Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Chapter headings are track titles from the movie soundtracks.

“Operator.”

“It’s quiet. Right? It seems quiet.”

“Yes. It’s quiet.”

“Well, that can’t be good.”

⸻

Once upon a time it was a nursery rhyme. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Okay, that wasn’t really a nursery rhyme, was it? Not a nice nursery, anyway. It was a rhyme, though. She could remember chanting it. She could hear her own small child voice chanting it. She could see her feet in patent leather shoes taking bigger-than-necessary steps over the seams of the sidewalk. It was a game.

But that was then. Now it’s different. Once, she jumped out of the way of a careering bike messenger and planted her foot square on a sidewalk crack. After waking up in the ER, she told them that she’d skipped breakfast, had the flu, something. Just so long as she didn’t tell them that she passed out in a puddle of her own vomit because of a rhyme. She wasn’t going through that whole thing again, thanks. Took her three and a half weeks to get out of the ward the last time.

It wasn’t because she was worried she’d make her mother a paraplegic. She was maybe just a little bit concerned that one day she’d jump out of the way of a bike messenger and step on the wrong crack and fall straight through. Into what, well, that was an idea so slick and smooth her mind just slid right off of it.

Sometimes, when she was lying in her bed looking up at the ceiling, or at work, in the moment between when her laptop stopped spinning its screensaver pattern and when it went into sleep mode, she could see the cracks. Sometimes they glowed. Sometimes Kyle would pop his head over the padded wall of her cube and hiss at her and she’d start like she’d been asleep. The first time he was really concerned, but he got used to it, so after awhile he just said, “Jesus, Sam, you’re doing it again,” and dropped a packet of Kleenex over the wall onto her desk.

She was a good analyst, though, so they didn’t mind if she cried really quietly as long as she got the job done.

⸻

“Maybe I should take this opportunity to say again that this is a bad idea.”

“I’ve got some activity. So much for quiet.”

“See?”

“What are we supposed to do, leave her there? I’ve got an exit. Fourteenth and Burke. Apartment 404. Don’t take the elevator.”

“Yes, we could leave her there.”

“She thinks she’s going crazy.”

“Who doesn’t?”

⸻

She was pretty sure that Michelle in Records wasn’t real. There was no particular reason she thought this. It was just something she felt. Like when you were looking at a photo-realist painting. Michelle was like that. She was so normal that she had to be fake. Sam wondered if she was an agent. Undercover NID, maybe, cyber-terrorism division. No, that would be the anti-cyber-terrorism division. Wouldn’t it?

⸻

“That exit’s four blocks away. He’ll be on me before I cover two.”

“They.”

“Fer cryin’ out loud. Bad idea. I said it. Remember that.”

“Um, I’d move a little faster if I were you.”

⸻

He came up behind her in line at Starbucks, stood too close, so that when she turned around after paying she bumped into him. Her own startled face looked back at her from the mirrored lenses of his aviator glasses. He was wearing a battered leather jacket that smelled of engine grease and jet fuel.

“Sorry,” she said, even though it was his fault.

When she tried to step around him, he put a gloved hand on her elbow and redirected her toward a table at the back of the coffee shop, near the doors to the bathroom and the alley.

“Sit,” he said, like he was used to being obeyed, and hooked a chair with his foot to pull it out for her.

Casting around the coffee shop for someone to help her, Sam found that no one was looking in her direction. She had a sudden weird feeling that if she were to start screaming nobody would hear her. Sweat traced a cold path between her shoulder blades. “Hey, look—”

“Just sit, will you? I’m not going to hurt you, but I don’t have a lot of time here.” When she gave in and sat down, he didn’t sit in the other chair, but crouched in front of her. He had an interesting face, gentle and hard at the same time. Salt and pepper hair. She wondered what colour his eyes were. “Carter.”

“How do you—?”

Holding up his hand, he cut her off. “No time, remember? I’m just going to ask you straight out. Do you want to be here?”

Sam blinked. That wasn’t the question she was expecting from a potential kidnapper. She had a can of mace—in her other purse, in her closet at home—but she could maybe get him in the jugular with her keys. But she didn’t try. She said, more cocky than she felt, “Here? Starbucks or Colorado?”

Instead of clarifying, he just kept the mirrored gaze steadily on her while she thought about how to answer his question. He was balancing there on the balls of his feet with one hand on her knee. In the other was a cell phone. He was as real as Michelle in Records wasn’t.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to be here.”

A thin smile. “Okay.” Before he could say more—maybe something direct and enlightening—his cell rang and he answered it. “Where?” He craned his neck to look toward the street, then spat a curse. “Okay.” Squeezing her leg, he got up, the phone still to his ear. “I’ll come back,” he told her.

“But—”

“I said I’ll come back.”

And he hit the alley door with his shoulder, rolled through it, was gone.

“Grande skinny cappuccino,” the barista called.

Sam got shakily to her feet and picked up her cup. The coffee had no flavour at all.

Chapter Text

“New exit. Barkley and 10th. Pay phone, southwest corner.”

“Got it.”

“Wait! Not that way. Cut through the lobby of the bank. There’s two of them in the alley.”

“Shit.”

“Faster. Go faster.”

⸻

It feels like the end of sex. Every time. Nearly twenty years in and that still freaks him out. Not the slithery feeling of the jack being removed from his skull, but the ache of loneliness it leaves behind.

The machines know how to fuck you over and fuck you up so you’ll like it.

Reason number fifty billion and eight to hate the machines.

“Okay?”

Daniel’s looking down at him with that crease between his eyebrows mostly hidden behind the uneven flop of his bangs. In the matrix he wears glasses. Here he doesn’t. That’s all backward, Jack thinks. In la la land, Jack’s knees don’t hurt. Here they sound like Rice Krispies. It’s the cold. They could run the Hammurabi hotter, but that’s just asking for trouble. Daniel’s fingers knead Jack’s left thigh a little, loosening the cramped muscle so that the knee will unlock. Seems Jack’s mortal coil got twisted pretty tight while his mind was in-country.

“Yeah. Peachy,” Jack says, confirming what Daniel saw in the running code, which was a running man and two agents running just that much faster. Not quite fast enough, this time, but as in the case of every near-miss—and there aren’t any other kind—Jack’s willing to chalk that up to an accident of circumstance and not to his own agility.

“Close one.”

Over the years, Jack’s learned to interpret Daniel’s understatement for what it is. If he wasn’t so pissed off right now, he’d close his hand over Daniel’s, let him feel the life in it. But he is pissed off right now so instead he swings his legs out from under Daniel’s touch and off the rig, stands up and cracks his neck. “Too fucking close. It had better be worth it.”

“Morpheus thinks it is.”

“Well there ya go, then. If Morpheus thinks it’s worth it, then, heigh ho, heigh ho.” Same shit, different day. “What’s the word from the Nebuchadnezzar?”

“Wait a bit, attempt another approach to set up the extraction when the agents are looking the other way.”

“Right, because they do that.” Jack starts to head for the bridge but detours instead toward the mess.

He wonders if there’s real coffee in the afterlife. Then he wonders if there ever was such a thing as coffee. Then he wonders if maybe, like the afterlife, coffee is just another machine-made carrot on a stick. Then he decides to stop wondering, because he’s cold and his knee is aching like a bastard, and he needs a few minutes of real sleep. So he gives up on the mess, heads back to the core, hooks Daniel by the bottom of his sweater and tows him to his crib. He wants to feel a heart beating under his hands.

⸻

Daniel’s back in the operator’s seat, traced by the rain-light of trickling code. He taps keys, refines the search query, and the code shifts. They’ve been at broadcast level too long. Any minute now, a sentinel’s going to come squidding by and open them up like a can of beans. But orders are orders.

“If she keeps on like this she’s going to get noticed.”

“Probably,” Jack agrees. He stands behind Daniel and looks through the streaming code at the digital dream Sam Carter thinks of as herself. Like everyone in the matrix, she’s asleep. Unlike them, she almost knows it.

“And if they get to her first?”

The system will reintegrate her and she won’t be Jack’s problem anymore. Schizophrenia, maybe, or incarceration for some kind of crime against the state. Loony bin or penitentiary. There are all kinds of quarantine boxes, most of them impenetrable, at the farthest reaches of the matrix, in the interstitial zones between the fake world and the machine world, where people like Jack won’t be able to get to her. People can live a long time, even if they’re nuts (Jack is proof of this), and there’s no sense flushing a good body if it still generates a current. If nothing else, the machines are reasonably good at animal husbandry.

Jack watches Sam Carter’s code drip down the screen, deformed slightly, just a bit askew. The matrix is trying to compensate, though, translating her unconscious resistance into some kind of phantasmatic symptom. She’s having a panic attack, or a waking nightmare. It’s not the world that’s broken, the matrix is telling her. It’s you. Jack winces. Been there. Done that. “Maybe she’ll get lucky and they’ll flush her.”

“And if we’re not there to catch her, she’ll die.” It’s Daniel’s patiently restating the obvious for the slow-of-wit voice. Jack wonders if it’s time to remind him again who’s wearing the red sweater on this ship. Daniel frowns at the feed. “Morpheus—”

“Is going to get us all killed.”

Swivelling in his chair away from the downlink feed, Daniel catches Jack’s sleeve before he can walk away. He’s got that earnest glow about him that makes his eyes look not-quite-human, or too human—Jack’s never been able to decide. It’s not belief Jack sees there, but a kind of scepticism that leaves a narrow margin for hope. Jack can almost feel it as a physical heat.

“But if he’s right?” Daniel asks.

Jack cards his fingers through Daniel’s hair, brushes it out of his eyes. Daniel’s thinner here than in the construct. There’s a hollowness to him. “Then I guess we’ll die for something,” Jack answers eventually. When Daniel almost shows teeth in a smile, Jack finds it catching, the heat if not the hope. “That would suck a lot less.”

⸻

Quiet. Quiet. Quietquietquiet.

The squid extends its dish. Listens. Shit, it’s close enough to hear them breathing. Jack counts its eyes. If it weren’t for the forward cockpit screen he could probably reach out and touch one, give it a little polish with his tattered sleeve.

The tentacles spread out around the core, undulate, hold the squid steady against the flux of its own drive as it scans the hollow at the mouth of the shaft where the ship is hunkered down. Just junk, here, Jack thinks, at it. Move along. In the fake memory that still ghosts around inside his head, Jack finds images from an imaginary sea, and for a moment the Hammurabi is there, 20 fathoms deep, washed by a current strong enough to make the sentinel’s metal body flow like it’s made of sinew, cartilage, whatever those sea monsters would have been made of back when there were still seas with life in them. It may be a case of parallel evolution, Daniel said once, an efficient design iterated in similar systems. Jack’s not so sure about the parallel part, although he couldn’t say for sure what came first, the sentinel in the machine world or the squid in the lies Jack’s memory tells. He wouldn’t put it past the machines to set that bogey man loose in the matrix, disguised as something that belongs there. That strategy works for the agents, after all.

In the co-pilot seat, Walter’s gripping the sticks with sweaty hands—displaced flight response—but at least he’s not rocking back and forth like he does sometimes when he’s nervous. Fear’s spread over him like frost on glass, grown through him like crystals, so he’s perfectly still except for his Adam’s apple working up and down as he swallows whatever noise he wants to make. He’s doing pretty good, better than Jack expected when he pulled him off the dock to replace Kowalski.

Above them and aft, in the rigs under the dorsal pads and the plating along the Hammurabi’s spine, Daniel and V are blind, and it will take an endless half a second to bring the gunnery systems up. Jack hopes they won’t have to. The sentinel seems to be alone, a sweeper doing a pass along the mechanicals running below broadcast level. At least this is what holographics told them before the ship went dark. Things might have changed. Jack’s eyes strain to see past the squid into the darkness beyond it, but he can’t make out anything except a couple dozen meters of twisted cable and piping lit up like innards by the squid’s dull red glow.

“Go on,” he orders it, his mouth moving around the unvoiced words. “Shoo.”

The disc retracts. Then the sentinel is gone, trailing its tentacles and taking the light with it.

Jack raises his eyebrows. “Maybe I’m The One,” he says.

Walter’s laugh sounds like a sluice of water after the thaw.

“What?”

Sobering, a little chastened, Walter swallows again, faces front. “Nothing, sir.”

Jack squeezes his shoulder. “Wait a few minutes and then light us up. We’ve got to find a new duck blind.”

“Yes, sir.”

As he’s going down the cockpit ladder, Jack adds, “Welcome to the crew. You need a handle. Walter’s kind of pedestrian.”

“Does this mean I’m cleared to go in, sir?”

Jack waves a hand noncommittally. “Just pick something cool.”

By the time Jack makes it back to the main deck, Daniel’s already got the maps rolled out on the workbench. V’s leaning over them, her black hair falling over her shoulder and hiding her face.

“Hmm. No. This is better,” she’s saying.

“Any particular reason?” Standing with his arms folded against the chill, Daniel’s squinting. Maybe the glasses shouldn’t just be part of his residual self-image anymore.

Tilting her head to flash Daniel an acquisitive grin—she’s got more teeth than anybody Jack’s ever known—V taps the map. “There’s a 2520 conduit here. I can tap in. We can put off a recharge maybe a week.”

“We won’t need a week,” Jack says. They’d better not need a week. “And a 2520’s going to be on a maintenance schedule. They’ll spot us for sure.”

V straightens up and her momentary pout of disappointment hardens to something more determined. “Then we’ve got to head back in less than two days. Either that or another ship will have to be dispatched to give us a boost.”

“Then we head back in two days. No 2520. In the meantime, find someplace else, close to the power plant. But not too close.” He offers her a ghost of a grin. “Maybe some shade and a view of the beach.”

She doesn’t even bother to hide her sigh as she leans over the maps again. “Right,” she mutters. “Ask me what I would give for a beach.”

Leaving her to it, Jack joins Daniel in front of the downlink monitors, which are finally flickering back to life. Daniel’s got that frown, the one that makes Jack’s skin go prickly, and that is no fair because he’s still got the crawlies from the squid encounter.

“What is it?”

Shaking his head, Daniel climbs into the operator seat and starts tapping keys. “M’don’t know, yet. Something....”

“Here’s one,” V announces brightly. “It’s got a really lovely effluent discharge point. That’s almost like a beach. Except for the stench.”

On Daniel’s monitors the search runs and then runs again. Same result.

The muscles in Jack’s neck start to tighten up. Phantom pain at the C5 plug in his neck. He scratches at it. “Diagnostic.”

“Already did,” Daniel answers. Another shake of the head, and the frown is deeper now.

Shit.

“It’s not the link.” Daniel splays his hand palm up toward the monitors and then lets it fall to his lap. “The link is fine. She’s just... damnit.”

Jack comes around him so he can peer at the trickle of code, like a close-up view is going to change anything. “Oh fer cryin’ out loud.”

V looks up from her beach-combing. “What is it?”

“Well,” Daniel says, “we’ve hit a little snag. Sam Carter is gone.”

Chapter Text

The white pyjamas were a very bad sign. Not quite as bad as the fact that Sam couldn’t remember why or how she got into them, but bad enough. The white room with its white table and white soundproofing tiles were worse than bad. She breathed in through her nose and blew the air out through her mouth. Repeat. Panicking would not be a good response here. That’s what got her into the white pyjamas the first time around. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Calm. Reasonable. Not crazy.

