chains and tendrils enveloping her, the monster with its familiar voice. With it pulled back, without the foreign thoughts pressing down on her own, it was easier to think, to consider her situation. When they had initially announced the plan, the children and Quiz had all tried to prepare her for what she would find, recalling scenarios of schools, and empty office buildings, and memories dredged from deep within the mind. None of it had suggested this. She wondered if Quiz had even known this was a possibility. This incomprehensible mass of the creature loomed high enough to frighten her. She was out of her depth, at the bottom of the ocean on a planet that was made entirely of sea.

(Quiz would have still sent her in here, even if he did know. About that, Ada had absolutely no doubts.)

She didn't know him—she didn't know any of them, but Diz, most of all, was a mystery. Theatres are infamously represented by dual masks of comedy and tragedy; Diz's performance was characterised by one of absolute neutrality and, at times, there hadn't seemed to be anything underneath it.

And yet, he was the one she had spoken to the most; he didn't have Quiz's affable naivety, or Viz's self-assured arrogance. He had been quietly, guardedly amicable—a strange presence, to be sure, but unobtrusive and, at times, almost friendly. It was impossible to say how much had been an act, where the performance ended and the person began. She was stuck in his mind, surrounded by him, battered by feelings like a little ship adrift in a fierce storm, and she somehow understood even less.

Ada imagined this colossal being curled up in the too-small confines of a person's skull, hidden behind flat eyes and a still-water smile, and felt slightly ill.   

"Is it true?" She asked, and the thing's attention dragged over her with the weight of a body.

"Is what true?"

'Anything. Has anything you've ever said been true? Are you even real?'

"All of it. Everything that Quiz told us. That you and Viz were—"

"I've heard that story once today," interrupted that disembodied voice, tension straining the membranes of the space around her to breaking. "Once too many. If that's what you came for, you can leave."

Cold sat on a thorny throne in the marrow of Ada's bones, of which she could suddenly feel every ridge. She was aware of the weight of muscle on every sinew, the delicate threading of her nerves through the fibres of her, how hard her body was working to keep her alive. There were a hundred million people in the world, alive and awake just like her: the teenager in the newsagent's down the road who had a new piercing every few months, and always greeted her with a brilliant smile; her neighbour, Alexi, who spoke very little English but often appeared on her doorstep to offer her a taste of whatever dish he was making; the bin woman whose face she had never seen but who was immediately identifiable by her husky voice singing cheerfully along to Queen as she worked; the old gentleman who always tipped his hat to her on the bus she took most mornings, with his tiny, toothless Yorkie tucked discreetly into his coat.

Ordinary people; the world was full of them, and the absence of just those four would be irreparable. It was only hypothetical and she still felt sick with the loss of them. To scale it up, to depersonalise the situation and offer it its full magnitude, was impossible, a concept crumpling beneath the weight of its own tragedy. Ada would have sunk to her knees if there had been ground to support her weight.

She hadn’t really believed it when it was her children telling her about their misadventures at eleven. The horror of it hadn’t sunk in when relayed piecemeal by Quiz, who had to keep doubling back to add context and bits of the story he had forgotten. Diz… she believed him. His honesty was as unadorned and unflinching as sea air.

Third time’s a charm, and all that.

"So you were going to destroy Earth." Ada wished there was a face to direct herself to. "Why?"

"Because it's fun," the voice said leadenly.

But he didn't really mean 'fun'; there was another sentiment hidden behind it, like the words 'YOU LOST' lurking behind the bright and cheerful veneer of a scratch card. Still, it popped in Ada’s head like fireworks: fun...

She had saved him. It had been a patch job at best, imperfect and hasty, but it had taken hours, and she had worried over it. The texture of his viscera was stark in her memory: the pastry-thin layers of flesh; the thick, sticky chill of the blood; the writhing of unfamiliar organs in her hands, discoloured and delicate. She had been careful, so careful—she wished she had taken that literal black heart in her fist and squeezed.

"You're a piece of work." 

A scoff echoed dully around the cavernous walls, amusement, weariness, and disdain rippling through those glowing nodules.

"You're talking to the wrong person. Viz is the one who gets tangled up in matters of petty morality. Go bother him and leave me alone."

"Great idea." At that moment, Ada would have done anything to abandon the dreadful leviathan and its maelstrom thoughts, with killing Diz being the least of it. For the first time, it registered to her that she had materialised with something clutched tightly in her hand. A revolver. Her husband's. His father’s, before that. He'd hoped to teach their daughter to shoot it one day. "Come here and let me kill you so we can leave."

All the lights went out and the illusion of a universe died with them.

She couldn’t breathe. It was like being inside a chamber in a machine, able to feel the pressure of mechanical exercise on every side, the heave of pistons, the grind of gears, stuck suspended in the steel-clad quiet of some godforsaken pipe. Or the centre of a vampire’s dead heart, cold and stiff but still moving, full of thick blood, tightening in intermittent convulsions. Without the lights, there was no creature, no consciousness, only a living prison.

Ada fought for every stifling breath, letting blackness pour down into her lungs unimpeded in a desperate reflex. Her voice was strained, like something that should hurt but didn't.

"We're both in your mind; if you don't let me get us out, we'll still be stuck here when they kill your body." No response. "If you die, you'll take me down with you."

"I would have seen your whole world reduced to ice, Doctor," the invisible shadow stated blandly. "I've killed hundreds. Thousands. One more won't make much odds to me."

Was goading a monster a wise thing to do? Perhaps not. But Ada was subject to sick flurries of emotion that weren't hers, and her head was pounding, and she had just found out that the strangers she had helped could have killed her and everyone she had known. The desire to fight this thing—to hurt it in some way—was potent.

"Guess Quiz was wrong about you," she sneered into the starless sky. "He said you weren't one to go down without a fight."

No. No—it was nothing like a sky. The night sky is endless, an infinity, an eternity in black; what Ada was looking at now was a ceiling, and it was only when irritation sent a pulse rippling along its length that she realised how close it was. Closer than it had been before, and growing closer still.

"The fight's over—we lost." Liquid metal lanced through Ada's chest, a bolt of something powerful and indecipherable. "I'll resign myself while I've still got some dignity, thank you."

"Just like that?"

"What do you want me to do? Wail like a war widow and mourn?"

"I want you to justify it." Cackles crackled through the void like silver lightning, reverberating through the soft jelly of Ada's organs. "You would have burnt my world through to its core and never looked back—I would have died and never known why—and now you're giving up. You would have killed me and everyone I've ever known, and now you're giving up? Is that all my world was worth to you—a bit of petty sport before you ran away? How is that fair?!"

"It's not." There was a dreadful, honest candour to the answer. "You don't deserve to die any more than I deserve to live, but if ripping the universe to pieces makes it go quiet, then so be it." 

Ada felt that she was shaking and wasn't quite certain why or when it had started.

"And that'll make it stop, will it? More dead strangers, that's what's going to make it better. You were too much of a coward to go after The Enquiry, so—"

"Do not," snarled the Diz-voice, low and guttural in a way she'd never heard before, louder than thunder, louder than the world breaking in half. "Call me a coward."

And hatred, not her own, was flooding her soul like marsh water pouring icily into an ill-advised basement, and she felt certain that she might die of it. If she had been fully human in that moment, and not just a human mind inhabiting a human shape, she would have died of it. The tendrils descended upon her like a cave in, bound her, held her crushingly tight. The weight of the world itself couldn’t have been more crushing, for the world, for all that it could be cruel, would not intend to kill her. If she'd had any sense, Ada might have thought to apologise, if only to preserve herself, but there wasn't air enough for sense; she couldn't breathe.

"Scared it's true?" She choked out instead, mind frothy with shared derangement. "Quiz didn't give up. You act like he's the worst of you—the least of you—but he came back. He decided to face the monster you've been running away from half your life."

In a movement like a convulsion, a helpless, sucking spasm, the tendrils clenched tighter, fist sized bulges of luminescence colouring the world the hue of polar ice.

Whirlwind memories clung to Ada's mind, leaf-skeleton moments with their detail and colour hollowed out, papering over her own thoughts in a hundred wafer-thin layers until it was impossible to think at all and she was reduced to remembering: '—(Stories since he was a hatchling about what happened to the ones that went underground)—(Research and Development needed subjects, always new subjects to replace the old)—(Medical transport; delirious and afraid of where he would be if he opened his eyes)—(Prison transport; the restraints a searing band of ache about his joints, the air reeking of infection and antiseptic, the knowledge of where they were taking him)—(Held in place, probes drilling invisibly through his head, thinking 'oh, this is it, this is how it ends')—(The Oubliette, The Eyes, The Enquiry lied)—(Staring down at a doomed world and hardly seeing it because: 'it was you, it was you, it was always YOU')—' An empty sort of horror that was almost rapture sizzled through the nerve endings in Ada's brain.

"His old friends," rasped the stormy voice in a scarlet tone. "His—"

"'Old' friends," Ada cut It off. "Old friends and a life he left behind to be stuck with you blaming him for everything."

Her mind was buckling under the weight of things that didn't belong to it. She was going to have to vomit up her insides to make room.

'—I didn't mean it, but you believe me and I’m not surprised—(an artificial argument with very real cruelty, a fire dying and going cold)—Quiz is the weakest one, the softest one, the one with the most to lose—He sent a photo to me after I was transferred out, his graduation; the white uniform and jubilance, the other fresh Enquiry beside him. I was so happy for him; I never had my own graduation—We were young once, though it doesn't feel like it now; I always had to look after Quiz—(Keeping him back, keeping his shackled and safe, because Quiz was an optimist with no idea what he’d signed up for. Quiz hadn’t seen it… he could still see it sometimes)—I win; Quiz is safe. It was worth it in the end, it’s always worth it in the end—(He had failed; Quiz had every reason to hate him)—‘

"It's not like that," protested the Diz Thing aloud, something in the tenor of it shifting. "I don't... It's not Quiz's fault."

"Would you have done it?" Bruises were forming under the black, imaginary blood vessels bursting like blobs of bubble wrap. "Would you have come back? Would Viz?"

'—Viz: his best friend, his enemy, his brother—(A sky painted a thousand shades of ruin, a hand on his arm)—Letting Viz go would kill him, of that he was certain, as surely as ripping out his heart—(A million dismissals, their minds grating together like two bits of a broken bone)—Would you have come back for me?—Would I have come back for me?—'

"Leave them out of it." And that had touched a nerve; she could feel the live-wire sting of it as an ache in her teeth. Blood began to drip from her nose, warm and ferric in the back of her throat. "You have no idea—no idea—what you're talking about."

Were she not being wrung dry of breath and brain like a damp towel, Ada would have gladly argued the point for hours; as it was, she managed a wordless, negatory utterance, somewhere between a cry and a croak. And still—despite the breathlessness and fright, the panicked urging of the blood to plead for her life—other, inhuman emotions were battering their way through every nerve; they screamed at her to fight, to kick, and scream, and test her limits until either the thing yielded or she died. She could feel the press of everything, tighter than even the monster's coils, the sick, suffocating strain of every foreign thought and feeling swirling behind the membrane of the other mind. The indiscriminate violence and despair of it all was indescribable.

She was growing cold… numb to the agony… distantly, she wondered if she was dying…

Cutting through the layers of the imaginary reality, like the searing, winter chill slicing through wool, was an increasing awareness of something wintry and smooth pressing firmly into the bones of her back, a stickiness and tension at her temples and neck. There was air in her lungs, a placid heart in her chest; her body was cold, and secure, and very far away...

'That's okay,' Ada told it mistily, 'I'm coming back now.'

All around her, the dream was thinning and peeling apart, burning away like early morning mist in the face of the rising dawn. But the closer she got, the louder the sounds became, her cleared mind raw to every voice; one rose cleanly above the others:

"No, no, no," came Quiz's anxious trill from a million light years away. "You're not meant to be doing that! Stop waking up—you're supposed to get him back!"

In a vague but imperative fashion, like a shout from another room, it occurred to Ada that she had a choice. Not one that could be made confidently, with that polarising, binary 'yes or no', but a muddy, complex thing that tangled through too many lives. She could feel wakefulness as a cool dampness against her lips, as though the world were something she could inhale. If she seized it, she could leave this creature and its crushing coils, and underwater dark, and killing pressure.

There was a way out here. 

And if she took it, it was very likely Quiz would refuse to help them home. He would stay here, with his friends who were little better than dead, surrounded by enemies. She would return to her children; she would strand them here among the stars. This would be their coffin, a magnificent casket, a tomb greater than any king's.

They had followed the aliens and now the game must be played by their rules. And, as backstabbing and petty as they were, one thing was abundantly clear to her; they had hooks deep in each other’s bones. They would do things together or not at all.

They would all leave here together, or they wouldn’t get home at all.

If saving her children (acquired and otherwise) meant enduring, then Ada would duck her head back beneath the waves and hold it there until there was no air left in her blood, until it squeezed her down into a diamond. This thing would be coming with her, and Quiz would take them home, even if she had to cut it out of Diz and throw it at his idiot blue friend.

(And maybe—just maybe—she remembered quiet mornings, an amicability that became less careful, less constructed as the weeks progressed. Quarrels with no bite, explanations offered freely when she asked what he was making, everything in her kitchen and study returned miraculously to normal on that last morning, as though there had never been ‘guests’ at all; she'd made him laugh once and he had seemed so surprised by it, so crestfallen. She hadn't known or really understood him, but it was with some bitterness that Ada noted she had come to like Diz.)

"He came back," she choked through the heaving static. "You have another chance. You can't just leave them."

Without quite meaning to—and she could feel the sudden weariness of it, the lack of intention—the chains slacked their grip, at last allowing Ada's lungs opportunity to draw in a wheeze of breath that ended in a series of rattling coughs; scarlet speckled the air in front of her and hung suspended there like beads in a child's mobile. With the chains went the oppressive pall of foreign thoughts, dumping her back in her own aching mind. Exhausted, Ada leant her head back, allowing it to rest pillowed on the tendrils still supporting her, and watched the control room and Quiz recede a little more with every desperate inhale. Had the creature any lungs, she had the sense it would be panting too.

