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Alexandria is not a stranger to kidnappings. That doesn’t mean she’s used to them, exactly, because it’s kind of hard to get used to people surrounding her, shoving a bag over her head, and dragging her into an unmarked van. It just means she’s learned how to take it in stride, especially since Eve described her as a “shockingly grabbable person.”
Being brought to a police station that’s clearly been commandeered by a secretive government organization is new, though. It’s kind of a nice change of pace. It means they aren’t going to jump straight to making her into an elaborate human sacrifice. The downside is that they’ve all got guns and think she’s behind some kind of conspiracy involving magical artifacts.
The other downside is that one of them is opening a briefcase with some nasty-looking syringes in it.
“I really don’t like the drugging part,” Alexandria says. She looks up at the lady with the case, smiling nervously. They took her coat—one of her favorites, too!—when they grabbed her. And her shoes, which means her feet are cold even though she still has her socks. “I would say it’s one of my least favorites. Do we think we can skip it?”
“We can ‘skip it’ if you tell us what we want to know,” the man next to her says as he takes a seat across from her. Alexandria starts picking open the hem of her sleeve now that it’s out of his immediate line of sight. She can be out of here in a minute. They didn’t even bother cuffing her to the chair, which is a rookie mistake. “Like, for example, what’s your name, Mr…?”
“Doctor,” Alexandria corrects, ignoring the familiar nauseous twinge inside her.
“Doctor what?” The man asks.
“Oh, I’m not telling you,” Alexandria says, because she’s not. She tries to keep her tone upbeat. She knows these people could kill her. Someone they work with already threatened to once. “I’m just making sure you know it’s Dr. Last Name.”
The woman sighs and picks up one of the syringes. Okay, right to business then. It’s probably—what, midazolam, sodium thiopental, flunitrazepam? Something like that. Hopefully better than last time someone drugged her, although if it’s scopolamine, same difference for some of the psychological effects. She just has to think of simple lies. One time she got cursed so she could only tell the truth, and she’d managed alright then! Of course, it had only been Judson and Charlene around, not a bunch of government agents, but that wasn’t important right now. Everything is going to be totally fine. She just would really prefer that they didn’t put that thing in her.
“You really don’t have to do this,” Alexandria says, leaning away. “I mean, um, that is my last name. Last-name. It’s pronounced—”
“Just do it,” the man interrupts, and the woman wrenches Alexandria’s cuffed arms forward at a painful angle so the inside of her elbows faces up. She rolls up her sleeve (thankfully not the one she’s concealing the wire in) and finds the dull blue line of her median cubital vein with practiced ease.
It stings when she pokes the needle in without wiping the skin down, and Alexandria grinds her teeth so she won’t whimper because that’s embarrassing. She’s got a window of time until it kicks in. How long that window is depends on what they gave her. The kinds of “truth serum” most people are able to get their hands on are partly myth; they’re just downers that make someone more compliant. The more compliant you are, the more effort lying takes, and thus the harder it is to do. She can deal with that. But these people study magic, even if Alexandria doubts they know how it actually works. They might have the real deal. Which would be very, very bad. If that’s true, she needs to… Stall? Stalling only works if there’s someone coming to save you, and that’s not going to happen, but it’s kind of the only option she has. If she can give them an overload of information—mix the truth with the fiction in a way that’s hard to parse—she might be able to get out of this.
Until they figure out what she’s doing and start using the rest of the tools in the briefcase that were underneath the syringes, but if she thinks about that she’ll panic and the Librarian does not panic.
It’s hard to stop herself from freaking out when she can feel her brain slowing down and logic getting harder to reach.
“Let’s try again. What’s your name?” The man asks.
“Ezekiel Jones,” Alexandria says. Her voice is wobbly, but she can lie, which means this isn’t magic.
“You are not Ezekiel Jones,” the man says. He makes eye contact with the woman, who picks up a small handheld CED from the case. Alexandria leans away from it, not that there’s very many directions she can go in. There’s a stun belt in two pieces in the briefcase, too. This is bad. “Please answer the question.”
