Chapter Text
“I think I found what Sykes is looking for,” Myka said feebly. She stared into the classroom, at H.G. Wells, in a green cardigan, hugging a student. The sight was just so… incongruous. It screamed wrong, and yet… and yet Helena looked… happy? As if she had not a care in the world.
“You found the artifact?” Pete’s voice came over the earpiece.
“Not… quite.” She swallowed dryly, then packed all her thoughts about the matter away into a neat little box so that she could tell him, nice and factual, what was going on.
Pete, true to form, didn’t take the news well. She could hear his admonitions to not get close to H.G., she could hear his warning that H.G. was dangerous, she could hear him start to sprint down whatever hallway he was in. But then he wasn’t looking at this incongruous Helena, she was, and if she’d ever gotten a vibe, it was now; it was that incongruous though the situation was, it was not dangerous. Weird, yes, wrong, hell yes, but not dangerous. Helena was smiling at the student, talking animatedly with her, laughing at a shared joke, looking for all the world like nothing more than a teacher. Maybe she teaches early sci-fi authors, shot through Myka’s head – she clamped down on a laugh, knowing it would have sounded wild. Instead she waited until the student had squeezed past her, then called out, “Helena?”
Helena turned around with a cheery, unconcerned, American, “Hello,” and Myka’s mouth dropped open.
“You’re pregnant,” she said, the words falling from her lips completely without volition. What the hell?
Helena’s head tilted to the side. “Not what most people lead with,” she said with just the slightest hint of disapproval, still in this weird, affected, wrong American accent, and went on, “Are you looking for somebody?”, polite smile back at full strength and just as fully wrong.
“Do… the Regents know you’re here?” Myka asked on autopilot, still trying to parse the fact that that cardigan, that frumpy green abomination over an equally frumpy goddamn floral blouse, hung open over a swell of belly that couldn’t mean anything else but pregnancy. Minnie, back in D.C., the only person whose pregnancy Myka had been privy to up close - Minnie had looked like that at six months. Six!
How? When? How?!
Myka’s mind raced. The last time she’d seen Helena had been two months ago, when they’d gone after Joshua’s Trumpet together. Helena had been a hologram then. And holograms didn’t get pregnant. Right? And she was definitely not a hologram now: she’d hugged that student; she’d wiped off the blackboard with a sponge. So what had happened between then and now that had a) made her corporeal again, b) made her affect an American accent, c) caused her to pretend to be a teacher in Cheyenne, Wyoming, d) caused a pregnancy – but wait, no. Helena looked much more pregnant than two months, so whatever it was must have happened before the Trumpet retrieval – but how?! Holograms didn’t get pregnant?! An accelerated pregnancy due to an artifact of some kind, post-hologram?
A million questions crowded Myka’s mind, and she barely heard what Helena responded to her question – and then Pete stormed in, tesla a-blazing, and Helena dove under her desk with a brief, breathless little scream.
The wrong just kept piling up.
“Well that’s new,” Pete said, tilting his head to the side. Then he leaned forward and his eyes bugged out. “Oh my god she’s preggo.” He yanked his gaze up and to Myka. “Mykes, what the hell?”
“I don’t know,” was all Myka could say. “Pete, I really- Look, something’s wrong. She’s acting like she doesn’t even know who I am.” And somehow, that hurt more than all the rest.
He sucked his lip in and nibbled on it, looking between her and Helena under her desk. “Whammied?”
“I don’t know,” Myka repeated, feeling utterly helpless, “but we really, really have to get to the bottom of this.”
“Well,” Pete shrugged and lowered his tesla, “at least we know what Sykes is after.”
“Oh god.” Myka’s stomach was suddenly in free-fall. “D-d’you think-” she stammered, “d’you think he… d’you think it’s his- that this is his doing?”
“What?!” Pete’s eyes flew wide. “Holy sh- eugh, Myka, oh my god, what the-” He shook himself and blinked a few times, even smacked his lips and stuck out his tongue as if to get rid of the taste of something disgusting. “Ew.”
“Who are you people? What do you want from me?” The questions floated up from beneath the desk, and if anything convinced Myka even further that something was off. They weren’t demands, such as a quietly fuming H.G. Wells might utter. They sounded scared, and Myka could count the number of times she’d heard Helena sound truly scared on the fingers of one hand. “Is this about my… my baby?”
