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“Table for one?”
The hostess smiles and grabs a single menu from the stack, tucks it under her arm, and gestures for the woman to follow her. “Of course, right this way.”
She stops at a table set for two in the brightest, busiest part of the diner—it’s a beautiful day and everyone wants to be near the windows—but before she can take the second set of cutlery away, the woman stops her with a light touch to her forearm.
“Actually, I’d appreciate someplace more private,” she says. She leans in a bit closer and lowers her voice conspiratorially. “A booth would be nice. Preferably near the back.”
The woman is well dressed: clean, slate-gray suit; immaculate black heels. Theresa figures she needs to make some important business call. It’s mid-afternoon so it isn’t too busy at the moment; the lunch rush is over and the dinner rush hasn’t started yet. She seats the woman at a four-person booth in the back corner, brings her a glass of ice water, and leaves her alone with the menu.
As soon as Theresa’s turned away, the friendly smile slides off the woman’s face like melted wax, leaving her expression haggard. Even on a day like this, the corner booth is the darkest spot in the diner: the shadows on her cheeks make her look gaunter. Long fingers curling around the water glass reveal chipped black nail polish incongruous with the rest of her appearance. She doesn’t open the menu.
“Who do I get to be this afternoon? Hmm.” The corners of her lips twitch upwards again, the ghost of a smile. “She is kind of fun.” She quietens, seemingly listening to someone talk, and her hand tightens almost imperceptibly around the glass. Rivulets of water run down the sides and collect at her fingertips; she sets the glass down and touches her cheek thoughtfully. “Just the one? I’ll be fine… Well, if you say so.”
Just as Theresa rounds the corner, the woman puts her smile back in place, turns it all the way up, and orders the pancakes.
*
The clack of her heels against the pavement resonates throughout the tunnel as Root makes her way to the building’s service entrance. Despite the sun, she’s traded the light suit for a shirt and a black jacket. She touches the pistol stowed in her right pocket before pushing open the door and slipping into the dark hallway, steps carefully over the scattered books on the floor, trails her fingers along the dusty railing as she climbs the stairs.
On the second floor, all the gates have been left open, the locks destroyed. Root stops when she reaches Harold’s old workstation. Standing at the desk, she rests both hands briefly on the back of his ergonomic chair. She’s a little surprised it’s still standing. Most everything else has been knocked over: Harold’s computers, the glass display board he and John had used to pin up photos relevant to their mission. The monitors are cracked, useless; the display board has been shattered completely, littering the area with dagger-sharp shards.
The biggest difference, Root notices, is the cameras that blink down at her from the corners of the room. Samaritan isn’t blind here anymore. It had had cameras installed as a precaution—if any one of them ever returned here for anything at all, it would know—but the library was left otherwise untouched. No one had made a move to clear out any of their things. Even the snacks and Harold’s kettle are still piled precariously in the makeshift pantry. Root fishes out a granola bar from one of the open boxes and tears the wrapper open as she returns to the workstation. She pulls the sleeve of her jacket down over her hand, sweeps the glass debris from desk chair, sits down.
“What time is it now?”
Her voice is loud in the empty room, but Root is unconcerned: she’s the only one here. She takes a bite of the granola bar as she listens to the response, then sits the rest of it down on the desk (it’s gone stale and she’s not hungry anyway).
“Wonderful. We’ll have company any minute now.”
‘Company’ shows up promptly at 5 PM; the Machine alerts Root to the agent’s arrival. The cameras may have been installed for Samaritan’s benefit, but the Machine also has access to its eyes and ears here. Someone’s managed to enter the library without making a sound; the Machine looks on as the woman crosses the hall, reaches the staircase.
“It’s nice of you to show up,” Root calls out, amiable. She doesn’t get up from the chair, but she does take her gun out. Under the desk, she points it towards the doorway. She’s not here to kill Samaritan’s operative, but—safety first. “We have a lot to talk about.”
“Talking’s overrated.”
Root sees her gun before the woman herself emerges, but she’d gotten to her feet—automatically, unwillingly—as soon as she’d heard that voice. Her gun hand hangs limply at her side.
They’re standing about three metres apart now, Shaw’s gun trained on Root’s heart. Root doesn’t react to that, not at first. She barely notices it at all; she’s too fixated on Shaw’s face.
