Heretical Edge

Fortunately, it wasn't hard to meet up with the others and bring them to the bridge, after shifting back to my normal self once more. Which happened without any more life and death fights, thankfully. The ship was still cloaked, and since it wasn't firing those big lasers, that actually meant something. Katarin and his people couldn't easily track us down. Though I had no doubt that we were going to have a hell of a lot more attention soon enough. I felt relatively confident that the Cryptseeker could withstand most searches, given it was from a couple hundred years in the future, but I really didn't want to push our luck on that.

Needless to say, the others were impressed by the ship. Especially when I let them see an image of what the outside looked like when it wasn't invisible. Well, Tabbris, Miranda, and Bezique were more impressed. The latter kept gushing about how spiffy and clean the whole place was, bounding from one side of the bridge to the other while flapping her wings excitedly. She was even happier when I set one of the walls up with a few touchscreen squares that would alternate between several colors and make a variety of chiming sounds whenever she poked at them. Soon, she was very occupied making colorful music in the background while the rest of us talked things out.

Aylen’s reaction, meanwhile, made it clear that she had actually seen the ship before. And had been on it, judging by the way she went straight to one of the consoles and started checking some sort of scan after expertly tapping at the controls. “We'll have Seosten company in fifteen minutes. They're coming down from orbit to see what the hell is going on down here. I don't think they'll be able to find the Cryptseeker that quickly, but you can't hide forever either.”

That said, she produced a small, curious-looking stone with inscriptions all over it and spoke three words in rapid succession. As soon as she did, a glowing field appeared all around the bridge area. “Time in here is sped up right now. We can have a few minutes to discuss things without wasting precious seconds. But I can’t hold it for very long, so we need to talk fast. Between the incoming Seosten and the sort of reinforcements Katarin is going to be pulling in by this point, we need to get this done right now.”

Miranda made a face while staring at the main screen. “Don't forget about Invidia-Bell. She'll use his authority to call in whatever she can too. And she knows a lot more than Katarin does about what's going on. Even if she can't tell them everything, she can make the situation a lot worse.”

Closing her eyes briefly while clenching her hands, Aylen muttered something in another language that sounded like a recrimination of herself. “I haven't forgotten. I just don't know what to do about it. How do we make her stop possessing him? By this point, she'll already have convinced the other Boschers that she’s the real Bell. So she'll be able to use them as bodyguards. As if it wasn't already hard enough to evict Seosten from their hosts.”

She was right, of course. Even if we had been dealing with just what Bell by himself could do, it would have been incredibly difficult to get him to stand still for us to try that possession eviction rune again. If we could even find a way to make it work with a Whisper-possessed Seosten ghost. That wasn't a given to begin with. And we didn't even have that best case scenario. We would have to deal with whatever other living Boschers she threw in our way, and all the powers Invidia had copied from me. Yeah, it wouldn't be a cakewalk.

So, I said the only thing I could right then. “We can't deal with that right now, unless something useful presents itself. You guys said it yourselves, we have a time limit here. They're going to be scanning for the ship, which probably means they'll be able to detect the rift. We can't let that happen. We have to finish this. Which means stopping Lechmere and getting to the rift first. If they find it, who knows what could happen? Especially with Invidia in the best position to nudge them toward something really bad. I don't know if it would be worse for the Boshers or Seosten to start poking at the rift, but I really don't want to find out. We deal with Lechmere, then get to the rift and get rid of it.”

After saying that, I grimaced and turned to look at Aylen. “I’m really sorry. If we can figure out a way to get that bitch out of Bell, I'm all in. I just-- there's only so much time, and I don't even know how we would go about trying to evict her at this point.”

She gave a soft sigh, reaching out to grip the back of the nearby chair tightly while looking over at me. “It's-- well it's not okay, not in the least. But I understand. The rift is more important right now. We have to close it.”

There was a lot I wanted to say, but none of it really mattered right then. Not in the grand scheme of things, and nothing I said would have helped anyway. We just had to deal with the problems in front of us as well as we could. And step one to dealing with those problems was making sure Lechmere couldn't use the power inherited from me to hurt anyone else ever again. Knowing how many people he had already hurt and killed with it was bad enough as it was. But I was just going to have to suck that up and move on with the knowledge that one of the most infamous serial killers in history had done his work using my power.

It probably went without saying that I wasn't happy. Neither was Aylen, obviously. If either of us could have managed to kill Invidia with just the power of our minds thinking really hard about how much we wished she was dead, we probably would have pulled it off in those few moments. Unfortunately, we weren't that lucky, and this situation wasn't going to be resolved that easily.

Just as I was about to turn the ship around, Extra spoke up. We think we might have some books in here that could help with that Whisper bitch. But we could use some help from an actual Seosten if we're going to figure it out in time. Even with the way we can make time pass faster in here than out in the outside world, there's still a lot to go through.

I knew what that meant, of course. Tabbris, they needed her in there to help out. Still, I had to ask, Would that work? Can she get in to where you guys are just by possessing me? There were ways to pull people into our Archive, of course. We knew that from Denny and the Carnival. But we hadn’t exactly managed to do it ourselves up to this point, and now really didn’t seem like the right moment to start spending a lot of time experimenting to try to make it work. We were on a pretty tight schedule as it was, with a countdown leading to the moment we would have both the Seosten and more Boschers to deal with. Possibly even Committee members, for all we knew.

