Sasha’s engine thrummed as the bike rolled through the ruined streets, the feel of the vehicle comforting under Mick’s hands. He had first gotten the Harley as a birthday gift from Eric when he turned fifteen. Donna had scowled and fussed, but Mick had fallen too in love with the vehicle to let it go. It had been an old, half-rusted thing, and he and Jai had taken to fixing it up like ducks to water. Mick had worked extra hours at his part-time job after school to buy the necessary parts, while Jai had watched his father work at the bikes and cars that came through their salvage yard. Within two months, the bike had been fixed to near perfection and had been christened as ‘Sasha’. Mick had kept the bike with the condition that Jai would be the only person who would ever tune it up.
Sasha had been a constant in his life through everything: Eric, Rachel, Dana, and now, Gabriel. Sometimes, Mick wondered if he should just stop with his ridiculous tendencies to take care of people and subsequently, getting attached to them. He always tried to give so much, he loved people too much, and everyone ended up leaving him. He always ended up alone, with only a Harley to be loyal to him.
He didn’t even know where he was driving. He couldn’t bear the idea of going to see Jai and Sam; he didn’t think he could face Sam after everything that he had confessed to her. If he went to the Horseshoe, Donna would revert to her treatment of him when he was a child and mother him to no end. He dimly wondered if he should do what Lenore had once tried to do and just leave the city, leave and unlike her, not come back. He could have a fresh start at a new life in a new place, anywhere that wasn’t Detroit.
But that would mean leaving everything behind. Sam would kill him. Jai would be furious. He couldn’t bear the idea of not seeing Tara again. Rooster would probably try to poison him for even thinking it. He didn’t even want to think of what Donna would do and Trish would see right through him.
Sasha’s front wheel suddenly struck a stray piece of meteor on the road and Mick was jerked out of his thoughts as the bike twisted wildly and he struggled to regain his balance. His vision blurred before his eyes and he gritted his teeth as he pressed the brakes. Sasha squealed to a slow halt and Mick’s boots dug into the pitted road, scattering pebbles and fragments of rock. He bent his head over the dashboard, trying to stifle the noises that rose in his throat. He felt tracks of heat moving down his cheeks and a sob burst from his lips. He gripped the Harley’s handles all the tighter, clinging one loyal thing he had in his life.
Something soft touched his hand and Mick jolted upwards in shock, staring wildly in the dim light. To his shock, Carly was standing next to him, holding his fingers in one hand as she stared up at him mutely. She blurred before his eyes and he blinked the moisture from them a few times before she fell into sharper focus. When he looked up, he saw that he was in front of Crossroads Books and the door was open, spilling out a fount of yellow light onto the street. Reid was standing in the doorway, holding a mug of coffee in one hand. Mick dimly realized that he had no idea of what Reid would say to him if he suddenly decided to leave Arcadia.
“Are you just going to sit there or are you coming in?” asked Reid.
Mick’s mouth moved up and down soundlessly and he glanced back at Carly, who tilted her head at him like a cat. She curled her fingers around his and squeezed his hand once. His mouth twisted into a sad smile and he dismounted from his bike, parking it in the side alley. Carly was still waiting for him with her usual blank face and Reid was watching him from the doorway. Mick tucked his keys into his pocket, stowed his helmet under one arm, and as an afterthought, took the file out of the storage bag and shoved it into an inside pocket in his jacket. When he exited the alleyway, Carly took his hand and led him into the shop.
Mick followed the girl as she led him into the central reading area in the shop and made him sit down. He obeyed her without a word, feeling too hollow to react at all. Reid switched off the lights in the front of the shop and Mick heard the turn of the key before he stepped back into the light. Reid shuffled between two tables and took a seat on a small sofa in front of him, sipping at his coffee. Mick studied his face absently: he rarely noticed the small lines that were etched across Reid’s forehead and at the corners of his eyes. When he wasn’t beaming or acting purposefully silly, he looked older than he actually was.
Mick started when he felt Carly tug on his sleeve. He looked around and saw her holding out a mug of hot coffee. He took it from her with a grateful smile, patting the top of her head affectionately and smoothing her reddish hair back. He had often thought her strange, even unnatural, but sometimes, the girl’s quiet, observant nature was more endearing than anything else he knew.
