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Chapter Text

oOo  oOo  The End  oOo  oOo

Daisy Shennings stood behind the reception desk of the Howard Street Hospital for the last time.  When she left, she’d be the last employee ever to shut the front doors.  She’d turn out the last lights and shut off the last computer.  The whole building would molder until the NHS Trust decided what to do with it.  Maybe they’d turn it into low-income housing. 

It was a sad thought.  She’d worked there for going on ten years.  She knew the hospital had seen better days, and that the staff had been steadily leaving since the NHS had opened a new hospital in their area that didn’t have mold on the walls wherever patients couldn’t see it, and electrics that only worked some of the time.  But to Daisy the hospital simply had personality, and to abandon it felt too much like giving up.  It had become like a second home; she knew all its rooms and corridors by heart.  Sometimes she even joked with her colleagues that she was as much a part of the hospital as the doorknobs.

But tomorrow she’d be gone and only the doorknobs would remain.  Then she’d be living off her severance package until she decided if she wanted to work at that new monstrosity, or whether she wanted to pack it in and get a different job entirely.  Neither option seemed appealing, but life did have to go on without the Howard Street Hospital.

She shut the computer down.  It was mostly there for show and solitaire these days.  The hospital no longer had any sort of network, and they had admitted their last patient two days prior, after the poor sod had cut himself falling down his stairs.  The last attending physician had patched him up and sent him on his way.  After that, it was just a succession of staff moving their personal belongings out, and removals men coming for all the NHS property, save the final computer.  Someone was supposed to pick that up while the scrap metal lads collected the last valuable bits and bobs from the once-great hospital. 

The computer turned back on.  She shook her head.  Faulty wiring was making the place feel like an amusement park.  You never knew what was coming next.  Just the day before, all the lifts went to the top floor for no reason, and wouldn’t come back down no matter how many times she pressed the call button.  At least she was still hardy enough to use the stairs.

The front doors opened with the sound of a strong wind.  Daisy looked up from the computer to see a man and a woman standing right in front of her desk.  She jumped, wondering how they had got from the door to her desk so quickly. 

They were a striking couple.  Both looked to be in their late fifties.  The man was tall and unhealthily thin.  He had a long, gaunt face and a well-groomed head of the whitest hair Daisy had ever seen.  His eyes were a strange shade of green that reminded her of neon lights.  He wore a white three-piece suit with a coat that seemed a bit too long, trousers that were rather too flared, and a broad tie that matched the green of his eyes.  Reminded her a bit of the posh suits from when she was in her twenties.

The woman was beautiful.  She stood nearly as tall as the man, and her hair was just as white.  They could almost be twins, but instead of green, her eyes were a pale blue.  The skirt of her white suit was loose and hung about her in folds, and the wide lapels of her jacket were decorated with swirling patterns done in tiny diamonds.  She wore a collar of diamonds that probably cost more than Daisy’s flat.

“I’m sorry,” Daisy said, feeling self-conscious in front of such elegance, out of place though it was, “but A&E isn’t open anymore.  I can call you an ambulance.”

The two people stared at her like they weren’t certain what she was.  Then they turned to each other, their expressions a study in blankness.  The woman said, still looking at the man, “We were sent to inspect the building.” 

Daisy assumed the woman was talking to her, and was just being odd about it.  “I didn’t hear anything about building inspectors.  I thought you lot wanted us to clear out first.”

The man turned away from the woman after a long pause.  His blankness broke as he offered her a close-mouthed smile that was simultaneously charming, alluring, and wrong; a smile that never reached his eyes.  He reminded her of some kind of snake.

“My dear, it would hardly be an inspection if you were informed of our schedule, now would it?” he asked.  Daisy was surprised that such a lovely voice came out of that body.  He came around the desk to take her hand, and she was surprised by how warm he was.  It must have been hotter than she’d thought outside.  “We shan’t be in your way,” he said, “but we really must insist.  We all have a job to do, don’t we?”

Daisy shook her head.  She knew his charm was an act, but she felt herself drawn into it anyway, or maybe that was just the sudden upset stomach and headache clouding her judgment.  “I …” she said, then dashed through the door behind her desk to throw up.

She stopped just inside the door, the feeling of illness receding as she caught her breath.  She stared at the single table and chair left in the front office, willing their plainness to help clear her head.  It took longer than she'd have liked to feel steady enough to turn back and peek through the cracked door.  The building inspectors were still there in the reception area, and they seemed unaware of her spying.

“You shouldn’t have held her so long,” the woman said.

The man looked at his hand and frowned, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping away what looked like ash.  After a moment he smiled again, this one reaching his eyes.  A smile that was sweet and sharp as knives.  “She left, didn’t she?  None the worse for wear if she rests for a few hours.”

The woman was not amused.  “You must be careful.  You’re already far too close to the transuranics for your own good.  Any major mistake, and you could be reassigned.”  Her coldness melted a little.  “It’s taken me far too long to break you in.”

Daisy wondered if they were maybe a bit more than colleagues.  Not her business if they were, of course, but it was bound to make the working environment awkward.  As for what they were saying, Daisy wondered if they suspected she was listening, and were speaking in code.

“The woman shouldn’t even be here,” the man said.  “This hospital was meant to be empty when we arrived.  They’re always empty when we arrive.  I don’t know how they expect us to work with her here.”

The woman cocked her head.  “Did we arrive too early?”

The man sighed, gave a shrug, and laid his hand on the desk’s surface.  He went eerily still.  Daisy stifled a gasp as she saw his eyes flare a violent shade of neon green light, sickly and beautiful at the same time.

Daisy shrunk back against the wall of the office.  People couldn’t do that sort of thing.  Not normal people.  Maybe he was some sort of government experiment in hiding as a building inspector.  It sounded like something that might happen on the telly. 

Daisy heard a clatter from the other room, and she pressed her eye to the narrow opening between door and jamb once more.  The man had stumbled away from the desk, the green of his eyes almost burning. 

“Radium!” the woman shouted, catching him by the shoulders and supporting him before he fell.  The man—was ‘Radium’ supposed to be a name?  Maybe code names were part of being a government experiment, like 007 or Superman—squeezed his eyes closed.  When he opened them again they were normal.

The woman steadied him and then stepped away.  Her hands hovered close to his arm.  “What did you find?” she asked.

Radium shook his head.  “It’s wrong.  We’re here years after the break, and yet we aren’t.  Everything here is in chaos, so badly splintered I can barely trust my measurements.”

“We expected damage.  You can repair it?”

“Not without killing the woman.”

They looked at one another, and Daisy had a horrible queasy feeling that had nothing to do with holding hands.  “Would there be any other problems?” the woman asked.

“Diamond,” Radium said, “the year is 1999.”

“Twenty years late,” the woman code-named Diamond said.  “How is that possible?  Breaks can’t stretch that far.”

“Can’t they?  The break in Antarctica was suspected to have swallowed up a century’s worth of explorers before we found it.  It took four teams to close.”

“This isn’t Antarctica,” Diamond said.  “Irregularities would have been noticed here.  We would have been called sooner.” 

“We were: 1979.  But here we are, and here is the break as well.”  Radium shrugged, a troubled look on his face.

“There’s something more.  Tell me,” Diamond said.

Radium’s voice took on a strange, echoing quality.  “By 1999, most homes in the United Kingdom contained at least one personal computer, and the portable computer had gained popularity amongst the general populace.  The internet became a central part of the computer experience, and forty percent of adults used it regularly to check emails, research hobbies, and access news. 1999 also saw the introduction of wireless internet.”  Daisy was left shaken and eyeing the window in the office.  It looked like it might open enough for her to climb out.  If she ran, could she get away before they noticed she was gone? 

Radium’s voice returned to normal.  “Remember the job in Norfolk?  How it got into the phone line?  We’ll need his help again.”

Daisy crept toward the window, listening for the sound of footsteps. 

Diamond said, “It won’t do for a clean-up team to call in a technician twice.”

“Nor will it do for the break to remain open any longer than it already has.  Can you imagine what could get through?  What might have already got through?  We have to seal it, Diamond.  We have to stop them.”

Daisy tried the window, but the latch wouldn’t budge.  She made her way back to the door and looked through.  They were staring at one another, not moving, as a minute stretched between them.  They were mad.  They had to be, or worse.  She’d heard all sorts of things about Y2K; maybe they were part of that mess.  Maybe they were robots.

Then they were moving again, Diamond frowning and turning away from Radium.  “I’ll call him in now,” she said.

Radium waved her on and leaned back against the reception desk.  His arms were crossed, and none of his skin touched any part of the hospital.  Diamond’s eyes burned with a white light, but Daisy had half-expected something like that.  Definitely Y2K robots. 

And then, behind Diamond, a man appeared out of thin air.  He was younger, perhaps in his thirties, with wavy ginger hair, a gray suit in a fashionable cut, a metallic silver waistcoat, and a tie of deep blue.  Daisy covered her mouth with one hand.  Even robots couldn’t appear out of thin air.  She had no idea what they were, but they were going to try to kill her.  She had to make a run for it.

But she was frozen, unable to look away.  The man took Diamond’s hand and brought it to his lips.  She raised an eyebrow at him. 

“Diamond,” he said.  “You’re as lovely as ever.” 

“Silver,” she said, cool as snow. 

Silver released her hand a bit too quickly, his smile strained, and then he turned to Radium.  He said, “Your taste and sartorial elegance never fails to astound.”  They shook hands.  Silver shivered under Radium’s grip.  He stepped back, his confidence clearly wobbling, and said, “I’d forgotten what a charge you carry.”

“Terribly sorry,” Radium said, but he wasn’t.  Daisy could see it in his eyes.

Silver looked away from Radium, and avoided Diamond’s gaze as well.  He was nervous, maybe even afraid.  His voice was steady, but it was a false sort of steady when he said, “Well, this is a surprise.  I don’t usually get called in by such … specialized teams.  Not twice in the same century, at least.  Clean-up not going as planned?”

“There are computers,” Diamond said.  “Before we close the break, we must be certain nothing has escaped the hospital.”

“Dear oh dear,” Silver said.  “You have arrived during the Internet age, haven’t you?”  Diamond didn’t respond, and Radium’s easy smile was no more comforting.  Silver retreated around the reception desk, and seated himself before Daisy’s computer terminal.  “Let’s see what ghosts this system is willing to give up.”

Daisy watched as his hands hovered over her keyboard, and data in binary began to stream across the screen.  He wasn’t touching anything.  “Do you know,” he said, “you might as well ask the woman in the office to come out.  She can’t be getting a very good view from that doorjamb.”

Daisy stumbled back, tripped over the chair, and went down.  She looked up to see Diamond coming through the door. 

And then, from a door that had never been there on the other side of the office, something else started to come in as well: a darkness that fingered its way into the room.  There was something behind it, huge and moving and terrible.  She couldn't make it out, but she knew that she had to get away from it.  

Then a single beam of light spilled out from the center of the darkness, finding Daisy.  A voice that wasn’t and could never be human sang, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do …”

Daisy started to scream.  Diamond charged the impossible door, her whole body glowing white as she slammed into it.  The door shivered under the force, but didn’t close.  “Radium!” she shouted.

Radium dodged around Daisy as gracefully as a gazelle, briefly caught in the light.  He hissed, and Daisy gasped as a film of ash covered him where the light had been.  Then he was out of it, the ash flaking off as he hit the door with the force of a freight train.  Diamond’s light enveloped him, and it took on a greenish tinge.  Daisy stumbled to her feet, knowing this would be her only opportunity to run.  She ducked out of the office and around the desk, where Silver now stood, facing the open door.  The computer’s mouse was in his hand, and appeared to be dissolving even as she looked at it.

She ran to the front doors and slammed against them, only to find that they wouldn’t budge.  They weren’t locked, but they wouldn’t open.  She threw a look over her shoulder.  Silver was backing his way around the desk, a ball of what looked like stars sparkling around him.  Beyond him, in the office, the light moved toward the open door to the lobby.

Daisy ran.  If she could reach the south stairs, she could get to the roof and the fire escape there.  Not the easiest way out, but probably the most direct barring the front door. 

She got to the stairwell, but the light was there at the top too.  She couldn’t believe it had moved so quickly.  She turned sharply away and ducked through the first door she found.  It was one of the two stairwells leading to the lower ground floor.  She could use the other to find an alternative way to the roof. 

She clattered down the stairs, hurrying past the mortuary and its glowing keypad.  And then she stopped. 

The old vault on the lower ground floor had always scared her, out of place as it was.  It looked like something that belonged in a bank; not the lower ground floor of a working hospital.  And yet it had always been there, since before the oldest staff member could remember.  It had probably been put in when the foundation was laid, back in the mid-1800s.  She'd heard that the entire vault was lined in metal and that it would be impossible to remove barring the demolition of the entire building.  Daisy believed it.  The vault had always seemed oddly still, oddly permanent, no matter how often everything else was changed and repaired.  It had been shut ages ago and left to rot, until the door was so rusted it wouldn't open even if anyone had wanted to try.

But it was open now, and light was pouring out of it, reaching for her.  Daisy felt as though she had been punched in the chest.  She couldn’t breathe.  Her lungs were burning, her heart pounding.  She felt the sensation of falling, suffocating, clawing …

oOo  oOo  The Middle  oOo  oOo

“This is not a garden.”

Sapphire cocked her head and regarded the sterile white hallway.  The dust had settled in layers on all surfaces, but was not so deep as to imply years of abandonment.  The hem of her blue gown stirred it, raising a slight cloud.  The neglect of this hall was recent, if quite complete, and the wake of her skirt was the only evidence of disturbance.  “No,” she said.  “I think we’ve arrived in a hospital.”

Steel frowned.  His long gray peacoat had likely been selected to fit in with the winter they were meant to have found upon their arrival in a garden in 1900.  Sapphire’s white fur muff certainly had been.  She banished it easily, allowing her dress to change to fit her surroundings.  The end of the 1970s, from her initial scan.

Steel’s voice echoed in her mind even though his lips didn’t move.  ‘This is not the matter we were called to look into, Sapphire.’

Her lips quirked.  ‘No indeed,’ she thought.  ‘I imagine we were diverted.’

“But for what reason?” he asked aloud.  “Can you sense anything here?”

She focused out beyond her own body.  There was Steel, solid and timeless as ever.  There was the building crumbling in inches all around them, but it was due to the usual effects of time rather than some accelerated aberration.  No, that wasn't quite right.  There was something wrong all around her, and yet there wasn't.  It niggled at the borders of her perception, contradictory and irritating, as though there was another layer beneath these recognizable surroundings that she couldn’t sense with any clarity. 

“There is … something,” she said, hesitant to elaborate further.  Steel wouldn’t want speculation without supporting evidence.  “A break, perhaps, but that isn’t quite right.  More like the echo of a break.”

“The echo of a break?  Do you mean it’s already been closed?”

“Yes … no.”  Sapphire shook her head.  “I can’t be that specific.  I’m approximating sensations.”

“Try,” he said, impatient as ever.

“I can’t,” she insisted.  “It’s too faint.  Too distorted.  Everything around us is slightly wrong, but in so subtle a way, I can’t pinpoint it.”

Steel paced ahead of her, scanning the darkened hall.  It was 8:18 in the evening.  Late, but not so late that there shouldn’t still be employees and patients.  Hospitals of this time period didn’t shut for the night.

Steel asked, “You’ve never felt anything like this before?”

“Not precisely, no.”

“It’s becoming far too common for us to be sent into an assignment with either incomplete or incorrect information.  I don’t like it, Sapphire.  It speaks to unpleasant things in high places.”  He was quiet for a moment, contemplating the hall and its implications.  “Have we at least arrived in the correct era?”

Sapphire smiled.  Steel had never quite mastered an understanding of fashion.  “No,” she said.  “It feels far more like the late 1970s.  1979, I believe.”

“You’re not certain.”

“Somewhere this hospital exists in 1979, but there are also fragments that are not of that era.”

“And yet this doesn’t feel like a break.”  Steel shook his head, and his peacoat shivered and shifted into his customary gray suit.  When he was settled in his new outfit, he made his way down the hall.  His gray eyes flickered over every surface.  Sapphire could hear him note down details in his mind.  The walls were covered in white tiles, and there were no pieces of equipment that could be used to pinpoint the era through conventional means. 

‘We need to find an administrative hub,’ he thought.  ‘Physical records are necessary for more accurate information.’

Sapphire's lips had that casually superior curl meant to tell him she had already considered such necessities.  Steel was clever and determined, but sometimes she needed to remind him not to treat her as though she was new to this game.  He had worked in the field longer than she, but only just.

“Come along then,” she said, and slipped around him to lead the way. 

As they walked, Sapphire felt the nagging sense of a break persisting.  Everything she looked at was white and blank, but when she allowed her vision to relax she thought she saw bricks and tall wooden cabinets. 

‘Do you see them?  The brick walls?’ she thought.  ‘They’re there, but they give off no sensation.  I can’t analyze them.’

‘I can’t see them,’ Steel thought.  ‘Are you quite certain this isn’t a time break?’

‘I’m not certain, no.  I’m merely certain that it feels like no break I’ve encountered before.’

He growled in frustration.  “Show me.”

Really, that was too far.  “Steel,” she admonished. 

His frustration overtook him for a moment of mental tumult that surrounded them both.  Steel was good at a great many things, but his only expertise was in strategy.  Having to rely on any source of information outside himself, even upon her, ran counter to his instincts and affronted his sense of self-sufficiency.

He calmed as rationality won out over his need for perfect control.  “Of course I trust you, Sapphire.”

She allowed herself a genuine smile.  “Let’s go to the lobby, then.  There should be a directory there that can lead us to the administrative wing.” 

“You know where the lobby is?”

“Probably.”

Steel snorted something approximating a laugh, but followed her.  They continued on down the corridor, Sapphire trying to hold a sense of the building’s layout in her head.  Normally that was not a difficult task, but she found that it would continually shift as they walked, the dimensions of rooms and the position of walls changing ever so slightly with each step.  She wasn’t joking about finding the lobby: she was going to have to rely on probability far more than she was wont to.

Their footsteps echoed.  There was no sound of air conditioning, fans, or other electronic devices.  The fittings in the ceiling were electric, but dark.  The entire area was dark enough that, she imagined, a human would not have been able to navigate without a light.

“Hospitals of this time period didn’t close at night,” Steel said, echoing her observations.

“Perhaps the facility has been shut down, or this wing is undergoing renovations,” Sapphire said.  “It’s difficult to tell.”

“You can sense no recent human activity in this area of the building?”

Again, a more difficult question than it ought to have been.  “I don’t think so, no,” she said.

Steel didn’t demand more precision after that, but he did draw even with her, tension radiating off him in a slight chill. 

They continued on, Sapphire navigating as well as she could.  After a time she realized that Steel was giving her a strange look. 

She asked, “What is it?”

“I never knew you to hum,” he said. 

“Hum?”

“Just then.  You were humming.”

“No I wasn’t.”

“Yes you were.”

Sapphire narrowed her eyes and looked hard at Steel.  The memory was projected between them, as crisp and precise as any of Steel’s memories: Sapphire, abstracted, humming to herself as she walked.

“I don’t hum,” she said, not denying the veracity of his recall, but confused as to how she could have done such a thing without noticing. 

“What’s the tune?” Steel asked.

