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Chapter Text

There is a world where the Old World had perilously little contact with the New between 1691 and 1861 and none after 1874 until the Great Diesel War brought American troops to France for the first time.

In that world, there was no Second World War, for the Great Diesel War was blamed on the Other and no one else, and Adolf Hitler had perished in the gas attack that in other worlds had merely left him temporarily blind. It would take another generation for commerce and travel across the Atlantic to become commonplace. But that one period of personal contact left an indelible mark on the Americans who’d crossed the Great Ocean for the Great War—a genetic one.

There were rumors in that world of god-queens and god-kings who’d achieved immortality and immense power. By the 1970s, few people credited the majority of those rumors... a fact that their subjects had cultivated by design. And almost none knew that the blood of four of the most powerful families in Europa, and the blood of some of their most faithful retainers, had passed into seemingly ordinary American families that thrived or broke of their own accord.

But Albia knew and kept watch. And when the time was right, she sent word to two of her fellow queens, young by her standards but treasured allies nonetheless. The USA might have no royalty by law and no god-queen within her borders—but she was about to need the scions of storybook lore to survive.

A month before their graduation from MIT in 1980, Nathan Ingram came to his best friend Harold, then using the surname Wren, and their mutual pal Arthur Claypool with a proposal. Arthur was excited by the idea; Harold was amused but skeptical.

“Backpacking across Europa?” Harold echoed. “When the Wastelands still haven’t recovered after the Great War?”

“Come on!” Nathan urged. “It’s our last chance to do bachelor stuff before Olivia and I get married. We’ll be just like the Heterodyne Boys. We’ll visit all the great cities—Londinium, Paris, Vienna, Venice....”

Harold raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t Venice sink a hundred years ago?”

“It was 1889; Baron Wulfenbach negotiated with Queen Albia for some of her sparks to mitigate the damage, so the city still survives the way Londinium does; and don’t try to get out of this by quizzing me on Europan history.”

Caught, Harold laughed.

“Besides,” Arthur continued, “it’d give you a chance to meet some of the big-league sparks over there, see what they’re doing with technology these days.”

Nathan nodded. “Might give you some ideas for a thesis project, if you insist on getting your Master’s.”

Harold’s cheeks and ears flushed pink in embarrassment. Nathan wasn’t a spark himself, not that anyone expected him to be, but he was the only person living who knew that Harold had broken through at the age of ten and had an affinity for information technology approaching the magical. The vexed question of the Spark was still highly controversial in the US, especially given the white man’s past treatment of sparks like Thundering Engine Woman, but Harold had more reason than most to keep his Spark, and his identity, hidden. Not even Arthur, the Klaus to their Bill and Barry and a decently strong spark in his own right, was allowed to know the truth about Harold, who hadn’t told his own dementia-afflicted father that he’d been attending MIT on the sly. (Even if Dad had realized at the time that the Spark was real and that Harold had it, there wasn’t much chance that he remembered those events now.)

“And then there are the other uses for networking opportunities,” Nathan went on. “Industry contacts, study-abroad locations—”

Harold threw up his hands in surrender. “All right! All right, I’ll come with you.”

Nathan grinned. “Thanks, partner. I knew I could count on you.”

“Just don’t expect me to dive the South Downs with you or attend any more revivification demonstrations once we get to Paris.”

Nathan laughed heartily. “I won’t tax your inner ears more than it takes to get a submersible down to Londinium, I promise.”

“And I’d rather go to the Immortal Library anyway,” added Arthur.

And so it was agreed.

Two months later, however, Harold found himself beside Nathan and Arthur on an airship from Dover to Paris, puzzling over the last few weeks. They’d enjoyed their tramp around Britain despite the pressure headaches from spending long periods of time in underwater cities like Londinium. But Harold had noticed, even if the other two hadn’t, that they’d been shadowed the entire time—not always by the same person, but plainly enough to put Harold on edge and prompt him to stop Arthur from trying the Ruediger Smoot gambit on anyone. Yet nothing out of the way had happened, no sudden arrests or being barred from any of the museums they’d tried to visit or anything. Why had Queen Albia taken an interest in them, or had she? Or was it only one of them she’d wanted watched, and if so, which one? If it was Harold—if she knew what he’d been accused of—why hadn’t she had him arrested?

The puzzle only grew when they arrived in Paris, watched the old-fashioned orientation puppet show that threatened anyone causing trouble with the Master’s creative wrath, and were shown through from there to Customs. Nathan presented his passport, gave his info, and was waved through without a blink from the bored female customs agent. She did the same to Arthur. When Harold gave his name, however, she did blink and made a notation beside his name that he couldn’t decipher. Yet she gave no other indication that anything was wrong, stamped his passport just as she’d stamped theirs, and waved him through to the exit. Confused, Harold caught up with the other two and didn’t protest when Nathan declared that their first stop should be a coffee shop.

It wasn’t until that night, when the three of them were at a party hosted by one of Nathan’s frat brothers, that a young gendarme approached Harold with an apologetic cough. “Pardon, monsieur,” he said in a quiet but official voice. “The Master would like a word.”

Now Harold blinked. “The Master?”

“Of Paris.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Non, monsieur, I assure you, it is nothing like that. The Master would simply like a word in private—and at once.”

Harold quickly downed the last of his wine and followed the gendarme out to a motorcoach, and moments later, he found himself being whisked through the dark streets to the Awful Tower. Moments after that, he was escorted onto an elevator, up more stories than he dared count, and out to the Master’s office, which was occupied by... two women, both clad in green. One was dark-skinned and had long, curly dark hair; the other was white and wore glasses, and her strawberry blonde hair stuck up from the back of her head in a striking cowlick.

He had the strangest sense that he was meeting his fairy godmothers. But if that were true—if he could believe that such things were more than mere literary fancy—why on earth were they here in the Master’s office, and where was the Master?

“Thank you, Henri,” the dark-skinned woman told the gendarme in French. “That will be all for now. I’ll ring when he is ready to return to his hotel.”

Henri bowed and left.

“Please forgive the informality of this audience, cheri,” she continued in English with a strong Parisian accent, stepping forward to clasp Harold’s hand warmly. “We could not risk attracting attention to you or to ourselves, especially from the American Consulate. You see, your government does not know that we exist.”

Harold shook his head as she dropped his hand. “I’m sorry, I’m very much at a loss. I thought the Master wanted to speak with me.”

“And so she is,” replied the white woman with a highly amused smile. Her English had a much more Romanian-sounding accent.

“Ah, permettez-moi,” said the dark-skinned woman before Harold could react. “I am Colette Voltaire, Master of Paris.”

Harold stared. “But didn’t Colette Voltaire—”

“Die in the Great War? We allowed the world to think so. One of my many nephews became the Master’s public face. But I still live, and the true rule of Paris is mine alone.”

“As the true rule of Mechanicsburg is mine, though my grandson is known to the public as the Heterodyne,” added the other woman. “I am Agatha Heterodyne, daughter of Bill Heterodyne and Lucrezia Mongfish.”

Harold opened his mouth and shut it again several times before he finally managed to ask, “How?”

Mlle. Voltaire laughed. “The usual way, cheri!”

“No, I mean—Agatha Heterodyne would be—”

“Over a hundred years old,” Lady Heterodyne finished. “It is true.”

Harold flushed. “Forgive me; I know it’s rude to ask a lady her age. But you don’t look a day over 25.”

“Neither does Albia, unless she wants to. And she was born during the last Ice Age.”

Harold’s jaw dropped. Everyone knew that Queen Albia’s official title was Her Undying Majesty, but he’d never met anyone who thought it was the literal truth.

“We have far more to tell you than we can cover tonight,” Mlle. Voltaire said, growing serious. “There are many secrets, here and in Mechanicsburg, that you will need to learn, and learn quickly, before you and your friend start your business back in America. Will you consent to spend a year studying in Europa, a semester here at the Paris Institute of the Extraordinary and a semester at the Mechanicsburg campus of Transylvania Polygnostic University?”

Shocked and flustered, Harold stammered, “Why... y-y-yes, of course, I’m honored, but I don’t understand.”

Lady Heterodyne put a hand on his shoulder. “We know all about you, Harold—including things you yourself do not yet know. There will be time later to discuss them. But I will assure you of this now: we will not betray our own kin.”

Feeling faint, Harold looked from one great lady to the other. “I—what?”

Mlle. Voltaire nodded. “Yes, you are of our blood. Not in a right line; your ancestors include one of my eldest brothers, who helped to found Louisiana before the Long War, and Agatha’s second cousin, who married an American soldier after the Great War. We believe your friend M. Ingram is of Wulfenbach stock, which makes him a good friend to have; but he is not a spark, nor is it likely he will ever break through. And we need an ally of both our houses in your country, mon cher Harold—an ally with the Spark.”

“Why? How can a nobody like me possibly help two of Europa’s greatest heroes?”

Lady Heterodyne looked him in the eye. “We need you to help us watch for the return of the Other. It may be thirty years or more, but she will return... and we think she may do it in America, where we cannot reach her.”

Harold swallowed hard and nodded. He’d been branded a traitor, but he still loved his country and all her people. He could just imagine what the Other would do if she came back with her slaver wasps and worse... and while he’d never make a good soldier, he’d do anything he could do to keep his country safe.

“All right,” he said. “Yes. Count me in.”

“Bon,” said Mlle. Voltaire and kissed him on both cheeks. “Now we must get you back before M. Ingram misses you.” And she went to call Henri while Lady Heterodyne gave him the most comforting hug he’d had in years.

He had family here—incredible Sparky family who knew what he’d done and didn’t care, family who wanted him to use his Spark for the greater good, family unafflicted by the ravages of time. It was mindboggling. And for the first time, he was soul-deep glad that he’d let Nathan talk him into coming on this trip.

By the time Harold got back to the party, Arthur was off in a corner in mid-fugue and seemed to be trying to build a computer out of toothpicks and plastic cups, and Nathan was laughing too loudly and appeared to be staggering drunk. But when Nathan slung an arm around Harold’s shoulders and spun him away from most of the crowd, Harold became sure it was only an act. Nathan always had had the knack for putting on the good-ol’-boy front that charmed and disarmed the sorts of people who needed to be distracted from Harold’s fugues. By all accounts, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach had been the same way during his Parisian college days, before the world knew he was heir to the Wulfenbach Empire.

Suddenly, Harold found himself reevaluating the trio’s roles—they weren’t so much the Heterodyne Boys as the cast of Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius. If Nathan was Gil and Harold was Agatha, though, what did that make Arthur… Tarvek Sturmvoraus, the boy who would be Storm King? Harold hoped not; he didn’t think Arthur could be devious enough to survive in that role. After all, it had been Harold who’d succeeded in creating Ruediger Smoot, though Arthur was the one who’d run with the fake ID.

“Where the hell have you been?” Nathan murmured clearly in Harold’s ear, and his breath didn’t reek nearly as much of alcohol as it should have.

Harold abandoned his musings and allowed himself a small smug smile. “Networking.”

It wasn’t until three days later, when the trio visited the Incorruptible Republic of the Immortal Library of the Grand Architect, that Arthur’s part began to make sense to Harold. “One of my ancestors built this place, y’know,” Arthur said casually as they made their way up the front steps.

Nathan and Harold looked at each other in shock and chorused, “Seriously?!”

Arthur looked surprised that they were surprised. “Oh, yeah. Van Rijn’s granddaughter Titia moved to New York with her husband just before the Long War got bad enough to cut off travel to the New World. One of her granddaughters married a Claypool. Didn’t I tell you guys this our freshman year?!”

Nathan stopped dead and turned to face Arthur, prompting Harold to stop as well. “Is that why you suggested we come here? You’re trying to one-up the Muses?!”

“No!” Arthur paused, then held up his hands placatingly. “Yes, I want to see what they have about the Muses from the standpoint of artificial intelligence, but you know I’m no good at building clanks. I mean, the Spark may be synonymous with megalomania, but I know my own limits. I’d never come close to even equaling the work of the greatest spark of all time. But if… if he could create genuine artificial intelligence with an entirely analog system—a clockwork system—imagine what someone could do in the Digital Age!”

Harold made skeptical noises that he knew would never convince Nathan, but Arthur bought them and kept expounding his theories as they finished the climb to the front door. Nathan, meanwhile, gave Harold a wink, which meant I’ll copy his notes for you tonight.

No, Arthur wasn’t a Sturmvoraus. He was Tarvek only insofar as Tarvek was van Rijn’s intellectual heir. That was both a relief and a worry—but Harold couldn’t let on now.

Of course, having a van Rijn with them opened a surprising number of doors with the Librarians. The Lord High Curator came to greet them in person and had the Grand Curators of the High Western Stacks give them a tour that included a chance to visit van Rijn’s Hermitorium. As fascinating as the Hermitorium was, however, Harold did have his own research goals to pursue, so Nathan covered for him while he slipped off to ask a deputy archivist to help him find van Rijn’s notes on mechanical memory.

