Pandora's Box: Part Four - Walking The Labyrinth

by Alicia McKenzie

May 2012

"Interesting," Sulven said, eyeing him thoughtfully. "Your shields are in better shape than I expected, little brother."

For some reason, she'd chosen to sit cross-legged on the kitchen table rather than in a chair. Nathan hadn't asked why. Maybe she was trying to keep him off-balance, or maybe she'd realized that she appeared too short for the chair and decided that it would be detrimental to her dignity to sit there with her feet dangling in the air. Either way, he wasn't going to let her distract him.

"I told you, my shields are fine," he said curtly. "I have that end of things under control." He should have known that she'd needle him about his telepathy at the first opportunity. The only surprise was that she'd heard him out about his visions before she'd done the predictable thing.

She had missed his little breakdown entirely, having left on a black ops mission he knew only the sketchiest of details about two days before he'd collapsed at the Tower. Recalling her hadn't been an option, thankfully. The only thing worse than stopping using his suppressants for a week would have been doing it with Sulven there to tell him what a fool he was for getting himself into the mess in the first place. At least Charles and Jean had limited themselves to thinking it.

"You have it under control? Really?" Sulven asked, her eyes widening as she affected a look of surprise. "Does that mean you've stopped taking the drugs entirely? Why, Nathan, I'm delighted to hear that. Truly."

He glowered at her, even though he knew that was the reaction she'd been trying to provoke. "Don't start," he growled, more heatedly than he'd intended. Once it was known that he had gotten his shields back in order, everyone who had refrained from verbally kicking his ass had finally gotten their chance, and some of them would simply not let it go. His nerves, consequently, were still a little raw. The last thing he needed was Sulven adding her voice to the chorus, especially when her scolding him for being a "weakling" about his telepathy was such an old tune.

Sulven tossed her braids back over her shoulder, giving him an imperious look. "I'll start if I wish, little brother," she said sharply. "I never approved of you resorting to drugs to solve your control problem, if you'll recall?"

"How could I forget?" She only brought it up every time something reminded her. "But we've beaten this subject to death over the last few years," Nathan went on as evenly as he could, "and besides, that wasn't why I wanted to talk to you." He plastered an entirely insincere smile on his face as she snorted at him. "If I can presume to drag the conversation back to the subject at hand--"

Sulven made a gesture that the people of several Eurasian Clans in their time would have considered sufficient grounds for the issuing of a personal challenge. "Don't be snide," she said. "It's unbecoming, especially when one is asking for help." Her eyes glittering dangerously, she leaned slightly towards him. "Though I feel obligated to mention that I'm rather annoyed at you for neglecting to tell me about these visions when they began. It implies a lack of trust that's rather insulting."

"I didn't tell you about the visions because you wouldn't listen to me about the chronopathy," he said tersely. "So I assumed you didn't want to get involved."

It was an excuse, really, and not a particularly good one. If he had actually tried to convey to Sulven just how serious the situation had become, he could have had her help in sorting it out ages ago--which was, of course, precisely why he hadn't tried. Being the recipient of her help was rarely a pleasant experience. But it was time he stopped making excuses--long past time, really. Sulven would help him figure out what was going on, what exactly he was sensing, and then he'd come clean with Dom. He'd come clean with everyone, once he had the details he needed.

"Bright Lady! I listened, Nathan," Sulven said instantly, looking displeased. "Don't you dare pretend I didn't hear you out. I merely told you that you were capable of handling it yourself if you put your mind to it."

"Clearly you were wrong," he said as dryly as he could. Watch your phrasing, Dayspring. The last thing he needed to do was offend her. Sulven could get vindictive when her pride was hurt. "And clearly it isn't a 'negligible chronopathic manifestation' if I'm having precognitive episodes as well, is it?"

"Not now, no," Sulven said, scowling darkly at him. "You should have told me when the connection grew more intense." Nathan was tempted to give that the response it deserved, but refrained. "As to whether you are manifesting precognition, I should be able to tell if I witness one of these flashes of yours."

He blinked at her, taken aback by her implications. "You think there's a chance it's not precognition?"

She gave him a smile of such poisonous sweetness that he bristled at her before he could help himself. "Well, we musn't exclude the possibility of stress-related hallucinations. Given the strain you've been under."

Knowing it was her attempt at a joke didn't make the sudden urge to throttle her fade any faster. "Funny. Very funny," he said flatly. "Can we please just--"

Sulven frowned suddenly, looking back over her shoulder at the kitchen window. #No climbing trees!# Nathan heard her 'shout', and followed her gaze in time to see Zara, outside in the backyard, jump away from the trunk of one of the larger oaks and shoot a contemptuous look in her mother's direction.

Clare and Nick were visible through the window, too. They were crouched on the lawn, their heads together as they examined something in the grass. Neither looked up as Zara flounced over and sat down with them.

Sulven looked away from the window, the corner of her mouth twitching. "The other two are attempting to communicate with some burrowing creature," she explained, as she turned back to him. She studied him for a long moment, chewing on her lower lip. "Wait," she said. "I think I begin to see--" Trailing off, she gave him what was, for Sulven, something very close to an understanding smile. "I do see. You think you're sensing a pattern to the events we've been witnessing. This cult, the attack in Cairo, Nur's legacy--"

Nathan laughed a bit uneasily. "More or less. The problem is, I don't know what to do about it. I don't have anything the others would accept as proof." There had been no more legacy site breaches since the one in Turkey, no other attacks on the XSE, but the lack of activity was deceptive, he was sure of it. All he had to do was listen to the timestream as it churned at the back of his mind, and he knew that the situation hadn't improved. In fact, he was fairly sure that it was getting worse.

During the worst of that week in the infirmary, he hadn't been aware of the timestream, or much of anything. Once he had been lucid again, though, that seventh sense had returned, flashes and all. There had been people in the room with him a few times, but he had used the handy excuse that his shields had fluttered. Buying time, again; by then, he'd made the decision to talk to Sulven when she got back.

There'd been no way to trick himself, though, no way to ignore that the disturbance in the timestream was increasing in magnitude. The flashes were showing him a world destroyed, a world remade, and he still couldn't make any sense of what he was seeing. The energy signature in Turkey was the only piece of evidence he had, but already Bishop and some of the others were brushing it off, pointing out that the teleportational technology could have been duplicated and sold to any number of buyers.

He needed more, and Sulven was the obvious choice to help him get it. There'd been a certain amount of masochism involved in telling her about this, of course. After all, this was the same woman who, five years ago, had pushed him to the breaking point over and over again until he'd demonstrated to her satisfaction that his increased psi-abilities didn't make him a danger to himself or others. The idea of putting himself through something like that again hadn't been appealing then and it was even less so now, after what he'd just been through rebuilding his shields. But he was all out of choices--

"Nathan?" Sulven leaned forward again, peering at him intently, and he blinked at her, aware he'd let his thoughts drift. She frowned, her eyes boring into him as if she were looking right through his shields, and he tried not to flinch. "You are not as recovered as you seem to be, are you?"

"I'm fine," he said automatically.

"Your concentration is lacking." Sulven looked like she wanted to say something more, but then shook her head slightly. "If you're correct about what you're sensing, this would be a unique case in my experience," she said abruptly, and given that her 'experience' constituted centuries, Nathan knew that was saying something. "I've never seen precognition and chronopathy come in tandem like this. They may be similar in effect, but as mutations they are quite different."

"My research has been telling me the same thing," Nathan said, gladly taking refuge in the technical discussion. "That, and that neither are typical late-emergence mutations."

Sulven shrugged casually. "Neither is chrono-variance, but you broke that trend." She started to play absently with Domino's miniature pepper mill. "I know some of the meditative techniques our precognitives preferred," she said after a moment. "They may help."

"I'm willing to try anything at this point." His voice broke and he stopped, his jaw clenching in disgust. Taking a couple of cleansing breaths, he then forced himself to go on, knowing that he needed to impress upon her that this was something very serious. "Sulven, whatever's coming - I don't mean with me, I mean what I'm sensing in the timestream - it's getting worse. Something bad is coming."

"I know," Sulven said softly.