Her mouth feels dry. “Dr. Alexandria Carsen.”
The man rifles through a manila folder. She briefly catches a glimpse of some photos of herself, but there’s also a picture of Eve with her and that’s bad. “Who are your buyers?”
“I don’t have buyers,” she says, which is totally true. Unfortunately, it makes the woman come closer to her with the CED. “I don’t! I’m not a smuggler, I’m not—I don’t—”
The man raises his hand and the woman stops advancing. “You’ve been at the center of a lot of unexplainable phenomena. As a threat to the security of the United States of America, it would be very easy for you to disappear for a long time. Do you understand the position you’re in, Mr. Carsen?”
“It’s Dr. Carsen,” she corrects. Her tongue feels numb. Her fingers have stopped moving because it takes a conscious effort to go back to opening her sleeve so she can use the wire in there to pick the handcuffs. At least her hands are in front of her. “I know, and I’m telling you I’m not—look, I get the feeling we’re on the same side, here. Protecting people from magic is my whole job, just like yours, right?”
She looks back and forth between them, a little desperate.
“Just tell us what you know, Dr. Carsen,” the man says, putting the emphasis on her name like he’s doing her a big favor. She knows why he’s doing it. It makes the suspect feel like they can open up. Humanizes them. Reaffirms that they’re a team, like anything about this is teamwork. She’s not good at that but she’s probably still better than him, so hah.
But he asked a question she can answer, because she knows a lot of things.
“There aren’t any birds that are blue,” Alexandria says. Her leg bounces sluggishly under the table. Her fingers want to twitch. Paradoxically, it’s harder to stop herself from moving when she’s tired, and right now she is so tired. “It’s a—a refraction of short-wavelength blue light over the keratin pockets in their feathers. And there are only a few birds that are green. Mostly turacos. They have their own special green and red pigments, turacoverdin and turacin.”
“Not what I—” The man starts.
“The green pigment we use for painting and dyeing isn’t turacoverdin, it’s from phthalocyanine. But before we started using that, it was highly toxic,” she rambles. “It was called Scheele’s Green when it was made with arsenite, and it made a lot of people sick. We use that in rodenticides now. They sell thousands of pounds of it in New York every year, but it kills everything that eats the rats, too. Owls and hawks and coyotes, mostly. It’s a bad way to die.”
The woman steps forward again. Alexandria’s eyes flick back and forth between them, down to their hands and up to their faces.
“You’re recently divorced,” she blurts out, looking at the woman. She stops, which was the intended effect. “You have two kids. One of them is still eating baby food. You used to play—some string instrument. Guitar? Mandolin?” She knows she should know which but her head feels all… muddy. It’s harder to force the words out but she keeps going. “You had an egg and cheese bagel for breakfast. You’re from Boston, which means they must have mobilized you fast to get you to Chicago. Just because of me?”
She hadn’t even meant to end up in Chicago. The Field Museum had been an unexpected pit stop after she’d remembered an old colleague of Charlene’s had been working there since 2011 and she’d begged to be allowed to drop in. Nobody else wanted to go with her but she’d promised to bring Cassandra something from the gift shop. Maybe the DOSA had their eye on something there and she had just happened to stop by and throw up a bunch of red flags. If they’ve been following her as closely as they clearly want to, they wouldn’t need to ask her for her name. They really must not have gotten much out of chicken guy.
“Interesting trick,” the woman says, the first words she’s spoken this whole time. Technically, Alexandria heard her in the hall, which is how she knew about the Boston accent, but she’d thought she was going to try to stay silent the whole time. She looks at the man, who inclines his head. “But not what we’re looking for.”
She puts down the CED and picks up the pieces of the stun belt. Bad. This is still very bad. Alexandria turns to the man. “You’re—not married. Long term girlfriend. The burn on your hand is from when you used to work at a restaurant as a teenager. Fast food, not big on OSHA compliance. You have a dog and a cat—two cats. One black and white, and one orange. Your dog is a Rottweiler.”
