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BEFORE
— - —
They were crammed into the small, dingy motel room - Devin sitting in a corner idly perusing an anarchoblog on his laptop, Sam sitting on the bed drying her hair, Karl sitting in the window watching cars pass on the dark street below them and Jacob relaxing on the other bed, eating a sandwich. They had the television on, but none of them were watching. Every so often they would hear footsteps in the hallway and all stop what they were doing until the sound disappeared around the corner. It was after one of these pauses that Devin broke the silence.
“Jacob,” he asked, closing his laptop and kicking up his feet, “you said you were alive during the Schism, right?”
Jacob grunted.
“First of all, that’s still crazy. Second, why did the Schism happen in the first place?”
The older man stopped chewing and swallowed. “Ideological quibbles.”
Karl rolled his eyes and Devin pouted. “No, seriously,” Devin said. “It didn’t seem like the Council had been around that long. What could’ve happened in such a short amount of time to cause a rift like that?”
Jacob set his sandwich down on the bedside table. “There was a profound disagreement from the beginning about what the Council had to offer. Back then we had this enemy, see - we called them Abbadon. We were led to believe the Abbadon was this group of desperate, hostile reality benders that were attacking our storehouses to loot our artifacts. The threat of Abbadon showing up on our doorstep everyday led us away from just researching and containing anomalies - suddenly we were concerned with protecting ourselves. Reaching outside our bounds.”
He took a drink from a can on the table. “We began a project to build this thing, this eigenweapon, that we could use to end Abbadon once and for all. Hudson Theodore, the First Consulate, he was in charge of the occult research that went into developing the rituals we used to bind unparalleled power to a word, a word that could be used to annihilate anything in the universe in an instant with nothing more than a thought. We-”
He paused as another set of footsteps proceeded past the door with little incident.
“We did something,” he continued, “during the development of that weapon, that was truly heinous. I am convinced there is no greater sin than the one we committed to create that perfect gun, and I am half convinced the Consulates only signed that deal with Death to avoid the fires of Hell we’re all now destined for.”
He paused again and took another drink. “Anyway, we were fooled. Abbadon was an excuse, one perpetrated by the Administrator to, for the first time, create an anomaly. Give form to something that had not existed before we started. We succeeded, but at a terrible cost. The Schism was a result of the two lingering factions after that event - those who believed that creating that weapon was a net good, and those who believed it was a net evil. The ones who stayed thought that the ends justified what we had done, and that creating that weapon had created a safer world. Myself and several others rightly believed that we had done something unspeakable, and that the Council couldn’t continue to exist. That it was rotten to its core.”
Devin pondered this for a moment. “What happened to that weapon?”
“They buried it,” he said without hesitation. “It could only be activated with the word, and the only person who knew what that word was defected with us. Ivan Hilohiko, The Engineer, the man who is currently the Fifteenth Consulate. When they realized they couldn’t use it anymore, they split up its component parts to keep them from being activated, and he could never use it again - word or otherwise.”
“What caused the defection, then?” Sam asked, scrubbing at her face with a washcloth. “What made Ivan Hilohiko go back?”
“Arrogance and lust,” he spat. “They called with a better offer and he picked up the phone.”
He leaned back against the thin, dingy pillows. “When we defected, Ivan Hilohiko killed the Administrator, thinking that would be the end of the Council. But the Administrator was just one man, and the Council was much more decentralized than it is today. The difference between then and now is a matter of scale. The Council of today has fully realized itself, and its core is less a connection of a few veins and more its bleeding, beating heart. There is power in the directors and everything, but true authority rests with the Consulates. When they’re gone, the Council will be a snake without its head.”
He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Karl slid the window open slightly more in response and shot him a look.
“And more than that,” he continued, “you’ve probably heard that all of the Council’s sites and storehouses sit on top of nuclear devices - a last chance option if something terrible happens. They’re not under every site, but they are under most. At 909-Site-100, there is a system in place that will activate when there is only one Consulate left, a command that goes out to arm all of those bombs. If we get there and kill Ivan Hilohiko, we can use that system to destroy everything - the sites, the anomalies, all of it. We’ll still have work to do, but we’ll have trumped them.”
Karl was looking at him from the corner of his eye. “How do you know this exists?”
