Chapter Text
They found themselves standing on a path in a gray, unformed space, which extended as far as they could see in either direction. The doors to the Oceanview Motel disappeared behind them in a vague - and vaguely menacing - mist.
Jesse looked around, and fought off a shiver of disquiet. The place (if it was a place) felt somehow marginal and profoundly unsettling, as if living things were never meant to discover it. "Ever see anything like this before?" she asked.
Emily shook her head, and folded her arms against the creeping chill. Even her perpetual curiosity couldn"t compete with the foreboding. "No. Though I suppose we have three options." Her voice seemed to fall short, as if the air was not dense enough to properly carry it between them.
"Three options?" Jesse prompted.
"Go left, right, or split up."
Jesse gave her a sharp look of immediate protest. "Hell no."
"Okay. Two options," Emily amended. She exhaled, and tried not to dwell on her body heat dwindling into the air. "So, left or right? Doesn"t Polaris usually have opinions about this sort of thing?"
In fact, their paranatural companion had been conspicuously silent since they"d been struck out of the Treehouse.
"Usually." Jesse scowled, then pointed to their right. "Any objection?"
Emily only uttered a breathless assent and fell into step at her side. They walked for a while, mostly in silence as they studied their surroundings and tried to conserve energy.
The gloom was oppressive, unnatural. As they trudged along, Jesse felt a knot of anxiety blooming in her gut. There was Nothing around them, they were Nowhere in particular, and while there didn"t seem to be an active threat, she was pretty sure they were fundamentally in danger. She needed to get Emily away from whatever this was.
Even worse, despite the overall lack of features available to notice, Jesse had the distinct impression that they were treading the same ground, over and over.
After a few more minutes of walking straight ahead and yet apparently making no progress at all, Jesse grumbled, spun around, and drew the Service Weapon. She pointed it at the path a few meters behind them, then fired, leaving a significant crater in the nondescript ground.
Emily only flicked her eyebrows up in question.
"Got a hunch," Jesse explained. She holstered the weapon with a sigh and ignored how much the comparatively basic expenditure of paranatural energy had drained her.
They marched stolidly forward, and after a handful of minutes, approached the crater in the path Jesse had left as a landmark.
"Son of a bitch. I thought so," Jesse muttered. She kicked at the path. "We"re in a fucking loop."
Emily was already shuffling outward, toward the edge of what they could perceive, where the unnatural mist loomed like an unstable wall that was threatening to topple in on them. She reached out with ginger, measured movements, and brushed her fingertips against the surface. The sensation was like tiny shocks of static electricity over her nerve endings, sharp and unpleasant. She winced and withdrew her hand.
Jesse watched her anxiously. "What if I zip out into that for a minute, do some recon?"
It was Emily"s turn to object. "If you get lost out there, I"d have no way to find you."
Jesse only nodded, then stepped closer to gently chafe some warmth back into Emily"s arms. "Okay, so. You told me once that the Oceanview Motel was "proof" that alternate universes exist."
"I did. And it is."
Jesse gave her an expectant look.
"But that doesn"t mean I know where we are right now," Emily added. She shook her head, trying to focus. "The Motel is a construct, a means of representing a dimensional passage. But it"s only ever lead to other places within the Oldest House. We"ve stepped outside the boundaries. Where we are right now is, by definition, undefined." She scowled and looked around them. "So how we define it?"
Jesse turned in a slow circle, and noted that the mist had crept in across the path; whatever interim reality they were inhabiting, it was collapsing quickly. "Is this maybe just another kind of construct? Astral Backrooms, or whatever?"
"Could be. Liminal spaces do tend to be Places of Power," Emily replied. "The problem is that the power tends to be amorphous. Difficult to quantify." She gestured to Jesse. "And difficult for a parautilitarian to harness."
"So why give us passage to nothing in particular?" Jesse asked. "The Oceanview Motel is weird, but it"s not hostile. Hell, Trench always thought of the Motel as a friend." She tried to slow her brain down, aware that panic wasn"t going to protect Emily from the encroaching void.
In fact, if she took Trench"s affinity for the Motel at face value, she had to assume it was actually helping, in some way. "Maybe it"s trying to tell us something. Like that we don"t need that representation of a passage anymore." She paused, and rocked on her feet. "Or maybe you don"t need it."
"Me?"
"Just saying - I"m not the only parautilitarian here. And there"s a reason Ahti gave you those keys."
Emily snorted. "Because I threatened to hurt him if he betrayed you."
"What, exactly, did he say?"
Emily took a deep breath, and thought back.