She stops when he looks at her condescendingly. The stun belt straps onto her calf and tightens until it’s uncomfortably snug. The battery box digs into her skin through her pants. She has enough coordination left to try to pull her leg away, but her body won’t respond fast enough for it to make any difference.
“You don’t have to,” she tries—pleads. She doesn’t like pleading.
“Dr. Carsen,” the man says, using the same tone one might employ when talking to a small child about adult concepts like taxes and colonoscopy appointments, “we are talking about the fate of the country. The greatest threat to the United States is not any foreign government, because we have contingencies in place that protect us in the event of a world power attempting to take control of our affairs. The greatest threat is the unexplainable forces you clearly have a connection to. We’re putting out fires before they can get out of control. You may be able to tell us how to stop them from starting in the first place.”
“That’s not how magic works,” she insists without even having to think. Her words and sentences keep running into each other. She’s gotten the wire out of her sleeve now. “It’s not like a gun you can point in a certain direction, it’s—it’s wild, it’s like its own living thing. It’s not something you should be messing with. There’s—there’s rules, and—”
The woman picks up a remote from the briefcase and Alexandria’s words die in her throat. She braces herself even though it’s pointless, but the shock doesn’t come.
“Why don’t you tell us who you really are?” The man says. “Not just your name. The rest of it.”
Alexandria swallows tightly. “I’m the—I’m a Librarian.”
The electricity makes her vision go white, her body locking as her mouth fills with the taste of bitter metal. It burns its way up from her leg in a wave, but extricating specific points of pain from the rest of the searing agony that rips through her is impossible. She can’t scream because her jaw is completely clenched and she can’t move and she can’t do anything and her whole body burns. There’s no way to control the convulsions. Her body is frozen but her muscles are jumping and twitching beneath her skin and every inch of her hurts like steel on steel.
It feels like it goes on forever, even though she knows it’s less than ten seconds. It’s longer than its been before, and it tastes different. Magic shocks taste like burnt toast. Regular ones apparently taste like blood. It’s making her brain feel even slower.
“I’m not lying,” she says through tears. It’s humiliating how the room is swimming. The handcuffs. She’s supposed to be getting out of here, she’s supposed to be picking the cuffs. Her fingers are still spasming, enough that she’d dropped the wire into her lap. She tries to scoop it back up without them noticing. “I—you can check my name, I used to work in New York.”
The woman raises the remote. Not pressing any of the buttons. And the horrible thing is that Alexandria feels herself cringe, feels the desire to give up and just tell them what they want to know through her now-clumsy lips and numb tongue. It’s not fair that they’re doing good cop/bad cop stuff to her. That’s only supposed to work when she and Eve do it.
Eve. She really wants Eve. She tries not to say that out loud. She tries to think about anything else. She knows she should be able to figure out what drug they gave her based on the effects and the time it took to kick in, but it’s—hard, her brain’s not working and usually that’s the only part of her that works so it’s extra frustrating.
“Who are the people you were with in Boston?” The man asks. His eyes flicker. He’s lying, but about what she can’t tell. “We have their faces, but not their names, except that of the known fugitive whose identity you attempted to assume earlier.”
Alexandria wouldn’t call giving the wrong name “assuming someone’s identity.” Oh, huh, she might have mumbled that out loud, based on how amused the man and the woman now both look. Her head is kind of spinning. She coughs a little to cover up the click of the handcuffs opening. At least that comes down to muscle memory. She could pick those apart in her sleep if she had to, and one time she did.
“Who were they?” The man pushes.
That’s the line, Alexandria decides. She won’t lead them home. She won’t. They can’t—they can’t have them. She probably shouldn’t even have said Jones’ name, but it’s not like he’ll be dealing with anything new; she’s seen his files, there’s probably no country in the world he’s not actively wanted for burglary except Antarctica. No, wait, Eve said they had to go to Antarctica once, so he’s definitely wanted there, too. But they’re not getting any more names.
The woman pushes the button again.