Just as the deputy archivist was about to start searching the stacks, she said, “Oh, and—Lady Heterodyne requests that you join her in her reading room.”

“Thank you,” Harold replied. “Where is that?”

The deputy archivist whistled, and a grey cat the size of a mastiff emerged from a back room. “Dorian here can take you to her,” she told Harold.

Harold thanked her and followed Dorian through the maze of stacks to a well-hidden room guarded by what must be Jägermonsters, where Lady Heterodyne was waiting for him with a tea tray replete with pastries and two teapots.

“I understand you’ve gained some rather cosmopolitan tastes in Boston, Harold,” she said as he walked in. “Is sencha green tea still your favorite?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied on instinct before he remembered his manners. “Er, thank you, Lady Heterodyne.”

She smiled. “No need to be so formal. You may call me Aunt Agatha if you’d like.”

He could hardly remember the last time he’d had an aunt. (As for uncles… well, the less said about Dad’s brothers, the better.) He found himself returning the smile. “Thank you… Aunt Agatha.”

Her smile brightened, and as she served him tea and cakes, they chatted amiably about the importance and merits of both, favorite flavors, and the like. They continued in that vein until after the deputy archivist delivered Harold’s books.

Then Aunt Agatha asked casually, “And how is your father today?”

Harold almost choked on his tea cake.

“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “We don’t actually read minds without permission, although picking up surface thoughts can’t always be helped. But Albia noticed you disappearing every day, and so did Colette. May I see your device?”

He hesitated, but she didn’t seem angry, so he sighed and pulled out his pocket teleporter to hand to her.

“Oh, yes, I see,” she said, looking it over briefly and handing it back. “Very clever!”

“It wasn’t so clever when I tested it and accidentally sent myself into Fort Knox,” Harold muttered and put the teleporter back in his pocket.[1]

She patted his shoulder sympathetically. “At least you didn’t send yourself into a volcano or the ocean.”

He accepted that with a tilt of his head.

“And that happened….”

“Six years ago.” He sighed. “I even made the mistake of picking something up, which means the Feds have my fingerprints.”

“But why develop it so early?”

“Well, Mom and Dad both wanted me to go to college—I don’t remember Mom well, but Dad told me she always said she wanted me to get an education. But Dad was already deteriorating enough that he couldn’t run the farm by himself. I knew the only chance I had was to build something that would let me leave town long enough to attend classes and come straight back with as little travel time as possible.”

“I see.”

“Then I got a full-ride scholarship to MIT, so I moved my college fund to a money market account to earn more interest. By the time Dad needed full-time care, I had enough saved up to put him in a good facility and hire some workers to keep up with the farm work. Not that it’s a big farm, but… even if I hadn’t been commuting to school, I don’t think I could run it alone.”

“And you have to keep up appearances, is that it?”

“Sort of. I do want to spend time with Dad regardless, but as long as someone sees me at the nursing home, in town, and at the house at least once a day, nobody will ask where I am the rest of the time. So far, no one seems to have noticed that I’ve left town at all.”

“What about your companions? Do they know?”

He shook his head. “Well, Nathan knows, but he’s the only one. Arthur hasn’t worked out why I scoff so much at the notion of machine intelligence.”

Aunt Agatha raised an eyebrow and looked at his stack of books.

“That was… not my breakthrough project, but one I started early and still haven’t cracked. I wanted to make Dad an external memory machine. Dad pointed out that even if it had all of his memories, it wouldn’t be him, and I knew even at the time that he was right, but that wasn’t the point.”

“No,” she mused. “Even the ‘life extension’ clanks the Hurwood brothers developed when Gil and Tarvek were studying in Paris weren’t more than pale imitations of the people whose memories were copied onto them, and they suffered from post-vital personality drift. But you’re not talking about making a life extension. You’re talking about a repository of memories that wouldn’t even necessarily display a personality, just facts and figures and images.”

“Yes, exactly—and store them so that even if Dad’s brain can’t access them, someone can. And if it did have a personality, it wouldn’t have to be the same as Dad’s. It could be an assistant, a friend.”

“Like the Muses?”

“Not quite like the Muses. They were built to advise the Storm King. I’m not even sure what kind of personality I’d give it, just… friendly and helpful.”

She smiled. “I see. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

He sighed again. “He’s getting worse. I haven’t been back yet today because of the time difference, but yesterday… even though it was a pretty good day, we had the same conversation three times in the space of an hour, and I’m sure he’s already forgotten I was there.”

“Poor Harold,” she murmured.

He hesitated. “I know the way you lost your own parents was very different….”

“Yes, but I have seen some of my friends and some of my best minions go through the same thing. There are some things I can cure, but… not dementia. Not yet, anyway. It’s too hard to pin down an exact cause, for one thing, and there are too many types for one cure to work for everyone.”

He nodded sadly, trying not to be too disappointed.

“We queens are still human, you know,” she added softly. “We can do a great many things that ordinary sparks can’t, just as sparks can do a great many things the average person can’t… but we’re not goddesses, no matter what the ancients thought.”

That comment intrigued him. “What separates a queen from an ordinary spark?”

“Well, there are elements that I really shouldn’t tell you and a great deal that even Albia doesn’t fully understand. We still don’t truly understand the Spark, after all. But the short version is, some strong sparks have the capacity for a second breakthrough that makes it possible to… well, to do all manner of things. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t done it.”

“And is it something only women can do?”

“Oh, no, men can do it, too—there was even one memorable occasion when a robot with my mother’s memories made the leap, which baffled everyone. The Polar Ice Lords may be in that class; they’re functionally immortal, and Princess Neena’s research didn’t answer all of our questions as to why. But most of the male sparks I’ve encountered who wanted to achieve that status went about it the wrong way. Lord Snackleford tried draining energy from an extradimensional being and wound up… well, I think he exploded, but Dr. Vapnoople wasn’t exactly coherent when he came back from that realm. Colette’s father used mechanical means to extend his life, so I don’t know whether he actually made the second breakthrough. Plus, not everyone who achieves the second breakthrough the right way survives for very long—Igneous Heterodyne tried it and exploded seconds later—and… well, I suspect that at least in the past, many of the men who did it failed to realize that they could still be killed with the right weapons, went to war against each other, and ended up killing each other.” She grimaced. “Unfortunately, most of the ancient queens were killed, too—by my mother.”

“Your mother?!”

Aunt Agatha nodded. “We still haven’t pieced together all the clues, but somehow Mother learned how to manipulate time and started time-traveling to learn as many of the queens’ secrets as she could, including the right weapons to use to kill them. Then she went back several millennia and started… well, eliminating competitors, I guess you’d say. She wanted to become a queen herself and use the wasps to enslave the whole world. I don’t know at what point she fully became the Other, but she created the Geisterdamen to serve as her priestesses with the promise that she would always return to them in one guise or another.”

“That’s terrifying.” Harold had always been intrigued by the stories of the Heterodyne Boys and of Aunt Agatha and her friends, but even the non-fiction books he’d read about the Great War hadn’t come close to revealing the full horror of the Other’s schemes.

“So you see why we’re certain she’ll be coming back in your lifetime and why we need more eyes watching for her than just our own.”

“I do, but—you said it could be thirty years or more.”

“It could, so your mechanical memory project could be helpful, especially if you can program it to make connections among disparate data points that a human mind might miss.”

“It would help if I could get it to remember more than a sentence at a time,” he muttered.

She smiled and patted his shoulder. “Here, this should help you get through all the books you requested in no time.” And she gestured to a large engine with a funnel on top.

Harold blinked. “What’s that?”

Aunt Agatha beamed. “The Accelerated Auto-Research Mega-Swot Engine. My friend Jiminez Hoffman invented it back in the ’90s, and I improved it several times over the years. The Librarians don’t allow it to be used often, but this is a special occasion.”

She fired it up, gathered all the books he’d requested, and dumped them into the funnel before he could protest. The machine whirred and pinged, placed each book in turn on a stand in a glass dome, flipped through the pages as flashbulbs popped in blinding succession, and deposited the books—evidently undamaged—on a cart by its base. More whirring and pinging followed, and a surprisingly modern dot matrix printer buzzed to life as a batch of capsules that looked like film canisters rolled out of another port on the engine’s base. When the printer finished, an attendant clank removed the paper, separated and collated the pages too quickly for Harold to follow, and just as swiftly put the stack of paper through a spiral binding machine. Finally, the clank delivered the bound papers and the capsules to Harold and rolled away with the cartload of books.

Dazed, Harold looked at the materials in his hands. “What….”

“A summary report of the information you requested,” Aunt Agatha explained, “and microfilm of each source.” She handed him another small device. “That’s a microfilm viewer that you can attach to your television, so you don’t have to depend on your local library to read them.”

“Oh.” He looked up at her. “‘Thank you’ hardly seems adequate.”

She smiled. “You’re very welcome.”

Before he could think of what to say next, the familiar sound of a throat clearing and a polite knock on the doorframe drew his attention drew his attention to Nathan, who was poking his head into the room.

“Hey!” Harold shifted the materials he was holding so that he could wave Nathan into the room. “Aunt Agatha, may I present Nathan Ingram. Nathan, Lady Agatha Heterodyne.”

Aunt Agatha smiled and offered her hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Ingram.”

Nathan bowed slightly, took her hand, and kissed it gallantly. “A great pleasure, Lady Heterodyne.”

Her smile grew. “I can see why you trust him,” she told Harold.

Harold beamed.

Nathan smiled and turned to Harold. “Listen, I hate to interrupt, but….”

“Arthur’s ready to go?” Harold guessed and started stuffing the microfilm into his pockets.

Nathan shrugged a little. “Not that he wants to, but we have to leave now if we’re going to have any chance of getting supper before he goes to shul.”

“Oh, that’s right, and he talked about wanting to go to the Grand Synagogue this evening.”

“There’s a nice bistro on the Rue Chantereine,” Aunt Agatha said. “It’s next door to the Hotel Beauharnais. And if you go to the patisserie on Rue La Fayette for dessert, ask for a Lady Heterodyne Magnifique.”

Harold smiled. “Sounds delicious. Thanks, Aunt Agatha.”

With that, they said goodbye and left, collected Arthur, and headed back into Paris for supper. There wasn’t time for dessert before Arthur had to hurry off to the synagogue, so Nathan and Harold promised to meet him at the patisserie afterward. But instead of following his suggestion to go see the revival of Agata della Heterodynes at the Paris Opera, they went to the hotel so that Harold could go home, hide his library loot, and check on Dad.[2] When he went by The Pines, however, Harold discovered that Dad had come down with a mild upper respiratory virus—not serious enough to send him to the hospital, but enough that the staff doctor thought he shouldn’t have visitors for a few days. Harold promised to call every day to check in, went home to cover his tracks and make sure his answering service knew where to reach him in case of emergency, and jumped back to Paris.

“That was fast,” said Nathan.

Harold sat down with a sigh. “Dad’s sick.”

Nathan frowned. “Do you need to go home?”

Harold shook his head. “It’s not that serious, and the nursing home won’t let me see him right now anyway. They’ll call if it gets worse. And anyway, I don’t want Arthur to think anything is wrong.”

“Arthur knows you have a family, Harold, even if he doesn’t know the details. He’ll understand if you have to go, and so will I. And so will your Aunt Agatha, if I’m any judge of character.”

Harold managed a wan smile. “Thanks.”

“So are we going to tell Arthur we went to the opera or not?”

“I’ve read the libretto. I’ve seen better Heterodyne shows at the county fair.”

Nathan laughed. “That’s what Grandpappy said when the Vienna Mechaniksoper’s touring production of Portentius Reichenbach’s The Storm King came to Houston.”

That got a laugh out of Harold, and they talked about Heterodyne stories until time to go meet Arthur at the patisserie.

[1] We’re never actually given a clear explanation of what happened in 1974 that would constitute either sedition or treason, although if it was sedition, he might have sent an inflammatory letter to the editor of the Washington Post or something. (How the FBI failed to connect it to anything more than his fingerprints until after the ARPANET breach is also not explained.) However, in this alternate timeline, neither the Soviet Union nor the Cold War exist, so Harold’s teenaged misstep would have to be something that would be a federal offense even without the Cold War. The teleporter also helps paper over the continuity error between “Wolf and Cub” and “Lethe”/“Alethia” with regard to Harold’s studies at MIT.

[2] I’ve seen some discussion on fan forums on whether this title ought to be Agata degli Heterodynes, but the poster Agatha encounters outside Blind Eos Gate Station says “della” very clearly.