When the door finally opened, it wasn’t doctors or orderlies but Men in Black. Three of them. Dark suits, dark glasses, impassive expressions. Two of them stood in front of the closed door with their hands folded in front of them, earpieces in place. The third pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from her. He laced his fingers on the cover of the file folder in front of him.

In her throat, panic started to scramble around with tiny, sharp claws. She was ready for doctors. This, not so much.

⸻

“Operator.”

“We’re in. Any company?”

“Two.”

“Morpheus?”

“Nope. His guys. Epoch and Cipher.”

“Okay. Keep an eye out. I’m not so sure that sentinel was a coincidence.”

⸻

“I haven’t done anything wrong.”

The MIB looked up from the file at Sam, smiled a smile that showed a row of small, not-so-even teeth. He was in his late forties, maybe, a little jowly, a little heavy in the neck. Even though he looked like he was sliding a bit toward middle-aged spread, Sam knew somehow that this was strategic on his part. He was put together to elicit underestimation. “Michelle Brunier,” he said, tapping a picture of Michelle from Records in the file. “You know her?”

A flush of heat across Sam’s skin. Of course Michelle. Too normal not to be fake. Calm. Calm, Sam told herself. “She works where I work. In Records. Why?”

He nodded, consulted the file. “Where you work. At NORAD.”

“Yes.”

“Where you do—” Another check of the file. ”—deep-space radio telemetry.”

“Yes.”

“Sounds dull.” That smile again. Smug. Cat with a canary. There was something wrong with it, like brand-new antique furniture. “Very dull. For someone like you.”

“Like me.”

He flipped some pages. “Someone with a colourful background like yours.”

Sam could see the forms, recognize the hospital logo at the top of the page even upside down. Managing not to swear, even under her breath, she shifted in the chair to get her feet braced flat on the floor. Not like she could go anywhere, even if she tried to run, but it made her feel better, anyway.

“It takes either quite a lot of talent or a lot of money to suppress something like this. It didn’t even come up during your security check at NORAD.” He closed the file and his voice shifted subtly from something just shy of admiring to something just the other side of threatening. “But we aren’t NORAD.”

She was gripping her knees too hard, so she lifted her hands and folded them on the table, mirroring his. “The records....” A deep breath. “That whole thing was a mistake.” When he opened his mouth, probably to point out that in fact falsifying documents and lying on her security profile was quite a bit more than a mistake, she clarified, “I mean the stay in the hospital. It was a misunderstanding. Yes, I was there, but I was discharged with a clean bill of health. It didn’t make me a security risk.”

In the long moment he spent regarding her from behind his glasses, she could hear his wristwatch ticking.

“All right. Then what does make you a security risk, Dr. Carter?”

Step on a crack. She squeezed her right hand with her left until her fingertips were white. If she hadn’t chewed her nails to the quick, they’d have left crescent bites in her skin. There was light leaking in from somewhere, around his edges, a heatless aura of agitated gold. “Nothing,” she whispered, cleared her throat and added, “I just analyze data. I go home and rebuild old motorcycle engines. That’s it.”

Again, he watched her long enough for the ticking watch to start making tiny divots in her brain. When he finally sat forward, she could see herself there in the lenses of his glasses. Blond hair lying flat against her head, still damp—they must’ve washed her when... when? Her eyes seemed very bright, even in the dark reflection, and she suddenly remembered seeing herself twinned in aviator glasses, and the man in Starbucks who’d braced his hand on her knee as he’d talked on his phone. The one who said he’d come back. The one she’d been waiting for, hours later, when the police came for her.

She squashed the rising panic and the hot, angry tears that came with it. She lifted her chin. “I’m not any kind of risk.”

Slipping his glasses off and folding them neatly on the table beside her file, he said, earnestly, in a tone that would have been almost sympathetic except for the ribbon of cold, liquid condescension that ran through it, “We know that’s not true.”

“Then you know more than I do.”

“We know you’ve been contacted.”

Sam set her jaw and looked down at her hands, willing them to relax.

“What did he promise you?”

Surprising herself, Sam laughed, and surprised herself even more by looking up and meeting his eyes without squinting against the light that limned him as though he was separating from space, tearing along a seam. “Why don’t you tell me who the hell you are, and I’ll consider whether or not I’m going to answer any of your questions?”

With a sigh that ostensibly signalled his resignation at her wilful refusal to see reason, he picked up his glasses and put them on again. “My name is Agent Maybourne.”

“Maybourne. FBI? NSA? NID?”

“Something like that.”

⸻

Epoch was okay, even with the ponytail, which made him look like some kind of Cuban gangster. Cipher, though, there was something about that guy that made Jack narrow his eyes suspiciously every time he looked Jack’s way. Morpheus was a good captain and, fanciful messianic obsessions aside, was somebody worthy of the respect he got. How come he kept a slithery guy like Cipher around was a real brain-teaser. But right now it wasn’t Jack’s problem. He didn’t bother acknowledging Cipher’s cheesy grin.

“Verity,” Epoch was saying as V slipped her arms inside his jacket and helped herself to a hug. Back in the day, she’d have helped herself to his wallet, too. She must’ve tried now, just for the fun of it, because Epoch reached in behind his back and caught her wrists. “The most ironic handle in all the resistance. Still evil in your heart, huh? I hope so.”

She aimed the pout at him and managed to wriggle a bit closer while working herself loose from his grip. “I’m not bad,” she said, casting him a look through her lashes that was capable of melting gunmetal. “I’m just configured that way.”

She certainly looked like she was designed for trouble, having poured her digital self into a shiny black rubber suit that made the idea of a concealed weapon—or a concealed toothpick—a joke. That was okay, though. The green wool overcoat would make her presentable in public so long as nobody got close enough to feel the holsters on both of her thighs through the heavy drape of the fabric, and she was cobra quick when she wasn’t doing the slow burn for the benefit of onlookers, both male and female. Both of those skill sets had gotten them through more than one heavily guarded door over the years.

Left out of the clinch, Cipher managed to tear his hungry gaze away from her and focus the snake eyes on Jack. “So, you fucked up.” He paused to move the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “Captain.”

Jack pushed the landline phone aside and hitched himself up onto the edge of the counter. Owned by one of V’s contacts, the drop point was the back room of a pizza shop that did occasional double duty as one stop on a high-stakes floating poker game. The owner was discreet and wasn’t inclined to ask any questions about who came or went, so long as he got his cut every week. It was easy to load cash into the construct, which, incidentally, took some of the fun out of V’s life. Hell, if Giancarlo had wanted to be paid in doubloons or the wings of butterflies, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But he wasn’t that inventive. The room smelled of oregano and sour beer, and it made Jack feel hungry and sick at the same time. He’d eaten enough fake pizza in his life.

But the sick and the sour had more to do with Cipher and his toothpick than with the room. Jack took a moment to imagine smacking the smile and the soul patch under it off of his face. But that would never do. Morpheus wouldn’t take too well to that, even if, in Jack’s educated opinion, Cipher should be put down before he got his captain into some deep shit. Instead, Jack turned to Epoch, who unwound himself from Verity, came forward, and held out a hand.

Jack took it. “Good to see you.”

“You too, sir. Heard you had some trouble.”

Jack nodded. “Squid. While we were playing dead the subject did a houdini.”

A frown darkened Epoch’s face, and he scratched at the well-maintained rakish stubble on his chin. “Convenient.”

“Yeah. Not for us, though.”

Cipher stepped in. “If she’s off the grid, and she ain’t dead, she’s in quarantine. That means agents, and you, sir, are gonna take it up the ass.” He cocked his head, and worked the toothpick again. “How is Daniel, by the way?”

Ignoring him, Jack turned back to Epoch. “What are our orders?”

“Morpheus is pretty sure about her. She’s at least a potential, and definitely someone we’re gonna want playing for us. The machines must know it or they wouldn’t have made a move, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

Epoch tilted his head in a half-sympathetic shrug. “He wants you to try to extract her.”

V barked out a disbelieving laugh. “From quarantine. You do understand what quarantine is, darling. Even I don’t have any contacts that deep.”

Epoch plucked a loose strand of hair that escaped her thick braid and twisted it around his finger. Jack knew what the operators on both the Hammurabi and the Nebuchadnezzar were seeing, that almost imperceptible jitter in the code as he let her go with a smoothing stroke across her cheek. “Maybe we can help with that,” he said to Jack, but with his eyes on V. “No guarantees, but we might be able to hook you up with some specialized help.”

Jack slid off the counter, pushed past Cipher and leaned a hand on the doorjamb to look into the shop. The paint flaked under his palm in a mathematically determined pattern of wear. “If by ’specialized’ you mean ’program,’ no thanks. We’ll find another way.”

Out in the pizza shop, old men in cardigans and slouching golf hats were drinking wine from juice glasses and playing chess at a table by the window. Beyond them on the street, rush hour was just beginning. People going nowhere slow.

“Unless you’ve figured out how to hack quarantine,” Cipher said, “I don’t see as you’ve got a choice.” Without even looking Jack could tell he was grinning his snaky grin.

This was not the way Jack’s day was supposed to be going. But then again, he’d been saying that since the morning he swallowed the red pill. Heigh ho, heigh ho.

⸻

He was still there, a blur in the corner of Sam’s eye, like a faint constellation that could only be seen with peripheral vision. If she looked straight at him he disappeared, became part of the background. But he was there and had been since she woke up, whenever that was. She could feel it, the way you could feel the gaze of a surveillance camera once you knew where it was. He seemed like that, a non-judgmental observer, recording without inference or interpretation.

She got up and ran her fingers over the padding on the walls. It was smooth and unbroken again, even though she’d spent hours patiently tearing it away in chunks, looking for the door. There was no door, though, behind the padding, just concrete blocks. Maybe she’d been dropped in through the ceiling. She had nothing to stand on so she couldn’t get up there to check.

Lap 20. Her trailing fingers were numb from the friction where she was running them along a shoulder-high seam in the padding. At first she expected to be able to feel him, even if just as a fuzz of static, when her hand passed through him, but she couldn’t.

“What do you want?” She didn’t expect an answer so she wasn’t disappointed when she didn’t get one. “Okay then.”

Stopping where the seam met another, she watched him out of the corner of her eye and picked idly at a tiny tear where the stitching was loose. As if he’d come a little closer somehow, or as if she’d shifted her focus just the right way, he stood out against the background so long as she watched him only obliquely. A black man, muscular, tall, wearing green BDUs, a black shirt. He watched her with his bald head tilted a little to the side, his hands folded behind him.

“Missed a spot here,” she said. As she watched, the tear she’d made in the fabric sealed itself. She picked it open again, making sure to pull out threads this time. The tear smoothed over and the threads shrivelled in her hand like drying roots and disappeared. “Right. That’s what you are? Housekeeping? Really?” Again, she pulled out threads, more of them this time. “That’s kind of disappointing. You seem more sophisticated than that.”

This time the rent in the fabric didn’t heal itself right away. She had the distinct impression that he was amused. At the same time, though, she knew he had a finger to his lips. Shhh.

After a few seconds the tear closed up, but the threads remained, dangling from her hand. Winding them up carefully, she tucked them into the hole in the front of her pyjama bottoms, where the drawstring would be. She had no idea what they’d be good for, in a practical sense, but she got the feeling practical wasn’t exactly the only measure of success.

“Right,” she said again. “Our secret.”

Chapter Text

“I hate waiting,” V says.

Her chin propped on her fist, she’s making happy faces with amino goop on the tabletop with her spoon. One booted foot swings like a pendulum beside the bench; the other is tucked up underneath her. The pout is back. She looks like she’s a five-year-old trapped in a woman’s body, and by a certain calculus, Jack figures that’s true. He remembers that she screamed when she came to on the slab after they recovered her, gulped air and screamed again, like a newborn. (The pureness of that birthing howl was so much like Charlie’s... but he doesn’t let that memory in, much, on the grounds that it’s the biggest mindfuck the matrix is capable of.) He remembers how, after seeming to adapt better than most to living in the flesh, V forgot incrementally how to walk as the dream self she understood flaked and drifted and disintegrated in her consciousness, leaving her the inexperienced captain of an ungainly machine. She still refers to her body as the “bone cage” sometimes, although Jack’s pretty sure she does that to piss off the zealots in the temple whose religion of the Free Real doesn’t leave a lot of room for that kind of supposedly assbackward thinking. He’s never been sure whether her chosen handle, “Verity,” is supposed to be a reminder or a joke.

Like the ripe-for-picking noob he is, Walter pulls out a hand-made deck of cards and V gives him all the teeth, full-wattage, at once. Jack knows that if Walter had been in the rig when he saw that, they’d have been able to watch his heart stutter. Fear or something else, it’s hard to tell.

⸻

V wasn’t kidding about the stench. About a hundred yards away from the Hammurabi’s bow, an effluent pipe big enough for them to fly right into is vomiting bile-green water, which drains out through the bottom of a whirlpool into a secondary discharge shaft. Even though the hovercraft is airtight, the rotten-egg smell somehow seeps in, saturates everything. By the most generous standards, this place is grim. Still, though, with the external mics turned on and dialled low, and if Jack closes his eyes and concentrates, the sound of rushing water is almost soothing, like one of those “Water Dreams” relaxation tapes, the kind that help you visualize yourself in a grotto beside a waterfall. Jack supposes that he’s spent too much time in Temple—mostly, for the record, because it’s the warmest place in Zion—because right now he feels guilty for pretending he’s someplace other than here in the Real. That capacity for imaginative travel has been commandeered for warfare.

Epoch better come through with a contact soon, Jack thinks, before he slides right into all-out blasphemy.

⸻

“You were the one going on about how we can’t leave her there, remember?” Jack jabs a finger at Daniel’s chest.

Daniel stares at him. Jack braces himself because he knows Daniel hates this, being caught between principles and tangibles—Jack being the most tangible of tangibles—and he hates it even more when Jack calls him on the double-think. That’s why now he’s trying to sear a hole through Jack with his eyes. It’s enough to make Jack wish Daniel was wearing glasses, something to attenuate that a bit. Or if they were in the matrix he could pretend the burn he gets from the blue isn’t real.

His jaw working, Daniel has a little mercy and shifts his gaze, looks over Jack’s shoulder at the rust-streaked bulkhead and then down at his boots.

Jack says, “I told her I’d come back.”

Daniel nods and keeps nodding. His eyes are squeezed shut, not blocking out the obvious, Jack knows, just clearing the mental decks of distractions. “I know. I know that,” Daniel says, his voice an irritated whisper that tells Jack he’s talking more to himself than to him. He stops nodding and sucks in a breath, lets it out. “I know that.”

“Hey, we’ve pulled off nuttier jobs.”

Daniel’s humourless laugh cracks against the deck between them like it’s propelled forward by frustration and yanked down by gravity. He’s got his arms folded around his body now, fingers worked into the loosening weave of his sweater, and this is why Jack thinks twice a month about transferring him to another crew, so he—so both of them—won’t get racked like this. Still, Jack hasn’t had him transferred. Which is stupid. It’s a tactical mistake. Jack learned the day he sluiced down the pipe and out of the matrix that most stuff isn’t worth hanging on to. But he’s learned since that some stuff is.

