Participants:
| Scene Title | Unveiled |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | I know what time is, time is a thief. It'll steal into your bed and rob you while you sleep. |
| Date | July 8, 2021 |
Silas Mackenzie finds himself wanting a cigarette.
Not that he has one. Not that he'd smoke it if he did. After all, he's been given some very good medical advice about not smoking, and he doesn't intend to ignore it… but if you shake a man enough, old habits can start to rattle around like so many sets of weathered bones, and between the bombshells getting lobbed about like a conversational World War III, the earliness of the hour, and the events of the previous day, it's hard to say that things lately have been particularly stable.
Out of all of it, though, the mention of the four names Glory had dropped is what's shaken him the most. One of them in particular — Daniel Linderman. A man that another version of Silas Mackenzie had known all too well… but a name that someone from this world shouldn't know.
Glory's voice draws him out of his own thoughts, his gaze settling on her; her odd choice of words takes a moment for him to parse, then he smirks faintly. "Primal," he replies, not without a bit of deadpan amusement — that particular bit of slang has never really fit him well, but it's entertaining to trot it out now and again. Maybe it'll buy him a bit of time to gather his scattered thoughts.
Glory hustles up to Silas’ longer-legged stride, adjusting the strap of her duffel bag over her shoulder as she does. “Don’t wanna delay you from the whole trial business, just wanted to uh, ask you something.” She glances Silas up and down, then quickly looks over her shoulder before returning her attention to him.
“You got all bug-eyed there when Daniel Linderman’s name came up,” Glory notes, adjusting the strap of her duffle bag again. “You know him or somethin’?”
"Did I?" Silas asks, lips twisting into a frown. "Hrm. Fair enough, I guess — hearin' that name did kinda throw me for a loop. Normally I try not to show when I'm rattled… but in my defense, it's been a long couple days," he chuckles, his gaze fixed ahead of him, but his stride slowing a bit to let Glory keep a more comfortable pace, walking side by side. And it was a firm shaking that name gave me.
"Oh. Speakin' of," he says, looking over to Glory. "Before it slips my mind — you, on the bus. Jumpin' right through the side, gettin' out there and drawing fire? Wasn't on my bingo card, but that was brave as hell," he adds, nodding once in respect before turning his gaze ahead again.
"But you wanted to know about Danny Linderman," Silas says, mouth drawing tight as he returns to the subject at hand. "The truth is… I've never met him. But I've seen some of his handiwork. Over where Richard and his group came from," he says. He falls silent again. "I'm just… boggled, I guess, that he was one of the four names you brought up. Who stopped the Flood, I mean… because up until now, I'd thought that his existence made the world worse. It sure made my life worse, judging by the version of me running around over there — far as I can tell, that was the big difference between us. He met Linderman. I never did, because as far as I could tell he never existed over here."
Now he pauses, looking back over to Glory. "So how do you know about him?"
“History,” Glory admits. “He was dead and gone before I was even born. But people like that cast long shadows, their influence… It's important.” She stops walking, slowing down enough to look Silas up and down. “I know that’s probably got more than a few questions spinning in your head, but when I say I can’t answer them I mean it, and I’m sorry.”
Glory steps in front of him, tilting her head to the side. “But when I say people cast long shadows, I was talking about you, too. Or, a version of you. One with a more colorful name.” Her brows pinch together slightly. “This might be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to ask a question, if you’d let me.”
Silas frowns in puzzlement at Glory's answers; when she heads him off at the pass on asking further questions, his expression shades sour… and the allusion to Redd only sees it sour further. He regards Glory for a moment in general dissatisfaction, his gaze sharp, weighing… but for all the mysteries around Glory, she'd shown what kind of person she is during the ambush: someone whose first impulse is to protect. Someone brave enough to put herself in the line of fire to do that.
Someone worthy of trust.
So for all that she's tangled in some thorny and alarming business… he sighs in exasperation and half-heartedly throws up his hands. "Fine. I'll sit on my questions," he grumbles with a disaffected wave of his hand.