Sapphire concentrated for a second before she could dredge up the information.  “Daisy Bell, composed by Harry Dacre in 1892 and made popular in London music halls.  Lyrics refer to a marriage proposal for a woman named Daisy.  Mr. Dacre had heard of the recent invention of the tandem bicycle and found it charming enough to compose an entire song so he could mention the concept.”  She blinked and added, “It’s a well-known children’s song at this point in time.”

“Were you aware of it before that moment?”

“Peripherally,” she said, as aware of that song as she was any of the stray information contained in dust and abandoned objects and human bodies.  Everything had a memory, even the hospital, mad as that memory seemed to be, and Sapphire could read it.  “Perhaps the hospital reminded me of it,” she said.

“Perhaps,” Steel said, sounding unconvinced.  Sapphire took the lead again, keeping her pace steady and her awareness now directed both externally and internally.  If the hospital was projecting the song powerfully enough to influence her subconsciously, she should be able to sense its origin.  Such anomalies ought to be investigated.

But there was no return of the song, so cheerful in all records, but so melancholy in Steel’s memory; her humming had sounded quite hollow as it echoed in the lonely halls.

Steel was walking beside her, standing close.  Perhaps he thought he could perceive the source of the tune when she couldn’t.  If it existed in the physical world, he might even be right.  Few operators possessed Steel’s ability to notice and synthesize seemingly meaningless details.

So it was no great surprise when he halted, holding up a hand.  Sapphire knew she hadn’t been humming again, and she wasn’t certain what he had noticed that had caused them to stop.

Then she heard it, thin and distant: a whistling rendition of Daisy Bell, echoing toward them down the long dark hall.  Sapphire cast her mind out, trying to locate the source.  Instead of a human, what she encountered was a roiling, disjointed sense of loss and fury.  It splintered time as it rippled toward them.

Sapphire gasped, her eyes going wide and illuminating the darkness around them in blue light.  Steel was calling her name, but she knew that in his present state he could do very little against something like that.

She needed to pull them back through time, so they could avoid this threat until they had better information.  She tried to focus, but the splintering made it hard to grasp her current time, never mind casting backwards for a safer temporal location.  Steel’s hands were vises around her arms, their temperature plummeting as he tried to bring up his defenses.  She needed to tell him, to explain what was happening.  There was no time …

And then there was.  The presence, whatever it had been, was gone as soon as it had come.  She would have fallen after that sudden decrease in mental pressure, but Steel still held her arms and took her weight with ease.  She let her eyes dim.

“It was a break,” she said, her face tipped up toward the ceiling.  “It was definitely a break, but not here.  Not now.”

“Show me.”

In this case, she was more than willing to do so, rather than trying to verbalize what she had felt.  She raised a shaking hand and placed it against the side of his face.  Steel stood stiffly under the flash of memory, then looked out toward the darkness. 

“Is it a directed threat?” he asked.  “Is it aware?”

Sapphire angled her face down and looked at him.  “I can’t tell.  It’s bound in emotions, but I can’t say whether the presence preceded the emotions or whether the emotions preceded the presence.”

“Was it aware of us?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a fear hanging between them, unspoken but mutually acknowledged: a Transient Being.  Something so alien and misplaced in their linear time stream that it splintered all the time it passed through.  Steel had encountered one early in his work, and still held an apprehension regarding them that, in any other being, would seem like terror.

Sapphire tapped into those memories, but there was no direct correlation between the Transient that Steel had faced and the presence Sapphire had sensed.  She shook her head.

Steel regarded her for a few seconds before his thoughts were in her head.  ‘You hummed the same tune it whistled.  Did it breach your defenses?’

‘It must have,’ Sapphire thought.  She was aware that her ego should be bruised by the implication, but she had never had time for such mundanities. 

‘Is there any way you could still be compromised?’

‘Not that I can feel,’ Sapphire thought.

‘That’s not the definitive answer I had hoped for.’

‘It’s not the definitive answer I had hoped for either.’

The tiniest smile touched his face, there and gone in an instant, and he let go of her arms.  Sapphire straightened her clothing while she took stock of herself.  Her limbs were steady, and her mind felt clear.  They needed to move forward, in order to unravel the mystery they had found.  They had been up against worse.  They had faced far stranger.  They simply needed to get on with things.

Sapphire spent the rest of the walk listening to Steel’s mental catalogue of every sound he heard, and the flicker of light up around a far corner that even she saw, but which vanished upon their arrival, leaving a sense of displacement behind it.

oOo  oOo  And Again  oOo  oOo

Daisy Shennings stood behind the reception desk of the Howard Street Hospital for the last time.  When she left, she’d be the last employee ever to shut the doors.  She’d turn out the last lights and put the cover on the last typewriter.  Then the whole building would molder until the Regional Health Authority decided what to do with it. 

It was a sad thought.  She’d worked there for going on ten years.  She knew the hospital had seen better days, and that the staff had been steadily leaving since the NHS had opened a new hospital in her area that didn’t have mold on the walls and electrics that only worked some of the time.  But to Daisy the hospital simply had personality.  It had become a bit like a second home to her: she knew all its rooms and corridors by heart.  Sometimes she even joked with her coworkers that she was as much a part of the hospital as the doorknobs.

But tomorrow she’d be gone and only the doorknobs would remain.  Then she’d be living off her severance package until she decided if she wanted to work at that new monstrosity, or whether she wanted to pack it in and get a different job entirely.  Neither option seemed appealing, but life did have to go on without the Howard Street Hospital.

She put the cover over her typewriter.  It was mostly there for show these days.  They had admitted their last patient two days prior, after the poor soul had cut himself falling down his stairs.  The last doctor had patched him up and sent him on his way.  After that, it was just a succession of staff moving their personal belongings out, and removals men coming for all the NHS property, save that final typewriter.  Someone was supposed to pick that up while the scrap metal lads collected the last valuable bits and bobs from the once-great hospital.   

She heard a rustle, and when she turned she was surprised to see the typewriter cover folded neatly next to the machine.  Was that Freddy the night watchman having a bit of a laugh at her expense?  He was always doing things like that to annoy her.  He had to have been the one to turn off all the lights in the building after the last doctor left.  He was the only one still there with her.  It had taken her almost an hour to go from room to room turning them all back on, and he’d just stared at her while she had done it.  Didn’t even offer to help. 

Daisy heard footsteps and looked up from the typewriter, expecting Freddy and his fat face.  She opened her mouth to give that lousy git a piece of her mind, only to fall silent when she saw a man and a woman standing before the desk.  They were a striking couple.  They were both some indeterminate age between twenty-five and forty, and both blonde.  The man wore a gray suit and a gray tie.  Even his eyes were gray.  The woman next to him wore a stunning blue gown that matched her eyes.  Her hair was curled gently about her face.  They were posh in a strange way, the sort Daisy didn’t want to breathe too hard at.

“I’m sorry,” Daisy said, feeling a bit defensive and at the same time very self-conscious, “but A&E isn’t open.”

The two people turned to each other, their expressions a study in blankness as they regarded one another.  Then the man said, “We were sent to inspect the building.”  He had a surprisingly deep voice for such a small fellow.

“I didn’t hear anything about building inspectors,” Daisy said.

Another glance was exchanged between them, and then the woman came forward.  Her blankness broke as she offered Daisy a close-mouthed smile that was simultaneously warm and very, very cold; a smile that never reached her eyes. 

“And I didn’t hear anything about a receptionist being here so late, Miss …”

“Shennings.  Daisy Shennings.  And you should have rung ahead.  Then you’d know that I volunteered to stay until the lads collecting the scrap metal came through.  Someone has to lock up once they’ve gone.”

“So you’re alone here?” the man asked.

Was this about following safety regulations?  Seemed an odd time to be doing it.  “No.  Freddy, the night watchman, is somewhere about.  He’ll leave with the rest of us.”

“Why isn’t he here with you, waiting?”

“Because he has to walk the halls, doesn’t he?  Make certain no one is breaking in.”

“But there wouldn’t be much to steal, if they did,” the woman said. 

“Maybe, but that’s his job, and that’s what he’s doing.  Don’t you doubt he’ll be along shortly once he hears you.”

“We’d be glad to speak to both of you, if he does,” the woman said.  “I do apologize for our suspicions, and for the lateness of the hour.  We had hoped to assess the structure of the building, and that’s most easily done after it’s entirely empty.  We didn’t expect you to be here, and so we felt we had no reason to ring ahead.  We don’t want to be a bother, but we need to look at your records.”

“Our records got moved to St. Christopher’s,” Daisy said.  “Try there.”

“All of them?” the man asked.  He sounded angry.  Daisy hated it when people got angry about things she couldn’t control. 

“I think so.  There may be a folder or two in the office,” she said, and nodded toward the door behind her.  There was a table and chair in there, and a box in one corner that Daisy hadn’t looked through.  It could contain records, but she thought it more likely to contain loose paper and pens.

She turned to go in and make sure, but the woman’s hand on her arm stopped her.  Daisy wondered how she had got around the desk so fast.  “Don’t go in there quite yet,” the woman said.

“What is it?” the man asked.

“There’s something behind the door.  An echo in reverse.  Can’t you feel it?”

Daisy started to worry; that sounded more than a bit mad to her ears.  The man cocked his head and listened as though it was all quite normal.  Daisy looked between them, but they’d fallen silent, staring at the door like they were transfixed.  It had to be carbon monoxide.  Daisy should get out before she was affected too.

The woman shook her head.  “It’s gone now.”

“Should I check our records now?” Daisy asked, eager to put at least the office door between them.

The man looked at the woman, and for a second they were transfixed again, but it was shorter this time.  When they broke, he was the one to speak.  “My name is Steel, and this is Sapphire.  These records in your office.  Are they recent?”

“Should be.”

“How recent?”

“Within the year, probably.”

“To clarify,” Miss Sapphire said, “which exact years would be covered?”

“Just 1979, like I said.”  Daisy began to wonder if maybe they weren’t mad or carbon-monoxide addled.  Maybe they were just a bit thick, and liked to use jargon.  It was the sort of thing the doctors did all the time, to make sure people like her didn’t understand what they were talking about.

Mr. Steel frowned.  “We’re looking for something older.”

Daisy wracked her brain.  The sooner she could find them what they were after, the sooner she’d be shot of them.  “How much older?  There are probably quite a lot of very old records down in the vault.  But no one’s opened that up since before the turn of the century, from what I've heard.  It’s all rusted over; you’d need a crew to pry it open,” she said.  “And records that old?  I can’t imagine you’d find anything there that would be useful.”

They stared at one another again.  They did that far more than made Daisy comfortable.  “Actually,” Miss Sapphire said, “I think we would find those records very useful indeed.  Could you take us there?”

“Keys won’t be necessary,” Mr. Steel said.

“Well, that’s good,” Daisy said, “because it’s a combination lock.  And no one knows the combination.” 

She led the way out into the east hall and turned on the lights.  Freddy had definitely been mucking about again, turning them off.  Now she'd have to check on all of them again, instead of waiting for the scrap metal lads like she was supposed to.  It made her hopes for getting out early enough put the kettle on at home even more unlikely.  And she had been so looking forward to the new episode of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Her footfalls echoed on the tiles.  It was disconcerting how much more noise her sensible shoes made than the silly heels Miss Sapphire had on.  Both she and Mr. Steel were painfully quiet as they walked, as a matter of fact.

The vault was on the lower ground floor, next to the mortuary.  Daisy never went down there if she could avoid it.  The sharp, sickly tang of blood and bile tinged the air even when there weren’t bodies in the fridge.

Mr. Steel’s voice surprised Daisy out of her thoughts, making her start.  “Does he carry a torch?”

“Who?” she asked, still thinking of bodies.

“Mr. Tomms, the night watchman.  Does he carry a torch?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Have you spoken with him tonight?”

“No.  I don’t usually see him, to be honest.  He comes in through another door, and usually leaves through the same.  Tonight’s going to be the first time we leave through the same door since he started working here.”

“He doesn’t patrol near your desk?”

“Sometimes, when he wants something.  But not usually.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Actually saw him?  I don’t know … two weeks ago maybe?  But I’ve seen the light from his torch down the halls nearly every night.  Sometimes I even hear him whistling.”

Mr. Steel began whistling, sharp and clear.  That silly Daisy song, just like Freddy whistled to her. 

“How did you know?” she asked.

Mr. Steel continued to whistle, and didn’t answer.  Miss Sapphire said, “We heard him too.”

“His voice must have carried, for you to hear him outside.”

Miss Sapphire smiled that smile again.  “Yes,” she agreed.

They reached the lower ground floor with Mr. Steel still whistling and echoing off the walls.  It was a damp, unpleasant place down there, where the white tiles of the public halls gave way to whitewashed brick.  The smells of the mortuary lingered, despite having been emptied over a week before.  Daisy supposed that once enough dead people were stuck in one place, that place would always smell of death.  Neither Miss Sapphire nor Mr. Steel objected, though, so she didn’t comment.

The vault door was gigantic and round, like something that ought to be in a bank rather than a hospital.  Everyone agreed that it hadn’t been opened in at least eighty years.  Daisy had always tried to imagine what it might look like inside, with its old metal cabinets half-fallen apart, and moldering papers scattered all over the floor.  Maybe there were bars of gold in there.  That would be nice.

Mr. Steel stepped up to the door and ran his hands across its surface.  When he drew back, Daisy wasn’t surprised that the rust had flaked off on his palms.  He frowned at it, and Miss Sapphire handed him a handkerchief.  Daisy wasn’t certain where she had been keeping it.  She didn’t look like she had pockets in her gown.

“Do you see?” Daisy asked.  “No one’s been in there in ages.  Even if the records you want are in there, you’d need to take the entire door off its hinges before you could look at them.  And even then, they aren’t our records.  Not properly, anyway.”

“What does that mean?” Mr. Steel asked.

“Don’t you know the history of this place?” Daisy asked.  “What sort of building inspectors are you?”

“The sort that aren’t historians,” Mr. Steel said.  He turned to her and she felt mutinous, getting that accusing look from him.  She hadn’t asked them to come, had she?  She didn’t deserve to be treated like the problem.  If anyone was the problem, it was Mr. Steel.

“Please,” Miss Sapphire said, light and charming, “don’t mind him.  I’m always having to apologize for his behavior.”

“He could do with a bit of tact.”

Mr. Steel snorted.

“I’m afraid our specialty is more structural than historical, although the two do intersect often,” Miss Sapphire went on.  “Could you tell us what this place used to be?”

“Well, it was still a hospital,” Daisy said, giving Mr. Steel a final glare before she turned her attention to Miss Sapphire, “but it got shut down ages ago.  The late 1800s, I think.  I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the last time anyone opened this door.”

“And was the hospital remodeled?” Miss Sapphire asked.  

“A bit,” Daisy said.  “Though most things in here are old enough that they look like got left alone if they weren’t completely broken.  Anyway, I say it’s not this hospital properly because it stood empty for about ten years before it was set up for patients again.  So it’s not the same hospital as it was back then.  New management, new styles, new tiles and all.”

“And now it’s being shut down again,” Mr. Steel said.  He was staring at the door.

“Yeah, well, it’s a ruin, isn’t it?  Anything that the public didn’t see was often broken and never fixed: peeling paint, chipped tiles, funny smells, creaks and groans and terrible wiring; that sort of thing.  The NHS built that new hospital, rather than trying to mend nearly a century’s worth of damage.”

“No one has opened the vault since the first hospital shut?” Mr. Steel asked.

“Far as I know, they haven’t,” Daisy said.  “How could they?  It’s rusted over, and the combination has long since been lost.  And no one could knock into it from the sides.  I’ve seen the wall through the maintenance cupboard next to it.  It’s solid metal all the way round.  They could have used it as an air raid shelter during the war.  I’m a bit surprised they didn’t, come to think of it.”

“An untouched room,” Mr. Steel said.

“I know,” Miss Sapphire responded, and Daisy wondered if she had somehow missed a part of this conversation.

Mr. Steel pressed his hand to the door again, but he closed his eyes this time.  Daisy watched him, nonplussed.  Was he having some sort of fit?  Had he fallen asleep? 

“Daisy,” Miss Sapphire said, and laid a hand on her arm.  Daisy nearly jumped out of her skin.  “I was wondering if you could tell me more about your own experiences here.”

“But Mr. Steel—”

“Prefers to work on his own.”  Miss Sapphire drew Daisy away from Mr. Steel and the door.  “Let’s leave him to it while you and I talk.”

Daisy didn’t mind getting away from Mr. Steel.  Even if she was certain Miss Sapphire wasn’t any kinder, at least she played at being congenial. 

There was nowhere to sit but the stairs, so they settled themselves there.  Daisy wondered if Miss Sapphire was worried about that frock of hers.  It was gauzy enough it should have snagged on anything.  Beyond her, Daisy could see Mr. Steel running his hands over the door, fiddling with the handle and bolts, and generally not doing any discernible work.  These were the two strangest building inspectors Daisy had ever met.

Miss Sapphire asked, “How long have you been working here?” and Daisy told her, still half-distracted by Mr. Steel.  She couldn’t say that her ten years of employment had been terribly interesting.  She only stayed at first because it was so close to her flat.  And after a while she couldn’t imagine anything else.

Miss Sapphire seemed genuinely engrossed, and after a while Daisy found herself paying less attention to Mr. Steel going over the hinges for the fifth time, and more attention to Miss Sapphire’s gentle smile.  Daisy told her about some of the doctors she knew—those she liked and those she didn’t—and about the nurses and all their gossip.  She told her about the security guards, and how she had liked Mr. Sutliff because he sometimes brought in desserts his wife made.

“And then there’s Mr. Tomms,” Miss Sapphire said.  “How do you get on with him?”

Daisy shrugged.  “To be honest, he gives me a bit of a chill.  He’s never nasty or anything.  He’s just … odd.  Whenever he looks at me, it’s like he’s looking right through me.  Like there’s something standing behind me, and he’s talking to it and not to me at all.”  She blushed and looked away.  “That sounds silly.”

“On the contrary,” Miss Sapphire said, “it sounds very worrisome.  Have you reported him to any of your supervisors?”

“For what?  Being strange isn’t a crime.”

“And you haven’t seen him for two weeks?” Miss Sapphire asked. 

“Nothing but his torchlight.”

Miss Sapphire’s smile slipped just a little, her eyes hardened, and she asked, “Are you certain he’s still here?”

Daisy stared at her.  “Of course he’s still here.  I hear him whistling that damn song, don’t I?  I see his light.  How would those things happen if he wasn’t knocking about?”

As if on cue, the faint, off-key sound of whistling broke the stillness. 

“There,” Daisy said.  “You hear that?  That’s Freddy.”  She raised her voice to shout, “Come up with a new song, Freddy!  That stopped being funny the second day you worked here!”

Her voice echoed off down the hall, but Freddy didn’t even waver.  He just kept whistling.

Daisy turned to see what Miss Sapphire had to say about that, but she was already on her feet, staring up at the ceiling about where the sound was coming from.  Mr. Steel was doing the same.

“There are no footsteps,” Mr. Steel said.

“Of course there are,” Daisy said.  “Freddy’s just light on his feet is all.  Same as you.”

Mr. Steel brushed past her before she realized he was moving.  “Then let’s meet him.”

Chapter Text

oOo  oOo  Outside any Quantifiable Measure of Time  oOo  oOo

A glittering wall of needles defined their reality, although it had manifested as a particularly refined tea-shop.  Diamond had been patrolling the edges of the room, mending crown molding that had already begun to crumble and making certain it was reinforced enough to stand up to even the most direct assaults.  She was also observing the void through the windows, looking for any variation in the uniform darkness that might indicate a threat or a path of return to their own reality.  Radium was seated at the table in the center of the room, burning quietly, maintaining some small area of reality.  The tea-shop was probably his doing, all things considered.  Diamond couldn’t believe her own manifestations would be so decadent.

