Chapter Text
“That’s all for today everyone, see you next Monday!” Neil claimed to the amphitheater of first year students.
He picked his notes up and sorted them out before clumsily shoving them into his brown satchel. Rather hastily too, because he preferred to avoid having to talk to anyone. Now, he actually quite liked students passionate enough to come and exchange with him but he was truly, genuinely, not in the mood. For better or worse, most of them turned to their favorite AI to answer their questions anyway.
He turned the big screen off and headed out, with the echoes of his heels having replaced the commotion of the youths exiting the hall. The fresh early spring breeze slapped his face as he checked his watch. He wasn’t sure why. Of course he had time to head to the laboratory. He could even sleep there if he wanted to. He was excited about working on his new mass spectrometer – at least he should be. He had been completely exhausted for the past few days. Sleeping in the lab was nothing out of the ordinary for him, but it certainly was not as comfortable as it used to be now that a group of undergraduates had invaded his space for their own research after their own lab had caught on fire. Granted he was not entirely uninvolved with this unfortunate accident but it was a perfectly reasonable collateral damage of his own research. It was all covered by the insurance so there should have been no issue. None. But airdropping a group of incompetent Neanderthals right into his lab seemed to have been the Dean’s way of punishing him. A lot of first years were still hanging out and chatting about classes and whatnot. He crossed the building’s front hoping no one would interrupt him mid-thought. At this point hanging on to this place felt like a masochistic vice on his end.
Perhaps it was time for him to move out of campus of Columbia University and have his own private research facility in the basement of a cute suburban home. He had paid back his student loan already since most of his tuition fees had been covered by his scholarship… Ah, but with the current state of his savings his credit score was sure to be mediocre at best. Forget the house, once he obtains a decent chair, labs would rid themselves of undesirables for his sake, without him having to ask. Heck, they might as well sprout from the ground.
The thought made him laugh at loud as he strolled aimlessly along the paved paths of the campus and among sparse greenery. Another gust of wind funneled between blocks, blowing away curriculum pamphlets and messing up his curls. He was still torn between going home for a nap, grabbing a coffee at the cafeteria (the one reserved for the profs, of course, because the other smelled of fried food) or directly heading to the laboratory and hazard a display of power in front of the chem students to make them leave early. The gurgling noise of the main courtyard’s fountain temporarily drowned the constant chattering of the people around him, before sounds of thermal engines replaced it when he reached the sidewalk. Although electric vehicles were much quieter, they could not go unnoticed when slowing up to someone. Neil glanced at the big shiny black sedan next to him. As he did with most situations that were bond to be an inconvenience, he forced himself to ignore it and go on his not-so merry way. His overthinking brain was making it worse than it was, as always. “What if it was something bad? Dangerous.” Though it never was, of course. And his heart would race, sweat would collect at the base of his neck and form embarrassing rings under the sleeves of his blue shirt (that’s why he avoided shirts anyway; they made him look like a snotty business student, there was nothing science-y about a shirt), and then he would be upset for no good reason until the end of the day.
But the car stopped and a strong hand grabbed his forearm, so firmly it could have crushed him. Before he had time to react, whether through voice or movement, he was yanked off his feet. He thought he would fall but his ass landed on the leather fabric of the car’s backseat.
“What the He—“ he began yelling before one man shoved a linen bag onto his head.
He barely saw his kidnappers but they appeared to be wearing suits, and from the bag, he guessed they didn’t want to know where they were taking him either. Strangely, he was so used to expecting the worse that he felt a bit desensitized to the whole ordeal. His usual fear had been replaced by hope – hope that everything would be clarified shortly and that they would understand it was a misunderstanding. Unless…
“Hey! Tell Worthington that’s not how he’s going to win our debate about relativity!”
There had been plenty of somber academic rivalry stories, and he’d accidentally become a part of it quite recently. He sure didn’t want his name to make the title of a clickbaity YouTube true crime video. But the people in the car didn’t reply. He felt his spine bend in an unnatural way as they passed an unexpected speed bump. All he could do now and suck it up and wait.
And wait, he did. Two whole hours in a grey cell with no window. Though they thought of including a mirror so he could admire how much of a ruin he looked like. A guard opened his cell, grabbed him and handcuffed him before moving him to another grey room. The man unceremoniously released him and sat him on one of the plastic chairs.