"You just don't get it," it whispered, ancient and sullen. "Viz has already given in—he's done for, like me. Quiz would do well to get himself far away from here... as would you. Leave."

"I can't," Ada snapped hoarsely, wishing more than ever there were a face she could glare at. "What do you mean Viz has given in?"

There was a long minute of quiet, of reticence. Ada tested her limbs, the bones feeling red and tender; a fog of memories drifted over her, fresh and tasting of early mornings and moss; recent memories. 'Camp fire. Plasma. Kitchen knives. Stars. They were going to die.'

"I told him they were coming for us, and he did nothing. Just sat there. 'A nice night for it' he said. Would he have fought with me if I didn't have the knives? The end of our enterprise... and he just sat there.

"This was my life. It's his name on the banners, but it's my effort, my work. I made these ships! I made the machine that's letting you bother me! I made our weaponry, our new star charts, his eye. Everything I've done, everything I sacrificed... and he sat there and did nothing. It has been... so long since we just did nothing...”

(There was an awful ache in that, exhaustion so deep it had become entropy.)

"I am… so very tired of everything I do being worthless.

"So no, I'm not fighting again. We're going down. It's done."

The pain was fading, as were the intrusive memories; each breath came a little easier and, as the dark voice rippled through her, Ada lay back and tried to pretend she was somewhere else. A beach, perhaps, surrounded by the hushing rustle of the sea at night… a haunted beach, filled with the spectres of doomed mariners. Slowly, the blackberry blossoms of bruising staining her hands started to drain away, flowing up the veins in her arms and leaving unblemished skin in their wake; absentmindedly, she watched them vanish, feeling the pain of having her guts turned to jam ease into coppery dullness. She combed her thoughts back into orderly rows, picking feathery strands of darkness from between each one.

It was vital she was herself—being Diz wasn’t helping.

She thought of the inexpertly relayed story told in snatches by Quiz on the journey over. She thought of the unspeakably hideous things people could do for love. She thought of being handed a purpose, being told it was yours, and allowing it to give you meaning. She looked up at the malformed creature and saw the lines along which it had been formed.

"Look, I get it," she told it, impatience and frustration tinging the understanding. "You dedicated your life to something, and when it fucked you up without so much as a thank you you were left with nothing. It meant everything to you and then it was gone. So you found something else to live for, and you're scared that's going to disappear too. I get it, but we need to go now."

None of this moved the Diz-creature. In the absolute quiet, she could hear it replaying those last memories to itself, a finger obsessively stroking over ruffled velvet, a scratched record skipping to itself in a dark, empty room, a finger poking a scar; the compulsion was as consistent and intractable as breathing. For the first time since they went out, the chains gave a brief pulse, no longer inches from Ada's face but returned to a respectable ceiling distance; the lights in them looked like shrouded blobs of lightning, tumours of pearlescence and damp.

"He just sat there," despaired that omnipresent voice again, thick with rage, and incomprehension, and something slightly deeper than both of those. "After everything he put me through, he gave up—how dare he give up."

"And now you're doing the same. Come out here and let me shoot you so we can both get out of your head."

"No." Those newly relit lights drifted higher into the sky and it felt like someone walking away.

Frustration making angry twists of her guts (and still the anger didn't quite feel her own, felt like the aftertaste of someone else's misery) Ada launched herself upwards, swimming through the thick miasma of shade and speculation. Her fingers raked through the dark as though it were something physical, but she could no longer feel the press of the creature's coils, and their absence made the atmospheric heaviness, previously unbearable, almost inconsequential.

"Why not?" She called after the retreating thing. "If you’re so clever, then make me understand."

Silence reigned through the empty space. Mrs Sundae felt the world right itself very gently, as though someone had caught her in her molasses slow ascent and set her carefully on a floor made of thin tendrils, where she stood unsupported, beholden to something like gravity. This was the bottom, she realised; they had come to the bottom of the sea. From every angle, the stars stared at her with ancient bitterness, full of an inexplicable yet ardent hunger for her to recognise it.

"He isn’t allowed to give up. I didn't agree to that. I'd rather be dead than give in. I'd rather let them kill me."

Which, by definition, entails giving up, but the invisible Diz didn't seem interested in operating on that conventional plane of logic. Maddened desperation was thick as gunpowder dust in the air.

"What makes you think think he won't try again?"

"I know him." There was disgust and despair in that, in the depth and certainty of that knowledge. "Just what do you think will happen if we escape this? He'll make us stop. He'll find out that I can't take the implant out of his head, and he'll send us in to hiding, and I can't."

’He’ll realise he’s traceable and he’ll try to leave. He’s not allowed to leave.’

There was a flash of something, quick and sickly, beneath the savage loathing. Just a glint, like a coin in a fast-flowing river, but hearing it, Ada paused slightly. Reassessed. Her next words were spoken very carefully, probingly, with conscious effort keeping their edges smooth.

"I don't think it's Viz you're angry with." If Diz were anything even approaching honest, she didn't think he'd be angry at all. "Would it really be so awful to stop being the three musketeers of galactic failure?"

"Yes." And all the lights in every chain lit up, bright as drowned suns, so full of certainty. "He can't make me." 

"What if he doesn't try?"

"He will. It's the only thing that matters. He will."

It made sense—to him, and him alone, it made perfect sense. And, even though the prospect of arguing against such complete conviction was daunting, Ada couldn't help but feel a sense of dejected commiseration. To Diz, the options were 'kill everyone' or 'die', and that was a very small world to live in.

They floated together in silence, at the bottom of a well that had never seen light of any description. In that amniotic quiet, Ada thought for a length of time she would never be able to quantify. She thought of living your life for one cause and replacing it with another when it failed. She thought of the way that, whenever her mind left her body alone, she defaulted to standing up perfectly straight, head up, shoulders back, as though people were still watching. She thought of the home she had cared for but never redecorated, the one built for family and friends she had never had time to make.

Ada closed her eyes.

With a monumental effort, she pushed her mind outwards, feeling the thickness of her skull and the thin warmth of her skin as her thoughts moved through them. This, she recognised, could work two ways; she may be surrounded by Diz's mind, beholden to his thoughts, but she had a brain and history of her own coiled inside like a reel of film. Very slowly, exertion bleeding into an ache, she advanced her peripheral awareness of the world until it brushed up against the boarders of tendrils, which drew back briefly in shock before crowding back in as though set on smothering her. Against every instinct urging her to curl her consciousness back into the safe shell of her skull, against the cloying instinctive fear of suffocation, Ada continued to push until the lines between them blurred and that membranous separation melted.

Without opening her eyes, she knew she too had lights now: her eyes, her forehead, her heart, her joints, the gun in her hand—all aglow with radium radiance.

"I get it," she said again, softer now. She meant it this time. "We're not the same—I'd never do what you did—but... my convoy got ambushed. Everyone got out ok, but I smashed my shoulder pretty badly. It never healed right, so they said 'okay, cheers' and sent me home. And that was... it. And all of a sudden I was back home. And I was alone—my husband was still overseas. It left me with nothing—fucked up shoulder, fucked up head, no friends, no family..."

The thing beyond her sight didn't speak, but it was listening to her. She could feel it's attentiveness, heavy as metal, heavy as grief.

"I had to have something to do, so I threw myself in to being the best housewife I could be. I was involved in everything and anything so that when my husband would come back home, things were perfect. I think really I just liked being active—it felt like I was still making a difference, you know? A house is a very tangible thing to be working on. And there was a whole community looking at me going 'ah yes: Ada Sundae! We know who she is!' and that made it a little easier to feel like I knew who I was. To feel like there was someone left to know.

"And sometimes, when he was home, it even felt normal; we were a normal couple, and the explosion hadn't happened, and he wasn't going to be gone for another six-to-twelve months at the end of the week. And then I got pregnant and it seemed like I'd won; I had everything I'd worked for. I'd finished making that picture perfect life and now I could sit and enjoy it. I had it all worked out—I knew who I was going to be." 

"Then you don't 'get it'," rasped the darkness. "You won. I didn't. You got your pretty little dream—how the hell is that anything like this?"

"Because the dream ended, Diz." Sundae could hear the heaviness in her own voice. She hated talking about these things, even with her daughter, whose endless questions were no kinder to her mother's reticence than her teachers'. "Just like it did the first time, when I dreamed of being a doctor and a fighter. My husband was shot. Dead in action. Closed casket. Dream over."

Silence from beyond the stars. A pulse of something went through them both—not sympathy. An acute awareness, perhaps, of the absence of sympathy, the inability to offer it.

"And everything fell apart. He was what had kept me alive, and now he was gone and... and what was I supposed to do? What was I meant to do with all the loose ends of this life he had left me with?"

For a long moment, the voice was silent, dead silent. Then, almost weakly: "And what did you do?"

"I found something else to live for." Thoughtfully, she fingered that old resolve, hard and determined as metal in her hands. "Picked myself back up for the third time. And I'll do it again if I have to."

When she got home—and it would be 'when', not an ambiguous but realistic 'if'—she would go shopping at the little corner store and see if Stephanie had gotten the septum piercing as planned. She would bake a focaccia bread and take it over to Alexi, perhaps use her amateurish Bulgarian to finally ask him for his Tikvenik recipe so she could make it for the impending Autumn. She would listen to Queen and hum along, and buy some soft treats to offer the Yorkie on the bus. She would throw herself back into life, because her job was done, and her daughter was grown, and her world had almost ended without her ever knowing why.

"So no—I don't know what it's like to have dedicated your life to a terrorist group of literally three people, and I don't know what it's like to watch that fall apart. I don't know what it's like to need revenge so badly you'd rather die than not have a chance at getting it. But I know what it's like to have had everything you worked for rip itself away and leave you with nothing twice over. I know it's hard to get up again."

"You had something." It was close to being an accusation. "You had your girl."

"Smiley. And if you stopped pretending, you'd have people too."

More emotions rocked her, that vast, oceanic tumult, but their slow-moving currents flowed through her now instead of fighting to drown her; surrounding her were images, sounds, and sensations that she felt as though they had been her own. She felt the soft stupidity of Quiz, the plush, callow carelessness, and Diz's certainty that it would get their navigator killed; a bilious burn—part rage, part grief—as he looked at Viz, who he would do anything for but who never seemed to have good advice or instruction, who was never quite enough to make the world stop screaming; the helpless, angry, compulsive urge to push them both into the periphery, to make them leave him alone because they stressed something brittle in his chest and he had no idea what would happen if it broke. Together, they were consumed with an exhausted, angry disbelief in the idea that either of them would want to stick around him if they gave up their cause.

"I can't do anything else," whispered the creature.

And maybe he couldn't. Maybe this was all he would ever amount to. Too many never found their way back to what they had been, and even fewer recognised it if they did; perhaps it would have always been too late. Perhaps a shattered thing that has lost enough pieces will always be a shattered thing, in spite of any effort made to put it back together or make it into something else.

"You owe it to the others to try." It was not an entirely fair thing to say, but Diz was not an entirely fair person. "You can always kill yourself later if it doesn't work out."

Sometimes the wrong thing to say is the thing that works. Sometimes our successes come back to haunt us just as keenly as our failures; much later, Ada Sundae would turn the slightly humorous, slightly callous suggestion over in her mind and wonder if she had done the right thing.

There was an immense rushing, the full-throated, leathery sound of storm clouds coalescing into rain, and then the floor beneath Ada's feet was dissolving, surrendering her once again to the openness those fathomless depths—emptied, now, of that dire construction of lights and chains.

This time, however, she was not alone; from behind her came the slow sound of someone clapping.

"Well played doctor," Diz said, sounding very quiet now that he was no longer all-encompassing.

Feeling unaccountably somber, though the dismal affair was at last at an end, Ada studied the person before her, once more man-shaped with a face she could glare at and eyes that could hate her. They didn't right now; Diz's eyes were a little sorry, a little amused, a little curious, and a lot like a brave face over something dreadfully empty.

He would have done terrible things. Monstrous, nightmarish, unforgivable things. But the chance had been taken from him before he could, leaving nothing but the greyness of malleable intention, the ever-fickle determinations of a hidden mind. Her world was whole in the here and now, but that did nothing to change that fact that the mind she stood inside had imagined it reduced to ashes and less. Even though nothing had happened, how could anyone ever forgive him?

"So... are we going now? You seemed so insistent before."

She had been staring, she realised. He didn't want to be stared at.

"Yeah..." Yes; she checked the gun, full of silver chances at an escape. It was time to leave and she had her ticket; everything else could come later. First things first. Despite everything, Ada Sundae still believed in the inevitability of ‘later’. "But Diz? One more thing..."

Looking down the gunsight was the most easy and natural thing in the world. If Diz felt anything beyond a mildly withering curiosity at being held at gunpoint, it didn't show on his face or in the tenor of the water around them. Ada thought of long train journeys, little bit of card held tightly between two fingers, cutout circlets patterned with printed letters fluttering from the conductor's hands like confetti—'time to punch my ticket. Time to get back home.'

"Do not steal my things."

Ada saw the thin, bitter mouth curl in to a snarl of a smile in the second before she put a bullet through his head and reduced the world to snowy splinters.

Chapter Text

Diz had been awake for all of two seconds before Quiz decked him in the face with a surprisingly staunch left hook. It ranked fairly low on Diz's list of worst ways to wake up, but scored soaringly on his list of most surprising ways to wake up because, as a rule, Quiz didn't hit people—least of all him.

"I am so angry with you!" Quiz shrieked cheerfully, which was genuinely alarming. People should not scream and smile at the same time, but no one had told Quiz this, and so he was going about it with great enthusiasm. "How fucking dare you decide to send me away like that—yes I worked it out! I worked it out as soon as one of the Enquiry drones walked passed me in the dark. I am not stupid!"

Diz gave a slow, disorientated blink, half raising a clumsy hand to his flat, snakelike nose which had started to bleed. When yelling at people, it is generally best to wait until they are properly awake, or are at least capable of understanding that they are being yelled at; this is another lesson Quiz didn't seem too concerned about.

