Chapter Text
A giggle, bright and gleeful, bubbled from the child's smile. "It tickles!" A fat, black ant crawled over her index finger, which she shifted back and forth to direct the creature. She laughed again.
"Hey! Kid, would you keep it down?" The words were a harsh whisper from a black-haired man in his late twenties, kneeling in the truck bed a few feet from her. A tarp kept them covered as the vehicle bumped down the road, but didn't keep out the heat that seeped through the plastic. The man grabbed the front of his old, blue security shirt - one he'd worn a thousand times - and shook it to get some air down his chest. His fingers prodded a small metal box, searching for a signal.
"It looks like a mini antlion," the girl informed him. She whispered this time, like a good girl. A weathered sundress hugged her grass-stained knees where they pressed into the bed of the truck; a mass of spiraling slate curls crowded the top of her head and bobbed every time she moved. She tugged absently at the boxlike pendant around her neck. "They seem like fun, they hiss and jump and - and they fly and live in caves! Can we adopt one?"
"No," you idiot, he wanted to add, "you can't just befriend an antlion. It… it's a monster."
"But what makes it a monster?"
Barney just sighed, too preoccupied to give it much thought. The truck shuddered dimly around them, and he was still trying to make out the muffled words on the radio. "Because it hurts people," he eventually went with.
She nodded, chewed her bottom lip, and went back to playing with the ant.
Angry, argumentative words were black oil, leaking under the crack in the door. Alyx opened it an inch to see the grown-ups fighting about something under the solitary glow of a light bulb.
"We don't know how far the contamination spread -"
"-ardly matters at this point, it's already out. There's nothing we can do now but evacuate base and -"
"We can't just up and leave, you know that's exactly what Breen wants out of this."
"Didn't you hear her?! An entire town, Eli, and that's just what's been officially released!"
"I wish I could say I can't believe he did this, but -"
"Alyx?" Uncle said, spotting her.
Faces swiveled in the girl's direction. She froze, caught in the act of eavesdropping.
"Someone get her out of here," her daddy said, and a moment later another adult was towering over her, herding her away.
A trail of words followed her down the hallway: she heard her daddy sigh, "All those people…"
She was settled down two rooms over in front of a TV and told to play nice and quiet. Her attention shifted from the adult closing the door to the image on the screen. The lion and scarecrow were singing a song again - she'd already seen this movie a dozen times.
Sitting back on her ankles, she shifted forward to pop out the tape and turn the dial for the channel. Black-and-white static flashed again and again, until one broadcast shone out clearly. A man whose face everyone knew, smiled a smile as wide as the sky as he reassured his public of how good the world was. Greying hair sitting on top of his head like a crown, he used the same big words the others did: "contamination," "evacuate." His tone turned oil into honey.
Her wide, youthful eyes narrowed and marked the features into her brain so that she would never forget.
"Monster."
The small kitchen was filled with the cheerful clatter of plates and rapid conversation. Everyone was talking between mouthfuls of stew, garden leaves, and bread, and the volume only grew louder as the meal progressed. Barney was somehow carrying on three conversations at once: one with Sam from the other side of the table, one with Kesi, their host, and one with his fourth bowl of stew to declare his undying love for it. Alyx at first felt uprooted, dreamlike, after all the drama at White Forest, but then spilled a bowl down her sweater, burst into loud laughter, and soon enough was stuffing her mouth and shouting across the table at the same time.
Jayne and Kesi - the former a man, the latter a woman - were the only rebels stationed at the Resistance outpost of Gota. Both East African, they'd been assigned together because they spoke the same languages. It was a lonely job manning this post on the Faroe Islands, which was not much more than a glorified communication relay between the next-nearest stations in Scotland and Norway, so they welcomed their guests with celebratory gusto.
Kesi was a graceful character with grief and laughter lines pressed into her face, who had been quick with the hugs and handshakes the minute they'd touched down. Jayne had been aloof when they'd first arrived - but when it turned out Marcus knew some Swahili, even those two were more animated than usual, holding a rapid conversation with heads ducked low together.
After dinner everyone split ways. Stepping outside into the cold sunlight of early evening, Alyx crossed over to the helicopter where it perched on a crumbling basketball court, refueling. Even in its heyday this town had only been a few buildings smattered across the slope from the mountain to the bay, but over two decades' worth of vegetation and snowfall had almost swallowed it back into the earth. Only the headquarters behind her bore any attempt at restoration, though it still wasn't much to look at. Someone's home once, it was a cozy red construction with a makeshift greenhouse out back and a two-meter radio antenna wobbling upward off the roof.