⸻

It’s here and it’s somewhere else at the same time. Daniel, the muscles of his back shifting taut or supple under skin, the alien precision of the circular dorsal plugs that feel dark and warm and weirdly natural there between his shoulder blades and in the curve at the small of his back, the smell of sweat and grease in his sweater and in his hair, the scrape of his boots across the scarred deck, the weight of his body pressing Jack to the bulkhead, the fine, raw angles and curves of his bones fitting into Jack’s like sorted coins, like broken pieces settling under the pull of gravity into Jack’s hollows, Daniel’s mouth, his open, hungry mouth, his tongue, his teeth closing briefly on Jack’s lower lip, his throat under Jack’s hand, the fine corrugations of his windpipe and the swallowed stone of his adam’s apple vibrating with something inarticulate and meaningful and unvoiced and tactile that Jack can only read with his fingertips. This is a stone door. Jack leans against it, the heft and the resistance and the space-filling thereness of it, and it opens onto sky.

⸻

“Put your party dresses on, boys,” V says, not even a twitch of an eyelid to suggest that she’s aware she’s walked into something she shouldn’t have. “Our prom date is calling.”

Chapter Text

She had most of the padding off of the walls again, except for one corner. Standing ankle deep in the mounds of stuffing, she scratched the back of her leg with her other foot and worked away at the stitching of the final seam. Torn and raw, her fingernails were bleeding so that she left red streaks and hatch marks on the fabric and the grey brick behind it, like a message left by a rodent. Help me. My hamster wheel makes me bored. Served her right for having a well-developed forebrain.

For some reason her companion/warden/whatever hadn’t stopped her this time, had mostly retreated from her conscious space so that he wasn’t much more than the occasional flicker in the corner of her eye like she used to get after her cat Schrödinger died and her brain hadn’t caught up to that reality yet. For that reason, she’d given up trying to talk to him, the warden, beyond the occasional aside that broke the rhythm of her low-voiced chanting: Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. She picked carefully at the padding. She didn’t have to go to the bathroom. She didn’t get hungry or thirsty. Time passed, or didn’t. Step on a crack.

“I don’t have a mother,” she said between gritted teeth as she wrapped a dangling swath of fabric around her hand and put all her weight into yanking on it. Ripping horizontally across the remaining padding, it opened up a tear where the batting bulged through, satisfying and weirdly obscene. The sudden give made her lose her balance and she ended up flat on her back on the floor—thankfully nicely comfy after all her work—where the loose fabric settled over her eyes. Enjoying the relative darkness—where was the light coming from, anyway?—she stayed there, watching squares and lines kaleidoscope across her retinas. Her companion filled up the space around her with his imperturbable attentiveness. She squeezed her eyes tighter.

After a few self-indulgent minutes, she pulled the cloth away and looked up at the blank white ceiling. “I never had a mother,” she said, with a finality that made her voice sound like a stranger’s. The truth of that statement seemed to fill the room like poured concrete, certainty an increasing heaviness that pressed her harder into the floor, forcing the breath out of her in a sob. She gripped at the bed of torn padding and cried.

⸻

It was hard not to take it as a sign, the fact that it was Cipher who came with the intel instead of Epoch. Everything Cipher said seemed to sidewind its way along the path of accuracy like a snake with a big “Trust Me” smile. Morpheus might be right on the money about the contact, but he had shit taste in lackeys.

⸻

“Operator.”

“We’re going to see some codeface named Ba’al. Apparently there’s an apostrophe and he’s not related in any way to ’Bocce.’”

“Ba’al? You’re kidding.”

“Yes, Daniel. This is my kidding voice. You know this guy?”

“Not the codeface, but Ba’al was an ancient Phoenician fertility god.”

“Fertility god. Nice.”

“And noted baby eater.”

“Even better. His place is called Sapan. What can you tell me?”

“Okaaay, hang on. Huh. I guess that qualifies as a lair, if by ‘lair’ you mean your standard night-club slash fortress, no hard lines, plenty of muscular security programs at the gates. He must be running some kind of Cheney, though. I can’t get my eyes on the layout past the foyer.”

“Of course you can’t. A visual might make this seem like one of those sane plans. According to Cipher—and he was sorry to break it to us, by the way—we are not the centre of the universe and Nebuchadnezzar’s got its own problems. We’re on our own from here on in. Codeface love gods aside, that is.”

“Right. We forge on blindly then.”

“Business as usual.”

“Okay. Jack?”

“Daniel.”

“Don’t let the love god take your special flower.”

⸻

“Oh come on!”

Sam kicked at the reconstituted padding and then stumbled around in a small circle, taking the weight on her heel because of the bruised toes.

“What difference does it make?” She stopped pacing and stood with her hands hanging, her eyes closed while she counted to ten and back again. When she opened them, the padding still looked perfectly new. “Okay, then how about a book? A magazine. Seriously. A crayon.”

No answer. Just a ripple in her peripheral vision as the warden-whatever coalesced a little, a slightly bemused frown on his dark face. She reached out and ripped open the fabric over the padding, clawed out the soft material inside until she was down again to bare concrete, but the hole closed up around her fingers. She stubbornly kept them there, though, while the padding formed itself around her, under her, and finally pushed her out. Again, she ripped through it.

“I’m developing a new understanding of rodents,” she said through gritted teeth. “Why they seem bent on destruction.” Tear. Shred. “They’re fucking bored. I have a Ph.D. In fact, I have two. Once, when I was in college, I memorized the first book of Paradise Lost. For fun. I can recite pi to a hundred and ten decimal points.” The padding grew around her hands again. But all she had in her head now were the fragments of a nursery rhyme and a rabid desire to make the warden give up, already, and let her have the blank wall if she wanted it. Not that she wanted it. It was the principle. Done is done. Torn is torn. The world wasn’t something you could remake.

The padding remade itself.

She tore it away, pushed her shoulder into the gap and braced herself against the corner with one hand while ripping and tossing bits away with the other. As she worked her fingers into the padding at the seam, they touched something warm, sparkling, like a live wire. When she jerked her hand back, it was numb, barely registering the sharp bite of her teeth.

“Shit! Damn it,” she said around her fingers.

Leaning back against the gentle push of the regrowing world, she carefully tugged at the padding again, exposing a familiar section of wall.

“That’s new.”

Along the seams between the bricks was a golden light, pale in the harsh illumination of the cell, but definitely there. It was the same light she’d seen in the interrogation room. A crack in the surface of things. Carefully, she reached out again and touched it with the tip of her finger. A tingle, but not so bad this time. And it gave, just a little, under pressure, leaked more light. She had three fingers worked into the gap, which was now a hand-span wide, when the warden spoke close to her ear in a deep, measured voice.

“You must desist.”

All the hair on her arms and neck rose, but she didn’t look away or stop prying at the gap.

It feels like she’s reaching into outer space. Inner space. Other-space. M-theory mutters somewhere in the back of her educated brain, but she ignores it. It’s all wrong. Or if it isn’t, it’s not relevant here, on the other side of the crack, or not the way she used to think it, back there.

In the cell, he was watching her, not angry, not stern. His head was tilted, brown eyes attentive.

“You must desist,” he said again.

“Why?” she says. Her voice comes from far away. It sounds different, like she’s listening to herself on a recording. She can almost....

“Because they are coming.”

⸻

Sapan was just the kind of place you’d expect to find a codeface with the balls to name itself after a Phoenician fertility god.

Standing across the street with one hand on her hip and the other twirling the end of her braid, V looked up at the forty-foot gold-plated statue that straddled the entrance and said, “Well, that certainly is a lot of bull.”

And sure enough, it was.

“Maybe you can get one in the gift shop,” Jack said as he hooked her elbow and towed her toward the doors.

“Ooh. I like gifts. And shopping.” She fell into step beside him, taking extra long strides to match his. “Especially if I don’t have to pay for anything.”

“You can get Daniel to load whatever you want in the construct.”

She sighed heavily and looked at him askance. “Of course I can get Daniel to load anything I want in the construct.” Breaking away from him, she stomped through a neon puddle and shattered the reflection of the golden bull. “Which is why the construct is fantastically boring.”

“Adrenaline junkies don’t live very long, you know.”

“So I’m told. How come you’re still here?”

Jack couldn’t help but crack at least half a grin to meet the one she tossed back at him over her shoulder. “Luck,” he answered.

“No. I think it’s—”

Maybe she said, “love,” but he couldn’t really hear her over the avalanche of so-called music that seemed to force open the heavy smoked glass doors between the bull’s forelegs as a pair of patrons swanned out into the street. The taller one was a vision in about twelve miles of stiff-looking netting sculpted into something like a hoop skirt, a fashion-scene Scarlett after the fire. The other one was wearing a top hat, tails and a dog collar clipped to a silver chain attached at the other end to Miss Scarlett’s belt. They stopped at the curb while Scarlett rummaged in her fuzzy cat-shaped handbag for her valet ticket. Top Hat watched Jack and V go by, his eyes all pupil. Fertility codeface was handing out the good candy, it seemed. V winked at him and then again at Scarlett as a red Jag slid up to the curb. Licking her lips, Scarlett gave first V and then Jack a slow drag of a look from boots to shades and back again before stuffing her enormous dress into the driver’s seat and gunning the engine. Top Hat climbed into the back and blinked slowly, like a gila monster on prom night.

Jack prodded V in the small of her back to get her going again. “Maybe they have those in the gift shop, too.”

“Hmm,” V said as the Jag squealed off through the neon puddles and the reflected bull broke and settled again, upside down, at their feet. “Been there. Done him.”

Inside, they were met by a phalanx of clichés in the form of four codeface bouncers each one roughly the size of Kilimanjaro, and all sporting shoulder holsters and the regular tough guy gear, like goatees and biker boots and leather pants. Just once, Jack thought, he’d like to walk into one of these places and face off against a bunch of ninja grannies in velour leisure suits or Bermuda shorts. Just for variety’s sake. Not that he had any great desire to throw down with a granny or anything, but could it hurt to shake up the box a little?

“We’re expected,” Jack said to the Bluto that stepped in to block his path to the inner doors. Jack waited while the surveillance camera over the security desk relayed his pretty face back to the boss. He smiled his winning smile. V waggled her fingers. Half a minute later, Bluto put a finger to his earpiece and nodded.

“No weapons,” he rumbled.

Hesitating long enough to let the codeface know he wasn’t happy about it, Jack held his hands out for the pat-down. V opened her heavy green coat like she was shilling watches and stood hip-shot with a bored expression while Bluto #2 took both of her Glocks and then felt her up for hidden blades or dangerous darning needles. By the time he was done, there was a stack of deadly accessories on the counter that made Jack’s 9mm and extra clips look a bit pathetic by comparison.

Jack fingered a ring of throwing stars and raised his eyebrows at V.

She raised hers back at him. “What? I think they’re pretty.”

“Yeah, but where the heck did you stash them?”

Running a hand over the bodysuit she wore under the coat, she gave him an arch look. “Wouldn’t you like to know.” She transferred the look to Bluto #2 and then softened it with a wink. “Our secret, eh, Tiny?”

⸻

They came through the door. The door that wasn’t there before.

Fighting the urge to back up against the far wall, Sam planted her feet as firmly as she could on the padded floor and lifted her chin in a not-too-bad impression of someone brave.

As before, two of the MIBs stood, hands folded, either side of the door while Maybourne stepped up close to Sam and gave her the faux smile. “Hello, Dr. Carter,” he said lightly. “Comfortable?”

“I want to see a lawyer.”

Maybourne shrugged. “So?”

“I have rights.”

“No, actually.” He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed hard, leaning his weight on her. “You don’t.”

She resisted, but his grip was iron and one of her knees buckled. As she hit the floor, Maybourne bending to keep his eyes level with hers, the air rippled around them a little in a wave of disapproval from the warden. Maybourne’s gaze over her shoulder and she could feel the warden retreating. With a jerk, she got free of Maybourne’s grip and settled onto her knees, sitting on her heels, and aimed her own eyes at the button hole in the lapel of his cheap black suit.

“What do you want from me?” she asked as evenly as she could. She rubbed her hands on the fabric of her pyjama bottoms and then laid them flat on her thighs.

She could feel his smile like an eel passing close in murky water. “We want you to let us help you.”

Managing not to laugh in his face—barely—she flicked him a look that she hoped communicated her scepticism.

He crouched down and tipped his head into her line of sight. “You want to get out of here, don’t you?”

For some reason, Sam was certain he could read the sudden rush of hope that opened up her veins, made her heart pump faster. She turned her head away from the blank gaze of his dark glasses, but that just made her feel like the side of her neck was exposed, the throbbing artery there confessing in pulses, so she faced him instead. “What do you want from me?” she repeated.

“Not much.” Maybourne unlaced his fingers and spread his hands as if to let the trifle flutter free. “We know you’ve been contacted. These people are dangerous. Terrorists. They threaten the very fabric of our world and they need to be brought to justice. We release you, and if they reach out to you again, you let us know. A phone call, that’s all, and you’re back to analysing deep-space radio telemetry.” Pausing, he seemed to consider whether to go on. “And none of this—” He cocked his head at the cell. “—and none of this—” He tapped her forehead with a hooked index finger. “—ever happened.” The smile was as winning as could be, a cardboard cut-out ad for goodwill, all life-sized, and in full-colour. “A clean bill of health and a clean slate, Dr. Carter. No more confusion. No more pain.”

Sam rubbed her palms on her thighs a few times before she caught the movement and clasped her fingers together instead. “So,” she said to the buttonhole on his lapel, “I help you put them in here, and I get to leave. That’s it?”

“Easy as pie.” The almost mechanically measured tone of his voice made the homey aphorism sound like the meshing of gears.

Nodding, Sam chewed the inside of her lip and counted the perfectly even stitches around the button hole. The warden was a low vibration at her back, attentive and waiting like a cursor on a blank screen. Finally, she looked up at Maybourne and said, “Why on earth would I do something like that?”

He shrugged with one shoulder. An eyebrow rose above the rim of his glasses. “I don’t know, Dr. Carter. I can only assume it would be for the same reasons you did it last time.”

⸻

It wasn’t exactly a throne, but it was close enough for hand-grenades. The codeface sat in it, just enough of a slouch, legs spread wide, to show that he owned it and that it was lucky to have the privilege of supporting his silk-clad ass. To Jack, he looked like a more refined version of the Blutoes at the door: a neater goatee, a muscular body that filled out the shiny grey suit and purple silk shirt to best advantage, that sense of relaxed menace that leopards have when they’re lying in the sun cleaning blood from their claws. In other words, cliché with polish, right down to the silly-putty-and-silicone women who were draped around him in poses designed to show off their assets to people who’d never get close enough to touch them. One of them, a girl who looked like she wasn’t more than fourteen under all that make-up, finished snorting a line of blow through a hundred dollar bill and then looked up at Jack through her fire-truck-red bangs and cut him a smile so wicked and weary it made him want to cry. Ba’al the baby-eater. No shit. Jack’s fingers twitched by his thigh where his gun wasn’t, and good thing it wasn’t, since it wouldn’t help the plan any to blow a hole in the codeface before Jack got what he came for.

Didn’t stop him from playing that happy scenario out in his mind, though, which accounted for the smile on his face when Ba’al finally deigned to notice him and V, leaned forward a little and asked in a cultured voice, “Is something funny?”

Jack made a show of starting a bit at being addressed from on high and then answered, “Sure. Lots of things. Clowns not so much, though. Which is funny, right there, don’t you think? Considering.”

Ba’al slouched again and steepled his fingers. Kneeling beside him, another girl, this one at least old enough to drive, rested her cheek on his knee and fixed the visitors with the stare of a taxidermied cat. Ba’al said, “You must be Jack.”