"I am as much a part of this sinking ship as either of you. I have just as much right to die for this stupid, doomed cause as either of you, and how dare you you try to take that from me. I don't need you to spare me because you think I can't take it; I need you to treat me like I'm part of this because I am, and I'm not going anywhere."

"I'm sorry."

"I knew you'd say that—you always say that—this has nothing to do with—" Quiz started that sentence with furious bombast, then trailed off very quickly, stunned. The sentence he had heard was not the one which had been uttered, and recognising that had the same psychological impact as running headfirst in to a wall. He stared at Diz, who sat there looking far smaller than he should. "... What did you just say?"

"I'm sorry." Diz gingerly took his hand away from his nose, fingers covered with translucent, black blood, but his eyes were steady on Quiz. His voice was softer than any of them had heard it before. "I never meant any of it… what I said in the woods, I mean. You're right. I've been unfair to you... for years. I thought I was keeping you out of danger by keeping you at arm's length because you're... I thought you would get us all killed but... oh Quiz, you aren't like Viz and I, you're just too... but you're also the only one of us who's never been shot before so..." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. I'll do better. I promise."

It was not a perfect apology. In many ways, it wasn’t even good. But it did seem to be the first one Diz had ever made, and perhaps that counted more than its failings did.

Very slowly, Quiz turned to look at the observing Mrs Sundae, his face full of dismayed accusation.

"What did you do!?"

Ada, who had been pleasantly surprised by the apology, hadn't been anticipating this reaction and seemed quite affronted to find herself reprimanded.

"What?"

For reasons best known to him, Quiz looked distraught, as though Diz had died a second time right in front of him. His frantic gestures were part appeal, part reproach, with the petulant desperation of a distressed child.

"You've brought him back all wrong!" He proclaimed, with an emphatic jab of a finger. Behind him, Diz's hesitant contrition was morphing into offence layered over something not entirely unlike hurt.

"No she didn't!"

Quiz rounded on him, clamping all four hands down onto Diz's arms and shoulders and squeezing until his knuckles paled. He didn't shake him, but he looked very much as though he'd like to. The scene, for those not involved in the emotion of it, was hysterical and a little funny.

"She bloody must have! This is the first time you've apologised to me in twelve years!"

"I'm never doing it again you pathetic ingrate!" Diz snapped, straightening to his usual rigid posture, his perfectly controlled facade slipping back in to place; his eyes were hot and slightly damp with humiliation and loss. "To hell with coddling you—I'm going to use you as a meat shield next chance I get!"

"You mean it?"

"Yes!"

"Good!" And Quiz threw himself around Diz in a bear hug that completely swamped the leaner alien. Thrown back against the wall with the momentum, the pair tangled together. Diz looked comically wrong footed by the reversal, lost by the whiplash of his flighty crew-mate’s emotions and an additional blow to the back of his head. Quiz's voice was muffled in Diz's singed uniform shoulder, the whine of it suddenly high and tearful. "You're not allowed to do this again. Don't you dare almost die again."

Helplessly and entirely confused, Diz blinked; he looked from face to face as though they would offer some advice, and after each his gaze would turn almost compulsively to his unconscious captain; nobody had any advice. His hands floated uncomfortably an inch above Quiz's shoulders, partway to removing them.

"You could have left," he said quietly, his sharpness gone. "You would have been fine."

"Fine?" Quiz croaked, high pitched and incredulous, crushed against Diz's collarbone. "I would have lost my two idiot friends. Do you have any idea how lonely that would have been?" 

Diz's face went completely blank in the manner it sometimes did when he was seriously considering something, and in the depths of his eyes the singular speck of softness usually well hidden by spite flinched. Very gingerly, moving as though it would hurt if he went too quickly, he folded his arms about Quiz. As hugs went, it wasn't very good, but as with the apology, this seemed to be Diz's first attempt and some things are more important than perfection or even adequacy.

This happy scene was sharply interrupted by the resurgence of the other three, who all reemerged at once with identical startled gasps. With the vigour of youth and triumph, Zach sprang to his feet, hauled a spirited but uncoordinated Phred after him, and held their jointed hands aloft. They were gleefully met, and long minutes were filled with enthusiastic reunion—slapped backs, and handshakes, and friendly blows to the shoulders and chest—until, gradually, they all pulled apart, and Zach once again raised his hand, this time to point accusingly at Viz and Diz.

"You two—" he snapped through a grin. "Sort your shit out. Seriously what the fuck?"

"Sort what out?" Viz bit back best he was able, sounding genuinely perplexed. Quiz stood beside him, hands making fluttery gestures of thrilled concern, never quite making the leap to touching.

"I have no idea, but the vibes are atrocious. Fix your shit, I'm completely serious."

Rather too dead to be dealing with an inquisition into his relationships, Viz turned a silent, slightly owlish demand for context to Diz, who had nothing to offer and looked a little lost himself. Sighing at their mutual incomprehension over something which should be patently obvious, Mrs Sundae, the designated Adult, attempted to ease them into an explanation. She looked deeply tired.

"Do you really not think anything’s wrong with you?” After it became clear they were still confused, she sighed continued. "Well… talking to each other about… things that bother you is normal… and while you two aren’t, I still think you should give it a go.”

Mutually bewildered, Diz and Viz turned back to each other with expressions of dubious scrutiny. Something wrong with them? Actually, factually, unequivocally wrong? Impossible; one of them would have noticed. This, they decided, together in silence, was probably the result of some of those human idiosyncrasies they had never quite understood. Nothing was wrong with them. They were fine.
 
Matter discarded, Viz stood. This was a decision he expected to regret, braced for the pain that inevitably came when pushing oneself too far after an injury, but it never happened. His whole body felt numb the way a scalded tongue tastes of nothing or a sun-smeared eye 'sees' the multicoloured dark of nonexistence. Though he didn't feel dizzy, the room dipped under his feet, not in a way that would trip him but in a fashion which seemed to send his consciousness slipping down the ladder of his spine, back inside himself. Casting his mind back, Viz found he... couldn't quite recall what had happened; his sternum was hot with a brittle, dry ache, his blood quick and slippery in his veins.

He remembered a forest, the open sky above him, a slowly curdling campfire, ashes, ashes, ashes...

Everyone was watching him. For once, the focus of so many eyes was not grounding, was not reason to preen. For once—for the first time since leaving the academy—he felt unsure of himself.

"I don't mean to sound ungrateful—" he began. "But—"

"Difficult premise, but I'll hold judgement," Zach interrupted, with his usual panache.

"—But how are we alive? This—" Viz tapped emphatically at the scorched hole in his sternum. "—should have been fatal."

"Yeah, no, that's a very valid concern." With a showman's flourish, Zach presented the blue alien. "Quiz, you're up!"

Quiz explained. This took a while. His audience made all the appropriate faces for people who had been non-consensually resurrected by nightmarishly dubious methods. By the time he finished the company had separated out a little, leaving the aliens to their own, anxious knot, bound tightly about each other.

"Is that... safe?" Viz whisper-hissed, sounding furious, because it is easier to feel fury than fear. Diz's expression was ponderous and he seemed to be attempting a pragmatic stance, a thin veneer over repulsed horror.

 "It's... not unsafe." He thought about it for a long moment before looking at Viz with a wince. "I'm assuming you were planning on putting us all through a full physical anyway?"

He had, and it would now be twice as vital... but the thought of what he might discover was positively abyssal.

Face rather grim, Viz nodded, eyes roving with dismal hesitance over his own unfamiliar hands, taking in the way they twitched and fluttered without his instruction. The return from the ghoulish halls of the dead had left both of them jittery as caffeine addicts, a damp and violent bit of wilderness stuck behind their eyes like a bird tangled in curtains. Almost tentatively, he squeezed all four hands into tight fists before letting them fall lax; he did it again, then curled each finger, one by one, in towards the palm before flexing them out to their fullest extent.

"You managed this all yourself?"

Looking a little nervous, a little proud, Quiz nodded. He held Viz's gaze with a schoolboy willingness to impress.

Viz raised a very careful hand to his chest, to the black singed jacket breast over the strange, wriggling bit of meat that might have been his heart.

"Well done, Quiz," he said after a time.

Meanwhile, the human company was engaged in its own, happier discussion—far livelier and less concerned with lives.

"Hey, Mrs Sundae, is my nose broken?" Phil proffered the nose in question, which was still florid with a host of unhealthy colours. While the chill had kept the swelling to a minimum, it was still an ugly sight and his mouth still tasted briny. With a restrained air of fussiness, Mrs Sunade took him by the chin and pulled him gently towards the blue light of the console screen. 

"I told you it wasn't," Viz cut in, slightly offended that his expert, if terse, medical advice was being called into question.

"No." Phil pointed a scolding finger, face still caught in the vice of Mrs Sundae's hand. "You told me I'd live—which was appreciated given how likely death was at the time, but didn't actually tell me how my nose is doing."

Muttering inhumanly, Viz relented, and all three aliens quietly rejoined the circle. Her inspection finished, Mrs Sundae released the boy's face.

"It's just bruised, Phil. A bit swollen, but you'll be alright."

From there, the pleasantries died down fairly quickly, the severity of their situation settling down upon them like the weight of a hundred disapproving eyes in a courtroom, as though some spectral jury were waiting to convict them. The feeling of being little rats in a narrow, squeezing maze returned tenfold; but, by its definition, a maze means a destination, an exit. Somewhere, in this tangle of choices they now had to make, there was a pathway that would lead them safety home, and their job now was to not make too many mistakes before they found it. To be wrong just once would be to fatal; after a little consideration, however, the only premise more galling than being condemned by decision was dying in that room, having come so far to achieve nothing. 

So came choice number one: how to leave the room so they could  at least die elsewhere if it came to it?

"Alright, I'm guessing walking back through the spaceship the way we came is the dumb plan—anybody have the good one?"

For some genuinely inexplicable reason, everyone turned to Viz and Diz, the two people least likely to come up with a plan either sane or reasonable. Their knowledge of the ship was going to be helpful, sure, but the contributing factors of their mutual instability made them little better than a Hail Mary. Jesus, being unavailable to take the wheel, passed the opportunity to two mad war criminals, who were not the next best option but were eagerly available to fuck yet another thing up in a quest to redeem themselves. 

"We use the vents." Decisively (read: not anticipating any objection) Diz crossed over to a panel on the far wall, through which cold air the texture of dust billowed. The negatory uproar seemed to surprise him.

"You're not serious? The vents?!" If it wasn't for the Everything, Phil would have said this was the worst news he could have received. "They were claustrophobic when I was a small and wriggly child. I'm much bigger and much less wriggly now."

"Then I'm sure they'll be much worse for you," Diz said practically, fiddling through the folds of the pocket on his sleeve with a slight frown which said it had been emptied since he last looked. "But the fact remains that they run pathways all over the ship. By all means, take the corridors if you prefer." 

Not finding what he'd been looking for, Diz turned to Viz who, after a brief inspection of his own pockets, had no help to offer. Both had been ransacked during their stint as corpses, their possessions catalogued, itemised, filed away in an evidence locker. After a little negotiation, Quiz pulled out his wallet and handed over a coin, which Diz immediately set to unscrewing the vent cover with; Phil fought the urge to break into hysterical giggles.

"So, did you guys deliberately build vents big enough for people to crawl through or is it a coincidence."

"It makes it easier for maintenance if I can easily get to everywhere on the ship," Diz replied, tidying screws away into his pocket. "It's not regulation standard, but nothing here is."

He eased the vent panel away from the wall. Together, unified by a slight feeling of doubt, they all leaned forwards and peered into the square of blackness open in the skirting board; air gushed out in one extruded exhale from some faraway turbine, smelling like oil and disuse, a machine's held breath. It didn't precisely invite them, but it seemed prepared to admit them to its dark and winding depths without argument.

As he was the one who presumably (hopefully) knew the layout of the vent system best, Diz took the lead, followed closely by Phred and Zach (who both, strangely, claimed to have "been here, done this."). Viz went next, Mrs Sundae and Smiley on his heels.

"You say that so casually for a man who has been blown up by his own equipment twice," Phil complained, taking his turn and feeling the weight of the space station settle down upon him.

"Twice that you've seen," Quiz grumbled behind him, voice echoing all the way to the head of the line. "Everything he makes explodes."

There was no way to be subtle in the vents, but the fearful procession of eight did their very best, aware that they were navigating above, below, and alongside a hundred unseen threats. Every shuffle was full of echoes like a metal snake in a sea cave, every step a beat of percussion in a tin man orchestra, every breath the effusion of a pair of metallic bellows; all this multiplied by eight—sixteen legs, twenty arms, eight sets of lungs struggling in the airlessness and warmth of stiflingly close confines. Every so often, patrols paced by in the corridor surrounding, the specifics displaced by its many echoes; the convoy would unanimously halt its progress and wait until the sound subsided and only continued in fearful reluctance afterwards.

Phil struggled forwards on his hands and knees, his back rubbing awkwardly along the ceiling until his sweatshirt started to feel unpleasantly like a particularly grim polishing cloth. Unaccustomed to the strain of bearing the weight of his upper body, his wrists ached, his knees chapped in ways which would be awkward to explain later, his toes cramped within their well-worn sneakers; as a child, he hadn't really spent enough time in the vents to give a more than cursory assessment of the fact that he never wanted to be stuck in them again.

Here he was, again, with ample opportunity to give his full and considered opinion—with the weight of eighteen years at his back and the full rationale of an almost adult mind, equipped with the very best engines of thought a full tour of education could give him, at his disposal... 

Yep. They sucked alright.

"... Quiet..." Diz halted, sending everyone behind him knocking gently into one another and swearing about it in a chorus of whispers until he hushed them. "... Do you hear that?"

