***FIONNA***
Whatever the fuck kind of natural sedatives they have in dark energy, they're gross. Waking up after a few hours of having those dark bags on your heads, I'm dizzy and my stomach is churning. Same with that guy Jay, who wakes up alongside me in an office with the name "Dominic Park" plated on the desk in front of us.
I'm actually awakened by the sound of Jay groaning as he pushes his hands under his glasses to rub his eyes. "If my stomach wasn't empty right now..."
"What, you'd puke?"
He jumps out of his seat and crawls on his hands and knees over to a trash can in the corner. I turn away as I hear him heaving, but it's the dry kind, I think. No sounds of semisolid wet stuff impacting inside the trash can. Then he looks up at me, his face ashen and a tad bit sweaty. "Not making much of a good first impression on you, am I?"
I tilt my head. "So now you get that I haven't met you before?"
"It's hella confusing," he mutters. "I've met you, I've talked with you a couple of times. But then we went and fixed up that Black Mirror - or, uh, you and Kensi fixed it with your light and fire powers - and you saved your human. But then, out of nowhere, you and Gabe and his brother started saying you didn't know me."
I stand up, feeling instant head rush. "I'm sorry, but it's true. Before I used the Mirror, you weren't there. Gabe's partner was Harris McCallum."
"So, what, saving your human means trading Harris' life for mine?" He gets back to his feet. "Not that I'm complaining - Harris is too weird to live and too rare to die. He deserves to live more than I do."
"Yeah. He also deserves someone who loves him. And Gabe...where the hell is he? I need to tell him I'm sorry. I need to tell him I'm gonna get him Harris back."
Jay takes off his glasses to polish the lenses with the hem of his T-shirt. "You'd kill a guy just to ship him with your bestie?"
"Well, when you put it that way..." I cross my arms, leaning against Park's desk and gritting my teeth. "Shit."
"I know. Confusing, right?"
"And morally questionable in so many ways."
Jay frowns at the floor. "I mean, when I was alive...hell, even after I died, I never really stopped being depressed."
"So you're saying it's better that you're dead?" I want to grab him by his shoulders and shake some sense into him. "Being depressed doesn't make you less worthy of living."
"And does it still count as living when you're technically undead?"
I'd keep on going with this convo, but I'd really like to know more about where we are. I get the feeling we're in the Second 'Verse, though. Park's office has windows, but they're tinted super, super dark. No, it's not like we're looking out over a nighttime view of Second 'Verse Bearville or wherever. It's tinted. How do I know? Because there's a control panel next to one of the windows, a panel I've seen before in Russell's office. He couldn't resist showing it off, my and Gabe's and Harris' first day in the Guardian program. It tinted the windows, Blade Runner style.
On closer inspection, I see the brand name on the controls.
Peppermint.
So they make the Black Mirror - or, at least, the old-timey TV it was disguised as - and a bunch of other sci-fi shit that doesn't exist in Prime.
How have I never heard of them before? Have I just not paid attention? Is it another symptom of me being an entitled piece of Millennial shit, not noticing what's important in the world around me?
Hey, as much as I want to feel safe and loved in Kensi's arms, for instance, my life can't exactly revolve around her.
Speaking of Kensi, where the hell is she?
Where are any of my friends?
And where's the Mirror so we can reverse what's happened with Jay and Harris?
The door opens. Maybe Park can answer my questions. Yes, it's Park coming in. Of course - it's his office, after all. Thank God it's not that creep Penner. I feel sorry for whoever he visits.
"Hey, guys," Park says with a gentle wave before taking off a pair of huge aviator sunglasses. "Sorry about all this cloak and dagger shit. I told them not to go dark-bagging, but..."
"But you let them bag and tag us anyway," Jay grumbles.
"Was the 'tag' part just a joke? I bet it was."
I play with the tint on the windows, and instantly regret turning it off when I see the Second 'Verse Bearville skyline. God, when are they going to repaint this town? These garish colors look so wrong under a sunlit green sky. Jasper Fforde writes stories about people getting sick from looking at colors like these.
"Could you not?" Park asks. "Please? You're gonna give me a seizure. I need the tint maxed out for a reason."
"Oh, sorry." I dial the darkness all the way up. Now it reminds me of the nights when there were "attack drills" on the wall - a wall that I get one last glimpse of before I completely tint the window. They've finally begun dismantling it, but that'll take a good long time, even with all those prefab parts they used to build it. Imagine if one of those ultra-conservative types they get on Earth got their hands on that technology. They'd have too much fun walling off all the countries, starting with the US.
