Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  When he looked up, Gwen was watching with wide eyes.

  “My father’s tee-shirt,” she said.

  Of course she’d want it.

  Basil felt stupid. He reached back into the bin, pulled out the shirt, shook the paper towel detritus off it, and folded it neatly. He placed in on the top of the pile of Gwen’s carefully folded borrowed clothing — the teal sweater with the hideous shoulder pads, the tight high-waisted jeans.

  Her eyes were slightly glassy, her pupils wide, her gaze locked onto nothing in the middle distance, her mind in the past.

  “At least I won’t owe Mark a shirt as well as a new Betamax,” Basil said, inching up behind her. Gwen was no wispy starlet, and for that Basil loved her. He circled those wonderful hips, that waist that was thick with muscle, the soft little spot under the belly button he adored so much. There was a still-healing line of white flesh, firm under his fingertips, that ran across her tummy — proof that he’d almost had a son, once.

  They’d all been strong enough to get through that, but only because they had each other. How would Basil get through this? When the soldiering and the debriefing and the technological tampering was over, when it was just him and Gwen alone in a small dark room, how would he…? He shook his head. Later. He’d think about it later. Right now, he could just hold on.

  Gwen made a sound, and it took Basil a second to figure out exactly what it was meant to be. Her laugh was so flat — yet at the same time, so genuine — that it hurt to hear it. He pressed his forehead against the back of her neck as she made that terrible mirthless sound, sucking in her warmth along with the air he gulped desperately, trying to absorb her temporary amusement to fend off his surging sorrow.

  In control. Right.

  Kalp was dead.

  It hurt to hear it only between his ears, so he said it out loud: “Kalp is dead.”

  It had only been about fifty hours since Kalp had denied anything to do with the letter on the dining room table and Aitken had panicked. Basil wasn’t even sure that he really knew that it happened, even though he’d already cried a lot, even though he’d been in mourning since before Kalp hit the ground.

  Like an equation too dense for him to decipher, it just hadn’t sunk in.

  Gwen turned around and kissed him hard on the mouth. “Yes, he is,” she said, and then they went to the meeting to tell everyone in the debriefing room why.

  ***

  As they took their seats, the same junior specialist that Addis had waved down placed a tray in front of Gwen and Basil — sandwiches, cups and a pitcher of water, and the components and tools Basil had requested. Excellent. Addis may not have liked their methods, but he seemed to be perfectly cognizant that the best way to catch the bad guys was to trust them.

  The room around them filled slowly with people who looked like lawyers, boardroom suits, someone who looked disappointingly like a psychotherapist, and of course, their peers — Agent Shelley and his special ops squad. Lastly, Agent Aitken slid in to the seat furthest away. She wouldn’t meet their eyes.

  Gwen picked at her sandwich but Basil dug in, alternating hands in order to have one free at all times to get at the small circuit boards inside the sleek, half-melted shell of the Flasher they’d used to get to 1983. He had an idea, but he wanted to make sure it would work before he told anyone, even Gwen, about it. Gwen glanced over, recognized the ruined Flasher, and jumped to the erroneous conclusion that Basil had hoped she would: that he was trying to repair the Flasher and not remake it. Gwen turned away again, back to glaring poisonous daggers at the top of Aitken’s bowed head.

  “Well?” Shelley said, when everyone was assembled.

  Gwen cut a glance at Basil. “Go ahead,” he said, a piece of lettuce catching on his lower lip. “Busy here. Besides, you know how much of it you want shared.”

  So Gwen stood up and told them.

  As she narrated the last thirty hours — carefully edited to exclude the fact that the child they had rescued had been herself — the room was silent, disbelieving. Nobody asked for proof, but nobody quite believed either, and then someone in Shelley’s squad said, “Does this change tomorrow?”

  Basil looked up from his work, eyebrows drawn down. The crumb of some already-forgotten piece of bread crust fell from his chin. “Tomorrow?” he asked. A sense of mild dread pushed at the back of his throat. “What happens tomorrow?”