“A reasonable facsimile of him, yeah.”

“Not ‘Jack Flash’ or ‘Jack of Hearts’?”

“Nope. Just Jack.”

“Prosaic. I thought you—” He smirked a bit at the quaintness of the term. “—people liked clever pseuds. I’m disappointed.”

Jack begged to differ, only without the begging part. “All the action heroes are called Jack. Which doesn’t say much for machine originality, by the way.” While Ba’al decided whether or not to take that personally, Jack cast a look around the VIP loft with its writhing decor of half-naked women and tough-guy accents, then down into the club proper where the packed dance floor was heaving under sweeping lights and frenetic strobes to the throb and grind of something similar to music, if music could be performed by construction equipment. The place was disorienting, and the noise and the light seemed to get inside his ribs and fuck with the rhythm of his heart. It made him grumpy. “Look, if you don’t mind, we’d like to get down to business. Fake places to go, fake people to see. You know.”

Sitting forward and dumping the woman off onto the floor, Ba’al reached across the low table in front of him, hooked a small silver box with his finger and drew it toward him. He paused to give the woman a shove, and after she’d crawled out and gone to find someone else to hold her up, Ba’al opened the box and drew out a data disc in a plastic cover. In the shifting light, Jack could make out the silhouette of a bull printed on its face.

“This,” Ba’al said, “is a key.” When Jack stepped forward to take it, Ba’al held it away from him. “It comes with a price. This is not charity. I have little interest in your war, and even less in the life of one human or even a thousand of them.” He reached out to stroke the hair of the coked-up fourteen-year-old who was still kneeling at the table pressing her wet finger to the glass to dab up the stray blow. “So long as my ends are served.”

Beside Jack, V was deceptively relaxed inside her oversized coat, but he could feel the thrum of tension in her. “Leaving your ends aside for the moment,” V said, “what do you want?”

“There’s a program in quarantine named Teal’c. Surveillance and Security. I want him.”

“Right,” Jack said. “And?”

Ba’al leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, held the disc up between his finger and thumb. “And this will get you in, past all the security protocols, like you belong there. However, it only works one way. If you want out, the Teal’c program will have to come with you.”

“Ri-ight,” Jack repeated. “And this program would do that why?”

Ba’al stretched out his arms in an expansive gesture that ended with him sprawled again in the throne, one arm flung over the wing of the back, casually grand. “He doesn’t know it yet, or rather, he doesn’t know what he knows, which is that he wants his freedom. This whole world to range in.”

“How does that serve your ends, exactly?” V asked, not taking her own advice with regard to ends and means and what they really didn’t need to know.

“You have your conflicts, and we have ours. Teal’c is necessary to mine.”

A slow smile slanted across V’s face. “The Merovingian. You’re making a move against him, aren’t you.” She turned to Jack. “A little internecine warfare is always interesting.”

“It’s not your concern.” Ba’al lifted his fingers in a waggle of dismissal, but then tilted his head and gave her a narrow, appraising look that finished up with a leer and a gesture toward his lap. “Unless you, too, would like the opportunity to serve the god Ba’al.”

V swung her weight a little, a hand on her hip, and seemed to consider the offer. “I don’t think so,” she said finally. “You know what the kids say.” She cocked an eyebrow at his ostentatiously displayed package. “There is no spoon.”

Now that Ba’al did take personally. His fingers twitched again and suddenly there was a lot of movement, all of it toward Jack and V. By the time Jack had landed a right hook on a guy in a leather mask, V had lunged to snatch a blade from the heel of her boot. She threw herself into a back-flip over leather-face’s falling body, and wound up behind another bit of muscle twice her size with her fist twisted in his hair and the knife at his throat.

Then, everything stopped. Jack stood with his fist drawn back, but there was nobody to lay it on. At his feet, the teenager was looking up at him, the end of one of her red schoolgirl ponytails caught between her small white teeth, and a neat little .22 aimed at his jewels. Her giggle was like wind-chimes over the crash and tide of the industrial punk.

For a long, slow five seconds, nothing moved but the light.

Then, Jack inclined his head a fraction toward V and she started to relax her grip on the thug. Before she let him go, though, she said in his ear, “Your kind is fast, darling, but you have no intuition, so you might as well be slow.”

She released him with a pat on his cheek to show there were no hard feelings and stepped up beside Jack. At that, the teenager slowly lowered her cute little gun and went back to finding crumbs on the table. The rest of the muscle faded again into the background.

Jack was mostly successful at squashing his own smug grin. “This is Verity. You sure you want her?”

“Less so than I was a minute ago,” Ba’al answered.

“Okay, then, can we get a move on here? Your security program isn’t gonna steal itself.”

After a moment of hesitation, Ba’al grunted and tossed the disc at Jack. “If I were you,” he said as Jack and V turned away, “I would not find myself in here again.”

“If I were you,” Jack replied, low enough that only V could hear, “I’d put a bullet in my brain.”

⸻

“Last time,” Sam repeated woodenly.

Maybourne smiled. “Yes, last time you were released from the ward.”

Her mouth felt numb. She shook her head and kept shaking it. “No.”

“What did you think, Dr. Carter? That they let you out of the hospital because you were cured?” Maybourne barked out a derisive laugh, but then his face settled into a benign expression that made Sam feel sick.

Sliding off of her heels, she got her feet under her and pushed herself away from him and toward the wall. She could feel the warden’s presence open around her, but she couldn’t tell if it was to contain her or to protect her. “They let me out because it was a mistake,” she hissed at Maybourne.

Rising, he looked down at her, the benign expression hardening into something pitying and grotesque. “It was a deal. You took it.”

“No.”

When she shoved herself away again, he followed, bending at the waist to bring his face close to her hair. “You took the deal and you will again.”

Her hands were braced on the padded floor on either side of her. Her broken fingernails scraped painfully against the canvas as she curled her hands into fists. “It’s not true,” she said. The anger made her voice shake, so she sucked in a breath and blew it out forcefully before speaking again. “I think I would remember—”

“Yes,” he acknowledged with a small nod. “You would think that, wouldn’t you.” Crouching again, he grabbed her wrist, forced her locked elbow to bend so that he could raise her hand. Then, he pried her fist open and turned her splayed hand around so that she was looking at the back of it. Her fingernails were smooth and unbroken, practically manicured, no sign at all that she’d ever torn them and worn them bloody by scrambling at the padding and the concrete blocks of her cell. “You would think,” he said softly as he ran his own smooth fingers over hers, “that you would know your mind like the back of your own hand.”

Sam stared at it. Inside her things were crumbling, falling away, debris disappearing into the dark circle of a well. It took her a few long seconds to convince herself that the hand she was looking at was her own, but then she deliberately closed it into a fist again and dug her clean, sharp nails into Maybourne’s skin. When he jerked out of her grip, the blood under her nails was his. But it faded almost before she could appreciate the small spark of satisfaction it gave her.

She looked up at him through the fall of bangs over her eyes and said through clenched teeth, “You can go to hell.”

This time, Maybourne looked genuinely disappointed as he stood, straightened his jacket and tugged at its sleeves. “You said that the last time, Dr. Carter. And like the last time, you’ll come around. If you don’t, these walls will be the last thing you see, and my voice will be the last you ever hear. You could live a long time in here. A very long time.”

From where Sam sat on the padded floor, he looked like a giant, and the anger that was sparking and sizzling through her started to sputter and dwindle under the weight of the empty whiteness of the room, its aimless, sourceless light, the all-swallowing silence.

“You can’t do this,” she whispered.

“Dr. Carter, in here, I can do pretty much anything I want.”

With that, Maybourne turned to the side wall of her cell, stepped onto it and walked up it to the ceiling where the other two MIB were now waiting for him. They all three looked impassively down at her—up at her—while the doorway on the far wall faded and another opened up, inverted now so that it seemed like the ceiling was the floor. One by one they stepped through the door and disappeared into darkness. Half a second after they were gone, the door disappeared, too, and in its place there was only plain, unmarked padding.

Sam stared at the blank space for a long few seconds until the vertigo overcame her and she fell—upward—downward—hit the ceiling on her shoulder and collapsed flat on her back gasping for air and trying to get her body and her brain to agree on up and down. Her body insisted that she was lying on the floor. Her brain was equally certain that she was pinned to the ceiling and was going to peel off at any second. It was a long time before she could trust herself to stand, and when she did, her toes curled, seeking purchase. She moved slowly along the wall to the corner, then wedged herself into it and pulled up her knees.

“Wake up,” she said. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

Chapter Text

“Operator.”

“We’re getting on a train.”

“I’m having a hard time getting a lock on you.”

“Apparently, it’s not your average kind of train.”

“Okay. Listen—Jack? Hello? Shit.”

⸻

The red-haired schoolgirl walked backward a few paces along the immaculate tile of the station platform and waggled her fingers at Jack, adding a coy tilt of her head and the brief pucker of an air kiss before turning on her heel and heading up the stairs. Jack watched her with his jaw cocked and his eyes narrowed until the short kilt and knee socks disappeared. Then, he growled, “I’m gonna have to kill our new friend Ba’al.”

“Hmm,” V said as her coat lifted in the wind driven ahead of the incoming train. “I’ll be happy to help.” With a sharp jerk of her elbow, she snapped a thin blade out of her sleeve and into her hand. Holding it up so the cold fluorescent light gleamed along its double edge, she smiled at Jack. “I know just where I’d start.”

As the train sighed into the station, she let the blade retract and they both turned to wait. The train looked like any other subway, except, like the station itself, it seemed like it had just been taken out of the wrapper. Not a speck of dust or slash of tagging anywhere that Jack could see. Even the air that buffeted them as the train slid through the tunnel seemed weirdly familiar and at the same time out of place, not clean, exactly, but empty, like the air inside the loading program.

When the train stopped, the doors snapped open to reveal the conductor, who stepped out onto the platform with a wide, somewhat uncertain smile on his round face. He bowed a few more times than was strictly necessary for politeness’ sake and then held out a pudgy hand.

“Documentation please.” His smile turned slightly embarrassed. “Regulations, you know. Must follow the rules. The rules are very important to... to—” He pointed up at the ceiling and then twirled the finger around to indicate something more general. “—to the powers that be.” After he took Ba’al’s passkey disc from Jack with another deferent bow, he slotted it into a reader the size of a paperback book and pursed his lips. “Humm, yes. Yes, I see,” he said to himself, looking up to study first Jack and then V in between the humming and the yes-I-see-ing. Finally, just as Jack’s hand was ghosting toward his Beretta and his brain was formulating a quick-and-dirty hijack plan, Harlan—or so the nameplate on the breast pocket of his uniform claimed—nodded vigorously, handed back the disc, and, after tucking his reader into his belt, put his palms together and then pulled them apart in a circular gesture of celebration. “Komtrya!” he exclaimed.

Jack exchanged a glance with V. “Kumbaya to you too. So. Can we go?”

“Oh! Yes! Yes! Of course we can go. We can go right now.” Harlan grandly waved Jack and V onto the train ahead of him. “Very busy. Very busy schedule today. So many passengers.”

As the doors hissed shut behind them, V surveyed the empty car. “So I see.”

Harlan blinked at her for a moment, then rubbed his hands together briskly in a getting-down-to-business way and headed forward to the conductor’s booth. “Oh, they’re here, they’re here. But it’s non-stop to the Gate, so no delays for you. Very busy schedule today. Must keep the train running.” He went on talking a blue streak until the booth door closed and cut his voice off mid-sentence.

“O-okay then,” Jack said to the closed door. “Can a codeface be on speed? Because I think that codeface is on speed.”

Jack was choosing which of the empty seats to take when V’s hand closed tightly around his arm. He turned to find her staring down the aisle through the door into the next car. At the window, an agent was staring back at her.

V whispered, “Don’t move.”

“I think that only works on velociraptors,” Jack said out of the corner of his mouth while he unsnapped his holster and slipped the safety on the Beretta. He drew the gun and let it hang in his hand behind his leg.

V was so tense that he could almost hear her nerves twanging over the uneven rasp of her breath.

“On my count,” Jack said. “One.”

The agent put his hand to his earpiece.

“Two.”

The agent nodded.

“Thr—”

The agent turned from the window. He walked the length of the second car and chose a seat facing backward next to another agent. He sat down.

Seconds counted themselves in the pulsing of the vein in Jack’s forehead. The train rolled backward a little as the brakes were released and then it shuddered and started forward. The station slipped by past the windows.

“Well,” V said. There was a muted double-snick as she slotted her Glocks back into her holsters. “That was rather anticlimactic.” She broadened her stance and leaned into him a little as the train accelerated and the lights in the tunnel became streaks on the darkness.

Jack blew out a slow breath. “Sweet. That’s one helluva passkey.”

“Maybe we ought to keep Ba’al alive long enough to get us a few more.”

Jack nodded as the train hurtled through another station without stopping, the empty platform a blur of white that barely had time to register before they were back in the tunnel. The two agents in the next car sat perfectly still. From behind, they looked identical. Maybe they were.

“If the key can get us by an agent, well, I for one like it very much.”

“Yeah,” Jack answered, thinking of the schoolgirl and her world-weary smile. “But the price, not so much.”

⸻

“Why do you not comply with Agent Maybourne’s request?”

Sam rolled her head on her folded arms to look up at the warden, who stood over her, his hands clasped behind his back, his head tilted inquisitively. Letting her forehead settle again on her arms, she sighed into the hollow made by her raised knees and said, “Because it’s not a request.”

“Do you not wish to return to your life?”

“I wouldn’t call what I had back there a life.”

“It is a better one than you will have here, is it not?”

“I don’t know.” Leaning back, she held up her hand and inspected it in the unforgiving light. She should have been in his shadow, except he didn’t cast one. “I’m trying to remember. It doesn’t seem real, either.” With that thought, she let her hands fall to grip ineffectually at the padded floor as a wave of vertigo swept over her. She closed her eyes tight enough to see stars. At the back of her skull, pain was a heavy hand starting to squeeze her in its stainless steel grip. “Maybe I am going crazy.”

“Perhaps you are.” She opened her eyes to find him sitting next to her against the wall, his large hands laced on his knees. He studied her for a long moment and then turned to look straight ahead, his mouth turned down in a scowl. “Perhaps you are not.”

She stared at him. “Thank you,” she said dryly. “Really. That’s very helpful.”

He inclined his head a fraction toward her. “You are welcome.”

⸻

When the doors opened onto a platform identical to the one Jack and V had just left, at least 50 agents stepped off the train.

One foot over the threshold, V checked her stride and instinctively shifted her weight, ready to push Jack back into the car, but he put a hand on her shoulder and urged her forward. She went, but he could feel her shudder of surprise as it propagated out through her muscles and settled to a saw-toothed vibration of contained fear. It matched perfectly the one he could feel in his own body.

“Easy,” he whispered from behind her, his mouth against the sleekness of her hair. Strands that escaped her ponytail were clinging to the sweaty skin of her neck. “Nobody here but us codefaces.”

He felt her swallow hard before nodding and taking two assertive strides away from the train and turning to face the agents.

It was hard to even start on an accurate count of them because they all wore identical black suits and dark shades, and there were only minor variations in the faces. Didn’t matter, though, since 50 agents were 49 more than it took to make Jack’s spine to go stiff, galvanized with the effort of resisting both fight and flight.

“Jesus,” he breathed.