They quietened, and they did hear it, though they direly wished they hadn’t. It wasn't the sound of a patrol outside. The low hum of faraway machines didn't change in pitch or speed. The sterile, impersonal breeze didn't pause or alter its course. Behind these other sounds, these sounds which had become normal, lay buried another; the awkward, metallic shuffle-thump of somebody crawling through a narrow metal chute. That is to say, somebody else. Somebody who was not them. Phil's heart, which until that moment had been placid in his chest, soothed by the lack of attention from beyond the vents, took up nerves-induced tap dancing and found it might go on to compete at nationals.

The patrol’s weren’t just outside; the patrols were running inside the vent.

There was no room to turn about without running into a metal wall. Regardless, everyone made the attempt, smearing their cheeks with the sticky patina coating the inside of the vent, a compote of oil, grime, and dust. A series of dull thuds rang out like a clock made of lead striking eight o' clock. The commotion echoing through the shaft like a ticklish cough in vast metal throat, that distant shuffle-step, paused briefly before growing faster. Closer. Eager.

Suddenly, all the pain of cramped muscles and little restrictions of stiff joints became immaterial. Panic rinsed through the flesh with cold-water clarity, stealing away pain, sensation, air—everything except a desperate desire to run, regardless of consequence, and the strength necessary to do so.

"Back, everyone back!" Viz ordered, at the same time Diz called out: 

"Go down the sideshaft on the left, keep going until you hit the wall, then head towards the sound of fans—there's a hatch that leads to a storage room."

'Orderly' was too much to ask of any of them at that moment; the best that could be said for their retreat was that no one fell over—and that was only because it is very hard to manage anything constituting a fall when your chest is only six inches off the ground. The grime pooling on the metal floor was joined by palm-sweat and exertional drool. There was no dignity in panic, not this sort, not blind panic; the sort where the brain starts to fizz—to boil—with chemicals and forget the distinction between 'inside' and 'out'. What was the shuffle-thump of vent-steps and what was the blood-muffled pounding of a terrified heart?

"Why would they put patrolmen in the vents?!" Complained Viz, more offended than frightful. Blind, restrained, and enraged, Phred did his best to kick the man in the face.

"Maybe because they realised you built vents big enough for people to WALK through."

What Diz probably should have specified was that the hatch they were helplessly searching for was not like the one they had come in by—waist-height, wall-mounted, something one could conceivably climb in and out of. This hatch was in the ceiling.

Phil felt his questing lead foot push into the ultimate yield of thin air, and that was all the warning he got before the ship's artificial gravity was reeling him out of the vent like a handkerchief string from a magician's hat. He went very quickly from being six inches from a metal floor to six feet—then six inches again, then SLAM! Catlike, he landed on his feet, narrowly missing Zach, who had been less fortunate and significantly less graceful but thankfully still had the presence of mind to roll out the way.

The room they now stood in was only just big enough to put three sofas in, or perhaps a medium sized dining table, and was lit up in a dim, dragon's-eye orange. Every wall was layered with shelving, to the degree that one rather imagined the designer would have continued the shelves across the ceiling of they could. When Diz had said 'storage room', Phil had vaguely anticipated... well, storage; jars of preserves, or miscellaneous machinery, or filing cabinets filled with extraterrestrial paperwork...

Instead, the shelves were filled with rank upon rank of guns.

"You said this was a storage locker!"

"It is," Quiz pointed out, in a tone that would be cheerful if it weren't for the terror, eyes fretfully upturned. "Weapons storage."

Because of course it was; Phil tried to focus on the part where they were being chased and having defences was A Good Thing. Above them continued the banging, a sound like a blacksmith God hammering out the dents in a skyline made of lead.

With quickness that said this had always been his intention, Viz crossed over to the cabinet's retinal lock. The scanner blinked in a negatory fashion and Viz swore; sensible recourse exhausted, he resorted to a less sensible attempt at simply prying the damn thing apart.

"Did any of you bring weapons?" He asked, his voice clipped and hard to prevent it sounding desperate.

"We took the bus and we were trying to lay low." With the misplaced confidence of someone who knows the basics of mechanics, Phred joined the assault on the complex locking mechanism. "Look, on the bus, you can have either guns or an alien—you can't have both. You're a weirdo if you have both, and weirdos can't lie low. That's just basic street smarts."

"Why didn't you hide them?" Phil suggested, thinking of toilet rolls in air vents, doors inside fish throats, and years of smuggling increasingly absurd snacks into the backs of classrooms.

"Where was this advice when we were on the bus?"

"I was in a coma!"

"Bloody typical, that is."

Above them, the shaft started to shudder, the booming pound of the pursuer joined in force by the metallic clatter of the vent ricocheting off of the pipes either side, dust and loose screws raining down on their heads. There was something rabid about the sound, a note of sudden ferocity that said the thing chasing them was a predator and it knew it had just been tricked.

Unfortunately, the number of ways to barricade a ceiling hole are limited, and most of them require you to first be able to reach the damn thing. Lacking a stepladder, the group were woefully unable to do even that. As defendable inlets go, ceiling holes enjoy a solid position at the bottom of the rankings. The very best they could do was take positions at the very edges of the room and assume imitations of furniture, and so that is what everyone did. Everyone, that is, except Viz and Diz; the former continuing to wrestle fruitlessly with the cabinet door, and the latter scavenging the corners of the room for something solid to hit people with.

The metal thunder ceased with a slither. Through that dark, square aperture in the ceiling came the tenth member of the ventilation party, falling liquidly to the floor like a dropped snake. A plum coloured pillar rose to its feet in the centre of their circle like it was something they'd summoned. It's face was blank and slack-jawed, it's eyes were mad with focus.

Without expression, it looked from face to horrified face and then, for reasons that were likely not as beyond determination as first appeared, the soldier lunged at Quiz.

Not one of the actual, active threats; not the foreign creatures huddling together and staring with their intricate, geode eyes; they chased after False Enquirer Quiz, who shrieked in alarm and led a not-so-merry chase around the cramped quarters, quicksilver quick with panic. With equal squawks of alarm, Viz and Diz joined in, clattering after the pursuer with ineffective fervour. Much to the horror of everyone else, there was no real room to get out the way of any of them; the humans moulded themselves into the contours of those resolutely closed cabinets, occasionally sticking out a foot or arm in hopes of tripping the right person. It was in vain. The soldier scrabbled on Quiz’s heels with the angry determination of a savage little dog.

"Stop!" he wailed, not anticipating he would be listened to. It was an instinctive result of petulance, of terror, not something the universe was expected to heed.

And yet, the soldier stopped dead, a response so unanticipated that Quiz continued to run in circuits until he collided with them and sent them both tumbling to the floor.

What ensued was a fight, but not in the sense of the old masters—the samurai, the ninjas, and knights of yore; there was no elegance, no honour, no skill. This was deeper, more brutal, more imperative than the machinations of blade or bullet. Cavemen ancestors and peasants with their cudgels, revolutionaries with no resources and the destitute made mighty by desperation, stood in the wings and nodded their satisfaction, their support, for this, the most primal of the martial arts.

Simply put, the most efficient way to beat an opponent is to hit them Really Hard, and to do this until they stop moving. Everything else is just garnish, pretty but pointless. Let's not complicate things; let's just say they beat the stunned patrolman until the crackles turned to squelches, and have that be the end of the matter.

Panting, Phil stepped back, feeling a little disorientated by what he'd done, as though he had taken a blow to the head himself. The soldier had been the vivid colour of bruises when they arrived and so they didn't look much different now; if it weren't for the clammy blood on his hands and the stinging ache of his knuckles, he could pretend he hadn't done anything. Shakily, he reached down to pull Smiley up from where she'd slipped trying to brace herself on flesh turned the consistency of old oranges. 

Unmoved by the whole affair, Viz flicked a dribble of blood from the corner of his frown.

"Care to explain why she paused, Quiz? I highly doubt it was pity."

So Quiz busied himself explaining mind control, his second horrifying explanation in the last hour, and Viz and Diz resumed their slightly sickened expressions. Between talking to his coworkers and the humans, Quiz was making quite the career for himself as a particularly morbid information point. The other two kept casting glances towards the body on the floor, faces twisted but unreadable; it seemed another blow to their certainty, and they had just beaten to death the one person who might have been capable of answering all their questions.

"That's Vyrelli," Viz announced suddenly, interrupting Quiz's ramblings on synaptic dissections, eye widening in recognition. "She was a sergeant with the 32nd at Monmarst." 

He leaned in to inspect the disc, fingers worrying at the edges like someone trying to unpick a sticker; in the places where the skull was broken, the metal had started to separate from the ridge of skin causing it to rise at the slight provocation. Encouraged, Viz tried harder. 

"Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were—“

Quiz never managed to finish that sentence, for the simple but pertinent reason that Viz was not Quiz and was, at his core, a decisive man with little interest in drawn out speeches. Quiz probably should have gone with something punchier like ‘stop’, or ‘don’t’, or, the all time favourite and reigning champion, the simple ‘no!’.

There was a disgusting wet sound best described as a slurp—a thick noise like noodles in cold gravy—and Sergeant Vyrelli slumped forwards in a dead-flower droop. Black blood that smelled of silver leaves and rainwater spilled over the floor, followed by the slow drip drip drip of thin, stringy pieces that came spilling from the new hole in her head. Viz reeled back, still holding the disc, which looked rather jellyfishesque with its series of long, trailing, translucent wires and tubes; he froze with the slightly guilty amazement of a person who hadn't meant to break something.

Everyone stared in various states of horror and shock, a tableau on the subject 'Oh Shit'. 

"That... is actually probably for the best," Quiz said gently.

"'For the best'!?" Viz whisper-croaked, in a frail tone of voice that made Phil wonder if Vyrelli had once been a friend.

"Well, she'd never agree to come with us," Quiz offered pragmatically. "She'd probably shoot you again, actually. Vyrelli was always a good soldier."

A minute passed, during which Viz was entirely still and silent, and everyone tentatively came to the conclusion they would be moving on without further comment. Moving awkwardly around the body (and Viz, who didn't seem inclined to move) they checked the door; like the cabinets, it did not open for either crewman's retinal scan, but there were no sounds in the corridor beyond and, as the minutes passed, it seemed they had miraculously avoided detection. Phil wished that was something he could feel reassured about, but all the universe's leniency meant to him right now was that the moment of discovery had been kicked down the road to visit him at a later date—and he was fast running out of calendar. The tension ratcheted higher, ever-closer to breaking.

Again, they checked the cabinets, then the door for the second time, and then they swept the empty floor; none of it had changed since the last time. They stripped the body of its weapons (two pistols) and checked the room again. It was the same, just a dead end—a safe, secure dead end, but a dead end nonetheless. In the ceiling, the dark mouth of the labyrinthian vents gaped.

As before, Diz went first. This time, he was followed by Mrs Sundae and Zach, who was significantly less confident now, but who understood his value as a human torch. Next, Smiley, Phred, and Phil, though not in that order. When he and Quiz were the only two left in the room, Viz's tongue came unglued and he spoke:

"Not after this, she wouldn't have been," he rasped, low and disgusted. Quiz blinked owlishly and tried to remember what they'd been speaking about. "Nobody in their right mind would follow The Enquiry after this."

There was no answer to this, but Quiz's expression bore a slightly ponderous aspect from then on. Precisely what he was pondering was anyone's guess, but they were all rather too busy playing the world's most intensely upsetting game of hide-and-seek to to take a shot at hypotheticals.

From there, they progressed even more slowly, a literal and metaphorical crawl, ears pressed to the metal in those many stationary moments to listen for the distant echo of other vent patrols. The damp heat of fear sighed hotly down their necks, a constant as they passed through the ambient tepidness of the general ship, to the arctic miles surrounding the coolant system, to the arid boil of the sections closest to the engines. They exited and entered new vent shafts a number of times, and, with each one, Phil's blood screamed 'THIS IS IT!'

It wasn't it—it was never it. Each close call shaved a little more off his nerves, but they were so close now, just a little further—

In the final vent, the passage was surrounded on every side by the buzz and beep of computer banks, and the metal hummed with a buzzing skin of static, the screws singing in their rivets; so close, so close, so close—

At long and arduous last, they arrived at the door to the bridge—which was, of course, as locked as the weapon's cabinets, and the storage room door before it. Once again, the retinal scan turned them away, despite multiple attempts and a fair amount of muted hammering with jumper-padded fists. So close; Phil fought the urge to stuff his filthy shirt in his mouth and scream as the universe dangled their only hope in front of them like a feather on a string and danced it around so he could bat at the air around it like a cat.

"Can you get in another way?" He asked, unhappily aware he might be suggesting yet another vent crawl, but Diz shook his head.

"Not without a remote," he said bitterly.

So close... and yet so far. They had come all this way, through trial and terror, to find a painted tunnel, a bricked up fire exit, a bunch of cans with no tin-opener. The unfairness of it all was paralysing.

Stricken by guilt so vast it made him feel deeply ill, Phil looked at his friends—the friends who shouldn't be there, the friends who had only come here because of him—and saw the trapped-animal terror in the helpless darting of their eyes and whiteness of their lips. With nothing else to offer, he gave his hands to the two closest to him and held eye-contact with the third with an essay in his eyes on how much he wished he could grow an extra arm. Right now, they were warm, and real, and alive, and in a few hours only one of those would be true.

How could they have been allowed to come so far, to achieve so much, only to have it all stolen from them now? How could he have been given enough time to think he missed this fear? Everything was being ripped away, quickly enough to tear a layer of skin off his palms, and Phil wanted to scream at whoever was stealing his future until his throat tore and bled. He wanted to tell the world to shut up for five seconds so he could look at the stars and remember that they were beautiful. How could he have come here only to lose everything?

No, wait; not everything. There was a heaviness in his pocket. Apparently no one had considered him threat enough to remove his possessions. Label them certainly—there were scratchy stickers on everything, even the insides of his clothes and shoes—but nothing had been removed. Nothing had been removed.

"Oh. Here." Phil practically ripped the still-blinking remote from his pocket. "Ta da; a remote. As if by magic. Please pretend it was magic."

Everyone stared at him with the rapturous eyes of people witnessing a miracle, a clear ring of white around the iris' of those who had sclera. Diz opened and closed his mouth, wearing a slightly different expression of perturbation each time.