  Shelley scowled at the agent, and it was clear that somebody had been telling tales out of school.

  Gwen put her hands on her hips, and Basil knew that she understood the relevancy of the verbal slip just as well as he; something was planned, something that they were not supposed to know about, something that they were being shut out of purposefully, probably because of Kalp.

  “Agent Shelley,” she said. There was no patience in her voice. She was already slightly hoarse from speaking so long, and she sounded very, very fed up.

  Tiredness and impotent frustration scratched against the underside of Basil’s skin; he could only guess how irritated Gwen must be.

  Some sort of nobility or soldier’s guilt (probably relating to the fact that he’d been the one who assigned Aitken as Kalp’s personal guard to begin with) tugged at Shelley’s expression. Something within him quickly won, but Basil wasn’t sure which side it was until Shelley spat, “Fine.”

  Shelley tossed a lurid red folder into the space of table in front of them, and Basil shoved away the empty sandwich tray to peer over Gwen’s arm as she flipped back the cover. The first page was a slightly blurry aerial shot of some sort of down-on-its-luck factory and yard. Basil wondered if it was once filled with fresh-cut lumber or piles of shining roof tiles or corrugated metal shipping containers of tinned food. He supposed he would never know; all it was filled with now were some rusting piles of scrap metal and litter. The walls of the building were graphitized in a lurid yellow that Basil could see in the photo, painting bold splashes on the brick, but the angle and clarity robbed the words of readability.

  “What’s this?” Basil asked.

  “Tomorrow’s target,” Gwen answered for Shelley. The head of ops gave a quick nod. “You’ve found the circle assassinating our people?”

  Shelley snorted. “It’s amazing how many people believe the urban legend that the traffic cameras aren’t actually on or monitored. The last guy was careless. But,” and here he paused and looked up and directly at Basil, “it wasn’t until we went to search your lab after you two took off that we could find the final destination. We had him on traffic cameras all through London, but once he hit the countryside he was gone. We knew the direction he was headed — the Flasher residue gave us the location.”

  Basil felt himself colour, at once pleased that the program he’d written had worked and furious that they had gone in and hacked his personal computer. Well, of course that’s what they were going to do, he chided himself. You were missing. Besides, everyone on base is a paranoid bastard, lately.

  Gwen flipped the page. The next one was filled with military speak written with so many dense abbreviations and code words that Basil could barely follow it. Gwen’s eyes skimmed over it and she nodded to herself, apparently approving of the plan that Basil couldn’t even decipher.

  “And for the non-grunts in the room, that translates to…?” Basil asked, looking up, exasperated.

  Aitken’s eyes flashed angry for a moment, then she went back to scowling at her own red folder. Shelley told them about the warehouse in a rural, half-dead community just outside of the metropolis, and the report that had gone to both the British government and local constabulary in the wake of the warehouse’s discovery. The military had been called into service, asking for a squad of Institute Special Ops soldiers and a van-full of geeks to help them take the place out. The sooner, the better, which was why this meeting had originally been convened with Shelley and his corps in the first place: they were waiting for the head of the military squad to come in and debrief them. G
wen and Basil’s presence — return — had just been convenient timing.

  The operation was set for ten-fifteen in the morning.

  “And you’re not coming,” Shelley added, closing his folder with a note of finality, his ink-black eyebrows squiggling down into a look of determination that Basil had seen quite frequently back when Shelley was helping him build the Array. Determined and bossy.

  A hot flash of anger pressed at Basil’s sternum, but was dampened almost immediately with sleepiness and mental exhaustion. He looked down at his nearly complete device and sighed. The fun had gone out of tinkering with anything months and months ago — after Gareth, if he was going to be honest with himself.

  Work, work, work, and all of it just leading to…what? Not much of anything but more killing, more violence, more pain. Disgusted, Basil pushed his screwdriver away. He had joined the Institute to make things, damnit — alien toys and better technological solutions and bridges between cultures, not for black ops raids and ways to track down people like animals.

  No, no, these assassins, these bigoted assholes were not “people.” They had killed Kalp.

