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2017-08-13
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She thought later, much later, and it was only much later that she allowed herself to think about all that had happened, that the worst moment, out of the many bad moments that had preceded it, had been turning away from Drew. He had wrapped his arms around her tightly, as if the force of his embrace would imprint upon her how crucial it was that she succeed, and Claudia had had to pull his arms away from Helena's waist, saying quietly, "She can't save the day if you don't let her go, Drew." Helena hadn't looked at him, couldn't look at him, because she knew what she would see, not just a strained, pale face, its freckles all the more visible without the big grin squeezing his cheeks, but that direct, questioning gaze which wanted only one answer. And she couldn't tell him yes because she didn't know if she would be telling him the truth. Instead she walked away from him, toward the elevators where Pete was waiting for her, his face as strained as his son's, walking a little unsteadily because her knees had been locked as Drew had hugged her, because she hadn't eaten or slept since one of the D.C. hospitals had confirmed what she had dreaded most, because . . . the hell with the stiff upper lip and the "Righty ho," because she was too frightened to pretend that she wasn't. Not for herself, but for Drew and Pete and Claudia - and for the others as well, some just arrived, some who were still on their way, Steve, Artie and Vanessa, Abigail. And, yes, dammit, for herself, because if she had made Myka want more than she had had before, Myka had made her feel, again, how sweetly sharp it was to want, to crave. To be as old as she was, to have done so much and suffered so much, and yet to want there to be another day and another day after that one, she hadn't felt so pierced through by what she could only call happiness since Christina had been alive.

She wasn't just frightened, she was terrified that what she had regained with Myka she could lose all over again. But as she entered the elevator with Pete and he said in the clipped, compressed voice that had been his since they had found out about Myka, "Everything a go?," she pressed the elevator button for the lobby and said, without a tremor, "Dave assured me they would have her ready for us."

There had been no niggling concern that grew slowly into an all-consuming fear. There had been a time when Helena didn't worry - because she hadn't needed to, because Myka had said she was flying to West Virginia for a QA check of a recent retrieval, because it was likely, Myka had said, she would be working too late that first day to call - and there had been the moment when Helena knew something was horribly wrong. When Myka didn't call the second day, didn't call that morning before Drew went to school, Helena didn't bother to counsel herself to wait; she called Claudia. If Myka had to break a routine, she always tried to make up for the interruption, especially when it came to Drew. When she was away, she called him before he went to bed, and the few times she had missed an evening call, she would call him the next morning. It was that simple with her. It wasn't Myka being rigid, it was Myka showing her son that while work might occasionally take precedence, it never really came first.

It was 7:00 in the morning when she made the call, and Claudia had been asleep. Querulous, she hadn't finished her rant about how not everyone kept a Victorian's hours, when Helena said, "She's not in West Virginia evaluating a retrieval, so where did you send her and what is she doing?"

Claudia immediately stopped her grousing. There had been no QA check in West Virginia. Myka had told her that the regents had asked her to verify whether an object that had come into their possession was an artefact. She had said she was going to Philadelphia. Sitting at the kitchen island, Helena put the phone down, ignoring Claudia's increasingly loud and apprehensive exclamations. It was a week ago that she had remembered where she had seen the painting in Bergstrom's office, and she had said nothing about it to Myka. She had said nothing, not because she had had some grand plan in mind that she and only she could execute but because she hadn't known what she was going to do. Yet Myka must have sensed something . . . . She cut Claudia off in mid-"I'm the frakking caretaker-in-waiting, you'd think people would –" and made another call.

She hadn't remembered his direct line, maybe she had never known it in the first place, but she managed, through the intercession of a number of assistants, to get put through to him, and when Russ Bergstrom answered, he sounded only mildly surprised. "I spoke to Agent Bering not too long ago. Didn't she tell you?"

That wasn't what she had wanted to hear. "And she asked you about the print, the one that used to hang in Stewart Afton's office," Helena interrupted, fearing that every one of her burgeoning suspicions was going to be confirmed.

"Yeah," Bergstrom said, drawing the affirmation out, as though she should have already known why Myka contacted him. "She said she remembered that I told all of you that one of Stew's old girlfriends had given him the painting. I don't know if that's exactly what I said, because I'd always gotten the impression from Stew that he wanted more from her than she was willing to give, you know what I mean?" Helena recalled the unlived-in look of Bergstrom's apartment, how he had turned their interrogation of him into a pizza party, and hoped she could suffer his increasing chattiness, which suggested he had gotten over his initial surprise and was treating her call as the reaching out of an old friend, without screaming at him to tell her what she needed to know. "She was the one who got away, that's how he always described her. I told Agent Bering that I didn't know who the woman was, but she said that was okay. She wanted me to take down the painting and look at the back of it. And there it was, 'To my favorite flâneur, Love, Suzanne.' I had to look that up you know, flâneur, and it doesn't really seem like Stew. Of course I didn't know him then like -"

"Thank you, Russ, you've been most helpful," Helena interrupted again, impatience giving ground to an equally unbearable sense of foreboding. She was too far behind, she wouldn't catch up to Myka in time.

"You heard about Dwight." Russ framed it as a statement rather than a question.

Her thumb hovering over her phone's screen, ready to end the call, Helena hesitated, compassion and a perverse compulsion to intensify her fear intermingling. "No, Russ, I didn't."