He regarded her evenly for a long moment, then fussed with a ring of keys on his belt loop, unhooked it, and handed it over. "Might need this. Get you into places. Or out of places."
""Isn"t actually tree, isn"t actually lock. Isn"t actually key,"" Emily recited, aloud. She pulled the keyring out of her pocket and bounced the keys lightly across the palm of her hand.
The air around them rippled.
Jesse broke into a broad grin. "Yup. There it is. That"s so cool."
Emily had to fight the desire to toss the keys at Jesse like a hot potato and pretend she couldn"t feel the energy they emitted, the deep thrum of power that connected her to Something. Just like the first time she"d encountered an Object of Power, her first instinct was to argue that she simply wasn"t paranaturally "special" - at least, not in the way Jesse or Dylan were.
As if aware of her internal struggle, Jesse prodded her gently. "C"mon, you got this."
Emily closed her eyes and forced herself to lean into the comfort of data collection.
Knowns: The object in her hand appeared to interact with reality. It appeared to react to her. She had some notion that it possessed a power that could be directed.
And the looming unknown: Could she figure it out before they were snuffed out in a dense fog of inter-dimensional vapor?
The pathway of the object"s power sparkled at her, so she focused on it, letting her mind adhere and learn like it had before, with the Chimney Stone.
Under the conceptual reality behind this reality you must want these waves to drag you away. After the song, time for applause.
The mist around them wavered, then cleared for moments at a time before rushing back in, closer, then closer still. Jesse caught glimpses of other places in the gaps, bits of reality flashing past as if they were careening through a subway tunnel and not stuck in a narrow interstitial passage that was collapsing around them. It was getting harder and harder to breathe as the strange gap in reality compressed, flattened, nearing some infinite transit.
Jesse clutched at Emily as if to anchor her, to stabilize her so she could in turn stabilize the construct and allow them to escape.
A streamer of blood spilled out of Emily"s nose and splashed onto her shirt. She listed a little, but Jesse kept her upright.
Shit. Well, stability was overrated anyway.
Jesse grabbed hold of Emily, and zipped with her through one of the flickering fragments of Elsewhere, hoping they"d find purchase on the other side.
When the Bureau departmental representatives reconvened in the Board Room an hour later, no one bothered to sit. Dylan paced in a far corner, dragging his fingertips across the wood paneling on the wall.
Arish flipped through the high priority memos that had just arrived via Pneumatics. "Okay, we"ve got sector isolation protocol engaged," he confirmed. "Non-essential personnel evacuation will be complete within the hour, and we"ll go ahead and seal the building until this mess is settled."
Darling bounced a little, and leaned toward Underhill to speak in a stage whisper. "I always enjoyed evacuation drills. Really broke up the day, you know?"
"I"m holding off on initiating internal lockdown procedures. For now," Arish continued. "Mostly "cause I"d like there to be a Director around to lift it sometime." He sighed, feeling fairly out of his depth. "Please tell me the HRAs are working, at least."
Underhill, Darling, Jones, and Dylan all started talking at once, and Arish winced.
Ultimately Dylan won out. "Emily updated the design," he called from the back of the room. "Now they can respond to different resonant frequencies, based on new threats."
"Ah. Then I assume that"s partly why she was creating a sensor mesh in the Quarry, to detect those new frequencies," Underhill mused as she brushed a spot of dust from her sleeve. "Rather ingenious, really."
Dylan gave her a sideways look. "You thought she was "wasting Bureau resources.""
Underhill huffed, entirely affronted at the implication. "I would be a rather poor scientist if I couldn"t take in new evidence when it became available and update my hypotheses accordingly, now wouldn"t I?"
"We"ll rotate crews in and out of Black Rock shelters, just in case," Arish said, pointedly ignoring the brewing argument while he made a note on his clipboard. "Do we know where the hell Faden and Pope are, yet?"
"They"re still in the Oldest House. Or at least, within its dimension," Dylan said.
"And how do you know that?" Underhill asked.
Dylan gestured to his chest, generally indicating where an HRA would be, had he needed one. "The HRAs. Jesse"s the source of local resonance that they"re amplifying."
Darling watched him with rapt curiosity. "Not you? Not Emily? Fascinating."
Dylan couldn"t really explain how he knew what he knew, and didn"t really care to examine his complicated relationship with Polaris with this particular audience. He shrugged and tried to look at anything else.
"Well, that"s good news, at least," Arish muttered. "So what"s next?"
"Any further action would be premature without analyzing the available data," Underhill pronounced. She leveled an imperious look at Jones. "I assume you are able to adequately brief me on Doctor Pope"s project?"