"...How... did you...?" He struggled, looking from the remote to Phil, to the remote again, to Viz, to Quiz, to staring in bewilderment at the remote, which lay in his hand looking for all the world as though it were slightly amused by him. Filled with a frenzied need to hurry things along, Phil flapped his hands as though making some particularly desperate introductions: 'Diz—remote control. Remote control—Diz. Have either of you met this door? Thankfully, this one doesn't talk, but I have the feeling it might open if you both stop dicking around.'

"Quiz gave it to me ages ago and I still don't know why. Before you get mad, please keep in mind the fact that we really, really need to get out of here and you yelling at each other won't do that." 

Diz gave a single hard blink, a single tremor running through his hand. Phil resisted the temptation to say he was taking this far better than he expected.

"Meat shield," he spat suddenly through clenched teeth, face blank. The hand holding the remote scrunched into a fist and he pointed a knifing finger at Quiz. "Next chance I get—meat shield."

"Why, Quiz?!" Viz sounded appalled more than angry. 

"I thought he might need a bargaining chip. You know, in case you decided to kill him," Quiz squawked around being pointed at, cross-eyed from staring down Diz's finger. "Obviously, I would have told you about it if we really needed it, but then the ship turned out to be destroyed anyway. Don't look at me like that—we couldn't have used the remote until this point anyway, so it really doesn't matter that he had it and I didn't say."

Viz looked at him Like That for the whole long, dumbfounded minute it took to get the door open.

"Meat shield."

"Hurry up!" Smiley hiss-shrieked, and, as though her frustration were the cue, the bridge door swept aside in stately fashion, beckoned them inside with a rainbow glitter of slow-strobing lights pinpricking a surprisingly resolute darkness.

It was beautiful, though nobody took the time to appreciate it. The opening of the door wasn't large enough to admit more than one person at a time, but that didn't dissuade anyone from making the attempt to enter the room a group activity. There were not enough of them to constitute a stampede, but the enthusiasm of it was not to be understated; they had all heard it, the faint patter of footsteps hurrying down the corridor towards them, started the second the door unlocked. Getting the door open had been a victory with a dazzlingly short lifespan—now, it was vital to close the door again, as swiftly as possible. How quickly satisfaction burns out when the metric all things are measured by is one's own life, how quickly things stop being enough! Last to enter was Quiz, muttering gloomy things about this being where the spirit of fairness got you these days.

The bridge was a vast room filled with consoles and monitors, their screens dark with dormancy. One wall was dominated entirely by a viewport, through which waterfalled the grey light of distant stars, the ship’s wheel a silhouette. They were facing away from Earth, peering into the abyss and allowing it to come inside; everything in the room was a dim, non-functional outline and nothing more.

At last, here was something he could do—not use the computers or fly them back home, but he was damn good at pushing buttons. With each lever thrown, each colour-lock filled in, every dial turned up to full, more of the lights came on, more of the control room coming to life.

Mercifully, it was unoccupied, unguarded. The relief of this was almost painful.

Each machine surged into renewed operation with a sound like a deep inhalation, the heave of machinery audible beneath metal skin. And as the sounds of potent electricity, boiling chemical, and mobile metal grew, so too did the sounds from elsewhere in the ship as its occupiers grew alert and agitated. From above their heads, a mechanical voice without any sort of personality started up a grim register:

Motion Detected: Observatory Gallery 

Motion Detected: Reactor 5 

Motion Detected: L8 Corridor—Southbound

In this fashion it continued without sign of stopping, describing a hundred little movements in the mass converging on the control room. A siren began its tin cat yowl. The aliens ignored it; the humans did their best.

Sealing Bridge Room Door...

Bridge Room Door Sealed: Air Purity At 98%

"Diz, start the engines and get us out of here," Viz ordered, as the last of the consoles whirred to life. The lights radiating throughout the room were as multitudinous and colourful as glitter; cold sluiced down Phil's spine in rain-water rivulets. Being unable to see the world suddenly felt dangerous—he hadn't appreciated it enough.

"We're running away?" Zach cried, voice hard with anxiety. His skin had the glaring glow of hot coals.

"We're putting distance between them and us," Viz replied, diplomatically nonspecific. "We can figure out what to do long-term after that." 

He started his way over to another bank of diodes and dials, only to be intercepted by Phred, who plastered himself over the keyboard.

"Whoa, whoa, how much distance?! You ran away to the next galaxy to get away from them before—how far are you gonna go this time?!"

A bubble—translucent and full of glisten—began to swell from the centre of the console, bearing Phred forwards on its front like a wave carrying a surfer. Calmly (though with an air of concentration which said the calm was forced), Viz stepped out of Phred's way and let the forcefield envelope him in its boundary. He was keeping his voice level, and it was worryingly evident that this was a struggle.

"If we can get out of this solar system—"

Out of orbit? They might have let him. All the way to the moon? A harder sell, but what a thrill such a jaunt would be! Only twelve people have ever done that! Even in dire circumstances, the experience might have been worth the risk.

'Out of the solar system' was too big. It was too far to quantify in reasonable thought. The file was too big for the mind to download in its entirety, and so it stuck to the cliff-notes which said they would all be dead before the ship even finished turning around for the return. After a certain point, the miles stopped meaning anything other than a death sentence, anything other than the years that would spool out behind them as their home went meaningless with distance in the rearview.

"You can't take us with you on a trip across the universe," Smiley cried, the first of them to recover her thoughts. "I've got school tomorrow!"

Everyone agreed with her wholeheartedly, even though most of them did not, in fact, have school tomorrow.

But what could they do? The hammering fists they rained down upon the barrier bounced at though striking rubber; it couldn't be scraped from the floor; it punctured when stabbed with Smiley's pocket knife, but only enough to admit the knife and nothing else. Nothing the humans did could penetrate the forcefields, whose glassy shimmer now encased the helm and every computer, blocking access to outsiders, obstructing the interventions that might save them. Once again, the aliens were untouchable, as they had not been since Phil was eleven years old. For the first time in seven years, the world was, once again, at their mercy.

They knew it too. He could see it in the way they all stared at him instead of their consoles.

Warning—Bridge Room Door Compromised: Electronic Failure. Status Pending...

And the moment tore like a muscle.

"Diz," Viz spat, turning back to space with singular resolution. "Engines!"

No response, from the pilot or the engines. Or, indeed, any of the machinery. Diz stared down at his hands where they lay splayed on the control board, surrounded by strobing diodes; he stared as though his machines had things to tell him in morse code.

"... No." It was barely even a whisper. It seemed to take a minute for Viz to hear him. Quiz heard it though; Quiz froze, deer-in-headlights still, mouth quivering around something that might have been 'no'. Something had gone horribly wrong, and somehow he was the only one to have figured out what it was.

"That is an order!" The fake calm broke; Viz sounded enraged that his lieutenant had the gall to disobey him, but more than that he sounded afraid.

"No," Diz repeated almost pleasantly, not taking his eyes off the lights. They danced across his face in patterns and shades that turned his scales grey, carved hollows in his cheeks and temples. At some point he had started smiling again, thin lips stretched non-existent.

He had no idea how old they were, Phil realised. 'Adult' was a given but, despite all their talk of decades, there was no number he could attach to any of the aliens, no proof that their concept of 'one year' was the same as a human's. Looking at Diz now, Phil realised with a sinking in his gut that, regardless of their specific place in a foreign lifecycle, the aliens had probably existed for far longer than any human alive.

(He sort of wished he had popcorn. He really wished things were different—that he had the time and security necessary to wish he had popcorn.)

"Have you got a better idea?" Rasped Viz.

'Better' was not the right word for Diz's plan, but, as he recounted it, the green alien's dead, black eyes looked like stars.

"I can overload our Cadmium generators and set off a chain reaction in the other ships. The explosion will incinerate everything in a thousand mile radius."

"Including us," Quiz whispered, in a voice that said 'please don't.'

"And most of Earth, guys," howled Phil, in a voice that said 'don't you dare.' "What the fuck?!"

"Everyone dies," Diz whispered, focus riveted now on his captain. He took a step towards him, one hand still trailing along the keyboard. Behind him, the screen was beset with an ominously blinking cursor, awaiting some sort of extremely final input. "Everyone dies, Viz. Please."

When they robbed Vyrelli for her two pistols, it had been deemed only fair to give one to Mrs Sundae; her priority was the human children, and there wasn't going to be much she could do without one if they got cornered again. It had been a good choice. They had all agreed it was a good choice.

Now, as Phil found, it turned out to have been a great choice, because Mrs Sundae did the only sane thing a person could do in that situation. Or it was an insane thing to do. It didn't matter—Phil was cheering her on. 

She didn't know the specifics on using a plasma pistol, but a gun is a gun and, once upon a time, she was good with those. She aimed it at Diz without flinching.

(Diz didn't flinch either. The smile carved into his face grew incrementally wider.)

At the time, with Viz unresponsive, bordering catatonic, it had been deemed sensible to give the other pistol to Diz, but he made no move to draw it now. He barely reacted at all; the same could not be said for the other two. Quiz shrieked, the raw, human noise as loud and startling as the siren, and started towards them, only hesitating when he reached the edge of that protective sphere. He looked at the humans with bone-deep apprehension, and he didn’t cross the line. 

With a swiftness that precluded thought, Viz snatched the other gun from the holster at Diz's side, and placed himself between Mrs Sundae and his helmsman. Where the woman's aim was steady, his trembled slightly. His single eye was wild and darting, watching everything fall invisibly apart.

Phil heart, beating too hard and fast for him to feel, was wrestling its way up his throat to strangle him. Beads of blood were forming on Smiley's knuckles, but still she punched the shielding, tears making tracks down her cheeks that glowed pink, aquamarine, and apricot as the computers flashed an applause for doomsday.  

There was a restless humming to the air, atoms preparing to shiver themselves apart.

For a lifetime, nobody moved. Nobody in the bridge, at least; scratches and scrapes hissed away at the door, a sound like spiders, like something stealthily creeping its way through bracken.

Warning—Bridge Room Door Compromised: Mechanical Failure. Status Pending...

It wasn't like the assault on the doors at Zone 5.1, a messy matter of fist and force. This was skilled and silvery, a false key as opposed to a lock pick. It was worse, it was so much worse—

Enter Sequence Code Omega

Still nobody moved on the floor of the world's worst disco. With the hand not occupied with maintaining a standoff, Viz groped the air behind him in search of Diz's shoulder. It was a search short-lived; Diz reached up, other hand still typing death into his machines, and laced his fingers with Viz's.

(This wasn't what the commander had been trying to achieve—Phil rather got the feeling Viz had wanted to pull Diz back. Still, it didn't seem unwelcome; he looked at his Second, lonely eye wide and round, and he tied all eight of their jointed fingers in a spectacular imitation of a Gordian knot, something that looked tight and complicated enough to hurt.)

"It's okay," Diz lied around his smile, genuinely elated at the prospect of incineration. "It will be okay."

'How did I get here? What happened to us? What the hell happened to my life? Where did I go wrong? Was it really wrong enough to deserve this?' Phil could feel sweat dripping down his face like tears.

There were no buttons to push. There were no weirdly convenient items to pick up. There were no secret codes, or little hints, or ways he could make this better. There was nothing Phil could do at all; nothing but hold three of the people he loved most close to him and pray that made it even incrementally better for them. Even though nothing could make this better, nothing could save them now.

Enter Sequence Code Omega

If machines could sound impatient, this one did. Zach dropped his head to Phil's shoulder and wept scalding tears into his shirt.

"Don't," Viz snapped at everything—at Diz, at the computer, at the situation in general. He shifted so that he still stood solidly between his helmsman and Mrs Sundae, who was subtly repositioning. "Don't you dare. We'll figure something else out."

But there was no time, just like when they stood here before, high above the world with disaster breathing down their necks. There wasn't a better plan—there wasn't time to think of a better plan.

"I... I actually might have an idea?" Quiz piped up. Quiz, who everyone had again forgotten about.

Instead of walking to the main computer from console to console, bubble to bubble, after a moment of hesitation, Quiz stepped out from behind the shielding, to where the humans, half feral with fear, could reach him. He kept his eyes locked on Phil's, too soft and anxious to be reassuring, but present; 'I'm here,' they said, hopeful that this was the right thing to do, 'I'm here in hell too.' 

Just as before, Quiz was here and he apparently had a plan this time.

Phil nodded desperately. Any alternative to the very binary options of 'abandon Earth forever' and 'perish instantly' was welcome. Because Viz seemed to be recognising for the first time that the mad dog he dragged across the universe wasn't biting people for fun, and while this was definitely an important revelation for him to have (indeed, a pivotal point in his relationship with Diz going forwards) it didn't need to happen right fucking then. Somebody needed to do something, even if that person was Quiz.

Enter Sequence Code Omega

"Go on, Quiz. What do you want us to do?"

(Diz's hand stayed still on the keyboard, despite the mechanised urging of the engine and the slow crackling of the door breaking down; he was looking at Viz's hand in his with a slight smile, as though wondering how much he'd miss it if he let go.)

Instead of answering, Quiz made a timid little shooing gesture to usher the pair away from the console. It was the same one he'd used to get Zach to leave him alone earlier and it worked... considerably less well here.

"This is my damn control board!"

"How dare you, I am still your superior—"

"Oh, come on!" Exasperated and feeling a little thwarted, a little ridiculous, Quiz threw his hands up in the air. "We are about to be grossly splattered across the cosmos, pretty please will you idiots move!"

The idiots moved—all three of them; Quiz slid into place at the main console and began typing feverishly, mercifully banishing the engine statistics and their implications. Slowly, the vital components of the universe ceased their doomsday dance.

