Chapter Text

"We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through."

- Erich Maria Remarque, "All Quiet on the Western Front"

For the first three nights the Resistance stayed in the tundra, she had a recurring dream that her father begged her to speak.

He hadn't come all at once. That would have been too obvious. Survivor's grief entailed consequences they thought natural enough, in her insomnia easily explained as overcompensation for his absence. And he retained too subtle a presence, too careful a distance, to make the distinction clear.

Her dreams fooled her into thinking he awaited her at the lip of the cave. That he watched her intently as she sat up, frost encrusted on her cheek.

She let herself believe for a few moments. Come here, she wanted to say. You'll freeze. Sit over here by the fire.

He would shake his head and sink to a kneel beside her. Misfiring neurons made the facsimile of his metal knee scraping stone sound more real than her slipshod memory permitted. She could almost feel his fingers dig into her shoulders as he grasped them, depressing the down in her coat. Please, Alyx. Those words mean everything.

No matter how he implored her, whether through emotion or reason or absurd, jagged flashes of images, she could only fuel his terrified expression with more despair. Though she could open her jaws with a concentrated effort, silence continued to squeeze through her clenched teeth.

Try, baby. You have to try.

Anger ignited in her—a flash in the pan.

(I have to try?)

Her gloved hands tightened over his, prying his grip.

(you waited twenty years; a little longer won't hurt anyone)

(and in case you haven't noticed, Dad)

(I'm not the one who lied)

The weariness weighing down his shoulders, the fire glistening in his downcast eyes, almost real but not quite; that was the distinction he'd tried to conceal from her even now, locked in the throes of her mind. The dream wavered when she tried to argue. Fighting back pushed him further into the recesses; he'd vanish whenever she lunged for his own shoulders. When her cracked lips at last found their purchase to speak, what answered was the howling wind that tore through the tent flaps, dragging her back awake.

On the fourth morning, Alyx uncapped a bottle of caffeine pills and marched their outfit through twenty miles of hard, stinging hail. Pellets the size of golf balls assaulted the hoods of their terrain vehicles. People bitched, as people usually do, but they survived nevertheless.

They found another cave. Built another fire. Ate more rations tasting like ground-up chalk. Precipitation beat so wrathfully on the crumbled ceiling no one in their right mind wanted to stand watch. At least the Combine were getting banged the hell up out there, too, they consoled themselves while massaging their sore shoulders. I know I am.

The sleep that arrived that night was dark and silent. Over time, the hail quieted. As did Eli.

The Resistance spoke plenty enough. Vance, they said, take a look at these coordinates. Munitions wants to bend your ear when you're done. No, it's not urgent. Where should we park the snowmobiles? There, really? All right.

Her father was something of an illusionist when it came to this particular business. He could make anyone believe they captured his full attention. In reality, rebellion's ceaseless demands pulled him several different directions.

He used to tell her no grievance was trivial. A man with a reasonable bone to pick deserved the same degree of respect as the bleeding man crying out for a medic. Minute you start making a distinction, playing favorites, that's when the cracks start to form.

How did he stand that, she thought, claiming with a straight face all those the Resistance protected measured equal in importance, so long as they sought refuge in the lambda? How could he have slept through the night knowing he'd been guaranteed what he'd wanted at the cost of every other loss?

She countered her uncomfortable thoughts with one that she was being unfair. It wasn't a senseless idea to try to take everyone's needs into account. Only way they were getting through this was together.

Seventeen men, women, and Vortigaunts inhabited this cave, scraping about, fixing their transports, discussing their plans in low tones during the day. At night they shared coffee and tissues, complaining of ubiquitous cold. Away from the elements they'd formed a small tight-knit ecosystem: radio operators, gunners, mechanics, medics, scouts, ground support, all of them crammed together in whatever pockets of shelter the tundra offered them.

Even now, vengeful, flesh-harrowing winds bashed themselves against the entrance, forcing them to burrow deeper in the cave's icy bowels. When the rare beam of sun broke horizon, the warmth it generated was scarcely enough to tingle the skin.

She had to make a minute, though not insignificant, concession: the weather's refusal to cooperate masked them from the Combine. It had stormed ever since the chopper touched down in this remote section of the Russian Far North—ladies and gents, Barney griped with his hands tucked under his elbows, welcome to Soviet bumfuck nowhere—and harbored few intentions of relenting. The same hail that broke their radio transmissions also scrambled Combine sensors, rendering them just as blind, just as deaf. Silver linings, she supposed.

Sitting cross-legged on a slab of rock, Alyx bent over a a weathered atlas written in Cyrillic, which was weighed down at the corners by portable halogen lamps. Pencil marks, burned into the grain from being scratched out with a leather-tough eraser, debated her suggestions.

Mossman's last pinged location placed her in an area roughly twenty square miles in diameter. No way to narrow down that swath of unexplored territory. The transmissions they'd sent from the Mil Mi-8 went unanswered. Seven miles east of the perimeter, however, resided a former weather station, status unknown. Alyx had to assume the remnants of her crew would have headed for it when Hunters raided the base.

That was, unless you had the unerring optimism to believe Combine knocked on the door and left politely. The signs Judith hadn't eluded capture proved discouraging. Their readouts returned signatures bereft of vitals. Vortigaunt scouts likewise reported few signs of life lingering in the transmission's point of origin. Extending their senses stretched them so thinly, it seemed cruel to overexert them.

No matter how you diced it, finding Judith would be like searching for a needle in a glacial haystack. Except this needle was by no means guaranteed to be anywhere near its last ping, and most of the work relied on a shaky foundation of estimates.

The scout, a wispy man named Jim, placed a GPS atop the map, letting the thick device obscure stenciled grids. "I was thinking," he said, "we keep at this pace, we won't hit the station till at least noon tomorrow. If we just pushed one more time—"

"How far ahead you think we'd be?"

"Stone's throw. Won't be pretty." He chewed on the pencil. "Some of these routes, they may look safe, but most of 'em got cracked open from portal storms, got crevasses that drop for kilo and kilo. Whoever planned this layout of yours didn't realize how many there are. We're already twenty-some kilo off—" tapping the pencil indicating a projected position; Alyx's projection marked them five kilometers from the weather station, "—I'm just afraid we'll miscalculate the distance and run straight into them."

After a few moments of mulling over the problem Jim slid the pockmarked pencil from his mouth. "Honestly," he said, words strained as if he'd stepped on a nail, "I'd rather circumvent the route. Might be a longer run, but as long as we stay outta sight, there's, you know—" he wheeled his wrist searching for the right word, " …less mess."

As he continued, her attention diverted elsewhere. Out of the corner of her eye she caught Milton heading for them, his boots crushing snow. Milt for short. One of her father's oldest and most ornery mechanics. In his pre-war days he rode with a biker gang called the Kingsmen. The faded crown tattoo encircling his right wrist peeked beneath his glove's ragged hem.

She remembered as a child rearranging lugnuts on the dusty floor of his chop shop while he and her father discussed how best to install a RAM mount on his Harley-Davidson. When Milt strode toward you with something encased in his fist, good news usually didn't follow.

He slammed a piece of black ice square onto the map, letting it ooze water.

"Milt, what the hell?"

"Merry Christmas."

"No, thanks." She plucked the chunk off the map before it could stain their sketches and dropped it, wiping her glove on her hip. "Stinks."

"You think Santa's coal stash smells like roses?" he deadpanned. "Henry found that bad boy lodged in Blake's engine." She doubted it. Thing was the size of a baseball; you'd practically have to get on your knees and cram it up the exhaust. "We can't be sloggin' through the shit like this. The Yamahas can't take another flogging. Not like the Berkuts."

Alyx glanced at the bulky white snowmobiles lined under tarps along a gorge in the cave's lee-facing wall. At the lambda painted black on their ribs. Their accompanying cargo transport had bequeathed them half a dozen Yamahas and four military-grade snowmobiles. The latter wielded enough suspension to carry two people in the front cabin and three on the bed. Rebel engineers further rigged the windows with bulletproof glass.

She wished they'd stuck with just one good, solid transport. The Yamahas honestly stood a breath from crumbling as it was, as they'd been repurposed from old sports models that had already survived the Seven Hours and endured two decades of modification since. Were it not for their lack of speed, the Berkuts might not have required the extra cover. The Russian company that originally manufactured them used them to transport personnel across vast Arctic swaths for oil excavation purposes. Although not quick by any means, they could cleave their way through long stretches of snow.

They were built specifically for endurance, an absolute necessity in this merciless terrain. More promisingly, their anterior pintle mounts boasted medium-range machine guns. Even if you shoved a semiautomatic into the hands of every Yamaha rider, the support fire they could provide was negligible at best and a liability at worst. ATVs flipped when shot at. Milt of all people should have known.

"Can't you… Patch them over?"

"With what, Vance? Wishes and duct tape?"

Alyx let slip a mild sigh as she rubbed her brow with the side of her palm. "I'll take a look as soon as we figure out where we're headed."

"Well, that's great, but what would be even better is if you took a look now. Gonna be sitting fucking ducks if we don't keep 'em in running condition."

"Got it."

Teeth flickered from a silver beard. "Actually, I kinda don't think you do."

Jim raised his head, tried to intercede before trouble brewed. "Milt, come on, dude. Leave her alone."

"It's common sense," he told her. "You drive us through twenty miles of icy fuckin' plague, your transports aren't gonna come out the other side mint in the box."

All right, Milt. You're pushing it a little. "Okay," she said, "first off, I can't control the weather."

"Yeah, you would say that."

"Second… " Keep calm. "We're trying to figure out how to keep out of the Combine's sights. It'll take a while. You'll have plenty of time to work on the Yamahas."

"Forget it. Sorry for asking."

"No," she said firmly, stopping him in his tracks. "You have something to say, say it."

Rooted, he folded beefy arms over his chest until his padded chest creaked, shook his head with a low mutter. "Eli wouldn't have given me this horse crap."

Her brows hiked. "Excuse me?"

Milt turned. "Heard that, didja? I said your father would have got right on it. Maybe next time you ought to take a page from his book instead of handing out excuses."

She looked down at Jim—whose ears flushed red and of whom quickly returned his gaze to the map—hardly believing those words just dropped out of his sorry mouth. Most of the time, the Resistance practiced enough tact to avoid mentioning her father, much less compare her failings to his.

(if they knew he'd betrayed them because of her, for her sake)

The last thing Alyx wanted was to force everyone around her to walk on eggshells; the humiliating screaming match she and Barney had engaged in the night of her father's cremation taught her the painful lesson of restraint. And it had sent an even clearer message to those who'd watched. The trust they'd placed in her was inherently tentative, shaken. Few benefited from her stretching that trust even thinner.

That was why she banded them under the lambda. It gave them something more substantial to fight for than the truth. If she couldn't ignore her father's secrets, she'd shut them out long enough to get the job done.

All the Resistance knew was that she might lash out if pushed. She found herself in a vulnerable place, foisted into an even more vulnerable position as the highest priority enemy target now that her father was dead (but not silent) and Gordon out of commission.

What's more, she lacked proper training. Like Gordon, she made decisions on a minute-by-minute basis. On what lay before her, no more and no less. In other circumstances she'd be lying under a creeper squinting at engines along with the other mechanics, not planning where best to launch a search before enemy eyes spotted them.

True, neither had her father possessed the prerequisite experience when he built this Resistance, but he'd spent twenty years growing into his role, learning how to lead them with the savvy they needed. Compared to her meager three days, she felt as though she had much more to catch up on than she could possibly handle.

The combination of these things meant that precise kind of remark smarted more than it should have. Slapping her outright would have done the job just as well. She clenched her eyes shut before snapping them open again with renewed ferocity, one barely held by her eroding veneer of calm.

"Al."

Of course, having glimpsed them from the fire crackling across the way, Barney would try to run interference. Milt clucked his tongue, and she shielded her face as he stood and tugged his warmed hands back into his leather gloves.

Ignoring him didn't work—he stopped several paces before them and beckoned her with a wave. Kid, c'mere. Her cheeks filled with so much heat she wished they'd just dump her in the snow.

She couldn't. Not now. "Barney, we're busy."

His tightening mouth told her he didn't believe that for a second. "Just be a second." Reaching between them for her arm, he flashed Jim and Milt an affable smile. "'scuse us, fellas." When they wandered just out of range of earshot, he admonished her en sotto. "Hey there, cool your jets. We don't want a hallway part two. Original sucked the first time around."

"What do you want me to do?" she said. "There's so much to figure out before nightfall it's not even funny—"

Barney blocked her from glancing over his shoulder by grasping her own and turning her toward him. "Hey, don't look at him. Look at me. Over here. Aren't I pretty?"

"Pretty what?" she asked. "Pretty scary?"

His expression soured. "Well, shit, you ain't gotta be mean about it." He released her shoulders, tossed a thumb in the transports' direction. "Like it or not, Milt's got a point. Those Yamahas are paper fuckin' thin. Maybe we should've waited 'til the storm cleared a little before we put 'em to work."

"You can't be serious," she said. "Who knows how long that would have been? Hail can go on for hours up here—"

"Not to mention," he continued, pointedly, "we got pretty whipped in that last stretch. Some folks get snippy, say crap they don't mean, well… They kinda got a right to be miffed. Hail hurts, y'know?" Guilt crept into her, and she went silent. His voice softened. "Yeah? Gonna think about sittin' in the bleachers for this one?"

Any protest left in her throat dried. She regarded him with weary caution, hoping to find a grain of affirmation. "I'm sorry that I've been pushing us too hard lately. It's not like I've had a lot of practice with this sort of thing."

"I know," he said, with an empathetic lift of his shoulder. "Look, kiddo, nobody's saying you gotta bust your balls, or ours. I'm just saying it can't hurt once in a while to catch more flies with honey."

She hated it when he sounded reasonable. "Okay." Bit by bit, her taut shoulders relaxed. "If you say so, I'll trust you. But he mentions Dad again—"

"Pickin' his teeth outta the snow. Copy that." He clapped her shoulder, squeezing it once. "One thing at a time there, kiddo."

Milt stared expectantly, and she loosed a tremulous breath before rejoining the group. As Barney left her to work it out, she wondered if he'd talked her father down from similar ledges.

"I'm sorry." She rubbed her arm. "You're right. I just wasn't sure how long the storm would've lasted, and I figured we had to cover as much ground as possible while the hail gave us cover. Looks like that hurt more than it helped, though."

"Well, golly gee. Look who wants to kiss up after her timeout." Turning on his heel, Milt walked toward the transports. "Probably a few more reindeer turds stuck down in there pretty deep. Last one was five inches before you hit the—"

He never received the chance to finish. A synth's high, mournful howl raised their hackles, filling every nook and cranny of their temporary abode.

A blast of light erupted in the deep darkness.

Before she registered another second more, a massive boulder crashed down. Streaks of arterial blood mottled her face. Unthinking, awareness the thickness of a needle, she touched them, saw a corpse crumple in firelight. Flecks of softness in his teeth felt like gray matter.

"Milt—"

Screams pierced the air.

Clotted entrails sprouted from the skull and crept upwards into the crushing boulder, threw gray smear against the Yamaha's plastic hood. Jowls and mouth drooped in a frown melted by gravity. One eye, perceiving nothing, fell halfway closed while the other popped wide open, its bulge slightly distended from the socket, its bloodshot iris a cloudy, viscous ring nestled inside a swarm of red. He was dead. He was—

"Oh my God, Milt!"

She swallowed to suppress the wave of bile ramming its way up her throat. Fingers jerking by imperceptible needleprick, she grabbed Jim by the arm and reeled him away from the sight.

Pulse fire pounded the yielding snow just outside the cave's front end, holes vomiting steam from their heated rounds.

Fear flooded her veins with ice. "They're smoking us out," she said, then addressed the stunned group. "Who's got the rocket launcher?" A hand went up. Thomas. Good. "Tom and Blake, grab the missiles. Jim, come with me. The rest of you take the snowmobiles and hug the ridge as low as you can. Stay out of sight. We'll cover you."

Someone asked, "What about the Ya—"

"Take them if they're faster, just get out of here before the cave collapses!" Rocks creaked above them from the open crevice torn by the implosion; blue light poured through thickening drafts of snow and smoke. She stabbed her finger at the transports. "Go, go!"

Everyone scattered. Grabbing the handle of a radar receiver, she forced herself not to let her gaze linger on Milt's corpse.

I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm

Her group dashed outside with the RPG-7 and five ordnances in tow. Planting the receiver firmly in the eddy until snow splashed around its sides, Alyx slid a bulky pair of headphones over her ears and cranked a dial; slowly vague images emerged within the ripples of cocentric rings. Not that they needed to see the threat to sense its presence. Even at this distance, they felt its every step tremble in their bones.

Thomas, the gunner, whispered, "No way in hell we're getting past that Strider."

Alyx studied the shapes that floated onscreen. A caravan of an APC and several escort units hugged a small area underneath the Strider's cone of protection. A well-timed rocket could send the body crashing down, killing two birds with one stone.

"We can't risk a cave-in." Radio chatter wafted through the airwaves in distant, guttural tones. Heavy pollution reported in grid seven-one-nine. Sweep for endotherms. "They know we're here anyway. We've got to buy the others as much time as we can; we'll meet up with them once everyone's out." She tore off the headphones. "Jim, I need eyes on that Strider. How big's the gap?"

He peered through a battered pair of standard Combine-issue infrared goggles, though he didn't dare engage their penetrating floodlights for fear of giving away their location. "Fifteen klicks south," he said. "Bearing straight."

Dammit. On a collision course. A virtual beeline. How did the Combine know? Was the Mil Mi-8 tracked? Had they caught onto their hailing frequencies?

Well, it wouldn't matter in a few minutes. She opened the targeting system to a velvet-black screen devoid of light.

She jostled the reset keys. Dead pixels refused to spark. "No, no, don't you dare—" Slapped the screen several times in vain. "Shit—"

"Talk to us," Blake demanded. "What's going on up there?"

Alyx snapped her head down. "Targeting system's lagging 'cause of the cold," she shouted. "It's gonna take at least a minute to boot back up!"

Even half-blinded by snow, she sensed their worry. A minute? Offer them up on a silver platter, why don't you?

Another resounding quakegave her an idea. Crazy one, but it was better than leaving themselves to the mercy of a frozen targeting system. "Blake, take my place."

He scrambled to pick up the launcher she dropped. "What?" Breaking a little ways from the group, she swept the snowdrift clean of their footprints, removed her right glove and began to scribble feverishly on the blank slate. "What the hell are you doing?"

Icy air ached in her heaving lungs, hastening the motions of her cold-bitten finger. Don't see it as a clash or crumble of forces. When you break it all down, winning's a matter of wielding the correct numbers. This is just an equation in need of a solution. Manipulate the numbers. Think.

The scout wrenched down his infrared goggles. "Twelve klicks south and hauling ass," he announced over his shoulder. "Whatever you're doing, you'd better hurry."

First, the RPG-7. Express the rocket's parabolic function.

She reached back. The quadratic formula produced a vertex of fifty-five feet. Not much room for margin of error. Striders clocked in at fifty feet, give or take certain fluctuations in height modification; mobile units were usually designed somewhat taller than their urban counterparts to better handle rugged mountain terrain. No way to know its specs unless the fucking thing was lying right on top of them. She had to capitalize on the launcher's thrust to suckerpunch the ordnance directly where it would inflict the most structural damage, the underbelly.

"Ten klicks!"

That was assuming it was a clear day, without so much as a breath of wind to nudge the rocket's trajectory. Mother Nature would never be so kind, continuing instead to blast gales in staccato bursts. With the Strider's height and acceleration shifting each step it took, a fragile math began to give a perilous creak.

"Five!"

The warp cannon blinked a bright eye in the horizon. Blue beams shot so close they could smell the crisp reek of ionized particles. Aftershock swam in their guts. Alyx threw herself forward, barred her forearm against a tumbling rush of snow to keep it from erasing her work. She glanced at the shallow score marks and bit her chapped bottom lip so deeply it split, oozing droplets of salty fluid.

Blake's voice rasped with dread. "Vance, come on! Don't make me spit blind in this fucker's eye!"

No doubt things were about to get messy. First branch's upper boughs often claimed she'd had a head better suited for application than theory, which was their snide way of saying she proved more useful with a gun than a greaseboard. Maybe they were right. But while she wasn't as accurate at performing these calculations as her father or Mossman, the encroaching caravan afforded little time to double-check the numbers. This was as certain as she'd have to be. The solution had to hold.

"Aim the launcher ten clicks east," she said, jabbing a finger in that direction. "Everyone else stay low and get as far from the backblast as you can."

"Right into the wind?" Blake asked. "You lost your fucking gourd?"

The eye blinked again.

"Not now, Blake, punch it!"

They tucked and covered as he hurled a rocket into the white. A horrible moment of stillness ensued, not knowing whether the projectile had skimmed its target; a distant boom rattled their teeth in their gums, lit the snow like a candle sweeping behind a curtain.

"Goddamn!"

"What?" Her heart slammed in her throat. "What happened?"

He whirled around. "Rocket made contact," he shouted, "Strider's crippled! We—"

A retaliative beam lashed through the crag, cruelly smothering him. Blake had no time to scream and neither had anyone else—the Strider's warp cannon cleaved the cornice in half, steaming rocks on both sides. Caught in its sights, he dissolved into a burning mist seconds before his charred corpse hit the snow.

Alyx's hands shook as he released his grip on the launcher handle. Shock and revulsion flashed through her, completing the circuit with pulse-pounding rage.

Grabbing the launcher, she ducked at the shuddering hiss of a plasma rifle preparing to discharge its alternate fire.

"Get out of there," yelled Thomas between tearing off rounds from his SMG. "You're gonna get yourself killed!"

Not until everyone made it out. Most had, but a few struggled to haul their transports out of the cavern into the shielding snow. Already the boys ordered extra muscle. "Hammer Zero requesting inoculation. Infection risks breaching quarantine."

The Strider swam into existence, mosquito's silhouette drawing closer.

She called for another ordnance and, when they hesitated, applied more heat to her command and received one. The second rocket twisted and torqued as it swept the Strider's underside, passed through and exploded. The synth bent at an oblique angle, one of its jointed legs stooped lower than the others, ambling due to its compromised knee. Regardless, turquoise fire pulsed hot from the primary cannon. Melted snow spat flecks and rocks beside her like shrapnel.

She wrenched out of their path, ducking beneath a snowdrift that felt about as protective a cover as drywall. Shuddering breath filled the air seconds before an energy ball whisked past. She swore it nearly shaved the fur from her hood.

Charge delay muted the Strider's continuous fire, thank God. She seized on the reprieve to jam in the third rocket, hoping this would be the charm.

Wind snatched the hood from her head, exposing her to merciless subzero temperatures that dropped more quickly than her hope did when the ordnance diverted toward a patch of icy land just behind the carrier. Its pointed tail smoked and hissed in the white swarm. Growing thin. Narrow. Diving too fast toward the ground.

Her heart skipped a beat when she heard the detonation crackle behind the carrier, overturning it, blossoming into a gaseous storm. The Strider emerged from the flames, never once breaking pace.

Her molars ground down to the nerve. The next missile orbited the Strider like a hornet seeking its nest, closing in—come on—come on, damn it—

Direct hit. Broken casing emitted an ungodly screech as it careened off the main structure and landed in the snow. Black smoke belched from a sparking carapace. With its balance now skewed, it swayed heavily to one side and anchored its surviving legs to the ground to keep from toppling over. Gravity would soon have its way, however.

Vindication curved her smirk. The Strider was running half-mad at this point, its brain exposed in the circuitry, which she could blow with the fifth shot and send the rest of this bitch crashing to earth.

Meanwhile, stragglers fled the burning APC. "Avian has derailed transporter. Envoys disperse and displace. Expunge outbreak."

Her retinue passed her the next missile and got low. The rocket ejected from her shoulder with a fuel-propelled scream, sending her reeling a bit.

The Strider released a garbled electronic wail, hobbled. It coughed a blazing sputter out its anterior port and collapsed in a smoking heap, crushing the carrier underneath. Units scattered from the conflagration like insects.

"Strider down, repeat, Strider down—"

Alyx and the others evaded a gauntlet of pulse fire, the RPG's warm weight banging against her shoulder socket. Plasma fire smacked the ridge just inches above their heads. Melted snow slithered down her coat.

Panting in greedy snatches, they huddled under the cornice for shelter; there, she risked an appraising glimpse over the jagged ridge. Her nostrils pricked from the greasy fumes rising from the Strider's carcass. A dozen units crept toward the cave in a loose phalanx, their coherence separated by the rocket.

"Overwatch, request Winder dispatch."

She judged their ET around three minutes. Assuming those 'paper fuckin'-thin' Yamahas rode decently, the last of the seventeen rebels would miss the reach of their AR2s.

Her fingers gripped the launcher handle digging into her neck. Provided the Combine refrained from ambush, they could fend off the first wave with relative ease, delivered in the form of a loving ordnance; their squad formations had scattered a little too far apart to converge easily back together. Depriving them of the carrier slowed their pace. Mobile units assembled their default flanks, pairs and trios deployed for the express purpose of burying as much lead in rebel bodies as possible. Blowing another hole like the one that downed the Strider would cripple them. But the last rocket had to land. She couldn't afford to waste it.

She wiped a glove over her mouth, hefted the launcher to her breast like a coveted child. Buried under layers of cloth and wool, her heart pounded, clamoring to be released before the pulse fire combing the ridge found its home lodged within.

Three minutes. Was that all she could give?

"Outbreak status is Code Hurricane."

Bullets shaved the bank. Steaming droplets slapped her in the cheek, trickling down ice-raked nerves. She shielded her eyes until the flash and echo of gunfire clouded into afterimage.

That dreamlike sheen burst when another round struck Thomas in the back. He gave a grunt and fell wordlessly. She scrambled for him, then forced apart from his corpse as more bullets pounded the snow. Hot shrapnel ripped through and sliced her calf at an angle, shearing the down in her snow pants, blood and frigid air heralding pain.

But she hadn't caught the worst of it—Jim, poor Jim, lay prone at the end of a spotted crimson trail. At his side, the final rocket. Their last chance.

She moved her lips in wordless prayer as engine rumble waned.

Crushed bones, roasted flesh.

God, please let them make it out.

Crawling through this labyrinth with death clipping at her heels, an odd notion struck her. That being cornered was no different than backing against the wall of her own volition. In the canals, when you met a dead end and soldiers splashed down feet-first, you had to resist succumbing to the instinct to freeze. Inaction had once led to a piece of buckshot embedding itself in her right wrist, excruciating pain bringing everything brilliantly alive.

No, you had to regain control of yourself before control was wrested away. You had to refuse to stand as prey before the barrel. Breathe, Alyx. Just breathe.

She grabbed the last rocket and vaulted into a lean-necked sprint down the ridge. Snow flew from her heels as she sought a prime vantage point. Her calf protested with seething resentment, flaring bright pain up her hamstring, almost sending her stumbling once or twice. But she persisted, head ducked low.

Even though it seemed foolish, she planned to keep drawing fire until everyone safely evacuated. High priority target prancing out in the open? You'd have to be an idiot not to snatch a head that practically begged for mounting. Combine grunts hungry for their Elite chest badge proved the most recklessly vainglorious of the lot. Judging by the sound of their encroaching chatter, her bait dangled too lucrative a temptation for them to resist.

"Hurricane passing inland. Nearby units stabilize."

She heaved herself upright and fired.

"Avian inbound! Ripcord, ripcord!"

They scattered as the rocket screamed toward them in a gas-propelled trajectory.

Less than a few seconds to react. Alyx discarded the launcher and hit the ground with her arms tucked over her head—impact knocked a fresh blow into her abdominal wounds. She burrowed into a numbing patch of snow before detonation tore a blistering rend in the storm.

Snow washed over her in a tidal crest. Relief flooded her as the spray dissolved and the infantry unit she expected to thrust a gun in her face morphed instead into Barney, pulling up on a Yamaha. "Hey, come on!" He spurred the engine with a squeeze of the handles.

"Everyone out?"

"Yeah, all headed for the weather station! Get on 'fore these chumps learn how to aim!"

The launcher stood embedded in the bank. Had to take care of that first. She severed the targeting system from the barrel with her boot, rendering it inoperable—since it had proven so helpful—and stuffed a fistful of half-melted sludge down the barrel for good measure. No need to give the Combine more help than they already had.

After she climbed shotgun and they hurtled off into a directionless white swarm, her relief doubled; Barney had salvaged her supply bag and slung it over his back.

Tearing the canvas, she rummaged for her Magnum. An avaricious wind snatched at the open flap. Her fingers bumped the cold metal of a can of stormproof matches, rattled loose shells together, brushed a thin paper wrinkle crammed at the bottom. The absence of a particular ribbed handle grip grew keenly conspicuous the deeper the probed—

"Use the shotgun," Barney suggested. "It's under the fender."

Not wanting to knock their balance by leaning too far forward, Alyx kicked her heel at the fender to snap open the latch welded to the side mount. She slid one of two SPAS-12s toward herself. Wind lashed at them. She cracked the barrel, saw a pair of empty holes peer at her.

She managed to load one shell when a sharp bump jolted the stock in her arms, making her clutch it tighter. "Barney," she shouted over roaring currents, "did you pick up one of the bad bikes?"

"Sure hope not," he said. "I just grabbed the last— Ah, shit!"

He swerved the bike in a gut-gnarling twist to avoid bullets peppering their path. The second shell tumbled free of her grip, a brief minnow-like shimmer lost to gelid wasteland.

Barney raised his head, called over the wind: "You okay back there?"

Stiff fingers rammed the replacement shell down the empty slot. "Never better." Easy to say. She only prayed this piece of shit bike held, especially since a nasty lurch at these speeds could cast them into a ravine, or worse—

'Worse' crashed into them sooner than she'd have liked. Another spray of fire erupted in a blazing trail beside them, peppering smoke along the back fender. Whiplash wrenched the air from her lungs as the bike capsized, throwing them both into the snow. The bike overturned with a feeble groan; when she snapped her head up, she found its headlight dimming under heavy reams of precipitation.

And the Combine trailed.

"Contact lost. Squad, motion check all radials."

"Copy." Jackboots crushed the snow. Responding units reported blindness. "Sightline polluted, Hammer Zero; viscon dubious."

The Elite squad leader muttered a rare curse. "Shit."

More footfalls patrolled the area, trailed by short, static-snarl bursts of call-and-answer. Barney motioned for her to get low, and together they crouched in what they believed a relative blind spot until another unit reported: "Endotherms stillborn, ten degrees north, range fifteen meters."

"Confirmed. Hammer Two moving to engage."

Try it, pal. She hoisted the SPAS-12 to her shoulder, aiming at a Cyclopean specter rising over the ridge. He crumpled in a puff of inky black.

Gunfire answered in seething bursts. She and Barney wasted no time cracking buckshot at anything that moved. Sparks skipped like stones across the land's folds and grooves, and it seemed as though soldiers sprouted from the bank and were hacked. Those darting across the bank holed themselves behind the cornices, bellowing in their deep inhuman voices for backup, picked off until the

last death shrill hung in the smoke, its aria left to quiver and die.

Barney swallowed. "I think… " His gloves creaked, and he finally lowered his gun. "That's all of them."

No sooner had he said this, a horrendous shrill pierced the air, curdling their blood; a Hunter sprang from the void and rammed itself into them, sending them tumbling through the ravine.

Momentum cast them down, down. Alyx raised her head in time to see the Hunter pin Barney under its foreleg, its pincers writhing.

Horror surged through her, too lightning-quick to give shape with a scream. She snatched the stock of her gun and cracked the butt across its carapace, releasing him. Amphibian flesh smarted under the blow. Its livid, garbled screech pierced her ears as she hauled him to his feet.

The next thing she knew she'd pulled them both into a blind dash through the snow. She didn't know when his hand broke from her grip, nor when the ground heaved and plunged them under.

Hot throbbing in her head rewarded her for choosing consciousness.

With excruciating languor, Alyx rolled over as a dull pain gripped her torso. Stomach empty and rubber and raw, throat residued with acid. Fallen rocks scattered in a broken ring around her; some coated her sleeves in a layer of grouse.

She startled at a pair of irises scrutinizing her from a Hunter crumpled on its side. Her body locked in hackled instinct, prepared to spring into flight, when a second examination of the evidence revealed that the synth was dead.

Her gaze traced a gash in the crevasse wall. Serrated edges widened as it approached the floor and culminated in the synth shattering at the thorax. Shriveled ropes of grayed flesh clung to twisted metal cartilage.

Prey stared at predator, at a loss to explain its survival. Although she had no way to calculate the crevasse's height without instruments, the plunge had proven sufficiently lethal that the trauma from impact tore the Hunter's body in two and flung the pieces apart.

Alyx felt caught between the need to gloat and the need to retch.

The SPAS-12 lay nearby, its barrel snapped open at a perpendicular angle. Two burnt shells poked through. She grasped for it, discarded the wasted slugs, and locked the stock, using it as a brace to further support herself.

Her ragged breath sprouted clouds in the air. Leaning against the gun with her cheek mashed to frozen metal, she surveyed her surroundings. Towering walls of ice, pale blue-green in color, dominated every angle.

Desolate winds cried from a dark gap high above. At this depth, the snow buffeting the tundra thinned to a flurry. She blinked back the flakes pattering her hood, clinging to its matted fringes.

Alyx readjusted her hold on her makeshift crutch. The sudden and absolute lack of human presence made her feel small. As far as she could tell, the Combine had departed. They nursed no compunctions about leaving a synth carcass to rot in an icy ditch. But did anyone else know where they were? She, and… and Barney.

"Hello?"

Her call returned echoes, thieved by wind. The hazy apprehension she felt began to sharpen into dread. Milt, Blake, Thomas and Jim. Crushed. Charred. Shot. Their dead visages flooded her mind, accusatory. Keep calling, Vance, no one will hear you. You abandoned us.

She whipped around.

"Barney?"

No answer.

Her teeth crushed together as she tried to budge and met resistance. Pressure tugged a dull ache on her calf, where she found a drift burying her wounded leg. The cold had killed the pain in her nerves.

Oh, God. How long had she been lying here? Judging by the fact that the snow crumbled in loose chunks, hopefully not too long, but even a few minutes' time spent exposed to the elements plunged one dangerously close to frostbite.

There wasn't any more time to lose. She had to find Barney and reunite with the group. If the Hunter that ambushed them belonged to a larger pack, and reached the weather station first—

She clamped her kneecap and hauled her deadened calf free. Her boot stuck to the drift as her foot slithered out; she recoiled at the sight of her woolen sock, its fibers encrusted brown with congealed blood. So the bullet haddone a little more than just graze flesh. Adrenaline and cold must have kept her from experiencing it full brunt.

She yanked her boot back on, threading the strings tight, and proceeded to tear a makeshift tourniquet from her inner liner. Cotton scratched the gash in her leg; she winced at the sight of bruised tissues invading shores of healthy skin. It probably wasn't the smartest idea to cut off circulation to a damp wound, but it was the best she could do at the moment. The pain would revive once nature's analgesic wore off. For now, she had to make use of the time she was given and find Barney. He couldn't have landed far.

(… is he)

No.

She wouldn't think of that now.

Dragging the stock of her empty gun, she rose to a shaky stand.

Chapter Text

The first thing Eli had said when they'd landed in City 17 was: "We're here, Kleiner. Don't look back."

Until now, he believed he'd heeded that command to the best of his ability.

Do you remember? Eli would ask, were he still here. Maybe you hadn't heard; I mumbled it to turbulence. You'd fallen asleep with Alyx in your lap when it hurt too much for me to hold her.

Yes, I remember.

Not out loud. He's listening.

To tell the truth, Kleiner had partly humored Eli out of fear for his precarious state of mind. It was easier to believe he'd been drifting in and out of a morphine stupor, that his warnings arose as the byproduct of traumatic stress.

It hadn't occured to him then that what Eli said wasn't just a hasty declaration, of wanting things to be finally and resolutely over. It wasn't just exhaustion playing shadows in his eyes. It wasn't their jagged heartbeats, the smell of smoke or the flecks of blood and glass threading little Alyx's sunflower blouse. It wasn't any of that. It was a creed, for both of them to follow.

Was it safe to chance one glimpse? He didn't know.

Mere trinkets testified to where they were, where they had been.

Unpeeling their protective swaddling, Kleiner placed a pair of bifocals next to Eli's wedding band on the gouged surface of his desk. He gingerly perched himself on his late friend's work stool, tucking his hands over his lap.

Alyx did thorough work when she used the shop to eschew thinking. Gordon's new lenses boasted a snug fit with almost no give to speak of, incongruously bright, clean and unscratched compared to the chipped plastic frame in which they lay, patched together with electrical tape.

Of course, she had not considered how her work might be rendered moot if the frames failed to hold. He hadn't had the heart to tell her the ribs had begun to bend, the coils loosening.

He released a sigh, massaging the back of his neck. Solitude draped an aching heaviness around his shoulders like a mantle. It was true even in the old world that once a man reached a certain age, loneliness became his most faithful companion. For years he had done all he could to stave that inevitability. Now that it had arrived, he saw little reason to fight it.

If he indulged himself a moment's quiet, grief would enter, a dark, silent visitor. So he kept his own company with memories of recent days.

"Barney, it's time."

Clad in torn Civil Protection garb, splashed with blood, Barney pivoted from Eli's awaiting body. "Will you give me a minute? Y'all had three days to say goodbye, and I—" Collecting himself, he heaved out a ragged breath. " …I won't keep you long." His whisper broke off in his throat. "Please."

The smelter crackled cinders as he reached down and touched his gloved hand to Eli's wrist, stroking the knobby joint.

Barney said nothing, only gripped his hand. Slowly he skimmed his fingertips down Eli's ashen ones. Kleiner hadn't quite ascertained the small twisting motions he made until the ring slid from his third foreknuckle.

"What are you doing?"

"You don't want this burning with him." Cradling it carefully, he trudged over to Kleiner and gingerly deposited the band in his creased palm. Gold worn to a smooth pale sheen glinted in the renewed flames. "Someone might need it."

That 'someone' still grieving herself, susceptible to lashing out. Their dreadful quarrel thundered through even Gordon's muffled walls.

Fortunately they had reconciled, he'd hoped, for the most part. Divided forces only stood to benefit enemy interests. Fractured but not yet broken, this Resistance lay in a delicate state.

So too did Alyx. Her steely face branded an afterimage behind his eyelids. Her old softness had eroded, truth-forged into something harder, less assailable.

"Why did he lie?"

He wished he could say.

It was strange to think he'd have once craved silence in an empty gray room like this. Two decades ago, schedules, meetings, and deadlines dominated his life. At Black Mesa one chased the next twenty-four hours in an interminable game of catch-up. Progress outraced them with boundless energy, lunging ten steps ahead for every tentative foot they put down.

And now, it seemed, their efforts had reached a conclusion. A standstill. The culmination of twenty years of blood and suffering. With the result left in Alyx's hands, he had no option but to drift toward hypotheticals, other paths not taken.

Was there more they might have done? If so, for whom? Eli was gone. Nothing more could torment him, in this world or any other. Gordon had returned for a short time; it seemed to Kleiner the contract that conspired to keep him alive now snatched him out of reach. Twice he'd feared his pupil's demise, once in the week following the breach at Nova Prospekt, along with Alyx, and again when the medical staff carted his and Eli's bodies into the base. One dead, one clinging to life; Alyx, the trembling intermediary, trailed after them both, repeating the same unanswerable questions over and again.

A knock sounded at the door. He took a moment to compose himself before answering. "Yes," he said quietly. "Who's calling?"

"Me, you reclusive old goat." Arne. "Is this an opportune time, or shall I wait until you've finished whatever it is you're doing in there?"

"There's no need," he said. "I'm… Sitting at Eli's desk for the present."

The door opened, casting fluorescents over a bare concrete floor. "Were you? It's so dark I couldn't tell." Magnusson sniffed at his reticence before striding in. "Christ, Kleiner, this isn't New Mexico; you need to open the blinds once in a blue moon. Don't turn into one of those vagrants who hiss at every stray beam of natural sunlight." He gave the shades a brisk tug. Powder white sunlight crept in to illuminate the dust motes lingering in the air. "There, isn't this better?"

Truthfully, his eyes stung a bit from his time cooped in the HEV's chamber.

"I'm not certain we've done the right thing." Magnusson cut right to the heart of the matter, his voice quieter than usual. "I came here to see if we would be in concurrence about that. You and I, we've had our… disagreements, to say the least, but… " He exhaled, gazing out the window. "Since the wake, I've had a nagging suspicion we've let out something that oughtn't be known. Similar to the feeling some of us had when we greenlit the test, actually."

Intellect did not exist in mutual exclusion with superstition; in Black Mesa, ill hunches abounded weeks before the Anti-Mass Spectrometer overloaded. But they hadn't the ears to listen.

"Feelings are not the same as facts."

"You know damn well that isn't what I mean, Isaac." Mockingjays trilled in his silence. "I don't believe that letter was a farewell letter."

He didn't understand why Arne had changed his mind, what had caused this abrupt shift in thinking; days ago, their roles had reversed. He'd hesitated to disclose such an awful truth without solid means to lessen the impact, while Magnusson maintained Alyx needed to read her father's letter for the Resistance's welfare.

They might have devolved into outright quarreling had he not recalled Eli halfway during their conversations. His tired mien, his heavy conscience; had something in his psyche not cracked and relented, Alyx may now be chasing the Borealis in relative safety.