Chapter Text

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Harold had talked Nathan out of the backpacking plan even before they left Boston; they went from city to city by airship instead, so staying in touch with The Pines was considerably easier than if they’d been on foot, and Harold didn’t have as much trouble finding moments to disappear once Dad recovered enough to receive visitors again. (And Dad did recover physically—but his mental clarity took a nosedive, and he recognized Harold less and less.) Their final stop was Houston, where they stayed for a week that ended with Nathan and Olivia’s wedding. And after the newlyweds left on their honeymoon, Arthur went home to Delaware… so Harold waited until Arthur’s flight had left before going back to Lassiter.

It was odd at first, spending all his days and nights in his hometown for the first time in years. He constantly felt like he needed to be somewhere else, even though “Harold Wren” hadn’t received any job offers prior to graduation and hadn’t left a forwarding address or phone number with the school other than the answering service and mail drop he’d used since first applying to MIT. But there were worse places to be in the summer than in rural Iowa, and the fall harvest arrived and absorbed his attention before he could become desperate enough to disappear when he shouldn’t. By the time harvest season was over, Harold had settled into his new routine well enough to be able to spend most of his time working on his memory machine, trying to implement new ideas based on the information he’d gotten from the Immortal Library. Nathan called once a week to check on him, too, which helped—Harold hadn’t lost touch with any of his high school acquaintances and occasionally accepted their invitations to get out of the house for a while, but none of them were much more than kids with whom he’d gone to school. He had exactly two friends, and of those, Nathan was far and away the best friend he’d ever had.

As October wore on, however, Harold’s patience with the components he’d been able to buy or scavenge began wearing thin. With Dad deteriorating ever more rapidly and no sense of when the Other might make her reappearance, he wanted to get the memory machine working as quickly as possible, but the components simply couldn’t cope with what he was asking them to do and kept catching fire. He needed something more, something better, but he had to make the farm’s profits last through the winter. Even Nathan didn’t have any good suggestions.

Finally, when yet another component ignited on the night of October 27, Harold snapped. He put the fire out—he could hardly do otherwise—but then he retrieved the phone phreaking whistle he’d picked up in Boston the year before and reached for the phone. He’d read everything he could get his hands on about distributed computing and the information network that was being built at various colleges around the country, and in his desperation, he concluded that said network was his best chance at getting the power he needed to push his memory machine to the next level. He whistled the correct pattern into the phone and put the handset onto a cradle connected to his workstation; a sound like a fax machine connecting came over the line, and suddenly his monitor displayed a screen proclaiming Welcome to ARPANET. He hardly registered the line stating that the network belonged to the Department of Defense, only the Proceed? Y/N prompt.

“If they didn’t want you to get in, they should have built it better,” he muttered and pressed Y.

The wealth of information he found suddenly at his fingertips excited him nearly as much as his Spark breaking through, and he spent the next four hours exploring what he could find and what his memory machine could do with the connection. He wanted to see everything, learn everything—

Finally, the smell of smoke pulled him out of his fugue. But this time, it wasn’t just one component that was on fire. It was the whole wall in front of him.

Panicked, Harold grabbed the fire extinguisher and tried to put out the fire, but the flames were spreading too rapidly for him to contain. He knew the farm was too far from town for the fire department to reach him before the whole house was involved. Instead, he hung up the phone, grabbed the go bag he’d kept packed for years with all his most important papers and most precious mementoes, and teleported to Nathan and Olivia’s house. Olivia, he knew, was out of town visiting a sick relative, but Nathan jumped and swore when Harold appeared on his couch.

“I’m sorry for not calling first,” Harold said shakily. “There wasn’t time.”

Nathan stared and then asked quietly, “Harold, what have you done?”

Harold explained and slowly drank the glass of bourbon Nathan gave him. As he finished both, he sighed. “I think the sheriff will draw the obvious conclusion and have me declared dead, even without my remains being found. I’ll go back in the morning to say goodbye to Dad, but after that….”

“Do you have a will?” Nathan asked and took his glass.

Harold nodded. “I made it the day after my twenty-first birthday, just in case—Dad was already at The Pines, so I wanted to be sure he’d be cared for if anything happened to me. Our family lawyer will have to sell the farm sooner or later, but there’s enough in savings to cover Dad’s care and his funeral.”

“And your funeral?”

Harold shrugged. “I don’t know if anyone in Lassiter even cares enough to have a funeral.”

Nathan poured him another shot and waited until he’d downed a few more sips before asking, “So where will you go from here?”

Harold sighed and considered. “Probably Venice. I don’t think Tante Colette would mind if I go to Paris early, but I’m not supposed to start my studies at the Institute until January.” He took another sip. “Will Olivia be terribly offended if I don’t come for Christmas?”

“Well, we may not be hosting Christmas this year after all, and Arthur already said he can’t come down for Hanukkah, so no, I don’t think she’ll be offended. I’ll tell her you asked, though.”

Harold nodded and drained his glass. He wasn’t as fond of liquor as Nathan was, but somehow the bourbon was just what he needed at the moment.

“So: Venice until January, Paris from January to July, Mechanicsburg from July until… December next year?”

Harold nodded. “That gives us the whole of 1982 to lay the groundwork for IFT and still hit our target launch date.”

“And I’ll try to have a nice, boring job lined up for Harold Wren by the time you get back—something like selling insurance.”

Harold couldn’t help smiling at that.

“Here.” Nathan took his glass again. “I’ll get you a pillow and a blanket. You can sleep on the couch for tonight.”

“Thanks, Nathan,” Harold murmured—but he was asleep before Nathan returned.

As sirens screamed past the IFT Building in New York on September 11, 2001, Nathan pushed the “Keep Calm” button on his desk that would trigger the company’s orderly evacuation protocol. Second, he turned to his private telegraph, connected it to the line to his home, and wired Olivia: IFT is fine. Evacuation is in progress. May have to stay here for a while but will keep in touch. Use this line only to keep phone lines clear. He knew Olivia might not be home, but if she wasn’t, he was sure she’d check the tickertape as soon as she got in. When he finished that message, he looked out the window again, took a deep breath, and composed a company-wide email to inform his employees that he expected everyone to stay home until the streets were safe to travel and to reassure them that they’d all get through the crisis together.

Just as he clicked “Send,” the telegraph delivered Olivia’s reply: Understood. Will is staying on campus with a friend. Stay safe, darling.

You, too, honey, he sent back and returned his attention to business. The security clanks, which Harold had modeled on the Gendarmy of Paris but looked more modern and operated on a different software system, were ushering people to their nearest safe exit. Some of the employees seemed to be having panic attacks, but others offered support and banded together to make the trek home on foot so that the roads would remain clear for emergency vehicles. Nathan kept an eye on their progress as he emailed clients and other important contacts about the immediate future. He checked on friends, too. Arthur wrote back from his home in Fort Meade; he’d been laid up with the flu and so had missed a meeting at the Pentagon, which had also been hit moments earlier, and Diane had mercifully stayed home to take care of him. (The email was in Yiddish, so Nathan knew how severely Arthur was shaken.) The Immortal Library sent heartfelt condolences and a rather timid request for copies of any memoirs that might be written in the aftermath. And Queen Albia sent a personal note that surprised Nathan with its tenderness.

Nor was correspondence the only matter on Nathan’s mind. He sent large personal and corporate donations to disaster relief agencies. He directed his property managers to open any vacant apartments and hotel rooms for people who couldn’t get out of Manhattan that night and to assure their guests that their stay was free of charge. And when he began to see stories of the heroic efforts of the ferries and other boat owners to help evacuate the island, he sent donations their way, too.

It was late in the day when he finally went down to Harold’s secret lab. Harold was in a light fugue and was merrily working away on his latest sustainable farming project, blissfully unaware of the chaos unfolding around them. Nathan wasn’t completely surprised—the precautions they’d taken to shield the lab from prying eyes also kept out unwanted distractions—but somehow it hurt even worse, knowing that he’d have to be the one to give Harold the terrible news.

As Nathan approached his desk, Harold looked up and smiled. “Hi, Nathan!” he chirped and went right back to work. “I’m almost done—”

“Harold,” Nathan interrupted gravely.

Harold looked up again and dropped out of fugue. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Turn on the TV. Any news channel.”

Harold did so, and Nathan found a chair and sat beside him as the full horror finally sank in and they both slowly slid into shock.

It was some time before Harold finally found his voice again, though when he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. “We have to do something.”

Nathan sighed. “I’ve done all I could. Donations, shelter—”

“No, I mean… we have to do something, build something, make sure this can never happen again.”

“Like what?”

Harold stared at the screen for a moment longer, and Nathan heard a low hum that slowly grew louder and took on a heterodyne note that interfered with the sound from the TV. Only when Harold bolted out of his chair did Nathan realize the source of the hum. The line That was you buzzin’! You naughty boy![1] flitted through his head, but a crash from the storage closet stopped him from saying it out loud.

Instead, Nathan turned off the TV and went to check on his pal. “Harold?”

“Where is it… where is it…” Harold was muttering with a growing sparky edge as he opened drawer after drawer until finally finding a flat palm-sized box and setting it on the work bench. He opened the box to reveal what looked like a pocket watch, which he took out and wound up. But when he pressed the stem in, the thing didn’t just tick. Tiny brass arms and legs extended from it, and what had looked like a boss in the middle opened to reveal a single eye. The little clank stood up and regarded Harold with an inquisitive chime.

“Do you know who I am?” Harold asked it. “Aunt Agatha gave you to me, remember?”

Bip, said the clank, which sounded to Nathan like a yes.

“She told me to activate you only in an emergency. And this is a national emergency. Will you help me?”

Bing! The clank saluted.

Harold almost seemed to glow as he slid fully into what Mechanicsburgers called ‘the madness place.’ “Let’s get to work.”

The clank went one way and Harold went another, deeper into the stores of brass components.

“Harold?” Nathan called after him.

“No time!” Harold called back.

Nathan hesitated, then decided he’d better at least make sure Harold ate. He went back to his office to wire Olivia that Harold needed help—she could read into that whatever she wanted—and that he wouldn’t be home for a while. Then he went to the company cafeteria and retrieved a couple of meals, making sure he got Harold something that would be easy to eat while working.

He got back to the lab to find Harold surrounded by a swarm of little helper clanks cobbled together from various odds and ends. The watch clank seemed to be directing a few of them to make more helpers while the rest held tools and lights and fetched small components that Harold slotted into whatever he was making at lightning speed.

“Harold?” Nathan called. “I’ve brought your supper.”

“No time!” Harold snapped and slammed a gear into place.

Nathan sighed, set the trays out of the way, and ate his own sandwich while he watched his friend working at a pace that was almost too fast to see. He couldn’t tell what Harold was building yet, but it swiftly grew from just a few gears to a mechanism on what looked like a 12" x 18" base plate. When Harold paused for thought, a couple of the helper clanks put the other sandwich in his hand, and he ate without seeming to notice that he was doing so. Then they handed him the bottle of water Nathan had brought down for him, and he drank but made a face as if plain water wasn’t what he wanted.

“Can I get you something else?” Nathan asked.

Harold looked at the water pensively for a moment, then said, “Coffee.”

“Cof—coffee?! You hate coffee!”

“Yes, but I need the caffeine.”

“Well, hang on. I think I’ve got some NoDoz somewhere—that’ll give you the caffeine without offending your tastebuds.”

Harold chuckled a little. “Thanks.”

Nathan hurried up to his office, found the pills where he’d thought they were, and—paused to wonder whether he should really give them to Harold. He hadn’t forgotten the night Harold had accidentally burned down his house nor the way Harold had grieved both over the fact that his dad hadn’t recognized him at all when he’d gone back to say goodbye and over having to miss his dad’s funeral the following August. He also knew that Harold had been wrong about people in Lassiter not caring enough about him to mourn him, and if Harold managed to off himself for real this time, more than the Ingram family would deign to turn out for his funeral. But Nathan had been covering for Harold’s fugues long enough to know that the only way out was through, and if the caffeine was what it took to get through this one before he needed to reopen the office… well, he’d just have to stand by with a fire extinguisher.

So resolved, he went back down and gave Harold the pills. “Now, take it easy with those. The last thing I need is for you to give yourself a heart attack.”

Harold chuckled a little, took one pill with the last of his water, and set the rest of the bottle aside in favor of accepting a cup of tea from a helper clank. Between sips, he hummed quietly and continued staring at the mechanism he was building. The little clanks responded as if he were giving them verbal instructions, slotting more gears and screws and balance wheels into place and fixing them in position. When he finished his cuppa, he took a moment to sketch something that the clanks studied and scurried off to build while he kept working on the mechanism. His working speed increased as the caffeine kicked in, and his humming grew louder and more complex. Nathan kept an eye on things for as long as he could, but when it became obvious that Harold wasn’t going to stop for the night, Nathan gave up and lay down on the cot Harold kept in a corner of the lab. Somehow the clattering and humming acted like a lullaby as Nathan drifted off to sleep, praying that he wouldn’t have nightmares based on the images he’d seen that day.