Root drinks in the sight of her: the dark hair she’d wanted to tangle her fingers through, the mouth that had pressed roughly against her own at the stock exchange. Shaw’s too thin, too pale, but she still looks strong. Unforgiving. There’s something in her eyes that makes her look harder than usual. Root wonders just for a passing second whether the woman in her own mirror would look something similar if she took the time to contemplate her anymore.
“Sameen?”
Root doesn’t mean for it to be a question. Shaw’s evidently here—isn’t she?
Root’s surprised at the hoarseness of her own voice, too: rough as if with disuse, despite that she’d been speaking clearly moments before. She feels old, all of a sudden. If she didn’t have the Machine’s voice in her ear, if she didn’t think in numbers and code, she might have wondered how long it had been. She knows this number, though. Knows how many days it’s been; how many minutes. Is that all? It feels as if decades have passed her by: years and years of wasted time. Time spent alone. Time spent waiting, searching. Did it feel like that for Shaw, too? Did time stretch out into endless plains while she was held captive for days, weeks, months without rescue? Root clears her throat.
“Sameen,” she tries again, softly now. “We tried to find you, we—” She starts to take a step closer, around the desk, but Shaw cocks the gun in warning, her finger on the trigger, and Root freezes in her tracks, frowning. “What did they do to you?”
“Well, now,” Shaw says, and now she takes a step closer, cornering Root behind the desk, her gun hand unwavering. “That is a long story. Too bad we don’t have a lot of time.”
Root trembles slightly. Shaw’s posture is meant to be threatening, but that isn’t what’s throwing her off. She isn’t afraid of Shaw. (Perhaps she should be, but Root’s never had much use for fear.) Root is worried. Something’s wrong with Shaw. Shaw, who values loyalty above most else; Shaw, who wouldn’t turn on a friend even with the threat of a bullet to her brain. Dozens of questions churn in Root’s mind, but she knows that voicing them out loud will get her nowhere—for the moment. She won’t let this go, but she has a mission here.
“She wants us to work together, Shaw.”
“And I’ve got orders to kill you. Looks like we have a conflict of interests.”
“They didn’t send you to recruit me?” Root allows a hint of amusement creep into her tone, although she feels anything but amused.
“They gave up on that after Samaritan came online. You’re not special anymore, Root. It used to be that only you could talk to the Machine.” Shaw stops and considers this for a second. “And maybe that’s still true. But Samaritan is more powerful, and with access to that, you’re… irrelevant.”
Root frowns again.
“She cares for you, Shaw. She’s been looking out for you for longer than you know. Samaritan doesn’t care. It’ll use you for as long as it needs you and then it’ll let you die.”
“Yeah, well. I’m still here—no thanks to Harold’s Machine.”
“Sameen,” Root starts, “Please. You need to be careful.”
Shaw raises her eyebrows. “You’re worried about me? Last I checked, you were the one facing the barrel of a gun.”
The Machine is calculating and re-calculating the probability of violence, numbers whirling upwards as it relays them to Root: a warning.
61%
72%
86%
…
Root ignores Her.
“I don’t think you’re going to shoot me.” She doesn’t sound as certain as she’d like to, but she keeps going. “You wouldn’t. You risked your life for…”
“For you?” Shaw sounds angry. “You think I took those bullets for you?”
Root remembers a kiss and a shove into an elevator. She isn’t sure what Shaw remembers.
Shaw takes another step closer. “So where the fuck were you, anyway?”
Or maybe Shaw doesn’t remember at all.
Root can imagine what Decima would have force-fed her over the past few months: lies about betrayal, supplemented with a cocktail of drugs. Can imagine how they would slowly become truth, because a truth that hurts is better than not knowing at all.
Root thinks about this and can’t come up with an answer. Instead, she starts to move around the desk again, slowly.
88%
90%
“What do you remember about me?”
Root doesn’t think she wants to know, but she has to ask.
“You’re the, uh… analog interface. For Harold’s Machine.” The anger has mostly gone from Shaw’s voice, replaced by a mild indifference, dismissiveness. “They used to show me pictures of you; see how much I knew about you—and Harold, and John, and the Machine. I know that we worked together, but I don’t remember much about that. Don’t remember much about this place either. What I do remember, Root, is that I trusted you.”