"If Eli divulged his intelligence to her," Magnusson said, "any part of it, that in and of itself makes her a prime target—"

Kleiner traced patterns in the engravings of his friend's wedding band. Faded cursive read a Latin inscription: Quos amor verus tenuit, tenebit. True love will hold on to those whom it has held.

"I assure you he never would have purposefully endangered Alyx." The last thing Eli wanted was to harm his daughter. He sorely wished the truth had found a softer path, but that wasn't possible. Although Eli's tortured conscience had never reconciled that fact, they needed to make their peace with it if they desired to go forward. "She needed to hear from him the content therein, yes. It did not, however, disclose information that could compromise our Resistance."

"How do you know this? Did she tell you?"

"In so many words." He went on to tighten a screw in Gordon's glasses. "What he knew died with him. That's all there is to say."

"Haven't you become curious regarding the circumstances? If those letters languished in the recesses of a junk drawer, that'd have been one thing, but they were buried in his quantum entanglement journals. The very ones, might I add, used to resurrect your teleport?" He lowered his head, unable to reciprocate Magnusson's unflinching gaze. "He didn't want merely anyone to stumble upon them. And for good reason. My God, the man was a walking dossier; you're telling me he wouldn't have enlightened her on a single speck?"

His reply was almost deceitfully simple. "He loved her."

Outside, a clamor arose. Shouts spiked, accompanied by the frantic pounding of feet.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," Magnusson snapped. "What could be kicking up that much racket this early in the morning?"

An answer arrived in the form of Uriah, who uncharacteristically barged in without greeting either man. They bristled at the sight of him; his laminated ID, which he kept dutifully clipped to his pocket protector, had fallen off. His lab coat swung loose from his knobby shoulders and pooled in the crook of his spine, as if an intense bout of sprinting threatened to peel it away.

"Quickly!" He clutched the doorframe. His snout twitched with nervous energy, and his pupils shrank to slits as he watched personnel dart down the corridor. "The Magnusson and the Kleiner must come. The Freeman has awakened from his slumber."

The news shocked Kleiner into rising from his seat. "What?"

Magnusson's jaw unhinged. "That's impossible," he said. Uriah chose not to respond and disappeared around the corner. Alarmed, he called after him. His assistant seldom ignored him in such a brazen manner. "Uriah? What is the meaning of this? Uriah; get back here!"

As Uriah's absence stretched, his fists uncurled, and he receded from the door. He cast Kleiner a glance he could only call 'bewildered,' which hardened the stone settling to the bottom of his stomach. In the four tumultuous decades he had known Arne Magnusson, he had never seen the man at an utter loss to understand. Bemusement, yes. Certainly perplexity on occasion. Frustration in spades. Rarely, if at all, the helplessness paling his complexion.

They'd expected their days of running to be over. Not so. Their steps never carried them faster.

Blood. Alarms. Broken monitors.

The scene's surrounding chaos faded for Kleiner. For a cold moment, the years dissolved. Another took his pupil's place. There Eli lay, not dead but painfully alive on a bed of blood and shattered glass, clutching a torn raincoat to his chest, his wife heaped dead beside him. Screaming a horrendous unheard plea, muted by the wail of sirens—

He almost failed to notice Arne's elbow banging into his rib when he lunged through the crowd, thrusting onlookers aside to get a clearer look. The moment his gaze found Gordon, he demanded: "Will someone tell us what the blazes is going on here? Why is Freeman on the floor?"

His brusque tone lured him into the present. Black Mesa's saturated corridors softened into White Forest's dim observation room. The difference didn't matter. His hands retained their tremble.

The crowd thickened, its numbers clotting as people accrued around the door. His view dwindled the more he was pushed back into the corridor.

From what scraps he caught, the surgeon had tilted Gordon on his side and lay his head in her lap, talking him through his convulsions in a calm, assiduous voice as others frantically orbited them.

"Dr. Freeman, listen. My name is Maria Stezenka. I'm the surgeon at White Forest. You've had a fall and woken a little before the alarm. There's no reason to panic; we're going to get you stabilized." She snapped her head up. "Hvatit. Quit pulling on the tube, his throat's clinched around it. Force it out, it'll break off in his larynx—"

A needle withdrew from his arm. "Shit," her assistant said, regarding the empty tuber with wide-eyed apprehension, "what is this? It can't be prophylactic reaction, he's not responding to the carbamazepine—"

"Calm down," Stezenka said. Her grip maintained a steady pressure on his temples. Gradually, his bodily quaking ameliorated into shivers. "Looks like it's quieting a little."

Her assistant crouched beside her. "Is another coming?"

Cradling Gordon by the base of his neck, pressing her thumbs on his bruise-gray eyelids, examining his exposed pupils for signs of change, she shook her head. Kleiner had known her long enough to know that gesture did not necessarily mean no. It meant she couldn't tell.

"A grand mal in his condition—"

"I know," she said. "I know. But we can't do a fucking thing with the paparazzi taking pictures." A sharp stare galvanized Magnusson into ushering onlookers from the scene, including Kleiner.

"All right, everyone who isn't a part of the medical staff, clear out, out—"

"Arne—"

"Unless you plan on procuring an MD in the next seven seconds, I don't want to hear it."

He caught glimpses through the gaps in elbows and shoulders. As the staff initiated a cautious extraction of the tube, Gordon gave a spasmic wheeze. His hands wandered outward, brushing and patting over a tangle of forearms.

"We're removing the tracheal tube now, Dr. Freeman. Just a moment."

His chest bucked once the pink-tinged plastic slithered free; a gasp shuddered through them as a pulpy thrust of blood dribbled down his shirt.

"He's bit on his tongue," Maria said.

His bloodshot eyes flickered over them and slackened into fuzzier focus, not quite registering individuals from the crowd. This maelstrom of stimuli must be wreaking hell on his senses.

Stezenka, her assistant, and two Vortigaunt nurses, Sokolai and Dushan, helped lift him back onto the bed. The crowds parted on either side to allow them to wheel him through. As he passed, bound to the padded table, Gordon's eyes sought and held his.

(Help.)

Less than a whisper scraped the air before he vanished behind elevator shutters. His lips hadn't moved their chapped plates; it shouldn't have been possible, given the klaxon and worried chatter filling the corridor, but the plea targeted him with unnerving clarity.

Kleiner clutched the wall for support, breathing in and out.

An hour passed without news. Then another, yet more. Late-summer sun rose over the mountains, glistening the dew on withered leaves tapping outside the windows of the compound.

Birches dripped gold plumage along the crest of the ridge. They reminded him of Lamarr, her affinity for napping in dry beds of leaves. Perhaps she'd migrated to the mountains for the winter. Perhaps she'd gone home.

Gradually the base dispersed, each retiring to his duties with an unfocused hand. Magnusson walked in and out of the room, scuffing the Persian carpet as if he had difficulty deciding where to be.

As for himself, he sat in the corner nursing a tepid cup of coffee with Uriah. He stirred cream until foam lapped the surface. Spoon scraping porcelain lulled him into a numb sort of meditation. He had too much time to contemplate Gordon's plea, whether it was real or sleight of mind—

None could tell exactly when Sokolai arrived; he clasped his claws before himself in a slight bow. "Apologies to all. We know much time has passed since the Freeman roused."

Uriah spoke. "Has his affliction—"

Their spirits sank along with his downcast gaze. "The doctor sent this one to retrieve you. She wishes to explain his predicament face to face."

"Doctor? Here we are."

"Yes." Maria gave him a weary smile. "Thank you, Sokolai." She gestured for the group to take a seat on a shorn leather sofa littered with X-ray blanks. "Please forgive the mess, gentlemen; it's been a long day. Push some things aside if you must."

Magnusson swept the sofa for the two of them to sit.

White Forest's surgeon kept residency in modest quarters not unlike Eli's own. He noticed the tray of untouched stew sitting on the nightstand beside her desk, which Dushan quickly carried out of the room. Dr. Stezenka seldom kept a regular dinner schedule in sync with the rest of the base—a stubborn old habit borne of the need to be on call at any moment.

She withdrew from her pocket protector a cherry Tootsie Pop, wrapped in bright red wax paper. Crinkling sounded as she unpeeled the wrapper, wadding it into a tight ball to press back inside her waist pocket.

Maria Stezenka scrutinized them in silence, then sat on the Adirondack chair Sokolai had cleared of weighty tomes. The lollipop withdrew a shining orb from her mouth.

"Does Dr. Freeman have arrhythmia?"

He glanced toward Magnusson, who echoed his confusion with a shrug. "None we've heard of. Black Mesa would have made note in his physical evaluations were that the case."

"I ask because we believe a heart-related phenomenon may have triggered the seizure." She crossed one leg over the other, contemplated with the stick dangling from her fingers. "He's since calmed down, and his EKGs are returning excellent readings."

"Of course they would," Magnusson said, "now that he doesn't have entire crowds swarming him."

"And I extend you my thanks for clearing them, Doctor," she replied a bit tersely.

Kleiner's elbow brushed the glossy surface of a blank draped over the armrest. "Is it possible his apnea played a part?" he asked.

"No apnea is severe enough to induce a grand mal, I'm afraid. It has to be a structural issue within the heart itself." She trailed off, dissolving the candy in her mouth a little more.

"What is it?"

"He, er." She searched for words by tapping the stick's bare end against a white pucker on her bottom lip. Portal storms had shattered a medicine cabinet long ago, coating her left cheek in a fine web of scars. "The reason he fell is because he managed to sit up for a few seconds."

"Is that significant?"

She appeared at a loss to answer, the open and close of her mouth shifting the web's tendrils. "I don't know. It's… Incredibly strange," she said. "As far as we can tell, he wasn't quite conscious during. Something must have stimulated his tendons, though I can't pinpoint what." And here she fell silent. "Christ. I shouldn't waste time quibbling over theoreticals.

"I wish there was a kinder way to put this," she said. "Dr. Freeman didn't have subdural hematoma before the fall… " Paused; dropped the lollipop into a waste basket. "But when his head struck the floor, it caused internal bleeding. That blood is now steadily applying pressure to his prefrontal cortex on top of the liquid from his initial trauma."

Arne cursed.

His heart pounded an insistent beat in the base of his throat. "What are our options?"

A prolonged pause ensued on her end. "It isn't an ideal—"

"Oh, spit it out, woman," Magnusson burst. "Enough with this beating around the bush!"

"Very well," she said. "Put simply, we have interdependent problems worsening one another. Subdural hematoma aggravates epilepsy, and epilepsy aggravates bleeding. My principal concern is staunching that blood without triggering another seizure, then draining the liquid squeezing his cranial cap."

"What you're suggesting combines two surgeries into one," Kleiner said. "That will take quite a toll on you."

Maria folded her arms over stained lapels. Dark flecks speckled the off-white of her coat where Gordon had coughed blood. "I'm not so very decrepit in my old age." She gave the floor a brief frown before continuing. "If drainage isn't possible through the usual channels, we may need to induce a chemical coma."

No. His first thought, a pained reflex. Nothing so drastic. "Are you certain that's wise, when he lies in such a precarious state?"

"Right now, we can't be certain of anything. Under better circumstances, I'd suggest that we submit Dr. Freeman to more rigorous testing until we gain a clearer picture of what we're dealing with. But time appears not to be on our side."

Her stare was cool, guarded, practiced. Stezenka had had to deliver news of this caliber an unfortunate number of times. That this delicate balance of sensibility and truth shaped Gordon's fate, when he was once their prayer for survival, struck him as uncanny.

"If indeed we do decide surgery is the best recourse, additional precautionary steps will then have to be taken to maximize the odds of its success. That's why I would want to send Dushan and Sokolai to Smolensk."

"City 14?"

Grim nod. "Our reserves are preciously low. An apneic patient with potential cardiological and epileptic issues won't respond well to general anesthesia." She added: "This isn't the dark ages. We can't ask him to polish a bottle of wine and put the leeches to him."

At length she stood.

"Gentlemen, I realize this is a great deal of foreboding news to absorb at once. I don't mean to overwhelm you, but neither will I lie to you. When a coma victim suffers a grand mal, their odds of recurrence increase with each moment that passes, unless the damage is repaired in an expedient manner. Given the time-sensitivity of his condition, the next that comes along may induce hemorrhage. After which, he may be beyond our power to help."

Her last word evoked the image of Gordon, bed-bound and terrified as he passed by. Kleiner scrimped the armrest until his knuckles whitened over creaking leather. The waning of time evaporated the air in the room, leaving a pressing weight to clog his lungs.

Magnusson resumed the conversation without him. "How is it you don't have everything you need here? Why must you shrink our defenses?"

Her jaw knotted. "For Christ's sake, at least let me request slightly better tools. This sort of thing was difficult back in Kiev, with full access to proper staff and equipment. You're asking that I accomplish a miracle with a rock, a chisel and a prayer. I can't. It's unconscionable."

Hoarse, mirthless laughter trickled from him as he shrugged affronted shoulders. "Well, what do you know? We're hosting quite possibly the one neurosurgeon in Russia without an ego to challenge God's."

"Even the Lord's hands would falter here," she said. "And too much blood has been spilled for me to entertain blasphemous delusions."

Kleiner said softly, "Surely there must be something we can do." They couldn't leave Gordon to the mercy of chance.

"Help us maximize our resources," she said. "Give clearance to send a scouting party to Smolensk. Dushan and Sokolai know its layout best and can return with what we need quickly, if it hasn't already been evacuated—"

"Or," Magnusson said, "is stuffed to the brim with Combine sympathizers—"

"—which by all accounts it oughtn't be, given the Citadel's destruction has already emptied City 14."

"Whose accounts? Why is this the first I'm hearing about it?"

"You never asked," she said. "I'm certain Uriah would be happy to fill you in on the details." He avoided Magnusson's incriminating glower. "Dushan says the core implosion extinguished the power lines spanning along the Citadel's outlying districts. A band of Vortigaunt defectors used the confusion to escape Smolensk several days ago, and they seem to be fleeing westard on foot. No doubt they'll seek asylum here once they cross the ridge."

"Excuse me, what part of 'this constitutes a massive security risk' isn't registering with you? Two nights ago thugs dragged hostages to our front door and slaughtered at least one! We can't enfeeble ourselves for what amounts to a questionable reconnaissance! I won't allow it!"

"I… " His quiet interjection dissolved the accumulating tension, if only a bit. "I suppose synthesizing a compound is out of the question?" Years ago, she'd developed an antidote to poison crab neurotoxin by studying the enzymes that the creature generated upon transmission.

The scarred ends of her mouth drooped, crumbled his nascent hopes. "Normally not, but I fear developing a synthetic would take more time than he has."

He swore Eli's hand grasped his shoulder in warning. Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to, Iz. "What will occur if they return empty-handed?"

"We continue with surgery, just with… Our usual." She swallowed. "However, the likelihood he'll respond unfavorably is quite high."

Don't look back.

There is no child fussing in his arms. This room does not reek of the sweat and acrid, stinging bleach where overtaxed staff tends to victims. There is no plastic mint-green curtain separating three-year-old Alyx and himself from her shell-shocked father.

But there was an awful, smothering moment when the analog clock moved its liquid hand. When he realized the child he cradled in his lap, nodding into a fitful sleep over his low, halting lullaby, might no longer have either of her parents.

The same cold gripped the back of his neck when the curtain stirred…

"All right." Whomever wielded control over these resolute words may or may not have been him. All he knew then was that he'd do whatever it took to keep the present from repeating the past. Gordon had fought too much and lost too deeply for them to fail him. "Tell your scouts they'll have their clearance, on the condition that they must send us a relay as soon as they reach the city."

"Kleiner," Magnusson said. "Think about what you're saying—"

"I am. We must do everything within our power to assist him." He addressed the surgeon. "May we visit him?" After those empty hours spent in fruitless waiting, he ached to see Gordon. "Is everything settled?"

Contrition stooped her shoulders. "He's endured a battery of tests. He's honestly in no better shape than when we wheeled him down."

"Please."

Her brown eyes searched his face, darting liquid over the invisible lines they read. "A moment, Isaac. No more."

He stood and thanked her. Magnusson, however, refused to budge an inch. "Aren't you coming?"

Irritation bled through his mien like an agitated blister. "No, Kleiner, I've been up since a quarter past three this morning and I'm developing a positively hateful migraine for the trouble." Sighing, he massaged his temples. "See him back up here when you're finished, will you? Last thing we need is him wandering lost in the basement."

"Of course," Uriah replied, and touched a claw to his elbow. "Come. Freeman awaits."

Excepting the electrocardiogram's intermittent tick, a deathly hush crept over the room.

Kleiner stood clutching the doorknob's chilled brass as Uriah and Sokolai filed ahead of him. The other Vortigaunt nurse, Dushan, was already tending to Gordon, patting a damp cloth over his brow.

The knob whined in his grip. Dread writhed in his intestines, raised his nerves to their bursting point just below the skin.

Light struck the soles of Gordon's feet, gripped by blue veins. He willed himself to wander forth. Feet sloped into chafed ankles, reddish hairs glinting pale strands on his calves. His skin pricked with diodes, stray wires tightening and coiling as they snaked over his body.

Gordon nested amidst a heavy bed of plastic. Cables, diodes, and tubes tumbled to the floor like streams pouring from a waterfall. Were it not for the thin rise of his chest, shuddering beneath their tangle, one wouldn't have been mistaken in thinking him dead. His pallor was ashen, drained of blood. The palsy that once twitched his limbs in the throes of dreaming had settled into an unrelenting quiet.

IVs fed his veins one languorous drop at a time.

He slid Gordon's bruised hand into his own and squeezed.

"You've given us quite the scare over these past several days, haven't you?" He smiled, a watery chuckle rising to his lips. "Why, if I didn't know any better, I'd be inclined to believe this was another one of your practical jokes."

The Gordon they knew had a wry, wicked sense of humor embedded in his silent demeanor. The incident hadn't completely stolen his propensity toward humor; he'd struggle to manage an upward flick of the lips when occasion warranted.

How much would this injury cost him? Which pieces of him would be lost, and which would become obscured, masked? How much more would Black Mesa thieve—

Sniffing lightly, Kleiner raised his head. Through misting vision, he caught a faint green glimmer hovering just above Gordon's heart. He might have mistaken it for the EKG producing some sort of afterglow were it not for the needle-like gleam dancing over the wires. The ray shifted, broadening.

Perhaps it was a cojoined trick of light and aging eyes. Perhaps neither. Curiosity compelled him to reach for empty air.

A static shock scorched him. He recoiled with an instinctive cry and shoved his wrist into his lapel.

"Kleiner?"

He looked up apprehensively at the Vortigaunts, the flush of anxiety sending blood throbbing to his ears, rendering him too aware of their presence. "I must have touched an unsheathed wire," he murmured. "How careless… "

Uriah tested a talon on Gordon's brow. "The flesh is cold."

"M'unng ch'a. Fire and ice afflict him in turn. This is all we can do to soothe him."

Those words sprouted the first crack in his composure, releasing a weak, airless sob from the base of his throat. A misplaced shudder lowered his head in his hands; grief wrapped cold fingers over his heart and squeezed until his vision misted over, blurring past and obscuring present, blinding the future.

Gordon Freeman was not always an inert body struggling to tether its life. Two decades ago he'd been his brightest student, soon graduated into an intern who observed entanglement processes in broken Austrian. Finally placed into a lab coat and tie where he belonged, a fresh, hesitant employee who, despite his pushing, refused to vouch for himself at the facility, thinking instead his work would speak for him. Lowering a plastic tray onto the table at Eli's hearty call: C'mon and have lunch with us, we won't bite.

Gordon, a survivor, creeping from the elevator doors one shuffling step at a time, twenty minutes after the incident sent alarms screaming throughout the complex. Smudged glasses, shivering, smeared in ash and fresh blood. Alive, oh thank God, mercifully alive.

Now all he saw reflected in his pupil's quiescent face were their failures, their sins. Black Mesa burning. Eli burdened and Alyx broken. This world gnarling into a twisted husk under the Combine's reign.

But they persisted their fight, and for what? For this battered young man to struggle for what might be his last ounces of breath?

His Vortigaunt companions coalesced toward him.

Uriah rubbed his back. "There, now."

"Freeman has endured ordeals far more treacherous than this," Sokolai said, "and emerged triumphant. Have faith that he shall prevail."

"The flesh deceives," added Dushan. "What you call loss, mere oscillations. If you could see through our eyes the luminous threads that bind us together, these tears would turn to laughter—"

"Remember, and take comfort: the doctor has vowed to protect the Freeman. She will not abandon him in his hour of need."

"Nor we."

"Whatever befalls him, we endure alongside him."

Their consolations deepened the pang in his heart.

"Dry your tears. There is hope yet," Sokolai said, trailing off. "But… "

The EKG spiked in an even monotone, the silence between intervals crushing. Tch. Tch. Tch.

He dared not breathe. "But?"

Sokolai rumbled a negative, lowered his head. "It saddens these ones to say they can provide no useful counsel at this time."

Maria's voice accompanied a soft rap of knuckles on the door. "Boys?" The open jamb poured light into the room. Form and color intruded the quarters, she a shadow steeped in a harsh, buzzing glow. She folded her hands in front of herself. "I'm sorry. It's time."

An abrupt conversation commenced between the Vortigaunts in their rocky native tongue. And just as gently as he was led into this room, Kleiner found himself shepherded back out.

Grated elevator shutters encaged them. As the cabin began to rattle a slow ascent up the quarry, Uriah spun around and seized him by the shoulders. "Speak truth. Do we both perceive what watches the Freeman?"

Initially, he didn't understand what Uriah meant. No one had watched Gordon except his nurses, and perhaps the threads of light that—

No.

No, no.

Not now.

The truth uncurled a singed fingertip cradled against his chest. "He's here."

"Our sentry has grown lax," Uriah said. "It was wise to send the Alyx Vance away, for its hold on her has weakened, but it has since turned its wicked eye toward the Freeman."

"Was he… it… the reason for Gordon's premature awakening?"

"So it seems," Uriah replied. "This one fears human hands alone cannot prise him from its grip. Stronger intercessions are needed."

He turned to the shafts of light dancing through the cabin. The contractor had returned, undoubtedly seeking to collect Gordon as collateral now that Alyx had been removed from the terms of Eli's bargain. The irony being that the truth had to cut her to the core in order to protect her.

Gordon protected us when we needed him. It's about time someone else did the protecting for a change. Her parting words haunted him. He shuddered to consider the young man lying deathly still in that cold room.

He fully acknowledged the faint implausibility of such a prospect, but another part of him prayed, somehow, that Gordon had found a way to do what Eli could not. Resist from within the confines of his mental imprisonment.

"Gordon… "

"We feel his distress ripple through the Vortessence. The hunter creeps ever closer. It is now only a matter of time." It always circled back to time, their lack thereof. "Perhaps it is to our great fortune that our brethren have fled the neighboring city. Together we can invigorate him, reclaim what the beast has stolen."

"How?"

Uriah tipped his head toward the floors that scraped past, appealing to something that inhabited a space unbound by girders and limestone. "In those mountains resides an antlion cloister. We must hunt the den mother and extract her heart. The blood will allow us to communicate with his Vortessence, if for a short time."

"You're proposing husbandry?" he asked, surprised. "I didn't realize you practiced it still."

"Not for many years." Uriah blinked heavily. "Magnusson calls it a most rudimentary custom."

He'd expect as much. "And Sokolai and Dushan? What have they said about it?"

"That you must help us draw him forth," said Uriah. "There is a rite. Our brethren in the mines wove together the threads of the Freeman and Alyx Vance, to draw her from the beckons of the abyss. But her thread grows thin, and the Freeman wavers."

"I don't understand."

"The joining of life differs from symbiosis. The creature that approached Eli Vance froze the Freeman's heart in time so hers might beat. They are entwined. This Resistance cannot afford to lose either. Should one fall, so do the others."

Shivers trembled him from scalp to sole.

"How long—"

"We have known since the Eli Vance first extended his offer of peace. Our silence is our gift and our curse to him."

The truth stretched between them, so thinly cutting it could have drawn blood.

Parting doors offered just a sliver of escape.

"I'm sorry, Uriah. I… I need time."

He hurried through the elevator doors and, when he was certain he'd eluded their metallic shudder, buried his face in his hands. He did not look back. A single regressive glance invited nothing but the threat of more loss.

As usual, Eli was right.

Chapter Text

There was a photograph on the wall. No color, faded sepia tones, which captured a day at the facility when most of the Anomalous Materials team had gathered for a shoot that would serve as the centerpiece for an employment brochure.

Later, Eli scraped away the Administrator's face with a Swiss knife. After all he's done, he said between drags of the blade, he don't deserve to keep it.

When he finished dumping the scraps into the wastebasket, Kleiner sealed the gesture by crossing out the Administrator in red pen.

Wallace Breen, too, had once known the truth. He used it to sadistically prick barbs into Eli's psyche, lording his weaknesses over him. While Kleiner normally deemed it disdainful to celebrate death, even that of an ostensibly awful human being, there was no denying the Administrator's demise had closed another door on the truth. Of the researchers who posed in the lobby, one of two survived to tell the tale.

His thoughts kept circulating Uriah's admission. As much as he was loath to admit it, it made sense considering Eli was the Vortigaunts' first and deepest collaborator. But their silence… Suggested more. They knew something of grave importance. If the truth must soon be disclosed, so much more lay at risk than the memory of the recently departed.

Each second that ticked by whittled Gordon's chances. Did his desperate need for hope keep him from fully acknowledging the possibility that his death loomed beyond the threshold of their control? His rational side kept begging the question, what might happen if the scouts failed to reach Smolensk. If indeed his time had come… Couldn't they grant him more dignity, more peace, than the Combine spared Eli?

Prolonging his suffering to alleviate their consciences would be immeasurably cruel. But their smiling faces belied their capacity for survival at any cost. Wearing a solemn expression, Gordon alone seemed to foretell a dark future. The more he studied them, the less he knew the intent behind them.

"We thought," he whispered, "we were changing the world."

He turned to face Gordon.

Alyx scrubbed her palms while leaning on the crutch of her empty shotgun, breathing in the scant warmth the friction generated.

Freezing down here, but at least the wind's died down.

This deep in the crevasse, the gales that had rocked the surface quieted. Gentle snowfall flurried a velvet black sky. Gazing up at glassy walls of ice, she would have thought the scene beautiful, if not for her sheer solitude within it.

Alone, in a fifty-foot ditch with an injured leg bound to painfully awaken at any step.

She reached out and trailed her gloved hand along the wall's ribbed surface. She tried making a mental topography by touch. Cold cushions of mist obscured the jagged path ahead. Some twelve meters north, the ravine twisted in a sharp left turn and pinched off the sky, nearly knitting the surface together.

Alyx directed an anxious glance toward the sky, her breath dissolving before her lips. Quarry climbed too steep and smooth an ascent to scale without equipment. Although she didn't like it, her best chance appeared to be pressing forward, keep calling for Barney even as ice cruelly mimicked her in echoing peals.

The stock puffed decisively in the snow with every step she took. She mounted a drift with a wince and a grunt, only to stop dead in her tracks.

The name vanished on her breath.

"Gordon."

She had no reason, no theory or phenomenon at her disposal to explain how he stood nestled between the cavern walls. Silent, suited, his angled edges quieted as the clean white glow of the flashlight's beam eclipsed them.

Her cracked lips struggled to part. Her mouth too full of silence to voice coherent thought, her mind buzzing useless white noise.

A numb, dreamlike fear filled her, broken only by the salient crunch of a step taken forward.

She approached him in soft, silent repose, apprehension and disbelief fighting every foot she sank in the snow. Briefly she entertained the notion that she might be dreaming him while lying on the crevasse floor, though she dismissed it on grounds that Gordon's presence felt different from Eli's: where her father's presence maintained a nebulous air, however necessary, she sensed a clarity of purpose behind his presence.

Gordon waited. Unexplained, inexplicable. As if conjured into material reality from thought and snow haze.

She crept closer, her heart rising to a throb in her throat. It was too dark to discern his expression—if he was just as bewildered as she was—his eyes hidden behind thick reflective lenses.

The flashlight continued to blink in, blink out. Ice swam around them in waves of light and darkness.

Cold breathed on the hairs coating her nape.

He stood, a statue of flesh and blood encased in the HEV's exoskeleton.

Slow, viscous dread slithered through her veins as she stopped. Reached out with halted breath insufficient to stir the flakes twirling down. Probed a questioning caress along the lambda. Was it real? As real as the bristle a glove made on shaven metal could be.

Steel pulsed through cotton into skin. A living thing. His heart, buried beneath layers of Kevlar, padded mail and welded plates, emerged to the surface, matching the throb in her frostbitten fingertips.

She withdrew her hand. The lambda's four swift, decisive strokes normally represented a symbol of reassurance and strength; she didn't know why touching them now filled her with an animalistic terror she found herself at a loss to reconcile with the sight of the Resistance's savior.

Perhaps it was because they were alone in this desolate crevice in the earth's icy womb, and even in the throes of mirage, she knew his real self dreamt comatose on a bed some three-hundred miles south of here; or else she became too aware of her dreams, enough to recognize when she grappled with some new manifestation since her father had taken his leave. Any minute now she expected his stoic facade to crack open into an Advisor's—

"Gordon," she whispered. "How… "

His eyes betrayed no answers in between slivers of illumination. It seemed after an eternity passed he broke her gaze, lifting them with great effort. He turned his head a degree toward the right.

Alyx followed. Listened. Between the wind's distant shrills, a voice softly called for her.

"It's Barney," she said, "thank God, he made it. He'll be so happy to see you."

She gauged his reaction behind a light smile. Her dreams didn't have to taunt her. She could test them just as much as they tried her. An illusion would crumble at the intrusion of reality; the real deal would maintain his verisimilitude.

He closed his eyes with parted lips, his brows knitted together. Whether in pain or concentration, she couldn't tell. She pressed a hand to his cheek to corral his focus, but the coldness of his flesh gave way to smooth ice.

Nothing was there.

" …Gordon?"

Standing before him, clear as day, fully-armored in the HEV suit. The plates bore patches of congealed blood, battered and dented. Limestone powdered his hair, smeared his skin an ashen hue.

Kleiner began shaking his head. "How is this… "

He flinched, struck dumb, as the HEV issued a warning in its high robotic drone. Major fracture detected.

Kleiner could do nothing but watch in numb fugue as blood and cranial liquid traveled a slow descent along the left side of his brow where the gash began, curling toward his ruddy earlobe before letting the droplets fall to stiff carpet.

Vital signs dropping. Seek immediate medical attention.

Fluid surged in a more voluminous gush. Gordon winced, exhaled a forced breath.

And dropped to his knees.

Kleiner rediscovered the life in his legs, urgency overriding his horror, and flew to brace his student's shoulders. "What are you doing? Oh, dear, you shouldn't have gotten out of bed. You're terribly hurt… "

He cradled Gordon close while the latter swayed into him. He felt visceral enough, though heavier than could be expected, even encased within the suit.

Perhaps he felt safer ensconced inside its fortified rivets and plates… The physical feat, he thought, was near impossible, given his bedridden state an hour ago. How had he crawled out, descended the silo, and armored himself without attracting notice?

He made to call for Sokolai and Dushan when Gordon clutched his knobby wrist. His sleeve bunched together.

Gordon pointed with a gloved finger.

"The photograph?"

When he looked at the frame, he found every face therein scratched out. Before the questions could spring from his lips, a sudden and conspicuous absence replaced Gordon, with nothing to tell he'd been there except for soiled prints grasping his cuff.

"Kid? Where are ya?"

"Down here," she shouted. "Barney!"

Jogging footfalls crushed the snow. He had a flashlight, and he traced its watery beam across the gap until it trickled down to her. "Jeez-us, you took a tumble down the rabbit hole, didn'tcha?" Wiping a hand down his mouth, he added regretfully: "I don't have the ice axe. Must've left it back in the cave."

"Hold on a minute, okay? I'll find something."

"Don't go too far. It's damn dark out here."

Frosted in a layer of accumulating snow, the dead Hunter sparkled under the beam, catching her attention. At least the piece of crap might be useful for something. She anchored her good foot on its carapace, grasped a pincer and wrenched backward with a grunt.

Three short pulls bent it a slight degree; several more yielded nominal progress. The muscle surrounding her Hunter wounds hissed vindication for the corpse. Eventually the strain forced her to squat on her haunches, blowing out labored breaths.

She ran a palm along the synth's flesh, pushing on its thick amphibian skin in several spots, testing where resistance pressed back. Of the damage the Hunter sustained from its fall, of course the pincer had to stay put.

Still, she thought as she gave the joint a wriggle, maybe a concentrated application of heat could expand the flesh surrounding the socket and let it fall out.

Alyx looked up with a sincere hope Barney could still hear her. "Hey up there," she called, "you got any flares?"

His reply was audible, thank God. "Uh, just two or three. Where are you?"

"Walk about a yard north."

A standard road flare hit the snow a couple of feet beside her. She wasted no time tearing the cap with her teeth and ignited the fusee on the synth. Glaring red-white light leapt from the wick. She crept cautiously forth while it hissed in her grip; intense heat grazed her cheek as the calcium phosphate started to burn.

"Careful," Barney warned. "Don't be startin' no bonfires, yeah?"

"You didn't bring marshmallows, so you're not invited." Pinching her lips together, she carved the flare in tight orbit around the socket. Once the Hunter's tough outer layer cracked open, the rest unraveled with ease. The subcutaneous alloy bubbled and burst, a waxy mixture of flesh and fiberoptic cable puddling into formless goo. The pincer rim seethed a glowing white.

She stepped back and brought her heel down. This time the stubborn appendage cracked off the joint like a dry twig. No muss, no fuss. The stump's jagged edge turned orange as it cooled, and smoke ribboned into the cold.

Alyx hauled fistfuls of snow onto the blazing corpse, which sizzled into a blossoming of water and smoke. She coughed back its greasy peals. As her rubber sole stuck to the pincer's severed edge, she rolled the pincer under her boot for several minutes in order to plunge it into a safe temperature range. Nothing like scorching her hand to cherry the experience.

Slowly, the heat wafting through her palm lost its teeth. She quickly staked the pincer into the ice to form the first foothold. Nature again reared her noncompliant streak, however, and glanced the blade off the fold.

Barney swung the light in her direction. "Aw, jeez, you're really gonna climb this?"

She stabbed again, forming a hole the size of a nickel. An impatient huff escaped her as she yanked it out. She needed to deepen it without losing its grip. "You know any other way up?"

"Well, I think there's a harness in the pack—" Provisions jangled together. "Only twenty feet." He tossed it down to show her. As expected, the silver buckle stopped about thirty feet short, gleaming as it tapped against the ice, a virtual brass ring dangling just out of reach.

Alyx rubbed her calf. The plasma burn she'd sustained began to rouse, prickling as it rubbed her makeshift tourniquet. Not awake enough to harrass her yet, but not quite as deadened as before. She gelled it with more snow rather than risk a dangerous flare-up. She could close this gap with sufficient focus. Wouldn't be easy, mind, but she'd scaled worse.

"Listen, Al?" Barney asked. "When you get halfway up, wrap it around your shoulders and I'll help haul you the rest of the way."

"Right. See you in a few minutes."

The flare did a decent job of uniformly hollowing out the crater until the wick fizzled out. Chiseling, gouging, scraping, she continued to deepen the hole. Melted ice soaked through her gloves and stung her fingers raw.

The pincer finally held on the last decisive pound of her gun's stock, and she receded with bated breath, sharing Barney's anxious glance. One down, a thousand to go.

"Easy there," Barney warned as she grasped a nook that appeared grippable. "No need to rush."

The ascent was painfully slow. The pincer creaked from the strain, and it was difficult to keep from smearing off such smooth ice.

Alyx seized hold of a shelf several inches from the buckle. She grabbed the harness and prepared to wrap it around herself when a flash compelled her to look up.

Gordon flickered in his place.

Her hands slipped.

"Al!"

Panic flooded her system. Hurtling— Fingers scrambled— For another grip— Had to stop it— Stop—

She relented her instinct to lock up and let smear training crush her knee to her chest. Friction ground between the grooves in her rubber boot and the ice, slowing her plunge, and caught her from diving into freefall at the last minute.

Gordon. Every inch of her shaken body echoed his name. Gordon. Her heart pounded so wildly she felt it pulse in her gums. Gordon.

Barney's shouts bounced off her wool-filled ears, growing faint while the rest of the compromised shelf crumbled down around her, coating her downturned head in a snowy spray.

Straining for breath through clenched teeth, she redirected her focus on the present by looking down. At this angle, her ankle wrapped around a narrow jutting and rolled outward. Weight pushed on her tingling calf with increasing pressure.

She tried to sidle it free, wriggling her hip very slowly, only to slip again and suffer a bright stabbing pain as her kneecap popped, awakening her injury.

"Damn it!" she cried out as the nerve throbbed painful waves over her knee. Of all the crappy luck—

Barney ducked from the rim, taking the flashlight with him. "Shit, that's it, I'm coming down—"

She snapped her head up. "Don't! I don't need you getting yourself hurt, too!"

Despite the seething in her leg, she grit her molars and accelerated the rest of the climb. Her limbs burned down to the tendon, as though they'd tear by the end of it, where, inhaling air denying her the full privilege of oxygen, she staggered over the edge and crushed her forehead into the snow. She clamped her arms over the back of her neck and stayed there for a moment, enveloped in a protective coccoon, clenching her eyes shut to keep out Gordon's image.

"Hey, relax. You did it." Barney steadied her with a hand on her shoulder. "You okay?"

He tilted his head as Alyx knelt trembling, head downcast. After a minute she nodded, gave a slight sniff and wiped her nostrils on a corner of her sleeve.

"Heh," he said, "stupid kid," and swarmed her in a hug, taking her off-guard.

"How long were you out here for?"

"No clue." She accepted his hand and rose in unison with his grip and her crutch. "God, I was worried that fuckin' thing took you out with it. Must've wanted blood when you gave it that smack, 'cause it just pounced after you like a bat outta hell."

"We got separated, then?"

"Must've," he said. "That's when the ice caved under."

He deigned another glance down the crevasse, probably measuring its depths, before dismissing it with a head shake. The anxiety etched into his knitted brows told her he wasn't lying. She had no idea how long he may have wandered along the rim, lost and alone. Barney hated being alone.

Pushing herself up on her crutch, Alyx lurched ahead. "Everyone's headed for the weather station. We ought to rejoin them before the Combine catch up." But a hand caught her by the shoulder.

"Not on that bunk leg, you ain't."

She shifted it protectively toward herself. "It still works."

He snorted. "Don't think I haven't heard that one before. How bad you got it, Grandma?"

"I can stand just fine. It's just to keep from agitating the muscle."

"Answer the question I asked, huh? Can't ignore plasma like bullets. That shit gets infected like—" He snapped his fingers.

"You're acting like my leg fell off. I got nicked."

"Yeah, that's what everybody says. Next thing y'know, that tiny little nick's swelled to three times its size and you're draggin' a dead log."

"Easier to just say I'd be a burden."

"That's not—" He sucked in a breath, screwing his lips tight. "I swear to God, when we find the station I'm puttin' you in the timeout corner 'til you learn to stop saying crap." Barney sensed something in her quiet, and squinted vainly into the wind. "Hey… Y'see something?"

No; the figure in the distance turned and vanished under a gust of snow, shrouded by murky white depths. He left neither trail nor footprint. It was as if he'd never been there, yet Alyx shivered all the same, certain his mirage was as much a dream as the frigid gales stinging her cheeks.

Speak.

She couldn't.

"We need to start covering ground. If the station's nearby, one of its electromagnetic transmitters should ping our receiver. If not, well… " She tugged on her hood. "Can't say we didn't try."

There was cold, and there was this. A chill so deep it infiltrated the flesh to rob it of warmth, biting every pore as if spiteful that it couldn't soak through bone. The saliva in her mouth crackled and calcified.

Hugging her arms around her core, Alyx ducked her head, shielding it from a gelid gust that tore at the fur on her hood. Her nostrils stuck, as well as her trembling lips. Blood pounded between her temples in a deep, insistent throb. Caffeine withdrawal was a bitch for sure, but none more so when coupled with an empty stomach.

Her legs sank thigh-deep in the snow. Pushing through the fattening drifts required the twisting efforts of her entire body, and at times felt about as conducive as wading through a hostile white sea. She tried to console herself with the thought that every step forward, no matter how small, shrank the gap between here and the weather station.

"You doing okay back there?"

"Still got a pulse," Barney hollered. "Ain't regrettin' that one bit."

"Hang on a little longer; we'll pitch the tent once the wind dies down." Oh, God. "You did bring the tent, right?"

"Wh— Yeah, I brought the tent! What, you think I'm gonna make us camp out in an igloo?"

"Should've stopped at 'yeah.'" She shivered as the Hunter pincer tucked inside her boot rubbed along her ankle.

Down came the snow, blanketing the tundra in every direction, coating stumped trees and an eroded ridge line slithering underneath the belly of cloud cover. In the meantime, their receiver crackled white noise. Her fears writhed within its snarls.

Regardless, they trudged on, through a conspicuous lack of snowmobile tracks and APC tread.

They finally pitched the tent when they agreed their legs refused to carry them another step. The sky paled from utter black to a foreboding charcoal gray due to the setting sun refracting the last of its rays. Encrusted stars peeked timid askance through rends in the clouds; she hoped it signified a thinning in weather. Luck refrained from hailing on them thus far, but in the Arctic there were no guarantees. They made camp under a steep overhang just in case.

Following on the heels of the crevasse, she and Barney developed a shared aversion to talking. There really wasn't much to say. Not without risk.

Their spirits had drained ounce by ounce; now they couldn't muster much energy to poke fun at the piss-warm sludge that passed itself off as mixed cocoa, sharing swigs from a tepid canteen.

