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[apparitionism]

Asleep 2

For the anniversary this year, I have the second “half” of my @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange story for @kla1991 : an involuntary bed-sharing situation that turns not sexy but disastrous. The first part took on Myka’s perspective; this conclusion is written from the other side of the bed. A confession: I find in-universe Helena’s head voice a somewhat difficult register to compose—because while she can’t be fully insane, she needs to teeter or list, sometimes more than a little (but without falling into histrionics). Which is to say that if you don’t entirely buy the turns of thought and/or coping mechanisms I’ve given her here, your skepticism is well-placed. Ultimately I hope it’s the case that a person can be broken but still want in a way that’s... pure? Justified? Sweet? Reciprocatable? Maybe just “vaguely recognizably human”?

Anyway, this is long, first because it extends well beyond the point at which the first part ended, but also because when a Bering and a Wells get to talking (as they at last do!), they need to work things out at their own pace...

Asleep 2

My arm is asleep.

Under normal circumstances, a person would, upon becoming aware of this, shift position so as to restore blood flow.

Under normal circumstances.

But very little is normal about the circumstances under which Helena’s arm is asleep.

She is in a hotel-room bed, in the dark of night, lying on her left side, with her left arm, her now-asleep arm, pinned beneath her. So ends the disturbingly limited “normal” portion of the situation.

Here begins the larger portion: she absolutely must not move.

Irony guts at her with that, a shiv-and-twist remembrance of bronze restriction—but that prohibition had involved a significantly different auxiliary verb: “cannot” rather than “must not.”

Grammatical particulars aside, her immobility now is barely less a torment. This is because her other arm, her alive right, terminates in an even-more alive sensate hand, one that now rests—but is in no way at rest—on Myka’s right hip.

Myka, too, is lying on her left side, a small distance in front of Helena, lying in this hotel-room bed. Such proximity in such a space might, under other circumstances, signify the fulfillment of a long-held dream... but here, now, it seems a nightmare. For Myka is Helena’s colleague and no more; they are in this bed for sleep and no more; and Myka is playing her part correctly while Helena is not, in contravention of what she has sworn to herself she would do no more.

Such drowsy sense the placing of that hand had seemed to make, when she had found herself facing Myka’s back. She had in the past regarded that length covetously, relishing the idea of touch both salacious and tender.

For all her coveting, however, she had in fact only once laid hands on that back, both hands with intention on the clothed blades of Myka’s shoulders: a terrifying embrace, one that was in the most basic physical manner right but overall searingly wrong, screaming bodily truth but surrounded by words that said nothing they should. A perversion of promise, like so much else that had happened in Boone.

Yet Helena had clung to its memory all the same.

She’d thought, here in this unexpected proximity, to supersede that, to touch once again, once again but brief, once again though brief. To erase and replace.

First she touched the right blade, light; yet her hand wanted stillness, more connection than a mere pat against cotton-clad bone. And there was Myka’s hip, a beckoning promontory jut... a place to rest. Rest, however brief.

Once placed, however, her hand had proved reluctant to retreat.

Brief, she reminded it.

No, the hand had responded. I belong here.

Helena knows this is true. She knows also that it cannot be true.

But she is no stranger to holding contradictory thoughts in her head. This has been essential to establishing and maintaining, in these new Warehouse days, a functional equilibrium. Functional. Indeed her goal, in this “reboot,” has been to function, which she has lately defined as something on the order of “to move through time nondestructively.”

This definition had come about due to her realization, pre-reboot, that her difference from others, her inability to fully perform a modern self—her arrogance about that inability, even as she attempted to hide both the inability and the arrogance—chipped at, chipped from, the good (the good nature, the good will, the goodness) of those around her. Over time, such chips accrued as wounds.

Nate. (Adelaide.) Giselle.

She had as a result finally understood that coming back to the Warehouse would mean, at the very least, that those with whom she interacted had already made a bargain, perhaps even a peace, with the inevitable violence of history: with the way the forces of the past could—would—affect, even infect, the present. Helena herself was, at her simplest, merely one more of those forces.

She did consider requesting that she be re-Bronzed, now absent any pretension of traveling through time, but rather as a way of neutralizing a dangerous, and demonstrably unstable, artifact. But then an image had come to her, possibly as an omen, possibly as only a desperate wish: Myka’s devastated face upon hearing such news.

Boone all over again.

Thus the reboot. Because the most significant entry under “function,” with additional emphasis on the “nondestructive” portion of that definition, was her resolution to spare Myka pain. In the past, Helena had been both careless and careful—surgically so—in her infliction of damage on Myka above all others. But she had sworn to herself that those days were done.

Done, but Helena knew she had not paid anything near a sufficient price.

So. To maintain distance, no matter how troublesomely ardent her wish to close it, was—had to be—part of her penance. And to do so decorously was—had to be—the gentlest approach. That was what Helena told herself in her more rational moments.

This moment, in this bed, is not one of those. If it were, she would simply remove her hand. Simply remove it, then roll over.

But her mind races, finding complication: She doesn’t know what sort of sleeper Myka is. Had Helena’s placing of hand awakened her? If she had awakened, has she now fallen asleep again? If she has, would she then be reawakened by the hand’s removal? Or would she, if still awake, draw some negative inference about the entire situation based on removal?

Ideally, Helena would maintain a facsimile of entirely blameless sleep while engaging in that removal, but can she make such a performance believable?

Never in her life has Helena been so concerned about her ability to mislead convincingly as when she has attempted to deceive Myka. That was the case in the past, even at her most nefarious, and now she worries day-to-day that her strictly disciplined disguise of near-constant wishing ache will slip and fail. A simple I am asleep should be... well... simple. But it is not, and Helena is reminded of Claudia’s tendency to observe, in situations both dire and banal, “Here we are.”

Here we are, because Myka is apparently indifferent to the idea of sharing a bed with Helena.

Here we are, because Myka is apparently indifferent to history.

Here we are, and that latter indifference is a surpassing irony, due to the fullness of—

Helena sees that she needs to divert her train of thought, as descending into unjustified anger will help absolutely nothing.

First, she entertains a fantasy of sitting up, turning on a light, and explaining to Myka that this entire situation is untenable, and that if they are going to share a bed, they should share a bed. But it’s true that Myka did not seem even to consider that as a possibility, which seems ludicrous, given the past... no, that’s back to unjustified anger, for who is Helena to resent what Myka wishes not to consider? And indeed, who is she to interpret the past in such a way as to believe she understands what Myka would have considered?

Focus on the facts, she tells herself. What actually happened in that nefarious past. And do so dispassionately.

Regrettably, the word “dispassionately” brings to mind another word: “passionately.”

Again. For she had thought that word not long after she and Myka had first entered this room, first entered it to find, as Helena’s unrestrained fantasies might have conjured, only one bed. That they were clearly intended to share. Thus her mind’s unruly leap to... an adverbial manner in which they might do so.

But Myka had said not one word about the accommodations, so Helena had held her tongue as well. She nevertheless couldn’t help but feel it an elaborate lack of remark on both their parts, the silence practically baroque in its fullness.

Baroque too had been the courtesy with which they jointly prepared for bed, a you-first-no-you stutter-choreography of politeness that ensured privacy, yes, but also reinforced the barrier between their past and their present.

Which Helena understood was necessary. It did nothing, however, to mitigate the breath-hold of preparing to lie down beside Myka.

Once she had managed that lying down, however (with a relative aplomb for which self-congratulation was not, she felt, unjustified), she hoped her torment might ease. A bit. If she could manage the additional task of pretending the body beside her was no more significant than any other human. Some flesh, recumbent.

But when they were situated thus beside, Myka spoke. “You seem a little upset,” she said.

Helena had barely been able to restrain a snort. Now Myka saw fit to comment? As if allowing this portion of the play to pass without remark would create some undue strain upon collegiality? As if their incongruous bonhomie might buckle under the weight of that silence? Oh, that was rich.

Bottling her pique, Helena questioned: “With?” To make Myka say it. Mere saying wouldn’t hurt. Would it?

“You haven’t been yourself since you put that camera in the static bag. Was it a problem, seeing it again?”

Helena held herself rigid so as to keep her body from betraying neither her disappointment at the question nor, contradictorily, her relief...

It was a reasonable question. A good question. Not one on which Helena particularly wanted to focus (although it indicated a certain attention on Myka’s part, an attention on which Helena suspected she should not dwell), but it did deserve an answer. “It closes a door, doesn’t it,” she told the ceiling, for turning her head to address the other body directly seemed an invitation to peril. “That one I opened so nefariously, long ago.”

“Or—and—maybe it closes a loop,” Myka said.

Unexpected. “A loop?”

“Right after college, I went through a self-help phase,” Myka said. She paused, and Helena found herself on relative tenterhooks regarding the applicability of this (new!) information to the current situation. Which reminded her how much she had missed talking with Myka... because of the very sound of her voice, yes, but also because her conversation could range so unanticipatedly. So rewardingly unanticipatedly. Helena had known few people who could lead her on such unpredictable, yet productive, journeys.

Was Myka’s apparent willingness to begin such a journey now indicative of... anything? A softening, perhaps, of relations between them? Not a rebooting of their once-burgeoning intimacy, for that had to remain taboo, but could it be that some restoration of their previous intellectual engagement might be, at the very least, neutral rather than harmful?

Helena had moved a tentative pawn in that direction during their conversation on the airplane. Perhaps this was Myka’s answering move?

With an exhale that seemed like resignation at what she was about to say—to reveal?—Myka said, “I felt like I needed to be someone different—someone better.”

Another pause. Helena considered that such a feeling seemed very Myka (and she heard that phrase in Claudia’s voice), but also very misguided. Of course she was not at all placed to make such judgments, and even less so to convey them to Myka. Thus she said a simple, “Did you,” to encourage without prejudice.

“So I read a lot of books,” Myka said, to which Helena had responded internally, Of course you did. “One was about how to get things done.”

“All things?” Helena asked.

“Sort of.” That was followed by yet another pause. Yet another puzzle.

All these pauses. Was Myka on the verge of sleep? Helena said, soft, thinking she might go unheard, “Perhaps I should read that book. As a help to myself.”

At that, Myka had laughed, more delay, but also soft. “I don’t think it’s any kind of help you need. The guy who wrote it had a big system, all these rules, and I love rules, but these... I admit I didn’t stick with most of them. Honestly, any. But an idea that did stick was actually a pretty minor part: open loops. Stuff you track subconsciously, all the time, because it’s incomplete. How troubling that is. And what a difference it makes when you close a loop, when you each a resolution. I mean, he was talking about stuff like answering emails.”

“Emails,” Helena echoed. So far from artifacts.

“Which this is so much bigger than,” Myka said, exhibiting, not for the first time, an uncanny ability to scoop from Helena’s thoughts. “But maybe the principle holds. You don’t have to tell me. But I hope you have fewer open loops now than you did. Before.”

“Yes. The number. Fewer,” Helena said, factually.

She of course couldn’t say out loud (but it was equally factual) that Myka herself was the loop most capaciously open. The one that gaped, superseding, never mind the number of lesser.

Indeed, however, that number was now minus-one. Oscar. Oscar and his ballad... that loop closed.

Helena had in fact, while handling the camera, begun to ideate a wish that someone (Steve? Claudia?) might be persuaded to use the camera to capture her image... for it had occurred to her that a spark of art, some production on which to concentrate, might animate this reboot... something to pursue, rather than to be pursued by...

But. Lying abed, still and strangely hopeful—a state she should have known would not endure—a realization had struck her, as an open hand to the face, a realization of why Myka had brought up loops and the closing thereof: she had somehow discerned Helena’s wish, via that scooping of thought, and was discouraging her from pursuing it.

So much for any softening. This was instead a warning: Helena should not open a loop that Myka might be obligated to close. And Helena had no trouble grasping that the warning was in no way limited to the use of a single artifact... no, it doubtless applied to any burdensome loops Helena might be thinking of opening, any new incompletions that might come to trouble Myka.

“I understand,” Helena had said, regretting that pawns could not be moved backwards.

At the same instant, Myka said, “I’m glad.”

That collision had canceled communication entirely; in its wake, Myka had turned out her light and turned away from Helena.

Leaving Helena to her thoughts.

Well, fine, had been the first of those.

Next had come an equally mulish sniff of And I will have no difficulty directing any subsequent away from this shared bed.

Whereupon she had proven herself both wrong and right, thinking about history, about the fact that, whatever Myka’s commentary or lack thereof had or hadn’t signified, the fact of Warehouse agents lodging together, sharing beds completely platonically, was certainly nothing new.

This line of thinking had enabled Helena to distract herself by recalling a mission with Steve and Claudia, one in which Steve had announced, after checking in at their hotel, “Bad news. Just a king room left, but they said they’d bring up a cot.”

He had then immediately assigned Claudia to said cot, prompting her to protest, “No way! This situation screams rock-paper-scissors tournament! Loser gets the crappy night’s sleep!”

“No way,” Steve protested back, far more mildly. “The father of science fiction gets first dibs on the lumbar support, and my back’s got a decade on yours, so I call second. If that father agrees.”

Helena had. Sharing with Steve had been fine.

Sharing with Myka should of course have been no different.

Should of course have been...

But now, here in the impossible present, as Helena’s left arm slumbers and her right hand sparks, what should have been? Isn’t isn’t isn’t.

She needs further distraction, so she casts her mind again to Claudia and Steve, to the compensations they have offered her during this strange and estranging reboot: at first Claudia, who had welcomed Helena back so unreservedly and continues to offer wholehearted allyship; and then Steve, who had quickly become an unanticipated boon companion, a partner upon whom Helena has felt increasingly, and increasingly exceptionally, lucky to be able to rely.

And yet these compensations, though Helena hopes she conveys all appropriate gratitude for them, are never sufficient, for Myka—necessary yet unreachable—is always present.

She’d been so, even during that cot-delineated retrieval. Its aftermath had (so much for distraction) involved a significantly Myka-related incident, for Helena had dared, as she, Steve, and Claudia were relaxing in the hotel lounge prior to retiring, to broach Myka as a topic of conversation. As one might do, she’d thought: speaking about a colleague.

“I have an inquiry,” she’d phrased it. To make the ensuing question sound... scientific?

Dispassionate, she jeers at her recalled self.

She jeers also at what she’d said next: a too-bald, “How is Myka?”

She had known, even at the time, that what she had truly wanted was to say that blessed name, to speak about that blessed person. She could not speak to Myka in any meaningful way, and she was starving.

Steve and Claudia had then shared what seemed an extremely charged glance, so Helena hastened to dissemble, making sure to use questions so as to prevent Steve from finding her immediately untruthful: “Given that her liaison with Pete ended? They’ve... recovered, as it were? Both faring well?”

But her tone had struck her own ears as too bright; a desperation rippled behind it, and Helena knew from experience that behind that tiptoed a still deeper threat of rupture, which required work to be kept at bay. As Helena had been instructed by her most successful therapist to do when such awareness overtook her, she began to breathe with attention.

Neither Steve nor Claudia spoke as she did so.

When the danger passed, she smiled, as best she could, to signal to them her appreciation—and to herself, her success.

Steve then said, “You’re not asking about Pete.”

Helena valued—as a personality trait—Steve’s discerning willingness to push. She did not in that moment value how he thus so easily revealed a glaring flaw in her initial approach: she should have asked about Pete; with that as her entrée, the talk might organically have turned to Myka. Foolish of her to think so unstrategically... or was her failure to do so a paradoxically positive sign?

“Give it time,” Steve said, and Helena knew he was making no reference to Myka and Pete’s recovery.

“My relationship to time,” she said, with contempt. Time: she’d taken it. Now she had to give it? A forfeit. Well, that was fair.

Claudia said to Steve, “Speaking of, we’re wasting it. Are we gonna do the thing?”

“Only if H.G.’s on board,” Steve told her. It was an unexpectedly mind-your-manners utterance.

“What is the thing?” Helena asked.

“Claudia’s trying out alcohols,” Steve said. “We can’t do it around Pete, obviously, which means retrievals are our—”

“So many questions to answer, right?” Claudia interrupted, her avidity increasing. “You know, am I über-suave James Bond with the martinis? Or a fights-against-my-general-cool-geek-vibe Carrie Bradshaw with a cosmo?”

Helena had had no idea what she was referring to, but the investigation seemed entirely fit for someone her age. “What have you determined thus far?”

“Turns out cosmos don’t work for me,” she said, “as the prophecy foretold, and Bond-wise, I like a martini all vodka, no gin; sorry, Vesper.”

“Is that all?” Helena asked.

Further avidity: “Oh god no. Vodka drinks aren’t perfect: white Russians are way too sweet. Also in the white family, the wine category pretty much bores me. Also there was this one time Steve ordered a gin drink called a white lady that I couldn’t even think about because it had an egg white in it and one look made me retch.”

“Quite the wide-ranging experiment,” Helena said, hoping to forestall further off-putting description. “Not conducted with inappropriate... ah... intensity, one hopes?”

Steve patted Claudia’s shoulder, at which she rolled her eyes. “I’m supervising,” he said. “No more than a few tries in one sitting, and we’re doing it mindfully.”

Claudia abandoned her attitude and nodded. “Paying attention to what I’m tasting. How to find, you know, notes and stuff. Except for the disgusting egg-white thing, it’s honestly been fun.”

“I’m not opposed to fun,” Helena said, and she was a bit surprised—but pleased, and pleased to be pleased—that Steve didn’t squint in response. “So, Mr. Supervisor, what’s next?”

“I’ve been pushing for the wide and wonderful world of beer, but—”

“Seems too jocktastic,” Claudia said. “You know, ‘Beer me, bro.’”

“I don’t know,” Helena said.

“Anyway that’s really not me,” Claudia continued, as if Helena hadn’t spoken. She did have a tendency to ignore Helena’s ignorance, a tendency that Helena enjoyed and found frustrating in equal measure.

“Her beer perspective is severely limited,” Steve lamented.

“I myself have always found a strong stout ale quite enjoyable,” Helena said: her contribution to Steve’s cause. It was also true, the fact of which he seemed pleased to affirm with a quirk of lip and a quiet “so you have.”

Claudia’s expression remained skeptical, but she shrugged weakly and said, “I guess I could give it a shot?”

“Oh, because H.G. says so,” Steve twitted.

To that, Claudia squared her shoulders. “Yeah. Don’t you know who she is?” she demanded.

“Who I was,” Helena hurried to emphasize, “and given that Steve assigned me the bed on that basis, he—”

“Who you are,” Claudia corrected, throwing the emphasis back.

“And who is that?” Helena asked. What distinction did Claudia imagine was relevant?

“The person who told me my destiny was glorious. You’re still that guy, right?”

Relevant indeed. Helena was taken aback, indeed taken back to that extremity, back in a novel way. She had been so mired in the Myka of it all in the intervening time, that she had lost her view of the bright salience of Claudia’s presence. Wrongly. “I am,” she said. She hoped Claudia believed her.

“Okay,” Claudia said. “So I’ve got this big-as-Pete’s-biceps incentive to hope the stuff you say is true. And by the way, one of you has to casually drop in front of him how I said that, because I want the points.”

Steve snickered and said, “I know my job. But in the meantime, I think I’d like to toast to all these sentiments, and to the agents offering them. With a strong stout ale.”

They tasted the three strongest the hotel bar had on offer, and Claudia pronounced that her favorite, one purporting to convey roasted notes of coffee, chocolate, and other darkness, was “way too complicated for your average broseph.” Which Steve seemed pleased by, as a judgment, so the overall experience scored a success.

There was no further talk of Myka, however, the avoidance of which topic seemed quite deliberate... as if Steve and Claudia had determined that Helena would not benefit from it.

Or that she did not deserve it.

For the best, Helena had concluded. Either way.

Now, in a similar “for the best either way” sense, she makes to raise her hand, with that intended overlay of feigned sleep, so as to shift away and at last regain equilibrium, restoring feeling to her sleeping arm and calming that oversensitive hand. But instead—in what she can interpret only as a stupidly id-driven attempt to bank some never-to-be-repeated sensation, to the memory of which that desperate id might cling in a touch-deprived future—she moves her hand, not away from Myka, but further down her leg.

And her worst fears are instantly realized: Myka’s body reacts violently, as if in revulsion at the very idea of Helena touching her.

It was only a hand at rest, Helena begs, with no conception of why or to whom she is rendering that supplication. That was all.

Alas, that was—is—not all, for in the next split second Myka is falling from the bed and crying out in pain.

Helena, at a loss, attempts a faux-innocent inquiry, which Myka answers unintelligibly. In trepidation, Helena ventures to the mattress-edge, then lowers herself to the floor next to Myka—and she is appalled, for the situation that confronts her is all debility, even more so than the absurd “my arm is asleep” with which this farce began: Myka’s shoulder is dislocated.

Further, Myka is now unconscious.

Spare Myka pain. How utterly unsurprising Helena finds her inability to obey such a dictum in even this most basic physical sense.

Unsurprising... worse, dispiriting, and it brings her low, such that again the incipient rupture asserts its subterranean power, urging Helena to give up, to run away and leave this broken Myka to someone else to bind up and save.

You’ve done it before.

That resounds in her head as both accusation and affirmation, and the voice pronouncing it might be Myka’s, or some deity’s, or that of any of the other personages who jockey audibly for primacy in that space, including Helena’s own.

She initiates breathing with care, even as an eddying undertow tempts her to entertain the notion that escape, too, might be rebooted, tempts her to entertain and revel in its ostentation as a response to Myka’s indifference, her rejection of history, even her revulsion.

Here is my answer to all that, a departure would declare.

Helena labors to breathe herself away from such perfidy, but the scenario creeps along, with an undertone of sinful relish, as she imagines leaving Myka to awaken alone and in pain.

But then—because her labor leads her there—she further imagines the various permutations of “someone else” who might be called upon to save the day in her absence. Whereupon the thought strikes her that moving through time nondestructively requires her to think seriously of, and to think seriously out, such knock-ons... how, for example, would Steve and Claudia respond to having to clean up this mess, knowing that Helena had made it?

Moving through time nondestructively. Interesting, here, the overlap with moving through time selfishly: selfishly, she does not want to destroy Claudia’s image of her as someone whose opinion matters. She does not want to destroy Steve’s image of her either, for it seems to have at least some positive components. Further, she does not want to destroy the fellowship they three are building.

If for no other reasons than those, she concludes that having caused this quite specific damage, she must fix it.

Because she can.

The fact of the matter is, Helena cannot fix most things. She has tried mightily to maintain the pretense that she can... but she has been forced over and over to confront the absurdity of that bravado. This very specific fix-it, however, she can perform. And while that performance—inconveniently, in the present circumstance—requires touch, here it can be functional. Perhaps in success she might in some way efface her earlier invasiveness...

Yet she can do nothing without two functional arms. She thumps her still-insensate left against the bed, hard—too hard, for Myka’s eyes open. She mumbles out something Helena decodes as “whatareyoudoing.”

“Preparing to remedy a situation,” Helena says.

“Okay.” Myka murmurs. She seems oddly comforted by the answer, to such an extent that she relaxes, losing consciousness again.

That’s fortunate, given the required manipulation.

Helena prepares herself to do it quickly, efficiently, as she has done in the past... rather dramatically on one occasion, as she recalls, for an agonized Wolcott... but she should not think of Wolcott. For the regret.

She sets that aside, preoccupying herself instead with the necessary activity. Her manipulation, determined and strong, is rewarded: what begins as a sluggish resistance resolves into a slip-pop of relocation, one that shudders a familiar path through her own bones. She then cushions Myka’s arm with a fresh towel and uses a pillowcase to fashion around it a tight sling.

Levering Myka up onto the bed would most likely cause further injury, so Helena sits beside her on the floor, ensuring periodically that she continues to breathe. The wait is calming, cleansing, its peace a renewal of a soothing activity of which Helena has been long deprived: observing Myka closely, at actual leisure. At no point since her return—so at no point in, literally, years—has she had such an opportunity.

She’s reminded, in that observation, of the true fundament: this precious person. Who could never be merely some flesh.

After a lengthy time, during which Helena is pressed to consider, to remember, to value Myka’s singularity, that precious person’s eyes flutter open.

That person tests her bound arm, a tentative physical investigation that approaches elegance in its delicacy.

But Myka’s delicacy and elegance, too, Helena should not think of. For the regret.

“I’m not in the hospital,” Myka burrs.

Reasonable, practical. This is what Helena should think of. “Not yet,” she says. “But we’ll go if necessary. If you’re in pain.”

Myka’s face contorts. “Not if. I am. Some. More than some. I’m sorry.”

“For being in pain?”

“That. But also, for changing this whole thing.”

Helena leaves the latter alone, for she cannot begin to interpret it. Focusing on functionality, she asks, “Can you dress yourself?”

Myka nods, but she winces far too much with even that motion, so Helena screws her courage to it and says, “I’ll change and then help you.”

Herself, fast, then Myka: Functional, she snarls internally as she addresses the situation, and even faster. She’s relieved to find that Myka’s trousers and boots are less complicated than she’d feared, and as it happens, preventing Myka suffering additional physical pain—even while undressing and redressing her!—is, paradoxically or not, far easier than navigating emotional shoals, or even hand-on-hip physical shoals. Focusing on Myka’s face for twists, listening for labors in breath, adjusting accordingly... it’s distractingly, satisfyingly concrete. Only the present moment matters.

Only the present moment matters. This is the mantra Helena iterates internally as they proceed to the nearest urgent care facility.

Yet as they wait there for attention, Helena finds herself increasingly unable to ignore why they are waiting there for attention. In the present moment, which matters. She begins—or does she intend it as an ending?—with, “I’m assuming you flung yourself to the floor in an attempt to escape a circumstance.”

Myka hiccups a laugh that makes her cringe in protection of the shoulder. “That’s weirdly accurate. As an assumption.”

Helena recoils at the confirmation, but she must acknowledge it. “A circumstance in which I touched you in a way that was unwelcome,” she agrees, with gloom.

“Unwelcome,” Myka echoes.

It’s so... definitive. It was one thing for Helena herself to think it, believe it, say it aloud. Quite another—though it shouldn’t have been—to hear it from Myka.

A punctuating end to what never truly began between them: there is some consolation, if only philosophical, in the idea that after so many starts that were false, they may at least enjoy a finish that is true.

“Of course it was,” Helena says, following with, “and how could it have been otherwise.” She puts the final period upon it by adding a bare, spare dig: “Given history.”

Myka closes her eyes... in acceptance of the cut? When she opens them, they are glistening. Tears? Helena is egotistically gratified by such a response, never mind that it means she has yet again failed to hold to her resolution.

“Helena,” Myka says, and now Helena is gratified simply by Myka’s low utterance of her name. Myka does not always use that deeper voice, and Helena does love (yes, love) the rare pleasure of hearing her name in it. “I’m so tired,” Myka says next.

That is less gratifying. It’s yet another utterance Helena should leave alone; of course Myka is tired. But in what she is sure is a mistake, Helena says, “Of?”

“Everything. But particularly, you.”

A dagger, that was. A cut back. Testimony to Helena’s concatenating mistakes.

“This you,” Myka adds.

The additional twist of blade leaves Helena unclear on the devastation Myka intends. “Of course” is all she can think to say.

Myka closes her eyes and exhales heavy, a near-sob. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” she intones, but what need has she to apologize? “That was the pain talking—or, no, I still know you well enough to know you’ll hear that wrong. What I mean is, I’m saying something I could keep holding back if the pain wasn’t cracking me open.”

The pain. Cracking her open. Which would never have happened in the absence of Helena’s stupid, thoughtless touch. Which in turn makes abundantly clear that the stupid, thoughtless person who applied that touch is the “this you” Myka means.

If Helena is to remain in this situation she must take measures, so she lengthens her inhales and exhales, entirely ashamed both at needing such a crutch and at having to exhibit that need.

After a moment of silence, Myka asks, “Are you breathing differently than you were just a second ago?”

Myka isn’t Steve. Helena could at least attempt to lie about this, to cloak her shame... but it’s effort, either way. “Yes,” she says, choosing the unpredictability of Myka’s interpretation over the unpredictability of her own performance.

“Is that good or bad?” Myka asks. “Or both?”

The questions stop Helena, stop her in the same way her at-leisure observation of Myka had. I still know you well enough, Myka had said, and it is true. This is why, Helena would say if she could. Your knowing to ask that.

But she can’t say it, and, worse, she doesn’t know what she should say. What should come next.

Apparently Myka doesn’t either. That not-knowing persists, hanging, until “next” arrives, as an intrusion from outside their suspension: medical attention is at last directed Myka’s way; she is escorted out of the waiting area and taken elsewhere.

“We’ll call you when you can see her,” Helena is told.

Alone in the waiting area—for no other human seems to have suffered damage this night—and uncomfortably situated on a hard plastic chair, she tilts her head back against a similarly unforgiving plaster wall.

She closes her eyes. She’s had no rest, no rest for so long. She is drained. Physically empty.

Philosophically as well.

She imagines trying to sleep... or rather, she imagines not trying to remain awake.

Doubtless futile, either way.

She next imagines constructing an airtight argument that could not help but persuade all who hear it—Myka in particular, but all others as well—that this entire situation is Artie’s fault.

Also futile.

This despite its being the fact of the matter, for indeed he did bring the situation about. Perhaps not in a proximate sense, but in the ultimate... the idea of which, after a moment, strikes her as both comic and tragic: Artie as the ultimate cause? Of anything, from the universe on down? Though he would doubtless like to imagine himself so... even at the Warehouse, however, he must be not even penultimate, given the bureaucracy that sits over the entire concern...

Helena thus spends the bulk of her time in the waiting area stewing about—stewing over? stewing under?—the relative positions of god, Mrs. Frederic, and various Regents in the universe. None of it, however, requires her to alter her breathing; rather, she composes in her head the opening paragraphs of several publishable monographs on these and related topics. It isn’t restful. But is evidence of something other than emptiness.

When someone does at last call her to see Myka, everything has changed.

Well. Not everything. Helena herself hasn’t, as her bureaucracy-pantheon thought may have been philosophically valid but made no difference.

Myka, however, has changed entirely: her arm is now professionally dressed, but more importantly, the knit of pain has left her face. “They medicated me,” she says, giving the word “medicated” a rapturous cast. “The X-rays said I didn’t break anything, so we’re waiting on results of a scan to see if I need surgery but in the meantime I feel better than I maybe ever have in my life and I am so happy to see you. All these doctors were like ‘why did she think she could fix you’ but I knew why and it was because it’s you. and that scan? It’ll shout out how Helena Wells relocated Myka’s shoulder so she didn’t need surgery, and they don’t know this, but actually H.G. Wells relocated Myka’s shoulder, which is even more amazing. Wait, that’s not more amazing. You’re the most amazing when you’re you than when you’re that guy. Even though I guess you are that guy. Sort of. Wait, Claudia’s been saying ‘that guy’ a lot now. And I cut and paste from her so much, but I don’t like it. The way things are.” She heaves an enormous sigh and blinks at Helena, as if she’s just re-understood that another person is present.

Is there some ideal way to answer this flood? Helena settles for an antiseptic “I’m pleased to see you out of pain.”

Myka gasps and flails wildly with her uninjured arm, which gesture eventually resolves into an index finger directed at Helena. “That’s it exactly. I’m out of pain. All out. No more pain to give. Particularly not to you. So saying I’m tired of you? I regret it, and I apologize for it, and I promise that’s the end of it. I was wishing to get something back, and you don’t want it back, and so I have to be fine. Without it. Without you.”

Without you. Helena supposes she should be impressed by how concisely Myka can foreshadow disaster. “Should I not... be here?” She braces herself for the answer.

“Of course you should. I have to be fine without how you were,” Myka says, very quietly. The collapse of her volubility gives Helena pause.

She knows it would be better not to probe; she ought to, as Claudia says, “take the win.” But “Of course you should” is only facially a win... “How was I?” she asks. To wound herself by making Myka clarify what has been lost.

“Oh, how you were...” Myka says, her words dragging. How much—any, all?—of this might be due to the varying effects of the medication? “Putting me into this story,” she continues. “It was so big, and I didn’t understand what it was, really or at all, but it felt so big. Yearning and tragedy, and there I was, still me, but in it, so in it, all in it, next to you. Bigger than life, and I... loved it? Needed it? Something to take me over. But my wishing for any of it back, when of course you don’t?” She raises that free arm, then lets it fall. Futility, it says. “So small. Only somebody little and desperate would want to make you revisit any of that.”

Medication effect or not, Helena can’t let Myka keep on with this. “Make me revisit it? Yearning and tragedy? I’m the one who inflicted that, and with malign intent; I damaged you. And I cannot imagine a scenario in which that debt is discharged.”

Myka squints. “Debt,” she says, as if articulating a new noun, but not one that names an abstraction; no, this thing is big and blunt, a dumb object that takes up space. Unfunctional furniture. That I carry on my back, Helena moods.

“Oh!” Myka then yelps, her tone shifting to excitement. “But I just damaged myself. So now we’re even!” She delivers that last bit big and broad, for all the world as if she’s the comic lead in a panto.

Helena has not spared a thought for panto in years. “That makes no sense at all,” she says, because it’s the case, but also to scorn the memory. This is no time for that past.

“Would you like me to dislocate your shoulder?” Myka asks, as if it were a reasonable proffer. Still comic, but now strangely sincere.

Helena meets this bizarrely compelling, ridiculous combination with as much severity as she can muster. “Honestly no. I would not.”

“I see,” Myka says, and she points again, this time without preambling flail. “Some prices you aren’t willing to pay.”

Helena can at the very least be honest about this. How nice it would be if Steve were here to verify. “Willing to... in the sense of volunteering to? No. In the sense of understanding that I deserve to? Certainly. So do me damage if you must. In particular, do me damage if you think it could even the score between us. It won’t, but if you think it could? Please do.”

“That’s pretty twisted,” pronounces the only arbiter who matters.

“You sound like Claudia again,” Helena observes. To push the judgment away? Yes, and she tries to make certain of it with, “Is that another cut and paste?”

“Maybe. But now that I think about it, she sees things pretty clearly a lot of the time. Don’t you think?”

“I would like to think,” Helena is compelled to admit. Hoist by her own petard.

At this point—suspending any resolution—a doctor reenters the curtained area. “Good news: no surgery,” she tells Myka.

“See, I told you she fixed it,” Myka preens.

“You did,” says the doctor. “Several times,” she adds, dry.

Helena says “I’m so sorry,” only to hear Myka say, at the same time, “Sorry not sorry!” Another echo of Claudia... this one, however, clearly heartfelt.

The doctor turns to Helena. “Don’t try anything like this again. You got ridiculously lucky.”

“That’s kind of her M.O.,” Myka says. “Except when it isn’t.”

The doctor sighs. “I’m pretty sure that’s my point. And listen, make sure to follow up with your local doc. They’ll prescribe a ton of PT, so brace yourself.”

Myka snorts. “Brace myself? Sure, but not for the PT; my boss is going to flay me alive.”

The doctor barely reacts. “Oh, maybe this one can fix that too,” she deadpans, directing an eyeroll at Helena, accompanied by a murmured, “not a suggestion.”

“Oh, she’s in for the flaying,” Myka says, with more than a little cheer. “If not for this, then for something. Eventually.”

The doctor shakes her head, eyes unfocused. “Good news for me: I don’t have to care.” She points at Myka: “You go to PT.” Now at Helena: “You don’t try to practice medicine.” At both of them, her eyes flicking back and forth with purpose: “Got it?” Helena nods; she senses Myka doing the same. “Excellent,” the doctor says. “Or whatever. I’m done with you now.”

She conveys with her rapid exit that interacting with both of them has been a most exasperating experience.

While Helena does not appreciate being chastised—and especially not for attempting to care for Myka—she does appreciate expertise. Especially when it contributes to Myka’s well-being. It’s a conundrum. “I find your doctor’s aspect strangely appealing,” she says. “Speaking of bracing.”

Myka grins. “I was totally thinking the same thing.”

“And yet I would practice that medicine again.”

“For me that’s good news.”

As they prepare to depart, Helena says, “I confess I’m curious as to what you intend to tell Artie.”

Myka offers a slight stretch of her right shoulder in the direction of her ear: the only version of a shrug available to her, bound as she is. “Maybe I should leave that to you. You’re the writer.” Forestalling Helena’s reflexive objection, she adds, “I know, I know. The research. The ideas.”

“And yet I don’t have any. I certainly don’t see a path to inventing anything that would—”

“How about I take your photo with that camera? Think that’d help?” This is accompanied by a different grin: sly.

Whither the warning? Or is this a test? Myka isn’t Steve, yet Helena goes with truth: “It might. With any number of things.”

“If only,” Myka says, inscrutably. “Anyway I intend to tell Artie that this is all his fault, because he sent us on this retrieval in the first place. Obviously I won’t say what really happened.”

While Myka bestowing such grace is not surprising, it moves Helena all the same. “Thank you,” she says.

Myka opens her mouth, then closes it. She does it again. This wait... it’s grace too. “You’re welcome,” she eventually says. “I mean I’m tempted to tell him how you saved the day—the arm—but I know I shouldn’t, because I don’t want to draw attention to the hotel charging us extra.” To Helena’s quizzical eyebrow, she says, “For the missing towels and pillowcase. Which I tried to talk the nurses into giving back to me, but they’d already tossed them as hazardous waste. Or something. Or maybe I’m just not very persuasive? Or clear in what I’m asking for?”

Helena would very much like to explain that her own answers to those questions are negative and affirmative, respectively: no, you are persuasive; but yes, you are unclear.

“On the other hand, they did medicate me,” Myka says, perking up. “I keep thinking it’ll wear off, but not yet!”

The consolations of intoxication. “To the delight of your shoulder I’m sure,” Helena says. To my delight as well, she wishes she were free to say.

Their return to the hotel room offers another “everything has changed” hinge: no longer a stage for new and awkward performances of politesse, the space is now familiar, a place they have reentered. For the next act of the play?

Myka, who has preceded Helena in, stops and sways—just a bit, but Helena instinctively steps close, taking her by the elbow of her uninjured arm with one hand, stationing the other around the curve of her waist.

She feels Myka’s breath catch at the contact; immediately, she curses herself, loosens her hold, and says a terse, “I’m sure you want to lie down.”

“More than maybe anything. Or, wait, no, not anything.” Myka turns and catches Helena’s eyes with hers, but Helena cannot use that gaze as the basis for any inference.

She backs away as Myka lowers herself onto the bed; eventually, she backs her way into the room’s one armchair. It lacks give. It also lacks arms at a height that might provide anything resembling support. Helena slumps down, trying to be grateful that it exists at all.

Long minutes pass. As in the hospital’s waiting area, Helena imagines trying not to remain awake.

Similarly futile.

She chances a glance at Myka, who meets her eyes again and says, “That looks uncomfortable. Or what I mean is, you look uncomfortable. Which honestly is pointless, unless you’re doing some hair-shirt thing, because we’ve got this big bed. Not a lot of hours before we have to leave it, but we’ve got it for now.”

“That went poorly before.”

“I think circumstances have changed. Don’t you?” Weighted.

Circumstances are always changing, Helena could say. Usually for the worse. Instead she ventures, “You’d let me lie down with you?”

“I never wouldn’t.” Myka squints. “Wait. Did that come out right? Anyway, yes.”

Medication: not yet worn off. “You’re sure?” Helena asks.

“I’m pretty sure this bed is almost as big as a field where Pete’s favorite sport happens. It’s at least as big as an ice rink anyway, and those aren’t small.”

Helena refrains from pointing out that that was no help in the previous disaster. She doesn’t, however, appreciate being able to recline. For the first while, the fact of being beside Myka is less relevant than the slow loosening of her lower back and hips.

 “Can you sleep?” Helena asks, as they are both evidently lying with eyes open to the ceiling.

“Not now,” Myka answers, and the sentiment seems clear: not after all of this. All of this with which we must deal.

The bed first, perhaps.

She turns to look at Myka, if minimally. “Did you request a cot?” she asks, because she doesn’t know. Because the answer might reveal... something?