“I designed it,” Jacob said. “We didn’t have nuclear weapons when I designed it, but the concept is the same. You could even do it from his desk. One button, and poof - it’s all gone.” He picked his sandwich back up and nodded. “That’s our play. That’s how we do it.”
NOW
— - —
“Once upon a time, a man awoke to find he had no memory of who he was or how he had gotten here.”
Sam snuck out to the studio’s balcony and plucked the pale, slim cigarette out from behind her ear. She was fishing in her pocket for a lighter when she heard the door behind her slide open.
“Y’know, those things’ll kill you.” Devin Krieg did not look like the sort of man who was accustomed to a suit and tie. He wore them as if they were prison fatigues. “I should know,” he added, showing her a half-empty pack of gum.
“Devin!” Sam’s slim figure slipped up against him with the grace of a small, elegant knife. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tight. Despite having kicked the habit five years ago, the old man still managed to smell like tobacco.
Devin dropped an enormous arm around her and gave her a comforting pat. They ended up leaning against the banister, side-by-side. It wasn’t quite morning, yet; below them, the city streets were cast in a tangerine glow. A cool, lethargic breeze drifted past them, carrying the ocean's scent.
“I’m glad you made it,” Sam told him. She finally pulled out her lighter. It was a cheap hunk of neon green plastic she had picked up on the way to the exhibition. After a few swipes of her thumb, it only managed to spit out sparks.
“Here.” Devin plucked the lighter out of her hand as if he was taking away a dangerous toy. He produced his own; it was an old, tarnished thing made of brass. It had more dents in it than he did. “And I wouldn’t miss this for the world, lady. Even if it is Paris.”
Sam rolled her eyes. Devin's lighter produced a flame on the first flick; she dipped her head down to bring her cigarette to the fire’s tip. “Spare me. I know you think this is all artsy fartsy crap.”
“Well, alright, can’t say I ‘get’ the Madonna made out of cottage cheese.”
Sam gave him a look. “You don’t like it?”
Devin did a brief double-take. “Wait, that one’s - yours? I mean, uh…”
She grinned. “No. I’m kidding. That one’s shit; the guy who made it is a hack.” She turned back to the city, taking a long drag. When she exhaled, wisps of smoke whirled up from her nostrils and licked at the bottom of the balcony overhead. “How’s Karl?”
“Doing good. He told me to tell you he’s sorry he couldn’t come, but—”
“Busy. I know. Fuck, I know.” Sam closed her eyes. “There’s just so much going on, now.”
“Yeah. I don’t think any of us really expected…” Devin's voice trailed off. “They needed the Vassal more than we realized. Once they lost her, they lost all their research on other realties — everything just started unraveling. Personnel started panicking, sites started collapsing - fuck, two Consulates ended up dead that night.”
Something tugged at the back of Sam’s mind; something she was forgetting. “How many sites are left, now?”
“Still about two hundred. We decommissioned Site-127 last week. Nothing in it but corpses and cockroaches.” He shook his head. “Just ordinary cockroaches.”
Sam turned to him. For the first time in a long while, he looked old - old and tired. The wrinkles in his face were carved deep into his skin; his eyes were surrounded by dark, impenetrable circles.
She felt that tug again. “How are you holding up?”
“It’s funny,” Devin told her, still watching the city. “You spend your life fighting demons, putting out fires - thinking this is the hard part. This is the work that needs doing. This is the work that’ll kill you. But it’s not.” His eyes met hers. “Sweeping up the ashes - putting shit back together again. That’s the hard part.”
She frowned. The tugging was harder, now.
“Don’t get me wrong. Things’re better, now.” He gave her a weary smile. “We don’t have to hurt people. We don’t have to kill people. We don’t have to mutilate children to hold back the nightmares.” His eyes drifted back to the city.
Sam closed her eyes. “Devin…”
“I don’t know how the hell we did it, but we won. The world’s… it’s still fucked up. When I go to sleep, I still have nightmares, y’know? But every night, it gets a little better. The nightmares are losing.”
She reached into her pocket and searched for something, pulling it free.
“Anyway, fuck - sorry, I’m just ranting. Listen, Sam. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask y—”
Sam slammed all 4 inches of the sleek, razor-sharp crafting knife into Devin Krieg’s heart. For one instant, the old man’s eyes were filled with raw confusion and shock. Then - stumbling back, numbly clutching at the hilt - his eyes were filled with nothing at all.