"So..." Park flips open the Macbook he keeps on his desk, waits for a moment, then swipes the touch screen a couple of times. "So what exactly did you do with the Black Mirror? I mean, we've got a guy who's not supposed to be here." He nods and grins at Jay. "No offense, man."
"Not offended. You're only telling it like it is."
I twitch, wondering where Jay's going with his endless self-deprecation. It feels almost strategic. Maybe he's not exactly going for sympathy, but he's definitely playing on Park's heartstrings, and it appears to be working. Unlike Penner, Park isn't a cold, robotic fish. Or, at least, he doesn't present that way.
"Here's the record of how time progressed for your humans before you used the Mirror." Park turns his laptop screen around. "Go ahead, take a look."
On the left is a record with my name written in all caps on top, as well as the subtitle "HUMAN." It abruptly cuts off about halfway down the screen, and when I pinch it and zoom in, I see that it ends with my human's death by suicide, followed only a few seconds later by this entry:
"Sunday, November 9, 2020, 12:00:24am. Fionna Lee's demon dies - see relevant file under Appendix B - and her human thus ceases to exist."
On the right, Jay and I read his human's file, which doesn't end with his death. It does, however, specifically highlight one moment of importance. "Sunday, December 21, 2020, 7:43:26pm. Jay Cross' human, aided by his friends under the direction of inventor and covert counterspy Elena Montoya, assists in ending an armed uprising against the first-ever California Solstice Rising."
"We were supposed to win?" he asks. "I felt like we were losing."
"Maybe that's why you wound up losing," Park suggests. "You made some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy...but look, if you click on the Solstice Rising, you'll get a properly detailed entry about the events therein."
Jay swallows, then taps the screen. A complete description of this California Solstice Rising expands to cover the whole screen, but the prose in which it's written is a little less flowery. "Montoya's teen agents, code-named 'The Magi,' used their powers to break into the Ice Palace and defeat the warlock-supremacist rebels, code-named 'The Scalers,'" etc. etc.
"I edit the life-story entries," Park says, "but my sister edits the event entries. She's better with visual arts than textual ones."
"Not important." Jay speed-reads the whole entry, leaving me a bit dizzy again from trying to keep up with this ability of his. "So, originally, Harris gets his leg broken, but doesn't die?"
"Not at the Solstice Rising." Park turns the screen around and starts typing away. "Dammit, I asked for McCallum's original record twenty minutes ago. Why are they taking so long to send it to me?" Pause. It takes him a while to find something relevant, then he does a facepalm. "Goddammit, Penner, why'd you cut in line? I need that record!" He closes his laptop with unnecessary fury, then leaps to his feet, almost fumbling the laptop as he tries to put on his shades. "Uh, okay, so I'm not supposed to leave you guys unattended, so come with me."
"If that's the case," I ask, "why'd we wake up alone?"
Jay looks up, adjusting his glasses, which have started to slide down his nose. He's still a bit sweaty - and I don't blame him, not with this room as stuffy as it is, even by my fairly heat-tolerant standards. Is the A/C malfunctioning? "What she said."
"You didn't want me to drag your sleeping bodies to the bathroom, did you?" Jay and I exchange blank stares. "Didn't think so." Park beckons us out the door and down the hall. Before we leave, I turn around to look at the clock perched on the wall. It's a little after eight. How long were we asleep? "Almost sixteen hours," Park says. "You're welcome."
"This isn't what I meant when I said I needed to make up for lost sleep," Jay gripes. But he shrugs and follows me as I follow Park. Out the door, down the hall, up to the next floor...why does this place look so deserted? And why are all the windows untinted? No wonder Park needs to keep his sunglasses on - nobody else around here is sensitive to his seizure issues, I guess. Assholes.
Upstairs, Park finds Penner's office and walks into the open antechamber, but finds the door to the office proper locked tight. "Penner? You in there?" He pounds on the wood under Penner's printed name. "Gotta talk to you!" He waits a few seconds before pounding even harder. "Hey dumbass! Open up!"
"I don't think he's in there," says Jay.