Moving as though, at any moment, someone would try to stop him, Quiz shuffled through patchwork V.I.Z.ion system files until he found something Different; something, sleek, and sharp, and white as snow. Into this page, he entered his clearance codes from before, and the Enquiry systems log that had been forcibly linked in to the V.I.Z.ion ship for cataloguing opened to him like a treasure chest. Though the language was inscrutable, the formatting of what appeared on screen was unmistakably some form of personnel database, with photographs matched to reams of information and tagged numbers. A vast network spiralled out before Phil's eyes, thousands of new faces flashing past like strangers on the platform of a station he was passing through at a million miles per hour. All of them looked stern, and strong, and regal, shoulders back, chins raised, eyes bright and hard with promise and pride.

How many of them were still alive? 

How many of them had been condemned by friends and trusted colleagues? Not just in The Enquiry, but all those who informed and reported for them, until every whisper of individual thought was deemed worthy of being snuffed out?

And then Quiz's typing stopped. Three profiles remained on the screen, their associated data curling behind the photos like tentacles or tendrils of ivy on an old stone wall, tangled and interlinked, fraught with red pulses that said things like 'open case', 'prioritised', and 'warning: lethal force required'.

They were familiar, the faces in those photographs. Hauntingly so—the 'before' of a funhouse mirror, having only ever seen the reflection.

Phil was surprised to find that Quiz's expression was bright and cold as surgical lights as he stood resplendent in a snowy dress uniform, radiating an icy smugness. Displayed either side of him were the profiles for Diz and Viz; both wore grey soldier's articles, much as they did now, and yet, simultaneously, like nothing familiar at all. Viz's recorded expression was a little aloof, the two eyes austere, but there was a glitter to the pride that said excitement. Diz’s face was making a good attempt at being serious, eyes skewed to look at something just out of frame. Something victorious hovered at the corners of his mouth, something not quite a smile. It was… disquieting. They looked young. They looked almost human.

And, behind those old photographs, lay records that spanned years.

This was it, the V.I.Z.ion file in its entirety. An inglorious compilation of every little war in a brutal and vicious campaign, an itemised list of every victory and every failure, every grim, dogged step the V.I.Z.ion alien's took away from their homeworld, and every attempt made to snatch them back. With the speed and ease of someone well-accustomed to admin, Quiz selected all of it and pressed 'delete', banishing the whole sorry story into whatever nonexistence constitutes death for the electromagnetic.

And the sound of movement from behind the door ceased. 

The wailing of the siren took a confused intake of breath and never resumed its tirade. In the surrounding computer banks came the lock-click noise of procedures and restrictions coming undone. Footsteps receded quietly down the hall, and that was the end of that.

With one click, the V.I.Z.ion file in its entirety—down to its very roots, the mere existence of Vlyanad, Deianacht, and Quircus—was deleted. And, to the mechanical minds of those little, computerised disks, it's deletion meant it may as well have never existed. Metal doesn’t care about things like reason; a machine will do what it is told until it is asked to stop and, for all that it is neat and precise, it does not care who has made these requests. It does not care that it’s job is not complete. To care requires, ironically enough, an element of humanity, and, with its undying mastery, The Enquiry had made certain there was none of that left.

Just like that, the struggle was over. They were free.

Was relief supposed to hurt? Phil wasn't sure but, as his blood soared knifingly through his veins, he found it hard to mind—he was alive to hurt! He was alive to feel the buildup of tears pushing his eyeballs out of his skull! Alive for his breaths to sandpaper his throat and ache in his belly! Convulsions shook him, and it took many minutes of happy confusion for him to realise he was laughing, even as hot salt poured down his cheeks. The stupid, fucking game was over! He'd won! They’d won! Game over!

(Nobody thanked Quiz, because the whole thing was one third his fault, but he wasn't even looking at them anymore and didn't seem to mind; Mrs Sundae slammed her gun down on a desk and bent over it, gasping; Diz didn't seem to be breathing any more, as though he had shut down the same moment the engine died.)

"You deleted yourself." Viz was watching Quiz with a surprisingly careful sense of appraisal. "You'll never be able to go back home now."

"Good," sniffed Quiz, the murderer of Enquirer Quircus. "Not sure what I ever saw in the place."

For a long moment, Viz looked away and, again, didn't speak; he stepped away from the command panel, pulling Diz along with him. The other alien followed, placid as a toy. Together, they returned to the viewpoint, black shapes that hollowed the stars out of the blackness.

"Well then," Viz said eventually. "You... would be welcome to come with us?”

There was some significance to that offer that Phil couldn't quite parse, but it clearly meant the world to Quiz (and for Quiz, the world genuinely was a metric measurement.)

"I would like that," he laughed, eyes looking a little damp. "I would like that very much."

Suddenly, there was time again—time to figure out where they would go from here. Phil could feel the dizzy swirl of the hands as they smeared the numbers across the clock's face, an infinity that he would get to see a little more of before the gears wound down. He was on his knees, face in Smiley's hair, letting her strangle him in a hug because he never thought he would have another chance.

In a minute, one of them would have to say something funny, to summarise the situation, tie it up nice and neatly with a half-joke so that it could be tagged and left behind. But not him, not yet; right now, it was enough that he breathe, that his lungs fill and contract around mouthfuls of artificial air that was blessedly never going to run out. Right now, it was enough that he sit and count out the pearls on the rosary, each one a year or ten that, a few minutes ago, had almost been scattered across the floor.

In the end, it was gallant Zach who took the shot.

"My therapist is gonna make absolute bank out of me for forever," he croaked. Wide-eyed, he sunk down the wall to the floor, looking at them all with a vague half-smile that was only just starting to touch wet eyes. "The woman is set for life."

Chapter Text

The night after the Almost-End Of The World (Mk. 2) was a perfect one for a sleepover.

They did not linger on the recaptured V.I.Z.ion mothership for very long—a few hours at most—but it was long enough for everyone to, at last, fully appreciate that they were still alive on an alien spaceship, and that the world drifting far below was beautiful. The three aliens excused themselves to run system checks, and damage control, and other such necessities, and the humans unanimously abandoned the bridge and its master computer in favour of the observation sphere that hollowed out the ship, spine to belly. There, they could see, through the cross-section either side, the mothership's varied children tucked neatly into her ribs, two empty bays denoting the ones lost on this last excursion. The sphere had it's own, internal sense of gravity, allowing them to walk the perfectly smooth glass walls as easily as they would pace a floor.

In the centre of the bubble, the humans sat. Above them: the magnificent tapestry of the universe. Below: their home, boldly spelled out in artistic smears of emerald, ash, and aqua. Slips of metal blackness snaked briefly across it at intervals, and then were gone, lost in the dark; Enquiry ships, lazy and graceful as koi, returning placidly home.

Like a reverent at an alter, Phil knelt and pressed his hands to the cold wall separating him from his life; he felt that if he pressed hard enough he might break through some thin film and fall—no, not fall. He would hang suspended forever above the world and never touch it again. 

The world! The ordinary, boring, beautiful, brilliant world! The one he had trudged through for seven years without really seeing, so intent on holding on to this image from above.

Here was his chance to see it again; to breathe it in, to feel the shape of it and the hole it left in his heart, and... let it go.

Sometimes things are terrible, and those are things we must absorb and release. And some things are beautiful beyond comprehension, so massive you feel like they're the most meaningful thing in your life, the reason you exist at all... and we must let go of those too. You can't carry it all with you, not if you want to survive to see what the rest of your life has to offer. You can’t walk forwards while looking back; eventually, you will fall.

'What a wonderful thing you are, what endless opportunity you offer... I'm so sorry for forgetting.'

Warm fingers settled in the divot of his shoulder and, feeling very detached from himself, Phil reached up and held onto Smiley's hand, the only real thing on the ship. She'd painted her nails a punchy cobalt in his absence, some time after he’d kissed her forehead goodbye while she slept.

"It's incredible..." Whispered Mrs Sundae, absolutely transfixed.

"It's not all that," Zach grinned, taking the liberty to sling a companionable arm around her shoulder. "All the cool stuff's on the other side."

Eventually, the aliens returned. All three were dressed in fresh uniforms, and the absence of scorch marks and tears offered them a certain inscrutability, that old veneer of invincibility; but even in this unity, there were visible cracks that hadn't been there before. Cold, silvery starlight glinted off of the fissures striking through them, new and old, and all three watched the humans with something that was almost apprehension. Among them, only Quiz wore an expression anywhere close to happy.

"We're ready!" He announced, in a tone that, with surprising subtlety, inquired if the same was true for them. Around him, in silence, people nodded, and Phil felt the force of their own certainty move his head up and down, his own admission of 'yeah' glued drily in his throat.

It was time to say goodbye to the stars. It was time to leave.

To keep everything neat, they landed in the crash site from the first time, as though that blackened pit carved out of the heart of that ugly little forest were their designated parking space. Soot footprints followed them home, eight pairs of feet following each other single-file to the door of a nondescript little house at the far end of a supremely ordinary neighbourhood just off the edge of a very boring city. Triumphant, exhilarated, full of cheer far too vibrant for the hour, they walked down streetlamp lit roads, feeling invincible, as though each step they took spanned miles.

Behind them, for lack of anything better to do with themselves, the aliens followed; not in the fashion of people attending a party out of some vague curiosity, but in the sneaking, shamefaced sense of people tagging along without an invitation. Their human companions did not dissuade them, but they didn't interact with them either. High-spirited conversation from the front of the line echoed back to where they trailed along at the back in silence:

"Have you considered the possibility that there are multiple cats?"

"It's bright pink, Phred, how many cats are bright pink?"

"Depends—are we talking neon pink or bald pink?"

"Like someone coloured a white cat in with highlighter."

"And you're sure it's called Gerald?—"

Inside, they switched all the lights on despite the lateness of the hour and the slumberous dark of the houses surrounding. They raided a confused convenience store for tiny sausages and dip, poured mismatched glasses of white wine and strawberry cordial, and toasted each other in the multicoloured light of the Tiffany lampshade. They rigged a phone to a set of crackling speakers and booed through the adverts that played before every song. And then, because it really was very late, and most of them did have plans and obligations for tomorrow, they hauled the blowup mattresses up the stairs to Smiley's room, changed into borrowed pyjamas, and lay down, indolent and proud as emperors. Phred had snagged a packet of jammy dodgers from the biscuit tin and was magnanimously distributing them via airdrop (throwing them at the ceiling and lazily seeing who said 'ow' when it fell.)

"I said it to Smiley, but I should say it to you two as well," Phil said after a time. "I'm sorry I took off on my own. I was having a moment and it went wrong in ways that weren't entirely fair."

"Eh, I forgave you sometime shortly after finding out you weren't dead." Zach's shadow shrugged on the wall. "To be perfectly honest, I also thought you could handle it just fine and was happy to leave it as your problem."

"Ditto." Gently, Phred lobbed another biscuit at his mate's head. "Next time you have a mid-life crisis, just let us know. I know a great broom cupboard we can scream in to, one where the janitors don't even mind that much."

For a minute, Phil was silent, listening to his heartbeat and the sound of his friends breathing and gently bickering over the last of the strawberry wine. Smiley's fingers were playing over his scalp where he'd lain his head in her lap, teasing loose those last, lingering anxieties like bits of dead leaves combed from hair; for the first time in seven years, he looked at the vast unknown of the future and felt curiosity instead of uncertainty. Whatever happened, it would happen to all of them.

"You guys are the greatest," he admitted quietly. He caught Smiley's hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it, across the thin skin covering her knuckles.

"No shit, bud." The Zach shadow stretched its arms above his head, hands full of gold. "I’m the best thing since bottled milk.”

“… Isn’t it ‘best thing since sliced bread’?” Smiley asked, in the slightly accusatory tone one might use if someone on one's quiz team was confidently advocating for the wrong answer.

“Sliced bread isn’t that great. No variety, no surprises, no need for knives. Bottled milk’s much better.”

“What’s so great about bottled milk?”

“See, before we had bottled milk, you had to suck it straight out the cow.”

It wasn't a magnificent joke—the setup was minimal, the punchline relied on the shock of the concept and little else. But, as howls of laughter rattled windows drenched in toffee-gold, mystified lookers on, rudely awoken by the cacophony, felt certain they had just missed out on the funniest joke in human history. All was well and warm in that little, childhood bedroom.

Downstairs was another matter, a status slight to the left of 'all's well'. Just down the hall from the stairs, in Mrs Sundae's study, the aliens stood shoulder to shoulder and watched their strange shadow unspool on the wall in front of them. All around them in the rest of the house, one by one, the lights were going out, until the only illumination left was that which came creeping down the stairs. None of them had spoken since the landing, and none of them spoke now as they heard the tread of purposeful feet come to a slow halt just outside the open door.

She had her daughter's eyes, Mrs Sundae did; dark and hot as pepper, unusually serious, full of a cutting cleverness that chose to be kind.

This had been where she put them to recover and, during those few weeks, it had become, in her mind, almost 'their' room, more so than it had ever been her study. It was a sense more indelible than the blood which had spotted the floor or the smell of silver and wet leaves, something she couldn't sponge out of carpet or wipe from the walls. No; she'd have to redecorate to be rid of it, and even that might not be enough. She felt it fully possible that this room might always, in some fashion, belong to these, strangest of all strangers, the ghosts of the world's Damocles' sword.

Ada studied them, as they all stood there with their backs turned like children hoping she might take her judgement elsewhere if they pretended she didn't exist. Age is such a subjective thing, unfolding endlessly towards the horizon in reams of years, but a person can pass whole lifetimes without ever actually feeling different. She remembered herself at twenty, holding her own hand in the face of a world that was going to make her fight for what she wanted, and she didn't remember ever losing that verve. She remembered holding her daughter in her arms and feeling as monumentally terrified as she had at sixteen, with vast choices being offered to her for the first time. And she remembered, clear as daylight, being stuck inside the head of a creature that had never known anything other than death; something designed as an embryo to fight, trained to kill and be good at it.

It struck her that, despite everything, she was the adult here. An actual adult, not someone recently past the threshold of eighteen, or a highly militarised alien with net zero perspective. She didn't feel old enough; she felt too small, too inexperienced, too young at heart to hold worlds in her hand.

Another way she had changed without her noticing; where was that youthful arrogance now that she needed it? Frittered away on sneaking out of school and into the pub with her mates.

