FF: All Your Faithless Loyalties 2/5 NC-17 Myka/HG
It takes time for Myka to get a moment in the Warehouse’s control room alone. She can’t face Artie’s disapproval or Pete’s judgment and she refuses to make Claudia an accomplice. A week passes, and then finally Artie takes Claudia and Jinks off on a training bag-n-tag and Pete goes into town for take out and Myka is left blissfully alone.
She brings up the archival footage in the bronze sector and tracks back to the date HG was reanimated by MacPherson. It’s just as uncanny to watch Leena-as-Claudia wave at the camera as it was the first time she saw the footage. Even stranger to see Helena stumble from the bronzer into Claudia’s arms, a blanket almost immediately wrapped over her before she is ushered away.
Myka makes note of the date, the time, down to the second. She rewinds the footage going back hours, then days until she finds Leena-as-Claudia standing before HG’s bronzed form. She watches in fascination as the woman places large earphones over the statue and connects them to a machine on the ground. Myka pauses the tape, enhancing it enough to get a better look, her confusion growing as she recognizes an old-style reel-to-reel stereo, the type found in recording studios. Leena leaves the headphones in place for an hour before removing them, packing everything back up, and walking away.
“The voices in her head,” Myka whispers softly.
Forty minutes later Myka is still so engrossed in her search of the footage she misses Pete’s return to the Warehouse until he walks into Artie’s office.
“Hey, Mykes, they didn’t have any of that corn salsa you like, so I got you some pico de gallo instead-” Pete drops the bags of food on the desk as Myka jumps up guiltily, clicking away from the video feed. “What’s, uh… what’s going on Mykes?”
“Pete, I was just, uh, looking at some footage…”
Pete doesn’t need Jinx to tell Myka’s lying, and the vibe that courses through him is of the definite bad variety. A specific type of bad actually. “What kind of footage?” Myka struggles for an answer. She doesn’t fight when Pete steps closer and brings the video back up, recognizing instantly the bronzed statue. “Oh, Myka, come on!”
“Pete, I know, okay, I know what you’re gonna say-”
“This is a new level of obsession, even for you.”
“Pete, there’s something not right here. I was talking to HG and-”
“-You were talking to HG?”
“Someone left her orb in my bedroom.”
“And you didn’t tell Artie?”
“For all I know, it could’ve been Artie who left it there.”
“Oh, yeah? You really think Artie left that in your room?”
Myka stops, sucking in a ragged breath. “No, but… HG… Helena-”
Throwing his hands up in exasperation, Pete yells, “For god’s sake Myka, what is it about that woman? I know she’s pretty, but that can’t be enough to have this kind of hold on you!”
“Pete-”
“No, I’m serious,” he continues, “I want to know what the hell it is about HG Wells that turns the normal, rational Myka I know into this… person.”
“You know what it is, Pete,” Myka yells back, unable to stop herself now. “You know what it’s like to be in love.”
Pete stops, mouth hanging open, whatever words he is about to say abandoned on his lips. He’s known, of course he’s known, about Myka and HG’s connection. And maybe he even might have heard their late night giggling, and, well, other noises. Hell, they both might’ve played a significant role in more than one of his fantasies. But he never, ever, expected Myka to fall in love.
“I know how crazy this is Pete, I know. But this is about more than my feelings for her. There was something else going on, pieces that don’t quite fit.” She steps toward him, her eyes silently pleading for his understanding, or at the least his cooperation. “Just let me show you what I’ve found okay? And if you still think it was nothing, then you can walk away. You can tell Artie, or Mrs. Frederic. Whoever. Just give me a chance to explain.”
He stares at her, seriously considering finding the nearest Farnsworth to call Artie. “She tried to kill me, Myka. She could have killed Kelly.”
The reminder is unnecessary; Myka is more than aware of her lover’s past deeds. She’s blamed herself for them over the past months as much as she has blamed Helena. “I know Pete, and I’m not asking you to forget that happened, but what if it wasn’t her fault? Not entirely? Wouldn’t that make a difference? Don’t you remember what it was like?”
It’s a none-too-subtle reminder of Pete’s accidental encounter with an artifact that caused vivid, and violent, hallucinations. Luckily, no one had ended up seriously injured, although not for lack of trying on Pete’s end.