Myka’s eyes widen. “Oh my god I should have,” she says. Stricken.

“Why didn’t you?”

“It didn’t even cross my mind.” She’s talking more to herself—or perhaps to the room at large?—than to Helena. Is this continued evidence of the medication?

“And do you know why that is?” Helena asks, hoping for that revelation, even if drug-induced.

“Honestly I think I thought I was being given an ultimatum. Like it was something I had to be fine with or else.”

“Fine with ‘or else.’” Helena means the echo as rueful agreement.

But: “Sharing a bed with you. Platonically,” Myka says, taking it instead as a request for explanation.

“Platonically,” Helena scoffs, unable to avoid the idea that agreeing to accept that adverb would, paradoxically, usher in others. (Passionately.) (Speaking of paradoxically.) “That word is so often misused.” It’s a push-off. A push-away.

“But I’m using it correctly.” Myka sounds not offended, but rather self-satisfied.

Fine. Harden the position. “You are not referring to our consciousness rising from physical to spiritual matters.”

“Well... but how about love for the idea of good? As a path to virtue?”

Myka is well-read. In this moment, that fact is not entirely pleasing. “I suppose we were both attempting to be courtly,” Helena concedes.

“I mean I’ll grant you that nobody ended up transcending the body,” Myka says. Helena is about to agree, to snap away from churlishness, to express regret and apologies, when Myka exclaims, “Hey! I just had the best idea for a joke. So you’re not a hologram anymore, right? So you know what you were trying to be? Last night, in bed?”

Jokes. They confound Helena nearly as completely as metaphors do Steve. “I have no idea.”

“A Platonic solid,” Myka declares, triumphant.

Helena is mortified to find that in this case, she “gets it.” “Myka,” she sighs.

“Too soon? But come on, it’s not bad!”

“Alas, it is.” This quality, Helena can recognize.

“Right, but the good kind.”

Helena is not made of stone. Or bronze. How much easier everything had been then, sans choice and sans reason... and most importantly, sans the near-irresistibility of this one human. “I did always enjoy the word ‘icosahedron,’” she tenders.

“See,” Myka says, now in indulgence rather than triumph. “Pretty sure you have more than twenty faces though.”

“You do as well. Some revealed only under the influence of opioids.”

“Here’s one I don’t think I’d have the guts to use otherwise: my explain-it-to-you-using-words face.”

“Explain what to me?” Helena asks. It’s a surrender. She should better have said she did not wish that face revealed, but that would never have stopped a determined Myka.

“Why I flung myself to the floor.”

“I thought that had been explained? You were attempting to escape a circumstance.”

“First, the flinging was more involuntary than an attempt. And second: your hand.”

“Perhaps you don’t remember”—a strange thing to say to Myka—“but we had this conversation previously.” Helena does not want to have it again.

“Not this conversation. In that one, you drew the wrong conclusion. Or relied on an invalid assumption. Actually both of those. Anyway, your hand.”

“Please stop saying that,” Helena requests. Begs.

“Fine, I’ll finish the sentence: Woke up every nerve in my body,” Myka says, causing Helena to cringe and wish she could this very instant construct a truly useful time machine so she could fly backward, overleaping this latest passage so as to muzzle Myka before she could say that, because she believes it but knows it leads nowhere functional. To her continued mortification, Myka carries on, “Woke them all right up.” This, she says rhapsodic. Helena feels that tone in her gut, a hot twist of something she deserves as pain, but that manifests, shamefully, as pleasure. “Then your hand moved, and it shorted out the system—my system—and I fell out of bed, and the rest is history.”

“On the contrary, the rest is quite present.” Helena tries pushing all of it away, striving for detachment. For function.

“So, your hand,” Myka says again.

Helena raises the offender. “Also present.” Detachment. Humor, even; pushing, pushing, pushing. Trying to maintain.

“No, I mean why,” Myka pushes in turn.

Helena bats back, in faux innocence, “Why is it present?”

“Why was it present. On me.” Low now, her voice, just as compelling as, and even more commanding than, when she uses it to utter Helena’s name.

“I have no excuse,” Helena says.

“I don’t need an excuse. I need a reason. Do you have one?”

“It isn’t exculpatory.”

“As long as it’s explanatory.”

No escape now. No excuse, and no escape. “Here is my reason: I wanted to touch you. So against all better judgment, I did. Intending only that, nothing more.” Myka’s response to these words is an exhale. Loud. Unlike the hospital sob, however, this is slow and controlled. Helena allows a decorous pause, but no words ensue, so she goes on. Myka deserves an explanation that is complete. “But then I found myself unable to... un-touch you. Competently. And the rest will at some point be history, upon which I will never cease to look back and berate myself.”

Waiting for whatever may come next, Helena feels exhaustion inch through her, infiltrating her eyes, limbs, brain, sapping every vestige of energy... her surrender to the creeping leach is imminent when Myka says, “I like that reason.”

All right then. Awake and aware. “You do?”

“You really can be impossible to talk to. Listen to me: if I did that—touched you—I would find myself the same. Unable to un-touch. Do you understand?”

What would be the cost of abandoning her resistance? “I don’t know...” she begins, then reverses course and begins again. Truth, never mind the cost. “Yes. I do understand. But I don’t know what to do about that.”

Myka turns her head full toward Helena, twisting her long neck. Helena turns her own head, but that isn’t enough, so she shifts onto her side—her left side, punitively aware that it will be weeks before Myka can turn in such a way.

They look at each other, Helena both knowing and fearing how her guilt must freight her gaze. Regarding Myka so close, looking now into eyes that are open, is a boon she does not deserve.

After a time, Myka says, “I know what I want to do.”

Her intent is abundantly clear. The entirely of Helena’s being balks, stranding her again in Boone: if she makes a move for the momentary better, it will most likely end worse. She cannot find the... courage? or is it foolish disregard for consequences?... to reach for that moment of joy. Neither, however, can she find the discipline to dismiss its possibility.

“But I also know I shouldn’t,” Myka says, breaking with clarity into Helena’s indecision.

Well. Helena can certainly see the wisdom of that, so perhaps at last they are approaching a real accord that will render all hopes and wishes moot, so that neither courage nor discipline features in the—

“I can tell the meds are messing with my head,” Myka says, “and if there’s one thing I want to remember in picture-perfect detail, it’s this.” She moves her right index finger near to Helena’s lips, then withdraws it.

Unable to un-touch. That withdrawal reaffirms that Myka believes what she says. “This,” Helena echoes, mesmerized.

“So I’m going to wait till tomorrow to—listen to me saying it out loud—kiss you. For the first time. I want to be all there when it happens.”

There is a practicality to Myka’s thinking, and to Myka, that Helena worships. She tries to match it with a bit of her own: “If it happens.”

Myka’s jaw drops. “Come on! I said it out loud! It’s real now!”

“It’s been real for some time, hasn’t it? But I’m being realistic about the circumstance. You might not remember that you wanted to.”

“Seriously? I’ve remembered it since we met.”

Helena has remembered it just as long. She has. Denying it is pointless. But she has a larger concern, and though this is the wrong time to address it, perhaps medicated Myka will afford an unfiltered read...

“Or you might think better of it.”

“Of kissing you? I don’t think so.”

“Of what could ensue. The possibility of a... relationship. Between us. What if it doesn’t work?”

“Relationship.” After she says the word, Myka’s lips part and close, as if the very word is savory. “What if it does?”

It is savory. However. “I’m asking as a practical matter, not philosophically. I’m constrained: I can’t leave again. That’s why I came back.” The thin strand to which she is clinging... refraining from attempting to rekindle an intimacy hasn’t been only to keep Myka safe. It has also been to keep the Warehouse safe for Helena herself to inhabit.

“Then don’t leave again.”

“But what if that means you do?” This is not philosophy either. This, too, is history.

“If I do, then I do, but I’d like to think I won’t. We’ve both had our walkaway crises, and they didn’t take. So if it doesn’t work, we put it behind us like adults. If Pete and I could, then so can you and I. But I’d rather not have to. So let’s be careful.” She pauses. “Breathe however you need to.”

The words are an embrace. A physical clasp might be more galvanizing, but right now, Myka is managing just fine with words. “If this works, it will be because you say things like that.”

“Good news, because I mean things like that. And I intend to keep saying them. Hey, speaking of saying, do me a favor and write down what I said just now, about the adults and the careful, because I want to remember it.”

Sluggishly, Helena ideates rising, going to the room’s desk, finding logo-bearing paper and pen, writing...

****

Helena and Oscar are in a salon. They are engaged in a dispute regarding choices and consequences. Helena is standing at a lectern, and Oscar is reclining on a lavishly upholstered chaise longue, kicking his right leg such that its calf bounces in a languid little rhythm against the low cushioned edge.

Kick. Kick. Kick.

“The choices that create a circumstance will not, repeated, resolve it satisfactorily,” Helena says. Is she reading from a monograph? “As we see in the case of your own Ballad of Reading Gaol, do we not? And yet injury need not lead inevitably to future debility, so clearly some choice in the matter is—”

“Helena,” Oscar says, interrupting her monologue. “Helena,” he repeats. He sounds nothing like himself, but rather someone else, and Helena is straining to connect the voice to the correct person.

Kick. Kick. Kick.

“Time to wake up,” Oscar-as-someone-else admonishes. Encourages?

“I know,” she tells him, hugely frustrated, fighting. “I’m trying.”

His impassive mien is no help. It never was.

Kick. Kick. Kick.

Trust Oscar to cast some part of himself as the pendulum of a particularly annoying clock—

“Seriously, wake up,” Helena hears, and consciousness jolts at her: Myka’s voice.

Oscar dissolves. Into laughter or tears, no doubt, as he was wont to do...

Helena’s eyes open, meeting Myka’s, and she is brought back to it all: the hotel, the bed; the shoulder, the hospital... then hotel again, bed again... and finally words, as if for the first time.

Myka is lying on her right side, facing Helena. Her eyes are bright, her gaze intense.

“Are you in pain?” Helena asks.

Myka leans forward, as if that were a signal. The signal: for Helena is the astonished, grateful, transported recipient of a kiss, a first kiss—the first kiss—one that is swift but soft, gentle, genuine. Like morning... “Better now,” Myka says when she pulls back. “I’m going to brush my teeth. Stay there.”

Better now. Not lost on Helena are all the ways that signifies, including: better that this happened now than at some point in the desperate past. Then, such a kiss would have been a tragic wish for all they would never have. Now, instead, it can stand as a reward for having survived all of that, as well as, universe willing, a mark of embarkation.

By the time Myka returns, Helena has sat up, stationing herself on the edge of the bed. She has also realized that she must apologize—for they should not embark on this new voyage with yet another of her many faults unaddressed. “You charged me with writing down part of our conversation. I didn’t. I fell asleep instead.”

Myka hesitates before joining her on the bed’s edge, clearly considering which arm should be next to Helena. She chooses the functional right. “It’s okay. Even if I don’t remember exactly what we said, I remembered what we needed to do.”

“Needed to,” Helena reprises. She could supply words of her own, but why? Myka is saying the ones that matter...

“Needed to,” Myka affirms. “So where were we?” She raises her useful hand to Helena’s cheek, cradling. Helena leans into it, saying nothing, because silence now says everything.

This is a longer kiss, more wandering, more suggestive of possibility, more likely to lead to such possibility... Helena is the one to this time pull away. “A place quite new,” she says.

“And yet I’m pretty sure we’ve been headed here all along.”

“It wasn’t inevitable,” Helena says. She is thinking now of dream-Oscar, who is slipping from her mind, dropping, like a poorly initiated painting, but he must have obstreperously been maintaining something about inevitability. He always did.

“No,” Myka agrees. “And it still isn’t. So let’s be careful.”

“You remember that part? Despite my stenographic failure?”

“Even if I didn’t—but I do—I’d know it’s important.”

Helena turns and touches her right hand to Myka’s right hip. She would certainly not be able to do this now if she had not done so in the night... the night’s ontogeny recapitulating the phylogeny of their shared history. Myka covers Helena’s hand with hers, and there is healing in the simple fact of their sitting. But eventually that is not enough, and another kiss ensues, longer still, and lips outweigh quiet hands—or no, lips add to quiet hands, but hands are not content to remain so calm, and so this continues and might continue—

Myka makes a noise that is clearly not of pleasure; she moves entirely away, her right hand pressing protectively at her left shoulder. “We’re going to need to be careful about this stupid shoulder too. I’m so, so sorry.”

“You’re sorry? I’m the one who can’t keep my hands to myself.” Ontogeny, phylogeny.

“It’s not like I’m some paragon of self-control... and I am sorry, because I’d like to be able to participate fully. But also I’d like to not have to hurry on account of catching a plane. In good news, eventually my shoulder will heal. I know we can’t stay here till then, but...”

“It would help,” Helena supplies.

“If only because we have to come up with how this supposedly happened. I still think maybe I should take your picture. Or you could take mine? Because by the way, here’s a funny thing: I was trying to write a novel.”

“You were?” More that is new... “Speaking of icosahedra,” Helena notes.

“I want to tell you about it.”

“You do?” Trying to convey her incredulity. That Myka would allow her such... access.

“I want to tell you everything. But in the meantime we have to tell Artie something... I guess we’ve got both flights plus the layover in Denver to get our story straight.”

Stories. Narrative. Novels? “But we’ll tell Steve the truth. Won’t we?”

“Of course we will. And Claudia, right?”

“Also necessary. Although most likely mockery-inducing.”

Myka smiles. It’s a sunrise. “Stress testing. If we can take it from her, we’ll be fine. Then again we might need the time on the planes to rest up for that.”

“Weren’t you able to sleep, this past while?”

Myka shakes her head, and just as Helena opens her mouth to express regret and apologize again for her own sleep, Myka silences her with a kiss, one that lingers, lingers, lingers... still half against Helena’s lips, she says, “The un-touching part really is difficult. But don’t worry about my not sleeping: for the first time in a long time, I was happy to be awake.”

END

[apparitionism]

@lady-adventuress , this is fantastic, and I send you heartfelt thanks! I second all the calls in tags for a poster, and I'll say also that I have never had a prompt realized so perfectly before. For those who are curious, I'd mused that something completely off the wall could be fun, and I did indeed bring up unicycle-riding, as well as the juggling of flaming torches, or chainsaws, or both. I admit, however, that Pete the ferret jumping through a hoop did not even occur to me, and that is nothing short of BRILLIANT.

Happy Bering and Wells Day! This year, @apparitionism gave me a wild set of prompts to play with, so here's what I ended up with.

@b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange

[apparitionism]

Asleep

Happy @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange to @kla1991 , our fearless leader, who of course knew I was their gifter, and who requested “a bed-sharing scenario that doesn't immediately turn sexy,” one that might involve tensions and/or physical discomfort. I’ve tried to approach that assignment in the appropriate spirit, with a bit of spin, although I suppose it all really depends on what any given person considers “sexy”... anyway, I’m pretty sure there are two sides to every story. Two sides to every bed, too. Here’s the first side. (This takes place in a post-season-five world, because why not raise the difficulty level?)

Asleep

My arm is asleep.

Normally, a person would, upon realizing this, shift position so as to restore blood flow.

Normally.

But very little is normal about the situation in which Myka’s arm is asleep.

She is in a hotel-room bed, in the dark of night, lying on her left side, with her left arm, her now-asleep arm, pinned beneath her. So ends the extremely limited “normal” portion of the situation.

Here begins the rest: she absolutely must not move. This is because she can hear, and can as a molecular disturbance feel, the steady push-pull of Helena’s breathing, near her neck, so near. She feels also the unfamiliar proximity of Helena’s body, offering heat across what must be only nanometers separating her from Myka’s back. And then there is Helena’s hand, what must be her right hand, resting in sleep, what must be unconscious sleep, on Myka’s hip.

They have never been in a bed together before tonight—but also, sadly also, they are not in a bed together now. They are simply two people in a bed in a hotel room, one of them obviously sleeping, obviously fulfilling her role in the “two agents are sharing a hotel room and getting some rest” play they are performing.

Myka, however, is not asleep. No: instead she is on fire because of Helena’s breath and heat and hand but unable to do anything about any of that, and thus desperate to escape and suffer her mortification in private but unable to do anything about any of that either—a terrible combination.

And now her arm, as if in intentional mockery, is asleep.

She has arrived at this pretty pass due to a series of events that had seemed, in their unfolding, to be at the very least manageable...

... starting with Helena’s return to the Warehouse.

That return had at first struck Myka as a beautiful dream—and, equally, a reward for awakening from a nightmare.

The particular nightmare from which Myka had awakened was the fugue in which she’d imagined she might have romantic feelings for Pete. How perfect it had seemed, then, for Helena to present herself to resume agent duties at the Warehouse, so soon after that enormous error had been rectified. “A reboot, I believe it’s called,” Helena had said of her change of heart, and Claudia had laughed uproariously at that, shouted “Turn it off and turn it on again!”, and hugged the obviously befuddled, but just as obviously pleased, rebooted agent.

Myka had not hugged Helena, not then. She’d thought to save such an action, such an aggressively bodily action, for an even more meaningful time, progress toward which would, at long last, begin.

But progress had not begun. In the reboot, Helena was a collegial colleague to Myka.... and that was all.

Helena did not, as she had in old times (old shows?), make comments that even usually-oblivious Myka could read as flirtatious. She did not step close, too close, as she had in old times, waking Myka’s body to possibility and want. She did not, in fact, mention old times at all. No words about “Wells and Bering”—as Myka had hoped to one day again correct, however incorrect Helena found the correction, to “Bering and Wells”—having ever done anything together.

And Myka of course could not assault such a collegial colleague with an anguished Why? She could do nothing but wish for a reboot of her own, or at least a do-over, one in which the minute Helena stepped from Claudia’s embrace, Myka herself initiated one that made her hopes clear.

But no such reboot was forthcoming.

That disappointment was, Myka found, manageable. Crushing, but manageable. It was made more so by the fact that Artie sent Helena on retrievals with Steve, sometimes with Claudia as adjunct; thus her collegial interactions with Myka did not have particularly meaningful stakes. At least, none that were Warehouse-specific, and that was what counted. That had to be what counted.

Until one morning at breakfast, when Artie tossed a folder at Myka and said, “Tomorrow you’re going to San Antonio to bag a camera.”

Then he pointed at Helena. “And you’re going with her.”

“Am I?” Helena asked, even as Myka voiced, “She is?

“She’s the one who stole it from Warehouse 12,” Artie told Myka. To Helena, he said, “So I assume you’ll know it when you see it.”

Well, that tone in Artie’s voice was like old times—old shows. But Helena did not respond with her back-then defiant chirp. She said a simple “oh,” a chastened wince that seemed pulled from a different show entirely.

Artie should not be inflicting this on her, Myka thought. After a moment, she revised that to, Artie should not be inflicting this on her or on me. Her first counter: “Maybe Helena could just tell me what it looks like.”

“If that would be easier,” Helena said, with a quickness suggesting she agreed that something was indeed being inflicted on somebody, “I certainly—”

“Did I stutter?” Artie demanded.

He didn’t. But after a bit of time, Myka thought she could, just maybe, manage the situation, both because of Helena’s apparent trepidations and as a way of sidestepping her own feelings. “I’m not sure this mission with Helena is a good idea,” she tried saying to Pete later that morning.

“How many times do I have to tell you the vibes aren’t bad anymore?” he asked, annoyed, as if she’d been making a habit of hitting him with this concern whenever he was trying to get comfortable with a comic book.

In fact, he’d told her that once since Helena came back. Once. It had happened when Myka had said, in a moment of exhaustion that had allowed her management to slip, “I miss how Helena used to be,” and he’d rolled his eyes and told her, “That’s dumb. The vibes aren’t bad anymore.”

Now Myka said—because why fight about it?—“Obviously more than once. But I just don’t think it’s a good idea. For her, I mean. Artie said that thing about the stealing and she... I don’t know. Wilted.”

“Okay, so tell that to Artie.”

Was that vaguely reasonable advice? “I guess I could give that a—”

“Like that’d work! Ha!”

“You’re very unhelpful,” Myka informed him.

“Keeping it on brand.” He flexed his biceps. “Just like these big boys.”

To which Myka could say only, “I am so devoutly grateful we aren’t together.”

“Me too. Different reasons though.”

“I’m devoutly grateful for that too,” she said.

She was grateful also, when it came down to it, for his total lack of interest in parsing the differences between their reasons.

Pete’s unhelpfulness aside, she still had the greater part of a day before her scheduled departure on this Helena-accompanied retrieval, and she hoped it might still be possible to extricate herself, Helena, or both of them from it.

Who would be more helpful in such an endeavor: Claudia or Steve? Claudia, who might be more sympathetic to the overall difficulty... or Steve, who would probably be more persuasive in helping to take a plan to Artie...  

She went with Steve.

She opened with, “I need to talk to you. No, wait, before you wince: I need to talk to someone, and I think you’re my best bet.”

“I’m not overly flattered, but my prefrontal cortex appreciates the revision. Also my sinuses.”

“I have a problem.”

“My prefrontal appreciates that too: direct, no nuance. And I know we haven’t talked about this out loud, but if your problem’s with me? Totally justified. I got the you-and-Pete thing wrong.”

“No, my problem’s with Helena.” That was probably too revealing. “But the other thing, he and I got it wrong. You were just a witness. Regrettably.”

“But I... pushed?”

“Probably it was a thing he and I had to test to know for sure. And we did, so now we do. I like to think I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

That got her a twist of a smile. “You like to think, but this H.G. thing. I know you two have history, so is this that?”

Myka would have preferred to say “no,” but she figured she should continue giving his sinuses a break. So instead she said, “See, you’re discerning. This is why you’re my best bet.”

“What’s the problem then? You both seemed less than thrilled at breakfast, but—”

Now Myka could tell a truth. “Exactly. She clearly doesn’t feel okay about this artifact, and she shouldn’t have to deal with anything that would make her regret having come back. Right?” Before he could agree or disagree, she presented her plan: “You should do the retrieval with me instead. And I’ll need help selling this to Artie, so if you could gently ask her about the camera and then tell him you’re just as likely to recognize it when you—”

“Wanting to spare her discomfort is admirable. Really. But that wasn’t your issue, not at first. The very instant Artie said H.G. was going too, you tensed up.”

He is your best bet, Myka reminded herself. She sighed and said, “Fine. I’m not sure I can go on a mission with her.”

He winced and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Okay, yes,” she acknowledged. “I’m sure I can. I’m just not sure I want to.”

He didn’t release the pinch. “Unfortunately for both of us, that’s also a lie.”

That one, she resented. “Maybe you’re too discerning.”

“And yet I’ve heard I’m your best bet.”

“Right. Maybe I do want to. But the problem is, everything’s different now.”

“Also, I’m sorry, a lie. That last part. Everything isn’t different. What’s the same?”

Far, far too discerning. “I don’t want to say.”

He smiled. “Aaaaah. Very truthful.”

“Here’s something I do want to say: would you take my place instead?”

“Either way,” he said, his smile morphing into an apologetic grimace, “I don’t think that’s how this works.”

“We just have to make a case to Artie, which I know is a heavy lift, but something like how much easier it would be for Helena to go with you since you’re her wrangler now, so—”

“No, I mean logistically. I’m not her wrangler at all, by the way, but also the plane tickets are already in your names, right?”

Well, that was annoyingly true. “Fine. I hate it, but fine. And even if I could find an artifact that would change names on plane reservations, I couldn’t use it because that would really be personal gain.”

“Would it though?” Steve asked, lightly, but with an undercurrent.

Myka did not want to answer that question.

So she and Helena went.

On the plane, Helena said to Myka, “I’m sure you’re wondering about Artie’s statement.”

Accurate, but: “Not if you don’t want to talk about it,” Myka said. “In that case, any and all wondering canceled. Canceled like... an underappreciated cult TV show.” That was something a colleague would say, wasn’t it? A particularly collegial one, such as, for example, Claudia, from whom Myka had copied and pasted the words about television.

This wasn’t the first time she’d plucked words like this; articulations of her own, she feared—even more so now than in the past—were likely to reveal too much.

Helena raised an eyebrow. “You sound like Claudia.”

Mission accomplished, if a bit too well, so Myka shrugged and said, “I’ve heard characterization can get weird in a reboot.” That was also from Claudia, who had asked Myka, not long ago, “Do you think H.G.’s okay? I know characterization can get weird in a reboot, but she seems a little off,” and Myka had pleaded ignorance as to the entire concept, despite her wish to opine at length on how Helena seemed definitely, from Myka’s perspective, not okay. Definitely off. More than a little.

“I did use that word,” Helena said.

“You did.”

“I did also steal the artifact in question.”

“Napoleon Sarony’s camera.”

“Yes. I gave it to Oscar Wilde.”

“You did?” Oscar Wilde. Okay.

“I told him to have someone use it to take his photograph.”

Obviously this has something to do with its effect, but Myka has no idea what. Helena clearly wants to be drawn out on the point, so Myka probes, using what she knows, “Because it was what Sarony used to take those photos of Wilde when he was on his big star-making tour in the U.S.? Or because of the Supreme Court copyright case about that one Wilde photo he took? Oh, that case, I bet it’s why the camera’s an artifact, but—”

“You’re correct on the why of the artifact. But do you know its effect?”

“I didn’t have time to look it up before we left. And it’s not in the file.”

“Artie left it out, I suspect.”

“Because it’s exculpatory?”

“Because it’s explanatory. As far as anything could be, given that time. Obviously nothing is exculpatory.”

Isn’t it? “Do you want to explain?”

“Want,” Helena said, and oh god if Myka could have given herself leave to understand that word said differently. But this was not that reboot. After a throat-clear, Helena went on, “It was... post.”

Myka didn’t need to ask post-what.

“So many artifacts there were,” Helena continued, “so many unhelpful to me in my extremity. Nevertheless I thought to help. To make some difference. Where I could, as opposed to where I could not.”

In old times, Helena had not said this much about her mental state... post. Fleshy, this admission was, and Myka did not know what to make of it. Was it a step closer, akin to the old sort of physical proximity? Or was it just... explanatory? “The effect?” she prompted, gently, hoping for clarification.

“Artistic enhancement of the subject photographed. Oscar too was... post. Imprisonment had diminished him so terribly. I thought an artifactual photograph might help restore his writerly prowess.”

“Did it work?” Myka asked.

“I can’t prove causation,” Helena said. “Nevertheless, post-photo, he did write ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol.’”

That was one of those utterances Myka would be processing for quite some time. Separate and apart from her outsize feelings for Helena as Helena—as a physical body to which Myka’s own body has for years now compulsively responded—there was the ongoing absurdity, the near high comedy, of Helena speaking factually about events of such cultural-historical import. “I can’t think that was a bad outcome,” Myka eventually managed to say.

“I can’t either.”

They had not had so genuine, so genuinely substantive, a conversation since Helena’s return.

However, their renewed familiarity, if that’s what it was, did not outlast the plane.

They found the camera, and they neutralized it with minimal difficulty—if a bit more consternation on the part of the gentleman who believed he had the right to possess the piece.

That was all very... collegial.

And—but—they then tried to check in at their hotel. Or rather, Myka did. Helena was occupying herself with the snacks on offer in the lobby. “Steve usually checks in,” she’d said. “Do you mind?”

How could Myka have been less accommodating than Steve? Also she was—she had to concede—more than a little charmed by Helena’s seeming admission of... well, not incompetence. Just a slight slink away from responsibility.

Please, a more cynical part of her said with a snort of derision, you’re charmed by the way she does everything. Walking, talking, existing. Inspecting potato-chip bags across the lobby in a hotel’s snack pantry.

“Bering and Wells,” the desk clerk said in confirmation of the reservation, and Myka wanted to thank him for that ordering of names. He followed up with, “One king.”

She didn’t want to thank him for that. “No,” she told him, and it was good that Helena was out of earshot. “Two. Kings, queens, doubles, twins, I don’t care. But two.”

“Sorry,” said the clerk. “Full up.”

So one king it had been.

And now, in that one king, Myka’s arm is asleep.

“Are you asleep?” she wants to ask of Helena, aloud, to ascertain the true contours of the situation, but the very asking might—would?—change the contours, and Myka isn’t sure she’s in any kind of state to handle any certainty or any change. So she thinks the question at Helena instead, thinks it over her shoulder at that warm body over and over, Are you asleep, are you asleep, are you asleep, are you asleep, until she’s estranged from the question as anything but words, until “asleep” in particular begins to strike her as bizarrely archaic, its construction completely uncontemporary, and she interrupts her telepathy to think, It is archaic; we don’t ask “Are you abed” or anything like that anymore—

—but she interrupts herself again, for that doesn’t ring quite right. So she calls up the dictionary, the A’s, riffling her way through, and the exercise offers her all sorts of examples that show how very unarchaic indeed it is to say “asleep”: ablaze, abuzz, aground, ajar, alight, aloud, amid...

The list goes on. It’s far longer than she expected, but she continues, doggedly, to the end of the A’s, through “astray,” “aswoon” (she doesn’t linger on that one), on to “atingle” (that one either), on and on, ending with “awhirl.” She’d been by then vaguely looking forward to something like “azoom,” but alas.

Such a lengthy jaunt through the initial chapter of the dictionary surely must have eaten up significant time, perhaps even more than she imagined; perhaps morning is at last approaching, and the alarm will ring, and all this physical consternation can be resolved by sudden wakefulness on everybody’s part.

The clock on the nightstand tells her the journey took three minutes.

Spectacular.

Well, fine. If the A’s were three minutes, the rest of the dictionary should offer her at least an hour of distraction—both from her arm’s discomfort and from the physical, emotional, and existential discomfort created by the presence at her neck, back, and hip.

She starts in on the B’s. First comes “b,” defined, in entry 1a, as “the 2d letter of the English alphabet.” No doubt it’s important to periodically refresh one’s memory of such things.

The B’s proceed, slow and thorough; after “b” comes “baa,” and on and on... “bedlam” catches her attention, in a Warehouse-y way; “bed of roses” does too, as it’s “a place or situation of agreeable ease,” which this certainly is not—

—in sudden, striking emphasis, Helena’s hand on Myka’s hip moves, a minimal slide-glide toward thigh, and oversensitized Myka can’t control a too-violent twitch in response, one that jolts her toward the bed’s edge, which was nearer than she realized, for now its surface is an abrupt absence, and a crash to the floor is imminent, and instinct, instinct: her brain shouts for an arm to break her fall, but the volunteering limb is the stupid somnolent one, and OH GOD she has never known pain to manifest like this—she’s taken a bullet but this is more, for “seeing stars” is no mere metaphor, as she’d always imagined; her vision is literally stellating, even as she hears herself yelp in prelinguistic anguish.

The horrific fullness of the situation settles on her as she additionally hears, directed at her from some angel perspective, the voice of her dreams but now this nightmare saying “Myka? What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” Myka moans at the unforgivingly injurious floor, and then the stars win.

TBC

[apparitionism]

Bonus 2

Here’s the second part of a holiday story, begun in part 1, about how Myka and Helena, in a vaguely season 4 world in which nobody’s going to go to Boone but through which they have thus far been separated, are reunited for a day-before-Christmas-eve retrieval in Cleveland. Helena has been summoned by Claudia to serve as Myka’s backup, for Pete is spending some holiday time with his family... but as it turns out, the retrieval is necessary because—plot-semi-twist!—Pete Christmas-gifted his cousin, who is a bigwig at an accounting firm, with an artifact, a pen that apparently has something to do with Santa’s naughty/nice list. Which said cousin used to confer end-of-year bonuses—and penalties. As this part opens, Myka is just beginning to process the fact that the whole situation is Pete’s fault...

(And no, I didn’t manage to bring this thing in for a landing in this part. Nobody faint from the surprise.)

Bonus 2

“Okay,” Myka acknowledges, because what else can she do? The fact is that in any Warehouse-related context, “coincidence” is a non sequitur, and she begins formulating a plan to Christmas-gift Claudia with a T-shirt featuring that sentiment. How fast can she get a custom T-shirt made?

The irony is that Claudia would know.

“Yeah,” says Pete’s cousin—Pete’s cousin! She might be affirming the Claudia-irony in Myka’s head, or the situational irony Myka is now stuck in, or any of the vast array of ironies that make up the Warehousian unfolding of time itself. Myka would not have expected Pete’s cousin’s words to contain multitudes. And yet.

“He told me it was the kind of thing he thought I’d like,” that cousin continues, “and he was right. Effects aside, it’s a gorgeous implement. Perfectly balanced... which I guess works on an existential level too, doesn’t it? Naughty, nice.” She shifts the pen to rest a delicate crosswise on an extended index finger, testing its equilibrium as a chef might a knife.

The pen—or is it merely a different species of knife?—basks in Nancy Sullivan’s regard. “Resonant little instrument,” she says, with clear affection. “Anyway, we were talking about Pete.” A different sort of affection now colors her voice. “He went into this big production-number apology about it being sort of secondhand.”

“Oh?” Myka says, distracted by pens, knives, resonances... but, right, secondhand. Of course it’s secondhand. No new item could be an artifact. Or could it? This seems like a Steve-conversation topic.... and it certainly beats “H.G. is god knows where” for philosophy.

“Not because it’s not new,” Pete’s cousin says, apparently reading Myka’s mind, “but because he initially was thinking he’d give it to somebody else.”

Myka repeats her interrogative “oh?”, but she’s getting a feeling again.

“Yeah,” says Nancy Sullivan, and Myka really has to applaud her talent for broadly applicable affirmation. “He said he wanted to give it to his partner because, and I quote, ‘she likes the old-fashioned stuff,’ but then he realized he shouldn’t because, and I also quote, ‘she’s got this whole family feathery-pen dealy-thingy and I don’t want to upset her.’” She waves the pen again, this time directly at Myka, like a conductor imploring the oboes to pick up the pace. “And he told me his partner’s name,” she concludes.

“I’m sure there are lots of Myka Berings in the world?” Myka tries, weakly, raising her hands as if to offer Nancy Sullivan all those other Myka Berings. The last vestige of defensibility... then her hands drop, because really. She looks at Helena in apology, with only an indistinct, tangled sense of what she’s apologizing for. I’m sorry I occasioned this is part of it, yet there’s a deeper fault she feels but can’t quite ideate, one more consequential than an anodyne “oops.”

“Listen, he’s a really good guy,” Nancy Sullivan says.

“I agree completely,” Myka assures her. But in the interest of full disclosure, she adds, “Mostly completely. I mean, I’m going to kill him for this.”

Helena says, “Are you.” Her tone brings Myka up short: it’s impossibly knowing, suggesting insight into everything Myka has been thinking, about someday and talking and things.

Again with the reading so right.

Myka would love to have the panache to do more than glance furtively at Helena, to pull off a playful, similarly knowing response, like “that depends on my backup” (or something actually clever that will doubtless occur to her during some post-holiday post-mortem). Instead she goes with a not at all interrogative “Oh.”

Nancy Sullivan looks from Myka to Helena. Then she says, “Okay, revision: A really good guy who might be hanging onto some unreasonable hope.”

Myka wishes she could keep from glancing yet again, now, at Helena—now as she grasps the fullness of her underlying error, now as she formulates a hopeful plan regarding someday saying out loud “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize that he had any such hope and that I didn’t make completely clear that any such hope would never have been anything but unreasonable”—but the wish doesn’t work. She glances... thus proving Nancy Sullivan’s point.

“He didn’t mention you,” Pete’s cousin tells Helena. “I think I see why.”

“I’m both offended and pleased,” Helena says, with her customary little thank-you head-bow.

Rather than luxuriating in the familiarity of that head-bow, Myka tries to head off a more detailed discussion of Helena’s role in it all (and what a nondescriptively limp phrase that is) by observing, “The sixth-sense thing is quite the family trait.”

“Ah. Sure. You’ve had experience,” Nancy Sullivan says, a little droop in her voice.

Has she taken Myka’s words as criticism? Myka hurries to reassure, “Sometimes it’s very helpful.”

“But. Other times.” This is heavier, and now she must be referencing her own vibe-related experiences.

“Your family get-togethers must be really... charged?” Myka tries.

Nancy Sullivan offers another all-encompassing “Yeah.” Then she laughs. “But at least we don’t have a feathery-pen dealy-thingy like your family does.”

Helena clears her throat, an attention-garnering ah-ha-hem, as if it’s in the stage directions preceding her next line in some farce. She inclines her head: more stage-direction drama. Finally, “You do now,” she says in benediction.

Nancy Sullivan’s jaw drops. “Wow,” she says, and “wow,” she repeats. Then she laughs again and says, “He really should’ve mentioned you.”

Myka might laugh too, but she is preoccupied by the way in which Helena’s well-chosen articulation has persuaded her body to remind her that it and she have reached no mutually satisfactory agreement about appropriate reactions.

And that in turn sparks Myka to a realization: once the retrieval is accomplished, there may be a nonzero chance that she and Helena could enjoy a bit more of that liminal together-presence...

Myka’s body makes its best effort to crash through the gauzy ideating her brain would prefer to do about what such time could entail, and after no small amount of nethers-vs.-cerebrum struggle, she manages to propose, truce-wise, a simple Let’s just hope it exists.

Surprisingly, body and mind are willing to shake on that, giving Myka leave to slip on a glove and pronounce, “Just give us the pen. Then it’s over. Mostly. The money will probably revert... so you’ll most likely have to redo the bonuses the old-fashioned way.” Hearing herself, she amends, “Well. The regular way.”

“I don’t mind redoing. But reverting...” Pete’s cousin tightens her fingers around the artifact, pulling it near to her body as if she might be considering, for one last “maybe,” the idea of punching her way out.

Myka tenses, and she doesn’t need to cast a glance to know that Helena is doing the same.

She glances anyway... and indeed, Helena alive with wiry readiness is a sight worth the seeing. So worth it, in fact, that Myka is genuinely, if improperly, disappointed that said sight doesn’t cause the truce to collapse.

After a moment, however, color returns to Nancy Sullivan’s knuckles, and Myka removes the pen from her slackened grip.

But then Nancy Sullivan cocks her head. “Is it really over though? I feel like something else might be happening.”

No. No. Absolutely not. “Something else is always happening,” Myka says, affecting nonchalance as she slides the feathery foolishness into a static bag, ignoring its yipping sparks of protest. “Don’t worry about it.”

Nancy Sullivan casts a skeptical look at the barky little bag. “If you say so. Anyway seeing Pete’s face when I tell him you and I –and he and I!—are fellows in family feathery-pen dealy-thingies now? Might end up being the second-best end-of-year bonus of all, given everything.” There’s a little mockery in her voice, echoing the cousin Myka knows so well.

“And the best such bonus?” Helena inquires.

“Docking Bob’s pay,” Nancy Sullivan says instantly.

Myka snorts, and Nancy Sullivan turns back to her and says, “Are you okay with me being glad we met?” Like she’s mostly but not entirely sure of the response she’ll get, and that’s another echo.

“Only if you’re okay with me being glad too,” Myka says, her own voice sounding a familiar note—one she’s pretty sure Pete would recognize.

After a nod, Nancy Sullivan turns to Helena. “I’d say it to you, but I feel like there’s something extra going on with you, like—”

Myka steps in: “Honestly, always,” and then she’s hustling Helena out of the office even as Helena chirps, “I’m both offended and pleased by that as well!”

Back in the elevator, Helena speaks first. “I did not expect that,” she says, sounding entertained by—practically bubbly about—the entire scenario.

“I should have,” Myka grumbles.

“You’re too hard on yourself.”

“Oh god no,” Myka says, involuntarily. “Too easy if anything.”

Helena’s eyebrows rise, and her eyes accuse. “I’ve known you for no small amount of time,” she says.

Myka’s previous review fights that statement, but she doesn’t speak of it.

Her lack of response prompts a heavy I-am-no-longer-entertained sigh. “Must I return to the phrase ‘your truth’?”