Myka and Pete exchanged a confused glance, then they both bent down. “W-what about your baby?” Myka asked with another glance at Pete. Sure, okay, Helena finding herself pregnant might explain the fearfulness in her voice, fear for the life of her chi- Myka chose to not examine that thought further. It didn’t explain any of the rest of it, anyway: the squeaky scream, the clothes, the accent. The timeline, for crying out loud!
“Are you going to put me in a lab to examine me?” Helena looked panicky. Her knees were up and her arms around them, protecting the swell of her belly with all she had available to her. She did not look like someone who was deadly at kenpo. She did not look like Helena at all.
Myka felt like she might vomit.
“What? No, lady,” Pete said with a deep frown. “We’re Secret Service, we’re with the government.” He nudged Myka, who was closer, and she shook herself and produced her badge. She held it out to Helena, who bit her lips together, eyes dubious, before snatching it to her to look at. “I mean we got some questions, yeah,” Pete went on, “but we’re not in the business of locking people into labs just because they’re pregnant.”
Helena’s jaw jutted in an expression that was both familiar and eerily not. “Well, you hear things,” she muttered in what she probably thought was an ominous tone of voice, that grated on Myka’s ears because, American accent aside, it was the closest the woman had ever sounded to the Helena that Myka knew. “And my pregnancy is not normal, I do know that.”
“I think,” Myka said, mind running a mile a minute, “that we might be dealing with a case of identity theft? Look, we just need to see your ID, okay?” Maybe this was simply someone with an uncanny resemblance to- But then why would this school’s address be in a super-secret Regent file?
Helena, or whoever she was, held out Myka’s badge back to her with a sullen glare. “It’s in my purse.” As Myka took her badge back, Helena’s hand stayed up, first finger pointed at the top drawer next to Myka’s hip.
Dismissing Pete’s injection about booby traps, Myka found a beige (beige! woven! pleather!) purse and within it, the wallet of the woman still crouching under the desk. Her stomach sank further as she looked at the driver’s license. The person in the photo looked exactly like H.G. – Myka even knew that blue shirt, goddamn it – but the name line read “Emily Hannah Lake”, and the signature on the dotted line was nothing like H.G.’s impatient cursive. “Pete, look at this,” she said weakly, holding out the wallet to him without taking her eyes off of Hel- Emily, who was now pressing back into the veneer-covered particle board of her desk, looking small and frightened.
“Who the heck is Emily Lake?” Pete asked the million-dollar question.
Myka watched a brief expression of fearful insecurity flit across Emily’s face, and reached a decision. “We gotta get her out of here,” she said, straightening up. “If we can find her here, so can Sykes.”
Pete nodded. “Right there with you, partner.” He pursed his lips, eyes flicking here and there in the classroom as he thought. Then he bent down again. “Hey, lady, um. Ms. Lake. Emily. Can I call you Emily? I think we can help you find out what’s going on with your pregnancy. You see, we specialize in weird.”
Myka almost socked him – what on Earth was he doing, choosing that approach? But against all odds, it worked: Emily Lake suddenly looked hopeful, and five minutes later they were walking out of the building with her, listening to her talking on the phone with a neighbor about a cat – a cat! called Dickens! as if Myka needed further proof that this wasn’t Helena! – who needed looking after.
As they rounded the bushes to where they’d parked their car, Pete hissed, “Shit,” putting a hand up in front of Myka’s shoulder, a gesture Myka automatically replicated to stop Emily too.
She followed his gaze, and saw what he had seen: Jane Lattimer was leaning against the hood of their car, legs crossed at the ankle, fingers knitted together, eyes stormy.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Pete went on, and now Myka did smack him, because Helena – Emily! – had fallen silent and was looking frightened again.
“Is this- Who is this?” Emily asked in a quavering voice.
Pete finally realized that it was his reaction that had her so spooked. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said, setting out again, “that’s just my mom. You’re not in trouble; we are. Well. I am.” He gave his mother a half-hearted wave. “Hi Mom.”
Jane glared at him, then pushed herself off of the car. “Let’s get out of here.” She stepped to the passenger door and gave Pete another expectant look until he unlocked the car.
The air in the car was thick with tension – Pete, following Jane’s directions, was driving them out of town; Myka was riding in the back with Emily, who was clearly too scared to ask questions and instead was shrinking further and further into her seat. Myka had no idea what to tell her to reassure her – Emily Lake had no idea who they were and what was going on, but then quite frankly, neither had Myka. At least she was sure now that this woman was indeed Emily Hannah Lake, even if she wasn’t clear on the how. Helena simply wasn’t that good of an actress and Myka not that bad at reading her, no matter what had happened last year. She had doubted herself then, but she didn’t now: this was real, Emily Lake was Emily Lake, not Helena pretending. Plus, what would Helena have to gain from this?