"Yes, ma"am."
Underhill turned to Darling. "And I assume your curiosity will be ill-directed and therefore dangerous unless you"re permitted to join us."
Darling grinned. "Yes, ma"am," he agreed, with enthusiasm.
With that sorted, expectant eyes turned to Dylan.
"Uh." He chewed on his lip. "I"m... probably supposed to go back to the Treehouse and keep watch, right?"
"Good a plan as any," Arish decided. "We"ll stay in standby for lockdown, but Faden and Pope were able to work around the last one, so I"m pretty sure we wouldn"t actually be leaving them out in the cold."
"Right, then," Underhill declared. She nodded once, then spun on her heel and marched out of the room. Jones and Darling followed in vague bemusement.
Dylan lingered in the back of the room, looking a bit dazed.
"Hey - you good, Deputy Director?" Arish called.
Dylan winced. "Yeah, don"t call me that."
Arish only chuckled and headed out.
Emily wasn"t sure how much time had elapsed, or just how unconscious she"d been, but she jolted back to awareness seated against a rocky outcropping, under a familiar starry sky. A thick FBC parka was draped over her, and a few burning flares were scattered nearby, casting a reddish glow across the rocks.
"Easy," Jesse instructed, gently. She lifted her hand to Emily"s cheek and waited until her eyes properly focused. Then Jesse held out an oatmeal cookie. "You good to eat something?"
Emily scowled and reached out from under the parka for the cookie, looking rather like a sleepy toddler when she took a small bite. A vague, queasy memory resurfaced. "Did I get sick on you, before?"
"Not on me," Jesse said, with a wry smile.
"Ugh. Sorry."
Jesse waved her off and tore open another MRE to pull out a small packet of crackers. "Found a shifted Ranger supply stash," she explained. "Only six months past "best-by."" She munched a cracker happily.
That comment spurred Emily to look around. She"d realized they were back in the Quarry Threshold, but couldn"t immediately locate any familiar landmarks. Still, the nearby case of FBC supplies half-exposed under fractured sheets of Black Rock was extremely comforting. She ate her cookie, patiently accepted another when Jesse pushed it into her hand, and slowly shook off the malaise of their unplanned dimensional crossing.
She smiled when Polaris shimmered in her periphery, as if greeting them in anxious relief.
"So what"s next, Director?" Emily asked.
Jesse shrugged. "Dunno. But we"re back in something that looks like reality, so I"m counting that as a win." She plunked down next to Emily, scooted in, and pressed a kiss to her temple. "Get some rest, then we"ll it figure out."
"I"m fine," Emily protested, even as she leaned into Jesse"s warmth and heaved a sigh.
Jesse wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. "Gonna get you back home," she vowed, in a whisper.
You are home.
You remind us of home.
On his way back to the Quarry, Dylan hesitated while rounding Central Maintenance. He could just feel a sort of rhythmic change in the air, pulsing against his ear drums in a way that was just below the threshold of his hearing. He slowed, then stopped entirely when he spotted Ahti mopping and humming along with the faint notes of a tune sounding from the radio on his cart.
Ahti turned at his approach, gave him a nod, then waited.
"Something wrong?" Dylan asked.
"New pests," Ahti said, simply. He gestured across the hallway, where Snoopy and Woodstock were staring intently at an otherwise nondescript wall.
Dylan frowned and stepped carefully behind them, then bent to crouch at their level. "What"s back there?" he asked in a whisper.
The pressure in the air abruptly shifted with a puff against his face. Both cats arched their backs and hissed.
Dylan tumbled backward, then scrambled to his feet and turned to look for Ahti, who had disappeared along with his cart and radio. He made a noise of disbelief and sprinted to the nearest emergency phone to call in a detection crew.
Twenty minutes later, as a jackhammer worked at the solid rock wall in Central Maintenance, Dylan was killing time meandering around Field Training, where his cats were taking great apparent delight in teaching him how to properly navigate the obstacle course.
He crossed the finish line, again, and the recorded message informed him of his failure. He offered a rude gesture to the disembodied voice while Woodstock hopped into a nearby bench to clean her whiskers and Snoopy pawed at his own reflection in the reinforced viewport.
A research assistant peeked into the control room. "Uh, Deputy Director?" he called.
"That"s still not funny," Dylan muttered.
"We"ve captured an audio artifact that matches the pressure pattern you described, and enhanced it for frequencies within human hearing."
Dylan followed the assistant back out to the Central Maintenance corridor, where the loud, rattling excavation effort was nearly complete. He put on a proffered set of headphones and felt his skin crawl as he heard a familiar droning.