"You do?" And he really should have been able to ask her that without sounding like a five year-old in need of reassurance, Nathan thought, grimacing as he looked away. He supposed he should also be encouraged that she was taking his word on the seriousness of the situation. Too bad that the situation didn't exactly lend itself to feeling encouraged--

"Of course. The other precognitives have been sensing this disturbance, remember, even if they've been unable to offer any helpful insight." Sulven made a face and put the pepper mill aside. "It's too large for them, I suspect. They see parts of it, but not the whole."

Nathan tried to laugh, but the sound that came out was rather appalling, and Sulven frowned at him. "If they're short-sighted, what does that make me?"

"Untrained. But we'll fix that," Sulven said dryly, and then was quiet for a long moment. "I feel it too, you know," she said, sparing Nathan from having to think of something to say to break the silence. He looked up at her, startled, and she raised a cautioning hand. "Only very vaguely. I'm chrono-variant, not chronopathic, but I've timeripped enough to have gained a certain sensitivity."

"That makes sense, I suppose," he said slowly.

"We should talk to Alex as well."

"Alex?" Nathan asked, taken aback again. He'd expected her to make some fairly exotic suggestions - this was Sulven he was talking to, after all - but telling him to go talk to his uncle? Alex was the Nexus of All Realities, true, but he was still adapting to being back in this one. Besides, from what Nathan knew of Alex's experiences after the explosion in Egypt had launched him into the multiverse, they were about equally challenged in the control department. For years, Alex had moved from reality to reality, thrown into a new life every time he died. It was hard to see how that could give him insight into whatever was happening here and now.

"The incident of his in the Danger Room comes back to mind," Sulven said, giving him a look that made it clear she thought he was being particularly thick. "I have to wonder about the vision he claims provoked it. Perhaps he became attuned briefly to the disturbance."

Nathan frowned. Back in January, Alex had arrived at the Tower one day in what could charitably be called an agitated state. He had commandeered a Danger Room and torn through a high-level combat simulation, exhibiting a level of power and control that had been--impressive, to say the least. Afterwards, he'd claimed to have been reacting to some sort of vision, disturbing images he thought were connected to this reality. But what he'd described had been as cryptic as any of the precog reports generated over the last six months, and Alex himself had admitted that the images might be from another reality entirely--

But Apocalypse had been part of Alex's vision. Nathan swallowed, feeling chilled. *I should have followed up on that. Why didn't I?* It hadn't been an option that day; everyone's primary concern, and rightfully so, had been Alex's well-being.

Afterwards. He could have done it afterwards. But then, so much had happened between then and now. The cult had come to light, the legacy sites had been raided--people had started to walk softly around him and whisper behind his back. Not to mention the fact that his own visions - and his problems with his shields - had started around the same time as Alex's little episode. If that wasn't an excuse for being a little distracted, he didn't know what was.

Except that he shouldn't be making excuses in the first place. "I don't understand how Alex could pick up on this," Nathan said as calmly as he could. "His powers aren't chronally based, as I understand them. Whatever this is, it's localized in our timeline. When Alex was--away, he was slipping through cross-time barriers, into entirely different realities."

"Perhaps," Sulven said with another shrug. "But as I just said, sufficient exposure gave me an awareness of the timestream's movements. Who's to say Alex didn't acquired something similiar in his travels? If this reality is indeed sliding towards some catastrophic branch point, he might be able to perceive that on some level."

"I don't know that we should bringing him into this," Nathan muttered, not quite sure why he was resisting the idea. It wasn't that he had some sort of misbegotten protective feelings towards Alex - the man might be family, but Nathan hardly knew him - but it just didn't seem right. Or fair.

"Can we afford to turn down any possible source of information?"

She had a point, damn it. "If we don't make any progress," Nathan conceded, but reluctantly. "Maybe." Only if they had to, he resolved. He might not have much of a relationship with Alex, but he owed Lily more than he generally liked to admit. The least he could do was try not to further traumatize her husband.

Sulven snorted. "When did you get so soft-hearted?" Shaking her head, she gave him a quizzical look. "You have spoken to Lily, at least?" He nodded, and she looked slightly mollified. "So, what do the chronographers say about this, then?"

"They're working on it." Nathan really didn't want to get onto the subject of chronography with Sulven. The Askani had considered shepherding the timeline a sacred duty, and Sulven had been very ambivalent about 'allowing' modern scientists to take up that burden. "Lily knows. I'm being a nuisance, she says." He was doing his best not to nag, or check up obsessively on what progress had been made in figuring out what the disruption in the timestream presaged. But it was so hard.

Sulven made a face. "We'll make better progress developing this connection of yours," she said firmly. Nathan just wished she didn't sound so much like she was trying to convince herself. "Science is no substitute for natural prescience. The key is discipline, Nathan, and I don't intend to let you--"

She kept talking, but her voice seemed to recede into the distance as something drew Nathan's attention back to the kitchen window, to Clare and the twins. As he watched, they sprang to their feet, almost in unison, and started to race down the lawn. Heading for the shoreline, maybe. Nathan watched them go, shivering as the brightness of the day started to dim, as if a cloud had passed over the sun.

But it wasn't a momentary shadow. The light continued to fade, everything taking on a grayish, unnatural hue. Something was wrong, Nathan thought, and he froze as he saw a fourth small figure there suddenly, running beside Clare. His heart began to thud sickly in his chest and instinctively, he started to rise from his chair. There shouldn't be a fourth child. Something was very wrong, there wasn't supposed to be--

Sulven was calling his name now, as if from an impossible distance, but he ignored her and reached out to the fourth child, trying to touch its mind. But there was nothing there, nothing to grasp. Only mirrors. The child skidded to a stop and turned toward the window as if it had sensed Nathan's attempt to make contact.

It had no face. Only a circle of burning red-gold light that flared outwards as it turned toward him, light that swelled into immensity and paled until it was like looking into the sun--

Blinded, Nathan staggered backwards, whimpering as pain stabbed through his skull. His knees buckled and he fell, barely registering the impact with the floor.

"Nathan!" Strong hands framed his face, and he tried in vain to wrench away as frantic thoughts exploded against his. "Listen to me, Nathan," the voice said fiercely. "Listen to my voice, little brother. Come back."

The light vanished all at once, and Sulven was there, crouching in front of him. Full awareness of his surroundings returned in increments, and he realized he was sitting on the kitchen floor, his chair overturned beside him. His chest hurt, like iron bands squeezing around his ribs every time he tried to breathe.

"Just breathe," Sulven murmured, wide-eyed and pale as she watched him. He'd frightened her, Nathan thought dazedly. That was strange. Sulven had laughed in Nur's face at Akkaba. She didn't get frightened. "Don't try to talk for a moment."

His shields had cracked. Again. It had to have been the vision that had done it--it couldn't just be a matter of concentration, not when his shields were so much stronger. Still feeling as if he were starved for oxygen, Nathan closed his eyes and tried to seal the breach in his defenses. Hopefully he could. He didn't think he could handle having to rebuild his shields from the ground up again, not this soon.

"You were seeing it clearly," Sulven said, sounding almost bewildered. "You slipped into a proper trance-state as I spoke to you, but then it seemed to break. Violently. I don't understand." She took him by the shoulders, giving him a little shake. "It was precognition, Nathan, do you understand me? I could tell that much, but something interfered--"

"It was--what I saw," Nathan whispered as the gap in his shields began to heal itself as he poured energy into it. Just a small crack. The patch would hold. "There was a fourth child. His face--" His eyes snapped open as he heard his daughter's panicked thoughts. He tried to get to his feet but couldn't quite manage it. By that time she was already bursting into the kitchen.

"Daddy!" Clare ran to him and he put an arm around her instinctively, cursing himself for not having realized at once that she would have sensed this.

"It's all right," he tried to soothe her.

"It hurt my eyes!" she said almost in a wail, clinging to him.

Nathan winced and stroked her hair with his free hand. "It's all right," he said as reassuringly as he could. "It's gone now." Looking up, he saw the twins standing in the doorway. "Are you two okay?" he asked. Sulven seemed to recall then that her children were there and gave them each a brief, measuring look. Whatever she saw seemed to satisfy her, but Nathan waited for them to answer.

"I guess," Nick said, clearly upset but struggling not to show it. "Clare's right. It was really bright."