Back in the real, where he couldn’t track them in the code, Daniel would be leaning over Jack in the rig, his forehead furrowed under the flop of hair and his eyes sharp and too blue, focused on the readout on the monitor, parsing the EEG, doing some funky numerology on the count of Jack’s pulse as he tried to decode the meat-data for a sign. Jack sucked in a deep breath and let it sift out again through his nose, feeling the ritual settle him. He willed his heart rate down. It’s okay. We’re not fucked up yet, he thought in Daniel’s general direction, a foot away in real space, and what might as well be a million miles by in-country reckoning. Another breath, in, out, as the last of the agents filed off the train onto the platform and the doors slid shut behind them with a sad little down-falling chime. Everything’s 5-by-5. This was something he knew: waiting, watching, going with the flow. No more scary than, say, putting on chum-trunks and taking a little dip in a shark tank.

“Niiiice fishies,” he murmured as he stepped away from the train and led V into the station, keeping pace with the agents on either side of them. Although they weren’t exactly marching in ranks, and they weren’t walking in lock-step, there was a sameness in the way the agents moved that gave that impression anyway, like they were lock-stepped in their brains, or on some level even deeper than that. It dragged at him, assimilated him. He shortened his stride for a few paces, dropped out of sync just to prove he could, and then let the rhythm of their movements catch him again. Beside him, V did the same, her eyes front and expression parade neutral.

⸻

“Why do you sacrifice yourself for them?”

Sam kept her eyes closed. Even through her eyelids, and with her head down and sheltered in her arms folded on her knees, the white light of the room seemed to throb in time with her pulse. Lifting two fingers on each hand to make scare quotes, she said, “You mean the ’terrorists’?”

“Yes. Do they have some special meaning for you that would motivate such resistance?”

“Me personally?” She rested her cheek on her wrist and looked at him, wondered whether this was Maybourne’s way of initiating Stockholm Syndrome, getting her to open up to a ghost. But she didn’t know anything, anyway, so the joke was on him. “They don’t mean anything to me personally.” She tucked her face back into the small share of darkness in the hollow of her body. “I only ever saw the guy for two minutes.”

“Then why do you sacrifice yourself for them?” he repeated. His tone was as level as always, only there was something in it now, a kind of urgency she hadn’t heard before.

That was almost enough to make her open her eyes again, but not quite. Her head was pounding so hard now she had to take shallow breaths, sit very still. Each heartbeat strained the veins and the bone with an outward pressure. Soon she’d have to move, to press her hands to her temples to keep her skull from cracking open. She wondered if this was another kind of persuasion. After the bright lights and the proffered bargain, a little sample of Maybourne’s power to get inside her. The memory of Maybourne’s finger tapped at her forehead in counterpoint to her pulse. None of this ever happened. No more confusion. No more pain. She shook her head once, hard, and winced at the lance of pain that seared across the space behind her eyes, defacing Maybourne’s promises.

After riding out a wave of nausea, she said, “I suppose it’s the principle of the thing.”

A long pause that meant that he was contemplating her again. When he spoke his voice foamed across the dark red landscape like an advancing blue wave. “You complied with his request—”

“It’s not a request. It’s blackmail.”

A thoughtful silence. Then, “You capitulated to his demands once before.”

Sam found herself smiling at his rephrasing. Sometimes a semantic argument wasn’t just a semantic argument. On the other hand, if it was the Stockholm Syndrome they were playing at now, it was working, because she wanted very much to let herself tip sideways and rest her head on the muscled curve of his shoulder. But she was pretty sure that, if she tried and she found nothing there but air, she’d lose her grip on whatever frayed scraps of herself she had left.

Instead of leaning on him, then, she concentrated on the colour of her pain and imagined dousing it with the cooling blue tide of his voice. “I don’t remember doing that. Capitulating. But even if I did, this is different.”

“How is it different?”

“This time I’m not going to do it. That’s different.”

Another thoughtful pause, and then, after the ebb, the advancing wave. “Indeed.”

⸻

In spite of the lovely feeling like the skin of his neck was trying to crawl up and over the top of his head in an attempt to escape the creepifying stares of the agents behind him, Jack allowed himself to nurture just the tiniest glimmer of optimism. So far, they’d navigated their way out of the station and through two checkpoints—both run by Harlan(s) in different quasi-military uniforms—and onto the Super Top Secret Elevator without anybody so much as batting an eye. Not that he could see anybody’s eyes, what with the standard dark glasses thing. He kept his own aviator glasses on and worked at making his expression as impassive as those of the agents around him. V was doing a reasonable job at that, herself, except that after the first shock wore off her impassive agent face looked a lot like her bored five-year-old face. But since nobody seemed to notice, Jack decided not to risk drawing attention to it by talking about it out loud.

If he’d been in a more experimental mood, rather than in a “get in and out again without the inconvenience of dying” mood, he might’ve tested out a couple of things, like agent hearing, for instance, maybe by whispering something disparaging about their motherboard. But today was not the day to be advancing the cause of science, so he kept his mouth shut.

The Super Top Secret Elevator (not actually labelled that way, but there was a Harlan in front of it to check credentials, and the doors only actually appeared once he’d done the Komtrya routine) seemed to be in a shaft that went from the surface to Centre of the Earth dinosaur country, or whatever the digital equivalent of that might be. Jack shifted his shoulders uncomfortably as his earlier optimism was eroded by a feeling of foreboding that came with the thought that they were drilling blind deeper and deeper into machine territory. He concentrated on that mental picture of Daniel, beside the rig, watching over him and close enough to touch. He closed his eyes for a moment and indulged himself with the memory of the way Daniel’s throat had felt under his fingers, the vibration of Daniel’s voice telling him he was real.

After a few minutes, V announced—in a whisper without moving her lips much—that she had to pee. Jack reminded her that code didn’t pee. She said she’d ask her make-believe bladder to take that under advisement. Thankfully, before V was driven by the dullness of the ride to explore the topic further, the doors opened.

Standard military subterranean bunker decor: grey concrete, heavy-duty steel blast doors, official-looking people in more of those quasi-military uniforms quick-stepping it to important duties, stone-faced MPs with machine guns. All the familiar comforts of home. For Jack, it brought back memories his time in the fake Air Force, where he learned to fly fake F-15s and to go on fake Black Ops missions behind fake “enemy” lines (and as that was also when he’d fake-married his wife, he got to remember the fake divorce and—). When they stepped into the corridor, another Harlan was there to tut-tut and of-course-of-course and Komtrya them from the elevator to the Embarkation Room.

Jack stopped abruptly just inside the blast doors and tried not to look stupidly at the fixture in the middle of the room. It was an up-ended ring, maybe twenty feet high, made of metal or stone, with crystals evenly spaced around its outer edge. A ramp led up to it, and ended at the empty centre of the ring, like it was supposed to lead somewhere but didn’t. When Jack tipped his head back, he could see that they were in what could only be a refurbished missile silo, although the shaft was sealed now four stories up. He couldn’t fathom why the machines would model the virtual space this way, unless they were reminding themselves that they were conquerors and appropriators of a human world. That line of thought brought him to the question of why, here at the very edge of the matrix, the machines would feel the need to replicate human forms at all, and that just gave him a headache.

Speaking of human-forms, the codeface that was heading across the open space in front of the ring to meet them was a general, if Jack was reading the insignia on his epaulettes correctly.

Jack took the risk and lifted his hand to his brow. “Sir.”

The general returned the salute. “At ease, Colonel.” He turned to V. “Doctor.”

“Sir.”

“Orders.” The general, Hammond by his nameplate, held out his hand for the disc then walked it over to a reader against the wall himself, motioning for Jack and V to follow. He looked like a fit fifty-year-old, with a shiny bald head and shrewd eyes that narrowed when he turned from the readout to take in Jack and V again. “Colonel Makepeace, Dr. Lee, you’re cleared for entrance into quarantine.” Pausing, he pursed his lips thoughtfully. “You two look different than you did the last time you went through the Gate,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Jack answered and left it at that, on the principle that a minimum of song-and-dance meant less chance for stepping off the path and into the shit. Hammond waited for more, though, and Jack got that creepy-crawly feeling he got when a sentinel extended a dish in his direction. He pulled himself up a little straighter and tried his own narrow-eyed stare. “As I’m sure the orders indicate, sir, the details of that are strictly need to know.”

That seemed to do the trick, because the general smiled and nodded. “Of course, Colonel. Forgive my curiosity.”

“Yes, sir,” Jack said.

They followed Hammond out into the centre of the floor. The general turned to the control room situated one floor up and protected by heavy glass. The blast doors were open to reveal a couple of techs and a whole lot of computer equipment doing whatever made computers go blink and ping.

“Two cleared for departure,” Hammond said and made a circular motion over his head. “Dial it up!”

That was when the ring turned out to be a really big combination lock.

Or something.

There was a lot of grinding noise and steam and some flashing light in the crystals as the interior ring spun in its housing. Each time it came to a stop, a tech in the control room announced their progress: “Chevron one engaged... chevron two engaged....” At “chevron seven locked” the ring flushed sideways. So maybe it wasn’t so much a lock as a—

V cast Jack a look that indicated that at no time did she sign any kind of contract stipulating that she would follow him into a giant toilet.

He shot her a look pointing out that every single mission she’d ever been on pretty much involved just that, in one way or another.

She answered with a face shrug acknowledging that this was true, then added a tiny eyeroll demanding better compensation, like, for instance, some quality time in the construct on a sandy beach with an umbrella drink and someone burly to put sunscreen on her back.

Jack twitched his eyebrow to table the discussion and went back to looking bored about the fact that the shimmering surface of the “pool” was defying gravity by filling the upright circle of the Gate without spilling out onto the floor.

Waving them ahead of him, Hammond followed them up the ramp to the surface of the pool, where he pinched Jack’s sleeve to stop him—not that Jack was about to go stepping right on in there, anyway. The “water” that stood in the Gate was clearly not water. Standing near it made Jack’s skin prickle with goosebumps, and there was something about it he could feel now that he was close to the surface, something slithery in the way his brain processed it that reminded him a lot of that almost imperceptible split second of not-ness between leaving the matrix and opening his eyes in the rig, that gap between the dream and the real. Glad for his dark glasses, he winced up an eye and turned to look at the general.

“Sir?”

Hammond regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, only this time without the narrowed eyes and that sentinel creepiness. “Colonel,” he said in a voice so low that Jack would almost call it conspiratorial if he didn’t know better, “when you go through, don’t hold your breath.” A ghost of a smile passed across the general’s face, so faint and fleeting that Jack wasn’t sure that he’d actually seen it. “It’s a rookie mistake.”

It probably wasn’t for more than a couple of seconds that Jack stood there working through all the possibilities he might be looking at in Hammond’s expression that would motivate that glimmer of collusiveness—everything from tests to entrapment to Byzantine machine politics and rivalries, and heck, even codeface goodwill if Jack was being fanciful. Still, though, it felt like a century or so—and probably was to the codeface—before Jack decided to fall back on the keep-it-simple-stupid credo and responded by nodding as noncommittally as possible.

With an equally unilluminating nod, Hammond said, “Good luck,” stepped back, and headed down the ramp again.

“To Oz,” Jack muttered by way of expelling breath, and they stepped through.

Chapter Text

“What’s your name?”

“Teal’c.”

“Teal’c?”

“Yes.”

Sam squinted at him. He was limned by golden light. Behind him, the padded wall seemed to be covered with thin, vertical lines of dripping shadow. If she held up a hand to block out the shifting glow around him, she could almost bring the shadows into focus. “Huh.”

“Are you not going to ask the next question?”

The laugh that escaped her as she pushed herself to her feet wasn’t nearly as bitter-sounding as it should’ve been. “You mean ‘what the hell are you?’” When he nodded, she shook her head, wincing at the jab of pain the gesture brought with it. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re either a hallucination or you’re with them. Either way, I’m not too likely to get any kind of real answer, am I?”

For a moment he looked like he was going to protest, but instead he thinned his lips and went back to staring stonily into the middle distance.

Leaning her shoulder on the wall, she braced one foot on top of the other and poked her finger into the drawstring hole at the front of her pyjama bottoms to pull out the threads he’d let her keep from her early attempt at tearing away the padding. She twisted them around her finger. “You’re not the first I’ve seen, you know.”

“Michelle from Records.”

“You know her?”

“I do not.”

Sam shrugged, unaccountably disappointed, like she was a tourist who discovers that everyone from Canada doesn’t in fact know each other. “There have been others, over the years. That’s why I was in the hospital. At first they thought I had some kind of autoscopy. One of the symptoms is the belief that real people are being replaced by duplicates. I told them that I knew that real people weren’t being replaced by duplicates. Of course they weren’t. That presumes that they were real to begin with.”

Another laugh climbed out of her throat, and that was getting a bit disturbing in itself, not only because she couldn’t seem to control it, but because the edge of hysteria in it caught the light and flashed it back at her. Closing her eyes against the ambient pulsing glow in the cell and the creepy shifting of the running shadows, she tried to think back to that day, the day she’d left the hospital the first time. How had she convinced them she was cured? She was cured. Or, rather, she hadn’t been sick in the first place. Because she was right. She’d always been right. If that were so, then there was no way they should’ve let her out, knowing what she knew. But they did. She tried to remember a face, a name, someone with “terrorist” tattooed someplace conveniently apparent. She tried to remember making the phone call to rat them out. There was nothing there. It was like groping along a wall in the dark and falling through an open doorway.

She knew better than to mistake that as an escape route. Either she stayed here with her principles while her brain shorted out from the light show, or she made herself a door. If they could do it, so could she. “You can let me go,” she said, her eyes still squeezed shut.

“I cannot.”

She shook her head hard and aimed an accusing finger toward his voice. “You warned me before, when I found the gap. You said they were coming. If you just look away long enough for me to get out, I promise, I can disappear.”

“I cannot.”

“You can. I’ve seen you make this place.”

When he spoke again, his voice was right in her ear. “My capabilities are not the issue.”

Startled, she jumped away from him and felt her way along the wall until she found the corner and put her back to it, shrinking a little when he followed her, even though he made no move to hurt her. The light seemed to penetrate her eyelids now, the pain a red screaming in a hollowed-out space.

“I cannot let you out because there is no out. This is all that there is.”

The memory of the gap she’d found in the wall tingled in her fingers. “That’s not true.”

“I cannot change the condition of the world. Escape from this prison would be a futile endeavour.”

“No.”

“You cannot disappear. It is their world. They will find you.”

“No.”

“They always do. I have seen it.”

“No!” Sam shoved at him. Behind her eyelids she could see the ghost image of her hands connecting with his chest, the flare of contact that exploded inside her head and whited everything out completely. When she finally opened her eyes, Teal’c was in a heap against the far wall of the cell.

“Whoa,” a voice said from above her. “Nice one.”

By reflex, Sam fell into a crouch and threw an arm up to protect the back of her head. After a second, though, she got a grip on her hindbrain and looked up toward the voice. A man was standing in the open doorway in the ceiling, looking down at her. He wore a battered motorcycle jacket and aviator glasses. His smile was thin-lipped and admiring.

The twisted perspective made Sam feel for a vertiginous moment that she was standing on the wall. She closed her eyes again and focused on her feet, which told her which way was down. Then she glared up at him. “You!”