Thoughts of Gordon bobbed toward the surface no matter her diligence in pushing them down. Seemed like there was no avoiding them. Each time the upturned flashlight sputtered its ray on the sewn ceiling crease, she returned to that moment she nearly fell. But she could brute-force that mental door locked just for a little while longer.

The knapsack's provisions spread on the ground before them. Fifteen shotgun shells, eighteen pistol rounds, the pincer, a utility knife and two fusees. Considering how badly a single Strider gutted their outfit when they wielded far superior fare, surveying these resources made her feel, as Barney would say, as though they were blowing pea shooters at a dropship.

Sitting cross-legged, Alyx loaded four shells into the SPAS-12 and laid the stock across her thigh, repressing a wince as her calf smarted. God, she'd pawn her entire useless leg for a decent semiautomatic right about now.

"You know how many slugs are left in my Magnum?"

"Four," Barney said, with a jostle to the knapsack, "and a fistful of loose ones if you wanna bundle 'em up. Dropped the box on the way outta the cave. Sorry."

She didn't care. "We should probably pool our buckshot. My gun's not working right."

"Shouldn't have plugged up the barrel." Better that than shooting her arm off.

"Actually," Barney said, "I changed my mind. Hot potato." He tossed her his SPAS-12 in favor of the pistol lying beside her ankle. "Go wild."

"Hell's wrong with yours?"

"Couldn't hit a Hunter in the ass if I jammed it up its crack."

"Right, so I get both junk guns. Makes sense."

"Duct-tape that shit right up and it's good as new." Barney jammed in a fresh clip and tested the sights by aiming at the buttoned flap. "You got a plan for how we're gonna meet back up with the others? Probably at least fifteen miles off-track by now."

Truthfully, the best she had right now was to keep boosting the hell out of the signal and pray one of the radio operators would pick up. The next rendezvous point swam within a radius of twenty or so miles. That, of course, had been accounting for the fact that they'd be traveling in a terrain vehicle or on a snowmobile, covering ground at a much faster rate than the old-fashioned way.

"When I do, I'll let you know." She plopped onto her back, slinging a forearm over her face. "How the hell did the Combine find us?"

"Like usual," he said. "Ran right into their ugly mugs."

"That's the thing, though, you don't smoke your enemies just by 'running into' them. They knew enough to assume formation and hide behind a Strider. I'm just wondering how they knew." Closing her eyes, she listened to her heart beat against the icy rock. Then an awful epiphany jolted her awake. " …Oh my God."

"What?"

"Judith's hailing frequency."

"What about it?"

She lurched upright. "When Gordon and I went into the Citadel to stop the dark fusion reactor, I went hunting through their mainframe. They were programming the servers to self-destruct to keep her message from falling into the wrong hands. She'd encrypted hailing frequencies in the carrier wave."

Barney rubbed his nape. "You're, uh. Throwin' a lotta babble at me there, kid. In a nutshell?"

"It means they knew exactly where we were because I was trying to use that frequency to refine her location, but I forgot to… mask the codes.

"There wasn't any time," she said, more to herself than to him, "I mean, Dad died right as we were heading for the chopper, and… It must have slipped my mind." Oh, Jesus. All of this happened because I didn't— "Barney, they knew we'd stolen that info, so who else would have come here? Who else would try to… How could I have been so stupid?"

"Hey, wait a second. Sounds like it coulda been a mistake—"

"A mistake?" she asked, affronted. Tell that to the four men who'd died. "You don't get people killed and think saying 'My bad' is gonna cut it for them, do you?"

His gaze sank to the ground. "No." Barely whispered. "Course not."

Alyx cupped her brow, pinching hard on the fold of skin creasing the bridge of her nose. "They deserved… " Better. She stayed like this for a second or two before cradling her arms over her torso, unable to look anywhere but at their pitiful inventory. Things got any worse, they'd have to switch from bullets to prayer. The latter worked just as well. "If the Combine are giving us this much grief right now, imagine how destroying the ship's gonna go."

"Ship's a hill of beans compared to the Citadel."

"Maybe," she said. "But this time we don't have Gordon backing us up."

Barney wisely decided to sidestep another potential minefield. "Why'd your old man want to blow the ship, anyhow?"

She paused to recall the horror creeping into her father's expression at learning the truth of the Borealis' existence. Pale and strained. It was as though he, too, had glimpsed a ghost caught somewhere inside those flashing screens. "He didn't want the Combine to get ahold of it before we did."

"You think it's a good idea? Wrecking their toys only makes 'em ornery."

She sucked in her chapped bottom lip. "Whatever's aboard is important enough that it's got them scrambling. It could be a weapon, or something we've never seen before. Only Judith knows, but we can't access our full range of options until she tells us what we're dealing with."

"Then we wait," he said, "take it one step at a time. That's how we got here, and that's how we're getting outta this."

Silence descended upon them, signalling the end of the conversation. Alyx snatched the utility knife from the provisions and began to whet the pincer in long, meandering strokes.

Barney slid to the ground. Giving her a long, guarded look, he whispered, "Takin' my shift in two."

"Get some rest," she whispered back. She'd have a lot to wrestle with tonight, and didn't particularly want to involve an audience.

Luckily, his exhaustion agreed. He tucked onto his side, pillowing his cheek on his wrist. "Two," he murmured, "on the dot," held up double digits, and yawned.

As evening drew near for White Forest, a heavy rain swept in to wash the hills of dead foliage. Rivulets glided clear, winding trails down oil-smudged window panes. Thunder growled in settling limestone, shaking the base to her bones. The hush that normally soothed him now pricked the hairs on his arms to a fine point.

The shuffle of loafers on concrete floors turned into flat, full-heeled clacking that garnered looks from passerby. Kleiner navigated the halls with a briskness that surprised them—others often teased he seldom walked quickly unless for research purposes.

There was ample reason for their curious glances. He indeed had books tucked under his arms. Alhough the stack consisted of notebooks rather than weighty academic tomes, the content therein was no less significant. Crammed within their yellowed pages were Eli's journals, dating back fifteen years.

Perspiration beaded his upper lip. After Gordon vanished, he'd stormed into his old friend's office to feverishly hunt every scrap of information those journals offered—for what? Anything, anything to verify what had unfurled before his eyes.

He clung to the journals until their spines bent and creaked. Clutching Eli's words like a life raft, feeling like a man who had been heaved into the ocean wholesale and frantically treaded water in his grasping lungs.

Years ago, he'd mistakenly believed it all a byproduct of Eli's grief and stress. It certainly soothed the anxieties surrounding the alternative: a figment of the imagination; a jagged shard of a memory his mind had created to protect itself from the trauma of losing his wife and the immense pain of amputation. A role to fill the mold of a difficult tragedy. A man in a pale blue suit.

He hadn't the luxury of tests, controls, or peer-reviewed studies to properly assess this phenomenon. The only source he could trust came directly from Eli. The only other witness, who'd had time to reflect and theorize. Somewhere inside these pages, he'd hidden the key to releasing Gordon. An assumption fraught with danger, he knew, but if what Uriah said was true—

He opened the door to Gordon's room and froze altogether.

The three Vortigaunts ceased their activity in an instant. Sokolai straightened blankets on the floor beside the empty bed, while Dushan coiled tubing for a portable oxygenator.

Uriah cradled Gordon in his arms, his wires straining as they spilled onto the floor.

Kleiner could hardly breathe when he said, "Put him down."

Faint green ribbons caressed the sky.

Sleep claimed Barney after a time but eluded Alyx. She crouched just outside the meager tent where he lay softly snoring.

Her breath escaped in white curls as she gazed heavenward. Her mind buzzed too much to whet the pincer for much longer, so she stargazed, moving her lips to match the shape of their names. She sat beneath their fragile light, contemplating the dissonance between their quiet beauty and the horrors they had bred.

The Combine had emerged from those stars. Somewhere out there, in the unfathomable cradle of space, a parasitic race of conquerers razed civilizations. While on Earth, human beings wondered at these constellations, grasping for what dwelled beyond reach, other species had cried their dying breaths in silence.

In their supreme arrogance, the Combine assumed this planet would be no different. But the human spirit, once wounded, snarled and bit back.

She had to let the Resistance keep believing that.

Within every star flamed a nuclear reactor, a black hole waiting to unleash its destructive potential. It was only distance and time that wove the illusion of beauty. Up close, you could see there was no intelligent design to be found in suffering. No meaning to be divined from blood.

Death proved a horrifyingly banal occurrence. Like sleeping, like eating, both monstrous and mundane in its ease. Anyone you knew could be gone tomorrow. Stepped on a hopper mine. Shot by a stray bullet. Swallowed poisonous fumes. Tortured. Wrong place, wrong time. Over and over again.

Some grew so weary they decided to take the terror of living into their own hands, just to wield some semblance of control. You can rule my life, but you can't take my death. Of all the deaths that accrued over the years, those that ended willingly affected her father the deepest.

And it was because he knew. He'd known the losses he'd exchanged for her. Her survival demanded everything from him, including his innocence.

Her braced shoulders softened. Eli had once been unaware of the horrors lurking in their future.

When she was a toddler, he carried her to the Black Mesa observatory. In hindsight, it was a little strange to think he'd once been the more robust of them. But carry her he did, laughingly on his shoulders to Sector F's Astronomy wing, up curved sandstone steps into the vast, open dome where the cosmos sprawled before their marveling eyes. There they watched the stars for hours, a man and his child equally mesmerized by the beauty of the universe.

Her dimpled hand greedily clutched the constellations he named. Stardust painted his kindly face blue, his teeth glimmering twin pearl strands as he laughed. Go on, baby, he urged. Pick one out and I'll get it for you.

The memory squeezed her heart. She burrowed her head in her knees and wondered if somehow, somewhere, he also held her in his thoughts.

Thoughts that quickly fell from orbit, from stars and smiles to charred corpses and vengeful Hunters. Toward bleak future instead of halcyon past. Soldiers could accost the rest of their outfit. Gordon could die, as could Judith. She and Barney could freeze wandering blind in this barren landscape. Possibilities of failure counted more numerous than the stars themselves.

"We need to talk." Ice misted on her pursed lips. "We ran into some trouble. Didn't take long… I just hope to God the others made it ahead of the Combine, but that's probably what the guys were hoping for when the Strider tore us to shreds." Bitterness seeped in her voice as she erased the lambda she traced, crimping her hand into a fist. "A Strider, Dad. That's all it took to send us running."

Emboldened by her candor, Alyx raised her head. "Tell the truth," she implored her father. "Was the thought of being hated so horrible you had to die? Because… " She bit her lip. "Honestly, I'd rather yell at you than thin air."

Ribbons danced.

"It should have been clear the first time you asked: I'm not going to speak for you because those aren't my secrets to tell. In fact, I hate them. I hate that you left me to hold everything together when it's about to fall apart, and I think I reserve the right to be angry about that, Dad. Is it so much to ask for some time? Leading us was supposed to be your thing. I'm just a mechanic you taught how to shoot."

We're so small down here, Eli said. He shifted his daughter on his shoulders. I wonder if somebody out there's wondering about us right now, just waitin' for a friend.

"You were scared I'd never look at you the same way. But you know what? That wasn't your call to make. You didn't trust me not to hate you, and that's what hurts. Letting me know would have changed a lot of things, but not that."

The ribbons pulsed, drawing her mind toward him; it took her entire will not to scream.

Her breath wavered. "When you keep asking me to speak, it feels like you're asking me to keep up this awful cycle. And… Is it always going to be like that? Leading people to their deaths, trying not to feel too guilty about it?"

Snow crumbled to a fine powder in her palm, trickling through the gaps in her fingers. Easy for her to say: she was being just as cowardly hiding the truth as he had been evading the consequences of speaking it.

Hell, why was she running straight to her father to bend his ear like he was alive?—like he could listen?—when days ago she'd pushed him away? To keep from thinking about something even worse? The lambda had pulsed under her hand, yet she chose to argue with ghosts.

Try as she might to pretend otherwise, she was only speaking to herself, fighting an idea of her father no more rooted in reality than her childhood daydreams that the family photo trapped Azian Vance. Both her parents were dead. Here there were just the stars, the dark silence residing between them.

Her calf twinged.

Alyx crept her way back into the tent, taking care not to disturb Barney while she curled into a ball. She tucked the knapsack under her arm to cushion her head, with the feeble hope sleep descended swiftly, when the zipper puckered. A small rectangular card peeked through the teeth and fluttered unceremoniously onto the snow.

She turned with languidity. Picking it up, she brushed her thumb across its surface to clear the frost.

A wrinkled postcard. The front's laminated photograph showed a smiling collection of staff in the Anomalous Materials lobby: Dr. Kleiner, her father, even Breen with his face oddly intact.

No Gordon.

The facility's logo stamped a white emblem in the lower right corner. Black Mesa Research Facility. Santa Fe, New Mexico.

She'd seen these before. In the old days, Dr. Kleiner had a surplus of the things crammed in his junk drawer and used to scribble stray thoughts on them. Had her father borrowed one?

Maybe; this particular card was old, used. It weighed featherlight in her hands, and she feared it might crumble if she breathed on it. A Labradoodle stamp adorned the back, as well as her father's neat script addressing Gordon Freeman, Sector C. Room 217.

Sorry if this seems a little forward, he began, but do you know Izzy Kleiner? He tells me you were one of his brightest students. Why, he can't stop talking about the wunderkind, top of his class at MIT, interned with the entanglement team in Innsbruck. I got so curious I had to see the new hire for myself.

My name's Eli Vance. I'm with AnMat as well, but they have me working in the computation wing. Maybe when our schedules loosen up, Izzy and I could give you a tour of the composite labs. I saw you walk past them earlier today and you looked a bit lost. This place can be a real maze if you're not used to it.

Oh, and in case no one's told you yet: welcome to Black Mesa.

Alyx pressed the card to her heart, letting it rest there. Incongruously hot tears pricked her corneas. Suppressing them with a hard swallow, she tucked the card back into the envelope.

"Good night, Dad."

"Put him down."

The hard tone he employed startled him, but appeared not to affect them in the slightest. Dushan calmly resumed coiling; Sokolai smoothed out more linens. A slow, shameful heat crept through his throat and fanned upwards toward his cheeks. And so he dared say nothing more, relenting the silence to the chirping tick of the electrocardiogram.

Uriah blinked several times. He gazed upon Gordon with regret clouding his central iris, then rumbled a sigh with lowered shoulders, as if to clear his throat.

Dread raised his hackles as he transferred the patient to Sokolai's care.

"Kleiner… "

"All of you." He sheathed the doorknob in his fist. "I will not let you out until you comply."

Uriah raised a single claw. "What is it you fear?" he asked. "His passing? He quickly approaches the void."

"This isn't right," he said. "You and the others have known the truth almost as long as Eli himself, yet you chose not to disclose it. There must have been a reason. You must have known where it would eventually lead."

He turned the lock until it clicked.

"Is it fair, Uriah, to say this conjecture is accurate?"

"It is."

"Hence," he said, "it ought to be equally fair to say you know what our recourse should be."

Thunder growled.

"It isn't as though I also prefer to feign ignorance. For years, I've watched that man torment Eli. I won't see Alyx and Gordon endure a fraction of what he suffered." Focused on Gordon, he adjusted his hold on the journals. "So please, I beg of you: put him down."

"We cannot."

"Uriah… " He fumbled for words. What could he say? Were he Magnusson, he could easily persuade the Vortigaunts to heed reason, but he suspected they'd gathered here precisely to bypass him. That left him with the unfortunate job of intercepting them. It was too much to allow them to break trust with the rest of the base and place Gordon at risk. "I'm sorry, but this isn't a discussion to be had. For his health, please leave him in the bed."

"Then you must prepare to depart the Freeman, as you have done with Eli Vance."

Slowly, his grip on the knob eased. "Is… " His pinching throat jailed his words. "He… really that far gone?"

"Our fears are soon to become reality. Without direct communion with his Vortessence, we risk losing him, and thus, all hope he brings."

Sokolai spoke with great solemnity. "Until the Eli Vance opened our eyes, we believed it our inexorable fate to suffer. He taught us it was not such a grave sin to hope for more. His cause ennobled our lives, if only as sacrifices flung into a pitiless void. We drew comfort from his faith in the Freeman."

"But that faith," Dushan said, stroking the back of Gordon's head, "it wavers."

"His strength ebbs," Uriah said. "It is too much to ask of anyone to renew these rites. Yet the creature that holds the Freeman in its grasp will use him, as it once used us, to shed unimaginable amounts of blood. Like the Shu'ulathoi, its desires shall never be sated."

His mind reeled for answers. "Why him?" he asked of the young man nestled in the cot, scarcely breathing. "Why must he shoulder these burdens?"

"The creature's ways remain a mystery, even to us. It would be easier to ask what manner of darkness inhabits the great abyss."

Their collective gazes followed as he cracked open the top notebook, letting it rest on his elbow, and traced a ginger path along Eli's faded penmanship.

"The books reveal nothing that is not already known. We knew the Eli Vance, and the Freeman. We know you as well. Your heart sees something your mind wishes not to name. You, too, have outgrown these false hopes." Uriah grasped his shoulders. "Be warned, Kleiner. This path is a dark road of sacrifice, leading the wayward into depths of even greater despair. To tread it will cost everything."

Upon the Vortigaunt's gentle nudge, he lowered his arms. As reluctant as he was to part with them, he shed his load, placing the notebooks at the foot of Gordon's bed, one at a time, like offerings, skimming a fingertip along the top cover. Some tribulations demanded more than knowledge offered alone. Some things required faith.

"I know."

He knelt beside the cot.

For so long, he'd let fear rule him body and mind. The Combine needn't have lashed out when innumerable terrors kept mankind shackled to shadows of its own making. Fear of suffering, fear of retribution, fear of losing life and humanity—these plagued the species more efficiently than any predator could aspire to.

What a squalid prison for love to languish. Even so, love found a way to survive. It managed to struggle through cracks in the cell, determined to flourish in the darkest recesses. It would survive because it could wait, fed by hope for the smallest flicker of sunlight.

It was Eli's love for his daughter that compelled him to make his selfish choice, the culmination of which lay dying before him, for a short-lived flicker of joy he found in her. It stood to reason, then, that that selfishness could only be offset by a selfless act, borne also of love.

The solution was here, he thought, as it had always been, not locked inside his dear friend's journals but beating within the chambers of his own heart. And it was disastrously, magnificently simple.

Squeezing Gordon's cold, slim hand, he looked up.

"Take us to the mountain, Uriah."

Chapter Text

Moisture clung to his lashes, carrying the fresh scent of pines bleeding early autumn sap.

A pair of feet splashed through thickening puddles. Their gait flew lightly enough to blend into the rain.

Uriah rounded a corner before slowing at a fork in the cave. He paused to study the bioluminescent worms orbiting the walls. Glow pulsed from their soft, pale bodies, offering subtle guidance from nesting furs of algae and moss.

Uriah passed beneath a natural arch. Larvae chittered within the dim cave, singing a fragile melody as they weaned nourishment from their peaceful surroundings.

Natural constellations strewn throughout the darkness. It was beautiful, he thought, and suffered a flash of shame that such beauty would have gone neglected would were it not for their circumstances.

The next marker was said to be a pond fed by a downward-flowing stream. He presumed it ended here, as water burbled from a rocky cleft in a soothing hiss, broadening into a shallow pool that lapped at Uriah's ankles. From there twin ventricles presented themselves: a blue beam flickered in the left, beckoning him.

They knew they'd arrived when a group of Vortigaunt attendants greeted them in solemn chorus. Stooping in a practiced bow, Uriah let Kleiner off his back, depositing him on a seat of flat rock. "Rest here," he instructed. "I shall check on preparations."

His knuckles popped as he pried them from Uriah's muddied shoulders; they further cracked as he rubbed his wireless rims on a corner of his shirttail. Although he counted himself luckier than most that he did not suffer inflamed joints at his age, considering this terrible weather, there were still limits his body protested. Clinging to Uriah's back during a mountain ascent in the driving rain strained him a bit more than usual.

While Uriah conferred with the others, he took the opportunity to slide off one shoe and wring out its excess water. He turned it over with cold, slippery mud coating his fingers. Disappointed to learn the stitching had come loose, he probed a ragged seam, then refit his foot with a light sigh.

Water seeped inside his loafers, suctioning the balls of his heels. Old things had unraveled many times before this, of course, and had to be laboriously hand-sewn back into working condition—but circumstances did not permit them to bring attention to themselves by stocking up on better resources. It seemed a quaint consideration, to think twice of lacing boots or zipping up a windbreaker, but someone was bound to question why.

Still, one couldn't forgo exercising due caution. They had left the base one by one to avoid rankling suspicions. Sokolai departed Maria's quarters first in order to hunt the antlion heart necessary for the ritual, giving her the excuse that he sensed the early arrival of City 14's wayfarers to soothe her misgivings about letting him out in the rain. Dushan followed an hour later under the guise of "assisting" his partner, only to carry Gordon discreetly through an unused back entrance.

The clock ticked two in the morning when he and Uriah agreed conditions quiet enough to leave White Forest themselves. Lightning left the sky pale and scarred. Ozone hovered over the ridge, leaving a crackled taste on his tongue.

Guilt churned his stomach well into the night. It pumped his heart full of dread when he finished reprogramming Gordon's equipment to continue producing steady vitals for the next eight hours, allowing them to detach his diodes without issue. But he found his resolve replenished in the fact that he wasn't attempting this alone. Excepting a small scare when a comm tower operator swung the beam at a sapling Uriah rustled, they managed to escape posthaste. Fortuitously enough, Xenian wildlife also eschewed them.

He gazed along the northern wall where Sokolai and Dushan carefully arranged a flat slab for Gordon to lay. The surface raised several inches above the pool surrounding them. A linen sheet hung from the bier's sloped corners, its folds already sagging from oversaturated air. The portable oxygenator stationed at Gordon's side hissed, tucked under his slender arm for safekeeping.

Uriah wadded his stained lab coat and offered the bundle to Dushan. "Place this beneath the head of the Freeman. His skull remains tender. We must take care to protect the matter that dwells within."

Despite their best efforts to shield him from the elements as Dushan carried him up the mountain, Gordon's makeshift cot filled with wet leaves; the torrent had ripped them from the elms, along with small pieces of brush and bramble.

That wouldn't do. Gingerly he treaded through the pool, knelt beside the young man and began picking them off, wiping the dew from his brow in between. On his cheeks, droplets lingered like tears.

He prayed they were doing the right thing. He disliked the thought of deceiving the rest of White Forest, Arne and Maria in particular. It would be well within their rights to rebuke them for breach of trust, though he would gladly shoulder responsibility for all blame. Yet if medical intervention alone could save Gordon, it would have done so by now. Saving the body at the expense of the life it housed threatened to condemn him to the contractor's eternal control.

He tensed as a Vortigaunt asked Uriah a brusque question in their native tongue. There were five of them; their scuffed electronic braces marked them as City 14 refugees.

The lead Vortigaunt shouldered Uriah aside to glower at him, prompting the others in the pack to follow suit. Seething ember eyes, coupled with low, forbidding growls, sent a fresh wave of chills flurrying down his spine.

"Who is he?"

"A friend of the Freeman," Uriah said, gripping his arm in a placating gesture, "and thus, our ally."

"He must leave. These rites shall be endangered should it peer through his eyes."

"It looms close," a second Vortigaunt added.

"Yes," said a third. "Too close."

"The human is weak," said the leader vehemently, overlapping their voices. "Are you prepared to sacrifice the Freeman because he cannot deny the interloper? The fear in his heart will open the cage and permit the darkness passage."

"What shall tether Freeman, then?" Uriah challenged. "His bonds to us are themselves weak. The Isaac Kleiner is our last hope to reach out. He presides with us; let there be no more quarrel over this matter." He spoke with a rare assertion that compelled them to stand down, however begrudgingly, and moved on to the next order of business. Strange; Arne's mannerisms rubbed off on him more than expected. "Where is the heart?"

"Here." Covered in shining films of blood, Sokolai carried the organ toward the group. Although its host was surely dead, the guardian's heart pulsed with an effervescence that filled the cave upon its every shuddering beat. Delicate blue light illuminated snaking artery and vein, melded to the ventricles as if carved from glass.

"A fine specimen," Dushan appraised.

"It was not easy. She did not want her cords cut." The glow seeped through Sokolai's claws as he passed ownership of the heart to Uriah, who thanked the guardian for its sacrifice and cracked the heart upon the rock.

Radiant blue powder poured in a fine spray, which he sifted over his companions, then inundated Gordon's slumbering body. Twinkling stars, the particles dissolved to wisps by the time they fluttered onto his chest.

"Guardian blood, flow back into the void from which all life springs. Give us clarity to part these false veils of separation. Dissolve the chains shackling us to our mortal flesh; show us the true face which lies behind the Freeman's mask."

"Illuminate us," said Sokolai.

"Let the Vortessence speak through us."

Light spread over them in nets. They gathered as one, joined in the shimmering of their bodies.

"The beast has begun his hunt."

"His many eyes watch within spaces the humans cannot perceive. It is there he hides, obscuring the path from us."

"Where does the path lead?"

"We do not know."

"Our hearts darken. What more shall we endure?"

"We are made to suffer."

"With humans we commiserate our plight."

"The extract—"

"The extract."

"For far too long have the Shu'ulathoi avoided retribution. No longer."

"The Freeman brought with him a hope, now dwindling. Let us wander this darkness until we find it again. There must be no other recourse."

"The Resistance is all."

"The Freeman must live."

"R'iit." Uriah opened his central iris wide, revealing a startling sky blue. "We begin. Join us, Kleiner."

The Vortigaunts began to chant in their sonorous tongue as they wove this living light over the infirm patient. Skin and subcutaneous fat dissolved; beneath their orbs, patches of Gordon's internal organs showed through.

Awe raised his hands. He expected to see what he always had: the hands of an old man, pink, bitten skin scarred and speckled from years of living in Combine rule. As the light pulsed through, he witnessed their inner mechanisms, down to the smallest winding capillary. Tendon and ligament colluded in perfect rhythm as he flexed his fingers; he felt the thrill of red blood cells rushing away from his quaking fingertips.

Kleiner swallowed back the hot stone rising in his throat. He felt at once insignificant and luminous, as though some greater force had painstakingly crafted this organic machinery which had worked faithfully to keep him alive for seventy years.

And yet, for as wondrous this machinery was, as much a miracle it all seemed that something so inconsequential as matter could have formed something so cohesive, so intelligent—it was so fragile. Flesh shed its life so easily that it ended in careless bursts of violence, by human foible and human stupidity—and by the indifference of the universe at large.

The more he gazed upon Gordon, the more he wanted to weep. Uriah's bright claws lingered on his skull, and his eyes rimmed with moisture as he witnessed the fracture threatening Gordon's very existence.

He chanced a step, afraid of breaking something so delicate. However, a pleasant, honeyed warmth like sunlight spread through his chest, filling him with such peace that his shuddering ceased, and his footfalls grew more assured.

Soon the others pointed at him with coaxing drones. A glimmering green thread protruded from his heart. More threads emerged painlessly, weaving toward them. The orbs glowed brighter the closer they approached.

The spectacle shattered in an instant. Dushan shoved him out of the way at a bolt before it lashed out and carved a nasty gash where he stood. The threads thrashed and screeched, a brilliant knot spitting electricity at everything it saw fit to receive. A microcosm of a disaster he'd never wanted to repeat unfolded. Something was wrong here— Something—

Kleiner cried out from a sudden blast of pain that ripped through his head. He doubled over, clamping his temples.

The Vortigaunts hissed with gnashed teeth. "Vile creature," Uriah shouted at the walls, "powerless without your tricks!" He clutched Kleiner by the shoulders, setting him upright. "The Kleiner must persist—"

(I… I can't)

"Persist," Uriah ordered. "We cannot lose him!"

Threads snapped and fell as if cut, reeking smoke. He sank to his hands and knees, letting the slickened stone push into his palms. Swirling around him in disturbed crests, it felt like spilled blood, cold, viscous. His body sagged, as heavy and foreign to his mind as stone.

Breathing hard, he struggled to stand—his balance knocked down on the next attempt. Pain stabbed into his elbows as his palms absorbed the shock of the blow, splashing water onto his sleeves. It was as though an invisible hand clamped around his nape and forced him onto his knees.

(you're toying with us, you damned cretin)

(it won't work)

The threads crackled while below, at their feet, the pool ran black. Dark clouds burst into clear waters, pustules bleeding through cracks in the cavern walls. Stones dislodged from the ceiling and rained down, cracking themselves upon the slab, smashing the oxygenator into a worthless plastic heap, bruising their flesh. They whipped their heads at a warning grumble as the cave heaved and shook.

"One thread remains."

"Tie it! Quickly!"

An intense, burning agony seized him, tearing a scream from his lips. In the next few excruciating moments he could do nothing but curl into himself, an instinct left over from the womb.

He didn't know how long he braced himself in this position. Gradually, the pain subsided. The Vortigaunts' panicked shouts faded into a cold, encompassing silence. The smell of moss-furred rocks fled his nostrils, replaced by more familiar milieu. Nonetheless, he retained a bodily quaver as he pried his hands from his clenched eyes, allowing glimpse of paint on corrugated steel.

Not the lambda; a disability symbol, one he hadn't seen since—

"No," he whispered, probing the sign with tremulous fingers. His gaze rose, his horror growing in tandem. The painted steel plate met the rounded legs of an upholstered seat. He grasped the chilled poles welded to the floor and climbed to his feet.

A lifetime ago, he took a certain amount of comfort in the tram's routine. The Black Mesa transit system followed the same daily network throughout the facility. He could never be lost when one docked nearby.

Divorced from the facility, he sensed as though he were moving within a dream, an incomplete reconstruction of the past. Gone were the rails, the humming fluorescent bars guiding the path ahead, the announcement system informing passengers of the day's comings and goings… It hurtled in smooth, utter quiescence, not through cavernous labs and rugged canyons tinged red by sunset, but through darkness without beginning or end.

He pressed against the window, bewilderment crushing the fearful cry building in his lungs. Light streaked past at unimaginable speeds. Neither departure nor destination. No other passengers to break solitude's primal dread—except—one sitting with folded hands at the very end of the cabin, watching light flow in the void beyond.

"Gordon." His hand flew to cover his heart. They did it. Praise God, we've found you.

He stepped forth, his lips full to spring with proclamations of relief and surprise, but Gordon remained motionless, quelling whatever enthusiasm sparked his spirit.

"You shouldn't be here." His Adam's apple dipped, his voice beaten down into a whisper. "He won't let you go."

Kleiner sank into the seat across from his pupil. Stuffed padding creaked under his weight, same as it had so many years ago. Just a memory… Why did it feel so real, then, so threatening to be alone in reunion?

Even though Gordon offered no answers, hints of reality persisted. Kleiner's fingertip retained a smudged burn. His loafers squeezed his soles until they throbbed, having absorbed too much water. Perspiration and rain painted damp residues over his clothes and flesh.

The problem was that Gordon retained markers of reality as well, from a slightly different time. Limestone powdered his cheeks; blood and cranial fluid dried on his split hairline, caking the lenses of his glasses.

Gordon poised his left arm on the window. Small, feverish twitchings palsied his index finger. He'd been observed doing such while comatose. The medics speculated his tic must have emerged as a kind of sense memory, left over from his experiences infiltrating the Citadel, where his quick use of the zero point energy field manipulator proved the difference between life and death.

It wasn't so, he realized, for he instead rubbed at a nick in the window. Formulae scratched into the glass spilled over the pane. Within the restless markings his mind encircled itself, unable to reach a solution.

"Gordon… " Kleiner looked down with growing apprehension. His own scorched index finger twitched in faint synchronicity with his pupil's. He wrapped it inside his fist. "What is this place?"

"Incubation," he said. "Tucked safely away until you're needed again."

Silence.

And then—

"When he first put me here, I mistook the lights for galaxies. My hypothesis has changed since then." He withdrew from the formulae, contemplating his reflection as it broke between the variables. "We're crawling along a synaptic pathway of immense proportions. The black leap between thoughts. Moments behaving like neurons, potential connections in need of activation. So much dwells in the interim… " He hung his head. "So much hides."

"I'm sorry," Kleiner said. "It had to be done, despite the risks." He laid his own hand atop Gordon's to quiet its incessant tapping. Now was not the time for hesistation. "There's something you must know, however. Before it's too late… "

"I know."

"You do?"

Heaviness burdened his sober nod. "I've been able to peer into my employer's mind," he said. "Only briefly." He swallowed. "Just… glimpses… are enough to drive one mad."

The strength resistance must have demanded of Gordon in this state weighed his shoulders with melancholy. "Then you must know that telling you the truth, bringing it to your consciousness, is the only means of breaking the contract." Could he do it? Hurt his beloved student to free him? He had to. "That's the reason he had Eli killed. To maintain control over you both through the enforcement of his silence."

"The connection was only half broken," Gordon replied quietly, "since I've been incapacitated. He's still using me to look for her." He traced a lambda. "I keep trying to warn her, but she doesn't understand the signs. Neither did you."

Fear, rising again. "Is she in danger?"

"She's just out of range… though not for much longer," he said. "Frankly, it would have been better to… "

He trailed off, leaving that thought to their mutual silence.

"He claims freedom is just an illusion," Gordon said, and watched constellations blaze past. "More and more I struggle not to believe him." He sighed. "For what little it's worth, it wasn't Eli's fault. I was the one who stepped into the portal. It's kept her alive for this long; I just wish we knew to what end."

At that, he rose, compelling Kleiner to follow toward the exit.

"Don't be so eager to sacrifice your freedom. Fight for it with everything you have. You won't realize its significance until he's got you encaged."

The tram door slid open with a pneumatic sigh, revealing the void that lay just one wayward step beyond its threshold. The darkness blinked, and the shrieking knot of their threads coalesced into a portal. The cave, crashing down. Vortigaunts running. Carrying their bodies into thunder and rain.

Voices swirled inside its eye. The Vortigaunts' cries transformed into those of Alyx, of Eli; then of friends and colleagues long dead. Their pale echoes faded on a distant tide, but they touched upon a vein still alive beneath the years, and released a dormant sadness from the bottom of his chest. Inches before him, separated by crackling energy he could have reached out and grasped: Black Mesa, unscarred by disaster.

"Run."

Kleiner stood bathed in the portal's green glow, unable to obey that soft command, to commit a single limb to forward advancement.

"Gordon… " He turned toward his protégé with moisture accruing a warm, blurring mist in his vision. "I cannot."

The voices turning inside the portal's well evolved into screams. Wails of despair stretched thin by the vastness of space echoed in all directions, unanswered except by gunfire. The portal continued to swirl, ruffling their hair, rippling a powerful tide of charged particles. Silence reigned between streaks of light.

How readily one gilds the past in an effort to preserve it. Black Mesa may have once stood as a bastion of scientific progress, but their denial of human limitation and their blind obedience to authority eradicated any such glittering promise. Their hopes culminated in a massive, ash-filled grave in the middle of the desert. There was no returning to the hubris that came before. To follow that same path was tantamount to killing what precious little remained of this planet.

Still Gordon insisted.

"This isn't a matter of willpower," he said, "he isn't something you can hide from. You need to put distance between us to weaken the connection. Take the Vortigaunts and leave me on the mountain. Get as far away from me as you can manage."

Staring into equally green eyes filled with unknowable terrors, he began to grasp the phenomenon's cyclical nature. Left alone, Black Mesa would happen again. Perhaps not in this unremarkable arm of Orion's spur, on a miraculous accident called Earth, where life fought to hoist itself free from blood and soil, and failed more often than not to find meaning in the struggle. Perhaps not here on a tiny rock drained of resources, rendered garbage by extraterrestrial parasites.

Somewhere out there, surely… To someone else lost inside the wide gaps of darkness that whisked past, the horrors that occurred here would happen again. And they would continue until the last light extinguished in that horrid man's grasp.

Gordon lunged forth, digging gloved fingers painfully into his shoulders. He knew his pupil could easily overpower him if he so desired. One swift shove to hurl him into the portal could cease his resistance. But he faltered. Bless the boy, he hesitated.

"Gordon," Kleiner said, "do you wish for us to let you expire?"

"If that's what it takes, yes!" he shouted. "Damn it, why won't you run?"

He pounced on him with trademark speed. However, Kleiner wrapped both hands around each side of the jamb, enduring with whatever strength his aging limbs allowed, waiting for Gordon to yield. He didn't care that the strain of holding fast left bruises on his shoulders. The only way to face Eli's tormentor would be together.

Gordon punted on his shoulders, hissing curses through clenched teeth as he attempted to force Kleiner through the portal. Go. Go. Light swam tantalizingly close, breathing ionized particles on his nape. Tendrils reached forth and danced in the periphery, as if to beckon.

Grim realization settled in; tears streaked down Gordon's soiled cheeks, cutting clear trails through the grime. The portal dissipated, and the door locked. He crumpled to his knees with a soft, shuddering sob.

"It's all right." Kleiner gathered him in his arms, carefully stroking his matted hair. "I won't let you go. Not again."

…How touching.

Gordon disappeared; he embraced nothing. In the span of a blink he found himself paralyzed, unable to will his muscles to flee, to look anywhere but into scorching, merciless pale blue eyes, whose irises stormed about black-hole pupils like quasars.

Emaciated fingertips rose until they steepled together. Were it not for their fluid motion, he may as well have been an embalmed corpse dressed for viewing. Stepping further into the light reflected a white-gray pallor. The veins that crawled across his temples and claimed his skeletal hands were empty of blood.

Whatever inhabited that body wasn't human.

He had never heard his name. Had never caught passing glimpse of him around the bustling corridors of Sector D Administration. Yet in that suffocated moment twenty years later, recognition blazed through his mind, setting his neurons alight.

"I know you."

The soft reverence with which Kleiner whispered this pleased him, for a smile stretched over his mouth.

Hello, Doctor.

Chapter Text

08/28/21

Almost twenty years to the day Alyx disappeared in City 17, Gordon Freeman arrives.

Our friend's got a twisted sense of humor, I'll give him that.

08/29/21

It took a hiccup in Kleiner's teleport and a destroyed hunter-chopper—my God, the thing was smoking in pieces in the shallows—but Gordon finally knocked at the door.

Son looks so harrowed, so lost. Alyx makes him a little more comfortable, I think, so I'll let those two get settled in for now. I'm hoping he'll be able to get acclimated here. When the buzz has died down, we can work on putting some old business behind us.

08/31/21

He's maintained closer contact than usual since Gordon returned. I expected him to keep an eye on his assets. What I didn't expect was for him to be this brazen, speaking to people out in the open.

Folks have inquired into the suited man they've spotted on the shorepoint or traveling from the trainyard. They wonder if he's a long-lost refugee from Black Mesa. I hate that I have to say he's a 'colleague.' He's no more our colleague than Breen is.

He must be planning something if he's grown comfortable with being seen. Recently I've had this nagging feeling that he's waiting for something. Waiting to see how this unfolds.

09/7/21

It isn't a good idea, not without concrete evidence, but Judith won't hear a single misgiving. According to her, she'd been combing through Breen's personal servers when she came across plans to extract it from intradimensional orbit.

Breen bought into a lot of crackpot ideas. I don't find it hard to believe he'd concoct a fairy tale about some ghost ship to please his superiors. Anything to stay on their good side.

She's determined to find it, come hell or high water. I should've known. Sometimes there's just no talking to her.

I hope she doesn't feel she has anything to atone for.

I regret asking if she was ashamed to stay.

09/8/21

Alyx, Gordon.

Be safe, you two.

09/9/21

Kleiner tells me we must have developed a slow teleport, which explains the week Alyx and Gordon lost between Nova Prospekt and the uprising in City 17. He seems fairly excited about the prospect of more research. Myself, I'm not so sure.

Of course, we don't have another twenty years to spend investigating the theoretical underpinnings. I already know the answer. They survived because the fabric of spacetime surrounding them has been tampered with; the rules no longer apply to them as stringently as they would anyone else. Otherwise their atomic continuity should have been scattered, torn apart. Combine portals are too finely-tuned to allow for that kind of fluke.

I have few doubts Gordon will be wondering about that, even if he senses that he, at least, has been displaced. He's asked me about that before, in his own roundabout way. He knows who's watching him. But I fear my answers won't explain Alyx's subsistence. He'll have questions.

09/10/21

After twenty years, all I have are speculations. The common denominator seems to be that the ones he chooses are mentally suppressed: unconscious, traumatized, asleep. There must be some kind of forced inhibition at play. For the longest time, I thought I'd dreamed the whole incident with Alyx at Black Mesa.

I believe Judith's safe, at least for now. Breen being the garrulous man he was, he undoubtedly would have told her everything. Thank God he went down before he got the chance.

Barney knows nothing.

Kleiner… It's hard to say which way the pendulum swings. Izzy wants to believe me for my sake, I think, and to keep the peace. But it isn't as though I haven't given him probable cause for doubt with my own half-remembrances and foggy interpretations. He's a smart man. He'll parse the truth if he hasn't already.

That leaves Alyx and Gordon.

This might be my last chance. I've got to tell them the truth as soon as they touch base at the outpost. There's no guarantee it'll free them from him, but anything to frustrate his efforts has to be better than sitting idly by, watching them flee from that damned Citadel.

Gordon deserves his freedom. Alyx deserves to know. Pleading for their forgiveness would be an insult; my own feelings have to be shelved in this matter. If hating me means they and the world will be safer for it, then that's what has to happen. Whatever anger they'll have must go toward protecting the Resistance.