"Oh, maybe he is." I tilt my head at the door, as if expecting to see through it in X-ray vision like I'm Supergirl or something. "Maybe he's listening to his tunes and can't hear you. I bet he's got Music Junkie earbuds too - those are so good at canceling noise."
Park growls to himself, then unclenches his fists and places one splayed hand on the door, near the handle. It sparks for a moment, then he jumps back, flapping that hand like he got burned and swearing up a blue streak. When he calms down, he turns to us and snaps his fingers. "Which one of you...Jay. Jay, could you help me out here? I need a dark spike."
Jay complies, forming a long spike in one hand, which he drives into the door just above the handle. I'm a little surprised, but then his physical strength is a little less immediately visible than that of Harris, because Jay doesn't show off his muscles like Harris does.
He's about to twist the spike and push it in deeper, but I tell him to stop. "I'll burn it."
The guys nod, then go out the door as quickly as they can. I stand in the antechamber's doorway, release a few trickles of flame, then jump aside just in time to escape the small explosion that rattles us.
"Thanks, guys." Park smiles graciously, then goes into the office through a now-smoking doorway. He makes a beeline for the desk, where, thankfully, Penner's left behind a tablet. He picks it up, then sucks air through his teeth. "Goddammit. It's Peppermint!"
"Peppermint? Again?" I look at the tablet, which Park turns over in his hands repeatedly. On the back is a small logo in the shape of a leaf. "What, is it unhackable or something? Wait, do you even know how to hack?"
"Barely," Park says. "And I'd need to hack this thing to get in, 'cause it's exclusively passcode-protected. Six-digit, and only four tries before it bricks up forever."
"Can't get Penner's thumbprint and be done with it?" asks Jay.
Park shakes his head. "Peppermint doesn't use thumbprints anymore. They stopped after the courts ruled it was okay to compel suspects to give up their prints to unlock their devices."
"That doesn't sound legal," I say.
"No shit, Sherlock. But that's Peppermint for you - they think they're above the law." Park scratches his head, a number of six-digit possibilities spilling out of his brain. "You don't think...Penner wouldn't be stupid enough to use his birthday as his passcode, right?" He tries that, whatever it is - I can't follow it, he types so fast - and it fails. "Shit fuck. What else could I try...?"
Footsteps come racing towards us. Park's voice trails off as we listen to them. I think it's maybe...two people? Maybe three?
Turns out it's two. Gabe and Kensi. They come up to the door Jay and I just IED'd. Gabe whistles at the sight. "Thought that was something to do with my best firebrand friend."
"Guilty as charged." I blow kisses to both of them. "Where's Alex?"
"He's gone home," Gabe says. "Same with Kelly and Ty, I think."
"Shit, and I was gonna say goodbye to 'em..." I shake my head. "Thanks a lot, Penner. Separating us must really get your rocks off, huh?"
"Tell me one of you two can hack for shit," Park says to our new arrivals, a hint of desperation in his tone.
Gabe scratches his nose. "I'm allergic to code."
Kensi holds up one hand with a couple of light blades extending from her fingers like an assassin's idea of French tips. "This is the best I can think of - warping the circuits. Making the tablet do what we want."
Someone's been reading their Victoria Aveyard, I see. But Park shakes his head. "I don't think you're anywhere near ready for that kind of light trick, are you?"
Kensi isn't about to let him tell her no. "Let me try-"
"No, wait!" I grab her wrist to stop her, then point at the tablet's screen. The keypad lights up like someone invisible is touching the right numbers - but there's no way anyone could reach in there and accurately touch the screen. Not with Park holding the tablet closely and the rest of us clustered tightly around him.
The screen unlocks anyway, and within seconds, the tablet navigates itself to a video of Penner and Russell facing each other across a table. They're in a blank-walled interrogation room of some kind.
"Where's this?" I ask.
"The basement," Park says.
"Naturally," says Jay.
Kensi (who's retracted her light blades) shushes us so we can hear what Penner and Russell are saying. "Simon, Simon, Simon...you think you can win against us? We stopped Preston Holly. You stand no chance-"
"Listen," Penner says. "The only reason Holly surrendered was because he saw that his son died in battle. Once we figure out how to use the Mirror to its full potential-"
"You'll what? Go back in time and drain Holly of his sympathy?"
"That'd be a real challenge...but no. No, we're going to ensure Lincoln lives-"
I don't hear anything else, really, because Park takes off running with the tablet in hand. The rest of us follow him to a nearby elevator, which we ride all the way down to the basement. While we wait to reach our destination, we gather around Park again, looking over his shoulders to watch what I'm pretty sure is a live feed.