“Jack.” He leaned back and said to someone outside, “Keep the door open.” Then he walked down the wall and onto the floor where he stopped to crouch down beside Teal’c. “Not bad,” he said. “Can’t say as I’ve seen too many people take out an S&S with one push.”

“S&S?”

Jack looked at her over his shoulder. “Surveillance and Security. Did you catch a name for this one, by any chance?”

“Teal’c.”

“I hope you don’t think that we’ll be carrying him.” Again, Sam jumped at the sound of a voice from above. This time it came from a dark-haired woman in a green coat. She pointed with her chin at Teal’c. “I bet he weighs at least a ton.”

Rising, Jack said, “He doesn’t weigh anything.” He tapped the side of his own head with a loose fist. “Remember? But you’re right. We need him up and walking. This is Verity, by the way.”

Ignoring the introduction for the moment, Sam stepped up close to Jack and tried to see past the mirrored lenses of his glasses. “You’re not supposed to be here. It’s what they want. They’re using me to get to you.”

“Hey, I’m not exactly thrilled either, but if we’re not here, it kinda puts a crimp in the whole rescue idea.”

She shook her head emphatically, even though the motion made her brain crack up against the inside of her skull. “Rescue?” She tried to push him toward the wall so he could do his freaky thing and head for the door, but he tensed up and refused to budge. “I’m the one protecting you.” Another fruitless shove and she gave up and ran her hands through her hair. “And you just walked right into their trap.”

Jack tilted his head toward the unconscious Teal’c. “We walked in and he’s going to help us walk out.”

Sam watched as Jack knelt again and started smacking Teal’c on the cheek while making “wakey-wakey” noises. “He said there’s no escape,” she said. “He said there is no outside.”

“Oh, there’s an outside, trust me.”

Sam snorted at that last bit. “Yeah, okay.” The anger was making her head throb even harder but it also made her feel stronger. “This is your fault, you know. All I wanted was a grande skinny cappuccino and they took me because of you.”

“Not entirely,” Verity said. “I wouldn’t underestimate your value.”

“What value? I’m a code-monkey, that’s all. And I don’t even know what’s real anymore.”

Verity lifted her shoulder to shrug and offered Sam a toothy smile. “That’s what makes you valuable.” She shifted her attention to Jack, who was sitting Teal’c up and checking his pupils. “Are we sure we want to wake him? Given that his entire purpose is to expose or kill us, or both.”

“He won’t tell,” Sam said.

Jack aimed a scowl at her over his shoulder. “He won’t if he’s dead. And if he’s dead, so are we.”

“That’s a lovely catch-22,” Verity replied dryly.

“He won’t tell,” Sam repeated. “And he’s not dead.”

“He looks kind of on the dead side,” Jack said. “No pulse.”

“He’s not dead.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s still glowing.”

Jack raised his eyebrows. “He’s glowing?”

“Yes. So are you.”

Jack lifted his hand and turned it over, made a fist and opened it to waggle his fingers. Each movement left a little streak of light in the air. “Huh. I’ll have to take your word for it.” Wiping his hand on his thigh, he asked, “What else do you see?”

“Numbers. No, not numbers exactly. Symbols.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.” Jack’s mirrored stare was giving her the creeps, so she fell to her knees beside Teal’c. “And it’s making my head explode and I want to get out of here, Teal’c, so please wake up.”

With a jerk, Teal’c opened his eyes. Half a second later he was on his feet. “You are unauthorized,” he said to Jack, then looked up at the open doorway. “This entry is unauthorized.”

Moving out of arm’s reach, Jack held up his hands. “Just hang on there before you go calling in the boys in black. We come with an offer.”

Maybe it was Sam’s wishful thinking making her see things, but it seemed to her that Teal’c’s wary stance relaxed just a fraction. “What kind of an offer?”

“You come with us, walk us past the Harlan at the Gate, and you get a place to go, outside. Protection from the agents.” He hesitated and a frown put notches between his eyebrows. “Freedom.” Something about the word twisted his mouth into a momentary scowl. “A whole world. Everything a guy like you could want.” Jack lowered his head a little so he could look over the top of his glasses. “Unless you really like it in here.” He made a show of surveying the room. “Nice view.”

“What I like or dislike is immaterial.”

Verity let out an abrupt, surprised laugh. “I’ll say. Muscles, I think you may be a poet.”

Jack rocked back on his heels and chewed the inside of his cheek. “Okay,” he said after a few seconds, “then don’t do it for you. Do it for her.” He reached over and dragged Sam up beside him. “You think she deserves this?” He gave her a little shake for emphasis. “Do any of them?”

Letting her go, he smoothed out her sleeve with a kind of brusque gentleness that made Sam’s eyes prickle with tears. His touch felt real. Against the trickling shadows that still traced the walls of the cell, he stood out in bright, warm tones, unlike anyone she’d seen before. When Sam looked up at the doorway, Verity was the same. Both were outlined by a shifting silver glow like an aura. Around Teal’c was that same hard-edged gold. Sam pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, but she could still see them, ghostly, against a backdrop of running symbols she didn’t understand. “Please,” she whispered as the floor swayed under her feet. “Please, please, please.”

“I can save these people,” Jack said. “Help me.”

“Many have said that. They have failed.” Teal’c’s voice sizzled across the burning desert inside her head and ebbed again.

“They didn’t have what I have, which is you.” Jack’s voice, by contrast, was more like oil heating up on a frying pan, slippery, leaving small round burns in her brain. “Can we please stop yakking and get out of here?”

“There is no out of here.”

An exasperated sigh like rope burn. “I said there’s an out. Trust me.”

Teal’c’s silence must have signalled at least grudging consent because the sound of Jack’s hands clapping together snapped Sam back to the cell.

“Excellent!” Jack said. Turning to Sam, he took a moment to consider her. Then, “No time for Gravity 101,” he said. She didn’t get a chance to protest when he leaned into her and hefted her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. “Just close your eyes until we get to the door.” He grunted as he straightened under her weight.

“She doesn’t weigh a thing,” Verity reminded him. “Remember?”

Sam didn’t close her eyes, but she wished she had when Jack turned and stepped onto the wall. When gravity twisted she didn’t barf down his back, so she was going to count that a win.

⸻

Two “Komtrya"s later, they were in another elevator heading down to the Embarkation Room on the quarantine side of the Gate. Jack had to give Carter credit. When they’d stepped out of the cell into agent central, she’d gone a bit wild-eyed like a spooked horse, but it took her only a couple of minutes to settle again enough to play the part of the demoralized prisoner. Teal’c, Jack wasn’t so sure about, but so far he seemed to be holding up his end of the bargain. He got them by the Harlans with a monotone recital of codes and transfer orders and marched along beside Jack looking like a Spartan with a score to settle. Even the agents seemed to give him a little extra space.

One more major hoop or two—no pun intended—and they’d be back in the real. It was going smoothly according to plan. Jack was suspicious.

“Are you broadcasting?” he asked Teal’c.

Raising an eyebrow and looking at Jack askance, Teal’c answered, “As you have no means to verify my answer, the question is moot.”

“True. True.” Jack turned to Carter, who was standing with V against the back wall of the elevator. She looked exhausted and it was probably only the handrail she was gripping that held her up. “Is he?”

Carter blinked at him. “Is he what?”

“Broadcasting.”

“How would I know?”

“Do you see it?”

“Do I see radio waves?” When he nodded she gave him the ‘seriously?’ face and said, “If this was a cartoon, maybe.”

He parried with a ‘humour me’ face and she sighed and pushed away from the wall to look up at Teal’c. Teal’c continued to stare at the doors in front of him, apparently neither nervous nor insulted by the affront to his honour.

“There aren’t any squiggly lines radiating from his head, if that’s what you mean.”

“Thank you,” Jack said graciously and turned front again, pausing on the way to give Teal’c a smug grin. “Moot, he says.”

“You people are all crazy,” Carter muttered.

Jack let the grin widen a little bit. “Only the sane ones.”

⸻

Jack hated being right. In particular, he hated being right about how the cards in that whole fake-world poker game were essentially stacked against him. Currently, that premise was embodied by the three agents who were looking down at them from the control room.

Sure, the trip through the Gate was a cake-walk. Just some jittery atomization and reconstitution (just add water) and boom they were stomping down the ramp trying not to look like they were in a hurry. Teal’c was in the lead, with Carter right behind him and V and Jack bringing up the rear, nonchalance personified. The Gate made a tearing sound and the shimmery water disappeared, closing the door behind them. And then, just as they were making their way toward the blast doors, Jack risked a look up at the control room and there were those three blank faces with their dark glasses aimed right at him. Like they were the synchronized swim team of doom, all three of the agents lifted their hands to their earpieces.

“Stroll faster, kids,” Jack advised sotto voce, at the same time Teal’c said, “We have been exposed. They are coming for us.”

Two seconds later the blast doors on either side of the Embarkation Room slammed shut and the shield over the control room window rumbled into place and sealed with an emphatic crunch.

“I knew it,” Jack said. “You were broadcasting.”

Teal’c turned in a circle, following Jack as he paced around him. “I was not. But I told you: there is no escape. It was inevitable that they should stop us.”

V pulled her weapons. “You know what, Mr. Gloomy? The inevitable makes me very cranky. I think I would like to shoot the inevitable in the face.”

“It will avail you nothing.”

“You should consider a career in motivational speaking,” Jack said. He spun around to take in the room. “What are they up to? Are they gonna gas us? What?”

“They are sending reinforcements.”

As if on cue—and Jack wasn’t sure that this wasn’t in fact the case—the Gate started making that grinding sound again. A chevron lit up. Another.

“Aw crap.” He aimed his Beretta at Teal’c. “Make it stop.”

“I cannot. It is not within my power.”

“Great.” Another chevron. Incoming connections seemed faster than outgoing ones, or maybe it was just that death came on galloping horses riding adrenaline storms or something. Jack actually cracked a grin; Daniel would appreciate that one, if not the fact that Jack was about to flatline right in front of his eyes. Another chevron. Sorry, Daniel, Jack thought, and wondered if the apology would show up somehow on the EEG back in the rig.

“Wait,” Carter interrupted Jack’s mental farewell. “Wait, waitwaitwait. It’s here. It’s right here.” She dropped to her knees and started to feel along the floor.

“What is? Look, we don’t have time to go hunting for your contact lens right now.”

“Funny.” Bracing herself on one hand, she used the other to reach behind her and grab for Teal’c’s pantleg. “Come on! Help me. It’s right here.”

After a hesitation in which another chevron lit up, he knelt beside her. Then the two of them plunged their hands into the floor. It must have been about as unpleasant as you’d expect because Carter’s face crumpled up in a grimace of pain, but she didn’t pull out. Instead, she seemed to throw her weight into it, like she was heaving on a heavy trap door.

Another chevron.

“Help me!”

V holstered one of her guns and leaned in. Carter grabbed her hand and led it into the concrete floor until V gasped in pain, yanked her hand away and then, after shaking it a few times, reached back in. “It’s an opening.”

Another chevron. At the same instant that the Gate coughed out its vortex of not-water, V, Carter and Teal’c heaved together and something—a tear—opened in the floor. There was a roar of golden light that competed with the silvery reflections of the puddle in the Gate, and then it settled to a sparkling border around a deep, black space. The gap didn’t seem to want to stay open, though, because Teal’c sat down and braced it with his lower back and his legs.

“They are coming,” he said. “Go now.”

Jack eyed the very, very empty-looking dark space. “Go where, exactly?”

“Anywhere but here,” Carter said and slung her legs over the edge.

Jack didn’t have to give the order. Three agents took care of that by stepping through the Gate with guns blazing. With his foot, Jack shoved Carter down the hole while laying down cover fire. V went next, dropping down gracefully in a swirl of green coat like leaping into the never-never was all about style. Bullets gouged the concrete beside Jack’s boot and he stumbled, fell sideways, and caught himself with one elbow on the edge of the hole and the other on Teal’c’s thigh. Twisting his hand into the utility pocket on the leg of Teal’c’s BDUs, he let go of the edge and dragged Teal’c in with him.

Chapter Text

Jack wasn’t expecting concrete and gravel. When he hit, his knees gave out and he pitched forward, landed on his shoulder and twisted around onto his back to aim his gun up the way he’d come. There was a thud beside him as Teal’c landed feet first and took a wide step backward to catch his balance and avoid crushing Jack with his boot. Whatever the gap had been, it was closed, and a cold, greasy rain fell out of an empty grey sky onto Jack’s face. Craning his neck, Jack found V and Carter crouched together in the shelter of the overhanging roof of a small maintenance shed a few yards away. The rain stuttered on the tin roof of the shed and, beneath that chatter, Jack could hear the drone of traffic, the occasional blaring of a horn, and farther away, the wail of police sirens. They were out. Sort of.

“Sweet,” he said as he clambered to his feet and snapped his phone open. While it dialled, he stepped over to the edge of the roof and looked down. They were at least twenty stories up. Across the narrow side street, the next building was mostly dark, only a few windows lit up in the late afternoon gloom.

“Operator.” Daniel’s voice was wound tight enough to cut metal. “Jesus.”

“Good to hear you, too. Get a lock on us and find an exit.”

“I’ll have to run a search. Where the hell are you?”

“No idea,” Jack admitted. “A roof downtown. South side, I think.”

Jack turned on his heel, looking for familiar landmarks. He raised his eyebrows at V, who shook her head. Teal’c was clearly not going to be any help, given that he was staring around him with his mouth hanging open a little bit in what Jack could only assume was the S&S equivalent of dumbfounded amazement. Teal’c tilted his head back and blinked upward into the rain like he was catching his first glimpse of heaven.

A tense pause on the line, then, “Sorry. The code is—” Daniel launched into a technobabble description of something that translated loosely in Jack’s brain as hinky and probably had something to do with Carter’s magic disappearing doorway. “It’s going to take a minute to sort this out.”

Since Daniel already knew they didn’t really have a minute, Jack didn’t bother reminding him. He could picture Daniel’s fingers flying over the keyboard as he homed in on them. Until he did, they were sitting ducks with no way to see if there were agents slithering through the code in their direction. Jack yanked off his glasses and wiped at his eyes with the back of his wrist. “Okay. We got Carter. We’re going to do the extraction right here, so tell Walter to get on the stick.”

This time the pause conveyed disapproval. “Not exactly controlled conditions.”

“If you can find us, so can they. It’s now or never. Find an exit.” Jack disconnected and stuffed the phone and his shades in his jacket pocket with one hand while reaching into an inside pocket with the other. He jerked his head at V, who helped Carter to her feet and brought her over.

“It’s okay,” V said to Carter. “We’ve all done it. You’ll be fine.”

Carter looked at her warily, then transferred the look to Jack. “Done what exactly?”

Turning his back to Teal’c, Jack held his open hand toward Carter. “Usually there’s a whole speech about the rabbit hole yadda yadda, but we don’t exactly have time for that, so—” He pointed at the blue pill. “Your so-called life.” He pointed at the red one. “Your real life.”

Hesitating even less than Daniel had, Carter took the red pill off of his palm and swallowed it. “Now what?”

V grinned. “Now, darling, you go to funky town.”

The effects of the pill were pretty immediate. A notch appeared between Carter’s eyebrows as her gaze turned inward. “Funky town? How?”

With a warning glance over his shoulder at Teal’c, who had stopped staring at the brave new world and was now watching them, Jack said, “Can’t go into that. Just trust me.”