But how the hell did a pregnancy figure into all of this, and a ‘not normal’ one at that? Was the baby growing at an abnormal speed? Was that why she was showing this much this quickly? After all, if this was Helena’s physical body, then Emily Lake’s baby was growing within a uterus that had been bronzed, out of ovaries that had been exposed to the Warehouse and all the artifacts inside it for over a century – what would that mean for the reproductive process? Was this a result of whichever artifact had been used to put Helena’s consciousness in that weird black sphere?
Somehow, Myka couldn’t bring herself to ask Emily any of these questions – how would Emily even know how to answer them, anyway? Emily, on her part, did not volunteer a single word, either.
As Cheyenne’s center was giving way to suburbs and then the greenery of countryside, Jane directed them away from the highway into a stretch of wood, and, once within it, off the main road and onto a forest track. Then she told Pete to park, told all of them to leave their phones behind, ushered them all out of the car, and strode further down the track until they reached a clearing. There she slung her purse off her shoulder, took purple gloves from it, and brought out-
“Hey, isn’t that H.G.’s pokéball?” Pete said.
His mother didn’t deign to reply, but prodded the orb until a small compartment opened. She took out a golden coin and carefully held it out to Emily. It shone bright buttery yellow against the purple of her glove, here amidst the sun-dappled green. “You have questions, I know,” she told Emily almost warmly. “The answers are in here. Simply pick up this coin, and you’ll regain all the memories you lost.”
“Wait!” Myka said, stepping half in front of Emily. Was this- This coin, was it a storage disk that somehow held H.G.’s consciousness? Had her personality somehow been separated from her body into the coin, leaving the body free to be inhabited by Emily Lake? “I’m going to need a bit more of an explanation here.”
“Is this going to hurt my baby?” Emily’s question came on the heels of Myka’s. Her arms were curled protectively around herself, but her chin was set in a firm line. Only a faint quaver around her lips betrayed her nerves.
“No, it will not,” Jane told her in a strong, sure voice, casting the briefest glance at Myka as if to reassure Myka of the same thing. “Your baby is fine, and will be fine.”
Myka looked at Pete in alarm – it couldn’t be just her, could it, who realized that Jane’s statement wasn’t exactly reassuring. It didn’t say anything about Emily being fine, after all. Myka gasped as she put things together at last: if Helena’s consciousness truly was stored in the coin, if the Regents had somehow disconnected her body from her mind, then that hadn’t happened two months ago when Myka had last seen holographic H.G. – that had happened before that, maybe as long ago as when Helena had been taken away and Myka had left the Warehouse. It had definitely already happened when Mrs. Frederic had brought Helena to talk to Myka in her parents’ bookstore. Which meant that Emily had been in residence, if you wanted to put it this way, in Helena’s body for ten months; had had ample time to… Myka gritted her teeth and finished the thought: get pregnant.
And if Emily taking the coin in her hand, like Jane was suggesting, reunited body and mind, Helena would find herself suddenly in a pregnant body, without any warning – if the Regents hadn’t told Helena where her body was being held, they sure as hell would not have told her what else was going on with it, pregnancies included. There’s no way Helena would not have told me if she’d known, another part of Myka insisted.
And what of Emily herself? She was walking, talking, making her own decisions, which apparently – god, hopefully – included consensual sex, perhaps even the conscious decision to have a baby. That meant she was a person. Would she disappear, be overwritten by Helena’s personality?
Myka made up her mind. “Jane, I really, really need you to explain this before I let this go any further.”
“The Regents-” Jane began, and Myka lost her patience.
“The Regents aren’t exactly known for making smart decisions,” she snapped. “Meeting in the middle of Atlanta, in a building that was patently not secure? Firing Steve just because he questioned an objectively questionable behavior of a superior? You, obviously knowing what was in Atlas-66, and not telling us a single thing?”
“I’m here now, aren’t I,” Jane fired back impatiently. “If you’d let me finish, Agent Bering, I would have told you that the majority of Regents thought this was a suitable punishment, but that I and several others disagreed, for various reasons which I am sure I don’t have to lay out for you.” She bit off whatever else she’d wanted to say, took a deep breath, glared at all three of them in turn. Her eyes lingered on Emily Lake, and she pursed her lips angrily.
