It was still early morning when Austin pulled over to a corner Starbucks and let the girl—whose real name, Alisa, he had learned just that morning—out of the car. They went through the drive-thru first, where Austin bought her some sort of sweet coffee and a doughnut. Then they sat in a parking spot as he passed her a wad of cash in a brown paper bag. He wore dark sunglasses even though it wasn’t a particularly bright day.
“Here’s a thousand,” he said with a small, forced smile. “I wanted to tip you.” She cocked her head at him curiously. Her hair was down, and her makeup was mostly gone. “Get yourself something you want.”
“Thanks, Joe,” she replied, her demeanor no longer the pretend sex kitten who had gotten into his car the night before. He was actually more attracted to this version of her. Last night, she had been all about the seduction, the promise of raw, disposable pleasure, and now a certain innocence played on her soft features. It reminded him even more of Marielle, who was innocent in so many ways, at times like a child. Austin felt like he and Marielle were both childlike, although he felt no innocence.
Alisa looked at him, her eyes brimming with genuine emotion. “Really, thank you. That was fun. You’re a nice guy, Joe. You didn’t try and hurt me or something the way a lot of those other idiots do.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry you can’t have her, whoever she is.”
“It’s fine,” he lied.
He’d rolled over that morning to find her sleeping in the nude, curled on her side facing away from him. For a moment, the world had been okay. But she—this Alisa—wasn’t her. The faded tattoo of a giant black widow on her left shoulder blade broke the illusion, since he was confident it was something Marielle never would have chosen for herself.
Still, he had pretended, reaching a hand over to stroke her right shoulder blade and drag his fingertips down the curve of her back. He’d had her again before they’d left. It had been necessary for to get him through the day with any sanity remaining. Addiction was a demon he embraced while simultaneously hating it and wanting to slay it. The problem was that deep down, he knew slaying it would mean slaying himself.
Silence.
“Maybe I’ll see you around?” she said quietly, bringing him back to the moment. He knew that even though he’d called her by a different name and made her say certain things for his benefit, she was telling the truth about him being a nice guy and all that jazz. Ultimately, though, she just wanted his money.
“Maybe,” he replied. Not likely, Alisa. Not likely.
She started to get out of his car.
“Hey, Alisa?” She turned back to him, and he pulled his sunglasses down a little so she could see his blue eyes. “Stay safe, okay? This is a dangerous job. You know that.”
She forced a soft smile and nodded, walking away with her coffee, money, and the bagged pastry in one hand and her high heels in the other.
Once she was gone, he put his face against the steering wheel for a moment and sighed heavily, gripping it and squeezing. Stop it, Austin, just stop it. You can stop anytime…
He started up the car again. “Who are you kidding? You know you’re going to do that ten more times before the end of the month,” he growled under his breath.
Then he headed off to the gym for an early morning swim, run, and shower.
***
Vincent looked up from the book he was reading and snapped it shut. The knock at the door had startled him, but he wasn’t unnerved. He stood up and went to the door, opening it. Ah… Austin.
If either of them had had a knife, one of them would surely have tried to cut the tension that was thick between them, except Vincent looked calm and controlled while Austin looked lost. He came in quietly, holding a clipboard and a pen.
“Ah, Doctor Rancor. I was wondering when you’d come to see me. Took a little longer than I thought.” Vincent stood in the center of the room; his arms crossed tightly over his chest.
Austin sighed and sat down at the desk, turning to him. “Let’s just dispense with the pleasantries, okay?”
Vincent flicked a hand. “Very well. Etes-vous sortis la nuit dernière?”
Austin narrowed his eyes at him. “Yeah, and I had fun,” he said flatly, letting Vincent take that however he pleased.
“Oh, Austin. Do you think that I am jealous?”
“I think you are a little, yeah. She forgot about you and told me she’d go out with me.”
Vincent chuckled. “She didn’t sleep with you, frère.”
Austin gave him a sardonic smirk. “How do you know?”
“Because you don’t look satisfied, mon ami. Your gloating is all fake.” The edges of Vincent’s mouth tipped a little proudly. “What was it? A… stand-in?”
Austin nodded. “Fair.” He looked down at his clipboard. “She likes you.”
“That’s not going to stop you from trying, though, is it?”
Austin shook his head.
“Don’t waste your time, mon ami.” He gave the other man a wry smile. “I know you well in the other dimension. I know her, too.”
Austin stayed silent for a moment, thinking. “Won’t you please sit?” he asked, gesturing to the bed across from him.
Vincent sat stiffly, ready for anything. He gently patted his arm, signaling that he had weapons. Austin gazed into the space before him for a moment before forcing a tight-lipped smile.
“I’m supposed to ask you all of the usual questions. How are you doing? How’s your mental state? Do you feel like you’re being taken care of? Do you think we’re all warming up to you? Do you want to be able to do more things? Are you a liar who’s using all of us?”
