04

A hard spring rain drenched the entirety of London in a cold gloom. Emma Delroy sat in a cafe, eyes fastened to the cup of lukewarm tea in her hands. The sleeves of her sweater hid her hands to the knuckle, mismatched socks pulled high over warm leggings. She ignored the chill that the rain brought, brushing a stand of her frizzy hair off her brow.

“Haze, Grim, Zephyr, Zeus the dog…” she said into the tea. She sat at the window. A man in a unicorn t-shirt showed in the reflection. The seat across from her was empty.

“Em,” the reflection said. She looked up, fighting a wave of tears. Emma shook her head and sniffled loudly, scrubbing her sleeve beneath her nose. No one else could see James Kendall. He was her wandering angel, her guardian spirit, her dead partner - and she was forgetting everything about him.

“Haze, Grim, Zephyr…”

The litany repeated itself on her chapped lips. She forced herself to remember, to commit their faces to memory. She wanted to remember the sound of their voices, the way the dog sat with his tongue lolling out to the side, the taste of her first beer at a beachside home or the sensation of connecting with Grim’s face during sparring practice. None of those things had happened yet - nor would they. Emma wanted to scream.

“Em, please,” the reflection pleaded again.

“No!” she barked. Some other patrons turned to regard her, turning their noses up at the odd girl sitting in the window. “I don’t want to forget you.”

Despite best efforts, she was forgetting. She’d gone to the Apothecary first, to find Grim, to make sure he was all right. The man remembered nothing of previous events at all. He knew Emma, but not in the way Emma knew him. By the following morning, names and faces were fading. She felt as if she were in a permanent dream.

“Maybe we can go talk to Grim aga-”

“Why? He didn’t believe us the first time. Why should he? Even I'm starting to wonder if I'm not just touched in the head.”

You’ve always been touched, Emma.

She shifted, tapping her ear with the heel of her palm a little as James continued. Her demons were stronger now, louder than they were before. It worried her, but she hid it well.

“Em, I'm right here; I'm real,” James argued. “Talk to Aubrey.”

Aubrey Miller had been Emma’s partner too. He understood her Evolution because his was similar. They were a quirky trio of outcasts: Emma, James, and Aubrey. They complimented each other well. Grim was not the same detective he was before. He was harsher, colder, more brutal with his investigations and methodology. In truth, he scared Emma a great deal. The way he looked at James had made her skin crawl: like one looked at an insect before stepping on it. His sight pierced dimensions Emma had never even heard of, and he was a complete dick to boot. Emma didn't care for him at all.

So much was different. Too much. Technology from various extra-dimensional species and extraterrestrial races had major breakthroughs over the course of the last fifty years - years Emma knew but did not truly remember. Evolutionary study was at the forefront of scientific research - with Dr. Kasimir Amadour spearheading the experiments that brought about new Evolutions, new technologies, new medicines, and mutations that unified man and beast to make them more ‘efficient’. Then there were the Enhanced. Enhancements were commonplace now, like getting a tattoo except instead of art, it gave you an Evolution. The military and local prisons were used to find test subjects; entire universities devoted their science departments to the science and research of Evolutionary biology.

The PeaceKeepers still operated as a police force for the supernatural and Evolutionary world, but were dealt such a crushing blow that they were little more than a face for so-called order among tangible chaos.

“All those horrible things on the tele about Haze,” Emma began even as she forced herself to remember the kind barista she’d met in San Diego rather than the ‘monster’ portrayed in current media. “All the weird things and people moving about like we’re living in some strange science fiction movie where everything exists all at once. I just… it’s like the X-Men meets Hunger Games but we have no Batman!”

“That’s an impressive combination of references, Em, but that doesn’t change what’s happened,” James said, as if sighing. “And sitting here repeating names over and over doesn’t do anything but give you a headache.”

Oh if he only knew… the voices in her head cooed. She wrinkled her nose at them and shook her head, missing the questioning look James gave to her reflection. She knew what he saw, knew what darkness followed her wherever she went. It was that darkness that fueled her, however; Emma was done being idle. She grabbed her battered old satchel and walked out into the deluge without coat or umbrella. James followed, moving through the window rather than the door. It broke her heart to see him adapt so quickly to being a spirit.

“Why didn’t you bring a coat, kiddo?” James asked. She glowered over her shoulder at him, walking quickly down into the tube that would take her into the heart of old London; to the Stronghold. “Is your phone vibrating?”

Emma glanced at her phone, frowning at that as well. She did not want to speak to Grim, she wanted answers and results, not more demands. People stared at her, whispering at her wet clothes or the empty seat she kept beside her, insisting that it was taken.

“I can stand, you know.”