The next day was more of the same, although Harold seemed to have temporarily abandoned his mechanism in favor of typing code into his computer at near-telekinetic speed while the helper clanks made a racket in the storeroom. Nathan could at least take comfort in the fact that Harold’s current workstation was significantly more robust than any PCs had been in 1980 and was thus unlikely to catch fire. For his own part, Nathan kept tabs on the news and on his email while standing by in case Harold needed anything more than food. The day after that, Harold was back to building again, although Nathan couldn’t quite tell what the mechanism was turning into beyond the fact that it seemed to be a humanoid clank with a white enamel casing.

As Nathan left the lab that third evening to take their supper dishes back to the kitchen, a contingent of helper clanks hurried out ahead of him and hurried back toting a bolt of white fabric, something black and shiny, and two or three small pots of paint. He supposed that meant Harold was almost finished, but he couldn’t figure out what those supplies were for or where they’d come from. He puzzled over it as he washed the dishes quickly, but none of his guesses prepared him for what he found on his return to the lab. Harold was just stepping back from the now-standing large clank with a paint pot in one hand and a brush in the other, watching as the helper clanks wrapped a length of fabric around the new clank to form an Egyptian-style dress and settled the black thing—which Nathan could now see was a shoulder-length wig—onto its head. The new clank had gained a feminine pair of lips and painted eyes that resembled the Eye of Horus. If Nathan hadn’t seen Harold build it, he could easily believe it had been recovered from the Valley of the Kings… or the basement of the Chrysler Building.

As the helper clanks finished tucking in the free ends of the fabric, Harold put the brush back in the paint pot and set the paint pot on his workbench. Then he went over to his computer and entered a command. The new clank whirred and stirred, and its painted eyelids lifted to reveal a pair of camera lenses that it trained on Harold. A moment later, a video window appeared on Harold’s monitor, showing what the clank saw.

“Hello,” said Harold.

A square box appeared in the video window, outlining Harold’s face with a dashed yellow line.

“Do you know who I am?”

A couple of quick whirs as the cameras focused more precisely, and the label Admin appeared outside the box in the video window.

Harold smiled. “Good.” Then he gestured to Nathan. “Do you know who this is?”

The clank turned to view Nathan. Another yellow box appeared around his face, accompanied by the label Aux_admin.

“Excellent. Nathan, this is Udjat, the Muse of Surveillance.”

“Hello, Udjat,” said Nathan.

Udjat bowed slightly.

Harold entered another command, and Udjat closed its eyes and seemed to shut down. Then the color drained from Harold’s face as he finally dropped out of fugue and the fact that he’d been awake for the best part of three days caught up with him.

Nathan was at his side in a flash to steer him into a chair. “You all right, Harold?”

“I… I don’t know… there’s still so much to do, so much—”

“The rest can wait until you get some sleep. You’re not a full-fledged Heterodyne, you know, and you’re not in college anymore. Even your Aunt Agatha had to sleep once in a while when she was repairing her castle before that big siege in 1892.”

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing. Bed.”

Harold grumbled but let Nathan bundle him onto the cot. He fell asleep quickly, but Nathan still took the time to check email again before setting up his own cot and drifting off to the sound of the helper clanks tidying the lab.

The following morning, Nathan managed to get breakfast made before Harold woke sluggishly. “What time is it?” Harold asked as he dragged himself out of bed.

“Nine o’clock on Friday morning,” Nathan answered and handed Harold a cup of tea. “I’m keeping the office closed through the weekend.”

Harold grunted and drank his tea as he sat down at his worktable.

“The attack wasn’t the Other’s work,” Nathan added and put a tray in front of Harold. “This group that claimed credit, Al Qaeda, apparently thinks all sparks are in league with the devil. That’s why they hijacked airplanes instead of sending something like an antimatter fragmentation bomb.”

Harold frowned and put down his cup. “But there have been Muslim sparks—the Iron Sheik, for one.”

“The Iron Sheik was also a friend of the Heterodyne Boys and sent his son to be educated on Castle Wulfenbach. Nobody’s saying so, but it’s pretty obvious that Al Qaeda considers people like that to be traitors to Islam.”

Harold grumbled and tucked into his breakfast.

Nathan ate a few bites of his own before changing the subject slightly. “Last night you called Udjat a Muse.”

“Well, unofficially,” Harold conceded. “I’d have to introduce her to the others to make it official, and I don’t think that’s safe, even on a video call. But I built her based on what I’ve learned about the Muses over the years, plus the research I’ve read on machine intelligence—even some of Arthur’s best ideas.”

“But you said there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

“Mainly programming at this stage. There might be some adjustment needed to the robotics, but I’ve done enough of that now to be confident on that side of things.”

“You’ve got the mainframe up and running, but how do you plan to refine the program without access to more surveillance data than we generate here in the building?”

Harold blinked, opened his mouth, and closed it again. “Well….”

Nathan raised a hand. “Hear me out before you start spitballing.”

“I wasn’t—”

“I’ve been in contact with a friend of mine in Washington—Alicia Corwin. She’s the Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, a job that up to now has mostly been about keeping tabs on what Mexico and Canada are doing. She’s hearing talk about Congress authorizing mass surveillance by the end of the year, if not sooner. But the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA together don’t have enough manpower to analyze that much data in anything like the time required to intercept credible threats. If and when the authorization goes through, the government’s going to start accepting bids for artificial intelligence programs that can process the data, identify threats to national security, and alert the agencies so humans can act on the intel.”

Harold chewed his bacon thoughtfully but said nothing.

“I’m sure IFT won’t be the only company to tender a bid, and they might get bids from sparks like Arthur who might or might not be able to make their programs work, but if you’re serious about wanting Udjat to be capable of stopping the next attack….”

“If I weren’t, do you think I’d have built her?!”

“If you’re serious, this program would get you the data you need to develop her to the point where she can actually do the job you want her to do.”

“… True.”

“But Congress won’t be passing any bills this weekend, so we should both go home and get some sleep.”

“I got some sleep,” Harold groused but kept eating, so Nathan considered his point made.

After breakfast, Nathan took care of the dishes and returned to the lab to find Harold dismantling most of his little helpers. The first one he’d activated was resting in its box and seemed to have wound down.

“That’s an antique,” Harold observed when he noticed Nathan looking at it. “Aunt Agatha made it soon after she broke through. She gave it to me because she thought I might need some helpers if I needed to build something in a hurry—I don’t think she quite envisaged this scenario, but the shoe fit, and it’s not like I have minions.”

“So it’s self-replicating?”

“Not exactly. It has enough of the Spark to create new clanks, and those can in turn create more. But they get less sophisticated with each generation, and none of them have much of a power supply. They have to be wound daily.”

“So it’s not really worth keeping them after they’ve served their purpose—” Nathan picked up the box. “—except for this one.”

“Exactly. It’s not like they’re human.”

“Oh, thanks for that,” Nathan snarked and put the box down.

Harold shot him a strange look. “Humans have always mattered more to me than machines. You know that.”

“Really? Is that why you spend so much more of your time with machines than with people?”

Harold huffed and went back to work.

Nathan watched him for a moment, then sighed. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair of me.”

“I suppose I have always had trouble connecting with people,” Harold conceded quietly. “The list of exceptions is rather short: you, Dad, Arthur—oh. Have you heard from Arthur?”

“He’s been down with the flu since Monday, so he missed the meeting he was supposed to have at the Pentagon Tuesday morning.”

Harold winced. “At least he’s safe.”

“Will was on campus when it happened, and I think Olivia was out, but she made it home safely.”

“Good. I’d better message Tante Colette and Aunt Agatha; they’ll be worried.”

So saying, Harold finally put down his screwdriver and picked up his jacket. Nathan walked him to his car, just to make sure he was actually okay to drive. Only after Harold made it safely out of the parking garage did Nathan go to his own car and head home.

When he arrived, Olivia met him at the door with a long kiss and an even longer hug. “How’s Harold?” she asked after she finally let him go.

“He’s doing better today,” Nathan replied. “He wasn’t coping well with the shock, so I didn’t think I could leave him alone.” Strict truth, this! But of course, Olivia and Will weren’t allowed to know that Harold had any kind of expertise with computers at all, let alone the extent of his brilliance.

“You should have invited him to come home with you.”

“I would have, honey, but he’s not feeling terribly sociable at the moment. Honestly, I can’t say I blame him—we never expected an attack of this magnitude to happen here, especially one coming from overseas. It’s the kind of thing that makes you think the stories of the Other dropping boulders on castles from outer space during the First Other War weren’t complete fiction.”

Olivia shuddered and changed the subject to a steady stream of gossip that gave Nathan an excuse not to think about the would-be Muse in Harold’s lab.

Life continued to change over the next months and years. The bill Alicia had told Nathan about was signed into law in October; IFT’s stock price had taken a hefty hit while Wall Street was offline, as had the stocks of most of the tech sector, so Nathan used that excuse to downsize enough to clear an entire floor for the servers Harold would presumably need for developing Udjat’s operating system into a true AI that he could then scale up to meet the government’s brief. Harold refined Udjat’s programming, teaching her strategy and problem-solving and all manner of ways to track people, identify outliers, and connect individuals to each other with even the most minute threads. It took a little over three years for Nathan to be able to hand Alicia the first piece of actionable intelligence—but apparently not even Arthur got that far that fast, because between the speed and the sale price of $1, Denton Weeks decided he had no choice but to accept IFT’s tender for what became known as Project Northern Lights and shut down all the other projects. Nathan’s relationship with Olivia deteriorated, and Will started acting out before deciding to run away from his problems by joining Doctors Without Borders, but Nathan thought the project was worth the toll it was taking on his private life…

… until he walked into Harold’s lab one evening and accidentally discovered that Udjat could detect more than just terrorist attacks.

Harold tried to assure Nathan that they couldn’t play god and give every random person whose imminent murder was being flagged the same level of attention as the government gave to plots that were relevant to national security. Nathan couldn’t buy that argument, and he also had growing doubts about Weeks and his ilk. It also didn’t help that Alicia started jumping at shadows as the date for transferring Northern Lights to the government’s full control drew closer.

Finally, after failing to convince Harold to give Northern Lights a back door before the system shut down for the transfer, Nathan waited until Harold was well away from the building, put the surveillance cameras on a one-hour loop, went back to the lab, and turned the Northern Lights mainframe back on. He was still coding a new subroutine called Contingency when Udjat came over to see what he was doing.

Rather than ignoring her, Nathan turned. “Udjat… I know you’re aware of what Harold calls ‘the irrelevant list,’ and I’m sure you know what I’ve said to him about it.”

She nodded.

“There’s only so much I can do on my own, but I want to try to save those people. Will you help me?”

She nodded again—and was it just his imagination, or did she look relieved?

“Thank you.” He finished Contingency and turned back to her again. “I’ll have to shut you down again, but it shouldn’t be for long.”

She nodded again and squeezed his shoulder. He turned off the system and bundled her back into the box Harold had built with the intent of keeping her in mothballs indefinitely. Then he took the box out to his car, drove to an abandoned library Harold had bought and done nothing with, and took the box inside. While Northern Lights was in transit, Nathan brought just enough equipment to the library to be able to investigate the irrelevant numbers when the system came back online.

He had just taken Udjat out of her box when she booted up, looked at him, and began taking stock of her new surroundings.

“Are you all right, Udjat?”

She nodded.

“Are you connected?”

She nodded.

“Good. Let’s get to work.”

She nodded a third time, and a window opened on his laptop with a young woman’s picture, name, and Social Security number. He sat down and began to investigate.

Little did he know that a year later, his attempt to do good would cause him to nearly lose his best friend… and to actually lose his life.

[1] John Lennon to Ringo Starr, Help!

Chapter Text

After the ferry bombing in September 2010 that killed Nathan and forced a badly injured Harold to disappear and let his fiancée Grace Hendricks think he was among the dead, after Harold had shed his tears for both Nathan and Grace and let Udjat patch him up as far as he dared, he began plotting his revenge. To the best of his knowledge, only one person could have wanted Nathan dead: Alicia Corwin, who’d convinced him to apply for the Northern Lights contract in the first place. Nathan had said she’d been acting nervous before the transfer. Denton Weeks wanted to hack into Northern Lights, sure, but who else besides Alicia had anything to gain from silencing Nathan? No, if Harold wanted to avenge his best friend and protect the love of his life, Alicia had to die.

Before he could formulate a plan, though, he needed to observe Alicia for a while. So, when he was healed enough for Udjat to bring him his laptop, he had a request for her:

“Show me Alicia Corwin.”