It lasts for the same amount of time as the first one, but somehow it feels longer. Her vision is even more blurred when it ends, the muscles in her face convulsing. She feels like she can’t connect one thought to the next, like the shock is pushing the pieces of her brain further and further from each other.
“Stop,” she slurs. Is she dizzy from the electricity or is it the drug sinking deeper? She can’t tell. Her head’s all fuzzy.
“Names.” The man opens his folder again and slides the photos forward. He sets the ones of her aside, along with the one of Jones that for some reason looks like it was taken in the world’s most insane photo booth. He taps the picture of Eve. “I’ll even make it easy for you. Can you confirm that this woman is Colonel Eve Baird?”
“...Nooo,” Alexandria says, even though they clearly know she’s lying. Her face feels so heavy. Of course they know Eve’s name. She’s got a very memorable face, and she’s got official paperwork and stuff, and if they have facial recognition software she’s probably all over it. They probably had her name and only did this stupid thing for—for fun or for power or whatever. They probably know all about the Library and everything.
This time when the shock goes through her, it wrings out a cry of pain. She tries to count the seconds but her brain won’t work. It’s almost impossible to keep her hands down like they’re still restrained. She tries asking them to stop again but her mouth just won’t do what she wants it to. The rest of her moves but it’s taking all her energy to make that happen and there’s nothing left for talking. And she likes talking!
“I think we’re fading,” the woman says, clearly disappointed. She frowns at Alexandria. “So we learned nothing? You couldn’t have asked something we didn’t know the answer to?”
“We learned pain works, and that’s better than we had before,” the man points out. He stands up. “Establishing a baseline of compliance is helpful with these ones. We’ll ship him back to Boston tomorrow, see what General Rockwell can do with him and if she thinks he can fix you-know-who. Dose him again and keep the stun belt on him while we move him.”
They’re going to drug her again, and that’s definitely going to put her out. No, no, they could take her anywhere— if she doesn’t get out of here now getting out later will be… highly improbable.
Her hands are free. Her legs are free, other than the stun belt. What does she know about interrogation rooms—hard interview rooms? She knows the chair she’s in is firmly attached to the floor. She knows the chairs they’re in are not. She knows the table isn’t secured. She knows the walls are soundproof. She knows they didn’t design this room, and they probably feel like they’re in unfamiliar territory just like she does. She knows she can get out.
She just has to wait for this lady to come close enough that she can grab the remote to the stun belt. It risks letting them drug her again, but they’ll be able to take her down in a second if they’re still able to activate the stun belt. She stands a better chance of getting out while sedated than she does while they have that remote.
The woman uncaps a second syringe, remote still in her hand. Good. Juggling them means her grip’s going to be looser on both. Alexandria holds her breath until she’s close enough to make it dangerous.
She has one chance at this. One chance. If it fails then they take her away to put her down like Old Yeller and evil swallows the world and she never sees Eve again and she never gets a chance to tell Charlene that she loves her or to make sure Jenkins knows he can have her books when she dies because she’s been putting off doing the whole “writing a will” thing until the last minute. If she succeeds, most of those things will probably still happen because writing a will is really hard, but at least she’ll see Eve.
The woman comes closer, and Alexandria jumps up and punches her in the face.
The syringe clatters to the floor along with the remote, and there’s just enough time for Alexandria to grab the plastic box. She means to throw the table into the man, but she doesn’t have the strength to actually lift it so she settles for slamming it into him as hard as she can. The whole room tilts and spins as she scrambles for the door, impeded by the trip hazard around her calf and the drug.
At least none of them know this place any better than she does, and despite possessing what has been described as a “general lack of coordination” by anyone who has ever seen her run, she is very good at getting the hell out of dodge. Okay, so she also runs face-first into the door at the end of the hallway, but so what? At least she made it to that door.
They must have cleared out the whole place, stocked it with DOSA agents, not cops, like she’d been counting on. Or hoping on? Whichever. These guys like hunting magic but they’re not very good at actually keeping their hands on it, and at this point she’s close enough to count. Should’ve cuffed her ankles if they didn’t want her running.
