***

  She cries for what feels like an hour, though it could have been five minutes. Her faculties in the timekeeping domain are all but debilitated in her current state.

  It’s not long after her last tear falls that Ywain is on his feet again, and he makes to approach—though timidly it seems.

  Marshal begins to say something, then seems to think better of it and stands in front of Ywain. He opens his mouth again, but Ywain cuts him off, “I’m sorry,” he calls from over the man’s shoulder. “Hey, I’m sorry. I—I—didn’t mean to upset you like that, I was—I was just trying to say th—“

  “That I’m so lucky, right?” she yells back, horse through thick phlegm. “I’m just so lucky that you guys found me before the bad guys, right? Before they killed me and anything and everyone good who’s tried to help me?

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he says, barely audible as he turns away. “I’m sorry.”

  She can hear something like shame in his voice—she has to admit he feigns sincerity well, so well, in fact, that a part of her deep down believes it genuine.

  She lets out a heavy sigh, blinking away the last of her tears. “So tell me, Ywain,” she says idly, staring at the ceiling. “What is this promise, huh? What is your reward for being the hired ‘muscle’ for these guys, huh?”

  Ywain blinks, then barks out a laugh, “Yeah right, muscle, good one.” He turns slowly to her, Marshal has taken a seat once move, seemingly tired of the babysitting. Ywain walks up to the gurney. “We’re not “muscle’—well, I guess Marshal kinda is” —he begins unfastening the binds from her wrists, Marshal glares at him before shaking his head and going back to staring at the floor— “we’re more like spies I guess, but even that makes it sound more interesting than it usually is” —he tosses her a rag from the tray beside the gurney— “we basically just sit in hot cars taking photographs and videos of people of interest. Sometimes we help stage a happenstantial meeting between a target and one of our guys, but it’s less Mission Impossible and more like being a random background character in a throwaway scene from some B-movie. It’s really quite boring most of the time. One time, though, I got to be a shit-covered crackhead asking for money, got within ten feet of some old guy and suddenly had, like, three guns in my face and a big dude shoving me backwards—that was exciting.”

  “Okay, so you’re not the muscle,” she says, wiping the last of the snot from her face. “You’re more like private-eyes.”

  “Yeah, actually, that’s a pretty good comparison.”

  “So you do detective work for the… the good guys, and in return they’re going to let you kill whichever one of those rich pricks wronged you or something? How many, like, pictures or whatever do you gotta take before you earn your reward and they gotta give you this dude?”

  “Well, first of all, we don’t have a purely transactional work arrangement, at least not like that. There’s no set amount of tasks I have to do to ‘earn’ anything, I’m here because—again, believe it or not—I actually want to see their whole operation burnt to the ground.”

  “And because they promised you someone’s head.”

  “That too,” he says. “Although either way I’d be trying to take down the rest of them while I was at it. Working with these guys just gives a little more structure, strength in numbers, that sort of thing.” —he chuckles and shakes his head— “shit, I’d be just another body if it wasn’t for our benefactors. I had the gun in my bag, I’d made all the preparations I thought necessary, and I was just about to leave my apartment, when Marshal here showed up. Him and Omar, they calmed me down—well, Marshal had to hold me down—they told me I’d be dead before I made it within three hundred feet of the condo, that I had no chance alone, but that if I really wanted to get even, they could help me. That was four years ago.” He looks at her and smiles. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”

  Sasha massages her wrists, she reckons after all this she probably won’t ever again be able to wear so much as a bracelet without triggering a flashback.

  She looks to Ywain. “So this guy they’ve promised you—“

  “Guys, actually, there’s three of them.”

  “So these guys you’re after, they killed your girlfriend or something? Your wife?”

  “My sister.” The words come out almost as a hiss.

  “Sorr—“

  He waves her off. “Doesn’t matter, she’s gone, nothing will change that.”

  “But you can kill the guys that did it.”

  He laughs, it’s dark, cruel. It sends a shudder down her spine. “That’s true, I could kill them.”

  She looks at him quizzically a moment. Her realization half-formed, he continues, “Killing isn’t exactly what I have in mind for Mr. de Gaulle or the Escoffier brothers, at least not right away.” He stares at her with hollow eyes. “Before? Yes. I would have put a bullet in each of their foreheads without a second thought. But that was an urge born of limited means more than anything, and being lost in the throes of rage I suppose.”