She turned her back on the void, taking in the scene in the shop with a critical eye.  She was worried by what had occurred, and by the knowledge that they were now squarely outside the corridor of time, but the job took precedence.  Fear ill fitted her, even here.

Radium sat with both his hands laid flat on the pristine white tablecloth.  He had been badly exposed to the void before Diamond erected their defenses, and his suit was a dead, ashy gray.  His skin and hair were that same color and powdery texture.  She had seen him like this before, but only very occasionally.  She wondered if he found his appearance in such circumstances to be embarrassing, or simply a reminder of his proximity to the transuranics.

“I must make quite the sight, for you to stare so,” he said, not opening his eyes.

“You’re not going to last much longer.”

“Oh, I’ll last.  No one else will, but I’ll be fine.”  His eyes opened slowly, as void and gray as the rest of him.  “It’s the fun of being me.”

“You won’t last as you.”

“No.” 

“I’ve told you before,” she said, her tone hard and brittle, “I’ve no intention of losing you to the transuranics.  I’ve worked far too long to make you an acceptable partner.”

“Flattery,” he got out, but his voice was grating and droning now, lost in his efforts.

Diamond thought to him instead.  ‘You can burn your way back.’

‘As soon as you find the way, I probably could.’  His mental voice was steadier, but only just.  ‘Provided you do it in a timely fashion and I’m not too exhausted just keeping us alive.’

Good.  ‘And the break?  Can you close it?’

‘Possibly.  Possibly.  If I do, the hospital won’t survive, of course.  If the human is still there, she won’t either.’

‘There is no scenario in which the human could have survived.  The light engulfed her completely, and that species is notoriously fragile.  As for the hospital, that is an acceptable loss.’

‘It is terribly drab, isn’t it?’

‘And terribly, terribly broken.’ 

 ‘The problem is this,’ Radium went on, apparently deciding that he was feeling chatty.  Diamond accepted this eccentricity, as more often than not his rambling yielded results.  ‘We could not have arrived when the break was forming.  I could have burned that closed as easily as I have any other.  Instead we’re here.  The break was massive.’

‘Give me your appraisal on the probability of closing it.’

‘At the moment, less than fifty percent.  I would need to pinpoint the origin of the break first, and post you as an anchor there, then find my way back to the other end and burn my way to you.  But at the moment, I would also need you with me to focus the burn enough that I don’t destroy the entire city along with the hospital.’

‘Ah.”

‘Quite.’

‘If we could locate Silver again?’

‘He is an excellent conductor.  I doubt he would have your deft touch directing my talents, but he would be adequate.’

‘Would he survive?’

Radium’s expression, previously his usual neutral smile, shifted to something much colder.  He rarely let that part of him slip through, as he realized that even Diamond found it disturbing.  They all accepted that human lives would be lost to this fight.  Operators, though, were rare.  Precious and strange, and not to be willingly discarded except in extremis.  They protected one another when they could.

The transuranics didn’t, though.  At moments such as this—with Radium sitting before her, bleak and terrible—Diamond had to wonder if she’d already lost the fight to keep him.

‘Technicians are notoriously fragile as well,’ Radium thought.

Diamond moved back to the windows.  She desired the distance, and she had a job to do.  “We shall need to find a way back first, before such concerns become material.”

Radium hummed his agreement.

Diamond had been attempting to locate the way back through simpler senses for the past several hours/years/decades (time lost a great deal of meaning when one was outside it), and had been failing.  It was galling.  She had excellent mundane perceptions.

However, something more extraordinary and potentially dangerous was apparently required.  Diamond focused outward, pushing her perception and nothing else past their defenses.  She could sense them immediately, the things that lurked in the void.  They had no discernible forms; they were made of a yawning, insatiable hunger.  They pressed their beings as close to the warmth of the tea room as the needles would allow them, and they yearned.

As her senses moved past the safety of the needles, they saw her.  They swarmed toward her, boiling and lashing out at one another in order to reach her first.

Diamond’s perception snapped back inside, shying away in spite of herself.  She leaned against the windowsill, breathing heavily.

‘How many of them are there?’ Radium asked.

“Too many.  I can’t feel my way past them.  They’re all around us.” 

“Then you shall have to drive them back, my dear,” Radium said.  “We can’t sit in here in the dark forever.”

“Puns are beneath us.”

“Hmm.”

Diamond knew what he was suggesting.  He suggested it more often than she cared for, although his intentions were always good.  Diamond was more effective when she allowed him to modify her slightly, and she was strong enough that the effects were temporary.  But it always felt like a small defeat, having to rely on a power outside herself.

She had been told by more than one reliable source that her pride was excessive.  She forced it down with effort, and then turned from the window.  Radium was still watching her, and he knew better than to appear the least bit superior.  On the contrary, he looked at her in that moment as though she was astounding, perhaps even intimidating.

Flatterer.

Diamond crossed the room and offered him her hand.  Radium’s eyes tracked very slowly to it, and stared at it for many minutes, as though he was trying to define her hand for himself.  Diamond wondered if he could even see in the conventional sense, with his eyes nothing but gray. 

With an intense slowness, Radium lifted his ashy hand and reached out to her.  His hand landed in hers, and felt as though it was made of some soft powder, not altogether solid.  He lifted his head to look from their joined hands to her face.  “I’ll have terrible control at this point, my dear,” he said.  

She smiled a little, though she felt no happiness.  “I’m stronger than I appear, Radium.  You know that.  You might shatter everyone else, but you won’t damage me.”

He nodded, his eyes never leaving hers.  The tingle of his abilities stirred under her hand, reaching out.  Others found his touch and presence unpleasant, but she had never found it so.  Indeed, the vibrations under her hand felt familiar and even pleasantly warm.  She stiffened a little as the tingling crept up her arm, turning the sleeve of her sensible white jacket a pale, sage green.  The color crept over the rest of her jacket, converting the spattering of diamonds to the same color. 

The tingling reached her head, and she let the air pass out from her lips.  She shuddered as her thoughts faded for a moment.  This was the only part of the process that ever irritated her.  It didn’t hurt, of course, but any loss of clarity put Diamond on edge. 

But it passed quickly enough.  In its wake, she felt stronger.  Her perceptions were more precise, her reactions sharper.  Her worries faded, pushed aside by her purpose.  She was now as dangerous as Radium, perhaps even more so as she bled the traces of his abilities from her edges.  He could control them, but she simply wrapped them around herself and laced them into all her empty spaces.

“Feeling better?” he asked. 

“Much,” she admitted.  The lessening of her fear alone was a vast improvement.  She looked over to him, and realized he’d gone an even darker gray.  ‘You’ve been damaged,’ she thought. 

He gave her a rueful smile.  “Minor drain, and expected.  I can recover.”

‘Be certain of that.  I can’t finish this assignment without you.’

“Oh,” he said, “I think you would find a way.  I’ve not seen a power in the universe that could stand before you when you set yourself to a task.”

“I do not underplay my own abilities, nor would I ever overestimate them.  When I admit that you’re necessary to our success, I would therefore prefer not to be forced to repeat myself.”

Radium’s chuckle was dry, and his ashen eyes drifted closed again.  “Find your way back, then.  I’ll be ready.”

Diamond rose from her seat and moved back to the window, pushing aside the curtains to get a better view.  Her perceptions pushed out again, past the barrier, and this time the things there shied away from the burning green light she leaked all around her.  The void still appeared featureless, but she was certain she could find a way back.  It would simply require time.

Behind her, Radium fell still once more, dark gray and ashen.  She could feel his exhaustion through the power he had lent her.  She could feel the doubt under his surface confidence.  Her fear began a slow creep back, keeping pace with the energy that leaked away from her.  Diamond pushed herself on, refusing to allow useless emotion that sort of foothold.  They would find their way back.  They would complete their assignment.  Any alternative was unacceptable to her professionalism.

oOo  oOo  The Middle oOo  oOo

Mr. Steel led the way, and Daisy had to hurry to keep up.  It was funny.  He wasn’t exactly what Daisy would call long-legged, standing barely taller than Daisy herself, but he managed to outpace her with no effort.  Miss Sapphire seemed to have an easier time keeping up, but then she was quite tall.  They spilled out of the lower ground floor stairwell and into the west hall, only to have the whistling stop as soon as the door opened.  It was dark there, too, and Daisy flicked on the lights.

Mr. Steel walked ahead slowly, with more caution than Daisy thought a night watchman with a penchant for practical jokes warranted.  Yes, it was a bit odd that Freddy would stop whistling the moment they’d walked out into the hall, but then he might have been startled when he heard them coming.  He probably hadn’t realized she had company, and now felt like an idiot, whistling while they listened and turning off all the lights. 

“Should I call for him?” Daisy asked Miss Sapphire.

“Not yet,” Miss Sapphire said.  She sounded cautious too.  Daisy felt a bit of it rub off on her, despite how silly it was to sneak about when finding Freddy was so easy.  Daisy had called for him dozens of times over the years when she couldn’t find something, or she simply got bored enough that she didn’t mind his company.  And each time she had called, Freddy had come, odd as ever, but never anything to fear.

Mr. Steel continued down the hall a way before stopping.  “There are no footprints here,” he said.  “Sapphire?”

Miss Sapphire left Daisy’s side.  She went to Mr. Steel and bent down to drag her finger through the dust on the floor.  Daisy noticed how much dust there was.  That was odd, wasn’t it?  The cleaners hadn’t been through since the last patients on that floor had left, but that had only been a few days prior.  Could this much dust accumulate so quickly? 

Miss Sapphire bent down and dragged her finger through it, then stood back up as though she hadn’t done something quite strange.  She rubbed the dust between her fingers and looked at it.  “It’s a natural formation,” she said.  “But the accumulation is strange.  It’s as though what I’m feeling is perhaps a few days’ worth of dust, but also much longer.” 

“The break?” Mr. Steel asked.

“It’s likely.”

“So all of your impressions could be affected?”

“As could yours.”  Her smile was smaller, more sincere.  Daisy hadn’t realized Miss Sapphire could smile like that.

“How did this go undetected?” Steel asked.  “How many people were working on this floor a week ago?”

Daisy realized he was asking her.  She was so lost in their strange jargon and even stranger actions that she had forgotten she would be expected to participate in this conversation.  It wasn’t as though they had been keeping things accessible for her.  “Around twenty,” she said.  “They left in the middle of last week to go to the new hospital.”

“How many were there two weeks ago?”

“More like fifty.”

“And even more before that,” Mr. Steel said.  “And none of them mentioned strange goings-on?”

“None that I heard.  No more strange than usual.  It’s an old building.  There are always lights going out or pipes banging.”

Mr. Steel looked at Miss Sapphire.  They stared at one another for long moments.  Daisy was starting to hate it when they did that.  It almost seemed like they were still talking to one another, just without words.  It was rude and strange.  Everything about them was strange, and when she thought about it, they didn’t seem like building inspectors at all.  But what else could they be?  And why were they so interested in the old records?  Were they some sort of thieves?  Were there really gold bars in that vault, like she’d always hoped?

Things didn’t add up, but there was enough information available to make her want to leave.  Mr. Steel and Miss Sapphire could do whatever they intended without her.  What did it matter, anyway?  The hospital was shut, and even if they did manage to open the vault and steal the old records, no one would care.

She turned around, thinking she would sneak off while they were distracted.  At the far end of the hall she saw the pale beam of Freddy’s torch.  She hesitated, remembering what Miss Sapphire had said about footprints.  Could they have just heard wrong?  The building echoed terribly, and it would be easy to get confused.  There was no reason for Freddy to patrol this hall anymore.  Not with everything gone.  When she thought rationally about the situation, rather than getting swept up in Mr. Steel and Miss Sapphire’s theories, everything made sense. 

She looked back, but Miss Sapphire and Mr. Steel were still busy staring at one another.  Oh, well.  It wasn’t like she needed their permission to talk to her colleague.  She began walking toward the light.  “Freddy?” she called.  “Oi, Freddy.  We’ve got visitors.  Do you want to see to them so I can go back to my desk and wait for the scrap metal lads?”

The light froze, wavered, and then turned toward her.  Daisy shielded her eyes against the glare.  “Freddy, stop mucking about,” she said.  “I said we’ve got visitors.”

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do …”

Daisy rolled her eyes.  Freddy’s voice was weak and quavering, but it was definitely his.  She stepped toward him.  “Honestly, Freddy.  Stow it for once, won’t you?  There’re building inspectors here.  Don’t be so odd around them, will you?”

“I’m half-crazy, all for the love of you …”

Daisy stopped.  Something was wrong.  Even at his strangest, Freddy always responded when she talked to him.  He might just stop and stare at her like a frog, but he did respond.  And he responded even quicker to other people, albeit in his own odd way.  He never seemed to like being noticed by them, so whenever one of the other staff members were about he'd shut right up and stand off to the side with his head down and his shoulders hunched.  Not exactly the imposing figure you wanted your security lads to cut, but then Daisy didn’t suppose he got paid enough to be intimidating. 

But now she was shouting.  Now there were other people there, and he wasn’t stopping.  It was like he hadn’t even heard her, or he didn’t care.  That wasn’t like Freddy.  Daisy thought about footprints that should be there but weren’t.  She took a step back.  “Freddy?”

“It won’t be a stylish marriage; I can’t afford a carriage …”

And then, quite suddenly, Mr. Steel was standing in front of her.  She felt cold radiating off him, like he’d been standing inside a freezer.  “What are you doing?” he demanded, sparing Daisy a glance.

She shook her head, backing away.

Mr. Steel turned back to the light and stood there.  “Who are you?” he called out.  The light got closer to him.  “What do you want?”

“Steel!” Miss Sapphire shouted.  “Steel, I can sense it now!  It’s powerful.  It’s very malevolent and very powerful.”

Mr. Steel looked back at them.  No, at Miss Sapphire.  Daisy might as well have not been there for all he noticed her.  “How powerful?” he asked.

Miss Sapphire didn’t respond.

Mr. Steel turned toward the light.  It was getting close now, and Daisy didn’t want it to.  She thought she could see something behind the light, holding it.

“Take it back, Sapphire!” Mr. Steel said.  “If we aren’t ready, take time back.”

A blue light threw Daisy’s shadow across the floor in front of her, and she whirled around in surprise.  Miss Sapphire stood tall with her eyes wide and her hands clenched at her sides.  The blue of her eyes looked like it was getting bluer, and then brighter.  Daisy realized that her eyes were glowing, and the blue light Daisy had seen was coming from them.  They burned brighter and brighter, and Miss Sapphire seemed to grow until all of Daisy’s senses were consumed by her.

Then the blue light winked out and everything went dark. 

oOo  oOo  The Beginning  oOo  oOo

There was a light at the end of the tunnel.  It was weak and wavering, a swaying beam in utter darkness.  There was a cold, harsh whistling tune echoing around the walls in broken fragments. 

There was a light at the end of the tunnel, but Silver knew all too well that such things were not to be trusted.  Metaphor-turned-reality almost always spelled disaster.

He sat against the wall, a short distance from the stairwell he'd run down while fleeing the light in the hospital lobby.  He was dizzy, and couldn’t be entirely certain his barrier had protected him from the effects of the light.  In fact, he was almost certain it hadn’t.

There had been fifteen nails and three screws on the floor of the basement he found himself in.  Some sort of removal service had left them, probably, when the hospital was shut down.  Convenient, if not plentiful enough to build anything truly useful.

Still, something was better than nothing.  He had broken all their intermolecular bonds and used them to supplement his own elaboration on a Faraday cage, already crafted out of the computer mouse.  It kept him from affecting the world beyond the barrier, yes, but it also kept the world from affecting him. 

Not being affected was extremely important at that point, because the world had turned quite hostile.  There was a light in the hospital that burned.  He had seen Diamond and Radium both wink out of existence under its glare, and seen it chase after the human woman he had found with them.  She was probably dead too.  He hadn’t bothered to check.  A bit too preoccupied with his own survival.

That just left him, trapped in a small circle in a basement hallway, pressed up against an unpleasantly damp brick wall.  The light hadn’t come for him yet, but it was there at the far end.  It was watching him.

One of the wooden doors in the hall had a metal core, and there was a chill on the other side.  The sign next to that door said ‘Mortuary’, a place for storing and examining human remains.  Quite charming.  When he had first arrived in the basement he had opened it in the hope of finding an entire metal room to put to use. 

The door opened into an identical copy of the hallway in which he was standing.  He had tried to use the metal in the door itself, but it wouldn’t respond to him.  Only the nails and the screws had responded.

There was another door too.  A huge, round metal door.  He’d wanted to open that one, but by then the light was at the end of the hall.  He’d tried to break down the bonds in that door, and it had been worse than the mortuary.  While that had simply been frustratingly inert, the round, gleaming door had felt actively terrible, as though it was not metal at all.  He had staggered away from it, using the nails and screws to reinforce his Faraday cage before crumpling against the wall.

He had to wonder if he had accidentally found the site of the break.  There was some humor in the notion that he might have found the source of all their problems, but was completely incapable of doing anything about it.

There were things a brave man could do.  He could get up.  He could try to run back up the stairs and find help.  He could face the light on his own, using his wits and whatever he could conjure from fifteen nails, three screws, and a computer mouse.  He could even jump into the darkness, hoping to pick up a more useful timeline as he fell through whatever void lay outside the corridor of time.  He could try to find Diamond and Radium. 

He could attract the attention of the thing that came with the light while he did it.  He could be devoured.

All of those things would be brave.  Someone like Steel would do those things.  Even Sapphire might, with the correct incentive.  But Silver had never claimed bravery as one of his virtues.  Prudence had always seemed so much better for his health. 

He wouldn’t lift a finger.  He would stay behind his defenses, and he would wait.  Silver was an opportunist.  His time would come.  It had to.

There was a light at the end of the tunnel, and a great metal door looming across the hall.

Chapter Text

oOo  oOo  The Middle  oOo  oOo

Daisy reeled back against a wall that hadn’t been there a second before.  The light bearing down on them was gone.  For a long moment, everything around her was pitch dark.  Then the lights overhead sputtered back to life.  She stared wildly at the door to the mortuary across from her, and the rusted vault door next to that.  They were on the lower ground floor again.

“What just happened?” she gasped.  She felt as though her entire world had been turned inside out.  A minute ago, she had been convinced that she was escorting two very strange thieves who got their jollies stealing old medical records, and that she could pass them off to the equally strange night watchman.  Then, in a matter of moments, she had realized that whatever had been whistling and singing to her hadn’t been Freddy at all, that Miss Sapphire had eyes that glowed, and that teleportation was a real thing.

The two not-building-inspectors were standing there as though nothing odd had occurred, just as they had when Miss Sapphire played in the dust and acted as though she could tell things from it.  And like they had before, they were ignoring her.

“How far back did you put us?” Mr. Steel asked.

“Approximately forty-five seconds,” Miss Sapphire said.  Daisy huffed a derisive breath; she was not prepared to add time travel to the rapidly growing list of impossible things that were now possible.  There were limits.  “Enough that we should avoid the being in the hall.”

“Did you identify it?”

“Not properly.”

Daisy raised her voice again, refusing to be disregarded after going through all that.  “Excuse me, but would you two ‘building inspectors’ mind telling me what in hell is going on here?”