  Basil picked up his screwdriver and went back to work.

  “Excuse me?” Gwen said.

  Basil felt all the little hairs on the back of his neck and arms stand upright. Uh-oh.

  Gwen licked her lips. “Because we broke the rules but came back with a crap load of valuable intel, or because you’re embarrassed that we gave you the slip when you were supposed to be watching us?”

  Shelley went red around the ears and glowered. “You’re fatigued,” he finally answered, eyes cutting around the room to the tight gazes of all of the other agents. Basil’s stomach tightened. Really, Gwen needed to stop picking battles in front of her co-workers. “You’re mourning.”

  Basil cleared his throat. All eyes turned to him. “By which you mean that you don’t want us there because we’re ‘too emotionally involved to be objective.’” The splotch of colour crept inwards across Shelley’s cheekbones, flagging over his nose. “Which is exactly why you need us. We know things you don’t.”

  Shelley snarled a “Dismissed!” at them, and Gwen and Basil had no choice but to obey it. Of course, they took their sweet sauntering time while they collected up their files and tools and trays, to make it very clear that they had no respect for his authority even if they still had to obey.

  Aitken reached out to help Basil pile all of his mechanical bits onto his discarded lunch tray. One piece, something burnt and melted beyond any use, he thought, might have rolled onto the ground, but when Aitken bent down after it, she came up empty handed.

  “I need more sleep,” Basil decided.

  Gwen left the room first, head high and face closed. Basil shut the door behind him. They exchanged a glance. In unison they turned towards Addis’ office, and Basil smiled.

  He reached out, ran his fingers down the inside of Gwen’s wrist and tangled his fingers with hers. “I totally love you, sometimes.”

  “Only sometimes?” Gwen echoed with a snort. “I’m losing my touch.”

  But it was good to hold Gwen like this again and he would not let her make light of his very real need for a connection right now. Basil tugged her to a stop in the hallway and folded her close and kissed her forehead gently. Gwen wound down a bit, her shoulders descending from around her ears. The hyped-up adrenaline shivered across her skin as her anger dissipated and her weariness weighted on her back. Basil knew exactly how she felt. The urgency of the debriefing and the rush of finding out about the sting operation could only do so much to fight off the pull of sleep and grief.

  They reached Addis’ office suite and didn’t bother to knock. His assistant stood to berate them, took one look at their faces and sank down into her chair silently. Basil let Gwen go towards the inner office first, deploying her like a weapon, a calculated strike. Gwen, blessedly stubborn Gwen, pulled up her shoulders and straightened them and stormed in, slammed her hands down on the desk and then pointed to the scar on her own forehead.

  Director Addis jerked backwards, eyes white all around his irises, startled. He dropped a mug of coffee into his lap and winced. Basil flinched in masculine sympathy. Ouch.

  “They did this to me,” Gwen said very, very calmly when she was sure Addis’ attention had been drawn to her scar. Basil stood in the door, leaning against the jamb. He watched and tried not to grin. He knew that tone, that look, and knew from experience that Addis would eventually have no choice but to capitulate. “We went back and found me, there. A baby me. That’s where we went, okay?” Basil was only slightly shocked by her method of admission; he knew that Gwen was saving that particular tidbit only for the most potent blackmail. Apparently, she felt strongly enough about being a part of tomorrow’s mission to lay it out now. “I’ve been waiting twenty-nine years for the payback. I will be a part of the squad whether you authorize it or not.”

  Addis sighed.

  “Also?” Basil added, and held up the small cell phone that he’d been tinkering with since their return. “Mobile Flasher Tracker.” Addis’ eyes sparkled. “But it’s encrypted, innit.” The sparkle faded.

  “This is blackmail,” Addis pointed out. Which…duh.

  Gwen smiled, but her tone stayed grim. “Is it working?”

  “Officially? No,” Addis said. “I know you two are way too involved and I don’t even know everything that’s happened. Unofficially?” He looked down at his folded hands, clenched and dark against the slick surface of his creamy leather blotter. “My wife was killed by a drunk driver. Report to Agent Shelley tomorrow morning, Specialists. Get some sleep. Good night.”