“Now where the fuck am I…” muttered Neil under his breath, hands on his knees and back slightly hunched as he observed the room.
Yup, just another grey room alright. Same obnoxious cold white neon above head. Slightly more furnished, two chairs, one large table. He was analyzing his surroundings as if he was some super-agent ready to exploit any little opening to flee out. As if. The man had left the room, but he still had his ass sat politely on the uncomfortable chair. A tall suit-wearing woman entered. Her shoulder length blonde hair was neatly tied in a low ponytail and everything looked proper and stern, save for her messy bangs.
“Hey, are you here to tell me where I am?”
“Agent Miller, CIA.” She declared, holding out her hand.
Somehow, despite all the overthinking he had done daily for over two decades, he had never expected to find himself in this situation. He should be glad. At least the suits were not a mafia expecting to make good money from kidnapping a big shot researcher. Surely his stingy mother would have left him to rot. The sad thing is that he wouldn’t have much of anyone else to ask. The woman arched an eyebrow suspiciously, and as she was about to retreat her hand, he shook it weakly.
“CIA…? Look. Ma’am. Er…” he stuttered before steeling himself. “I think you got the wrong guy.”
“Mister Neil Ackmann.”
Adrenaline spiked his heart. He gulped.
“Yeah… Well, you know, plenty of us from where that came from.” He joked, voice cracking in the process.
“Doctor, lecturer and head researcher at Columbia University. Famous for your brilliant research in particle observation, though the chair for quantum physics was given this year to your colleague Ted Worthington…”
“Alright! Alright, that’s me!” Neil admitted, shaky and unable to look up from the table. “But… why…?”
“I want you to work for me, dude.”
The sudden familiarity made him jolt. He slowly looked up to her, only to see that she was now significantly closer, sitting on the edge of the table right next to him, with her grey eyes staring intently. His own eyes landed on the badge hanging around her neck.
“Ered…?”
“It’s Meredith.” She deadpanned before turning away.
“You’re CIA?”
Ered didn’t reply. Neil now vaguely remembered that her parents both worked for the CIA. Of course, the cool kid from the camp would end up having the coolest job one could think of. Just the natural order of things. Neil didn’t need a reminder. A laugh escaped him.
“Haha, yeah, that makes sense. You’re freaking CIA, and now…” he muttered.
Ered crossed her arms and eyed him sternly, waiting for him to stop rambling. “Don’t you want to see the offer first? You know this pays way more than your current situation.” she stated.
The mention of money was yet another stab to Neil’s heart. He was getting there, alright. Soon, an offer for an entry-pay CIA job would mean nothing to him. Well anyway, Ered was just asking rhetorically. She invited him to stand up and walked him out of the room, into a web of similarly grey corridors. Then they took an elevator to a floor that looked much more functional and lived in, but he did not have time to dwell on it as he was dragged into yet another blind room and immediately harassed by a hoarse male voice yelling from the farthest side.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, that’s your guy?! Him?!” the male asked, voice mixed with explosive anger and disdain.
“Sure is.” Ered declared, hands on her sides before removing Neil’s cuffs and letting him into the room.
Still hunched, he slowly made his way in, eyes transfixed to the man who had just insulted him. No mistake. It was somehow the same ratty hoodie that he remembered. A typical scowl was plastered on the features of the brown-skinned man, with just the right amount of angles and creases so that he would look slightly more worn out than when he last saw him, if possible. His silky jet-black hair was slightly longer, too.
“Well hello to you too, Max…” he ironized, now frozen upright.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Max muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“What’s with this reunion? I thought you guys were friends.” Ered noted.
“Well update your fucking spy data, Ered.” Max seethed.
“Meredith. Anyway, friends or not, this is how things are now.”
“Yeah, alright…” Neil said, sitting down and letting all the information sink in while the rest of his emotions burst out. “Seriously, is this a joke? This has to be some elaborate prank, right?!”
“I highly doubt anybody would go that far just to prank you. I sure as hell wouldn’t bother.” Max snickered.
The corners of Neil’s mouth twitched and near unbearable turmoil twisted his insides. “I’m gonna kill you.”
“I’d like to see you try, dipshit.”