“I’m sorry,” Sam whispered. She pushed him over the banister’s edge.
And the world ended.
NOW
— - —
“Suddenly, a voice spoke to the man: ‘Your second wish has been granted. Now, for your third — and final — wish.’”
“-up. C’mon, c’mon, wake the hell up-”
Slivers of light squeezed through Sam’s eyelids. She felt a constant buzzing in her ears.
Someone was tugging at her arms.
“Wake up, wake up—”
She popped her eyes open and immediately regretted it. Sharp, jagged sunbeams rushed into her pupils, forcing her to squint. Sam squeezed one fist into her left socket and started rubbing away. “What… where am I?”
The man stopped shaking her and slumped down into a chair. “Fuck. Thank God.”
Sam kept rubbing at her eye, letting her vision adjust. She was laying back on a bed inside of a cheap motel room. The overpowered AC rumbled to her left; above it, sunlight streamed in past the curtains. The room smelled faintly of coconut oil.
Devin was seated beside the bed. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His laptop was sitting on the nightstand, with a pistol laid out next to it.
Sam blinked her way through the grogginess. “Devin? What’s—”
“How much do you remember?”
Sam squeezed her eyebrows together; they grinded like cogs in some enormous adding machine. She tried to think her way through the events that had led her here. The last thing she remembered was…
“I was having some sort of dream. You were there, but it was — years from now. It was all wrong. Not real. It felt real, but…”
Devin nodded. “Something was off, right?”
“Yeah.” Sam closed her eyes and coaxed the dream out from its hiding place in her subconscious. “You didn’t smoke, but you had a lighter. We were in Paris, but we could smell the ocean. And the more I thought about it…”
“The more you realized it was a lie.”
She nodded and opened her eyes. Devin was focused on his laptop.
“I don’t know how, but somehow I realized the only way out of it was to—”
“Yeah.” Devin cut her off. He was taking great pains to not make eye-contact with her. “I know.”
Sam frowned, sitting up on the bed. “Devin? Do you… uh, want to talk about—”
“It’s fine. We’re out of it, now.” He was pulling a file up on the computer. “You don’t remember how we got here, right?”
Sam shook her head. “No.”
“Same here. Luckily, I think we planned for this.” He double-clicked something. The laptop’s screen was filled with a still-image of Karl’s face. His stoic expression stared out at them; behind him, they could see what looked like an office. “Karl loaded a video on Alexandra, along with instructions to play it if we found ourselves, uh… not remembering anything about how we got here.”
Sam scooted forward to sit on the edge of the bed beside Devin. He clicked ‘Play’.
A window popped up over the video, requesting two passwords. Over one was the name ‘DEVIN’; over the other was the name ‘SAMANTHA’.
“It’s encrypted?” Sam asked. She frowned, staring at the screen.
“I guess. I don’t remember… I mean, there’s a password I might have used,” Devin said, typing something under his name. As soon as he hit enter, his name turned green. He glanced back to her.
Sam bit down on her bottom lip, thinking.
“Sam?”
Something tugged at the back of her mind.
Without stopping to think, she snatched Devin’s pistol off the nightstand and buried three rounds directly into his skull.
And then the world ended.
NOW
— - —
“The man considered this for a moment, and — seeing no other choice — made his final wish: ‘Allow me to remember all that I have forgotten.’”
“Sam?”
Sam opened her eyes. She was laid back on a cot inside of a small, comfortable looking office. There was a bookcase stuffed full of leather-bound volumes; in front of it, there was a wide, polished desk.
Karl was standing over her. He looked distant — when didn’t he? — but his expression carried a hint of concern.
Sam immediately slammed her knee up into his solar plexus.
Karl buckled, crouching forward. She rolled off the cot and stumbled toward the desk, fumbling for the hidden latch under one of the drawers. Sam had been in this office a hundred times before; if memory served, there was a hidden space right… here.
By the time Karl had managed to catch his breath, Sam was pointing the pistol straight for his heart.
Karl raised his hands up and took a step back. “Sam…”
“Shut up.” She narrowed her eyes. “Let me think.”
Karl said nothing.