Vincent returned his disingenuous demeanor with a smirk. “Fine, good, yes, no, oui. I’ll leave the last one to your imagination.”
“Would you like to expand on any of that?” Austin tapped his clipboard with the tip of his pen.
“No.”
Austin scribbled something. “Would you like to talk to me about anything else?”
Vincent cocked his head, sizing him up mentally. “I’d like to talk to you about Marielle.”
Austin swallowed the dryness in his throat. It remained dry. “What about her?”
“She likes you, my friend, but it’s as a friend.”
He shrugged. “I like her as a friend, too.”
“Yes, but you want to charm her into your bed. She sees right through you, trust me.”
Austin considered that, momentarily pursing his lips. “We’ll see, I guess,” he said dismissively. A brief pause. “What do you know about Chamber?”
“Not a whole lot—or everything, depending on how you look at it.”
Austin wrote something down, tapped the pen on the clipboard a few times, then looked at the golden markings that covered Vincent’s exposed arm. “So, you really can’t take those things out of your body?” he asked, biting his bottom lip.
“Nope,” Vincent replied with a cocky smile as he leered and rubbed his hands together.
Austin narrowed his eyes at him and shook his expression off. “What?”
Vincent rubbed his fingers over his chin and smirked at him. “Just wondering when you’re going to let that mask slip even more.”
Austin set the clipboard aside and glanced around the room as if looking for microphones. Then he leaned in a little. “You said you know me on the other side?”Vincent leaned toward him a bit, too. “I know you well, mon ami.”
“And our lives—mine and my double’s—are pretty parallel?”
Vincent shrugged one shoulder. “With a few exceptions.”
“Like?”
Vincent smiled wryly. “You’re the one to worry about on that side, Austin. Not me.”
Austin cleared his throat. “What about Cory?”
A brief pause past between them. “Cory’s worse…”
Austin swallowed hard. “So, you know.” A pause. “About me, I mean.”
Vincent straightened again and turned a cheek slightly toward him. “I know everything, mon ami.”
“And what do you plan to do about it?”
“Depending on what you do… eventually kill you.” He smiled. “Or use you. We’ll see which way it goes.” He cleared his expression. “But don’t worry, Austin. You’ll have plenty of time to flirt with Marielle and try to charm her.” He let that dangle in the air for a moment before adding, “As well as every third person you meet.”
Austin took that shot and rolled on. “Just flat out threatening me…” He chuckled.
“Why not?” Vincent dropped his cavalier attitude for a moment and leaned in a bit more, locking eyes with Austin. “I have a feeling you already know exactly how savage I can be.”
Austin tucked his lips in and nodded, momentarily glancing down to the right, as if recalling something. “Okay…” He stood.
“Austin?”
He paused at the door and turned.
“Feel free to take Marielle out whenever and wherever you want,” Vincent said with a confident smile. “Vous serpent…”
Austin left without replying.
***
Marielle rushed past Vincent into his room and turned, throwing herself into his arms. He stood stunned for a moment, then embraced her.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I-I forgot about you.”
He smiled down at her as they pulled away from each other. “It’s fine, Marielle. You wanted to go out with a friend.”
Marielle bit her bottom lip nervously. “He is just a friend, Vincent.”
“Marielle,” he began as he led her to sit on the bed with him, “you are not my girlfriend.”
These words hit her strangely for some reason. She was far sadder about them than she should have been, but at the same time, the sound of the word “girlfriend” made her internally giddy, like a teenager. She wasn’t… but could she be? She tried not to wonder too hard right now.
“You can go out and have fun with whoever you want, including Dr. Rancor.”
“You told me to be careful around him.”
He curled a finger under her chin. “Oui. Have fun with him, sure. Just be careful.”
“I still feel so sorry,” she whispered.
“You don’t need to apologize to me.” He reached over as he said this and took a lock of her hair and gently slipped it behind her ear. This time, he let his fingertips graze her skin a little along the curve of her ear, and she shuddered.
“If you don’t want me to be your girlfriend… why are you touching me like that?”
There was a pause. “I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” he breathed.
A knock interrupted them, and Vincent cracked the door open. Kiritani nodded at him. “Results are in. Come with me.”
Vincent and Marielle followed him to the elevator and down to the morgue, where Liam, Barbara, and Sabine were all waiting with Kirra. Kiritani stood behind Vincent and Marielle.
“Vincent wasn’t lying. There is a slow deterioration in the cells,” Kirra explained, gesturing to the bodies. “If that hadn’t been successfully treated sometime soon, our ‘friends’ would have died in this order: Iselin first, in approximately seven years; Sasha second, in approximately nine-and-a-half; then Klara in about ten, and Jamie last in about eleven.”
Liam glanced at Barbara, and then at Sabine. “Okay, Vincent, you’re free to move about campus, and I won’t assign anyone to watch you. Do you want to stay in Room Ten?”