“I remember,” he sighs heavily. He wants to tell her no, wants to pack everything up and pretend he’s seen nothing. But this is Myka, his partner and best friend. The one person he trusts with his life. He can’t tell her no. Reluctantly he asks, “So, what is it you think you’ve found?”
*
Hours later and they’ve found more than ten instances of Leena/Claudia sneaking into the Bronze Sector to place the headphones on HG, always with the same track player.
Pete shoves away from the desk, scavenging the last few bites of broken chips and guacamole with his fingers. “Okay, we really got to talk to Artie about upgrading the surveillance around here. No audio? Total crap.”
Myka laughs softly, rubbing at her stiff neck. Spread out in front of her are pages of hand made notes on the days, the times, all of which have been cross-checked against Warehouse activities. The sessions lasted no more than an hour, and always at times when Artie and the rest were away from the building, even if it was just for a few hours. There’s no particular pattern, just moments of opportunity, and Myka wonders how much worse things could have been if Leena could have gotten to Helena with more frequency. How much faster would MacPherson’s plan have been put into action? Would Helena even have had the strength to fight?
Pete stands up, bouncing on the balls of his feet as if he’s warming up for a fight. He even throws a few mock-punches to get the blood flowing. “Our basic theory is that HG was brainwashed by something right? Whatever it was that Leena kept making her listen to. So, we just need to figure out what that is.”
“I doubt Leena remembers, Mrs. Frederic did a clean-sweep on her mind?”
“Right, right. But there’s gotta be another way to find out right?”
Myka turns back to stare at the computer screen. “There is, but you’re not going to like it…”
Shoulders slumping in defeat, there was no other way to describe Pete’s expression but a full-on pout. “More staring at boring security footage?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll make the coffee.”
*
“Dude, you’re kidding me! There is no way Superman wins that fight.”
“I’m telling you, he can use his x-ray vision and-”
“Oh, would you two shut up?” Artie yells in frustration as they walk through the ambilical toward the control room. “Three hours I’ve had to listen to you trade barbs and tech lingo acronyms over which fictional superhero could beat another fictional superhero in a fiction battle royale. Enough! No one cares, especially me. Go ask Pete, who will probably be fascinated by this level of-”
Artie trails off, the door to the control room swinging open as he stares in horror at the scattered food containers and stacks of papers littering the room. And there, in the middle of it all, are Pete and Myka, completely asleep slumped over the desk.
“Wh-wha-what what the hell is this?”
Myka jerks awake, a piece of paper stuck to her face; Pete keeps snoring.
“Artie? What time is it?”
“What have you done to my office,” Artie demands, gesturing far and wide to the stacks of paper.
“We were, uh, just doing some research,” Myka answers weakly. When Pete snores again she nudges, then shoves him awake.
Blinking, he wipes the drool from his mouth and looks up with a grimace. “Aw, man, Dad’s home…”
“You’re damn right I am, and I still haven’t gotten an explanation.”
Pete knows that tone of voice far too well to even attempt a lie. “Well, Artie, you see… Myka had this idea and I thought…”
“No, Pete, it’s okay,” Myka jumps in, touched that Pete would try and shield her. She stands up, brushing away the paper and smoothing her hair down. “I had a hunch about something Artie, and I didn’t want to come to you until I had more evidence. I roped Pete into helping me last night, it wasn’t his fault. So if you’re going to yell at someone, yell at me.”
“I’d be more than happy to yell at you if you’d just tell me what is going on,” Artie answers cautiously. He knows Myka too well, knows her need to please authority figures, especially him. There’s only one thing that can have her this spooked: HG Wells.
“I think HG was brainwashed while she was bronzed.”
He hears the words from a distance, through the tunnel of memory that woman’s name always triggers, through the wave of emotions that cascade with them: Pain, betrayal, anger.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me if I just told you I had a hunch, so we went back through all the footage Artie, and look,” Myka holds up her stack of handwritten notes, “We found fifteen different times Leena pretended to be Claudia and snuck into the Bronze Sector to put these headphones on HG and then she played some sort of audio track for an hour each time, and-”
“Enough.” The one word cuts through Myka, slashing her to the bone. Artie needs nothing more to convey his utter disappointment in her. “You’re never going to learn, are you?”