Udjat looked as startled as her robotic features allowed. But after apparently calculating her response, a grainy security camera feed appeared on his screen. Harold settled in to watch, only to be brought up short when Alicia’s haunted face appeared on the screen. The identifying box around it should have been yellow, indicating her knowledge of Northern Lights, but it wasn’t.

It was a shocking neon orange.

Harold wracked his brain trying to remember what orange meant in the scheme of identifying boxes and colors he’d coded when building Udjat. He barely even remembered including orange on the list. When the penny finally dropped, however, he gasped and looked up at Udjat again.

“She’s wasped?!”

Udjat nodded.

That put a whole different spin on the matter. Even if Alicia was responsible for Nathan’s death, it might not have been her own choice—and in any case, the fact that she was infected with one of Lucrezia Mongfish’s mind-control wasps made her the best lead Harold had for working out the place and manner of the Other’s return. Of course, if no one in the current administration had any notion that the Other remained a threat, no one linked to Northern Lights would accept the idea that one of their number had been compromised… and if they did suspect her, they’d probably kill her themselves. Nathan wasn’t the only person connected to Northern Lights to have died since the transfer.

Harold sighed. “We’ll monitor the situation. But I’d better inform Aunt Agatha.”

Udjat looked relieved and brought Harold the secure communication device Aunt Agatha had given him years before.

Alicia’s nerves were shattered even before she arrived in Morocco just before Thanksgiving to deliver the orders that would, in Control’s estimation, tie up the last loose ends from the Daniel Casey affair. She’d known for years that Control was ruthless, but she hadn’t wanted to believe that murder had been among the options for keeping Northern Lights a secret. She’d hoped the other deaths connected to the program had been mistakes and that her own close calls had been accidents—but then Control had ordered Hersh to eliminate Nathan. Now Alicia knew her own days were numbered if she said so much as one wrong word to the wrong person.

The thing in the back of her head that itched every time the phone rang didn’t help. Neither did the gaps in her memory. She wasn’t even completely sure what was going on, but she did know that Control wouldn’t hesitate to order her own “retirement” (what a horrible euphemism!) if anyone had the slightest suspicion that she was suffering from anything more than stress.

Upon her arrival in Morocco, where the weather was unseasonably warm, she briefed CIA Agent Mark Snow and accompanied him to the black site where his subordinates, Agent Kara Stanton and Agent John Reese, were interrogating a suspect. Agent Reese looked particularly unhappy to receive the orders to go to Ordos, almost as if he knew they were being sent to their deaths. Alicia couldn’t blame him. And after delivering their briefing, she stepped outside to get some fresh air—for more reasons than the inside air being stifling.

She had nearly caught her breath when her cell phone rang. She steeled herself and answered.

“Report,” ordered a female voice in a language she didn’t remember learning.

“The package has escaped us,” Alicia heard herself replying in that same language. “Last report places it in Ordos, China. Two birds are being dispatched to retrieve it. The eagle has ordered their elimination.” She cursed internally—she hated being a security leak—but this wasn’t her doing. The thing in her head was doing the talking, and she couldn’t stop it if she tried.

“Understood,” said the caller. “You will not remember this conversation.”

No no no wait—

Why was her phone in her hand? She’d only stepped out for a breath of air….

“Ms. Corwin?” Agent Snow called from somewhere behind her.

Alicia quickly pulled herself together, put her phone back in her purse, and turned around. “Yes?”

Agent Snow looked concerned. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, just… tired and hot.”

His lips pursed slightly, but he nodded. “Allow me to see you to your hotel.”

As Alicia followed him back to his car, she started mentally composing her resignation letter. She couldn’t keep living like this. The sooner she disappeared to a place where neither Northern Lights nor the US government could find her, the better—and maybe the thing in her head would stop itching and let her live a normal life, too.

Meanwhile in New Rochelle, New York, Axel Higgs watched from the shadows as the chill of night descended and blonde, beautiful, distraught Jessica Arndt sat in the front seat of her car and tearfully promised to wait for her old flame, currently known as John Reese, to return from his current assignment and escort her away from her abusive husband. Axel didn’t understand the details of young Master Harold’s sparkwork that told him Mrs. Arndt’s life was in danger nor the reasons Master Harold thought her fate was important for tracking down the source of the wasp that had infected Alicia Corwin. But after Master Harold’s previous assistant had double-crossed him and sold one of his inventions to a rogue element in the Chinese government, Lady Heterodyne had sent Axel to assist him in his quest… and Axel’s fellow Jägermonsters didn’t call him the Sneaky General for nothing.

As Mrs. Arndt hung up her phone, Axel tapped the earwig connected to his. “Did you hear?” he asked Master Harold.

“I did,” Master Harold replied. “But I don’t think we have twenty-four hours.”

“All right. I’ll intervene.”

“Please be careful, Mr. Higgs.”

I haven’t lived eight hundred years by not being careful, Axel wanted to snap, but he wasn’t sure if Master Harold actually knew what he was, and he couldn’t risk being overheard anyway. Instead, he made his way over to the car just as Mrs. Arndt was getting out of it.

“Excuse me,” he said in his best ‘mild-mannered English sailor’ guise. “Mrs. Arndt, is it?”

“Um,” she replied, clearly startled to be spoken to at all. “Yes. Sorry, have we met?”

“No, ma’am. Axel Higgs, at your service. May I speak to you in private?”

She shot a worried look at her house, heaved a resigned sigh, and gestured to the car. “Sure.”

“Thank you.” Axel took care not to make a move that would attract attention from the neighbors—or from Mr. Arndt—as he slid into the front passenger seat.

Mrs. Arndt took another worried look around before she got back into the driver’s seat. “What can I do for you, Mr. Higgs?”

“I’m afraid there’s no easy way to say this, Mrs. Arndt, so I’ll come right out with it. I have reason to believe that your husband intends to kill you soon—perhaps tonight.”

What little color remained in her face drained away. “Kill me? Are you sure?”

“Let’s just say I have a source, and it’s never wrong. And… if you’ll forgive my sayin’ so, I’ve seen my share of battered wives.”

She swallowed hard.

“But I’ve a friend what can help you get away, start over somewhere safe. He wants you to come with me now, this moment, not even go back in the house to pack a bag.”

“I… I can’t. I promised my friend I’d wait—he said he’d be here within twenty-four hours.”

“We can arrange for you to meet your friend when he gets to New York, but if you don’t leave right now, you may not be alive in twenty-four hours.”

She hesitated, dragging in ragged breaths as she tried to fathom what he was saying… and then her phone rang again. “It’s John,” she read from the Caller ID.

Axel nodded. “Answer it.”

She nodded back and picked up. “John?”

“Jess,” Reese’s quiet voice replied through the phone’s tinny receiver. “My boss just gave me another assignment—he won’t let me take off.” Axel heard an edge of desperation in his words.

“Uh, it’s… it’s funny you should say that, ’cause… there’s this man here. He just offered to help me get away.”

“Man? What man?”

“He says his name is Axel Higgs.”

A beat passed as Reese processed the name. “Let me talk to him.”

“Okay.” Mrs. Arndt handed the phone to Axel. “He wants to talk to you.”

Axel raised the phone to his ear and said in Romanian, “My master was pleased with your handling of your encounter with one of his servants last week.”

“Is that so?” Reese answered warily in the same language.

“Rest assured, no such maneuvers will be required to save your beloved.”

“You will see that she comes to no harm?”

“On the honor of the house I serve, I will see that when you meet her again, she will be alive, unharmed, and free.” Axel had crossed paths with Reese and Stanton in Mechanicsburg years before, and he was reasonably sure that Reese, at least, had worked out that Axel worked for the Heterodynes. Stanton wasn’t to be trusted, but Reese had clearly understood that the Master was a staunch ally of the US and had stopped her from indulging her curiosity about Mechanicsburg too far. So surely he would understand what Axel couldn’t say in front of Mrs. Arndt.

Axel barely heard the exhale that wasn’t quite a sigh as Reese accepted the vow for what it was. “Let me talk to her again.”

“All right.” Axel handed the phone back to Mrs. Arndt and switched back to English. “He wants to talk to you.”

Slightly baffled, Mrs. Arndt resumed the conversation. “John?”

“It’s okay, Jess,” Reese responded in English. “Go with Axel. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can.”

She nodded jerkily. “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”

Reese hung up without another word.

“Do you think you can drive?” Axel asked gently.

She drew a deep breath and nodded. “I can get us out of sight of the house.”

“Fine. When you need to stop, I’ll take over.”

She nodded again, started the car, and drove away a split second before Mr. Arndt came out of the house. She glanced up and seemed to see him in the rearview mirror, but rather than bolting, she maintained a remarkably steady pace and turned onto another street just as he jumped into his car to follow. Axel readied himself to draw and fire if needed, but Mrs. Arndt drove a meandering path to a nearby park, stopped the car behind a tree near a burned-out streetlight, and watched the road until her husband’s car roared past.

Then she let out a shuddering sigh and dropped her trembling hands from the steering wheel. “Mr. Higgs, could you—”

Axel gave her a small smile. “As it happens, my own car is just past the tree. Come on.”

Still shaking, she followed him out of her car and deeper into the darkness, where he had indeed left his car before approaching the Arndts’ house on foot. He helped her into the back seat before getting into the driver’s seat, then waited as Mr. Arndt’s car passed the park again. Only when Mr. Arndt’s tail lights disappeared around the nearest corner did Axel start his engine and drive away as quietly as possible, leaving his headlights off until they were out of the park.

Mrs. Arndt was asleep before they reached Manhattan.

Getting her into a safe house was easy. Master Harold had clothes and toiletries delivered for her, and he arranged for her to meet with a divorce lawyer through a video call. She declined to press domestic violence charges but did file for divorce and a restraining order, which went through in a matter of days thanks to more of Master Harold’s spark-wizardry behind the scenes. And once the divorce was final, Master Harold arranged for Axel to escort Mrs. Arndt to Mechanicsburg, where the Mistress had discreetly hired her as a nurse at the Great Hospital.

“You’re sure you’ll be all right without me?” Axel asked Master Harold quietly before boarding the airship.

“I still have one helper,” Master Harold answered. “I can get by without hiring another Rick Dillinger. And I’m sure Aunt Agatha will need to speak to you in person when you arrive.”

“All right, I’ll come back when I can—provided I’m not needed elsewhere.”

“Thank you, Axel.”

Axel really hoped Master Harold would be all right on his own. Udjat might be a fair copy of the Muses, but there was only so much she could do without giving the game away.

John picked glumly at his MRE as he waited with Kara at the extraction point, just inside a covered walkway near the top of a vacant office building leading to a roof that could double as a helicopter landing pad. Knowing that Higgs had sworn on the Heterodynes’ honor to get Jessica safely away from Peter had taken some of the sting out of being sent to Ordos, but the whole mission stank to high heaven. Ms. Corwin had looked uncomfortable with more than the heat when she’d delivered their orders, and something had been off about the way she’d insisted that Kara and John had to be the ones to take the mission and that they’d have to enter Ordos without comms. John couldn’t help wondering if it was just a coincidence that they were being sent after this package just days after they’d been ordered to eliminate Daniel Casey, a white-hat hacker. The fact that the stolen computer virus had allegedly been sold to the Chinese government was even stranger—Sino-American relations had been strained at times, but since the US had helped Chiang Kai-Shek defeat Mao Zedong’s rebels, the two countries had never been outright enemies. Yet Ordos was a ghost town, abandoned after being devastated in the Great War and allegedly quarantined after a biological virus had escaped from some rogue spark’s lab, so whoever was operating there was probably as much an enemy of China’s government as of the US. The alarm bells in his head had grown louder when Mark had ordered him to “retire” Kara with some nonsense about her having been compromised by terrorists; Kara might be a sociopath, but she wasn’t a traitor, and John wasn’t sure even she deserved the destruction wrought by one of the CIA’s spark-made retirement bullets.

And how the hell did Higgs, of all people, know that John had faked Daniel Casey’s death and helped him escape to Canada? There’d been no indication that Casey was working for the Heterodynes. Or maybe the servant in question had been the merc who’d been protecting Casey—although that still raised the question of why the Master of Mechanicsburg had any interest in Casey. There had to be some connection to this mission; John just hadn’t figured out what it was yet.

Being in Ordos had taken the sense of wrongness to still higher levels. Ghost towns always felt a bit creepy, but the slaughtered computer technicians John and Kara had discovered made the feeling worse, especially since some of them were already bloated and decaying even though they’d been dead less than a day. Kara didn’t know that John understood enough Mandarin to know that the one tech who’d still been breathing had rambled something about giant spiders and ghost women who’d come to take away “the machine,” whatever that meant. The tech had also asked Kara to give him something for the pain, so she’d shot him—it always bothered John when she did that. Yet they’d entered the devastated computer lab to find the laptop they were after still sitting on a shelf in what used to be a Faraday cage. Kara, seemingly unbothered by the illogic of the previous intruders getting all the way in and leaving the laptop behind, had simply stuffed the thing into her backpack and taken off for the extraction point with little more than a “Let’s go” to prompt John to follow her.