"He passed away a couple of days after you guys left. Never regained consciousness." He said it matter-of-factly but Helena could hear both the sorrow and the somewhat awed note that Dwight Sheffield's fate could have been his.

Five days? Five days after they had met with Sheffield in his office. Granted, they didn't know how long he had possessed the replicated artefact before he succumbed to its lethal side effect, but it had taken him only five days to die from when he had collapsed in the restaurant. If Myka had come into contact with a replicated artefact, particularly one that had been "amplified," it was possible she was already suffering from the side effect. Which would mean there were four days, four days to find Myka and save her. Unless Suzanne and her co-conspirators had taken more direct action, and that possibility Helena couldn't dwell on either.

"Agent Wells?" Helena almost dropped the phone. "Agent Wells, is there anything else you or Agent Bering need from me?"

"I don't believe so, Russ." Although Sheffield's behavior with his artefact had been reprehensible, Bergstrom had counted him as a friend, and Bergstrom himself seemed a decent man, so Helena swallowed her revulsion at the memory of Sheffield touching his artefact to control her and added softly, "I know Sheffield was your friend."

"If there's anything about that painting that can help you, hell, I'll FedEx it to you." His tone grew uncertain. "That woman, Suzanne, the one who gave it to Stew. She's not mixed up in this mess, is she?"

"We're still investigating." It was an inadequate response and hardly one to give him comfort, but telling him that Suzanne likely played on Afton's feelings for her in order to use him as a conduit for distributing replicated artefacts would leave Bergstrom feeling no better.

Down the hallway, a door slammed. Drew. Helena put down the phone and made sure she was casually leaning back against the island, an indulgent smile on her face by the time he slouched into the kitchen, the backpack hanging off his shoulder half his size. Since he was tall for his age, maybe it was an exaggeration, but the backpack was wider. There was being honest with a child, and there was alarming him. Helena didn't see how she could do the former without causing the latter, and if his mother was in danger, the less time he had to focus on his helplessness the better. Yet, as he slung his backpack over a chair and went to root in the refrigerator, intent only on finding a snack and unaware that he couldn't rescue his mother if she was in need of it, Helena wondered if obsessing about her own helplessness was what she was trying to avoid by not telling him.

"My mom call yet?" He took out an apple and stuffed it into a pocket of his backpack.

Couldn't he have been sneaking a pudding pack? Of course that would have required the presence of pudding packs in the refrigerator to begin with - Myka claimed they were plastic cups of cornstarch and sugar. Today was a day when she needed him to remind her of Pete, not his mother. "Not yet. That means we can raise bloody hell with her later." He only shrugged as he went to grab his coat, Myka's missing her morning call prompting no demands from him that she call the police, the FBI, or his Grandma Jane. He waited patiently for her by the door to the garage. Slapping her legs, she said with false briskness, "Let's get you to school then."

If he noticed that she drove faster than usual or that she turned on the radio rather than quiz him about fractions or state capitols, he didn't let on. After seeing him lope toward the school's entrance, backpack swinging like a pendulum, she found a quiet street nearby and, letting the Land Rover idle, she called Claudia again. When the call went to voicemail, she next tried the analyst from her hedge fund who had become her part-time researcher. She needed him to ferret out from the information he had collected on Wade Farraday the locations of all the old Farraday factories with driving distance of Washington D.C.

Which he was able to do with admirable speed had she been in an admiring frame of mind. Promising her that he would send the information in an e-mail he had just begun drafting, he swore with the fervor that had apparently produced the list of factories that he was within one or two more queries of having the information she had wanted on Suzanne Emory. "Interesting thing about her," he volunteered over the snicking of his keyboard, "she's -"

"A Farraday or believes she's one," Helena grimly supplied for him.

His disappointment in being preempted was plain. "You could've saved me about three weeks' worth of work digging that up if you'd told me."

"It was a hunch," she said. She hadn't known for certain. But ever since she had remembered where she had first seen the original of the print in Bergstrom's office, she had been trying to understand the reasons behind Suzanne's involvement. That is, she thought about why Suzanne was involved when she wasn't trying to figure out what she was going to do with the knowledge, whether, in an uncharacteristic concession that she had superiors, she would present an argument for reopening the investigation into replicated artefacts to the regents and Homeland Security or act as she had done before, on her own and without consulting anyone. Only Myka seemed to have sensed her dilemma and resolved it for her . . . .

" - her biological father was a Farraday, some sort of cousin of Wade's and a real loser by all accounts. Couldn't hold down a job, had scrapes with the law. Her mother eventually dumped him and remarried, and Suzanne went by her stepfather's name, Wilcox. Then she changed it again, to Emory, after college. That's why I kept running into roadblocks. It took me a while to figure out that Suzanne Emory, Susan Wilcox, and Susie Farraday were the same person."

His voice became a buzz once more as Helena wondered, not for the first time, if the chameleon-like quality that Myka had recognized in Suzanne during their brief meeting at the Farraday Gallery was forged by a childhood of having a storied name but not the access to the privileged world that other, luckier, Farradays inhabited. Her envy would have hardened over the years, driving her to do whatever was necessary to become one of "us" as opposed to remaining one of "them." Helena shook her head in irritation; she was fast developing the plot for a potboiler that, in its lurid psychology, was more Jackie Collins than H.G. Wells. All she lacked was cover art that would have an extraordinarily busty Suzanne planting a stiletto heel on the backs of Stewart Afton . . . and one Helena Wells . . . as she sashayed her way to the top. "What's her connection to Congressman Jaffee, or is Perkins the one?"