Repeat the word.
The name of the sound.
It resonates in your house.
Seven ounce red pepper hummus, buy one get one free.
After the song, time for applause.
He blinked and took off the headphones. "Wait. What the hell was that?!"
The research assistant only shook his head. "Don"t know, sir. It"s like the Hiss, but corrupted."
"It was already corrupted," Dylan argued. He looked over just as a crew pulled away the last piece of wall sheeting from the corner, and a bright blue pulsing form emerged from underneath. Woodstock and Snoopy wound anxiously around his feet and growled.
Dylan realized the agents and security team were all looking to him to make some kind of call. "Um. I guess - tell Arish about the intrusion so he can lock down, or whatever?" he said, with a shrug. He bent, scooped up the cats, and headed to the Quarry.
They"d spent about an hour hopping between islands of Black Rock, after Polaris placed a helpful beacon at the top of an obvious peak.
"So despite the intensity of the resonant impact, I don"t think we ever actually left the Threshold," Emily mused, as she scrambled up a ledge. At the top she paused and turned in a circle. "Fascinating."
Jesse grinned at her, bright and indulgent. "Glad you"re feeling better."
Emily rolled her eyes a bit at the tease, and gave Jesse a pointed look. "You are, too. Back in your element."
"Sure. Unknown weird shit and the imminent risk of life and limb? Beats paperwork." Jesse levitated easily up to another ledge, then bent to offer a hand down to Emily to pull her up.
"I"ve been wondering about that, actually," Emily said. She grabbed hold of Jesse"s jacket and took a moment to catch her breath. "The "paperwork" part of being Director, I mean. I wasn"t sure you"d be inclined to keep doing that."
Jesse scowled and thought that over. "What else would I do?"
"Literally anything? Jesse, you"re easily the most capable person I"ve ever met."
Jesse huffed out a laugh. "Yeah, but my resume sucks."
"Maybe, but after seeing you with that axe, I can tell you you"d make an amazing lumberjack." Emily let herself enjoy that notion for a moment, then turned a bit ponderous as she regarded the next bit of rocky terrain. "Though I do sympathize. I"m not sure I could return to mainstream science after my time in the Bureau."
"But you basically have infinite work to do here, if you want."
"If I want," Emily said, agreeing even as her voice trailed off into speculative quiet.
Jesse swallowed against a sudden feeling of unease. They concentrated on climbing for a while, until reaching the next gap that required Jesse to carry Emily across empty space. When Jesse landed, she bent to set Emily"s feet carefully on the ground, but kept her close with a gentle hold. Her expression reflected obvious fretting, and Emily reached up to draw fingertips across the crease between her brows.
"What is it?"
"We keep "kinda" talking about leaving," Jesse blurted.
"I don"t think that"s what we"re talking about," Emily countered. "You"re talking about deciding what you want to be when you grow up, which is entirely understandable because that kind of discovery was never afforded to you, before. And I"m talking about being with you during that journey, no matter what."
"Oh." Jesse chewed on her lip, and hesitated before her next observation, which was a lot quieter. "We also keep "kinda" talking about getting married."
At that, Emily only smiled, then turned to scramble up the next rock face.
Underhill barely looked up from her workstation as the lockdown notice echoed ominously though the Research department.
Jones, on the other hand, looked like she might burst into tears.
"Steady on, now," Darling said, as he lifted his mug of coffee in a vague kind of salute. "It"s just a precaution."
"That"s what you said before," Jones whispered.
"Well, that time I was lying." He took a loud slurp of coffee and poked at a crumpled wad of paper on Underhill"s desk. "I"d run out of contingencies, and I"d left Emily out of the loop."
At that, Underhill sat back in her chair and pinned him with sharp eyes. "And why was that, exactly?" she asked.
He returned her gaze evenly. "My hypothesis was flawed." He took another sip of his coffee and stared into space while another research assistant delivered a priority memo to Underhill with specifics regarding the lockdown order.
"As one might expect, we"ll be confined to the Research sector until further notice," Underhill reported as she read. "And apparently there are already nodes of dimensional intrusion appearing in Maintenance."
That caught Darling"s attention. He lurched over, then barely stopped himself from snatching the memo out of Underhill"s hands. When she finally passed it over with an exasperated noise, he read it three times - forward, backward, then forward again. "The blue wavelengths imply higher energy," he murmured. "Possibly a more local source."
Underhill grumbled in agreement. "I do wish we had access to at least some of Director Faden"s paranatural abilities. We could measure their interaction with this new form of resonance."