“Want to make it Irish?”
Mick glanced at Reid, who placed a small decanter of whiskey on the low table between them. He nodded and held his mug out, letting the other man pour a thimbleful of the golden liquid into his coffee. When he sipped at it, the heat of the drink along with the burn of the whiskey made his chest feel warm.
Reid slipped his shoes off and brought his feet up to sit cross-legged on the small sofa. The corner of Mick’s mouth lifted in a tiny smile as he remembered the last time he had seen Reid do that. It had been the day of the Ascension, before the yelling and panic, when it had been just the three of them drinking some strange fancy tea that Mick couldn’t be bothered to remember. Gabe had worn a dark grey button-down, one of his nicer ones, the type that fit him properly in all the right places. He had laughed so loudly that day, his blue eyes alight with mischief and happiness....
Mick froze his train of thought and aggressively took another few sips of the Irish coffee.
“How did you know I was here?” he asked. The sound of his own voice, thick and scratchy from crying, startled him. His face still burned and he was sure that his eyes had gone red. “I thought you’d be upstairs.”
“I’d know the sound of that bike anywhere,” Reid replied, “and not many people are out on a Friday night.”
Mick didn’t miss the pointed tone in his voice and touched a hand to his temple where the blood had long since dried, but the scratches were still exposed. Carly came back, holding a white box. She set it on the table before climbing up onto the seat next to him.
“It’s okay...you don’t need to...
“Michael.” He blinked in surprise at Reid, who had never called him by his full name before. “Let her take care of you. That’s going to get infected. His hands too, Carly,” he told the girl.
Carly took the mug from Mick and set it down, taking his hands in hers. He watched her small face, touched with a childish roundness, but with no trace of a child’s innocence. She worked mechanically on his hands, pulling out tiny slivers of glass with tweezers and dabbing at the cuts with antiseptic. He winced whenever it burned and wondered faintly why he had not noticed at the pain before.
He lowered his eyes to his knees. He had been too wrapped up to even notice.
“You got caught in the meteor shower, I take it?” asked Reid. At Mick’s silent nod, he asked, “What the hell were you doing out there?”
Mick laughed bitterly. “I was getting pie and whipped cream,” he declared, his jaw tightening painfully. “It’s Gabe’s birthday.”
Reid cringed. “He couldn’t have taken that well.”
“No, that’s putting it lightly. He flipped out.” He let Carly wrap gauze around his palms. “I don’t think he even realized it.”
“What happened, Mick?” He glanced at Reid, who looked unnaturally solemn. The only lights that were on in the shop were the ones where they were sitting and they cast shadows over his face, making him look strangely old. “Did Gabe say something?” he asked.
Mick tilted his head to make it easier for Carly to rub antiseptic cream on his temple. His chest suddenly felt like a cage, but with nothing left inside to guard. Even in the company of two people whom he knew cared for him, he felt so alone.
“Mick...”
“Gabe has been cheating on me.”
He closed his eyes tightly and gritted his teeth against the burn of the antiseptic. Carly’s hands were small and soft, and they were comforting as she applied a bandage to the side of his head. She closed up the first aid box, having finished with him, and he vaguely wondered if there was anything that could cure a heart that had been broken multiple times. Saying the words aloud had only made the fact all the more real.
“How do you know?” asked Reid in a careful tone. He added another shot of whiskey to the coffee mug before pushing it back to Mick.
“You remember that night class he’d been going to for the past couple of months? There was no night class. He was meeting someone.”
“Why would Gabe do that? The man’s crazy about you.”
“Yeah, a lot of people seemed to have thought that,” he said bitterly, gulping down the contents of the mug and reaching for the decanter. “I even fooled myself into thinking it was so for a long time.”
“You weren’t fooling yourself,” said Reid. His tone was stern and yet, he made no move to stop Mick as he poured two fingers’ width of whiskey into his mug. “How do you know he was meeting someone? Did he say that he was?”