And now here they were, trying to choke down rations that tasted even worse than usual, while Kara waxed morbidly philosophical about all manner of things and John wished he were anywhere else in the world. He’d loaded a retirement round into his sidearm earlier, while she was in the restroom; he just hadn’t quite convinced himself to use it.

All too soon, Kara noticed that the sun had gone down far enough that it was time to toss out a batch of IR chemlights to signal the helicopter that was supposed to retrieve them. She stepped out onto the landing pad to do so, giving John a clear shot at her back. He drew, aimed… and found he couldn’t shoot his partner in the back.

He lowered his weapon. “Listen, Kara—”

She spun and shot him. The round punched through his body armor and lodged in his chest, causing far more pain than conventional ammo would. He knew instantly she’d used a retirement round. At the same time, his stomach started burning, which meant the MRE had been poisoned.

“Sorry, John,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “Nothing personal. They told me you’d been compromised.”

He managed a feeble chuckle.

“What’s so funny?”

“I got the same orders as you,” he wheezed. “And the MREs… they were poisoned.”

For the first time since he’d known her, she looked truly alarmed.

“They don’t want us to retrieve the package,” he went on. “They want it destroyed. They want everyone who had contact with it destroyed. And you just gave them a beacon.”

She turned back to consider the reason for the chemlights—and he gathered his strength to dash down the stairs before the jet he could hear in the distance could fire at the building.

He’d only made it down two flights of stairs and was beginning to doubt his ability to get much further when he was met by… someone coming up. Said someone looked Scandinavian or Russian, apart from the pointed teeth bared in a smile and the ram’s horn sticking out the left side of his head. John suspected he was already hallucinating.

“Hoy, Hansi!” Ramshorn said boisterously but not too loudly. “Ve iz here—” He broke off and stopped smiling, evidently recognizing that John was not at all well. Then he swept John into a bridal carry and vaulted over the railing, landing several floors down. “JENKA!” he bellowed and sprinted down the nearest hall toward a purple-and-silver blur. “Mek vit de portal, FAST!”

“Vot der—” said the blur, gasped… and the world spun and settled into something that looked like Frankenstein’s lab.

“KESTLE!” hollered Ramshorn, still running toward something John couldn’t quite make out. “Get de Miztress!”

“There’s a round,” John wheezed. “In my gun. Same kind.”

“Dun tok end dun vorry,” said the silver-and-purple blur as clawed hands began stripping John’s clothes away.

Everything became a blur after that—light, noise, burning, freezing, dark, whirling, yelling, ozone, blood, screaming. John couldn’t even try to sort out how many people were in the room or the origin of the bits of shouting he kept hearing.

“First switch!”

“Agatha! He’s—”

“GIL! Get the—”

“Blue fire! TARVEK!”

He couldn’t follow any of it. His DNA was unspooling.

John. Don’t you dare die.

The tattered shreds of his consciousness wrapped around the command like a lifeline.

That’s it. Don’t let go. Jessica needs you.

Jessica needs me, he echoed and clung to the thought. Jessica needs me. Jessica needs me.

“Third switch!”

Jessica needs me Jessica needs me Jessica needs me

“Watch that—”

Jessica

“Ready!”

needs

“NOW!”

The world exploded in light and faded into silence and darkness.

Bip

Bip

Bip

Heart monitor.

He had a heart. It was beating. His chest was rising and falling as he breathed.

He was (alive!) in a bed, a hospital bed. It seemed to be the softest hospital bed he’d ever been in. His eyes were closed, but the room seemed to be dark, and he had a hunch that even the heart monitor had been set to the lowest volume possible, although it sounded loud to him. He didn’t think he could handle more noise than that at the moment. Everything still felt uncomfortable and strange, as if he’d been electrocuted again—not quite the same, but it was the nearest analogue, more so than just having a high fever that made his skin hurt—and he could feel the IV needle in his vein and the cold liquid flowing through it and into his bloodstream. But he wasn’t dead, which was the main thing.

Then he sensed… a Presence. He didn’t hear anyone enter the room, but somehow he knew someone was settling into a chair beside his bed even before the generic smell of hospital—disinfectant and sanitized cotton and whatever else made hospitals smell more or less the same the world over—was overpowered by the scents of brass, ozone, machine oil, and something else that he couldn’t place but smelled very good indeed. He managed to turn his head and open his eyes just enough to see a beautiful strawberry blonde with glasses and a cowlick smiling warmly at him. A soft blue glow surrounded her like a nimbus, and a halo of brass trilobites circled her head. But she was dressed more like a mechanic than like an angel.

“Welcome back, John,” she whispered, and he recognized her voice as the one that had commanded him not to die. “You have a long recovery ahead of you, but you’re out of danger. Your government won’t be able to find you here.”

“Thank you,” he breathed.

“I look after my own.”

He wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

“Just rest now. There will be time enough for explanations later.”

That hadn’t been a command, but he let his eyes close anyway and slept.

The feeling of sunlight on his skin finally woke him some time later. It didn’t hurt as much as it probably would have the first time he’d woken up, but his skin still ached as if he had a fever. He turned his head toward the chair and opened his eyes… but the Lady wasn’t there. Instead, the chair was occupied by a purple-skinned man with long purple hair and a Victorian-era cavalry uniform in the same color. The man leaned forward with a smile and put one clawed hand on the bed, not quite touching John’s hand.

“Hoy dere, Hansi,” the man said quietly. “Hy iz hyu Opa Maxim. Iz goot to meet hyu.”

John frowned a little. “You’re… my grandfather?”

“Hyu grandmama vos a nurse in de Gret Var. She vos Hamereekan, but some ov de men riding vit de Horde vos sent to de hospital vere she vos vorkink. Hy met her ven I vent to check on dem for de Miztress. Von ting led to anodder, und… vell, Hy din know she vos heckspecktink ven she vent beck to de States. De Miztress din tell me until efter she und her schmott guys put hyu bek togedder last night.”

John was usually pretty good with accents, but Maxim’s was so thick that it took a moment before John grasped even part of what he was saying about the biological grandmother John had never known. “Hold on. The Mistress—”

“Lady Heterodyne. Hyu met her last night.”

That… filled in some gaps. “Lady Agatha Heterodyne?”

“Ja. She iz a qveen now, like Qveen Albia. Hy tink hyu met her grandson lest time hyu und dot Kara vos here.” Maxim said Kara’s name with distinct distaste.

“Here… is Mechanicsburg?”

“Ja, ve iz in de Gret Hospital. Iz a goot place to rest. Hy din unnerstond vot de Miztress said vos wrong vit hyu—zum qvantum instabilithingy—or vot dey had to do to save hyu, but she said now hyu iz more like uz Jägers dann like normal hoomans, und de Gret Hospital knows how to tek care uv new Jägers vot hef trubble gettink used to de transformation.”

More blanks filled in. “So… am I going to grow fangs?”

Maxim chuckled softly. “Hy dun tink zo. She din giff hyu de Jägerbräu de vay Hy took it—dere’s a ritual for dot, und hyu heff to tek it villingly und svear de Jägertroth. Vos more like ven Mamma Gkika used de Bräu to safe Miz Zeetha. Hy dunno if she did giff it to hyu dot vay, but….”

“Well, I can already tell my senses are heightened beyond their normal range.”

Maxim nodded. “Ve von’t know de full effects for a vile yet. All Hy know is, hyu vos von sick keed ven Oggie und Jenka brought hyu in. But hyu gun be hokay now. Chust tek hyu time und rest.”

That was said so kindly that John found himself warming to the idea of having Maxim as a grandfather. He hadn’t had a family in a very long time.

He heard footsteps in the hall suddenly, and Opa Maxim looked away briefly before looking at John again and patting the bed. “Hy gots to go now, but Hy come bek later. Hokay?”

John nodded a little and smiled as best he could. “Bis später, Opa.”

Opa Maxim grinned and stood just as the door opened. He waited until the nurse had passed him before leaving and closing the door behind him as gently as he could.

John closed his eyes for a moment while the nurse bustled around the room. Then a much more familiar voice said, “All right, John, I’m just going to check your vitals—”

He opened his eyes. “Jessica?!”

Sure enough, there she was, smiling at him from under a nurse’s cap blazoned with a red trilobite. “Lord Heterodyne personally assigned me to be your nurse for as long as you’re in the Great Hospital.”

He returned the smile. “Jess… I… I….”

“You don’t have to say anything,” she whispered and leaned over the bed just so.

He accepted the invitation and pulled her down for a kiss. And suddenly having haywire senses didn’t seem so uncomfortable after all.

Chapter Text

Over the next couple of days, John not only learned to cope with his new condition and his newfound relative but found out more about what had happened to him. His sense of coming apart at the molecular seams had been surprisingly close to the truth; the poison in the MRE had been designed to destabilize the body at the quantum level. The Heterodynes’ best guess was that the poison would ordinarily act so slowly that its effects would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect. But a severe shock to the system—say, being shot with something like a retirement round, which was designed to cause maximum damage to tissues and organs throughout the body, or being at the top of a building when it was struck with a missile, or both—would send the poison into overdrive. Being a Jäger’s grandson didn’t change anything, since the mutations caused by the Jägerdraught didn’t affect the DNA and couldn’t be passed on to the Jägers’ descendants. Only a god-queen stood any chance of reversing the damage… and the only reason John was in the care of a god-queen was that Lady Heterodyne had sent Oggie (the one with the horn) and Jenka (who had silver hair and had been wearing purple) with some sort of portable teleportation device to retrieve John for reasons she wouldn’t tell him yet.

John didn’t want to think about what must have happened to Kara. She’d ingested far more of the poison than he had, and he doubted that she’d made it off the roof before the jet Oggie said he’d heard had fired its missiles and destroyed the building. And she didn’t have a god-queen in her corner.

Lady Heterodyne didn’t come back to see John—at least that he could remember—but Lord Heterodyne did stop by both to welcome John to Mechanicsburg and to ask what had happened in Ordos. John didn’t reveal any details about the purpose of the mission, but he did pass along what the tech had said about the ghost women. “I don’t know whether he’d hallucinated them,” he noted, “but the attack didn’t look like the work of an average military or mercenary unit.”

“He may not have hallucinated them,” Lord Heterodyne replied. “The Other’s most loyal servants were the Geisterdamen, women whose hair, skin, and eyes were entirely white and who rode giant white spiders. Apparently they originally lived underground, and when she sent them to look for my grandmother, they felt safer living in places like the catacombs and underground realms beneath Paris and the Deepdown beneath Sturmhalten than on the surface. Grandmother believed all the ones who were still loyal to Lucrezia had been killed during the Great War, but it’s possible that some of them escaped to China and have been rebuilding their numbers in the last hundred years.”

“That still doesn’t explain why they attacked that lab in particular.”

“No, it doesn’t. I’d better see if we can gather more intelligence.” Then Lord Heterodyne smiled a little. “But you don’t need to worry about that side of things. Just focus on getting well.”

John returned the small smile. “Thank you, sir.”

And he did so as the days became weeks, with plenty of help from Jessica, Opa Maxim, and the doctors at the Great Hospital. It helped that, for the first time since he’d had his first leave after joining the CIA, he had nothing to do but heal and nowhere to be but here. He hadn’t realized how much tension he’d been under for the past four years. But now he was legally dead, reunited with the love of his life, and able to relax without feeling like the world was going to end if he took five minutes—or five months—to recuperate. Plus, the holiday season was well and truly upon them; John had to miss Mechanicsburg’s annual solstice festivities and celebrated Christmas in the hospital, but by New Year’s Eve, he was well enough to be discharged into Jessica’s personal care.

A month later, when he could climb the steps without collapsing, John married Jessica at the door of the Red Cathedral, with Opa Maxim as best man, Jenka standing as Jessica’s matron of honor, and a sizeable chunk of the Jäger Horde for witnesses. They even had one of Oggie’s distant descendants officiate. John was only slightly sad to have to miss out on the post-reception party at Mamma Gkika’s Tavern; Opa Maxim warned him about both the strength of the liquor and the… raucous nature of Jäger merriment, and while John wasn’t averse to a good party and a strong drink now and again, he could honestly tell the Horde that he was still feeling pretty fragile. Staying home with Jessica felt like a special event anyway.