“Please don’t,” Myka says. That’s also nearly involuntary, but it sounds too harsh, like she’s dismissing as unimportant that bookstore interaction, as well as the entirety of those in-extremis manifestations of herself and Helena. Rather than apologizing for that, for surely it would prove far too entangling, she tries to draw Helena’s attention back to the entertainment. “I like Nancy Sullivan. She reminds me of Pete and his mom.”

“Pete’s mother? I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

That’s a bit more jousty, backed by curiosity. Good. “She’s a Regent,” Myka says, for it’s the most salient piece of information she has about Jane Lattimer.

Helena stills. Her jaw hardens. “Then perhaps I have indeed had the... pleasure.” Cold. Cold. Cold.

You idiot, Myka scourges herself. Why couldn’t she have done the normal thing and left Pete’s mom as “Pete’s mom”? But now, but now: now she’s seen this wound, down there under the ice, and she wants to test that ice, but she can’t, regardless of her wish and want to know know know, to know everything Helena has been put through, so as to know whom to hate (and she hopes that doesn’t include Pete’s mom) and whom to someday thank (and she double-hopes that does include Pete’s mom). “Anyway I think the cousin had the right idea,” she says, pushing back to the now, to what just happened. “Using an artifact to do what are really decent things, even if they were judgmental.”

“Rather Old Testament,” Helena says. “Strangely inappropriate for this holiday, no?” She asks that like she’s really thinking—wondering—about it.

Myka congratulates herself on having provided a distraction, however minimal, from whatever Regent-pain her unthinking reveal caused to surface. “I hadn’t thought about Santa being more Yahweh than Jesus,” she says, to enhance it, “and I’m not sure what it says about my position on salvation that I genuinely wish we could have let her keep that pen. Or even better, if we could maybe ferry it around to deserving arbiters... wouldn’t that contribute to the greater good, even if it’s in a judgy Old-Testament way?”

Helena’s face moves as if she’s about to answer, but before she can, a rupturing screech of metal-on-metal complication resounds decisively through the space, and their ear-popping descent slows, slows, slows...

...and stops.

After an appropriately irony-bearing pause, Helena says, “This elevator seems to disapprove of your suggestion. Or perhaps it’s your theological indecision that displeases?”

All Myka can manage is an extremely resigned “I am not surprised.”

Efforts to summon help strengthen the “disapproval” interpretation: they’re fruitless. No one answers the emergency line, and this mirrored box is, according to both their phones, the place where cell service goes to die. Or where that service is interfered with by a theologically offended pulley-based mechanism.

“I genuinely cannot believe we’re stuck in an elevator,” Myka says. It may be the most true statement to which she’s ever given voice.

After a beat, however, she concedes, “But of course I can.”

Helena casts her gaze around. Once again, exaggeratedly stage-direction-y. “At least it’s reasonably well-appointed. For an elevator in which to be... stuck.” She seems to relish articulating “stuck,” so she’s back to being entertained. Not quite bubbly, but definitely entertained.

Myka can’t get past her annoyance with the elevator’s disapproval, so she says a peevish, “I don’t like mirrors.” She’s painfully aware now that they cover not only the walls, but also the ceiling. She can’t even look heavenward in supplication, sarcastic or otherwise, without regarding herself. It really is too much.

Given that no other communication technology is working, she resorts to the Farnsworth. She gives thanks for Warehouse mojo, or whatever enables it to elude the elevator’s wrath, when Claudia answers with, “No info on ‘lists, making them’ yet.”

“We dealt with that,” Myka tells her. “New problem.”

“Another artifact?”

“Who knows? Maybe Pete’s in an elevator somewhere else in this town making bad decisions, and they’re redounding to our detriment.” She’s vamping. Stuck in an elevator with Helena, she’s vamping. Instead of simply basking in such fantasy-made-fact, she’s vamping.

She doesn’t bother wondering whether Helena knows she’s doing that; if this little adventure has done nothing else, it’s reminded Myka that Helena always knows. It’s both wonderful and terrible to be so legible, particularly to someone Myka so often finds frustratingly illegible.

“I’m not following,” Claudia says.

Speaking of illegible: Myka, heal thyself. “We’re stuck. In an elevator,” she clarifies.

Claudia makes a noise that, impressively, marries a gasp and a snicker. “Are you really? Or did you push the stop button, like people do?”

“Like people... what?”

“When they want to have a little uninterrupted chat,” Claudia says, pedantic, as if now she’s the one who’s “clarifying.”

“Nobody does that in real life,” Steve says from offscreen. Myka is pleased to know he’s around.

“Myka just did,” Claudia insists in his direction. “Didn’t you,” she insists at Myka.

“If I did,” Myka says, “why would I be calling you to get us out of here?”

“Yeah, why would she?” Steve asks, but from farther away.

Don’t leave! Myka wants to exhort. She would never admit to needing backup in a counter-Claudia sense... but she does appreciate when Steve provides it.

“Oooh, because maybe the chat didn’t go so well,” Claudia says with great, and to Myka’s thinking entirely inappropriate, relish.

Trying for calm pragmatism, she says, “Wouldn’t I just... unpush the stop button then?”

“Myka,” Claudia says. It’s the most chiding, disappointment-laden use of her name Myka has ever heard, even when measured against all the times her father has uttered those two designating syllables. “Believe me when I tell you I’m a fan,” Claudia goes on, turning mollifying, “but you really need to lean in when it comes to tropes.” Myka can’t imagine how to respond to that, so she doesn’t. Claudia sighs—seemingly everyone’s preferred go-to when Myka fails to produce words—and says, “Did you try calling maintenance? Pushing the emergency button? Using your cell?”

“Yes, yes, and no service. Do you genuinely think I don’t understand modern communication technology?”

“I think you pretend you don’t understand newfangledness all the time. Particularly when you’re trying to show off how sympatico you are with H.G., who incidentally doesn’t seem to be piping up like I’d expect. Did you knock her unconscious after your terrible chat? Or maybe during it?”

Helena has indeed been very—very surprisingly—quiet while Myka has explained the situation to Claudia. And she doesn’t step in to help Myka out now. So much for any counter-Claudia backup.

“There was not a chat,” Myka says.

Helena is regarding herself in the mirrored ceiling.

“But there could be one now?” Claudia nudges. “Let me see if I can see what’s up. I’ve got cell service.” She disconnects.

Helena abruptly abandons her ceiling self-contemplation, focusing her gaze upon Myka. It’s disconcerting. “Are you attempting to avoid an uninterrupted chat?” she asks.

Myka can’t suss the question’s sincerity. And notwithstanding all her ideas about talking, she suffers a cringing internal “yes.” Externally, however, she says, in what she hopes offers at least a veneer of sincerity of her own, “No.”

She doesn’t follow up by asking “why would I be doing that,” because Helena would probably have a guess. And because that guess would probably be accurate: “You are a coward,” Helena might say, and Myka would regrettably have to either tell the truth and agree, or lie and disclaim any emotional investment in whatever the outcome of such a chat might be.

Silence. Longer than it should be... or is it as long as Myka deserves?

You wanted time together. Don’t bellyache about the form it takes.

“Your objection to mirrors,” Helena eventually says.

“What about it?” Myka asks. Her very soul flinches.

“What is it?”

Myka has never before stated her dislike of mirrors aloud, and she regrets having done so now. To play it off, she says a dismissive, “An artifact.” And yet the truth is that despite the unnerving nature of her interaction with Alice’s mirror and how it continues to prey on her mind, it isn’t really that—or rather, that only intensified her dislike.

But when Helena proposes, “Yet another ‘dealy-thingy’?”, clearly (and preciously) trying the phrase out in her mouth, Myka misleadingly (intentionally misleadingly) nods and says, “They’re all dealy-thingies.”

To that, Helena says, “Interesting.”

Myka would probe that word, but to do so might destabilize the ground, here in an elevator. Instead, for the moment, she tilts her head in the direction of the Christmas muzak, the literal elevator music, being piped in. “Oh, sure, that still works.” She gestures at the speaker, a thin dark stripe between two mirror-panels, from which the sound is emerging. The elevator is nothing if not insistent.

In truth, she doesn’t mind Christmas carols. She does mind the bowdlerization thereof, and isn’t that an attitude the dogmatic elevator really ought to share? O holy night, the stars are brightly... synthesizing? It’s wrong.

Now even her mind is vamping. Great.

Helena tilts her head toward the speaker, however, and Myka appreciates her willingness to be redirected. At least for a moment.

In fact, for all her vamping, mental and otherwise, Myka finds herself absurdly content to simply stand against a mirrored elevator wall and regard Helena... who in that instant of Myka’s acknowledged contentment seems to accept their predicament as unlikely to be resolved in a timely fashion: she sits down, of course elegantly, resting her back against her side of the box and stretching her legs (her legs, Myka’s body notes, just to let her know it’s still paying close attention) out in front of her.

The looking-down perspective is a bit disorienting—although at least this time it has nothing to do with being stuck to a ceiling—but Myka has no time to process it, for Helena’s next salvo, looking up, is, “You’ve been expecting me to remark further on naughtiness, haven’t you.”

Reading, yet again. “I kind of have,” Myka admits. It seems an overly judgmental statement, particularly given that Myka has to deliver it as if from an elevated bench. And yet... she kind of has.

“I’d rather not fulfill that expectation,” Helena says. “If we could speak of other things.”

Myka is a little thrown, but thankful. “That is entirely fine by me. What do you want to talk about?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly,” Myka says, meaning it as an answer to either interpretation of Helena’s interrogative: Are you asking what I want to talk honestly about? or Are you asking, with honest intent, what I want to talk about? She hopes Helena will respond similarly.

“Something that interests you,” Helena says.

That’s not in any way what she was expecting. “Really?”

“Really.”

It’s a word similar to, yet very different from, “honestly.” What, in a real sense, interests Myka? In this moment, all she can think to say is “you.” And perhaps because her normal inhibitions are disordered, here in this stopped elevator, that’s what she blurts out.

And that seems, incongruously, to take Helena aback. “What about me?” she asks.

Myka can’t say “everything.” It’s the real answer (really), but it’s far too... big. For an unexpected reunion, an unexpected uninterrupted chat—although Claudia or rescuers could at any point interrupt it, which Myka should hope happens (should)—it’s far too big.

So: smaller. What occurs first to Myka is “where have you been”—but that would most likely seem accusatory. She needs something else. Something something something...

In the aftermath of the Warehouse not being destroyed, she’d felt herself full of hard-earned wisdom and bravery: enough, surely, to stop hesitating. Enough, surely, to act. Or enough, at the very least, to articulate.

“Wisdom” and “bravery” now seem nothing more than labels on empty containers, and so “faintheartedness” is the fullness with which Myka here initially accuses her today self. But as Helena breathes and waits for an answer, Myka revises that, gentling it to “caution.” And she adds “care.” Because she is trying to attend to, to appreciate, that breathing. And that waiting.

These might be nothing more than self-indulgently comforting shifts in vocabulary... but then again they might be akin to the shift from “Christmas” to “end-of-year.” Gentle. Inclusionary.

The something something something that occurs to her—because in attempting to avoid her own reflection, she is confronted instead with multiple Helenas—concerns a topic she probably should censor but doesn’t: “When you were a hologram... or a projection, or whatever we should call it... did you have a reflection?” She then reflexively backtracks, “It shouldn’t matter? But I don’t know.” That last, she means both ways. She doesn’t know: whether the reflection existed, or whether it matters. But maybe it’s a sneak-up on things, because she shouldn’t ignore things, and because a seemingly inconsequential tangent might tiptoe toward importance.

“I don’t know either,” Helena says. “I suppose I would have?” Her face contracts. “Or perhaps not, as I don’t know how that holographic projection of myself was... projected. But I do intend to look into it.” She says this last as if Myka has caught her in some inattention, a recklessly uncompleted assignment.

“I never even started majoring in physics,” Myka laments, which is true but also, she hopes, reassuring in an I didn’t do the homework either sense, “so I don’t know the optics of it. Projections. Light and mirrors. “ She doesn’t mention that in the wake of Pittsburgh, she had indeed tried researching such things... she’d got as far as some advanced volumetric displays, ones using dust particles as screens onto which lasers projected light, but at a certain point, a tipping point, the idea of Helena existing as—being relegated to—nothing more than light and dust screamed a surpassing insult, a degradation conjuring death, and it was more than she could bear.

For now she puts that away. She shakes her head, shakes it free, and changes tack. “Anyway, that’s probably the wrong approach. This is Warehousey, so thinking outside physics, the laws... okay, all I know about reflections, unphysically, is that vampires don’t have them. So if you didn’t have one, then maybe all holograms are vampires?” Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. She would have done better to speak of dust, that and light and despair. Going with vampires instead? Talk about vamping...

“Presumably not vice versa,” Helena observes, seemingly taking Myka’s words far too seriously. “Certainly fictionally. Also not overly flattering, in the syllogistic sense of ‘Helena was a hologram, therefore.’”

“They’re very popular though,” Myka temporizes.

“Stoker’s novel was all the rage,” Helena allows.

The chat stalls out. Interrupting itself?

Myka nevertheless feels pressure to fill the silence: it’s her fault. Will a simple truth suffice? “I didn’t expect to be spending the day before Christmas eve with you,” she says. “Or any day with you. In Cleveland.”

A small smile from Helena marks this as a more welcome fill than a question about reflection. As do her next words: “Nor I with you. In Cleveland, or any place. Equally, I didn’t expect to be sent on a mission with you.”

“That part of it went well.” Myka gestures at her bag that contains the artifact.

“We did—and now do once again—make a good team.”

“I’m glad we got the chance to do it again. Glad, but also... relieved.”

“Relieved,” Helena echoes.

That wasn’t a question, but Myka answers anyway, “Well, obviously, first,” she says, feeling herself launching into an explanatory babble that she fears she’ll be powerless to stop, “because you didn’t have to talk anybody out of using Joshua’s Trumpet, so that really makes a difference in terms of how we—”

“‘First’,” Helena quotes, interrupting (stopping), conveying her full knowledge that that too is a vamp. “And second?”

“That we still are.” This, Myka says simple and frank.

“A good team?”

That is a question. Myka knows “yes” is the only sensical answer, so she tries to say it. But the depth and weight of the ways in which she and Helena “still are” choke her: they “still are” in the basic sense of existing, which was never a certainty; and even better, higher, these hours they’ve spent together today have made clear, to Myka at least, that they “still are”... well. She’d like to finish that with something like “in love,” but instead she tries to leave it, even in her head, at “still are,” with their time-crossed, maybe-destined predicate undefined.

“A good team” should be good enough—true enough—for now.

So after a stretch of time during which Myka knows she’s been focusing her gaze far too intently on Helena, she manages that “yes.”

Helena waits to speak.... are her eyes glistening more brightly than usual, or is Myka hallucinating? “I’m relieved as well,” she says, and Myka chooses to simply delight in whatever prompted such a saturated sparkle.

It draws her closer.

She crosses the small-yet-large elevator-width that separates them. “I need to either sit down beside you or help you up,” she says. “Do you have a preference?”

“For?” Helena’s eyes continue to glow.

That shine... Myka has hopes. They may not be realized, but she has them, the product of relief, “still are,” and an unknown predicate. “Whatever’s next,” she says.

A bit of time passes, with Helena now being the one focused most intently. “I’ll stand,” is her verdict.

Myka reaches down with both—both—hands, offering, and Helena reaches up, accepting. Their fingers meet and clasp, and too cold, Myka thinks, for both of them have a chill in those extremities... but first impressions of temperature promptly fall away as the new reality of the clasp roars into precedence.

Myka has never been so certain of, so certain of and enchanted by, what must and will happen next in her life. Never in her life so certain, as the clasp tightens, as their torsos lean, as Myka’s body begins an at-last congratulation, one that will become a celebration—

A voice from somewhere overhead barks, “Everybody okay in there?”

TBC

[apparitionism]

Hello, Bering and Wells gifter here! I'm an artist, anything you'd like to see illustrated this year?

Hi, gifter... I hope all is well with you in this strange season. As for what I'd like to see, my most basic "please, if you could" is of course Bering and Wells showing off their uniquely sparky connection. But speaking of basic, you might think about focusing on an everyday situation, which they might... say... mess up in some way? Alternatively, something completely off the wall could be a lot of fun; I think I mentioned unicycle-riding last year, but there's a vast array of absurdities in which they could be, you know, compelled to engage, artifactually or otherwise.

In the end, though, any depiction of them together is something I'll cherish. Because the actual-show scenes we had were so few... it never ceases to amaze and delight me that so spectacular a fandom as this one was built on so few interactions. My thanks to you for being a part of it!

[apparitionism]

Bonus

Happy particular Monday! Here’s a story for it, which came about mostly because I wanted to put a couple of people into a clichéd situation, and then I had to do leadup and aftermath... anyway, it’s intended to be a two-parter (yes, I know; aspirations) set in a not-entirely-canonical season 4, in which the Warehouse did get brought back and Helena did leave without explanation, BUT Artie doesn’t go full Father Data and Leena doesn’t suffer the consequences—mostly because Mrs. Frederic has sensed some badness to come and thus sent Artie and Leena away. Because why not? Also I have Claudia jumping into Caretakering, and even a bit of Artieing, with some enthusiasm.

P.S. I know I haven’t yet finished last year’s Christmas story—that’s a pain point—but I genuinely am working to get back on various horses, including that one. Weather (in all senses) permitting.

Bonus

“I genuinely cannot believe we’re stuck in an elevator,” Myka says. It may be the most true statement to which she’s ever given voice.

****

SEVERAL HOURS EARLIER...

Myka’s reasonably pleasant thought, burring along as background to her monotonous tasks, is I don’t mind this. She and Steve are in the Warehouse office early in the morning, doing file inventory, and it’s true: she doesn’t mind it. It’s a little lacking as a holiday activity, but with Artie, Leena, and Pete all away, “lacking” is pretty much the flavor of the moment.

Claudia pokes her head in and says, “Ping.” She’s unenthusiastic, speaking of lacking. Where’s the usual revving about what it might be this time? “At some midwestern accounting firm, because it’s important to have a boring Christmas.”

Ah. “An accounting artifact?” Myka asks. Speaking further of lacking: here, it’s artifacty zing. Then again, artifacty zing got Myka trapped in Alice’s mirror, among other catastrophes, so maybe boring isn’t so bad. “Balance sheets?” she ventures. “Pluses and minuses?”

“Some people at this pingy company just got extremely large Christmas bonuses,” Claudia says, “and some got their pay extremely docked. So yeah, ‘balance sheets, pluses and minuses’ just about covers it. Probably. I mean, I might be trying to manage expectations here.”

Claudia’s certainly right, in that getting one’s hopes up—about anything (or anyone)—is a fool’s game.

But still, there’s something to be said for boring-but-remunerative, even if only for some people... what a nice idea. “I’d like a Christmas bonus someday,” Myka says, “instead of a Christmas penalty. Which I think pretty accurately describes the Pete-plus-artifacts situation.”

“It’s two days before Christmas, and he hasn’t done anything yet,” Claudia says. “That you know of,” she amends.

“Because he’s been with his family in Ohio for the past week,” Myka points out, and she’s gratified when Claudia rolls her eyes. It’s practically a concession.

Steve says, “It’s inappropriate to say ‘Christmas’ bonus these days. It’s ‘end-of-year.’” The contribution suggests he’s listening with only one ear.

“I wish appropriateness mattered here,” Myka says, not really to him but in general. Who knows how a Warehouse HR department would make heads or tails of the application of employment laws—much less employment niceties? “Not that it makes a difference. Christmas, end-of-year... call it Fred, and we still wouldn’t get one.”

“If I ever do get a bonus, I’m absolutely naming it Fred,” Claudia declares.

Myka shakes her head. “Poor Fred. Doomed to be injected right back into the discretionary economy.”

“Inject-o-what are you even talking about?”

“Just a guess, but: you’d spend it on things you don’t need.”

Claudia harrumphs. “Thanks for lumping me in with the avocado-toast-and-Starbucks crowd. My fiscaling is way more responsible.”

“Really? What would you use Fred for?”

“Asus VG278HE gaming monitor. Plus a graphics card, maybe the Nvidia GTX 690, depending on how hefty Fred is.” At Myka’s snort, Claudia challenges, “Fine, where would you inject it?”

“My Roth IRA,” Myka says immediately. She’s not sure what assets her evil, crazy, or dead self will need in retirement, but given the many and varied forms each of those, or combinations thereof, could take, it seems like a good idea to have a financial plan in place. That’s another thing a Warehouse HR department might be useful for...

“You’re the actual human manifestation of an accounting artifact,” Claudia accuses. “Speaking of which, here’s the deal. I gotta stay here—some Mrs.-F homeworky stuff—and Steve’s busy reassuring all the misfit toys in the building that Leena hasn’t deserted them forever. And I’d say ignore the ping entirely, but your never know what’ll go viral, and I bet Artie’d say the last thing we need is another financial crisis. Or maybe you’d say it. Anyway, you’re it. And for your backup, when you get to Cleveland—”

Myka groans. “Cleveland? Seriously? Pete’s going to be so mad about you pulling him away from the family.”

“I’m not pulling him away,” Claudia says, blinking like she’s some innocent little lamb.

Myka groans again. “You’re making me do it?”

Claudia shrugs. “Sure. Why not. You’re partners, right? But here’s some advice: wait till you get there to call him. You know, put off the misery, if that’s what it is, as long as possible. Besides—more advice—I really think you should spend your travel time thinking about bonuses. Who gets ’em and why. Because what’s a bonus, really?”

“An economic stimulus whose nametag reads ‘Fred,’ if I’m understanding things correctly.”

“We’ll see what you think about that when you get to Cleveland.”

“On the day before Christmas eve,” Myka grouses. “By the way, that’s a whole lot of ‘advice,’ coming from somebody who’s over a decade younger than I am and not technically my boss.”

“By the way,” Claudia mimics, archly mocking, “we’ll see what you think about that too.”

“When I get to Cleveland?”

“When you get to Cleveland. On the day before Christmas eve.”

“Sounds like the title of a lesser Christmas carol,” Steve says—he’s tuned back in to the conversation. He then says, with his grin that curves so impish, “Think we could get Mariah Carey to sing it? It’s a hit if we get her, right, no matter how lesser?”

“‘When You Get to Cleveland on the Day Before Christmas Eve?’” Claudia skeptics. “Hit-wise, that’s gonna need a lot more power: Mariah dueting with Darlene Love at the very least. Plus we’ll need a Destiny’s Child reunion for at least one chorus.”

“Thanks for reinforcing my sense of how awful this is likely to be,” Myka tells them both, and Steve’s grin turns apologetic.

Claudia, however, shrugs. “Maybe you’ll sing it different.”

Myka is now the one to roll her eyes. “I won’t sing it at all.”

Surprisingly, Claudia doesn’t go with another eyeroll. “We’ll see,” she says, and Myka is struck by the Mrs.-Frederic resonance in her words. Does the homework include practicing the enigmatic tone?

Steve looks up and catches Myka’s eye. He winks. Myka would wink back, but he would probably interpret that as her saying she understands what’s happening. And that would be a lie: serious enough, probably, to make him wince and massage his temples.

So Myka just blinks—not Morse or any other code, just basic eye-moistening blinks. Then she goes upstairs to collect her always-packed travel bag for her trip to Cleveland.

****

Her flight departs late, of course; it’s December in South Dakota. But that’s this-time fine, because it allows Myka a necessary excess of opportunity to prep her Pete-placation. Under her breath, she practices the delivery of such words as “shorthanded” and “necessary,” aiming for maximum sincerity.

When she at last emerges from her Cleveland Hopkins jetway, that extensive prep deserts her entirely, for what awaits her is the manifestation of a Christmas wish she has worked overtime to convince herself would not, could not possibly be granted:

Helena.

Whose arms are crossed, and whose posture betrays that her foot might recently have been tapping out impatience with the plane’s tardy arrival. The attitude is so normal, so entirely of-the-world (rather than of-its-imminent-end), that Myka wants to reverse course, get back on the plane and redisembark, just so she might meet it again, meet it and refeel this wash of absolute relief at seeing Helena impatient in an airport.

Devious, Claudia, Myka thinks. Outstandingly devious. “Hello, Fred,” she murmurs, then tries, in the ten seconds she has before she and Helena are in proximity to speak, to engage in a far more consequential prep.

For Helena has been gone—has been, as Myka put it to Steve not so long ago, “god knows where”—since shortly after the Warehouse did not explode. She was there, in the Warehouse, but then she was gone, and Myka was told only that Helena had “matters to attend to.” God presumably also knew what those matters were, but Myka hadn’t, in the wake of that first moment of absence, and hasn’t since, been able to pry any information about matters or their whereabouts out of anyone, divine or otherwise.

And through the seemingly endless wondering, Myka’s mind and heart have gnawed themselves ragged.

Until this moment, when the wondering and gnawing end: now her blood speeds, coursing with urgency even as everything else seems to slow.... her movements, her reactions, her thinking, all are sluggish, unresponsive; only her blood matters. This blood knowledge. For all her wondering, she’s been avoiding gnawing her way to that answer.

“Claudia said you needed backup” are Helena’s words when they meet.

Myka’s attempt at prep has fallen grievously short—not that she could have risen to such an occasion, not when hearing that voice for the first time in some time, and certainly not when faced with what her blood’s embarrassing insistence has forced her to confront anew. “I... assumed I’d be calling Pete,” she says, to at least go with truth.

“Interesting assumption. Perhaps necessary, if you believe I’ll be insufficient.”

Myka’s impulse is to reassure: “More than sufficient—you’re necessary,” she would shout, or better yet, whisper. Instead, because Helena’s tone is neutral—is she in actuality indifferent?—she falls into a defensive, businesslike crouch, offering only implicit denial of the premise of Helena’s statement. “Let’s head for the accounting firm,” she says, internally cursing herself.

Cursing, but also justifying: Helena is here as backup, thanks to Claudia’s cleverness, and Myka should not assume (speaking of assumptions) that she even wants to be here. All focus should be on retrieving the artifact. Certainly on that and not on Myka’s (honestly) predictably overexcited blood.

She tries to concentrate on Claudia’s advice (while at the same time trying not to resent her success at being cryptic about it): what’s a bonus, really? Helena’s presence, the sight of her, the apprehending of her impatience, the experience of blood: whatever else may happen, these have been—must be—are!—the bonus.

****

The cab ride is quiet. Myka’s resolve to think only of backup and bonus is dissolving by the second, and she lets words reach her tongue that might start a conversation with Helena about things... but those words don’t escape her lips, for a strand of formality seems to be stiffening Helena’s spine. Does she know how Myka cherished her impatience? Is she attempting to discourage such adoration?

Myka, in regret and relief, follows that more-strict lead.

That’s a bonus too, though, for it turns the ride into unpressured, liminal time, perfect for simply basking in presence. It’s best, Myka is now thinking, to treat this reunion as something that was of course going to have happened. For backup or other professional purposes. Despite the fact that it’s the thank-god fulfillment of recurring, desperate dreams.

However: at one point in the traffic-backed silence, Helena, completely unprompted, turns and smiles at Myka.

Myka smiles back.

It’s a previously missing puzzle-piece slotting into place... yet in its aftermath, Myka finds herself having to push with force against a will to worry over other missing pieces; in particular, she must fight the fret-intensive futility of trying to count them.

****

They find the accounting firm’s lobby spacious but quiet—holiday-low staffing, presumably. Myka asks the receptionist, “Is there someone we can talk to about end-of-year bonuses? Also penalties?”

“I’m a temp,” says the young man. His tone suggests it’s his answer to every query... but then he adds, very quietly, “Unofficially, there’s this one guy...”

That has the ring of “artifact,” so Myka nods, encouraging him.

“Super-vocal about his paycheck the other day. How tiny it was. I mean, he’s the kind of guy you might have theories about what else is tiny, but I—”

“Who was that?” Myka interrupts, even as she feels Helena’s readiness to laugh. Mr. Super-vocal is thus probably not a wielder of an artifact; more likely, one of that wielder’s... victims?

“Bob,” the temp says. “I’m sure he’s got a last name, and I’m sure he thinks everybody should call him ‘Mr. Lastname,’ but my care level? Anyway he’s down the hall—one of the only ones in the farm today. Spite-working. Maybe on his anti-everything manifesto.”

“Down the hall” turns out to be a vast expanse of cubicles: definitely a farm.

Myka says to Helena, “Follow my lead?”

“Always,” Helena says.

It’s a tonally sincere utterance—and in that, admirable—but it’s also manifestly untrue; nevertheless, Myka’s blood decides to believe it, to recognize it as another puzzle-piece. I really need to function, Myka tries to explain to her interior. So if we could climb down just a couple rungs. Like to the cab-ride level, maybe?

Her body refuses the agreement.

Of course.

The occupant of the first inhabited cubicle they find is an over-coiffed middle-aged man who clearly spends far too much time in tanning booths. He’s typing aggressively, as if the force of his keystrokes will power his message. His manifesto?

“Are you Bob?” Myka asks him.

“You better be here about my money,” obviously-Bob says, clearly spoiling for a fight.

Myka finds his demand incongruous—his job has to do with other people’s money, and Myka and Helena are manifestly other people. Who could have money. Fred or otherwise.

“In a way,” she says. She follows up with “We’re from the IRS,” and it’s never not funny for that to be useful. Bob winces, as if she's about to strike him. Also never not funny. “We’ve noted some suspicious discrepancies in end-of-year reporting.”

“You have?” Bob asks. Now he’s avid rather than confrontational.

“Looks like some overreporting. Also underreporting. So you see our concern, particularly about effects on withholding.” She is making this up, as she generally does whenever she has to go actual IRS on someone. Read up on tax law, she reminds herself, as she generally does every time. Not that she’ll ever have the leisure to do that... “What we need to find out is whether it was in error, or if it warrants a full investigation.”

“Nancy Sullivan,” he says, with contempt, the name itself a curse. “She’s the one you should investigate, and then send straight to jail. She’s always been a witch about year-end, but now?  On steroids. Talking about making her list, threatening to mark down people she doesn’t like, including yours truly, as naughty... and then we got our paychecks, and somehow she did it! No idea how she managed to push that garbage through, but I swear you better get her up on some kind of charges!”

He rises abruptly, clutching a slip of paper; his chair topples over behind him. He shoves the paper in Myka’s direction, his knuckles nearing her astonished nose—but in the instant before contact, Helena intervenes, her arm blocking his, stopping his forward motion.

Backup.

Helena plucks the paper from his pushy hand. “And what’s this?” she asks.

A pretty minimal manifesto, Myka thinks initially. But then she replays his screed in her head, and his babbling about Nancy Sullivan resolves into meaningful references; struck by the realization, she very nearly misses his next statement: “My pay stub. She can’t just do this.”

Helena says, “Of course not.” She’s soothing him, her voice a faux-caress. It’s enough to tempt Myka to act out, just to hear it directed her way, even as Helena continues, “But we understand some of your colleagues, to the contrary, received large bonuses.”

His “tanned” skin darkens further. “Guess she thought they were nice. To her. Suck-ups.”

Mya looks a Find out anything else that’s relevant at Helena, who nods. Retreating back to the pre-cubicle hallway—relieved that her nose is intact—she Farnsworths Claudia. She skips the pleasantries, starting with, “A very disgruntled employee says the woman who signs off on bonuses was making a list.”

Claudia chortles. “You’re hilarious. Was she checking it twice?”

“This is my point. We don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with, not yet, but I bet that’s the crux.”

“I should’ve known you weren’t aiming for hilarity. So you really think this is some Santa thing?”

“No. I’m saying words about lists because I think it’s a grocery thing.” Myka wants to shake her fist at the heavens and every deity who occupies it. Occupies them. All the heavens. “Of course I think it’s a Santa thing! I also think it’s Pete’s fault somehow.”

“Just because it’s Christmas? C’mon.”

“Christmas and Ohio?” Myka snorts. “You c’mon. I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“Maybe you should though. For peace of mind?”

“That’s another thing I don’t believe in. Just see if you can find anything about a Santa’s-list artifact, would you?”

“Roger. By the way, how do you like your backup?” She chortles again and disconnects.

“I like my backup like I like the sunrise,” Myka tells the blank Farnsworth screen.

“What about the sunrise?” Helena asks from directly behind her.

Myka wishes the sound of her voice were either more or less startling. She wishes also that she knew exactly how much overhearing had occurred.

“It’s inevitable,” she sighs.

In response, Helena blinks.

They take the elevator to Nancy Sullivan’s office.

In that elevator, which is aggressively mirrored, Myka can’t help but glance repeatedly at herself. So many reflections. You called this into being, thinking about Alice’s mirror before, she accuses. She tries not to focus on how her hair could really stand to be more controlled... she’d focus on Helena instead, but who knows how that would be received? Instead she allows herself one glance, then looks down.

She likes being on the elevator with Helena, though; it’s a space of relative privacy, like the cab. Have they ever before been on an elevator together? Alone or otherwise? She runs through their interactions, fast-forwarding from the Wells house to D.C., Tamalpais to Moscow, Yellowstone, Colorado Springs, Ohio (here Myka trips over the fact that Helena’ s now been to Ohio twice, if only once in physical form), Pittsburgh, Hong Kong...

The review—the speed with which she can conduct it—reminds her of how limited that time has been, so: an elevator ride. Yet another bonus.

“That fellow,” Helena remarks, and Myka looks up again; their eyes meet in the mirror of the elevator’s doors. It’s uncanny, as if they’re both holograms, so Myka turns her body toward Helena, who meets Myka’s actual eyes and continues, “He attempted to make a lewd joke about his willingness and ability to be naughty when it’s called for. I pretended not to understand.”

Myka can’t help it: she snorts. “I bet he didn’t buy that for a second.”

“I have the ability to perform ‘prim’ when it’s called for,” Helena says, and Myka has to acknowledge that statement as good evidence of itself. Then Helena’s face reshapes into a devilish grin as she says, “In a slightly different vein, his quailing at those three letters with which you assailed him? Hilarious.”

“Letters?” A little perverse-quirk makes Myka want to hear Helena say them, though she’s probably not pulling off “disingenuous” in making the request.

Helena seems fine with the perversity, for she obliges: “I,” she begins, then draws out “Aaaaare.” Then, after a beat: “Esssss.”

Myka now herself feels assailed—by how right Helena’s reading her. She tries to step it down with, “I wasn’t aiming for hilarity. I never do. Claudia can vouch.” But she does spend a little moment thinking about the context of that previous assailing: we’re from the IRS. We are here, together, from an agency. We, together, represent. It isn’t by any means everything Myka would have wanted... but it’s something: part of this bonus. “Fred,” she says, sotto voce.

The office they’re seeking is on the building’s highest floor, suggestive of Nancy Sullivan’s bonus-approving rank; it features several large windows, one of which affords the office a view of the hallway, and vice versa. Through it, Myka and Helena watch a woman, presumably that powerful Nancy Sullivan, writing with a quill-esque pen.

“It’s the pen,” Myka says, because it has to be. “It’s always the stupid pen.”

“Always?” That’s unusually tentative, like Helena’s trying not to step.

“Okay, once,” Myka concedes. “My dad and Poe and a pen, and as a result I’ve developed a severe aversion to those quill things.”

Helena takes a beat. Then: “I never liked feather pens.”

“Are you just saying that,” Myka says, because she might be, and she might admit it, and that might be good or bad or something else Myka has no way of evaluating. Why does Helena say words like this? And for that matter, why does Myka keep spending her limited time on this planet trying to parse them?

“Yes? In that I’ve... said it?”

That really didn’t help with any of the whys. “I mean, just to make me feel better?”

Helena shrugs. “The fact is, today’s ballpoints et cetera are far more reliable. Does that make you feel better?”

She’s playing at being obtuse—surely that’s for a reason? But Myka has no time to wonder further, for Helena is knocking on the office door and opening it without waiting for an invitation, and the real retrieval is underway.

Myka flashes her badge. “I’m Agent Myka Bering, and this is Helena Wells. We’re from the IRS.” She glances at Helena—all these glances!—and gets a small smirk in response.

Rather than introducing herself, the woman says, “Really? I bet that’s not true.”

“Why?” Myka asks. Have she and Helena, over the course of the elevator ride, lost their ability to perform “official” correctly?

“I have a feeling you’re here for this,” Nancy Sullivan says, and she lofts the pen, waving it like a wand. “Mostly because I also have a feeling that I want to close my fist around it, punch my way past both of you, and make my escape.”

Well. “That’s self-aware,” Myka says. “Unusually so.”

“Thank you? Although it’s less self-awareness than kind of a... sixth sense.”

Helena raises an eyebrow at Myka. “Sixth sense aside, we appreciate your good sense to refrain from attempting to punch your way past us. That would have ended poorly.”

“I wish I’d had the good sense not to use this pen,” Nancy Sullivan says.

“Is there a reason for your wish?” Helena asks. She sounds, to Myka’s ears at least, like a recently summoned, slightly flummoxed genie.

“Because of how much I liked using it—particularly when I realized nobody was going to question anything. I signed off on all these orders, and it was like...” she trails off. Then she concludes, “Magic.”

To keep her talking, Myka prompts, “Was it?”

“Having the power to reward good people has been fantastic,” Nancy Sullivan continues, “but penalizing the awful ones? I mean I’ve sort of resented feeling compelled to use the word ‘naughty’ about them, because that’s way out of character for me. But other than that? Utterly spectacular.”

“Bob,” Helena suggests.

“Oh, god, you met him?”

Helena offers a dry “Alas.”

Nancy Sullivan’s smile is as dry as Helena’s tone, astringently vindictive. “I could not have been more thrilled to hit him and everybody like him where it hurt... I admit I’ve always been kind of judgmental, but wielding this pen? Intensified. Like, the hates are more. In particular, the hates are more. I’m not saying the Bobs of this company didn’t deserve what I did, but I feel it more. Punishment. It’s satisfying, but also weirdly costly. Grinch-in-reverse costly.”

That’s a little on the nose. Myka glances at Helena again, because the satisfactions of punishment, of judgment, even of hate, are among the things they will need to talk about. Maybe. Someday. If they are to have a someday that is theirs... if that is even possible after so much time and tribulation... Myka lets the glance grow into a gaze, a resting regard, and it stays that way until Helena, too, glances, with the result then that their eyes meet and lock... such a clasp, Myka feels, could ground that potential, and potentially necessary, talk of things, if only they were not in the middle of a retrieval...

...which makes Myka think. Why are they in the middle of a retrieval?

“I wish I didn’t feel like I need to articulate this, but where did you get the pen?” she asks. Because she has a niggling sense of something larger happening, something beyond her grasp. Nevertheless, it is not—repeat, not—a vibe.

Fine. It might be a vibe.

“My cousin gave it to me,” says Nancy Sullivan.

“Your cousin,” Myka says. “Whose name is?” Now she’s knows what’s coming, and that has nothing to do with a vibe: no, it is entirely deduction based on experience.

“Pete Lattimer.”

TBC

[apparitionism]

Apologies for being so tardy with the reblog, but maybe this will show the option to some folks who haven't yet seen it?? Anyway I encourage everyone to do the thing!

Sign Up for the Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange 2024!

Hello everyone!

It's American Thanksgiving, which means sign-ups for the Bering and Wells Holiday Gift Exchange are officially open!

Here's how this event works:

Send a message or ask to this blog (@b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange) or directly to me (K, your host, @kla1991) stating that you would like to participate. Sign-ups begin today and close on the Winter Solstice, December 21st.

If you sign up, you'll receive the name of your giftee on Christmas, December 25th. You will then have one week to *anonymously* contact your giftee to tell them what kind of fan works you make (art, fic, gifs, etc.) and ask for ideas or requests.

Between New Years', January 1st, and Valentine's Day, February 14th, you'll work on your gifts, and on the 14th we'll all post what we've created for our giftees and enjoy all the gifts!

If you have questions of any kind, feel free to reach out to this blog or to @kla1991 to ask. And even if you don't plan to sign up, please reblog this post to spread the word!

Happy American Thanksgiving, and happy Bering and Wells Gift Exchange Season!