  Ywain’s eyes have taken on a wild look as he stares out at some space beyond the confines of the van. Sasha finds it a much needed reprieve from his unwavering eye contact.

  He looks back to her, cocks his head to the side. Sasha finds the man’s mannerisms extremely disconcerting.

  “But now?” he continues. “Now that I’ve had time to meditate on it, to let that rage simmer, let it congeal into a hate diamond-hard and razor-sharp? Now that I actually have the means to exact the penance I deem adequate, my priorities have changed” —that carnivorous grin again— “I’ve planned a rather prolonged catharsis for myself, and to this end, our mutual benefactors have agreed to assist me, so… I help out. In the meantime I’ve been reading up on anatomy, biology, sharpening my first aid skills, taking inspiration from the internet’s more sordid corners…” —staring again into space, he looks almost intoxicated by his thoughts. He looks back at her, smile almost manic in its intensity, as she fights the urge to shrink away— “for reasons I’m sure are quite obvious.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  When Sasha doesn’t respond, Ywain steps back, hands open in a placating gesture. “My apologies, I got… carried away. I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable, I just” —his eye twitches as though accosted by a fly— “I was just putting the cards on the table, being straight up about why I’m here. I figured it was either that or just bullshit you for however many hours we got left in this thing.”

  “Well,” she says after a while. “That’s not the opener I would’ve gone with but… thanks I guess?”

  Ywain gives her a wink and a points a finger-gun. “You got it, Sasha.”

  “Wait, so you know my name?”

  “Uh… well, yeah… I mean, we were listening to you at that Roy and Molly’s place.”

  “You bugged their fucking house?”

  “Nonononono,” he laughs. “I mean, we will I’m sure—or maybe not we we, but one of our guys will. Gotta keep tabs, like I said. I mean, shit, if Central spotted you coming back through, you gotta wonder if they did too. And if they did, why’d they let you go?” He scratches his chin. “To be honest with you though, I don’t think they have any idea you made it back. First off, no way they’d’ve let you just swim away, they’d’ve taken you back or put a bullet in your head or something. And second” —he stares up at the ceiling shaking his head— “I think they really, truly do just think that they are too big to fail. They probably can’t imagine a thing like this even happening, someone getting away, or people like us uncovering their operation and coming after them. Or if they can, then they can’t imagine such efforts would ever not be in vain.

  “These are people who’ve never had to play by the rules. They’ve never had consequences. I think they genuinely can’t fathom a world in which they aren’t on top. And if anything threatens that? Well, make a few phone calls, pull a few strings, disappear a few people. Boom, problem solved. If they need something swept under the rug, they have it swept under the rug. With the shit they get up to I think that’s a regular occurrence. They don’t think anything of it. Really, I don’t think these people even know what it’s like to feel threatened, like, I think they literally don’t experience that emotion in the same way as you are me, almost like they’ve… evolved out of the ability to even form that concept in their minds.

  “Why would they keep round-the-clock tabs on their Gates? Why would they bother cordoning them off? To do such things would be to tacitly admit of some limit to their imagined omnipotence. No, I think you really did slip by unnoticed because there really wasn’t anyone there to notice you” —nodding to himself— “I guess we have that going for us at least: that great hubris of theirs will end up their great Achilles hee...” He stares blankly at her as he trails off. “Sorry, what was I saying, before? Oh yeah, right, bugs. No, we didn’t have to bug anything, we just used a laser mic.”

  “A what?”

  “A laser mic, it’s… well it’s a laser mic. Points a laser at a window and when you talk that window vibrates and from that we can tell wha—“

  “You can fucking do that?”

  Ywain laughs again, “Yeah, that’s pretty basic stuff really. I mean, they make fuckin’ kids toys that can do tha—”

  “Those are parabolic microphones, not lasers,” Marshal corrects.

  “Okay, either way,” Ywain says. “Having Marsh over there crawl through the woods and shine a laser at a window is pretty much bottom tier as far as surveillance tech goes.”

  Sasha looks over to the man sitting, he meets her eyes for just a moment. “Think I pulled fifteen ticks off myself,” he grumbles.