The sentiment of ‘apparently-I-shouldn’t-have’ goes unspoken, but Root can feel it burning her.
Root can’t even fight back. Shaw thinks that Root had betrayed her. Who is Root to say otherwise? She may not have done whatever it is that Shaw believes she’d done, but she hadn’t managed to save her. They’d written her off for dead.
“I don’t think you’re going to shoot me,” she says again. “If you were going to, you’d have done it already. You’d have done it as soon as you walked through that door. Sameen. Please. Please say you remember me?” Root tone has turned pleading. On the surface she feels utterly helpless: she doesn’t know how damaged Shaw is, doesn’t know how to help her. Underneath, she simmers with rage. How could this have happened? How could they have done this to her? They’d cannibalized her like a machine: discarded the pieces that were inconvenient to them, re-wired her with new parts so that she’d function again; function differently, function for their purposes. Root feels sick.
“Let me help you,” Root hears herself say. She takes another step forward and a gunshot sounds through the empty library.
*
Two things happen after Shaw pulls the trigger.
One.
The bullet connects with Root’s left shoulder and passes right through. She cries out, a mixture of pain and surprise; stumbles; turns to grab the tabletop with her right hand to keep herself upright.
Two.
Shaw stumbles, too.
"Next time I see that woman, I’m shooting her. And not in the knee.” Memories of an empty nuclear facility. Of ‘that woman’, Root, with her gun trained on Finch. Of a perfectly aimed shoulder shot from a doorway, followed by a cry of pain. Of Root crumpling to the ground, small and broken.
Root turns with a frown when she hears Shaw’s gun hit the ground.
Now.
Root obeys without much thought. Despite the pain in her shoulder, Root relinquishes her support, closes the distance between herself and Shaw—Shaw, who is grimacing and dazed and bent over, hands on her knees—and picks up her gun. She puts the safety back and pockets it opposite her own. Shaw reacts too late, and her swing is clumsy: Root retaliates with a kick to her left leg that brings Shaw to her knees. Whatever’s going on in her head must have shaken her because she stays there, breathing hard.
“You—been taking lessons—from—Reese?” Shaw manages. There’s a hint of an unwitting smile in her question.
Root doesn’t trust herself to answer aloud—her own breathing is pained, shallow—so she shakes her head once and taps at her ear.
“Huh. The Machine—knows—Wing Chun?”
Root’s familiar knowing smile creeps across her face before she can hide it away again.
“Right. Of course it does.”
They’re both silent for a minute as they fight to regain composure. Root is holding onto a bookcase; Shaw is on the floor at her feet. Root figures she’ll probably have the strength to reach up and make a move for her gun—for both guns—soon, so she backs up again, putting some space between them.
“You remembered something, didn’t you,” Root asks. It isn’t really a question.
Shaw grunts noncommittally.
“That day at the nuclear facility? You shot me in the shoulder then, too. You know, Shaw, we’ve had a lot of good times, you and I, but I can’t say I count that moment as one of them.” Root shifts against the bookcase and breathes in sharply when her shoulder bumps it. It’s still bleeding profusely, but Root doesn’t particularly care. Shaw remembered something. Her memories weren’t gone: they were just hidden underneath the drugs and the lies and the empty spaces.
Shaw drags herself up and fixes Root with a glare.
“I don’t suppose you’ll give me my gun back.”
“So that you can kill me? Sorry, Sameen.”
Shaw looks ready to lunge at her for a second, but then her glare twists into a deadly smile.
“Normally I’d fight you for it—and I’d win—but I’m not feeling so hot right now. So I’m gonna go with the easier route.”
Root notices now that Shaw does seem unsteady on her feet. Dizzy. It’s wrong, Root thinks, to see her so unbalanced. She feels another twinge of anger.
Shaw retreats to the end of the row. “I,” she says, “am gonna get myself another gun. You,” she points a finger at Root, “can stay here. You try to leave this building, I call backup. Got it?”
The Machine scans the area: Samaritan’s got a three-man team on the next block. She could call John, but he and Harold are too far away to get here in time, and Root’s never liked asking people for help anyway.
“Whatever you say, Sameen.”