“Artie…”
Pete steps forward protectively putting himself between Artie’s glare and Myka. “Hey, Artie, man that’s unfair…”
“Oh, don’t tell me she’s convinced you that HG Wells is redeemable.”
“No, but, she wasn’t wrong about the brainwashing thing,” Pete defends. “We saw it for ourselves on the tapes.”
“You saw what you wanted to see on those tapes. I’ll let HG Wells actions speak for themselves.”
Artie turns, remembering for the first time that Claudia and Jinks are still behind him. He shoves the artifact bag at Claudia. “See that the artifact is properly tagged and labeled.”
“Artie-” Myka calls after him to no avail, the only response his footsteps echoing back down the tunnel as he walks to the Warehouse’s main door.
Claudia gives the room a once-over in the awkward silence that follows. “Let me get this straight: you think HG was brainwashed, and you made this mess trying to prove that.” Myka nods. “I could have looked all this up with an algorithm and figured it out in about twenty minutes. You know that right?” Myka nods again. “Okay, just so we’re clear.” She looks back at Jinks and grins, “Come on Boy Wonder, we’re about to jailbreak HG.”
“Wait a second, didn’t she betray everyone, shoot Artie, try to end the world, and then get put into some sort of mystical hologram prison?”
“That’s the same girl.”
“Then why are we helping to get her out?”
“’Cause Myka loves her, duh. Catch up already, will you?”
With a quick shove to get Pete out of the way and hug for Myka, Claudia places herself in front of the computer and cracks her knuckles before she starts clacking away. With a few keystrokes she brings up the footage they have marked and then inputs a series of code no one can follow. Within five minutes they’re watching Claudia’s doppelganger backtrack through the Warehouse surveillance feed.
“How’d you do that?”
“I wrote a simple code that joined the motion detector sensors with the surveillance footage and cross-checked against someone with Leena’s basic height and weight.”
Pete and Myka give her a look. “Simple code, huh?”
Claudia just shrugs and turns back to the screen. It doesn’t take long for them to narrow down the footage to the corresponding days and times Myka has noted. They all stare at the computer, watching as the doppelganger walks down Warehouse aisles while Claudia brings up the inventory for each one.
“There - she left that aisle with the headphones!”
“Headphones… headphones… Gotcha!” With a triumphant spin of her chair Claudia pulls up the information for the only headphones in that aisle.
Pete leans over her, reading off the screen, “The sound technician’s headphones used when Leonard Cohen recorded the original version of Hallelujah… his wife had just left him and took their kids. He killed himself three days after the recording. The headphones are imbued with the depression of the song plus the despair of the sound tech’s broken heart. Use of the headphones put the wearer into a fugue state where they inevitably attempted to kill themselves or those closes to them… Ouch.”
“Look, here she is a few aisles over picking up the reel-to-reel player.”
Another series of keystrokes has Claudia shouting, “Yahtzee!”
This time it is Myka who pushes her out of the way. “This is the original recording of the Beatles Revolution 9-”
“- the Paul-is-dead song?” Jinks asks, only to be immediately shushed by the others.
“-It’s the most influential use of backmasking, phonetic reversal, and subliminal messaging in modern music,” Myka continues to read. “Apparently, when used in conjunction with this recording, a person can dub in any message they want and the listener is completely unaware of the hidden imprint. It just sounds like noise. Oh, and as a bonus - it was one of Charles Manson’s favorites.”
The team shares a collective eye-roll before Jinx clears his throat. “Okay, so I get it. You’ve got the most powerful subliminal messaging track, filtered through headphones imbued with pure despair and depression, which mixed together is enough to make someone want to end their own life… but how do we get from there to HG trying to end the whole world?”
“That’s an excellent question, Mister Jinks.” As one they turn, each of them coming full-circle to find Mrs. Frederic staring back at them. Her focus, however, is only on Myka. “Perhaps we should discuss your findings further, Agent Bering?”
Myka stares right back. “Perhaps we should.”