"It's pretty sketchy, but back when Jaffee was a state senator he enlisted a lot of college students to do the grunt work of his campaigns, making fundraising calls, going door-to-door, that sort of thing. Her name pops up on lists of volunteers over a couple of years." He chuckled. "You don't know what it took me to unearth them. Dinners with, ah, a friend from my MBA program who used to be a Jaffee supporter until, as she phrased it, 'he went from being a sensible, fiscally conservative Republican to a complete wacko with a desire for world domination.' She was good enough to contact some old friends of hers who used to work for Jaffee in the Dark Ages. Apparently he's the paranoid type who doesn't want any paper or electronic trail, other than what he's legally obligated to maintain, so a lot of old stuff is gone. I guess if you're planning some right-wing coup, you don't want it out there for everyone to see." He laughed at the absurdity of it, while Helena, recalling the sleepwalkers in Ellis, thought he would find it less funny if he had seen what she had.

Without warning, her phone started vibrating so violently that she thought it might shake into its environmentally unfriendly component parts. A series of repetitive text messages from Claudia began to populate the screen, Call me NOW. Urging her researcher to e-mail her with any other information he found, she ended the call and tried Claudia's number again.

"Dude," Claudia shouted as soon as she heard Helena's voice, "she put it all together. Most of it, anyway. I found where she had squirreled it away, in the last place anyone would look, a bunch of subfolders buried in our procedures. Open the folder named Neutralizer, subfolder Bags and Gloves, subfolder Pre-retrieval Checks, subfolder Completed Pre-Retrieval Checks - and there it is. Your ex Suzanne, Jaffee, Wade Farraday, you. Not that we're still suspecting you or anything, it's just that -"

"I was an oblivious, self-centered fool, easily led and easily used," Helena said in wry summary. "I think we'll discover the same about Wade Farraday." She sighed, thinking of the countless times she had used her laptop, which held the results of her searches and, more importantly, the graphs she had created to compare the timeline for the replicated artefacts with her trips to Washington D.C., when Myka was in the room. Myka and her amazing recall. She must have memorized the key strokes of her password. A fleeting smile crossed Helena's face. They would have a conversation about boundaries and privacy once Myka was safely back home with her and Drew.

"She must have been working on this since . . . I don't know, a long time. She didn't compile all this information overnight," Claudia said quietly.

Myka's visit to the Farraday Gallery. Natural curiosity about an old . . . girlfriend . . . or had she suspected even then? Myka insisted that she was logical, analytical, not intuitive; Pete was the one who had vibes. But no one with an ounce of logic would have taken a chance on her, would have loved someone who was so ill-equipped to love in return. Myka acted on her gut far more often than she was willing to admit, just as she had in Ellis when, again, with no reason for doing so she had believed in the ability of an erratic, boastful "genius" to neutralize an artefact that had overtaken an entire town. Helena sentimentalized the retrieval because it was then when Myka had told her that she loved her. Yet it was also when Myka had threatened to kill a major in the Air National Guard, when she had refused to allow for any other outcome than the one she wanted most. Myka was crazy. In fact, Myka was crazier than she was.

"At least since we came back from Ellis," Helena said, "maybe before then. She's done all this to protect me. She's figured it out so I didn't need to, she's gone to Washington to confront Suzanne so I wouldn't have to."

"We're going to get her back," Claudia said reassuringly. "I forwarded all her work to the DHS. They're agents, sort of, right? They're at least competent enough to bring Suzanne in for questioning, Wade Farraday, too. If they're not scared of their own shadows, they'll go after Jaffee."

"She should have called by now, Claudia. She's in trouble. We can't wait on Homeland Security." Her grip on the phone was becoming slick. Helena switched it to her other hand and wiped her sweaty hand on her jeans. She had heard how thin her voice was becoming, as if it were a piece of wire being twisted until it snapped.

"What do you suggest we do?"

"We start calling hospitals. I saw what happened to Dwight Sheffield, to Gene Butler. The replicated artefacts, they're becoming more dangerous. The properties seem to be degrading faster. If Myka came into contact with a replicated artefact or several . . . ." Helena couldn't make herself say it, but she could picture it. Suzanne and Jaffee's other willing helpers dumping Myka, unconscious and without any identification, in an alley. They wouldn't have to kill her, only wait for the side effect of the replicated artefacts to do its work. While Myka lay comatose in a hospital, they would have time to flee – or to construct an unbreakable alibi. "If we don't hear from Myka or Homeland Security by the end of the day, I'm flying out there, and I'll find her myself."

"I need to loop in the regents and Mrs. F., and then I'm going to grab a seat on that flight you're taking. She's my family, too, H.G."