  ***

  They couldn’t bear to go home.

  They were told that Specialist Wood had taken their chickens to live in her own back garden for a few days. A service had been called to clean the blood out of the carpets, and someone had packed up all of Kalp’s personal belongings, probably as evidence. The house was safe to return to, now; no grim souvenirs remained.

  But they still couldn’t go.

  Kalp was…Basil didn’t ask where Kalp was. Probably the Institute morgue. Basil didn’t know if the Institute had a morgue; but it had to, right? The Institute had performed autopsies on Ogilvy and Lalonde and Barnowski, so surely there was a morgue.

  Somewhere.

  He hated thinking about it, about Kalp far below his feet, quiet and cold and…not moving. Downstairs somewhere. Alone. Not sleeping. Just…just not. Basil curled up in a ball in his borrowed bed in the building’s private suite — reserved for visiting dignitaries and officials, usually, but put at their disposal — and tried very hard not to think about it. About, about anything.

  The adjoining bathroom door opened and Gwen padded out, naked save for the water droplets that still clung to the back of her bowed shoulders, the steam that followed from the shower, the faint drifting scent of a cloying floral shampoo. Gwen snapped the bedside lamp off, sinking the room into complete darkness, and pulled back the covers. A blast of cold air crept along Basil’s spine, licked the bottoms of his toes, but then Gwen was there, shower-warm and damp. She tucked herself against him in silent misery, hooked her chin over his shoulder and said into his ear, with minty breath, “We should bury him beside Gareth.”

  Basil nodded and squeezed her as close as he possibly could and replied, “You should call your mother.”

  Gwen didn’t react as if she’d heard, except for a quick tightening of the skin right between her eyebrows.

  Seized by the notion, Basil said, “C’mon, it’s the right thing. Right now.” He steered her first out of the bed, then into clothing, then out into the hallways, then into their office.

  The whole room had been tossed, probably in an effort to figure out where they had disappeared to. Basil snorted; it wasn’t like even he had really believed that they would reappear where they had.

  Basil ignored the minefield of scattered beads from their torn privacy cu
rtain, clicking and sliding under the soles of their boots; he ignored that the contents of the drawers had been dumped all over the drafting table; he even ignored that his computer was off and he knew that he’d left it on before they departed.

  What he couldn’t abide was that Kalp’s chair was lying on its side, futile and helpless as an overturned turtle, and looking just as sad. Basil paused and lifted it carefully upright, set it down gently on its feet as if it really were a living thing. He ran his palm across the backrest once, searching for…he wasn’t sure. Residue? Body heat? A fine dusting of turquoise hair?

  The chair offered him nothing.

  The hollow thing inside Basil echoed once, a low pang in the place where Kalp used to be. Where he still was, sort of, but not…filling the space any more. There, but not there enough.

  Basil looked up. Gwen was already sitting on her own pilfered desk, watching him quietly with sad eyes. Then she turned to the phone. She picked up and dialled.

  Basil moved around the chair, giving it a ridiculous and yet respectful distance, as if the ghost of Kalp was really sitting in it and Basil didn’t want to rudely bump his knee.

  He’d give anything to be able to accidentally bump Kalp’s knee right now.

  Looking up at Gwen, hesitating before she dialled the last and fateful digit, Basil amended that thought. Almost anything.

  Gwen held the receiver tight against the side of her face. Her knuckles were white. Basil longed to reach out and brush his fingers across them, remind her to relax. Instead he slid one arm around her shoulders, kissed the dusting of white hairs that clustered around the puffy end of her scar.

  He was close enough that he could hear it when the phone began ringing on the other side of the planet.

  There was a muffled click and then a voice that he knew, oh, so well, said: “Piersons, Evvie speaking.”

  Gwen sucked in a breath, sharp and a little scared sounding. A little young sounding, and Basil could hear it now; the pain that the rift between them caused, the child that Gwen had been when she’d shut her mother out of her life forever.