“Shut up! Or I kill both of you.” Ered claimed, raising her voice for the first time. Her hand sat menacingly onto the black holster at her belt and both men fell silent. “As I said, it doesn’t matter. We have a mission and Neil, I need you on it.”
Neil shook his head silently, looking between the CIA agent and Max’s provocative green eyes. Although hostile, it appeared like the latter had no say in who Ered dragged in on this “mission”. He would lie if he said he was not curious about what exactly led the three of them to be reunited in the same room after so many years. But there was no way he could handle that. The pressure, the irritation… He was not suited for that. Natural order of things loudly called back to him.
“Okay, look Ered, eh, Ms. Miller. I appreciate you going out of your way to pull me into… whatever fresh hell this is, but that’s not for me. So I’m going to have to say no and leave you to it while I go back to my quirky scientist stuff and forget I was ever here. Deal?”
“Thanks fuck.” Max commented.
Ered closed her eyes and clenched her jaw. She was quite visibly pissed off that things had not gotten her way immediately.
“Suit yourself. I’m sure the Dean will be thrilled to know that you have been experimenting on unstable matter on campus site.”
The room fell terribly silent, and her voice seemed muffled.
“What…?”
“Aside from the endangerment of all the people in the perimeter which should land you a few months at least, there is an obvious breach of ethics there. Expect to be blacklisted from any respectable establishment on the east coast for the next few decades.”
Neil could not stop shaking. Suddenly all of his fears and constant anguish seemed extremely justified. Potent. Imminent. Everything was about to collapse. “Wait wait wait. How?! It was just one time!”
“If you think that’s all the dirt we have on you, you’re free to take the bet and leave.”
“Are you blackmailing me…?”
“Always so perceptive.” Max sneered.
“If that’s what you want to call it.” The woman replied. “So?”
“But… But why me!! Don’t you have plenty of guys trained to do that job?!”
She bit her lip, seemingly unsure whether she should reveal the next bit of information.
“Right now my options are limited. I can’t just trust anybody.”
“What? Aren’t you being a little paranoid right now? You’re the one talking about an ethical breach, alright! We’re your childhood friends, not some relief expandable agents for fuck’s sake!” he yelled, ending almost out of breath.
“See Ered, that’s Neil telling you this, I think you might be off your damn rocker, for real.”
Still evasive, she did not seem to accept criticism with open arms. “I don’t care if you have a problem with my methods. Are you in. Or not.”
Neil was trembling from his rant. End of the road, just like that. If he rejected her offer he was sure to lose everything. And if he accepted, he would be forced into a leave of absence from his job and forfeit his spot in the same breath. All he had worked to achieve until now, Meredith Miller was selfishly taking it away because he had the misfortune of knowing her. All for a secret mission that certainly didn’t concern him. He thrashed about on the spot, feet kicking the linoleum floor and hands punching the table as he groaned, and swallowed back sobs.
“Cool. I’ll take this as a positive answer. Be right back, I’ll fetch some food and drinks and I’ll present all the details to you.”
Neil stilled after she left him with Max.
“Hey if that’s of any relief to you, she used the same shit on me.” He said with slight hilarity in the voice.
The physicist kept his mouth shut, biting back and insult and holding back the tears threatening to roll out.
He remained in a stupor for a while. Max had taken the hint not to address him anymore and the conference room was entirely silent, save for the annoying ticking of a clock. Neil exhaled loudly and shoved his hand into his pocket, digging for his emergency stash of anti-anxiety pills and dry-swallowed a couple of them, naively thinking it would not turn out to be a conversation starter.
“Still just gobbling these down, uh?” Max remarked.
“What’s it to you?”
To that, the younger man had no reply and shrugged. Thankfully, Ered came back to put an end to this torture of a wait with Chick-Fil-A and chocolate chip cookies from some obscure bakery.
“Have at it, dudes.”
Max jumped onto the food, taking a giant bite off a greasy chicken sandwich. Neil had no appetite despite his empty stomach. Meanwhile, the woman set up a screen at the end of the room which started displaying a map of the U.S.
“We’ve been investigating a series of mass disappearances. We’re talking about three to around twenty people at once, all across the country, but mostly in these three states.”
“Kidnappings?” Neil inquired. He still had no clue how this related to him, but he held back his words.
“We don’t know. Some come back days or weeks later with troubles ranging from memory loss to severe higher cortical function disorders.”
