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"I suggest you all listen to me," the elderly man suggested politely, his fingers digging into Beatrice's upper arm. Despite his age, his stride was steady; he leaned on no cane, and he held Beatrice's arm tight enough that she could not pull away. "I would like to leave with this young lady here. The rest of you may go about your day as usual."
"That's not really a suggestion-Ishmael?" one of the volunteers noted.
Ishmael still looked the same, even all these years later. The white hair, the lines on his face, his conciliatory expression.
"Call me Ish," he said.
He even sounded the same.
"And it is a suggestion, because I'm suggesting it," he explained.
"I don't get it," a recently graduated apprentice said.
"Hush!" his chaperone told him. "We're negotiating a hostage situation here. Make sure to take notes."
"This young lady-" Ishmael started.
"My name is Beatrice," Beatrice muttered.
"-will simply be accompanying me to meet my associates!" Ishmael said. "She is very important to us all, you know."
"Which is why you will not be leaving with her, and she will remain here," the head of this branch of headquarters, a man who went by the initial M, stated. "She as good as symbolizes our noble organization, and we won't allow firestarters like you to get their hands on her."
"Firestarters?" Ishmael sounded genuinely shocked and affronted. "I'm not a firestarter! I'm the farthest thing from a firestarter I know! I simply seek to prevent conflict at all costs."
"By endangering volunteers?" a black-haired woman with green eyes asked pointedly. "Kit Snicket was my only friend!"
"Now, don't rock the boat," Ishmael told her. "I'm sure many people considered Kit their only friend. But we've gotten off-topic. The fact remains, I will-"
"Ishmael!" Friday shouted.
She stood at the top of the stairs, above the entranceway in which all the volunteers were gathered, glaring down at them. In her hand she held what looked like a glass vial.
He stared at her. His face turned chalk white. He took a few fumbling steps backward. His grip on Beatrice's arm faltered, but only for a moment before he renewed his grasp.
"Miranda?" he whispered.
"Friday," Friday corrected.
"Friday." Ishmael relaxed. "It is wonderful to see you again-"
"No, it isn't!" Friday sounded like she was about to cry. Her face was strained, her teeth gritted. "Stop pretending! Stop talking!"
"That's no way to speak to your facilitator," Ishmael chided her, like she was still his obedient follower.
"You're not my facilitator," Friday hissed. She held up the vial. "Do you know what this is?"
All the volunteers and apprentices gathered below looked on wordlessly, sensing that more was going on than a simple hostage negotiation.
"No." Ishmael didn't sound particularly concerned. Then again, why should he? He'd once persuaded an entire boat of people to let themselves die. If he could do that, he could talk his way out of anything.
Well, not this.
"This," Friday said quietly, "is the Medusoid Mycelium." Merely saying the name made her voice shake, even all these years later.
His eyes widened. "You would not dare."
"No?" she asked. "I would not dare release the same fungus that killed my mother? That killed Finn, Omeros, Professor Fletcher? Remember them? Remember their names? You let them die, Ishmael. You convinced them to do so."
"I did nothing of the sort. I simply suggested-"
She interrupted him. "I want to become a scientist, Ishmael. A mycologist, which is a scientist who studies different kinds of fungi. I want to destroy the Medusoid Mycelium. I want to discover a permanent cure for it. I'm going to set up a lab, and I'm going to experiment, and Beatrice will be my apprentice, because Beatrice has as much of a reason to want to discover a cure as I do. All of this means that I have samples to experiment on." She brandished the vial. "Let Beatrice go. Or else."
"You wouldn't," he said. "You would not endanger all the volunteers here. And besides, you remember, I have a resistance to it."
Oh, yes, she remembered. She closed her eyes, struggling to block out the memories.
"And how do you know that my experiments did not result in an extra-powerful strain of the fungus?" she asked.
"You're bluffing," he accused.
"I might be. Or I might not. Besides," she whispered, "resistant doesn't mean immune."
He blinked.
"Let Beatrice go," Friday whispered. With her thumb and forefinger, she began to loosen the cap on the vial.
There was silence. No one said a word, feeling the ominous tension in the room. Friday had ten years worth of nightmares and an entire island to avenge, and Kit Snicket's daughter was at stake.
There was a quiet, unassuming click, very loud in the silence of the room.
Ishmael turned his head, but then he frowned and staggered, suddenly unsteady on his feet. Beatrice yanked her arm out of his grasp and ran. He took a step after her, tripped, and fell to the floor and didn't get up. Everybody saw, very clearly, the poison dart sticking out of the middle of his back.
Lemony Snicket took a single step forward out of the shadows, the dart gun in his right hand. He kept his face expressionless, aware that all eyes were on him, and avoiding the green-eyed woman's gaze specifically. He prepared to be rejected, as he had been before.
He wasn't expecting his niece to run forward and wrap her arms around him, trying very hard not to cry.
The hum of noise and buzz of movement slowly returned. Three volunteers stepped forward to examine the body. Two more circled the room, taking everyone's accounts of what had happened, so that the day's events could be written and chronicled for the neophytes to study.
The vial slipped out of Friday's fingers and rolled down the steps.
Everybody froze.
"It's just horseradish," Friday said, and then she sat down right there at the top of the staircase and put her head in her hands and sobbed.