And that was it. A single house with a few coms in the living room and two Resistance members as permanent outlooks. That was the entirety of Gota outpost.
Alyx ducked her head into the chopper: all silent, all still, all dark except for the unnatural blue glow of the dark energy reactor in the back: an eerie column of light shielded behind slats of metal. She leaned into the passenger bay only to swipe her Black Mesa hoodie off the bench, and then was crossing the mossy undergrowth again.
She stopped. Out back, Marcus's tall frame wandered through the greenhouse, and he checked his reflection in the glass, his hands fiddling sadly with his half-burned-off hair. The welcoming face of the house stared out into the street; a couple lines of conversation drifted through the door.
The inside would be bright and warm, and she'd have to talk and smile and make light remarks… so, stumblingly, her feet turned away and took her into the workshop off the side.
Hand fumbling in the musty darkness above her head, she pulled a cord and dry incandescence bathed every surface in light or long, angular shadows. Crates. Tools. An expansive of table at the center where sure hands maintained what needed it. A hand to her pendant, she smiled. This place was well-used, and you could feel it.
She stopped herself in front of a wide sheet of polished metal and tore off the stew-stained sweater - the air pricked her bare skin into goosebumps.
She hesitated when she caught sight of her distorted reflection in its surface. Her fingers drifted to the two circular marks on her body a few inches below the hem of her sports bra; these two coin-sized marks on her skin identified exit wounds, and she could only guess how large the entry wounds were on her back.
That hunter had come out of nowhere. There was no scar, nor even a faint tinge of green like a medkit would leave behind, but when the vortigaunts knitted her back together, the cells of her skin had regrown in a spiral pattern, like two massive fingerprints pressed into her abdomen.
Being attacked, being healed - it was all one cold blank in her mind. Not cold in the traditional sense that leaves you shivering and uncomfortable, but in the scientific sense: a lack of heat, a lack of presence. The moments before she'd woken up surrounded by Gordon and the vortigaunts, she'd just felt an overwhelming… nothing. A nothing like a human face barely visible in pitch blackness - there were words buried in the nothing, too, words she tried to trace out without looking directly at them, like trying to see dim stars.
Her fingers outlining the wounds on her abdomen and her eyes glazing over, she began to speak without hearing it.
"Prepa-"
"Whoa!"
The voice snapped her back to reality - she whirled around to see Sam standing at the double doors of the workshop with chagrin on her face.
"I-I'm sorry, I was having a smoke and I saw the light -"
"No, it's fine," she said. An uneasy knot in her chest, she shook her head and the thought disappeared.
Sam's age was hard to pin down. Skin browning and weathered, she could have been one of those absurdly healthy forty-year-olds… or a twenty-year-old who'd gotten way too much UV damage. Ethnically, Alyx estimated she was from about the same part of the world her own mother had come from: around Southeast Asia or so. But the comparison ended there, as the woman puffing the smoldering nib of a cigarette in front of her now was massively shorter and more calloused than Azian had ever been.
Normally she wouldn't have minded the intrusion, but there was something in Sam's expression, how she looked away and shifted in place, that made Alyx hyperaware of the cold and pull on the Black Mesa hoodie straight away.
Alyx cleared her throat, suddenly uncomfortable. "Actually, you're just who I wanted to see."
"Really?"
"Yeah, I've been thinking over a little problem we have. Or, not so little," she added with a humorless laugh. "You're pretty familiar with destroying things, right?"
"Actually I've been getting into birdwatching - of course I am! Gimme a person, place, or thing, and I can burn it down, guaranteed."
Her eyes followed the smoke trailing into the air. "How about icebreaker ships?"
When Sam didn't respond, she craned her neck into the sheet metal's reflection and fixed her hair. "Our trip up north isn't just to secure Dr. Mossman. You knew that, right?"
"I…" Sam dropped her spent cig to the floor and crushed it beneath her heel. "Dr. Kleiner told us we were retrieving ol' Mossy from a boat called the Borealis, as well as any data we can collect."
Alyx's eyes narrowed. "Did he."
"I guess it depends how destroyed we're talking here: do you want to annihilate every last molecule, or just rough it up enough that you can't present it as a bed and breakfast?"
"Enough that no one can ever collect the information on it."
"I'm... confused," Sam said. "Are we, uh, getting the data or not?"
