The room Vertin had chosen for the call was small and windowless, tucked behind the pantry of the house they’d been using as a base.
A single rotary telephone sat on a narrow table, its cord looping down to a socket someone had clearly installed in a hurry.
She dialed the number from memory, one slow click of the wheel after another, and waited through the static with the phone pressed close to her ear.
“Hello.
Please get me Madam Z of St.
Pavlov Foundation Committee.”
There was a pause, a series of distant clicks, and then a familiar voice settled into the line.
“Hmm.
It’s you.
What’s wrong?”
“I require access to the historical intelligence on the U.S.
financial market in 1929, specifically of the date of the Wall street stock market crash, and how much arcanum was involved in the methods of stock exchange.”
“Anything else?”
“…
Also, I request sending backup to reinforce the Storm Gathering tonight.
Casual wear required.”
There was a shuffle of paper on the other end of the line before the answer came.
“The date of the 1929 Crash confirmed by primary sources is Thursday, October 24.
And the decline happened again on the 28th and 29th.
Intelligence Division indicates that no arcane forces were involved.”
Vertin’s grip tightened slightly on the receiver.
“Hmm…
The Manus is changing history, Madam Z.”
“I’ll send you a special team and give you the highest command.
Do not make any moves until you figure out the reason why they want to change the history.”
“Copy that.”
A silence stretched on the line, longer than the ones before it.
Madam Z’s voice, when it returned, had shifted into something quieter, more careful.
“One more thing, before you go,” she said.
“During the previous Storm.
Did you notice anyone unusual?
Anyone who shouldn’t have been there.”
Vertin’s hand went still against the receiver.
For a moment the image rose unbidden, arms crossed behind his back, a frown aimed at the sky like it had personally wronged him, gone from her memory before she could hold the shape of it properly.
“No,” she said.
“I didn’t notice anything.”
The pause on the other end lasted a beat too long to be comfortable.
“Very well,” Madam Z said finally.
“Good night, Vertin.”
The line clicked dead.
Vertin set the receiver back into its cradle slowly, the click of it settling into the quiet room like a small closing door.
‘That probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do,’ she thought.
‘Lying to Madam Z.’
But the Foundation had lied to her too, about her mother, about the lies that answered every question she’d ever asked on the subject, a lie that was too smooth and too rehearsed to be simple ignorance.
And the man in the street, whatever he actually was, had the same ability to weather the Storm like her, literally, something that circled far too close to her questions about her apparent mother.
He might even be her-
She shook her head, sharp and sudden, and let the thought go before it could finish forming.
Instead she thought back to what she thinks is her mother, the only image of her she still carried with any clarity, strapped down somewhere in a Foundation laboratory she had never been allowed to see, and let that image settle the matter for her the way it always did.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Foundation’s headquarters did not look like a place where anyone kept secrets.
Every hallway ran white, floor to ceiling, broken only by checkered tile beneath their feet and diamond-shaped inlays worked into the walls in a single, deliberate shade of gold.
Nothing else interrupted the color scheme.
No warmth crept in anywhere, no wear, no dust, only white and black and the occasional gleam of gold catching the overhead light exactly where it was meant to.
Madam Z was in a black-and-white uniform pressed sharp enough to hold its own creases, a pair of thin glasses catching the light every time she turned her head.
“Sounds like your friend just got into some troubles, Regulus.”
“I’d say, sign these documents and that’s all for me, right?
And then to the office of the Scientific Computing Center?”
A boy in a uniform cut similarly to Madam Z’s was in front of Regulus, one of his eyes didn’t quite match the other.
“That’s right.
Let me show you the way, Regulus,” he replied with a kind smile on his face.
“This is X, our mechanical scientist.
He will introduce you to some of our research devices …
By the way did you notice anyone suspicious while you were with Vertin?”
Regulus opened her mouth.
“Oh yes, there was a person that…
Actually no, I didn’t notice anything, I was probably hallucinating.
You know how it is, the Storm Syndrome and all that… Why do you ask?”
Madam Z stared at her intensely, sharp and unreadable behind the glasses.
Regulus’ eyes slid away from hers, looking around for anything else to land on.
“Oh you know what?
Just call me Captain R!”
X tilted his head, the strange eye catching the gold trim on the wall behind him.
“Heh heh.
That’s not what our names come from,” he said with a slight chuckle.