“So, drugs.”
“Possibly. We’ve been keeping this on the down low for now but it’s a race against the clock before the truth gets out and panic takes over.”
“Been telling her to leak everything and let the streets’ rage take care of this one.” Max commented matter-of-factly.
Ered ignored him. The screen pointed various places before zooming in onto New York.
“That’s not all, though. Alongside people, buildings are disappearing. Or rather, are destroyed. Every person who disappeared was likely to be within ten miles of those buildings. We have consistent data on three different locations.”
“Yeah, that’s what you call a coincidence.” Neil remarked with a dismissive shrug before digging his hand into the bag of fries.
Ered brushed him off. The aforementioned locations were pointed on the map and she pursued her presentation.
“And permits were granted to build new structures on each of these plots.”
“That seems like the usual course of events when there’s an empty plot of land.”
Max had a little nod of the head, showing that he agreed with Neil. This time, the agent slammed her fist onto the table and both jumped.
“No. Not that quickly, anyway. There are safety regulations. There has to be an investigation.”
“Isn’t that your job!?”
“It’s…not. But anyway, we did take over and tracked the irregularities. Which we found, on clearly falsified evict notices annexed to a destruction permit granted in Johnston. My father went to the spot. And he never came back.”
Neil gaped and Ered looked down, a slight frown on the face as the screen displayed the desolated sight of a razed building and rubble.
“It’s been a month. I’ve been pulled from the investigation since then. Which, as you can imagine, is hard to accept.”
“What she means to tell us is that the only reason we’re trapped here is because of some fucking special agent ego-trip.”
It appeared Ered was quite used to Max’s snarky remarks and she, once again, ignored his words.
“My other father’s been covering for me so I can keep looking for answers. We need to find what happened to these people, who is behind it all, and how they managed to pull it all off.”
She raised her fingers as she listed the three goals of the mission.
“A clandestine mission.” Neil stated, eyes unfocused as he realized the implications of Ered’s words. “Great.”
“It’s okay. If the mission’s successful, there won’t be any charges pressed and you’ll get your life and career back.”
“Terrific!”
“We do have a few leads.” Ered declared as she resumed her explanation and her scrolling of the slideshow. “Our city halls tour pointed to another anomaly, this time in Riverhead.”
“Which is where I enter the scene.” Max declared, pointing at himself with a proud air despite seemingly hating every second of this.
“Selene Health Corporation was identified as the suspicious contracting authority this time. Turns out Max worked for them under a fake identity as an independent scouting agent a few years back.”
“I was selling unicorns and pixie dust to a bunch of old people. By far one of the easiest scams of my life. Shit was legal, too.”
Neil gritted his teeth. He did not exactly need a reminder as to why he hated Max’s guts. He had still no clue why he was sitting there. And he mentally cursed his inner voice because he knew that, inevitably, Ered would come to explain it and seal his fate for good.
“I asked him to put the costume back on. He was invited to the quarters and managed to get precious intel about the future retirement house they were planning on. Including strange plans from around the area… which lead us to this.”
From one of the untouched Chick-Fil-A bags, Ered retrieved a small electronic device, while the plans appeared on screen, marked in red where, Neil assumed, they had found the object.
“A broken piece of junk.” Neil deadpanned.
“I had a friend of mine take a look at it in the lab. She said it emitted high amounts of radiation. But she’s way out of her depth, here.”
Neil grabbed the mechanism gently and looked at it from various angles, frowning slightly. It was a box of metal with a quite a few indents and scratches. It was completed by an arc joined to the box at its upper sides. Near the bottom was a small led, which he guessed would light up red if powered. But there was no power port, and no manufacturer’s mark. No inscription at all for that matter. Whoever had used it had to be the one who built it.
“Neil. I need you to tell me everything about this device. Don’t worry, you’ll get your own lab.” Neil jolted and put the object down, eyes widening as Ered continued speaking: “And your own quarters too. We’ll have you move here for a while because it would be a pain to go fetch you from Columbia every time we need you, right?”
She addressed him a slight smile and the scientist nodded slowly.
His own lab. That was all he could think about now. No irritating undergraduates. No faculty committee cutting costs and freedom alike. All negative thoughts had been dissipated by this single prospect. Perhaps had he judged this situation – and Ered – too quickly.