*
The thing is, Root knows that even in her weakened state, Shaw could probably kill her with her bare hands. Root’s learned a thing or two about hand-to-hand combat, but her skills in that area will never compare to Shaw’s years of experience. And she’s suffering from a gunshot wound.
Shaw had just given her a chance at survival, whether she’d consciously decided to so or not.
The Machine lets Root know that Shaw’s headed to the history section: she’d stashed one of John’s old guns there. Root wonders if Shaw had remembered that on her own, or if Samaritan had helped.
Samaritan.
The wrench in the works.
Shaw has deadly aim even on a bad day; with Samaritan’s directions, it would be almost impossible to dodge her bullets. Root’s going to need something more specific than ascending and descending tones for ‘left’ and ‘right’.
“I’ll take angles today,” she tells the Machine. “And I’ll need a plan.”
*
It doesn’t really matter where Root goes: Shaw will be able to find her. Still, she moves over a couple of rows to a more sheltered area of the library. The Machine feeds her Shaw’s location.
43 degrees.
There are no dividers between the bookshelves here: back when this library was still public, people might have held conversations through the gaps over the tops of the books. Root rather suspects that if she were to peer through the gap she’d get a bullet between the eyes, though, so she keeps her head up and shielded. She wields her gun in her right hand, lets it hover over some book about scrapbooking.
46 degrees, and Root aims past 50 as she fires.
She can’t—won’t—shoot Shaw, but she needs her to keep her distance. If she lets Shaw move freely, Root will be cornered and dead in under a minute.
1 o’clock, and Shaw sends a shot neatly over the rows of books in the history section.
Root moves to the end of the row closest the wall and prepares to fire again, but—
Move. Now.
Root lets go of the shelf she’d been leaning against and Shaw’s second bullet shatters the half-empty bottle of top-shelf whiskey that had been sitting a fraction of an inch away from where her torso had been mere milliseconds before. She hears Shaw curse her miss at the sound of breaking glass.
Shaw’s shooting to kill now; even with the Machine’s help, Root isn’t sure how long she can last.
5 degrees, and Root aims to Shaw’s left this time.
12 o’clock, and Shaw’s third bullet hits Root squarely in the chest.
*
Root didn’t usually wear a vest, but the Machine had put two and two together and concluded that any agent Samaritan sent to their meeting would most likely be uncooperative and violent. Posing as Augusta A. King, Root had swung by the FBI after her trip to the diner to pick one up; she’s wearing it now, underneath her jacket.
The blow still hurts like hell.
Root doubles over but manages to keep a hold of her gun. Shaw’s all out of ammunition, the Machine informs her. Good. Root takes the second gun out of her pocket, aims both at nothing in particular, and fires ‘til she’s out, too. She pockets them again, makes her way back to the workstation, and collapses into Harold’s chair again.
Root doesn’t want to move, but the vest and jacket are stifling all of a sudden. She unzips the jacket and shrugs out of it, grimacing as the dried blood around her shoulder wound cracks and tears. Pulling the vest up over her head is a little trickier, but she manages. The effort leaves her gasping, though, and she leans into the backrest, eyes clenched shut. Each breath is a strain on her broken rib.
“Where’s Shaw?” she asks aloud. Her voice cracks, too.
The Machine doesn’t know, which is… concerning. Shaw had evidently had Samaritan put out some cameras.
Unsurprisingly, Root doesn’t have to wonder for long.
Her eyes are still closed when Shaw’s arms come around her from behind, effectively pinning her to the chair. Something sharp is pressed to her throat—one of the shards of glass from the shattered board, Root guesses.
“Heard you were looking for me.”
Shaw’s voice is so low and so close; a shiver runs down Root’s spine.
Root smiles.
“Do you remember when we rescued Jason Greenfield from the CIA? That was a fun day.” Root’s voice comes out ragged, but she keeps it light and as playful as she can manage with a bullet wound and a cracked rib. “That was the first time you saved my life. I was starting to wonder if you’d left me for dead, and then you just,” Root makes some kind of gesture with her hands, “showed up. My knight in shining armour.” She’s still smiling. “Of course, you knocked me out after that. I guess I deserved it. I did tie you up on more than one occasion.”