The entire front of the building is all glass. Reinforced, obviously, because they’d be stupid not to. This is a police station. Guns—these people have guns, they should be shooting at her, it feels weird that they aren’t. Reason for that, Alexandria should find a reason for that, but mostly she just needs to get the fuck out.
The DOSA agents aren’t police. They could have locked the building’s door like real cops do, but she doubts it. They would want freedom of movement in case a magical anomaly popped up. And if she winds up just crashing directly into it because it is locked… At least she did something. At least she tried.
She rams into the door and it opens with enough force that the hinges rattle (probably bad, they should maybe look into making these more structurally sound). Oh, they’re firing at her now. That’s not good. Alexandria doesn’t like being shot. It hasn’t happened very often and she really wants to keep it that way.
Running, she’s supposed to be running. She’s definitely moving fast, but it feels like she’s more just… leaning in the direction she wants to go and then her body is taking her there, rather than actually putting effort into moving her feet. Her head is still spinning. She should—try to call a door? They didn’t find her phone in the inside pocket of her pants because they didn’t pat her down. There’s not really a crowd outside she can disappear into (when did it get so dark out? How late is it?) but there’s enough people around that maybe—holding onto one thought is hard, when did it get so hard?
Ooh, alleyway.
The dumpsters in random Chicago alleyways are not known for being clean, but the only idea Alexandria seems capable of executing right now is climbing in there and slamming the lid behind her. It smells and it’s filthy but it’s mostly empty and if the DOSA agents want her to come out then they’re going to have to climb in after her to do it which means they might just give up.
Door. She should get a door and go home and—her fingers tighten on the remote. She can’t get rid of it or risk tampering with it, because if it gets, say, water damage, it’ll just turn the stun belt on nonstop. She fidgets with the stun belt itself for a moment, but she’s currently too clumsy to get it off. Crap. Bad. All of this has been bad. Door.
Alexandria pulls out her nearly-dead phone. She should probably call Jenkins, but muscle memory takes her to Eve.
Her voice is one of the best things Alexandria has ever heard. “Alex, you’ve been gone for ten hours. I’m about to go to sleep.”
“I love you,” Alexandria says wonderingly. Her words are slurring way more than they were earlier. “Thank you for not hanging up.”
“Well, I considered it,” Eve says. “But if you’re making an effort, I’ll keep the olive branch extended. And I was a little worried the world might be about to end to make you call first. What’s going on? You sound weird.”
“The—them.” She presses her fist into her forehead. “Door. I need—I needed to talk to you?”
“Oh my god,” Eve says. “Are you drunk?”
“No!” Alexandria says, which is technically true. “Just high, kind of. Or low. Downer… One of them.”
“Unbelievable,” Eve mutters. Then, louder, “I’m hanging up. Call a cab or Jenkins.”
“Didn’t do it on purpose,” Alexandria complains. She presses harder on her forehead. “Don’t—I want to go home. Tried calling Jenkins and called you instead.”
“Yeah?” Eve sounds much more guarded now. Good, she realizes this is an emergency. “What did you take?”
“I don’t know.” She screws up her face. There are footsteps outside the dumpster and she holds her breath until they back away. She knows she should know by now what they gave her. Intravenous delivery, took maybe five minutes to kick in. Everything just seems so far away. “Maybe flu—fluni—flunitraz—one of them. Maybe?”
“...Flunitrazepam?” Eve guesses. Alexandria nods emphatically and then remembers that she can’t actually see her.
“Or one of the other ones,” she says. She tries to think of the others. Midaz-something. Sodium thiopental. Her mouth won’t say them.
“You—someone gave you Rohypnol. Someone—okay. I’m coming to get you.” Alexandria hears the sound of Eve standing up. “Where are you? Are you still in Chicago, or are you somewhere in Portland?”
“Dumpster in Chicago,” she agrees. “I don’t know where. Around… Drove half an hour from the Field Museum. Went west.”
“Is whoever drugged you still there?” Eve asks urgently. “Are you safe? I may need to put you on hold and call Jenkins to open a door for you if we can find where you are.”