"It was funny," Zara pronounced, looking intrigued. Sulven frowned at her, and the girl made a face. "It felt funny," she corrected herself. Then her eyes brightened. "Can we see it again?"

"No, you can't," Nathan said vehemently, horrified at the thought of what he could have done. All three of them were coming along well with their shielding, but this sort of backlash could have sent them into psionic shock. This couldn't be allowed to happen again.

"Sulven, I've got to get this under control," he said, holding his daughter close as she continued to shake.

***

She'd sensed as soon as she'd pulled into the parking garage that Nathan was home, although his presence on the link was subdued. Even so, when she got upstairs and let herself into the apartment, Domino was surprised to find him curled up peacefully on the couch, reading something that was either a Tom Clancy novel or the dictionary, to judge by the size of it.

"I shouldn't have laughed at Bishop, I see," she said, smiling at the unlikely scene. Closing his book, Nathan sat up and gave her a questioning look. "He told me you'd taken the afternoon off," she explained as she hung up her coat. "I thought he was trying to make a joke."

Nathan smiled back a bit uncertainly, and she could tell by the way he rubbed his eyes that he'd been squinting again. He was ridiculously stubborn about wearing his reading glasses, but she preferred to save her energy and only argue with him about the really significant things. Not that picking her battles ever guaranteed success, of course.

"I didn't actually take the afternoon off," he confessed. Setting her briefcase down on the kitchen table, Domino came over and sat down beside him on the couch. He reached out and put the book - a Clancy novel after all, she saw - on the coffee table. "Sulven left about an hour ago."

"Oh." Domino ran a hand through her tousled hair. She hadn't had it this short in years and didn't really like the way it looked, but it was more practical. "You two have certainly been spending a lot of time together lately. Anything I should know?" It was a question she should have asked before this; Sulven and Nathan could stir up so much trouble when they put their minds to it, and forewarned was forearmed.

Nathan snorted softly. "Don't worry," he said, leaning back against the cushions with a muffled groan. "We've been working, that's all."

He looked tired, Domino thought, pursing her lips. Not that he had looked anything but tired through all of this, but lately he'd seemed to be improving. She still thought he had gone back on duty too quickly, not given himself enough time to rest after the ordeal of rebuilding his shields, but he hadn't been what she would call responsive to her concerns.

"Working on?" she pressed after a moment, not willing to let it go.

"Me, actually. Lucky, lucky me."

"Your shields?" Domino asked, but regretted the question as soon as it was out of her mouth. If he told her he was having problems again--Her stomach twisted at the thought, but she told herself harshly to settle down. Charles and Jean had both tested Nathan's shields - Cecilia hadn't let him out of the infirmary until he had passed muster - and for all she knew, Sulven was just helping him reinforce them further. Which would be a good thing, even if it was Sulven doing it.

"They're holding up," Nathan said easily, and if there was any defensiveness on the link, she couldn't tell. "I just have to stay on top of it."

Domino leaned back into the couch, closing her eyes briefly. "You 'just' have to stay on top of it," she said heavily, really wishing now that she hadn't brought it up. He had promised he'd tell her if he started having trouble again, and she ought to take him at his word. Sheer perversity made her continue, though. "'Just' for every moment of the rest of your life, you mean."

She heard him sigh. "In a pedantic mood, are we? Yes, for every moment of the rest of my life. What is, is."

It was enough to make her sit up straight and glare at him. "You just had to say that, didn't you?" she said balefully, looking around for something handy to hit him with. The book would work, maybe. "I'm in no mood for the same old philosophical platitudes."

He smiled again, almost apologetically this time. "It slipped out."

"Well, next time try engaging your brain before opening your mouth," Domino said peevishly. Still smiling, he just watched her, that tired, vaguely sad expression lingering on his face, and Domino let her breath out with a hiss. "Don't look at me like that," she muttered, sliding across the short distance that separated them and wrapping her arms around him, letting her head rest against his shoulder as she settled into a more comfortable position. "I'm allowed to snap at you, just like you're allowed to be irritating. It's in the rules."

He kissed the top of her head. "Did I say anything?" he inquired gently. The link was vibrating softly, but there was a barely perceptible hollowness to the soothing thoughts he was projecting at her, a sure sign of fatigue deeper than what he was letting her see.

"You didn't need to," she grumbled, taking a deep breath and trying to relax. It would be so easy to let it go, she thought, to just enjoy being here with him. But there was too much that they'd been avoiding, things that probably needed to be said.

"Dom? What is it?"

She hesitated, then shrugged. "There are times I haven't been quite fair to you," she said slowly. Time to lay some of her own cards on the table, maybe. She was getting tired of interrogating him, and besides, she could hardly expect him to be open with her if she didn't reciprocate. "You know that I think you like to avoid dealing with how much trouble you have with your powers--"

Nathan gave a choked noise that was probably supposed to be a laugh. "Actually, no, I never picked up on that."

"Shut up," Domino commanded, squelching the urge to swat him. "I'm trying to confess something here. Let me finish." He mimed his lips being sealed, and she poked him in the ribs, hard enough that he grunted. "The problem is, I'm a hypocrite, because I like avoiding the subject too."

He blinked at her, clearly taken aback. "Dom, don't be so hard on yourself. It's not--" He stopped, his sense of self-preservation apparently kicking in, but not before the link let her sense exactly what he hadn't said.

"My problem?" she asked angrily, pulling away from him and sitting up straight again. "Damn it, Nate."

He opened his mouth, then stopped, clearly thinking better of whatever he'd been about to say. "I didn't mean it that way," he muttered finally, somehow managing to look both chagrined and annoyed.

"Oh?" Domino demanded testily, and he flushed. "We have a life together, a child together. Your problems are my problems, remember?" The tempation to keep ranting at him was almost irresistible, but she knew that if she wanted this conversation to go any further she needed to settle down. He'd shut her out in an instant if her anger started to erode his shields, and frankly, she'd want him to. "I mean that, Nate," she went on more calmly. "But sometimes I just--hell. It scares me, all right? You know that if you ask for help, I'm there, but when it comes to this, part of me doesn't actually mind when you don't ask."

He didn't respond for a long moment. "I know you've never been comfortable with my powers," he said at last, his voice carefully neutral. "I know it's been harder since Akkaba, too."

"There have been times I've wished that you had burned yourself out during the Merge," Domino admitted, and bit her lip as Nathan's eyes widened. "Or at least that your powers hadn't come back--well, like this."

"Because they came back 'like this', I don't have to worry about the T-O virus getting out of control again. Ever," Nathan pointed out tightly, anger slowly building in his voice as he spoke.

If only it had been just his telekinesis that the Merge had augmented, Domino thought wistfully. That would have wonderful. "But because they did come back like this," she said wearily, "you can also lose your mind if your shields fall apart on you. Double-edged sword, Nate."

Nathan sighed heavily, rubbing his eyes again. "Point, I suppose," he said, the anger gone. "But it's a compromise that still seems pretty good to me. Dom, I know it can't have been pleasant for you to see me like that, but--"

"Not pleasant?" she yelped, but clenched her hands into fists and took a deep, shuddering breath, telling herself to settle down as he leaned away from her, his eyes widening slightly. "Nate, how the hell can you be as strong a telepath as you are and be so blind sometimes? Talk about a talent for fucking understatement!"

The urge to reach down the link and force him to share what she'd felt as she had sat outside the shielded infirmary room, unable to do anything but watch and hope he'd find his way back out of the madness, was almost overpowering. There were so many other memories she could share, too, ones that were just as painful. Like the time he'd had pneumonia and been too sick to manage the concentration necessary to hold his shields, or the day when his telepathy had first come back and she'd found him lying on the nursery floor, so lost in what he was sensing that he had been deaf to the anguished screams coming from Clare's crib. There were more, and for a split-second, she relived them all.

"What do you want me to say, Dom?" Nathan asked, sounding distressed, and she realized abruptly that the link was wide open. He must have shared her little romp down memory lane after all.

Maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. "Nothing," she said softly and moved towards him tentatively, not sure of her welcome. But he immediately put an arm around her shoulders, drawing her closer, and she relaxed against him with a sigh. "There's nothing to say. You can't promise me that this won't happen again, and I won't promise you that I'll be okay with it when it does." The sensation of being helpless was one she'd always loathed, more than just about any other. Sitting back and watching was utterly foreign to her personality, especially when it came to the people she cared about. But life tended to be a bitch that way, she'd noticed.

"I'm sorry," Nathan muttered hesitantly, and hearing those particular words from him was shocking enough to make her breath catch in her chest.

"What?" Domino asked incredulously, looking up at him, and he shrugged, not meeting her eyes. "Shit," she sighed, leaning up and kissing him lightly. "I'm not angry with you, idiot. Well, I'm still not impressed with how you chose to deal with it this time, but you promised me you wouldn't be this stupid again."

He looked at her this time, too many conflicting emotions on his face for her to decipher his expression. "I won't, Dom, I swear. And I'm going to do everything I can to make sure you never have to go through this again," he said almost grimly, and then took her face between his hands and kissed her, rather more seriously than she'd kissed him.

His intentions were clear as crystal on the link, and Domino froze for an instant, surprised. They'd hardly touched each other since he'd gotten out of the infirmary and she'd been afraid to initiate anything, worried that it might be too much of a strain on his shields. But he didn't seem to be worried, and who was she to turn down an invitation?

"When did you tell Jean we'd pick up Clare?" she asked a little breathlessly as they came up for air. Her body was already telling her that yes, this was exactly what was called for at the moment, and to hell with avoidance being a bad thing.

"After dinner." Nathan said with a perfectly straight face. "Although I'm sure Jean wouldn't mind if we were a little late."

"Perfect," she said with a grin, and bounced off the couch, pulling him with her. He tried to reach for his cane, but she shook her head. "You don't need that to get from here to the bed, Nate. Just lean on me."

For an instant, he gave her a look that seemed almost pained, but it was gone again so quickly that she could almost tell herself she'd imagined it. "You don't get to laugh at me if I fall on my face, then," he said wryly.

"Oh, come on. I wouldn't do that."

"Yes, you would."

They managed to make it into the bedroom without incident, however, and things started to progress rather nicely at that point. She'd pay close attention to the link, she told herself as she pulled her turtleneck over her head and let it drop to the floor. If I sense anything that makes me think his shields are giving out, cold shower time it is--

***

When Nathan slipped out of the meditative state for the fourth time in less than fifteen minutes, Sulven sighed inwardly, surrending to necessity. Something was clearly interfering with his concentration. If they were going to accomplish anything this morning, that something needed to be resolved.

"All right, little brother," she said, righting herself in the air and floating down to sit on the padded floor of the meditation room. It was one of several in the Tower, and she had requisitioned it - 'booked' it as the young woman in Administration had put it - only until noon. She and Nathan both had other commitments later today, so she was loath to waste what time they had. "This is not doing any good. What's distracting you?"

Nathan didn't answer for a moment, only continued to hang in the air in that awkward horizontal position he'd been forced to adopt for meditation when it had become clear that he would not get any further range of motion back in the leg he had nearly lost at Akkaba. She waited with her best facsimile of patience, and finally he muttered a curse, lowering himself to the ground and sitting up.

"Nothing's distracting me," he said restlessly, tugging at the collar of his uniform as if it were chafing him. "I just didn't sleep well, that's all."

"A vision?" Sulven asked sharply, ready to express her displeasure in forceful terms if his answer was yes. Their efforts were doomed to failure if he kept things from her, and he'd specifically promised to give her as full a description as he could manage of each precognitive flash he experienced.

"No," Nathan said quickly, meeting her eyes, and she relaxed slightly as he opened his shields for a moment and let her see that he was telling the truth. "The timestream's actually quieter today. I haven't had a flash since that one on Tuesday."

"What's interrupting your sleep, then? You can't expect to make any progress unless you're well-rested," Sulven said, mentally reviewing that last flash. He had seen the Academy under aerial attack, but he'd been unable to identify the attackers. She'd failed in that as well, even though she'd managed to tap into the vision as it hit him and witness it through his eyes almost from the beginning. No matter, though; it was more information to be processed, more details to aid in the construction of the greater picture.

The smile he gave her was tight and unamused. "Sleep is good--check. I'll keep that in mind." He laid back down and closed his eyes, starting to levitate again. #I'll concentrate harder, too,# he sent. #So let's get back to work.#

Sulven rolled her eyes at him. Stubborn could be a useful character trait, of course - she would be the last to deny that - but even after all these years, she still found Nathan's peculiar brand of sheer intractability impressive. "Ignoring the problem won't make it go away," she pointed out calmly.

"It's not a problem."

"No?" she inquired, watching him closely on the telepathic level as he tried and failed to compose his thoughts. His appearance on the astral plane was fuzzy, as if there were several different images of the steady golden presence he should be, all overlapping. Delicately, using only the barest flicker of power, she slipped in past his defenses and knocked him even further off balance. He crashed back to the floor with a grunt, and she smiled sweetly. "Seems like a problem to me," she said as he pushed himself back up to a sitting position, breathing hard and glaring at her.

"Fine," he growled, slamming all of his shields up at once. Sulven seized the opportunity to test them, and was quite pleased at how solid they felt; her probe, sharp as it was, hadn't even penetrated their surface. "It's a problem. Happy?"

She uncrossed and crossed her legs again, then let her hands rest lightly on her knees. "Tell me, then," she invited, projecting subtle encouragement and the impression that she was open to whatever he had to say.

"I just--" He stopped, cursing again, and rubbed at his bad knee for a moment, his expression moody. "I don't know how I'm going to tell Dom about this. The visions, all of it. I don't know how she'll handle it."

This was the great distraction? Sulven raised an eyebrow, more amused than irritated. She should have realized; in the time they'd been working together on this, Nathan had steadfastly avoided the subject of whether he had told or planned to tell anyone else about his visions. "I have a simple answer for you," she said lightly, wondering why he insisted upon making these things so complicated. "Don't tell her."

"Sulven, I can't keep lying to her," Nathan said, giving her a disgusted look.

"Don't be ridiculous. How are you lying to her?" she asked, her amusement only growing as she sensed his ill-disguised ambiguity on the subject. He was trying to convince himself, not her, of the need to tell Domino about his visions. It was a constant fascination to see how much he had been influenced by the peculiar morality of this era, Sulven reflected. If he'd only adhere to what experience and the Sisterhood had taught him, he'd be far less beset by emotional conflict.

"A lie of omission is still a lie."

"And sometimes a lie is necessary," she countered, her patience beginning to ebb. The more he became obsessed with such peripheral issues, the less energy he had to devote to the real problem he was facing. "You know that as well as I do. Do you really think she can handle the truth?"

Nathan gave her a hard look. "That isn't my decision to make."

She laughed scornfully. "You're being disingenuous," she told him. "Truth is something you choose to share, if you possess it. And like any choice, it can do harm as well as good." Twining one of her braids around her finger, she stared back at him steadily, unblinking. "Can Domino do anything to help you with this? No. The truth will make her uneasy, and then it will make her angry. Why do that to her?"

Nathan was absolutely still for a moment. "I really think we should get back to work now," he said finally, breaking eye contact.

Sulven smiled faintly, knowing she'd reached him. Still, there was nothing wrong with driving the point home. "You might consider how much of your burden you should expect her to carry," she said. She was quite fond of Domino, actually, although she knew the feeling wasn't reciprocated. Still, Domino would trust her at her back in a fight, and that was what mattered. "You shouldn't be selfish, Nathan. She already struggles with what you've become."

"What I've become?" Nathan snapped in sudden agitation that created just enough of an opening in his shields for Sulven to see, yet again, how much he disliked what he'd become. His fury at his physical limitations, his frustration with the visions--his fear of his powers. It was all there in that instant, laid out in figurative black and white.

As always, it made her feel rather tired. "You still don't see it," she said patiently, baffled once more by this tendency of his to focus on only the negative effects of the changes forced upon him by the events at Akkaba. She was far from a natural optimist herself, but his fixation seemed perverse. "Perhaps when you master this new ability, you will." Maybe. When he started to understand how much he would be able to do with it--

"If I master it, you mean," he said tensely. Before she could point out that he wouldn't if he persisted in thinking like that, he stiffened, one hand going to his temple and an expression of pain twisting his features. "Oath," he gritted out, his eyes widening.