[apparitionism]

Confection 4

Welcome back to Confection, which began its life as last year’s holiday story but went on hiatus due to this year’s gift exchange story, which in turn ran far longer than it ever should have. But the whole point of a hiatus is that it ends, so: this part continues an AU wherein Bering and Wells are chefs competing on a TV show titled “This Without That,” in which cheftestants are charged with making well-known dishes without their primary ingredient. The competition in which Chefs Myka and Helena find themselves is Christmas-themed, a fact that relates to their shared history... some of which was revealed in part 1, part 2, and part 3. I'd mumble something about the whole thing being undercooked, but that probably goes without saying at this point.

Confection 4

Decide, and do it fast, Myka told herself as she examined the produce and other ingredients available to the contestants. Cranberry sauce without cranberry—a tart fruit. Could she reasonably tweak a sharper version of her fruit pickle into a sauce, but maybe using raspberries, for the appearance? Yes, most likely, but only if she could find raspberries. She scanned the refrigerator... okay, raspberries found.

Move on, and do it fast.

Candied yams without yams? She saw golden beets and envisioned (entasted?) merging their earthiness with some similarly earthy sweetness (to be determined), plus a creamy element (also to be determined) that might evoke the traditional marshmallows.

For now, she was satisfied with her choice of major components.

These were decisions—fast ones, even! Now all she had to do was cook.

Okay, fine: and keep from distracting herself with glances at Helena, who was clearly also deciding fast, gathering ingredients, her overflowing-with-produce arms transforming her into some metaphorical—or maybe actual—goddess of the harvest.

Quit thinking like that! Myka admonished her overheated, now goddess-oriented, imagination.

No! that imagination shot back. She is a goddess!

Myka marshaled every bit of her superego to command, We. Are. Focusing. On. Beets.

And yet her id kept sneaking glances.

Her ego, meanwhile, noticed that Chef Artie wasn’t having to decide fast. He’d done nothing, even as Myka, Helena, and Chef Walter, his attitude notwithstanding, had filled their stations. His indecision prompted a producer huddle around him, and Myka heard snatches of phrases: “you could use,” “or maybe try,” “okay, we’ve got.”

****

Myka’s departure from Apples had happened quickly: two days after the Christmas party, she interviewed for the job at Secret Service, getting the offer on the spot, and that evening she gave her notice to her direct supervisor on the line. Not to Helena—Chef Wells—for the chef hadn’t been present in the kitchen.

That was unusual... did it have something to do with strings being pulled? Myka told herself she didn’t need to know. She told herself, equally untruthfully, that she didn’t need to care.

Not that Helena—Chef Wells—was even going to notice Myka’s absence. People came and went all the time in restaurants. What did one line cook matter?

After leaving, Myka tried not to ruminate on how much she had wanted to matter.

She tried also to evict Helena Wells from the top of her mind. She didn’t give in to the temptation to walk by Apples; that would have been another of those teenage-reminiscent impulses she needed to prevent her presumably adult self from indulging.

The setting of a Google alert, however, she justified as professional. Practical. Keeping track of a former employer.

Which was how she learned that Helena Wells would be appearing on This Without That.

Which she tried to convince herself she did not need (need...) to watch.

Which attempt was, she had even then acknowledged, doomed to failure, because watching the show meant she would at least be able to look at Helena, a thrill of which she’d been deprived for what felt like forever. Need... need. She could—and did—replay her memories, but she was starving for new images.

The show didn’t disappoint on that score. Myka was captivated anew from the first shot of Helena in talking-head closeup: her hair was down, lusciously so, and if Myka hadn’t been anxious to see how the competition would unfold, she might have stopped the show there, just to savor the sight.

When asked to describe her style in the kitchen in one word, talking-head Helena said, “Take no prisoners.”

“One word,” an off-camera voice said.

“It’s hyphenated,” Helena responded.

Myka added the hyphens in her head, retrospectively.

She paid little attention to the introductory attributes of the other contests—Chefs Marcus, Leena, and Hugo—because: not for one instant did it occur to her that Helena might not win.

She was well aware that she knew nothing about television production but clichés; nevertheless, she found herself stuck on one in particular as far as Helena was concerned: “The camera loves her.” And Myka found a similar lover’s elation, if tinged with a lurker’s shame, in her surreptitious alignment with that camera and its gaze.

The dish for the first round, the appetizer, was clams casino without the clams. “Mushrooms,” Myka said aloud the minute Steve Jinks announced the challenge. The rest of the dish was traditionally pretty simple—breadcrumbs, butter, bacon, bell pepper, lemon—with the only even vaguely difficult part getting the proportions right. But mushrooms stood out as the clearest substitute, texturally, as long as they were cooked with great precision so as to simulate the clams’ chewy-but-not-rubbery distinctiveness, and that would be, she thought, the real challenge. That and choosing an appropriate variety of mushroom, one that could be coaxed to a sufficiently correct mimic.

Myka was thus unsurprised, if gratified, when talking-head Helena said, “I thought immediately of oyster mushrooms. But then I discerned that Chef Marcus might be aiming for them... so I moved quickly.”

The next shot of the kitchen depicted Helena darting in front of Marcus, a tall and somewhat sinister figure, and appropriating all the oyster mushrooms. Then, as if just realizing the other chef’s presence, she said, “Oh, did you want these as well? Surely there are enough for two.”

That struck Myka as pretty magnanimous.

She revised that down a bit after the next talking-head Helena said, “Had I kept them all for myself, how could I have demonstrated my superiority?” Then she smiled: wolfish, with the edges of her teeth. “Not to mention, I had a trick up my sleeve.”

****

As Myka began her preparations for her cranberry sauce without cranberries and candied yams without yams, she felt herself moving with extraordinarily swift precision... had she been dosed with performance-enhancing lightning? Or some other quantity granting an efficient-motion superpower? Then she realized: she was showing off. For the camera? No. For Helena. Who was most likely focusing far too closely on her own cooking to look over and be impressed by Myka’s ability to prep beets for the oven at speed.

While the sauce-pickle simmered and the beets roasted—she would soon peel and purée those—she sought the finishing flourishes for the latter dish. In her search for sweet, she thought of molasses, but then she noticed Helena had that bottle at her station. Casting about, she found her eye caught by a jar, very small, of manuka honey, and its likely kiss of bitterness seemed instantly correct. To provide additional interest, she saturated figs in that honey in a sous-vide bath, with an aim of creating a soft-yet-chunky topping for the beets, texture balancing taste.

Cream, now: maybe yogurt? The tang of plain Greek yogurt rhyming with the pickle’s bite? But she needed depth... she toasted a vanilla bean, ground it, then mixed it into the yogurt; tasted; yes. A dab of honey, then, to match what it topped, and that element was complete.

She allowed herself a breather, while the pickle matured and beets reached peak melt-in-mouth texture, to assess the other competitors’ approaches.

(Not Helena’s, though. Helena’s presence was distracting enough; attending to her cooking was likely to render Myka entirely incapable.)

Chef Artie was doing something with red beets—she’d heard those mentioned by someone (not Chef Artie) in that prior huddle—and something else with butternut squash. Chef Walter, like Myka, was working with raspberries.

Myka felt a flicker of Helena’s “demonstrate my superiority” bravado. She hoped it would prove out.

****

The trick Helena had up her sleeve turned out to be an innovation to replace the clam shell in which the clams casino was traditionally served: she scraped the ribs from a portobello mushroom cap, then dropped it in the deep fryer. She pulled the fryer basket out as the round’s final milliseconds ticked away, then plated her entire oyster-mushroom casino with speed that Myka wouldn’t have imagined possible.

But: This is Helena Wells, Myka reminded herself.

Anything was possible.

Helena was, unsurprisingly, right about demonstrating her superiority. Myka watched her smile as the judge charged with delivering the first-round verdict sent Marcus to his doom, telling him, “We couldn’t overlook that fact that the texture of your mushrooms was no match for that of Chef Helena’s.”

“She tricked me,” Marcus said into the camera as he exited the kitchen.

“She outcooked you,” Myka corrected, a bare instant before talking-head Helena said, smugly but equally accurately, “I outcooked him.”

Myka would have reveled in their consonance but Steve Jinks then announced the entree challenge: beef Wellington without beef.

Now that was a challenge, and Myka was gifted a commercial break to ponder what she might produce. She came up with nothing more than “something else Wellington”—some other protein encased in pâté-slathered pastry. But what protein? And this is why you aren’t on the show, she told herself.

So she paid attention, if a bit begrudgingly, to the choices the other contestants made. Chef Hugo chose venison, which Myka had no trouble imagining would pair well with that expected pâté. Chef Leena chose chicken, but instead of pâté, she used a butter-herb mixture that Myka immediately recognized as intended to bring a cordon-bleu sense to the dish. It seemed nothing like beef Wellington, but it did seem special, invented just for this competition.

Helena was up to something special too, but Myka didn’t fully understand it. She was wielding a mallet on a flank steak, rendering it thin, thin, thinner, and bringing the same thin-thin-thinner energy with a rolling pin to pastry. Myka couldn’t see where the Wellington—its richness—resided... maybe in the duxelles she was making, the sauté of mushrooms that was sometimes paired with the Wellington’s pâté, sometimes substituted for it. Helena had pâté on her station, but she didn’t touch it.

Myka waited impatiently through Chef Hugo’s venison and Chef Leena’s chicken, until it was finally time for Helena to be judged. She cut into her Wellington.

Somehow she had managed to roll pastry, steak, and duxelles into... a pinwheel? Yes, a beautiful swirling pinwheel, with seemingly infinite layers.

Surely she’d been saved for last because her dish was astonishing.

However: “You seem to be attempting to subvert the rules,” a member of the panel, a Chef Kosan, told her. He looked down at his portion disapprovingly, then up at Helena the same way.

What was that about?

“Do I?” Helena was calm, the picture of confidence. Myka was reasonably sure she herself would have been dissolving in anticipatory terror...

“Chef Leena and Chef Hugo both managed to make beef Wellingtons without the beef. You, however—”

“Have as well,” Helena interrupted. “Without the beef tenderloin, ‘tenderloin’ being implied, even if not explicitly stated. Or has the constituent ‘beef’ element changed since I was in culinary school?”

She was obviously right. The “beef” in the name didn’t cover all beef. Myka would have made the same argument.

When the program returned from that commercial break, Steve Jinks rendered the verdict, drawing out the suspense, saying a long and lingering “Chef....”

Myka idly wondered whether venison or chicken would lose.

“Helena,” Steve finished. “Unfortunately, this competition will continue without you.”

Myka blinked. Surely she’d heard that wrong?

But Helena’s incredulous expression suggested she’d heard exactly the same thing.

Chef Kosan was charged with explaining the panel’s reasoning. He began, “In your Wellington, we did find the lean flank steak well-balanced by the richness of the duxelles, even more so than Chef Hugo’s venison was by his pâté—he needed more of that richness.” Myka saw that as a point given to Helena. How had she lost it? He went on, “But his failure in that arena was your fault. You appropriated all the pâté, then gave only a limited portion of it to Chef Hugo, despite the fact that you clearly had no intention of using it the remainder yourself.”

“He was entirely free to ask for more,” Helena said. She didn’t say anything about her intentions.

Chef Hugo, meanwhile, looked bereft. Myka felt something like sympathy for him, for certainly interrupting Helena at work was a frightening prospect. Then again, he was supposed to be competing.

Chef Kosan narrowed his eyes. “The ingredients are not yours to dispense. That struck us as inappropriate gamesmanship.”

“And yet this is a game, is it not?” Helena asked. Myka chalked up another point for her—not that this tally in her head would do anything other than torment her.

Chef Kosan continued, “Nevertheless, in the end the substitution of one type of beef for another struck us as insufficiently creative, if not actually against the rules. Of the game. As did your use of the rather obvious mushrooms in the clams casino.”

If she squinted, Myka could maybe see his point with regard to the mushrooms. But wasn’t changing the Wellington into a pinwheel a creative change? Why hadn’t that outweighed the beef issue?

Helena’s thought process seemed similar: “A puff-pastry pinwheel Wellington was insufficiently creative,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “And both were beautiful dishes, worthy of the Apples menu.” Did she now sound petulant? Myka couldn’t honestly blame her.

“Pursuant to that,” Chef Kosan said, “we’re genuinely curious: how did you manage to get the pastry entirely cooked?”

“Skill,” Helena said. That was a full sneer.

Myka had been curious about the same thing, but she was also imagining getting access to that skill, were she still at Apples and had the dishes made it to the menu... imagining what it would be like to cook those dishes on the line... imagining getting those mushrooms’ texture exactly right for the casino... imagining balancing the Wellington’s fat and lean, while seeing to it that the pastry was indeed entirely cooked. And all right, yes: she was imagining Helena leaning over her shoulder, breathing near her ear, insisting on all of that.

As Helena performed the apparently obligatory walkout of defeat, she pronounced, “I’m far more skilled than this result indicates.” Her tone situated scornful quotation marks around “result.”

That had sounded very Helena. And very true.

Helena then said, “This won’t be the last you see of me.”

Myka had at that point cut off the television and prayed—yes, prayed—for that also to be true.

****

She did not recall the memory of that prayer in its specificity until she was competing alongside Helena in a Christmas-decorated studio in August.

Mysterious ways.

TBC

[apparitionism]

Tabled 7

And with this at-long-last final part, Tabled (my lengthy @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange offering for @barbarawar ) comes to an end. Does that end justify the tortuous (and torturous) trip? Probably not, but something something journey destination... it all began with “Myka sits at tables and tells lies,” and part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6 gave what I hope was a reasonable explanation for how Myka might have so fallen, as well as how she could have begun to scramble up (spoiler: with a lot of help). Anyway, she’s just got back to South Dakota—having come to a tentative understanding with Helena—only to find Mrs. Frederic waiting for her at the airport (!!).

Tabled 7

Myka has spent an evening, a night, and the entire subsequent day on her trek back to South Dakota, so her trip as a whole has now stretched to over thirty-six hours, during which she’s had emotional nadirs, shocks, and acmes; adrenaline overloads, ebbs, and re-overloads; minimal amounts of minimally palatable airport food; and far too much coffee, both interior and exterior. She desperately needs a shower, clean clothes, and, above absolutely all, some sleep lying down in a bed. Some sleep that way.

So she’s having trouble processing what she sees. Has Mrs. Frederic divined her ultimate intention and thus appeared here to prevent her from burning it all down? This possibility should strengthen her resolve; instead, it makes her want to turn and run away.

Unfortunately, she’s now through security, and she can’t turn around. Thanks a lot, DHS.

But please, she goes on to pray, not another table. And: Extra-please, not another lecture about children.

Can the people around her in the airport see Mrs. Frederic? They seem to be moving more slowly, less noisily, than reality usually offers. Or are they? It’s hard to know, here in this quiet, draggy little transit-place...

Mrs. Frederic puts a bow on the weird by pronouncing, “I have spoken with several people today. Yet you are my determinative interlocutor.”

That sounds like Myka might be a very few words away from being sent to a penal colony. Or, no: bronzed. The ultimate irony. Utterly Warehousian.

“I have for you the following salient information,” Mrs. Frederic continues, and Myka doesn’t even bother bracing herself, because she’ll have to take it, regardless. She might as well be rattled by the full impact. “I am prepared to have words with Agent Lattimer.”

She should have braced. “You are?” she asks, wishing she could sound indifferent about the prospect, wishing the idea of such words didn’t add fuel to her gut’s terror that Mrs. Frederic knows all about Myka’s meeting with Helena, a terror now compounded by the prospect of her telling Pete of it, and the further prospect that his having been told will be an additional, far higher bar over which Myka must clamber.

“Should those words occur,” Mrs. Frederic says, and now Myka does brace, “your brief liaison will seem but a dream to him.”

What... what? No bar, no clamber? Instead, deliverance? Myka, whiplash-befuddled, is struck dumb.

Mrs. Frederic waits. Her patience, as long as it lasts, is admirable, if surprising. Then she quirks an eyebrow.

It makes Myka think of Helena—and that allows her to breathe. To soften.

Mrs. Frederic softens too: she lowers the eyebrow. “Is that truly what you wish?” she asks, carefully, as if she’s prepared also to withdraw credit from the source who conveyed to her the substance of Myka’s wants. As if Myka, given one last beneficent chance, can surely be gentled into exercising her better judgment and choosing the certain path.

The sliver of solicitude allows Myka to consider Mrs. Frederic’s motives with a new charity: she may have been driven not by stereotype, as Myka has suspected, nor malice, as she has feared, but rather by a thoughtful assessment of availability—i.e., here are the Warehouse’s extant resources, and here is how they may best be deployed to ensure an acceptable balance of efficacy and safety.

Myka has spent a great many hours on airplanes and in airports preparing herself for the burn-it-down possibility, but the fact of the matter is that she, too, cares about efficacy.

She cares even more about safety.

The additional fact of the matter, however, is that she wants a future untethered from such calculations—except as reckoned by, and between, her and Helena.

So if Mrs. Frederic is willing to help fix what she had a heavy hand in breaking? There’s probably a downside, but Myka will suffer it for this unexpected upside.

“Yes. It is. Thank you,” she says.

“No,” Mrs. Frederic says, now differently severe. “Agent Jinks.”

“Steve? What about him?”

“Thank him.”

****

Myka finds the B&B dark and silent, lacking even a video-game glow and hum from Claudia’s room. Sadly, the quietude doesn’t yield sleep; rather than knitting up her exceptionally raveled sleeve of care, she tries and fails to keep “here’s how this might go” scenarios from playing in her head until she can reasonably go downstairs and begin making morning noises.

As the others appear, she tries to act as if nothing has changed.

Claudia enthuses, “Storms no match for you!” which is flattering but of course entirely untrue.

Pete is in his too-early-to-do-more-than-grunt mode, but he seems to care more about his bowl of Lucky Charms than he does about anything to do with Myka, which tells her that Mrs. Frederic has almost certainly had the promised words with him. The way that buoys her—her shoulders move down and away from her ears, where she hadn’t even realized they’d taken up residence—is probably unseemly, but she doesn’t care.

Then Abigail walks in, and her eye-flick between Pete and Myka suggests she knows everything, which she probably does, but even if she all she might have had were suspicions, they’ve probably been confirmed by Myka’s radical change in posture.

A twinge of guilt at having allowed her body to reveal her relief visits Myka... but she quashes it. That guilt is about parts of the past she’s supposed to be ignoring. Practice. Practice.

When Steve emerges, he busies himself with the first steps of making scrambled eggs. Myka reads this as a tactic, for on workdays Steve generally eats two unheated Pop-Tarts at speed. On lazier mornings, he might undertake toast, but eggs are the rarest of production numbers... and indeed, no one but Myka waits through his meticulous preparation.

“You want some?” he asks, but he’s already sliding his results onto two plates. “Airports,” he says, handing her one.

“So hard to find something normal,” she agrees, “and even when you think you might have, you’re still in a place that isn’t.”

“Sounds like you’re talking about every day here.”

His affect effortlessly encompasses both “perpetually surprised new guy” and “perpetually resigned old hand.” Myka loves him for that facility. “Not about these eggs, though,” she says around mouthfuls, “so thanks.” She pushes her empty plate away. “And, also, thanks.”

“I’ve never seen anyone eat food that fast, so thanks back for the demonstration. But also thanks why?”

“You’re welcome, and also you know why: I have you to thank. Or so I hear from someone who miraculously shifted her thinking about what’s best for me,” and she concludes, “you miracle.”

He gives a little smile and head-shake. “You said to protect you, so that’s what I did. Differently. Once I figured out you were telling me things had changed.”

His figuring? Correct, regardless of anything Myka might have intended to be saying. “Things did change,” she acknowledges, “like you said they would. But listen, what you did. The risk. You shouldn’t have taken that risk for me. In fact people in general should stop taking risks on my behalf.”

His smile grows wider. “We will when you will. Reciprocally.”

“No, no,” Myka says, “I need to take more. On my behalf and everybody else’s.”

“All the more reason you should have the right backup.”

“Well, so should you,” Myka says, fully aware, and fully remorseful, that she hasn’t provided any such thing.

Steve’s smile shifts in a way she doesn’t understand. “I think I’m going to. Maybe in not too long? You know Claud’s doing a lot more Caretakering now.” The doorbell rings. “Oooh, if that’s who I think it is, somebody’s timing is something.”

“Is it?” Myka asks. She trails, a confused duckling, behind Steve as he heads to the door.

“I think you’re about to meet my new partner,” he says.

Myka doesn’t bother asking “Am I?” as he swings the door open, because questions are not being answered sensically.

Her exhaustion is comprehensive, so it’s no surprise she’s hallucinating. She says it aloud, directing a slack-jawed “I’m hallucinating” at both Steve and the doorway-framed Helena as they stand before her, their smiles bizarrely rhyming blends of sheepishness and pride.

They don’t respond. This supports the hallucination conclusion.

Myka moves her right hand, minimally; in this way, she touches Steve, a little backhand to his torso. The purple cotton of his shirt is softer than her knuckles expect.

With her left hand, she reaches out, reaches through the doorway, and pushes, probably harder than she should, against Helena’s right shoulder. Nothing there is soft. The shoulder resists.

Fine. Not a hallucination. Not even a hologram. Everyone’s physically here, breathing and taking up space.

“Her timing,” Myka says to Steve. She’s not quite ready to speak directly to Helena. “It’s definitely something.”

Helena says, “Ssh. Let me reveal my shortcomings to my new partner in my own time.” She’s surpassingly beautiful, here in this moment: glowing with mischief and morning sun.

It’s too much. Myka squints and looks away, back to the comfort of Steve. “Your new partner?” she asks him. “Really?”

“Seems so,” Steve says, right as Helena offers, “As I understand it,” and Myka hears a harmony as their voices overlap. She hadn’t seen this coming, but she might have heard it, if she had thought to listen close enough.

But how could she have thought to, before today? “You both make the world turn a little faster than I’m comfortable with,” she tells Steve.

His smile persists. “Call me on that, no problem. But you really want to argue with H.G. Wells, who by the way is standing right here”—and he gives her a little “you really are, right?” look, which she answers with a minimalist palms-up “I suppose” shrug; more harmony—“about how time moves?”

“If history is any guide,” Helena says to him, “that and many other elements of the oeuvre.”

“I just didn’t think I’d be doing it this morning, is all,” Myka says. She’s trying to bring herself to speak to both of them, but Steve remains her direction of safety.

His brow wrinkles. “If this isn’t okay...”

It would be nice to be able to reassure him, but. “No idea if it’s okay.”

His face clears. “I appreciate your telling the truth. And I guess your voice is less agitated than it could be.”

This garners a snort from Helena. “My dear new partner. Your understatement is a balm.”

“We’ll see if I can keep that up,” he says, visibly nervous.

Myka is, now, able to address Helena. About Steve. “He can. Not always understatement, but the balm part.”

“I’m glad to know it,” Helena says, directing at Steve a formal incline of head.

That incline. Its sweet propriety. Glad. Glad. “I’m glad you’re here,” Myka tells her.

“Thank you,” Helena says. She doesn’t need to add “for saying.” Her hair is shining, here—here!—in this morning sun that illuminates the entryway. Such light visits this space every morning, but Myka has never before seen it ignite Helena’s hair.

This day: new.

“I have something in the car for you,” Helena goes on. “Wait.” She exits the doorway, moving out of the sunbeam’s path. A bright loss.

Myka turns back to Steve. “Wait,” she echoes, shrugging. “There’s not enough time in the world for me to explain to you why that’s ironic.”

“Your own private irony.”

“But you did spare me some waiting. Some not-knowing waiting. And way more than that,” she says, because it needs saying, “you spared me the hard part.”

“I don’t know her very well yet, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”

“Oh,” Myka says, because of course she’d meant detaching herself from Pete, but Steve is (also of course) wise and right: each day, however few or many she and Helena manage, will no doubt have its hard parts. Each day of those few or many might itself be the hard part. “But how did you... I mean, did you have this plan all along? Partner and all, and Mrs. Frederic started nodding along as you said it all out loud?”

“Oh god no. I was just trying to ease her away from the you-and-Pete thing, as gently as possible. Turns out she wanted H.G. back ages ago.”

No. No. “She what.”

Steve nods, looking sick. “But—and I hate to be the one telling you this—she thought you didn’t want H.G. back.”

Myka feels sick. The non-sense of this day... no: of these days. “She what,” she says again.

“Because you left her in Boone, she said.”

“Helena was forced to stay in Boone!” she protests, or tries to.

“But you didn’t fight anybody on it. So she thought you were okay with it.”

Of course. Here’s Myka’s inaction again, kicking her legs out from under her. “But if she wanted to bring Helena back, why didn’t she just... do that? Once she decided it was safe to let her out of Boone?”

“Like I said, she thought you didn’t want H.G. to come back. So she was trying to make sure it wouldn’t matter so much to you. If it happened. If you had something else to focus on.”

“Pete,” Myka says, the very idea a heaviness. “Kids?”

“I’m not saying I can read her mind, but yeah, I think that’s how that went. I can tell you she was really surprised to hear you were meeting with H.G. yesterday.”

“In a hotel room in an airport in Chicago,” Myka says. The base fact of it. “Do I want to know how you explained that?”

“All I explained was the airport in Chicago,” Steve says. “I didn’t know about the hotel room part.”

Right. Myka hadn’t said that part out loud. “It’s not what it sounds like.”

“Interesting utterance,” he says, cocking his head, like he’s waiting for more. “Not an immediate lie, But the eventual truth-value, plus my possible eventual headache, depend on what you think I think it sounds like.”

It’s a privilege, this glimpse into the complications of his gift; nevertheless, Myka winces. “I think you think it sounds like what I think it sounds like,” she says. “Like I wish it didn’t. Because I swear to you, it’s not that.”

She prepares herself to dig in and hash out the truth-values, but Steve says, “I get it. No dirty work in those words.”

No dirty work: it’s a diploma. In reverse. Disqualification.

“Anyway I don’t think I made a lot of sense explaining any of it to Mrs. Frederic,” he finishes.

“Enough to save me,” Myka says.

“Yes. Because if you could be happy.”

“You said that before.”

“I did. But now I mean, if you could be happy.”

“If... then?” she asks, logic being what it is.

“Then maybe I could too,” he says.

Myka wants to put an immediate stop to the idea that he would look to her, for that can’t help but end in abject failure. But she gets out only a weak “Don’t” before he continues, “Because I was thinking of a saying: ‘Happy wife, happy life.’”

“I’m not your wife.”

“Better for both of us. I’m just saying it’s a saying. About a person and somebody else. There might be a better word for where you and somebody else are—or, I guess, where you might be headed?—but it wouldn’t rhyme with life. And it’s probably important to rhyme with life.”

Myka’s heart hears him, but she shies away, scoffing, “That’s a leap. Not the rhyming. The saying.”

“Isn’t it always?”

“I don’t want to give you false hope.”

“But if we could both acknowledge that there is hope.”

She’s not sure. She’ll probably never be sure, but in the face of doubt and fear (and “endless wonder,” that misleading canard), she determines to acknowledge it. For Steve’s sake. “Okay,” she says. “In the full knowledge that you’re the one who made the hope possible.”

“No,” Steve says. Serious. Simple. Unfraught. “That’s not what I did.”

Myka has no counterargument. All she can do is say “thank you” yet again, quick and quiet, for suddenly Helena is appearing in the doorway, taking over the space. Myka suspects she’s been waiting for their conversation to end—speaking of timing, this reminds her of the hotel lobby—and she doesn’t know whether to hope Helena was eavesdropping their words or simply their tones.

She’s holding two cardboard coffee cups. Myka gestures for her to hand one over, but Helena shakes her head. “You haven’t texted me.”

So Myka dashes to grab her phone, and “Gh” says the message, the first purchase her fumbling fingers could find, sent as fast as she could remind those fingers how to do that.

Helena sets the cups down on the hall table when her own phone noises (and now Myka doesn’t know whether to be pleased or distressed that a text from her yields a generic ding). She extracts it from the interior of her jacket and smiles. “I bought these, in hope, in the Sioux Falls airport,” she says, “but they’re now cold. No doubt terrible.”

“‘Worth every penny,’ I once heard someone say about coffee,” Myka says.

“Fewer pennies here. In any event, worth to be determined.” Helena is jaunty; it’s very her, but on the edge of too her, hinting that she’s less certain than her initial doorway presentation implied. As Myka now meets Helena’s gaze, she imagines—but hopes she isn’t only imagining—that their vulnerabilities might for once be commensurate.

Helena doesn’t look away.

Steve says, “You know, ‘I was making eggs’ buys you only so much late-for-work in this job.” It’s a transparent attempt to excuse himself, but he does add, “I’m really looking forward to getting to know you, partner.”

“I hope to impress you,” Helena says.

He snort-giggles, then composes himself. Minimally. “H.G. Wells—who isn’t lying!—hopes to impress me. Okay.”

Myka can’t begrudge him his surprised delight, even if it does delay his departure. “Welcome to a world of endless... surprise. She kind of wrote the book.”

“A lot of books,” Steve augments.

Helena waves a hand. “That was Charles. So wordy.”

Steve’s brow furrows—which Myka reads as a bit of confusion over how to negotiate the Helena/Charles disjunction. He says, “Okay. I’m going to the Warehouse,” clearly (smartly) choosing not to start now.

This time he does leave, though Myka is tempted to stop him, to cling to the surer footing afforded by his buffering.

Coward.

But. Then.

Alone, precariously so, Myka and Helena situate themselves across from each other at the dining room table, their promised-coffee cups before them.

Myka supposes she should have foreseen this arrangement—table, coffee—and she should at the very least have queried the book as to what would ensue. Not that she’s had any time for that, which probably means she should now do that, should go and do that, before she finds a way to undercut its foreseen future and make blunders that will prove unsatisfactory.

“Surprise,” Helena says.

“Yes,” Myka concurs, trying for Steve-ish understatement. It doesn’t work; she knows she sounds distressed.

“May I explain?”

“I wish you would.” That comes out better, but Myka realizes that she is literally on the edge of her seat. She sinks backward, trying to make the movement look like relaxation. That probably doesn’t work either.

“The invitation from Steve,” Helena begins, but upon saying his name, she stops. “Before I continue: ‘H.G. Wells who isn’t lying’?”

“He can tell if you are,” Myka says, and she’s gratified to see in Helena’s ensuing eyebrow contortions that she’s conducting the “what exactly have I said to Steve” inventory everyone does when introduced to that fact.

Its result: “Well. Then it’s fortunate I haven’t. To him.” She seems inclined to reflect on the revelation’s full compass.

Myka does love (love!) to watch Helena think. But right now... “Explanation?” she prompts.

“It isn’t complicated,” Helena says.

“That’s unusual.”

Helena bows her head; she smiles, from that bow, up at Myka. It’s flirty. It’s beautiful. “It is,” she says, and she seems to be affirming Myka’s words and her thoughts. “Steve and I had a conversation during which I explained how you and I had left our... situation. And then, a bit later, came his invitation, which I understand was extended at the behest of Mrs. Frederic. The opportunity—the freedom—to be myself again? It was too enticing to refuse. Of course I never would have accepted in the absence of our rapprochement, but given that? Steve was so convinced, and convincing, that all would be well.” She raises her head fully now. “And it cut short the waiting.”

“I said I would hurry,” Myka says, resentful, unsure of why she’s jumped to that.

“Your return required so many flights. Any number of delays might have ensued.”

“Due to the flights?” Myka asks, but she can’t unhear the clear disjunction between those sentences.

“And everything else,” Helena acknowledges, with a head-duck.

Myka knows that duck; it’s worry. “You didn’t trust me?” she asks, but in the question she finds the reason behind her resentment: offense at the idea that Helena had such worries to begin with.

“Can you blame me?” Helena asks this with a little flinch, as if Myka’s judgment must be harsh.

“Yes I can,” Myka says, but soft. “You were supposed to be ignoring all that.”

Her answer causes Helena to raise her head again and smirk—or, no, this isn’t her smirk; rather, it’s a lip-twist that’s more... conspiratorial. She says, “And yet the foundation of trust is past experience. If I ignore the past, on what basis could I trust you?”

Playful, but a jab. Myka retreats into sarcasm, acknowledging it hit the mark: “There’s a flaw in my big idea? Shocking.”

Helena nods, slow with a sigh, as if in sadness at Myka’s imperfection. But she turns serious to say, “In any case, after all that’s happened, I certainly didn’t trust fate either.”

Fate. How they’ve been subject to it... but are they now trying to chivvy it, in a way that will backfire? Myka pushes her fear into words: “What if it’s too soon?”

“Then regret will haunt us to the end of our days,” Helena says, and Myka has to nod to the truth of it. “But consider this: rather than wasting precious time on such questions, shouldn’t we rather be grateful that, after such complications, there is even a whisper of a chance that it may not be too late?”

Too late, too late, too late. Those words have truly haunted Myka. Miraculous that they might not apply. “I don’t want coffee,” she says. Truly.

“What do you want?” Helena asks, like she might really not know.

Well, maybe she doesn’t anymore, given the vast conceptual distance between Myka’s initial saying and now. “I did tell you. I don’t know how many hours ago; I haven’t counted. I’d have to use my hands.”

“Save your hands, but tell me again. I challenge you, however: change the vocabulary.”

Myka can do that. Only a little, here and now, but she can do that. “To save the world. Our world.”

They are breathing at each other and the table is in the way; Myka ideates the drama of grasping its edge, flinging it sideways, clearing her path—but that’s not who she is. Now, more than ever, she needs to be herself.

She stands up and steps decorously to the side and around, slow, savory, even as her body threatens to effervesce.

“Can we do this?” she asks, but she knows, through her inexorable movement, with all its effervescent potential, that they will. Regardless now of consequences.

“I have no idea,” Helena answers.

These could be words of delay, but not here and not now, because regardless, regardless, they will—and at once they’re both moving, as if pressure from a familiarly heartless authority will relegate Helena yet again to disembodiment if they don’t make this fast, and thank god, god, god this once they’re fast enough; they meet and hands are at waists but they’ve touched with hands before... even so, the infinitesimal pause they both take before those hands pull and define is understandable but then over, and their at-last kiss begins as an action but swiftly transforms into a state of being: pressure, presence, soft, sharp, warmth, weight, low, lasting...

After some time—how much time? is this kind of time measurable?—they break apart into staring silence, in the stunned after of the prospect they have spent so long before.

“I can die now,” Myka is moved to murmur, even as she feels its banality as a response to this experience, this knowledge. Because she has at last truly gained the knowledge: she had hoped to gain it, and yet she now understands she had never fully believed she would, if only because fundamental questions—e.g., “what would it feel like to kiss Helena?”—aren’t often answered.

“You most certainly cannot,” Helena ripostes, bracingly practical. “One kiss is no culmination.”

Myka might object to the description of what just happened as “one kiss,” but she’s too busy being unable to process how an actual culmination might feel.

In fact she’s unable to process anything. “I have to sit down,” she says. Of all things, lightheadedness had not been among her expectations. It should have been: because of course her blood is nowhere near her brain.

Passing out will help nothing. Probably. So she backs awkwardly around the table, her logic, such as it is, being: I have to sit, and that is my chair; if I reach it, then I can sit. Fortunately, her reasoning bears out. She breathes into the relief, as she sits, of still being conscious.

Helena says, “If you can’t stand, then I’ll sit beside you.” More logic, here spoken as indulgence.

She situates herself in the closest chair and scoots it nearer, inch by accommodatingly sweet inch, and then she’s in fact sitting beside Myka, like they’re on a carnival ride together, and now they’re both turning sideways—with Myka devoutly grateful for her continued (seated) consciousness—as they steal (back) these kisses, these presses and exultations, that should so long before this have belonged to them.

“This is not enough,” Helena breathes, sultry against Myka’s mouth.

Myka makes a noise of agreement, and she moves for more, to start the movement to more.

Her hands have made their way to Helena’s shoulders, and are anticipating her hair, when she and her hands are startled by a crash-clatter from across the room.

Myka wishes she could simply ignore whatever such noise signifies... but that wish is unrealistic. She removes her hands and opens her eyes.

Claudia is standing in front of the sideboard. Much of the china that had previously adorned it lies around her in ruins. “I swear to god, this is not what it looks like,” she says. She glances down, then shakes her booted foot. A teacup handle falls from it, producing a tiny clink of pain as it hits the floor.

“It looks like you were trying to blink in but got the coordinates wrong,” Myka says. “That’s happened before. But this time you got tangled with the plateware?”

That yields an eyebrow-raise and a finger-point, then: “What I should’ve said was, ‘This is not what it looks like even to someone who knows all the words to my extensive back catalog of Caretakery mistakes.’ The thing is, I blinked in, saw something I was in no way supposed to be seeing, turned my back on that—faster than fast, and I swear I would’ve tried to blink back out but I can’t reset that quick—and I guess I did Wonder Woman arms, because...” She waves down at the china. “This stuff. Or ex–stuff. Unless you’ve got a lot of glue? Which you might. You were pretty stuck to H.G just now, like in a way I’ve never seen before and like I said was in no way supposed to be seeing, but it’s the most spectacular news of this century or any other because all the feels I can’t even!” She clasps her hands up high and squeezes her eyes shut, as if the scene Myka and Helena are presenting is too glorious to behold.

Myka turns from this emotional show to look at Helena. A half-beat later, Helena turns to Myka. Lacking any ready response, they both turn back to Claudia, who opens her eyes, drops her hands, and says, “Your faces are telling me all those words happened out loud.”

“Unfortunately,” Helena says.

“Hi?” Claudia offers, with an apology face.

Helena smiles. “Hello, darling,” she says, warmly.

Their interaction is lovely to witness, but: Warm, Myka thinks, because that’s how Helena’s body is, next to hers. Why, why, why has Claudia appeared now?

“I’d run over and hug you,” Claudia says, “but I see that seat’s taken. Instead I’ll just say I missed you.”

Myka can’t help herself; she accuses, “Not enough, you spy.”

“She called me. Was I supposed to be like ‘oh, it’s H.G., I better not pick up’?”

Myka’s immediate thought is YES. She says in its place an umbrage-laden, “You could have told me.”

“Maybe you don’t understand what you looked like every time you came back from seeing her,” Claudia says. “You think I wanted to make you look like that?”

Helena shifts position beside Myka, legible as a “you are failing to ignore the past” caution; Myka adds to it a self-admonitory on this day of all days. “Fine,” she says. “Not fine at all, but fine.”

“Anyway Artie’s already shouting about how you’re both late for work,” Claudia says.

Myka sighs. “Artie. Shouting. So everyone knows?”

“Well not about this. Which I double-pinky-swear I never meant to know about, even though it was always something to hope about. All Artie knows about, and probably even hopes about, is who works here. There. At that place. And is late. For it? So I guess we should get going?”

Myka can easily imagine agreeing that yes, yes they should get going: result being that she and Helena would proceed to the Warehouse. That place. Additional result, as history has shown, being that something would happen to once again put the promise of this day out of reach.

She sees, now, that she has to act against such results. Act against them. Act.

And she sees something else, something both sickening and enlivening: all her lies, those interventions against truth? They were acts. Sinful ones, but her agency in telling them has fortified her with the necessary heft for this moment.

Her lies were practice.

Morally inexcusable practice, but: she was a feral little fabulist. Now she must put ends before means. Use the muscle; ignore the exercise by which it developed.

So. “No,” she says.

Her refusal disturbs the space, shaping it into a new kind of silence.

In its wake, Claudia offers appraisal: eyes narrowed, jaw tilted. Eventually, she says. “Not entirely sure who I’m talking to now.” She squints tighter, sly-red-fox. “By the way,” she says, calculatedly casual, “your book buddy says hi.”

If anything could knock Myka out of her certainty... certainly, it’s guilt. “Oh god,” she says.

Claudia’s narrow tension relaxes. “Steve and I figured out you were the one doing ‘unauthorized use.’  And it took us a while, but we also figured out what you were unauthorized using.”

“Thanks for not telling on me,” Myka says.

Silence again, until Helena breaks it with, “Myka used an artifact? Was this for personal gain?” She doesn’t look at Myka.