Sometime during her reverie the aliens had all turned around and were watching her with their liquid, dark eyes, crowded behind their leader. Properly dressed and healed, they looked, in every sense of the word, better; they looked dangerous again.

"Thank you," Viz said, with a formal sort of sincerity. "For letting us stay." It was abundantly clear he didn't mean this night, this specific time.

Ada ignored this, for what was there to say? She didn't regret saving them—regret wasn't in her nature—but she knew now they hadn't deserved it, and she had no idea what to do with the information. She had grown reluctantly fond of them; she would not be sorry if she never saw them again.

The sour taste of starlight still tingled at the back of her throat like a sheen of bile; she felt like she would spend the rest of her life trying to wrap her head around the events of one night.

"I would tell you that nothing—nothing—gives you the right to destroy our world, or any other world that might be out there," she said instead, voice low and shaky with wrath. "But I think you all know that. I think you know and don't care."

Three different nods of agreement: meek, terse, and apathetic. All of them avoided looking at her directly.

"Playing God won't fix what's wrong with you. And playing angel doesn't absolve you of the things you did." The weight of their attention was thick as clay, their attentiveness frightfully heavy; they trusted her, she realised, respected her. Whatever she said now would be what they carried with them going forwards. She struggled for a minute, the silence like a well. "I would have preferred to have met you before you were monsters."

She didn't tell them that they might have all been better off dead, though it was certainly something she could have said, and not saying it didn't mean she hadn't thought it. Not saying it didn't mean it was wrong.

"Goodnight, all of you," was what she said instead, voice gentle. "Sleep well."

With nothing left to offer, Ada turned and headed up the stairs, back towards the light. She had only made it halfway up before Viz's voice stopped her; in the dark, he was reduced to an eye and the glisten of the hard edges filling the other socket. She didn't stop.

"Earth is safe," he said quietly. "From us, I mean. We won't..."

He trailed off. Admitting it out loud felt like defeat, that freely made decision, and the need to justify himself to this one, inconsequential human was too ridiculous to contemplate. Behind him, he sensed his lieutenant stiffen, but there was no objection.

Silhouetted by the hall light upstairs, Mrs Sundae paused on the last step and lingered there as though about to respond. She continued without uttering a word and, minutes later, the light shut off, plunging the downstairs into pleasant, blue-tinged gloom that nevertheless felt final, like theatre lights shutting off and leaving the stage boards to go cold.

Pride bruised, sense of neatness satisfied, Viz struck his debt to the humans from his ledger and returned to his room. Together, they set about bedding down for the night, in the same places they had occupied for the duration of their stay—one by the window, one by the door, one under the desk. They had replicated this arrangement every night for weeks with no change but, this time, they somehow ended up gravitating to each other; by the time they had all lain down, they found that they were lying in a row, three inches apart each, exactly. None of them made a move to correct it.

"Any injuries?" 

"No."

"No, Viz."

"Alright then." Weary of the universe, Viz eased himself down onto the blanket pallet. "We can have a meeting later about your conduct. Both of you."

But, though they were all tired, none of them felt much like sleeping. Something about the dark was distinctly unrestful, like the blackness cobwebbing the inside of a coffin lid, so very unlike the sort they were used to, with its kaleidoscope speckling of stars and glowing diodes. A preoccupation with the various ways in which they were dying had prevented it from bothering them previously, but now, with adrenaline still licking at every nerve, it was unbearable. This was not a night for sleeping, but the V.I.Z.ion aliens were nothing if not good liars; they lay in the dark with their eyes stubbornly shut and pretended it put them at ease.

'Well,' Quiz thought, after about thirty minutes of this limbo. 'No time like the present.'

"Actually I'd like to talk now, if it's all the same to you."

Feeling rather unprepared, Quiz sat up, the millions of things he wanted to say teeming across his tongue like a shoal of eager fish. He hardly knew which to address first; he had almost lost the chance to say any of it.

Inwardly, very deep down, he knew whatever he said next would alter things irreparably, and this was something he was refusing to examine closely. He wasn't sure if he was ready for it, a changing of that invisible contract drawn up between them, even for small, inconsequential things. If the last few hours had shown him anything, it was that, as much as he loathed being kept in his usual place at arms-length, he hated this more—the scrabbling, the desperation, the fear. He hadn't thought things could get worse than being left out; he had been wrong, horrifically wrong. 

As much as he understood (peripherally, implicitly) that such a thing was inevitable, Quiz wasn't certain the change would be for the better—he had full faith in their combined ability to get worse.

For better or worse, it was regardless a moment that deserved a certain amount of gravitas; some sort of desk should probably be involved. A studiously frowning solicitor. Signatures written in swirls by a fancy pen. Instead, there was darkness so deep it was impossible to see each other's faces, and mismatched blankets laid thinly out on a rug some long ago dog had loved to chew. The other two opened their eyes but did not sit up.

"Go on then," Viz sighed, and Quiz felt his insides squirm. Once upon a three-days-ago, he would have said Viz looked like a corpse, lying there like that; he now had a much clearer understanding of what that would look like, and he still found the resemblance haunting, far too close for comfort.

And so, for too long a moment, he didn't Go On; he sat in the dark and watched them breathe until the heat of their half-invisible gazes became too impatient to ignore.

"I saved you," he blurted out at last. "Both of you. So... so you owe me."

'Excellent start,' Quiz thought spiritedly to himself. 'Clear, incisive, factual. This is going so well!'

This was not an opinion shared by the other two; in fact, it's rather the antithesis of their thoughts. In hindsight, it was probably not the most constructive way to begin that discussion, but Quiz wouldn't think of that until years later.

"I don't owe you anything," Diz murmured, closed-door cold. "You've meddled with my head quite enough."

'Oh, not this still.' But then, he had never known his friend to let things go easily—if he let them go at all. 

Unwillingly, Quiz thought of the truncated helplessness he'd felt when the other two had died, the sense that he had lost his hands, that he was stuck in a hostile place without the things which were supposed too protect him, that there was nobody to come and rescue him; perhaps that was what it had been like to be shot down and stuck, without warning, in a machine which rendered you unable to move or speak. For the first time, Quiz considered the possibility that Diz had been scared too.

"Look." Quiz swallowed the denials and excuses that immediately sprung to his lips. "I'm... sorry. I understand you didn't like being put in the Neuro-Scribe. It's not my... I didn't mean to hurt you, but I was angry enough with being left out I decided it would be worth it anyway." He glanced shamefacedly down at Diz, who was watching him with muted shock, and a hint of something softer. "I felt like you could manage without me and I didn't like it."

"I don't owe you anything either," Viz agreed, after Diz failed to continue his recriminations. "Considering you left me marooned on an asteroid after my whole ship was reduced to flinders."

"You weren't hurt!" But that wasn't the point, and Quiz knew it. "... Can I start again?"

(Years later, the dualities of this request would strike Quiz, and he would realise that this would have been a much better lead in to what he had wanted to say.)

"Just tell us what you want, Quiz."

How to say it tactically? How to say it at all?

"I came very close to understanding you both after you died," he started bluntly. "And I think I get it now. I was a little... lost without you, and it would have been very easy to fall back into a... stable routine, even if it was part a world I didn't like anymore. And I suppose I saw some of what I represented to you both... what it would mean for you if I did decide to go back...

"And it's not fair for you to hold on to that and hold it against me. I'm not that person anymore and I haven't been for a long time. But I get it now. I didn't before. And I know I do still rely on you both for a lot of things and can't offer much in return, which I imagine doesn't help with you seeing me as one of them and not one of you.

"But I missed you. I missed you both dreadfully."

A tremor wobbled through his voice, and Quiz was suddenly quite glad for the unnatural, unfamiliar dark; maybe he was the weakest of them, but he didn't want to cry. The indignity of watering down his confession with tears was distinctly unpalatable, especially now that they were alive to know he had wept for them. He paused, taking deep, steadying breaths in an effort to compose himself.

Beside him, the other two slowly sat up; a hand found his, and Quiz didn't look to see who it belonged to. There weren't protocols for this; for major injuries, sure, and in-fighting almost as a matter of principle, but not this.

"I need you both to understand I'm not going anywhere. Ever. I had the opportunity to leave you both and I hated it more than anything. I had the chance to go back to The Enquiry and I didn't—I'm never going to. I need you to treat me like I belong here—with you—because... well, I do."

The hand in his squeezed, then gently withdrew, and Quiz held his breath, palm feeling unhappily bereft. It shouldn't have—holding hands was, after all, a far stranger circumstance than not—but still, he was filled with the urge to snatch it back.

"Our lives were on the line every day for years and you were the only one without weapon or flight training outside of the little Diz and I could teach you. You were a liability." Viz took a slow breath, like a man about to duck his head underwater. "But you're right. You've done a lot for us over the years and we should recognise that above anything else. I'm sorry for not involving you more. I'm... I'm sorry."

Tears prickled at Quiz's eyes and his smile threatened to fall off either side of his face. Hugging his captain was not something that would go over well, so Quiz restrained himself... for a few seconds. Viz didn't hit him or give him a dead arm, and so, in glory, Quiz laid claim to his fifth victory of the day (not a record number, but certainly the one he was proudest of.) 

"Thank you for coming back for us," Diz murmured quietly. With a delighted chirup, Quiz put his secondary set of arms to good use and dragged Diz into the embrace. 

It felt like something coming dislodged deep within him, like phlegm after an illness or a clot melting in a vein, but perhaps without such medicinal imagery. Some stagnation long fermenting in his blood was easing, clearing like a vegetation choked stream running clear for the first time in years and letting him see the detritus on the bottom. It wasn't a solution—plants regrew, the waters were bitter with poison, and the sediment on the riverbed cloaked dagger-sharp stones—but for the first time in years it was better. 

'Was that so hard?' Quiz wanted to ask them, but he had a feeling the honest answer would be yes, and he was elated enough to forgo mockery for a minute.

"Well, at least we won't have to worry about running anymore," he told them, as they all lay back down. "And I forgive you, if it means anything."

It meant everything, but neither of his superiors felt stable enough to speak on the matter, and in any case 'forgive' wasn't  precisely what Quiz meant; he would forgive them, in time—just as, in time, Viz and Diz would unlearn their distrust and see the third member of their crew as more than a manacle tying them to their past. Right now, Quiz wanted to forgive them so completely he felt he'd already done it.

"You're certain?" Reassured that the discussion of feelings had been put to rest, Viz gladly seized the easier subject of their Enquiry shadow. "You're absolutely sure we're safe now? The Enquiry will never cast its Eyes on us again?"

"Not unless we plan to go back into their airspace and make nuisances of ourselves. But even then, the system's about to go down; we'll never be tagged and logged in the same way. All information on us was wiped."

"You deleted us," Viz pointed out with customary grimness. "Not The Enquiry itself."

It was at this point Quiz came to the realisation that neither of them had any idea what he had done, leaving him with the slightly disconcerting feeling of once again holding all the cards. They were still deep within the realm of Everything Changing and, this time, it wasn't so much a matter of how to tell them, it was if he wanted to at all. 

In a peripheral sense, with a depth of perception he rarely utilised, Quiz knew that, despite everything, having the threat of Enquiry to rail against had given his crew-mates a sense of purpose. Part of him worried that losing it, losing that pressure, would kill them. Now that the danger had passed, part of him worried that he had taken away their reason to live.

Best to do it kindly, he supposed. Rip the bandage off and see how long it took them to bleed out.

"I kind of liked Diz's idea about blowing up generators," he said steadily, eyes on the ceiling. "But I don't know how to do that... so I just changed some admin commands to make it so the reactors for the ships can't be turned off. It was easy to make the switch while I was getting rid of us. No one has high enough clearance to fix it—I used Enquirer Myiku's codes. Anyway, no one will notice; everything's automated these days and I turned off alerts. I figured it'll eventually overheat, but they'll likely get back home and dock before that happens.

"And when they blow, they'll take out The Enquiry."

There was a beat of quiet after that. The sort of monumental, tectonic quiet where everything in a person's world shudders and shatters, falling apart into infinity. Tension filled the small room, a sort of airlessness—worse than airless, for they could survive without air; this was loss, and they had seen so much of that already they weren't sure if they could bear another. With kindness, but also a growing sense of pride as he really considered his achievement, Quiz continued: 

"All the lead Enquirers, all the mind control servers, everything. It shouldn't affect the army, but even if it does the civilians will be alright.

"So, now you get to pick. We can go home and get wrapped up in whatever civil war is bound to happen after The Enquiry collapses, or... we can do something else. Anything else." Blindly, slightly worried by the silence, Quiz groped about in darkness until he encountered again bony, rough-skinned hands. "But whatever we do, I'm part of it."

Quiet—quiet of the grappling kind, with thoughts flitting through it like wringing hands, like darting eyes trying to find a familiar face in a room that was suddenly full of strangers. Despite this, despite the sense that he had just swept his friends' feet out from under them, Quiz was suddenly quite convinced he had done the right thing. For the first time in his life, the universe was opening up to him like a flower, flooded with possibilities—it had been the only thing he could do, he was sure of it now.

They'd see. They'd learn. He'd only ever wanted what was best for them, after all.

"What... what is this, Quiz?" Diz whispered hoarsely, his world destroyed a second time. 

"I don't really know," Quiz mused, enamoured and a little intrigued by the infinite possibilities of his own proposition. "I suppose I'm offering you something you two never offered me. I'm offering you a choice."

"You demanded to come with us." Viz argued, fixating on the one thing he could correct. "We didn't just decide to drag you along."

'I did decide. I'm deciding again. Maybe I'm making bad choices but they're mine.'

"Alright, alright, fine—this is our first group choice, alright?" Pacifyingly, Quiz squeezed the shivery fingers in his, content to lie like that for the rest of the long night. "We don't have to decide tonight... I just thought I should tell you we have options."

"Things... would have to be different," Viz said slowly, in the slightly wary tone that meant he was turning a hundred flakes of thought over in his mind, examining each one very carefully. There was a tension around the word 'different', an anxiety in the ambiguity that even Quiz, protected by his boundless optimism, could feel in echoes. 