“I got away, but they’re looking for me,” Alexandria says. She looks around at the dumpster walls. They feel like they’re closing in on her. She tugs at the stun belt again to no avail. “I think they’re going to find me.”
“Wherever you are, stay there,” Eve says firmly. “Do you still have Find My Friends turned on?”
“Did I ever?” Alexandria asks.
“I turned it on for you after the last time you got kidnapped so I didn’t have to rely on looking at your eBird checklists and whatever cryptic texts you sent me to know where you were,” Eve explains. Oh. Alexandria didn’t know about that. “Let me find you there and I’ll have Jenkins open a door. I’ll be at the annex to meet you in less than ten minutes. Stay on the phone with me.”
“Tired,” she complains, resting her head against the side of the dumpster. All the remaining energy she had was put into running away. It would be so easy to fall asleep here. It smells terrible, it’s cold, and it’s not safe or sanitary, but it’s dark. Sometimes that’s good enough. She’s slept in worse places.
“Alex. Focus on me. Do not fall asleep,” Eve orders. “I know where you are, and I’m going to put you on hold for thirty seconds. When I come back, I want you to tell me three things you noticed while I was gone, and then you’re going to go through the door. Do you understand?”
“Fine.” Alexandria pulls on her hair. Thirty seconds. She can do thirty seconds. There are more footsteps outside the dumpster. Are they listening to her? Are they waiting for someone to come through to get her so they can grab them? That would make sense. It’d also be a reason why they wouldn’t have wanted to shoot her. Uh oh. Bad again. She thinks that’s bad. Has it been thirty seconds yet? There’s more scraping outside.
Wait a minute. Did those agents find her because of the eBird checklist she made outside Shedd Aquarium? Those weren’t private, were they? She doesn’t usually make them private.
“Eve?” She says quietly. The sounds outside stop. She curls up into a smaller ball and glares at the lid of the dumpster. She almost cries with relief when Eve’s voice comes back.
“Three things, Alex. What are they?”
“Uh. There’s a sound outside, like someone’s there.” More than one someone, probably. She can’t guess how many. It’s weird, it’s like one of her senses is just… completely gone. She can still use all the rest of them but her brain can’t compute the data. Her words are tripping over each other again. “It smells like rotting food. And I’m cold because they took some of my clothes. I lost my favorite coat.”
She hears Eve make a sharp inhale through her teeth, clearly understanding the catastrophe that is her coat being stolen. It had her stuff in it—the overpriced Bast statuette she got in the Field Museum gift shop for Cassandra, about seventy cents in American change and ten cents Canadian, a spare set of dowsing rods, a few sticks of tropical-flavored gum, a bunch of pamphlets from the museum, a notebook with everything Charlene’s friend told her, a different notebook with a list of all the bugs she saw, her extra lock picks, and her replacement pocket watch. She suddenly remembers she’d put her ascot in one of the pockets, too. She’d taken it off when she got too hot looking at the animatronic invertebrates. There was crappy air flow down there.
“Jenkins is going to open a door to where you are and come get you,” Eve says, each word forced. “You didn’t say if you were hurt. What should I be expecting to walk in on?”
“I don’t know,” Alexandria says. She fidgets with her sleeve where she pulled the threads open. “When is he—”
She hears a hum outside, a polite cough, and then a truly earth-shattering amount of gunfire.
Okay. So she was the bait in a trap, then.
“Excuse me!” She hears Jenkins yelp, and then there’s another hum as the door closes again.
This time it opens underneath her, and she falls through white light to safety.
“Hi,” she says, looking up at Jenkins from where she’s accidentally sprawled on her back on the floor. It doesn’t work well when you’re supposed to go through something from one direction and accidentally go through the other. Physics get all wonky on either end. Her phone is also dead now. Doors drain it like crazy if it’s on when it goes through. “I love you.”
“Hello to you too, Dr. Carsen.” He kneels down to offer her his hand, and she uses it to pull herself up until she’s sitting again and promptly scoots under the closest desk. Safe. “Colonel Baird will be here soon. She requested that I ask you if you would like me to make myself scarce and call Ms. Cillian.”