“Follow me, friend from afar.
I have a lot of interesting new things to show you.”
“That sounds like a great idea!
Let’s go!”
Regulus followed right beside him, and the two of them turned down the corridor together, footsteps fading against the checkered tile.
Madam Z remained where she stood.
She did not follow.
She stayed there a long moment, glasses catching the light, thinking about something she did not share with the empty hallway.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Cormac found Vertin’s team by her clothes before he found them by anything else.
Every one of them had traded uniforms for plain, unremarkable civilian dress, blending into the 1929 US evening crowd the way trained people knew how to, with the exception of Vertin of course.
He turned to a dark corner on the street and went into his divine kingdom that still held nine sleeping Foundation Agents.
He drew out a slim and sleek ID from one coat pocket among many, and swiped at a photograph that looked nothing at all like him.
Darkness swallowed the photograph for a moment then came back, but now it has his face on it in the same uniform that the person that originally owned it wore.
‘Identity theft is not a joke, Cormac,’ he lampooned to himself, smirking lightly as he performed a quick ritual to give the ID to himself in the physical world.
He didn’t bother listening closely to the murmured conversation ahead of him as he moved into the group, briefly showing his identification before hiding it in his breastpocket.
He caught only fragments as he followed the person in front of him quietly, something about an explosive device, spoken too low and too quickly to piece into anything useful, before the group ahead of him passed beneath a lit sign and through a heavy set of doors into The Walden.
The crowd inside was thick and glittering, voices layered over a low current of music, and near the center of it stood a man with gold-rimmed spectacles very much like Cormac’s own, holding court over a small circle of listeners with the easy confidence of someone recounting old victories dressed up as history lessons.
‘Another man of good taste,’ Cormac thought, adjusting his own gold-rimmed glasses slightly out of pure reflex.
He peeled off from the group he’d followed in, drifting instead into a secluded corner where the light didn’t quite reach, and ignored the spectacled man’s voice that carried over the general noise of the room as he announced the evening’s next event.
He caught the man’s name somewhere in the middle of it, Forget Me Not, and a phrase that came and went too quickly to fully register, something about Manus Vindictae, before he lost the thread entirely and let his attention wander elsewhere.
‘A knight, Forget Me Not,’ Cormac thought.
‘These are pretty good.
I’ll be using The Warrior, The Sleepless, and The Corpse Collector as names from now on as well.
Establishing a schizo personality this early should make acting later more seamless.’
The crowd went quiet as Forget Me Not raised his voice, and the room turned toward the center of it as one.
“Let’s welcome our fighter of the year!
The defender of the undefeated honor of knocking out ten consecutive arcanists and human challengers!”
A spotlight swung down onto a girl in a red, skimpy outfit, poised at the center of the floor with the easy stillness of someone who had done this exact thing many times before.
“It’s her?!”
Cormac picked up Vertin’s small voice over the noise, his heightened hearing narrowing to filter the overwhelming amount of information he was getting.
Recognition landed hard and suddenly on Vertin, the same girl who’d shot three people in front of her and Sonetto not long ago, though the last of them had done that particular job to himself.
Forget Me Not let the murmurs of the crowd build before speaking again.
“Then, which guest will have the honor to be the challenger of the duel?”
The crowd erupted into noise, half of it screaming names, half of it screaming nonsense, and the spotlight swept across the room in a slow, deliberate arc before settling.
“The fate of this challenger, we let the spotlight decide.
The spotlight chose you, lady with a top hat.”
“Shit!” an unexpected word came out of Vertin’s mouth, but the only one that would appreciate it among the crowd was already distracted by something else.
The crowd only grew louder at that, a tangle of envy and encouragement rolling through the room in equal measure.
“I give you, Schneider, the defending champion of last year, and the Timekeeper from St.
Pavlov Foundation, Ms.
Vertin.”
“Shit!
They got our intels too?” the captain of the support team said with a panicked voice.
“… I’m going.
Don’t worry.”
“And now, let the duel begin.”
Somewhere at the edge of the room, well away from the light and the noise and the growing crowd pressing in around the floor.
Cormac slipped a full glass and a small plate of hors d’oeuvres from a table where two distracted guests had left them unattended.
‘They have some good stuff in here,’ he thought, taking an appreciative sip.
‘Hopefully this place doesn’t blow up or something.’