"We can do different," he agreed confidently. "... If we want to carry on together, it might actually be... better to consider doing things differently."

If all the years together had taught him anything, it was that they were infinitely adaptable, capable of almost anything. It was not a question of whether or not they could manage such a thing. 'Different' still frightened Quiz, but he was beginning to suspect it was the uncertainty that worried at him more than anything, the sense of being beholden to whatever decision the others would make. That couldn't happen here; he was the one making things Different. It is one thing to be stuck in a changeable world, another thing entirely to be the god who dictates the changes.

Most of us are not gods; most of us have to live with whatever is thrown our way, but living is itself a choice.

"I've enjoyed traveling with you both," Viz said eventually, his voice thoughtful. "I... don't know where we would go from here."

"Anywhere," Quiz replied happily, not realising, as he usually did, that this was precisely the issue. "Anywhere at all."

Neither Viz nor Diz corrected him with their concerns, lost in a myriad of intentangled thoughts. They let Quiz believe he had fixed things and, eventually, he drifted off to sleep, still holding their hands, content for the first time in years.

One they were certain he wouldn't wake up, Viz and Diz wormed their fingers free and resumed lying in the dark, awake and alone, their towers crashing down in the dust around them. Sleep never came for them, their heels bitten by that fast approaching spectre called the future, it's deathless eyes fixed unflinchingly on their own.

It was not terror they felt—they knew terror too well. They didn't know what this was, had no name to call it, and so they lay awake and wondered.

("You gonna do anything stupid?" Phil asked, long after everyone else had fallen asleep, head stuck through the door at a crooked angle, glass of water clutched in one hand. Viz studied the eerie circlet of half-familiar face, the boy turned man, the captive turned ally turned saviour. He looked at them without wariness, without condemnation, without affection; he looked at them like they were strangers. Which, Viz supposed, they were.

"No." He watched a knot of tension unravel in Phil's face and realised, with a feeling like a bruise, that he was, in some fashion, still trusted.

"Okay..." Nodding, almost to himself, Phil withdrew slightly. He paused with his head mostly out of the door, his face a pale streak mostly hidden in shadow. "Are you...? I mean... never-mind. I'll see you in the morning, yeah?"

No answer. The door slipped closed and footsteps padded slowly back up the stairs.)

"Are you... alright?" Viz asked of the pitch black room some time after midnight had struck. In a rare fit of candidness, Diz actually thought about his answer before giving it. 

"... No." Truth tasted strangely, after so many years of saying 'yes' to save face. "No, I don't think I am."

He was still struggling with the aftertaste of Ada Sundae's well-lived life, the richness of a beloved family and cherished friends, so other from him and his own world of ashes. It has been as brilliantly clear to him as daylight, as though those happy memories of a warm home had been his own, as though he were someone who could live with the horrors of the past and not just repeat them. And then he woke up and it was gone.

All his brilliance, all his drive, and what did he have to show for it? What did he have? Nothing. Nothing left to his falsified name, nothing left to lose, nothing left so he would take it—

But suddenly there was a hand wrapped about his, and it stayed there even as he squeezed it like he was trying to break it. 

Viz didn't look at his helmsman, and he didn't sit up. He almost wanted to take the question back, to pretend it hadn't happened, and discard the inconvenient honesty, but the desire was less pressing than the sudden, unprecedented relief he felt at finally having even a sliver of the truth. Diz's hands were still the ones he remembered from a lifetime ago; perhaps a little bloodier than they had once been, but still strong and calloused from hard work, steady as stone and slightly cold. Holding on to them across Quiz's body was awkward and strange, but to let them go was suddenly unthinkable.

Inadequate. That's what it was, painful though it was to think. He had gotten almost everything wrong at every turn. Almost destroying a planet, being saved, being killed, being brought back to life, watching his most trusted friend try to kill them all... Viz didn't think he would ever be as sure of himself as he had once been. He wasn't what either of his crew-mates needed, and he had no idea if he could be. But he could do this; he could try again and, perhaps one day, it could be enough.

Until then, they had This, for whatever it was worth. Which wasn’t much, but such was the way of things—not much survives an explosion, even less survives death, betrayal, and insanity. Once, the three of them had it all—respect, and power, and a world they understood and which understood them in turn. And after that they’d had substantially less but it was something. Now all that remained was This; three murderers’ hands clinging to each other with a strength that would have broken human bone. None of them could stand to let go; they would have held on even if the force had been enough to crush their fingers to paste. They might not have been surrounded by the people they needed… but they were the only ones left; none of them would change that for the universe.

Once upon a time, Viz had been rather good at staring down the barrel of the impossible and carrying on. He supposed, with an idle mixture of despair and hope, he would have to remember how to be that way again. It was either that or let his First Mate drag them all after him into oblivion.

You weren't supposed to survive past the ending of your world. You weren't supposed to wind up in the places beyond the boarders of the maps, those empty, endless spaces which proclaimed, like harbingers, Here There Be Monsters. You weren’t supposed to wake up the morning after your funeral and look your mourners in their grief-ruined eyes.

And yet, here they were.

They were alive to try again. That wasn't a chance many people got. Viz would do his best with it, even if it killed him.

"I don't know how to do anything else," Diz confessed in a haunted whisper, so very far away from the pilot Viz had met in the dockyard all those years ago who had been convinced he could do anything. The painful knot of fondness tying them together bled. "What if I can't?"

"Can't what?"

Diz just shook his head, eyes glassy and glossy, the very image of desolation, transfixed by horrific spectres of his own making. For once, Viz didn't push him.

"You were the best in the academy. You'll learn." Feeling easier in what was left of his heart than he had in years, Viz ran his thumb just once over his lieutenant's knuckles. "We'll figure it out."

And that is where we leave them, in the ambiguous no-man's-land of Figuring Out. To do anything else, or to pretend their coming concretely to a decision—any decision—was easy or even eventual, would be disingenuous.

We cannot be as we were, but were we ever? Memories get so jumbled. Nothing is either as good or bad as it seems at the time.

We can never really try again. Once passed, a moment is gone forever. By the time we find our way back, we are different people in different worlds, even if only incrementally. But, perhaps, that it why such returns are so important. The 'us' of yesterday no longer exists to stand in our way; we shed them like snakeskin and abandon the husks to ephemeral eternities. They watch over us as we fail again and again in new and exciting ways.

Eight people lay in that little suburban house trying to sleep and, around them, time moved on, ushered by clock hand butlers.

It was not the best of times, nor was it the worst of times; it was simply the times. Not The Times—these seconds were not notable and they would not be recorded, observed, or missed. When the world folded in upon itself and drew its most-enduring stories to its smouldering heart, these would be among a million million lost moments. The twenty second of February 1429 had been a Tuesday and nobody cared. The Earth has Not Exploded every day since the beginning, and this was just another tally in the column for days it failed to do so. These moments meant nothing.

Everything is meaningless in time; the universe is composed of a vast and unutterable irrelevance.

There are only a few moments in a lucky person's life that are what we would call important. In that single second where you matter you feel as though you can never stop mattering, that the very cosmos exist to facilitate your mattering. And then the second passes, the sparkler fizzles out, and everyone moves on without you—the ceremony ends, the hype dies down, the lights turn off, and you're alone.

You are still so alive.

You are irrelevant, but that is not reason enough to not exist, and those sparse, split-seconds of relevance do not define you. It is the quiet moments in between, the miasma of nothing, that offers us space to describe who and what we are, and most of us are supremely ordinary. And far from being okay, it is the most brilliant thing a person could be. We go to the park, we sit under a tree to read in the shade, we go to the supermarket to get ingredients to try that new recipe and order takeaway when it inevitably sucks; these are not great or heroic deeds but they are the vital ones.

These were almost the thoughts of Phil Eggtree as he lay on the edge of sleep. It wouldn't be possible to offer a more accurate transcript, as his mind at that moment was little more than a wisp surrounded on all sides by things it felt may be Very Important, and yet were so insubstantial it was impossible to grasp them. 

'Is this a happy ending?' Phil wondered, mind stretched out and limp with tiredness, pulling gentle apart under the weight, but even as it occurred to him it was slipping from him. And perhaps that is for the best; it is pointless to ponder the machinations and messages—the meaning and moral—of a story not yet ended, and this tale was not yet through, though it's characters were weary and their trials were done, and the narrator was turning off their light and putting on their coat. Perhaps it will never be over, not even when all involved are dead.

'Maybe it's all the same story. Maybe we've all been here before.'

And that was the last nonsensical thing on his mind before he was overtaken by sleep. It was deep, and restful, and he did not dream.

Chapter Text

When morning light broke through the purple shroud of night, the three aliens were gone. This time, there was no note, but nothing stolen either; everything was exactly where it should be, as though nothing had ever been amiss. There was, however, an ink splotched piece of paper left by the window which suggested someone had tried to write something and failed to think of the right thing to say.

In the park, in place of the spaceship, there was a pond. It filled up the dark pit of the crater, it's fringes layered with uprooted rushes, it's waters home to a boisterous family of ducks. The abducted birds did not care that their new home had been hastily constructed in under twenty-four hours; they splashed and quacked and foraged, duck-like and undistressed. Human experiences and extraterrestrial machinations are trite and temporary when faced with the massive continuity of ducks. A letter was written to the confused but not displeased local council congratulating them on the new addition to the park and the swiftness of its construction.

That Spring, green returned to those grim, spindly branches for the first time in years, fresh and tender. Grass and moss regrew in the furrows of bark and ground, scars filling in.

Zone 5.1 was sold; the group found this out when lawyers contacted them to notify them they had been listed as beneficiaries of the sale. When they inquired about the agents who had inhabited the place, they found that they had all woken up after a decade of amnesia, tiny incision scars at their temples, foreheads, and spines. They were far from okay—they had lost ten years of memories and woken up to a derelict facility full of corpses and incomprehensible machines—but they were receiving counselling and would likely be able to lead normal lives in the future.

Smiley returned to university, where she graduated at the age of twenty one with three degrees; she returned quickly for a score of master's degrees, then a few doctorates, and then she decided to simply not leave—Professor Sundae was beloved by the student body and had the envy of her peers. Zach formed a shitty punk band which never reached any soaring heights but had a dedicated cult following that never let them down. Phred became a writer, a profession which allowed him to sit in pleasant locations staring pensively out in to the abyss for long periods, which he had been doing for years anyway.

For a few years, Phil jumped around on the subject of work, testing the waters in a number of different careers. Eventually, he went into game development, where he found a love of click-and-point escape games. After working on a couple projects with other people, Phil started work on his own series, quietly based on places he knew; Escape The University Library, Escape The Abandoned Tube Station, Escape The Scenic Graveyard... Escape The Alien Space Station. His friends gave him great ratings for the price of the dumbest reviews possible.

They only heard from the aliens one more time, ten years after they had vanished. It came in the form of a letter handed to Phil directly by a postman who didn't look like he thought he got paid enough to be delivering weird envelopes with hologram stamps and a return address listing 'space' in its first line. 

The letter was addressed to all of them, Mrs Sundae included; they all read it together, on a humid evening in June when the air was heavy with perfume and sweat, and everything smelled of suncream.

Hello everyone!

By the time you're reading this, we will be out of your solar system. Depending on how slow interstellar mail rates are, we may have left your galaxy altogether. 

We thought you might like to know that nothing else will be headed your way. Erasing our file got rid of all record of where we've been and, therefore, there is no longer any evidence of your planet's existence. Most of the populated universe is actually in the other direction—I think we might be the only people to have made it that far. Of course, this does mean Earth won't make contact with any sort of galactic authority in your lifetime, but somehow we doubt you'll be sad about that.

The three of us are doing alright. 

Hope you're all well and that this reaches you before the end of your pitifully short human lifespans. I don't think we'll see you again.

Quiz. Viz. Diz. 

It was a brief letter. It's most notable feature was the third line—'the three of us are doing alright'—which had been crossed out and rewritten time and time again in all three different hands, as though there had been a squabble on whether to include it at all. There were the stunted, cut-off beginnings of further sentences following after it, all of them so completely scribbled out the paper had torn in places. The specifics of what the three were doing now would remain forever a mystery.

There was no way to ask them and, even if there had been, Phil wondered if he would have.

The years passed. Phil was nearly thirty years old the last time he went and sat on the roof of Smiley's childhood home. It was a winter's night, clear as glass, everything painted with a cool and chilly blue. The air had to it a fresh bite, with teeth made of snow. Every star in the sky had arrived in its silvered finery to a masquerade and the world was frozen still enough that Phil felt, if he listened hard enough, he might hear them laughing like pretty socialites at a ball. Both he and Smiley were wrapped in several layers of coat, but the fast-running greyhounds of the wind were still able to press their icy noses into their gloved hands and huff cold breath up their sleeves. Smiley roped Phil's arm about her shoulders, which were bulky with four different scarves.

"You okay?" He asked her, and Smiley hummed, snuggling deeper in to his shoulder. 

"Yeah," she replied around a yawn. "You?"

Phil looked up at the endless stars and knew, with bone deep certainty, what they felt like when they pressed their hands against one's face. He remembered that cold radiance and the way it made his skin tingle. For a moment, he held this knowledge before, fondly, he set it down. Gently, he pressed a kiss in to Smiley's hair.

"Yeah. I'm okay."

Somewhere, far away, someone is struggling to tune a broken guitar as their friends cheerfully heckle every discordant note; somewhere, someone has remembered the word 'smaragdine' and is gripped by the need to use it in a sentence somehow; somewhere, three people are playing a new card game with rules that are incomprehensible even to the players. And everywhere there is life, there are eyes turning to the sky, to the stars.

The story ends. Without knowing, we take our bows and exit stage left (sometimes pursued by a bear.) In the wings, we take our places, read our cue cards and—in new configurations, as new people, in different ways—the story starts again.

'Encore!' cries the universe, and every strand of the infinite cosmos rings with a rapture of applause.

Life goes on.