“We’re not building inspectors,” Mr. Steel said.

“Yes, thank you, I had figured that out,” Daisy snapped.  “What are you?”  ‘Who’ seemed secondary at that point.

They looked at one another for a long moment before Miss Sapphire said, “You have a problem in your hospital.  We were sent to solve it.”

“A problem.  That thing whistling in the dark … that wasn’t Freddy, was it?” 

“No,” Miss Sapphire said.

“How long has it not been Freddy?” Daisy asked, remembering all those nights when she would hear the whistling or see his torchlight, and simply assume it was Freddy without actually seeing him.

“We don’t have enough data to make that sort of assessment,” Mr. Steel said.  “Not yet.”

“But you can get it?”

“It’s what we do,” Miss Sapphire said, still so calm and confident.  Did nothing faze them?

“How?” 

“We find the trigger,” Mr. Steel said.  “We find whatever allowed time to break through in this place.  Whatever allowed that thing to come through.  We destroy that trigger, and the problem will resolve itself.”

“What does any of that mean?”

“It means you’re in danger, and we haven’t the time to explain it to you,” Mr. Steel said.

“Well you had best make the time!” Daisy said, taking a hasty step toward him.  “If I am in danger, I need to know what’s happening!”

They looked at one another again, damn them.

Then Miss Sapphire came to her and took her hand.  “You experience time in a linear fashion, don’t you?” 

“Yes,” Daisy said.  It sounded like something someone would be asked on Doctor Who. 

“The universe as a whole also experiences time in that way, but it’s not necessary.  Some things can travel through time with great ease.  And there are things out there that have no time at all, that exist outside it.  These things want time very badly.  So they find weaknesses—places where time is already delicate—and they break through.  They shatter time.”

“And occasionally, time shatters itself,” Mr. Steel said.

“Which one’s happening right now?” Daisy asked, not sure if it would make much difference one way or the other.  Was time shattering itself better or worse than some monster doing it?

“This time, it feels like the former,” Miss Sapphire said.

“And is that good?  Or better, at least?”

Miss Sapphire’s smile wasn’t genuine at all.  “In some ways, yes.”

“And the thing that broke through is the same thing we saw in the hall?  The thing with the light?”

Mr. Steel actually looked at her with some surprise.  “Sapphire?” he asked.  There was a tension in his voice she hadn’t heard before.  Not impatience, but something worse. 

Miss Sapphire thought for a moment before saying, “No.  I don’t think it’s a Transient Being.  It was powerful, but not in that way.”

Mr. Steel relaxed a little.

“But I can’t be certain they won’t follow,” Miss Sapphire added, and Mr. Steel was tense again.  “The feel of it was similar, and we know little enough of the Transient Beings that I wouldn’t like to rule out a relation.  Nor would I rule out it acting as a beacon to draw them in.”

“We should have been notified earlier,” Mr. Steel growled.  “For something like that to break through …”

“The break must have been forming for years.  Possibly decades,” Miss Sapphire said.

“What?  No, there’s been nothing like that here,” Daisy said.  “This was a working hospital a few days ago, with people here around the clock.  Someone would have seen.”

“Yes,” Mr. Steel said.  “That’s the problem exactly.”

Daisy stared at them for a long moment, trying to parse what they had said.  Nothing made sense.  It was something out of science fiction.  She didn’t know what to think or what to do. 

She did know one thing she’d like to do.  The same thing she’d wanted to do since before she’d realized that Freddy wasn’t Freddy.  “Can I just go home?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Miss Sapphire said.  “The apparition in the hall was drawn to you.  Connected with you.  It’s been around you enough that its echoes are all over you.”

“Yeah, but that’s just because I’m the one who’s been here, isn’t it?  It’s not singled me out.”

Mr. Steel started to whistle that damned song again.

“That was just because it was imitating Freddy!” she snapped.

“Was it?” Mr. Steel asked.  “When we were in the hall it went directly for you.  Why?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“It’s interested in you.  And that makes you useful.”

“So, what?  You’re just going to dangle me in front of it?”

“Yes.”  Mr. Steel’s eyes glittered in the half-light.

The smell of the mortuary seemed stronger as Daisy shook her head.  “No!  I’m not going to let that thing hurt me.  Not just so you can destroy a trigger or close a break or whatever nonsense you spout next.  I don’t know who you are!  I don’t know what you are!  All I know is that I’m scared, and I want to go home, and I’m not going to play bait just to make your lives easier.”

She turned to run up the stairs and make for the door, problems in the hospital be damned.  It could rot for all she cared.  She was three steps up when she heard the whistling.  She froze.  Mr. Steel caught her arm.  They both stared up into the darkness. 

“You’ll never make it out of here on your own,” he said.  “That thing is looking for you, and without us, it will find you.”

“You know, I think you’re hoping it’ll find me, even if it kills me.  I don’t think my survival is even a priority to you.”

Mr. Steel looked at her, honestly looked at her.  He had lines around his eyes like he frowned a lot.  He paused, as though he was trying to find the right words.  “I dislike waste,” he finally said.  “And as far as I can tell, your death would serve no purpose.  Therefore, I will try to keep you alive, if I can.”

It wasn’t enough by a long shot.  She was angry, but she was also scared.  There was something up there that sang to her, and came toward her, and wanted her very badly, if Mr. Steel and Miss Sapphire were to be believed.  These two were strange people, maybe even terrible people.  But they were also powerful people that had saved her once already.  Maybe if she helped them a bit, they would let her go.

“I’ve got no choice, have I?” she asked.

“None at all.”

Daisy looked up into the darkness at the top of the stairs.  She couldn’t see the light.  The whistling was moving further off, but she could still hear it.  It was still there, still waiting for her. 

She let Mr. Steel lead her back down.

oOo  oOo  The Middle Reversed  oOo  oOo

Steel listened to the hospital.  It creaked more than it had before Sapphire had brought them back through time.  It was a useful trick, of course, but it was the sort that had limited use.  Now their opponent knew what they were about.  Now it could prepare.

The break was getting larger.  They were too late to prevent it from starting in the first place, but they could stop it from growing.  They had done such things before, albeit with varying degrees of success.

He didn’t enjoy thinking about the train station.  His solution had been one of desperation; it had been inelegant, and no true victory at that.  He had simply stalled the darkness, and had sacrificed Mr. Tully to do it.

Such things happened, yes, but should not happen lightly.  What he had done to Mr. Tully … it weighed on him more than he had anticipated.

And now they were trapped with Miss Shennings, upon whom the whistling apparition had fixated.  Sapphire was concerned about the amount Miss Shennings might have been exposed to it already; its echoing quality also manifested in Miss Shennings to a lesser degree degree, making Sapphire’s reading of her more unreliable than usual.  Sapphire could determine no birth date or precise age, although she could narrow it down to within a year of 43.  There was no clear date of death or state of health beyond basal levels, either.  Just echoes, as though Miss Shennings' future was entirely uncertain.

That was not promising.  Miss Shennings did make a convenient lure for their apparition, and could likely provide them with further information about the hospital if prompted, but having her timeline already muddied implied that the apparition had imprinted on her deeply, and wouldn’t let her go without a struggle.  Such fixations were not conducive to keeping her alive.

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have promised her you would try,’ Sapphire said.  ‘I know you.  You take such promises far too seriously.’

Sapphire had always been irritatingly perceptive.  Steel was willing to lie to those they encountered during their assignments, of course.  He lied whenever it was necessary to do so.  But there was much more satisfaction to be gained in finding the truth and weaponizing it.  The truth would always be more dangerous than lies, and so he dealt in truths whenever he could.

He had promised Miss Shennings, and he would therefore exert whatever effort he had to in order to fulfill that promise, so long as it didn’t jeopardize the assignment.  Sapphire was not content with this conclusion, but she would accept it.  She always did.

Steel started walking toward the stairs at the far end of the hallway.  Enough time had passed that, with luck, the apparition would have moved beyond them, and wouldn’t notice them in its wake. 

Unless, of course, it was not yet tied in to the linear time stream.  In that case, it could be forewarned from an alternative timeline.  In that case, they were walking into a trap.

A slow smile spread across Steel’s face.  He would never call himself something so flamboyant as a daredevil, but he couldn’t deny that he relished the moments when he walked into unknown danger.  Every one of his senses—limited though they might be compared to Sapphire’s—sharpened, and his mind worked cleaner and faster.  Speeding toward danger, Steel became dangerous himself.

“What’s your truth?” he called out into the dark at the top of the stairs.  He knew without looking that Sapphire was unimpressed.  She preferred caution, an approach from the side where the enemy least expected it.  Sapphire relied on information.  It made her excellent at the long game, but tactics sometimes demanded other approaches.

The likelihood that they were already expected was high.  The apparition was strong.  Not quite Transient, as Sapphire had said, but nearly as bad.  He didn’t need to be psychic to know that.  It splintered reality wherever it went.  He had felt the shards of it when it had come toward them on the floor above.  It was a wonder the hospital hadn’t collapsed with all the faults driven through it.

“What are you doing?” Miss Shenning hissed at him.

“Greeting our host,” he said, loud enough that it would carry up the stairwell.  He turned his head so that he could still see the top of the steps, but could also see Sapphire standing at the bottom, her stare approaching incendiary.

She might prefer the long game, but she had never failed to rise to the occasion when Steel decided to increase the pace.  It was one of her best qualities.

“I would think my best quality would be pulling us back through time to avoid your mistakes,” she said, her slight smile belying her words.

“We need information,” he said, “and to get it, we must provoke a reaction.”

“Wasn’t that what we just did?” Miss Shennings asked.

“We weren’t prepared then,” Sapphire said.

“And what’s changed now?” Miss Shennings asked.

Sapphire said, “Nothing.”

Steel continued to move up the stairs.  Putting some distance between himself and Miss Shennings was a good idea, particularly if he meant to keep his promise.  “Miss Shennings seems interesting,” he called out again.  The darkness at the top of the stairs seemed to grow thicker, but his senses weren’t acute enough to be certain. 

‘It is,’ Sapphire thought to him.  ‘It’s here.  It’s listening.’

Steel was more than willing to continue playing the provocateur.  “We’re rather enjoying her company.  She’s been telling us all about ‘Freddy’.  Is that who you played at being?  Did you think it would let you get closer to Miss Shennings without making her afraid?”

“Steel,” Sapphire said, a tense tone of warning in her voice.  He could see a flicker of light deep in the darkness.

“And you would make her afraid, wouldn’t you?” Steel asked, advancing a few more steps, willing to risk that much to press his advantage.  “Tell me, did you ever have a form, or is this the best you can do?  Just darkness and light with no purpose.  That is all you are, isn’t it?  A thing without a purpose.”

And then, just as quickly as the darkness had begun to amass, it dissipated.  Steel followed, his pace measured, but quick enough that he wasn’t likely to miss observing a retreat.  “Did you sense any sort of reaction?” he called over his shoulder.

‘Nothing clear,’ Sapphire thought.  ‘You had its interest for a moment, and far too much interest.  You’re not indestructible.’

‘And then?  What happened then?’

‘When you said it had no purpose, its focus shifted away.’

‘To what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you sense anything else?’

Steel reached the top of the stairs and examined both directions.  There was nothing there.

“Yes,” Sapphire said, joining him.  Miss Shennings was behind her, peering around in apprehension.  “Most of what I sensed from it was mindless malice, but underneath it … Steel, there were words.  Thoughts.  Human thoughts.”

“I thought it was something that broke through time,” he said.

“Perhaps,” Sapphire said.  “Perhaps not.  I’ve not been able to study it long enough.”

“It didn’t look like any echo I’ve ever seen.”

“And it didn’t feel like an echo.  But Steel, the core of it is human, and not a living human.”

“Are you … are you talking about ghosts?” Miss Shennings asked.

Steel looked at her.  She was, he had to admit, holding up adequately in a stressful situation.  “That is one word for them, yes.  In reality they’re a fragment of a person taken out of time, usually by an external entity, which then allows them to exist anachronistically.”

“A fragment of a person?  So it could be a living person too?”

“No,” Sapphire said.  “Such apparitions are always the dead.”

“Why?” Miss Shennings asked.

“Do you know,” Sapphire said, “I don’t think we’re certain.  It’s simply the way things are.”

‘And yet this one doesn’t manifest as a human,’ Steel thought, and looked at Sapphire.  She gazed back, serene and poised as ever.  ‘You said it reminded you of a Transient Being.’

‘Yes,’ she replied.

Steel peered down the halls again, seeing no sign of the echo.  ‘What if it’s both?’ he asked.  ‘What if the initial event triggered the formation of an echo, and over time that echo and the widening break attracted attention from outside time?  What if a Transient Being is attempting to ride an echo into this world?’

‘Is that even possible?’

‘I’ve no idea, and would prefer not to find out.’

‘If that’s the theory you wish to work from, what next?’

‘A simple question: you said that you heard human thoughts.  What were they?’

‘Three words: not time yet.’

“Not time yet,” Steel said aloud.  Miss Shennings was watching them, frowning.  He had no desire to discuss the intricacies of time with her, but he was also aware that human beings tended to find it strange if they didn’t speak aloud at least some of the time.  “It’s waiting for something.  It lost interest when I said it had no purpose.  I got it wrong.  The Transient may have no purpose, but echoes always have a purpose.  They always want something.  And this echo is keeping to a timetable.  We have to figure out what it wants, first.  Then we find the trigger that created it, and we destroy them both.”

“How do we find out what it wants?” Miss Shennings asked.  “You can’t really ask it, can you?  All that malice and whatnot in it, I don’t think it would cooperate.”

“Oh, finding out what an echo wants is easy,” Steel said, his tone lightening as the hunt began in earnest.  “All we really need to do is find out who it was.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?”  Miss Shennings sounded put out.  Finding oneself the focus of an echo’s attention might, Steel supposed, be rather trying.  “It could be anyone, from any time, right?  It’s not like we could look through the records.”

“Actually,” Sapphire said, “we could.  Did your hospital keep a record of everyone who died here?”

“Probably, but Lord only knows where.  Like I told you, this building’s been about for a long time.  Those records might be in the vault, or they might have been moved already.”

“Oh, I suspect our apparition’s identity is in that vault,” Steel said.  “To grow powerful enough to attract the attention of a Transient?  It’s been here for a very long time indeed.” 

Miss Shennings continued, “Even if the name is in there, there’s no telling where.  I doubt the files are particularly well ordered.  You might have to dig through decades of paperwork just to find a few deaths.  And if you did find them, how would you tell which patient it was that decided to haunt the place?  Call out each name, one at a time?”

“That could work,” Steel said.  “Ghosts tend to have a particular connection to their name.”

“Wonderful,” Miss Shennings said.  “A hundred years of dead people’s names, only the oldest of which are actually here.  Shall I put the tea on, just to be certain you don’t lose your voices half way through?”

Steel smiled just a little.  Miss Shennings may be put out, but she was admirably morose about the entire affair. 

“That won’t be necessary, thank you,” Sapphire said.  “We would appreciate a bit of help with the reading, though.  As you said, there are going to be rather a lot of names, and we are apparently working to a deadline.”

“Hopefully not,” Miss Shennings muttered.  “I’d rather not spend my last night on earth digging through old papers and shouting names.”

“We’ll try to keep it interesting for you,” Steel said.

He wasn’t certain, but Miss Shennings might have offered him a smile of her own.  It lightened her.

They made their way back down the stairs and into the sub-level.  The lights flickered briefly, causing shadows to leap about them.  “I hope we don’t get a power cut,” Miss Shennings said.  “Now that the hospital’s shut, we don’t have backup power.”

“Do you have a torch?” Steel asked.

“No.”

“Then we hope that those sealing the vault had enough foresight to leave a few candles inside.”

Steel made his way back to the vault door and felt along the seams.  Miss Shennings had been correct in her assumption that it had rusted shut.  The advanced state of corrosion was going to make opening it more difficult.  “Sapphire?” he asked.

“Iron oxidation has damaged the lock mechanism, but it should still be operational with care,” she said.

Steel was pleased that Miss Shennings didn’t bother asking how she knew.  Sometimes the people they were forced to interact with were far too inquisitive; Miss Shennings appeared more pragmatic after her initial outburst had subsided.  Or perhaps she was in shock.  Steel had no aptitude for reading human emotional states.

He felt along the surface of the rusted door, red dust flaking off and embedding in his hands.  There was a combination dial at the center of the door, long since corroded to uselessness.  But the lock mechanism itself was still intact, according to Sapphire’s readings.  There was a mild attraction under that corrosion: the metal reacting to him.  Sapphire reached over his shoulder.  “There are two large metal releases that must be moved,” she said.  “One must be moved up, here.”  Steel placed his hand over hers for a fleeting moment before she pulled away to find the other release.  “The other must be pulled down, here.  The wires that would have held them in place are broken.”

Her hand perhaps lingered a moment longer than necessary under his, but it was difficult to say for certain.  Sapphire was a mystery to Steel more often than not, and one he was in no hurry to solve.

He could feel the releases under his hands now, rusted but still functional.  As long as they didn’t break or damage the door, his work could proceed without fuss.  If not, he would have to resort to less subtle methods.  He usually wouldn’t mind, but he had no desire to cover his suit in rust.

So he delicately began the process of working both releases at the same time.  Deep inside the door he could hear the groan of metal too long in one place, and he could feel the grit of oxidization resisting the movement.  He pushed on, steadily and slowly, and felt the releases begin to give.

The air grew colder.  Sapphire hissed, “Steel.”

“I take it our visitor is back,” he said, working the mechanism still.

“There’s a light at the top of the stairs,” Miss Shennings said.  “It’s brighter than before.”

Steel took a moment to look away from the vault.  He didn’t look at the light; he had no need to.  He looked at Sapphire. 

She knew, of course, even without him thinking it.  Steel needed time.  If trying to open the vault door had got such an immediate response from the apparition, then its name must be found inside.  He could feel the mystery unravelling with each inch the releases gave.

“I’ll buy you what time I can,” Sapphire said, serene as ever, but with an edge of fatalism in her voice.

This was the job.  At times it meant putting themselves in the path of danger.  He thought back to a room filled with dust and shadows, and Sapphire’s body jerking upright with her eyes full of darkness.

He forced himself to turn away.  Such sentiments had no place here, where their enemy could listen in.

He felt Sapphire move away, and forced his concentration back to the door.  The releases continued to shift.  It should only take a few more inches for them to clear, and then the wheel at the center of the door could be used to open it.

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.”

Did the song have a direct relationship to the situation, or had it simply been chosen because Mr. Tomms had connected it to Miss Shennings?  And if it was relevant, how?  Was it a clue to the apparition’s origins?  Sapphire had said that the song had been composed in 1892, and was popularized shortly thereafter.  Did the original echo form at that time?

There were too many questions, and far too few answers.

Steel felt something press against his back, and tensed for a moment before he realized it was Miss Shennings.  Her breathing was fast, but not panicked.  Sapphire was still holding her own, then. 

“Who are you?” Sapphire asked.  She sounded steady.

“I’m half-crazy, all for the love of you.”

“You must tell me your name.”

Another inch only, and the mechanism should release. 

“There’s something behind the light,” Miss Shennings hissed, close to his ear.  “I can see a shape.  I saw it before, in the hall, but it’s clearer now.  Mr. Steel, it’s squirming.”

“I know you have a name,” Sapphire continued, relentless in her task.  “You must tell me.”

“It won’t be a stylish marriage.”