Helena looked at the homes on either side of the street, snowmen in various stages of disintegration, listing like crumbling wedding cakes in the yards, Christmas lights framing windows and lining roofs; lacking the magic of night, they were only green electrical cords in the daylight. It was a scene gay and tatty simultaneously, and she thought that she should have driven the Land Rover farther away and parked it in front of a junkyard or an empty commercial building with its windows boarded and a For Sale sign crowding the sidewalk, somewhere more fitting for her halting, nervous inquiries about whether an unconscious woman in her 40s, possibly a Jane Doe, had been recently admitted. She felt desperate and ridiculous in equal measure describing Myka, and the businesslike manner of the hospital staff who answered her calls only solidified her belief that the ordinary, the logical wasn't separate from madness but part of it, the front that madness put on when you met her at a party in a client's home or when you heard her say, from her jail cell, that she wouldn't lose you again or saw her reflection when you looked in a mirror.

She was told, time and again, in the same professionally neutral voice, no matter which hospital, that she should pursue her request through appropriate channels, that they couldn't provide that information over the phone. Appropriate channels, yes, and what was Homeland Security doing? Had the minions to whom Claudia had sent Myka's findings filed the information under Replicated Artefacts - Closed or Warehouse 13 - Paranoia and Hysteria? She could try filing a missing person's report with the Washington D.C. police: "My girlfriend didn't make her nightly call to her son, and I fear that a U.S. Representative and his co-conspirators have subjected her to the deadly spell of a replicated artefact." That would be a hastily ended call – by the police. But there was someone who would believe such a story, parts of it, anyway, and had the clout to override "appropriate channels."

He answered on the second ring. He couldn't possibly have that much time on his hands; he would be in back-to-back meetings with his boss or other high-level functionaries or answering questions before Congress. He wouldn't be in his office, scrolling through his e-mail, and hoping for a call to interrupt the quiet.

"I have favors to ask of you," she said without preamble.

Dave answered almost lazily, "What can you give me that I can't already demand?"

He had a point, but she hadn't made this call unprepared. "You have in me a reluctant, resentful employee, compliant but just barely. What if I were to give you an H.G. Wells who wanted to work for you? Or made a better pretense of it, at the very least."

He laughed at that, but his laughter quickly died when she explained what was happening and what she needed him to do. Two hours later, she received a call from one of Dave's lackeys, who informed her that a Jane Doe admitted to George Washington University Hospital earlier in the day had been identified as Myka Bering. In less than three hours after she had gotten the call, she, Claudia, Pete, and Drew were boarding a chartered jet that would fly them to Washington D.C. There had been an agent waiting for them at the Rapid City airport and another in the cabin of the jet; they were wearing the same dark business suits, and their badges said Homeland Security but she wouldn't have been surprised if they were on loan from another agency. She didn't care. Drew clung to her hand, as if she were the only one he trusted to someday explain what all of this meant, other than that something was very wrong with his mother. He didn't need that explained to him. He could see it in his father's face and Claudia's . . . and hers. Yet he whispered to her, "She's going to be all right. I feel it, like Dad would."

The fact that Pete didn't seem to be having any positive vibes far outweighed Drew's fledgling ones, if he was having them at all and not mistaking the intensity of his hopes for them. But Helena kissed his head. "Good, that's good to hear, Drew."

It was a spartanly furnished jet, just a few rows of seats as uncomfortably small and squeezed together as on a commercial airplane, but Pete leaned across the aisle and reached for her other hand. "She's tough, you know." He didn't sound like himself, his voice tight and under pressure, the last defense against the emotions threatening to pour out. He wasn't Myka's husband or her partner any longer, but he had an enduring relationship with her and their history eclipsed the time that she and Myka had shared. "She faced you down at Jellystone," he gave her a ghost of a smile at his weak joke, "and then she had the guts to ask you to move in with her." Partner, husband, Drew's father, but even more than that Myka's friend, and that was all he was claiming now.

She stared at the hand covering her own, warm and broad and supportive. He meant it to be supportive, and she had thought she would find such a gesture comforting, and in some numb, distant way she did appreciate it, but it didn't lessen her fear. When Christina died, and she, sitting alone in the hotel, had torn the telegram into shreds, she had yearned for someone beside her, someone to brush the pieces of paper from her lap and to hold her. It would have made the news different, no less awful but more familiar, because death stole from everybody, and if the grief couldn't be shared with another, even a stranger, then nothing could. But here, now, the presence of others was too much, and their fear only added to her own. Reminding herself that this wasn't Christina, this was Myka, and that she wasn't too late, not yet, she gave Pete an equally small smile. She slipped her hand from under his and patted it apologetically. Drew's hand she still held; she was a mother, even if she wasn't Drew's mother, and you always gave comfort, whether or not you could accept it yourself.

She had also thought that having the time to tell Christina that she loved her, to stroke her hair, to sit or lay next to her would have made losing her more bearable, but sitting next to Myka, telling her that she loved her, stroking her hair made it all the harder she discovered. During one afternoon when she was with 13, a precious day with no retrievals and no inventory, she and Pete and Claudia had spent it watching soap operas; Claudia and Pete had called it a necessary step in her acculturation to the 21st century, Myka had only sniffed and retreated upstairs to resume her favorite long-term project of updating their procedures manual. There had been more than a few deathbed scenes, and they had snickered at the perfectly styled hair and make-up of the actors playing the characters clinging to life. "Where are the catheters and the ventilators and all that shit?" Claudia had cracked. "Yeah," Pete had echoed, "and there were no hot nurses when I was laid up in Seattle with that weird artefacty-like virus-thingy. All kinds of crap was leaking out of my body, and this one older, hairy male nurse kept growling at me, 'You're keeping us busy, Mr. Lattimer, with the mess you're making of this bed,' as though I was doing it on purpose."