“The bastard certainly didn’t deny it.” He knocked back the drink, relishing the burn of the liquid moving down his throat. “He’s been telling me about that ‘friend’ of his from his so-called night class and not once did he ever say that he knew him from before.”
“Mick...”
“The fucking liar!” Mick huffed in incredulity as he stared into his empty mug. He knew that he was drunk and yet, kept talking, unable to stop now that he had started. “Everything was a lie, all of it! And he’s delusional, and so is that other boyfriend of his! They already killed Mad Barty and turned him into a goddamn skin, and if Gabe keeps this up, the same thing’s going to happen to him! I keep telling him that, but no, he doesn’t listen, because he’d rather listen to his old buddy Kit, who’s been feeding him lies from the side and telling him to be friends with me so that he could get ‘inside information’ to learn to survive in this town that he calls hell!” He laughed aloud, sounding demented in the silent reading room, before sobering. When he tried to laugh again, it came out like a sob. “He said that I was never supposed to happen to him. I was a mistake.”
“Kit?” asked Reid. Mick looked him incredulously. “His friend’s name is Kit?”
“Are you serious, Ink? I’m pouring my heart out here, and that’s what you pick up?”
“What’s his whole name?”
“Well, fuck if I know!” he exclaimed. He reached for the decanter again, but Reid grabbed it, pulling it out of his reach.
“What’s his whole name?” he repeated. Mick stared at his face, eyes strangely serious and mouth pressed into a tight line. His head spun lightly and his forehead throbbed with an impending headache from all the stress of the evening, but he searched his memory to answer him anyways.
“I don’t know.... Tailor or something. Some job.”
“Tyler?”
“Yeah. Kit Tyler.” He spat out the name like it was something poisonous. “That’s him. You know him?”
“In a way.” Reid was staring at Mick as if seeing him in a whole new light. He rose in his seat, eyes suddenly sharper, and put the decanter of whiskey far out of Mick’s reach. He protested, but Reid gave him a severe look, taking his mug from him and tossing it aside onto a pouffe.
“Carly, can you get Mick here some more coffee? The proper kind, no Irish this time.”
“Oh, come on!” Mick exclaimed. “I’m in the middle of a heartbreak here and I don’t even know how I ended up at your doorstep, but you’re supposed to be letting me get drunk!” He slammed a fist onto the table, making it rattle. “Just give me the damn bottle, Reid!”
“No,” he snapped. “I’m not going to let you get shit-faced when you don’t even realize what you’ve stumbled upon.”
Mick stared at him open-mouthed, before letting his head fall back and chuckling. “Oh God, you too. Another thing that I don’t realize. Another thing that Mick Hardy, the dumb tour guide, missed out on.” He giggled at his own description. “And you know Kit too. You and Gabe can form a club, have yourself little tea parties and book readings with lots of nibbles by the side. Mind you, when he says that he doesn’t like pizzas with meat, he’s lying.”
“Mick, stop talking. You’re drunk.” Carly came back with the coffee pot and a new mug, and prepared it the way he liked. Reid slid it across the table with a firm look at Mick’s mulish expression. “Drink up, and Carly will get you an aspirin for the head. We need to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Trust me, you’ll feel better.”
“If you want to make me feel better, then give me the whiskey.”
“You know I’m not going to do that.”
“I was going to give him a ring today, Reid,” he said miserably, sagging against the couch. “I was finally going to do it. But then, the meteors happened and he was yelling so much and then, all this bullshit came up and...I just left it there. I’m so tired, Reid. I’m just so tired.”
“I know,” he replied after a long moment, during which Mick didn’t look at the sympathetic expression that he knew was on his face. “But there are some things that you need to know. And I don’t think Gabe was cheating. Lying, yes - I’m not defending him on any of that - but I have good reason to believe that he’s only ever been nuts about you.”