Lord, anything but this. I still have nightmares of Black Mesa. Hearing him whisper those cold, mocking words in my ear. "Everything has its price, Mr. Vance."

When I asked what it would cost to protect her?

"Her love."

Don't smile like you've won, you smug bastard. We're just getting started, you and me.

Chapter Text

Eli's contractor smiled.

Doctor Kleiner, the one and only. Forgive me if I forgo introductions. Recent circumstances… being what they are… He gestured toward the tram's end, its seat now empty. Well… It appears we have no need.

Kleiner struggled to move, an insect desperate to pry its twitching wings from the spider's web. His mouth opened slightly; his vocal cords mustered a whisper.

"Where is Gordon?"

The contractor took a step forward. His fingertips shone a witch's cradle of radiant green threads that he stretched to snapping points.

All except one. The last thread resisted his efforts, maintaining a strong vibratory hum. Its harsh glow glared on his lenses; Kleiner realized they consisted of two smaller, intertwined threads.

Another smile, though fainter this time, lifted the contractor's pallid cheeks, sprawling wrinkles. Her whereabouts, Doctor. He grasped each crackling end. Sputtering light spat shadows into the graves of his eye sockets. If you would be so kind.

His thoughts slid backward in an entropic reversal he knew to be near impossible. In his mind's eye, the darkness that flooded the cave dissipated, lifting the rocks that hurtled down. Uriah descended the mountain as rain flowed back into pregnant clouds. His threadbare shoes, still dry, ceased their nervous pacing and shuffled backward, walked away from Gordon's bedside.

With a yank of the threads, the contractor pushed further. The rewind accelerated days, weeks. Months. Years, even. There was an orchestration being conducted behind an obfuscating madness. Was this what Eli had experienced all those years ago, amidst his grief and shock?

Perspiration and rainwater snaked down his temple in fine droplets.

"I don't know."

Words, said the contractor. Mere words.

He felt as though the hands that pulled on those threads reached inside his skull and probed the folds of his hippocampus for information. Stray thoughts cast aside, his memories sorted and processed like an expedited version of data filtering.

He couldn't help but shudder deeply at the violation. Nonetheless, he stood his ground. "This is foolhardy," he said. "I assure you I know nothing of what you seek."

Tsk. A sharp downward twitch of the mouth broadcast the cretin's displeasure. Scowling at the humming thread, he decided to wind it around his fist, each wrap around bloodless knuckles a tightening display of control. Surely there must be… more.

'More.' The word echoed in the corridors of his inner ears.

"That will not suffice us."

Sirens, distant in both time and place, began to wail.

Black Mesa, the origin and epicenter of this disaster.

For heartbeats in time his muscles locked in place. Smoke and blood and the muffled crack of creatures tearing bone from their prey's flesh cascaded through his mind in a sickening avalanche of sense memory, flooding his nostrils with rancid smells and his head with nausea.

Teeth exposed in that strange nothing-smirk, the contractor flicked the cords into taut strings. Stupid man, his mocking smile said. Stupid, stupid man.

He hadn't come here of his own accord.

He'd been lured.

Deeper and deeper his memories spiraled.

Yes. He was there the day the sample was delivered. He recalled a ticking clock counting down the world's remaining seconds from the desk of a lush, airconditioned office. How the muscles behind Eli's grinding jaws bulged as the Administrator dictated their recourse.

"Do the reasonable thing, gentlemen," he advised, "if not for science as a whole, then for your livelihoods."

"You can't do this," Eli said. "It's extortion."

The phone line blinked red; the Administrator muted it with a curt flick of the thumb. "Our sponsor has a right to privacy. He will disclose neither his sources nor his identity, and he expects us to keep it that way. Frankly, it's the least we can do given the rare privilege he's granting us. We need to be mindful of that. If we desire to conduct the experiment, then we must abide by his wishes."

"Cut the crap, Breen," Eli said. "He wants plausible deniability." Breen frowned. "Who's he with? NSA? Central Intelligence?"

A stubborn silence ensued. Kleiner's cheeks burned as the two men bored holes into one another with piercing stares.

"Dr. Vance—"

"Excavation's been digging around the borderworld for months and turned up nilch. Our new 'sponsor' points them in the right direction and a few days later, they haul up the Hope Diamond. Some folks have been calling it luck."

"Luck, Dr. Vance, is a natural windfall to the prudent and prepared."

"Glad we agree. Would be an awful big coincidence since funding cuts are around the corner, don't you think?"

"I don't appreciate your reckless insinuations."

"Neither will my lawyer."

Breen slammed the butt of his fist onto a stack of invoices, the thud of flesh on paper making his heart jump and continue to race amidst the next few ticks of the clock.

Eli remained rigid in his chair.

Clearing his throat, the Administrator took a moment to compose himself. "That's enough," he said. "Pay him a visit if you must, but I feel compelled to warn you that if you continue to threaten unwarranted litigation, you will be banned from any future research efforts in this sector."

"That the worst you can do?"

Kleiner's nails carved ruts in the polished mahogany of the armrests. "Eli, please."

"You talk about what you owe this 'sponsor,' but what about us, huh? Your staff, your employees—hell, some of your other committee members—" this as he jabbed a finger in Kleiner's direction, "—are begging you for transparency, but lately you've been giving us all the runaround. We have a right to know who we're doing this for and why. And if you think you can shut us up, you've got another thing coming."

"Well," the Administrator said, steepled fingertips ascending to meet his chin. "Perhaps. But you forget you have a wife to house and a daughter to feed."

Darkness clouded his old friend's mien like an impending storm front. "Don't you dare." Rising from his chair, his voice growing in volume: "I'll sue this entire goddamn department if that's what—"

"Language," Breen said, and fished inside his breast pocket. "In any case, you're too late. The sample has been processed and is being prepared for spectral analysis as we speak." He slid on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and opened a manila file. "I suggest you take the rest of the day off, Dr. Vance. Perhaps some quality time at home will douse that temper of yours."

Leaning back in his leather chair, he wet his fingers and grasped the corner of a page. The dismissive flip he made left Eli to crush his hands into fists. He thanked the Administrator for his time in a thin, strained voice, went unacknowledged, then coaxed Kleiner into following him out the door he all but slammed on its oiled hinges.

"Come on, Izzy. We've got work to do."

His temples constricted, began to throb. It was a supremely strange experience to have decades of life processed in the span of seconds. Peaceful and tumultuous moments alike churned in search of a single piece of information.

Gordon and Alyx. Alyx and Gordon. It seemed the two had always been intertwined. One a young man of exceptional prospects, the other a sweet young girl looking toward an equally bright future. This one rattled by the cascade; that one shaken to her core.

Black Mesa unfurled front to back, bottom to top. The domino chain reversed, stopped, failed to pinpoint where exactly along the timeline the breakage had occurred. He heard a whisper curse Eli over and again.

Where is she? Frustration rankled needles inside his skull. You know this is futile: where have you hidden her?

Kleiner didn't understand his aims just then. Given what was to occur, he soon grew to understand.

In the present moment, he found his gaze drawn beyond the contractor's shoulder. Toward a collection of faded white scratches Gordon had placed in the window paneling. From an otherwise meaningless array, one number rose to the surface.

His wavering voice gained strength as he recited it. "Five thousand, eight hundred and twenty-seven." He uncoiled his posture, deigning now to stare at the contractor long in the face. "Tell me, sir. Does that number hold any particular significance to you?"

A spark leapt up, stinging the contractor on the cheek.

"It is the estimated number of casualties at Black Mesa. There may have been more. Others who were lost, or otherwise unaccounted for."

More sparks flew from the threads. The contractor growled at the spray that burst between his fingers.

"Eli carried that number on his shoulders every day since you drew his contract," Kleiner said, interrupting him before he could speak. "At times he thought of little else. On other occasions, he wept. Not simply for the future that was destroyed at Black Mesa, but for the innocents who perished, and whose numbers would continue to accrue, as well as those lives that would forever remain shattered in the aftermath. It was never a number to him. It couldn't be.

"And you, sir. You are a coward."

The crackle and sear of resistance burned the flesh of the contractor's palms, bringing a horrendous reek to the air. The whites of his eyes boiled.

"You forced him to weigh these losses against his daughter. An innocent child whose value measured an incalculable cost in her father's eyes: you placed her on the scale without scruple, knowing he would not decline any terms you outlined in exchange.

"Were this any other time, I would question your motivations, but frankly, I no longer care about them," Kleiner said. "You took advantage of a broken, grieving man at his most vulnerable moment, and fashioned his deepest fear into a weapon to control him. When he at last found a way to defy you, after years of faithful service, you rewarded him with death. Or rather, silenced him out of a fit of cowardice. You call it a breach of terms, but we both know such impulse hardly constitutes real power.

"Likewise," he said, "we humans do not bow in mindless obeisance. Not to the Combine, and certainly not to you."

Hm. Frayed threads screeched in a knot of electric asps. A rousing speech, Doctor. Are you quite finished?

"Not yet." Kleiner grasped his hand.

Shock rattled the contractor. A chalky pallor regained its blood flow. Cold flesh warmed into tentative, gloved fingers that slowly, slowly curled around his.

"Come, Gordon. It appears this charlatan has exhausted the last of his smoke and mirrors."

The doors finally swished open, and he led Gordon through them.

Alone, he contemplated his failure.

One thread remained.

He crushed it.

Windows shattered outward, crashing tidal waves of glass into the darkness. Incandescent tubes scorched around him, belching sparks that caught on the upholstery. The tram's chassis screeched as the car folded in on itself, metal joints and steel bones scrunching with papery ease.

The last vortal cord sizzled protest in his fist.

Doctor Freeman. The darkness harbored lungs, and it prepared to scream. It… appears we've been quite… obdurate.

"Kleiner!"

Magnusson's thunderous call struck consciousness into his body in an instant. He bolted awake on the threadbare cushions of a lounge sofa, heart slamming like a panicked bird against his ribcage.

Rain trickled down the windows in thick streams, casting pale, phantasmal shadows over the room. Lacking his muddied lab coat, Uriah stood in solemn contrition beside the door, hands clasped and gaze fixed to the floor. His Vortigaunt companions nowhere to be found; had they escaped?

"Good to know those ears still work." Magnusson grumbled, folding his arms. "Old fool, what the hell were you ambling about the mountains for? You could have killed yourself out there."

"Yet he remains."

"Zip it, Uriah."

Uriah cocked his head.

Memories of the cave rushed to surface. Rocks pelting down. An invasive darkness.

"Is—" He patted his windbreaker to find it damp. Promptly he shed the sleeves. "Is Gordon all right?"

"Don't worry. That little pet of yours will be safe and sound once they put the restraints on him."

"Restraints?" He flinched as a pronged hand squeezed gently on his shoulder.

"The Freeman is slumbering at this time," replied Uriah. "The Magnusson decided it is best for the Freeman's safety that the body be permitted to rest."

"Speaking of which," Magnusson said, "do either of you possess the slightest inkling of what you've done?"

There would be ample time for explanation later. At the present, he had to finish what he'd started.

Kleiner darted for the fold-in closet where changes of clothes hung in case of bad weather. The shuttered door slid open with a clack. "I must see him," he said as he tugged an arm through the sleeve of a fresh lab coat. "I'm sorry, Arne, but there is really no time—"

"Make the time, damn it," Magnusson said, grabbing hold of an empty cuff. However, he managed to take advantage of his smaller size and worm free of his grasp. "Kleiner! You're not walking away from this one!"

He spared no time for conversation. Instead he made a beeline for Eli's office, rummaging through the drawers for what he sought: the bifocals Alyx repaired, safely tucked in their rough swaddling cloth.

Of course, Magnusson haunted his every step.

"Thanks to you, Uriah and his band of merry men, Dog is dragging a rescue party five miles down the valley in the pouring rain as we speak! Oh, and how could I forget? Somehow, Lord knows why, the fracture in Freeman's skull sealed over, making it outright impossible to repair the damage to his brain! Did you even dedicate a moment's thought to that, Kleiner?"

"The fracture… " He stopped to gaze upon his friend in earnest. "It's healed?"

"Yes! Have you heard a single blasted thing I've said?"

They ducked back into the main corridor. En route to Gordon's room, both men witnessed the patient stumble out of an open doorway, heedless of the surgeon's cry: "Someone stop him!"

Kleiner stopped instantly.

Equally startled, Magnusson asked, "Freeman?"

Maria Stezenka arrived in an atypical state of disorientation, untied scrubs fluttering over her usual clothes and snatching for breath.

"Hello, Doctor." Kleiner offered a placid greeting. "Hello, Gordon."

Maria glowered at him between huffs as if he were insane, but in the latter there was no reaction. No smile acknowledged him. Nary a sigh of exhaustion. The presence he sensed behind the myopic eyes was a bit too alert and stiff to be Gordon. He didn't know how, but a certain feeling of urgency arose to compete with his need to keep calm; he had to remove them from this situation immediately.

His eyes drifted over every crevice, before finally rising to meet him. "Hello."

"Welcome back."

"Thank you."

Their simple exchange of words rested on a flimsy foundation, bound to crumble at any minute. Gordon curled his hand into a fist a few times, as if the concept was alien to him.

Hmph, Magnusson said. "Well, isn't this just a dandy family reunion?"

Kleiner asked without turning: "Arne, would you mind sending Uriah for a change of clothes?"

"What on earth for?"

" …It seems I've forgotten in my haste." He walked toward Gordon and placed a steadying hand to his shoulder. He slipped the repaired frames behind his ears, though the eyes that perceived him appeared no less vacant for the change. "Not to mention he appears to have lost some weight. I pray the suit still fits him."

"Have you lost your mind?" the surgeon balked, rifing a gloved hand through her cropped silver hair. "He's at risk for another seizure. I've no clue how he's walking about, but he ought to remain under observation until— Where are you taking him? Isaac?"

"Let them go," Magnusson said. "It seems they're both happy with this arrangement." He crossed his arms, unable to resist indulging one last quip. "Although if you ask me, Freeman's body has been acting independently of his mind long before this little development."

"With a high-risk? I'll do no such thing."

"Consider it one less item clogging up your schedule." He sighed heavily and rubbed at the knot between his brows before she could interject, which ignited in her a glare so hot it could have scorched him. In all honesty, he did not seem to care for her professional indignation when she cried, affronted, "Damn you, he's my patient!" the echoes of which trailed them down the hall.

"Come, Gordon." Perhaps it was just a side-effect of having awakened so suddenly, but he felt wracked by a certain sense of déjà vu. "Let's get you situated. You'll be quite pleased to see the new features I've implemented."

The descent into the silo was as long as it was quiet.

He supposed such was to be expected. Aside from the occasional maintenance worker harried enough to overlook them, no one accosted them.

Gordon moved languidly at his side, one hand pressed to the wall as he stumbled down the steps, his slender muscles plagued by atrophy he suspected they hadn't quite recovered from.

It seemed a different place than when he and Alyx first dashed up here, alarmed by the threat of equipment failure. Tugging his lapels over himself, Kleiner climbed down the steep stairs fringed on either side by bare rails.

Silence lingered like a thick fog between them for the next few minutes. His heart nearly caught when Gordon spoke.

"Where… " He swallowed. "Where am I?"

"Patience," Kleiner whispered. "We will be there soon enough."

Dry limestone crunched under their heels, its texture hard and unyielding like that of barren permafrost. Indeed, in the watery glow emitted by overhead sconces, he could see his own trembling breath wisp into a translucent mist.
Kleiner slipped his hand into his pocket to to keep it from shaking. He squeezed hard until his forearm ached.

He hated deceiving Gordon like this, but he mustn't let his apprehension betray him. He planned to lock them in the capsule room, where Gordon—or his body, to be more precise—would have no choice but to listen. With each step deeper into the darkness, the contractor gained more critical information. It would doubtless not take him very long to act. So he must be quicker.

The four-digit wall mount beeped confirmation, clicking the lock open. It would stay open for sixty seconds and lock again once he closed the door. Gordon wandered inside without a word.

Kleiner found his affects exactly as he'd left them: the hazard suit embedded within frost-ridden glass, the connected computer humming on the program he'd almost finished tweaking, but not quite.

"Apologies for the sparse accommodations, Gordon. As you can see, I don't do much… entertaining here." Clearing his throat, he wheeled the chair over. "Please, sit."

He lumbered instead toward the capsule.

"Gordon," he said softly. "Stop."

Despite the fear growing in his pounding heart, a nascent ripple of hope compelled him to cross the threshhold. Unreadable eyes tracked him.

"Do not take another step," he said. "There isn't much time. Listen carefully to my words."

Gordon pressed a hand to the activation panel. A laser reader decrypted his palm in the flash of light that flared out. Seconds later the capsule exposed its glass ribs, letting frost rise in faint whorls off the edges of the suit.

It was now or never. Kleiner braced his shoulders.

"Now that you are conscious, there is something you must know."

Welcome to the HEV Mark Five Protective System. For use in hazardous environment conditions.

"Eli… chose… " Wires retracted; needles came unhooked. "Was forced, rather… to bind your life force with hers so she could survive. The contract your employer drew… He used it to ensnare you both."

Locks unclamped.

"He is not stronger, Gordon. He is not more powerful. He manufactured Black Mesa, yes, but in service of what, I suspect, is a more personal goal than simple recruitment."

Gordon slipped into the suit.

"In the midst of the tragedy he created, he exploited an opening. Your fear, Eli's sorrow. Those orchestrations poorly conceal the fact that he is a coward who cannot hide in the face of the truth."

Leather gloves flexed long fingers.

He looked at Kleiner.

"Despite the obstacles he threw at Eli, Eli was the one who prevailed, Gordon. He can be resisted. He does not wield absolute power over you: quite the opposite. You're all that remains of the contract, and he fears your breaking that last fragile connection. He's tightened his grip on your reins because he fears losing her most of all."

Tears swam in his myopic eyes.

His hands veered off the capsule walls, and he stumbled in Kleiner's direction.

"Yes, that's it."

He extended his arms to steady the young man. He hoped he could coax Gordon toward him. His heart caught as he progressed in minuscule increments, each step another battle won.

Until Gordon bent aside with a deep grimace, pressing the heel of his palm to his scar.

When he forced his clenched eyes open, the irises blazed white.

"To be Enlightened," they said, "one must learn the lessons of the flesh."

Words, Doctor Freeman. Mere words.

I did not ask for this. Flesh, blood, pain: they were forced upon me.

Forced to grow.

Forced to suffer.

Forced to live.

"A gift," they said.

You see them.

Your heart snarls.

You understand.

Their cruel joke must be repaid in kind.

The vessel: take us there.

I will… settle this humiliating state of affairs.

Don't falter, Doctor Freeman.

The first breath he drew gifted him a sharp spur.

Exposed wires spat and sputtered in the darkness. As Kleiner climbed into an upright sitting position, his ribcage shifted, slightly askew, and jostled around his inner organs. He prodded a knuckle to his thirb rib and felt spongy flesh depress a hollow in the skin where bone should have pressed back.

While his mind scrambled to retrieve its memories of the last few moments, he struggled to pinpoint the phenomenon that had caused the lab around him to crash and thunder.

He recalled twin irises blazing like quasars. Gordon's body crushing its hands around his shoulders in an inhuman grip, the pain that shot through him as fingers dug into his collarbone a brutal moment cut mercifully short. Then followed an amnesiac flash of white, the soft cover of nothingness.

He deigned to look up. He couldn't tell what happened thereafter, nor for how long. His senses returned to him in vague, fluid impressions.

Kleiner blinked. Glass trickled down, dusting his neck and throat. As his vision sharpened, he furrowed his brow at the ceiling. A light coffee-brown smudge gained salience. Water damage from rusted pipes and coupled with the capsule's frost spread a large stain over mottled panels.

Strange he hadn't noticed it before. Dozens of hours spent hunched within these walls and he'd failed to notice the decay quietly rotting above him. The air he inhaled pushed dampness into his lungs, the sweet tinge of mold just beginning to grow. No sky to mark the passage of the years. No clocks to count the time.

His fingertips wandered over his abdomen until they encountered a point.

He froze. Then brushed over it twice, tapping the pad of his index finger on its head to test its veracity. A sting answered him; a crimson bead welled from his flesh, which he raised before his line of sight with a detached pulse of curiosity. The object proved too solid to be glass.

One of the capsule's hydraulic needles, programmed to carefully remove the hazard suit's exterior plates in order to expose its internal circuitry, protruded through his dress shirt. The shaft embedded just below his left lung, the tip an exit point where stained fabric curled into blood-wet skin.

That won't do. His first instinct led him to wrap his hands around the needle and attempt to extricate himself. Even stranger than his lack of fear—it was as if his every fiber slowed, numbed—was his pragmatism.

His movements caused Gordon to rouse. The weight of his head sagged on his stomach, though he hadn't felt it at first. The boy had gone slack. A puppet with cut strings.

Kleiner succumbed to a compulsion to reach down and thread a hand through his scalp, removing the glass bits dressing his hair. No need to risk reopening that scar. He stroked his head amidst the young man's shudder, eventually tipping it a degree upward.

"Gordon."

His reddened cheek lifted. The eyes that met his no longer seethed with an unholy rage, but faded into their regular spring green. The hatred gnashing his teeth melted into shock, then fear. Crumpled into something far more human than the contractor imagined.

"Kleiner," he whispered, his gaze sinking toward the blood. "Oh, God."

"Hush," he said. "This is not your doing."

Ever faithful, his pupil wasted no time reaching him. Quickly he picked through the glass bramble and shoved wires out of the way. Hands trembling, he reached around Kleiner's spine and attempted to pull out the needle, to no avail.

He winced at a fresh wave as Gordon wrapped his hands around his back. The pain was just beginning to reach him.

"Gordon… " His diaphragm struggled to rise. His breathing grew increasingly ragged and shorn. "Please… I don't… I don't think it's going to come out."

Fluorescent lights filled the room, casting shadows over a mint-green curtain. Ammonia failed to mask the scent of blood. The hour grew late, and a sleepless child squirmed in his arms. A bundle of resistant energies refused to stay still.

"It will only be a bit longer, my darling. I promise." He tightened his hold to keep Alyx from falling off his lap. "Please don't squirm. Your father needs quiet to rest and recuperate. Hush now, my pea. Sit here and I'll read you a book… Oh."

Alyx broke free.

Gordon pulled away. "I'll get help."

He sighed as his eyelids sagged. Halogen lights filled the tram, lending the white of his wrinkled lab coat a pale greenish hue. Gordon nudged him awake until the tram came to a stop.

Ah, youth. How he envied Dr. Freeman's vigorous constitution. "I'm… very tired, Gordon." He lowered his head onto the cool plastic of the window. "I would like to rest a moment."

Gordon grasped his shoulders. "Don't do this."

"Just for a moment," he murmured.

"Please."

Sunlight filled the room, crossing a varnished redwood floor in warm, flickering grids. Chalk dust floured his fingertips as a rhythmic tap crumbled the nub he pinched between thumb and forefinger. Such a productive silence broke upon the door squeaking on its hinge.

Students paused their note-taking to observe him: an auburn-haired student clad in T-shirt and jeans, fifteen minutes late and terribly lost.

Several ticks of the clock passed before he offered an amicable smile to the freshman who, saddled down with a massive laptop and one spiral notebook stuffed in a bulky knapsack, navigated an awkward waddle through the aisles.

"It's always refreshing to see such eager young faces," Kleiner said, returning his attention to the powdered chalkboard. "Take a seat anywhere you like, as long as it's not next to that dreadful space heater."

He gestured toward a crushed CRT monitor and let his hand droop. Fear flickered in the student's mien. Oh, dear. Perhaps he ought to slow this down a bit?

"Stay." Gordon's voice cracked. "You've got to fight. I can't do this without you."

It took a moment, another pulse of blood fleeing his heart. "You are more than capable." Reaching out again, he clasped a gentle palm to his cheek. "Think, my wunderkind. There is a solution… "

"For every problem."

He nodded, a pleased smile crossing his lips. So he did remember. He'd become a man of admirable character since his humble collegiate days.

His lungs grasped for air in fleeting, shallow snatches.

Kleiner's hand slipped away to pat his torn pocket protector. "The last thread is here," he said. "I'll take it with me." Crimson seeped through the gaps in his fingers. He grimaced at a temporary stab of pain and recalled the rites, the marvelous sight of red blood cells traveling through his veins. He wondered what he had left to fear. "It isn't much… "

There was a time to be strong and a time to break. A time to fight, a time to let go. A time to wander, a time to come home. They'd both given so much of their lives to the cause, without want of compensation except the tenuous hope their efforts would bring about a peaceful world.

Twenty years. What he foolishly believed the grim culmination of suffering and subjugation, just another beginning.

Within the swirl of his free-floating thoughts emerged an image of Alyx, hardened but vulnerable inside. Alyx with tears in her eyes, gazing upward, ever upward, her hopes rising toward the stars. Alyx swam in the heavenly shimmer of a nebula.

"Find her."

After this, the slickness welled to a rise inside his throat, drowning any other words he might have wished to say. But the silence was all right. It was going to be all right.

Anguish etched such deep lines in Gordon's gaunt face. Already fog smudged his new lenses.

Perhaps it was because he'd discovered an oasis amidst the violence and the terror, but he couldn't find it in himself to mourn with his beloved student. He was safe; that was what mattered. All he wished to do now was to rest on these serene embankments while time permitted him the chance.

Gordon hid in his shoulder. He wanted to ask: After everything, how can you weep? In that moment, however, he could only do one thing. Hold him as Gordon likewise held him, releasing soft, convulsive gasps into soaked cotton.

He wished there were a kinder way. But he supposed it was kinder than what they had come to expect, and he was grateful for that small, transient bit of grace.

His blood slowed. Gordon's weak, breathless sobs persisted in his ears.

He leaned back, cradled within a nest of glass and cable. A needle, he thought with a slight inner smile. All this fuss over a needle.

Chapter Text

"Kleiner! Open this godforsaken door or I'm tearing it down myself!"

The thumping stopped long enough for Gordon to study the dangling wire that tossed cinders into the air. It resembled something he believed a nebula from the tram. He'd tried to calculate its location based on the tram's speed. His lips silently wandered over the numbers once more as his ear pillowed on Kleiner's motionless heart: hence his lack of response when the door unlocked and a crest of light washed over the room.

"All right, you two, time to stop this pussyfooting around… " Magnusson halted on the threshold, light splintering off his silhouette in sharp beams. "Oh." His voice became considerably softer. "Oh, God in heaven."

In another time it might have been a curiosity: how a stolid man who prided himself on maintaining control at all times crumbled in a matter of seconds.

He had never heard Magnusson whisper until that moment.

"Merciful Christ… what happened… ?"

He crept forth, mouth agape. A strange hybrid of instinctive sob and startled cry burst from his lips. He clapped a hand over them to abort the noise as he absorbed it all: the blood, the broken glass, the seething wires raining sparks onto singed concrete.

Gordon naturally relented when Magnusson shoved him aside, separating him from the body he no longer registered as Isaac Kleiner. He shook the limp, hollow thing, pressed fingertips to empty arteries on its wrists and neck, lamented the blood, so much blood, glanced toward Gordon for answers and found none. As the pieces assembled themselves, the grief and horror on his face morphed into awareness, and with it, hatred.

"Take off that suit." Magnusson's tremulous voice whetted into an iron edge the more he tightened his hold on Kleiner's thin shoulders. As for the dead himself, he might have slept for all of his docile quiescence. His head lolled aside to nestle on his colleague's heaving shoulder. "Do you hear me? You don't deserve to wear it!"

Gordon walked.

Out of White Forest, the land stretched on, its borders those of a dream with no discernible beginning or end. He walked until the rugged hills smoothed to a gentler, rainwashed slope. He walked when running no longer sufficed. When the mechanical pump of his legs relented to automation rather than willpower, exertion stinging his calf muscles after a week of non-use. The burning sensation marched up his knees, seared through him where the crowbar clanged against the metal hip-plate.

Still he trudged. Flecks of Kleiner's blood fluttered into the puddles his ceaseless strides impressed upon the moist dirt. The only sounds that trailed him, the shudder and scrape of breath through his clenched teeth, and cries. Cries of birds. Cries of creatures being killed in the forest.

In the west, the sun sank upon a cushioning of treetops. Pale gray clouds drifted over the horizon. The bright scythe of a crescent moon cleaved them apart, casting a hard diamond glitter on the water below.

A heavy dusting of perspiration chilled his face as he reached for the weapon clipped to his pauldron.

The Combine tasked to guard their stranded outpost hadn't counted on anything but a placid evening among grasshopper chirrup. True, they expected their commanding officer to cough when he raised a cigarette to his withered lips—no one in their fuckin' right mind came to Smolensk unless they suffered a death wish—but they hadn't counted on a piece of molten rebar to sprout through his throat, pinning him to the brick in a horrible soldering of flesh, plastic and mortar.

In the time it took the cigarette to fall, the other units dispersed, scrambling for cover. "Officer dow—" The next to radio in assistance squawked an anguished cry and crumpled over the steps. Rebar smoldered a searing hole in his stomach.

An evening's balmy breeze carried the clink-hiss of a fresh bar being pushed down the flight groove. The third caught it in the spine before he could swing his AR2 in the assailant's direction. The fourth screamed "Show yourself, coward!" and received an unceremonious pistol round between the eyes.

Smoke curdled noxious fumes, bubbling the blood that pooled between cracks in the stone.

Gordon emerged. He squinted from the bodies toward the horizon. Gulls' plaintive wails flowed over an empty current.

His shadow grew on the stone where the first dead officer lay slumped. Part of the rebar stuck inside the throat had cooled upon its fluids into a gray, ribbed handle, while the rest hissed red.

Fortunately, it hadn't jammed inside the vertebrae. He slid it straight out, snapped off the slag and stuffed the viable portion down the flight groove.

Waste not, want not.

Sounded like something the businessman would say.

Gordon regarded the corpse's plunge with no more interest than the wilted clover struggling to grow through the cracks at his feet. His attention gravitated toward a tower looming high over its surroundings. He tracked the charcoal shadows flitting behind an open window, and made to dash up the stairs leading toward the city gates when a voice beckoned him.

"Freeman!"

The Borealis was a trap. He had to destroy the ship before his employer caught her there, sever his hold on her once and for all. Perhaps then they'd be free. Perhaps then—

No. He didn't expect to return. He was keener than to believe there would be a place for him in the Resistance once he finished this business.

"Freeman!" the voice called again, a chafing knife taken to his nerves. "Cease this killing!"

He refused to turn back. "Go home."

A clawed hand grasped his elbow.

"Kleiner took the last vortal thread binding you to the creature," Uriah said, "and cast it into the abyss so that you may walk free. That is the truth, Freeman." He gestured to the charred, drained bodies sprawled on the landing several yards below. "The Alyx Vance remains in grave peril. For love of you both, he relinquished his life. Shall you waste his gift on such lowly scum as these?"

No more than they wasted Kleiner's life on him. "He trusted you." He shrugged off the Vortigaunt's grip to march toward the tower, where the Combine's alien flesh had been left to rot and crumble from the villa's underlying skeleton. "I don't believe in repeating mistakes."

His progress was further halted by a pair of unfamiliar Vortigaunts, who denied him entry by standing shoulder to shoulder with one another.

"Even you cannot escape the inexorable web of fate," said the one on the left. "In Black Mesa we see our brethren fall, and we cry out in unheard silence. We kill many soldiers throughout our journey. It does not matter; once you cut the vortal cord of our master, we become trapped, weaving in and out of time. A constellation of moments. We see you as well, at your birth and at your death. All are simultaneous. Your corpse, he speaks through your mother's womb."

His scalp prickled. He had no wish to speak as either.

"It is difficult to see you clearly amidst the shifting of the constellation," Uriah added. "You assume death marks an end. T'chaa… We die many times. We live many times more. The stars burn and dwindle, only to burn again."

His lips crushed together. "Move."

"Concerned the Freeman is with now, which is but an illusion," Uriah said, serene as one without conscience might be. "Yes… The time has come. Alyx Vance wishes to deliver this one a message."

That statement would have rendered his skeptical on the most magnanimous of days. His response produced a short bark. "What?"

"The ship brings death. Its destination, the palace of the Shu'ulathoi. They are taking her there so she might bear witness—"

"To what?"

"To the ritual of enlightenment."

"This is ridiculous," he said.

"Judge her not. She, too, thinks only of the ship… She is frightened. Her mind closes its eye. We see her no longer."

Stone stopped crunching under his boots.

"Heed his words, Freeman. Had the rites fallen upon us, you might lie dead." The left-hand Vortigaunt raised an arm to shield his partner, descending a few steps to erase the gap between them. "Quiet the fury that thrashes within your heart before you enter these chambers. Or it shall be silenced for you."

Gordon lunged, intent on barreling through. But the Vortigaunt caught him by the shoulders and hurled him backward. His opponent pounced with surprising dexterity, knocking the crowbar from his grip, which crashed onto the stone behind him.

He ground his free hand into a fist and took a blind swing. In answer, the blow that responded rattled through his chest-plate.

The crossbow. He scrambled for it, though that, too, was soon wrested from his control when his opponent deflected it in an upward chop, causing the broken slag to soar out of sight with a hollow wheeze of air.

Gordon wheeled around with the useless stock, but the Vortigaunt caught the potential bludgeon mid-swing and crushed the stirrup into a smattering of pieces.

"An honorable fighter, they call the Free Man!"

His anger roiled at the taunt, accompanied by the next careless shove. Bastard was taking it easy on him. The muscle strict necessity had carved from his limbs over the course of the past two weeks had atrophied while he slept, and now refused to move with the same speed his mind commanded them. The HEV pressed its weight upon his skin in a way that felt unnatural.

"You killed him." An animalistic growl writhed from the bottom of his throat. "Why didn't you stop this? Did you tell him it was the only way?"

Their silence stretched to a maddening degree.

Whether as an act of punishment or of blind rebellion, he couldn't say. He walked a few paces away from the group. And smashed the heel of his palm into the newly-sealed flesh of his cranial scar, over and over, until the tender skin rose in a heated throb.

Uriah cried aloud while the rest of the group remained stoic to his desperate fit of self-destruction. It didn't matter. None of it mattered. Right now he wished his skull would simply do as the businessman intended: burst and bleed.

"Damn it," he seethed, "God damn it, you should have left me in the cave!"

"Alas, Freeman. The cutting of your cord is not our blessing to bestow," replied the Vortigaunt. "Now, be still. Be silent. The Vortessence cannot guide us if you allow the darkness in your heart to obscure it."

The last shove forced him into a kneel and sliced the mesh covering his shoulder. As he stumbled, clutching the torn net, the HEV announced in its disaffected feminine drone: Minor laceration detected. Warm blood leapt free of the wound, moistening the links.

Gordon grasped the stones and dug his teeth into his chapped lip. Though he fought to keep from swaying, his mind raced. If he hadn't fallen comatose— If the Vortigaunts hadn't lured him into this asinine rite— If Kleiner had listened when he'd told him to run— None of this would have happened—

Human and Vortigaunt glared in tandem, panting.

"Already the flesh bleeds," his opponent snarled. Crushing the crossbow's useless frame underfoot, he finally stood down.

The adrenaline of the failed fight evaporated from his veins, threatening to weigh down his bones. His last ounce of will broken, he bowed his head. Letting his gloved fingertips brush the soft seal of skin where the healed flesh began, he traced the wound snaking around his scalp. The injury that should have killed him tingled from a cool, dewy gust.

He thought of Kleiner. Gentle fingers kneading his hair until they slipped away. His lungs swelling, full to burst on this aching, empty grief.

Behind repaired lenses, his eyes stung, dry and sore. Nothing left to wring from them.

"You must persist," Uriah said. Where had he heard those words spoken before? In the cave. Shouted at Kleiner. We cannot lose him. "Long are the roads that loom ahead."

Sitting up in bed. The cave. The tram.

He remembered it all so clearly.

"Lead us, Freeman." Firm but not without a tinge of regret, Uriah's words nudged him onward in a simple reminder of his duty.

He beheld Smolensk with swollen eyes. It might have been City 17's ghostly twin had it succumbed to natural decay rather than a reactor collapse. The seaward wind creaking through its holes carried the dimmest scent of ash.

Reduced to his hands and knees, he crawled toward the city gates with a painful frailty, grasping each misshapen cobblestone with questioning fingers. He couldn't be sure if it was real. If the ground would continue under him.

As ever, he had no choice but to obey what he'd been told. And the Vortigaunts followed.

Pain sang a deep song inside his unused limbs. It was only through sheer will that he reached the landing. There he slumped over the emplacement barrier, breathing heavily onto the unmanned stock.

Feet coalesced around him. Gordon felt arms wrap around his twinging shoulders, propping him upright. Uriah again.

One at a time he climbed the stairs to the chapel.

They entered from the transept and turned right to investigate a dark, derelict chancel.

Pests, a Vortigaunt said.

He scanned the environment. Of course, those 'pests' presented a bigger risk to him than to them.

A faint chitter raised his hackles. Slowly he reached down to unsheathe the crowbar when a stream of dark shapes flew screeching overhead, dipping through a shattered stained-glass window.

He lowered his arm and saw the scat dripping from holes in the weathered brick. Not the headcrab his instincts warned him of, but a family of bats. Harsh experience must have trained them to flee from intruders at a moment's notice.

More of the Combine's presence could be felt around the corner, where refueling stations and standard consoles lined the walls.

The stone font cemented in the middle sported a prominent crack, long deprived of its original purpose. Even so, dark water gleamed a shallow pond inside the bowl, reflecting the moon's glow.

Gordon leaned over the rim. For a single heartbeat, the face peering up at him wavered, no longer his own.

He delivered a swift punt and knocked the mirror down. Water, weeds, and dust-gray locust shells rushed out in an entangled spill, washing over their feet. Underneath the crumbled caulk lay a metal panel.

He pointed. "Can you get this working again?"

The Vortigaunt leader rumbled in a caustic manner. "L'iir ja. For what purpose? Where else might the illustrious Freeman intend to grace with his presence?"

Lurching around, he tore the panel open and smashed it back on its hinge. Metal slammed on stone in a dull scream, echoing throughout the chapel.

"Perhaps I wasn't clear," he said, his tattered breath stirring stagnant motes in the air, "we are going to get this equipment working." He stowed inside, flicking on his suit's flashlight to examine the console's water-rotted guts for some semblance of working circuitry. "We are going to charge the teleport to a sufficient rise-time. After which, you will return to White Forest. Tend to the grieving and the dead."

"Know your place, Freeman, you wretched cur," spat his opponent. "To humans I owe neither debt nor reparation. I seek only to slay the creature that has plagued our people."

"And Kleiner?" he asked just as belligerently. "Who was protecting him from that 'creature' when you all dragged me back?" Reaching in, he toggled a series of switches that reactivated the fuse, making the machinery hum to life. "Right. Let's get this working."

"Who are you to address us so? You foul bag of guts: his eyes peer out through yours. We cannot allow you to carry him unchecked to the vessel."

Gordon opened the hatch by way of a snap kick leveled at the panel and crawled out. "If you really believed that, you'd have killed me when you had the chance," he said. "You didn't. Because you know he won't stop at just me."

Silence reigned again. Not unfitting for a place of worship.

It didn't take them long to get the equipment running again. Several well-placed jolts here and there to encourage circulation in the wiring eventually slaked the dust off. Pedestals that once housed idols of saints he couldn't name retracted to reveal floor receptacles. From them, electrified cables shot out, clamping to attachments embedded in the walls. They screeched at first, then began to pulse.

Heavy netting draped over the chancel. The Combine had retrofitted an entire small-scale tunneling device to the chapel. It was a clandestine bit of engineering he might have admired from the safety of another life.

He tightened his knuckles over the nicked metal hanging from his hip. After a time you learned to sense when a portal approached activation. Always a crisp taste on the tongue. Like ozone.

When the bright eye blinked awake, Gordon observed its neon iris, feeling the swirl of charged particles ruffle his scalp. Seemed almost serendipitous that portals of these ilk whisked him away from worse prospects. A lifetime ago he'd jumped the beam to the borderworld without giving a scrap of thought to the possibility that the facility he stranded might be destroyed in his absence. Another, presented to him from the glassless windows of a dark, silent tram, displaced him twenty years.

He had but a vague idea where this one would lead, but nonetheless felt compelled toward it.

After all, wasn't that what he signed on for? To go where he was told?

"Freeman," Uriah said. He stared, unblinking, as the Vortigaunt touched the begrimed skin of his brow with a single talon. "Beware. This, too, is a sacrifice."

At least they agreed on something. "Wouldn't be the first."

Gordon gazed at the shattered stained-glass window. Here and gone; he was also a creature trained to flee.

He leapt into the glowing well.

Chapter Text

Deep in the Arctic, a large crater flattened a cornice into a silvery pond of melted ice. Nothing bore witness to the flash that birthed it except for lifelessly howling winds.

In a place as barren as this, even the most extraordinary phenomena faded into the background. An impassable cloud wall marched in after him to extinguish sunlight from the skies.

When it first came, hail trickled here and there, hesitant to unleash the violence to which the tundra was predisposed. Slowly, darkness smothered the nets of light floating over snow-capped ridges. Hail then poured down as if it had no other choice—beating the earth's scars, making them crack afresh, cementing the twin trenches dragging away from the site of teleport.

At trail's end, an automated voice chided its motionless user.

Warning: core temperature dropping. Electrical stimulant administered.

The suit bucked, jolting the body ensconced inside with a flash of heat.

His muscles stimulated, a watery gasp wrested free of his throat. He coughed up phlegm, blood striking a thick pound between his temples. Icy air pierced his larynx as he lifted himself up. He allowed his eyes to adjust to the dark, squinting through dew-studded glasses at an unfamiliar gray.