All the equipment that had been so conspicuously absent in the hospital rooms on the soap operas' sets was in Myka's room, including a prominently placed ventilator. She was still breathing on her own, but, occasionally, Helena thought she heard a slight gasp, as if Myka was having difficulty drawing in enough air. There were lines in her arms, and other lines whose placement on Myka's body Helena couldn't see but which were extending from under the bedcovers. Myka wore no make-up, and there were patches on her head where her hair had been shaved and electrodes attached. There was nothing glamorous about her; she looked every one of her 43 years and more. Helena thought how unlikely it was that someone born toward the end of the nineteenth century hadn't previously kept watch at the bedside of someone gravely ill; generally people took their first and last breaths in a home, in the bed they had slept in. But both her parents and her grandparents had still been alive at the time she had been bronzed, and as for the agents she had worked with at 12, serious injuries stemming from an encounter with an artefact or its holder were usually fatal, if not on the site of the encounter then usually not far from it. She wasn't unaccustomed to death; she was unfamiliar only with its more "genteel" prolongation. Some might say she had been present at Lebecque's deathbed, but it was different when you had pushed all the divinities out of the way and assumed the role yourself, and she had made sure that when he finally did die, he died as brutally and as quickly as her daughter had.

Helena fingered her locket. She hadn't worn it often these past few months; she hadn't had to since Christina had been nearer to her than she could ever remember. The memories didn't flood her, but they flashed across her mind frequently, triggered by events hardly memorable in themselves: seeing Drew play with Shep, eating one of Myka's less-than-successful dinners, sitting on the sofa between them watching the original Star Wars yet again. Especially since Myka had expressed her desire for another child, Helena had been visited by the sound of Christina's laughter and her cries - happy, angry, surprised, disappointed - the echoes so strong that at times she had whirled around, convinced that, somehow, her daughter was in the house with her. But when she had received the call from Homeland Security about Myka, and she had frantically pulled out bags for herself and Drew, heedlessly throwing items in them, she had actually stopped and taken the time to search for the locket, and once she had found it, among the few pieces of Myka's jewelry, strangely enough, she had put it around her neck.

She was alone in the room with Myka, which was unusual. Drew had been a constant presence, sometimes sitting with Helena in the lone visitor's chair, sometimes squeezing himself onto a narrow strip of the bed to curl himself around his mother. But Pete had taken him out for "some fresh air," which meant a trip down to the vending machines or the cafeteria. If the cafeteria was open. Helena wasn't sure what time it was. They had arrived in D.C. Tuesday evening, and a car had been waiting for them at the airport to take them to the hospital. Escorted by another pair of dark-suited, expressionless agents, they had been taken to a high security floor of the hospital - or some area that Dave had ordered be designated as one - on which Myka was the sole patient. The doctors and nurses had regarded them curiously but hadn't imposed any restrictions on the number of visitors allowed in Myka's room at any one time, and when Drew had dislodged one of the lines leading to or from Myka's body as he had attempted to lay next to her, the nurse in the room had adjusted it without comment. It was as if, completely ignorant of what had caused her condition, the staff had tacitly decided that the usual restrictions weren't applicable. In fact, the only time a nurse had intervened was when a fight had broken out in the visitors' waiting area outside Myka's room, a fight mainly conducted in angry hisses but a fight all the same.

Helena had started it, drawing Claudia out of the room a few hours after they had been there, pleading with her to "transport" herself back to the Warehouse and bring back whatever artefacts might possibly have a positive effect. Damn any hellacious side effects, they couldn't be worse than the coma. Claudia had only shaken her head. "Which ones, H.G.? Do you know which ones would save her instead of making her worse?"

"How, how could it be any worse? She's going to die if we don't do anything."

"I know." Claudia had been literally wringing her hands, and the hopelessness in her eyes as she raised them to meet Helena's would have stopped Helena from saying anything more if she hadn't been about to choke on her own sense of futility. "But she's got this thing, she actually had it written up after Drew was born, kind of a DNR except that it's about artefacts. Like, if I'm dying don't use any artefacts to save me."

"And you're going to follow it?" Helena's tone had been coldly incredulous. "You used a fucking metronome to save Steve's life, and now you can't purloin an artefact because it's the wrong thing to do?"

"I wouldn't do it again." The emotion in Claudia's gaze had turned from hopelessness to agony. "As a caretaker, you're responsible for something larger than yourself. You know what happened when Artie used an artefact to change the time line. I was just lucky nothing serious happened to Steve, or anyone else. What if I bring an artefact back here, and not only does it not save Myka but in combination with whatever is affecting her, it harms us or the doctors and nurses, maybe the entire hospital?" As Helena's expression refused to soften, Claudia had said in a low, furious voice, "You would've never become a caretaker, H.G., because, in the end, you always put yourself first. Whether it's savior or villain, you're always the one out in front. If you're so goddamn superior, such a fucking genius, then why haven't you already saved her?"

A nurse had approached them then, suggesting - forcefully - that they calm down or take their "conversation" elsewhere. Claudia had, not quite, stomped away, and Helena had scanned the chairs and tiny counter with its coffee maker and paper cups, afraid and ashamed that Drew had witnessed their argument. There wasn't much in terms of mores or social niceties from her upbringing that she had thought worth preserving some 150 years later, but her fight with Claudia had been unseemly. Her grandmother would have called it that, and it felt even more presumptuous than it did inappropriate, as if she and Claudia had taken Myka's death for granted and were conducting their own private, accusation-laden post-mortem.