And domestic bliss wasn’t the only thing to occupy John’s mind. Opa Maxim had stories to tell about everything. Among the topics he explained were how Faustus Heterodyne had turned a copy of his own personality into an artificial superintelligence that controlled both Castle Heterodyne and the entire old town apart from the cathedral and the hospital; how Princess Zeetha of Skifander had nearly died defending Lady Heterodyne and Mamma Gkika used the Jägerdraught, which usually killed ninety percent of the humans who took it, to save her life; how the tolling of the Doom Bell was a joyful sound for Mechanicsburgers but could disable attackers with overwhelming existential dread; and how Opa Maxim, Oggie, and their friend Dimo had searched for Lady Heterodyne for more than a decade, found her in a traveling circus, and helped her return to claim the rule of Mechanicsburg and defeat the Other. John drank in every word, even when it seemed like a story was going to go on for a year. Opa Maxim also started teaching him both modern Mechanicsburgisch and Old Mechanic, including the words of the Jägertroth, the oath sworn by prospective Jägers before drinking the Jägerdraught in the hope of being one of the ten percent who survived the mutation process. They also had deep discussions about the changes John had undergone and might still face as a result of his having been poisoned.

When John asked whether he should go to work for the Heterodynes, though, Opa Maxim told him to wait. “Hyu iz schtill von sick keed, und Hy dunno hif hyu iz meant to schtay here for keeps. Hy vants hyu to, dun get me wrong, bot zumtimes de Fates dun vork dot vay. Hif hyu do leaf uz, though… Hy tink hyu vill schtill find a Heterodyne vot needs a Jäger.”

John puzzled over that premonition for the rest of the day.

By late February, John had recovered enough to start thinking more seriously about looking for a job. He was discussing possibilities with Jessica over breakfast one morning when her phone suddenly pinged with a text notification. Jessica checked and whispered, “Oh, no….”

“Jess?” John prompted.

“It’s from Mom. She wants me to come home—she’s in an ambulance on her way to the hospital.”

A cold sense of dread washed over him. This was the first time they’d heard from anyone in the States since arriving in Mechanicsburg. “What’s wrong with her?”

She shook her head. “She doesn’t say beyond the fact that she’s sick.” She poked at her phone for a moment, presumably pulling up the ticket app for the Corbettite Railway. “The Wyrm of Limerick leaves for Paris at 9—”

“Wait, slow down. I understand that you need to go, but I can’t travel with you. I’ll ask Lord Heterodyne if there’s another option that doesn’t involve going through Customs, but I can’t risk the CIA finding out that I’m still alive—I’ve even seen operatives try to force a Corbettite brother to break the seal of the confessional, not that it worked.” There had nearly been an international incident over it, in fact, both because the agents had violated the Corbettites’ neutrality and because the monk had died under interrogation; but the government had disavowed the agents with enough vigor to satisfy His Holiness of Belfast,[1] and Mark hadn’t even bothered with taking them to a black site before he retired them with extreme prejudice. John wanted to think that the other field agents in Europa had more respect for the Church, even if they weren’t religious themselves… but he couldn’t be sure they’d gotten the message.

Jessica shook her head. “John, you don’t have to come. I can travel alone just fine.”

“It’s not just the trip that worries me. You won’t be under the Corbettites’ protection when you get to Long Island.”

She frowned. “Protection? Protection from whom?”

“From Peter. He was planning to kill you, remember?”

She hesitated. “I’ve still got a restraining order out against him.”

“Restraining orders are just pieces of paper unless you call the police to report a violation. What good will it do if he ambushes you?”

“How would he even know I’m in New York? He’s not psychic.”

“Neither are the well-meaning friends who might tell him if they see you.”

“John, it’s been almost three months. Surely he’s cooled down by now.”

“Are you really willing to bet your life on that?”

She hesitated again. “Can I afford to wait, though? It’s going to take a couple of days to get back to New York anyway, and without knowing how sick she is or how soon Lord Heterodyne can find someone… I just can’t bear the thought of losing the chance to say goodbye to her because I stayed here too long.”

The argument went around and around while they ate and while she packed. He kept insisting she shouldn’t travel alone; she kept insisting that she’d be fine, almost as if she were trying to convince herself. By the time she called the Great Hospital to inform her boss of what was happening, John thought they’d reached the compromise of her waiting for him to arrange alternate transportation so they could travel together. But while he was on the phone with Lord Heterodyne, she left.

“I can stop her if you wish,” Lord Heterodyne offered, “or ask Herr von Mekkhan to find someone to accompany her.”

John sighed. “She can’t bear to wait any longer. Just… is there a way I can get to New York before her?”

“Hm… Grandmother’s not sure what the teleportation device might do to you… she suggests using the Queen’s Mirror that’s under the cathedral. Those allow instantaneous travel, and they shouldn’t trigger another round of instability. The snag, she says, is that no one is quite sure where the Mirror in North America is. You might have to travel quite a distance to get from the Mirror to New York.”

“Well, if I can get there without alerting my former employers, I’ll take it.”

“Fine. Meet me at the cathedral in fifteen minutes.”

John quickly packed a bag and headed to the cathedral, where Opa Maxim escorted him to the heavily-guarded room that housed the Mirror, which looked like a glowing green slab perched several feet off the ground in the middle of a pylon-shaped recess surrounded by ancient relief carvings and machinery. When they arrived, Lord Heterodyne requested something made in America to help tune the Mirror’s system to the right coordinates. John considered and cut off the end of one of his boot laces. That was sufficient, apparently, and after some fiddling with the controls, Lord Heterodyne pressed a button that turned the recess into a doorway that clearly led to a room somewhere else.

“Hyu tek care, ja?” Opa Maxim asked sadly.

“I will, Opa,” John promised. “And I’ll be in touch when I can.”

Opa Maxim pulled him into a rough hug. “Und hyu follow hyu nose. Hit vill help hyu find hyu Heterodyne.”

John nodded.

After another moment, Opa Maxim let go. John thanked Lord Heterodyne and shook his hand, steeled himself, and then stepped through the portal.

Harold, laid up with a touch of flu, was miserably trying to watch TV but failing to find anything that could hold his interest. He perked up slightly when Udjat came in holding three books. Then she handed them to him, spine up… and his stomach dropped as he read the Dewey decimal numbers. They combined to form a Social Security number—one he knew very well, having received it just three months earlier for what he’d hoped was the final time.

It belonged to Jessica Arndt.

“No,” he breathed. “She was… she was out, she was safe….” He looked up at Udjat. “Has there been some mistake?”

Udjat sadly shook her head.

His misery trebled. He was in no fit state to try to intervene himself, and he couldn’t send Udjat. Higgs was tied up investigating a report of Geisterdamen in Ordos, China, but requesting other help from Mechanicsburg might catch the authorities’ attention. And Harold didn’t dare hire another mercenary, even if he had time to find someone and vet him before the imminent threat took Mrs. Arndt’s life.

Udjat squeezed his shoulder gently and left him to shed his tears in private.

John cautiously made his way out of the building that housed the Mirror, discovered that he was deep in a wooded area well after dark, and took his time following his nose toward the scent of tarmac. When he reached the road, the sky was clear enough for him to work out his position. Fortunately, he was in the States. Unfortunately, his best guess was that he was at the Watson Brake Mounds outside Monroe, Louisiana. It took him several hours more to follow the road into Monroe, find a coffee shop that was open at that hour, get some sustenance, and consider his best strategy for reaching his destination without being arrested or mugged. In the end, several days of hopping freight trains, hitchhiking, and stowing away on buses brought him to New York City without incident. From there, he bought a bus ticket to New Rochelle, trusting the length of his beard to be enough of a disguise to escape notice. He disembarked at the bus stop closest to the hospital and walked the rest of the way, hoping that either he’d arrived before Jessica or that she would be in her mom’s room.

When he presented himself at the reception desk and asked what room Jessica’s mom was in, however, the receptionist searched for her name and looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, sir,” she replied. “We don’t have a patient by that name.”

Confused, John tried, “Well, have you seen Jessica Arndt in the last couple of days? I understand she used to work here.”

The receptionist’s face fell. “She was killed in a car accident two days ago. The funeral is tomorrow. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you.”

He could hardly hear anything else she said over the sound of his heart breaking. He couldn’t even bring himself to thank her. He turned and started for the door, nearly colliding with someone in a wheelchair as he went.

Not two steps later, his mental fog was pierced by two very un-hospital-like scents. One, fainter, was a smell he’d always vaguely associated with Paris. The other, which spun him around like a magnet, was very clearly Heterodyne. He looked down at the wheelchair to find it occupied with a slight, bespectacled man with brown hair that stuck straight up and gave him the general appearance of a startled bird. The man had a file folder in his lap, half covered by his left hand while his right hand remained on the wheel of his chair.

“I’m so sorry,” the man murmured.

“Nov shmoz ka pop?” John breathed.[2]

The stranger swallowed hard and replied in Mechanicsburgisch, “We cannot talk freely here. Wait for me by my car.”

John nodded and followed his nose out to a nondescript Lincoln Town Car, by which he waited until the stranger wheeled himself out to it. John helped him into it, discovering that he could walk but had some poorly-healed injury to his back that was recent enough that he couldn’t walk well or for long distances. Once the stranger was settled, John put the wheelchair in the trunk and let himself in to sit in the shotgun seat. They sat in silence for a long, heavy moment.

“I thought she was safe,” the stranger finally said. “I asked Higgs to take her to Mechanicsburg.”

“He did,” John said quietly.

“So what happened?”

“She got a text that her mom was going to the hospital.”

The stranger sighed. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Reese.”

John gave him a sidelong look. “You know who I am?”

“I’ve been aware of you for some time—and not just in connection with Mrs. Arndt, as she was before you married her. You see, I don’t just know who you are. I know everything about you. And I think we can be of great help to one another.” The stranger paused. “You can call me Mr. Finch.”

“What sort of help?”

“You need a job. I need an assistant to help me intervene in bad situations—some like your wife’s, but more generally in cases of premeditated violent crime that wouldn’t necessarily come to the attention of the authorities before it’s too late. I have a list to work from, but I never know at first whether the names on my list are victims, perpetrators, or both. That often takes investigation techniques that I’m… not suited to carry out myself.”

John nodded slowly. “You need some muscle.”

“Not just muscle, Mr. Reese. Muscle is easy to come by. But you’re a keen investigator yourself, from what I can tell. Intelligence and resourcefulness are more difficult to find, and combining all three with a strong moral code… that’s rarer still.”

John considered. “I want to know more—and I want to get justice for Jessica before we start.”

“I do hope you mean justice and not simply revenge.”

“I’m not up to a fight right now.”

Finch shot him a look but started the engine. “You’ve had a long journey. Will you join me at my hotel for the night?”

“Sure.”

Finch nodded and drove to the hotel, where John helped him up to his suite. Then, while John dozed on the couch, Finch tapped away on his laptop, checking cell phone and hospital records.

“Mr. Reese?” he finally said. “I think I’ve found something.”

John sat up and accepted the coffee Finch brought him. “What is it?”

“There’s no record of Jessica’s mother being admitted to the hospital or even calling 911 in the last year. And there are no texts on her phone that were sent to Jessica since your wife left for Mechanicsburg.”

“So where did the text come from?”

“I wondered the same thing, so I checked the records for Jessica’s phone. The text did come from her mother’s phone, and upon closer inspection, both that text and a reply Jessica sent shortly after receiving it were deleted from Sharon’s phone seconds after being read. Now, there are apps that can do that sort of thing, used mainly by people seeking to hide infidelity from their spouses, but Sharon’s never had an app of that type installed on her phone. So whoever sent and deleted the text did so intentionally and had to have access to Sharon’s phone to do it. I couldn’t find any signs that the phone had been hacked.”

John considered that information as he sipped his coffee. “Who would have had physical access to Sharon’s phone, then?”

“According to the GPS data, only one other person’s phone was close enough to Sharon’s at the time the text was sent to give us a potential identity.”

“Let me guess. Peter Arndt.”

“I’m afraid so. He never cancelled the life insurance policy he held for his ex-wife, which would in itself be sufficient motive for her murder. He owes over $3 million in gambling debt, and some of the loan sharks who’ve subsidized his real estate business have started getting tough. The policy wouldn’t be enough to get him completely out of trouble, but it would help—as long as the insurance company doesn’t know that he divorced her.”

“Or that he killed her.”

“We don’t have enough evidence to stand up in a court of law.”

John got up and paced over to the window. After staring out at nothing for a while, he stated, “I think we should go to the funeral tomorrow.”

“I would really prefer to keep a low profile, Mr. Reese. The government thinks we’re both dead, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“… If I promise I won’t kill him?”

Finch considered. “Perhaps we can go to the graveside.”

John accepted that with a nod, which Finch took as his cue to order dinner from room service and black suits from a Manhattan tailor. After both orders arrived and John and Finch ate as much dinner as they could stomach, they called it an early night.