Her father's voice cut into her thoughts flaring with anger: Use it?! That thing has to be destroyed! and that same anger made her growl, "Not!"
"Whoa, I'm sorry!" Sam held her hands up in mock surrender. "Sensitive topic, I guess."
"Yes." She swallowed and tried to steady her thoughts, fingers brushing the jewel around her neck. "That ship - it's too dangerous, too advanced for anyone to use, do you understand?"
"So you know what's on it?" Sam asked, leaning in with excitement.
"Well, it's been missing for ages," Alyx answered. "It seems like everyone has their own personal conspiracy theory. I've heard nanobots, time travel, artificial intelligence, mantis men," she added the last with a roll of her eyes.
"Sooo you don't know what's on it?"
"It doesn't matter what's on it! My father knew, and he said it needs to be destroyed; if you trust him, then that's what we're doing!"
Conflict raged on Sam's face, who was suddenly fascinated with her shoes. "I really didn't know him, Vance."
"That thing has to be destroyed! Now are you with me or not?!" Her fist slammed into the metal sheet with a deafening clap that filled the room and echoed back against the mountains.
The abandoned town was deathly silent except for waves down in the bay and the generators' groans as the helicopter refueled.
Alyx came back to herself as blood rushed to her face. A long, slow exhalation through her nose. "I'm sorry." She didn't feel it yet, but knew it was important to say. She stretched her fingers out of the fist one by one. "It's not you I'm mad at. Forget I said anything." She offered the words to the room, inadequately quiet.
"No-no-no, it's alright, angel!" Sam said sweetly, moving closer. "We all want to punch things sometimes. I know Barney sometimes makes me wanna dunk him in antlion pheromones and release him on the Coast."
A weary smile from Alyx. "Grab some popcorn…?"
Cackling, "Yes, exactly! Maybe a couple roller mines to keep 'im on his toes!"
Alyx was just beginning to laugh when the workshop doors opened again: Jayne, one of Gota's attendants, ducked his head through the door.
"There was a noise," he said.
"Sorry, it was nothing to worry about."
His head turned to Alyx, eyes disinterested. "The mzungu is looking for you."
"Who?"
His held his hand an inch or two above his height. "The American."
"Oh! Barney. Is it important?"
Jayne just shrugged and directed his attention at Sam. "Kesi has a message." He gestured at the workshop around them. "You can use anything in here."
"Well that's," she cleared her throat, "real generous and all, but there doesn't seem to be…"
He began opening cupboards one after another, and the words drifted off. Alyx couldn't see anything interesting: bottles, boxes, labels...
"Ohh man." Sam's hands flew to her hair and she began bouncing on her toes. "Ohh man!"
"Something good?" Alyx hazarded a guess.
"Are you kidding me? We hit the jackpot!" Sam was 4'11'' of manic glee. "Just look at this stuff: cleaning supplies, expired gasoline, petroleum jelly! I could blow us all to Kingdom Come with a fraction of this stuff!"
"Please don't," Alyx noted.
Sam, darting about the room like a drug-addled hummingbird, turned to Jayne. "Do you have a welder? A lathe? A shit ton of scrap metal?"
Alyx began leaving to give them space to work.
"Yeah, you go on ahead." Sam rushed about the room gathering packages into unstable stacks in her arms. "I think I'll make some of my gourmet recipes if ya know what I'm saying. Maybe I'll work on our little problem with the ship, too," she added with a wink Alyx's way, who paused with the door half-open.
"You mean it?"
"Hey, I never met your dad, but I trust you, Vance. If you say the ship needs to be shrapnel-ized, I believe you."
A hand to her pendant. "Thanks."
A quick cross through the cool sunlight and then she was stepping into the warmth of the house.
"Alyx, there you are!" Barney called from the living room, beckoning her inside with a huge smile. "Come and see this!"
She rushed into the living room: a sort of command center of TVs and radios - some new, some patched up, some ancient - stacked up wherever there was space. A celebratory mood filled the room as Barney and Kesi stood together, pouring a clear liquid from a bottle into their glasses.
"What's all this about?" Alyx asked as Kesi gifted her a glass.
"Sending 'em with their fricken' tails between their legs, that's what!" Barney said, pointing her to one of the televisions.
The largest screen, backed up against a wall, was spilling light into the dim room. The image was blurry and probably filmed on a handheld camera, but clear enough: masses of people were swarming into the streets between steel skyscrapers. Synths - ones they'd never seen before like giant centipedes - picked through the crowd and, one by one, were overrun by sheer numbers.