Fortunately, the response assured me, We’re like ninety percent sure that we can pull her the rest of the way in if she’s already possessing us. It’s basically like helping you come through.

That was good enough for me. We still needed to work out how to pull others into the Archive without that extra possession step, but that was for another time. Glancing toward the girl in question, I quickly asked if she would be interested in hopping inside, explaining the situation as succinctly as possible. Tabbris, for her part, was already enthusiastically nodding before I’d even finished. “I can help! I wanna meet them, I wanna see all the other Flicks and help find a way to save Mr. Bell!” Even as she said that, her gaze was already shifting over to the anxious-looking Aylen before adding (in a voice that was clearly her best attempt to sound reassuring and confident), “We’ll find a way to separate them, you guys focus on the rift!”

Before she could do anything else, however, Bezique darted over from the wall where she had been playing with the color and sound lights. “I wanna come!” She’d barely gotten that much out before seeming to blanch visibly as she looked toward me. Apparently the idea of having expressed a personal desire like that at all, let alone blurting it out, made her think she was about to be in trouble. “Ah--that is, I am always at your service and exist to fulfill your needs, Miss.”

Well this was awkward. The last thing I wanted to do right then, after she finally said she wanted something at all, let alone when that something was to spend more time with Tabbris, was to deny her. Especially when she was clearly already so sensitive about that. Unfortunately, there really wasn’t any way we could pull her in without more practice. It wasn’t like she could possess me too. Tabbris had that shortcut. But Bezique? I really had no idea where to even start.

But Tabbris did know what to say. She turned to take the cobbled-together harpy-like girl’s hands and squeezed them. “I have to go inside and help them find a way to stop the bad ghost. So I can’t be here to help Flick, and she tends to get in a lot of trouble. She needs people to help her. I wanna stay here to help my sister, but I can’t. I have to go in there to look at books and stuff. Can you please stay with Flick and help her so she doesn’t get hurt? Then, when I’m done and this is all over, we can play another Magic game. But you’ve gotta protect Flick for me, okay?”

There was a very brief pause before Bezique drew herself up to her full diminutive height and gave something approximating a salute. “Yes, ma’am!” she piped up before giving me a smile full of teeth from dozens of different people and creatures. “Don’t worry, Miss. I’ll protect you.”

Tabbris and I both solemnly and sincerely thanked her, before my sister turned to me and gave a somewhat nervous giggle. “I uh, guess I get to see the whole Flique right now after all?”

With that, she took my extended hand. Somehow, this moment felt so much more dramatic than it usually did. This was just Tabbris possessing me, like she had done so many times before. Yet it was different. This was her being officially introduced to the others, the rest of the Flique. This was her being taken into the Archive to visit with them, which was… yeah, I couldn’t dwell on that right now. There wasn’t time. Which wasn’t exactly new, there was almost never time to really think about this sort of thing while we were in the midst of the situation. We just had to do it.

Just like that, Tabbris possessed me, vanishing from sight. Which actually made Bezique hop up and down, clapping a couple times at the ‘trick.’ Offering her a brief smile while half-focusing on what was going on in my own head (Extra and Tabbris were greeting each other), I announced, “Okay, time to get to that rift and shut it down. Aylen? Please tell me we’ve got a good handle on where that thing is, cuz we don’t have a lot of time to go searching door to door at this point.”

Meanwhile, Extra had been proven right. She and the others were indeed able to pull Tabbris the rest of the way into our Archive island. I was really tempted to shift there myself to see what was going on, but no, I had to focus. Aylen had made it clear that she couldn’t keep this time-acceleration bubble thing up forever. Sooner or later it was going to falter, and then we would only have a few minutes before the incoming Seosten ship arrived. To say nothing of the Boschers that were being called in. If we didn’t get to this rift and deal with it before all that new company showed up looking for Jacob and the Cryptseeker, everything would go from difficult, to damn near impossible. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if either of those groups managed to find the rift itself and figured out what it was. Or maybe even worse, didn’t figure out what it was and went through the damn thing anyway. That could be universe-ending. Which, to be honest, really wasn’t the sort of added pressure that any of us needed right then.

To my relief, however, Aylen gave a short nod. “Yes, we know where it is. Here, I’m putting in the coordinates now.” Her fingers danced across the console once more, making me want to ask what had happened at one of the earlier rifts that led to her being on this ship that time. Hell, it made me want to check the ship’s logs to find out for myself. Obviously something like that would be recorded, all I had to do was look for the last time Aylen had been here. But somehow, I didn’t think we had time for that either. Besides, even though it had obviously already happened, it felt strangely like looking it up would be spoiling things for myself. Once we got through all these rifts and every disparate part of me was brought back together, I would have those memories.