"Focus," Sulven said immediately, sliding across the mats to his side. She took his head in her hands, forcing him to look up at her. "What do you see?" she said firmly, slipping in through his defenses once more as they began to waver under the stress of the precognitive vision.

"An office," he said, his voice going flat. "People in XSE uniforms." He was trembling slightly--fighting the urge to pull away, she knew as she tried to link with him and see the vision through his eyes. They'd had some success with the meditative techniques they had been practicing together; he was becoming increasingly able to segment his consciousness, to remain aware of his physical surroundings and communicate with her while he was in the midst of a vision. But he was fighting her this time, more than usual, and she didn't dare try and force her way in.

"What are they doing?" she prodded, hoping that if he focused on the visual details, he'd leave her an opening.

"They're--dead." His voice shook as he went on. "There was an explosion--"

"Hold it in your mind, as we practiced," she said, using a deft mixture of telekinesis and telepathy to manipulate his neural activity, to keep him in that moment of precognitive awareness. She'd been taught to do this a very long time ago, but the precognitive she'd assisted as an acolyte had been both more practiced and nowhere near as strong as Nathan. There was something interfering with his precognition - that much, she'd concluded after their first session together - yet she still couldn't identify the problem.

"Details," she grated, beginning to tremble herself as the strain started to build. "Focus on the details you see. Let them tell you where you are--"

At the first, scorching touch of feedback, she instantly released him - at that point, persisting would only have succeeded in harming both of them - and pulled clear of the partial psi-link. Nathan slumped, gasping in obvious pain.

"I couldn't hold onto it," he said, his voice shaking. "I tried--"

"You're improving," Sulven said as calmly as she could, projecting soothing thoughts that she sensed him reject violently. "You can't expect to master this overnight," she added more forcefully.

He gave a gravelly laugh, rubbing his eyes. "How much time could I possibly have, Sulven?"

Sulven grimaced, unable to deny that he had a point. The time frame before these visions came to pass could not be indefinite. They were being provoked by events that were happening now, altering the course of the timestream. If they didn't track the source of the disturbance down soon, what hope did they have of repairing the damage?

But as much as Nathan truly wanted to get the information necessary to act, and she knew that he did, the unfortunate fact was that he was still resisting, fighting both the visions and her. Sulven bit her lip, pondering the problem yet again. Her experience lay in the how of such things. She was beginning to think that Nathan's problem laid in the why.

"It's a secondary mutation," she said, thinking aloud. "Obviously stemming from the Merge. It must be related to what you did to the timeline at Akkaba."

"I don't remember what I did," Nathan said, too quickly and without meeting her eyes. His voice was sharper than it should have been, betraying something verging on alarm, and Sulven's eyes narrowed. "I've told you that before."

"I know," she said thoughtfully. They had rarely spoken about the specifics of the battle at Akkaba, but the subject had come up a few times, often enough for Sulven to realize that he preferred not to talk about it. Perhaps that was a normal reaction to such a traumatic event, but yet--"Sharing your mind with several billion people will play tricks with your memory," she made herself say when his nervousness only grew more overt. "So will a fractured skull."

All true, of course. But the simplest explanation wasn't always the correct one.

***

The XSE's offices here in Amman were - had been, Scott corrected himself grimly - quite small, staffed by a mere handful of officers. Detachments like this were meant to establish an XSE presence in places where a base wasn't warranted, and this one had constituted more of a token presence than most. Why someone had considered it an attractive target, Scott didn't know, but he certainly intended to find out.

He picked his way through the blown-out offices, careful to avoid the spots that had been roped off. The ranking officer among the local emergency crews that had responded to the explosion was worried about the stability of the floor. If Scott hadn't assured him that there was a pair of teleporters standing by to pluck anyone out of trouble, he'd probably still be out there arguing with the man, and the forensics team would be sitting on their hands instead of working.

The explosion had happened just after nine A.M. local time, when every member of the detachment had been in the office. Planned for maximum damage, most likely. There'd been no deaths, but all six officers were in the local hospital, two in serious condition, and four civilians who'd been walking by on the street outside had suffered minor injuries from flying debris. The wounded would be taken care of shortly, at least; he'd requested two healers from the Tower, and they should be here within the hour. Just a question of finding out what the hell happened, now, Scott thought, and looked up as Nathan came out of what had been the detachment commander's office, frowning.

"Anything?" Scott asked neutrally. Nathan had shown up out of the blue a few minutes ago, without calling ahead from the Tower to say he was coming. You'd think he could have waited and brought the healers with him.

Giving him a distinctly unfriendly look, as if he'd picked up on Scott's train of thought, Nathan shook his head. "Nothing," he said curtly, his gaze moving restlessly across the floor in front of him as if he was trying to figure out the easiest path through the debris. "It's not like we're dealing with the aftermath of a battle here. With something sudden and unexpected like this, there's not much chance of useful telepathic residue."

*Then why are you here?* Scott wanted to ask, but didn't. If there'd been a possibility of picking up on something helpful, it would have made sense for Nathan to be here - he was marginally better than both Sulven and Jean at reading echoes in the astral plane - but he must have known they were dealing with a sudden explosion of some sort before he'd left the Tower.

Nathan's jaw clenched. "I don't have to explain myself to you," he said, levitating himself smoothly over the debris and descending onto a clear patch of floor closer to where Scott was standing. "I'm here to assess the situation."

Before Scott could do more than stiffen at the coldness in Nathan's voice, the lieutenant commander in charge of the forensics team emerged from another blown-out doorway, a look of grim satisfaction on his soot-smudged face. "We've found the center of the explosion," Bryan Sale said briskly. One of the many network members who'd joined the XSE at its inception, he was a slight, dark man in his early thirties with beta-level enhanced senses and a genius for forensics. "Definitely the mailroom. I'm going to work on the hypothesis that we're dealing with some sort of explosive package."

"Any sign of that teleportational signature I told you to look for?" Nathan asked immediately, focusing on Sale. His voice was steady, but he wasn't hiding the urgency behind the question very well. Scott frowned darkly, beginning to understand what was going on here.

Sale shook his head. "There are no residual energy signatures at all," he said, frowning. "Which makes me wonder what sort of explosive we're dealing with here, because if it wasn't a plasma charge or something similar there really should be more structural damage." He gave the main office a once-over, the look in his eyes measuring. "I really don't know what happened here," he said, sounding a little surprised at his own admission. "But I'll figure it out."

He turned and went back into the mailroom without another word, and and Scott shook his head quizzically. Sale had always been overly abrupt. Reminding himself that there were more pressing issues here than his forensic chief's eccentricities, Scott turned back to Nathan, deliberately keeping his voice low.

"Assessing the situation. Nice euphemism," he said disapprovingly. "You expected them to find the energy signature from Nur's teleporter, didn't you?" Nathan didn't respond, and Scott gritted his teeth, holding hard to his self-control. "Did you actually have any evidence for thinking that, or is it just the fact that we're dealing with another Middle Eastern facility that set you off?"

Nathan paled, his eyes flashing angrily. "Don't be so flonqing condescending," he almost hissed. "If you had any idea--"

"Then give me one," Scott said fiercely, ignoring the flash of indignation that crossed Nathan's face at being interrupted. What he really needed was to have some sense shaken into him, but things hadn't gotten to the point where Scott was willing to try something that drastic. Yet. "Really, I'd like to know why you're so sure that all these different incidents are connected. And I know I'm not the only one who'd like an answer to that question."

"Of course you're not," Nathan snapped, a little too loudly, and the members of the forensics team working in the main office started to very noticeably avoid looking in their direction. "It's turned into quite the little game for all of you, hasn't it? Let's guess what paranoid idea Nathan will come up with next--"

Scott folded his arms across his chest. "Nice try," he said, letting his voice harden even further but keeping the volume low. He was not going to let this turn into a shouting match. "But it's been a long time since the days when I'd back off just because you flashed some attitude at me."