"This is from City 3 a day ago," Kesi reported with a note of pride. "The Uprising's in full swing!"
"Which one was that again?" Barney asked.
"Shanghai."
"Whew." He shook his head, and slurped from his glass. "That'll be a bloody one."
"It already has been," Kesi said, ducking to read from a computer screen. "A scout estimates about 3,000 dead the past two days alone."
Kesi continued, "Oh - here's City 41!" Another screen, this one perched above the couch, enlivened with a crowd cheering in a town square, many civilians standing on the smoldering carcass of a gunship.
"Outlands!" A convoy of jeeps raced over dead earth toward an Air Exchange factory.
"And…" She scrolled through the report with squinted eyes. "Ha, honestly most of the lower-tier cities."
"It's really happening," Alyx breathed, the glow of the screens filling her eyes. "After all this time, after everything..."
"Thought I'd never live to see it," Barney said, shaking his head.
"Hey, have a little faith!" Alyx teased, smiling.
"You don't know what it was like; by the time you were old enough to know anything, the damage was already done." He couldn't stop watching the screen as the mass of people turned into a river down the avenue, chanting and holding fists in the air. His eyes were far, far away. "We thought it was the end of the world. Nothing to do but bunker down and wait to be next, right? The idea that there might actually be something after all this is..."
But he caught himself and broke his speech with a laugh, flopping onto the couch. "Yep, brings a warmth to these old bones!"
"No, that's just your arthritis," Alyx said.
"Hey!"
"Augh!" Alyx had taken a sip from her glass and nearly choked. "It tastes like burning!"
Kesi laughed. "We get stocked once a month with whatever's leftover from Vanir Outpost. Ha, I'm not too sure what it is."
"Thank you for the offer, but I'm flying soon, remember?" She tipped the liquid back into its bottle and started heading out. "I'm getting some shuteye. But hey," she paused in the doorway and held up her empty glass, "viva la resistance, right?"
They cheered and raised their glasses, and Alyx slipped out of the living room. The dining room was all cleared away by now, so she sat on the table and stared out the window; green mountains sat across the bay, glowing in the evening sun, untouched by anything in millenia.
She probably did need some rest, but that wasn't why she'd left the room. Everything they'd worked for was coming to fruition, but the person who'd made it all happen would never get to see it.
Back in the command center, the conversation continued half-dimmed through the door.
"There will be something, after." Kesi's voice was matter-of-fact, but gentle.
"Hm?" A grunt from Barney.
Alyx turned her head to the door, listening.
"You wondered whether there would be something after all this, and of course there will." Kesi's voice sounded unreal to Alyx, like a single line remembered from a song. "There always will be. Whether we will be here to see it is, ha, another matter."
"And whether the something will miss us when we're gone is another," he added: not morose and not upset, just a muted statement.
"Such things are unhealthy to think, friend."
Barney's footfalls, then the gurgle of a pouring bottle.
"Asante," Kesi thanked him. And then, unprompted: "Do you have a family?"
"I didn't even have much before the First Days. But any family I did have, was taken from me."
"And me. My brothers, all of them. You never get better, not really."
"And me." Alyx, from the other room, only mouthed the words too softly for anyone but herself to hear. The others continued.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I wish there was something I could say."
"There is nothing to say. Such is this world. They went the way they all do."
They fell silent, and for a moment the house was empty except for the bay and the high-pitched whine of electronics.
"Are you married?" Kesi asked.
"I was," he answered, a smile in his voice. "Eight years. But a coupla years ago, she uh…" His fingers tapped his glass, and the smile was gone. "She went the way they all do."
The clink of glasses, the murmur of conversation switching to politics. "Do you know how the Combine's reacting to all this?" he asked.
"It varies. We found Consul Zegarra comatose in his office with no injuries. Bit of a mystery, but a welcome one…"
As Alyx's thoughts drifted away, a line of people stretched out in her mind of everyone she'd ever met, and they all said "And me," one after another after another.
The grassy cul de sac was humming with pre-departure activity. The evening sun peered through the tiered mountaintops and framed the preparations in clear, slanted, icy light. Sam had conscripted Marcus and Jayne into helping her convey boxes and odorous containers from the workshop, so the three of them now formed a sort of deranged conga line, passing homemade explosives from one to the next like hot potatoes.