Shaw’s annoyance is almost palpable now, but Root is still breathing, so she must be doing something right. Or rather, not-wrong. She keeps talking, translating her memories into words, on and on, hoods and zip ties in a CIA safe house with ten hours to kill.
Shaw’s normally steady hands begin to shake, and the jagged glass at the soft skin of Root’s throat cuts in just a little bit, drawing blood. She breathes in sharply and continues.
“Sundown,” she recalls, “Ottawa. Left, light, left, right, one, two, three.”
Shaw’s grasp fails her for the second time that day; the red-stained glass slips from her hand and falls into Root’s lap. Shaw’s hold on Root loosens, too, and she slumps to the ground behind the chair.
You say the sweetest things.
Root’s body screams in protest, but she vacates the chair and manages to haul Shaw into it instead.
Memories are rushing back to her again: Root can see it in her face. Not all, but some, filling in blank spaces. Like before, the process sends Shaw into shock as her mind tries to cope with the flood of newly (re-)acquired information.
Shaw doesn’t fight her, not even when Root retrieves a pair of zip ties from a drawer and secures her wrists to the arms of the chair. Shaw shakes slightly, and Root can barely stand to watch. She feels like Shaw wouldn’t want her to, either; she values strength and stoicism too much. Shaw would think this looks too much like weakness.
But is it weakness if you can’t control it? If it’s been inflicted on you by someone else? Root doesn’t think so. She perches on the desk, wincing at the pain. She waits for Shaw to speak again before turning to face her.
“You know, I’m—not really getting a helpful vibe from you,” Shaw says faintly. She glances pointedly down at the binding around her arms.
“Well,” Root says with a smirk, “you have been trying to kill me. It’s for your own good, Shaw.”
Shaw makes a sound that might have been a half-hearted “fuck you”; Root ignores it.
“How are you feeling?” Root asks instead, and she’s not really expecting an honest answer, but she’s concerned, so she asks anyway.
“Like shit,” Shaw says.
Root thinks that her voice lacks the antagonism from earlier and feels something like hope in her chest.
Root wants to know what Shaw knows now. Does she remember stealing a jet to Alaska? Biking across New York City to make sure Root made it out Samaritan’s facility alive?
When Root refocuses her gaze again, Shaw is looking back at her with a strange expression.
“Sameen?” Root frowns.
(Does she remember Miami?)
“Root.”
Shaw’s still talking much more quietly than usual; Root leans in closer to hear her.
(Does she remember what happened at the stock exchange?)
When Shaw pushes forward in the office chair and kisses her, Root suspects that the answer is ‘yes’.
*
“They’ll know I’ve been compromised,” Shaw says, minutes later. “It’s not like they can’t hear every word we’re saying.”
“Words aren't all they can hear, Shaw," Root reminds her cheerily. “If I'd known I could get you to—”
"Fuck, Root, not now."
Root grins wider. "Maybe later," she agrees; then: “Can you get Samaritan to switch those cameras back on?”
“I’m not really sure it’ll listen to me now.”
Root just waits.
“Hey,” Shaw tries. “Can we get those cameras back on again?”
They watch the red light in the corner of the room return.
“How long before backup gets here?” Shaw asks it, and then, “we have two minutes.”
“Two minutes,” Root says at the same time. Shaw looks over irritably and Root smirks again. "This could be fun, Sam. Too bad you'll probably lose your access soon." She takes a gun in each hand, gingerly makes her way over to a drawer unit, and rummages around until she finds what she’s looking for.
Shaw frowns. “Samaritan didn’t know those bullets were there.”
“That’s because this drawer hasn’t been opened since before those cameras were installed.”
“Well, then the Machine wouldn’t know either, would it?”
“Maybe not,” Root agrees, “but I do.”
A door bangs open on the ground level. Root’s about to step in front of Shaw, to stand in between her and the doorway, when Shaw coughs. Root turns around and Shaw looks at her expectantly.
“I don’t know, Sameen,” Root says, “are you sure you won’t try to kill me?”
“Root,” Shaw says, teeth clenched.
“Oh, alright.”
Root snatches the glass shard off the table and slices the ties that bind Shaw’s wrists; hands her her gun back.
The first of Samaritan’s operatives reaches the top of the stairs. Together, side-by-side, they fire.