Mick lifted his head to look at him, not needing a mirror to see that he probably looked like a complete wreck. Reid raised his eyebrows and nodded at the coffee, taking the aspirin from Carly and putting it in front of him next to a glass of water. He closed his eyes, escaping into the heat behind them as the events of the past hour caught up with him and weighed heavy on his shoulders. Memories of Gabe flickered through his mind: the way he always smelled of green apple body wash that Mick always thought was girly, the way he laughed with his whole body and not just his face, the way his eyes grew soft and crinkled in the corners when he was happy. He could recall the way Gabe always stumbled over his words when he was nervous, the way he looked whenever he staggered into the kitchen on a Sunday morning, grumpier than an old bear until he had had his morning coffee. He remembered the feel of his elegant pianist’s hands on his person, the way Gabe would curl his long fingers into his hair whenever he kissed him, the feeling of utter completion and rightness that spun in his mind whenever they were joined together, like two pieces of a puzzle. Mick recalled the horrible sounds of his shouting voice, the harsh words that he threw at him like arrows, the wrecked gasp that had escaped him when Mick had placed the box on the table and walked out of the house.
And Reid thought that he wasn’t cheating.
Mick popped the pills into his mouth and swallowed them down with a gulp of water. Reid watched him silently with his arm around Carly’s thin shoulders as he sipped at the hot coffee. He finished it in a few minutes without complaint and set it down, wearing the same empty, blank face that he had often seen Gabe wear whenever he shut himself down.
Reid turned and pressed a kiss into Carly’s hair, rubbing her arm once before letting her go. He nodded to her to sit down and she climbed up onto a chair, still looking at him with the same absent expression she always wore.
“Mick,” he began. “I will give you answers, I promise. I’ll tell you all about Kit Tyler and who exactly he is, and why Gabe’s been saying everything that he’s been saying, but first, there’s something that you mentioned that I want to ask you about.” When Mick didn’t say anything, he took a breath and asked, “What did you mean when you said that Mad Barty had become a skin?”
Mick frowned, recalling dimly that he had blurted it out in the middle of his rant. He hadn’t mentioned his breaking into the Ascension Lab in City Hall to anyone and had avoided the Horseshoe like the plague since then in case Trish read his mind and figured it out. The thin, folded-up file in his jacket’s inside pocket suddenly felt larger and heavier than it had been a few moments ago.
“Mick, I need you tell me this,” he said seriously, no trace of his usual humour visible in his face. “Where did you see Mad Barty as a skin?”
“Why does that matter?” he hedged.
“You can trust me. I’ve known you longer than you realize and right now, in the face of everything, I am one person whom you can trust. So tell me: where did you see this?”
Mick’s eyes narrowed at the man in front of him. He had no idea what Reid meant, but somewhere inside him, he had always known that he was a man whom he could rely on. It was something he had never been able to explain to himself and he had usually dismissed it as a hunch, but he knew that Reid was not one who would stab him in the back, especially in the face of admitting to an act as grave as the one he had committed.
“I broke into City Hall,” he said quietly. The bookshelves around him seemed to loom high and deepen their shadows, making him feel like he was in a spotlight. “It was the day I was collecting compensation for when my sister, Rachel, was taken during an Ascension.”
Reid’s eyes softened with regret. “Again, I am so sorry for what I did that day,” he said.
“I know and I told you to forget it.”
“Go on.”
“I was waiting for my turn and I was talking to this kid, this little girl whose dad was taken a few years ago. She said that he had worked in something called an ‘Ascension Lab’. I had no idea what the hell it was or that it existed at all, and it got me wondering if Rachel and Dana were safe wherever they were.”
“I remember Dana. She was a lovely girl.”
“She was amazing, and she was taken too, and I didn’t know why the hell the Powers above needed a lab if they just took the people at random as - I don’t know - occasional sacrifices. The City Council always told us that they were safe and happy, that everyone who was ever taken was in a better place, like heaven. They always said that the Powers were kind gods and that they took good care of those whom they took, but I needed to know for sure. I had to know.”
“So you went there.”
“I went there,” he affirmed, shoulders hunching in as he recalled everything he had seen in there: the glowing cubes, the Watchers, Dodson, Dr. Novak, Mad Barty’s empty skin lying on that steel table in Section C-4. “I stole a suit and a gas mask and I went in there. They thought I was some intern or something, and they took me into this room where there was this steel table and on that was....”