Myka glanced over at Emily as well, and saw that she looked deathly afraid – and no wonder; this whole exchange was pretty much textbook ‘they’ll never find your body.’ “Hey, um. Emily,” she said, turning to the woman with her hands held out low and appeasing. “I’m sorry, this is probably scary as hell right now.”
Emily laughed, once, wild. “You think?” Her lower lip wobbled, then she pressed out, once again, “Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Myka. Myka Bering.” And then, because she couldn’t help herself, Myka added, “Does that name mean anything to you?”
Emily shook her head. “I told you, I lost all of my memories last year, so… should it? Mean anything to me?” She looked up at Myka almost defiantly, and it broke Myka’s heart to see how little actual belief was behind the gesture. It was pure bravado, and nothing like H.G. Wells’ bravado would have been.
“We were friends,” she said quietly. Her voice caught a little on the last word, and she cleared her throat. Pete tried to meet her gaze, but she refused to look over to him. “Before. Friends, and co-workers, and in our job, we sometimes ran into dangerous people. And right now we’re trying to protect you from one of those.”
Emily’s eyes flickered immediately over to Jane, and Jane snorted, unfolded her arms, stemmed them into her hips. “Not me, sweetheart,” she said dryly. “Trust me on that.”
“You actually can,” Pete added. “Trust her. And us.” He looked like he wanted to go on, but Myka shook her head at him and he thankfully fell silent. There was such a thing as over-selling it.
“O-okay.” Emily blinked a few times. “Am I… in some sort of witness protection?” She looked between Pete, Jane and Myka. “Is this about… about how weird my pregnancy is going?”
“Yeah, why don’t you tell us a bit about that?” Pete asked, and Myka nodded – she needed answers to that, she really did.
“Not the time, Pete,” his mother snapped. And before either Pete or Myka could react, she darted forward and pressed the coin into Emily’s hand.
Emily gasped and stumbled backwards; Myka’s hands came up around the woman’s upper arms to steady her – and then she looked up, and met Helena’s eyes. There was no mistaking the spark of recognition that passed between them, the way Helena’s gaze lit up for the briefest of moments, and immediately darkened, the way her mouth gasped open, the way that her eyes moved down and landed on Myka’s hand on her arm, solid flesh around solid flesh. The way she whispered, “Myka.” And then her gaze wandered further down, to the swell of her belly, and another gasp escaped her. “Oh,” she said, and stumbled as her knees gave out.
Myka caught her in an awkward half-hug, half-carry; Pete jumped forward to steady both of them.
“What the hell, mom?!” he called over his shoulder.
“I keep telling you,” Jane snapped, picking up the coin and storing it away again, “we don’t have the luxury of discussing this. Sykes is on his way to find her. I’ll gladly take full responsibility for the moral implications, all of them, but we need to get back to the Warehouse immediately. Right now that’s the safest place for all of us to be, especially Ms. Wells. Agent Wells,” she corrected.
“Oh, so now she’s an agent again?” Myka said acidly. “An asset you’re gonna push around some more, now back in corporeal form?”
Jane stared at her for a moment, and for the life of her Myka couldn’t tell what was going on in the woman’s mind. Then Jane turned on her heel and marched back to the car. “Follow me,” was all she tossed over her shoulder.
That woman was far too used to people obeying her orders without question.
Myka opened her mouth to protest, but Pete shook his head. “No point,” he said quietly. “Not when she’s like this. And she’s right about one thing: we need to get going. I mean you can always lay into her when we’re in the car, right? C’mon, let’s get H.G. upright.”
Myka quickly shifted her focus. “Are you alright?” she asked the woman who was still clinging to her.
Helena huffed a bitter, toneless laugh. “Needs must, I suppose,” she said, getting her feet under her and slowly shifting her weight onto them. Myka still kept her hands on Helena’s forearms just in case, until Helena stepped away with the briefest of apologetic smiles and turned to follow Jane. Myka immediately missed the contact – she hadn’t known how much she’d missed Helena’s constant little touches until that day in the bookstore, where she’d reached out and encountered only nothingness. Hadn’t known how much a person could miss such constant little touches until they weren’t available anymore. She pinched her lips together; Pete was looking at her so sadly that she couldn’t bear it.
Not the time.
She shook her head when he reached out to her, wrapped her arms tightly around herself, and stalked after Helena.