Alyx, dismantling the generators, eyed the abandoned town. Objectively, she knew the island was merely a range of tiered basalt that jutted upward from the water like irregular teeth, and everything was coated with a thin layer of long, clingy grass, whose spindly fingers reached outward and always seemed to be damp. But personally, it was hard to internalize the fact that people as real as herself had once used that soccer field, that pier, that clinic. Gota wasn't unlike any number of other decimated villages she'd seen, which meant it brought to mind an echo of something she'd long forgotten. Something like a feeling - something like the houses and buildings around her were once more than just trees in a worldwide forest of ghost towns.
Kesi approached.
"We have the next stop's coordinates," Alyx told her. "I got to admit, I didn't know we had a base on Iceland."
"Oh, it's not a base." Kesi tightened the shawl around her shoulders, a sour look on her face. "You will be siphoning fuel from the remains of the last Resistance helicopter that went up there."
Barney, who had been examining the cargo like suspects in a lineup, overheard. "Wait what now?" he asked, coming over.
"We have not been able to hold an outpost on the island since Consul Lamant settled in City 29," Kesi explained to the both of them. "A few months ago a ship from Vanir Outpost passed through here, to maybe establish a new presence in Iceland - but when they landed, soldiers were everywhere."
"Gee," Barney remarked while rubbing the back of his neck, "that sounds like the perfect place to go, real safe an' all."
"We don't have another choice," Alyx's tone was sharper than she'd intended it. "It's the only stop between here and Greenland." Then to Kesi: "And you're sure there'll be enough gas?"
"Our sensor is showing the tank still has plenty and, ha, I doubt the fuel could have expired in just a couple months. The vessel is still where it last landed outside of City 29."
"Hey uglies!" They turned to see Sam power-walking from the workshop. "It's cleared out; let's make like a tree!"
"What does that mean?" Kesi wondered.
While Barney attempted to explain what 'make like a tree' meant to a non-native English speaker, Alyx noticed Jayne watching them with an even gaze. Even when their eyes locked, he didn't look away, and it was Alyx who had to turn herself back to the group.
"... so they sound similar, geddit?" Barney finished.
"Oh, yes I think so," nodded Kesi, who clearly did not get it.
"Uh, if I'm not interrupting," Alyx cut in with amusement, and held her hand out to Kesi. "Thank you for everything. We really needed a break."
"Nyota njema huonekana asubuhi," Kesi replied, and brushed Alyx's hand away in favor of crushing her in a hug.
"Agh!"
"Good luck begins in the morning," she translated, and released Alyx. "Or, ha, evening in this case."
The passenger bay of the helicopter was now so packed with supplies that Alyx, Barney, Marcus, and Sam had to enter one at a time, picking their way with care to their seats. The four of them pulled on the clunky old headsets.
As Alyx sat in the pilot's seat flipping switches, Jayne approached the glass of the nose on her side. Wind from the rotors flattened the grass all around and forced him to squint, but he motioned at Alyx for a headset and climbed halfway up the side of the chopper.
The window slid open, she passed him a headset, he pulled it secure over his ears, and he stuck his head into the cabin. He had a soft face but hard eyes, and no hair except for a thin layer of black fuzz over his scalp.
"What's this about?" she asked into her microphone, near-smiling. "Did we forget to tip?"
"Listen," he stated. When wearing the headsets, the cacophonous whirring of the rotors was still audible, but dampened - and when he spoke, the words were transmitted directly into Alyx's set, so she could hear the quiet urgency in his voice as though he were whispering in her ear.
"You need to be careful," he said.
"What do you mean?" Her own transmitted voice was an echo in her headset.
"City 29 is…" he struggled for words, but fluency escaped him. "It is its own world. There is no Uprising. 17 was never destroyed. Doctor Freeman never returned. When you are there, it is everything. You know nothing else."
"We've been in places like that before. We'll just keep our heads down, like always."
"No, you do not understand." Jayne shifted, and for a moment the sun behind his head turned him into a silhouette. "There is no resistance in City 29. You go in a criminal. You go in a traitor to the Combine. But you come out a citizen. You come out," here he stretched his mouth into a wide, splitting grin, "smiling."
"I - okay, we'll stay out of the City," she said. She glanced to the side, uncomfortable, through the glass at nothing.
"Your mission is important," he continued. "The most important one to come here. But believe me: if it was not, I would not let you leave Gota."
Alyx couldn't respond for a moment as Jayne let the ultimatum hang in the air, and then, extracting himself from the side of the chopper, he said, "Good luck. As you say, do not let the kuruka chungu simba bite."