  Ywain looks at Sasha and cocks a thumb behind him. “Yeah, remember when I told him he wasn’t in the Army? Well, I should have said he’s not in the Army anymore. Sasha, meet Sergeant King. That there’s our special operator.”

  Marshal rolls his eyes. “Just regular infantry,” he says, looking at Sasha.

  “Like I said,” Ywain continues, winking again at her. “He’s kinda the muscle.”

  Cute too, she thinks, in a ‘I will snap you in half’ kind of way.

  A woman’s voice hollers from the front, “We’re thirty minutes out, one of you ring Eli and update him.”

  “Already on it, Tiff,” Ywain shouts back as he pulls out his cell.

  “A flip phone?” Sasha chuckles. “I thought you said your benefactors made sure you guys were well funded? Or did they make you buy your own ph—“

  “Nah, this was my choice,” he quips back. “I don’t need anything fancy, that’d just be complicating things for nothing” —he flips it open— “I don’t need a screen in my pocket to jerk off to or look up damn Yelp reviews, just calls and texts, less distractions this way.”

  “What should I expect?” she asks, just before he can hit send. “When we get there I mean. Is that Eli fellow going to interrogate me, will Omar and Sal-whatever be joining him?”

  “Oh, it’ll still be a bit before you meet Omar and Salinger and the rest.” Ywain smiles. “Central’s a ways from here. We’re taking you to a safehouse right now. Eli’s a doctor, gonna patch you up real good. And don’t worry about ‘interrogations’ or anything like that. They’ll have plenty of questions for you, sure, but no one’s gonna have a gun to your head, okay? The techs’ll wanna know everything you can remember about where you were, like what you said about the sun rising and setting in the same place, that kinda shit they’ll wanna know. Might help them figure out where you were, where the specific Gate you went through leads. Give them a better idea about how the whole network functions” —he hits send and holds the phone to his ear— “and other than that just whatever other details you remember, like dates and names an—“

  “Ethan,” she hisses.

  Ywain pauses, eyebrows raised. He snaps the phone shut. “Ethan, huh?” He glances at Marshal. “Tall, dark, han—“

  “And handsome, yes. Last name Priell—“

  “Cordellis,” Ywain says. “His last name is Cordellis—Cordellis Junior actually, uses Ethan Priello as one of his aliases. We’ve been watching him a while. Sounds like he’s your—“

  “I’m going to fucking kill him.”

  “Hey, no judgment here.” Ywain raises his hands in the air. “Join the club.”

  “Him and his fucking goons. Steelson and Brooks and Brett Wilcox—or maybe it was Brad—and his main lapdog Marlo.”

  She catches it right as the name leaves her mouth: the look Ywain shoots Marshal— “Marlo another one of your guys?” she asks. Then, looking to Marshal. “One of your guys?”

  “You could say that,” Marshal grunts.

  “What did he do to y—“

  “Pssst, Sasha,” Ywain whispers, quite theatrically, raising his hand to his mouth. “Words for the wise, Marshal there doesn’t really like talking about it.”

  “Oh, sorry,” she says, glancing at the imposing man seated before her before averting her eyes.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ywain says jovially. “He’ll warm up eventually, just give’m some time. Underneath that face of a killer there’s a big ol’ teddy bear I promise” —he brings the phone to his ear again— “now gimmi a sec, I need to tell Eliezer to get his shit ready for you.”

  Sasha is aware of a great calming within, a relaxing of the tension that has been building in her. Maybe the cry she had earlier really just cleared everything out. Maybe she’s finally broken and given up.

  Either way, she can’t shake the feeling that these people are actually looking out for her. Stonefaced Marshal looking like he would kill a litter of puppies and Ywain’s obviously tenuous grasp on sanity aside, she finds herself in the wholly unexpected position of actually trusting these complete strangers—she wonders how much of that is Stockholm Sydrome talking.

  “Hey, Ywain,” she says, sometime time later, as the van comes to a stop.

  “Yeah?” he says, throwing the door open.

  “You really think we can bring them down? If they’re as wealthy and powerful and well-connected as you say, if they have technology like that… you really think we have a chance? You really think we’re a threat?”

  Ywain has stepped halfway out, he stops and pulls himself back in. His eyes dance back and forth in the space in front of him as he runs the calculus in his head.

  After a time he looks to her, then to Marshal, and then back to her.

  He shrugs, “Let’s find out.”

  ***