“What’s she doing?” Miss Shennings asked.  “Does she think it’s going to answer her if she asks enough?”

A cold white light offset Sapphire’s radiance, washing out the blue light reflected against the wall next to the vault door.  Sapphire’s glow intensified to compensate.  She wasn’t built for direct confrontation.  Her abilities were many and often rather intimidating, but they were focused on investigation, subterfuge, and defense.  But Steel trusted her.  And he trusted that he hadn’t seen her limits.

The release slid the final inch, and there was an audible click from deep inside the vault door.  Steel seized the wheel and began to turn it.  It grated even worse than the releases had: the heavy metal pins that held the door shut had long since rusted into their sockets.  But there was still metal at their cores, enough that he was certain they would retract so long as the fragile workings pulling them free held together.  Slow and steady again, with an ear for any indication of something breaking.

“I can’t afford a carriage.”

It would take only a bit more effort, and the door would open.  Whatever secrets had been locked in that vault would be known. 

Miss Shennings gasped.  Sapphire’s voice lanced through his mind, ‘Steel!’

He couldn’t help himself.  He turned, and saw a wall of darkness before her, completely blocking the lights down the hall.  From the darkness came a single, piercing white light, fixed on Sapphire.  She appeared to be struggling against something, twisting and throwing out her hands.  Her eyes were wide and burning blue. 

Steel took a step forward, feeling the cold gathering inside him.  ‘Keep calm,’ he thought.  ‘I’m coming for you.’

‘The door—’

‘Will wait.  Hold fast, Sapphire.’

Her voice in his head fell to a hush, intense and desperate.  ‘My impressions are getting clearer, the closer I get to it.  It was a man, once.  A long time ago.  He did something … created the break.  He made himself this.’

‘Is there any trace of a Transient Being?’

‘Yes, but still distant.  It’s not through yet, Steel.  It could be years from getting through.’  She shook her head.  He got closer and colder.  ‘No, that’s not right.  It’s already through.  It’s all around us.  There are cracks throughout the building.  Bricks and mortar.  Computers.  So much more dust than there ought to be.’  Her eyes grew wider.  Steel was almost to her, but the light was closer, closing.  Steel started to run. 

“But you’ll look sweet …”

Sapphire thought to him, ‘Steel, we’re still missing something.’

And then she winked out of existence.

A shout tore itself from Steel’s throat.  He felt his connection to Sapphire stretch as she was wrenched away, and then it snapped.  For the first time in millennia, Steel was entirely alone.

It was impossible.  They had worked together longer than humans had recorded time.  They had faced things beyond even their own comprehension, and still found a solution.  There was no way that a human echo, even one connected to a Transient Being, should be able to tear her away so easily. 

But of course it was.  They had been lucky and clever, but the odds were always against them.  Their foes were strange and innumerable.  The situations they faced were relentlessly dangerous.  To think that they would persist without loss defied all rational thought.

But Steel, pragmatic though he was, had always believed it.  Right up until the moment she was gone.

He staggered under the loss.  His body temperature went into a reckless free fall.  The air around him condensed, and ice crystals stuck to his skin and clothes.  He glanced over his shoulder to see Miss Shennings with her back pressed to the vault door.  “Run,” he ordered.

She did as he said, fleeing toward the other stairwell.  Steel felt the weight of his promise to her in the void Sapphire had left.  He could buy Miss Shennings time at the very least.  He had a few tricks up his sleeve, developed recently to ready himself for a confrontation of this nature.  There was steam rising from his skin as the air around him became liquid and then evaporated again. 

“What can I call you, then?” he asked the light.  It swept over him, but continued to feint around him, searching.  “No, you won’t get her.  You’re going to have to deal with me.”

“Upon the seat …”

There was something under the singing, close in harmonic resonance, but somehow sour.  It was a thin, high noise, like a scream. 

His body temperature wasn’t dropping fast enough.  He wasn’t safe yet.  “Come now, talk to me,” he said.  His mouth had begun to feel stiff and numb.  He would lose control of his finer motor movements soon.  “I know you’re there beneath the song and the nonsense.  Make me understand what you want.  Tell me who you are.”

Miss Shennings had been correct.  There was a figure at the heart of the maelstrom, beyond the darkness and the light.  Steel couldn’t be certain it was human, and without Sapphire, he found he didn’t care.  Human echo or Transient Being, his goal was the same.  Identify, and then eradicate.  Close the break.  Find Sapphire if possible.  When possible.

It would be possible.  The alternative was unacceptable.

Steel pushed forward, and the room around him shivered.  Through the darkness he caught glimpses of bricks devoid of whitewash.  The door to the mortuary twisted in shape, wood then steel then electronic.  What was it?  When was it?  Was this what Sapphire had meant by them missing something?  They had already suspected that time was fragmenting.

He fought to keep his temperature falling to a range fatal even to a Transient Being, but the light was hot, hotter than expected, almost burning.  He couldn’t force his temperature lower.  He would need some sort of external source to get him down far enough.  The mortuary would have a refrigerator, wouldn’t it? 

He needed to retreat, but too late he realized how deeply into the darkness he was.  The light was blinding and hot, and he felt his temperature start to rise.  There were hands brushing at his face, his hair.  Sapphire’s voice whispered things in his ear, but they were wrong, and it wasn’t her voice.  Shadows skittered around him, racing along the walls.  The screaming that had underlain the song was growing to a deafening pitch.  Steel wasn’t prepared.  He had demanded Sapphire buy him time.  She had wanted to wait.  She had wanted to proceed with caution, but Steel had been too eager for the chase.  If she had been destroyed, the fault was entirely his.

“… on a bicycle built for two.”

Steel felt himself wrenched hard, and fell onto his back.  The light was focused to a point in the center of his chest, and it burned the breath out of him.  The walls were closing in, and they weren’t whitewashed anymore.  They were bare bricks and mortar, and the light fittings were gas lamps.  He scrambled backward on his hands with none of his usual poise, his shoes slipping on a damp floor.

Then he felt an intense tingling along his back, passing to his arms, his head, and then his legs as he kept pushing.  The darkness stopped pursuing him, not able to pass through a peculiar barrier composed of millions of tiny, twinkling fires.

“Steel,” a voice said behind him.  “You know, if I have to be utterly annihilated, I’m rather glad I get to be utterly annihilated with you.”

Chapter Text

oOo  oOo  The Beginning Again  oOo  oOo

It wasn’t every day, Silver thought, that a rather disheveled Steel tumbled into existence on the floor and scrambled back right into him.  There was something gratifying in it, if he was honest.  Steel had always had such a stolid, immoveable air about him, incapable of being excited by anything—even by his rather stunning partner, much to Silver’s consternation. 

Stark and utter terror suited Steel.  Or at least, it suited Silver’s current mood to see Steel in that state.

The idea of being ripped from existence and flung outside the corridor of time, to be torn apart by the abominations that waited there, did seem a bit rosier knowing that the unbending bore than was Steel would get flung along with him.  He shared this insight with Steel, because he was feeling generous and quite punch-drunk after so many hours of keeping his defenses in place.

Technicians really weren’t made for this sort of front-line nonsense.

Steel relaxed fractionally upon hearing him, and tucked his legs under him so that he was kneeling rather than half-prostrate, half-crouched.  And he was still staring at the barrier.  Silver had always been pleased by Steel’s grudging admiration of his constructions.  “Do you like it?” he asked.

“Must it be so showy?”

“What, adding a modicum of aesthetic appeal to one’s work?  Only you would consider that to be ‘showy’.” 

Steel finally turned to look at Silver.  Silver wondered how much of a mess he must look, to make Steel appear nearly concerned.  “What are you doing here?” Steel asked. 

“At the moment?  Attempting not to die in a basement.  Probably failing at not dying in a basement.”

“You weren’t here a moment ago.”

“I’ve been here for hours.”

“When are we?” 

“Oh, that’s difficult to say.  There is no internet, which is a relief on a technical level.  But there are no electronics either, which is significantly less relieving.  Whatever era we’ve found ourselves in, it’s dull.”  More than that, he didn’t add, it was disconcerting.  Silver appreciated how things were made; delighted in it, in fact.  He existed to take things apart and fit them back together again in impossible geometry.  He built machinery and mechanisms that could do anything, or he would if he had something to work with.  He was feeling far too vulnerable with only a computer mouse, fifteen nails, three screws, and his willpower to keep him safe.

Steel gave him a look, and Silver had to wonder if his thoughts were leaking.  They were close enough that it could happen.  Silver didn’t have the energy to expand the barrier to accommodate a second occupant, so Steel simply had to get used to being cozy.

“You’re exhausted,” Steel said, with a complete lack of sympathy.

“Well, this sort of thing is supposed to be a temporary fix,” Silver said, waving at the motes of light spinning around them.  “Only kept up until someone like the lovely Sapphire can arrive and get me out of my jam.”  Silver realized the implications of his own statement, and something terrified in him relaxed a little.  “That’s another reason I’m glad you’re here.”

Steel frowned.  He always did that when Silver mentioned Sapphire.

“I just mean that she would move heaven, earth, and more importantly time to find you,” Silver said.  “And finding me will be the happy side-effect of her efforts.”  It was amazing what good an increased probability of survival did for his spirits.  He was no less tired, but he was a bit more optimistic about the outcome of his situation.

Steel was silent for a protracted moment before saying, “She’s gone.”

It took Silver far longer than he’d like to realized what, precisely, Steel meant by that.  In a flash he reached out, letting his barrier exist on its own for this one necessary instant.  He knew Steel was being truthful—he was never anything but painfully blunt—but Silver had to confirm it.  He had to know.

His hand closed around Steel’s wrist, and he saw her struggling, her eyes wide and burning against the darkness.  He saw the light focus upon her.  He saw her vanish and felt the connection stretch and snap. 

Steel broke his grip and returned it then, with punishing strength.  The barrier fluctuated around them before Steel released Silver, who fell back, cradling his hand and putting his focus back on their defenses.  He couldn’t even muster any irritation at Steel’s rough handling.  It was one thing to know that Diamond and Radium might have been destroyed; he had only worked with them once or twice, and they were always a bit horrific.  But Sapphire …

Silver had rather liked her.  As much as he liked anyone who wasn’t himself, that was. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, the words feeling clumsy in his mouth.  He was usually so good at this sort of thing.  “Oh dear.  I’m terribly sorry.”

Steel hardened over.  “I’ll find her,” he said.  “We’ve found operators beyond the corridor before.  I can do it now.”

Silver couldn’t bring himself to mention the great probability that she had been torn apart the second she had entered the void.  The denizens of that place weren’t known for their patience.  Instead he simply asked, “How?”

Steel gave him one of his most disapproving looks.  Silver had an innate talent for bringing those out in Steel.  He also had the ability to irritate Steel into forming a plan, which frequently turned out for the best.  Without the hope of Sapphire finding them, Silver needed that second option. 

“What?” Steel asked.

“How exactly will you find her?  It has perhaps escaped your notice, but we’re currently trapped in roughly three feet of space, displaced in time, in a basement, with no usable metal within reach, staring down the manifestation of a break.  So, how are you planning to find her in all of that?”

Steel turned and concentrated.  It was fascinating to watch him work, Steel with his single-mindedness and meticulous, tactical mind.  Silver often found that one-track thought process to be the most boring thing about the universe’s most boring operator, but there were moments when he found that focus to be immensely useful.

“The door,” Steel said.  “It’s not rusted.”

“You mean the vault?  No.”  Silver reached out with his awareness.  It was still awful, even from this distance.  “Though I can’t recommend opening it.  There’s a feeling to it, Steel.  A menace.  I can’t even find the metal under all that unpleasantness.”

Steel was staring all the more keenly at that damnable door, as though the promise of nastiness only made it more appealing to him.  It might well do.  Steel had the strangest tastes.  He said, “We need to get in there.  Before we were separated, Sapphire and I determined that there is something extremely important in that vault.  Perhaps the trigger itself.”

“Good luck getting there,” Silver said.  “You’re safe within the barrier, but I’m far too depleted to expand it that far.”

Steel sat in silence, and Silver slumped back against the wall. 

“How did you get here?” Steel asked him.

“The same way you did.”

“Why are you here?”

“Why am I ever in a place like this?  I got called.”

“We didn’t call you.”

Silver smiled.  “You’re not the only team I work with, Steel, much as you might like to think so.”  Steel snorted.  He always had a way of making technicians feel appreciated.  “I was called in by Diamond and Radium.  A possible complication in a clean-up job.”

“When?” Steel asked.

“1999.”

“We arrived in 1979 with no briefing.  We expected to begin another assignment in a garden in 1900, but were diverted.”

“And when you failed to stop the break in 1979, one assumes Diamond and Radium were sent to 1999 to close it for you.”

“Did they?”

“No.  I’m not even certain they still exist.”  They’d lost a shocking number of operators to this thing, when he thought about it.  Far more than they ought.  What was it, that it could dispose of them so easily?

“We think there’s a Transient Being,” Steel said, and Silver’s mind faltered in terror.  It made sense, of course.  Transients would have the power to eject them from the corridor with an ease that few other creatures could claim.  But he would have recognized a Transient in that darkness, wouldn’t he?  It might not be his area, but surely he wasn’t that lacking in semi-organic perception.  Steel continued, “We think it’s riding through the break formed by a human echo.”

They both watched the vault door.  Without Sapphire or Diamond there to do something terribly clever with space or time, and without Radium and his particular flair for incineration, there wasn’t a great deal they could do.  Especially not if there was a Transient waiting for them just outside Silver’s flimsy barrier.

“I’m considering trying to take my temperature down,” Steel said.

“Being in close proximity to anything that cold is going to disable my abilities.”

“If I’m that cold, I could face the Transient while you opened the door.”

“You wouldn’t be telling me this if you didn’t have reservations.”

“I tried doing the same before Sapphire was lost.  The apparition’s light is hot.  It prevented me from dropping to a lethal temperature.”

“Ah.  And you’re worried that even if you do drop to nearly absolute zero, I won’t be able to reach the vault before it heats you back up and eradicates us both.”

“That is the concern.”  Steel quirked an eyebrow at Silver.  “Unless you can think of something terribly clever to prevent it.”

That was a challenge, and an obvious one.  Steel knew how to play on Silver’s vanity.

“If this fails, my barrier will fall and we’ll both be destroyed,” Silver said.  “I’ve only got components for a single use.  I can keep the barrier, or do something terribly clever.  Not both.”

“If you don’t help me, you’ll deplete all your reserves, the barrier will fall and we’ll both be destroyed anyway,” Steel said.

“You have a point.”

“Do you need any assistance?” Steel asked.

Silver smiled, but was already diverting most of his attention to the barrier and how much mass he could remove without weakening it to a critical level.  It wasn’t much.  In fact, it didn’t seem doable at all.  “I need more components, as I said.  Otherwise, I’ll have to take the barrier down while I work, and I don’t think either of us wants that.”

Steel patted himself down.  So like him to be aware of everything around him, but entirely unaware of whatever clothing he materialized in.  After a moment he held out his hand, holding a tie clip made of dull metal.  Pure iron.  Silver preferred working with finer metals, but needs must. 

He pressed his hand down over it until the molecules began to buzz against his palm.  Steel kept his hand in place, but frowned at what he obviously thought was Silver’s attempt to annoy him.  And yes, that was part of it.  A rather enjoyable part, in fact.  But Steel was also a conductor.  Not as good as Silver, but strong enough that Silver could leech a bit off him, draw on a few of Steel’s reserves to give himself the extra energy he would need. 

Steel gave him an irritated look.  He had noticed the drain. 

“You want miracles, Steel?  I require a baseline of materials and energy to produce miracles.”

“Then I do hope they’re miraculous enough.”

Silver lifted his hand, and the spiderweb galaxy of liberated molecules vibrated around it.  It was a start, certainly, of something better.  He just had to figure out what.  “I have found,” he said as he began to weave an initial lattice, “that horrific annihilation is an excellent motivator to get it right.”

oOo  oOo  Splintering oOo  oOo

Daisy did as Mr. Steel had said: she ran.

She tripped her way up the stairs, using her hands to propel her as much as her feet.  Once she reached the east hall, she ran for the reception area and the front door.  It would still be unlocked.  It was the fastest, most direct way out of the building.

She felt terrible for leaving Mr. Steel behind, but after Miss Sapphire had vanished, Daisy had known she was well and truly out of her depth.

She heard singing, distant and distorted.  The ghost was still there, and Mr. Steel was probably gone too. 

She had to get out.  There was no one left in the building who needed her, and no one who would protect her.  She had to get back home, where mad, strange things were the remit of children’s telly and not her actual life.

The lighting in the east hall should have been as strong as it had been when they went down to the lower ground floor, and the walls should have been just as reassuringly clean.  Instead, the overhead lights guttered like candles, and cast only the dimmest illumination.  Why had she never thought to keep a torch behind her desk? 

There were things skittering across the floor too.  She could see them out of the corner of her eye, though not well enough to know what they were.  There were trolleys scattered about, even though they had all been taken away when the collections lads from the NHS had come.  The instruments laid out on the trolleys were as rusty as the vault door had been.

The white tiles on all the walls were far more chipped and broken than she remembered.  There were patches of bare brick with specks of grouting every few feet. 

Mr. Steel and Miss Sapphire had said things about time.  Was this what they meant?  Was time somehow speeding up in her hospital, making the tiles crack and fall about her feet?  If she did manage to get out, would she find herself in the future?

She couldn't think about that.  The priority was to get out.  Get back to her flat and phone the police.  They could sort out anything untoward.  She would never have to go back.  The job was done.  Everything about the hospital was done.  She just had to get out.

But the hallway was so dim, and shadows leapt in the flickering light.  She could smell the damp in the air, just like in the lower ground floor.  Her shoes squeaked loudly as she ran, skidding in a thin film of moisture that shouldn’t have been there.  She was terrified she would fall, because people in movies always died when they fell down. 

She could still make it.  Daisy knew the hospital better than anyone, and the reception area wasn’t far.  Even if she were blind, she could find her way out.

She just had to keep her focus.  She had to run and concentrate and get out.  And then go home.  And phone the police.  And make tea and eat pink wafers and curl up under a blanket and watch the telly until she forgot everything she’d been through.

There was a trolley right in front of her that she could swear hadn’t been there a second before, and Daisy went sprawling over it.  Ceramic bedpans shattered, and she barely missed cutting her hands on them as she caught herself.

She turned her head, and far down the hall, emerging from the lower ground floor stairwell, was a light that swung to fix on her.  The whistling got clearer, less distorted, and much closer.  The lights overhead sputtered and died.

Daisy scrambled back to her feet and ran.  Her shadow was flung up on the walls all around her. 

She burst through the double-doors that separated the east hall from the reception area.  The lights were out there, too, with only the moonlight coming in through the front doors keeping things illuminated.  She could see through the glass panes in the doors to the west hall that the lights were still on there, and didn’t look like candlelight.  It was strangely tempting just to go through them, but she couldn’t.  Not when freedom was so close. 

She dodged around the desk and hit the front doors at full tilt.  They shuddered, but didn’t open.  Daisy’s breath caught in her throat.  She looked between the two wooden doors, but could see no bolt thrown.  She tried the lock anyway, twisting it to draw the bolt back, but it didn’t budge. 

She looked over her shoulder.  Around the corner of the desk, emerging from the east hall, she could see the pale beam of the light.  The whistling continued.