Since then, Claudia had kept her distance, keeping to the corners of the room when she checked in on Myka, and Helena, though she regretted the argument, couldn't expend the emotion to tell Claudia how sorry she was. Because Claudia was right. If she was so brilliant, where was her startling insight, her out-of-the-box idea to save Myka? She had nothing. At least Drew had had the idea of counting to three and snapping his fingers, as though Myka were only under hypnosis. As she stretched against the back of her chair, she thought she heard someone come into the room. Maybe it was Vanessa. She and Artie had arrived last night? This morning? Vanessa had already run a set of diagnostics, but the results had left her looking no less grim.

"What time is it? Hell, what day is it?" Helena asked groggily.

"It's Thursday morning, 9:00 a.m., if you want me to be precise," Irene said, seeming to glide to the other side of Myka's bed.

"Where are your sickle and hourglass? Are you here to cart her off to whatever afterlife exists for Warehouse agents?" Helena tilted her head, her face stiff with the effort of smiling. She wouldn't let the old bat see how vulnerable she felt. When she hadn't been thinking of ideas to reverse what had happened to Myka and discarding them, she had been imagining in detail how she would kill Irene, right after she killed Suzanne and Jaffee. If it hadn't been for Irene, she wouldn't be here now, feeling now. Technically, Claudia had been the one who sent her the invitation for Artie's retirement party, but Irene had been behind it, as she was behind everything Warehouse-related.

"She more than Mr. Lattimer was the wild card for me, you know." Irene looked steadily at Myka, but she was gripping the rail on the bed, as if she might totter against the wall without a handhold, and Helena spied the exhaustion that had carved lines - or revealed existing ones - in Irene's face. "Methodical, logical, hardly given to the flights of fancy of her partner or his vibes. Yet to be a Warehouse agent, you have to have something different, something special, and outwardly Myka didn't seem any different from the hundreds of other agents whose personnel files I had reviewed." She smiled gently, maternally. "I just . . . sensed . . . it was there. And when she met you, I recognized what it was." Irene's gaze was no less gentle, no less maternal when she focused it on Helena. "She would stop at nothing for someone or something she cared about. Many people say they would do anything, but few can, or would."

"That quality seemed to annoy you when we last spoke. Was her preventing Major Lowry from leveling the town of Ellis, and me along with it, ill advised?" Helena had tried to say it mockingly, but it came out raw and angry. She wasn't angry only at Irene, however. She had prided herself on knowing Myka so well, and yet she hadn't sufficiently appreciated Myka's insight into her. Nor the depth of her devotion. Bloody blind fool, too self-involved to recognize how she affected others or how others reacted to her. Just as Charles had said once upon a time, she was the only sun that she would allow in her universe . . . .

"I don't believe I ever said that," Irene countered. "It's an admirable quality, heroic even. She just needs to temper it with one of her other admirable qualities, her ability to reason her way through a problem."

Sententious witch. As though Myka was ever going to have the time to learn to "temper" anything. "When she dies, I'm coming for you, you know." It didn't sound the least bit threatening coming out of her mouth, and Helena, as she automatically wiped the skin under her eyes, realized that she was crying.

Irene didn't seem afraid, pulling a tissue from the box on the cart next to the bed and handing it to Helena. "I can't hide very well, too hobbled up with arthritis, so I should be easy to find." As Helena blew her nose, Irene said quietly, "What's your plan? You don't have much time at all." Helena looked at her in disbelief. "I didn't bring you back so you could fail and let one of my agents die. What's your plan, Helena?"

"Maybe I'll just stand here and count to three and snap my fingers. That's been the sole idea we've had, and that was from a nine-year-old boy." She dropped the tissue in a wastebasket and started running the locket's necklace through her fingers again, grimacing at the memory of how she and Caturanga had worked together on an elaborate hypnosis to counteract the artefact that induced a hypnotic state. De-magnetizing Mesmer's magnets, that was what she had called it. But Myka wasn't under the influence of a single artefact with a single property, she had been bombarded with the unstable, shifting properties of multiple artefacts or one that had been "enhanced" by the object she had found on Gene Butler's body. It would be like sticking a knife in a toaster and feeling the voltage surge through you. Not volts, of course, but emotions, overwhelming in their intensity, and the only escape, the only defense would be . . . .

She lifted the necklace over her head. She opened the catch to the locket and lifted its lid. She hadn't looked at its contents in a very long time. There were still a few broken strands of hair, but most of it was gone. She had been carrying a virtually empty locket for - it didn't matter. What mattered were the emotions she had imbued it with, what power those emotions could generate. Holding it in her hand for a moment, she asked, "Why was this never taken from me? It has to be an artefact."

Other than a quiet beeping that had started issuing from one of the monitors, the only sound was that of Myka's breathing, which had become disquietingly uneven. As Helena looked anxiously from Myka to the doorway, in which a nurse would damn well appear in the next three seconds or else she would snatch one from emptying catheter bags or whatever it was that was keeping them all occupied, Irene said, "An object only becomes an artefact once it's separated or removed from its owner. The locket was never out of your possession."

