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"Where is Dylan?" Emily asked, for the third time in as many minutes. "Is he- is Jesse- where are they?"
"He's been radio silent ever since..." Agent de Vera's voice replied, thin with static and even thinner with worry. "Pope, I don't- he had a plan, but what if he..."
The lobby lights hummed above Emily's head. She was holding her clipboard against her chest, the way field agents held their shields. On it, in her own small handwriting, was an hourly log:
0200 - Dylan: no contact. Jesse: no contact.
0300 - Dylan: no contact. Jesse: no contact.
0400 - Dylan: no contact. Jesse: no contact.
She had started writing the times down because it was the only thing she could do.
"Pope!"
Emily whirled.
Dylan was running through the entrance of the Oldest House, although running was almost the wrong word. Dylan was flying. The doors folded back on their own hinges before he reached them, the way a crowd parts for a stretcher, without a hand laid on them.
He was a ruin. Dust had turned his hair the grey of old paper, and blood had dried on his jacket in a long brown smear from collar to hem.
But Dylan was there - alive.
And in his arms, he was carrying-
And in his arms-
And-
Emily's clipboard clattered to the floor.
The sound it made was enormous. It went on echoing long after it should have stopped. A dozen people in the lobby turned to look towards it, and then they looked past it, and then every one of them forgot how to breathe.
"Help her," Dylan begged, as he clutched Jesse to his chest.
She did not remember crossing the floor.
There was a version of this moment, one Emily had dreamed of ever since Jesse had left. A wonderful reunion, smiles on both their faces. Their arms around each other.
This was not that version.
In the real version, Emily's knees hit the marble so hard she knew she'd be finding bruises next week, and no words came at all. Dylan folded down to meet her, as though his strings had finally been cut, and then Jesse was laid between them on the cold floor. Her head rolled to the side and came to rest against Emily's knee, warm and terrifyingly still.
"Medics!" someone was shouting. "Medics, Ground Floor, now, the Director-" and someone else was saying, "Is she breathing, is she breathing," and a third voice, a young one - a new recruit, was just saying oh no over and over, quietly, like a desperate prayer.
Jesse was breathing. Emily put two shaking fingers under her jaw to be sure, and found the pulse. It was good. It was slow and level and unhurried.
But she was completely still. Unmoving.
Emily looked down at Jesse's face, and couldn't bring herself to take her hand away from the reminder that Jesse was alive.
She had missed her so much that it had gone past just feeling. It had curdled into internal infrastructure. It was a shelf Emily had built in herself to hold the weight, and now the thing the shelf was for had come back, and she was here, warm against her knee, and the shelf had nothing left to hold, and it gave way.
"Jesse," Emily said. It was the first time she'd used the name aloud in a very long time. "Jesse, hey. Hey. I've got you."
Nothing. Of course nothing.
The medics came in a clatter of wheels and rubber and procedure. Emily had always found that sound comforting, the sound of people, who, just like her, had a protocol for the end of the world; and now it made her want to scream, because they were going to take Jesse away, and take their protocol with them, and she would be left on the floor with nothing in her hands.
"Pulse seventy-two, steady, unresponsive to sternal rub, pupils equal, equal, reactive- that's reactive- okay, that's good-"
"BP is fine, it's all fine, why is it all fine- she shouldn't-"
"Get a monitor on her, get her up on three, one, two, three-"
"Who's got a- sensors, sensors-"
"...is that the Director?"
They connected her to the world in wires. Adhesive pads went on her chest; a clip went on her finger; a cuff tightened on her arm. The monitor beside the stretcher woke up and began to write her heartbeat across the screen in a calm green line, and Emily, who was not a medic, who had never been a medic, saw the line and had the strangest thought.
It's not skipping.
Human hearts skip. They stutter, they hitch, they speed up for a reason that has nothing to do with the body they're in, they slow down. But this line did none of those things. It rose and fell in a rhythm so even that if you shut your eyes you could have set a clock by it.
Someone put a hand on Emily's shoulder and said, kindly, "Ma'am, we need you to move."
So she moved. That was what she was good at. She moved.
She was backing away on her knees, already composing the reports in her head because that was what she did with grief, she filed it, when something at the corner of her eye caught the light.
It was hanging from Jesse's bag.