Daisy hit the front doors again, putting all her weight into it.  Again the doors shuddered, but didn’t give.  She flung herself at them repeatedly, desperate for a different outcome.  Tiny, fearful noises were starting to leak from her on every exhale.  The light crept along the wall toward her, catching the edge of her body and throwing her shadow up against the wood of the door.

Only it wasn’t her shadow.

Something withered and skeletal, with tatters of some kind flapping around it, was projected in her stead.  The shadow of hair waved about its head in tendrils, and there were threads spreading out from the shadow’s heart, reaching further and further across the doors and wall, to the very edge of the light.

Daisy turned from the sight and ran for the west hall.  She knew there was no exit that way, no easy way out that wasn’t a thick window, but she had to stay away from the horror coming after her.

There was a rickety fire escape, she remembered, off the upper floors of the hospital.  There was even easy access to it from the roof.  She considered all the possible routes.  There were at least half a dozen ways to the top floor, but there was only one stairway that led to the roof. 

She could make it.  There were ways to get to the top floor from the west hall, and even a few that would let her out close to the rooftop access.  There was still a chance.

As she ran, her heart pounding in a sympathetic burn under her tongue, the whistling continued behind her, never hurrying, but always present.

oOo  oOo  No Time  oOo  oOo

The realization that she was outside time, and that there were things lurking in the vast sea into which she had been plunged, now arrowing toward her, struck Sapphire like a knife to the heart.  She supposed it should hurt, but she was too busy being overwhelmed by the obliteration of her connection to Steel.  Of all the ways she could have known she was well and truly lost, this seemed the most devastating.

She couldn’t allow herself to fixate on it if she wanted to find her way back.  There were unnamed and unknowable horrors in the void, and they were drawn to pain.  She knew that they had sensed her.  She was a trespasser, a blue glow of fear and loss in an ocean of perfect dark. 

She had been expecting these horrors, and the pain.  Both had been vividly described by the few operators of her acquaintance that had been lost in the void and managed to come back.  What she hadn’t expected—what no one had mentioned—was the temptation.  There was a siren song in that oblivion that reached out to her, begging her to come closer, to look, to understand.  There were wonders beyond time, as well as terrors.  And those wonders could teach her things that would allow her to operate far better.  She could get back to the proper side of reality with what they could teach her.  She could save Steel, amaze him even.  She could save Miss Shennings as well.  She just had to get a bit closer, a bit deeper …

‘Come away, fool child!’

Sapphire gasped and jerked her mind away from something reaching and unspeakable.  And hungry.  So very hungry.  She flailed herself outward, desperate for the voice again.  Who had it been?  What had it been?  Was it just another siren song?

Steel.  She wanted it to be Steel, and at the same time she very much didn’t.  His presence would be a comfort, a solid point in this strange, shifting nothingness.  But he wouldn’t be able to withstand this place.  He wasn’t built to exist in the darkness.  Not like Sapphire, already darkness-touched. 

‘Reach out.  I refuse to do all the work on my own.’

Sapphire tried to locate the source of the voice, but could perceive nothing.  ‘What are you?  Where are you?’

‘Behind you.  Reach, Sapphire.’

It knew her name.  That was both promising and ominous.  But the creatures that were rushing toward her were clamoring, and she had little choice.  Sapphire reached behind her with her body, mind, and being.

Something strong and sharp closed about her in a viselike grip.  She was dragged backward at incredible speeds, and felt her body smash against and then pass through a razor lattice.  It should have torn her apart, but it parted for her, just wide enough that she slipped in.  Just as suddenly as she had been thrown into the void, she was ejected from it and found herself sprawled out upon the deep carpet of a dim, plush tea-shop. 

Sapphire had to remember how to use her hands.  They felt strange, like they didn’t belong to her.  Like whatever she had been in the void was a truer form than palms and fingernails and warm, delicate skin.  She dug her fingers into the carpet, but it made her feel sick.  The carpet had no history.  It felt real in the physical sense, but it wasn’t. 

She drew her hands to her chest, shivering.  She would find her calm after a few moments, she was certain.  She simply needed some stable point of reality to focus on.

“She appears rather shaken,” a desiccated voice whispered.

“She was just in the void for some seconds,” a second voice said, stronger and closer.

Sapphire raised her head to see a sage green heeled shoe leading to a pale leg.  This ended in a neat sage green suit.  Above that was a familiar face. 

“Diamond?” she asked.

“Quite.  You’re rather outside your element.”

Sapphire allowed a shaky smile to form on her face.  “It wasn’t my intention,” she said.

“Understandable,” the same dry voice she had heard before said. 

Sapphire rose to her feet and could not stop herself from startling at the appearance of Diamond’s partner.  Radium had always seemed a bit sickly, but now he was a dark, slate gray from his hair to the tips of his shoes. 

Sapphire cut a glance toward Diamond, who said, “He’ll be fine,” in a way that left no room for further questions.  Considering the noxious feeling rolling off both of them, Sapphire was willing to let discretion be the better part of valor.

She had only rarely encountered the clean-up crews—what some called the ‘specialist’s specialists’—who appeared after assignments were complete, and sterilized the break.  If operators removed the tumor that was a time break, clean-up crews were there to cauterize the wound. 

They were considered odd, even by the loose standards set by operators.  Sapphire was aware that she was odd too, as was Steel.  But clean-up crews tended to be the sort of odd that set an operator’s entire being on edge.  The sort that itched and burned.  Now, standing so close to Diamond, Sapphire realized that was a literal description.

But there was a job to do, and that job would be easier with the considerable abilities of a clean-up crew at her disposal.  They were looking at her as though they were thinking the same thing.

‘What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?’ Radium asked her, his mental voice ticking like a Geiger counter. 

‘We were on assignment, Steel and I,’ Sapphire replied.  ‘An old hospital in 1979 containing an echo made of darkness and light.  We think it was being used as a bridge for a Transient Being.’

She received matching looks of surprise from Diamond and Radium.  ‘We were assigned to an old hospital in 1979,’ Diamond said.  ‘But we didn’t arrive until 1999.  The break was massive, and we weren’t able to contain it.’

‘A Transient would make sense,’ Radium said.  ‘There aren’t many things I can’t burn.  If it was strong enough to throw you out in 1979, I imagine it was very near emerging completely in 1999.’

Sapphire took in the implications.  She thought of being diverted from their original assignment through both time and space.  Perhaps the garden they were supposed to find had been close enough that the break in the hospital had dragged them off course.  It was certainly warping reality enough to manage it.

If they had failed, what had happened to Steel?

Sapphire stiffened despite herself.  If Diamond and Radium were there, Steel had not succeeded in finding her, or in closing the break.  That left very few options.

‘It’s likely he’s been destroyed,’ Diamond told her, what cold sympathy she could muster not lessening the blow.  ‘Steel is a singularly unbending operator.  I doubt he could have withstood what he encountered.’

“Speculation is useless,” Sapphire said aloud, breaking the building stillness in the tea room.  She sounded harsher than she ought, but the notion that Steel was entirely gone was abhorrent to her, and not to be entertained until she had definitive proof.

Radium’s smile was gradual and cracked, and Sapphire knew he had picked up on her train of thought.  “Quite useless,” he said.  “And very much not the point.”

Diamond turned, looking vaguely embarrassed.  “Quite,” she said, and moved past Sapphire to peer through the window.  “Your arrival was useful.  We’ve been attempting to track our own wake.  Being able to observe your arrival has made this job easier.”

They had already formulated a means of finding their way back inside the corridor, then.  The relief was instantaneous and intense.  Sapphire had wanted to believe it was possible, but had little notion of how to navigate the void.  Diamond and Radium, on the other hand, seemed more than capable.  How close were the clean-up crews to the edges of time, she wondered, to form even this level of affinity with the oblivion that lay beyond? 

She noticed Radium still watching her, and when she caught his eye he gestured to the chair opposite him.  Sapphire approached and sat down.  The sensation crawling over her skin became more intense as she drew closer to Radium, but she didn’t react.  His particular abilities were useful.  She had no need for them to be pleasant.

A tiny smile lit her face.  She sounded rather like Steel in her practicality.

‘We appreciate your arrival,’ Radium told her, ‘and we sympathize with your situation.  Even if Diamond can’t express it.’

Radium’s sympathy was well-meaning, but it chewed at her in the same way his abilities did, feeling poisonous.  ‘Thank you,’ she thought.  ‘And I still believe we’ll find him.  Steel is more resilient than he seems.’

‘Undoubtedly.’

She couldn’t tell if he was being facetious or not.  Silver always had the good grace to broadcast such things, but Radium was like static.  She couldn’t see through the haze enough to divine his intentions.  She wondered how Diamond managed.

‘She’s been working with me a long time.’

Sapphire shot him a hard look.

She got the sense of a shrug in her mind, even though he didn’t physically move.  ‘Don’t mind my eavesdropping.  Thoughts get leaky around me.  I’m quite used to hearing more than I ought.’

‘I see.’

He smiled at her, his teeth as gray as the rest of him.  Sapphire realized that as much as he protested, Radium enjoyed the effect he had on those around him.  He was a provocateur.  She relaxed.  She had worked with enough provocateurs to feel more confident. 

‘I’m glad that I don’t need to fill in the rest of the details about our assignment, then,’ she thought.  ‘It’s quite convenient.’

His chuckle was more like a cough.  ‘I’ve always thought so.’  His thoughts took on a serious tinge.  ‘I don’t like the idea that a Transient Being could manage to slip past us for so long, or that it could divert our teams so far in time.’

‘We know that they’re powerful.  It’s well within their capabilities.’

‘All the more reason to monitor for them diligently.  This should have been caught.  I find it disturbing that it wasn’t.’

‘Steel thought along similar lines.’

‘And well he should.’

Diamond broke into their conversation. “I’ve found it.”

Sapphire rose to join her.  The crawling feeling coming off Diamond was less, although the fact that it was coming off her at all was worrying.    

“Where?” Sapphire asked.

“You can’t see it.”

Sapphire gave Diamond a disbelieving look.  “But you can,” she said.

Diamond sighed, but offered her hand.  It was soft and cool under Sapphire’s, and in an instant her perceptions expanded out to encompass the abyss, like needles shot out in every direction.  Diamond was using some form of echolocation, tuned to Sapphire, but it wasn’t just Diamond’s own abilities fueling it.  Her mind was shielded by Radium, pushing back the things outside and magnifying her view.

Through her, Sapphire could see a thin thread of shining blue points, brilliant against the blackness and ending in a blossom of light.  “There,” Diamond said.

Sapphire felt Diamond’s excitement through her hand, much as she hid such things.  She felt Diamond’s apprehension as well, along with flashes of Radium growing darker and less accessible.

‘That’s quite enough of that,’ Diamond thought, and pulled her hand away.

‘Terribly sorry,’ Sapphire replied, although she wasn’t.  She was sure Diamond had gleaned at least as much from her.  “How do we get there?” she asked aloud.

Diamond’s smile was sharp.  “I have a fix on the location, now, and there is enough substance to give me a hold.  I shall pull us there.”

The illusion of the tea room wobbled, and Sapphire saw the crystalline underpinnings all around them, needles facing outward to ward off the hungry beings that battered it.  Between the needles was a glimmering green shine.  ‘Your doing?’ she asked Radium.

The information she received in return was far less words, and more the concept of Radium integrating his abilities into Diamond’s, turning her green and harder than before, adding a burn to her sharpness.

Sapphire watched as Diamond’s edges unraveled and snaked out in tiny, razor wire tendrils.  She was alien even to Sapphire in this form, powerful and reaching.  Her wires threaded out into the blackness, and Sapphire saw the forms of terrible beings shrink away, lest the wire cut through them.  Her tendrils formed an intricate spiderweb, growing paler and paler the further out they got. 

Diamond was panting.  Her hand was gripped tight against the windowsill, and her physical body was shaking.  Her fingers were curled against the pane of glass.

Sapphire heard the scrape of a chair and startled.  Radium had risen, and was far closer than he ought to be, given his speed of movement.  His attention was fixed on Diamond, and he placed a hand upon her back.

She stiffened, and then her wires glowed with a new energy.  Far in the distance, at the point where all the glowing lights converged, Sapphire saw the wires begin to weave. 

‘Something strange,’ Diamond thought, painful to hear.  ‘I can feel the place you entered, but there are two adjacent entrances as well.’

‘You came from 1999,’ Sapphire said.  ‘It makes sense that the entrance from that point would be slightly different from mine.’

‘But the third?’  Radium’s thoughts were dragging and clamorous.

Sapphire had no answer, though she felt like she was on the edge of something.  She prided herself on her instincts, on perceiving more than others.  Diamond and Radium were fixed on the goal, but Sapphire was more interested in the mystery. 

A third entrance.  A time before or after.  Perhaps before.  It would make sense.  The break was some time in forming even at the point she and Steel had arrived.  If there was indeed a third entrance …

“Can you determine which entrance you used?” she asked.

‘Yes,’ Diamond replied.

Radium was giving her a hard look.  “The initial break,” he said. 

Sapphire nodded, feeling her being straining forward.  The origin of any break was critical to undoing it, and there was a doorway straight there waiting for them. 

Radium thought, ‘It won’t be enough.  The break is too devastating to simply close at the beginning.  I need to go to the end, and burn my way back.  Now that I know what's waiting there, we could do it.’

Along with the thought, there was further information.  Burning back through time was imprecise.  He tended to use Diamond as an anchor, since he would know her presence anywhere.  But the break was large enough he would need her at his side to channel and sharpen his burn.  To make it surgical enough that they didn’t sicken and kill the entire city.

And that meant they would need another anchor. 

“No,” Diamond said through gritted teeth.  “There are costs too dear, Radium.”

“It’s a Transient, Diamond, on the brink of breaking through.  There is no cost too dear.”

“Would I be a familiar enough guidepost for you?” Sapphire asked.  “Even through that much intervening time?”

“Not at the moment,” Radium said.  “But modified?  Yes, you would do.”

Modified.  Sapphire looked at Diamond and her green clothing and burning green eyes.  That was what he meant by ‘modified.’  That was what Diamond had meant by a cost.

No, there was more than that.  Diamond was a pragmatist, like Steel but worse.  Even if the modification was permanent, Diamond would accept it and move on with the plan.  There had to be something worse.

Ah.  The burn.  A burn which Sapphire—being filled with the same energy that was lighting the entire break ablaze—couldn’t avoid if she tried.

‘The cost is high,’ Radium thought to her, ‘but the cost of failure is higher.  Imagine it, Sapphire.  A Transient Being inside the corridor, after at least twenty years of waiting, acclimatizing, and planning.  Would any of us be enough to stop it then?’

‘You’ll burn out,’ Diamond told her, countering Radium.  ‘One use and gone, guaranteed.  Not thrown outside the corridor, but gone.  Broken down to your component parts with no hope of reassembly.’

Complete destruction.  Yes, that would be bad enough to make even Diamond pause.  But Radium was right.  A Transient was too great a threat to let through, even if Sapphire had to burn to stop it.  She didn’t long for annihilation, but she had accepted the hazards of her profession when she began. 

“You don’t have adequate data to arrive at the correct conclusion,” Diamond said.  It struck Sapphire that in her own brusque way, Diamond was looking out for her.

There was something touching about that, the same way it was touching when Steel offered her affection at the worst possible moments.  And it was just as irrelevant.  What was the alternative?  They burn blindly, destroying not only the break, but the city?  It was a cost that was truly too high.

Sapphire was an acceptable cost.  Diamond and Radium and even Steel were acceptable costs.  This was their function.  She wouldn’t shrink from it simply because it was her turn to pay.

“I have all the data I need,” she said, “but thank you for your concern.”

Diamond turned away from her in disgust, and Sapphire caught the faint echo of ‘Idiot child’ rolling off her as she focused on her job and ignored Sapphire and Radium.

Radium lingered by Diamond’s side for a moment.  He then removed his hand from her back and stepped over to Sapphire.  “I suppose I should mention that you might find this unpleasant,” he said.

“I had suspected as much,” she said, smiling.

His hands came down on her shoulders.  On the other level, in which Diamond was made of stone and razor wire, and Radium was the noxious epicenter of a creeping burn, he reached into her. 

There were spaces inside Sapphire that gave her the ability to bend, to adapt.  Impurities that allowed her to perceive the world in nuance.  They also made her fallible, but that was preferable to being unable to understand the human world and its inhabitants through the screen of her perfection. 

But clean-up crews didn’t interact with humans.  Clean-up crews didn’t care for nuance.  They cared for precision, for slicing through and burning away until nothing but time and pristine walls remained. 

She felt her lattice rearrange, the spaces becoming sharper and more ordered, and then filled with an energy that wasn’t her own.  It suffused her, burning nuance and investigatory zeal and manners away, until only purpose remained.  It was agony, a shredding of self in the face of a single goal.  Sapphire could feel her nails cutting into her palms as a distant counterpoint to the pain.

And then the pain was gone.  The energy was still there, but it had faded to a background tingle.  Sapphire relaxed and turned toward the window.  Everything around her was sharp and anticipatory.  Radium was watching her with a curious expression, and Sapphire was distantly aware that he was apprehensive. 

But apprehension was a meaningless thing, an emotion with no particular function.  The goal was laid out in front of them, clear and unwavering.  Diamond had drawn them in close to the three openings, close enough that Sapphire could perceive each of them in turn.  The largest glowed a brilliant blue and felt familiar.  Another was pale green, and also felt familiar.

The third was tiny, barely a pinprick of an opening, and gave off no light at all.  The origin would be the weakest point, before the break had time to grow beyond its original parameters.  “There,” she said.  Her voice sounded bizarre, as though there were other voices layered beneath hers.

“I suppose you’re quite certain about all of this,” Diamond said. 

“Of course.”

Diamond cut her an unreadable look and said, “Yes, of course.”  Sapphire should have been able to decipher it, but it didn’t matter as much as it once had.  “Are you damaged?”

Sapphire smiled, although the expression didn’t sit as it ought.  “Rather the opposite, I should think.”  She went to the door of the tea-shop and reached for the handle.  It was cold, but the burn of her skin warmed it.  “I’ll be quite all right in the void for a time.”

“You will,” Radium said, “but take care.  It’ll sap you faster than you think.”

“Then get me as close as you can to the opening.”

Diamond gave off a wave of aggravation.  Radium continued to be cool and confident.  Sapphire waited.  Soon enough she would open the door.  Soon enough she would burn her way back to reality.  Soon enough she would see the job through to conclusion.

Chapter Text

oOo  oOo  Maybe The Middle  oOo  oOo

Daisy fell against the wall of the stairwell.  Even adrenaline could only take her so far.  Her heart was pounding and her body was shaking.  She couldn’t go on like this.  At every turn, as she began to think she was making progress toward the roof, she would be cut off.  The darkness was all around her, the light around every corner.  The whistling had stopped being directional.  It came from everywhere now, bouncing off the walls. 

She felt like she was being herded, forced to turn back and down.  The worst part was that, despite knowing the halls as she did, despite often feeling that she was as much a part of the hospital as the doorknobs, the building had become strange.  The tiles had continued to chip away until only shards remained, clinging to brick walls all around her.  The halls smelled like must, mildew, and the hint of a sweet odor she couldn’t identify.  The doors were wooden and heavy, and there were paneled cabinets dotted here and there.  Part of her was tempted to hide inside one like a child, but every time she drew close, she shied away.  The sweet smell was worse near them.

She pushed off from the wall and stumbled down stairs made of stone (there was no crack on the third stair where there should have been one—was she in the right place at all?) and down to floors that ought to be tiled, but were made of hardwood instead. 