“I literally would never. And neither would Steve.”

Myka wants to say Could we ignore that too. Instead she confesses, “For personal... desperation.”

Now Helena looks. “So at last you understand,” she says. It’s a softer condemnation than Myka might have expected, not that she had expected anything, because until this moment she hadn’t made the connection. Not through the clean line of “so at last.”

But then a new connection, or rather consequence, strikes her: “What’s its downside?” she asks Claudia.

“You don’t know?”

“I didn’t care.” At that, Helena grasps Myka’s hand, tight, and Myka knows she’s going to have to think very hard at some point about this newly realized kinship between them. Right now, though, she’d rather think about the fact that Helena is holding her hand. But for that niggling consequence. “Do I need to care?” she asks.

“It’s a downside, so yeah? But with this guy, it’s a downside-with-a-twist.” She pauses, as if waiting for... guesses? Applause? When neither Myka nor Helena responds, she says an aggrieved, “Anyway, it’s the same as the upside.”

This baffles Myka. “Seeing the future? How is that a downside? I mean maybe in the Cassandra sense, if nobody believes you, but—”

Claudia interrupts, “OOC of you to get that wrong. But I guess OOC is your new IC thing, Ms. ‘No’? Anyway I don’t think you grokked what the artifact is.”

“A book,” Myka says, because... it is? “A future-seeing book.”

“Book, schmook. And future-seeing... schmuture-seeing? It’s an oracle. It doesn’t see the future; it predicts it. Literally, it says in advance: you ask it a question about the future, and it answers. It says it. In advance of that future.”

Helena chuckles. “Etymology strikes again.”

To which Claudia nods. “Right?”

“I still don’t get it,” Myka says. “Saying versus seeing? In my defense, I’m very tired.” She is sorely tempted to put her head down, heedless, here on the table, but she feels Helena tighten her handhold again, a press intelligible as Stay with me. She breathes deep and refocuses.

“Its answer is a decision,” Claudia says. “About the future.”

Helena looks at Myka, then at Claudia. “Now that is power.”

“Also right,” Claudia says. “But it can’t make that decision if nobody asks it to. Myka.”

“I did ask it,” Myka concedes, “but now my head hurts. Are you saying that if I hadn’t asked, then none of this would have happened? Would be happening?” She can’t argue with the outcome, but: upside, downside? Her head does hurt.

Claudia’s face empties. She says, “Asking questions has consequences, Agent Bering.”

Has Claudia been taken over by... something? Myka can’t help it now: “What?” she asks. The word rings a little less desperate, here at home, as a thing she tends to say. But she’s no less lost.

“Sorry,” Claudia says, turning back into herself. “I was trying on my spooky-Mrs.-F suit. Bad fit so far.”

“The art of the gnomic utterance,” Helena intones. Her own utterance doesn’t quite rise to gnomic, but Myka can see more clearly than ever the helios toward which Helena-as-Caretaker might have troped. Losses. Gains. How can Myka place herself in relation to so many competing ledger columns?

“Did you just insult Mrs. F?” Claudia asks, her obvious confusion breaking into Myka’s reckoning. She might as well have said her own Myka-esque “What?”

“What?” Helena then asks, thus squaring that circle.

“The red hat?” Claudia says, gesturing at her own head. “And doing magic or whatever in your garden?”

Sense at last. Myka doesn’t quite suppress a laugh. “Gnomic,” she says. “Means terse. Mysterious. Not gnome-related... or actually, it is, but not those gnomes. Different derivation.”

“Etymology strikes yet again,” Helena says. She suppresses her own laugh—Myka hears it behind that overly serious observation—but not her smile.

“I’m really glad you’re here,” Myka tells her. The fact and experience—correct, appropriate—of their speaking together. “Claudia,” she says (and Claudia is looking at them like they’ve both lost their minds, which they probably have, but not about this), “go to the Warehouse. Keep everybody there. All day. Please.”

Claudia brings her hands together once again in a dramatically audible clap. “I get it. I mean I’d say something about a booty call, but I know that’s not it. You need your day.”

Our day? Our days. Our days, our weeks our months our years.

“Yes,” Myka says.

Helena follows up with, “We do.”

“Hey, but I’m no oracle,” Claudia says. “No predictions here.”

Myka and Helena give her incomprehension again.

“Not ruling out booty call,” she clarifies, laughing, but she backs away as she speaks, now blessedly making her exit—unlike her entrance, through the B&B’s front door.

That means Myka and Helena can—must—make their move. And they do, rising from the table, stepping toward the stairs—but not yet up them, for Myka can’t wait; her hands are at last finding Helena’s hair, and as they do, as she touches and feels, she says, in wonder, “It’s just us. It’s never been like this.”

“Why would you comment on it?” Helena demands, as if Myka taking even an instant to reflect threatens to make the entire situation evaporate. Her hands are busy too, running along Myka’s arms, not quite grasping, but then grasping, and then Myka can’t comment on anything, because her lips are busied, back in that new state of being.

The journey to her bedroom: she had in the past allowed herself to imagine such travel, but carefully, the fantasy within strictures. Policed possibility. The walk, but not its end... not, in fact, the culmination, the sense of which had increasingly eluded her, a frustratingly constant receding of possibility, as if her body were teaching itself over time to echo Helena’s incorporeality, her sensation waning, from body to limbs to fingertips alone, until all vocabularies of touch became words not near enough the tongue.

But now everything is nearing, nearing and blurring, boundaries dissolving, everything her body, her body everything, the stairs the hallway the room the clothes the hands the lips the skin the stumble the fall...

****

Myka slow-motions into consciousness, unable to discern where she is, knowing at first only that wherever it is, she was exhausted before she got there. Got here.

That’s mostly because she can’t remember the preceding events, and experience has established that extreme fatigue is one of the few states that interferes with her otherwise reliable recall.

So she begins to sort it out, blinking sleep-weighted eyes. Her initial perception is that she’s lying in a bed—a bed blessedly recognizable as hers—yet she also seems to be perceiving something else, something absurd: that Helena, of all people, is speaking to her. Speaking unclear words, near to her, while she is in this bed that is hers.

I’m dreaming.

The words resolve: “Are you all right?” Helena asks, and Myka snaps to.

Not dreaming.

She is in her bed, and Helena is here. Their skin is... together. Helena, propped on an elbow, is regarding Myka in full recline.

Myka wants to answer Helena’s question with a strong “yes.” But she isn’t at a table and she doesn’t want Helena to be reminded of her feral fabulisms, not here not now, so instead she dares to ask, “What happened?”

“I believe you fell asleep,” Helena says. “In the middle of things.”

Myka’s first thought is that she can’t imagine a worse blunder. Her second is that of course she can. Her third, which she formulates second by second and piece on piece as her memory returns, is the one she says out loud. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

Helena shakes her head. “I brought you coffee. That was all.”

It’s a damning pronouncement. “You’re saying I could have caffeinated, but instead I ruined everything.” Myka raises her left hand to cover her face. She’d use her right one too, but Helena’s body is trapping that arm. Move, she wants to say. I need both hands. To cover her shame.

Helena uses her free, unpropping hand to remove Myka’s, revealing her face. She interlaces their fingers. “Your sleep has addled you. I’m saying that I brought you a small gift, but in return you’ve given me a far greater one.”

New bafflement. “I have?”

What could possibly be sufficient penance here? “Not the right one.”

“Witnessing your fulfillment of a bodily need.”

Helena offers a considering head movement, a cerebral back-and-forth. “Isn’t it? Proof that you trust me enough to lost consciousness—in this way—so near. Differently meaningful, but meaningful all the same. Particularly to someone who, as you know, occasionally forgets to ‘ignore it.’”

Her words have such depth, in sound and meaning, that Myka can barely process any of it. Particularly given that they are lying down in privacy... and far more.

“What am I supposed to do now?” she asks. Blunder some more, the book would no doubt reiterate... but she’d rather get her guidance, here in this moment, from Helena.

“Enjoy it.” Helena says, and she laughs—this sound not deep but high, high and so happy.

Myka has never heard this laugh from her. It’s as much a directive as her words are. “Enjoy it—I didn’t know,” she says. That comes out more terse than she intends... because she can barely speak. The joy in the room—occasioned by everything, but especially by that new, new laugh—is so thick, interior and exterior to bodies and souls, that forcing words through it takes great effort.

“Know what?”

Myka would worry about her answer sounding too intellectual, if this were anyone else. In her bed. But it’s Helena. Thank god, it’s Helena. So she feels safe to say, “It’s a corollary. Follows from ‘ignore it’? I think?”

“Yes,” Helena says, gratifying Myka immensely, “yes, ignore it, about the past; enjoy it, about the present; and thus one additional corollary, this one about the future.”

“Ask an oracle about it?” Myka tries.

Helena frowns—exaggerated, comic. “That doesn’t follow, either poetically or epistrophically.”

“It does follow epistrophically.”

“Minimally so,” Helena sniffs. The acknowledgment, itself minimal, further pleases Myka, even as Helena goes on, “But it should scan as well. My proposal does.” She pauses, doubtless for effect. Myka tries to think out what the teased proposal might entail, but she doesn’t get far before Helena pronounces, “Absolve it.”

“That does scan,” Myka acknowledges.

“Thank you. This next doesn’t, but I know you’ll want to take on blame for how our future unfolds, so I add: absolve yourself as well.”

Ignore it; enjoy it; absolve it. These strategies—despite Myka’s having insisted on the first—are all antithetical to her way of being in the world.

But she’s been unhappy, being in the world. Unsatisfied.

Now she is being satisfied, a new state that only this skin-to-skin with Helena could possibly have brought about.

She deliriously doesn’t care whether Claudia has kept, did keep, is keeping everyone else away.

This is hers and she can and will enjoy it.

This is hers and Helena’s and she can and will see to it—she can and will ensure—that they both enjoy it.

She has never before ideated such power—could never have, but here it is, in her hands, in her body, in giving and taking: power. And if she’s still too tired to remember, on next waking, that she had it, it’s all right. She’ll have another occasion to exert it. More anothers.

“Did you just say ‘more anothers’?” Helena asks, speaking and breathing with exertion.

Apparently there’s still room, in and amongst the joy and the power, for embarrassment. “Out loud? Are you sure?”

Helena calms enough to say, with indignation, “My hearing is quite good.”

“Evasive answer,” Myka says, recovering a little. “I’ll take it as a no.”

“Evasive?” More indignation.

“It wasn’t a yes,” Myka points out.

Helena runs a hand through her hair, as if in preparation for more argument. “I propose we table this debate,” she says instead.

“Good idea,” Myka says. “Because instead of talking, or asking about talking, you should be kissing me.”

“So should you. Vice versa. Me. Kissing.”

Transportingly charming near-incoherence... “You’re right,” Myka says, her heart overflowing. “So be quiet.”

“You first,” Helena ripostes, with what sounds suspiciously like a giggle.

Myka wants to keep that sound active, so she doesn’t comply. And they continue to speak together. Through it all.

This time, Myka stays awake. That’s probably a blunder too—but it’s most satisfactory.

****

In the weeks and months that follow, Myka takes time, as she finds it, to visit the book. Often, its pages ruffle and sigh, their invitation clear: Don’t you want to know? To know more?

The temptation is real, compounded by what she feels as an exertion of pressure from the volume: Did I not gift you this future? it seems to whisper. Surely you could gift me the opportunity to exercise. To provide still greater definition.

Then again, that could simply be her guilt—her ongoing struggle to absolve it—talking.

On one such occasion (though not the only one), she hears footsteps. The rhythm, the particular ring of heel-strikes: she knows the confidence of those strides. The knowing is calming, if not itself absolving.

“Back already?” she asks without turning around.

“Absurdly simple retrieval,” Helena says. “Steve found the entire exercise an insult to the considerable intelligence he and I bring to bear on any mission we undertake.”

Helena’s interpretations of Steve’s thoughts are often baroque—often, seemingly, more suitable to her own thoughts. But when she offers such interpretations in Steve’s presence, he doesn’t wince. “Really?” Myka says, just to make sure.

“He said aloud that he was bored.”

“That’s something,” Myka concedes.

“And you?” Helena asks. “Have you contrived to place new parameters on the future?”

“I keep telling you I won’t.”

“And yet I continue to find you here,” Helena says. More seriously, she offers words that have become customary: “If you could be happy.” Steve’s utterance, shared among the three of them, has become a mantra.

“You know that’s a work in progress,” Myka says, and although that’s customary too, it’s also true: while she knows she can be, and while at certain times she genuinely is, she is by no means consistent in that achievement.

Nevertheless she has to admit, now as always, that the book has been right. The blunders—the many, many blunders, even as she’s perpetrated them, even as she’s dealt with their aftermath—have been satisfactory. Such are the components of that work. Of its progress.

Helena nods. She lays her hand upon the book, as it lies there on the shelf, as if swearing an oath. “Everything is,” she says.

****

Myka sits at tables. She tells lies. But the sitting and the lying, as activities, are now uncoupled.

Coffee, too, has shed its significance; it’s a beverage, not an event.

However: she keeps a stained shirt in her closet as a reminder of earlier, pained, connected times—of, also, the work that was even then in progress, even as she was failing, spectacularly, to recognize it as such.

She needs the reminder, because with regard to the past, “ignore it” doesn’t always work. Nor does “absolve it,” as the future unfolds.

But on the best of present days, ignoring and absolving intersect. And on those best days, Myka does, in fact and in practice, enjoy it.

END

Instead of shoehorning thoughts into tags, here’s what I’ve got:

Did both Myka and Helena get let off the hook too easily? Your call... but I’m inclined to embrace the idea that instances of grace might manifest as the reward for hard work, and acknowledging culpability may be the hardest work of all. I mean, Elton John wrote a song about it, so put that on whichever side of the ledger works for you. Also, I like it when people help Myka in ways she doesn’t know how to ask for. She seems (to me) to be very bad at asking for help. Or maybe I mean that she seems disinclined to ask for help even (or especially) when she should.

Generally the only way to come out the other side of the hard stuff is to go through. But sometimes you do have to set some things aside if you want to move forward... and that’s what this story, at base, has been about. I hope. I offer all gratitude to @barbarawar for giving me the impetus to think it through in this particular way, at my snail-in-a-school-zone pace.  Finally, if there’s a timeline in which Helena becomes an agent again and she and Steve don’t become partners, I don’t want to know about it. The potential perfection of their pairing thrills the bejesus out of me.

[apparitionism]

Tabled 6

“Change the vocabulary!” Myka has just exclaimed in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, in a full-throated effort to bring Helena around to her newly realized way of thinking, here in this story occasioned by @barbarawar ’s months-ago @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange request regarding what would have happened if Myka and Helena had had their Boone-proposed coffee. Much has ensued since then: meetings poor and poorer, rendering hopes faint and fainter, leaving potentials squandered and... squandereder? Seeing to it that emotional moves make sense is always challenging, I find. People want to make sense to themselves, want to make sense of themselves, and someone as thinky as Myka would, I imagine, double-want that. But while we all contain multitudes, we tend to bumble through situations as unfull representations of those multitudes: weird gotta-keep-moving sharks desperate to present consistency. I too keep moving: trying to land this thing, even as it fights against the stick, remaining *this far* above ground. Apologies as always, my strung-along giftee. See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 for the convoluted way we got here.

Tabled 6

“What?” Helena says, but it’s not her usual “what”; she’s obviously flummoxed, and her echo of Myka’s characteristic bafflement is precious. Preposterous, but precious.

Myka had hoped for some spark of recognition at her transformation of “change the rules,” but the confusion... it might be better. Sweeter. She tries not to make too much meaning out of this chime of similarity, even as she wants to pull that soft, bewildered “what” from the air and cradle it.

“I was trying to be clever,” she says. “Never mind that. And never mind fixing it, because we can do something else.”

“Repair it?” Helena says: a cautious, skeptical—and, yes, still baffled—synonym proffer.

Don’t laugh, Myka instructs herself, but faced with the idea that Helena really might think they’re playing a word game, it’s hard to follow her own order. “Never mind that too,” she says, a chuckle bubbling in her throat. “Because never mind. Because that’s it. Because you know what we actually can do?”

Helena raises her hands up, high, obviously in question, but really for all the world as if she were indeed being held at gunpoint.

This is not ending as it began, Myka tells the universe. Not as it began, or any other way.

She chambers the only bullet she has, aiming it right at Helena’s heart.

She pulls the trigger with a smile: “Ignore it.”

Hands still high, Helena opens her mouth slightly, and she squints, as if Myka has morphed into a dangerously unidentifiable animal.

Yes, Myka thinks, wildly, trying to live up to that wariness, I’ve been genetically engineered right here in this island of a hotel room! A Warehouse agent crossed with a yawper who has her very own plans! Amorphous ones, but! This infusion of abandon—Moreau power?—gives her the strength to hold Helena’s gaze.

The standoff lasts until Helena gets her language working again. “That recommendation is... entirely specious,” she says. “And you sound uncharacteristically overwrought.”

It’s a wobbly pair of objections. Myka draws even more strength from Helena’s lack of conviction. “What if it is? What if I am?”

“I don’t believe the slate can be wiped clean,” Helena says, a little more firmly. “Nor do you.”

So you do think we know each other. “I’m not saying it can. I’m saying I know it’s dirty, and so do you. I’m saying we ignore it.”

Helena’s face, from her “what” until now, has been a study in something Myka honestly never expected to see from her: full (fully wrong-footed) incomprehension. Myka doesn’t blame her, for she’s finding herself pretty incomprehensible, but she presses on. “You were ready to ignore my Boone-changed opinion of you. Weren’t you. When you hoped I’d know I was the someone else.”

After a pause: “That was then,” Helena says, her resentment at Myka for having worked her way to that truth—and for having articulated it—very clear.

“Oh, not anymore?” Myka pushes. “Even though now we both know I was that someone, and that there wasn’t a Giselle?”

“That was then,” Helena repeats.

Wait... “There’s a Giselle now?” Myka can’t process it, if it’s so. If it’s so, she will have to let Helena leave, then bury her face in one of the expensive pillows from this room’s unignorable bed and scream.

Another head-toss, the most dramatic one thus far, accompanies Helena’s next words. “I’m of a mind to say yes. But pursuant to my previously articulated policy, I’ll tell the truth: there isn’t, but there could be. In the future. I agreed to meet with you today to ensure you wouldn’t mistake yourself over Pete, but I have no intention of stepping into a similarly mistaken place. I’ve done my best to let this go.”

Myka can’t accept any of those words. “Ignore that too,” she says. She would like to point out that that whole litany was pretty rich, coming from Ms. To-Continue-to-Speak-Together, but instead she zeroes in on what seems the clearest contradiction. “But if you’re letting this go, why do you care about me mistaking myself over Pete?”

“Why did you care about me mistaking myself in Boone?” Helena counters, sour.

The response is uncharacteristically incompetent, particularly because Helena already knows the answer. “I could repeat something somebody once told me, about not walking away from what she called ‘your truth,’” Myka says, with what she hopes is a “that was then” fillip. “But I won’t. What I’ll really say is, I asked you first.” She allows herself a half-breath to marvel at how unusual it is for her to have this much of the upper hand.

“I could say the same thing.” Helena is visibly struggling not to acknowledge Myka’s advantage, but she collapses, saying, “The former, not the latter. I didn’t ask you first,” her devotion to accuracy (or so Myka reads it) defeating her. “Nevertheless I could repeat the something somebody once told you. As the why.”

Myka continues to press. “But isn’t repetition boring? You hate being boring.” She hopes this observation might visit upon Helena that kick of so we do know each other: “I bet you threw your coffee on me just so I wouldn’t walk away thinking how dull you’d been.”

“That was not the reason,” Helena says, but with a press of lips that suggests a ripple of otherwise.

Here, Myka shouldn’t press. “Then what was the reason.”

“You were being recalcitrant, and you know it,” Helena says.

“And what are you being now?” Myka asks, as laconically—as lean-back, as Helena-esque—as she can.

That question causes Helena to scowl and move energy into her hands, extending and then bending her fingers; though she doesn’t quite form them into fists, her intent is clear: she wants to deck Myka. It’s glorious. Please, do it, Myka urges internally, so we can get this all out in the physical open.

But Helena resets her face and waves her hands, the flutter of fingers dispelling the energy and its threat. “Realistic,” she says, prim.

Quit acting like me, Myka would tell her, but for the fallout. What she says is, “I wish I still had this coffee,” pointing at the table, the tragic cup-ceremony of which probably now deserves replaying as farce. Or was it farce the first time? No surprise, really, that they would skip-jump their way over the natural course of history.

“Yes, because stains solve problems,” Helena sarcastics.

Maybe; maybe not. Nevertheless, Myka says what’s true: “You seemed to think they would. And anyway, they redound to your benefit.” Helena greets this with a completely reasonable additional “what,” but Myka blows past it with, “Maybe because you ignore them? Anyway, this one here”—she gestures to the now-dry coffee-map on her shirt (it looks like no country, and she’s disappointed to be unable to name it as “this Brazil” or “this Azerbaijan”)—“kept me from walking away when you thought I shouldn’t.”

“A delaying tactic,” Helena says, offering only bored disdain, as if the very idea of it had been in the end inconsequential.

Keep pushing. “How long was that delay supposed to last, anyway?”

Helena doesn’t have an answer; Myka knows it because she begins to pace. She starts, of course, at the doorway, then walks past the bed, over to the window, and back again: bed then doorway, doorway then bed, bed then window, back and forth—six times, Myka counts—before she leans her back against the door, crosses her arms over her chest, and says, “Why are you tempting me this way? Why this way? What’s changed? In this room, in the few breaths since resignation and coffee, what’s changed?” It’s a fret.

“Well, what’s changed for you?” Myka asks, with no fret at all for once in her life. “More breaths since, but why did authority let you out of Boone-prison?”

Helena’s face produces an inscrutable scowl-smile hybrid. She thrusts herself away from the door, walks to the bed, rubs her hands together. Re-gathering energy? “I suppose I could offer a long-winded explanation about having been given to understand that the balance of safety and threat had shifted. But instead, to quote: ‘What I’ll really say is, I asked you first.’”

“Well played,” Myka admits. In return, she’s gifted with the little acknowledging bow of head she loves. (Loves—yes.) It draws her physically closer, that head-bow: only a few shuffling inches, but enough that she can answer, more quietly, “What’s changed is I saw a future. And I saw how much I’m willing to ignore to have it.”

“I do not understand your morality,” Helena says. This time, she sounds a note of wonder rather than censure.

So much recursion in what they say, think, feel, do—once, then back again, and then again. Maybe they’re bound to get something right, if they try everything over and over? This particular repetition-with-variation seems a little better than usual, tragedy repeated not as farce but as fairy tale... or, no: Warehouse tale. Because for better or worse, there’s no escaping the Warehouse, the curse but also blessing of wonder. She and Helena are here together today only because of the Warehouse—that necessary condition of their meeting and connection.

Myka could dilate forever upon fate and purpose, but “ignore it” must be her mantra now, her grounding principle. For better or worse... for better and worse. The true moral of any Warehouse tale.

“I don’t understand anybody’s morality,” she says, “especially not mine or yours. I’m not trying to. I’m ignoring that too.”

But what she can’t ignore—not now, not anymore—is the way in which their bodies have, so gradually, continued to near, with Helena slowly mirroring Myka’s movements, these little distance-closing developments. So small is the gap between them now, the displacement it would take to touch surely must be measured by time, not distance.

And yet she hesitates, for this raise of hand must speak correctly: not want, but offer.

Slow. Stretch that time, turn it back into space.

She does that, moving as slowly as she can. More slowly than she ever has.

Helena doesn’t retreat.

Minimalist increments... yet their yield is immense: Myka’s right hand meets Helena’s left, and their fingers link and twist, palms not pressed but near.

It is their first genuinely mutual touch since Boone.

“I will be blunt,” Helena says, soft, burred by the contact. “I need you to... just say.”

Blunt. This knife of request—indeed unsharp—meets Myka’s fears, at first bending against them, yet still bearing threat. The force of it makes her glance away, and again she’s drawn to the clock. All she can find to articulate is, “I missed my flight.”

It could have been a way of saying, but Myka didn’t mean it like that, and Helena knows it: she raises an eyebrow. The leavening takes away the knife, and it gives Myka leave to lighten too, to postulate, “Maybe we’re constitutionally incapable. Of the saying. Or maybe it’s just me? Okay, not maybe—probably. Is that a dealbreaker?”

Now Helena cocks her head, completing the gesture with a lifting twist of chin. It calls of early, early: Helena handcuffed in a chair, Myka foolishly imagining she knew how all the ensuing moments would go—then being flung up to meet the ceiling.

The book would have known that would happen, but Myka didn’t. Hasn’t. Flights, crashes. Over and over, each as unpredictable as every other. Which will Helena choose to inflict now?

“Have we agreed to a deal?” Helena asks. The question isn’t coy. “Ignoring may be a way forward, but historically, you do seem to presuppose the existence of agreements that you fail to inform me I’m a party to. That you then accuse me of violating.”

So: an objection, but one grounded in their shared history. A flight and a crash. “That is an uncomfortably accurate description of what I do,” Myka admits. “Let me start again. I missed my flight. Did you?”

“Miss your flight? Yes.” More leavening: unfunny joking, words for the sake of them. To continue to speak together... of course this has been what Myka wished too. Of course she would listen to Helena saying words about anything.

Not anything, her Boone-and-Giselle-haunted memory reminds her...

“But that was not the issue under discussion,” Helena continues. A providential interruption.

“Right. Dealbreaker. Saying. Inability.” Why are you vamping? What is the impediment? The answer is immediate: You are the impediment. “Change the vocabulary” was a nice idea, but one word was never going to be enough. “Look,” she begins, determined now to do better, “I—”

Helena tightens her fingers’ grasp against Myka’s. It’s a very different way of getting things out in the physical open. “Wanting you warps all I do,” she whispers. The words, the grasp: both are saying. Out in the open.

More even than the oh-so-welcome grasp, the words mean everything to Myka. And their meaning is itself everything—everything that matters—so she steals them and says them back: “Wanting you warps all I do.” It’s mind-clearingly correct. The relief of at last having an accurate description of the past half-decade: it hits her like that slug she’d perversely hoped Helena might deliver.

But having used Helena’s words, however perfect, while coming up with none of her own pains her, so she feels she has to modify, “Warps. And warped, but not in any of the ways that might have helped. I can’t apologize enough for how I got it all so wrong.”

Helena’s tilt of head gentles. Her chin drops. “Someone has recently recommended, rather eloquently, ignoring such things.” She smiles. “You are terrible at following your own prescription.”

Helpless to object, Myka says, “That can’t come as a surprise.”

“A surprise? No. Perhaps an obstacle.”

“Would you... surmount it?”

Helena says, “For you...”

Myka fears she hears a lift of question. “That’s what I meant. Would you?”

“As stated: for you.”

The certainty is... transporting. Nevertheless, “I don’t know how this will work,” Myka admits. “If this will work.”

“Nor do I,” Helena says, yet her admission is a balm.

So much remains to be negotiated. So fragile this semi-resolution between their hands.

Then: “I’m so tired,” Helena says, actual rather than despondent, and Myka is ready to agree that yes, she is tired too, that everything that’s taken place in this room has taxed her to her limits, but Helena follows that admission with, “Will you lie down with me?”

Myka tenses. Her immediate, insistent bodily approval of the idea jangles against her just-as-immediate worry over where such a request—and such approval—might lead.

No doubt feeling that stiffening via their still-joined hands, Helena says, “For rest. Rest, in privacy, and nothing more.”

Myka believes her. She doesn’t trust herself, for her self is a serial liar with terrible impulse control, but she believes Helena.

Who is also a serial liar, one with similarly terrible impulse control, but saying “no” to this person who has so lately spoken of want and warp, this person whose hands continue to grip hers, is not an option.

Thus in a hotel room in an airport in Chicago, Myka lies down on a bed, and Helena lies beside her. They shift their bodies awkwardly, then less so, as they find a fit: Myka on her back, Helena on Myka’s left side, curled like punctuation around everything they’ve suffered.

From a position moments ago unimaginable, Myka finds room to ask, “What are you doing?”

“What? Nothing,” Helena says, as if Myka has made an accusation. She stills the slight, slight stroke her fingers have begun to apply to Myka’s hair.

More unfunny comedy. “I don’t mean with your hand. I mean, every day. In your life.”

“Oh,” Helena says. The stroke resumes. “Waiting.”

“You said you hadn’t stopped living.”

“That is not what I said.”

“If you could press pause on the semantics.” It’s true that Myka could—should—quote with greater accuracy, given that she knows exactly what Helena said. But Helena knows that Myka knows exactly what Helena said, and while continuing to speak together is the weirdly frustrating joy it is, they should really try to get somewhere.

Helena sighs; the sound contains a put-upon “fine.” She says, “I pretend to have expertise in several areas, including forensic analysis, for which pretensions I’m paid absurd amounts of money.”

“Ends before means?” Myka asks, a tiny joke.

“My own fabulism is unsurpassed.”

That’s probably a joke too, but thinking back on her own vast course of lies, Myka finds it important to counterclaim, “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Does competition truly matter at this late date? A win in this category is dubious—sinful, even—but today I’m inclined to concede your victory in anything you like.”

So she understood Myka was talking about herself; is that pleasing or disturbing? In any case, Myka does know the concession as a surprise: “You are?”

“Today. For here we are, at rest. Salvaged. By you.”

“But only because you wrecked my shirt,” Myka reminds her.

They’ve been wrecked, over and over, with stained shirts only the most recent, small detritus. Yet here they are, salvaged, washed up on some unfamiliar shore... this island of a hotel room: no Moreau; instead, uncharted.

Would that it were an island, one they could make their home.

“Only because,” Helena echoes. “Only because you were being recalcitrant... but we can’t carry such recursion back ab ovo.”

“Or we can,” Myka says with a hiccupy laugh, momentarily captured by the possibility, seeing it as a burrowing-in, a we-got-here-and-this-is-how affirmation.

“This from the woman whose mantra would be ‘ignore it’?”

“Game show,” Myka goes on, the laugh persisting; there’s no escaping the beautiful fact—she might have imagined it would be true but now it’s a fact—that lying with Helena wrapped around her makes her giddy. “Whoever buzzes in with the preceding turning point the fastest gets...”

“What?”

“I was about to say ‘a point,’ but that sounds weird. A point for a point?”

Helena’s cheek flexes against Myka’s, in what Myka suspects is her I-don’t-quite-understand squint. “A point for a point... surely that should be the name of the program? But I’m not conversant with game shows.”

“You are a little. Whammies.”

Another flex of cheek. “The current argot for being affected by an artifact?”

She’s right. But. “It’s from a game show. The coinage... it’s Pete’s.” Myka wishes she could have forever avoided introducing him into the conversation, the room, the problem. But in the end this hotel room isn’t an island.

Helena nods. The movement is an acknowledgement of what Myka has done—but it’s also yet another blessed slide of her skin against Myka’s. “What will you tell him?” Helena asks, and Myka can face the question only sideways, through the warmth of the slide.

Lying in bed is unquestionably better than sitting at a table. Myka nevertheless feels an incipient lie forming, a dodge to push off difficulty: I don’t know, she could tell Helena, and maybe that lie of omission would suffice, here as they lie in a comfort Myka has already disturbed more than enough.

However. The truth is she’ll tell him whatever she has to, to get herself free. To make him let go. So that’s what she says to Helena: “Whatever it takes.”

To her shock, the out-loud saying wallops her with a vision of a still different future, one stark and Warehouse-less. The view is empty: of purpose, of feeling. A disaster. “What happens if I burn it all down?” she asks. Her heartbeat speeds; her blood floods fearful.

“As you should have in Boone?” Helena responds, with acid; then, “Sorry. Momentarily failed to follow the ‘ignore’ prescription myself.” She raises herself on an elbow and looks down at Myka. It’s a new, breathtaking view, one that Myka feels her prior lack of as acute deprivation.

Into that negative space, Helena says, “If you burn it all down, then you and I will rise from the ashes.”

Every word is clear as still water.

Purpose: Myka and Helena, rising. Not empty of feeling; rather, replete. That reward would elevate.

“Is that what you want?” Helena asks. “To burn it down?”

“Yes.” Myka can say it; it’s true, if the rise is the result. And yet she can’t uncommit her professional self so easily and entirely. “But also no. And I have to tell him something.”

“‘Ignore’ is a powerful word,” Helena observes.

“I don’t think that will work,” Myka says, for she can hear his escalating “but why” iterations as clearly as if she were herself the Ladies’ Oracle of the uncanny book. “I’ll have to explain. That I was wrong?” she tries, but that’s too small. “That I’m always wrong and he should have known that?”

“Really? Then you must be wrong about me as well.”

“Don’t use my overgeneralizing words against me,” Myka says. She touches Helena’s temple, intending it as a rebuke.

It lands instead as a caress, against which Helena leans and nestles. “Aren’t I using them against me?” she asks, low and amused.

Myka says, because she can’t not, because the words are desperate to be said, “This. I want this.” Joking, disputing, speaking, bodies together (and so much more of bodies together): all of this.

“Me using your words against myself? I see why you would.” Helena smiles against Myka’s neck, then raises herself up again, her expression changing over. “But thank you. For saying.” She follows this by reclining, nestling closer still.

The words, and the movement, are warming, but leaning all the way in would lead down a path too tantalizing. “You’re welcome,” Myka says, but she follows it with, “When we leave this room. What will you do?” she asks, because this is something she doesn’t know but might now learn, no book required. Just a Helena.

But there’s no “just” about Helena, and particularly not when she’s gazing up at Myka, sweet yet flinty, and that look tempers her answer. “Wait,” she says, differently than she said “waiting”; now the task rings of burden and freedom both. Waiting for something, rather than waiting, without predicate.

However, that predicate: Myka is the one who must act. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“I’m accustomed.”

The little shrug of resignation that accompanies those words: Myka feels it small against her shoulder, but its implications make it seem a larger shudder. Helena has waited through so much—decades of punishments, and Myka should not make her suffer anything even vaguely similar. She’s about to say “I’ll hurry,” even with no idea of what that would look like, but she’s preempted by Helena saying, into her ear, “But please hurry.” A breath of telepathic direction.

So. Now she must.

Yet that direction requires changing not the rules, nor even the vocabulary, but the speed with which the future is ushered near. It’s a daunting prospect.

Daunting but necessary, if Myka is to blunder satisfactorily. “I will,” she says. But what is necessary isn’t sufficient, not if the goal is to bring about the truly desired future. “Once I’ve done... that. What comes next?”

Helena shifts her position again, un-nestling herself from Myka’s neck, her head still on the bed but reared back a bit, looking up, and Myka tilts her head to look down. She’s often had to angle down, just that bit, to look into Helena’s eyes, but this prone person is a dramatically differently enjoyable inflection of the standing version.

As she appreciates the view, she receives Helena’s answer: “You should text me.”

So strange to hear that voice say that sentence. But relief dizzies Myka, even as she’s reclining and looking, for she realizes it’s just strange; Helena saying it doesn’t make her seem a stranger.

“And then we should meet for coffee,” Helena adds—lightly, but not throwaway.

“Or save the world?” Myka says, trying for the besting echo. Trying to overwrite the words said in Boone.

“And save the world,” Helena says. “Our world.”

The modified callback is pointed and just right; it overrides both Boone and Myka’s attempt. Myka shakes her head and says, “I’m no match for you.”

“Counterpoint: you are the match for me.”

How can it be true that Helena is saying these words? Ever, but more so here, on this day, the one Myka intended to end with the end, this day, that is instead ending with a beginning.

Not enough of a beginning, though, and Myka wants to make that clear—that, and her regret at its clear, clear, clear, yet absolutely necessary insufficiency. She says, “I want to kiss you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.” Helena doesn’t move; she has to know what’s coming next, and Myka delivers it: “But I can’t.”

Helena sighs. “I do not understand your morality.”

Third time the charm—the Helena-knows-it charm.

She might as well know it, because who is Myka, really, to recognize and hold to some bright line? But to start now would entail a foundational lie—“I’m free”—one that would infect all that came after.

You could ignore that too...

Animals, animals. Of course they would advocate for the body getting what it wants, regardless of consequences.

But the dismissal of obligation, though it might seem easy now, can’t help but make realizing the future more strenuous. Myka should not increase the burden. Thus in the end, despite the pain of want, she has to get herself out from under the bodily lie she so desperately and foolishly told—she has to do that before she can give herself leave to know the bodily truth. It may be just as desperate and foolish, if differently so, but she wants, wants, wants to know it.

“Like I said, I don’t either,” she says, to ward off, for what she hopes will this time not seem forever, Helena’s charm. So as to think herself as far away as possible from the basic physical reality that a tiny turn of her head could “accidentally” join their lips, she turns the opposite way and tells the ceiling, “I have to rebook my flights now.”

“To set the future in motion,” Helena says. Agreement, but aggrieved.

Myka smiles at both of those, allowing herself a minimal turn back toward Helena. She’s a far better sight than the ceiling. “You do know something about that.”

Helena breathes out, probably in more-aggrieved affirmation, and she makes no move to sit up. Is it possible to be aggressively still?

Helena’s answer is an impressive yes.

Myka allows herself a dispensation, as she did when she watched Helena approach in the airport, so many hours ago: twenty more breaths before she takes the get-up initiative, as Helena very clearly intends to force her to do. So she breathes. Very. Very. Slowly. Inhale: beat... beat... for as many beats as she can manage. Hold, for the same: an the number is not small. Exhale again as many, then again, hold. That’s one. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold. Two.

Eighteen more of these with Helena warm against her; it isn’t how she ever imagined heaven, or its earthly approximation, but here it is.

For now.

Right as she reaches inhale thirteen: “Are you asleep?” Helena whispers.

“Sssh. I’m counting.”

Helena doesn’t ask “what.” She stays still, now solid and present only, until Myka reaches the pause after her twentieth exhale.

Disengagement is difficult.

After, they busy themselves with phones and booking. Myka situates herself at the desk, while Helena reclines on the bed: these stations they might have taken if they had done nothing but inhabit this room as travelers, travelers now bored before departing.

Helena finishes before Myka does, at which point her reclining becomes reclining, a grandiose occupying of space. A new Helena aspect, and Myka would never have seen it, never if not for salvage, wrecking, recalcitrance... back and back and back. How they got here.

“I don’t want to leave,” she tells that new grandiosity.

Helena stretches, arms up then sweeping wide, as if making a snow angel. Then she props herself up on her elbows. She moves both her hands, a finger-flutter suggesting that whatever statement she about to issue is obvious. And it is: “Then we’ll stay forever.”

For a brief counterfactual burst of cosmology, Myka believes they could. But this time Helena is the one to rise and dismiss the possibility, although she does it with still more ostentation: “And yet this room is entirely inappropriate as anyone’s final resting place.”

Myka loves every muscled, meaningful emphasis. From inside that love, she pities her earlier-today self, the one who thought she could have lived without the continued possibility of this.

Well. She could have lived. But it wouldn’t have been living.

For all their need to speak together, their final minutes in the room are silent, as if refraining from using that small duration of their privacy to the purpose they set, they might be able to bank it. Against some unprivate, nonspeaking future.

As they reenter the unprivate hallway and head toward the far greater unprivate spaces of transit, Myka says, “That coffee was expensive.”

“Worth every penny.” The and you know it is inescapable.

Inescapable and true.

Helena’s flight is scheduled to leave well before (the first of) Myka’s is—New York is so much easier to reach than anyplace named Dakota.

“Not The Dakota,” Helena says when Myka shares this gloomy observation with her, as they wait for the tram to the terminals.

Myka doesn’t know whether to groan or congratulate her on the reference. She settles for a sincere “Touché,” then asks, “Should I come to your gate with you? To... sit?” She’s thinking on sitting together. Sitting together. What people see when they look.

“Should you?” Helena asks back, with an eyebrow.

“No,” Myka has to concede. “I’d want to kiss you goodbye.”