“Technically, you float, not stand,” Emma countered. James grinned then frowned as if something were wrong. “What?”

“I…” the spectre began then looked at her and said her name even if the sound did not reach her ears. He looked panicked and afraid even as he faded from existence.

“Detective!” she cried, looking around in a panic despite the stares she got from everyone else. “James!”

~

Shift

The top of Nat’s brow felt cool while at the same time scalding like the rest of his body. The fevers hit hard this time, leaving him weak and in a state of delirium he could not break away from. He heard voices and saw things in psychedelic color. He was aware of groaning, of trying to roll to his side but unable to do so - he had no strength for it. His throat felt raw, like it’d been eaten apart by acid; maybe it had.

It’s okay, Natty, I’m here.

Zoe. Her voice rang through Nat’s pounding head. She was nearby. He didn’t even have the energy to think anything back to her. He just wanted to sleep, to die. He wanted the torment to end. What they’d done with Apollo’s string worked. He knew it, but it changed things, made things worse for Nat. Without Apollo to pick on, Kasimir focused all of his attention on Nat. Rosamund wouldn’t let him touch Zoe, and Kasimir wouldn’t harm a pretty black hair on Artemis’s head. Which left Nat to play the role of guinea pig.

He knew he needed to pull it together, to focus. They had things to accomplish. The world was still imploding. What their parents had done was altering the very fabric of existence. He and Zoe figured out a way to fix it, to undo what Rosamund had done, but it took time - - time he was running painfully short on. He didn’t have the energy to care, finally giving in to fitful sleep as his muscles turned to luke-warm soup.

Zoe smoothed Nat’s hair back, putting the needle down. She’d injected her brother with morphine, hoping it might offer him some peace while he recovered from his most recent ‘infusion’. They needed to help Haze and V, but there was a problem: in order to help them, to stop them, they needed to fix what caused their rage to begin with.

Like everything else, the past was full of wild echoes that made it difficult to see anything clearly. Zoe couldn’t just look at someone and know what their life had been. She had to guess - or worse, actually do her research. After Apollo vanished, they spent a day waiting, then spent the following day in the library looking through every newspaper clipping or video report they could get their hands on.

Best they could tell, the horrors in every reality started with the investigation of one little bartender. They spent hours discussing how to fix that, how to make it right. Did they stop the investigation? Stop certain parts of it? No matter what they discussed, all ideas lead back to James Kendall, a very dead Agent of the A.E.C.

“Hang with me, Natty,” she said to her brother. “We’re going to fix this. I’m going to save you.”

Nat was suffering because of what their parents were trying to do. They wanted the perfect Evolved, the perfect engine of chaos to unleash upon the Earth. They were doing the same to Apollo, but now that string had been set free. Their weird ass parents hadn’t even noticed. It was almost as if Apollo never even existed. Zoe knew better. And, logically, Kasimir and Rosamund did too, but they could not be bothered to care. Now she just had to figure out how to get everything else sorted.

Zoe sat back against the bed opposite the one Nat was laid up on and turned the TV on. It was set to a local channel, interrupted with breaking news that made her eyes roll. Another new fire was not breaking news; not anymore. But then she looked at the headline and felt what little color she had drain from her face.

“….asking anyone who may have information on the fugitives or a vehicle matching the following description …” the news anchor said. They stood in front of a strip mall that burned in wild whips of orange and red, black smoke billowing up to the sky above. Haze and V’s face was caught on camera leaving the grocery story minutes before.

“Oh shit…” Zoe breathed out while shaking her head. “No, no, no! You guys can’t get caught!”

She huffed, looked at her brother, and grabbed her coat. She needed to pull another string, to make things right. She looked at her brother again, then the television.

Where would you be? she thought as she swung herself into her coat. Her mind raced as she ran to the elevator, pounding on the button over and over until the doors opened. Once inside, she paced, wracking her brain for information. The date mattered, so did the location. Nat had pointed that out when Apollo vanished. Once again time did not change, circumstances did. The device didn’t reset time, it altered reality.

“If I were a dead agent, where would I be right now?” Zoe said aloud as the elevator doors slid open on ground level. John still sat behind the front desk.

“Hey John?”

“What’s up, kiddo?”

“Where did you work before here?”

“R&D for the supers. Same job just different place. Pay is better here thought - and no one wants to kill ya. Worse than an abortion clinic out there.”

“Where?”

“Out at Joliet, the old correctional facility. Why so curious?”

Zoe smiled. “You’re new. I like knowing where people come from. Thanks, John.”

Zoe ran back to the elevator to the basement level, skipping right past Frank with a shouted excuse of forgetting her phone.

When she got to the device, she glowered at it.

“You are gonna work right this time,” she snarled, already inputting a new stream of data.