"You don't understand," Nathan said. But there was less anger behind the words this time, and more uncertainty. He glanced away, a strange helplessness twisted his features as he looked around at the devastated offices. "I know I haven't come up with any real evidence yet, but I can't not follow this up, Scott. Not when it's Nur--"

"Nathan, look at me," Scott said firmly. Amazingly, Nathan obeyed, and Scott found himself on the receiving end of a confused, impatient look that was more than slightly reminiscent of how Nathan looked as a child when he was struggling with something but was bound and determined he wasn't going to ask for help. The thought made Scott soften a little. "Even if you're right," he went on more gently, "even if this is all connected, it's not Nur. Apocalypse is dead." He managed a wry smile. "Very dead, actually. You might not remember blowing him apart on the molecular level, but I was there, and it was one hell of a show."

Nathan took a deep breath, his shoulders rising and falling as if he was trying to shake off tension. Some of the color returned to his face. "I know. I know Nur's dead," he said. "I probably shouldn't have come. I just thought--" He stopped, trying vainly to smile. "Well, you know what I thought," he said, his wry tone sounding more than slightly forced. "I should get out from underfoot, I suppose--go do something useful. Maybe I'll head over the hospital and check on our people."

"That sounds like a plan," Scott said with an approving nod. He didn't cherish any illusions that he'd convinced Nathan to drop this, but if he had managed to get him to think about it a little more clearly, this conversation wouldn't have been a total waste. "I'll walk you out, if you want." It probably made more sense to wait down in the lobby at the ad hoc command post and let Sale and his team finish their work without him hovering.

"Thanks," Nathan said. He looked around at the offices once more, an indecipherable mixture of emotions crossing his face as he did. Then he turned and limped towards the door, and Scott followed, walking more slowly to keep pace with him.

Outside the offices, the halls were filled with a mixture of local emergency personnel and XSE officers checking over the rest of the floor. Cooperation seemed to be the order of the day, which was a relief. You could never tell when the local authorities were going to be friendly and when they were going to be hostile. The fact that the Jordanian government had signed the Cairo Accords didn't really guarantee anything. All it took was one local with a little power to throw a wrench into the works, especially if he or she felt that power was threatened by the XSE's presence.

"I'll let you know when the healers get to the hospital," Nathan said, sounding a little more like himself as they got into the elevator and he punched the button for the lobby. "I suppose we can probably scale back the roadblocks if we're dealing with an explosive package. The whole point of a flonqing mailbomb is that you don't have to be around when it goes off."

"A little early to make that call, maybe."

Nathan shrugged. "Sale knows what he's doing, but I suppose that keeping a few telepaths out doing wide-band scanning can't hurt." He smiled again, a little more convincingly this time. "You have to admit, we'll get less flak from the Jordanians if we keep the disruption to a minimum."

Scott couldn't help a chuckle. "You're not turning into a diplomat on me, are you?"

"Perish the thought."

***

He'd been so sure. So positive that the XSE office he'd seen devastated by an explosion in that vision had been the one in Jordan, and the idea that one of his visions had finally come to pass had been somehow comforting, as well as terrifying. But when he'd gotten to Amman, nothing had looked right. The layout of the office was somehow wrong, key details were missing--it wasn't the place he'd seen in his vision, and there'd been no evidence to link it to any of the key events that had played a role in the pattern so far.

It was a dead end. His telekinesis responded automatically to the swell of anger he felt at the thought, sending the final report on the bombing flying off his desk and across the room. The report hit the door with a satisfying thump and dropped to the floor, just as the door slid open to admit Sam.

Sam gave him a questioning look, then stooped to pick up the report. "Was this directed at me," he asked calmly, "or do ah just have bad timing?"

Nathan felt himself reddening. He'd been so caught up in his frustration over the report that he hadn't heard Sam coming. Not a good excuse for carelessness, Dayspring. Still, he'd have to have a talk with his temporary secretary about not letting people stroll in here without warning; Layla would never have made that mistake, but even a perfect secretary was allowed to take an occasional vacation.

"You could leave and come back in to find out," he retorted a bit defiantly. The report hadn't actually hit Sam, after all. He had nothing to feel sorry about.

"You know what they say about ignorance being bliss," Sam said with a grin that made him look closer to his apparent age than Nathan could remember seeing him in quite a while. He ambled over and sat down in the chair on the other side of Nathan's desk, leafing idly through the report as he did. "Oh, ah get it now," he said, giving Nathan a knowing look.

"What do you get, Guthrie?" Nathan asked coldly, almost certain he wasn't going to like the answer. Sam's posture was giving him away; he always held himself a certain way when he knew he was about to step in it but wasn't going to let that stop him.

"You're still obsessing over that bombing in Jordan." Nathan straightened in his chair, levelling a warning look at his one-time student, but Sam went on in that same light tone that didn't quite manage to disguise the hint of concern in the words. "So you're trying to kill the, uh, message." He laid the report down on the desk, just out of Nathan's easy reach.

Nathan eyed him malevolently. If only he'd been more careful of what he'd said and how he'd acted in Amman--but what was, was, and he was not having this conversation. "Can I kick you out of my office yet, or did you actually want something?" he inquired as levelly as he could.

Sam leaned back in his chair, shrugging. "Ah wanted to talk to you about getting the new rapid-reaction teams some arctic training time," he said. That grin was back, although it was more wry and somehow older this time. "But if you'd rather blow off some steam by trying to throw me out of here, feel free."

Now he was beginning to wish he'd been a couple of seconds slower in sending that report flying. "When did you turn into such a smartass, boy?" he asked acidly, trying to think of how to make Sam go away with a minimum of effort. He was too tired to put on a convincing show of disinterest here, and Sam had always been too good at 'encouraging' him to let things slip.

"Ah learned from the best," Sam said, but the amusement was fading from his face, replaced by one of those too-serious looks that always made Nathan uneasy. Sam rarely let things go when he looked like that. "Anyhow, ah was telling the truth about wanting to set up a training exercise. But ah'd be lying if ah didn't admit to an ulterior motive or two."

Nathan drew in a sharp, aggravated breath. "What, are you and Dana tag-teaming me now?" When he'd teleported Nate and Alison home last night, Dana had started fussing over him as soon as he'd walked in the door. It had taken him nearly a half-hour to extricate himself. "I'm fine, Sam. Really. My shields are back in order, and Dom is rationing out my pills so that I don't kill myself. There's nothing to worry about."

"So why do you still look like you aren't sleeping?"

Had Sam really come in here intending to take the conversation in this direction? Nathan wondered irritably. Surely he hadn't given him that much of an opening with the flung report. Sam had seen him lose his temper much more explosively than that.

"I'm just tired," he said finally, but only because Sam was still sitting there watching him expectantly and clearly waiting for an answer of some sort. "Things piled up while I was in the infirmary. I've been trying to clear the backlog--"

"Ah see," Sam said, in a tone that made it clear he did nothing of the sort. "And was dashing off to Amman without clearing it through the CIC first part of clearing that backlog?"

All right, I've had just about enough of this-- Nathan gritted his teeth and turned his attention to his terminal, calling up the rapid-reaction training schedule. "Does it have to be arctic training, or will antarctic do?" he asked in the best 'all-business' voice he could manage. Sam had handed him this excuse to change the subject on a silver platter, and his only mistake had been not making use of it immediately. "Magnus is constantly inviting us to make use of his facilities."

Sam snorted softly to let Nathan know the manuever hadn't been lost on him, but he didn't try to change the subject back. "He still pushing for a tactical base down there?"

"Every single time I talk to him. I keep pointing out the political reality of why that would be a bad idea, and he keeps reminding me that the last time I didn't like reality, I changed it." Nathan rubbed his eyes as he peered at his terminal, wishing he hadn't forgotten his reading glasses at home again. Poring over that damned report had given him the beginnings of a headache. "When would you want to hold this exercise?"

"Ah'm not picky," Sam said equably, and Nathan nodded, studying the few openings in the training rotation thoughtfully. This would be workable, if he could get an okay from Magnus--which shouldn't be hard. "So," Sam said after another moment, just as calmly. "What did you think you were going to find in Amman?"

"Could we please drop this?" Nathan asked, unable to keep the frustration out of his voice. He really wasn't up to this sort of verbal sparring at the moment.

"Sure, we can drop it," Sam said with a slight smile. "If you're sure you don't want to talk about it."