Mick pressed his fist to his mouth, eyes darkening as he recalled the flesh-coloured bag-like skin that had previously been a man with a beating heart, a life, and a voice. Bile rose slightly in his throat and he snatched up the glass of water, gulping the remnants down.
“So yeah, I saw his skin in there. The doctor there called them ‘leftovers’. He said that they were remnants of an unorthodox format or something. ‘Format’,” he repeated. “That’s the word he kept using.”
Reid’s eyes flashed with a hint of something dangerous in their blue depths. He worked his jaw from side to side, but nodded at him to continue.
“There’s more,” he said pointedly.
Mick drew in a slow breath, reaching into his jacket’s inside pocket. “The doctor there gave me some work to do, some stats to fill up, and he gave me this file along with Barty’s.” He drew out the file and placed it on the table between them. Reid’s eyes widened like saucers at the sight of it. Mick opened the file and drew out the two stamped sheets with trembling hands.
“And there, I found these,” he said.
He set the two sheets on the table and turned them around to face Reid, not looking at them himself. Their faces had haunted his nightmares enough. Reid picked them up, looking at the filled tallies in the two tables and the red ink stamps across both of the pictures. Mick saw him swallow tightly, his mouth twisting in a grimace of sorrow and regret, but still, something sparked in his eyes that looked oddly like triumph.
“They’re dead, Ink,” he said hoarsely. “I’m not that smart, but I don’t have to be a genius to figure it out. My baby sister and my old girlfriend...they’re both dead, along with everyone else who was ever taken in an Ascension. They were all skins on that table.”
Reid’s jaw worked up and down as he flipped through the rest of the file, stilling for a moment when he came across Mick’s sheet. He drew two more of the papers out: the sheets with Mick’s and Gabe’s faces. He set them down on the table, smoothing out their crumpled edges.
“It’s been too long,” he murmured. “I’ve been here for so long and I never thought that this day would come.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Mick,” he said slowly. “You said that Gabe was delusional. Did he ever speak to you about realities?”
Mick groaned aloud, shaking his head. “Oh God, no, not you too. Come on, Reid, don’t you think I’ve been through enough tonight?”
“On the contrary, Mick, I think this is just beginning. Gabe’s talked to you about this, hasn’t he?”
“Only all the fucking time. He said that it was for some book he was writing. He kept going all Alice on me! Don’t tell me that you believe that bullshit too.”
“You broke into the Ascension Lab in City Hall and saw what you saw. Why do you find it so hard to believe in what he says?”
“Because I believe what I see, Reid! I’m not something imaginary, I’m real!”
“I’m not saying that you’re not,” said Reid, “but reality is ultimately perception and you can’t always trust what you see. But you want proof? Gabe didn’t have proof, so he couldn’t have convinced you. But I can.”
Reid reached out and cupped Carly’s cheek in one hand, stroking across it with his thumb.
“Mo?” she asked, her voice tiny.
“Just for a little while, darling,” he whispered.
Carly’s whole body - clothes, shoes, and all - suddenly flickered like an image on a bad television and she disintegrated in a flash of white light. Mick threw himself backwards in horror, clutching at his seat. His heart pounded loudly in his ears as he gaped at the spot where the little girl had been sitting just a second before. Reid lowered his hand and twitched his fingers once, and Carly came back, still in the same position she had been. It was as if she hadn’t just disappeared and reappeared in front of their eyes.
Reid calmly turned back to face Mick, who pressed himself against the back of the couch.
“Carly’s not real,” he said simply.
***
Dr. Wren winced at the sharp disconnection of the communication line and removed the device out of his ear, turning a finger inside it and wincing as he did so. He sighed heavily, taking his glasses off and massaging his tired eyes. He had been working for Lazarus for too long, but was in no certain position to retire. The boss would never allow it.
“Four oh three, run a stability scan on the environment module and give the firewalls a five percent boost,” he commanded, tucking the communication back into his ear and setting his spectacles back on his nose.
Lazarus would tolerate no anarchy, but he was the one who had made the initial designs that ran the entire system. Dr. Wren could only do so much to keep things stable until he would have to call in for reinforcements, possibly even the boss himself.