The bag had come off her at some point, and now it lay slumped at the foot of the stretcher. Threaded through the strap, carefully, was a green earring.
Emily knew the earring the way she knew the weight of her own hand.
She knew about the small scuff on the top side of it, the one spot where it had been dropped on the Research Sector floor months ago. She knew it by the memory of who had gifted it to her. Because that was Emily's earring - the matching pair to the one currently hanging in her ear.
She had lost it.
She had lost it the day before Jesse disappeared, and she'd turned over her desk and the sector floor and, God help her, the drains, and she had never found it, and she had never stopped feeling, in some small absurd corner of her chest, that its loss had been her fault. That she had been careless with a good thing, a perfect thing, and the world had noticed, and taken the rest.
She stared at it.
The green was bright as the day she'd first held it. Not a speck on it. Not a mark. As though somebody had polished it that morning. As though somebody had been polishing it, all this time, with a thumb, in the dark.
A connection they had unknowingly shared, in their time apart.
She took it, Emily thought. That week. She came by my quarters and I didn't see her, and she took it, because- because-
Because she had wanted something of Emily's to carry.
Emily's hand was already moving.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF CONTROL - CUSTODY LOG Item: Earring, green, single. Condition: Clean. Received from: Personal effects, FADEN, J. - FBC Director. Released to: ______________
Every personal effect belonging to an incoming patient, especially in the Oldest House, was to be logged, bagged, and sealed. That was not just a guideline. It was the thing Emily had built her whole self around: that there is a correct way to handle objects that matter, a chain of people each of whom signs and hands to the next, so that nothing is ever simply lost. Hers was a profession of paperwork against the dark. A thing that went from hand to hand without a signature was a thing that could end in disaster.
Her hand shook as she closed it around the earring.
She broke the rule.
They wheeled Jesse away through a pair of doors. The monitor's green line went with her, level and patient and utterly regular, and Emily listened to it recede until it was only a rhythm, and then only a feeling of a rhythm, and then she wasn't sure that she heard it at all.
The earring was warm against her skin.
It was a while before she looked at Dylan. He was a few feet off, where he'd stopped, standing in the exact spot where the stretcher had passed him and not one step beyond. Nobody had gone to him. Emily noticed that and she hated it. The lobby was full of people and the people were looking at the doors Jesse had gone through, or at their own hands, or at the floor, or at anywhere, and their eyes slid across Dylan and Emily and kept going, the way eyes slide over a thing they wanted to ignore.
He looked like he didn't know what to do with his hands.
That was the part that undid Emily. Not the blood, not the dust, not the long dried stains down his jacket. It was that his arms were still curved. They'd held Jesse for so long, through so much, that they hadn't been told yet that they could stop; and now they hung half-bent in front of his chest, around nothing, and the fingers kept flexing, a little, closing on air. Like a man checking again and again for a thing that he had only just put down.
And behind his left ear, his hair had matted dark, something wet still trickling down. Emily saw it because she was the only one looking. A wound, wet and fresh and the wrong shape for an accidental wound. Because it wasn't. A thin red line ran down his neck and into his collar, and he had not wiped it away, and maybe he had not even noticed it, and it was going to keep running until somebody made it stop.
The MCD, she thought, and something in her chest twisted.
"Dylan," she said.
He turned his head. It took him a long time, longer than it should have. His eyes met hers, and they were the haunted eyes of a man who had survived something that he thought he shouldn't have.
"You're bleeding," Emily said, quietly.
He didn't answer. He looked down at his hands. He looked at the empty space where his sister had been. And for the first time since he'd come through the doors, something moved in his face.
"She's... She's going to be okay," Emily heard herself say. "She's alive, Dylan. She's going to be okay. She... has to be."
The radio on her belt crackled. "Pope?" Agent de Vera's voice. "Pope, talk to me. Did he- is he-"
Emily's hand moved to her radio, but she couldn't find the strength to push the button.
Her other hand was still a fist.
She could feel the earring in it, warm as a living thing. It was digging into her skin, piercing it, and she let it. The pain was small and bright and exact. It was the only thing in the whole lobby that was.
Dylan stood, bleeding, with nothing in his hands.
Emily stood, bleeding, with a stolen earring in hers.
And neither of them knew what to do.