She had shown no distress at the change in Myka's breathing, and she seemed unworried as a team of nurses hurried in, a doctor trailing them. Irene observed them without emotion as they inserted a breathing tube into Myka's mouth and set the ventilator. Helena, after being asked to step away, tightened her hand around the locket, hardly able to concentrate on what the doctor was telling her. "Her oxygen levels were dropping. This will help her breathe easier." For a second or two, they all were silent, watching the ventilator operate, everything the doctor hadn't said louder than the ventilator's hum.

When the doctor and nurses were gone, Irene said, as if she had merely paused in her explanation, "That's the official answer. The real answer or, perhaps, just the one I choose to believe is that we're not that heartless." Yet when she turned her face to Helena, the despair in it was undisguised. "The minutes are ticking, Helena, and she doesn't have many left."

"It may not have been an artefact before, but it's going to become one now. A special one. An artefact to end all artefacts." Helena placed the locket on Myka's chest. She glared at the cluster of machines blinking and whirring around the bed. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did they represent and how many more hours of labor? Scientists and doctors always seeking to extend life even when they didn't know what was causing it to slip away. Medicine, still more hope than fact a hundred years later. At least the Warehouse, for all of its indifference to the suffering it both witnessed and caused, was a truer testament to how short humanity's reach actually was. The forces that drove them, her, Myka, Irene, everyone, were ultimately unknowable and magical only in the sense that they so easily eluded control. So she would start with something simple.

"When I was a girl, you were a girl, there were no antibiotics to cure an infection. What you could only hope to do was to draw it out - by heat or poultices . . . or leeches and incantations. I think there were doctors in my time who still believed in those." She looked hard at Irene, not just willing her to understand but to assist her, because she couldn't do this alone. "How do you neutralize an artefact when you have no goo? You draw the emotion out of it." Leaning over the bed, she pressed her lips against Myka's temple. Straightening, she put her hand over the locket, barely feeling the movement of Myka's chest. "You and I and Claudia, we have a special connection to the Warehouse, right? Well, there are possessions of mine in one of the old Farraday factories that they've been using, along with others', to create the replications. I'm going to reclaim them, and to do that, I need your help, the Warehouse's help, to draw all of that energy from them. And not just my artefacts, Irene, every artefact that's there. We'll be conduits for the Warehouse. Do you see where I'm going with this?"

"You want to use the Warehouse as a giant neutralizer," she said evenly.

"That's what it is, isn't it? I'm simply asking it to do its job," Helena said the last sardonically.

"I'm only its caretaker, not its boss," Irene replied, her tone cool but a smile beginning to hover on her lips.

"I'd like to think that maybe it feels it owes me," Helena said, "but solely on the basis of self-preservation, it should want to see an end to the replication." She hesitated. "Will you help me? I doubt that my connection to the Warehouse is strong enough by itself." As Irene bent her head, appearing to ponder a response, Helena, irritated and unsettled by Irene’s needing to think over the decision, added, "If you're not up for the task, I can always ask Claudia -"

"No." It was unequivocal. "I wasn't deciding whether to help you but how. Claudia can't be a part of this. Someone has to protect the Warehouse from us if . . . things . . . don't turn out as we intend." Irene took the locket from Myka's chest and carefully fastened it around her neck. She then took one of Myka hands and loosely interlaced their fingers. "I think it would be prudent if I wore the locket. I may be a caretaker in emeritus status, but I understand how the Warehouse works better than you."

There were practicalities that needed to be addressed before Helena could put her plan into action, although if she had been asked what form that action would take, she would have growled, "Let me get into that ersatz Warehouse first, then I'll tell you." Which was what she was on the verge of saying to a skeptical and only stiffly cooperative Claudia, who had asked a version of that question. Assuming a calm authority she was far from feeling, Helena said, "Irene and I have it in hand, Claudia, and if you don't trust that I know what I'm doing, I know that you trust her. We wouldn't be doing this if she didn't think it would work. Just keep an eye on her." She hoped it would occur to Claudia only much later that Irene never consulted, never took direction, never merely acquiesced. As if Irene would work with someone instead of boss her around. In fact, Helena suspected that Irene didn't believe her idea had any chance of success; if she hadn't been desperate, Irene wouldn't have considered anything that might present the slightest risk to her precious Warehouse. Because who could predict what would happen when an irresistible force met an immovable object?

"You haven't told me anything, you know that," Claudia said with a ferocious scowl. "And if I find out that you're BSing me and you don't know what the hell you're doing, I'll kill you if the replicated artefacts don't do it for me first."

"Am I to take it that I'm forgiven for earlier?" Helena said it flippantly, but she realized that she didn't want to leave with the image of a still-fuming Claudia in her mind. She would be carrying enough fear and regret as it was when she went to find – and neutralize – Jaffee's private cache of artefacts. If she could rid herself of that particular self-recrimination, it would be one less negative emotion that she would be adding to a combustible mix.

"Maybe," Claudia said grudgingly, "but I have the feeling that all I am in this deal is a glorified babysitter."

"There's no glory to it." Helena mustered a wry smile. "Irene is more trying than a child."