Once he'd jumped down to the grass, the helicopter started raising itself up, and Alyx half-watched the Gota attendants wave them away.
"Marcus," she said, "did you catch that last part?"
"It roughly translates to 'flying antlion'."
"What."
The two attendants, then the red house, then the town, then the islands all shrunk into nothing, and the four travelers drifted once more into their flying routines. Barney settled down onto one of the benches in the passenger bay. Reaching into a pocket of his Civil Protection uniform, he pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper and studied it with a knot of frustration in his forehead. Shaking his head a minute later, he tucked it back away and closed his eyes.
When he woke, a couple hours had passed. He staggered, still getting his air legs, into the copilot's seat beside Alyx. Out the window, the domelike sky was crystal clear and fading to starlight at its zenith, and stretched out below them was an endless sea of roiling, greycast clouds.
"Hey, kiddo," he said, "keeping rosy?"
"I'm fine, Barney. A bit tired, but what else can you expect? Better than you, by the looks of it," Alyx laughed, "did you sleep at all or were you just laying there to mess with us?"
"Ugh."
"That bad, huh?"
He rubbed his baggy eyes. "Bad dreams."
"Oh. I'm sorry."
"Nah," he shrugged it off, "I was just dreaming my life wasn't fraught with horror and mayhem." He pretended to shudder. "Terrifying."
"Heh, right. We should be pretty close to the island by now, thank god," she said, changing gears. "It gets so monotonous up here that I've actually been able to look over my multitool a bit."
"Yeah?"
"And I saw..." her eyes narrowed, focusing on the memory as though she could still see the code. "... something interesting. You remember, back at White Forest, how the vortigaunts hooked it up to your Advisor pod?"
"You mean that incredibly important thing that saved everyone's lives? No, I forgot."
"When they did that," she continued, aggressively ignoring him, "it looks like my tool saved a bit of the code they used. I mean, I use the thing to unlock checkpoints or rejigger roller mines: translating human programming to and from Combine code is what it's made for, so it's no surprise this happened..."
"... But?"
She nodded, grimacing. "But I don't know what this new code does, exactly. I'm sure I could figure it out if I put in the time, though; their programming is pretty hieroglyphic, but understandable."
"Uh-huh," he grunted, uninterested. Leaning forward, he patted the invisible underside of the dashboard. "The ansible is still there, that's good. Let's hope Dr. Kleiner hasn't lost his already."
"Oh come on, he isn't that forgetful."
"Oh yeah? He once lost a building. An entire building, Alyx, how do you do that?!"
She snorted. "Well, the Combine need to get both of them to shut down the satellite array, and ours is duct taped to the underside of the dashboard; I sincerely doubt we're going to lose it."
"What did I say about tempting fate?"
"... Do?"
"Don't!"
When it came time, they descended into the sea of clouds - reminding each passenger of a time not too long ago they'd fought for their lives in a white fog - and then, glistening with clinging condensation, they emerged to the sight of a silver sea breaking on a long, abandoned coastline of graphite rock. The island, extending ahead into obscurity and just barely outside the Arctic Circle, was a near alien landscape of shrubby plains and black, jagged peaks. Orange light slanted over the hundred miles as the sun hovered in the clear strip between the cloud layer and the sea, and already far to the West they could make out the just-emerging speckled lights of a city.
"So there 29 is," Barney broke the silence. "Now let's stay the hell away from it."
Marcus, once again bent over the locator in the passenger bay, directed them. The nose of the chopper steered over the crisscrossing nest of mountains as Alyx strained her eyes in the failing light to pick out the landing site - like trying to find a really annoying bug on a pile of dirty laundry.
With a few minutes' more flying, Marcus soon announced: "Uhhh, there is a green thingie and a red thingie, and it appears that we, uh... are now at the... green... thingie."
"Poetry as usual, Mr. Goyal. Taking her down!"
The floor dropped out from under them as the helicopter spiraled into its descent, and the artificial rectangle of a tiny building and parking lot grew before their eyes. Perched on the side of a glacier, the spot had once been a tourist trap along a hiking trail, but now was quietly dominated by the presence of a much larger helicopter dormant on the pavement.
As the legs of their little aircraft touched down, swirling dust and dead grass into the air, the last scrap of the sun disappeared below the horizon.
"Let's make this quick, people," Barney's voice through the headsets was barely audible over the slowing rotors. "In and out, nothing fancy."