“No. Why?” Alexandria blinks owlishly at him. “I lost what I got her at the museum.”
Jenkins sighs. “I’ll let Baird explain it to you. Are you hurt?”
“Eve already asked and I said I don’t know.” She watches him kneel and move his finger in front of her eyes to see if she can track it. She doesn’t even bother trying. Only one of her eyes feels like it can focus, but she can still see when his gaze falls to the stun belt.
“What is that?” He asks. She holds up the remote. He sighs again. “Thank you, that’s very helpful. Would you like me to help you take it off?”
Alexandria’s not sure why she hesitates. She wants it off. She doesn’t have the coordination to do it herself. That leaves Jenkins and Eve, and she trusts both of those people enough to let either of them do it. She has the remote, so it’s not like they could turn it on even if they wanted to, and neither of them do, right? They wouldn’t.
“We’ll wait for Colonel Baird,” Jenkins decides, straightening up. She likes that idea. Maybe she can nap before she gets there. She’d like to nap.
Unfortunately, there’s no time to nap before Eve storms in.
“Did you get her?” She demands, and Jenkins points to the desk Alexandria is hiding out under. She tries waving and only succeeds in flopping her hand in their general direction. Eve kneels down about six feet away. Unfair. She wants her closer. Eve’s voice softens. “Hey, Alex. What happened?”
“Don’t know,” Alexandria says. She rests the back of her head against the desk. It smells so much better in the Library than in a dumpster. “Was walking and they grabbed me.”
“The Department of Statistical Anomalies happened,” Jenkins says. “They had about ten people pointing guns at the dumpster Dr. Carsen was in. I nearly got shot. I’d imagine the only reason she wasn’t recaptured was because they intended to take whoever came to get her by force. I don’t know if that precludes your suspicions, but…”
Eve slumps a little. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, clear relief in her voice when she says, “Right. DOSA. That’s—they’re who drugged you? What did they do?”
“Asked questions.” Alexandria says. She twitches a little as Eve comes closer. Her muscles are still kind of convulsing. “Zapped me a few times.”
“‘Zapped’ you—” She notices the stun belt. She comes a little closer, holding out her hand like Alexandria’s a scared horse. That’s not fair because she’s nothing like a horse. She’s more like a shoebill than anything. “Let’s get that off.”
“I stole the remote,” Alexandria says proudly, holding it up.
“Jones will be thrilled. He’ll probably give you a sticker,” Eve says. The stickers were Cassandra’s idea and they worked amazingly, at least at first—any time Alexandria remembers that other human beings with thoughts and opinions exist she gets to pick a bird sticker (she also gets to tell them one fact about the bird). The problem arose when Ezekiel and for some reason Jenkins also requested stickers, and then Jake and Cassie had decided everyone needed to be on the sticker system, Eve included. Now they all get birds. Eve keeps finding them stuck in random places. “You hold onto that while I figure out the buckles.”
Alexandria cradles it to her chest while she watches Eve loosen the belt from around her calf. She obligingly moves when she motions for her to lift her ankle so she can slide it off. Only once it’s been completely removed and put aside somewhere out of the way enough that Eve can’t easily reach it again does she relinquish the remote.
“You know, these deliver fifty thousand volts of electricity,” Eve says carefully. She tosses the remote to Jenkins who immediately smashes it with a hammer that appears from nowhere.
“I know now,” Alexandria says, halfway to herself. She can feel herself relaxing now that it’s gone.
“Are you sure what they gave you was Rohypnol?” Eve asks. She stretches as she stands and then settles back down to properly sit this time.
“No,” Alexandria says. She’s definitely starting to lose it now. The numbness in her mouth has moved into her brain. “Could… Mid—midazolam? Sssodium thiopental… Am… Amobarbital…”
“Ah,” Jenkins says from across the room. “I see. So I assume it was their attempt at a ‘truth serum?’”