“Someone’s fucking with my head. I’ve gone through two iterations, now. Two with Devin, none with Jacob since he’s dead. Each time, they were trying to get information from me,” she said, talking her way through it. “Each time, I realized there was something wrong. A detail out of place. Devin had a lighter. His computer — he calls it ‘Alexander’, not ‘Alexandra’. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized…”
Karl started to lower his hands. “Sam, listen—”
“I said shut up,” she snapped back. “Alright. Each time, it all started unraveling once I realized something was wrong. Each time, I realized the only way to escape was to…” Her breathing quickened.
Karl took another step back.
“I have to kill you,” she whispered.
“Sam. Just, okay, just take it easy. Let’s talk this through, alright?”
“I have thought this through. Devin, now you — you’re just another dream. Another…” She pursed her lips. “Lie. Liars have other identities. Chimeras. The Chimera. You’re the fucking Chimera.”
“Sam.” Karl’s tone took on a building urgency. “Please, listen to me. You might be right. Someone might be messing with your head. But it’s not me. I’m not the Chimera.”
“Then how the fuck…” Her finger curled tighter around the trigger.
“Listen. Just listen, okay? You were helping me with research. You fell asleep in my office. Now you wake up, and you’ve pulled a gun on me.“ Karl kept his arms held high. “You said these things unraveled when you noticed something wrong. Have you…?”
Sam scowled. “Not yet. But…” Her eyes traced their way through the office. It all looked like it was supposed to; unlike the previous two dreams, this was all familiar to her. But did that mean…?
“You said it started with a dream about Devin, then Devin again. Think about it: If I were the Chimera, would I really start with Karl, next?”
Sam’s breathing slowed. Nothing was out of place; nothing felt off…
“Once is happenstance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern,” Karl told her. “I think the Chimera is trying to trick you into killing me.”
Her grip on the trigger loosened.
“You said he was trying to get information from you. What kind of information?”
“I… with Devin, I don’t know. He said he needed to ask me something. With Devin again, it was a password, I think, but…”
“A password?”
Sam lowered the pistol, but kept a firm grip. “Yeah.” She forced herself to breathe slowly. “Okay. Okay. Just… give me a second, okay?”
Karl slowly lowered his hands, but kept his distance. “Alright. But yeah, this doesn’t make any sense. You don’t know any passwords that the Chimera would want. He didn’t ask you about anything else?” He paused, then added: “He didn’t ask about your copy of the journal, right? You still have it?”
Sam shook her head. “No, he didn’t — yeah. I still have it.” She reached with her free hand to touch the base of her wrist; the faint, familiar lump was still present. “The journal is right here.”
The Chimera smiled. “So it is.”
And then the world ended.
NOW
— - —
“‘Funny,’ the voice laughed, granting the man’s final wish. ‘That was the first thing you asked for.’”
Sam’s mouth felt like it was coated in a thin layer of dissolving chalk. It left the faint flavor of peppermint lingering on her tongue.
She forced her eyes open, then immediately closed them. Bright, glaring lights beamed straight down into her retina — the throbbing pressure behind her temple intensified.
She was in a hospital room somewhere. Sam didn’t even need to look around to know that; she could just feel it. She hated hospitals. Counting backwards from ten, she eased her eyes open and gave them time to adjust.
Yep. It was a medical facility, alright — and she was strapped down to the bed. Good times. Several pieces of sterile, complicated equipment were placed next to her. Most of them were making beeping noises. She lifted her head as high as the nylon straps allowed, trying to get a lay of the land.
A nurse and a doctor laid face-down on the floor. Pools of crimson crept out from under them. An older woman in an immaculate white suit was seated nearby; she held a gun. Her gaze was on Sam.
Sam blinked. She was wrong; it was a young man with a neon green mohawk. He wore a studded jacket splattered with something wet. In his left hand, he clutched a blood-soaked switch-blade.
She blinked again. It was a person of indeterminable gender; their skin was a deep shade of ochre, with a face full of piercings. They wore several leather straps around what looked like a charcoal binder. Instead of a knife, they held an aluminum baseball bat. It was coated with clumps of hair and meat.
She blinked again. A man with teeth like serrated steak knives and claws that could carve through steel. She blinked again. It was Devin. She blinked again. It was Jacob. She blinked again. It was Karl.
She blinked again.