The next day, no one seemed to notice John and Finch haunting the edges of the crowd at the funeral home or at the cemetery. Most of the people who’d known that John and Jessica were an item before 9/11 were either dead or still in Washington State, so he had little fear of being recognized too soon. And many of the people who attended the graveside service had already given Sharon and Peter their condolences and left as soon as the service ended, going back to their workaday routines or going to the church for the reception meal. So it wasn’t long before Peter drifted away from Sharon to speak to someone else and the line of people wanting to talk to Sharon dwindled to single digits. A couple of uniformed police officers were within earshot of Sharon but not really looking at who was speaking to her.

That was the opening John was waiting for. Before Finch could object, he strode over to the seating area and joined the end of the line. And it wasn’t long before he reached Sharon.

“Sharon,” he said, taking her hand gently. “I’m so sorry.”

She looked up at him with a flicker of recognition and surprise. “Er… John, is it? I thought Jessica said you were out of the country.”

“I was. I ran into her again in Europa, just a few months ago.”

She sighed and looked away. “I didn’t even know she was in Europa. All she told me after the divorce was that she’d gotten a job out of town and not to worry about her.”

He allowed a suitable pause before continuing. “I’m glad to see you’re out of the hospital.”

She looked at him again, puzzled. “Sorry? I haven’t been in the hospital.”

“You haven’t?”

“No.”

The officers had stopped talking. They were behind him, but he could tell they were taking an interest in the conversation. Peter was still out of earshot, and if he could see John talking to Sharon, he was at the wrong angle to get a good look at his face.

John pretended not to notice that anyone besides Sharon was aware of him. “Well, she got a text from you that said you were going to the hospital. That’s why she came back.”

“When was this?”

He gave her the date. “It was morning for us, but I guess that would have been the night before for you.”

She smelled as confused as she looked. “I never sent such a text. I felt fine that evening, fine enough to have dinner with….” She broke off, seeming to realize something, and looked at Peter.

For his part, Peter clearly felt Sharon’s gaze and stopped talking. His heart rate spiked, and John smelled fear. Then Peter bolted, and the police officers gave chase. John murmured a farewell to Sharon and left.

“Are you sure that was wise, Mr. Reese?” Finch asked quietly as John got back to the car.

“Did you have a better idea?” John returned at the same volume and helped Finch into the back seat of the car. Then he put the wheelchair in the trunk and himself in the driver’s seat, and they left with the radio on a classical music station.

They were crossing the bridge into Manhattan when news of Peter’s arrest broke.

After the bulletin, John turned the volume down and glanced in the rear view mirror. “So do I get the job?”

Finch’s face remained neutral, but John could smell his amusement. “You’re hired, Mr. Reese.”

John smiled.

As they dodged Manhattan traffic, Finch sent a series of texts and directed John to stop in several out-of-the-way locations. At each stop, someone came to the window and handed Finch an unmarked envelope. When those errands were finished, Finch had John park in a nondescript lot downtown and wheel him through a tunnel to a door hidden under tarp-draped scaffolding that opened into a marble-lined foyer strewn with books.

“What is this place?” John asked as Finch pointed him toward the main stairwell.

“The decay of Western civilization,” Finch quipped and explained that it was an abandoned library that he’d bought through a shell corporation and then ensured that it would remain in legal limbo so no one would enter without his knowledge or consent. He also revealed that his list came through a back door in an artificial intelligence system he’d built for the government to analyze surveillance data. The government wanted the system to detect terrorist attacks, but it detected all manner of violent crimes, and it alerted Finch when a crime that wasn’t relevant to national security was about to occur in New York City.

As he talked, John carried him up several flights of stairs to a floor where Finch indicated that he wanted to walk. Then Finch led John through a gate to a space that was clearly a command center, with a state-of-the-art computer workstation, plexiglass board for taping up papers or taking notes with a dry erase marker, printers, filing cabinets, and more.

While John looked around, Finch emptied the mysterious envelopes and organized their contents before saying, “Here we are. Driver’s licenses, credit cards—six cover identities, with funds to be replenished by a proxy corporation. Just like when you were with the Agency.” He placed the items he’d named and a stack of passports on the desk.

John picked them up and slid them into his pockets. He was tempted to point out that he’d known who was paying him when he worked for the Agency, but his nose had told him enough about Finch that he couldn’t really imply that he didn’t know who he was working for now. And no sooner had he dismissed that thought than his eye was caught by the items tacked up on the wall behind Finch.

“This is your list?” he asked, walking over to it. “The list?”

“Yep.”

“But you don’t get names, do you? These are Social Security numbers.” He turned back to Finch. “And that was enough to tell you that Jessica was in danger?”

Finch limped toward him. “Neither of us was able to be there for her this time. But I can help you be there in time for someone else—at least until one of us ends up dead for real.”

John regarded him for a moment. “We’re both on borrowed time, aren’t we?”

“I suppose you could look at it like that. But we can use the time we’ve borrowed to save as many other lives as we possibly can.”

John nodded.

“You’ve had a very trying week, and I’m sure you’re still not fully recovered.” Finch turned away with a jerk. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll show you a room where you can stay until you’re up to finding more permanent accommodations.”

John followed Finch through the stacks until the titles he could see at a glance told him they were in the religion section. Then he stopped. “Hey, Finch? What’s your first name?”

Finch turned and looked up at him warily for a moment before answering, “Harold.” Then he squeaked in surprise as John knelt in front of him, took both of his hands, and bowed his head.

“I, John, grandson of Maxim, who take the name of Reese,” John began in Old Mechanic, “do hereby pledge my life, my love, and my undying loyalty unto you, Harold, known as Finch, and all the House of Heterodyne….”

Harold gasped as he recognized the ancient words of the Jägertroth, and John could smell the instant he began to panic. But the Troth was old magic, invoking the elements and the Dyne along with divine powers, and John couldn’t stop reciting it now even if he tried. The oath itself pulled the words out of him, and the sacred texts on the shelves around them both witnessed the oath and fueled its strength.

“These things I vow,” he concluded, “by the old gods and the new, by heaven and earth, to keep faith and to serve until the Heterodyne release me or death take me.” Harold wasn’t wearing a ring, so John kissed the back of his right hand to seal the oath—and although there wasn’t an audible sound, the air shivered with the finality of the act as surely as if the Doom Bell had rung.

“John,” Harold breathed as John dropped his hands, too spent to rise right away. “You—I—you didn’t have to do that. I mean, the Jägertroth….”

John looked up at him, eyes stinging with unshed tears. “Opa said I’d find my Heterodyne. He was right.”

Harold swallowed hard. “Well, since... since you have sworn... and since you know this much... let me introduce you to someone.” As John stood, Harold turned with a jerk and led the way to a break room, the door of which he knocked on with a code.

The door opened—and John stifled a gasp. What came out was a woman-shaped clank unlike any he’d ever seen before, lithe and graceful, wearing an elegant but simple white dress and straight black wig. The only thing that marked her as a clank, in fact, was her porcelain-white face, which bore a too-perfect mouth and camera-lens eyes outlined in a distinctive black design, with a teardrop-like line and a long curlicue underneath the lower lid.

“John,” Harold said softly, “this is Udjat.”

“The Eye of Horus,” John realized as Udjat bowed slightly. “All-seeing, protective.”

“Can you think of a better name for the Muse of Surveillance?”

John looked at Harold sharply. “She’s your back door?”

“She’s the original, Mr. Reese. I built her in a feverish fugue in the days after 9/11. It wasn’t until later, when I needed to take her out in public to train her, that I copied her AI onto the servers the government bought. And you are the only other person outside Mechanicsburg who knows she exists,” Harold added pleadingly. “I’m taking a great risk in even showing her to you.”

John looked him in the eye and put a hand on his shoulder. “Thenk hyu, Master. Hyu dun need to vorry about me. Hy iz hyu Jäger now.”

A dozen emotions flashed through Harold’s eyes—mostly relief and gratitude—before settling on annoyance as he stepped around John. “You may be my Jäger, but you don’t need to speak like one.”

John shared an amused smile with Udjat before following Harold back to his workstation. “You called her a Muse.”

“Not a perfect replica, I admit,” Harold replied. “I drew my inspirations mainly from Otilia and Moxana, both of whom I was privileged to meet while studying at TPU. But I also received a copy of Master van Rijn’s notes on the Muses from one of my mentors there.”

“You mean Lady Heterodyne?”

Harold stopped short and turned back to John, startled. “You’ve met her?”

“Briefly, that I can remember. Pretty sure she’s one of the people who saved my life, but I wasn’t too with it during the procedures. Opa’s a member of her honor guard.”

“One of the people?”

“Think I heard the names ‘Gil’ and ‘Tarvek’ at some point, but I can’t swear to it.”

“Then they all made it,” Harold murmured, looking away. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

John frowned. “What? All who?”

“Baron Gilgamesh Wulfenbach and Prince Tarvek Sturmvoraus. The stories never agreed on who she married, but I always wondered who she meant by ‘we,’ since it couldn’t just have been herself and Colette Voltaire who’d made it—that would have left the coalition too small to fight a threat like Lucrezia....”

“Made it? Made what?”

Harold finally looked up at John again. “The second breakthrough. The one that sends regular sparks into god mode. She said they learned about it from Albia, who wanted new peers as well as stronger allies against the Other.”

John’s frown deepened. “I thought the Other was dead. That was the whole point of the Great War.”

Harold shook his head. “Her avatars that existed at the time were destroyed, but they never found the last beacon engine or the Muse of Time. The Other will be back, if she isn’t back now. Aunt Agatha was certain she’d return, and I’ve identified at least one person here in the States who’s been wasped, which suggests that her agents are already active again. And we’re the only ones in this country who know of the threat.”

John nodded slowly. “That’s the other reason you kept Udjat, isn’t it? The government may be using the Machine to look for terrorists, but they’re not watching for the Other.”

“They have no notion of what Lucrezia could do if she ensnares a strong spark who’s well-versed in this century’s technology. So our best leads—in fact, our only leads—”

“Will come from the irrelevant list.”

“Exactly.”

John looked away, took a deep breath, and let it out again as he digested all of that. “Well, then....” He looked back at Harold. “I’d say we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

Harold didn’t reply, but his face was a picture of gratitude.

“Have you administered the wasp yet?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Why not?”

The former British operative currently known as John Greer looked across the otherwise vacant ward of an Ordos hospital at the bed where a Geister nurse was helping Kara Stanton drink. “You may have resolved the quantum instability, Mistress,” he reported into the corded phone at the nurses’ station, “but we have no way of knowing yet what residual effects of the poison remain or how they would interact with the wasp. We might lose the wasp, the patient, or both. Besides which, I don’t think we need such extreme measures to secure Agent Stanton’s loyalty.”

“Don’t you?”

“Her country betrayed her. We saved her life. When she’s well enough, she’ll want revenge. All we’ll need to give her is a chance to take it—and a reward when she’s done so. She might react badly if we try to coerce her, but if we let her choose freely, she might even agree to smuggle a miniaturized hive into the United States for us.”

Lucrezia Mongfish, currently posing as the goddess Decima, no longer had a human voice box, but somehow Greer still heard her thoughtful hum turn into a pleased purr as she considered what he’d told her. “Very well. I still expect regular reports of her progress.”

“Yes, Mistress,” Greer replied. “And the laptop?”

“I’ll send one of my sparks from the Knights of Jove to take a look at it, but they tell me developing the virus is likely to take some time. Let me know when you’ve shown Agent Stanton that the laptop is in our possession.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“And your own loyal service will be… amply rewarded, I assure you.”

The frisson of delight that passed through him at her praise reminded him of his thrill at finding and waking the Muse of Time and the ecstasy of entering her service by willingly taking a wasp. His time in Her Undying Majesty’s Secret Service had been nothing in comparison. “I live only to serve you, my queen,” he breathed.

Lucrezia purred again and hung up, leaving Greer to indulge in his dreams of what the world would be like under her benevolent rule, aided by the ASI he planned to steal from the US government. There was only one loose end he’d have to tie up once Agent Stanton was properly conditioned, one that should barely even be an inconvenience: eliminating Harold Finch… whoever he was.

[1] The Catholic Church in GG-verse canonically has seven popes by the time the story starts in 1892; the Corbettite Monks, who belong to an order evidently founded in Ireland, owe allegiance to the Popes of Belfast rather than the Popes of Rome.

[2] The only phrase of Old Mechanic seen in canon so far, said to Dimo by Oggie’s great-great-grandson Philbert (before Oggie meets Phil and identifies him) in Agatha Heterodyne and the Golden Trilobite. Dimo replies, “Oho, a local boy!” Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess gives the rough translation “Are you going to eat me?” and explains that it’s traditionally said to a Jäger at the first meeting, but even if Maxim explained that to John, he’s rattled enough to default to it at this first meeting with Harold.