*
Days off at the Warehouse were few and far between, but every once in a while they managed a lazy Saturday with no impending doom. In the past, Myka had made a habit of spending those days doing as little as possible, which for her meant sleeping in past eight a.m., having a lazy breakfast, a five mile run instead of ten, and possibly a nap before curling up with a book on the porch.
Today, it was after ten and she still wasn’t out of bed. She also had no intention of leaving it.
Helena smirked as she trailed a finger lazily over Myka’s naked back. “Do you think the others have noticed?”
“Us?”
“Mmmhmm.”
Myka laughed softly. “Claudia I’m sure. And Leena. But Pete doesn’t notice anything until you hit him upside the head with it.”
“And Arthur?”
Myka sighed. “I’m sure he suspects.”
“You think he disapproves?”
“Well, we’re both Warehouse agents.”
Helena’s hand stilled on her back. “But that’s not why you think he will disapprove, is it.” Myka’s silence was all the answer she needed. “I am sorry about MacPherson,” Helena said after some time.
Myka turned over, propping herself up on her elbow. “Why did you do it?”
“He lied to me, my darling. Said awful things about you all, about Arthur. He promised me that he was my only chance for survival and after so many years of being bronzed… I couldn’t go back Myka.” Helena took a breath and closed her eyes, feeling a rage surge within her; the inexplicable need to destroy everything welling up like a rising tide waiting to crest. Myka laid a gentle hand on her cheek, her thumb ghosting over her face in a soothing caress. Another breath and the wave receded, the anger dissipated. “I had to escape Myka, I didn’t have a choice… I had to escape the Warehouse… You captured MacPherson and were a breath away from capturing me and I… it sounds trite, but I didn’t feel as if I had a choice. I could not be bronzed again. It was either him or me.”
Myka didn’t understand, not completely, but the pain in Helena’s eyes called to her, begging for forgiveness if not absolution. She leaned forward, pressing a gentle kiss to her lover’s forehead.
Helena reached up, sinking her fingers into Myka’s curls, her eyes locked on the younger woman’s. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making amends, Myka, I swear it to you. You haven’t placed your faith in me for naught.” She kissed her fervently, desperately, breaking away to whisper, “I was so lost for so long… don’t give up on me. Not now that I’ve finally found you.”
Myka’s arms came around her, pulling her close as she whispered, “I’ll never give up on you.”
Part Three
She brings up the archival footage in the bronze sector and tracks back to the date HG was reanimated by MacPherson. It’s just as uncanny to watch Leena-as-Claudia wave at the camera as it was the first time she saw the footage. Even stranger to see Helena stumble from the bronzer into Claudia’s arms, a blanket almost immediately wrapped over her before she is ushered away.
Myka makes note of the date, the time, down to the second. She rewinds the footage going back hours, then days until she finds Leena-as-Claudia standing before HG’s bronzed form. She watches in fascination as the woman places large earphones over the statue and connects them to a machine on the ground. Myka pauses the tape, enhancing it enough to get a better look, her confusion growing as she recognizes an old-style reel-to-reel stereo, the type found in recording studios. Leena leaves the headphones in place for an hour before removing them, packing everything back up, and walking away.
“The voices in her head,” Myka whispers softly.
Forty minutes later Myka is still so engrossed in her search of the footage she misses Pete’s return to the Warehouse until he walks into Artie’s office.
“Hey, Mykes, they didn’t have any of that corn salsa you like, so I got you some pico de gallo instead-” Pete drops the bags of food on the desk as Myka jumps up guiltily, clicking away from the video feed. “What’s, uh… what’s going on Mykes?”
“Pete, I was just, uh, looking at some footage…”
Pete doesn’t need Jinx to tell Myka’s lying, and the vibe that courses through him is of the definite bad variety. A specific type of bad actually. “What kind of footage?” Myka struggles for an answer. She doesn’t fight when Pete steps closer and brings the video back up, recognizing instantly the bronzed statue. “Oh, Myka, come on!”
“Pete, I know, okay, I know what you’re gonna say-”
“This is a new level of obsession, even for you.”
“Pete, there’s something not right here. I was talking to HG and-”
“-You were talking to HG?”
“Someone left her orb in my bedroom.”
“And you didn’t tell Artie?”