"I thought you guys were all about making sure time wasn't changed," Russell says with a harsh laugh. "And yet, here you are, proposing some pretty radical changes. You know they're not happening, right?"
"You let Fionna Lee make a change," Penner points out. "And she somehow switched one person for another. That sounds like a pretty radical change to me."
"Small potatoes, assbutt," Russell retorts. "What you're proposing could undo the progress we've made towards rebuilding this 'verse..." His voice trails off, then he bursts out laughing like a madman. "So it's true. You're serious? You're really gonna try and make White Shadows fail? Good fucking luck, Sippy-Cup."
Penner twitches. "Don't call me that."
A chiming sound goes off in the real world, not on the tablet, as the elevator doors open. We spill out into a hallway lined with doors. "Where do we start?" I ask.
"Every door here is an interrogation room," says Park. "We just gotta check 'em all." He bends down over the nearest door's keypad, then starts working his powers on the circuitry.
"Dammit, I really gotta learn how to do that," Kensi says.
"Want a crash course?" Park opens the door he's working on, checks to see that the room beyond is empty, then beckons her over to the next one.
"Come on." I tug on Jay's sleeve. "Let's get to the other end and do our thing. We'll meet these two again in the middle, huh?"
Jay shakes his head to clear his brain, then follows me to the end of the corridor. "Have you noticed even down here, there's nobody?"
I wait for him to shove a dark spike into the last door. "All deserted. Yeah, hard not to notice. What's up with that?"
"I feel like something apocalyptic's about to happen."
"Were you here to see what happened when Holly started his little war?" I light the spike up, blowing the door open. Empty room.
Gabe, who's busy trying to ice-spike another door, jumps at the sound and drops his spike, which shatters all over the floor. "Ow," he deadpans, Alex-style, with his hand over his heart. Then he reaches out over the fragments of his spike, slowly reassembling it and pulling it back into his hands.
"The city was practically deserted," I say to Jay, 'cause Holly pretended the dark scrivs were nuking us. Everything evacuated."
"So what are they evacuating for?"
I shrug. "Beats me. We just gotta find Russell. And maybe Ariel, if he's down here too. Give either of 'em a minute, and maybe they can explain this shit to us."
Jay and I open up a couple more doors, as does Gabe, all to no avail. Our ears are ringing, so we can't really talk to each other at the moment. But then we hear, faintly, Park and Kensi's cries of surprise as they open a door and find Ariel in another interrogation room. He walks out, turns to see us, and waves. Okay, he's safe and sound. Now we just have to find Russell-
"SHIT!" Park's yell is loud enough to echo all around us. He stares, openmouthed, at the tablet's screen, blinking fast as if he can clear out whatever he's looking at.
I approach him tentatively, then more quickly as I see the others take a look at whatever he's seeing and mirror his reactions. "What's happening?" My own voice still sounds like mush in my ears because of all the little explosions. If only one of us - I'm looking at you, Park! - had thought to provide ear plugs all around.
Park turns the tablet around. "Just...look." He's pale and starting to sweat.
We watch as Penner gets up from the desk, letting go of what looks like a giant, gaudy red gem. "I know buzzcut season's over, but...whatever, I've waited too long for this. Godspeed, Troiraz." He spits Russell's scriv name, literally, before turning and leaving the room.
"What's that?" Jay points at the red jewel, which shines brightly on the desktop.
"Sangrite," Ariel breathes. "Prized for its beauty in antiquity, but atomically unstable-"
"And the source of power for the earliest prototypes of the ultralight bomb." Now we know why Park looks scared.
"Wait a second..." I turn around, checking the entire hallway. "Penner just left the room, but none of these doors opened."
The penny drops for Kensi too. "He's not here."
"Then where the hell is he?" asks Gabe.
"Probably in the Guardian building," says Park.
"And we gotta get there right away," says Ariel. "I think Penner might have activated the sangrite."
Russell reaches out with cuffed hands and captures the ugly-ass jewel in a dome of darkness. But it doesn't last - soon, red light starts cracking the dome's surface, and it all falls apart in less than twenty seconds.
"What are we waiting for?" I run to the elevator doors and open them. "Don't just stand there! Russell needs our help!"