A half-despairing laugh slipped out before Nathan could stifle it. "I'm getting to the point where I don't want to think about it," he said, and then immediately wished he hadn't as Sam shifted forward in his chair, studying him with a perplexed look on his deceptively young face.

"So why the pit-bull impression, then?"

It would be wrong to throw anything at Sam for his choice of words, Nathan tried to convince himself. Very, very wrong. "Because there is something to it," Nathan said irritably, looking back at his terminal as a way of avoiding Sam's eyes.

"What?" Sam asked. To give him some credit, there wasn't a trace of skepticism in the question.

Nathan looked up at him, raising an eyebrow. "If I could answer that question, people wouldn't be snickering behind my back about wild goose chases and paranoid fantasies, would they?" he asked, more bitterly than he'd intended

"Hey," Sam said sharply, his eyes flashing, and Nathan stared at him, taken aback by how stern his expression had become. "No one's laughing at you."

"Tell me another one," Nathan muttered, and Sam sighed.

"Ah just wish you'd talk to me. Or anyone," he said wistfully. "Ah don't like seeing you so stressed."

"Cheer up, Sam," Nathan said as nonchalantly as he could, giving Sam a smile that he hoped was at least a little convincing. "I've had my quota of breakdowns for the year. Besides, just because you can't go prematurely gray doesn't mean you should worry so much."

Sam sighed again. "Ah give up," he said dryly, spreading his hands wide in a helpless gesture as he rose from his chair. "The sooner the better for that training exercise, ah guess."

"I'll set it up and get back to you."

"Thanks. And just remember, ah'm here if you want to talk about this other business," Sam said, shooting an encouraging look back over his shoulder as he left the office.

"Thanks," Nathan murmured, and then closed his eyes. #Ms. Giordano,# he sent to the young woman sitting at Layla's desk, and sensed her startled surprise. #Next time, announce the visitor before you send them in, or the next desk you'll be sitting at will be somewhere in Siberia.#

Y-Yes, sir.

#And set up a green-level transmission to the New Lands for me. I want to talk to President Lehnsherr when he has a moment.#

With that, he broke the mental contact, leaning back in his chair with a sigh. The timestream growled softly in the back of his mind, and he closed his eyes again, hoping that Giordano got the channel open to Magnus relatively soon. A distraction would be nice, even if he had to compromise and listen to yet another lecture on how the New Lands could easily support an XSE tactical base, or worse yet, one on how tired he looked. The Master of Magnetism could be a flonqing mother hen when he put his mind to it.

***

"Afternoon, guys," Lily Summers said crisply as she strode into the conference room. Nathan looked up, almost smiling at her briskly imperious demeanor as she nodded first to him, then to Scott and Sam in turn.

She shielded well for a non-psi - he could remember how much she'd disliked learning, but she'd done a proper job of it - but to him, her determination to establish that she was the one in charge here was as clear as day. He didn't really object to her proprietary leanings, even when they extended to playing 'I'm the queen of the castle' with visitors to her lab. Although he was tired of getting summarily dismissed every time he asked for a progress report.

Patience had never been his strong suit. She should know that by now, he thought, paying little attention to the small talk as various members of Lily's staff arrived in the conference room. He did nod to Alice Epstein, a former network member he knew quite well. Another of Lily's people - Vasiljevs, Nathan told himself, pulling the name out of his memory after a moment - started to head in his direction with an armload of equipment, and Nathan moved his chair to give the man better access to the data jacks.

"Stan and Vic think they'll have the filters you asked for by three," Vasiljevs said, looking back over his shoulder at Alice as he started to set up the laptop computer and projector. "There was a problem with one of them. One of your parameters made the first test-drive explode."

"That's what I was hoping for, actually," Alice said, and although she was looking at Vasiljevs, not at him, Nathan got the distinct impression that she was suddenly very aware of him sitting right there listening. "Well, not hoping for, but what I thought would happen," she corrected herself, and then turned to Lily, adding something too quietly for Nathan to catch.

Nathan toyed with the idea of reading her mind for it, whatever it was, but only for a moment. Alice had earned a certain amount of consideration from him. He'd wait, hear what they had to say. Taking a deep breath and folding his arms across his chest, Nathan tried to clear his mind. He'd been dreading this meeting. The fact that Lily had initiated it meant that she had progress to report, that her people were closer to mapping out the timestream and pinpointing the disturbance, and as eager as he was to hear the details, he was apprehensive, too.

"Okay," Lily said forcefully as the last of her staff took their seats. "Let's get this show on the road. If you'll all open your folders--" Nathan blinked, but realized that someone had placed one on the table in front of him while he'd been lost in thought, "--you'll find the timeline Radek Droppa from Midnight produced for us."

'Midnight' was the Midnight Sun lab in the New Lands, the counterpart of the Midday Sun lab here in New York. Two sides of the same coin, Nathan thought. Although that expression had never made sense to him. The two sides of a coin were no less different for being part of the same object--and what the hell is the matter with me? Aggravated at himself, Nathan shook his head and focused on what Lily was saying. Nothing like waiting all this time for her results and then daydreaming through the briefing.

"--the only changes in this one from the one you were all emailed are that the incidents in Jordan and Switzerland were removed and there is a new entry for the synagogue destruction in Alsace. As was said in the email, any questions on real-life events go to Radek or Roger Marlowe and Louisa will send out clean copies today along with the rest of what we produce here."

Nathan gritted his teeth, ignoring the sidelong look he got from Scott when Lily mentioned Jordan. The less said about that particular incident the better. The fallout from that was why he hadn't so much as opened his mouth about the incident in Switzerland, despite what his instincts had been telling him. The timestream had been so unsettled, just before and after the raid on that bank--but he was more inclined to trust Lily's analysis than his feelings. Still, he'd feel better when that investigation made clear exactly what had been taken from the bank's vault. There had been some confusion with the records, apparently - unusual enough to raise a warning flag, given that they were dealing with a Swiss bank - and he still got uneasy feelings when he thought back on that day.

Uneasy feelings--for some reason, that made him think of Alex again, and what light, if any, his Nexus abilities might be able to shed on the problem. Nathan grimaced, trying futilely to put it out of his mind. The fact that Lily was standing right here certainly wasn't helping. She'd be furious with him if he insisted on dragging her husband into this, he knew; she'd been justifiably protective of him ever since he'd returned to this reality. But Sulven kept pointing out that they couldn't afford to leave any stone unturned, and as unwilling as Nathan was to take this particular step, he couldn't argue with her logic. Maybe he just ought to talk to Alex and get it over with--

"Jordan and Switzerland have stopped being our problem and can be considered yours," Lily said, smiling guilelessly at Scott when he frowned at her, probably for the inference that they'd ever been the Chronography group's problem to start with. "We were skeptical about their relevance from the start, you'll recall from our last get-together, but now I can give you a more precise reason why: the Alsatian synagogue destruction wasn't all we thought it was."

Nathan leaned forward in his chair, peripherally aware of Scott and Sam doing the same thing. Now they were getting down to it. Lily had said something vague about this in her last email, but had put him off when he'd asked for more details, saying they were still working on it. I swear she gets some kind of perverse thrill out of leaving me hanging-- Lily nodded to Alice, who took over.

"We had been operating on the premise that the synagogue destruction was part of the rash of anti-Semitic attacks that have been going on in Western Europe," Alice said, and Nathan knew, just from the look on her face, that he wasn't going to like where this was going. "According to the reports, it fit the pattern of those defilements in the geographic area - the only smashed windows were those depicting Jewish rites, the Torah scrolls had been removed from the ark and unrolled before they were burned, the graffiti and so forth and so on. Our field operatives verified this in their first report and the inventory we procured from the French police seemed to support that conclusion. But we were having a ton of problems trying to work that data into our schemes and it wasn't until our own agents drew up their inventory that we figured out why: we now believe that the destruction was staged to look like an anti-Semitic attack but was in fact an elaborate artifact retrieval."

An artifact retrieval. Fumbling with the folder, Nathan flipped through the pages until he found the inventory Alice had mentioned. Four entries were highlighted: a bronze sword, a collection of papyrus fragments, a set of metal jewelry and a manuscript dating to the twelfth century. He recognized all of them. From another list, one that had been burned into his memory years ago.

