Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

There was no telling when exactly she'd come to the decision, though she believed that it must have been brewing in her subconscious for quite some time. When the notion had hatched during her silent vigil just now, it had done so fully formed. She took it as an omen that she was meant to obey the impulse and, after all, it wouldn't make a difference in the end. Not for her, not for the people in the village above.

Trying to persuade herself that none of them had ever been meant to exist didn't help. If she truly believed it, why had she helped to safely deliver her tiny namesake? Why, over the years, had she healed countless injuries, saved lives even? Pima's, for one, and the thought of what would happened to the woman who had befriended her made her ache.

Had she truly had the right to set Major Sheppard on this course? If he succeeded… If he succeeded, every single person in this galaxy, in an infinite number of galaxies in all the timelines Charybdis had created, would wink out quietly without even knowing and be spared the horror that was inevitable if he failed. Those who had survived the cataclysmic birth of those timelines more than thirty years ago could tell of unimaginable destruction and loss of lives. But as terrible as it had been, what was to come if Major Sheppard failed would be infinitely worse. It had already begun. She could feel it in her bones. Perhaps even the doubts she was having were part of it.

And loitering here, wondering, fishing for reasons not to act, wouldn't improve the outcome. On the contrary. She-everybody-was running out of time. Charybdis was becoming unstable, a by-product of the entropy it had caused. The outward indicators seemed almost accidental; tremors like the one that had caused the rockslide in her cave, the unusual number of storms this past winter, even Pirna's pregnancy at a time when she should no longer have been able to bear a child. Internally, the signs were less inconspicuous; she felt, hour by hour and day by day, the erosion of the barriers between herself and her alternate versions. Holding on to herself and her sanity was getting increasingly difficult, as a myriad other consciousnesses pressed in on her mind like the weight of water onto a crumbling dam. When-not if-the dam burst, they'd all be swept away in a torrent of chaos. She'd seen all her futures, and too many of her alternates were already dying, while the original was about to face grave danger. Teyla couldn't be completely certain, but she became more and more convinced that, if any of the originals died, there would be no righting this.

Reaching out, her fingertips encountered the top of what had to be the city monitoring consoles. There would be a chair ahead, occupied by a dead technician. Another nameless memory, he; in fact, she couldn't even say who'd been on duty the day they all died. She gingerly made her way past the body. Then she was out in the hallway and crept along the wall, toes brushing the floor ahead so she wouldn't trip. At one point she stubbed against something soft, heard a whisper of fab- ric-somebody's clothes. A crane's step carried her over their owner. After that she encountered no more obstacles all the way to where the corridor opened out into a lounge where she had nearly fallen earlier.

He would be somewhere around here.

Bracing herself against the wall she got down on all fours and began to crawl, moving her hands in slow searching sweeps just above the floor. Suddenly she realized what it reminded her of, and she laughed-they'd played this when they were children; one of them would be blindfolded, the others would hide a treat or toy under a pot, and the blindfolded kid would have to find the pot by batting the ground witha cooking spoon.

Her laughter died abruptly when her fingers caught in a shock of matted hair. Holding her breath, she held on to one of the tresses, examined it carefully. It was a braid or rather, a tightly intertwined strand.

"Greetings, old friend," she whispered. "And I hope you'll forgive me for doing this."

From the pouch attached to her belt, she fished a hunting knife. A gift from her father, it had been hers for as long as she could remember, though it never had seen use such as this. Respect for the dead was something Athosian children were taught from early childhood, and what she was about to do went against everything Teyla believed in. The knife clutched in her right, she felt with her left: a shoulder, upper arm, forearm covered in threadbare material that was rotting away around the corpse. Dust and the peculiar musty odor of ancient death rose from it and made her sneeze. She found the cuff of the shirt and then the shriveled, leathery skin of a hand. It lay palm up and open, almost relaxed, its fingers curled slightly from dehydration. Clasping the knife even tighter and gritting her teeth, she grabbed one finger, hesitated briefly, and then cut it off, half expecting to hear a sudden scream of pain. There wasn't a sound, of course, apart from a gentle thud when the dead hand fell back to the floor. Only then she realized that, absurdly, she had kept her eyes scrunched shut.

Teyla blew out the breath she'd held, gently patted the body's chest. "Forgive me," she murmured again, stowed the knife and finger safely in the pouch, and returned to the control center.

At the dialing console she stopped, again wondering about the wisdom of this idea. What swayed her in the end was the certainty that she couldn't possibly make things worse. Her hand slid over the smooth surface of the console. In her mind's eye, she tried to picture the order of the glyphs, which was much harder than she'd have liked to admit. After all, she'd looked at it hundreds of times in the past, but all that wanted to materialize now was a confusing jumble of symbols.

Why hadn't she memorized their precise position?

Because she'd never seen the need, it was as stupidly simple as that.

Her fingers traced the layout of the console, struggling to remember. The glyphs weren't raised, as they were on a DHD, and all she felt were the smooth edges of the of the dialing panels. She only needed the one symbol. Only the point of origin, for if she was right, it wouldn't matter which Stargate she dialed, she'd always be taken to the place and timeline where her original was. If she was wrong-well, it wouldn't matter. Not that much, in the grander scheme of things. Her left hand hovered over one panel, and she was almost completely certain that this had to be the one. Nothing left but to try.

With her right, she dialed a random sequence of six symbols, listened to the reassuring noise of engaging chevrons as she went, and then pushed the seventh with her left. The seventh chevron failed to lock. It could mean one of two things. Either she was wrong about the point of origin, or the six coordinates she'd dialed before were not a valid Stargate address. Given the infinite number of possible combinations, the second option was more than likely, and it was unreasonable to expect that she would accidentally hit an address on the first attempt. She'd just have to keep trying, however-long-it took.

Hours later she felt a little less determined, but she doggedly dialed again. Eventually she was bound to find a viable address. When it happened at last it took several seconds to sink in. She'd pushed the six coordinates, heard the chevrons engage, pushed the point of origin, and moved to dial again so mechanically that she barely noticed the seventh chevron locking. It was the whoosh of the event horizon cascading out toward her that drove it home; she'd found her place to go.

And she'd have to hurry now.

Hand over hand, she guided herself along the console, onto the handrail along the gallery and down the stairs. As she reached the last step and ran out of rail, she hesitated for a moment, then caught the whisper of the event horizon and used it as a beacon to orient herself. Mere steps into that no-man'sland between the stairway and the Stargate she tripped over a piece of metal she'd never considered might be there. She pitched forward without time to brace herself and came down hard on more debris, pinning her right arm under her body. The snap of breaking bone was audible even muffled by her body and clothes.