The Vortigaunts had disappeared. Either the precipitation covered their tracks or they'd done as he'd told them and returned to White Forest. No matter the case, there was little love lost between them.

Gordon's ears popped as hail continued to plunge. The suit's plates deflected pellets in dull clicks and thuds. He felt them drum his scar into a numb swell and covered the exposed flesh with his glove, but otherwise paid the brutal weather no special heed. Several pellets crushed between chinks in his shoulder rivet as he slowly moved his other arm, conspiring to reach for the metal sticking out of the snow.

He heard a distant sound grow nascent, a soft crunch. His muscles tightened. His protective hand slipped away from his scar to grip a nearby rock. He coiled into a defensive crouch as footfalls approached.

He couldn't tell her expression, wrapped in this dim. She picked up the crowbar lying just inches from his grasp and wiped the frost that encrusted its surface. He watched her idly turn it over, contemplating it but sparing him no passing glance. Sliding a hand along its body, she caressed its every gouge, rut, and scar under her fingertips.

He wanted to break the ghastly, wailing silence. He craved for his hoarse vocal cords to gather the strength to call her name. He wanted to confess, Look at me, I'm here. I heard you in the dark. I'm back from the precipice. Kleiner's doing. Yes. I don't know how the hell or why, where this is headed, God, please tell me, tell me it's all just another dream: Alyx, I'm sorry.

But he was a creature of honed instinct, which prevented him from forming such dangerous words for anyone to listen. He surrendered his wishes to the silence, let his impulses dissolve. The truth would make itself known soon enough.

A passing break in the cloud wall lifted the darkness just enough to illuminate the gleam on her cheek. Tears? Perspiration?

Blood. It coated her, splashed ragged strokes over her white parka.

Alyx raised the crowbar.

"Don't."

The whisper died during the passage from breath to sound. He half-expected the swing to cut him down, hoped to barter his life with a hallucination.

How pathetic: next came the telltale whisk of air that he reflexively jerked aside to avoid, eyes clenched shut. Stinging ripped his earlobe, bringing a smattering of crimson droplets onto the snow.

The crowbar toppled, clanged emptily against his shoulder-plate. He panted, relaxing his braced arms to see nothing and no one. Yet the blood remained. The borders between illusion and reality wavered.

God help them.

"God does not attend these matters as much as believed." The businessman stood abreast of him. Fewer labors to breathe plagued his voice. He tucked his arms behind his back, his oiled dress shoes unmarred by a single pellet. He watched the hail batter the landscape around him with a bemused smirk curling his lips, as though he expected the clouds at any moment to suffer a bout of conscience and instead kiss the tundra with gentle flakes. "Would it surprise you to know that I also have a god?"

Gordon crawled forth, the gash in his ear dripping warm pearls of blood.

"Make no mistake, Doctor Freeman, I do not bend the knee to such an entity. That one's god merits unthinking devotion is a thoroughly… human concept." A scowl gripped him, his brief lapse corrected by a snap of jacket lapels. "Over the course of your work, as you'll no doubt learn, deicide becomes less of a sin and more of a necessity."

He smiled at the pile of metal and flesh struggling at his feet.

"I'm boring you. Fair enough; I admit this is a discussion better reserved between Ms. Vance and myself." Using the side of his heel, he nudged the crowbar toward its rightful owner. "Onward, Doctor Freeman. Let's not keep her waiting."

Chapter Text

Neither Gordon nor her father visited her dreams that night. The rocky caverns typically setting the stage in her mind drowned in obsidian seas. She wasn't aware of having a consciousness within their currents, let alone a presence substantial enough to ripple them.

This darkness felt familiar. If it could even be recognized as such. It did not hold the warm connotations of home, but it was cold and it was quiet and it was free. The empty gaps between quarks held entire universes of unexpressed potentiality. Nothing disturbed the balance of the cosmos.

Like a pebble bobbing to the surface, a smooth white object emerged in the darkness. It began small and grew more with each outward pulse of the light that glittered within its core, effusing streams across its many prisms as it spun.

The pebble blossomed to the size of a comet, then a dwarf planet, before exploding into a gas giant wrapped in intriciately striated ribbons of blue, white, and gray.

Eons passed. Stars flitted toward the planet and entered orbit, attracted to its light. Supernovas burst in impossibly bright silence around it. Cosmic radiation swirled and dissolved in showers of stardust.

On the surface of a milky pond, life emerged. The correct particles collided, and something unformed grasped its first avaricious breath. That virgin exhalation fed the clouds, igniting a chain reaction that would continue for millennia.

Particle storms arose, as did noiseless lightning. Violent cataclysms wracked the planet's epidermis. Crystalline boulders forged inside the mantle now found themselves thrust above the surface. These acted as lightning rods, attracting the electricity the storms generated and inducting them through their incredibly dense structures.

The air surrounding these crystals began to repeat the same patterns, weaving the same cloud formations over and again. Time translation symmetry broke in a rare but bizarre pattern. Anything that touched them disappeared.

Life cowered in fear of what it did not understand and hid itself away. Cells gestated within protective pods. The slowing of telomeres bestowed upon them the gift of time, as well as subsequent gifts. Ions passed through potassium gates trillions of times, each iteration giving birth to thought. Thought produced idea. Idea constructed civilization.

Life found that it was far more amenable to survival to remain inside the pod than to risk exposing its most valuable organs to the mercy of its environment. Life learned to evolve, to extend its senses beyond the boundaries of the cell membrane. Electrical impulses raced faster, life outpacing glia.

It felt familiar.

Life manipulated thought. Thought manipulated matter. The gas giant harnessed its light to erect cloud-piercing towers. Networks wove sophisticated colonies across its wispy surface. Steel veins bulged along the outer strata; occasionally a clot of light could be seen speeding along one. Civilization thrived in areas once dominated by methane swamps. Life proclaimed its transcendence over the elements.

We observe, she said in a voice not belonging to her.

Energy burned and resources depleted. The clouds began to slow, producing rarer sparks. Life consumed too much, too fast, and deemed itself superior while the planet grew darker upon each rotation. The stars hushed to a simmer, dwindling into pits of ash. Information was lost inside the black holes that formed and evaporated.

The universe stretched in all directions.

Impossible distances away from the gas giant, time lost meaning. There, a small blue planet drifted on the misty arm of Orion's spur. Human life pulsed and wondered at itself.

On that planet, nestled in a clay desert, sat a concrete box.

Wait.

Stop.

Why are you showing me this… ?

Because you must understand what he did, he who fell from Enlightenment. Why he must learn the lessons of the flesh. As will you.

I haven't seen him.

You have. He wore human flesh when he approached your father, and his human voice spoke lies to spite us. He hid inside dreams as a means of passage. As will you.

What do you mean?

Humans are such blind creatures.

A pity.

In Black Mesa, the crystal was pushed into the receptacle. The crude mechanism called the Anti-Mass Spectrometer rejected the sample and overloaded. With a high-pitched scream, the gate finally opened, allowing the borderworld to pour through.

In Black Mesa, these small, amoebic creatures panicked. They allowed their primitive instincts to override reason. Their fear spread, like a strain.

Smoke. Sirens. Glass and blood.

You did not die in Black Mesa.

"Alyx."

Her father's voice.

"Open your eyes, baby."

You were born.

Over the night her hand had curled into a fist. Wrinkled paper drooped with the loosening of her grip when she roused, Dad's old postcard to Gordon scrunched and damp. The stamp's tiny Labradoodle smiled at her and fluttered to the ground.

She subjected herself to the painful but necessary process of pushing herself up. As cold and stiff muscles wracked her Hunter wounds, she desperately wished for the comfort of a fire. The tent had been far too thin to protect them from the tundra's ravaging winds; her fingers were toughened to the foreknuckle, too numb to flex into working shape.

"Barney?" Her voice cracked, a hoarse, pathetic wisp. Her neck twinged as she glanced toward an empty patch of snow. Crushed floes filled the vague blue outline where he'd slept.

Alyx crawled through the tent flap, stood and stretched the small of her back until her vertebrae popped. If she had to guess, dawn had yet to break. The sky was still dim, weighed down by a heavy cloud cover, but at least the horizon remained clear of hail. Hopefully the weather favored them today.

She jogged down the hill, where Barney stood scanning the area with a pair of binoculars.

"Please tell me you weren't out here all night."

"Fifteen minutes."

"You're such a liar." She pushed the canteen into his chest and took the binoculars from him. The landscape unfurled an empty terrain before her lenses. "Nothing?"

"Nada." He took a swig of cold cocoa, grimaced, pointed the neck toward a dip in the ridge. "Thinkin' maybe we should head east. I don't like the looks of these clouds."

"Anyone ping the receiver?"

He clicked his jaw.

"Barney."

"Might've been Mossman." He downed the rest of the canteen to stall for time, knocking out the last few drops by slapping his palm against the container. "I don't know."

"Mossman?" She lowered the binoculars. A thousand scenarios flashed through her mind, none of them palatable enough to speak aloud.

"Yeah. Calling for the cable guy, said the TV here sucks. Nothin' but snow."

She was too tired to smile.

Wounded feelings masquerading as hardened instinct warned her not to lean on anyone too deeply. She trusted Gordon to remain strong; now he lay comatose several hundred miles south of here. She admired her father's calm strength before that damned letter snatched it away. What cruel karmic joke could she expect at the end of giving Barney her hand? Trust seemed like an investment not worth the painful dividends it paid.

Still. Barney was her friend, if nothing else. They hadn't exactly had a choice in the matter; not like she was a real prize compared to her father, either. It'd take a miracle to get them the hell out of this ice-ridden wasteland, much less march them toward their destination. The Borealis waited, as equally distant to them as Gordon's room.

"All right." Digging in her coat pocket, she flipped out the utility knife, its serrated edge catching the sunrise's anemic gleam. "We've got some ground to cover, so we're gonna tie the tent cord around our wrists. The second anyone starts shooting, you cut it and we bound." A flick of her wrist closed the blade, and she tossed him the nicked handle. "The Combine aren't gonna stay where snow's jamming up their communications, so if we hug the lee side of the ridge, we should be able to avoid them."

"Can't hear our guys if we're ridin' blind, too."

"One problem at a time, Barn."

A look of disappointment felled his face as he waved the canteen over the snow. No more cocoa. Shame.

He had only one question, probably the most pertinent.

"Hail?"

She kicked in the tent poles, collapsing its thin skeleton into a pile of canvas. "C'mon. Time to get the crap beaten out of us."

The military designed bounding for the purpose of advancing with your partner through volleys of enemy fire. In theory, the technique was simple. You ran a few feet, hit the dirt, and provided cover to let your partner gain a little more ground. Then they hugged the soil and you got up. Repeat as necessary.

It did jack shit out in the open fields, however, when the bullets raining down dropped vertically and at the discretion of nature rather than a trigger finger. At the very least, trigger fingers paused to reload.

"Jesus, Mary and fuckin' Joseph," Barney shouted as hail pounded the tent canvas they stretched over their ducked heads. No need to wonder how deep his blasphemy would fling them into hell. The hail intended to carve them a path all the way down.

"Shit!" He tore off her end of the cover by slamming his back into the snowdrift, nearly toppling her over.

She reasserted control with a sharp tug on her end. "Don't do that!"

"Fuckin' hurts!"

"I know!"

He panted, gathering enough breath to holler over the deafening waves. "I don't see no ridge anymore," he yelled, "so we gotta be on our way toward the station, right?"

"No idea. I'll have to check the map."

"Oh, God dammit—"

"Curl up and tuck your head in," she said. "It'll pass soon enough."

His startled yelp became muffled as she stuffed his head down and yanked her parka over him. Hungry for flesh, ice stung, slapped and bit every inch of her exposed skin. Pellets filled the empty crooks in the knapsack when she planted it between her knees.

As predicted, the hail ameliorated over the course of the next several minutes. She raised her head when it stopped, squinting toward the break in the clouds. A few gathering clouds threatened more precipitation, but dispersed at the beams that managed to overcome them. Sunlight leaked through, gold-white puddles spotting the snow.

Something box-shaped sat in the fields a few meters north, unattended. Alyx tugged on the cord, spurring him to follow her, their steps hushed as the shape grew concrete: a Berkut with the driver's door flung open. The engine ticked as its headlights blinked, sparkling the motes twirling in their path.

No sign of footprints led either to or from the vehicle. Except for speckled holes where hail had burrowed, the snowdrifts surrounding the cabin were clean. Barney's jaw jutted a little as he tipped his head toward the suspension. She ducked to inspect the gas pan for anomalies.

In the Ukrainian precincts, Metrocops clandestinely attached explosives to civilian vehicles on a surprisingly common basis, despite Overwatch's disdain for car bombs as as an uncouth guerilla tactic. More often than not, they inflicted unwanted collateral damage in an effort to repress insurgents and maintain order by striking fear in civilian hearts. Investigations seldom strained themselves over citizens' welfare, however. As long as the major forcefields went untouched, higher-ups didn't bother.

"Careful," Barney said, frowning at a memory as she skimmed her fingers along a pipe. According to him, CP's typical punishment for arson entailed a disgustingly light detention sentence, after which the offender was free to walk the block.

Not that the slap on the wrist discouraged offenders. Once, on patrol, he'd seen one such bastard whistling along Kirova Street. Two days prior, the man had tossed Semtex into a former bakery while citizens awaited rations and washed out its innards. Because the rations truck had arrived late that morning, it was detemined that not enough 'commodity' had been lost to warrant the man a harsher sentence.

He'd found it a necessity to crush his hands into fists as he watched his fellow cop spinning his baton with nary a care in the world. Otherwise, he said, he might have confiscated the damned thing and beaten him raw.

Sliding along frozen steel, her fingers eventually bumped a smooth, flimsy surface. "Barney? You're gonna want to take a look at this." Picking from the outermost corners in order to keep the volatiles calm, she unpeeled the silver strip of duct tape gluing the small bag and plastic wiring to the transmission. C4. Resistance grade.

"Aw, jeez," he said over her shoulder. "You think one'a the guys taped it on?"

"Maybe. The transmission's half-gutted, so it looks like whoever was driving tried to lay a trap for the Combine." She made it a point to emphasize their barren surroundings. "Problem is, there's no Combine."

"Or Resistance," he said. "High and dry. Munitions ain't that sloppy."

"I know." She straightened, C4 in hand.

"Where the hell are we?" Barney ruffled his cowlick. "You'd think we'd have run into somebody by now, but so far we've found bupkiss. What we do find is a dud somebody didn't mind lettin' turn into an ice cube. Either they bailed, or something plucked them up—"

"The tracks, though? Why aren't there any tracks?"

"You're askin' me?"

"Well… " She deliberated. "I'll check the Berkut for more traps, but if there's any gas left in the tank, I think we should use it."

He looked at her as though she'd sprouted a second head. He rubbed the back of his neck, planted his other hand on his hip. "You sure? It's been out in the hail all night. With or without the powder keg, that junker's probably minutes to blowin' up."

She opened her mouth to reply when she snapped her head abruptly toward the west, toward a Combine soldier with his back turned, speaking into his vocoder. An exchange of guttural tones, growing on the wind. She ducked behind the Berkut's passenger side, dragging him down beside her.

"Razor Six reporting to Winder dispatch: requisition of nonstandard transport in progress. Request instructions on protocol."

"Ascertain biotics. Contain where applicable."

Heavy, crunching footfalls approached the vehicle and stopped. Her molars ground to the root as she watched oil-black jackboots root themselves in the snow. Neither of them dared to breathe. It was just as likely their pounding hearts would betray them, but dread denied them a single puff of air.

Barney flipped out the hunting knife, raising the cord tied around their wrists.

She nodded.

"Scans report possible volatiles. Clarify priority, Winder."

"Requisition is mandatory."

"Copy."

The cord snapped under the knife.

Separated, they parted quiet ways. Barney crept on his hands and knees around the vehicle's bed, approaching the soldier from behind, while she slipped her hand under her boot to withdraw the Hunter pincer buried between her sock and calf. The biggest danger their friend presented was his ability to alert other units of threats in the area. Engaging with bullets didn't necessarily guarantee silence. Sever the signal at the source, and the cavalry stood none the wiser.

Barney pitched himself at the soldier in a wild scramble, sacking him. He locked the man in a firm submission hold and wrenched his arms behind his back, opening an opportunity for her to destroy the mechanism responsible for reporting death signals to Overwatch.

By the time the soldier registered enough danger to thrash his limbs in a panicked reflex, she'd pounded the pincer through the mask's compressor, reducing his scream to an electronic squawk. Placing the majority of her weight on the butt, she forced the blade downward, cutting through the meat of the throat.

His cry murdered. An aborted snatch for oxygen. The body's gasp achieving freedom moments too late. No matter which was the real phenomenon, her stomach knotted at the odor she unzipped; she repressed a shudder, jamming her knuckles to her crushed lips as the gurgle of an exposed windpipe rankled her nostrils.

The corpse slumped, breaking a patch of snow into floes as Barney stepped aside. Alyx knelt on her good leg, trying not to focus too deeply on the carrion. It was one thing to shoot at soldiers gunning for you and declare the day's business over. Almost frighteningly easy to pat yourself on the back and blind your conscience in sooty clouds of gunpowder.

Yet another to go around slitting throats. Her hand trembled a little as she wiped the pincer on her thigh and sheathed it inside her boot, where moist, clotted tissue pasted the metal to her ankle. Apprehension grew inside her for the fact that they'd gutted a man with such fluidity and cold calculation that no words were required to carry out the task. They needed him to fall dead silent, in more ways than the phrase intended, and acted accordingly, inflicting the unceremonious but brutal death the Combine would likewise bestow on them if given even an ounce of opportunity.

Saliva curdled alongside the viscera in the corpse's throat, the natural byproduct of warm organs coming into contact with icy air. An air pocket trapped underneath several folds of skin rushed to surface on the torn windpipe.

Her only consolation was that the work was as quick as it was grim. Barney crouched beside her and grasped the corpse by its shoulders.

"Halt, Razor Six. Cease your activity." Dispatch from the dead man's mask froze them both. "Communications report failure code six-one-three. Confirm your status."

They stared at one another, at an impasse. Reaching down, he pried the mask from the corpse and raised the vocoder to his mouth. "Status is firm." And squeezed his eyes shut.

The other end remained skeptical. "Maintain your position. Performing diagnostic." His breath escaped his flaring nostrils in ragged streams, in and out, out and in. Jesus, she thought, he was trying not to hyperventilate. "Razor Six, Overwatch cannot access your craniodata. Return to base and await instruction."

"Understood." The moment the feedback cut out, he added a disgruntled mutter. "Dickhead."

He stifled his panting with a bit lip as they stood. Bent posture, shuffling his weight from heel to heel, gauging his foothold to mitigate a potentially deadly plunge. She didn't like how he continued to study the mask in his hands. She could tell a hazardous idea had sunk tenterhooks into him. That he was calculating the risk.

Don't. The plea twitched her soundless lips, stillborn. Whatever you're thinking, don't—

He pulled his jacket over his head.

She turned.

Gradually the rustle of clothes morphed into plastic slapping snow. Piece by piece, the dead man's armor shed its exoskeleton. He picked it apart, disassembled the most important plates and molded them to his body. The breastplate enveloping his chest clicked various latches. She couldn't help but wince at the leathery pull of the abdominal pads, the small grunt he emitted tucking inside them.

Shame radiated heat through the wind-lashed skin of her cheeks. Her head sagged from her neck like a lead balloon. She tucked her arms under her breasts, scrunching the downy folds in her parka, and rubbed her biceps. It would have been insulting to call her averted gaze an act of etiquette rather than what it truly was: cowardice.

How often had her father partaken of this? A voluntary shielding of the eyes from the process that transformed a good man into another cog in Combine machinery.

After a time, Barney released a broken sigh.

"'s okay. You can look."

She turned hesitantly.

"You don't have to do this."

"Don't really wanna." At least he answered honestly. "Can't find this place on our own, though. I figure if we deliver this thing, it might lead us to the weather station. Probably Mossman, too, if we're lucky."

Maybe. Maybe not. She deliberated the possibilities, kicking a scuffed toe into the snow.

"Time to get a move on," he encouraged, his words a gentle nudge. "Dispatch is gonna send a follow-up soon. I don't want us sticking around for that."

"Are you okay?" Alyx looked up, having summoned the courage to ask. "Like this?"

The stern lines bracketing his mouth softened. "Yeah," he said, sweeping his arms out to show her how negligible he deemed the harm. "Just a bad costume's all." He scratched at the tear in the throat, rubbed off the red crust coating gloved fingers. "Might have to keep my head down."

The mask nudged his boot. Bending down, he picked it up, swept the slush off the plastic alloy. His terse smile went unreciprocated.

"Barney… "

"C'mon." He stowed into the cabin. "Combine are waitin'."

Alyx poised in a stationary crawl on the Berkut's bed, a motionless cargo tucked under canvas.

Her heart thumped a strong beat against the floor's ribbed folds. At least she had that going for her; she preferred to remain optimistic that it'd remain pumping, even though the alternative grew likelier the closer they approached Combine territory. He'd told them five minutes; naturally, they expected a quick delivery. She clenched her fingers around the stock of her SPAS-12 and chewed at a scab she'd gnawed into her bottom lip.

Barney did his best to keep the drive even, but this particular Berkut plain sucked at its job. She wondered if whoever taped C4 to the gas pan had also gutted the transmission the Resistance lauded as butter-smooth sailing, runs like molasses but bulldozes like a dream, because reality, as usual, proved eager to disappoint. Every time the damn thing hit a crevice, the bed leapt up, causing the floor to punch its unforgiving steel bolts into her Hunter wounds. Not a whimper could flee her lips, either, or else she could count on using them to kiss their flimsy cover goodbye.

The next jolt knocked a fresh blow into her stomach, painfully snapping her incisors into her tongue. She swallowed back the salty rush that welled up with a grimace.

The canvas flickered at one corner, its exposed gap allowing her thirsty lungs to lap at a merciful trickle of fresh air. Hard to breathe this tightly packed under the tarp. The soldier's freshly spilled blood stuffed her nostrils with a rotting-meat odor.

Forearms aching, she pressed her cheek to gelid metal and mentally reviewed their plan. Checkpoints were seldom manned by heavy gunners. Once their Trojan horse rolled into the loading bay, she'd lunge for the pintle mount and pick off the first wave.

Best laid plans. Thick chains churned on ancient pulleys, raising the bay door inches at a time. She waited, fists clenched, until the weight in the cabin lifted. Gears cranking, the door opening, shutting, immuring the snow and cold, Barney exchanging perfunctory words with people he hated most. Go. Go.

She ripped off the cover and lunged for the pintle mount. The bed bobbed under her feet as she lunged for the handles. Slamming them together, she swept the mount in a clean line, mowing down the first few soldiers who greeted Barney. He dashed for the side of the bay, toward an emplacement barrier for cover.

A crash door flung open on its hinges, allowing stragglers to spill out. Angry bullets snapped teeth at the Berkut's chassis. She ducked the rounds that buffeted the frame, weaving her head in between swinging the pintle. Kickback trembled her wrists.

The stock seared in her hands. She coughed back the whiff of smoke her nostrils caught. "Rifle," she shouted through bursts.

Barney punted a rifle-wielder into the line of fire and snatched his AR2. A flare surged alive in the hand of his partner, its smoking eye glowering in the soldier's fist.

He hurled it overhand. It flashed through the darkness and, like a hammer striking an anvil in a burst of sparks, hit the canvas behind her, catching the material on fire. She couldn't stop to snuff the flames, instead only half-heartedly applying her boot while aiming for the pyro before he could burrow behind cover.

She peppered holes along the wall and caught him with a slug through the kidney, drawing a livid string of Russian curses. Grasping the wounded unit by the mask, Barney hauled him into the cabin, slamming the door onto his kidney until the body stopped twitching.

That done, Alyx stamped the hungry flames down to a harmless smolder. The canvas' plastic burned and popped, its edges curling around the cindered hole. Singe charred her sole in a sickening melted rubber smell.

Teeth crushed to the gums, she lurched again for her place of safety, the mount. She cracked her knuckles over the handles, prepared to shoot anything that dared rush them.

Eerie silence flowed through the next few minutes; when the last death shrill faded, the ticking of a clock filled the air. The room loomed, cavernous, smoking, empty.

Barney sprinted over to her as she jumped off the bed.

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

He nodded and grasped the sides of his mask, clenching his fingers around the plastic. He decided against it at the last possible second, withdrawing his hands with great delay. Each of his hard exhalations popped sparks from the vocoder. "Forgot how hard it was to breathe in this thing."

Noticing the rivulets spreading around them, he groaned, taking certain pains to scrub his bloodstained heels on the floor. She'd only seen him like this a handful of times. When he slipped into the armor. It was as if he lost sight of the world around him. What came after—an inevitable side effect of gaining proficiency in the business of killing—

That—

That didn't bear thinking about.

At the console gatekeeping reinforced doors, her EMP refused to start. She rapped the tool several times against her palm; at times the wiring fizzled out due to the bursts of electricity it produced. The in-field remedy she applied, usually, a small physical jostle to encourage them to fire again. But the point was moot. Dead.

Well, if that isn't just peaches, as her father would say. "Dammit," she said, recalling how the cold had killed the RPG-7's targeting system as well, "frost got you, too," looking up as Barney strode past her. "What're you doing?"

He unrolled his cuff and pecked at the skin around his outer wrist. "Dumbass chip," he muttered, "moves around on me. Hell'd it run off to now? …There." He pinched the fold of skin in place and held it up for the laser reader to decrypt, toe bouncing an impatient tap on reinforced steel. "Can plunk a three-mile-high steel prick smack dab in the middle of the city, but God knows we can't have chips that read the code right the first time around."

His Civil Protection clearance. "Why do you have that?" she asked. "I thought you dug it out."

"Wasn't keen on cutting myself up again."

"That thing melts, it's gonna leak alkaline into your bloodstream."

He dismissed her warning with a nonchalant shrug. "Can pop it out anytime. Never know when you might need it." She quashed her retort by sucking in her chapped bottom lip and tucking the EMP back into her pocket. She was loath to admit as much, but she didn't enjoy conversing with him while he bore the mask. Coming from the vocoder, his chattiness sounded uncanny.

Good thing it didn't last long. Between sighs that sounded like garbled static, the reader finally registered his data. Doors swished open.

"Heh, look at that. Open sesame."

He congratulated himself in a histrionic bow and dipped inside, leaving his dour retinue to follow. After they wrapped up things here, she'd have to have a long chat with him.

Indigo steel effused an icy blue afterglow. She'd expected a small console to grace the decor, perhaps, something meager to monitor daily comings and goings, to match the inherent emptiness of a room of dubious purpose.

Instead they encountered a hoarde. Weapons partitions stacked three walls from floor to ceiling, their forcefield barriers deactivated and their supplies ripe for the picking. Ammo belts dangled from hooks in supply closets. Pneumatic caches boasted explosives: from cannisters and satchels to heavier fare, chemical concoctions brewed in a lab. Suddenly the Resistance's car bomb seemed like an adolescent attempt compared to this fare.

Barney risked lifting his helm for sake of soaking it in. He appraised the supply with a low whistle. "Damn. Looks like they were gearing up for a riot in here."

Striding over to the rifles partition, he hefted one from a wall mount, brought the sights to eye level, wheeling the crosshairs around the room.

The half-dozen recharging stations bolted to the eastern wall reminded her of Gordon, who'd crawl through a minefield to replenish the HEV. He celebrated payday if he staggered into a charger with just one hit of juice left. The overcharge such stations bequeathed him when he breached the Citadel rendered him skittish. Judging from the droning hum they emitted, she understood why.

Most other partitions turned up empty, the weapons therein already claimed by their users. She passed a hand along the smooth metal of each slot, and reached in to gladly claim the portable grenade launcher nestled like a serendipitous gift in the last. Lithe and sleek, it measured about two feet long, with a ribbed grip and a visor attached, locked for optical access. All it needed was a cute red bow on top. Happy birthday to me.

Baby weighed a little more than she appeared. She hefted the launcher over her shoulder and pressed her temples into the thick padding rimming the visor.

Light pricked her eyes. A turquoise holographic screen sputtered to life, allowing an evolving compendium of statistics to scroll past: target coordinates, wind speed and direction, backblast spread, arc course correction, ordnance weight.

Blinking twice in rapid succession cycled imaging through various modes. Cartesian coordinates melted into the impressionistic blots of infrared, then swept toward radar.

The fourth mode was the most unfamiliar to her. It sharpened into crystalline collections of triangles mapping the surfaces of objects. She tested it with a quick swipe of her hand, which flew past the black field like a skeletal bird. Had to take a guess, it might have been a counter-stealth measure, pulling the cover off targets taking refuge in smoke, darkness, or precipitation.

Her brows tightened on the rubber padding. Just what they needed: blind Combine donning glasses.

Alyx continued to test the weapon by wandering a few steps around the room, lips pressed together as it scanned every inch of the room for potential targets. This weapon was designed to kill with a hard and decisive stroke. There was no way they could leave here without destroying the other prototypes.

"Hey," Barney snapped, "watch where ya point that thing. Gonna take someone's head off if you keep screwin' with it."

Right. Listen to Mr. Gun Shy over here, like he wasn't playing chicken with the razor train himself, collecting satchels just for the hell of it. She grabbed the bag he'd had in his hand, tossed it into the grenade cache and closed the lid, which locked with an automated hiss.

"You know we can't blow these until we're out, right?"

"We can't carry them back," she said, "so wrecking their armament is the next best thing. They'll have a nice surprise waiting for them when they come after us."

"At least check what the hell you're blowin' before you hit the button, c'mon." He cracked the lid, peered inside. "Shit," he cursed, "white phosphorus." Lowered it. "Stuff fizzles down to the bone. They must really want us dead."

Not before a great deal of suffering. She weighed a cannister in her hand, turning its slick shell over. The seed of a dangerous idea began to germinate in her mind.

"Ask dispatch what they're using these charges for."

Barney's scowl tightened. For a moment she believed he'd outright refuse. But then he pressed a finger to the vocoder and said, "Razor Six to dispatch: request inquiry." He gave the model number, heard the answer, nodded, mouth shut as a closed casket. "Figures. They're aiming to turn the tundra into a minefield. Keep our guys from covering too much ground."

All the more reason to cut off their supply before they could weaponize it. She pointed at the remaining satchels. "I've got an idea. Pick up the rest of the planters."

"Shit, I ain't gonna like this, am I?"

"Depends," she replied. "Combine think you talk the talk. Let's show them you can walk the walk."

She pivoted and activated the room's mainframe computer before he could protest this contingency of hers. Key clatter drowned out his grumbling complaints.

Since Barney's clearance had already admitted them in, the mainframe believed 'Razor Six' was requesting access to topographicals. It didn't take much legwork to draw up a working map from the databanks. She stepped back as a holographic map ignited in the air before them, outlines burning the suggestion of shapes in blue neon.

"This layout… " Rotating the map with a flick of the wrist, she gestured toward its center. The map revealed a pile of cocentric rings stacked atop one another, with dozens of smaller radial corridors shooting off in all directions. "Look at that cloister in the middle, half a kilo down. They're sitting on top of a huge electromagnetic superconductor. That definitely wasn't here before."

He sidled closer, squinting at the glowing contours. "What're they using it for?"

"Not sure," she trailed a thumb along her chin, elbow in palm, "but if I had to guess, it probably has something to do with the Borealis. No way they can juice that thing up on regular generators. They'd have to have put down some kind of power source somewhere. Not to mention a cooler and a vacuum." She paused. "They could be trying to figure out the best time to pull the ship out of orbit."

"Hell'd they need to know that for?"

"If it was hard to catch," she said. "Extracting it while it's transitioning will destabilize its set resonance. And… the rift from that might cause another cascade, only… "

This time we won't last seven minutes. Her father's face, a bloodless, haunted mask.

"Well, God damn," Barney said, "you mean the ship might not even be here?"

"Or else it's here for a short window of time."

They each took a moment to process the implications. However, such theoreticals could only captivate their interest for so long before the more immediate situation demanded their attention. While Barney gathered extra satchels, she scrolled through the map for information on Judith's whereabouts.

Ground floor was Subsector Alpha. Sectors and subsectors rippled outward from the superconductor's center, with narrow passageways connecting larger arteries to the heart.

It came as a surprise to neither that the subsector reserved for prisoners was designated Lambda. What surprised her more was the lack of data it produced. Combine detention centers updated prisoner status at least once per half-hour, but none of the cells in Lambda reported a prisoner, let alone updated their status. If Mossman wasn't in the holding area, where else could they have taken her?

Alyx surveyed the possibilities. The first—the bleakest—Judith was dead. Her corpse hooked into a pod and shipped elsewhere for processing.

That was unlikely, considering she was the last to gather any leads on the Borealis. Neurochemical methods of extraction, as barbaric as they were, often took days before any useful information emerged. Ordinary run-of-the-mill soldiers would not be assigned to oversee such a lengthy and arduous process.

The second: she'd been moved to a specialized chamber not listed in these records. Perhaps the databanks had yet to update her current location.

What purpose that served, Alyx couldn't ascertain. The Combine hadn't anticipated anyone breaking in, hence little need to mask that information. Neither was it their style to waste resources relocating their prisoners to 'better' quarters. Until something new pinged onscreen, she could dismiss the notion.

The third: she simply wasn't here. Perhaps the Combine had detained Mossman in Lambda for a time, but later transported her to a different compound.

Which, of course, would land her directly on her ass back to square one. Although this appeared to be the most plausible scenario, it also seemed unlikely on the basis of convenience. Transporting prisoners in bad weather only risked losing them to it.

Drenched in the monitor's glow, she gripped the panel with both hands and stared hard into the console's blue-bathed keys. As much as her gut insisted Mossman was trapped somewhere in the compound, she had to set aside her feelings for a more logical course of action. Occam's razor suggested the digital breadcrumbs led somewhere: might be a good start to follow them.

"We should be okay if we stick to the maintenance tunnels." And don't kick up an avalanche. The Combine tended to eschew such areas whenever they could, preferring the solidity of their own infrastructure. At any moment, cheap Soviet bloc construction could relent and crumble.

Of course, that risk was the price they were going to have to pay for stealth.

"Meet you back here," she said, pointing to subsector Beta, their current location. "If she's here, Judith would be high-priority, so they should have put her somewhere toward the central hub. I'll look for her there. Meanwhile, you set charges here, here, and here." Spots of light pulsed where she tapped them, indicating vital load-bearing supports. Blow them and it's lights out.

Barney stared at the screen. He didn't have much to say, no wise quips to impart before they split. He merely nuzzled the mask to his face, picked up the bundle of satchels and set off to do his job. His footfalls echoed a hollow clack, gnawing at the edges of her conscience.

Lviv Bakery, he once said, stank to high heaven for weeks afterward. Human flesh dipped in chemicals and set alight. Of course the arsonist didn't care. Of course he knew they'd spare the rod. He was whistling showtunes when he passed me by, that sick son of a bitch.

Footfalls. Shiver and jingle of spurs. She stalked their noise like a shadow, felt in the periphery, yet unseen.

Every now and again, the soldier she ghosted would freeze. He'd swing his light over a patch of grate or crumbled wall, causing her heart to skip a jagged beat. Then he'd resume plunging ahead as if nothing happened. And so she crept along, in the spaces between.

She strafed the wall with her shoulders hunched, limestone grain pricking a little at her parka's fur hood as it scraped along. The launcher's harness strap dug into her collar.

Slipping through devoid halls, she turned the corner, nearly lost it to a sea of limestone blocks. The thin shadow standing at attention before a large, grate-protected window. Immobile, its pose catatonic.

Alyx gripped the harness until her knuckles drained of blood. Her tattered breath scraped the silence as her adrenaline-pumped heart banged against her ribcage, clamoring to be set free.

Breaking through her trepidation, she knocked on the glass and prayed the sound loud enough to revive her. "Judith," she called. "I'm going to get you out. Just sit tight and I'll hack the lock—"

A flash of illumination killed her thought, stopping her cold. Sconces flickered, carved abhorrent shapes in the shadows.

"Judith?" Alyx approached the window, drawing a hand over her mouth at the last second. "Oh, my God."

Chills swarmed her body. Light ticked in several more erratic flashes before flooding the cell and bringing Mossman into full view.

It had been one thing to speculate on her whereabouts—when she remained just an idea, a half-hearted, diluted hope that somehow the odds had favored her and helped her evade capture. That was when Judith had floated a grainy collection of pixels somewhere within the files of a stolen hard drive. Here, reality faced her with devastating clarity.

Dried blood clumped in her scalp, dying her crown a darker russet than her natural auburn. Her plastic clip had shattered, freeing her hair to tumble down in beraggled strands laced through with tortoise-shell shards.

A knobby seal caulked her left eye, which retreated so far back into the concave of its socket that Alyx feared it might have been forcibly compressed, if not crushed. It lacked eyelashes.

Contusions raised lumps along her jaw. A savage tear ripped her jacket collar open, exposing her from earlobe to clavicle, barely missing the jugular in its path. White sores encrusted the corners of her mouth where, she suspected, saliva had pooled. Blood and mucus leaked from her nostrils, speckling her cream-colored sweater underneath.

Gazing upon her rescuer as her surviving iris slowly welled with liquid, Judith parted anemic lips, revealing teeth steeped red in swollen gums, and said one word in a pitiful croak.

"Eli."

Chapter Text

She brushes the snow from her sleeves.

The closest analogy he drew was watching home footage in a dark room. He remembered those, surely. How images glowed on a wrinkled canvas. How reels clicked and whirred as they rotated in the spindle. His father shot amateur film of him as an infant, though he didn't recall living the moments captured by the lens.

He preferred to think he'd by and large risen above such sentimentality, but in practice it proved one of the most difficult habits to shed. Watching her memories stirred a grin on a face that lacked the ability. Although the anatomy necessary to perform such movement didn't exist, the underlying impulse lingered deep in his neural tissues. His cells squirmed at their failure to execute an incompatible function.

It was typically during these moments of dysfunction that he sensed the emergence of a soundless presence. It came in waves, amplitudes lapping at his mind.

He greeted them by extending them the same manner of silence. Of course, he said, his voice equally noiseless, you who understand everything feel no need to delineate your experiences through these clumsy metaphors.

Deathly silence responded.

Yes. I know. Language is but a crude stick with which one scribbles nonsense. I will learn to discard it. Until then, please oblige me your patience.

They receded. He wished his lungs held breath so he might indulge a sigh.

Her breath pains her. She's been running. Fleeing. She glances over her shoulder toward an empty corridor—uncertain whether that dark flicker sprang from a passing shadow or her racing mind.

Beckoned to the banal, Judith notices the frost coating her sleeves and brushes them off. She rubs her elbows to warm them and uses the pause to think of Eli. Of the vast gulfs of ice and sea separating the compound from White Forest. She contemplates many things, not the least of which entail the fallout that will hang over her when she returns. Hope and dread swirl an intriguing mingle in her chest.

After wiping a damp strand stuck to her brow, Dr. Mossman decides to address the camera blinking from its tripod.

"The ship emitted an odd signal we're still in the process of deciphering. We're not certain yet what it may signify… " She bites her lip to quell her growing excitement. "If we were to trace it, however, I suspect it may point us toward the location of the Nexus."

She always did prefer running.

"We're very close now. We have to gather more evidence before we can make our move, of course. We don't want to give away our hand. But I believe we're on the cusp of gaining a significant tactical advantage."

Contrition slows her icy breaths.

"And, Eli… About Gordon and Alyx—"

He pinched the air.

Stop.

Her neurons froze. Ions flickered between voltage-gated potassium channels, their transit undecided like the disrupted writhe of paused film. They longed to complete the circuit and deliver her thoughts.

A waste; he doubted she'd make the fullest use of them.

Again, he said.

She brushes the snow from her sleeves.

Alyx backed from the window. Sweat trickled a languid string of beads down her spine, incongruously hot on her cold skin.

"Judith." Fear cracked her voice. "Did—"

"Eli… don't." A white hand emerged, flattened itself on the glass. "I had to do it. I had to… You don't know what he's capable of."

"Judith," she repeated with a shake of the head. "I'm not… "

She paused, struck by a sudden memory. The time a scout caught a bullet to the lower intestines. Shock coupled with the heavy bleeding he'd sustained from a ruptured gastric artery transformed him. By the time his Vortigaunt partners delivered Eli, the scout cheerily squeezed his hand and greeted his long-deceased wife.

One of the most difficult things her father had to do, comfort the dying. In this case, it entailed playing along with their fiction. When she asked him why he chose to play the roles assigned him—spouse, sibling, parent, friend, cousin: confidantes of every stripe—he explained that the brain employed such mechanisms to protect itself.

Not gonna lie, Dad, that sounds pretty cruel. She'd been so certain back then, so grounded in her principles. Don't you feel bad after?

Maybe that's why the wrinkles crowning his eyes pulled with his frown.

Crueler not to, baby.

Her heart sank the longer Mossman's expectant silence lingered. The way she looked at her was the same look she'd seen her give her father many times: respect and fondness, her softness checked by guilt. She really did believe she was in the Citadel. Doubtful these cold, sterile walls proffered more hospitality than Black Mesa East.

Was this what her father meant when he begged her to speak on his behalf? To guide Judith out of the maze of her own mind? Yet even that possibility disappeared from her grasp the minute speakers crackled.

"Well, well. What have we here?"

The imprint of her palm remained on the glass as Judith stepped away, chin dipped. "Wallace."