"What changed your minds?" Sam asked, and Nathan concentrated on keeping his expression impassive, on not reacting. On paying attention to Alice, even though he knew what she was about to say.

"Back in the old days we had a list," Alice replied. Nathan deliberately made eye contact with her, and she gave him a fractional nod before she continued, one that acknowledged that yes, she realized the significance and knew that he did too.

"A list of artifacts, events, people, and other bits that had to do with En Sabah Nur," she went on. "'Pandora's Box' we called it. It was a relatively small grouping - history's been anything but short of predictions of doom and gloom and we wanted to avoid false positives. But anything in the Box had been cross-referenced and triple-checked with whatever records we had from both future and past so that if any one of them was active in any way, we got suspicious. If two or more were in play, we called in the reserves and hunkered down for a crisis. Akkaba had about ten elements in motion. We destroyed eight of them during the battle and five inactive ones were removed in the course of events. That's thirteen down and the original Box had twenty-eight. We've added nine since then."

Almost automatically, Nathan started to scrawl notes in Askani, getting down everything that was known about the artifacts. Sulven kept encouraging him to do things like this, to turn what information he had into a visual form so that it had a better chance of sparking a connection.

The payprus fragments contained the only known records of the ritual practices of a Nur-cult in the Roman period. The manuscript was the account of a Byzantine merchant's travels in Egypt, including his description of the ruins he'd found while crossing the eastern desert. The pieces of metal jewelry were actually techno-organic weapons components. And the sword had supposedly belonged to Nur himself.

"So something on the new list that your intelligence produced is one of the two dozen extant parts of your Pandora's Box," Sam said, frowning. "And ah'm assuming that all of these items still have relevance even with Apocalypse dead, else you wouldn't be worried about them anymore."

Relevance--that was the question. The sword had a high monetary value for its age and workmanship, even setting aside its historical associations. There were a number of collectors interested in Nur's history who'd pay very well for the papyrus fragments. The weapons components were another matter entirely, though, and the manuscript was almost a roadmap--

"More than one something and yes," Alice said with a sharp nod. "The engineers in the room will tell you that rogue time streams are still unproven theory, but we can't afford to not keep the idea in mind. As for the Box, some of the items have more than one part and aren't considered active unless they're all in motion. The new inventory put things together like a jigsaw puzzle."

It could have been a simple theft, Nathan acknowledged to himself, but that didn't account for all the effort put into making it look like an anti-Semitic attack. Doing that hadn't hidden the theft, at least not for long. But it had hidden the fact that a specific set of artifacts was missing.

"Are these discrepancies the result of intentional obfuscation, carelessness, or genuine ignorance?" Scott asked.

"We don't know for sure," Lily interjected, giving Alice a pointed look. Nathan, catching the stray thought that slipped through her shields, had the sudden and bizarre urge to laugh. Yet another person worried about him going off half-cocked--why did he even bother trying to behave himself? "We're tempted to go with obfuscation - there's an Interpol agent whose involvement should be a red flag, but we're not sure what he knows."

"I want details," Nathan said steadily, adding to his notes. "Alice," he said, picking his target carefully. Alice was more likely to give him a straight answer, and had a better eye for matters relating to Apocalypse. "How bad is it?"

"Ten years ago, we would have been preparing for Convergence," she responded immediately, and Nathan knew she was right. If this many items from Pandora's Box had gone active at the same time ten years ago, every station chief in the network would have been convinced that the last showdown with Apocalypse was at hand. "Ladies and gentlemen, it means either we figure out how to shear this sheep or we're fucked."

It should be comforting that someone else was putting the pieces together in the same way he was. At this point, he'd take any allies he could find. But as grim as the atmosphere in the room had become, he wasn't encouraged. There was concern, but not enough. They'd look on this as a potential problem, he thought, something to be debated and analyzed and eventually dealt with. Not as the latest sign of a catastrophe waiting to descend on them.

"Pete," Lily said, breaking the silence, "put up the graphs of the last two revisions of our timeline, please?" Once the information she'd requested was up on the screen, she went on. "Before we get sucked into worrying about whether or not we're going to be reliving Akkaba, I want to revisit some of the methods behind the madness. It's important to emphasize the mechanics of what we've done because anything to do with En Sabah Nur is not brought up lightly and it's crucial that we eliminate every doubt that this is the proper path."

As Lily launched into a review of the work her lab had been doing, she gave him a direct, warning look. Nathan met her eyes levelly, feeling a flash of relief as he realized that she was taking this every bit as seriously as Alice was. She was just being herself, determined to wait until they had the complete picture, and to keep everyone on track until they did.

Lily soon turned the discussion over to another of her people, who started to explain the mathematical basis behind the tentative designation of the brewing crisis as a religio-cultural, rather than a political event. It sparked off a lively discussion that Nathan half-listened to, distantly surprised that Sam and Scott were getting so involved. Neither of them had ever shown quite this much interest in the specifics of how chronography worked before.

He wasn't going to take that as a hopeful sign, though. Not when there was so much reason for pessimism. Nathan stared blankly at the list of artifacts, trying to figure it out. The timestream was absolutely silent in the back of his mind, giving him no help at all. This might be a moment of revelation, but apparently it wasn't going to be a critical moment in the timeline. Oath, that's a depressing thought--

Nothing came as he stared at the list. It was every bit as clear a connection to Apocalypse as the teleportational signature had been, but it was pointing nowhere. Maybe the others were right, and he was trying to create a big picture out of all the little pieces because he wanted there to be one, because he couldn't believe these echoes of Nur were just coincidences--

No--no, flonq it! He fought to keep his expression composed, to keep himself from betraying his chagrin. There was a pattern; he knew that, in a way that went beyond logic. It was the one thing Sulven had managed to drill into his head; if he didn't believe in what he was sensing, if he didn't trust himself, he'd never make sense of it. He'd never see everything he needed to see.

There was something here. These artifacts were another piece of the pattern, and if the pattern went deeper than an attempt to undermine the XSE, to pick up the pieces of Nur's power and rule, then that only put the seal on his sense of impending disaster--

A string of silent, shocked profanity came from Lily's direction, and Nathan looked up at her sharply. She was already focused right on him, and he could read the ill-disguised worry in her eyes, even before she let him read her thoughts.

We may have a problem, she sent, and let him see what she was looking at. It was one of the filters Alice had been referring to at the beginning of the meeting, Nathan realized. No--not just a filter, he saw, sharing Lily's thoughts as he looked through her eyes. One of Alice's infamous Armageddon Test Drives, her theoretical worst-case scenarios.

And it looked very bad. It was showing something immense warping the timestream, something exerting an unimaginable amount of influence on the course of events. Something that was sending the timeline into a freefall towards disaster.

But the only thing the chronographers had even charted as having had such an intensely focused, dangerous effect on the timestream hadn't been a thing. It had been a person.

If you called En Sabah Nur a person.

He waited for a moment, until he was sure that his heart was going to keep beating. Only then did he answer her. #Are you sure that's what it is?# he sent back numbly, hoping Lily would mistake it for composure. He could see in her mind that there was no doubt that it was exactly what she thought it was, that these particular parameters were exactly what Alice had been experimenting with.

No, which is why I don't want to say anything just yet. This was supposed to be an extreme case, not anything to be worked with. There was caution in her thoughts, the usual scientific skepticism, but he detected more than a trace of anxiety as well. Perfectly understandable, he thought dully. If what the filter was telling them was true--

No. Nathan closed his eyes for an instant, holding hard to that denial. Apocalypse was dead--more than dead, really. Wiped out of existence. This couldn't be what it looked like. It just couldn't--

We had set it up to be beyond our least upper bound, Lily went on, and he felt her wonderment as she reflected upon how random a scenario this had been when Alice had run it. I'll look into it, but I'm not going to cause a panic until I know this isn't a fluke or an accident.

Nathan inclined his head slightly to her, and then pretended to pay attention to the conversation. She would check, and find out it was a fluke. Or an accident. His heart was hammering furiously in his chest, and he felt light-headed, almost dizzy. It had to be a fluke, he told himself again. An anomaly, a mistake--

It couldn't be anything else. It just couldn't.

to be continued...

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