“For all I know, it could’ve been Artie who left it there.”
“Oh, yeah? You really think Artie left that in your room?”
Myka stops, sucking in a ragged breath. “No, but… HG… Helena-”
Throwing his hands up in exasperation, Pete yells, “For god’s sake Myka, what is it about that woman? I know she’s pretty, but that can’t be enough to have this kind of hold on you!”
“Pete-”
“No, I’m serious,” he continues, “I want to know what the hell it is about HG Wells that turns the normal, rational Myka I know into this… person.”
“You know what it is, Pete,” Myka yells back, unable to stop herself now. “You know what it’s like to be in love.”
Pete stops, mouth hanging open, whatever words he is about to say abandoned on his lips. He’s known, of course he’s known, about Myka and HG’s connection. And maybe he even might have heard their late night giggling, and, well, other noises. Hell, they both might’ve played a significant role in more than one of his fantasies. But he never, ever, expected Myka to fall in love.
“I know how crazy this is Pete, I know. But this is about more than my feelings for her. There was something else going on, pieces that don’t quite fit.” She steps toward him, her eyes silently pleading for his understanding, or at the least his cooperation. “Just let me show you what I’ve found okay? And if you still think it was nothing, then you can walk away. You can tell Artie, or Mrs. Frederic. Whoever. Just give me a chance to explain.”
He stares at her, seriously considering finding the nearest Farnsworth to call Artie. “She tried to kill me, Myka. She could have killed Kelly.”
The reminder is unnecessary; Myka is more than aware of her lover’s past deeds. She’s blamed herself for them over the past months as much as she has blamed Helena. “I know Pete, and I’m not asking you to forget that happened, but what if it wasn’t her fault? Not entirely? Wouldn’t that make a difference? Don’t you remember what it was like?”
It’s a none-too-subtle reminder of Pete’s accidental encounter with an artifact that caused vivid, and violent, hallucinations. Luckily, no one had ended up seriously injured, although not for lack of trying on Pete’s end.
“I remember,” he sighs heavily. He wants to tell her no, wants to pack everything up and pretend he’s seen nothing. But this is Myka, his partner and best friend. The one person he trusts with his life. He can’t tell her no. Reluctantly he asks, “So, what is it you think you’ve found?”
*
Hours later and they’ve found more than ten instances of Leena/Claudia sneaking into the Bronze Sector to place the headphones on HG, always with the same track player.
Pete shoves away from the desk, scavenging the last few bites of broken chips and guacamole with his fingers. “Okay, we really got to talk to Artie about upgrading the surveillance around here. No audio? Total crap.”
Myka laughs softly, rubbing at her stiff neck. Spread out in front of her are pages of hand made notes on the days, the times, all of which have been cross-checked against Warehouse activities. The sessions lasted no more than an hour, and always at times when Artie and the rest were away from the building, even if it was just for a few hours. There’s no particular pattern, just moments of opportunity, and Myka wonders how much worse things could have been if Leena could have gotten to Helena with more frequency. How much faster would MacPherson’s plan have been put into action? Would Helena even have had the strength to fight?
Pete stands up, bouncing on the balls of his feet as if he’s warming up for a fight. He even throws a few mock-punches to get the blood flowing. “Our basic theory is that HG was brainwashed by something right? Whatever it was that Leena kept making her listen to. So, we just need to figure out what that is.”
“I doubt Leena remembers, Mrs. Frederic did a clean-sweep on her mind?”
“Right, right. But there’s gotta be another way to find out right?”
Myka turns back to stare at the computer screen. “There is, but you’re not going to like it…”
Shoulders slumping in defeat, there was no other way to describe Pete’s expression but a full-on pout. “More staring at boring security footage?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll make the coffee.”
*
“Dude, you’re kidding me! There is no way Superman wins that fight.”
“I’m telling you, he can use his x-ray vision and-”
“Oh, would you two shut up?” Artie yells in frustration as they walk through the ambilical toward the control room. “Three hours I’ve had to listen to you trade barbs and tech lingo acronyms over which fictional superhero could beat another fictional superhero in a fiction battle royale. Enough! No one cares, especially me. Go ask Pete, who will probably be fascinated by this level of-”
Artie trails off, the door to the control room swinging open as he stares in horror at the scattered food containers and stacks of papers littering the room. And there, in the middle of it all, are Pete and Myka, completely asleep slumped over the desk.