Darling perked up. "Oh!" He hurried over to the office door, pulled it open, and immediately quailed at the armed security guards glaring back at him. "Um, Raya? Could you possibly arrange for our escorts to take us to the Mirror?"
Their travel was slow and exhausting, and even Jesse found her patience in extradimensional wayfinding wearing a little thin. The peak Polaris had indicated now loomed ahead of them, beyond a dizzying gap that far exceeded Jesse"s levitation range.
Jesse swore and looked around for an alternate path, but they were already on the closest available island. It didn"t take long for her to slap her hands against her thighs in annoyed defeat.
"I can"t get us over there," she admitted.
Emily had gone still and focused beside her. "I think maybe I can."
"Yeah?"
Emily nodded, looking equal measures determined and nervous. Jesse took half a step away, grinning in anticipation. After a long minute of nothing happening, Jesse held out her hands.
"Do you, like, wanna practice, or..."
Emily grabbed her by the arm. With a pop of displaced air, they were suddenly transposed, on the far side of the abyss.
Jesse reeled, and exhaled suddenly frosty breath from the thermal transference. "Holy shit," she crowed. She spun on her heel and laughed. "That"s my girl!"
Emily was considerably less celebratory as she wobbled on her feet, looking a little green around the gills. Jesse immediately helped her sit on a nearby boulder and fished out yet another cookie she"d stashed in the pocket of Emily"s borrowed parka.
"You stole all the cookies out of those MREs, didn"t you?" Emily grumbled, even as she dutifully took a bite.
"Of course I did. You okay?"
Emily nodded. "Yeah, just give me a minute."
Jesse sat cross-legged, turned so as to keep an eye on her. Her worry promptly manifested as boredom, and she loosened a nearby pebble to chuck it off the nearby cliff and into the gaping emptiness. "So. Say we do get hitched," she said, as if that branch of conversation hadn"t died long hours before. "Do we live at your place or mine? How does that work?"
"We could get a new place," Emily mused. "Make it "ours.""
Jesse thought that over. "Oh. Yeah, I guess we could."
"Or not," Emily added, blithely. I think we"re the ones who get to decide whatever it is we want." She tilted her head to regard Jesse. "Is that what"s worrying you? Where we"ll spend our absolutely minimal time off?"
"No, and I"m not actually worried. I"ve just never really been able to "plan" for that kinda stuff, you know? Where to live, who to live with, what color the sofa should be, or whatever. Feels weird."
Emily chuckled. "That"s fair. And - gray, for the sofa."
"Gray?!"
"Mmhmm. In a nice microfiber that"s easy to clean."
Jesse"s face twisted in dramatic distaste, and Emily could only laugh.
"Okay, fine. But I get to choose the towels," Jesse said. "And they won"t be gray."
"Deal."
Jesse nodded, momentarily satisfied before she chewed on her lip. "You wanna talk about the "beam me up" thing you"ve got going on now?"
Emily heaved a sigh. "Not sure what to say. I do wish it wasn"t so... resource intensive."
"Yeah." Jesse fretted for a long moment. "Look, I know I"m one to talk, but be careful, okay? You have to stick around long enough for me to torture you with technicolor towels."
"Jesse, I"m fine," Emily insisted. To prove her point, she stood, and cast her eyes to the peak of the island they"d reached. "And the sooner we get moving, the sooner we can go to IKEA and have a ridiculous argument about Edison bulbs."
Jesse likewise got to her feet, but didn"t look ahead to the next part of the journey, just yet. She found herself smiling at Emily"s profile, and the adorably stubborn lift of her chin.
It really did feel strange, allowing herself to plan for the future while wandering in the unexplored reaches of a distant Threshold. It really did feel strange, thinking that "happily ever after" was a possibility in her reach after all she"d been through.
She lifted a hand and gently swiped at a smudge of dust across Emily"s cheek. Emily turned into the touch and gave her a smile.
The moment stretched, and Jesse found herself wishing she was better with words, so she could somehow explain the joy she had in every moment she spent at Emily"s side.
(She"d spent a lot of time in libraries over the years, and when she wasn"t teaching herself disjointed fragments of science and paranatural theory, she"d indulged in a truly shocking amount of romantic fiction. Despite that extensive preparation, right then any flowery declarations just tangled uselessly on her tongue.)
Instead, she went with, "Edison bulbs? Really?"
Emily"s eyes were kind and soft, as if she"d been aware of Jesse"s struggle. "Love me, love my retro lighting, Faden," she declared, before turning and starting her next ascent.