The light was behind her, pushing her onward.  She had to find a way around it soon.  It couldn’t be everywhere.  Maybe if she could find a light of her own.  She’d tried the switches, but none of the lights would come on.  Now there weren’t even switches.  The lights hanging from the ceiling didn’t have any bulbs in them, just some sort of nozzle.  She didn’t know what to do with that, so ignored them.  There had to be light somewhere to drive back the dark.

She continued along the corridors.  The light chased her, leaking around doorframes and throwing the shadow of the skeletal monster up all around her.  She thought it was reaching for her, bony fingers grasping and desperate, tendrils eager to wrap her up and drag her away.  She couldn’t tell if she was more afraid of the shadow ahead of her or the light behind her.

There was a door in the wall that wasn’t lit, and she dashed through it.  Another stairwell leading down.  Daisy wanted to cry in frustration, but she couldn’t turn back.  The light was pouring in behind her.

She hurried downward, the smell growing even damper.  She had been nearly to the fifth floor when the chase had started in earnest, and she had only descended two other staircases.  That meant that she had to be approaching the second floor. 

But it smelled like a basement.  It smelled like alcohol and decay.  She rushed through the door at the base of the stairwell and looked around.

The walls were whitewashed brick.  The floor was tiled a reassuring mix of neutral colors.  But ahead of her was the metal door to the mortuary, and next to that was a great, round vault door. 

Daisy pressed her hand to her mouth.  There was no way she should be so far down.  No way she should be back on the lower ground floor, where she began.  She turned, and the light was already leaking around the closed door to the stairwell, sealing her in.

oOo  oOo  The Origin Point  oOo  oOo

Steel watched Silver, attempting to contain most of his impatience. 

“Staring at me doesn’t actually make me work faster,” Silver said.

“What would?”

Silver chuckled, but didn’t respond.  Steel continued to glare at him while focusing on the light that kept sweeping over the barrier, trying to find a way through.  The shape was there as well, but unclear through the haze of metallic atoms.  If Steel knew what the man’s name was, he might be able call him forward and force him to manifest.  If Steel could do that, then he could banish the echo, preventing the Transient Being from breaking through.

But without a name, he had only the vault door and the hope he could find the trigger and unmake it. 

“Do you see it?” he asked, not actually wanting Silver to answer.  “The shape in the darkness.  Can you see through your own barrier better than I can?”

“Not really.  Why?  Do you want to see what a Transient looks like before they hide in human form?  I don’t.  I’m not really sure I could stand it if I did.”

Steel said, “But if we could see it.  If we could identify a Transient Being through conventional senses—”

“Then we’d know what it was five seconds before it destroyed us.  Honestly, Steel, there are some things that are too much.  Even for you.”

“You had best hope this isn’t one of them,” Steel said.

Silver’s tone was light, but shivered.  “Oh, believe me, I do.”  He shifted behind Steel, perhaps drawing closer.  Steel felt something like ice draw near to him as well.  Something small.  Silver made a satisfied noise.  “You might want to start cooling down.  I should be able to have this done just in time to push you the last few degrees.”

Steel kept his attention fixed on the light, but he allowed himself to think of Sapphire.  He focused on the image of her struggling against the darkness.  He focused on their connection snapping as she was torn away from him.  He focused on the rage that had ignited somewhere buried inside him.  Steel’s rage had always been a very cold thing. 

His body temperature began to fall for the second time that day, and his joints protested.  He wasn’t made to transition frequently and rapidly.  It made him brittle, in need of tempering.  Too many fluctuations and he would break apart.

“Are you quite all right?” Silver asked.  “You’ve gone a bit pale.”

“I’m dropping my body temperature at inadvisable speeds.  Paleness is to be expected.”

“You wouldn’t be downplaying your own difficulties, would you?  Because that could be inconvenient.  This device will be effective, but only so far.  If you’re more damaged than you’ve let on, you could burn through it too quickly.  I might end up on my own and annihilated.  I don’t savor that idea.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Because there is a time and place for bravado—most times and places, to be honest—but right now isn’t one of them.”

Steel gritted his teeth.  His lips were starting to frost over.  “I.  Will.  Be.  Fine.”

“Wonderful,” Silver said with enough sarcasm that even Steel could identify it.  “Forget I asked.”

Steel tried to do just that.

The air within the barrier grew colder, and Steel wondered if Silver was shunting the heat out from around them.  It would be considerate if he was, which made Steel doubt it.  Silver was never considerate. 

The temperature fall began to slow as it became more difficult to push himself further.  He kept going, of course, but it was becoming more and more frustrating.  After a certain point, it would take hours to overcome the energy that simply pushing created.  It was why he relied so heavily on external cooling agents.

Speaking of such things.  “That device would be useful now."

“I appreciate the subtlety of that request.”

“Silver.”

“I’m almost done.  Keep your temperature as low as you can.”

“I know how to do my job.”

Steel pushed as far as he could, until his temperature drop slowed to a crawl and he was starting to find it difficult to move quickly.  There was a palpable heat drawing nearer to his back. 

Silver circled in front of him, close and crouched away from the tight barrier.  Steel moved to give him room to work.

“Thank you,” Silver said, distracted.

Steel didn’t bother acknowledging that.

Silver held a small metal flower in his hand, which he slipped into Steel’s jacket pocket.  “I thought you would appreciate a boutonniere,” he said. 

“I would prefer a tie clip.”

“Honestly, Steel.  You have no sense of style.  And in this case, no sense of how a good heat sink works.”

Silver folded the petals back one at a time, and Steel felt a jolt of cold race through him at each.  The barrier shivered as Silver’s attention wavered.  The darkness pressed closer, and the barrier shrank. 

The flower began to glow hot, and Silver snatched his fingers away as soon as he folded down the final petal.  “A heat sink?” Steel asked.

“My own improvement on the theme.”  Silver looked haggard by that point, and his smile was ragged at the edges.  “Each petal can shunt off heat both from you and from your environment, but only so much.  Even I can’t stop atoms from reaching a state of such excitement they shake apart.  But I can divert the release of energy away from you when they do break up.”

“Much appreciated.  How long will it take you to open the door?”

Silver gave Steel an eloquent look.  “You’re very demanding, aren’t you?”

“Silver,” Steel said.

Silver didn’t need to be further prompted to duck behind Steel.  They both got their feet under them, crouched and ready to rise.  “Get me to that door, and I’ll get it open,” Silver said.  “I’ll dissociate every atom in it if I have to, no matter how it feels on its surface.”

The barrier shattered all at once, its atoms blowing outward in a brilliant flash.  When the light faded, the darkness had been pushed some feet backward.  Steel straightened up, his limbs.  He felt the warmth of Silver at his back, rising along with him.  They started to edge toward the vault door.

“Have I mentioned what a stupendously terrible idea this is?” Silver asked, with no true meaning.  He just liked the sound of his own voice, particularly when under stress.  “How do we know that the vault is even relevant to your investigation?”

“Because all roads lead back to it.  Because the apparition dislikes this place and that door.  Because you find it so loathsome you don’t even want to attempt to work with its metal.”

The apparition hated him, Steel was certain.  The Transient hated him because that was what it did.  Whatever shattered remnants of a human echo were left hated him for less clear reasons, although it might have something to do with his provocation before.  He should try that again once he was cold enough.  If he could keep his barbs on course, they should keep the apparition busy with him and ignoring Silver.

Around them, Steel could see time shake and splinter.  Now that he suspected it, he could see the damp brick all around them grow a coat of whitewash, only to lose it again.  There were other things, implications of echoes even further forward in time than he had been, perhaps from the era Silver had been called to.  Key pads and electronic locks.  How large was the break?  How could he close something that massive?  Even with Silver’s assistance …

No.  Doubt was the enemy.  It was a foothold for beings beyond the corridor.  Silver hissed wordlessly behind him.  The darkness boiled, and the light stabbed out toward them.  The flower in Steel’s pocket burned bright as it absorbed the heat that tried to warm him.

‘It’s working,’ he thought.

‘Let’s not be hasty,’ Silver thought, clearly not as adept at blocking his doubt as Steel was.  ‘We have some distance to go.’

‘It’s angry.  It’s not playing anymore.  No singing, no games.  It’s threatened.  Silver, when I tell you to run to the door, you must do as I say.’

‘You’re going to do something foolish, aren’t you?’

“I’m going to do what must be done,” Steel said.

Silver said nothing, which Steel took for acquiescence.  He stepped closer and closer to the door, and the darkness drew near.  He could see the shape again, past the light.  He had to get to that, to the heart of the echo.  If he could get there, he could stop it long enough for Silver to do his work. 

Ten feet.  Eight feet.  Six feet.  Four feet.

‘Now!’

He felt the warmth at his back tear away, and Steel lunged forward.  The darkness and the light both wrapped around him, trying to tear him apart or throw him out of the corridor, but he was too immobile.  Too cold and still and present.

So it engulfed him in burning light.  The flower glowed even brighter, shunting more and more heat away from him as he pushed toward the fluttering heart of the storm.  He could see it, the squirming edges and the central mass.  No.  Not mass.

Masses.

One was clearer and shaped passably like a short human man.  The other was spectral, looming huge behind the smaller form.  It held no shape for long, but shifted and tore at Steel’s comprehension.  This was the Transient Being, or as much as he could perceive as it stretched its shadow through the break.

One of the petals fell from the flower and burst apart in a cascade of light.  Steel felt a trickle of warmth at his outstretched hand.  He snatched it back against his chest.  Silver’s warning had been in earnest.  He was losing the petals faster than anticipated. 

Very well.  Steel wasn’t averse to working under pressure.  He often found that he preferred it.  He pressed on.  Another petal fell, and his other hand began to warm.

Was Silver shouting at him, or at the door?  There was no telling.  He was nearing the center of the darkness, and anything external to it was muffled.  The squirming edges of the smaller mass were beginning to resolve themselves. 

Another petal burst into light, and his left leg grew warmer.  He heard whispering in a voice graveled and inhuman.  “Tear you apart.  Send you away.  Can’t see it.  Can’t have it.  Mine.”

Another petal.  All Steel’s extremities were warming now under the glare of the light.  He held them in close to the numbness in his chest and head.  There was one petal left.  He could make it.  He could so nearly see the Transient and its host.

It felt as though he was pressing against a membrane, tough but yielding.  He pushed himself as hard as he could, freezing the surface, making it brittle.  He wrenched his arm forward, and the membrane broke.  Steel stumbled inside.

And there, at the very heart of the darkness, was a man.  He was small, round and unassuming.  His sideburns were ill-trimmed, and the buttons across his stomach were strained.  He was wearing a uniform, Steel thought, though he couldn’t tell what it signified.  That had always been Sapphire’s area.  In one hand the man clutched an old storm lantern, its light striking Steel in the face.  In the other hand he held a knife.

“You can’t see it!” he cried, his voice now altogether human.  “You mustn’t see it!”

“Who are you?” Steel demanded.

“You can’t see it!  You won’t!”

“Who are you?” Steel asked again.  He had to find the answer.  He had to drive forward.  He was running out of time.

The last petal fell from the metal flower, dissolving in a blossom of light.  He was out of time.

The man looked Steel in the eye and nodded, his fear fading.  “You won’t see it.”  He held up his lantern, and Steel’s temperature began to climb perilously fast.  He fell back, but the membrane had reknit itself behind him, trapping him.

“My da knew a thing or two about metalwork,” the man said.  “You know what happens when iron gets very, very cold, and then you make it hot too fast?  It shatters.”

Steel felt his molecules begin to vibrate at different paces throughout his body, not responding to one another through proper collisions, but sticking and then breaking apart with violent energy.  “Tell me your name,” he gritted out.

“You’re not going to see,” the man said.  “Not you.  I’m going to break you into tiny pieces.”

Steel wrapped his arms around himself and doubled over, desperate to stop the pressure, to hold himself together through sheer force of will.  The man smiled down at him, his features twisting and his edges snaking back into the darkness that lurked behind him.  Over his shoulder, two eyes watched Steel.  They wanted him to break.  They wanted to see an operator crumble to his component atoms.  Nothing left but dust.  Around those eyes, a body was coming into focus.  No, not a body.  Something that might be called a body.  Something that was nothing like a body. 

Steel didn’t dare breathe, lest he break apart on the exhale.  The Transient was going to eclipse the man, sweep forward, and tear him apart.  It was angry.  It was frustrated.  It wanted to be free.

“No,” he heard.  The man jerked back, flinging his hand up and across his eyes.  The Transient swelled, but at the same time it lost its cohesion.  It stared at him, baleful and hating, promising that nothing was over.  Promising that it would find him again.  Time was infinite, and it had no concept of waiting when it was outside the corridor.  It would find another weakness, and it would creep in.  And then it would throw him out.  Just a void forever, trapped inside a single room.  Staring out curtained windows, sitting at a table with a checked cloth …

It vanished, slipping away just before a burn of green light cut through where it had been a moment before.  Steel felt his temperature stabilize, watched the darkness dissolve in the onslaught.

The man remained, kneeling on the floor, shaking and only half-substantial.  After all this, he truly was just an echo. 

With no more threat before him, Steel turned.  At the door to the vault, his hand on the gleaming handle, Silver stood arrested and staring in shock.  Steel turned his gaze to the source of the light.

Sapphire stood behind him, her dress a violent shade of green and her eyes burning with power of the same color.  She gazed past Steel, to the echo kneeling upon the floor. 

“Sapphire?” he asked, not believing his eyes.  She had been thrown out.  As much as he had said that he would get her back, the realistic part of him could not believe it was possible.  She should have been destroyed, torn apart in seconds once she entered the void.  Instead she stood there, but wasn’t entirely herself.

She didn’t respond.

‘Sapphire?’ he tried again, reaching for her mind, trying to find the pieces of their broken connection so he could stitch them back together.

The burn of it, the sickly and horrific power, made him jerk away.  Her eyes moved to him very briefly, but there was no spark of recognition there.  No trace of the Sapphire he knew.

Steel went still.  The notion that she could have been lost was terrible, but manageable.  It would have been a quick destruction, after all, and one that most of them would eventually face.  He couldn’t quell the rage or the grief, but he knew that there were worse ways to go.  To have her return on her own, suffused with power and uncaring as her gaze skipped beyond him?  To have the shell of her before him, but none of the spark?

That was worse.  He tore his gaze away from her and back to Silver, who had pressed back against the door, his efforts to open it forgotten.

Steel had to try again.  The spark had to still be there.  She had saved him, hadn’t she?  Why would she have done that if there wasn’t some part of her that still knew him?  “Sapphire,” he repeated.  He straightened up on legs that felt weak and near to breaking under the strain of his own weight.  “Sapphire, do you hear me?”

She moved around him, her skirt sweeping against his legs.  She stood over the echo and said nothing.

“Don’t see it,” the man whispered.  “Don’t look.”

She cocked her head as a bird might, looking down at prey.

“Sapphire,” Steel tried again.  He forced himself to move forward toward her. 

He stretched out his hand to the luminous gown she wore, green in the wrong way.  He touched her back and gasped at the feel of it, crawling with energy that shouldn’t have ever been hers.  It had solidified her, he realized, forced out everything that wasn’t a single purpose.  A single use. 

Single use items were disposable, destroyed after that use.  She had made herself a torch, there in the void, to burn the break closed.  She had become something she ought never have been.

Radium.  That was the only explanation.  She had somehow found Radium, and perhaps Diamond as well, and they had incorporated her.  They were going to seal the break by using her as a conduit.  They had to have known what would happen to her.  Was this forced upon her? 

No.  Sapphire was an operator.  She did her job, even when facing her own destruction.  He was ridiculously proud of her, and furious with her, and in awe of her.

‘Sapphire,’ he thought again, allowing just the smallest hint of his regard to slip.  He disliked it, how she affected him.  How she impressed him.  Not this creature, but the other Sapphire with her flaws and perceptions and mocking little smiles.  Her way of looking at him and seeing him.  ‘Do you see that, Sapphire?  Do you see what you were?’

She didn’t.  She couldn’t hear him.  She was tuned to the wrong frequency. 

He felt the build-up of power around them.  It was far away, and at the same time it was rushing nearer.  Radium was coming, burning toward Sapphire.  One use, and then done.

But a conductor could pull some of that energy away from her, couldn’t he?  It would light him up, perhaps even break him if he had already been weakened by too many temperature fluctuations.  But wasn’t it better that he break than her?  After all, she had just saved him.  It was pleasingly symmetrical that he return the favor.

Steel moved his cracked and damaged arms around her waist.  She burned him, but that was all right.  He leaned his head against her back and let the green spread, staining his suit.  He heard Silver calling something out, but ignored it.  Whatever Silver had to say was irrelevant at the best of times.  Steel certainly didn’t need it intruding on him here at the end.

It was, then, rather surprising when Silver wrapped his arms around them both, sandwiching Steel awkwardly in the middle.  He couldn’t avoid hearing Silver’s words at that point.  “It wouldn’t kill you to ask for help.  In fact, you pathetic excuse for a conductor, it might just save your life.  But no.  Steel has to be self-sufficient and turn up his nose at the first hint of assistance.”  He made a disgusted noise.  “I just want it to be known, for the record, that I am doing this for Sapphire, not for you.  In fact, if I am annihilated by our own side because I decided to be generous against every instinct for self-preservation I have ever developed, I am going to spend the last picosecond of my existence loathing you.”

Steel couldn’t help but laugh.  Sapphire was back and Silver was miserable.  In that moment, his world was entirely acceptable.

The energy rushed toward them, back through time.  Steel saw things in a rush: a woman dashing down the halls; a woman falling, surrounded by light; Sapphire lost in a void he couldn’t comprehend; Silver curled in a corner waiting for obliteration.  A man huddled on the floor, weeping.  A shape forming above the man, waiting and whispering.  It had found its way in.  It would break through.

And then the burn arrived, blinding and all-encompassing.  Steel gritted his teeth and the world around the three of them broke apart. 

Chapter Text

oOo  oOo  The Beginning/The Middle/The End  oOo  oOo

Daisy saw something at the end of the hall, hazy but growing brighter.  It wasn’t the light behind the door.  It didn’t reach for her in particular.  Rather it was something that was everywhere, green and terrible. 

The hall was changing in the light.  The whitewash was burned away, leaving only the bricks behind.  The lights with nozzles were there again, as were the wooden doors.  The vault was no longer rusted over.  Perhaps she could hide inside.  It hadn’t liked the vault, had it?  She could wait there until everything was over.

There were forms in the terrible green light.  There was the silhouette of a man huddled on the floor, and another silhouette behind him that looked like a lumpy, three-headed monster. 

The silhouettes started to resolve themselves.  It was as though she was seeing them drawn into reality. 

The source of the light was the three-headed creature, and it resolved first.  She saw three faces sketched in and then filled with color.  She saw two pairs of arms wrapped around a delicate waist, and realized that it wasn't one creature, but three people wrapped around one another.  She saw Mr. Steel with his eyes squeezed closed.  She saw Miss Sapphire, dressed in green light, her eyes burning the same shade.  She saw another man she didn’t know, a ginger in a gray suit, wrapped around both of them.

It was both awe-inspiring and a bit silly.  Daisy didn’t quite know what was happening, but thought she might be intruding on a moment.

The final shape, the man on the floor, took form only sluggishly, like the edges of him weren’t as simple to define.  The round body, the red face …

“Freddy?” she gasped.