In the meantime, I looked up at the map on the screen as part of the city started to glow. There, that was the rift. The one that Lechmere himself was apparently perched on top of just waiting for us to show up. Which, of course, also meant that Invidia knew where he was, where the rift was. She could bring the Boscher reinforcements straight there the moment they showed up. But would she? Would she actually want them to find it? I had no idea. I didn’t have the slightest clue what she wanted or what she was actually capable of. Part of me wanted to say that she (and by extension, Tartarus) wouldn’t want to completely fuck over the timeline like that. After all, it wouldn’t really help them to do so, as far as I could tell, and ending up in the whole new timeline that would create would probably complicate their own plans. But again, there was no way of knowing for sure. For all we knew, Invidia would gleefully fuck over the timeline just to watch it burn. We had to be ready for anything. Which meant being ready for more Boschers to show up.

Or, in a perfect world, getting through the rift and ending this before they had a chance to show up and complicate everything. Which was why, as Aylen dropped the time dilation field, I immediately sent the ship that way as quickly as possible. If it had been a car, we would have left burning rubber on the road. No more screwing around. No more distractions. We had dealt with the zombie bombs, and now there was nothing stopping us from putting Lechmere down once and for all and sending me through that rift. Even if I did wish we had more time for me to catch up with Miranda and Tabbris. Let alone all the stuff I wanted to ask Aylen. I wished there was time for a lot of things.

Instead, I just parked the Cryptseeker directly over the building the rift was supposed to be in. Which, of course, was when I looked at the screen and finally really noticed where we were. A heavy sigh escaped me. “We really should've seen that coming, huh?”

Yeah, we were hovering above Bethlem Royal Hospital. Bedlam Hospital. The very place that had been the origin of not only the word bedlam, but also essentially patient zero for every frightening and terrible mental asylum that had come after it. The rift we were looking for was somewhere in that place. “Please tell me you’ve got a precise location to work with.”

Somehow, I wasn't even surprised when Aylen shook her head. “Sorry, that's the best I can do to narrow it down. We'll just have to search the whole building from top to bottom. And then probably beyond the bottom. There's basements and sub basements, hidden ones that aren’t on any blueprints.” She paused. “And he’s gonna know we’re there the second we show up.”

This whole situation just kept getting better and better. Still, there was no sense in worrying about it. We just had to take this one step at a time. And right now, the next step was to get down there and start searching. If he wanted to send more of his creations at us, well, maybe that would just help us find that rift even faster.

Of course, thinking about his creations did make me give a quick glance over at Bezique. We still had no idea how she was going to react if it came down to choosing to support me or the man who had created her. Obviously, I could have affected that by telling her that I was Jacob, but I still wanted her to make that decision herself. If she knew I was Jacob and turned against Lechmere fully, she would only be doing it because she saw Jacob as the superior master or whatever. I wanted her to decide of her own free will to turn against him. But until that happened, we were just going to have to keep an eye on her. If it came down to it, I would put her to sleep and deal with it later. Errr, as in actually sleeping, not a euphemism for death.

Without wasting another second, I teleported all of us down to the roof of the main building. I also sent the Cryptseeker away, back to where it had come from. I didn't want it to be here when the Seosten showed up and started searching, and either way, this was going to be dealt with inside the building right below us. We didn't need to go anywhere else. Or at least, if we did, it would mean that things had gotten even more wrong than they already were. .

Once we were standing on that roof, I paused and looked over at Aylen. “You know, somehow it only just occurred to me to ask if this place is still in business. I mean, are there doctors and actual patients in there right now? And if there are, how the hell are we going to just get past them to search this place. And why wouldn't they have already found the rift? Please, please don't tell me that we could have a bunch of people with psychological issues walking through a rift to the Fomorian homeworld.”

Miranda put a hand on my arm. “You really know how to suggest all sorts of great scenarios, don't you? Are you sure you don't want to come up with any ideas about the entire building being teleported into a hell universe while we're in there?”

Reaching out to squeeze her hand, I replied flatly, “I mean, considering I would call Tartarus a hell universe, that really is a distinct possibility considering everything else that's--”

Unsurprisingly, that was when Randi covered my mouth and shook her head at me. “I've got an idea, how about we just deal with what's right in front of us. Aylen?”

The girl (or rather, woman considering how much older she was now) in question made a face. “There's definitely people in there, but I've been checking some of the old blueprints against the areas that seem to be an active use right now, and it seems like there's entire wings of this place that are being ignored. Either the rift made these people forget them, or Lechmere did.”

“Whichever it is,” I agreed, “those are the areas we need to start looking at. So uhh, lead the way.”

Together, we moved across the roof. In the distance, I could hear people shouting at one another down on the grounds. It didn't sound like anything we had to worry about, but the things they were yelling did send a shiver down my back. I really wanted to get out of this place as quickly as possible. Even if the people down there weren't part of the rift situation, I didn't want to have anything to do with them. Especially considering I couldn't do anything to help.

Finally, we reached a hatch in the roof. Aylen crouched by it, looking over at the rest of us. “Once we go in there, we have to move quickly. No hesitation. We find this guy, go through anything he puts in our way, and end this.”

She waited until we nodded, then pulled open the hatch. She was right, it was time to finish this whole thing.

I just hope the terrifying shriek that came from that group on the grounds below wasn't a sign of things to come.