“If you would be so kind,” Vincent replied with a small bow.
Marielle felt herself exhale. Things made more sense now, and she also felt like she could trust Vincent a little more. “Let’s get him some clothing to rotate,” she suggested. “It’s either the suit or Valorant apparel, and one’s too formal and the other’s too casual.”
Vincent raised his hand. “I can tell you where to pick up some of my clothing, Marielle. However, I dress mostly like this.”
“Why?” Sabine asked, her tone edging on disgusted.
“I like to look good.”
Sabine scoffed and looked away. “Trust me, you don’t.”
Marielle turned to Vincent and shrugged. “I like it,” she whispered wistfully.
“Let me be clear, soldier,” Liam interjected. “I don’t mind if you move about campus—hell, I don’t mind if you walk around this entire facility from one end to the other—but I want you working on some of the things you mentioned yesterday.”
Sabine took a step toward Vincent. “You’ve made promises we expect you to keep.” She glared at Marielle. “Less flirting, more focus, thank you.”
Vincent nodded his agreement, and Marielle’s heart sank. She wanted to be with him more, not less. “Where would you like me to start?”
“We all know how hard this has been for… Start with John,” Sabine replied, then left the room abruptly.
It was obvious to the others that she was unable to contain her emotions on this matter, but no one would confront her about it. They would simply continue to support her in whatever way they felt they could.
Liam nodded and looked to Vincent. “You said you might be able to help him. That’s a problem we’ve been trying to work out for over five years.” He sighed and rubbed the space between his eyes. “The entire facility had issues after we lost Morgan, and John…” He shook his head, his voice trailing off.
Vincent nodded. “I can help him, although I can’t fix him. The radianite has done what it’s going to do. He’ll never be normal again, but…” He tilted his head one way, then the other. “I can make his life more normal. Stable.”
“What do you need, Mr. Fabron?” Barbara asked, opening her laced hands for a moment.
“Klara.”
***
Kirra led Vincent and Marielle to the isolation room at the back of the lab where John was being kept.
“We’ll need you to wear a mask, and Marielle can’t go in,” she explained. “He can’t stand much light, so we use filtered light in the room at the lowest frequency he can handle.” Kirra stopped at the control panel. “What are you going to do in there?”
“Just assess him first,” Vincent replied.
Kirra took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then nodded and pressed a few buttons. Vincent donned the paper mask she handed him. Marielle gave his hand a squeeze before he went in.
It took a moment for Vincent’s eyes to adjust to the light, then he slowly approached the giant blue eyes staring at him, which blurred into a full body as his vision became clearer.
John looked him over. “You…” he rasped in that distant, detached voice. “I see you in my dreams.”
“I know, my friend. I see you too.”
Vincent leaned over John and put a hand on his arm to examine his condition. His hand slid through John’s skin, which phased around his fingers and turned to dust as Vincent pulled his own fingers through it. Then it reappeared. Vincent lifted his hand in front of his face and rubbed his fingertips and thumb together, testing the residue John’s body had left behind. It dissipated quickly.
“What do you remember?”
“Very little, if anything,” John replied. There was a pause as Vincent leaned down and studied the smoke appearing and disappearing over his body. “How many times was I torn apart and put back together?”
“You’re being torn apart and put back together now, my friend,” Vincent replied tenderly. Then he looked over at the monitors printing out readings and went to them, glancing them over. “I’m going to try and stabilize you.”
***
Vincent emerged from the room about twenty minutes later, and looked at Klara, Kirra, and Marielle. “Okay, that’s bad,” he deadpanned. Then he stood straight, smoothed his vest down, hitched his tie up, and turned to Klara. He began to list the items he needed and question her on certain formulas using a ton of scientific jargon Marielle didn’t understand.
Luckily, Klara knew what he was talking about. She grinned. “I see where you’re going with this. I like it.”
Kirra turned to Klara, her face lighting up with realization. “I mean, we didn’t even consider that angle.”
“Right,” Klara said, scratching her head under her beanie. “We’ve just been trying to fix him.”
“And it’s an endlessly painful process for him. He’s not fixable,” Vincent said almost curtly. “Start there. The moment you accept that he will never be his original self again, as he has, that’s when the next solutions will come.”
Klara nodded and began giving instructions to her assistants. The entire lab went into action.
“What do you need from me?” Marielle asked, following behind him as he went.
“Nothing at the moment. You can stay for now if you want, but I might need some time alone.”
That stung a little, but she knew he hadn’t meant it to. “Understood.” She bit her lip, thinking. “I just…”
“You wanted to spend some more time together,” he finished for her.
She flushed. “Yeah.” The memory of the pearl necklace Vincent had given his wife hung in the air between them as they gazed at one another.
“Me too,” he said with a soft smile. Then he turned and headed for the nearest table, and began to talk to Klara.
Things looked like they were taking off, so Marielle decided to go check her schedule for the day.