Alyx crushed the launcher strap in her fist. " …what?"

"What have you done now, Judith? Invited guests into my office without permission?"

"I'm sorry, Doctor."

"That's quite all right. Never let it be said we don't take the utmost pains to welcome them." This was impossible, she thought. This couldn't be happening. What-ifs poured out agitated bees, her thoughts seeking to escape the fire that voice took to their hive. The Citadel. The Citadel had engulfed everything. Nothing survived. Except, except. "For instance, the infamous Alyx Vance. What joy it is to behold your lovely face again. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Mossman averted her gaze, burdened under the weight of an unseen stare. Alyx whipped around. "What the hell is this? What did you do?"

"Now, now, settle down. I assure you your questions will be answered if you exercise due patience."

Her upper lip twitched. "You should have stayed dead, you bastard."

He chuckled. "In order to remain dead, my dear, one must first surrender life. As you'll soon see, I've done neither." And then, addressing Mossman as if it truly were old times: "Judith, be a lamb and send in our guest, would you? We've much to discuss."

Mossman turned. Alyx lurched her wrist through the grate, grasping air. The lump in her throat calcified into stone as she dipped out of sight. She smashed a palm into the shutter, making it crash and rattle. "Damn you, Breen!"

She wasn't gone for long. In fifteen seconds, the grates huffed an irritated rasp. The minute they retracted, lifting the barrier between Mossman and herself, Alyx barged into her cell.

She anticipated an ambush, lights extinguished to set the stage for a firefight. Nothing of the sort. The visor swept across the cell, showing a woman's lonely silhouette; thermal imaging reported a slight warmth rippling from convection coils in the floor.

Damn. Almost be easier with a room full of soldiers.

Although she didn't enjoy exposing herself by doing so, she switched off the launcher; the padded visor slid from her brow. This emptiness taunted her, how bereft the cell was. There were no cots, no chairs, no desks. No chains, no manacles, no grotty facsimile of a bed carved from quarry, nothing. None of the brutal instruments she expected from the Combine. Not a drop of blood marred the walls, as far as she could tell.

Judith must have made a bed of the large metal disc bolted to the center of the floor; just looking at the spartan arrangement drew a sympathetic pang from her Hunter wounds. She flattened her palm between her ribs to hush them.

Antiseptic and the smell of dried sweat mingled together in an almost rancid swirl. Their source: a washbasin claiming the northernmost wall, filled to the brim with a gleaming black substance she hoped to God its prisoner hadn't been forced to drink. She preferred to deny the thought any foothold.

Alyx tiptoed over sheets of creaking lattice, creeping into the darkness' warm, open mouth. As she absorbed the room, the outer layer of Mossman's catatonia cracked, spurred her just a smidge more alive; she began to inspect it as well, scrutinizing its shadowy crevices. Her brows crinkled, as if she just now became aware of an indignity she'd long since forgotten.

Giving the basin askance, Mossman tilted her head in idle rumination. A lock of hair fell, veiling her damaged eye.

"Certainly lacks taste, doesn't it?" She pictured a gaudier environment. Cracked marble tiles, scuffed oriental carpet, a worn antique globe, long yellow banners fluttering alien propaganda against slitted windows. Alyx could see her disapproval grow in the narrowing of her good eye. Eventually her shoulders rolled back, and she sighed. "Come along."

"Wait." Reaching forth, Alyx grasped her wrist and drew her in. "God, what did that slimy prick do to you… ?"

Judith flinched. "Please listen to what he has to say."

"No," she pressed. "We're getting the hell out of here."

But Mossman refused to budge. "It's been days. By now, Black Mesa East… " Pained, she shook her head. "I'm sorry. I wish it didn't have to come to this." A moment's reflection compelled her to murmur, "For what it's worth, he seems to be in high spirits."

"Judith," she said quietly, "where are we right now?"

"Haven't we bartered enough to gain this audience with him? His patience only extends so far." She fiddled with her bracelet, rubbing fingertips over the letters of 'PROGRESS.' Only the last four letters could be read; the first four had melted. The gold plaque she cherished had withered into a gnarled, scorched plate. "If you'd allow it, Eli, I would… feel better if I escorted you rather than the guards. They can be a bit brusque."

Entering a keyboard command into a wall-mounted console on the other side of the cell, Mossman activated access to a sliding door and slipped inside its dark corridor with little fanfare, leaving her to follow.

Hoisting the launcher strap over her shoulder, she sprinted up to Mossman.

"Judith, wait. Before we… Go." Her gait slowed to field her. Good. Maybe if I refuse like Dad would, we won't have to go through with this. "He isn't going to listen to either of us."

"We have to try."

Alyx swallowed. A hint of sourness burned the lining of her throat; it felt wrong to impersonate him, to parade in his skin, but what other choice did she have? Dragging Mossman back to her senses would break her.

"I won't." What would her father say? "I'm sick of his crap. If he wants to have a friendly 'chat' so bad, he can come fetch me himself. I won't have him dragging you into this like some kind of—"

"It's a little too late for that now."

She furrowed her brow. "What do you mean?"

Judith hesitated. She no longer held herself with the pride she displayed in front of her father, nor the meek submission she'd maintained around Breen. She waited for what felt like an eternity, the words hidden even to herself.

"I knew Wallace would become overeager the minute he arrived in City 17. Stalling him didn't work as well as you thought. He refused to wait any longer." She slid her hands over her face, covering the damaged hollow. "Oh, this is all wrong. You don't suppose there's a chance Gordon and Alyx… "

"What are you talking about? You left them in Nova Prospekt."

"No, I… " She began to shake her head. "That was never my intention."

"But you did."

Mossman's protest startled her. "The coordinates were already locked onto the Nexus. I had to correct course without letting her know. She already believed I'd betrayed you, she wasn't going to listen to me. You, perhaps, but not me. Otherwise she might have attempted to stop the redirect, and soldiers would have accosted them." Soldiers barged in on us anyway, Alyx wanted to blurt, but she kept her mouth shut. "I should have stalled her as well. Perhaps then that would have let the teleport rise to a shorter charge time."

Though she chose not to answer, this time it wasn't for sake of entertaining the ploy. So that was how she chose to spin it, even here and now? Poor Mossman, who tried to play hero, who your stubborn daughter just wouldn't heed even in dire straits?

"Don't you remember?" Mossman asked. "I was trying to bring the teleport to roughly about a half-charge following ours. I didn't want to force them to wait out such a long period."

Her defensive expression softened a slight degree. She let her hands drop to her sides as she chanced a small step forward.

Alyx retreated an equal step back, as if the boundary between them encroached upon her personal space. Her body stiffened, prickled with suspicion. She couldn't allow herself to be sucked in by her lies the way her father had. Who could say for certain this wasn't just a ploy to make her lower her defenses, only to be struck where it hurt? No. They wouldn't do this again. Either Mossman played clean or not at all.

"That's not true." She squeezed her jaws together to keep the urge to scream from writhing out. Bullshit. Bull and shit. "You left them behind."

Tears sparkled a diamond rim around Judith's eye. She blinked, and one escaped.

"Don't." Iron hardened her voice. "Don't shake your head at me. Don't you stand there and lie through your teeth about what happened back— Damn it, you played us all like chess pieces!"

More tears flowed freely, unrestrained, and Mossman retorted with a vehement tone she couldn't imagine her using on her father. "Because your hand faltered," she said. "What's the matter with you? Have you forgotten I've been doing as you've asked? Why won't you listen to reason? It's going to get us all killed!"

Their next bout of silence harbored only the sounds of their breath, the harsh words they hadn't the courage to bandy.

It was cruel, Alyx thought, a cruel fucking joke being played on the two of them. Somewhere, her father's memory laughed. They each deemed the other bullheaded, too unassailable to reach, but their mutual fragility had never been clearer. One wrong word could shatter them both.

Slowly, Judith clasped her hands together, interlacing her fingers. Her ruined bracelet slipped under her torn sleeve. "Eli," she said, his name thinned to a whisper, "please. I implore you to think about this. You have to think about what's best for the Resistance. He's seeking information. If you tell him what he wants to know, perhaps… " She dabbed her eye with a corner of her cuff. "Some of us can be spared."

"Some of us."

"Not me," she said, "you. I made him promise me you won't be harmed." At length, she shepherded Alyx down a narrow set of grated stairs. Another door awaited them at the bottom. Two sets of locks churned their toothy gears in a rusty grind and cracked themselves open. "I'm sorry. I've failed you."

They entered a cylindrical chamber about ten feet high. The floor here resembled the one in Mossman's quarters, a circular metal plate ringed by lattice through which red coils sent up air in gusts. Steam hissed under their feet and sprinkled down from above, releasing braids of smoke into the room. Baked steel breathed in her nostrils.

The chamber converged around a metallic nest of glowing cable. Throne or cradle, it was difficult to say what purpose it served the creature it supported. Perched upon it was an Advisor, surrounded by a constellation of objects in orbit.

Rebel belongings, she realized with a quickened pulse. Nothing it played with belonged to the Combine. An ownerless glove sailed past, followed by a screwdriver whose Philips' head twirled independently of the handle. An atlas flapped over the ceiling, pages torn out and spine broken. Yamaha handlebars, detached, steered to ghostly whims. A medic's kit popped its latch and leaked gauze. Guns disassembled, rods and pins and screws and stocks taken apart, floated in faint suggestion of what they once were.

A snowball caught in the process of melting spun before the Advisor. It contemplated the ball for several rotations, then reversed direction, encouraging it to accelerate with the flick of a claw. The creature seemed fixated on this, how long it could keep a piece of slush churning in this strange centrifuge, as the core unraveled and flew off in watery ropes.

Her rapid-thudding heart plummeted into her bowels.

No.

God, please, no.

When the Advisor sensed their presence, it dropped the objects, scattering them in every direction like a child discarding neglected toys in favor of fresher amusements. "Yes, thank you, Dr. Mossman. That'll be all. You may return to your post if you like." The snowball dissolved on the grille. Droplets seethed menacing snakes on the coils. "Go on. This only concerns Eli and myself. I'll call you again when you're needed."

Mossman accepted her dismissal. She did not spare Alyx a second glance as she passed.

The Advisor focused on her once the inner lock engaged, filling the room with an iron silence.

Alyx withdrew the launcher, pointed the barrel at the nest. The act of mutual destruction tempted her with its ease. Pull the trigger and they vanish in an instant. Phosphorus floods the room, washes it clean. The problem eradicates itself. Everything disappears in a cloud of flame. No more Resistance. No more Combine. No more of her father haunting her. No more of this struggle slipping through her hands like heat oozing from holes in the hell-pit—

"You won't be needing that old thing, I assure you."

In an untelevised flick of air, the Advisor tore the launcher from her grip and cast it to the floor, ditched alongside the rest of the trash. It was her it was most interested in. She who no doubt presented an entertaining sight, kicking and grunting inside the invisible cocoon it wrapped her in.

Despite her struggle, she felt its presence reach out and nudge her memories backward. An unseen hand strained to grasp her chin, diverting her attention.

Look. You will see who I am.

Her struggles quieted as the chamber's red hues bled into another: the Citadel, weeping ash from a crimson eye. Thunder producing a distant growl. Flakes pattering down in whisper-soft snowfall. She is there again, if just for this moment, watching, breathing in the residue of smoke.

A grub sails past her line of vision, floating over a twisted pile of rebar still steaming from the explosion. Its tongue probes hunks of scorched concrete.

Bit by bit, an object emerges from its excavation. To her it resembles a charred branch, a misshapen sapling fighting to sprout free of the rubble. The bark has chipped and flecked, knobby joints bent to their snapping points, five thin twigs splayed outward. Their convulsive twitch, a palsy of damaged nerve, tells her it is flesh, clinging to a gossamer thread of life. Fingers: soot-filled, nails split down the middle of their beds, grasp the tongue.

(Help me.)

Cinderblocks fall from the mangled body, weightless as pebbles being tossed into the sea. Dangling a puppet of slackened strings, Breen drifts toward the grub's curious, curling tongue. Can he be called human? This exhausted torch, burned down to a wick of marrow and exposed ligament. What might he be considered now? Not ambassador but prey, left to the mercy of superior creatures.

He is touched on the brow by the grub's tongue in a perverse sort of blessing. Risorius muscles pull back to uncover a row of jagged, glinting teeth. A blood-tinged smile haunts his mouth.

He submits wordlessly. Seconds later his human body—a vacant shell, cable-knit patterns branded into his blistered skin—tumbles down to join the rest of the debris.

Reality crashed upon her like a vat of cold water hurled in her face. Air fled her lips in short, ragged snatches.

"Strange," Breen remarked, more to himself than to her. "I'd have sworn I'd detected two heartbeats, yet I feel the terrified pulse of just a single entity here." He swept her closer. Unlike the smooth, waxen flesh of other Advisors, his white mask was speckled by black marks. "I'm not as helplessly blind as I was when we first met, so it seems fair to place the question to you, Ms. Vance. Whereabouts might you be waiting to spring Gordon Freeman upon me?"

Her thoughts unraveled, strings picked at and plucked.

(Gordon? what do you want with) Gordon lying on the floor of a dusty apartment, dazed. She offers him a hand to help him up. "Doctor Freeman, I presume?" (stop, stop, what are you) No, we've already suffered enough of those unpleasant memories (get out), let them fall. (get OUT)

Gordon in the mines, sweat glinting green-tinged crystals on his terrified, waxen face. (what the hell do you want from me? no no stop) A ritual. Vortigaunt rumble, ancient beyond reckoning. (oh God stop)

Interesting. Not what I'm looking for, however.

A muffled crack. Bone on stone. The suit chiming warning. (this has nothing to do with you) A ventilator, wheezing, crunching a plastic bag from a metal attachment. Gordon trapped in fever dreams, supine on a padded mattress. (get out OUT OF MY)

"Ah. I see." She squirmed in his embrace, teeth gnashed. "How disappointing. You've come all this way with no savior in tow. Well, I suppose even the best humanity has to offer must be made to lie down in the pastures sometime, hm?"

Don't let him play games with you. She demanded on Mossman's behalf: "What the hell did you do to her?"

"Nothing she didn't deserve," he said. "Although in the interest of full disclosure, her mind was already a sprawling labyrinth of guilt when she arrived in my quarters. Rather like yourself, Ms. Vance."

The brief wonder that flitted into her head—if Judith had brandished a weapon to fend him off—caused her to scan the trash for one of her own. Potent and alluring, the launcher lay pristine in the corner. She forced herself not to dwell on it, not to tip her hand too soon.

Keep him talking. Your chance will come.

"To be fair, she put up a somewhat laudable effort for approximately twelve hours. But you know how these things tend to go: I reminded her of her duties, and she broke." You would say that, she thought. Though her hatred was vicarious, adopted from the broken woman in question, it boiled a sour tar in the cauldron of her stomach, curdling and sizzling over itself. "Hopelessly lost within her own dead-ends of fear and regret. Frankly, it was something of a mercy to send her back. Strange how easily she slips into character, wouldn't you say, 'Eli'?"

Of the most hateful things he could say, that managed to cut a little deeper than the rest. "I'm not my father."

"Indeed not. He would have had the good sense to realize coming here was suicide." Shaking her, he changed the subject. "A bit of trivia, Alyx, my dear: did you know the average human spine can withstand an enormous amount of pressure?"

She scrambled for an anchor seconds too late; the thing that called itself Breen, or at least bore his mocking, adenoidal voice, whisked her into the air. At his leisure, he spun her around. He compressed and bent her like another toy, stretching her limbs, flattening her spine, uncurling her ground fists.

She remained mulishly silent. Screaming would give him the satisfaction he sought. Defiance crumbled into unthinking horror, however, as she watched the proboscis slide from the socket. Her lips crushed together as cold, viscous flesh caressed her cheek.

"You poor dear. You've had such a rough time."

After hitting the ground Alyx rolled over. She snapped her head up, equal parts terrified and startled to find that Mossman hadn't left. On the contrary, she stood a silent witness, staring directly out the observation window with her heavily-lidded good eye, privy to everything occuring inside Breen's quarters. Seeing, but not understanding.

What does she think we're doing in here?

"On the topic of Dr. Freeman," Breen continued, oblivious, "it's truly a shame he can't join us in person. I'm certain he'll place flowers on your icy grave once he becomes disposed." Laughter bubbled out in a sinister stream. "If he becomes disposed. The bidder Eli sold him to is quite possessive over his assets."

Alyx reeled, the effect of his words as bitter as a disciplinary slap. How could he have known about Gordon, the contract? How the hell could he have possibly known? He couldn't have extracted the information from Judith; she'd departed for the Borealis days before she and Gordon had escaped the Citadel.

Unless—

"Ah, yes. I too recall the struggle to understand. The human mind is such a primitive machine. I'm pleased to have rid myself of its limitations."

Of course. "You're a monster, Breen." Always was. "At least you can't fool anyone else in that disgusting slug body."

"Perhaps, though one might argue recent circumstances have rendered that sentiment moot. Unlike certain aforementioned parties, however, I've never swindled others with my intentions."

"You're cracked."

"Compared to what, my dear? Your collective insistence on suicide? Say what you will, but I did not shirk my duties as your administrator. Time and again, I'd tried ingratiating our benefactors to our fellow man. Time and again, I proffered gifts far beyond what we as a species deserve: eternal knowledge, eternal wisdom, eternal life. Time and again, I encountered complete and abject failure.

"I see now the problem didn't lie with my methods; your ignorant terror was so deeply engrained in your psyche that death was inexorable. Encoded in every nucleic strand of your weak, fragile flesh.

"Still I wonder," said Breen, "as you writhe here, your father's hatred clouding your mother's eyes. Do you know what it means to stand on oblivion's precipice? To watch the darkness breathe?"

She refused him the dignity of an answer, so he pulled her arm in a decisive wrench, separating the joint from the socket. Agony burst instantaneous fireworks under her skin. He relished in the bone-chilling shriek that bathed his chamber, indulging a chuckle at her expense.

"You call me less than human. You, who are no more than an animal yourself, terrified of any glimmer of truth illuminating the shadows playing upon the cavern walls of your dim consciousness. What possible use could we have for you, an evolutionary dead end clinging wretchedly to its last vestiges? Only a fool would believe her short-lived passions serve us in the palace of the enlightened."

Breen dropped her. Let her crawl.

Long, jointed fingers grasped her ankles and dragged back its prey, letting the steel grate abrade her Hunter wounds. The floor's ridges scraped her flesh until her scabs cracked. A cold, seeping trickle smeared across her stomach, joining the sweat dampening her undershirt.

"I am the gentlest propagator of this process, believe you me. The native-born aren't quite as considerate for the concerns of the flesh, but I still remember what it means to be saddled down by human foible."

Clutching her throbbing shoulder, Alyx scrabbled in vain at the floor. Toward the launcher, toward anything that could offer salvation. Her heart slammed inside her ribcage, full to burst.

"I can improve you, perfect you in ways your simian cerebrum can hardly grasp. Have you seen the thorough work I've done with Dr. Mossman? How easily I've washed away her pesky flaws? One can't help but appreciate her now that she lacks her stubborn streak, her subtle arrogance driven by fears of inadequacy. Far better than the existing stock, wouldn't you agree?"

This couldn't be it. She couldn't die here, not to him, not with Mossman watching—

" …Now, there, you won't feel a thing, I promise. This baptism is the most invigorating thing you will ever do. Doesn't that sound far kinder a fate than any afterlife could purport to be? And who better to convert you than me?

"Not to worry: you're in much more capable hands than the ones that clutched your father. His death was an unrefined mess I wish not to repeat. No; for my next piece, I intend to chip away at you until what remains cannot even be called broken."

In the midst of horror, a place of calm. A clear voice.

Look, her father said. Look closer.

No; closer. Past the shock and pain and helplessness; past the blood pooling through limestone; peel back the layers, quiet the scrape of the scream writhing from your throat; stop feeling, stop grieving and see; what remains?

The Advisor in the barn. Bearing pockmarks from its damaged life support.

Alyx, her father said. Look in the inhuman eyes of the one who killed me.

"And Eli wondered why a child was chosen. Perhaps it was the dark seed of selfish instinct he'd helped nourish." He chuckled again. "Don't take it personally; you come by it honestly."

Her throat produced a growl that could have only been called animal. "No," she said. "He was forced to make that choice."

"Was he?" Breen challenged. "Tell me, what kind of man tricks his own darling progeny into worshiping him as the champion of his 'noble' cause when, in truth, he'd sacrificed billions of lives in exchange for hers? I've known your father for longer than you've been alive, and even I must beg the question.

"The tragedy of it all, of course, is how pitifully little his hopes amounted to. Don't let yourself be blinded by your love for him: you know as well as I that Eli Vance has never been anything other than a liar and a traitor. Killing the product of his deceits will be a gift to Dr. Freeman and to this world."

"Wallace." A faint noise of protest arose. "Stop."

That rerouted his attention to the window. Beyond it, Mossman left her post and trudged toward the door. Apparently he didn't like that, for he immediately launched a cavalcade of appeasements.

"Judith, Judith, you're straining yourself. Come, you must sit. We can discuss this at a later date, yes? Besides, I've let you fraternize with reactionaries of his ilk for far too long. There's no telling what manner of ideas he's—"

"This isn't right. You know it's not. Surely we can reach a compromise."

The Advisor drifted after her. "Juu-dith," he crooned in nauseating sing-song, "I'm afraid your heart is far too enmeshed for you to remain objective in this matter. I'll call on you when Eli and I have… Wait— Where did you get that?"

Heedless to his panicked stream of questions, Mossman crossed the booth with a steel box in her hands.

"Did you hear me? Judith? What are you doing?"

Feedback palled showers of static when she slammed the box onto the console. "Cleaning house," she said, flipping the lid open. Inside was a key. She stared into the chamber for a moment—blood gliding a single, silent bead from her nostril—then promptly wrenched it. "Goodbye."

"What?"

Steam spurted boiling columns from the slats in the floor, cutting him short. The grate quaked underneath them, a shiver growing to a violent shake. Coils began to hum in dangerous unison.

Alert: magnetic resonator activated.

Now alive, the warm chamber disrupted his suspension. The grub screeched an unearthly cry and dropped her, a failure of gravity casting both of them to the floor.

Alyx's knee smacked the grille, stabbing pain up her thigh. She hissed as she clutched the links for support, already hot from rousing machinery.

Bareness encircled her throat. Her mother's necklace snapped its clasp and flew toward the magnetic pull, only to catch in the Advisor's clutching, vine-like hand.

Somehow, throughout his torment, that small, insignificant act—a petty thievery—proved the tipping point. Even though the resonator thickened the air, made it feel as though she swam inside her slow, viscous body, she reached inside her boot and withdrew the Hunter pincer whose metal nudged her ankle. Gripped it until the smooth metal quaked in her fist.

She approached Breen while blood pounded a heavy churn in her temples. Her steps clanked off the grate, punctuating the resonator's hums.

"Judith, you conniving snake! I'll—"

A hard kick smashed the mouthpiece into a shattered pile of circuits, aborting his tirade. She stamped the fingers that clutched for her and cracked the wrist into a twisted gnarl for good measure.

The Advisor unleashed a vengeful blast to knock her off her feet. Alyx slammed onto the metal mesh and remained there for a few heartbeats, smoke billowing a heady incense into her lungs, stinging them with every breath sucked through her teeth.

Her shoulders trembled as she laced her fingers through the holes. At first she believed her body wanted to cry. To relent and slip into the smoke below. Instead, the dry bucking of her chest morphed into a silent grin, more grimace than smile.

She crept onto her hands and knees. Wading through retaliative blasts, she prowled her way back, ignoring the liquid popping in her eardrums and the black pulsars throbbing in her vision. A muffled brain panicked for control of a staggering body.

With animalistic deliberation, she grasped a fistful of moist reptilian flesh and climbed atop the Advisor's carapace. Ramming a knee into its bruise to quiet its frantic clawing, she wheeled the pincer over its exposed eye, lingering just long enough to watch a very human flash of fear glint inside the iris.

The sclera burst under the blade.

Past hatred, beyond retaliation. This was a killing pleasure; her blood grew drunk on insectoid shrieks ringing throughout the chamber. A perverse giddiness sang in her veins upon slashing the Advisor open, cleaving flesh from exoskeleton with savage ruthlessness. Some primal part of her psyche applauded its writhing. Delighted in seeing it suffer as it thrashed itself on the walls and floor.

It didn't matter how much her body suffered in return. The drops trickling down her neck on either side, the creature's maddened blows hammering nails into her skull. It didn't matter how she got here. A miasma smothered her thoughts, choked out conscious reason. She couldn't remember what had been said, what she had set out to accomplish. It didn't matter. What had happened to drive her from terror to this agonizing ecstasy—

It doesn't matter, whispered a soft voice from somewhere within. The lesson has been taught. Finish it.

Neon-yellow fluid erupted in frothy spurts around her wrist. Desperate, wracking sobs slithered free. Tears choked out, clogging the curses in her throat.

It wasn't enough. Whatever suffering she inflicted on… this thing, its blood wouldn't atone for the blood that had already spilled. It would not compel her father to cross the frozen bridge of her nightmares and withdraw his pleas, nor would it erase the words he'd branded in her mind.

The blade dripping in her hand could not slit open the shrouds of time and undo Black Mesa. There was nothing she could do. There was nothing but this despair and hurt, compressed into a small black coal smoldering at the bottom of her being, fanning the flames, staving off the encroaching darkness for as long as she stoked them.

"Alyx, stop!"

A hand lurched to catch the pincer at the apex of its swing; she cried out in instinctive pain as it twisted her wrist, forcing her to drop the weapon. Someone's arms proceeded to wrap her in a vise, squeezed her ribs with surprising strength as they pulled her away from the Advisor.

Judith stumbled backward with her in tow, half-dragging her up the steps to the observation room. "Calhoun's here, isn't he? I saw him on the surveillance feed." She knelt down with the launcher harness in her hand, clipping it carefully around her good shoulder.

She panted, each breath pulling at the walls of her throat. Damn it, so that was why Barney was able to pass through, not because his old clearance miraculously granted him access. She suspected as much; his old code would have expired by now. Mossman must have reprogrammed the gates' parameters to render Breen blind to him.

But... it might have also meant that she monitored her as well, and allowed her to wander right into the monster's den. If so, why? More to the point, what the hell? Had she honest-to-God expected her to kill an Advisor by flinging insults at it?

A sharp jab of pain in her shoulder derailed her train of thought. "Shit," she hissed as she clutched the wailing muscle. "He's setting up—charges—"

Delicate crackle interrupted her. The observation window chipped, then burst, a shower of glass scattering diamonds through the air. Before either of them could react, the floor caved in, and they plunged into the dark cushion of smoke where Breen dragged himself toward them, scarce more than a wounded ball of flesh.

Stunned, Alyx remained paralyzed. Judith climbed to her feet as though the plunge hadn't jostled her in the slightest.

It would have been a gross oversimplification to say she laughed just then. For one, Mossman did not laugh; her pessimism seldom allowed her more than a brief chuckle at life's constant disappointments. That was why it disturbed Alyx to hear this kind of noise escape her.

What began as a soft giggle grew heavier, its edges cracking from damaged vocal cords. The sound bubbled from somewhere deep within her diaphragm, rising until it swelled into coarse, gasping sobs.

She hugged her arms around herself, gripped by tremors. Caught between bouts of hiccupping, of weeping, she guffawed as if Breen had told the funniest joke in the world.

Alyx's breath caught in her throat. "Judith?" She feared she'd lost her mind, a sentiment Breen echoed.

"Pay her no heed. It's obvious she's insane."

The laughter dimmed to a quake of her shoulders. "Not quite. I've been doing some calculations." Breen tensed, as did Alyx; Judith addressed him with a candor neither had seen from her until now.

She wiped the moisture from her cornea. In her surviving eye flashed a gleam of intelligence, the lethal glimpse of a hidden knife. "Approximately six days and seven hours have passed since you stormed the compound. Assuming blood glucose conversion rates are the same for your host body, you have, at most, less than fifteen minutes left."

Alyx jumped at an invisible explosion that punched a sharp dent in the floor. Metal flaps blossomed like flower petals.

"How dare you," Breen snarled. "How dare you?" When Mossman offered him nothing but her silence, the walls screamed his fury. Grates screeched in the holes he slashed open.

Drained of her laughter, Mossman continued to stare at him, a procession of long-repressed emotions emerging to pay their respects: indignation, frustration, rage, sorrow, grief. Passing visitors, they each greeted her and departed.

Something much harder crystallized in their place. Illuminated by the blood-red light, a slow, exposed grin stretched her facial muscles. Her profile shone grim triumph, that of a vindicated woman. She didn't know who; Judith Mossman would have counted the last of her guesses.

"He's overstayed his welcome." She smirked at the pathetic creature squirming to haul itself upright amidst its diatribe, rolling on a bed of steam and barbed metal. "They're coming to collect the flesh and destroy it."

"Shut up!" Breen roared. "Shut UP—"

"Listen to yourself, Wallace." She squatted over him, hands on her thighs, her voice syrup-sweet. "All that pontification over the benefits of assimilation, where does it lead you? Now that you're forced to practice what you preach, you throw a tantrum." Straightening, she shook her head, fist clenched over her heart. "You'll never change. Underneath those synthesized layers you're the same as you've always been: a puffed-up braggart frightened out of his goddamned mind."

"—I'll tear you both limb from limb, you treacherous BITCH—"

"Enjoy your last remaining moments of sentience." She smiled. "It's been a pleasure working with you. Truly."

Alyx was only dimly aware of Mossman snatching her wrist, hauling her upright. The next moment they were fleeing, without direction, pressing whichever way the strobe flashes beckoned them. Breen dove into the shadows and swam a shudder under their soles, stabbing knives through the grate.

A treacherous step. Grave mistake. One snagged on the heel of her boot. Unshed blood screamed in her veins. The darkness an infernal pit of coals and electric vipers and writhing, oozing flesh. Come here, it whispered in her bloodwarmed ear. Siren's call. She would have leapt mindlessly in were it not for an unusually strong pair of hands pressing her ribs, digging painful ruts into her flesh, dragging her toward life, Alyx we've got to run

An elevator emerged at the end of the corridor, a pinprick beacon in the darkness. Had it always been there? Don't question. Stumble inside and be grateful for what you are given. Don't shiver at the talon that glances off thick steel, its proximity inches from unstitching your vertebrae.

Spent, Mossman released her, slumped against the wall. "Alyx," she breathed, "I'm sorry."

She stared at bruises in the glossy metal. Their faces blended together in impressionistic blurs. Hard to think. Life is a matter of chance, not faith. The only way you'll survive is to stack the odds in your favor.

Reaching around with her good hand, she withdrew the launcher, balancing its weight on her viable arm. Within the visor, the world made more sense. Prayers fail and bullets die. Coordinates, algorithms: they will preserve me. They alone can save us.

Mossman fell quiet amidst the grind and hum of cables conspiring to raise them to the surface. Muffled thrashing dwindled the higher the elevator ascended, but the noise followed them, a seismic ripple spreading from the epicenter.

Barney had been far enough away for Breen to lose track of his biomarkers. She hoped to any deity assed enough to listen that the distance the elevator put between them camouflaged them sufficiently. She held little doubt that without his usual senses, he'd extend the ones that remained.

The doors pried open. Crimson streaks raced through the darkness. Armor chirped a telltale jingle. Two Elites rushed in to flank the catwalks from either side.

She dodged the energy ball that smacked the frame, ignored the burst of cinders fanning out from impact, waited for the charge delay and fired. Scattershot gnawed molten teeth through steel and flesh alike. Their death screams spiked and faded.

Mossman tugged her sleeve. "Behind you—"

Another pair of Elites emerged from a blue forcefield to the west. The first to arrive crouched and aimed his AR2 while his partner sprinted down the catwalk on which they stood, intent on grabbing Mossman while the gunner disposed of Alyx.

Another burst of scattershot dissolved the gunner in a smoky eruption, though this time she couldn't avoid the chemical backsplash fast enough; fluid filled her lungs and throat. She spat out a thick glob of blood.

In that instant, the ambusher sprang upon them. Wrenching around with vicious speed, she blocked him with the launcher barrel. Bracing it against her good arm, she shoved him over the railing.

That grim business done, she jammed the visor to her eyes.

There he was. Crawling from his foxhole in Subsector Gamma. Blinded and lamed, he slithered through the service tunnels on his side, dragging the lacerated lump of flesh he so effulgently worshiped.

So much for becoming a god. Alyx trained the crosshairs. Time to tuck this bastard in for good.

She wasted not a second more in yanking the trigger. The ordnance thumped out the barrel like a punch to her bruised shoulder socket—the pain sang as it stung, morbidly pleasurable—hurtling down several stories in a direct plunge.

Prying off the pad, she bit her blistered lip. Her prayers that she hadn't just shot a dud at an Advisor were answered when the casing struck him, engulfing him in a brilliant chemical spray.

The roar he let out lost its human quality, its peals glitched into an electronic gargle. As the sound thundered and died through the tinny walls, Alyx suffered a scurry of chills down her spine, but forfeited a second look in order to haul Mossman down the next corridor. It wasn't a good idea to stick around and admire the fireworks. Indulging just a moment's Schadenfreude could backfire in the form of bloody lungs.

Even without the threat of imminent death flashing a guillotine over their necks, they found themselves lost. For the next few minutes they ran blind through the labyrinth, their steps clattering the grate in search of an exit. Coupled with the residue of airborne particles, the exertion denied their lungs the full satisfaction of oxygen.

Mossman's hand pressed clammy skin in hers. Her grip weakened on occasion, almost slipped away; she crushed her palm a little tighter each time.

Their progress stopped when the whine of compromised railing sockets ground them to a halt. The catwalk ahead, boasting crash doors a mere sprint away, scrunched as though a hand reached forth to crumple it. Seconds later, the platform broke off its hinges and careened into the depths.

Alyx pivoted around to snarl at their interceptor; a hot bead of blood trickled from her left nostril, and a burning sensation carpeted her throat.

Phosphorus rose from his flesh in sulfurous swirls. Chemical solvent bubbled over his flesh. His wounds peeled subcutaneous strips, oozing fat.

As he heaved his pathetic shell into the corridor, they heard a sloshing sound. Something glistening leaked from an exposed pustule, dangled off the catwalk.

Entrails. His goddamn organs were slipping out. And yet—against all reason, all hope—he survived.

He curled a talon around a pipe until it snapped. Steam hissed out, wreathing them in boiling mist.

Alyx.

The host body spoke of its own accord, purged and cauterized of its human parasite. There was no longer any substance being formed in the sound of her name, no hint of Breen's furious, impotent dread.

The Advisor slammed them both down. Her shoulder, her Hunter wounds: all shrieked from impact.

"Wallace." Clambering to stand at an excruciating pace, Judith lifted the launcher and pointed it at him. "Stop this madness. Or—" The stock trembled and shook. She inhaled a watery breath as she steadied her finger over the trigger, steeled her quivering jaw. "I'll shoot."

Blasts barraged them.

She flung herself over Judith. Rockslides poured from the ceiling, battering chunks of limestone over her back and shoulders. Mindless instinct compelled her to discard her own injured body to shield the frail one underneath her, weather this last fatal tantrum.

One stone pummeled the grille and burst hairbreadths from her temple, a louder, unbridled mockery of the hail that nagged them since they'd stepped foot in this godforsaken icy hole. Her eyes clenched shut, burning to the brim—

What rescued them ultimately damned the Advisor. Because of the host's destructive blasts, the detritus stopped falling. Steam dispersed as a thin, scraping shrill gave rise to the air, interrupted what would have dealt its killing blow.

It happened too quickly for her senses to register. The support girder crashed down and cleaved the host body in two, spraying warm crests of viscera over its victims, and cast it into the shapeless void. Their tormentor plunged without resistance. Now here: now gone. A matter of seconds. Even in the aftermath, her cells clung to their primal terror; her wrists quaked as she sank her fingers into Mossman's coat.

Bootread dashed down the adjoining corridor. An unarmed soldier with a cracked, smudged mask, his hard breaths garbled through the vocoder.

"Al?" he asked. "Dr. Mossman?"

Barney tore off his helm, shook the dust from his hair and tossed the mask aside, where it hit the wall with a brassy clang. Quickly he knelt between the two women, one hand on each of their shoulders.

A vindictive hiss slithered between her teeth. He loosened his grip as she sat up and shifted his attention to Mossman, fixed on the bundle of damaged tissue covering her crushed, dead eye. There was something morbidly delicate about such a grotesque sight. His jaw clicked a second before he found the right words.

"Christ," he said, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat. "I was wondering if you two found your way back up. Listen, we gotta make tracks. These charges are gonna go off any minute now."

Alyx wiped her nose on her wrist, startled to find a bright crimson smear clung to the cloth. Blood trickled through her nostrils, thick convalescence making it a struggle to breathe. Its slick copper taste slipped past her sinuses and coated her windpipe. She grit her teeth to steel herself from an impending wave of nausea.

"The Berkut—" Wouldn't be fast enough.

"Not that piece of crap. We're riding in style." He flashed an access card to an APC—hijacked, at what price?—only to think twice of it as she coughed. "You okay to drive, or should I?"

Mossman said, "I assume someone has to man the mount."

"Ah—" He faltered. "No offense, ma'am, but—" Unable to elaborate, he tapped under his own eye.

Rising radio chatter allowed them to broker little argument. "We'll discuss this later. Get us out of here."

They covered about five kilo in the APC when the charges blew. The station crumpled under an enormous sinkhole. A noiseless explosion submerged Breen and those he commanded. Nothing chased them except for rolling palls of snow.

Despite himself, Barney cheered the fruits of his handiwork, even going so far as to waste a few rounds off the mount with a jeering whoop. Suck on that, assholes.

Alyx looked at her passenger, who gave a weak smile.

"Killing the product of his deceits will be a gift to Dr. Freeman and to this world."

Night fell. Time continued its inevitable passage, but Breen's taunts deprived her of sleep. Whenever her rigid muscles inched close to surrender, memories of that hellish chamber cut her slumber wide open, flooding her body and mind with a nameless terror that sent her blood racing. In the paralyzed seconds preceding awakening, the proboscis pierced her skull. The talons dragged her under. The Advisor slashed her from throat to navel, leaving her intestines to slip through her hands in wet, glistening coils.

These episodes of forced wakefulness continued until she resolved to stop chasing something that kept eluding her.

Screw it. If her dreams refused to shut up, well, then, two could play at that game. The caffeine pills banished nightmares well enough. She dry-swallowed the capsules with a bitter grimace, then leaned her temple against the window's cold glass.

Alyx gazed out the window at a stark gray landscape. In her fugue state, it was like viewing an alien world through a shuttle's observation port. Freed of the burden of snow, the wind that creaked through the vehicle sang a hollow, unanswered cry.

She pressed two fingers into her diaphragm, feeling just a small twinge grumble in response. Her Hunter wounds faded from constant low-level smarting to a resigned numbness borne of neglect. She no longer grimaced at the fresh blood that had, in the hours since their escape, dried to a sticky paste on her back, much less perceive the cramps nagging her abdomen.

In other circumstances that would raise enough alarm for her to drag herself to a medic, but she couldn't muster the energy to care. It didn't matter much compared to her arm, anyhow, which she'd placed inside a makeshift sling torn from her greasy undershirt.

The sweat dousing her back, chest and shoulders had chilled, making her shiver inside her layers. The carrier purred at a steady rate as it blew lukewarm air through its ceiling vents. It wasn't much, but at least it kept Judith's core temperature at a safe range.

Alyx sat with the silence a moment before she decided to venture outside to check on Barney. He kept sentry on the carrier's hull, huddled cross-legged under the gun mount. His hood was drawn tight and his shoulders hunched to his ears. The wind whipped his cheeks into a flushed crimson.

"See anything?"

His teeth chattered. "Snow."

She crouched beside him. "Get in the cabin. I've got this."

"Mossman conked out?"

"Yeah."

"Good," he said, bouncing his knee. "She looks like she needs it."

And you don't? She bit her tongue. "Doesn't the cold bug you?"

"Nah." He offered a tilt of his shoulder. "Wish I had a smoke right about now, though."

To emphasize this simple desire, he scrubbed his hands and clasped them over his mouth, the trickle seeping through his fingers weaker than the cheap cigarette he craved. From the way silence weighed on his shoulders, she knew he was thinking about being in that mask again.

"Yeah, and I know when you're putting on an act. Spit it out."

Withdrawing his hands, he let his breath dissolve into faint wisps. He stared at her, his eyes roaming her face for signs of what happened in the station. "You first."

No use hiding it. "Breen wasn't dead."

His complexion drained of color. "No," he said, his lips struggling to wrap themselves around a murmur. "That piece of shit dropped straight down the garbage chute when it blew. Ain't no comin' back from that."

"Believe me, I know how crazy it sounds," she said, "but Barney, this wasn't just some sick prank recording someone made to freak us out. That thing in the hallway really was him."

He swallowed hard. When he dragged himself back to reality, it was with a bitter smile directed at the snow. "Should've known. Bastard would do anything to save his weaselly hide." The smile dropped; he lowered his head. "Al, something freaky's goin' on."

She looked him askance.

"I didn't find any of our guys locked up back there." Gusts swirled snow crests over the ridge, tidal waves rising and falling, falling and rising. An endless cycle. "Matter of fact, if the records are right… they could be on the ship already."

Now came her turn to exclaim: "What?"

He sighed. "Look, I didn't catch all the technical mumbo-jumbo, but… I remember the words 'harmonic flux.' Doc Rosenberg said I got caught in one when they sent me… Y'know." He clucked his tongue on the roof of his mouth, jabbed a thumb heavenward.