“Anyone looking would expect you to kiss me, and/or me to kiss you. Goodbye or otherwise. But you’ve made it clear that isn’t in the offing until we can fulfill everyone’s expectations.”

“Everyone’s?”

“Ours and those of fortunate observers.”

“Of course you’d think they’re fortunate,” Myka says; she hears and feels affection—distinct from want—in her voice. Affection has been gone for so long between them... she welcomes its old-friend tenderness, gently yet insistently shouldering its way through all that must be ignored.

More eyebrow, differently inflected. “Of course they are fortunate. You underestimate our beauty but, more significantly, your own.”

Such a compliment is unassimilable right now, so Myka counters with, “But not yours. I don’t underestimate yours.”

Helena leans backward. “Your saying such things is why you should not come with me to my gate,” she says, and Myka reads the lean as speaking commensurately about what is unassimilable. “Because I want you to come with me,” Helena goes on, to Myka’s delight, “and then to board the flight with me.”

“Burning it all down,” Myka notes.

“Which you don’t want to do,” Helena notes back.

“But I will if I have to.”

Helena now offers a wrinkle of brow. “There is almost always a better way. You showed me that.”

The wrinkle doesn’t belong, so Myka tries to smooth it by saying, with a lightness, “You were going to freeze it all down. Totally different.”

“In any event the way found then was better... and, I must say, better than shooting you in the head.” Helena says this dry, joking back, yet also a little stunned, probably at the idea that Myka would joke in the first place.

Myka answers that surprise with, “I’m pretty happy you thought so.”

Helena doesn’t move, but she says—tight, as if dampening some vibration—“Your understatement is rhetorically effective. In that I now want to kiss you more than I ever thought I could again be capable of wanting.”

This should be simple. Grab her right now and never let her go. But nothing is as simple as it should be, so Myka says, “I’ll bear that understatement thing in mind.”

“I suspect I’m weak for a wide array of rhetorical techniques. When deployed by you.”

The bubbling of possibility is... irresistible. “I’ll make a study,” Myka says, exerting great effort to keep herself under control. “Maybe litotes next.”

“Not ineffective, you may find.”

They are tuned tight to each other now. In public, but speaking privately. If they can keep this alignment... they’ve had it before, lost it, got it back. Myka lets herself dissolve into one final dispensation: the blissful idea that they will always get it back.

Are there any words to describe what she is, other than “in love”? If so, she doesn’t want to know them.

She also doesn’t want to watch Helena walk away. She’s mourned such walks too often. So they clasp hands one more time, then let go; Helena turns away, and Myka, after enjoying the movement of Helena’s hair the turn occasions—that swirl of fluid promise—does too.

****

At the Sioux Falls airport—which Myka, hating its provincial familiarity, always greets with an internal but why do I have to know this place whine—she wants nothing more than to roll off the plane and into the car she’d parked in the absurdly small lot so many hours or days ago, thence rolling on to the B&B and into some state that might, if she’s lucky, resemble sleep.

What she wants is not what she gets.

Mrs. Frederic is standing by the security exit.

  TBC

[apparitionism]

Tabled 5

This slow-motion @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange gift for @barbarawar , a tale that concerns Myka and Helena’s post-Boone coffee(s) and the fallout therefrom, continues to be quite difficult to get right. It’s still got the shape I envisioned, with Myka sitting at tables and lying and consulting a book to find out her future, but I have to say I didn’t expect the Bering and the Wells to need to hit so very many beats in the course of enacting, or embodying, that shape: witness my optimism in each of part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 that that part would (might) be penultimate. Then again these two were never going to be able to “get coffee” with any degree of ease, much less find their way back to—or is it simply to, for the first time?—good. Slow and steady may not in the end win the race, but it does finish the race (eventually, though not today); however, please know, @barbarawar​ , I’ll always be apologizing to you for letting this race, such as it is, continue to run. Anyway, the prior leg ended with Myka and Helena behind the locked door of a hotel room. Myka’s hand had just touched, then trailed away from, Helena’s shoulder.

Tabled 5

Blunders. So the book had said. Satisfactory, so it had also said.

Myka raises her right hand again; it wants to meet Helena’s waist, meet and seek, seek and sway... this hand, so empty as it rises, could be, at long last, full, full, full as it blunders...

But Helena backs away, raising her own right hand, warding Myka off. “Oh no,” she says. “You’re not getting out of anything that easily.”

Rendered purposeless by the refusal, Myka looks down at her reaching (empty) hand, her wanting (empty) body. “Easily?” she asks, because what could that mean? Such blundering could never be easy, no matter how satisfactory.

And yet satisfactory would mean satisfaction. At long last, satisfaction.

Keeping her own hand up, Helena says, “Privacy and nothing more. I said it to you and I meant it. You’ll blame me if in the end it proves untrue, and as for any intemperance of your own? I don’t doubt you’ll indict me for that as well, particularly in the event you’re forced to confess it. Does Pete even know you’re here?”

Myka wants to say yes. As if that lie would make what she wants defensible. As if it would be reasonable of her to say “yes, he trusts me, and isn’t that foolish”: as if by saying that, by getting agreement on that, she could in fact implicate Helena in all of it too. She glances at the table, bolted down, solid. It could give her cover to put that lie in motion.

As if she could do any of that... all right, yes, she could do it to herself. But she should not do it to Helena.

But you can, unison the snake and the lizard and all the other animal manifestations of... well. Animals.

And as she fights to maintain that “should not”: Aren’t you an animal? is their next enticing chorus.

Obviously...

“Obviously not,” Helena says, which brings Myka up short until she walks herself back to Helena having asked about Pete. About what he knows. Myka wishes, for a bloodless, anti-animal moment, that he could know, that she could have told him, told him cold, such that he could understand her as, because he himself also was, then and now and going forward, purely pragmatic.

But Pete is not pragmatic.

“I refuse to serve as your release valve,” Helena goes on, the last two words harsh.

“How could you say that?” Myka demands, trying to make her taking of offense believable, trying to dismiss from her head the evidence that was her raised, reaching hand. Her raised, reaching knowledge of the blunders she would volunteer to make.

“How could you say you have romantic feelings for Pete?” Helena counters. “Never mind what you’re willing to do when his back is turned.”

This is not just about what Myka has said, or even what she’s willing to do. It is not. And apparently now is the time to crash full speed into these walls: “How could you say you had romantic feelings for Nate? For nonexistent Giselle?”

“I did not say that. I invite you to search your prodigious memory, in which you will fail to find me saying that.”

“Really? Semantics? You implied!” This is not the hill to die on; Myka knows that. But she will be dying, and here is a hill. Why not plant her flag?

“Perhaps. But you inferred. And you seem to be doing it again. About my... what shall we call it? Use-value?”

Myka, mortified by intention and error and invalid inference, accuses, “You are the one who brought us to this room.”

“Yes. I do seem to be the one who acts. Leaving aside the recent poorly considered raise of hand.”

Myka doesn’t understand the fuller itch of meaning in Helena’s words. Maybe on purpose. “What are you talking about?” she demands, but she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to hear the answer. Hearing it will surely require yet more bracing.

“Why did you come to Boone?” Helena asks.

The question confounds. Is she trying to punish Myka by making her put herself back in that place? “Because you called me about the artifact.”

“Yes. I contacted you.”

“I know. Like I said.” Are they negotiating something? Myka can’t reach to it, whatever it is. Maybe that’s on purpose too. She’d rather just raise her hand again, regardless of what tainted meaning Helena might assign it. She wouldn’t say no twice, would she?

Helena’s exhale—exasperated, closing in on angry—suggests she would indeed say no twice, in fact infinitely, based on how obtuse she finds Myka’s response. “Do you not see why I might have had reason to question your... interest?”

“What?” Myka does hate how often she uses, how often she seems to have to use, that word as a mark of utter bafflement.

“It isn’t as if you were looking for me.”

Myka’s entire being sinks. “How do you know?” she asks. A question isn’t a lie, but she feels the further fall of where this must go if the truth comes out, and it’s awful and unpardonable and she will never live it down in front of herself, never mind in front of Helena.

“You didn’t find me,” Helena says, and the backhand of that compliment slaps Myka hard across her pride, because Helena’s right. On every accusatory level, she’s right.

All Myka can muster, in pathetic defense, is, “I didn’t know where to start.”

“So you didn’t. Start.”

Myka doesn’t affirm it. She doesn’t have to.

“Were we not just speaking of who acts,” Helena says. That’s no blunt slap; rather, it’s the lightness of a perfect blade.

“I should have,” Myka says. Her wince is contemptibly inadequate. “Started.”

“You didn’t.”

Myka wishes that had been an angry accusation rather than a dispassionate statement of fact. She begins in response, “Well, you should have...” But she can find no similarly dispassionate retroscription.

“Held myself in limbo?” Helena finishes for her, brutal and true in what she knows Myka wished—what she and Myka both know was unreasonable for Myka to have wished. “I had had enough of limbo. Bronze. Incorporeality. And furthermore, I didn’t betray you.”

Here at this late date, Myka should say it out loud, this unjustifiable position that has irrationally sustained her: “It feels like you did.”

Helena takes a moment, her breathing again exasperated, then says, “Your feelings were not—are not—the primary determinant of my actions. Do you know why?”

“Yes.” Myka wishes she didn’t have to hear the elaboration. But she deserves it.

“Because I did not know your feelings.”

“I said yes,” Myka stubborns. “And it’s not my fault you didn’t know them; that’s Mrs. Frederic’s fault.” Myka would have spoken; she knows it. If Helena hadn’t disappeared, she would have spoken.

But you could have spoken if you’d looked for her and found her! Those animals again. Sing-song. Laughing at all her inabilities.

Helena sniffs. “Her fault perhaps at first. Subsequently, however, your fault.”

The animals and Helena, singing together. Their accord makes Myka dig deeper into her resentment. “I didn’t know yours either.”

“I did keep them close, first from necessity,” Helena says. She’s very serious now, intensity legible in her brow, and Myka feels herself pierced by a familiarly impossible love for that concentration—so lanced that she might fall to her knees, stricken. “But later,” Helena continues, even more severely, as if in rebuke (of the love, of any drama of possible expression), “because I saw quite clearly that my choices in Boone altered your opinion of me. Fundamentally. Not my other sins, grievous as they were, but my choices in Boone. As evidenced by your pulling further and further away... even unto Pete.” She hardens. “I don’t understand your morality. I don’t believe I care to.”

“Then we’re even,” Myka says, trying for similarly hard but faltering, failing, because the soft, vulnerable fact is that she has desperately tried to but doesn’t understand Helena’s morality, particularly (but not solely) how she could have, even for a second, entangled herself with—wanted to be with—that... person, whose daughter could not possibly have offset enough of anything. She doesn’t understand how Helena could ever have taken any comfort in that mediocrity, that fakery, never mind any effect those choices were always going to have had on Myka’s heart. Never mind that.

Never mind it, and Helena can deny that it was a betrayal, but it’s sharp like that, there in Myka’s heart... the condemnation of betrayal is part of her morality, that’s always been a bedrock, and she recognizes a sick mortification at the acute, astute contrast Helena has drawn between her ability to justify Helena’s other sins but not her choices in Boone.

In further contradiction, Myka isn’t condemning herself for betrayal—well, not yet—and of course Helena would call out that flagrant inconsistency. Call it out and condemn it. “You’re changing your opinion of me. Here, now,” Myka accuses, and Helena’s set face is confirmation enough. “We said we knew each other so well,” Myka says, an illogical lament for that tragic, though clearer, time.

Helena shakes her head. “Sentimental claims in an extreme circumstance.”

Nothing but sentimental claims, those words they’d said... and here Myka had thought she already had sufficient fault from that incident to scourge herself forever: Oh, Pete, I’ll refuse to watch you kill Helena, but I’ll let you kill her. As if “I can’t watch this” were a moral stance.

Sins, sins, but omissions not commissions, for what Helena has laid out before her seems now entirely right: Myka doesn’t act. She lets others do the acting. She lets others do the acting; worse, she lets them do the unholy, if thwarted, killing; but most of all she lets them do the saving, which Steve and Pete and above all Helena have done for her. Again and again. Damningly, because whenever she should have thought of ways to save Helena, she’s failed. Perhaps the greatest reason they both must walk away is that the scales between them will never be even.

Myka isn’t crying, because she doesn’t cry; instead, she steels. But in this moment, her tempering goes awry. She feels heat in her throat, threatening to overfill, for she is here, now, realizing that she hasn’t truly believed in this as the end, even though she’s the one who determined so deliberately to bring it about. There have been so many supposed ends—ends-that-were-not—that she’s harbored (yes, tied tight to a dock in her heart) a lifeboat of hope that Helena would save her this time too.

But just as the book declined to save her, Helena is declining as well. Myka can’t see a way out, can’t see any way for them to stop reminding each other of everything that begrimes what once promised blinding beauty, everything that makes the possibility of that beauty harder and harder to discern, even for Myka who can replay all its promise in detail, every brilliant episode, over and over at will... but never fresh. Never without everything else replaying too.

She isn’t crying, but she is grieving. “We can’t fix this,” she says.

“No,” Helena agrees.

It’s a final verdict.

The coffeemaker exhales loudly, inserting itself back into the conversation, and Myka turns to it, numb. Two small filled cups await her, determinedly present. Her hand shakes as she takes one and sets it next to the machine on the bureau; it shakes again as she takes the other and hands to Helena, saying “here,” to which Helena says “thank you”—a domestic little exchange, as if a glimpse of that other reality, the one with the couples therapy. A quiet scene from a pleasant time before they needed the therapy. It’s an achingly calming view.

But the picture fades, going and going, away away, as Helena says, “I don’t know what to do now.” Bleak. Newly so.

Myka stands inarticulate, because she doesn’t know either. Into the gap, she places her best guess: “Drink our coffee?”

So they do that, in this quiet, private space. The lack of distraction brings home to Myka that she has never really attended to how Helena drinks coffee. Their “coffees” have not allowed for that sort of observation, but now she attends, and she readily discerns a pattern: Helena takes a sip, then follows it with a near-gulp; another sip, another gulp. Hesitant, sure; hesitant, sure. Over and over, but then too soon she’s through, through and walking to the table, setting her cup there.

Helena retreats back to the bedside, and Myka understands that she, too, must finish. This is now become a ceremony.

She raises her cup to her mouth and drinks. In a final irony, it’s strong and good.

When her cup is empty, she places it next to Helena’s on the table—this final table that might have supported disastrous, yet satisfactory, blundering.

But even as Myka for one escaping instant lets her imagination soar to the potential transcendence of that blunder, she is visited by a question that crashes it into dirt: could “satisfactory” ever have been enough?

Of course not, say some animals, writhing and reveling in contradiction.

So has Helena in the end saved her one last time?

Sorry, book.

Involuntarily, Myka glances at the clock on the nightstand. It informs her that she can catch her plane if she hurries. Plane, flight, flying...

Oh, I’m flying...

The wisp from that early, beautiful part of their story, when everything was possibility, forces her to try to steel again, this time into cynicism and distance. All it really does is lead her to an incongruous near-regret that she has no gun.

Things should end as they began.

But then they very nearly do, in an even more literal sense: both Myka and Helena move toward the door, then veer away, saying “sorry” as their paths threaten to intersect. Myka takes a step back, yielding.

Helena’s hand is reaching for the door’s handle, to push it down, then to pull, thus breaking the seal that has kept them here.

However: a certainty rises in Myka, a conviction that this part of their story shouldn’t end as it began. They can’t fix everything, can’t fix enough of anything, but maybe Myka can fix this one thing. “Wait,” she says, and she’s gratified to see Helena still her hand’s rise. “I lied to you,” she says.

Helena turns minimally, as if Myka’s request that she stop her motion is an unreasonable burden. “About you and Pete. Your supposed feelings. Yes, I know.”

“Not that lie,” Myka says without thought, then realizes what she’s said, then realizes it doesn’t matter at all that she���s said it. “I’m talking about Nebraska.”

Helena twists her face. “My proving ground.”

“What?” Bafflement again. More mortification.

“Speaking of lies,” Helena clarifies.

It’s not a relief, that acknowledgment—that the “home” talk was fabricated—but it’s something. “Mine too,” Myka begins.

Helena cuts in with, “You were not well.”

So she knows. Knows the lie. Which means she knows the truth. “Is this Claudia again?” Myka asks, defeated.

Helena breathes.

“It isn’t fair that you had a spy the whole time,” Myka says. If only she had had a spy.

Helena says, “No—and I mean no, it isn’t fair, but also no, not ‘the whole time.’ In fact that was how she and I came into contact again: because you didn’t seem well. Egotistically, I thought it might have had to do with me. So I inquired.”

“Which means you know everything.”

“I’d like to think so,” Helena says, with a momentary sparkle of full charm, “but in fact, I don’t. Why did you lie?”

Myka, helpless against the charm, gives the most real answer she can: “I didn’t see a way to be honest with that version of you.”

“Ah,” is all Helena says, and Myka doesn’t know what that means. Implies. Carries. Before she can ask, Helena continues, “And are you well now?”

“I’m sure your spy told you the answer to that.”

“She may have believed she had. But I would like to hear it from you. Honestly.”

“I’m fine,” Myka says. It isn’t honest. She’s about to walk away from Helena for the last time. She is not fine.

“You’re lying. Yet again,” Helena says, with obvious disappointment.

Myka has never wanted to disappoint Helena. Helena has disappointed her, more than once, but for the reverse to be true—it’s pain Myka will suffer in perpetuity.

Helena sighs. “Of course it’s what we do.”

“You and I?” Myka asks, desolate.

Helena curls her lip. “Humans. We’re feral little fabulists who put ends before means.”

If there’s a better formulation of what Myka’s been performing, lately but never when it would do her any real good, she doesn’t know it. “I didn’t look for you,” she says, condemning herself. “And I didn’t burn Boone down to get you free.”

Now Helena smiles fully. Condescendingly. “To what would you have touched your match?”

Myka doesn’t bother answering, because there is no answer. Instead she says, because she should say it aloud, “You’re very good at saving me. I’m terrible at saving you.”

“That’s not true,” Helena says, gentling.

She sounds sincere, and she might mean it, but Myka knows better. “I never hoisted you into the sky.”

“But you did serve as my eventual impetus to leave Boone: essential, once it was allowed. I admit that in the circumstance, faced with your disapproval, I became more obstinate.” Helena ratchets her face down to a half-smile, one that self-deprecates rather than condescends. “Would that you could have hoisted me into the sky.”

“I think the car had already hit you,” Myka says. “I think you stepped in front of the car and begged it to hit you.”

With a bow of head, Helena says, “Apt.”

“Was that because of me? All that I didn’t do?”

“In part? But that can’t be the entire answer.”

“I guess I did the same,” Myka says. She isn’t guessing.

“Because of me?”

Myka wants to put everything on Helena, but she can’t. Well. She can, but she shouldn’t. “In part,” she echoes. Then, “If we had both just said.” It’s a lament.

“We don’t just say.”

“Humans?” Feral little not-sayers, Helena might clarify, which would make their own not-saying at least in some way justified, if not fully excusable, and—

“No,” Helena says. “In this case, you and I.”

Myka’s desolation is complete. “Maybe in another life we would.” She looks at the clock again. Time, time. She knows she should hurry now, but instead she’s fixated on that other life. It’s different, that life. It’s just—different. She wishes she could see her way back and through to how it might have come about, but there are too many branching points, an exploding tree of “why didn’t I” choices; they mingle and blur into a chaos that she has to push down, push down and hide, to prevent that back-tracery from taking her over.

Helena is again moving to the door. Again raising her hand to it. The action—graceful, as always so graceful, a movement flowing as if through water, not air—unfolds in slow motion, stretching time, and is this why Helena always moves with such grace? To prove, over and over, her mastery of time itself?

Tellingly, Myka’s first impulse is to turn away: I can’t watch this. The consequence for Helena here today is not so dire; for Myka, though, it might as well be.

But turning her back on what is most difficult is not—should never have been—part of her morality.

Face it. Face it.

She orients herself toward the door, readying to watch that graceful hand open it. Readying to watch that beloved body recross—uncross?—the threshold. Facing it, just as she should have faced Helena’s imminent actual destruction.

She wishes, hard, that she could have been the one to deliver the reprieve then, wishes she could have parried all of Pete’s and Helena’s arguments about usefulness and nobility, parried them and found a better way, found it and brought it about. That would have been more moral, surely, than a simple turning of her face toward what she never wanted to see...

At that, her brain clicks. More moral? The moral. The lesson hadn’t been—isn’t—“Watch, even when you want to look away.” Because: “Things you don’t want to watch are things that shouldn’t happen.” And so the real moral, of all these stories: “Find a better way and bring it about.”

But this insight, valid as it may be, offers her no vision here of how to find, of how to bring about, that better way.

She tries to think, tries to find, but laughably, in spite of everything, her hand wants to rise again, to catch somewhere, anywhere, on Helena’s body; she feels her wrist, palm, fingers pulling against all the gravity, as if trying to get everyone’s attention, as if that could be the way, as if the argument of a wanting hand could ever be stronger than that of history. As if it could fix any of what had gone wrong.

It couldn’t.

Of course it couldn’t.

But. But. But.

In raising her hand, before, in that inarticulate closed-door wish, she’d been prepared to... what?

Fix nothing. Certainly, she’d been prepared to fix nothing. So: what, then, had her intention been?

To ignore everything that stood between that reaching hand and what she wanted it to achieve.

And if for a blundering moment in a hotel in an airport in Chicago...

What if the book, in its prediction, hadn’t been referring only to what might happen in a blundering moment in a hotel in an airport in Chicago?

What if Myka is meant to blunder—satisfactorily—well beyond this moment in a hotel in an airport in Chicago?

What if the book had told of more than her immediate future? What if it had understood what she had been “about to undertake” as... the rest of her life?

And one final what if—one final move of mind, like the anticipatory shudder of the second hand the instant before it calls a clock’s alarm to life—what if learning to let language slip hasn’t been about dirty work at all? What if it’s the key?

Try it try it try it try it...

“Wait!” Myka yells—it’s no yawp; she’s got purpose now. “We can’t fix this,” she fevers out.

Helena slews her head around, and yes, yes, now she’s caught again; and this, yes, yes, this is what Myka needs. She isn’t surprised, however, when Helena says, “I know. If I hadn’t before, I know it now.”

“No. Listen.” Language, the slip, the work. “‘Fix.’ That’s the word I said.”

“I did listen,” Helena says, and the set stone in her voice rhymes with the adamant of her face. “That is the word you said, and I agreed. And thus we are finished.”

“No!” Myka throws the exclamation up against that tall wall. “We need a different word! Change the vocabulary!”

TBC

[apparitionism]

Decalogue 5

I’ve been chipping away at this “story” for three years now—it’s more a conceit that got out of hand, really, but ten years’ worth of regular fanfictional postings can send the conceptual car into some unreasonably esoteric cul-de-sacs. This one, as the title makes clear, has to do with ten commandments—not THE Ten Commandments, but one for each year of the Bering-and-Wells situation (I started this excursion on the tenth anniversary, intending to finish it soon after and wind up the ten, but...). Part 1 covered years one through five, with commandments as follows: one, meet at gunpoint; two, thou shalt not touch; three, suffer in silence; four, make mistakes; and five, thou shalt not hold grudges. Part 2 was year six: Thou shalt not damage. Part 3 dealt with year seven and instructed, “Thou shalt take nothing for granted.” Most recently, part 4 yielded year eight’s “Remember the anniversary,” which is always good advice, so here’s year nine, which via time’s-arrow shenanigans and bizarro chapter-math is part 5, being posted on the thirteenth anniversary.

Decalogue 5

Year 9: Calm down.

It would of course have been wise for Myka to have applied such a directive, spiritually, throughout most of her years with (and without) Helena. It would have been wise for her to have applied it throughout most of her interactions with Helena... and if anyone had asked her, she would have said she’d tried to do so. But apparently her efforts hadn’t met the universe’s expectations: such that by their ninth year, said universe saw fit to insist, insistently, that she work much, much harder at it.

That insistence came over time to manifest as an incessant tapping against her consciousness... naturally (or was it artificially? and was there a salient difference?) everything that happened served as a commentary on everything else that happened, for Myka would over the course of the year come to understand the heavy significance of a particular tapping sound.

Circumstances began to converge—though Myka didn’t realize they were converging, and that in itself ended up being salient—when she and Pete were driving home, late at night, from a retrieval that hadn’t mattered at all. Late at night, though: that mattered. Nearly midnight, in fact, which mattered most.

“Helena hasn’t called me yet,” she said. She hadn’t really intended to say it aloud, but there were only five minutes left in the day. And when Helena and Steve were away on a mission, Helena called Myka at some point during each and every day: a compromise, one designed to mitigate Myka’s urge to smother, at least as far as Helena’s health and safety were concerned. It wasn’t that Helena wouldn’t call, left to her own devices. But Myka was able, was allowed, to expect it. To rely on it.

Pete snorted. “Charlize Theron hasn’t called me yet, but you don’t see me checking my phone every ten seconds about it.”

Myka had given up trying to explain to Pete what a non sequitur was. Instead, she asked, “Why would Charlize Theron call you?”

“Why wouldn’t she? It’s like you’ve never looked at me. But also: get it?”

“I think there’s a significant difference with regard to roles in lives.”

“Only because Charlize hasn’t got the memo on her destiny with me. Don’t be acting snooty just because you and H.G. got all the memos. ‘Agent Bering,’” he pronounced, high-voiced, “‘we’re forever destined to meet at gunpoint.’”

Another thing she’d given up: getting offended and telling him his Helena impression was atrocious. Instead, she said, “I really wish Claudia hadn’t told you about that.” She did wish it. But she knew it was—

“Pfft. Water, bridge, under,” Pete said, reading her mind. “I really wish you’d quit checking your phone every ten seconds. You’re making me nervous.”

“You check your phone constantly!”

“But not for a reason.”

“I just want to know why she hasn’t called yet,” Myka said, hearing herself sound not a little desperate, aggravated that she hadn’t scrubbed—apparently couldn’t scrub—all that evidence from her voice.

Pete didn’t seem to care. “Maybe she’ll tell you when she calls. Or hey, I just realized, phones work both ways.”

That wasn’t the deal, but with three minutes—no, now two—to go, Myka gave in and called. Straight to voicemail. She then went entirely in-for-a-penny on it and called Steve, who picked up quickly, only to say, “Can’t talk; call you back when—”

And then the phone went dead.

Myka’s throat wasn’t really closing in panic, was it? It couldn’t have been. Through the obviously nonexistent clutching choke, she said to Pete, “I called Helena and she didn’t answer and then I called Steve and he said he couldn’t talk and he’d call me back but the line went dead. What do I do now?” She wasn’t really looking for advice, but she had to ask to at least try to force her heart back down.

He didn’t turn his eyes from the road. “Here’s an idea: calm down.”

“I’m very calm,” Myka lied.

Now he did look at her, with an eyeroll of oh please. “Another idea: quit lying.”

“As ideas go, you should quit Steving. And answer my question!”

“I don’t remember the question.”

Myka exhaled with purpose. “What do I do now?”

“Finally an easy one. Wait till Steve calls you back.”

She didn’t have much choice.

Myka had always taken pride in being practiced at simulating calm; that kind of fakery was practically part of an agent’s job description. But she was being forced to learn (and resisting being forced to learn) that such simulation wasn’t enough to resolve every situation... or, more broadly, that appearances unfortunately weren’t reality.

Not until nearly two in the morning—after Myka had showered, changed into her pajamas, pretended to read some pages of Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time (she and Helena were mutually bookclubbing that), and finally given in to doomscrolling news, because at least that didn’t require an attention span—did Steve call and say, “Everything’s fine. She’s about to call you, but I told you I’d call you back, so I am.”

Helena opened her own call by saying, “Via miscalculation, I broke our deal. I know it, and I apologize.”

“Miscalculations happen,” Myka said, because of course they did. Then she said, “I’m too rigid,” because of course she was. Probably.

“I’ll make it up to you,” Helena said, with a fervent affection.

“By calling twice tomorrow?” Myka asked, her own affection rich.

“It’s already tomorrow, and I’ll be home then. Or now: it’s today.”

“You make no sense.”

“Be that as it may, and it may, but: how was your appointment with the physician yesterday?”

Myka had figured that was going to be on the agenda, whenever this call happened. Earlier in the day, she’d been happy enough to put off talking to Helena about the results of her physical; now that wish for postponement returned full force. “Better than your retrieval, I bet,” she hedged, hoping that Helena might just... drop it. Drop it and regale Myka with retrieval exploits.

That was a vain hope, of course: first, Helena had an uncanny ear for reluctance and would seize it and shake it till it yielded a why; second, a full physical, with its palpations, percussions, auscultations, and analyses of the living breathing body, was jam-packed with the sort of trackable data Helena found endlessly enthralling.

“Steve and I are fine,” Helena said, of course declining to elaborate on the mission, of course dashing Myka’s hopes. “Are you?”

That was without question a shake in search of a why. “Do I look unhealthy to you?” she countered.

“I can’t see you. This isn’t a video call.”

“If the answer’s yes, just say it.”

“The answer is that to me, you look reasonably healthy. I’ve certainly seen you look far less healthy.”

“You have?” Because Myka had hardly been sick at all, these past several—

“I suspect you’d rather I didn’t talk about that.”

“I would?”

A breath. Then: “Boone.”

Stupid mistake, Myka chastised herself. You should have understood immediately. Should have understood—which still often took the place of “did understand”—even now, after so much time. She breathed out heavily, trying for that elusive calm. “Okay. Yes.” They had talked, at first poorly, about the cancer. Talked, continually poorly, about Pete’s role in making it go away. Talked about—argued about—who had the right to, who deserved to, save whom. “I can’t change the fact that he did,” Myka had said.

To which Helena had said, not enraged but resigned, “I can’t change the fact that I resent his doing what I couldn’t.”

“Because you didn’t know,” Myka had tried.

“For which I blame myself,” Helena had gloomed in response.

“Blame both of us,” Myka had tossed into the breach. Before, she would have said “you should,” but she’d seen how time could stretch the boundaries of fault, of responsibility, for so many acts. In this case, she’d made sure to push those boundaries herself. On purpose, hard and away. “Blame the Warehouse. Blame everybody everywhere. There’s so much blame to go around...”

Now, Myka was at least able to follow up with, “I can honestly say I’m glad I looked worse then. Because comparatively, this is not a big deal.”

It wasn’t. At any rate, it didn’t seem to be. Her primary care doctor, whom Myka trusted because he’d steered her through the non-Warehouse parts of the cancer without making any of it weird, had been factual: “Most everything looks fine, but your systolic blood pressure falls in a range we refer to as ‘elevated.’” He then perked up, like he’d been itching for an opportunity to have something to do, in these years she’d been untumored: “In younger people like you, this generally results from lifestyle issues, so I’ll link you to some articles in the portal outlining changes, steps to take so you don’t develop dangerous hypertension.” Myka had thought he’d sounded overly enthusiastic on the word “dangerous”... but she’d hoped that was a figment of her hyperactive imagination.

“And yet you’re telling it to me,” Helena said, after Myka explained what he’d said, trying to downplay it, omitting in particular his use of the word “dangerous.” Trying and failing to downplay it, apparently, despite the omission, because Helena followed up with, “And you sound a trifle agitated, most likely a bit about my failure to call as I should have... also a bit about the diagnosis itself. But perhaps something else as well?”

She was discerning, Helena was, reading Myka not like a cipher, rendering a single message, but like a novel, allowing for varying interpretations. What could Myka have done but reward her by telling the truth? “He wanted to know about family history,” she said. “I had to call my parents. Well. My mom’s blood pressure’s fine. I mean my dad.”

“Ah. A still-fraught proposition.”

“A useless proposition,” Myka said. “I got myself all geared up for it, but he wouldn’t tell me much of anything. Like I was trying to pry military secrets out of him.”

“You two do often seem to be at war.” And Helena added, as if she’d seen Myka’s immediate nod of agreement, “In keeping with that, perhaps you should try another sortie.”

“I’ll need to gear up again. Which I guess is in keeping too.” She harrumphed. “Won’t be good for my blood pressure, I bet.”

“Nor is being awake at this hour of the morning. We should end this call, and you should sleep.”

“But you’re on this call, and so am I. I don’t want to end it.”

“Nor do I, but you should sleep.”

“So should you,” Myka said.

“Lost cause. But we’ll both sleep better tomorrow night. No, tonight. It’s today.”

“You make no sense,” Myka accused again, but drowsily.

Helena rewarded her with a low chuckle. “And you make nothing but sense?”

“You wouldn’t know,” Myka said...

They continued on in that vein that for some time, until they finally agreed to end the call at a three-two-one same moment. Myka felt grateful, as she often did, for the way in which her life with Helena gave her access to some very typical experiences, ones that she probably wouldn’t have appreciated if she’d had them as a teenager. As an adult was better. As an adult with Helena was better still.

But just as Myka was about to slip into sleep, her mind began to race: she realized that she hadn’t asked Helena again about the retrieval, which had to have been more than a little fraught, and while she knew she wasn’t supposed to smother, she berated herself for what must have seemed like a total absence of real concern.

Thus when Helena and Steve arrived home, met by the cadre of Myka, Pete, and Claudia, the first thing Myka said, with a carefully calibrated mix of casual interest and earnest apology, was “I should have asked you before: what was the artifact, anyway?”

Helena didn’t say anything, but she glanced at Steve.

“You... what?” he said. Their imperfect communication—but communication all the same—reminded Myka of herself and Pete. What they’d had before they got it all wrong... what they were ever closer to fully getting back.

Helena shrugged, the very picture of resignation. “Go ahead.”

“It’s Nikolai Korotkoff’s sphygmomanometer—his Riva-Rocci cuff, they called it in his day. He’s the guy who discovered the sounds doctors listen for when they’re taking your—”

Myka’s knee-jerk response, she had to admit, was not ideal: exasperated, she interrupted, “This was about blood pressure? You’re kidding. You’re actually kidding.”

Steve turned to Helena, and while he wasn’t exactly panicked, he was clearly unsettled. “I want to tell her I am. I really want to. I feel like it would make your life easier if I do.”

Helena shrugged again. “Well. ‘Easier.’ Sorting out life’s relative ease, moment on moment, is a tricky business.”

“Is that a dig?” Myka snapped. “Why didn’t you say something last night? Or no, I mean this morning, because it wasn’t last night, which doesn’t matter now, but...”— she glanced at Helena, in a little apology for the snap—“...did. Look, if this thing lowers blood pressure, wrap it around my arm right now.”

That got her an eyebrow. “As someone tends to intone: not for personal gain.”

“Wouldn’t it be personal loss here though?” Claudia asked, with a surprising absence of snark.

That made Myka laugh, and she applauded, a triple-clap for emphasis. “See, this is what the Warehouse needs: a Caretaker who knows a loophole when she sees one.”

Claudia’s jaw dropped. “Who are you? The Myka I know and mostly love but am also driven nuts by because she’s such a rule snob hates loopholes.”

Obviously Myka was going to have to rethink her relationship with rules, if only to get some benefit from... something. “You know what? I’m just going to say—to postulate—that the Warehouse owes me one. Or several. I think it owes me several.”

Helena said, “Keeping score with the Warehouse is the very definition of a fool’s game.” That was her you are overreacting voice, rarely deployed except for when they were in Colorado. “But more importantly, that isn’t the cuff’s effect. It matters not at all to the one being measured, but rather to the measurer, in whom it increases sensitivity to, and the ability to interpret, diagnostically informative bodily processes. Hence our difficulty persuading the doctor who relied upon it to... relinquish it.”

Myka, reacting poorly both to the news and to the tone in which it was delivered, said, “It absolutely figures that the Warehouse would ping out something completely useless at a time like this.”

“Ping out?” Claudia asked. “Do we say that now?”

“I will say what I want. Stupid artifact,” Myka muttered.

Pete and Steve had been notably silent during all this. “Um,” Steve now said. “I feel like something’s out of proportion here, for reasons I’m not getting.”

Pete, apparently similarly confused, said, “Since when are you weird about blood pressure? Used to be anything about H.G. was your trigger, but now mostly it’s anything you think triggers her. So what gives?”

Myka was tempted to let him go hard on painful nostalgia, just to avoid having to talk about this ridiculous medical situation. But Helena gave her a look, one that said both “your reaction is out of proportion” and “you can’t hide this forever and certainly not if this is your response to related stimuli,” and even though Myka would have much preferred to hide it forever and was pretty sure she could if she worked hard enough, regardless of stimuli, she had to acknowledge that the whole thing was about what could stay hidden but would probably have adverse consequences if it did. So she grumped out, “My blood pressure. Is elevated. It’s a term of art,” she added, to try to forestall—

“Wow. That’s a biggie,” Pete said.

Oh well on the forestalling. “No it isn’t,” she told him.

“Except it is.”

“Except it isn’t. This is just a preliminary-warning type of thing.”

“A ping!” Claudia shouted. “Ping out!”

Steve said, “You sound a little too enthusiastic about that.”

“Kind of like my doctor,” Myka said, “who started going on about ‘lifestyle issues.’ I would like to state for the record that I do not have ‘lifestyle issues.’”

“Except for isn’t stress a thing? Working here’s a big part of your lifestyle,” Claudia pointed out, unhelpfully.

“And... you know,” Pete said. He nodded toward Helena, who spread her arms in an angelic “who, me?” gesture.

“‘Lifestyle’ is a stupid word,” Myka grumbled. “So I guess I’ll quit my job and break up with Helena, so I can live to a ripe old age and be broke and miserable. Excellent ideas. Thanks for the help.”

Steve—being his wise, confrontation-avoidant self—said, “I think I’ll just take this little artifact to the Warehouse so it can settle in.”

That had the unfortunate effect of reminding Myka of the artifact’s identity. “Did we all get whammied a long time ago with something that makes everything that happens in our lives rhyme in the most annoying way possible?” she asked. “Or was it just me?”

“I think it’s more repetition than rhyme,” Steve said, though in an I don’t want to be implicated in this way.

“Repetition with variation, however,” Helena said, and Myka wanted to be able to want to smack her.

“Right,” Steve said. “Would that be reprise? Maybe? Or am I thinking of something else?”

“None of this is lowering my blood pressure,” Myka informed them. Pointlessly.

Steve, to his credit, hotfooted it out of the situation, but Pete said, “You should look into stuff that would.”

“ON IT!!” was Claudia’s response.

Myka tried to head off whatever that was going to be with, “I’m supposed to check the online portal for links to what the doctor rec—”

“Links?!?” Claudia enthused. “I got all the links! Let’s run through some together!”

“Let’s not,” Myka said. Pointless again.

“Here’s the first one: ‘Lose extra pounds.’”

“She’s a pretty skinny drink of water,” Pete said. “Not much extra.”

“I guess,” Claudia said, sounding disappointed. “Next one: exercise regularly.”

Helena tilted her head a bit and said, “The regularity of her exercise is indisputable.”

“Come on,” Myka said. “I try really hard not to wake you up when I leave for my run.”

“I was not referring to your run.”

Claudia’s face pinked, and she said a quick, “Okay, okay! Moving on! Next really good idea: Eat fewer processed foods.”

That was patently ridiculous. “When was the last time I ate a processed food?” Myka asked.

“When I made bean dip in the food processor,” Pete said.

Myka sighed. “Look, this isn’t helping.”

Claudia nodded, despondent. “Yeah, you’re also supposed to quit smoking.”

“Like I said,” Myka agreed.

“But wait, here we go,” Claudia said, perking up, “like I said: reduce stress! And there’s a whole list!”

Myka waited for enlightenment.

For once, Claudia didn’t seem inclined to read aloud; in fact, she perked back down. “These are just... tips. Life-hacky,” she said, frowning. “How’s ‘plan your day’ supposed to do anything? And this one totally contradicts it: ‘Don’t experience future pain.’ Aren’t plans all about future pain?”

“Myka’s sure are,” Pete said. “So she’s doing everything right and wrong?”

