James Axler - Janus Trap

Domi looked confused for a second, before she saw where the ex-Mag was looking and realized what he meant. “Ha, no—just doing a little exploring this morning,” she explained. “Haven’t had the time to put things back.”

Kane nodded, then he glanced back to Brigid and Grant before he sat down. In that moment, it seemed, a significant look passed between the three, and Domi wondered if they were mocking her. “You could join me sometime,” she said defensively, though she didn’t relish the thought of company on her morning jaunts.

Grant took the seat to the left of Shizuka, and a broad smile played across his face as he watched her sip from the teacup. “Miss me?” he asked as she placed the cup delicately back on its saucer.

“An infinitesimal amount, perhaps,” Shizuka allowed, turning to look at him. After a second, a smile broke across her face and her hand reached out to entwine with his beneath the table.

Kane took the seat on the other side of Shizuka. Brigid walked around the table and took the seat opposite Kane, leaning back and surveying the other denizens of the cafeteria.

“Aren’t you guys eating?” Domi asked, looking from Kane to Brigid. Neither of them responded, and she snapped her fingers to get their attention. They both looked at her, their expressions inscrutable. “What’s up with you? Hey, you’re not doing that anam-chara thing again, are you?”

Brigid tilted her head indulgently as she looked at the albino woman. “Anam-chara?” she asked. Then, after a long blink, she continued, looking significantly at Kane. “The bond of the soul friends. No, Domi. Why do you ask?”

“Because the last time we were all together like this,” Domi began, “you were all—” she waved her hands around “—wooo-ooo! Soul-friend magic shit.”

Kane smiled. “We’ll try not to do that,” he assured her before pushing back from the table and standing. “I’m going to grab a tray and see what’s cooking,” he announced.

Excusing herself, Brigid followed him to the rear of the queue.

Shizuka leaned close to Grant and asked in a soft voice, “Are you not going to acquire something to eat, Grant-san?”

“In a minute,” he told her, still clutching her hand beneath the table.

“Keep your energy up,” she whispered, a tantalizing twinkle in her eye.

“Careful, Shizuka,” Grant whispered back. “That’s a threat I may just hold you to.”

BACK IN THE OPERATIONS room, Lakesh was placing Brigid’s discarded satchel of gold coins back in a secure cupboard, having removed the hidden stash of flash-bangs and other minor weapons and sent them on to the armory for secure storage.

“You’re pleased to have them back on-site, aren’t you?” Donald Bry said, calling across from the desk where he worked with Skylar.

Locking the cupboard, Lakesh turned and smiled. “Somehow, Donald, the three of them seem to complete Cerberus. The place always feels a little empty in their absence, present company notwithstanding, of course.”

Sitting beside Donald, a soldering iron in her hand, Skylar Hitch tsked.

“Something bothering you, Skylar?” Bry asked.

“Just thinking,” she said as she replaced a burned-out chip on the motherboard, “how you can get too attached to people sometimes.”

Lakesh joined the two of them, wheeling over a chair. “Now, then, what is that supposed to mean?” he asked, concern in his voice.

Skylar looked up at him for a few seconds before averting her gaze and turning back to her soldering. “Nothing, Dr. Singh,” she said quietly.

Lakesh and Donald shared a look; neither of them was quite sure what was going on with the normally quiet Miss Hitch.

IN A DARK CAVE many thousands of miles away, Decimal River was checking the results on his laptop’s screen for a fifth time. Finally satisfied, he shifted his body, turning away from the screen so that he could see both Cloud Singer and Broken Ghost where they stood across from each other within the small cave. “Infiltration complete,” he told them proudly. “They’re inside Cerberus.”

Cloud Singer felt a flush of warmth over her body at the thought. “What now?” she asked, looking at Decimal River.

In response, the young man simply inclined his head toward Broken Ghost, waiting for her to answer Cloud Singer’s question. “We wait,” Broken Ghost told them, “showing great patience always.”

“Always,” Cloud Singer repeated, despite feeling the intense need for action. She yearned to find Kane and the others and make them hurt for all they had done. But, she wondered, just where are they now?

The side lighting of the room was dimmed, and Kane lay snoozing on the sagging couch in his two-room apartment. A plate rested on the low table before him, a half-eaten meal left to stew in its own juices. Beside it, catching the lights from the nearby residential towers through the window, brown drapes pulled back, a half-drained glass of milk, the bone-white liquid clinging to its interior sides as it was slowly dragged back down the glass by gravity.

Kane lay in a peaceful, dreamless sleep, head back, mouth open, and a quiet snoring came with his deep breaths. For the first time in a very, very long time, Kane was at peace.

“THE QUICK BROWN FOX never jumps over the lazy dog.”

Brigid Baptiste smiled as her fingers raced across the computer’s keys and these words formed on the display before her. The phrase contained every letter of the alphabet, an old typist’s mnemonic to ensure that all the keys could be reached and were operational.

“The quick brown fox never jumps over the lazy dog.”

Never.

The computer and keyboard sat on a little desk that was hidden in a converted wardrobe within Brigid’s tiny apartment. Strictly speaking, she should not own a computer. Despite her high ranking as a Cobaltville archivist, Brigid was not legally allowed ownership of a personal computer of any form—the designated work databases should be enough for her, where her data queries could be monitored and questioned at any time.

Her computer at the Historical Division was newer than this one, using voice-recognition commands in place of this clumsy, old-fashioned keyboard with its “quick brown fox.” The keyboard felt old and slow by comparison, unable to keep up with the speed of Brigid’s thoughts. Still, it did the job.

She had found the computer, a cast-off DDC model, in the trash close to her one-person apartment. It had seemed to be serendipity, a stroke of luck, but she suspected it had been planted for her to find by her friends in the Preservationists, an underground movement dedicated to retaining the complete records of the world as it was before 2001. Brigid’s job, as an archivist, was to smooth the rougher edges of history to ensure that it was palatable with the enlightened baronial world view. Which was to say, hide the truth.

They could ask Brigid to smooth and hide all they liked, but her eidetic memory ensured that a perfect, untouched copy of it remained in her mind’s eye. She spent long evenings at the DDC’s keyboard, re-creating this information into computer files once more before leaving it at a specified drop-off point for the Preservationists to collect.

Sometimes she wondered if the Preservationists really existed. Sometimes she woke in a cold sweat, convinced that she had been snared in a web of deceit and the Preservationists were a simple fallacy that the emotionless Magistrates had created to prove her guilt.

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