The agents are on the case. Cheyenne’s murder was a terrible tragedy, but in
the end, it hasn’t changed anything. They still need to find Meredarchos,
who is hiding out in Andile’s former body, and they still don’t know where
he’s going. His motives are difficult to understand, to say the least. Why
sneak into the Lofts, and how did he do it? Why kill her? For the Insulator
of Life? If he’s as powerful as he sounds, death is probably not something
he’s really ever had to worry about.
Angela calls Leona, Mateo, and Ramses into the security room. She’s been
studying the footage, and might not have slept last night. At first, she was
focused on making sure that Ramses didn’t do anything, or his body, anyway.
After she cleared his name, though, she apparently wanted to go back
through, and look more closely at the feeds. “How did he get in the
building?” she poses.
“We don’t know. How?” Leona asks right back.
“I’ve seen every frame from every camera,” Angela begins, “and he doesn’t.
He doesn’t step one foot in this place.”
“Okay... Do you need to sleep?”
“I’m fine, I’ve had some coffee,” Angela says. Coffee indeed, the trashcan
is full of coffee pods. She takes another sip from her current cup of the
stuff. “The reason I didn’t see him enter the building is because he was
already inside.” She switches the monitors to the feeds from the fifteenth
of this month, which is the day Rothko broke out of the blacksite,
and—probably unintentionally—freed Meredarchos. It is here where they see
him pick the lock on the side door, and enter the building. “I looked into
the operation records from SD6. He came straight here. He knew exactly where
we lived and worked, and he knew exactly what he wanted to do.”
“What did he want to do?” Mateo asks.
Angela begins to step through the timeline. They see Meredarchos walk right
up to the lab, let himself in using a badge that shouldn’t exist, and which
he definitely shouldn’t have, then approach the Insulator of Life. He
touches the top of it, and disappears in a flash of life.”
“Where did he go?” Alyssa asks. She wasn’t in the room before.
“That I don’t know,” Angela answers, all jittery. She tries to take another
desperate sip, but Mateo takes it away from her.
“Okay, that’s enough.”
“Whatever, you can’t control me, I’ll just wait until you leave. Now, that’s
not the interesting part. Here’s the interesting part.” She jumps back to
the feed from two days ago, dragging one particular camera over to the main
screen, so they can see it better that’s showing the outside of that side
door. “Okay, so watch her—I mean him—leave.” Meredarchos does indeed leave
the building, and walk out of frame. “Right quick, look at the distant
viewer...there. Did you see that? His arm—well, I mean, Andile’s arm—appears
in frame for a second, and then he goes back out. So it looks like he’s
leaving, right? Wrong. He comes back. Now, we don’t see him coming back, but
I know that he did. Because look at this camera.” She switches to the
loading dock camera, where nothing happens. “Uhuh. See it right? Right?”
“See what?” Mateo questions. “Nothing happened.”
“Run it again,” Leona asks, leaning forward, and squinting at the screen.
Angela nods. “Okay.” She does so. “There! Aaaaaand there! And there, and
there, and there.”
“Yeah, I see it,” Leona acknowledges.
“I see it too,” Ramses says. Of course the three smartest people in the room
see what the other two don’t.
“What is it?” Alyssa asks them.
“There’s a leaf on the pavement. The wind picks up, and pushes it maybe a
centimeter to the left. It’s barely noticeable, but it’s there. And it keeps
repeating. This footage is on a loop. In fact, it loops the same five
seconds over and over again for twenty-five minutes. That’s enough time to
step out of the blindspot, and into the dock through the regular door.”
“I thought that’s why you guys put those lava lamps all over the place,”
Alyssa points out. “Don’t they prevent loops from happening?”
“There are none outside. It’s not a mistake,” Leona tells her. “We made a
conscious decision to not put them on the exterior.” Having lamps on the
outside would draw too much attention. It seemed safer to assume that anyone
wishing them harm from the outside, would try to make their way inside,
where cameras would be waiting. That seemed good enough...unless they had
explosives. “They would look suspicious. People would be asking why the hell
they’re out there.”
“So, what does this mean?” Mateo poses. “Meredarchos snuck in here to kill
Cheyenne for the thing he already had in his possession a week ago?”
“It’s all about Erlendr,” Leona realizes. “He knew that he wouldn’t be able
to keep Ramses’ body forever, because we would figure it out, and we would
spend untold resources to get him back if he escaped with it again, so he
came up with a plan to get himself into Andile’s body, which is extra, and
thusly less important. Because apparently Meredarchos has the ability to
store full substrates in the Insulator, which we were to understand is not
something it’s capable of.”
“So both Meredarchos and Erlendr are in Andile’s body?” Alyssa guesses.
“Either that, or Meredarchos just took the Insulator with plans to use it on
some other poor unsuspecting soul later,” Leona suggests.
“That doesn’t explain why he came back into the building,” Angela reminds
her. “What did he need in the basement? We swept the whole place, nothing
was taken.”
“You didn’t sweep everything,” Ramses reveals solemnly.
“What are you talking about?” Leona asks.
“Okay, don’t get mad, but I found something in the basement when we first
got here that I decided to keep secret in case I needed to store hazardous
materials. I don’t have all my memories of when Erlendr was in my head, but
I get fragments back. I think he put something in there.”
“Something, like what?”
“Something like...Trina’s body?”
“Oh my God,” Alyssa exclaims.
They all take a field trip to the basement to see whether what Ramses
believes is true. He remembers digging in the dirt, and coming down here
with something approximately human-sized, so he just put two and two
together. Now he needs proof. He removes the false panel, and opens the
secret refrigerator door, but they don’t find Trina’s body in there.
Instead, they see Andile’s.
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