Enlisting Pete's assistance required no persuasion. Unable to bear the sight of Myka connected to so many monitors – "She looks like a freaking human power strip, juicing all those things," he had muttered to Helena – he had spent most of his time in the visitors' area playing games on his phone. Luckily, other required elements had been in place before she came up with her scheme. Dave (she had stopped saying it in her mind with her usual underscoring of distaste – he had helped her find Myka, she could at least do that) had called her at several points or, more than likely, Claudia because she was fairly certain she had stopped answering her phone once they had arrived at the hospital. First he had called to inform her that Suzanne Emory had been found and brought in for questioning. Then, when a search of the gallery had turned up Myka's ID, he had called to tell her that Suzanne had been arrested on charges of . . . . Helena hadn't cared what the charges were; she had needed to know only that Suzanne was in custody. Since this was before a nine-year-old had led her to an idea of how to save his mother, she had still been plotting what she would do to Suzanne. Helena had cared only to the extent that the information made Suzanne easier to find when she was free to exact her retribution; the fact that Suzanne might be squirreled away in a highly secured location that had no official connection to a federal law enforcement agency would not be an obstacle. There had been one more call about Congressmen Jaffee and Perkins, who had also been brought in for questioning but neither of whom had yet been arrested. Helena had vaguely fretted then that Jaffee might not be so easy to locate when she was ready for him, but now it didn't matter, not in the same way, anyway. Suzanne should be able to give her what she and Pete needed, which wasn't the satisfaction of revenge but details: which factory, how many artefacts, the number and type of security measures restricting access. As for exacting retribution, should her plan fail, which, in all probability it would, she didn't count on surviving the failure to kidnap Suzanne and Jaffee. If, in the context of the Warehouse and mucking around with artefacts, Myka had stuck a knife in a toaster, she would be carpet bombing a power plant. And if she did manage to survive, given how she had wept through her promise to kill Irene, she probably didn't have it in her anymore to torture and kill someone. Which was a good thing, all in all.

The last task that remained was ensuring Dave's continued support of her and her actions. Talking to him for the first time since Tuesday morning, when he had seemed more struck by the thought of H.G. Wells reviewing the specifications for yet another TSA scanner-of-the-future with a smile on her face than by the threat posed by replicated artefacts, she was surprised by how rapidly and seriously he assented to her newest request. "I'll admit," he said with what might have been characterized as an embarrassed sigh, "that we might have underestimated how 'involved' certain persons were in the activity."

"You mean Congressman Jaffee," Helena said pointedly.

"Primarily but there were others interested in his experiments with, um, enhancing his base, you might call it."

"I call it mind control."

"Let's just the say the search of his home has proven fruitful."

"Have you arrested him?" Helena asked impatiently. "He was the so-called mastermind, but he couldn't have done this without more help than could have been provided by a curator with delusions of grandeur and a compulsive collector. Where are the ones actually responsible for the replication?"

"We're rounding them up, don't worry," he said with a dismissiveness reminiscent of Irene.

"Of course I worry," she barked at him. "You can't afford to leave him or her out there, someone with the ability to divorce a property from its artefact and then multiply it. That's the 'terroristic threat' you should be concerned about."

"H.G. Wells advising me about another world-destroying H.G. Wells . . . will wonders never cease? Oh, I guess with your group they don't." He chuckled at his own joke.

"I did not destroy the world, by the way. Just in case it might have slipped your mind, the woman whom your agency fired and who's breathing only with the assistance of a ventilator stopped that from happening. Furthermore, we're not talking about destroying the world, we're talking about enslaving it, although it's hardly better." She paused. Her voice grew quieter. "I have your word there will be no interference when it comes to Suzanne Emory?"

"Absolutely."

She sucked in a long breath and turned off her phone, setting it on a table between two chairs. She wouldn't have much need for it from now on. She had to leave the hospital, leave Myka to bring this mad plan to completion, which had found its start in a boy's childish hope that he could wake his mother simply by snapping his fingers and images, disparate and lacking any connection except the one in her fevered mind, of overloaded circuits and poultices applied to infections. She hadn't gotten beyond the visitors' area before Drew ran from Myka's room, Claudia in pursuit, to fling himself at her. Bollocks. As she bent over him, her hand in his hair, murmuring words that had no meaning, she flashed back to standing in the overfurnished parlor of her cousin's home on the outskirts of Paris, her legs imprisoned by a distraught Christina, who refused to let her go. Patrice and Georges, wearing pained smiles, were clearly bewildered by Christina's shouted demands to return to London. Who would prefer sooty, teeming London to sooty, teeming Paris? It had been an especially oppressive August afternoon, and Helena was in danger of missing her train to Vienna. Hot, irritable, and determined not to give into Christina's tantrum, she had pried her daughter's arms from her, saying sharply, "Stop acting like a baby and be good for your cousins. I shall be back before you have time to miss me." A businesslike kiss on Christina's wet cheek and then she was striding out of the room, Christina's gulping, strangled "Mama! Ma-a-ma-a!" lost in the rush of her thoughts about how to retrieve a Beethoven score reputedly able to deafen all those who touched it.

From Vienna, she would travel to St. Petersburg to retrieve a jeweled egg and on to Constantinople to retrieve what had been identified as a Crusader's coat of mail. With luck she would be back in Paris within a month. She had been back in five days, the score unretrieved and other agents dispatched to Russia and Turkey.

But the hospital wasn't Paris, Drew wasn't Christina, and she was no longer the woman she had been then. This time she wouldn't be putting the Warehouse's needs above all else; this time, it would be in service to hers.