“This is not a surprise,” Myka said.

“Maybe what’s next is simpler,” Claudia said. “Like, philosophically: ‘Make time to do the things you enjoy.’”

At that one, Pete leered, Myka groaned, and Helena objected, “I am not ‘things.’”

“I should’ve seen how that would go,” Claudia said, managing to refrain from turning red this time. “Okay, but this last one’s for all of us, except Steve, king of zen: practice gratitude.”

“Huh,” Pete said. “You know, I could probably stand to work on that.”

“I as well,” Helena agreed.

They all looked at Myka. “Fine,” she said. “I could too. In that spirit, thank you, Claudia, for caring enough about my blood pressure to find at least one thing that might lower it.”

“Score! And thank you for understanding how helpful I am.”

“Steve might not approve of your mixing gloating and gratitude,” Helena told her.

“No, no, I’m grateful for the gloating: it means we’re done,” Myka said.

Claudia said, “The internet’s a big place. I could find more!”

“Let’s end on success,” Myka said. “For everybody.”

She didn’t actually do very much practicing over the next while, not until she one evening received a surprise call from her father, right before she was ready to head upstairs to bed. She was tired—tempted to fend him off with “I’ll call you back tomorrow”—but it was a ready-made, if challenging, opportunity to practice. So she said, “Hi, Dad. Are you okay?”

He said an expectedly brusque “fine,” but then: “So, about what you were... asking about. The other day. I don’t like to talk about this kind of thing.”

Myka couldn’t quite hold back a dry “Really.”

“Don’t get smart with me,” he said, but with far less snap than he would have in the past. “Sorry. Look. Your... wife. Convinced me I should be a little more up front.”

“She... okay.” That presented a truckload of issues to process—and, she had to admit, to be grateful for.

First, the word “wife.”

That was new, as a word that applied—newly, quietly, it applied.

“I don’t want a wedding wedding,” Myka had said to Helena, once they’d got down to talking about the actual logistics. She knew it was likely to be a problematic position: knew and felt a powerful anxiety rise as she articulated it.

Helena had said, “Claudia does, and—”

“I know,” Myka began, her rebuttal at the ready, “but—”

“And,” Helena had interrupted. “Yet. While we owe her a great deal, that does not include dominion over how we enter into a legal union. And given all I’ve come to understand about modern weddings, I agree with you.”

Thus small it was, with Steve and Claudia—who continued to insist that she was, in fact, the flower ninja—their only witnesses.

Small, yet legal. About which Helena had evinced something very close to wonder: “A binding contract,” she had said, after words were pronounced and papers signed, as if the idea had just struck her.

“You’re the one who proposed,” Myka had reminded her, floating, light; she was in a bubble of something like wonder herself.

“I beg to differ,” Helena reminded back.

“The one who intended to propose. I have to believe you knew about that binding-contract endpoint of the proposal process.” That they could be these people. These word-trading, contractually bound, wonderstruck people.

“Of the proposal process,” Helena agreed. “Endpoint. Yes. But otherwise: beginning point.”

She’d said that last part quietly. But in the silence that followed, it swelled to a clarion.

Steve cupped his hands, as if to have and hold a bit of the air in which the words resonated.

“And here I was worried this—” Claudia had said, gesturing around the small conference room, which they would soon need to vacate for whoever was solemnifying next, “wouldn’t be enough.”

“Enough for what, darling?” Helena asked, though Myka was pretty sure they all knew the answer.

Now Claudia gestured at the two of them. “This.”

A decent enough word for it all, as words went.

Word-wise, and more salient to the present phone call, “wife” was new as a syllable her father would willingly pronounce of someone who was Myka’s. So: gratitude. There was also the matter of Helena having “convinced” her father of anything, although Myka was really unsure about where to place any appreciation for that. Further... well, no, that about covered it.

Her father then said, “I told you numbers. Befores, afters, but not what I did to move them.” He paused, and Myka had no trouble picturing his facial reluctance at having utter whatever might come next. What did come next: “Meditation.”

Not a word she’d ever expected to hear him utter—on a par with “wife” in its new application.

“Your mother makes me,” he said. “Thirty minutes a day, strictly enforced. You could try it.”

“Could,” he’d said, not “should.”

She knew she ought to have appreciated the call for what it was: seemingly sincere, part of an overall positive trend. But instead she worked herself up to offense, marching upstairs to find Helena—brushing her hair, innocent of any intent—and demanding, “You called my dad?” Petulant. An uptight whine. Definitely not her finest hour.

“I did not,” Helena said, not pausing her strokes for even a millisecond. “He called me.”

“He did?” So she’d climbed up to offense for no reason. The climb back down involved an awkward reset of her face and her breathing, but she did it, ending on a cringed, “Sorry.”

“He wanted to know if you were well,” Helena said, still conducting the stroke, stroke, stroke. “This was after he called your sister and asked her the same question.”

“He told you that?”

“No. Your sister did. When she called me to warn me that your father would be calling me, because she had told him she had no information on the point but that I most likely would. I asked her if she wanted me to tell her anything about said point, and she said no, that she would get it from your mother after your father told her what he found out from me.” Now she stopped the hair show and turned in Myka’s direction, brandishing the brush. “Your relations seem to take comfort in communication that is as indirect as possible.”

“I can’t even begin to argue with that. I sort of hate that everybody in my family—but especially my father—likes you more than they like me. But obviously I’m grateful for it too. It’s a slow-motion relief.”

“If your father’s concern for your health is any evidence, he likes you a great deal. I’ve never heard him inquire about my health.”

“Then again, maybe he doesn’t like you,” Myka said. “He thinks it’s your wifely duty to force me to meditate.”

“Coercion seems antithetical. And yet I do have every intention of fulfilling my wifely duties, including such new ones as arise—including this one. Given that it... has?”

“I guess it has. And I appreciate the intention. It’s important. Required, even. I honestly have a hard time believing this particular one’s going to have any tangible effect on the future, but I appreciate it.”

“Well, the future. What did Claudia say? ‘Don’t experience future pain.’ You should experience future effects—even pain, if necessary—when they happen. Not before.” Helena turned back to the mirror. She set the brush down and watched herself breathe in and out, very deliberately.

“Are we still talking about me?” Myka asked.

“I confess I’ve had to put effort into... braking trepidatious anticipation. With regard to effects.”

“Effects?”

“I can, for example, report that my blood pressure is fine.”

“Of course it is,” Myka groused, because of course it was.

Helena ignored that. “Fine for now, that is, which I know because Dr. Calder keeps a close eye. As part of her unplanned, yet obviously necessary, case study of the long-term effects of the Bronze, which she records as I... experience them.”

Myka felt her pulse speed at the thought. Not helpful.

Nor was the overall fact that the future, whatever pain it would or wouldn’t deliver, was unknowable.

“I try—often unsuccessfully, but more successfully with the passage of time—to remain securely in the present moment,” Helena went on. “Steve’s a great help.”

“Pete wouldn’t be,” Myka said immediately.

Helena turned fully around to face Myka; she leaned forward and said, “Wouldn’t he?

“Of course not,” Myka said, because the idea of Pete being helpful in some mindful pursuit of present-ness? Helpful like Steve would be? Preposterous.

“I believe you’re mistaken. Pete has many habits that vex every one of us, but you of all people should know that he does not fret. Certainly not about the future.”

Myka had to think that out for a minute, then a minute more. “You’re... right,” she said. “If something’s unknowable, he doesn’t try to know it. He forgets about it and reads a comic book.”

“A lesson for the both of us?”

“I don’t like comic books,” Myka said. “And neither do you.” But formulating this basic fact about her partner sparked Myka to think of her childhood, the way she would turn to a book in order to soothe herself, so as to simultaneously leave and fully inhabit as many present moments as possible... to Helena, she admitted, “It is a lesson. I used to be able to... lose myself. More. Better.”

A very small smile ghosted its way onto Helena’s face. “You lose yourself quite well.”

That was welcome, if (still, even now, a bit) embarrassing. “Thank you? But for the purposes of peace, maybe not ideal.”

“Well then, I suppose I’ll have to force you to meditate,” Helena said, and was that enthusiasm in her voice?

“Now?”

“No time like the present.”

Myka allowed herself to be manipulated toward the bed, then to be situated there cross-legged, even as she complained, “It seems like it’s going to take up a lot of time. Like the present. Thirty minutes a day, my dad said, but wasn’t one of Claudia’s tips about making time to do things I enjoy?”

“You just now rejected that,” Helena said. She put out the light and joined Myka on the bed, facing her, sitting similarly cross-legged.

“You’re just lucky ‘Things’ isn’t your new nickname. But come on, when you think about it, half an hour’s half an hour. Wouldn’t it just be stealing time from, you know, us?”

“Stealing present time—minimal present time—yes. But to increase the likelihood of maximal total time. For, you know, us,” she concluded.

It was a low blow; Helena knew how susceptible Myka was to having her own speech patterns mimicked by that voice. Nevertheless, she tried, “Didn’t you just say there’s no time like the present?”

“I did, and I was correct. Now focus.”

“Fine.” She closed her eyes. Then she cracked one open. “On what?”

Helena gave that some consideration. “At the risk of adding insult to injury, we might try Korotkoff sounds. I’ve been thinking on them since encountering Mr. Korotkoff’s instrument. We didn’t know them in my day... we could have produced them, used them for diagnoses, at any time. Yet to us, in our ignorance, blood moved ever silent.”

“My ignorance too. I’ve had my blood pressure taken a million times—and there’ll be a million more, and now more often—but I don’t know how it works. Tell me.”

“One imposes pressure by inflating the cuff around the arm, then one releases it, slowly, and listens. Silence at first, then five distinct phases of sounds, telling sounds, emerge as blood begins again to flow. The phases, the sounds. The same in all bodies. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s. Five. In succession.”

Her voice was slow. Lulling. This might not be meditation, but it was an easing. “Tell them to me,” Myka said. She closed her eyes again, imagining a wrapping, enveloping density, an inflating push of an determined cuff... yet even as she did so, a tendril of unease slipped its way in, an instinctive pre-flinch of discomfiture at what the release of pressure might reveal. She reheard “you lose yourself quite well”—felt the reflexive, nervous rise of self-consciousness—but she pressed against it, willing it down, down and away.

“In phase one,” Helena began, “the blood signals its return with clear taps, low but clear, knocks of announcement.”

Myka reached for the lull again, working to hear the silk-low voice both for itself (to be here) and for what it gave (to be elsewhere).

Helena thwarted her for a moment, becoming less hypnotist than lecturer as she said, “The pressure at which phase one occurs is the top number, that troublesome number of yours.”

Eyes still closed, Myka reached her hands out, feeling for Helena’s body, reaching her arms, and at the contact Helena seemed to understand. “In phase two,” she said, slow again, “the knocking softens, joined by a new sound, a swishing, soft, long, the blood taking its time, finding its way...”

Myka let her hands move, just a little, wayfinding.

“Phase three,” Helena said, with a small hitching throat-clear. “Here the knock returns, insistent now, the blood knowing its way, impatient to resume its course, pushing itself to phase four: an abrupt muffling, as if reassembling for a final push of sound.” Her hands now met Myka’s body, grasping her arms, tightening as she said, “But no, no final push, for phase five is the disappearance of all sound, the reestablishment of what the doctors of my day knew only as unrevealing silence. Yet not so unrevealing after all: that restoration is the diastolic pressure, the lower number, completing the diagnosis, culminating the story of how the blood speaks as it relearns to move: sound to less sound to more sound to no sound.”

That repetition of “sound”... it rang in Myka’s head. Sound, sound, sound...

She opened her eyes. Her hands were at Helena’s waist, and Helena’s hands had moved to her shoulders; now they were locked in the pose, statues waiting for a spell-break.

Myka willed herself not to move her hands as she said, “I didn’t meditate.”

Helena wasn’t moving either, but it seemed to be taking just as much effort. “I’m grateful,” she said.

“Are you calm?” Myka asked.

“Not at all.”

“Good.”

But later, later, in the still: yes. Calm. No sound.

TBC

[apparitionism]

Tabled 4

And on we go, @barbarawar , as I continue to try your patience with this incremental approach to telling a @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange story about coffees and consequences. Where we last left our duo: Helena had proposed adjourning to a hotel room so as to avoid continuing to attract attention for disorderly behavior (i.e., launching coffees at each other, followed by raised voices) at O’Hare Airport—that transitory place where Myka had intended to have a final coffee with Helena before telling her goodbye and returning to the Warehouse to face a future she doesn’t really want. Part 1, part 2, and part 3 explained the tables, books, beverages, and lies that led to this point.

Tabled 4

The trek to the hotel is arduous. No conversation. Myka appreciates the tacit agreement she and Helena seem to have made to wait for the space, but she’s bowed by what it’s added: multiple steamer trunks of existential weight, all of them balanced on her head, her shoulders, such that it’s labor for her even to turn her head in Helena’s direction.

Nevertheless they navigate, side by side, destination mutual. That’s weight too.

All Myka is physically carrying is her laptop case; she’d told herself, “I can work on reports on the plane. Or prepare remarks.” Instead she’d sat on the plane. It might as well have crashed; she was already braced for impact. Braced, yet again. For all the impacts.

Helena is similarly unencumbered, but without even a work-pretense: only a slim little bag, its strap a delicate suggestion of metallic braid that adorns her shoulder. She offers the sleekest of presentations, with even her stained sweater somehow managing to speak to her apparent surety that whatever the thoughts of those regarding her might be, they’ll redound to her benefit.

Myka, on the other hand, wants to hold her case to her sullied chest, or better yet fold herself entirely over, to hide this... evidence. She hates giving anyone grounds for a negative inference, and the uncomplimentary list of things any given observer might take the smirch as evidence of is infinite.

She herself has felt that “redound to my benefit” certainty only in the rarest of circumstances. Once or twice, though, it’s happened when Helena was the one regarding her, giving Myka a fully confident sense of I know you like everything you see, and even better, you like it just the way I want it to be liked. Transporting, when it happened.

Helena chooses that moment to turn ever so slightly, meeting Myka’s eyes ever so briefly... as if in appreciative echo of the past.

It prompts Myka to think on a different kind of evidence: what she and Helena provide, as they pace beside each other through the airport. It could oh so easily support the idea that they’re traveling together, which in turn leads to the infinitely better idea that they might be traveling together.

Indulge, she tells herself, and the granting of permission... it shifts the weight.

Who are we, this me, this Helena, traveling together... traveling together. She starts simple: We’re Warehouse agents on a retrieval. But of course that’s too easy. Okay, instead, we’re... dealers in rare books? Better... And we’re heading to an auction... wait, no, we’re heading home (home together), home from an auction, one that yielded a rare first edition of... oh, let’s say The Invisible Man... and the auctioneer unfortunately made a slightly incorrect statement about its original serialization... one that Helena felt she had to counter emphatically... leading to the first fistfight ever seen at that auction house...

Myka can easily picture the self-satisfied snarl-smile Helena would have worn as she decked the ill-informed auctioneer. The ease with which she can conjure such a moment... that, paradoxically, is yet more weight.

Even so, she warms further to the story, folding in their coffee stains: On this first leg of our trip home (home together), there was dramatic, beverage-service-disrupting turbulence... but we got through it with only wardrobe-related disasters... which is to say, we protected the first edition...

The fantasy looms real enough for Myka to put her hand against her case, casting an impossible wish for confirmation that it holds a precious book.

When her wish isn’t granted, she’s nonsensically crestfallen. Her indulgence now seems yet another blunder, as foretold by that other... book. (She can’t get all the way to “precious,” not this minute, an aspersion of omission for which she’s pretty sure she’ll be expected to apologize.)

Remember that future, Myka tells herself. She pronounces those words in her head, and she’s half tempted to say them to Helena, too, despite the fact that she’d have no idea what it’s about. Though she might ask what it’s about... and Myka can’t land on whether she would hate or thrill to offering an explanation. I used an artifact, she might begin. Because of you. She might go on: And I lied about it. Also because of you.

That might get her a snarl-smile of her own. Maybe even a fistfight.

In the end she stays silent; it’s the theme of this hotel-destined journey. She should rather have focused on Helena, with no imaginings; should rather have just looked, no matter how great the weight. What would observers have concluded then?

You just told yourself a story about that.

As they near the hotel desk, Helena says, “Allow me,” and Myka... does. Because, for good or ill, Helena is the driver. If she were not, Myka would be at a gate, sitting and waiting for a flight, her mission nearing completion. Instead, she’s standing a good distance away from Helena in a hotel lobby, calling Steve, saying, “I’m pretty sure I’m missing my plane.”

The response in her ear: “Because...?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

“Really? No.”

“Good. But if anybody else asks—”

“And when you say ‘anybody else.’”

Myka sighs. “I mean protect me.”

“By saying what?”

“I’m stuck in an airport.”

“You believe that,” Steve says, with a little wondering hitch.

“Oh how I do.” She laughs, just a half-huff. “Oh how I’d prefer not to.”

She hears, “Is that Myka? Where is she?” It’s Claudia (not Pete, thank god), in the background.

“Stuck in an airport,” Steve says.

“Weather?” Claudia asks, now close to the phone.

“Storms,” Myka tells her.

“That sucks,” Claudia pronounces. “See you when the climate gods dispensate some dispensation.”

After a pause—presumably waiting till Claudia leaves earshot—Steve says, “You’re getting really good at this.”

“This?”

“Letting language slip. To do the dirty work.”

“Good at this,” Myka echoes, belatedly. She knows it now as cause for despair. She’s painfully aware that the work is dirty, but... she’s developing a facility. That’s what’s wrong. “I’ll try to get worse.”

“After the storms?”

“During,” she says, because speaking in private should—at the very least and very last, it should—entail saying what she really means. Not letting anything slip.

Should. Which doesn’t, dirty or otherwise, mean “will.”

“Take care,” Steve says.

“I don’t know how,” Myka concludes. It’s a weird way to end a phone call, but Steve seems to know it’s right.

Helena has decorously waited to approach, but now her seemingly eager “Shall we?”, key card in hand, is a painful parody of the invitation Myka has dreamed of for years. If it had happened in those earlier years, it could have been an invitation to everything. Now it’s just an invitation to... blunders. And their contribution to an end.

The existential weight lowers again onto Myka—countdown-tragic now—as she waits out the rise of the elevator (its mirrored walls too harsh) and the walk through the corridor (its canned lights too artificial). It freights even the too-sunny chirp of the key card’s success, as Helena inserts it into the door.

As Helena pushes the door’s handle down in further proof of that success, she looks over her shoulder at Myka with something like delight—but is it delight at this circumstance, this promise of new privacy? Or is it another instance of her generalized thrill at an encounter with technology? That she might not yet be so familiar with as to be jaded by this aspect of modernity is... something very like heartwarming. But also painful, because how many Helena-delighted-by-the-new episodes has Myka been deprived of witnessing? How many episodes of anything and everything Helena-related has Myka been deprived of witnessing?

And what is the consequence of letting herself know that as deprivation? And, more, feeling that deprivation as pain?

Helena pushes the door open and strides across the threshold, but Myka hesitates, hoping for... something. Purpose? All that comes to her is a maxim: never go in without knowing how you’ll get out.

Where Helena is concerned, Myka has never known how she’ll get out. Ridiculous to think she could start now.

She goes in.

The quiet: that’s what strikes her first. The closing of the door behind her is a muted snick; after it, there is no noise at all.

Then she apprehends scent: antiseptic overlain with some ruse of spice, as if “clean” couldn’t possibly be enough to justify the undoubtedly absurdly high price of the room. Of course it probably couldn’t; nevertheless Helena had paid it. Myka wants to resent that, but she’s the one who acquiesced to that “allow me.”

The scrimmed light from the window allows her eyes to discern only the barest detail, but they’re drawn immediately to... of course. A table. Metallically, shinily, obviously, a table. It’s small and round, seemingly innocuous (too low to sit at), but Myka skirts it. She sets her laptop case on the less-threatening desk.

Helena lays her own bag on the bed. The bed, which Myka had intended to ignore. Then she turns, eyes still eagerly alight, to face deskside-anchored Myka.

The look sends Myka back to ideas of I can’t do this, or maybe what she means is I can’t feel this, but that isn’t right either, for what she feels isn’t singular; instead it’s I can’t feel these, these battering, battling threads of sensation she can’t untangle. “Why are we here,” she says, groping, suddenly dull, feeling the air numb around her.

“For speaking,” Helena says. Over there. By the bed. “Freely. As you agreed we should.”

But where is the freedom? The table reminds Myka of constraint, and even the room’s privacy—this new, behind-a-locked-door privacy—chains her, making her question every movement, lest it speak as she doesn’t intend. Or does intend but shouldn’t intend. Paralysis. “What do you want to say?” she asks.

Whatever Helena wants to say, she wants to accompany it with a head-toss, followed by a contemptuous exhale. Quite a performance, at the conclusion of which she snorts and juts her hands at Myka. “At the very least, more words about the unbelievability of your putative romantic choices.” Contempt coats it all.

“You don’t know what’s in my heart,” Myka says. She means it as a dismissive judgment—of Helena’s continuing to insist that she knows how Myka feels or doesn’t feel about Pete (although of course, Myka has to concede privately, she does know)—but, more broadly, of Helena’s not bothering herself to know how Myka has felt about anything. Not for a very long time.

“I’m aware,” Helena says, and then, as if she’s heard Myka’s more-broad thoughts, she says, “I’m very aware.” Then she stops—another of those curiosity-piquing pauses—leaving Myka to wonder what’s next. What is: “So tell me,” she says. Soft. Sincere.

“Why?” Myka asks. “What will it change?”

“For one thing, you will have said it. Rather than simply felt it.”

“Said it to you, you mean,” she accuses. Right: something might change for Helena.

“Ah. You’ve spoken of this to others. Perhaps your sister? And have you found that unburdening to be helpful?”

That’s soft and sincere too, but internally, Myka snarls, with no smile, You can keep your therapy questions. I have all the Abigail I can handle on that front. She wouldn’t answer such a question no matter who asked it, and she is neither ready nor willing to explain Steve—Steve and what he’s meant. Instead, she says, “This room has a coffeemaker,” despite not knowing that for sure. But it must. “I’m going to find it and... use it.” A neutral action, that’s what she needs.

“I’ll watch you,” Helena says.

So much for neutral.

But turning her back on Helena... surprisingly, it loosens her. The gaze is on her, and she feels it, but she doesn’t have to meet it. She finds the coffeemaker on the bureau and begins the process: water, cups, coffee packets, filter basket. Of course it isn’t neutral, would never have been, but being occupied, putting something in that space between—standing and looking was never going to get them anywhere, given that it never did in the past—it lightens the atmosphere. It’s a purpose. It’s a purpose against which Myka can, and thus determines to, slide a question of her own.

“So you had this realization that there was ‘someone else’,” Myka says, making the quotation marks as clear as she vocally can, “and you broke up with him?”

“Essentially,” Helena says.

To her... credit?... it’s not an objection to the topic shift. Or to the quotation marks. But it’s also profoundly not informative. “What, seriously”—Myka had nearly made the mistake of saying “honestly”—“is that supposed to mean?” She turns around, away from her coffee task; the machine’s begun to noise, anyway, so it doesn’t need her.

Helena’s aspect doesn’t indicate that the renewed eye contact is meaningful. She says, “That is supposed to mean you have identified the essence of what occurred.”

More details are clearly not forthcoming. Back up. Ask something else. “Why did you go to that place at all? Why go there and make yourself so... small?”

The very idea is tragic—even worse, pathetic. Helena’s slight dip of head, signaling at least partial agreement, offers pathos too. “Safety,” she says. “Mrs. Frederic said I’d be safe there.”

“I could have kept you safe. Why didn’t she say that?” Myka hears herself getting louder now, angry at all the conversations, decisions, interactions that were kept from her, that she had a right to be part of, all these clandestine resolutions to problems that she and Helena deserved to solve together.

“She had other plans for you,” is the reason Helena gives. Pathos there too. It’s awful.

“What about my plans for me?” Myka cries, and it must have been audible all over the hotel, this nearest she’s ever come to a barbaric yawp, and it’s about all of it: Mrs. Frederic and Pete and expectations and everyone thinking they know and no one knowing, not even Helena, who might have been the only one who could have really known but went away, was taken away, and now Myka is going to have to push her away and this is exactly why she turned to the book: to steal back the tatters of her own capacity, one small bit of augury at a time.

“You work for the Warehouse,” Helena says.

It’s a bald truth. It’s why little auguries are all Myka has. But it splits her open, too, for it tells nothing at all about why Helena did what she did, and she shouts a new accusation into the yawning gap: “You don’t!” And another: “Since when do you bend the knee to authority?”

Helena straightens her spine. “Since authority rendered me incorporeal and suggested I would be returned to that state if I didn’t do as I was told.” She lowers her chin, giving that spine one more bit of extension. “I was disinclined to stop living.”

It breaks Myka. No, it re-breaks her. She knows she should say things, including “but you redeemed yourself” and “so what’s different now,” but all she can in fact do is reach out a hand and touch Helena.

Maybe that’s what Helena intended, but even if it is...

Between any two people, it might be nothing: a simple right hand resting upon a left shoulder, followed by a run down that left arm, to the left elbow, then wrist, brushing against a left hand’s fingers, falling away.

But it’s Myka’s right hand. It’s Helena’s left shoulder. Helena’s arm. Helena’s elbow, wrist, fingers.

They’re behind a locked door.

TBC

[apparitionism]

Tabled 3

Hello yet again, @barbarawar ! I swear I’m not dragging this @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange  out on purpose—the thing is, I always think, “This will be the time I make these loons get it together with reasonable speed,” but I’m (almost) always wrong. This third part follows part 1, in which Myka met Helena for that Boone-mentioned coffee and suffered its consequences, and part 2, in which more coffee caused her to suffer more consequences, leading her to decided that the only way to mitigate the suffering was to cut Helena out of her life, choosing to do so on a busy concourse in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Helena for some reason (tragicomedy?) responded to this idea by dousing Myka in coffee.

Anyway, this third part will in turn be followed by at least one more part, because god forbid they work anything out unwordily. (In semi-positive news, I don’t think this will extend to the seven-part opus I inflicted on my poor giftee last year.) (However: I should acknowledge also that, unlike the book Myka consults in this story, I can’t predict the future.)

Tabled 3

Myka’s head tilts down again, involuntarily, to behold her now coffee-stained shirt. Just as involuntarily, she then raises her head, and, yes, Helena’s still looking like she’s proud of herself. Proud and calm and at peace. Myka voices the bafflement in her head: “You... what did you do?”

Helena’s expression doesn’t change. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Obvious? Yes? “You threw your coffee at me?” Obvious but incomprehensible? “You threw your coffee at me... on purpose?”

“Yes,” Helena says, like it’s an accomplishment. “I can do that. I’m not a hologram.”

That’s true, and... good? Important? But... “But you ruined my shirt,” Myka says, which is objectively a fact. Even though the fact makes no sense.

Helena offers a tiny shrug. “So take it off.”

At that, Myka hardens: You don’t get to say things like that to me! she wants to yell. She settles for demanding, “Are you insane?” As the words leave her, she feels their carelessness. But they had come in response to the extremity of the situation, and that was all Helena’s doing. Your fault not mine, Myka thinks, in mulish self-defense.

Instead of objecting, Helena blinks a slow, condescending blink—a blink of I know you know better—and says, “The answer to that question depends entirely upon whom you ask.”

Nobody better ask me. Not right now. Reassembling her outrage, vowing not to fall victim to any impulse to protect Helena (from careless words or herself or anything else), Myka sputters, “I have to get back on a plane!”

Helena gestures, lazily, at the disaster she caused. “In that ruined shirt?” she says, now with a tsk-tsk, as if Myka is the one whose actions are inexplicable, given that they’ve landed her in this unfortunate situation.

“I loved this shirt,” Myka says, and it’s an embarrassingly, tellingly true statement... why did she let it escape? She’s wearing the shirt because of that love, which she feels because it enhances the green of her eyes in a very particular way, a way she has all along admitted to herself she’s hoped Helena would notice: notice and... maybe... regret the loss of.

But choosing to wear it was, she sees, yet another blunder, because of course she’s now the one doing the regretting. Of course she is.

“Did you?” Helena says, with one of those maybe-I’m-just-vain head tosses. It displays her neck. It’s probably intended to display her neck. “More so now.” She follows that with the challenge of a trickster eyebrow-lift.

Myka wants to strangle her, for all the reasons but mostly because she isn’t wrong. Because this shirt, even if the stain washes out, will always now be this shirt. Particularly if the stain washes out: if Myka wears this shirt, or even considers wearing it, on some eventual, otherwise unremarkable day, the this shirt of it will occupy her thoughts.

Hey book, she thinks in the direction of South Dakota. Look at me, predicting a future I didn’t see before today.

Calmly, now, she gazes at that future. She can live with this unspooling, because being reminded of Helena, having to process nostalgia, is something she knows how to handle. So many things in the course of a normal day spark a similar memory walk, and she imagines—no, she sees—that they always will.

That retrieval will always be that retrieval—matteringly large. That aisle will always be that aisle, a place of unfinal goodbye. Quietly, in the kitchen, that tea will always be that tea. Et cetera.

This airport, in fact, will now always be this airport.

This shirt will always be this shirt.

She looks down again; the coffee has fully reached her skin, and the entire scene—the increasing damp chill, combined with the initial splash as well as Helena’s words and face and neck and this familiarly angry need to put hands around that neck—it’s awakened her. And it’s awakened them, or Myka’s sense of them, the two of them together, that perfect entity: Wells and Bering, Bering and Wells...

Myka picks up her (surprisingly) unempty cup from the table and removes its lid. She then lifts her eyes to, and her own eyebrow at, Helena, who smirks. Myka tightens, brightens, and she flings her remaining coffee at the pristine, creamy expanse of sweater, surely cashmere, adorning the perfect body across from her. An uncanny joy floods her as the liquid hits—as a stain blooms, marring what was previously flawless. As, even better, Helena’s smirk enlarges into a smile.

But the moment has no chance to resolve, for they’re interrupted: Myka hears a throat-clear from behind her. Helena widens her eyes, then rolls them like some adolescent book-artifact. Myka, unclear on what that reaction says about who the intruder is, turns herself around... ah. An authority figure. A woman whose badge and uniform identify her as airport security.

“Ladies,” that authority says, tired and resigned, as if that Myka and Helena’s little coffee assaults barely even rank for her as inappropriate behavior but she supposes she’d better intervene before some overvigilant busybody attacks her for not doing what they see as her job.

“I’m sorry,” Myka starts, but that’s a knee-jerk remnant of table-lying. Or, no: hiding. In any case, she’s not sorry. Not at all. She closes her mouth.

“Ladies,” the careworn agent says again. “This is not the way.”

Not what Myka expected to hear. She swallows a laugh at how the words sound like advice from a parallel universe—one in which she and Helena are in couples therapy. The laugh tastes of regret.

Helena shakes her head. She says, with seriousness, as if the agent’s words were what she expected to hear (as if that parallel universe were this one): “I assure you, this is the way.”

And Myka can’t help but confirm, as she suspects she would in that other universe as well, “The only way.”

To that, Helena offers a beautiful, open affirmation: a soft-eyed, beneficent nod.

Wells and Bering. Bering and Wells.

The agent gives them her own eyebrow—pretty effective as chastisement, as far as Myka’s concerned—then makes them show her both their cups, ascertaining their emptiness. She says, again, “Ladies,” cautionary but also long-suffering, like she’s seen this exact scenario play out too many times. Myka finds her jaded view comforting: she and Helena aren’t singular. This isn’t once-in-a-lifetime; it’s over and over in everybody’s lifetimes.

The agent takes her leave, but she stations herself only a gate and a half away, communicating quite clearly that Myka and Helena—Wells and Bering, Bering and Wells—can’t be trusted.

Well. That’s certainly true.

Focused on each other again, they breathe and look for a little. The respite is heavenly. Myka stands in her coffee-spoiled shirt, looking at Helena in her similarly marred sweater. It’s the least complicated span of time she’s enjoyed in months. No: years. She is regarding someone, a non-hologram someone, she wants to regard, at momentary peace, with the next moment (at the very least, the next moment) undetermined.

“I’m so very relieved to have passed inspection,” Helena eventually says, breaking it.

The fracture threatens to let the complications back in, but Myka resists. “You know she’ll be watching to make sure we don’t go back to Starbucks for refills. Or even to a water fountain.”

Helena smiles. Myka feels no need, in that moment, to spare a thought for what the renewed winch of circumstance will bring. Their accord, in that moment, is full. It’s them.

Them, full, beautiful, but it’s not for keeping. This is one last hurrah of their beautiful connection—and it does warm her that Helena would take such drastic, security-attracting action to resurrect the feeling, to call it back into being, as this coda.

That’s all it is, though, for there is Giselle. And there is Pete.

Myka looks, one more time, down at her shirt: ruined. Up at Helena’s sweater: ruined too. Then she says it aloud, what she knows, in the wake of all the destruction: “It’s the end.” Then, because they might as well rule the day, she lists the proximate reasons: “There’s Giselle, and there’s Pete.”

“No there isn’t,” Helena says, enviably serene.

Also obstinate. Myka supposes she should have expected that. “Yes there is. I won’t tell you again.”

Helena’s eyeroll now is no less exaggerated than the one she produced in response to the agent. “Won’t you? Thank god for that. However, my disbelief regarding ‘you and Pete’ aside, my meaning is that there is no Giselle.”

Hope is a muscle, according to cliché. If that’s true, Myka’s will one day blessedly atrophy, for it will no longer be subjected to Helena saying things that make it expand. “You broke up?” she asks, unable to control a traitorous tremor.

Helena purses her lips. It’s distracting. “I should say yes,” she offers.

What does that mean? As Myka wonders, she watches Helena fidget: she has her cup in her hand again, and she’s picking at the label, which refuses to come free. Myka waits out the struggle, until Helena finally abandons the task and says, “I should, but I’m newly committed to pursuing a policy of truth. And the truth is, there is no Giselle. There never was.”

An involuntary “what” escapes Myka’s mouth. It isn’t really a word; rather, it’s her placeholder when she has no coherent response to... anything.

“I made her up,” Helena adds, unhelpfully.

“What,” Myka says again, low and quiet, and this time it’s holding the place of—holding her back from—a scream.

“In that coffeeshop in South Dakota,” Helena says.

Myka registers that she’s touching her wet shirt, wrapping her arms around it, seeking protection from... this. She removes her arms and thinks herself down: What is a rational response? She turns to a nitpick. “That’s... when. When you made her up.”

“Yes,” Helena says.

“But why. Why.” Myka’s arms want to move again, and she doesn’t stop them. They press her shirt cold against her. Cold, so cold.

Helena delivers yet another infuriating shrug as she says, “You wouldn’t connect.”

“I wouldn’t connect.” Nightmare, nightmare. Myka is slogging through a cold, wet nightmare: the dream-logic of it, of Helena saying that Myka did what Helena actually did, makes that so, so obvious. But obvious also is that it isn’t a dream; Myka is awake and confused and if she could just go to sleep maybe everything would be put back where it belongs, but probably not, because her shirt is coffee-sticky and she is tripping, falling, drowning, all these but awake, awake and still stupidly willing to partake of hope, that drug she will never, ever be able to kick.

“I said there was someone else,” Helena says, schoolmarm-severe.

How dare she. “I know. I was there.”

Helena does dare: she dares to look wounded. “Yes, you were. And yet you weren’t, in that you so obviously, so coldly, refused to entertain the possibility that ‘someone else’ might be you. Given that, I had to protect myself.”

Myka had thought it a nightmare only seconds ago—she’d had no idea how much worse it could get. She can’t in any way process that “might be you,” and certainly not followed by the “given that.” The consequences. She can’t. She forces out, irrelevantly, “So you made up your ‘new’ girlfriend right on the spot?”

“Yes. I suppose I took some perverse pride in being able to do so.”

Of course she did. It’s exhausting. “On the spot, you made up someone named Giselle?” Myka is offended by how... believable this is. How if this thing had happened—as apparently it had—this was its necessarily, entirely credible form.

“What?” Helena says, in that familiar there is no reasonable basis for your skepticism tone. “It’s a name.”

“But that’s the name you came up with?” Myka pushes, knowing she’s pushing—seizing on it as exemplifying the absurdity, as if by forcing Helena to make sense of that, she can make everything else fall into place.

Helena’s slight hand-wave isn’t a shrug, but it’s even more infuriating in its dismissiveness. “On the flight to South Dakota I may have read an article about the ballet.”

That’s “making sense,” in a very Helena way, but it sure doesn’t help. “Thanks, ballet,” Myka snarks.

“Does the name matter so much?”

“I told it to people.” And the people she told it to remembered it, because it was memorable. She’d been subjected more than once to Pete “joking” about Helena and her fancy French girlfriend. It had been awful.

“To people at the Warehouse,” Helena guesses. Presses.

Myka isn’t prepared to acknowledge that pain, not here, not now. “To my sister,” she says, because that is true, and, thank god, less painful.

“You told the name of my supposed girlfriend to your sister,” says Helena, not as a question, but with wonder.

Myka had. In a vague “someone I know” sense, in the context of supporting a contention that it was just fine for people to love who they love, and Tracy had been thrilled to connect it to ballet, so obviously everything was a stupid circle. “What does that matter?” she demands, though she has no right to be so defensive; she brought up that telling. Why had she? As a way of pushing the case for Helena’s wrongness in being so misleading... but Myka is now exposed as being overly invested in speaking about Helena... which she is, but... this is all going completely wrong again.

“You spoke of me outside the Warehouse.” Still with that tinge of wonder.

Myka has no way to counter that. Helena’s right about its significance. Myka sometimes finds herself desperate to speak of Helena, simply to savor the saying of her name, and when Steve or Claudia isn’t available or willing to indulge her, she calls Tracy. She tries a shuffle to the side: “I thought it was important. To you, I mean.” That’s a feint. “And I tell my sister about important things.”

“Such as your relationship with Pete?” That’s a taunt. Helena’s the one pushing now.

Myka wishes she could yield.... fall over, soft and easy, and let Helena win. Instead, what emerges from her mouth is an unhelpfully true “Not yet.” Helena smiles, and it’s mean, so Myka follows up with, “At least she’ll believe me when I do. She’s been on that team for a long time.” Now Helena squints. “The ‘men and women can’t be friends’ team,” Myka explains. “You know.”

“I don’t know,” Helena says.

History. Helena has offered a similar deadpan response, with that same dry emphasis on the “don’t,” just about every time Myka has said “you know” like this to her, and Myka used to find it charming. But she doesn’t want to start remembering patterns. Falling back into them. Not when she knows she’ll have to break them again. So she treats Helena’s objection as entirely literal, saying a pedantic, “Men and women can’t be friends without romance getting in the way.”

Helena literally turns up her nose as she says, “The grounds upon which to object to such an asinine generalization are many and varied.” Her upper lip then drifts in the direction of a sneer. “But you know that perfectly well. You know also that it doesn’t apply to you and Pete.”

“It does,” Myka says. It sounds pathetically petulant: an adolescent’s objection to a more-mature figure’s knowing judgment. Great. Now she’s the one aping the artifact-book.

“It does not. You are friends.”

“And then romance—”

“Got in the way? No.”

“Yes.” Myka hears herself say the word, knows it is yet more artifact-book puerility.

“Got in the way? No,” Helena says again, as if repetition is all that’s needed to cancel out Myka’s objection. Myka tries not to concede, even internally, that that might be true. “Occurred at all? No to that as well.”

“Yes it did! Stop making me say it!” Why can’t she just let this be? Myka let her be, back in Boone.

“If it had in fact occurred, you would be delighted to say it!”

That’s so true that Myka desperately wishes she could throw more coffee, or something heavier and more damaging, to get Helena to shut up. “Stop it!” she shouts, knowing that those words have no weight, that they won’t damage.