"And you accuse me of tempting fate," Alyx laughed, hopping out the bay doors and tossing aside her headset before the rotors had come to a stop.
Well-practiced now, the four of them hauled out the generator and pump, and began siphoning the fuel from the older one's tank. Towering over them and covered in rocky dust, this helicopter dwarfed their own in comparison, and served only as an eerie reminder of what happened to the last people who were here.
They didn't like looking at it. They drifted apart, finding various things to occupy themselves with; Barney, on edge, ended up at the ancient, mounted binoculars built into the tourist site, and surveyed the area, in particular the distant image of City 29 far off in the valley.
After a time, Marcus wandered into the relative shelter of the tumbledown gift shop. Scattered tables and chairs to one side by what was once a cafe, smashed and long-dried snowglobes from tacky shelves, and in the center of it all on a coffee table sat Alyx, who was working away at the innards of a television set.
When he stepped into the room, she looked up. "Oh, hey." The thing on his head caught her attention: a tacky, orange, knitted hat which flopped over his ears and obscured his half-burned off hair. "Nice hat," she said, smirking.
"Thanks. Jayne gave it to me."
"I'll probably want one soon;" she gestured to the white puffs coming from her mouth with every word, "I guess we're going to have to get used to this."
He eyed her work, and asked: "What are you doing?"
"I'm just trying to fix up this piece of junk," she began, keeping a careful eye over the electronics in the TV set. "See, I was thinking; let's just say, for instance, that you can't talk."
"Easy enough."
"And let's also say that you're doing something crucial for the liberation of the human race, and you need to communicate your progress with other people trying to help you."
"Okay..."
"And let's say," she continued, her voice getting louder and more agitated with every word, "that the thing you're doing is life-threatening, and those same people whom you should really be contacting by now, were worried about your well-being!"
"Uhhh-"
"AND let's just say that you're a big dumb idiot who always gets yourself into dangerous situations because you're a hero-type in literal shining armor without regard for the fact that - " but she cut herself off with a loud groan and went back to picking through the TV with a screwdriver, like a fork through unwanted leftovers. "I forgot my point."
"Let's say you can't talk?" he reminded her.
"Oh yeah, sorry. Well, if you wanted to send a message long-distance, then you might send..." a connection clicked, and the screen flickered with static, "... a video."
"Good job!"
"Hey, it works! Considering how old it is, I'm impressed... And," she muttered after a pause, flashing through channels, "can we pretend we didn't have that conversation?"
He just made an awkward laugh, too embarrassed to think of anything to say.
Alyx focused on the screen as black-and-white static flashed again and again, until one broadcast shone out clearly. She saw a man whose face everyone knew, who smiled a smile as wide as the sky as he reassured his public of how good the world was. Her stomach plummeted as she heard him speak, grey hair sitting on his head like a crown, his tone turning oil into honey.
"Be wise. Be safe. Be aware," the television said.
"Oh... my god."
At her words Marcus looked over, and his expression flipped from relaxed to deer-in-headlights in under a second, and he ran toward the others.
"We must all collaborate," Breen preached from his nondescript blue background, "willingly, eagerly, if we expect to reap the benefits of unification. Now is the moment to redeem yourselves. Do what is right. Serve mankind."
Alyx could only stare in horrified disbelief as she watched the man she'd personally helped assassinate give his usual lecture as though being dead was business as usual. Barney slammed through the doors to the gift shop followed by the others, and swung his head at the screen... and then at her.
"I thought you said he was dead!"
"He was dead! He - he fell from the top of the Citadel, he was in the first explosion!"
"Uh, you survived it, didn't you?" Marcus, ever in the details, pointed out. His long limbs were folded into a seated position by the door. "How?"
"I..." Alyx balked for a moment as she clambered through her brain like desperately searching for a lost wallet: she and Gordon and Breen, all at the top of the Citadel as it was swallowed by fire - then pulling herself from the rubble at its base, and nothing cementing the two memories together except the chanting of vortigaunts.
Not knowing things, that was fine, because it only presented the opportunity to learn; that was actionable, that was a path to navigate. But this, and when her abdomen was sewed back together, and a few other moments which didn't quite make sense - all felt like glitches in her own life, and the force of the realization pinned her in place while Breen proselytized in the background. All she could say, offered dully, was, "I don't know."
"I ask you," Breen continued, uncaring, "what greater endeavor exists than that of collaboration? Refusal to collaborate is - an insistence on suicide."