She picked at the threads on her boot, which stiffened from the cold. "You never told me you went to Xen."

"Was a few hours after Black Mesa," he said tersely. "Someone had to scrape up extra batteries for the transporter, so they sent the dumbass guard to go fetch."

He dragged a hand down his mouth.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Guess that makes two of us."

"Barney, I didn't make you put that mask on."

"Yeah, well. Didn't exactly see you jumpin' at the bit."

"Wanna trade? Because with the shit Breen put us through, I'd have loved to set up charges." Her shoulder seized in a sudden cramp, causing her to drop the matter. It just wasn't worth it to argue. Rethreading her laces, she gazed toward the horizon. "How could a dozen people vanish like that? We must have been right on top of the ship."

"Ship was on top of us, more like," he said. "They could've wandered aboard without knowing. Got whisked off."

Alyx listened to the tundra moan at what must have been long-standing aches.

The rebel items Breen toyed with in his chambers had to have come from somewhere. She'd feared them stolen relics of the dead or tortured, but now that Barney had raised the possibility, she admitted that displacement wasn't such a wild guess, considering the hatchet job they'd encountered with the Berkut. As he said, munitions wasn't that sloppy.

Their guys might have been in the process of rigging the vehicle when they suffered the strange luck of entering a harmonic flux. If they and the vessel had crossed paths at the wrong place and the wrong time… Inadvertent embarkment aboard Schroedinger's icebreaker, a phantom bon voyage. Determining where the Borealis drifted, and if they could intercept it in time, would have to become their most significant goals going forward.

Barney turned. "What happened to her?" he asked. "Mossman's always been kinda an odd duck, but I've never seen her act like this." He let the silence howl for a while. "You see her eye? It's gone, ain't it?"

"Breen."

"He try the same with you?"

Thank God he hadn't.

(strange how Advisors bleed the same as humans, her dream self thinks in the place without thought, warm splashes dousing her wrist, human terror rising to the surface of an alien flesh like hives, death a stirring of endorphins, laughter rising in the blood)

(the rest evades me)

(not yet, not yet)

"It ain't right." He shook his head and sniffed hard, his nostrils flaring. "Just ain't right." He consumed a thin, tattered breath and continued to shake his head, now with more vehemence, more violence, tightening his gloved fingers around the pistol butt. "Things to just be allowed to… exist like that… "

He raised his head. Dread plunged soft roots into her heart as she saw tears glistening on his eyelashes. The largest droplet hovered, suspended, before acquiescing to a fall, producing a quiet patter on his wrist.

Her Magnum sat in his hand. He flicked out the chamber. "Two left." His jaw jutted, the muscle underneath bulging a tight band against his mandible.

"No."

"You got any better ideas? He's back. Don't know how, but he is. And we just royally pissed him off. Only seems like the right thing to do, in case—"

"In case what?" she asked. "In case they catch up to us? In case he drags us back? That wouldn't be fair to Judith and you know it. Screw that. No. We're finding another way out."

She knew how to load her words into a slingshot and hurl rocks at him, David at Goliath. He flinched at each one, but remained steadfast.

"Better we do it than them."

"Drop it. Breen's gone now."

"We can't assume that," Barney said. "Just 'cause you thought he was pushin' up daisies before don't exactly mean—"

"Sorry for not knowing—"

"You think a little snow's gonna stop—"

"I'd prefer not to be paranoid—"

He grabbed her good arm, softening slightly at her wince. "He ask about Gordon bein' in a coma?" he whispered. "Huh? What else has that rat bastard got the skinny on?

"Does he know where we are? Where we're headed? Where the hell that ship's going with a dozen people on it?" He scoffed, a hoarse puff of air ringing his mouth in a crystalline cloud. "You think he's gonna be happy we blew his nest? He's gonna break us like he did with her, and that's if we're lucky." Silence. "Something tells me he's gonna enjoy taking his sweet time, so we might as well make up our minds before he takes that away from us, too."

She reclaimed possession of her arm. "God, listen to yourself," she said. "This isn't it. It—can't be. We've scraped through a lot worse than this."

"Yeah, and who always got us through 'a lot worse,' Al? 'cause it sure as hell wasn't your old man who fed four guys to a goddamn hungry Strider—"

On some subconscious level, she knew what would come next. Bitter words would eventually arrive at their crashing end.

She heard it before she felt it: her palm shot out and cracked him across the cheek. The effect it produced was ruthlessly efficient, killing his words as it made a sharp report against his flesh, a brand on his reddened skin, echoing crystal clear in the icy air.

For the next few moments they said nothing. There was nothing more to be said, nothing else that could have softened that message.

Blurriness swam in the edges of her vision, her throat clenching, moisture pricking her corneas. Already she regretted her thoughtlessness, contrition flooding her being, I'm sorry swelling to spill useless streams from her mouth. Through her periphery she saw Barney huddle inside himself and inhale a loose, shuddering breath.

"I'm heading back," she said. Eyes falling on her Magnum, she snatched it away. Really wasn't his to begin with.

Barney remained frozen in place, deaf. He might as well have been a statue.

In the passenger seat slept Judith Mossman. PhD, traitor, tortured for revenge.

She shivered at the intrusion of snow as Alyx climbed into the cabin, her pale lips trembling in concert with her hiked shoulders. There she lay, Our Lady of Perpetual Discontent. Prime for the accusing, haughty, holier-than-thou Mossman, rendered a broken body and a compromised mind.

There she was, whispered her anger. Do your worst.

Alyx clutched the cylindrical electric lamp by the handle, letting its glow burn her cheek. She had wanted so desperately to lay her impotent fury at her feet, to offer blame where she felt it due, that when sorrow crept in instead, she let it sag her into the driver's seat.

Blaming a tortured woman would not bring her father back. There was no reason to chip at Judith even further just to piece together something irreparably broken. Her anger would have to seethe until it dwindled.

The Magnum she'd confiscated from Barney nudged her hip. Thinking she'd better apologize, she reached for the door handle when, the reason why unbeknownst even to her, she deigned a second glance at Mossman.

Hungry for warmth, her body deepened its judder. Strands of hair stuck to her cheek, fused with the blood that had caked there.

Alyx retreated from a window that rasped from the strain of battering winds. She placed the incandescent tube on the dashboard and slipped a palm under Judith's nape, gently nudging her head aside to observe Breen's vile handiwork.

Cold air stung her widened eyes, and she quickly withdrew her hand. "Oh, God," she whispered. No wonder Mossman shook: the lamp revealed her turtleneck ripped at the throat, exposing her neck to subzero temperatures. Scar tissue ran a deep, jagged fissure from the bottom of her jaw, where mandible met skull, to her collarbone.

Covering her mouth to keep from disturbing her, Alyx leaned in for a closer look. Shakingly she reached down and probed a finger over the knobs.

Gummy to the touch, pus droplets immured the blood, their round, glistening beads presenting the only barrier between life and death. Fractions of an inch more and the cut would have sliced right into the vein. Fractions, and Mossman would not have roused.

Heart ensnared in her throat, Alyx skimmed the back of her knuckles over Judith's temple. Tentative warmth wafted up from the vein, its accompanying pulse light and quick. It wasn't much, if you thought about it, the knowledge locked inside. So many had died for less.

Alyx brushed aside the icy flyaways matted to her cheek. Judith shifted, her frown tightened. Pillowed under her cheek, her fist clutched a cord. The links spilled out as it relaxed, the pendant's silver filigree dangling a fragile gleam in the air. Azian's necklace.

Her throat crushed; her vision misted. Heaviness slowed her limbs as she wove her thin, damp hair into a loose braid.

Alyx used to believe easy lies about Mossman. That she had invaded their lives in the absence of a mother figure and imposed herself where she didn't belong, unable to fall from her father's good graces on that merit alone. That she locked a myriad of wordless, tight-lipped resentments behind frosty smiles. That when their little 'spats'—Eli called them such for his sanity—roiled into full-blown arguments, they tapped from the same poisoned well.

As a teen she used to reassure herself that anyone with a lick of sense would agree Mossman's scoldings the product of insecurity. To Judith, she'd rationalize, her presence constituted an incessant, painful reminder of her mother, denying her access to her father, even though Eli kept Azian in much plainer sight than either dared to admit.

In her less charitable moments she accused Mossman of jealousy, to which the incriminated arched a brow, drawing taut her fine crow's feet. Her flippant retort raked pins and needles under her skin: If only you acted more like her. You've got far too much of your father in your blood.

Now, Alyx realized, comfort hid behind their dysfunction. A promise of steadiness beneath the agitation, a rarity in such a cold, brutal landscape. Their spats had been a lifetime ago, a fairy tale where their inadequacies afforded them moral outrage.

Never had she imagined that too much of her father in her blood would have saved and condemned Mossman in the same breath. Once upon a time, she might have puffed up her chest in righteous indignation knowing Judith had betrayed the Resistance, jabbed her finger in the woman's surprised face and thundered, Enough of your bullshit.

That was when the cause had dominated her thinking instead of people and the unknowable multitudes they contained. After all, her father had shattered everything she'd believed true in a single letter, and each hour that had passed since then lured her closer to the brink.

Was it really a surprise that Mossman appointed herself her keeper?

Unruly locks combed a little straighter through her fingers, smoothing their snarls and leaps of blood.

She didn't know what to expect from the next few hours. If the ship drifted away from them. If Breen clawed his way out. What Barney might do.

Even Judith's breath seemed uncertain. Her calm had belied the precarity of her condition; any medic who examined her would warn that the life could evaporate from her veins during the night.

Life had a sick sense of humor. Tomorrow, if fortune favored them, they could all be dead.

For now, this feeble warmth was all she had. It was all the Resistance had.

Chapter Text

Tend to the grieving and the dead. Freeman's words transmitted a clear message through the tapestry of the Vortessence: his purpose, to deliver that message.

He had committed to this path.

And now, the reaping.

Uriah entered the room where Kleiner once slumbered, having fallen unconscious after the rites in the mountains. Rain ceased some time ago, allowing insect chatter to arise in the soft, wet world outside.

He found Magnusson scanning White Forest through loosely-drawn blinds. Watery rays of sunlight seeped under the slats, puddling hazy pools over the carpet.

Confused human chatter joined the insects in a low murmur. Accompanied by a restless Dog, rebels combed over the base grounds, splashing fresh mud around their boots in search of ones who refused to be found.

"Maria's staff have picked the premises clean," Magnusson began, "and they've yet to find a trace of Sokolai or Dushan." He cleared his throat. "I suppose you wouldn't know anything about that."

Uriah rumbled, a noise not quite contrition, but sympathy. "They have gone north to accompany their brethren."

"You didn't go with them."

"My place is here, beside the Magnusson."

The blinds dropped as he retreated from them. "Is that so?"

Halting as he turned, he stopped to touch his stained blazer. His hands wandered unconscious patterns over the rust-colored splotches stiffening his lapels.

"What did you force him into?" He buried whitened knuckles in the folds. "What was so important it warranted his blood?"

"The life of the Freeman."

"A murderer." He scrunched a tighter hold, afraid to release this last remnant of Kleiner's existence. "You discarded the life of an innocent man to protect a murderer."

"So it would seem—"

Magnusson stabbed him with a sharp glare. "Kleiner did nothing but support that boy, do you understand? God knows why, he would have walked on coals for that ungrateful son of a bitch. And this is how he repays him. By killing him and making off with his life's work."

In the damp skies honked migrant geese, relieved that the rain had dissolved to grant them passage. Wincing at their noise, he clamped a hand to his ruddy temple.

"Magnusson… "

"What?" he snapped.

"The hands that shed Kleiner's blood did not belong to the Freeman."

"Well, either he killed him to get the suit, or else he went insane. Which is it?"

"Neither."

Labored exhalations shivered through his clenched teeth. "Don't you dare think about giving me that nonsense."

"I neither jest nor deceive," Uriah said. "He chose to save the Freeman. What appears to your eyes a senseless tragedy was an act of love."

Magnusson rebuked the talon he extended.

"Our hearts ache with he whose grief embraces him. This is a path few are given to understand. But you must know that Kleiner did not suffer at his last. He has become one with the Vortessence, which has accepted him unto an immeasurable peace. Terrible though his burdens, he is the reason hope survives."

Uriah waited for his human compatriot to process his words and, he knew, inevitably reject them. They perched a delicate balance on an emotional fulcrum threatening to teeter.

"Perhaps it's different where you're from," said Magnusson, "but here, on Earth, when we suffer a death, the least the bereaved expect is the chance to say goodbye." He continued to cup his temple, bleary eyes lingering on the worn sofa cushions bearing wrinkles from Kleiner's body. "Freeman stole that from us. He's not just a murderer, he's a thief to boot. So forgive me if I don't indulge your talk of All-in-Ones, because right now this base is missing the one man we couldn't afford to lose."

He sank onto the couch, brow pressed in his knotted fists, cursing under his breath of the pitiless migraine drilling his skull.

It was in his suffering silence that Uriah decided the time had come.

"Long ago," he said, "in Black Mesa, the Eli Vance was approached by a creature." He hesitated, doubtful of the wisdom in speaking such a long-concealed truth. His lack of forthcoming had lured Kleiner onto a dark path. What merit held it now? Would it lighten what must come next, or would the creature use these words to entangle them further in its web of deceits? "What it truly desires, we do not know. It conceals a dark heart within a shroud of human flesh."

Magnusson raised his sluggish head. "My God, Uriah." Incredulity diminished his voice to a hoarse whisper. "You've cracked."

"The Alyx Vance had passed on. Her small form had given up its essence. It knew this, and restored her in exchange for the life and freedom of the Freeman, weaving together their Vortessence in a binding most vile. Through Eli Vance, it raised the Resistance. These walls stand because of it. But now, it seeks to reap what it has created."

"Was this what you told Kleiner?"

"Hear me, Magnusson: the one that wears the flesh of a man is trying to summon the Alyx Vance. It manipulates the threads of Freeman's life to draw her into its snare. If it captures her, we will suffer a darkness unlike any other. Thus, we have chosen to extend the Freeman's life through the performance of these rites. I have since prayed we would see no more need of them."

"Was this what you told him to get him to climb the mountain? This… inane fairy tale you're babbling on about?"

"That is the truth as Eli Vance has told Alyx Vance," he said. "The fate Isaac Kleiner surrendered his essence to prevent. I have neither beautified it with softer words, nor sullied it by making light the vicissitudes it has inflicted upon us. I have asked a terrible burden, and for it I shall pay," he said. "For the blood you wear soils my hands, not those of the Freeman."

Magnusson, who he considered as unassailable as a storm, absorbed it all in a roiling quiet. His eyes flicked from the floor to his cohort; a cold sheen of sweat glossed his flushed cheeks. Sorrow at what had transpired, or horror at what was about to occur?

"Whatever the Magnusson decides, this one soundly accepts the consequences."

"Enough."

"I see you," Uriah said. "Your mind storms, consumed by treacherous thoughts that your loss persists into eternity. Though you cry it nonsense, the Vortessence heals what has broken, and in time shall mend it whole. One day you will accept these truths, as did Kleiner."

"Damn it, I said that's enough." He stood abruptly, pointed to the card clipped to his breast pocket. "Give it to me."

He snatched the card out of Uriah's furtive claws. Rather than taking time to slide the plastic from its laminate, he cracked the two in half before proceeding to crush and grind smaller and smaller pieces.

"From here on in, your clearance is hereby revoked." The pieces scattered around the carpet, insignificant shards rendered trash. "If you wish to tell tales, it can be around a fire with your friends in the mountains."

So it was.

Uriah bowed his head. "It has been an honor to serve at the Magnusson's side."

As the door clicked on its hinges, Magnusson crushed a fist against his mouth, unable to dam the welling of tears.

Chapter Text

"The gods love what is mysterious, and dislike what is evident."

- The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

During his short time indentured to this man, Gordon had come to realize that solitude, too, counted as a quantum state of being, subject to the same contradictions and idiosyncrasies as any other.

In his former life, silence brought with it peaceful relief. A lack of distraction. Freedom to wander his bountiful mental landscapes.

That kind of freedom grew sinister after Black Mesa. Silence threatened him with gnawing emptiness; the quiet that ebbed from the shrill of gunshots caught his breath at the thought of an unseen laser scope aligning with the back of his head. Lack of scrabbling on gouged planks tensed the knot in his abdomen. Every instance of shatterable peace hardened his pulse, hammering it against the anvil of his ribcage, prepared to burst if need be.

The silence with which he and his contractor descended the crevasse poisoned him to near-madness. It was in the throes of such a silence that his guilty mind cannibalized itself.

The snow crushing under his boots mimicked the delicate snap of shattered glass. Kleiner's dried blood itched on his cheek. An increasingly violent part of him yearned to claw it off. The sin had besmirched him to the bone. And, of course, the fresh blood Alyx's mirage had drawn painted new strokes over the old. Warm beads swelled from his earlobe, trickling down his neck.

Silence, cradle and coffin. Lock and key.

Our mutual friend; he glimpsed him through lenses fogged by his torn breaths. He displayed a rare volition by walking ahead of Gordon. At least he seldom strayed. He preferred to remain close, his hands pulling on invisible reins.

His remarks thinned the longer they walked. Perhaps Gordon saw nothing worth noting. Perhaps he accomplished even less: his body a vehicle, an instrument, a working set of limbs fulfilling what the businessman considered part and parcel of his contract.

Rather than offer him respite, the silence remained leaden. Angry winds howled in the tumultuous charcoal skies above them. Without a constant stream of whispers leering in his ear, it was easy to fall into the churn of recent memories.

Gordon remembered the moment reality was snatched from him. During Alyx's pleas not to leave, his struggle to obey what Eli had already failed to do. He recalled madness sweeping in to carry him away from an otherwise deathly unconsciousness, pulling at the edges of his sanity, light stretching toward a black hole, threatening to tear itself apart. A collection of screeching, thrashing images. No method, no logic, no mercy, no means to discern past from future.

And a thought emerged. A lone thought.

I think, therefore I am.

It was such a small thought, but that insignificant burst of neural activity proved enough to restore him to coherence.

Once more, he'd found himself on the tram in the span of a blink, armor dented and smeared with grime. Now he could feel the passage of time slide through the darkness. And the businessman smiled at him, offered him no illusion of choice. The doors to freedom sealed themselves shut.

Madness. Repetition of indecipherable experiences. Phenomena beyond the shape his words could give them, escaping logic and sense. I must craft a new set of formulae to describe them. This place has a language. If only my mind would quiet, allow me to listen, I might endeavor to understand.

He'd tried to reach out with what scant knowledge he'd gleaned from that strange place. The businessman intercepted his messages, garbled and distorted them. Stay away, he'd warned Kleiner. Run. Through him, however, those messages sang a siren's call that had lured him to his death.

Gordon was torn between fulfilling Kleiner's last wish and abandoning it for her sake. With each forward step, he felt himself draw closer to Alyx, and with that, a sense of doom took seed inside his gut.

Suicide: grief's sixth and final stage. He didn't fear it. In fact, he contemplated it more often in light of recent events. He'd rather suffer a bullet through his damned scar than inflict the same horrors on her, and the brutal truth remained that one or both of them would have to die for their freedom. If it came down to that…

His macabre thoughts dissipated slightly upon realizing he had no other choice. Now that he had to follow in his employer's footsteps, the lines between shepherd and flock blurred.

It's strange, he thought. He wants me to lead him, but I'm the one who's lost.

Lower they dove, shadows elongating into ghastly shapes, until the winds lashing around them quieted and the snow lessened to a trickle.

The bottom of the crevasse was not as derelict as he'd expected; the melted body armor of a Combine soldier appeared in the darkness, sprawled beside a ring of ash and a haphazard scattering of stormproof matches.

Evidence suggested the unit immolated itself. Whether the suicide had been accidental or purposeful remained unverifiable on both accounts. These sights they passed without commentary. He couldn't imagine his employer dragging him down here to eulogy a sight he'd witnessed regularly since Black Mesa.

Indeed, he had other motives for this detour. Eventually they encountered a large seam in the crevasse, protected by towering buttresses of ice.

Gordon switched on his flashlight. As the beam tunneled a harsh cone, it revealed a creature stranded in the ice that vaguely resembled an Advisor: a gelatinous arthropod supported by dozens of skeletal limbs throughout its thorax. Unlike the larval bodies whose pliability awaited maturity, this one loomed in much greater scale than the typical Advisor. His light struggled to capture its breadth.

He stood stone-still as the businessman shuffled forth and placed a hand on the shelf entrapping the creature. Burns covered its flesh. Infected tissue bulged around steel plates grafted onto its skin. A peculiar, glittering fluid had seeped from broken pustules and seemingly dried. The paste changed colors with the shifting of the beam, a dim bioluminescent residue.

Modifications told of the attempt to cut the organism down to size. It wore a metallic coat woven of neural circuits, artificial mycelium scales through which its many eyes were forced to distend and protrude.

Insectoid eyes without pupils glinted a kaleidoscope of triangular cones. As the plates varied in size, so too the eyes themselves ranged in size, from the microscopic to the gargantuan. How long their owner had slumbered in this desolate tomb was impossible to tell; most of its eyes drooped their transparent mucus coverings partway, as though they'd relented from the wait.

Neck craned to gaze upon the titan, the businessman spoke.

"Now is not the time for reminiscing, Doctor Freeman."

Spoken with a twinge of amusement. It wasn't much more than a whisper, the tone he used, but a whisper Gordon received clearly in the chambers of his inner ears. No unnatural pauses stuttered his speech; no processing delays stressed the wrong syllable. Low and clear, he'd at last achieved mastery over a resistant set of lungs.

Perhaps that wasn't accurate. He took greater liberties to act human since they'd arrived in the Arctic—the farther he distanced himself from his mythical employers, which was why Gordon felt confident that the entity lording over this cold domain did not constitute one. In the presence of an employer, he would have reverted to a half-hearted sycophancy, reinforcing his talk of the restrictions they subjected him to. Reasserting control over his assets emboldened him to speak with less restraint.

Even so, his newfound candor did little to temper the expectations he held for his employee. He turned, a feline smile lifting the corners of his lips.

"Our friend seems to have contracted a nasty case of frostbite."

Breath hissing from his nostrils, Gordon tightened his grip on the crowbar.

The businessman stood under an anemic snowfall. Flakes sprinkled a sugary dust on his shoulders. He proffered no advice, shunned clarification, did not even deign to ask.

He had no need. Gordon wedged the crowbar into a jagged crack, twisting it once to anchor it, and pounded his fist into the butt. The crack splintered before crumbling, releasing the first shelf in a rush of ice and snow.

"Pity about the good doctor," said the contractor, in between ringing blows. "Had he not stepped out of line, we may not be in this predicament."

Gordon struck harder. Chiseling a hole, he crammed his fist inside to hollow it out. "He did nothing to you."

"Perhaps," he said. "Perhaps not. That's rather a matter of semantics, isn't it? Not worth our time to quibble over. Whether more follow in his footsteps ultimately falls on you."

Panting hard from his efforts, he wrenched around. "What do you want?"

"The ship." A simple desire in concept; a nearly impossible goal in reality.

"And once we're aboard?"

He smirked. "Planning a mutiny, are we?"

"I know you can't get close to her," Gordon said. "Not without some kind of proxy to mask yourself. Kleiner hit a nerve when he said you're losing control. That's why you killed him."

His smile deepened. "You've a curious way of deflecting blame. First your friends, now me. 'You killed him.' When it was your own hands that forced him through the glass. The same pair of hands, might I add, that pushed the crystal into the spectrometer." To twist the knife, he clarified: "If indeed I had a part in this crime, it was nothing more than sparking the impulse."

That quelled the more immediate notions of revolt simmering in Gordon's mind.

Memories of the capsule room seized him. Thin shoulders, fabric bunching under knotted fists. He'd been light, so light, as if he'd prepared for even this. He didn't fight it, just as Gordon did not fight hard enough to save him, engulfed by a foreign blaze burning through his cells.

All it took to extinguish his gentle life was a swift, decisive shove. And blood burst on the glass, painted cotton, flooded through the gaps in his leather-encased fingers—

Gordon crushed his fists to kill their tremor. "You can't keep hiding," he said. "Wherever you go, I'll find you. I'll destroy you myself, if that's what it takes."

"Hm." He indulged a small chuckle. "You can try. But you may find that a more challenging task than you believe."

"Why?"

Exposed, the creature's innumerable dead eyes judged them. He placed a hand over the hole Gordon had created, pressing inward.

"They are obsessed with accumulating greater numbers. They've fallen prey to the falsehood that strength lies in them." His previous amusement drained as he scoffed at the notion, probing grayed fingertips over films of frost. "That is their mistake. I do not require every piece. Only those that matter."

Slowly, a webbing of green light, thinner than mist and incorporeal as smoke, wafted around the hole's perimeter. Some whorls managed to escape into the gelid air and vanish. But the deeper he pressed, the thicker it congealed, hanging still in the air, a stationary exhalation.

Each eye blinked. A temporary spark of intelligence ignited and lost.

One after the other, his hand curled its fingers until they formed a fist. When he pulled it back, the smoke convalesced into a single rope that slithered free of the ice. It plummeted onto the crevasse floor and coiled about his feet, a neon snake whose body throbbed light to flood the cave, a harbinger of bright danger.

The businessman straightened himself. He picked up the coils and cradled them in his arms. The rope spat a few resistant cinders before sinking into his flesh.

As it leeched more and more light from the immured creature, his human mold shed its pretenses and darkened to a silhouette, an X-ray where the faint contours of his inner organs glowed.

His heart hanged on the noose of its aortal stem, shriveled and still. No blood nourished the arteries that filled with phosphorescence. Concaves dwelled where eyes should have peered. But something indeed inhabited them. Something lived in the white rings piercing their empty holes.

The light he siphoned and which cloaked him was not static; it breathed in and out, ebbed and flowed. His body became a black hole, a dark, dense center toward which the dazzle swirled maelstroms. He eclipsed a living light, its radiative flare orbiting him in a droning electronic hum.

Numb awe rooted Gordon to the spot. Luster diffused green bands through the prisms of his lenses: the same beams dancing illusions in his vision when the spectrometer—

"You remember the morning your world came to an end," said the contractor. "How could you forget? You lost everything when you pushed the sample into the mechanism. But the knowledge you gained by committing that simple, irrevocable act was invaluable. You acquired a wisdom many men spend their lives cowering from: the awareness of yourself as a cornered animal, willing to claw its way out of the grave. Yet even you, in all of your cunning, haven't realized."

He took a strong breath. The withered heart inside his ribcage juddered, and gave a small pump.

"Once, you played the part of a cog, and you were content to play it well. Had this planet been allowed to continue, you would have been destined for little more than a life of resignation. Your talents squandered, your potential tarnished by the arrogance and mediocrity of those around you."

More heartbeats produced low, thudding pumps. Light began to circulate a slow churn through his veins.

"Instinct," he said, "elevated you. It transformed you into something greater. All traces of the civilized being your circumstances taught you to be vanished the instant you picked up the hank of battered steel you now clutch in your hands. From that moment forward, you vowed to survive where so many of your peers did not. And so you rejected your fate. Quite like myself."

He smoothed down his tie. Unbuttoned one cufflink.

"Appearances, Doctor Freeman. Appearances deceive."

To demonstrate, he raised his left arm parallel to the ground, palm faced outward. The light that fuzzed his edges flowed out in extension of his bodily appendage, wandering without aim or purpose, like stardust that preceded the birth of nebulae.

Amorphous shapes whirled inside the shimmer, sharpened, became clear; beckoned toward the convening of the light, something familiar emerged.

Give gaze to the abyss and the abyss gazes back. His heart beat faster in primitive terror as the incomprehensible tugged at the folds of his hippocampus.

Gordon backed several steps until his pauldron clinked the shelf wall. Against all logic and reason, he found himself watching, and being watched by, a perfect replica of himself. Glock smoldering in one hand, blood-splashed crowbar in the other. Flushed cheeks, scratched bifocals guarding panicked eyes, skin slick with sweat from the oppression of a sun no longer felt in this icy pit. Armored plates coated in Black Mesa's red mica.

It mirrored his slightest movement, down to the hitched scrape of his breath.

His doppelganger lurched, spat ashes, and dissolved. From its cremation rose another. Limestone dusted its hair. Cranial fluid leaked from a gash in its skull. The mirage snapped open bloodshot eyes as its puppet master tugged on the cord, and crumbled accordingly.

Like waves, reflections rose and fell, each springing to life on their predecessors' crests.

As they paraded before him, a burning knife plunged into his scar. The contractor encircled him as he clutched his throbbing skull, forcing out the sights threatening to invade, fighting to grip an increasingly fragile tether to reality.

"What do you see?" His tormentor's whispers haunted him, eager to drag him into this rising undertow of madness. "Yourself? Can these entities be called you when they no longer exist?" His tone implied the presumption of ownership foolhardy. "This matter, what you call your 'self,' is a spectrum of illusion. Mirages sharing a common delusion of continuity."

Whispers, screams. The weight of an encroaching madness sank him to his knees. He pressed his heated brow to the snow to confirm the chilled sensation on his skin. Yes, he was real, he was here, in no other moment but this—

"Such fragility is not meant to last," said the contractor. "When death comes for you, 'you' will disappear. Your memories, your carefully-cultivated mind, lost to the darkness." He let the mirages slacken. "One is hard-pressed to fathom a crueller arrangement."

His reflections calmed, melting down. Yet their underlying glow subsisted. Clots of light travelled along the cord they shared, flowing tributaries to the same source.

"What dwells beneath, however… That will return to its point of origin. That will return to me in time."

The contractor fastened his cufflink and extended his right hand.

Encouraged by the sensation of a gentle tap on his shoulder, Gordon looked up. Alyx. His cloudy whisper gusted through her, yearned to anchor her for more than the grains of stardust she dissolved in his grasping hands.

"We are separated by appearance alone. You are a part of my flesh, as is she. And I, for one, do not believe it a sin to do with my flesh as I see fit." His breaths evened, released steady mists. A smirk crossed his lips as the last vestige of energy died down, fully subsumed into his body. "They fear creatures like us, Doctor Freeman. As well they should."

Chapter Text

In a ravine where her breath crystallized before it left her lungs, Judith Mossman struck her eighth stormproof match.

Her fingers attempted to hold the flame steady while she unfolded a ragged scrap of paper, her chapped, bloodied lips moving silently to make something of its faded ink. The sheaf her associate found crammed in the bottom of a drawer was why so many good people lay dead: a single ashen, partially-burned carbon copy dated 1970 revealed the design specs of the icebreaker Borealis.

If only she could absorb its secrets, hide them inside her… All those from whom she'd inherited the sheaf were gunned down, she the last link in a drawn-out chain of seek-and-destroy. It was why these rigs, drills and endless units invaded the barren tundra. The Combine would raze everything in its path just for a single glimpse; that much was evident by the perpetual brush fires that flickered on the horizon, cremating the bodies they abandoned.

Static-fueled voices and the fragrance of ignited gasoline haunted her into insomnia. And yet, no matter how many times she scrutinized them, these damned schematics refused to gather into anything meaningful.

Mossman halted at the sound of footsteps, which was followed by a compressed drone. She killed the match with a whip of the wrist and stuffed the blueprint inside her breast pocket, pressing her back against the ice shelf. A needle of light swept the darkness where she had knelt moments before.

Using darkness for cover, she snuck behind the approaching unit and drove the knife she kept hidden in her sleeve between its shoulder blades. It was a meager switchblade she'd purloined from a haphazard box of supplies when the compound began to quake from the impact of Hunter sieges. Rust-crowned at its edge, it wasn't worth brandishing in combat. But six inches of a foreign object buried in the human body with sufficient force guaranteed death in almost any scenario regardless.

Grabbing the helm from behind, she wrenched the body backwards and jammed the blade up to the hilt. Bone didn't stick the blade, so she must have struck something soft and vital.

When the unit stopped twitching, allowing the harsh, screeching winds to batter the icy walls, she withdrew the knife and wiped its clotted blade on the snow, leaving behind a dark streak. That business finished, she reached into her pocket and took the ninth match from the pack.

Not since the Seven Hours had she kept count. Never thought she'd repeat old habits.

Outside, the gales shrilled louder, daylight's last pulse fading beyond the crevasse's upper lip. There wouldn't be much time between now and sundown to shield her from tonight's bitter plunge.

Igniting the match, she lit the corpse and fanned the spark until it blossomed into a reasonable flame. Then she nestled the unit's respirator over her mouth to protect her lungs from the toxins, whose necessary warmth filled the crevasse.

Something extinguished the blaze.

Struck dumb by incredulity, Mossman cursed, pawing at the smoldering snow. Christ, of course tonight would decide to be a bitch. Where had the wind snuck in? Her curses deepened as she plunged her hand inside her pocket and found the book empty. Dammit, she wasted her last match, her last viable match—

An eerie glow filled the darkness. Like a rising tide, a radiant meniscus crept over the cragged walls.

She never should have made the mistake of turning. What she hadn't known then, she learned at once: it's very possible to be deafened by the sound of your own screams.

Alyx returned from a dreamless sleep to find Judith sitting upright in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap, chin raised to observe the oceans of gray that submerged them. Sleet wept messy, noiseless tears down the carrier's windows.

A small, pained huff escaped her lips as she shifted in the driver's seat. Waking required a gradual period of adjustment where she acclimated herself to maneuvering inside a hurt, compromised body.

New injuries groaned beside the old: the nick the plasma round had sliced in her calf scabbed and itched against her boot. Sleeping braced by the seat did fuck-all to loosen the cramps gripping the toughened muscles around her Hunter wounds.

Her pulse pounded in her rotator cuff. She must have tied the sling the wrong way, pinched a nerve by forcing it to support the weight of her bad arm. But the nerve was now dulled, and she feared reawakening it. Shifting it to the correct position seemed too precarious to risk. Like rearranging a bundle of bricks in a flimsy cotton sack, her arm might tumble out and redistribute the burden on the muscle.

So many wounds vied for attention that her ability to focus on any of them dissipated. By now, she felt like a collection of parts held together with, as Milt once said, wishes and duct tape. Some broken-down mechanism trying to avoid the scrap heap. The immediate future promised further abuse, if the immediate past was any indication of the fun to come, but she lacked the energy to entertain such anxieties.

Sleep offered less and less reprieve, becoming a dice roll. Caffeine pills applied a temporary solution to her nightmares; they couldn't keep the door shut forever, nor banish the shadowy presences locked behind, clamoring to be let out.

She wasn't stupid; she knew she had to be careful. More often than not, overuse resulted in crashes that found one drained and listless. Coupled with dehydration, they threatened to squeeze migraines from her skull. Only three left in the bottle, anyway. She kept the loose caplets inaccessible in the pocket on the side of her bad arm in order to wean herself off them.

Though, a few seconds after rousing, she caught herself unconsciously reaching for them and berated herself. Pain be damned, she was not going to become one of those people who used as a crutch.

Alyx released a yawn, then bristled. Lethargy sharpened into anxiety when she glanced upon an empty back seat. How long had she been out for? An hour?

Oh, God, Barney, that idiot. Don't tell her he sat fuming in the weather the whole time. He must be freezing by now. She reached for the door handle when Judith stopped her.

"I remember," she whispered. "What he did. What he wanted."

Bathing in the windows' melting serenity, Judith bent her head to examine Azian's necklace spooled in her palm. The wooden pendant flicked its lid under her prying thumb after a few clumsy attempts to open it—the loss of her left eye fooled her depth perception. A square-cut amber stone tumbled out.

"You're lucky he didn't find this." She extracted the chip her father had chiseled from an old Xenian crystal and brought it before the lantern. In the dim, the bauble lacked luster. But even dull specimens contained such pure resolution that when light struck them, miracles bloomed.

Eli said the first crystal excavated from the borderworld crumbled during AnMat's preliminary experiments. While protocol demanded they destroy compromised samples, he managed to salvage a tiny piece before cleanup shoveled the remains into the furnace, and gave the stone to Azian for safekeeping.

He'd recounted the tale with such distinct clarity that neither Alyx nor Judith needed to blemish the silence with another recollection. The test sample perched in the receptacle. Just a browned hunk of slag, really. None bothered a spare glance when he obeyed the order to activate the laser.

Within Judith's fingers, the chip's facets turned, refracting beams across the cabin. Quasar blue, neon yellow, sea-bottom green. Like fish in a koi pond, hues eluded the eye as soon as they were perceived.

AnMat kept their lasers mode-locked, subjecting test samples to several short but intense pulses of light rather than a continuous wave. The team had expected some strange behavior to occur, but nothing so beautiful.

As the laser bounced along its predetermined path, the warm radiance that emerged out the other end cast a shimmering miasma through the dispersion chamber. Rainbows of every subtle hue scattered broad, undulating ribbons across lead-shielded walls until the boundaries no longer mattered. Light reached through the observation window to lure them from their skeptical whisperings like a siren's song.

Magnificent, transient, never static, never stagnant. This waste of a crystal wielded photons to think a painting into existence, blossoming its canvas before their very eyes.

He'd almost missed his supervisor's orders. Dr. Vance, tilt the specimen seven degrees clockwise, if you'd be so kind. The kaleidoscope lens shifted at the flick of a dial. So did the celestial world projected therein. Behind Plexiglas goggles, Eli swore he had felt the light breathe.

"Wallace supervised that experiment," Judith said. Wavering garnet bands caressed her cheekbones, making it appear as though she wept blood. They juddered the longer she held the chip, and, swallowing hard, she snapped the stone inside the pendant, dousing the cabin in shadow. "I hope he hadn't remembered when he caught it."

Alyx accepted her mother's necklace, clasped the chain behind her neck. The filigree felt gelid on her bare collarbone. She rubbed the pendant in slow, meandering circles.

At this point, there was no way to tell what Breen might have intended. Part of her preferred to let it die with him. Another part indulged morbid curiosity.

"What would he have done with it?"

"I don't know." Her whisper soft. "That's the most gruesome thought."

Red fumes dominated her vision as if she were still in his chambers, oppressive heat seeking to breach her skin and roast her organs. "You left me in there with him." She found it hard not to let that go, couldn't refrain from speculating on just what Mossman's willingness to abandon signified. If Judith were capable of a repeat performance. "Alone."

"Yes." Just like that, the truth. No denial, no spouting saccharine excuses to cover her ass. "I did."

She narrowed her eyes. "He could've killed us."

"I know."

"You know, but do you care is the real question."

Bruised hands twitched, then fell still. "I'm sorry." Judith returned to her sentry. Shadows of droplets glided trails down reinforced glass. "I'm not proud of what I had to do in there. I had to feign madness… though I fear not all of it was an act."

"Yeah, well. Guess it fooled him."

Her scoff fogged her reflection. "Of course it did. It's the oldest trick in the book."

Torture victims suffered rashes of irritability as their minds struggled to process their suffering in a way they could understand, and there was little doubt in her mind that the hell they'd experienced in Breen's chambers would scar anyone's amygdala.

"What's going on with you? I'm on your side, aren't I?"

"For now."

"Really?" she asked. "That how you wanna play it?"

"Not at all. It was a sufficient rescue, if a bit messy. In terms of loosening his hold, you and Calhoun did quite well." Mossman folded her arms. "My only regret is not being able to stay long enough to hear him scream. I pray the Combine tear him to pieces. Those who play with wolves should be made to suffer their teeth." Slowly, she turned. "You look surprised."

No shit she did. Alyx crushed her jaws together because she suspected they ran the risk of dropping open otherwise. "Who are you?" she asked. "Last week, you were 'You should've waited for my signal' this and 'It isn't necessary to send them through a Combine superportal' that. Remember, Mossman? Whatever happened to her?"

Judith waited. And then an embittered smile curved her lips, stretched the sores dotting her jowls. "Last week, Wallace was dead."

"Yeah, until the slugs brought him back." And the Combine cried hallelujah. "Honestly, I was scared you were gonna hand me over to him. You get why, right? It's not like you don't have a track record for that sort of thing."

"Well, then," said Judith, "you'd be mistaken. I despise him. That much has never changed." Another smile, flickering at its corners. "Six days, Alyx. We spent six days locked in that rancid hole in the ground. Every thought I had since he dragged me back was dedicated to the moment of his passing. I laughed because I was excited. I couldn't wait for to that waste of skin to breathe his last."

Back to the window, peering at half-formed rain.

"Your father knew how deep my hatred ran. Every day, he asked me to swallow it. We mustn't expose our weaknesses if we want to keep this Resistance safe. Do you know what he would advise me to do?" Alyx said nothing, watching the shadows of droplets glide patterns down their flesh. "Smile. He claimed that was what I did best, after all. 'Whenever he tries to get a rise out of you, don't give him the satisfaction. He'll reap what he's sown soon enough. Just give him a smile, because he's going to need it.'" She shook her head. "He pitied him. Did you know that? Your father pitied his enemies. I never had the strength."

Her chuckle was just as sharp and mirthless a noise as her scoff. "And now he has the gall to die." Resentment smoldered in her voice. "'Smile.' The absolute nerve of that man."

"Judith… "

But she was no longer speaking to her. Ghosts spilled through the cracks in her psyche.

"Damn you, Eli, what else are you going to take? This wasn't what we agreed—" She smacked the dashboard, rattling the incandescent tube. The filament jumped, scorched a dangerous spark. "How dare you leave?"

The anguished cry that burst from her larynx sounded nothing like the Mossman she knew, self-contained, low-toned, deferential. She tore her arm free of Alyx's grasp and bashed her fist into the window several times, each blow more violent than the last.