Carter was shivering now, and not because of the needling rain. “You keep saying that.” She lifted her eyes to his and with an effort focused on him. Her teeth were chattering, her lips blue. “Is it going to hurt?”

“O-oh yeah.”

A wan smile. “Great.”

Then her eyes went wide and unseeing, so Jack grabbed her by her shoulders and shook her sharply. “Listen to me, Carter.” Another shake that made her head loll a little bit, but she blinked and focused on him again. “You just have to remember one thing. When you wake up, keep your head above water, got it? That’s all you gotta do. Remember. Keep your head above water and we’re coming for you.”

“That’s two things.”

Jack was about to warn her about being a smartass when their luck, such as it was, turned tail and ran out.

He heard the crack of the gunshot at the same time V collided with him hard, shoving him into Carter. V’s cry of pain was lost in his own shout as, by reflex, he grabbed for Carter, catching her hand as she tipped over the edge of the roof, dragging him with her so he fell sprawling at the edge with a really nice view of Carter’s face and twenty stories of straight down. He felt a weight come down across his legs, anchoring him against the pull of Carter’s body. She swung out over the dizzying drop and then back to crash against the wall of the building. She scrambled at the brick with her bare feet but couldn’t get any purchase. Slipping, she jerked Jack forward a few more inches so that his belt buckle caught on the steel edging of the roof which jammed him hard in the gut.

“No,” Carter said with a weird, flat detachment. Her eyes were wide, the blue irises almost lost in fathomless black pupils as the pill dissolved and started screwing with her connection to the matrix.

Jack could hear the spitting of bullets strikes in the gravel to his left, the prang of ricochets against the corrugated metal of the maintenance shed, the almost not-sound percussion of returning fire from beside him. His phone slipped from his pocket, bounced off of Carter’s shoulder and fell on, an intermittent winking light as it tumbled into the well between the buildings. A long few seconds later, it landed, setting off a car alarm.

Carter’s hand was rain-slick in his, slipping free. She slapped at his sleeve with her other hand, but couldn’t get a grip on the wet leather. “No,” she said again, still connected to this world enough to feel a distant fear of gravity. “Jack.”

“Remember,” Jack told her and let her go.

It took forever for her to fall. It seemed like time was distended, just like the space around her, the regular lines of the two buildings with their yellow-lit windows and snaking fire escapes distorting downward as if stretching to take her weight. Her eyes were huge as she drew away from him, hands still outstretched, her mouth opening in a silent scream as the matrix torqued around the corrupted data, adapted, recoded, remade itself. When space snapped back into place again, Sam Carter was gone. It was up to Daniel and Walter to catch her now.

⸻

“I’m out!”

V’s shout jerked Jack back to the here-and-now, where bullets were still gouging divots in the rooftop and sending gravel into the grey air in fans of stinging debris. Reaching out a hand and shifting his weight off of Jack’s legs, Teal’c pulled him back onto the roof, where they got turned around in time to see V patting down her coat, looking for another clip. The green wool was made darker by a widening pool of blood under her right leg. With a grunt of frustration, she heaved the empty Glock toward the dark rectangle of the open access door halfway across the roof. It was a good forty feet away, too far to make a run for. The spent Glock spun twice when it hit the deck and then skidded through the doorway and down the stairs. Jack swore as he grabbed V by her collar and dragged her further into the meagre cover behind the maintenance shed.

Once Teal’c was squeezed in beside them, Jack nodded him toward V and eased over to peek around the corner to get a quick read on the situation. There were plenty of cops in SWAT gear, two of them hunkered down near the roof access door and the rest, five or six at least, darting from vent shaft to skylight to take up flanking positions. Crouched behind the nearest skylight was the dark form of an agent. Jack swore again and wished he’d hung on to Carter and her magic doorway powers just a little bit longer. A shot rang against the metal of the shed about six inches from his eye and Jack shrank back into cover.

“How serious is your injury?” Teal’c was asking V, who was swatting away his attempts to get a look.

Her lips had gone white in a very pale face washed by the rain and smeared under her chin by a swipe of black-red blood. “It hurts, Muscles. It hurts like a sonofabitch and all his cousins, is what, and I threw my gun away and that makes me very sad and angry and no it’s not just the same as the other one yes that hurts get away from me Jack I swear there had better be a beach at the end of this where is my other gun—”

Jack put his hand over her mouth. “You’re not really shot.” He could feel her saying, “I feel really shot!” against his palm, and she seemed like she might go on for awhile, so he left his hand there so he could think in peace and quiet, if, that is, he didn’t count the car alarm still whooping away in counterpoint to the police sirens wailing louder and more insistently the closer they got, and the irregular clanging and singing of rounds connecting with their pathetic bit of cover. When he let V go to check his last clip—only four rounds left—she’d wound down and her eyes had started to roll. She was going into shock. If they were gonna go, it had to be soon.

A quick look out at the roof and the layout of the players told him, depressingly, that the coppers and the agent weren’t going to line up neatly so that he could dispatch them in pairs with his last four bullets.

“What is your strategy?” Teal’c asked. There was a wicked welt across the side of his bald head, just above his ear. A way-too-close call. Seemed he was vulnerable out here the way he wasn’t in his own domain. That wasn’t good news. Or maybe it was, depending on which side he ultimately ended up on. Either way, Jack filed that little bit of intel away for the future.

“Fucked if I know,” Jack said as he fumbled in V’s pocket for her phone. “Unless Daniel’s found us a miracle exit.”

Before he could dial, the phone rang in his hand and he snapped it open.

“Sir!”

Jack actually held the phone away from him to look accusingly at it before putting it back to his ear. “Walter? What the hell? Where’s—?”

“Above you, sir!”

Jack looked up toward the roof of the little shed and into the muzzle of a gun. Behind it, a man-shaped shadow loomed against the darkening sky. There was a sudden silence.

“Hello, Jack. It’s been a long time.”

Jack felt the world slide sideways as the voice caught him and dragged him back to a very bad place in his head. He rose slowly and planted his feet against the undertow. “Maybourne,” he said sourly. “Believe me, it’s not long enough.”

“Aw, Jack. I thought we were past such acrimony. It’s too bad we won’t get a second chance to work things out.” The agent shifted his attention to Teal’c. “Good work, Teal’c. Your services are no longer required here.”

When Jack shot Teal’c a glare, all he got was a blankly neutral expression in return.

As Teal’c stood, V let out a low moan. “Oh, Muscles. You break a girl’s heart.”

If the accusation meant anything at all to him, Teal’c didn’t let it show. Instead, he took one last look around at the city spread out below him, then met Jack’s eye. “Thank you,” he said with a small bow, “for showing me this world.”

Jack couldn’t get his jaws to unlock, and there wasn’t any point saying anything, anyway. It wasn’t even a betrayal, really. A scorpion would always be a scorpion and codeface was a codeface. Jack felt suddenly more tired than he ever had before. In his hand where the phone was still connected, Walter was shouting something, his voice tinny and indecipherable under the rattle of the rain on the shed’s roof.

Sorry, Daniel, Jack thought for the second time in less than half an hour, and damn, he should’ve spent some time when he had it thinking up something more eloquent in the way of last words. Except those were the ones that mattered, so screw it. He thought about closing his eyes.

But he didn’t, and because he didn’t, he saw it when Teal’c’s lips quirked up a tiny bit on one side. “This world has many opportunities,” Teal’c said, and reached up with a speed that turned his arms to a blurry streak and left a hole in the rain. He grabbed Maybourne by the ankle, yanked him off the shed, and flung him off the roof.

Jack had just enough time to see the agent spread-eagled against the lights of the city before a new barrage of bullets made him hunch down again next to Teal’c, who was now busy pulling knives of various sizes and shapes from inside V’s coat.

After taking a few seconds to adapt to the slight seasickness he was getting from all these sudden changes of direction, Jack slapped Teal’c on the shoulder and waited for him to pause to look at him. “Thanks.”

“You are welcome.”

“They aren’t going to like you anymore, y’know.”

Teal’c cocked his head. “What they like or dislike is immaterial.” He didn’t stay to see Jack’s grin, but rose to a crouch and inched along to the far side of the shed. “Perhaps you can find an emergency exit.”

Jack poked his head out to look at the uprights of the fire escape jutting up at the corner of the roof. There was a glint of reflected light. Someone hunkered down with a rifle just at roof level.

“Too exposed. They’ll cut us down.” Even if they could make it past the cops, an agent on the roof meant they’d cut the hard line, so there was no point doubling back through the building, and twenty flights was a long way to carry V as dead weight. Once on the ground they’d be picked off for sure. Somewhere in the real, Sam Carter was drowning. Jack rubbed his hand across his mouth and lifted the phone to his ear. “Walter, we’re going to jump for it. Find us an exit over there.”

Teal’c followed his gaze to the roof of the next building and looked back at him with a raised eyebrow.

“I can make it. No sweat.” Jack pushed himself up onto the balls of his feet and gave V a reassuring grin. She looked sceptical but for once kept her mouth shut.

“That rooftop is also exposed.”

“Yeah, but it’s over there. Over there is better.”

“I will remain to cover your retreat, to provide a distraction.”

Jack got his arms cradled under V and was ready to lift her, but he stopped. “There’s a lot of them, even for you.” He eyed the welt on the side of Teal’c’s head. “You’re not invincible. Not out here.”

Teal’c’s lips thinned in what Jack could only describe as a deadly smile. “I will hold my ground. It is the least I can do for someone who has given me the world.” He held out his hand.

Chewing on his lip, Jack hesitated, but only for a second before handing Teal’c his Beretta, butt first. “Don’t waste ’em.” He waggled a finger at the gun. “I mean the bullets. Those guys you can waste all you want.”

“Wait, wait,” said V and yanked the ring of throwing stars out from wherever she kept them. “These are sexy. Good for a poet.” She tossed them to Teal’c, who caught the ring one-handed and offered her a bow of thanks.

“Get out as fast as you can. They’ll send more agents.”

“I will.”

Jack scooped V up and put his back against the side of the shed. From there, he’d only have a few steps to build up some momentum and then it was about 40 yards of nothing and a long way down, and he’d never done a jump while carrying someone else. “Okay,” he told himself. “It’s less Wile E. Coyote and more Superman, that’s all. No sweat.” Another barrage of bullets played steel drums on the shed. Teal’c tensed, ready to move.

Clinging to Jack’s neck, V looked up at him, a toothy smile on her pale, blood-smeared face. “Well, I for one am brimming with confidence,” she declared and passed out, her head falling against his shoulder.

“Good to know.” With a last nod at Teal’c, Jack swiped a figurative hand across his mind to erase any thoughts of flying bullets and the laws of gravity, took three long strides, and launched himself into the air.

Back before he was yanked from the matrix, Jack had flown a lot in dreams. He joined the Air Force and became a pilot, but as much as he’d loved the Nighthawks, they never quite caught it for him, the control and effortlessness of dream-flying. When he made his first jump off of a roof—after Charlie, that was—and didn’t hit the ground like an exploding watermelon like he half-hoped, but instead landed not so gently as he had in his dreams, but gently enough to survive it, Jack started to wonder if maybe he was dreaming all the time, and what it might be like to wake up. That’s when the agents found him. Fortunately, Morpheus found him pretty quick after that, but not before Maybourne had tied him down and slipped a bug in his gut. It all worked out though, in the end. Jack lived to dream another day, only now he did it for the cause. Jack wasn’t what Morpheus had been looking for, and Jack had never bought into the fervour that lit up Morpheus’s young face back then and still did now, but one thing Morpheus gave him was the ability to tell when he was awake. Most of the time, Daniel was there beside the rig to remind him it was worth it.

So it was Daniel Jack was thinking of when he leaped over the street, over the cop cars skewed across the lanes twenty stories down with their lights strafing the brick faces of the buildings. And it was Daniel whose name was jolted out of him when he hit the far roof, buckling under V’s weight and rolling to protect her against the crush of his own. He was up and running again in seconds, racing just ahead of the bullets pocking the tar behind his feet.

At the access door, he had to stop to put V down, bracing her with his hip against the wall while he got the door open. He paused then, looked back the way he’d come to see Teal’c laying on like something out of a video game, almost a blur in the dull light, and guys in SWAT gear scattering around him like cast-off or broken crows. Overseeing it all from the roof of the maintenance shed was Ba’al’s schoolgirl, her braids hanging limply in the rain and a P90 slung across her chest. She took out a guy who was drawing a bead on Teal’c from behind a ventilation shaft. Then she turned and blew Jack a quick kiss before sending another guy dancing with a short burst of fire. A breath or two later, only she and Teal’c were left standing on the roof. Teal’c nodded in Jack’s direction and Jack lifted a hand in thanks.

But that was all the time he had. Somewhere on the floor below him a phone was ringing.

He threw V over his shoulder and keyed his phone as he took the steps too fast for safety.

“Apartment 1909,” Walter said before Jack could ask. “One flight down. Go right out of the stairwell and left at the end of the hall.”

Lit by a strip of flickering fluorescent lights that turned the writhing patterns on the wallpaper the colour of drying blood, the corridor was empty. The phone stopped ringing. Jack tripped once on the seam of the carpet, but caught himself on the corner of the wall and let his momentum roll him around it into the connecting hall. 1909 was at the end. The last 9 was missing, but he could read it still as a void in the grime. The door was unlocked.

Just inside the door he was brought up short by a gun muzzle in the middle of his forehead.

“Hello again, Jack,” Maybourne said, sounding not the least bit different for having been dropped off a twenty-story building.

“Agent!” Walter’s tiny voice said over the open line in Jack’s hand. “Captain!”

Jack raised the phone to his ear. “Thank you, Walter. I can see that.”

The expression on Maybourne’s face was hard to place, something between triumph and pity, and that just didn’t sit well on anybody, least of all an agent. “It’s a shame,” Maybourne said, making that infuriating not-smile of his. “I would’ve liked to work with you some more. Ah well. Good-bye, Jack.”

Jack flicked his gaze away from his own reflection in Maybourne’s glasses and over the agent’s shoulder. When he looked back, he was wearing a smile of his own. “S’long, Maybourne,” he said.

Stepping out of the shadows, Daniel pressed his gun to the side of Maybourne’s head and fired.

If the world had a scrap of decency in it, even an agent wouldn’t survive a point-blank shot. Since the world was the world, that was too much to hope for, but at the very least Maybourne would have to reboot in someone else’s body, and that gave them a breath of time to get out. The suit at their feet morphed back into the body of the agent’s host, an old man in a housecoat and slippers. Thankfully, the shot had spun him around completely so that he’d fallen with the exit wound toward the carpet, mostly out of view.

“Oh God,” Daniel said and stepped away unsteadily. “Jesus, Jack. That’s not right.”

Jack stepped over the old guy and steered Daniel away, toward the table where the phone was ringing on a round lace doily beside an open can of Coke. He let V slide down onto the sofa, picked up the receiver and pressed it to her ear. In a moment of sparkling light, she was gone.

He cradled the phone and it rang again almost immediately. “Get out of here, Daniel.” Before he went, Jack grabbed the front of Daniel’s shirt and pulled him close. Jack could still taste his mouth even after Daniel had sizzled away into the real.

Catching the receiver as it fell, Jack glanced through the chintz curtains at the building across the street. Teal’c and the schoolgirl were making their way down the fire escape. About five floors down, still too high up to be spotted from the ground, the schoolgirl threw open a window and ushered Teal’c inside.

Jack answered the phone.