“Wh-wha-what what the hell is this?”
Myka jerks awake, a piece of paper stuck to her face; Pete keeps snoring.
“Artie? What time is it?”
“What have you done to my office,” Artie demands, gesturing far and wide to the stacks of paper.
“We were, uh, just doing some research,” Myka answers weakly. When Pete snores again she nudges, then shoves him awake.
Blinking, he wipes the drool from his mouth and looks up with a grimace. “Aw, man, Dad’s home…”
“You’re damn right I am, and I still haven’t gotten an explanation.”
Pete knows that tone of voice far too well to even attempt a lie. “Well, Artie, you see… Myka had this idea and I thought…”
“No, Pete, it’s okay,” Myka jumps in, touched that Pete would try and shield her. She stands up, brushing away the paper and smoothing her hair down. “I had a hunch about something Artie, and I didn’t want to come to you until I had more evidence. I roped Pete into helping me last night, it wasn’t his fault. So if you’re going to yell at someone, yell at me.”
“I’d be more than happy to yell at you if you’d just tell me what is going on,” Artie answers cautiously. He knows Myka too well, knows her need to please authority figures, especially him. There’s only one thing that can have her this spooked: HG Wells.
“I think HG was brainwashed while she was bronzed.”
He hears the words from a distance, through the tunnel of memory that woman’s name always triggers, through the wave of emotions that cascade with them: Pain, betrayal, anger.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me if I just told you I had a hunch, so we went back through all the footage Artie, and look,” Myka holds up her stack of handwritten notes, “We found fifteen different times Leena pretended to be Claudia and snuck into the Bronze Sector to put these headphones on HG and then she played some sort of audio track for an hour each time, and-”
“Enough.” The one word cuts through Myka, slashing her to the bone. Artie needs nothing more to convey his utter disappointment in her. “You’re never going to learn, are you?”
“Artie…”
Pete steps forward protectively putting himself between Artie’s glare and Myka. “Hey, Artie, man that’s unfair…”
“Oh, don’t tell me she’s convinced you that HG Wells is redeemable.”
“No, but, she wasn’t wrong about the brainwashing thing,” Pete defends. “We saw it for ourselves on the tapes.”
“You saw what you wanted to see on those tapes. I’ll let HG Wells actions speak for themselves.”
Artie turns, remembering for the first time that Claudia and Jinks are still behind him. He shoves the artifact bag at Claudia. “See that the artifact is properly tagged and labeled.”
“Artie-” Myka calls after him to no avail, the only response his footsteps echoing back down the tunnel as he walks to the Warehouse’s main door.
Claudia gives the room a once-over in the awkward silence that follows. “Let me get this straight: you think HG was brainwashed, and you made this mess trying to prove that.” Myka nods. “I could have looked all this up with an algorithm and figured it out in about twenty minutes. You know that right?” Myka nods again. “Okay, just so we’re clear.” She looks back at Jinks and grins, “Come on Boy Wonder, we’re about to jailbreak HG.”
“Wait a second, didn’t she betray everyone, shoot Artie, try to end the world, and then get put into some sort of mystical hologram prison?”
“That’s the same girl.”
“Then why are we helping to get her out?”
“’Cause Myka loves her, duh. Catch up already, will you?”
With a quick shove to get Pete out of the way and hug for Myka, Claudia places herself in front of the computer and cracks her knuckles before she starts clacking away. With a few keystrokes she brings up the footage they have marked and then inputs a series of code no one can follow. Within five minutes they’re watching Claudia’s doppelganger backtrack through the Warehouse surveillance feed.
“How’d you do that?”
“I wrote a simple code that joined the motion detector sensors with the surveillance footage and cross-checked against someone with Leena’s basic height and weight.”
Pete and Myka give her a look. “Simple code, huh?”
Claudia just shrugs and turns back to the screen. It doesn’t take long for them to narrow down the footage to the corresponding days and times Myka has noted. They all stare at the computer, watching as the doppelganger walks down Warehouse aisles while Claudia brings up the inventory for each one.