Then he schools his expression into something at least a little less grumpy; if nothing else, this is a not-unwelcome distraction from the thorny business of Gracie's judgment. "What's your question?" he asks. "No promises as to bein' able to give you a satisfactory answer, but I can try."
“Two.” Glory clarifies, slowing her pace so as to give them enough road between here and there to ask them. “First, I’m just… spitting in the wind here. Taking a wild shot because of your proximity to Linderman in one lifetime versus your absence in this one.” She holds her hands apart about a foot. “Have you ever seen a knife, about this big, with a wavy blade? Not like, in a book, but in person? Probably looks really old, might not even be sharp anymore.”
Silas's pace slows in turn, his lips again curling into a frown as he considers the question carefully. "You mean like a kris?" Silas asks, brow furrowed as he thinks for a moment. "No. Can't say as I have. I was kinda hoping to pick up something like that overseas — not a museum piece, I mean, but…" he trails off, shaking his head. "Sorry, no." He wants to ask why, but restrains himself. "What else you got?"
Glory’s brows furrow, dark eyes cast to the side and attention focused off the road to bushes blowing in the wind. She breathes in deeply through her nose, lets the smell of pollen and sweet grass linger before exhaling.
“How well do you know Eve?” Glory asks, visibly hesitant to even bring up her name. “Do you trust her?”
Silas is silent for a moment. "I've known Eve a long time. Mad Eve, anyway. Met her way back when, when I was just a rogue repairman bumming around the Pelago. Circling the drain…" he says, his gaze going distant for a moment. Seems like a lifetime ago, he muses… and in some ways it was. "Probably would've wound up drinking myself into the sea eventually… but Mad Eve took an interest in me. Hell if I know why, maybe my socks were the perfect size for the clothing golem or whatever it was she was putting together…" he says, and despite everything he surprises himself by laughing at that.
The amusement fades quickly though. "She kept headhunting me until eventually I signed on with her crew just to get her to settle down. But… it worked out well, in the end. Probably saved my life," he says distantly. "No… definitely saved my life. Several times over."
His gaze shifts back to the here and now, resting on Glory. "So yeah. I knew Mad Eve pretty well. And I trusted her. Now this Eve," Silas says, frowning thoughtfully. Then he chuckles. "I suppose I can speak a little more candidly for someone who knows about Danny Linderman. I first met Eve at Sunspot. Same place I first met Richard, come to that. Over on the other side of the Looking Glass. She was helping to open the gate from that side, so we'd have a place to land when we leapt through the portal to get out of the Ark, when it was melting down. I saw her die there… not that that did much more than slow her down, seems like, because she ended up saving my life again later when I did something rash. Of course, she was also the one who organized the expedition that ended with me back here, so…" he trails off with a grimace.
For a moment longer Silas is silent, thinking. "I see echoes of Mad Eve in her. But she's wilder, more chaotic; a ball of lightning instead of a fire. I think… when the chips are down, you can count on her to do what she thinks is right. Whatever that may be." And therein, of course, lays the rub.
He looks to Glory. "And on this one, I am gonna ask. Why?"
Glory stops walking, nostrils flared, eyes focused on the long road ahead. She’s silent for a moment, but her stillness shows she isn’t running from the answer.
“Because I know her too,” Glory finally offers, blinking a look up at Silas. “Not her, not Mad Eve, but… another her.” She swallows nervously, not realizing she’s moving her hand to an empty knife sheath on her hip until her fingertips touch it. “But I don’t know if I can trust her, and…” Glory looks away, eyes tracking left and right. “And I don’t know what to do with that indecision.”
When she finally looks back at Silas, it isn’t with uncertainty, but rather fear in her eyes. “You said she’d do what she thinks is right.” Glory looks down, moving her hand away from the sheath. Then looks back at Silas. “Right for who?”
Silas stops a moment after she does, frowning… but that look on her face causes him to hold his silence, waiting for her to speak.