It was the Chimera.
“How’s that cut feeling?”
Sam looked down at her wrist. A fresh series of stitches criss-crossed over a recently opened wound; it extended from the base of her palm to nearly the inside of her elbow. A distant memory tugged at the back of her mind.
She licked her lips and lied. “It… doesn’t hurt that much.”
“Still. Make sure to keep it covered. Antibiotics, too.” The left side of the Chimera’s mouth twitched upward. “They would have prescribed something for it, but I’m afraid I killed them before they had the opportunity.”
“Who…” Sam’s eyes fell to the figures on the floor. “What’s going on? Who are they?”
“They worked for me, and we captured you,” the Chimera told her. “You were brought to me for… processing. To discover what you knew; to determine if you had the journal. Or, at the very least, if you knew what was in it.” Their lips pursed with amusement. "You know, after all this time I had forgotten it ever existed. When the agent who penned it defected and told us what it contained, you'd have thought we might have taken steps to make its contents untrue. But… we are nothing if not creatures of habit."
Sam couldn’t remember anything after they killed the Vassal. The Chimera must have noticed her confusion: “You’ve been amnesticized. Several times, actually. Did you know that’s my primary function within the Council? To maintain the veil. To make sure no one remembers anything they’re not supposed to.”
They tapped the weapon against their thigh. “And, of course, to replace those gaps with convincing lies.”
“Why am I still alive? Why are we even having this conversation?”
“Because you and your friends accounted for this. Because you did have the journal. Or, at least, a small piece of it. A subdermal flash-drive, located under your wrist.”
“I don’t understand.”
The Chimera smiled. Although Sam could no longer recognize their features, she could still make out the weariness in their face. “Not all cognitohazards are anomalous.”
The code-phrase flashed through Sam’s mind. It was as if she had just found the piece of a puzzle she hadn’t even realized she was solving. An image surged into her memories; she now remembered everything.
“You used to be one of us,” she whispered. “You used to be part of the Insurgency. You were part of the third Delta - I've heard the late Jacob talk about you. Jean… Jean-Luc Dubois - they always talked about how you were tortured by the Council for weeks for your secrets and never gave up a word. I don't… I don't understand.”
The Chimera closed their eyes and nodded. “That's true, but I didn't give up my memories because there were no memories to give up."
They sighed. "I was deployed to locate an anomaly in the Bengal Sea. Our ship capsized in a storm and I was dragged into the ocean when my leg got caught in some netting. I drifted in the darkness where the eyes are empty and sunk into the Void. They found me, months later, and the Council recognized who I was - what I could do. They gave me to the Mercenary - that witch - and he gave me a new identity; a lie to believe in.” They opened their eyes and rose to their feet, approaching Sam. “Your friend Karl found out from the journal no doubt, that clever boy. Your copy only had that entry in it - the entry containing my name. Seeing it for the first time in so many years… it was like coming up from under water after so long.”
The Chimera began unbinding Sam’s limbs. “I’ve cleared a path to the front entrance. It will be open for another ten minutes; once you’re out, you’ll find a grey van in the parking lot. The doors are unlocked; the keys are in the glove compartment. You’ll find instructions, a map, and a flash-drive.”
“A flash-drive?” Sam sat up, feeling her extremities tingle with the sudden surge of blood. Her forearm pulsed with pain.
“It contains crucial data — including the location of your next target. The Terrorist.” The Chimera stepped back. “Out of all of us, he may be the easiest one. Tell your friends that he’s not much of a threat.”
Sam nodded, swinging her legs around. She sank to the floor. “…what about you?”
“What about me?” the Chimera asked, and then they laughed. “I'm not faultless in this. I may have forgotten my purpose, but it was still me in there making those decisions, doing the things I did. There's nothing left for me out there - if the Council doesn't kill me immediately, I'll spend the rest of my life running from them because of what I know - and I'm not about to run from the truth. The truth has set me free.” They sank back into their chair, laying their weapon across their lap. “Move fast. Your window is closing.”
Sam reached out to touch the Chimera’s hand. They did not look up. Turning to go, she spared one last look at them; for a moment, she thought she might have recognized a face. Then, she made her way out into the hall and toward the exit.
It wasn’t until she reached the stairwell that she heard that single, lonely shot.
- BACK -