Freddy Tomms, night watchman and habitual pain in her arse, the man she had thought vanished and replaced by some hideous monster, jerked his head up to stare at her.  He was dressed funny, in old clothing, but it was still Freddy.  “Daisy?” he asked, and sounded distant.  “Daisy.”

“Freddy, what are you doing here?”

“They can’t look, Daisy.  They mustn’t see.”

A terrible thought came to her, seeing all this laid out.  “Freddy, tell me you just got here.  Tell me you haven’t been here all along.  I know we haven’t always got on, Freddy, but you’re not like that.  I know you wouldn’t chase me down.  I know it.  You wouldn’t hurt me.”

“No,” he whispered, but he was crying.  “Never hurt you, Daisy.  Not you.  No matter how you ignore me.”  His face twisted, and Daisy shrank away from the anger there.  What was this?  She’d never seen him like this before.  He was just odd, staring Freddy with his torch and his whistling.  He didn’t care if she paid him any attention, and if he did, he’d just turn out all the lights or play about with the lifts to irritate her.  He was a lad on the playground pulling her pigtails.  He wasn’t the sort who would … who would …

“Oh, Freddy, what did you do?” she asked, sinking down to her knees.

He stretched out his hand and Daisy stared at him.  It was true, wasn’t it?  The darkness and the light and that terrible song.  And at the center of it was Freddy.  No one but Freddy all along.  Daisy thought she might be crying, but she didn’t feel sad.  Instead, all of her bewilderment turned to betrayal, and that turned to rage.  How dare he?  How dare he haunt her all these years?  How dare he chase her and hurt her and terrify her?  What gave him any right? 

“Why don’t you sing to me, Freddy?” she spat at him, furious and grieving something she couldn’t even define.  “Why don’t you sing to me, you complete bastard?”

His face lit up like she wasn’t angry at all.  Like he’d been hoping she’d ask all night.  His voice was thin and reedy and just what she remembered, passing close to her desk but never reaching her.  Starting only a few days after she'd begun working at the hospital, he had passed, and sang, and looked at her with distant eyes.  A ghost’s eyes.  Was there ever even a night watchman, or was that for her alone?  Did everyone just assume they didn’t know Freddy the night watchman when she complained about him?  Did no one ever check?

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.

“I’m half-crazy, all for the love of you.

“It won’t be a stylish marriage;

“I can’t afford a carriage.

“But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a—”

And then he was gone, vanished with a sound like a puff of air.  Standing where he had been were a man and a woman, she in white and he completely gray from head to toe.  He looked like a statue, but he moved like a man.  Miss Sapphire, Mr. Steel, and the ginger all collapsed together, too bright to look at.

“Take it back!” the woman in white said, her voice forceful and urgent.  “Take the power back before they all break apart!”

The gray man lurched forward like Frankenstein’s monster, bending at the waist to take hold of Miss Sapphire by the shoulders.  She stiffened with a scream that was echoed through both Mr. Steel and the ginger man.  Daisy saw Miss Sapphire’s head jerk back like she was having a seizure. 

And then, with a great flash of green light, the gray man staggered back, only he wasn’t gray anymore.  It fell off him like snow, melting as it touched the floor.  Underneath, he looked human.  Just a middle-aged fellow dressed all in white to match his lady friend.  The lights in the hall had come on to illuminate them, burning with actual fire.  They were gas lamps, she realized.  She had never seen that sort of thing, but she had heard about them.

Miss Sapphire lay on top of the heap of people on the floor.  She was dressed in blue again, and she opened her eyes as though she had just been sleeping, as though nothing bad had happened to her.

“Sapphire?” Mr. Steel asked.  He was squashed under her, wedged between her and the ginger man.

Miss Sapphire smiled up at the ceiling.  “Steel?” she responded. 

“Hello, Sapphire,” the ginger man said from the bottom of the heap.  “Feeling well, I hope.”

“Quite well, Silver, thank you.  I take it I have the two of you to thank for that?”

“Well,” Mr. Silver said, “there are times when one must be heroic and self-sacrificing, now aren’t there?”

“Yes,” Miss Sapphire said, “there are.”

“Are you quite finished, Silver?” Mr. Steel asked. “Or do you feel the need to boast a bit more?”

“Don’t thank me for saving your life, please.  My heart couldn’t take it.”

“Don’t worry.  I won’t.”

“Could you have at least fractured several bones?  Just to cheer me up?”

“No,” Mr. Steel said.  “On the contrary.  I feel … tempered.”

Mr. Silver let out a dramatic sigh.  Daisy hadn’t realized that their lot could be dramatic.  “Of course you would be.”

The woman in white stepped forward and offered Miss Sapphire her hand.  Miss Sapphire took it, and allowed herself to be helped up.  The woman in white did the same for Mr. Steel, and Daisy was surprised to see him accept. 

“Steel,” she said in a voice that brooked absolutely no nonsense.

Mr. Steel gave her a long, steady look.  Daisy wondered if they were doing the same staring thing that he and Miss Sapphire had done.  After a moment he nodded, apparently accepting something that made him relax the tiniest amount.  “Diamond,” he said in response.

They moved away from one another.  The man in white offered Mr. Silver a hand, but Mr. Silver climbed up on his own.  “Thank you very much, Radium,” he said, “but I’ve had quite enough of that particular feeling for the next century or two.”

“Do take care,” Mr. Radium said.  “I have it on good authority that some people grow to enjoy it.”

Mr. Silver gave him a tight smile, and then maneuvered himself away. 

Daisy looked at them all, strange and more numerous than she had anticipated.  But they were all right.  The hospital felt so much lighter without the darkness there.  Without the whistling and the singing and Freddy’s staring, hungry eyes.  Without the ghosts.

Daisy let all her air out in a rush.

They all turned to her, staring at her with varying degrees of surprise.  Daisy felt like a gatecrasher.

“You survived,” Mr. Radium said.

“I suppose I did,” she said, wondering how he knew she’d been in trouble in the first place.  Maybe that was his special power, along with turning Miss Sapphire blue again.

“How?” he asked.

“I ran.”

Ms. Diamond took a step toward Daisy, her eyes narrowed and suspicious.  “You don’t know us.”

“No,” Daisy said. 

They turned to one another abruptly, and then to Miss Sapphire and Mr. Steel.  They all gazed at one another.  Then the woman turned back to Daisy.  “What year is it?”

“1979,” Daisy said.

“Who do you know here?”

“Miss Sapphire and Mr. Steel.”

Another pause.  Miss Sapphire stepped around Ms. Diamond, holding out her hand.  “Daisy?” she asked.  “What was your birthday?”

“11 December, 1936.” 

“Could you take my hand please?  I just need to confirm that.”

“I know my own birthday, Miss Sapphire.”

“I know you do,” Miss Sapphire said.  “But Mr. Tomms distorted time around you rather badly.  My colleagues would be much more comfortable with my own assessment.”

Feeling silly, like she was some of the dust that Miss Sapphire had scooped off the floor, Daisy obliged her.  Miss Sapphire stared down at their joined hands and frowned. 

“Miss Sapphire?” Daisy asked.  She felt a creep of uneasiness returning.

Miss Sapphire’s fake smile was back, and Daisy didn’t like it.  “Open the vault door, Silver,” Miss Sapphire said.

Mr. Silver was watching both of them with a cool expression, and trotted over to the large, gleaming door without question. 

He grasped the shining handle and twisted it.  There was a groan inside the door, but it did turn.  The door looked heavy when he tugged it, and it barely moved at all at first.  Then it moved faster and faster.

Daisy stepped toward it.  She couldn’t help herself.  She had to see.  Freddy hadn’t wanted them to see, and Miss Sapphire thought it was important.  Daisy had to know.

The vault was just a room.  There were the rows of filing cabinets and boxes Daisy had expected, along with shelves and jars she hadn’t.  Set up in the middle of the room was a table with two places set.  There were still the shriveled remains of food on the plates.  There was a candle in the middle of the table, burned all the way down.  And seated in one of the chairs was a shriveled-up body wearing the uniform of a night watchman.  The same old-fashioned uniform Freddy had been wearing when she’d seen him last.  His storm lantern sat upon the table.

Daisy stepped over the threshold of the vault.  She needed to understand this.  There was a knife on the floor next to Freddy’s body, and a photograph on the table.  It was old, like something taken before the turn of the century.  In fact, everything in both the vault and the hall looked like it was from the turn of the century.  Was this time-travel again?  Had she somehow ended up in the past, rather than the future? 

She couldn’t bring herself to look at the mummified thing that had been Freddy, that had also been a ghost, that had also been a bloke she knew, so she fixed her gaze on the photograph.  His shriveled hand covered most of it.

She took the corner furthest away from his bony fingers and slipped it free.

It was the picture of a woman, standing behind the desk of the hospital.  Her hair was pinned back, and her frock was simple in that fancy way of Victorian London.  And her face …

Daisy dropped the photograph.  She staggered past Freddy, further inside the vault, guided by knowledge that she shouldn’t have.  She moved past the filing cabinets, past the jars, and to the corner.

She was as badly mummified as Freddy had been, with brown staining the front of her frock around a rip in her dress at the center of her chest.  She looked just like the shadow that had been thrown against the walls by Freddy's light as he was chasing her.  Daisy lowered herself to a crouch so she could look into the woman’s desiccated face.

“Oh,” she heard behind her.  Mr. Silver was standing by the table, the photo in his hand.  “Oh, I see now.”

Daisy shook her head, because she didn’t.  Because it made no sense.

Because the woman in the photograph had her face.

“I’m not her,” she said, her voice cracking.  “She’s right there, and I’m right here.”  She whirled around to see Miss Sapphire lingering near the table too.  “She’s dead and I’m alive!”

“Are you?” Miss Sapphire asked.

“Of course I am!  I held your hand!  I ran the desk for ten years here, and I knew everyone!”

“Daisy,” Miss Sapphire said, “where do you live?”

“410 Merchant Street.  Flat 4.”

Miss Sapphire’s expression faded to something abstract before she said, “There is no apartment building at 410 Merchant Street.  It burned down in 1916.”

“That’s not possible,” Daisy said.  “I was just there last night.  I watched telly and had dinner and slept in a bed at that address.”

“410 Merchant Street is a car park now,” Miss Sapphire said.

“I don’t believe you,” Daisy whispered.  “If I was a ghost, I would be like him.  I would know it.”

Mr. Radium walked over to her.  He lowered himself to kneel before her.  Daisy felt a little ill.  “Miss Shennings,” he said, even though she’d never told him her name, “my partner and I arrived here in 1999.  You greeted us behind the desk.  The same ‘you’ that is here with us now.  The only differences were cosmetic.” 

“I don’t believe you.”

Miss Sapphire joined them, offering her hand.  Daisy took it.  Miss Sapphire looked at it with the same expression as before.  “You’re right, Daisy,” she said.  “When I touch you, I feel the history of a woman who was born in 1936.  I can see that life very clearly.”

“Thank you.”

“But without the interference formed by the echo, I can see other women.  One born in 1926, one in 1916, one in 1906 … back and forward into infinity.  Every ten years.  Every ten years you begin to work here, and every ten years you die here.  Diamond and Radium saw it happen in 1999.  We almost saw it happen now.”

“There were people here that whole time, though.  People I knew.  People I talked with every day.  You’re telling me that they didn’t notice I was the same woman who had worked there ten years before?”

“That puzzled me, that there should be so many people, yet such obvious signs of neglect about the property,” Sapphire said, “until I realized that we only ever had your word for their existence.  They were echoes too, Daisy.  Everything within this building was echoing forward in time as a backdrop for the cycle you were trapped in.”

Daisy staggered up, away from them and the corpse of the woman who looked like her.  Out of the vault and its secrets.  “But I’m not trapped!  Maybe there are more than one of me, crazy as that sounds, but I’m not dead!  I’m not her!”

Mr. Steel’s voice was behind her.  “But you are.  And you’re not.  You’re alive, and you’re dead.  You’re a paradox, Daisy.  A break unto yourself.”

She turned on him.  “You said you’d get me out of here.  You said you’d save me.”

Mr. Steel looked over her shoulder.  Daisy cast a look back, to find the rest of them standing inside the vault.  She looked back to Mr. Steel, and he to her.  Then he started walking.  She followed him to the stairs, where they sat together upon the lowermost step.

“I have a life,” she said.  “Even if you don’t believe in it.”

“Oh, I do.  I think that you’ve got a life, and memories enough to convince us all.  Even you.  But how could you be in the future, as well as now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s suppose Sapphire is right, shall we?  Let’s suppose that you’ve really only existed for ten years.  That all your previous memories are just updates of the originals, from the first Miss Shennings who lies in that vault.”

“But they’re still mine.  Even if I didn’t exist ten years ago, I believe I did.  I have memories of doing it.  If all those other women were real, and they all died, then it’s only fair that I live.  That I leave here, and I get the life that the original Miss Shennings was denied.  Even if I don’t remember her.”

He looked sad, she realized.  She had never seen that look on his face before.  “Daisy, beyond these walls you are an anomaly.  You’ll shatter time and space around you wherever you go.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Yes, I can,” he said.  As much as she didn’t want to believe him, she did.  She had seen too much not to.  She stared down at herself.  At her sensible shoes and her legs and her floral print dress.  At her hands, and the calluses on her fingers from a life spent typing.  How could all that be a ghost?

“What do I do, then?  If you’re right, and I’m not certain about that, but if you are, what would I do?  I don’t want to stay here where she died.  I don’t want to … haunt this place.”

As she said it, Daisy realized she was buying into what Miss Sapphire and Mr. Steel had said, no matter how much she wanted to deny it.  She thought of the woman in the photograph, but she didn’t remember her, nor any of the others they said had existed.  There was just her.  Just Daisy, who was born in 1936 and lived at 410 Merchant Street.

Daisy, who was alive, but maybe also dead.  She touched her hand, and it felt warm and real, but the longer she stared at it, the more she was convinced that perhaps she could see through it.  She touched Mr. Steel’s hand, and it felt real too.  “Am I really here?” she asked.

“Yes, you’re here.”

“And where would I go if I wasn’t?  If I’m a ghost but I’m alive, where do I go?”  She looked at him.  “You’re not human, right?  I mean, I never asked, but I suspected.”

“No, I’m not human.”

“Then you know, don’t you?  What would happen to me if I left?”

“Do you mean if you left the building?”

“No.”

“Ah.”  Mr. Steel looked uncomfortable.  “No, I don’t know that.  It’s not my area.”

“And if I stayed?  What would happen then?”

“Then you would have two options.  You could stay in this hospital, which is already accustomed to your particular break.  But you could never leave, and I’m not altogether certain you could die naturally.  So you might be in these rooms and these halls until the building itself crumbled around you.”

Daisy swallowed hard. 

“The other option is leaving, and breaking time.  Becoming a problem we would have to fix.”

“Would people die?”

“A great many, I would imagine.”

Daisy buried her face in her hands and cried softly.  “This isn’t fair,” she said.  “There are no good choices!  There’s just … I don’t want to hurt anyone, and I don’t want to be trapped here forever either.  But even if I do sort of believe you.  Even if maybe I’m just … just some echo of a dead woman, it’s not like I know how to leave.  There’s no tunnel of light.  No black mist or river.  I feel the same as ever.”

“I’m … sorry,” Mr. Steel said.

“Aren’t we all?”  She lifted her face to look at him.  “There’s no real choice, is there?”

“No.”

“I can’t stay here, and I can’t go out.  So I have to leave and hope that a fragment of a ghost gets something after this.”

Mr. Steel said nothing.  Daisy supposed there was nothing to say.  She scrubbed her face with the back of her hands and saw the rest of Mr. Steel’s lot standing just outside the vault door.  “They’re all waiting on me, aren’t they?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And they know how to make me go away, don’t they?”

“They do.”

“I see.”

Daisy stood up and tried to get a bit of her dignity back.  She didn’t want to be like that woman dead in the vault.  She could imagine it as though she had been there—and maybe she had been.  The Daisy she didn’t know was led down to the vault by Freddy.  Maybe on an errand.  Were they lovers, or was Freddy all alone in his infatuation?  She thought it was the latter.  So she was led down under some pretense, only to find the vault open with the table set up.  A candle on top.  Romantic or something.

They rowed, perhaps, or Daisy just tried to leave.  Freddy got angry.  He had a knife.  Why did he have a knife if this was supposed to be romantic?  Had he always thought to kill her?

He killed her.  Stabbed her.  A hole in her frock and blood everywhere.

Freddy had hid her in the corner, where he couldn’t see.  Had he locked himself in on purpose or by accident?  He locked himself in, she was certain.  It took him days to die.  Days enough to start hating her as much as he mourned her.  Days enough that something fundamental broke in time that dragged them both back.  That set them to going through the same routine every ten years.  That drew the attention of something that took them and twisted them and the hospital into shapes so terrifying that this lot came to fix it.

It wasn’t fair.  She hadn’t deserved what had happened to her.  Freddy was the one who ought to be paying.

But any other alternative was worse than the one she had.  She looked at her hands again.  She could see the tiled floor through them, she was sure.  Everything about her was going hazy around the edges.  Maybe she really could remember the original Daisy if she tried hard enough.  Or maybe it was just her imagination trying to fill in the blanks.

She looked at the others, and found them changed.  Miss Sapphire was glowing again, soft and blue.  Mr. Silver sparked at his edges.  Ms. Diamond had sharper features, and Mr. Radium glowed green.

Mr. Steel was the same as he always had been.  That was a comfort.  “You’ll have to show me what to do,” she said.  “I suppose dying properly is new to me.”

He gestured to Mr. Radium, who came forward and offered her a hand.  “It’s actually quite easy,” he said.  “I’m Radium, by the way.  I don’t suppose we should do this without at least an introduction.”

She looked to Mr. Steel and then to Miss Sapphire.  They both looked calm, but Daisy’s heart was pounding.  “Will you stay?” she asked them.  “When it happens, will you stay?”

“Of course,” Miss Sapphire said.

She glanced at Mr. Silver.  He exchanged a look with Miss Sapphire, and then Mr. Steel.  Then he looked at her, tipped an imaginary cap, and vanished.  The woman in white exchanged a look with Mr. Radium, and then she also vanished.

That left three of them there, down in the lower ground floor next to Freddy and all the damage he’d caused.  Mr. Radium spread his other arm in invitation for an embrace. 

“Are you serious?” Daisy asked.

“Absolutely,” he said.  “It’s this simple.”

She felt ridiculous, but it wasn’t the worst way to go, she supposed.  Better than being stabbed.  She saw that Mr. Steel had joined Miss Sapphire over Mr. Radium’s shoulder, right where she could see them.  She was grateful for the consideration.

Daisy moved into the embrace.  It was loose and friendly, and it tingled a bit.  “Will it hurt?” she asked.

“No,” Mr. Radium said, and Miss Sapphire mouthed the word along with him.

Daisy looked at her and Mr. Steel.  The tingling got stronger, but not unpleasant.  Just a bit warm.  Daisy took a breath and held it.

oOo  oOo  oOo  oOo

The Howard Street Hospital was closed on October 14, 1899, after a new hospital was built in the area.  Shortly after its last patient left, the hospital collapsed in on itself.  Only two employees, Frederick Tomms and Daisy Shennings, were in the building at the time, waiting for a crew to come and collect the scrap metal.  Their bodies were never recovered.  The site was cleared, the lower ground floor filled in with dirt, and in 1900 a community garden was planted on the remains.