He might have overlooked the way she touches her knife sheath had she not just asked him about a knife, but what she has to say is more interesting still. Another Eve? That is a revelation, one that supplies answers to a few questions, only to illuminate a great many more…
All of which he leaves unasked. The unease in her eyes tells him plainly Glory feels like she's going out on a limb asking him about this; he isn't going to leave her hanging. "That. That is the right question," he says, nodding. "Just because someone believes something is right doesn't mean it won't cause misery."
"So let me ask you a question now. You don't have to answer me, but just… keep it in mind. This other Eve… is it that you're unsure about whether to trust her? Or that you feel like you shouldn't, but can't see any other options?" Silas asks, his gaze intent. "Anyone who's survived here for any length of time has good instincts by default — we're all survivors here. So if your gut's givin' you the heebie jeebies about someone — listen to it." He holds Glory's gaze for a moment, then nods. "That's my two cents, anyway."
Glory can’t hold Silas’ gaze, instead choosing to look away, brows furrowed. “I’m…” She hesitates on her answer, reconsidering what he asked. “I’m not sure.” It’s the God’s-honest truth. The look in Glory’s eyes when she returns to Silas’ seals it.
“But I’m also afraid it’s way too late to decide one way or another.” Glory admits, her voice smaller than before. There’s a youthfulness in her expression that Silas hasn’t seen before. A vulnerability not shared with others. “That’s why I… wanted to know how in deep I am.”
But why ask Silas of all people?
Silas nods slowly. "Then play the hand you've got as best you can," he says, with sympathy; in too deep and out of time is a sentiment he can well understand.
That question lingers, though. What the hell, he decides.
"Why ask me, though?" he asks, his tone curious.
“Because I don’t know you,” Glory says with a hint of sadness in her eyes, “and you don’t know me. So… it can’t change much.” She smiles, ever so faintly, then steps to the right and phases through the side of a ruined car,
and out of sight…
Two Days Later
New Chicago
Ruins of Indiana
July 8th
5:11 am
The sun has not yet risen, but it threatens the world with a blue glow across the water.
Glory sits on the edge of a rust-stained concrete pier, looking out over the rippling surface of the lake. The wind coming off the water is cold and strong, playing at her hair. Heedless to the prickling feeling on her cheeks, she flips a knife in one hand with a steady rhythm, catching the knife by the handle each time. Eventually though, what goes up fails to come back down. Glory startles when she doesn't feel the knife hit her palm, when she fails to find it anywhere in her line of sight.
But then, as her hand goes to the empty sheath at her hip she questions—when did I get my knife back? She jolts up to her feet, wheels around and—is face to face with a woman shrouded in a black veil. Holding a knife.
"Are you there yet?" The veiled woman asks, and Glory steps back just enough to feel her heels on the edge of the pier. "Careful, you don't know how to swim in waters that deep."
Glory braces, searching the veiled woman's features. She looks at the knife, the same one she lost on an assignment to another time in another world. "What the fuck do you want with me!?" Glory shouts, throwing her hands down at her side. The veiled woman twirls the knife between her long fingers with effortless grace. Between one half turn the knife seems to fold in on itself and disappear like a magic trick. Glory's breath hitches in her throat. "What the fuck do you want from me?" She whispers.
"Are you there yet?" The veiled woman asks again, and this time Glory has had enough of it. She blooms into a blurry outline and phases around the veiled woman, who simply reaches out and grabs Glory's incorporeal arm by the wrist. Glory freezes in place in a panic and solidifies, looking up at the taller woman with wide, frightened eyes.
Anger flashes in the back of Glory's mind. Indignation.
She reaches up and grabs the veil and yanks it off the woman's face. But her blood runs cold when she doesn't see who she expects on the other side of the cloth.
"Wh—"
Glory jolts up where she sits on the edge of the pier. She gasps, scrambling to her feet with the haze of dawn painted blue at her back. She is alone.
Her sheath is empty.
Her heart is racing.