Surprisingly, Helena does stop it, and the pause rings in Myka’s ears, making her aware of how loud their voices have become. She dares a look around: passersby don’t seem to care, but the agent has turned to look at them disapprovingly again; she’s shifting her weight from foot to foot, most likely preparatory to drifting with intent in their direction.

Helena copies Myka’s gaze, then grimaces. “I don’t wish to be placed under arrest,” she says.

“I don’t think she’d do that. Maybe she can mediate.” The alternate-universe-couples-therapy theory certainly suggests that’s within the realm of possibility.

“I don’t wish to share our discussion with her either.”

Myka knows she shouldn’t ask what seems obvious. Knows, knows, knows. But she asks anyway. “What do you wish?”

Helena inhales and exhales, once and then twice, her shoulders and chest rising and falling, rising and falling—clearly she’s considering, and abandoning, a series of possible responses.

At last, she produces words: “To continue to speak together.”

Myka’s plane doesn’t board for another hour and a half. She can grant this wish. She says, “If we can just keep the noise level down—”

“In private,” Helena says.

“We’re in an airport.” Myka spends so much time in airports. They are so unprivate.

Helena swivels her neck around, as if seeking to confirm Myka’s statement for herself, then focuses on Myka again. She holds that focus, for one beat then two, and this time she obviously already has an answer in mind; she’s trying to pique Myka’s curiosity. Of course it’s working. If Myka could put her hands on that neck and be assured of forcing words from that intentionally withholding mouth, she’d do it.

But she stills her wishing hands, and at last, Helena relents. “An airport, yes,” she says. “But one that houses a hotel.”

Which brings Myka up short. It also opens a chasm. She entertains, for one morally evacuated second, the idea of being in a hotel room with Helena—and, worse, of doing what people do in hotel rooms with Helena. Then she snaps her spine back into place and says, “Absolutely not.”

“For privacy,” Helena says. “Nothing more. I swear it.”

Myka knows what being manipulated by Helena feels like. This... isn’t that. Or at least, it isn’t a “doing what people do in hotel rooms” sort of that. “Privacy,” she echoes.

“Do you dispute the notion that we have more to say to each other?”

In so many parts of the past, Myka’s answer to that would have been an immediate “no.” Now, she pretends she has to think about it—but Helena most likely knows it’s a pointless pretense. Myka gives up and says “no” out loud.

“And would it not be better, in saying that more, to say it freely?”

The answer to that is less clear-cut, despite what Myka would love to believe is sincerity in Helena’s eyes and voice. She would love to believe it. So much... so does that mean she should say no?

As she thinks about it, however, this has all the hallmarks of being another blunder. As foretold by the book. And really, who is she to think she knows better than a predictive artifact?

“Okay,” she says. “Hotel.”

TBC

[apparitionism]

Tabled 2

Hi again, @barbarawar ! Here’s a continuation of your @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange  present... it’s the second part of what has apparently decided to become a longer-than-two-part story. (This is kind of a short part, and I’m trying mightily to keep it to three, I swear.) In any case, a narrative wants what it wants, and given that this one is trying to deal with what might have happened if Myka and Helena had the “coffee” suggested by Helena in Instinct, I guess some difficulty of resolution is the price of doing business. I postulated in part 1 that Myka didn’t deal at all well with that “coffee,” and that it in fact initiated a cascade of lies, subterfuges, and all-around poor choices. Is that a sustainable mode of living? We’ll see. She might need a wake-up call. Who could deliver such a thing? Hm...

Tabled 2

Myka had run to the book because using her body to lie belonged, so clearly and painfully, to a new and different equivalence class of untruths.

If only she could have narrated a relationship with Pete instead. Sat at a table and told a series of story-lies about it—to herself, to him. Then she wouldn’t have so desperately needed the book to speak a different story.

Despite her need, however... nothing. From that nonresponse, Myka had taken the lesson that with regard to the future, what you see is what you get. What you see is all you get.

That being the case, she’d begun the work of reconciling herself to it.

She had soon thereafter received a text from Helena: a brief “Coffee?”, to which she had responded “Sorry, busy” without even asking for details, because one thing to which she could not reconcile herself was the way in which, even now (especially now), her heart leapt to see “Helena” appear in a notification.

The leap, its shock familiar yet striking her anew with its force, was a piercing reminder of those times before, when she had been so high-wire alive. Even as the coffees themselves had left her unsettled, incomplete, each new heralding text had lacerated her with frustrated want, the hot pain of things once were different. The prod of Myka, you once were different.

A fall into love had ripped her open; one into sin was now closing her up. She didn’t want to be reminded of either.

“You will never lose this friend” seemed now a curse, not a promise; another way of saying that she would never lose a particularly turbulent priest.

Will no one rid me...

****

As the wake of Artie’s are-you-the-culprit interview widens, Myka sees that she must rid herself of that priest. She cannot, in fact, endure the heart-leaps of more “coffee?” texts; and, beyond that, she needs fewer tables. If she can shed these sit-downs with Helena, where the lying began... it may be a false idol, but now she is choosing belief: that she can edit herself down to a way of living that is rational, even cold, such that she can functionally confront each new hour, day, week, every measure of time to come.

So. Initiating a “coffee,” which she has never done before, she texts Helena. It’s terse but, ironically, true: “I need to talk to you. In person.”

She is surprised to be surprised when she receives a nearly instantaneous reply, a simple “yes.”

Myka texts back her plan, which begins: “Meet you halfway.” Halfway is Chicago: between South Dakota and New York, where Helena now resides—with, Myka presumes, or at least near, the ideal Giselle.

Helena can have her. Myka will be her own ideal: she will be the person who sits at the table, the person who says the necessarily dismissive, lying words. Rationally. Above all, rationally.

She hopes the book will be willing to help that person.

Now, for what she knows must be the last time—the real third time, the real charm—she confronts the volume. “I’m making an end,” she tells it. “I need a shape.”

Could a book roll its eyes? Of course not. But an artifact certainly could.

That artifact may be adolescently scornful of Myka and her request, but it is no longer unresponsive. She resists considering what that means, concentrating instead of the book’s actions: it once again page-turns her to the later questions. She understands immediately why, as she is blinded to everything but question forty-three: “What will be the result of what I am about to undertake?”

She turns the page to reach the chart. She closes her eyes.

Superstitiously (not hopefully; hope is a drug she is trying to kick), she’s sharpened a brand-new pencil for the occasion. She now lowers its point to the page deliberately (not hopefully), but the instant it makes contact, her hand spasms, bouncing the spike of graphite elsewhere, jamming it there against the page, and she feels it snap and splinter.

She opens her eyes to find that she’s made two very clear selections, which is to say, she’s marked the book rather than simply touching it: the first is a right-pointing three-pebble triangle; the second—the one she twitched to and broke against—is a similarly small triangle, this one pertly upright. The first she knows as mathematical, about subgroups and containment; the second, obviously and cross-disciplinarily, is the delta of change.

“Both?” she asks, but it’s rhetorical. Surely the book itself produced her twitch, either via artifactual telekinesis or a physical nudge of its pages, to offer her two answers. The confirming page-ruffle is just punctuation.

And so she proceeds to the prophecies. The first, the right-pointer, is “You will only commit blunders.” Well. The book has known her for a while now, so that’s not a difficult prediction to make. She’s surprised, in fact, that it hasn’t given that one to her every time.

She turns to the second, the one corresponding to the delta. That one yields, “It will be of a satisfactory nature.”

“Oh, thanks,” she says. Sarcasm, but she shouldn’t be so cynical; the book is sensitive. These conjoined answers might feel like a joke, but even a joke has a shape. “I’m sure I’ll do it,” she tells her counselor. “The blunders of course. Satisfactory, though?”

No ruffle, no sigh. Myka is on her own.

****

Myka has arranged to meet Helena in the airport, for she is trying to make this excision as surgical as possible. Her return flight (well, the first of two) leaves three hours after her arrival; the layover is that long only because getting to and from South Dakota means bowing to airline schedulers’ ideas about which places merit reasonably quick access. Regardless of how pressing a person’s need to escape O’Hare might be.

In any case, the significance of the word “terminal” is not lost on her.

She catches her first glimpse of Helena from an entire length of concourse away—it’s a flicker, a mere suggestion of Helena-ness—but Myka knows it’s her. Once upon a time, she might have reveled in the intimacy of it, the way she knows the sight. Other people, indeed every other person, in the airport, the city, the country, even on the planet, might appreciate that sight, but Myka knows it. She knows the stride; she knows the toss of hair. She knows the bravado... knows it as a front. Knows it paper-thin.

But she can spare no sympathy for Helena’s fragility, nor for whatever it might cause her own heart to pulse.

This is the end, though, so she offers herself a tiny dispensation: for the length of Helena’s walk from gate B14 to B11, she will imagine this meeting is taking place in a different world. “Let’s start again,” she might say, in that different world. “Let’s run away and start again.”

Helena passes B11. That different world is no more.

Myka schools her face—her face that has been so revealing in the past—as Helena nears.

The line at the gate-adjacent Starbucks is short, yielding no time for much talk past “hello” and “how was your flight,” and that’s fortunate, because Myka has been witless to prepare anything cogent. She has, however, compiled a list of several synonyms for “ended.”

She’s considering launching without preamble into those, just pronouncing them all, one by telling one, then turning her back. But once she and Helena have collected their cardboard cups and sat down across from each other at a high table among a cluster between gates, Helena is the one to deliver the first salvo: “I presume you’re here to tell me about you and Pete.” She says it with a head-toss that seems rehearsed, but does she mean to convey nonchalance? Or is it nothing more than vain look-at-my-hair emphasis?

Myka can’t deal with either one. “Do you,” she says, as blandly as possible, but inside she is seething. She had not intended to say anything about that. She had intended to pretend it did not exist, to let that sin of omission be a relief, but someone has thwarted her. She suspects Steve... suspects it might have something to do with protection. She begins prepping a high-minded rebuke to be delivered later, even as she tells him now, in her head, where he and his truth-detection have taken up residence, You will not alter what I am here to do. “How did you hear?” she asks, again bland. Matter-of-fact, because of the matter of this fact.

“Claudia told me,” Helena says.

So much for the rebuke. Everything about this is going in the wrong direction. But there’s no right direction, so of course it is.

“I guess she’d know, wouldn’t she,” Myka says. She isn’t able to fully disguise her sourness at the idea of Helena and Claudia being in contact, but ultimately that’s all the more reason to detach. Helena has plenty of Warehouse connections, and that means Myka isn’t special. Here, too, she needs to be reasonable, to curtail any wish for that. Among so many other things.

And so she lies even more extensively than she did at the Round Table, despite the absence of Mrs. Frederic and Steve to goad her, telling a story about a story, investing her gray despair with cartoonish color, reciting again her ultimate line—her ultimate lie. Saying it out loud again, she feels her lies folding in on themselves, then expanding outward, untruths about untruths. She pushes on, however, ignoring the entanglement: “That was really my defining moment,” she concludes. “When I realized.”

She wishes Helena’s face would change, but it doesn’t. Yet another wallop of finality. The end, the end.

A moment passes: a suspension of time in which nothing at all happens. If only it could last forever...

But then Helena’s eyes narrow. “I don’t believe you,” she says. It’s blunt. It’s also defensive, and that is a change.

Myka does not know whether to rejoice in or lament the fact that she is not, here at the end, a competent enough liar for an audience of H.G. Wells. So she punts: trying for flippant, she says, “Well, congratulations, you and Pete finally have something in common, because he didn’t either. Not at first.”

That conjures the scene in which she had persuaded him... and that in turn brings home to her the fact that she has no bodily way to persuade Helena of anything. Her disruptive id, however, offers up an alternate scene, one in which she pulls Helena to her, Helena instead of Pete, into a kiss intended to convince somebody of something.

But even as Myka would do that, still, now, if she could, the back of her neck prickles with “maybe I can hurt you like you hurt me.” Because while she has tried to see that Helena must have had her reasons (for Nate), and must have her reasons (for Giselle), she doesn’t care about reasons. She cares about pain. Then, how guttingly she felt it. Now, how retributively she might inflict it.

“You and me. This is the end,” she says, hoping Helena feels the snap of the words. Hoping she feels it against her neck.

“Because of you and Pete?” That’s contempt.

Myka is about to say yes, to lie and throw that contempt right back in her face, to lie and throw it and then stand up and walk away and never look back.

But she owes the entirety of the situation just this bit of truth. “I want to say yes,” she begins, and Helena frowns. Myka can’t, now, spare the space to cherish that frown. “But the real answer is no, because it’s me. I can’t sit at tables and pretend to drink coffee and act like small talk matters. I wasn’t your roommate at...” She pauses for what she intends as a condemnatory moment. “Idaho Tech.”

Helena exhales in response a disdainful sniff. “Don’t misquote me. You remember precisely the lie I told.”

Righteous, even now. Myka can’t contain her resigned sigh. “I’m saying it doesn’t matter anymore. You’ve got Giselle, I’ve got Pete, and we’ll both be fine.” Now she does stand up—trying for the physical embodiment of “it doesn’t matter anymore”—but she moves her hands too dramatically: she knocks her cup over, and coffee from the untasted container glugs like slow blood from its plastic lid onto the innocent tabletop.

Well, there’s an obvious blunder. That book... its truth. Myka hurries to right the cup, then uses a comically inadequate single, flimsy napkin to begin mopping the spill (another obvious blunder: not having anticipated needing a stack). But while her clumsiness annoys her, as does the delay, she appreciates the latter as providing one little extra indulgence before she says and, worse, hears, the last goodbye.

She is in any case discomfited by the way Helena watches her attempted cleanup: silent, appraising. It feels like the past, but having that attention focused on clearing a slick of cold coffee from a table is so... inappropriate. It’s a waste. It’s small, so small; not scaled to the past. The pathetic downsizing offers yet more reason to know this as a sunset.

Of course Myka is not, and will never be, ready for the fading end—of the sight of this face, of the sound of this voice—but she has nailed herself to this cross, and she can’t climb down now (never mind what she ever said to anybody about crosses and getting off them and... never mind). She’s going to live out her life in a way that makes continuous sense, not as a trudge punctuated by interludes that make her wish for a more electric timeline. The Warehouse had, via Helena, shown her such a bright flash, but that light is gone. In its absence, surely, the Warehouse will show itself as big enough, will offer enough, to fill a different unfolding’s worth of life.

In any case, her future is set. The evidence of her having committed blunders is clear. Now must be the time for Myka to turn to whatever it is that will be “of a satisfactory nature.” Whatever it is, it’s probably the best she can hope for, going forward.

She draws in a breath and begins, “So I guess this is...”

But she doesn’t finish, because she’s distracted by movement from Helena’s side of the table.

What is she doing?

She’s pushing her chair back and standing, taking up her own untasted coffee container into her right hand. She’s looking not at Myka but at that cup, and Myka can hear, in this flash of relative silence, a tap-tap-tap of Helena’s fingernail against the cardboard. That draws her attention to the cup, to the hand—and suddenly Helena’s left hand swoops in to rip the cup’s lid away, and her right hand moves back then forward—and in that blink of motion, the cup’s tepid contents rush toward Myka, dousing her torso.

Myka looks down. Her shirt is soaked—soaked—with coffee.

She looks up.

Helena is gazing at her in something very like triumph.

TBC

[apparitionism]

Many thanks, @righty-ho-then​ ! It’s always a pleasure to see Bering and Wells in all their intensity, and that you took inspiration from my story makes this gift particularly sweet... I can promise that at some point as that tale continues, Myka will indeed be a little bit braver. If all goes as planned, though, she won’t have to be notably quick—which I think they’ll both appreciate.

Thanks again, and incidentally, thanks for letting me know you were going to be a little late. No problem at all, of course. I’m always stringing out multipart gift-stories over months, so this was quite honestly a marvel of timeliness!

Happy gift exchange @apparitionism !!

inspired by your fanfic Confection (if myka was a little bit braver and quicker)

[apparitionism]

Tabled

Hi @barbarawar , and happy Gift Exchange to you! Here’s what you said to anonymous-me: “Okay, so we know up until Instinct HG wasn’t in contact with Myka, but after it seems maybe they were from Myka’s reference to HG’s girlfriend in the finale for example. Did they ever get that coffee? Do they talk regularly? If you could do something with that that’d be awesome!”

First, I should say that from Instinct onward, the show seemed committed to forcing its characters into shapes that fit (or “fit”) an apparently predetermined, clichéd outcome, and I share the resentment that many feel about how awful that was. However! For the purposes of your gift, it’s that sense of “fit,” in quotes, that I’ve set out to push at in this piece. When people (well, characters) are forced—or feel themselves forced—to “fit” into particular narratives, what damage is done? How much of that damage is irreparable? And what does it mean for damage to be irreparable, anyway? This story offers some maybe-answers.

(P.S. This is going to be two parts, both because I’m incapable of being succinct and because I would like to get it right. Right-ish. Second part will appear in due time, with apologies for making you wait.) (P.P.S. The book referenced herein is real, which I hope comes as no surprise.) (P.P.P.S. Much gratitude, as always, to @kla1991 for the @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange management!)

Tabled

Myka sits at tables and tells lies.

She wouldn’t have imagined she’d take up these conjoined activities—an irrational hobby if ever there was one—but: here she is.

At times, this joint doing is an obstacle course, but today it’s simple. Artie, stationed across from her, asks, “Are you making unauthorized use of an artifact?”

He’s asking everybody, one on one; Claudia had been the first interrogatee, and she’d told Myka to brace herself, with a groan of “Why does he have to turn into Torquemartie like this? ‘Oh, the ping’s coming from inside the Warehouse!’ Dude. Artifacts get weird. They make pingy noises. Doesn’t mean we’re running around punching our downside cards.”

In the past, Myka wouldn’t have needed the heads-up, for she would have been innocent and indignant. And in fact she doesn’t need it now, for now she’s a practiced liar, so: “No,” she says (innocent), and “of course not,” she adds (indignant).

“If you run across anything that... strikes you,” Artie says.

“I’ll tell you.” Also a lie. Things that strike her, she keeps to herself.

Unlike her table-set lying, that’s not new.

“I think I might be a writer,” she’d said to her father, before she was old enough to have learned better. Eight. She’d been eight, and in school she’d written a story about a girl who tamed a lion. Her teacher had asked her to read it aloud to the class.

“You know nothing about that,” he’d snapped back, and the sting of it taught her: if you love something, if it sets you on fire, that’s wrong. Kill it.

And if you can’t? Then hide it.

Myka, having discovered after much effort that she had no talent for killing her love for anything, had become adept at hiding it, particularly from her family: she’d hidden her love of writing, after that first young cut; later, she’d hidden her affinity for law enforcement, every scrap of satisfaction she took in the accolades she received for valor, dedication, marksmanship, all of it; she’d even hidden the perverse pride she took in her adept ability to hide.

She hid everything, from her family and then from everyone, and she was adept at the hiding. That didn’t keep her clandestine investments from going south—witness Sam—but she was adept.

Until Helena.

Helena short-circuited Myka’s hiding mechanism. So much fire, so uncontainable, and it all spilled out, so loud, so open. So... unhidden.

So Myka has reasserted her old ability, augmented as it has had to be, here where she dwells in so many layered aftermaths. She’s hiding—which, fine, maybe that’s passive lying, but at least it’s a sin of omission. And she’s uttering (but not only uttering) untruths: this new, committed sin.

If she were paid by the lie, she could retire. Oh, and if she retired now, how about this: evil, crazy, dead; she’s got the trifecta too. Evil because she tells lies, which is no good in any cosmos; crazy because that’s what those lies render her in her head; and dead... well.

She could lie to herself and chalk that, too, up to those table-lies, but what would be the point? She wouldn’t believe herself. She remembers too much about what being alive felt like. She can’t fail to understand the contrast now.

****

“Just coffee next time,” Helena had said, and while Myka had counterproposed “save the world,” she hadn’t explicitly turned down the coffee proffer, and that had resulted, via a weird press of obligation in her head that hurt like hope, in her having to accept it when it was in fact proposed.

When Helena had contacted her—by text, and the Helena of before (before, oh, before) would never have begun “R u available,” so the texter seemed from the start a stranger—Myka had thought, Sure, I can do this, only to think, T–minus five minutes, I can’t do this.

Because she’d compartmentalized, until that zero-nigh moment, the implications of what had brought Helena near: a forensics conference in Nebraska, which had to mean Helena was still working that... Myka tried to say “job” in her head. Instead it came out “con.”

Thinking that word, doing the work of thinking it further into a sneer, helped paper over at least enough of her panic to allow her to walk into the designated coffee shop, a walk she tried to take with no expectations or intentions. I will see Helena. That was all. I will see Helena.

And see her Myka did, her face in profile against a window that offered, in stark contrast, a plain gray Nebraska sky. Its neutrality set Helena’s beauty in high relief. She was striking enough, as always, to instantly take a heart and break it, and yet to Myka’s gaze, this first sight after a length of time, she struck uncanny, like a painting of herself. Or not even that: instead some inartistic facsimile, an AI-generated irreality unworthy of her name.

Even so... even so, Myka could have regarded Helena forever—show me her, any version, and I will hungrily look—but looking, now, seemed an endpoint, not at enticement. Before (before, oh, before), Helena had been a magnet, aligning Myka’s entire compass of being to her true-north pull.

Now, with Helena dead metal, Myka had no way to orient herself.

She stood in the coffee shop’s entryway, trying to decide, and I can’t do this echoed in her head. Doing this, making it real, would put this fake-Helena in place of the ideal-Helena to whom Myka still, even after the Boone-crash, clung. I shouldn’t do this.

Her body gathered itself to leave, so as to not do this, but Helena—as if she sensed both Myka’s presence and her ambivalence—moved her even-now-so-beautiful head, turned to catch Myka’s gaze, and there was no escape.

So Myka sat at a table across from Helena. Having coffee. What wouldn’t she have given for this chance, this quiet chance, at so many hinge points of their history?

“Are you well?” Helena asked. Her voice was as uncanny as her face, emanating from an elsewhere that admitted none of that history.

There Myka sat, at a table across from Helena, hating the chance, hating that she now hated the chance. And from the depth of that hate, she told a lie: “Yes,” she said. She did not know—could not have known—that it was the first of many.

She had tried to logic herself out of culpability, there in that first lying moment, away from what exams and scans seemed to be revealing. What does “well” really mean, anyway? She’d driven a car to get here, and she hadn’t committed any moving violations while doing so; she was drinking coffee (terrible coffee that tasted of slag) without spilling it on herself; words emerged from her mouth in a language she spoke with reasonable fluency. She was functioning, and any reasonable person might consider the ability to function a measure of wellness, so, “Yes, I’m well,” she reiterated. Re-lied.

As their conversation, if that was the word for it, continued, Myka’s first impressions were borne out: Helena’s aspect was wrong, as in the lab in Boone, when she and Pete had witnessed her strange matter-of-fact performance of something that didn’t quite rise to the level of amnesia: rather than lacking her memory, as in the first Emily Lake disaster, in that lab she’d had no depth. H.G. Wells with no depth! The first of so many Boone sacrileges...

And there in Nebraska, the sacrileges had continued. “Home” was a word Helena used, over and over, and Myka experienced each utterance as an accusatory taunt, as if Helena were saying, with emphasis: You told me to do this, so I did.

Had Helena made the accusation aloud, it would of course have been no lie. Myka had said the words; the responsibility was hers. She deserved this punishment. Because that, some snake agreed in a whisper, was when your lies truly began.

Once their conversation (that was not the word for it) had petered out—leaving Myka mourning their ability to talk for hours before (before, oh, before)—the goodbye was awkward: in its too-formal words, for they clanged against the intimacies of the past, but also in its estranging absence of physicality. The latter was Myka’s doing, as she made sure to keep the table between their bodies. She’d made the mistake of touching Helena in Boone, there at that bitter end. She was certainly not going to do that again. Those burns on her body had not healed.

Driving back to the Warehouse, she tried initially to keep her composure, but it was no use; she gave up and yelled at the Helena in her head: Why couldn’t you be yourself! Make sense! Break through! (She aggressively refused to understand that she was yelling just as loudly at whatever lying version of “Myka Bering” she’d been performing, there during “coffee.”) She told herself the car-yelling was perfectly normal, or at least—in keeping with her justificatory theme—perfectly functional: she was getting Helena out of her system, so she could fit herself back into her nothing-is-the-matter Warehouse suit.

As if she were ever going to get Helena out of her system.

“How was your... coffee?” Steve had asked her, back at the B&B.

Myka hadn’t confided in him, not fully, but he had a tendency to ask discerning questions, and she had a corresponding tendency to answer. Sometimes, it was a relief.

This time it was not. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she had said.

He whistled, a muted but sharp little inhale. “Ain’t that the truth,” was his verdict.

Myka laughed. It hurt.

****

Artie’s concern about unauthorized artifact use is surprising to Myka only in that he took as long as he did to realize it was occurring: for personal enlightenment (if not gain, but really, what was “gain”?) Myka has twice consulted a book. Its title is The Fortune-Teller; or, Peeps into Futurity, and its publication date is 1861, but neither that title nor that date is its salient feature. No, its salience lies in the artifactual ability of one part of it—known as “The Ladies’ Oracle”—to predict the future.

These consultations had begun as a result of that initial “coffee,” which had rendered Myka bereft, even more so than Boone had (as if her bereavements were rankable). In its wake she’d needed something, anything, to grasp and hold. She knew she couldn’t find comfort in the past, that treacherous country, and the present was merely something through which she was struggling to swim. That left the future.

So she had researched, furtive but diligent, until she found her little candidate.

You’re doing this because turning back time didn’t do what you wanted it to, did it, some truth-insistent fold of her cerebral cortex had jeered when she’d first considered using the book. You’re praying this direction will be different.

The accusation was fair. Reasonable. Thus, standing before the book, considering its perils, its unknown downside, she’d tried to resist: Don’t, she told herself. She’s alive and in the world. That has to be enough.

But it isn’t, said the lizard at the bottom of her brain.

It sounded like Steve.

The book’s divination process was elaborate and, in its way, entertaining, entertainment being what the book was initially intended to provide: Myka read that she was first to choose a numbered question from the list of sixty in the book, then close her eyes and touch a pencil to a chart on the following page. From that chart, her blindly directed point of lead would select a symbol, one of twelve, each comprising small circles in a distinct mantic-pebble pattern. Her next series of tasks: look up the page associated with her question’s number that corresponded to that symbol, turn to that page, and discover her pebble-pattern-designated answer.

At first she thought to be clever, to game the outcome, working backward from desired answer to symbol to question, so as to contrive a prediction that would yield some light. The book resented this idea enormously. In the wake of her considered (not even attempted!) subversion, it refused to open to “The Ladies’ Oracle,” instead offering her pages related first to the reading of cards, then to the interpretation of dreams. She knew from her research that these pages had no artifactual significance. These seem more suited for a charlatan such as yourself, the book was conveying, with what Myka took to be great disdain. You don’t deserve the access I afford.

“I’m sorry,” she told it, and that was entirely true. “I really want to know.” That was true too—or true-ish. She wanted to know... but only if the knowledge would help.

Beggars can’t be choosers, said another lizard. This one sounded like her father.

The book took its time deciding whether to believe her... no doubt sensing some residue of her dishonesty, adding that to her offense against its power. But rule in her favor it did, riffling to its oracular pages with a sigh of surrender. Or was it triumph?

She chose her question, that first question, based on her overall disquiet.

The question was numbered twenty-five. It read, “Shall I long remain as I now am?”

Pencil in hand, Myka closed her eyes. She moved the lead until it encountered bookish resistance... the symbol on which it rested, when she opened her eyes, resembled a little pebble cairn, upright, proud. She consulted the page-map and learned her destination: page thirty-seven.

The book, unmoved by her anxiety about what she would discover, allowed her to turn only a single leaf at a time.

Show-off.

On page thirty-seven, the pebble cairn nestled at its very bottom.

Its prediction—Myka’s future—her fate.

“That is impossible; so much the worse.”

****

For some time, Myka had thought the book must have been wrong—maybe it had decided in the end to withhold true knowledge of her future out of spite?—for her status remained quo. Artifacts. Retrievals. Warehouse business, world-shaking in the strangely run-of-the-mill ways it tended to be.

The looming presence of cancer as a possibility had kept her tensed for “the worse” to emerge from that quarter... and she did on some level find it hilarious that the likelihood of having some you’ll-probably-die-soon disease hadn’t been enough to push her to seek an oracle, but an emptied-out Helena had.

But then, abruptly, cancer had been removed from the table.

Myka had tried not to dwell on how wrong that removal could have gone, given what Pete had done. She had tried to be content that the most significant upshot of that entire series of episodes seemed to be the adding of a benign category to her catalog of untruths: she sat not at but rather on a table and told a lie. “I guess I’m just lucky,” she had said when her oncologist’s PA expressed the team’s surprise at having found no malignancy.

But then Helena had texted again. “I’ll be in South Dakota soon, relatively near Univille. Can you believe it?”

As if belief had any right to be any part of anything anymore... but Myka should have believed the book. The second coffee (“coffee”) had not allowed her to remain as she was. It was, truly, so much the worse.

This one happened to happen on Valentine’s Day, a fact on which neither Myka nor Helena remarked, despite what Myka couldn’t help but read as its bracing irony.

And speaking of bracing. Myka had braced herself for more extollings of “home,” its charms, its warm certainties...

...but: “Oh, that ended,” Helena said. Dismissive. Breezy.

Myka had put so much anguish into making Helena’s “home” in Boone make whatever tortured sense it could... justifying it as Helena needing to make her own choices about what she could face and what she couldn’t, what she could wake up to every day and what she couldn’t, what she could bring herself to need every day and what she couldn’t... and Myka had further worked very hard to keep all of that torturesome rationalization from spiraling into “why not face me, why not wake up to me, why not need me.” Her hard work there had failed to hold, so: Because you are not Nate, she told herself, again and again, in cut after cut. And because you don’t have a daughter. Cut. Cut. You. Don’t. Have.

Yet here, now, Helena had simply waved her hand at the entire chapter. It unmoored Myka—was this a weight lifted? or was it yet another burdening betrayal?—such that she for a moment couldn’t speak, and for that moment, she didn’t understand that Helena was waiting for her to speak. Eventually: “Ended,” she managed to echo, and she did not recognize the sharp breath she then took.

“Yes. Because there’s someone else.” As Helena said that, she was not performing the uncanny copy of herself—instead, she sparked.

The spark smashed Myka with the realization that her breath had signaled hope. Stupid, naïve hope. And she was defeated, bitterly, both by that hope’s instant dashing and by the knowledge that it still could spring. Would spring. Would, apparently, always spring.

“Is there,” Myka said, as blankly as she could.

“A woman,” Helena said.

She might as well have pulled out an actual knife, but Myka was ferally not going to let that show. “That’s great,” she said, reaching for something beyond blank, something even more resistantly telling, trying to channel Steve at his most calm, like water unsubject to weather.

To that, Helena’s reaction was to sit back and say, as if she resented the idea, “Yes, it is.” Then she said, “Shall I tell you about her?” Still sparking. A challenge.

I don’t need any more challenges. But: “Sure. Why not,” she said. At this point, Myka was certain she could sit through anything. “What’s her name.”

“Her name...” and Helena tightened her jaw, making Myka think she was trying not to unleash an incongruously outsize grin, “is Giselle.”

And Myka said Sure; why not again, but under her breath.

Helena had then begun to relate seemingly endless anecdotes conveying the attributes of this apparent wonder of the world named—sure, why not—Giselle.

You should be enjoying this, Myka told herself as the accolades unfurled. The one and only H.G. Wells is deigning to tell you stories, but here you sit, getting picky about content, all surly and—

“You know what? I’m happy for you,” she interrupted, because she could not, in fact, sit through anything. She could not suffer more, from herself or from Helena. Steve would have clutched his head and screamed at what she’d said, but at this point, what did lies matter?

Driving home this time, she did not yell. Instead, she practiced. “Helena is with a woman named Giselle.” Over and over she said it, to make sure she understood it, and to make sure her mouth knew how to repeat it, because someone, Steve or Claudia or even Pete, would ask, and she would need to say. Out loud, she would need to say these words that told the harshest of truths (though she wished she could sit, at or on a table, and lie that truth away): Helena wants a woman, and that woman is not Myka Bering.

So much the worse.

****

“Well, book,” Myka had said late that night, facing it, facing up to it, “you were right.”

Did the acknowledgement prompt it to offer a self-satisfied ruffle?

She had then asked, “Where do we go from here?” She wished she could have asked it of Helena...

This occasioned something legible as a sort of shoulder-shrug: the book opened to the first of its question-pages.

“You think I want to know more?”

Provocatively, the page turned, as if catching the waft of some future-breeze.

Scanning that next of the list, Myka’s eyes—and her mind—were drawn to, were powerless but to settle on, question 37: “Is a certain person thinking of me?”

That was about the present, not the future. The book wouldn’t really know. Would it?

But Myka was powerless to resist divining the answer. This one corresponded to a pebble nabla (Myka could not help but think of slopes and slipping): “Some one is thinking, dreaming, and talking unceasingly about you.”

Upon receiving that statement, she had suffered another of those stupid hope-leaps... “some one”! Never mind the future; if it could be true in the now: “some one!”

She had soon been forced to realize, however, which “some one” the book must have meant. That was made painfully clear by the events of the most improbable, yet to date consequential, table: that voracious, hateful Round Table. It had brought Myka’s lies home. Literally.

Sitting at that table, Myka had prepped for more lies, these to sell a supposedly “defining” story, for she of course could not allow her definitional truth to be seen. Worse, extracted. She had tried to maintain confidence about being able to exert her will: My brain might not be as big as some brains but it’s big enough to beat you, table, she sneered. But then she admonished, Don’t sneer. No attitude. Because who does attitude make you think of?

She felt herself almost almost almost picture, almost almost almost name, her attitude-ideal...

And so Myka had redoubled her thought-efforts, thrusting every shred of attitude, every shard of emotion, every bit of real definition, from her mind, forcing it to produce for consumption the most anodyne memory possible: something she’d come as close to forgetting as she ever could, some ridiculous ninja-something that wasn’t worth the neurons firing to deliver it to the table’s dumb demands.

But then... everything had gone wrong. Not in the way she’d feared, but in a way that, given the book’s answer, she should have thought to fear. Her imagination had failed her, for the taking of cancer off the table had been the salient change after all: not what Pete had done, but instead, why he’d done it.

Sitting at that selfish table, Myka had at last come to understand the expectations surrounding her response to that why. With Mrs. Frederic and Steve both looking like examiners at the worst imaginable viva voce, she knew what she—she who had never failed a test in her life—had to say in order to pass.

So she’d said it.

The roiling in her gut had come as a surprise, for shouldn’t her soul have been resigned by now to endless perjury? She resented this unwelcome vagus-nerve stimulation of her earlier, righteous self.

In the immediate aftermath she’d stumbled away, trying to find a space to breathe, to assess, to plan how she would act a convincing version of the play she had stupidly—or, no, functionally; she needed to know it that way—let begin. The aisle in which she stopped was dim, its shelves full of metal, pieces of things, things she wished she could herself wright into a bunker of such artifactual strength that no one would dare approach her. Ever. No one.

She hadn’t realized Steve had followed her until she heard his voice. “Are you okay?” he asked, quiet behind her.

So much for her wish: his question, and his solicitude, were absurd. He’d seen her state; he’d encouraged her state. “Obviously not,” she snapped. He had the grace to wince. But because it had all gone so wrong, because she was still so angry that he had helped all that wrong along, she said, harsh, “What was with that ‘hello’? Why did you start that business about my face?”

His face spoke of pain. “I had to. I had to. Because today, honestly: today Mrs. Frederic had to hear what she wanted to hear. From all of us.” His desperate sincerity rang very true.

Myka breathed. Metal coated her throat; further hard words would snag and twist on it, wounding her more than Steve ever could. “I’m pretty sure she’s been wanting me to say that for a while,” she conceded.

Steve winced again. “You looked like you might throw up, and I felt like I would, hearing you... saying what you said. I wish I could’ve given you an out.”

Myka didn’t, now, doubt him. “Me too. And I wish I could’ve taken it.” She meant it, but that was all it was: a wish. For a different world. A different timeline? She said, with a wince of her own, “But I think I have to play along.”

“I see that, from the Mrs. Frederic angle. But you sound like... like there might be something in it for you. Not what I said there was—and I’m sorry I had to say it, or felt like I had to, or couldn’t figure out how not to—but something.”

“Backup,” Myka said immediately. It was the only answer.

“Backup,” Steve echoed, and “backup?” he said again, as if it were a word from a language in which he was not fully fluent.

“I need something—I need something—reliable.” Another hurt: that that was what she needed. So short a time ago, she would have claimed a different need. Such a crashingly different need.

“Need,” Steve said. “Not ‘want’?”

“No.” And Myka admitted: “That’s too dangerous.”

“I have to ask you about it though. Want.”

Myka braced herself. She braced herself, even as she thought on how tired she was of having to brace herself.

“Do you want me to keep protecting you? Primarily from Mrs. Frederic, but...”

It was a less dangerous ask, about a less dangerous want, than she’d feared. Or maybe it was the same want, the same danger, but more gently expressed. “Yes?” she said.

“Mrs. Frederic aside, the problem is that if you do play along, I don’t know what ‘protect’ means. Should I keep covering your lie or tell Pete the truth?”

“I don’t know either.” Another admission. She wasn’t proud of it. “For now, just let it... lie. Sorry.”

At that, he didn’t wince. “Tell me when things change. In whatever way they do.”

“If they do.”

“They always do,” he said.

“So I guess I’ll be telling you.” But she believed neither him nor herself.

Steve said, “If you could be happy.” Helpless.

Sweet Steve. Helpful, helpless. Myka gestured into the air. Conjuring speech took her a minute, and even then, all she managed was, “If I could.” Steve just kept looking like he looked, with his base of sympathy (and she had never so appreciated, or so responded to, sympathy), so she asked, because she didn’t know, “Why don’t you want to protect him?”

He offered her an exhausted smile. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but: you said ‘need.’ Who needs protecting? I like Pete, but if it comes down to it, it’s you.”

Leave me alone! she wanted to yell. But she also wanted to curl up in Steve’s protection. Backup. Backup.

****

Even as Myka found Artie’s interrogation easy to lie through, she knows that her lying footing as a whole is becoming unsteady, even vertiginous. If she could have restricted her lies to those sitting utterances... but the expansions are depleting her, and she is trying to resign herself to what she sees as her only realistic option for narrowing her scope. As for any objections her heart might be raising? She is shutting those lights out, one by one.

****

“I think I have to play along,” Myka had told Steve, and she had continued to convince herself of that necessity. So she had taken the initiative and done it, in at least the first of the ways she knew she would have to, in order to act her role.

To act your role? Really? No. To sell your con. Was that a lizard or a snake?

No matter. She sold it. She was not sitting at a table, but a kiss was a lie that was worse.

So much the worse.

After that—that demonstration, that acted untruth—she could not reach her lifeline fast enough. After that, she ran.

“Book,” she said, facing it. “Book.”

Her third try was not the charm; rather, it was the compulsion: Tell me something, anything, that I can’t already see about what’s next. Because an oracle must know more than I do, must know different. If not... Myka had not been ready, not then, not yet, to think on any consequences.

Some days—certainly that day, but not only that day—what she wanted more than life (literally, more than life) was to go back to protecting the president. If a bullet, then I take it. Simple. Clean.

She hated how resentfully, brokenly beholden she had become to people for saving her life. They set her up with the saving, but they didn’t bother with the consequences: with the fact that she had to keep on living. And nobody seemed to be interested in saving her from that.

So: “Book,” she said again, and if that word had never before meant “save me clean,” it did that day.

But struggle as she might, with increasingly desperate fingers into which she tried to wish and pray prying strength, the book refused to open.

Was this the downside? No response in one’s hour of true need?

“What am I doing wrong?” she begged.

But if that was her question, then of course the book was right: it could reveal nothing to her. She knew the answer.

Everything.

TBC