Chapter Text

“You are not cleared for combat work,” Jack growls even before Daniel has withdrawn the spike from Jack’s head.

“You’re welcome.”

“Walter? You left Walter in the chair? He hasn’t even run basic programs yet. Are you nuts?” Jack doesn’t wait to hear the answer, is out of the rig and slapping V on the face, less gently than he would under better circumstances—which would be never. “C’mon, V. Wake up.” He looks across her at Daniel. “You got a lock on Carter? You’re going to have to do the retrieval on your own.”

Daniel nods and heads for the hatch and the winch. “I’m on it.” His shoulders are hunched defensively under his sweater and that sends a pang like a needle through Jack’s chest, but he doesn’t have time to deal with it right now.

Lifting his head to aim his voice at the intercom, Jack shouts, “Walter! Move us into position and get holographics up. We’re gonna have company.”

“Already on the scope, sir,” Walter answers from the bridge.

“How many?”

“Still too far out to tell. More than one, though.”

“Great. Perfect. Peachy.”

V wakes with a jerk when Jack lifts her out of the rig. “Ow,” she says as her feet hit the deck and she sags into his arms. She grabs on tight when he swings her around and heads for the aft ladder beyond the mess. “Where are we going?” She repeats “ow” with every second step.

“You’re going to the aft gunnery rig.”

“But I’ve been shot!”

“No you haven’t.” He gets her onto the ladder and prods her up it.

“Well, my leg doesn’t believe you!”

“Your leg doesn’t have to believe me. And you don’t need your leg to work the guns.”

Her “ow, ow, ow” recedes up the ladder. Jack heads forward to the bridge.

They’re already skimming along the water heading for one of the secondary discharge pipes to the side of the main effluent pipe. V was right on the money when she picked the spot, because they’ve played the odds and won. Miraculously, Carter’s there, a white, naked form clinging to the rocks.

“Good girl,” Jacks says and manoeuvres the Hammurabi into position so Daniel can grab her with the winch and pull her in.

On holographics between him and Walter, the fuzzy blotch of colour resolves into recognizable forms: four squids in formation heading their way through the main shaft. Walter realigns the sensor dish and picks up two more speeding down the starboard tunnel. The Hammurabi is cut off. This is not going to be pretty.

As soon as Daniel signals he’s got Carter on board, Jack pulls the ship up and into the centre of the cavern, hovering over the whirlpool where the effluent is draining out through an unseen discharge point.

“V,” Jack says over the intercom. “There’s a cavern below us, right?”

“Yes. Um...” He can picture her closing her eyes to recall the maps. “Some kind of treatment plant. Then it’s out through a cheese grater and into the ocean.”

“Any exits down there that don’t leave us shredded five fathoms deep?”

“One, southeast wall, above the waterline.”

“Good to know.”

V’s voice rises an octave with the objection: “No, wait, wait. That’s a mechanical shaft. You can’t nav a mechanical shaft.”

“Look,” Jack answers testily as he juices the aft pads and the ship’s bow tips toward the swirling grey water, “unless you’ve got a better idea, this is it.”

“EMP,” Daniel says from the infirmary.

Walter shakes his head. “Still too far out. We’d have to let them get a lot closer.”

“Batteries are low,” V adds. “We never got our boost. Not sure we’ll be able to re-up.”

“In which case, if they send backup, after, we’re dead. And Carter can’t do a tunnel run on foot if it comes to that. Next option.” Jack waits for exactly one breath. “Anyone? No? Okay then.”

He guns the aft pads just as the first of the sentinels leaves the tunnel to starboard and swerves to intercept. The Hammurabi hits the water with the aft guns blazing. V crows as the squid takes a hit and spins away from them before they’re completely submerged. As Jack expected, the water shuts down the pads, but they’ve got enough momentum going and gravity is on their side. Besides, the water is surging hard and carrying them along. Jack just hopes the discharge pipe is as uniform as he remembers it from the map, and that the machines haven’t done any renovations since the map was made. Bile green water boils against the front port. Daniel yells something about a flood in the hatch-room and the indicator light on the console in front of Walter confirms. Walter’s fingers are white-knuckled, but he pumps the charge lever above his head with a measured rhythm.

They’ve been in the pipe for way too long when there’s a sharp squeal of feedback over the intercom and the ship shudders. They’ve grazed something. Another warning light flares and Walter shuts it off.

“There goes the aft gunnery array,” V announces.

Jack mouths, “Oops,” and goes back to wrestling with the sticks to keep the ship from spinning in the churning outflow. It’s no picnic with only the docking thrusters to work with.

“If you can hold it steady, Captain, I’m going to switch to the forward rig.” V’s “ow, ow, ow” fades and then gets louder as she leaves the aft rig and moves into range of the forward intercom mic.

She’s mid-“ow” when the Hammurabi shoots out of the pipe and into the blackness of the effluent treatment cavern. The ship hangs in the air for a moment before gravity catches her and pulls her into a downward trajectory that would be rather beautiful if it wasn’t going to kill them all in about five seconds.

“Now!” Jack shouts and Walter jabs the restart. Nothing. “Again!”

This time, the ship shudders and fills with a rising whine as all sixteen pads flare at once. The cavern comes alive, shadows writhing away from the electric blue arcs that crackle out from the pads in all directions and stutter along the cavern walls and the ceiling with its inverted landscape of twisted rebar and the underside debris of a long-ago-fallen city. The ship hangs bow-downward for a moment in its own frenetic corona until Jack eases it level again and Walter damps the dorsal pads.

Holographics flickers and comes back on-line to show them three squids exiting the discharge pipe above them. They splay their tentacles to brake and then dive toward the ship.

“V! You’re on.”

“I see them.” The ship vibrates with the percussion of the guns. “Heave to!” V shouts. “I can’t track them.”

Without the aft array, the coverage is literally half-assed, and Jack tweaks the starboard pads to swing the ship around and keep the squids in the firing zone of the forward guns. The bright blue arc-light fades in the orange flash of a direct hit. Shrapnel from the exploding squid peppers the ship like Morse code. A few seconds later, another squid takes a hit and falls headlong into its lurid reflection in the black lake below them. V’s whoop of triumph turns to an exasperated “Oh please” when the other two squids exit the pipe above to join the remaining one from the first squadron. The ship yaws as Jack brings her around, but the squids have figured out the Hammurabi’s one gun down and are keeping out of the sweep of the forward array.

“Daniel!”

“Here, Jack.”

“Get yourself an arc rifle. They get through they’re gonna try to breach the hull at the damaged array.”

“Already there.”

Not a moment too soon. V hisses a curse and the ship rings with sound of impact and then the clank of tentacles latching onto the hull, followed by the sizzle of cutting lasers.

“Okay,” Jack mutters, “that is just about enough of that.”

He tells Walter to get a lock on the mechanical shaft on the southeast wall, and when he’s got the data up on the screen, Jack barks a series of orders, pad numbers and percentages. Walter can barely keep up, but he manages, although his eyes look a little wild once he realizes what Jack’s up to.

“Hang on, kids.”

All the pads but those aft and port go dark. The Hammurabi wheels around, its searchlights sweeping the cavern and revealing two squids now dead ahead. Then the aft pads power down and the bow pads light up. The inertia throws Jack forward into his harness as the ship surges backward, full speed toward the mechanical shaft. Tracers from the guns light up the blackness above the cones of the ship’s searchlights, and there’s a series of small flares where the rounds connect with one of the pursuing squids. Marginal damage.

“Come on!” V says and this time her aim is better. The squid takes the shots right in the eyes and goes down in a snarl of tentacles.

At the aft gunnery array, Daniel fires the arc rifle and the charge that dissipates through the ship lifts the hair on Jack’s arms. Two more shots and he announces, panting, that the invading squid is dead.

“Two hundred yards,” Walter announces tightly.

“Stand by.”

“Trajectory is off by twenty degrees. We’re going to miss it.”

“Stand by.”

On the nav screen, the mechanical shaft is an open mouth with teeth. It’s big enough. Barely. But Walter’s right: they’re going to miss it. The pursuing squid is a few dozen yards away, right in the light cone directly in front of the bow, below the line of fire, following like it’s riding their wake. Jack can practically feel the heat of its red gaze. The wall of the cavern looms up behind them in the reflected arc-light.

“Sir—”

“Now!”

Walter’s programmed sequence initiates. Pads flare: aft, full-burn, then forward ventral pads, 50%, aft dorsal 20% and on. Slamming hard on the brakes, the Hammurabi does a backflip. The ship shrieks in the twist of forces. In front of the forward screen, the cavern ceiling passes in a blur, then the wall, then the lake. Jack registers the flare of collision as the squid overshoots, passes under them, smashes into the rock above the mechanical shaft, but he’s too busy pulling the Hammurabi out of her dive to spare any time for celebration. With a swerve that leaves his stomach on the lake, the ship skips twice across the surface of the water, slows, and comes round again to line up for the shaft. Remnants of the last squid still burn on the rock shelf above the opening or fall, trailing sparks and smoke, into the gloom.

“Holographics,” Jack says.

Walter looks at him wall-eyed for a second, then peels his fingers from his harness and brings up the feed. “Nothing in range.”

Nodding, Jack eases the ship between the jagged teeth of the mechanical shaft. Pipes and conduits snake along the walls and jut out at unexpected angles. The going will be slow.

“Everybody okay?”

There’s a burst of what sounds like very annoyed static over the intercom and then V says in her most dire of voices, “You made me throw up on myself, Captain. That is so not attractive.”

Jack grins but squashes it when he sees Walter watching. “Daniel?”

“Alive.”

“Carter?”

“Alive too. And Jack?”

“Daniel.”

“Please don’t ever do that again.”

Chapter Text

It’s cold on the ship and Jack’s knees are aching. Walter’s alone in the mess, asleep on his folded arms at the table. V’s in her crib with headphones on and her leg propped up on a bunched up coat. When Jack looks in on her, she cheerfully flips him the bird and turns up the volume. As he passes through the main deck with its darkened operator’s station, he can hear her singing snatches of something he doesn’t recognize, probably pirated from the matrix. He can’t say as the machines have much taste in music.

He finds Daniel sacked out on a cot in the infirmary with his arm thrown over his eyes. He lifts his legs, though, when he hears Jack coming and makes room for him. Jack slumps down against the bulkhead and lets Daniel stretch his legs out again across his lap. Jack’s almost asleep when Daniel’s voice comes muffled through his sweater sleeve.

“How’s V?”

“Whiny and insubordinate,” Jack says with his eyes closed. Even so, the light from Carter’s med-rig bleeds through.

“So, in other words, she’s okay.”

It takes Jack a second to remember who they’re talking about. The negative image of Carter on the brightly lit bed, bristling with stim needles, floats inside his eyeballs. “V’s fine. She’ll forgive me. Always does.” Still wanting to curl to grip the sticks, his hands lying on Daniel’s legs feel heavy and nerveless, like they belong to someone else, but Daniel’s weight is familiar and warm, even if it’s making Jack’s knees twinge. He shifts his boots on the deck and tries to keep himself from sliding sideways. There was a reason he came down here.

“Oh yeah. Heard from the Nebuchadnezzar. They’re still tied up, but Captain Niobe’s going to swing by with the Logos and give us a boost, escort us back to Zion.”

Daniel grunts. “So we play dead and hope the squids don’t get here first.”

“That’s the plan.”

Jack’s pretty sure they’re safe for now. They followed the mechanical for hours, sliding into side-tunnels, doubling back, all on the lowest possible burn, until they found a cavern off of one of the main shafts where they could go to ground. The dog-fight with the sentinels drained the batteries to practically nil and there’s no way they’re going to risk jacking into a conduit to siphon some juice. So the ship is cold and Jack’s knees are aching.

“That was quite a move,” Daniel says. “In the cavern, deking out the squid.”

“Thank you.”

“Learn that in fake flight school?”

“Actually, I learned that from a Roadrunner cartoon.”

Daniel’s low laugh vibrates through his body and into Jack’s hands. “Don’t tell Walter that. It’ll ruin his image of you.”

“Perish the thought.”

The med-rig peeps a warning and then the warmth of Daniel’s legs is gone.

“She’s waking up,” he says and leans on Jack’s thigh to push himself up off of the cot.

Scrubbing at his face with both hands, Jack yawns wide enough to crack his jaw, then watches Daniel checking the monitors where the squiggly lines are saying something important about Carter’s brain. He suppresses a groan and gets up to shuffle over to the med-rig, one fist screwed into his eyesocket. “How’s she doing?” he asks, but the end of the question gets swallowed when he’s ambushed by another yawn.

Daniel squints at the monitor and then down at Carter on the bed. The stim needles that are building up her muscles vibrate almost invisibly with the charge and pierce almost every inch of her body. Between them, there are long, livid scrapes and a few deeper cuts glistening with ointment. Her skin is pale and hairless, translucent as onion paper. Blue veins are visible underneath it like an aerial map of a river system. The left side of her face is purple and swollen, the bruises deepest around her eye and fading to a delicate green on the edges along her jaw.

“She took a hell of a beating. If the current from the effluent pipe hadn’t thrown her up onto the rocks, we would’ve lost her for sure.” Daniel makes an adjustment to the stims and her muscles twitch under the skin. “I suppose Morpheus will want to take her, once we’re back in Zion.”

“That’ll be up to Carter.”

Daniel meets Jack’s gaze across the bed, and there are fine crinkles of amusement around his eyes. “Oh gee, Dad, does that mean we get to keep her?”

Jack raises his eyebrows at him and then stuffs his hands in his pockets, bounces a little before he nods in Carter’s direction. “I wouldn’t use that pet puppy language when she’s awake, if I were you. I get the feeling that even in this state she’d kick your ass.” Jack’s grin fades and, with it, the smile lines around Daniel’s eyes. “Speaking of asses,” Jack continues after a pause. “Thank you for coming in and saving mine.”

Surprised, Daniel blinks a few times and then ducks his head. This time when he says “You’re welcome,” there’s no sarcasm in it.

Taking his hands from his pockets, Jack braces them on the edge of the bed so that he can lean over it. He waits for Daniel to look up again so that they’re eye to eye over the bed’s hood. “But so help me, Daniel, you ever pull that again I swear I will bust you back to Zion and you can live out your days operating a drone in hydroponics. Got it?”

Daniel swallows. “Got it.” But then the smile lines are back. “Hydroponics, though. Sounds kind of groovy.”

“Not that kind of hydroponics.”

Another peep from the monitor draws Daniel’s attention back to Carter. He tilts his head. “Hello there.”

Carter’s eyes are a glassy blue like a doll’s and don’t seem to be tracking very well. Eventually her swimming gaze settles on Jack’s face. It takes her a couple of tries to say, “You came for me.”

“Said we would.”

When she nods, the stim needles on her shoulders and chest sway with the motion. Her eyes slide shut again.

“She’ll be in and out like this for a few days,” Daniel tells him unnecessarily. Jack’s seen more people in this state than Daniel has, even if Jack’s medical knowledge is minimal by comparison with Daniel’s.

He’s about to step away from the bed when Carter’s eyes open again and focus sharply on him, catching him up like a hook in his clothes. He leans in under the hood so she can see him better. Her fingers twitch on the bed, so Jack lays his hand over hers. The other he rests on the top of her head. The hairless skin is as soft and smooth as a baby’s.

“Am I awake?”

Jack smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “You’re awake.”

~0000~