Alexandria gives him a weak thumbs up. Eve moves a little too quickly in the corner of her eye and she recoils, banging her head on the desk. “Ow. They said—didn’t learn anything from me though. Like… didn’t even care about what I told them about turacoverdin.”
“How is it that you can say that but not flunitrazepam?” Eve shakes her head. “I think you’re fading a little.”
Alexandria can hear the affection but she still leans back, fingers preemptively jerking toward her sleeve as she twists her arm away. “Tired,” she says when Eve looks concerned. “I don’t… Don’t like the drugging part.”
Eve smiles thinly. “I don’t think anybody does. I didn’t even know that was on the list of things I had to be worried about. Curses, yes, pharmaceutical technicians, no.”
“Happens sometimes.” Alexandria slumps over until she’s lying on the ground under the desk. She pulls on the threads of her sleeves again. “Didn’t… Wasn’t this last time. Just… wanted me scared, and high, and…” She yawns so hard her ears pop. “And to make it look like I died on accident wandering into the water.”
“Doesn’t sound fun.” Eve settles closer. Alexandria closes her eyes. She thinks Eve’s going to let her sleep because she waits almost a full minute before hesitantly asking, “Was that while you had your other Guardian?”
“No.” She feels like the Library is rocking slightly, heaving in and out like breathing. She thinks this might be midazolam. That’s not outright sedation, right? It’d fit with the delivery method. She tries to hold onto that revelation but it slips away again. “S… Simone saved me. Brought me home ‘til it wore off. Nightmares about it for ages after she…”
“What?” Eve nudges.
Alexandria yawns again. “Y’know. Killed herself.”
Eve makes a bitten-off noise. “Oh. I’m… sorry for bringing it up.”
“S’okay. I helped. You would’ve liked her. ‘N she would’ve liked you.” Alexandria’s not sure if she’s even audible anymore. She doesn’t think burning up is a painless way to die. But now she understands the peace Simone must have felt when she decided to do it. The knowledge that dying the right way was the best thing to do. Before she just thought dying was a side effect of doing her job. She oscillated pretty rapidly between the belief that she couldn’t possibly die and the knowledge that any day could be the last.
Now it’s… better. Soothing. Some day soon it’s all going to stop, and she’ll see everyone she misses and probably some people she doesn’t.
“I’ll say hi,” she mumbles, and it comes out in East Coast song sparrow dialect. It’s buzzier than the accent the ones in Portland have. The ones here say she doesn’t have the right timbre. Kind of rude. She should’ve just been speaking like this the whole time they were asking her questions. That would’ve been a great way to get them to hold the button down until her heart gave out.
“I don’t know what that means,” Eve says, checking her phone for the time and resigning herself to sleeping on the floor. She really had been in bed when she got the call. There’s still adrenaline going through her from when she’d figured out Alex had been trying to say flunitrazepam and she’d dug up where exactly she recognized that from the recesses of her brain.
Alexandria switches to albatross, southern hemisphere cant. She likes their deep rumbling. “I know. Sorry. But ‘s better this way. I’ll tell her about you. I think… she would’ve ended up in the same sky as other people even though…”
She tries to mime fangs and instead rolls her head to the side, directly into Eve’s knee. “Sky” is the albatross way of talking about the afterlife. It’s most birds' way of talking about the afterlife, really, flighted and flightless alike. She likes that. It’s so dark in her head now, like a blanket is settling on top of her brain.
“We’ll warn the others when you’re sober,” Eve says, running her fingers through Alexandria’s hair so she doesn’t have to pull it herself. Nice of her, because she can’t move her upper body at all anymore.
“Right,” Alexandria agrees, in English this time. “Thanks again. For…”
“You’ll get another sticker for that,” Eve says, but she’s already unconscious.
Eve doesn’t believe her in the morning when she says she doesn’t remember anything following leaving the Field Museum, but it’s mostly true—the only thing she knows is that her dreams were vivid and strange, full of birds in cages being fed to snakes.
And if she skitters back when Jones takes his phone out of his pocket until she can verify that it is indeed just a phone even though she can’t quite remember why, that’s not anyone’s business but hers.