"Hey boneheads," Sam called, watching the broadcast with her face an inch from the screen. "His mouth didn't match the words there."
"What?"
"Dr. Vance's capture," Breen continued, "coincided with the act of - spreading general chaos and terror."
"There's another one!" Sam insisted. "A little skip midsentence, barely audible at all."
It took a moment for Alyx to process it, but when she did, relief flooded through her. "It's not really him!" she sighed. "It's just a cut up version of his old announcements."
"Well I'll be damned!"
The atmosphere grew palpably less tense, and Barney asked, "This is a local channel, right? It does beg the question: why would City 29 go through the trouble of botching up new Breencasts?"
"I don't think they know he's dead," she answered. "Not the average citizen, anyway - they don't have any reason to; it's like Kesi said, they have no idea what's going on out there!"
Barney saw a dangerous look grow in her eye: a stand-on-top-of-a-barricade-waving-a-red-flag kinda look. "Hey, we have an important job to do remember? Reach the Arctic, recon with Gordon and Dr. Mossman, save the world?"
"But there might be something we -"
"No," he leaned in for emphasis. "In and out nothing fancy, remember? The best thing we can do for these people is strike one hell of a blow up North, not waste time liberating one City while the Combine get their hands on that tech."
"Uh," Marcus noted, "it stopped." He gestured at the television, where Breen's bloated head had stopped flapping. The image was frozen, staring directly out of the screen and, apparently, into each of their eyes.
"There..." Breen began, again, with his disjointed speech. "You... Are. I was beginning to think - you wouldn't - grace us with your presence."
"Am I imagining things," Sam ventured, glancing between the others' faces, "or is it...?"
"I have been wanting to - have a word with you. Our Benefactors - cannot stop what they - cannot see - yes?"
"It is."
They began moving simultaneously. Everyone moved quickly and without much thought to precision: they needed to get out. Now.
"How could I have been so stupid?" Alyx spoke through tight lips as she grabbed things left and right. "Of course they would monitor electricity use on the island!"
"Or they coulda," Barney responded, "you know, seen the helicopter flying over their heads?"
"Or one of us is bugged," Marcus suggested. It was a joke, but no one found it funny.
"Please remain calm," Breen continued with one of his award-winning smiles. "There is no need to evacuate." He continued like this, but the gang rushed out of the gift shop and his voice cut off with the slamming of the doors. Light was draining from the sky into violets and reds, mixed with the blue cast from the TV through the windows.
"Do we have enough gas to make it to the next stop?" Barney asked Alyx, as he lowered his eyes into the mounted binoculars and swiveled them toward the City.
"No - no, we're talking about crossing half the sea!"
"What about back to Gota?"
"That's the other half!"
"Then just get us out of here!" he said.
Alyx was already on it, sprinting to the helicopter and unhooking the gas tank, while the other two darted back and forth.
Magnified a thousand times, Barney saw a fleet, five or six strong, floating above the City and toward them at a terrifying pace - the crafts were blurry with the distance, but too bulky, too round to be gunships. The sigil on their sides was hard to make out, but recognition made him lean in to the binoculars until they dug into his eyes. That looked familiar...
"Let's move, let's move!"
He became aware, vaguely, that he was the only one still by the gift shop. The rotors of the helicopter began slicing above their heads, whipping dirt and noise into the air.
"Wait," he managed to get out. They didn't hear him.
"Barney, we gotta go!" Alyx, at the passenger bay door, was shouting over the speeding rotors.
The expanse of valleys and volcanic plains disappeared under the aircraft as they made a beeline for the gift shop.
"Wait!" The decision cemented in his mind and, reaching into his inner jacket pocket, he ran toward the chopper - but didn't get in. He instead swiped a headset from the passenger bay floor and held the microphone to his lips: "Alyx, we need to stay here!"
"They're almost on us!" she shouted into her own headset. Desperation crept into her voice.
"Exactly!" He pulled from his pocket a crumpled piece of paper and shoved it toward her, still without stepping inside. "Just look at this!"
"Guys?" Sam was nearly begging from where she was strapped into her seat; now they all could hear, even above the rotors, the alien sound of fast-approaching aircraft.
"Not now!" Alyx pushed away the paper and began to seethe with anger. "Just get in the damn chopper!"
"It's a message!" Barney responded, remaining planted on the ground.
"From who?"
"FROM THEM!"
A moment of shocked stillness, and then darkness descended from above.