“There - she left that aisle with the headphones!”
“Headphones… headphones… Gotcha!” With a triumphant spin of her chair Claudia pulls up the information for the only headphones in that aisle.
Pete leans over her, reading off the screen, “The sound technician’s headphones used when Leonard Cohen recorded the original version of Hallelujah… his wife had just left him and took their kids. He killed himself three days after the recording. The headphones are imbued with the depression of the song plus the despair of the sound tech’s broken heart. Use of the headphones put the wearer into a fugue state where they inevitably attempted to kill themselves or those closes to them… Ouch.”
“Look, here she is a few aisles over picking up the reel-to-reel player.”
Another series of keystrokes has Claudia shouting, “Yahtzee!”
This time it is Myka who pushes her out of the way. “This is the original recording of the Beatles Revolution 9-”
“- the Paul-is-dead song?” Jinks asks, only to be immediately shushed by the others.
“-It’s the most influential use of backmasking, phonetic reversal, and subliminal messaging in modern music,” Myka continues to read. “Apparently, when used in conjunction with this recording, a person can dub in any message they want and the listener is completely unaware of the hidden imprint. It just sounds like noise. Oh, and as a bonus - it was one of Charles Manson’s favorites.”
The team shares a collective eye-roll before Jinx clears his throat. “Okay, so I get it. You’ve got the most powerful subliminal messaging track, filtered through headphones imbued with pure despair and depression, which mixed together is enough to make someone want to end their own life… but how do we get from there to HG trying to end the whole world?”
“That’s an excellent question, Mister Jinks.” As one they turn, each of them coming full-circle to find Mrs. Frederic staring back at them. Her focus, however, is only on Myka. “Perhaps we should discuss your findings further, Agent Bering?”
Myka stares right back. “Perhaps we should.”
*
Days off at the Warehouse were few and far between, but every once in a while they managed a lazy Saturday with no impending doom. In the past, Myka had made a habit of spending those days doing as little as possible, which for her meant sleeping in past eight a.m., having a lazy breakfast, a five mile run instead of ten, and possibly a nap before curling up with a book on the porch.
Today, it was after ten and she still wasn’t out of bed. She also had no intention of leaving it.
Helena smirked as she trailed a finger lazily over Myka’s naked back. “Do you think the others have noticed?”
“Us?”
“Mmmhmm.”
Myka laughed softly. “Claudia I’m sure. And Leena. But Pete doesn’t notice anything until you hit him upside the head with it.”
“And Arthur?”
Myka sighed. “I’m sure he suspects.”
“You think he disapproves?”
“Well, we’re both Warehouse agents.”
Helena’s hand stilled on her back. “But that’s not why you think he will disapprove, is it.” Myka’s silence was all the answer she needed. “I am sorry about MacPherson,” Helena said after some time.
Myka turned over, propping herself up on her elbow. “Why did you do it?”
“He lied to me, my darling. Said awful things about you all, about Arthur. He promised me that he was my only chance for survival and after so many years of being bronzed… I couldn’t go back Myka.” Helena took a breath and closed her eyes, feeling a rage surge within her; the inexplicable need to destroy everything welling up like a rising tide waiting to crest. Myka laid a gentle hand on her cheek, her thumb ghosting over her face in a soothing caress. Another breath and the wave receded, the anger dissipated. “I had to escape Myka, I didn’t have a choice… I had to escape the Warehouse… You captured MacPherson and were a breath away from capturing me and I… it sounds trite, but I didn’t feel as if I had a choice. I could not be bronzed again. It was either him or me.”
Myka didn’t understand, not completely, but the pain in Helena’s eyes called to her, begging for forgiveness if not absolution. She leaned forward, pressing a gentle kiss to her lover’s forehead.
Helena reached up, sinking her fingers into Myka’s curls, her eyes locked on the younger woman’s. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making amends, Myka, I swear it to you. You haven’t placed your faith in me for naught.” She kissed her fervently, desperately, breaking away to whisper, “I was so lost for so long… don’t give up on me. Not now that I’ve finally found you.”
Myka’s arms came around her, pulling her close as she whispered, “I’ll never give up on you.”
Part Three