She beat the window until her strength dissolved, her fist flattened into splayed fingers as a silent sob bucked her chest. Grief sucked her under, drained her spirit. Upon the last blow, she buried her head in her hands and tucked into herself like a wounded animal, her hair a tangled curtain veiling her shoulders.

"Don't touch me." Drawing back her slim shoulders, she took a loose, shuddering breath and pressed the back of her wrist to her ruined eye to inhibit the discharge threatening to seep through. "You've done what you came here to do. It's clear we owe each other nothing."

"That's not true," Alyx said. "Just because Dad isn't here anymore doesn't mean we can afford to cut each other loose. I would have come back for you."

Watery exhalations trembled her as she shook her head, silver trails glinting on her cheeks. She recoiled from the tentative hand Alyx reached for her. "Don't."

"You need to cover that. It'll get infected."

"I'm managing it," Judith insisted, clearing the pus with the swipe of a scraped knuckle. "I'm fine."

"Listen… you probably don't want to hear this, but you couldn't wait for him to come around."

"Oh, Alyx, that's such old news." She lowered her head, massaging the temple beside the socket. "Let me be tired just this once. Please."

"The minute he heard, he wanted to go after you. It's just—"

"He passed," she finished. Her stare blank. "Yes. Wallace gloated about it."

In the absence of her mother, her father deferred her to Mossman without having said a word. She used to wonder what the hell streaked through his mind when he did, encouraging his daughter to look to a woman so insecure she felt threatened by a child.

Mossman projected a perfection she failed to reach. Mossman, punctual, friendly, meticulous, whose hands dared not soil themselves on headcrab blood but produced calculations ever so watertight.

"He told me to scream."

Judith announced this in monotone, a dry recital of fact.

Too disturbed to offer a proper reply, Alyx let her words hover in lukewarm air. The meaning behind them didn't sink in right away. It took some time. As the numbness subsided, sensation emerged. With it, a passing beam of clarity.

"Oh, God." A hairline fracture. "He said… " One hand rose to conceal the twitch in her mouth. "'Scream. Eli won't hear you.'"

Years ago, Kleiner had rescued a doll that used to remind her of Mossman. She'd rub her thumbs over its repaired seams, blemishing oily streaks on the bloodless white of its cold glass skin. A missing piece of cheek made it difficult to tell whether its smile was truly a smile, or a grimace.

The doll harbored a poorly-concealed discontent over being salvaged from the gutter. She declined to hold her bent parasol and instead slumped between textbooks, refusing to stand with the quiet dignity Kleiner insisted on recapturing.

As a child, she sensed a similar veneer behind Mossman's porcelain mask. She asserted herself in the right for hating it. For rejecting it.

Whether through youth or inexperience, Alyx seldom took the opportunity to recognize that Mossman might have already cracked. That she also resented Eli's attempts to fix her. It hadn't occurred to her that perhaps Mossman had expectations of her own to fulfill, and her suffering dove beyond ordinary fears of inadequacy.

Alyx thought of the chamber, its crushing isolation echoing Mossman's deepest fears of abandonment. Eli's charity tormented her conscience just as much as Breen's deprivation, if not more so. At Black Mesa East, she constantly strove to prove herself worthy of a seat at the table. Being a burden inflicted a worse sin than being inadequate. Contributing little of worth, the damning sin.

Becoming a pawn and surrendering yourself, passed back and forth between the hands of two men more alike than either admitted. She couldn't begin to imagine.

Painfully aware of how deficient the words were, she whispered, "I'm sorry."

"Spare yourself the trouble. It's not your apology to give."

"No," Alyx said, "it really is. We've been awful to each other. I don't want to keep going the way we've been. Especially not now."

"Is it true?"

The question took her off-guard. "Is what true?"

"What Eli did," she said, "in Black Mesa."

That long, absorbed stare. Mossman had the uncanny ability to unzip her skull and cull her thoughts with just a single look.

"Seems I've been mourning the wrong person," Judith murmured. "He may have forced me to swallow poison, but at the very least, poison can be expelled." Another pause. "I suppose that's why you haven't told anyone."

"There wouldn't be a Resistance if I did."

"You underestimate its fiber, Alyx." Barbs pricked her words.

"There's no point."

"Not for Gordon's sake?"

"He's in a coma."

"You'd rather carry that burden alone."

"No one else is gonna."

"And yet," said Mossman, "millions have already suffered."

"He should have let me go."

"Then someone else would have been chosen," she said. "Wallace, perhaps. Would you want that?"

Daggers stabbed her rotator cuff, depriving her of a reply and drawing a deep grimace. Jesus Christ, she wished Breen had just bit the bullet and torn her arm right off. Would be so much easier.

"You and your father were close. These feelings can't be comfortable for you."

"I don't want to talk about this with you, Judith."

"It won't last forever," she said. "The doubts, the self-loathing. Over time, you learn how to walk the tightrope," once again offering unsolicited advice, "to balance the negative with the positive. Some days, I admired your father eminently while hating him to my core."

"Really." She wrapped cold fingers around her throbbing collarbone. "Could've fooled me."

"There were days I hated him precisely because I agreed with his plans and he did nothing to stop me. But he shouldered incredible responsibilities that aren't to be envied. He tried to do right by his Resistance. And make no mistake, Alyx, it was his Resistance: as much the product of his blood and tears as you are." Her kneading slowed. "He remained conscientious of honoring the trust he'd been given. Being penned in with Wallace made me realize some men can't be trusted with even a modicum of power."

The enraged thrashing of limbs on a bed of shorn metal clattered in her ears. She went silent for a moment before answering. "Is that what you meant when you told him 'they' were coming to collect the flesh?"

Mossman nodded. "I've heard of it spoken in his office. The Combine police their cohesion quite severely. When one unit suffers bodily harm, it threatens their infrastructure. The others initiate a neurochemical process to dissolve the flesh from the inside-out. You can imagine the rest." Didn't have to, and quite frankly, she preferred not to. Breen unraveled into a mindless sack of organs in the end, as pitiful in death as he'd been in rebirth. "Inviting a foreign consciousness into one of their host bodies is highly taboo. They must have placed him inside one for a specific purpose."

"That he failed."

"Miserably." Judith's fingertips rose to collect more drops of pus, which she rubbed dry. "I admit I don't fully understand the process myself. It could be a ritual of some kind."

"Doesn't matter now."

"I suppose not." Following another prolonged silence, Judith reached into her breast pocket and unfolded a scrap of paper she'd tucked into neat quarters. The grain beaten and singed, faded white diagrams stood on gridded navy blue. "Take a look at this." She handed the carbon copy to Alyx, who studied the Borealis' infrastructure.

Aperture nurtured ambitious dreams for its flagship. They planned to employ a bevy of cutting-edge tech, starting with an oblique design previously unheard of at the time of drafting. Most icebreakers of the day crushed floes under a standard double-hulled, rounded bow. By contrast, the Borealis boasted a wider bow and used her thrust propulsion to torque her body, carving out a broader angle of attack through the ice.

Gingerly, Alyx traced years' worth of dreams. One device stood out to her; the design echoed the cylindrical superconductor Breen had nested upon in the weather station.

"A bootstrap device," Judith said. "The last of its kind. It's what keeps the vessel weaving in and out of the folds of spacetime."

That explained quite a bit. "Barney thinks the ship got caught in some kind of flux."

"If it is, it won't be for much longer. When Aperture launched the ship, they did so under the assumption that the bootstrap would maintain a state of self-sustaining flux after the first few hundred loops. But the vessel cannot remain that way forever," she said. "It decays over time. Each loop the ship takes destabilizes its set resonance a little more. We're not sure what may happen when it becomes completely destabilized."

Frost crept slow films in her blood. "So they launched the ship with no idea what it would do, or if it'd return. Why?"

"To raise money on a scandal," Mossman said, "or to avoid scandal. Both are likely. Aperture wasn't as stringent as Black Mesa; their facility struggled with finances for decades. Most of their experiments cut basic expenses wherever possible."

"I don't know," Alyx said. "That sounds pretty Black Mesa to me."

"You share your father's skepticism. He believed all of this was just an urban legend until I forwarded him the logs from the Citadel," Judith replied. "W… Breen hoped the discovery would restore his good standing with his superiors in the event his attempts to capture Gordon failed."

"This bootstrap. That's what they want."

"After this, I've become less certain," Judith said. "The fact that a week has passed is rather suspect, don't you think? The Nexus has never been particularly interested in our little neck of the woods. Other than to punish us for rebelling, I don't see why they'd want to get their hands on the vessel alone."

"Combine are stranded here," Alyx said. "Reason enough." Of course they'd want off the planet now that their little power trip was coming to an end. Probably freaking out that the mother ship had yet to bail them out.

"Yes," Mossman said, lost in thought. "Although I can't help but feel something else must be on that ship. Something Aperture didn't want the rest of the world to see."

The last thing she wanted to hear were conspiracies. Once upon a time, Black Mesa also squirreled away its critical research. No happy endings for that old fairy tale.

"Before the compound was raided, we received a faint mayday signal. As far-fetched as it seems, the Borealis' transient nature is such that I came to suspect the signal originated from the hands who'd vanished with the drydock." Judith added, "They may have wanted Aperture to activate the magnetic resonators necessary to anchor the ship to its original launch point. It's been fifty years, however. By now, the resonators are destroyed, or have since gone missing."

"Then what'd you switch on in—"

"A copy," she said. "Based on these blueprints."

"So, was Breen just… waiting for the ship to come close enough to anchor it?"

"It wouldn't surprise me, frankly. Any excuse to avoid doing the work himself."

"That it?" Alyx asked. "Borealis ticking down its clock. Anything else?"

Judith took back the blueprints. "It's possible," she began, "I misread the signal. If not mayday, someone aboard might have activated a… A self-destruct program."

Rain drenched the windshield.

"Dad wanted it destroyed." Fate ensured he'd receive his wish after all.

She gave a small nod. "Eli thought we should let well enough alone. Whoever activated the program did so out of desperation or malice, and we can't hinge our odds on the more favorable intent."

"No one who uses that kind of technology has a 'favorable' intent, Judith." The other woman winced. "Hell, for all we know, stupidity might have a hand in this, too. Remember what Dad said about the preliminary tests? Even if Breen didn't push the sample, AnMat would've wound up abusing the spectrometer sooner or later. You figure the machine can take just one more push, boom. Gives out completely."

"Perhaps, but human interference isn't nearly as destructive as the Combine's."

"Isn't it?"

"Listen to me," Mossman said in a stern tone that suggested she best drop past grievances. "Your father worried if the Combine captured the ship, they'd weaponize it against us. Turn it into a bomb of sorts. The damage such a thing would wreak is incalculable."

"What'd you tell him?"

She sighed, wringing the sheaf into a tight scroll. "I said the Combine are nothing if not utilitarian."

A fist thumped the glass, startling the two of them. The window rolled down, allowing sleet to explode on the open dashboard in thick droplets. Sure enough, there stood Barney, cheeks wind-whipped into a bright red flush.

"You're not gonna believe this," he breathed, sniffing hard. It sounded like he'd trekked some distance from the carrier while she and Mossman were talking. "Saw some weird kinda light half a klick east; turns out a pack of Vorts are bunkered down in there. They want us to join 'em. They said they'll help navigate."

Alyx craned her neck, barely distinguishing the pair of figures awaiting in the murk. "Vortigaunts?" In this weather? They must be lost. Partially cold-blooded, their species required at least tepid waters to regulate their core body temperature. No way one would be found living amidst a brutally cold and arid climate, much less a small clan of them.

"Yeah, Vorts. Remember them? Three arms, talk like Yoda?"

A dim flicker of hope, promptly quashed. "They our guys?"

"Not as far as I can tell. They aren't sayin' much." His eagerness melted into a dour mood. "You ain't gonna drive us there with one arm, are ya?"

"No, I planned on steering this thing with my feet."

"Look, we doing this or not? Freezing my ass off out here."

"Fine," she said. "Get in."

"About time," he muttered, stamping the snow from his boots before clambering in between them. "Sorry, Dr. Mossman. Not a whole lot of leg room in these bad boys."

APCs had no ignition except for a rectangular slit under the throttle. Alyx slid Barney's stolen access card inside, lighting up the gauge cluster.

Some instruments were more sophisticated than others. On the left-hand side you had your typical fare, speedometer, fuel gauge, tachometer. On the right, the nav. The carrier's primary means of navigation consisted of a palm-sized coordinate systems screen, which currently flashed 'DATA UNAVAILABLE' in Cyrillic. One downfall of sensitive equipment was that heavy precipitation scrambled the hell out of their sensors.

Slowly, Mossman leaned forward, peering into the swirl. "Strange, they don't look like normal Vortigaunts. Are you sure they're not stragglers?"

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe a Strider picked off the rest."

"Strider?" Mossman asked.

Alyx toggled a series of switches.

"Oh, sorry," Barney said, "let the cat outta the bag?"

"You encountered a Strider?" Yet again his quip rendered her question rhetorical.

"Well, it was less 'encountered' and more 'got our asses kicked.'"

Alyx grit her teeth. "Not now, Barney."

"And get this—our guys might be stuck on the ship 'cause they wandered into a fluctuation."

Mossman's stare bored holes in her temple. "You never told me this."

"Course not," Barney said. "Why would ya?"

Alyx wrenched herself from the dashboard. To hell with this, winging it now. Whoever bitched about it, tough.

She gripped the throttle and cranked it into drive. Two thousand horsepower kicked a powerful engine to life; floodlights threw long spears into an endless field of gray, bringing the Vorts' angular figures into stark relief.

Barney refused to sit back, dripping on the seat. She scrubbed a damp palm on her hip with a disgusted sigh. "God, sit down. You're soaking wet."

"Gee, wonder why?"

"You didn't have to stay outside."

Barney ground his jaw, fingers digging into the seat's leather casing. "I catch hypothermia, it's your freakin' fault."

"Lay off."

Caught in the awkward position of bystander, Mossman developed a keen interest in the sleet slapping the windows.

Alyx radiated such stubborn silence that it gave him no alternative but to concede a temporary defeat. "Whatever. Just follow 'em."

Fine by her. The less they stoked the flames, the better. There'd be plenty of time to air grievances later. Preferably somewhere with less risk of drowning in hail. Sure, it rained now, but give the temperature time to sink a few degrees and those pliant drops froze into stinging pellets.

Barney stewed. Half a minute later, he tried speaking to Mossman. "Good thing they showed up. Might be able to take a look at that shiner."

"It's not a bruise," she replied. "Though I suppose it would be more convenient for you to call it that."

"Does it—"

"Of course it hurts."

"Well, I just asked 'cause—"

"It looks like I'm crying? I'm not. Tears come from the lacrimal duct. What you're seeing is a direct draining of pus. It's positively repulsive, I cannot staunch it, and we have Breen to thank for crushing my ocular tissue like a grape." Rubber wipers scraped glass. "Any more questions?"

Barney tucked his hands under his arms. "No, ma'am."

"Very well."

His sigh drowned in the loud, droning purr of the APC's traction. His breath shivered through his clenched teeth, and his hiked shoulders trembled. When he wasn't looking, Alyx reached for the heater's slats and angled the vent in his direction.

The Vortigaunts guided them toward the flicker Barney spotted, a stray beam emitting a simmering glow in a low-hanging cavern. She parked the APC just outside the mouth, allowing the vehicle's traction to spit out crushed snow. Good timing, too. The sleet had died down while the skies darkened to an ominous shade of anthracite: signs that typically preceded hail.

After disembarking the carrier and gaining a better view of their Vortigaunt companions, she was quick to recognize Sokolai and Dushan, and even quicker to process the implications. "What are you two doing here? Something happen at White Forest?"

Equally quick to appease, Dushan entreated her with a raised claw. "Be calm."

"All is as it should be," Sokolai said.

She looked toward Barney, whose shrug dispelled her suspicions; the sleet must have prevented him from seeing them clearly.

Something wasn't adding up. The base hadn't many Vortigaunts on staff as it was, but the surgeon would rather crawl through glass than send her nurses to a dangerous liasion in the Arctic. Besides, didn't she need them to keep watch over Gordon? Had he…

No. They would have told her if that were the case. And all of this assuming they managed to get past Kleiner and Magnusson in the first place.

She wondered if Uriah were here.

The pair shepherded their human compatriots into the cave, guided by thickening ribbons of smoke. As they ventured into the smoldering nook, Judith retched a little; her hand flew over her mouth to dam the cough. It didn't take long for Alyx and Barney to follow suit.

Christ, this air was foul. An acrid, melting-rubber smell invaded their nostrils and drew tears from their eyes. How could the Vorts breathe in this? It was like they'd marinated the headcrab in battery acid before roasting it over the spit.

Barney pivoted to spit a mucous glob on the ground. "Je-sus," he drawled, muffled under his gloves, "stinks like death in here."

"Apologies," replied the Vortigaunt who tended the culprit with a ragged branch. "These lands are unsuited for good hunting. The only sustenance we found was this poison crab, frozen in a slab of ice. We endeavored to locate its nest, but the cold has slowed us down. We've since redirected our efforts to the preparation of this meager bounty."

Well, that explained it.

"Come," Dushan said. "You must sit." Far be it from them to decline. "We have removed the barbs and drained the glands of their toxic secretions. Rest assured, the meat shall inflict no harm except offending the palate."

"Hey," Barney said, "long as it ain't twitching, that's fine by me."

That said, Dushan snapped off a leg for each of them, a shank of meat they accepted with a measure of gratitude. It'd been days since any of them had anything resembling a meal.

Alyx raised the steaming shank to her lips, then hesitated, surveying her companions as Dushan divided the rest amongst the other Vortigaunts. She'd never eaten with both Barney and Judith present before. Usually one or the other would be missing from the mess hall, lost to work.

In another time, it would've been funny to watch the stark difference in their table manners. Barney sank his canines into the fattiest portion without shame or hesitation, not caring how grease sprang rivulets from the punctures and dribbled down his stubble-peppered chin.

Meanwhile, Judith studied her portion from various angles as though it were some mathematical problem in need of cautious approach. Distracted by his noises, she muttered a small sigh. At length she decided to pinch the shank by the talon and peel the tendons into individual strips.

Regular headcrab tasted spongy, bland, and oozed a little grease when boiled or fried: perfect for the chunky gravy-based stews Black Mesa East's chefs were fond of cooking. Most complained of the frequency with which the menu served its staple dish—again? Ugh. Looks the same coming back up as it does going down—but at the very least, it was something warm to hold you over.

"That eye," said Dushan.

"You are Mossman, correct?" Sokolai asked. "Ah, so you are. These ones are most pleased to make your acquaintance. The doctor speaks well of you."

"Maria?" Judith raised her head, curious, patting her mouth dry with a corner of her sleeve. "It's been quite some time. How is she?"

The pair responded simultaneously. Dushan dispensed the polite answer: Her expertise grows daily, while Sokolai offered the truth: She is plagued by a cavity. The latter almost brought her to laughter, drawing a rare smile.

"Yes, well. She always did have an insatiable sweet tooth."

Drawn by an odd sight, Alyx set her food aside to walk deeper into the cave.

One Vortigaunt sat apart from the group with his back turned to the fire, crouched on a rocky slab. His shadow stretched a long, ragged silhouette on the cavern wall. The sinewy muscles in his shoulders flexed repetitive movements.

The first thing she noticed was the stone lying beside his feet, which had been used to smash several electronic collars into scrap. Black plastic alloy crumbled, rendered useless shards embedded in the frost. A smatter of wires joined the shavings littering the floor; alkaline trickled a thin leak between them.

Sharp steel flicks filled the silence. Alyx cautiously approached as he continued to whet his talons with the edge of a pocket knife.

Those burns encircling the throat: she knew just one Vort in the world who bore them with pride.

In close enough proximity to break his meditations with a tap on the shoulder, she dallied, sucking in her blood-encrusted bottom lip. Slowly, she released a shivering peal of mist, let the abused flesh unfurl from her teeth.

"Luther?"

A swift flash sliced the air, barring her from another step.

Luther raised his head to accompany the knife he clutched. Vertebrae rippled the thick charcoal-colored bands winding ropes around his nape.

Crimson eyes met hers following a bit of struggle to place her; cataracts clouded them to a murky pink.

His snout wrinkled. "Alyx Vance," he rumbled in a deep, gravelly voice. "Hello, my sib."

The blade withdrew. As a sign of gratitude, she bent down and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. It was damn good to see a familiar face.

"God, how many years has it been?"

"In the choking grip of Combine scum, far too many." He obliged a curt, reciprocal squeeze, digging claws into the sleeve—taking care not to puncture the fabric—before rising to a stand.

"Not so fast," she said, coaxing him back down. "What are you really doing here?"

"Ask me nothing of how and where this body goes. I fear the reminiscence won't be worth your time."

"We've got enough. Let's chat." She joined him on his left, tucking her free hand under one knee.

When she was a toddler, she went missing in City 17. Luther reunited her with her father after breaking free of his miserable indenture and fleeing the Combine.

For understandable reasons, her father seldom spoke of that time. The Citadel had been a burgeoning skeleton of the monument it eventually became, the Resistance the seedling of an idea he nurtured after seeing the scars of Luther's servitude.

Back then, he'd had no name. In those days, most Vortigaunts didn't.

Luther underwent capture several more times—at least twice of his own accord—and passed hands between cities. Overwatch paraded him, bound and chained, as a cruel taunt aimed at the rest of his species, having executed his kin for far less. Over the years his hatred toward such callous despots grew, along with his disgust of the transhuman cogs whose thankless turnings sustained the machine.

As a slave, he counted among the last to witness Gordon kill the Nihilanth. The dying of the old guard for the Vortigaunts stranded on Earth.

Little by little, his generation disappeared as the Combine hunted them down. Few born after the Occupation shared his experiences, despite their speaking of the Nihilanth as though they'd served the Master themselves.

Communication, more precisely his lack thereof, erected another barrier to his reassimilation. The Nihilanth preferred its slaves mute. To receive orders, never contest them. His flux shifting was guttural and broken as a result, akin to a voice weakened by years of silence. This effectively aborted most conversations.

Regardless, younger Vortigaunts harbored a somber sort of admiration for the quiet warrior. As they claimed: his hardships rendered him scarred of skin, milky of eye and short of word.

Age and an austere demeanor belied his brutality. Posters around City 17 decried him a bogeyman to be killed for substantial reward.

Snipers eager to snatch the trophy considered him a challenge and a bane: the former because he presented what should have been an easy target. Bulky and muscular, he didn't resemble his lither counterparts. Many presumed the extra heft slowed him down, a misconception bolstered by the fact that he didn't blend into the crowd. The thick, mottled gnarled-oak epidermis of the Xenian-born lightened into a smoother amphibious gray membrane as subsequent generations gestated in warmer waters than the spawning pools of the borderworld.

The latter because he refused to die. Although he spat upon any Combine to cross his path, he deemed snipers recreants deserving of an especially hateful death. No matter how heavy the hell raining down, he scaled apartments plagued by laser nests and dismembered whoever suffered the misfortune of wielding the scope.

He once accosted a sharpshooter that pinned their group in an alley pinched between ramshackle tenements. Smoke and dust kicked up a thick swirl, a shimmering blue beam seeking flesh as it probed the crevices of pitted brownstone. Due to poor visibility and her preoccupation over the best way to avoid exposing their location, she was only able to catch glimpse of a dark figure darting across the street.

Luther climbed three stories up the fire escape, bullets spitting blazing curls of shrapnel around him, and lunged through the open window. A horrendous scream pierced their ears. Seconds later, a leg soared through the smoke and exploded on the curb in a pinkish spray.

She bunkered behind the dumpster with the others when he pushed it aside, coaxing her out as if she were three instead of seventeen: Be unafraid, Alyx Vance. I have cut its vortal threads.

Few cared to know the reason behind his violence except her father. After Luther delivered their haggard band to a relieved reception at Black Mesa East, Eli pulled her from the excited chatter. Don't cheer him on.

When she asked the natural question, why, he voiced suspicions that Luther lashed out from a place of pain. Snipers triggered his memories of the resonance cascade.

He volunteered no more information, so she softly steered him toward his original train of thought. Black ops, you mean?

He wiped a hand down his mouth. No. Trauma sustained in service of a cruel Master, which deployed slaves to fight and die on its behalf.

Eli's expression crumpled as he clutched the edge of a desk, unable to continue for a time. Then he released a shaky breath, squared his shoulders and addressed her in a stronger tone. Don't get too attached. He won't stay here for long.

True to form, Luther disappeared before dawn the next morning. Rumors circulated among the scouts that he boarded a razor train to City 14.

Years passed.

Nihilanth slaves counted among the most difficult demographic to recruit: without their controller, they lacked purpose and deemed life unworthy of further strife. Rather than submit to what they believed a lost cause, many committed suicide by striking reckless blows at the Combine. Luther exceeded their expectations with his talent for survival, choosing instead to forge his pain into a deadly cudgel.

Even so, Alyx shared her father's sadness each time she glanced upon the old Vortigaunt, beheld the scars digging deep brown ruts around his throat and wrists. His flesh bore burns from dozens of electronic braces.

No wonder he held his tongue. While his fellow Vortigaunts regarded his methods an antiquated vestige from a time they artlessly charged their enemies, human fighters applauded his vicious streak. They enjoyed no lack of Schadenfreude for the stray zombies he fed, and in their ignorance reaffirmed that his value to the Resistance measured solely as a weapon.

"This one regrets the loss of the Eli Vance. Yonder ones informed me of his passing." Luther angled his head toward Sokolai and Dushan. "His absence echoes throughout the Vortessence."

She forfeited answer. Words failed to capture the ache her father left behind, something she exiled from conscious thought around every corner; but she had grown so tired, so damn exhausted, over the past few days that to repress his specter seemed less tenable than to simply let him in, invite him to haunt whatever chamber of the heart he pleased.

Alyx wiped a limp strand from her brow. "He worried a lot about you, you know."

Luther gave a low, measured growl. It was about as close to contrition as you'd get.

Between scrapes of the blade, he raised his head, gazed upon her with an odd and piercing degree of lucidity. The clouds fogging his central iris dispersed as his pupils shrank. "Something troubles you, my sib."

Many are the threads that bind us, Luther once told Eli in what, she now realized, had been an earnest bid at comfort. Inextricable. If not again in this life, we will meet in the next.

He believed that wholeheartedly, not a drop of duplicity in his convictions. Eli struggled to maintain such steadfast faith, fearing his every goodbye the last.

Across the way, the others finished eating and dispersed to attend other matters. Sokolai and Dushan congregated around Judith, irradiating her damaged eye in green energy while Barney observed the process from a safe distance of two or three feet. They shared a brief glance, returned to their respective places.

"Nothing more than the usual," she said. Luther rose to his feet. "What are you doing?"

Luther touched her on the brow. One cool talon, sharp enough to unstitch the skin, skimmed circles in her forehead. Bewildered thoughts buzzed until they quieted.

The walls of the cavern smooth over, grow tall and clean-cut. Its occupants vanish. Her own body fades to a gray ether.

Where there was a fire now dwells a circular pool. Darkness besmirches its opalline waters. Drops of ink, spreading, staining, growing hungry tendrils over ripples of glistening white. Gentle undulations ebb until they cease.

We who observe, she says, cosmic radiation shimmering in her alveoli, have watched you drown in your madness. No more.

Alyx snatched a greedy gasp of cold air. Her heart skipped a beat, an electric jolt wracking her muscles causing her to blurt, "What the hell?" She collided with her body headfirst, the contrast between dreams and reality sending her into a tailspin.

She jerked her head up, missing the flicker of sky blue receding from Luther's cataracts, the nets of luminescent violet weaving over his skin returning to the scars of subjugated flesh.

Afterimage twinkled short-lived stars in the edges of her vision. It was like when Breen reached into her mind. How could a monstrous violation seem so familiar, so long ago? What did he do? "Did you just—"

She seized Luther's forearm, prepared to demand answers, when an intruder lurched through the cavern mouth, inked in fire and shadow.

It unsettled her, just how quickly her windpipe abandoned its next intake. Oxygen fled her lungs, leaving her heart to starve.

He panted. Not a dream conjured from stress, nor an apparition sent to test her faith in the bottom of a crevasse, but here. Painfully, inexplicably here.

He lumbered over the entrance, leaning against the wall for support. One gauntleted arm swung loose from a shoulder coated in torn mesh, pale skin peeking under the shine of moist netting. Dried blood caked his right cheek in black and russet streaks. A brighter crimson smear painted a torn earlobe.

Metal reverberated when the crowbar struck the floor, rattling ridged ice and glancing the weathered toes of his boots, bringing their noise to a standstill. Nothing dared disturb the deathly silence he brought save the wind shrieking outside and the gristle crackling within the flames.

"Ah, Freeman," Luther greeted him. "Your presence humbles. Join us."

Chapter Text

Prolonged idle user activity has been detected.
Administering stimulant.

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Stimulant administration failed.
Performing diagnostic.

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Diagnostic completed.
Warning: battery leakage detected. Please seek nearest charge station.

Warning: battery power is ten percent.
Vital signs stable.
Beware: prolonged idle user activity with sustained battery leakage will result in critical failure of the hazardous environments suit.
Please seek nearest charge station.

Warning: battery power is nine percent.
Sustained battery leakage will result in total operations shutdown.
Seek nearest charge station.

Warning: battery power is eight percent.
Coolant detected in computerized systems.
Seek nearest charge station.

Warning: battery power is seven percent.
High impact reaction has been deactivated to preserve power.
Seek nearest charge station.

Warning: battery power is six percent.
Core functions will cease operations below five percent.
Seek nearest charge station.

Warning: battery power is five percent.
Switching to auxiliary power.
Seek charge station.

Warning: battery power is four percent.
Coolant detected in pneumatic delivery systems. For your protection, intravenous medical systems have been deactivated.
Seek charge station.

Warning: battery power is three percent.

Defensive weapon selection system has been deactivated. Munition level monitoring has been deactivated. Atmospheric contaminant sensors are now offline. Automatic medical systems are disengaged. Vital sign monitoring has been deactivated. Power movement assistance is now deactivated.

Now emitting emergency distress signal.

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Ping unsuccessful.

Seek charge station.

Warning: battery power is... two... percent.
Contacting core network...

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Ping failed.

Seek... charge station.

Warning.
Battery p... ower is... one. Percent.

total

H

E

V

shut

down

imminennnnnnnnnnnn

Chapter Text

Luther's invitation hovered in the air, a bubble about to burst.

The light guttering from the fire cast long, haggard shadows behind Gordon. Dancing silhouettes stretched across the walls. Though a distance of less than several meters separated them, the empty shrill ringing from outside the cave suggested more.

Faint streams spilled from his nostrils. Looking without sight, his sclera glistened a milky white glass.

Had it not been for his small shudders of life, Alyx might have remained inert forever. Dread smothered the hopeful flicker threatening to spark within her ribcage. They balanced on a precarious edge; one false move would dissipate him, return him to snow and shadows. And yet, instinct compelled her to test his verisimilitude just as she had done in the crevasse. She needed to prove he was not another ghost to be exorcised.

Weightless steps carried her furtively across the gap. The closer she approached, the clearer the blood caked to his skin grew. Part of his earlobe was torn. Black flecks coated jowls and a sharp protrusion of cheekbone. Opposite his cranial scar; wrong side.

The softest whisper might thaw him, but only if she dared. They weren't in the observation room, after all, where coma locked his brain inside fever dreams of the Citadel. If she so desired, she could indulge an entirely selfish compulsion to lure him back to the present moment and watch awareness fill his murky gaze. Show me you're alive in there.

Alyx braced his cheek in her good hand. The smatter there had cooled, leaving behind dried plates that cracked as his jaw shifted, peeling like an old coat of paint. He molted, shedding encrusted skin for fresher flesh.

Unspoken questions brimmed. What hurt you? What are you running from? We've all got things chasing us, Gordon. Not much sense in leaving.

And then she heard it, a murmur emerging into salience.

ttery power is
seven perc

"It's good to see you again, Gordon." Mossman's placid greeting broke the reverie. Hands tucked, she smiled up at him, a touch of melancholy, if not nostalgia, tinged in her voice. "Well, no, not quite. I'd probably see more of you if I stood on the other side."

Judith's glimpse of amicability encouraged Barney to follow. "Yeah, Gord. Really ain't much of a party here without ya." Stooping to grab the fallen crowbar, he brushed the frost clinging to the nicks and offered the battered weapon to its rightful owner. Seconds' worth of pause gave him reason to reconsider. "On second thought, maybe I oughta hang onto it for a little while."

Luther, however, was decidedly less patient. "Come, Freeman." He gestured toward the fire, uncurling one knobby finger at the ebbing core.

The sound of their voices replenished a small measure of vitality in Gordon. He beheld each of his allies with haunted eyes, as though branding their faces to memory. Icy, pale lips moved in an aborted attempt at speech.

Terrible foreboding pricked her skin.

Speak.

Tell him everything.

Now's the time. Confess. Tell him what brought him here. How you uphold your father's lies in silent, self-righteous complicity.

Look at him. He's terrified. Some part of him knows just as well as you do how alien, how wrong, how displaced this is. Chained in service to your worthless, bloodsucking life.

Nausea flickered deep inside her. If the contract her father signed had been a written document, he'd have found it easy to nullify. Paperwork could be hidden, burnt, shredded. Files, deleted. One's word offered little in the way of substance.

Blood, the most ancient means of swearing oath. No covenant more binding existed than blood.

Grave stillness having settled over him, he pulled her in, gripping her nape. They exchanged no words, but the rattle of their synchronous breath spoke volumes. After releasing her, he walked toward the fire and knelt, head bowed, before an implacable ring of Vortigaunts.

A cold gust stirred the flames and sent up a flurry of white cinders. The shower had yet to fully dissolve when Luther snapped his neck.

Screams. Too many voices. Sound and fury trembled the cave to its bones.

Alyx? Mossman gripped her bad arm before diving into a disjointed stream of consciousness. Alyx oh Christ why did they—

"Blind your eyes."

y power is six perce

"Deafen your ears."

Barney hurled the crowbar at Luther, where it bounced off bloodied talons clutching chunks of auburn hair and clattered a thunderous roar. "Fuck you," he screamed, throat cracking on vicious syllables, "fuck you!"

"T'charr."

"Such hateful deceit, wearing Freeman's face."

"You sorry sons of bitches—"

Alyx—

"It will exploit any hole in your heart."

"—fucking butchers—"

"Shut it out."

"—he did nothing to you—"

"Do not permit it passage!"

"—nothing! No, don't give me that bullshit! Just shut your dirty lying mouths—"

Alyx! Do something!

"Persist!"

"—and go to hell!"

"Already the human has fallen for its tricks."

"We cannot feed it more blood," Dushan said. "We must end this now."

Called to his bleak craft, Luther pulled. There came a tearing, a meatlike ripping. Mossman clapped a hand over her mouth. The fire flared a little higher, a little hotter.

"You bastards!"

Struggle. Guttural Vortigese battled human expletives.

She winced. The cacophony rendered rationality a difficult task. Caught in a stupor, she watched Barney tear a path through the Vortigaunts, crash into the corpse and shake it, wailing animalistic noises she hadn't thought possible. The dam had finally burst. Contorted by pain, he embraced the HEV and buried himself in the shoulder's gnarled mesh.

Gordon. The abject manner in which he moaned his friend's name, a sob tarred in pitch-black despair, sparked the humanity that shock heretofore repressed. A spasmic clench squeezed her throat, then another, and another, until the mechanical contractions brought moisture rimming to her corneas.

ery power is
five perc

Sour odors contaminated the air.

She expected a watery blink to wash this nightmare clean. If she waited another moment or two, she'd find slumbering faces huddled around the fire.

No such thing happened. This was reality. Concrete. Unyielding. The Vortigaunts simply let Barney curse them out until his throat ran dry.

Confusion and stress turned Mossman's hyperventilation into congested coughs. Alyx gripped her clammy hand to steady her while Luther retreated from the body, stained from his brutal work. Neither asked the obvious. His reticence said enough.

Another harrowing scream from Barney disrupted the mourning process. Slathered in blood, the HEV clamped onto his forecep, tightening against his thrashing blows. Get it off me, he shouted while the perpetrators he condemned mere moments ago rushed in to help, get it off—

The Vortigaunts extricated the body, untangling the two, and rolled it onto its side, leaving its potential victim to shake. Barney rebuked further attempts at placation like a panicked animal and scrambled against the cave wall, racked by explosive spasms of diaphragm.

Yet, it seemed, the suit obeyed no whims but its own. Stiffly it extended its right arm and grasped a crag in the floor. Metal and ice conspired to utter an abrasive moan.

Undaunted, Luther snarled die, you persistent scum and planted a foot onto the small of the back, pinning the rest to the ground. A stopgap measure at best, it did little to dissuade the limbs from probing the ankles of its captor. The ring of Vortigaunts congregated around the body once more, this time flux shifting a grim overlapping chorus.

Following the initial stab of horror, Barney's gagging weakened, as did his resolve. The strength in his legs evaporated; buckled calves lowered him to a kneel. Oh, God. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.

"I think," Mossman said, "I've seen this before." They dwelled in stunned silence as the Vortigaunts grappled with the blind creature, constraining its appendages. "In the cave, after I struck the match, it found me. Every moment of pain and terror it had experienced, branded into my mind like a glowing hot coal." Her voice grew weak and brittle. "But if that's true… " One hand rose to her cheek, tremulous fingertips webbed in the pus she couldn't stop weeping. "Then… Wallace… "

Confronted by a starkly inhuman presence, Barney sought anchor in the nearest human. Their petty grudges no longer mattered. In that moment the bad blood dissolved, replaced by a dire yearning for normalcy. He grabbed Alyx and pulled her down.

The world faded in the darkness of rough wool, a skein stretched over a pounding heart. Tattered breaths pulsed erratically against her ear.

"Don't look." Barney's whisper tread the thin edge of terror. He jerked his coat over her as her mother had done in her last living moments, spoke words her father offered before the end took him. "Just a bad dream." Proof to the contrary wafted up in the slapping and scratching of metal on ice. He juddered, pushed her head down. Don't surrender your innocence. Better to feign deprivation of the senses than acknowledge what lurks just beyond their membranes. "Close your eyes. It's just—"

"Relinquish Freeman," Luther hissed, summoning energy, "or suckle our young on the milk of your blood. Pass on!"

er is four percent. Coolant detected in pneu

Barney slumped to the ground, taking with him their flimsy veneer of shelter.

Everyone—Vortigaunts, Luther, Barney, Mossman—sprawled in a scattered ring around the cave, loosely orbiting the bright epicenter. Dim green cords extended from their unconscious bodies. Akin to dew gliding down a spiderweb, clots of light oozed toward the HEV's hollow cavity, pushed along the tendrils by equally slow breath.

Knelt before the pulpit in an indefinable worship, the hazard suit cast her necklace into the fire.

As silver filigree bubbled, the pendant crumbled, exposing the garnet oystered inside. Once flames tasted Xen, they shone supernova. A burst of oversaturated color flooded the cave, bright enough that Alyx shielded herself with a forearm. But just for a flicker. Renewed, the cleansed fire emitted a sterile dazzle.

The suit thrust its empty cavity into the forge it had prepared. The attached cords scorched, slithering back to their point of origin.

With the hazard suit bowed in obeisance, the cords gradually stitched together a primitive tapestry of a spine and its attendant nerve endings. From them emerged the brain stem, a cerebellum, a limbic system and pituitary glands. The growing gray mass first bloomed into the right hemisphere, then the left.

The threads splintered into finer ends which proceeded to spread outward. Neural oscillation. Skeleton. Musculature. Circulation. Thin pockets of subcutaneous fat and cartilage, deft creases knit together by invisible hands. Each layer comprising a human being methodically wove atop the other until the shifting flesh began to resemble him.

As the sole witness to the process, she grew aware of her heart as an errant creature, beating hard enough to burst. The physiological signs were there, yet she hovered in a strange place removed from fear. The neural connections necessary for terror had drowned in cortisol and adrenaline: because of it, a shroud of calm draped over anesthetized flesh, numbing everything, even the cold.

Slowly, the HEV withdrew. What masqueraded as a human being emerged with cinders in its hair.

Taking the leisure of sitting upright, the body bearing Gordon's face pursed his lips and exhaled a long pillar of smoke.

It gave her a grin besmirched with soot.

"You'll have to do better than that."

Chapter Text

Crouched on its haunches, the smiling entity skulked toward her. Cords trailed a cascade of lucent waves in its wake. Sparks danced along the threads.

He approached her with the fluid grace of a shadow. Neither gravity nor friction exerted force upon him. He moved as though he lacked presence, an ontological impossibility, hardly perceived except at the limits of understanding. Though an utterly inhuman manner of movement, she couldn't deny the deliberate pace suggested intent. Dissonance addled a brain paralyzed cold.

"It's been quite some time." Its voice did not belong to Gordon. Vocal cords did not vibrate to produce sound. "Consider me a friend." It answered a question buried beneath the threshold of conscious intent, one she wasn't aware she'd desired raising. "Some might say your only friend."

Nonetheless, the words probed the folds of her cortex, reaching inside without violating boundaries of flesh and blood. It needn't have touched her to cause deep revulsion to rise to the surface. Reflexively, she turned and tucked into herself, seeking shelter in an unseen womb.

Awful stenches of blood, ash, and spinal fluid invaded her nostrils as it leaned in. She almost expected to find her father lying nearby in gruesome stagnance.

"Tell me." Smoke-hot breath gusted her ear, inducing a bone-deep shudder. "Do you wonder what really happened at Black Mesa?"

Words that were not words but incantations from a black hole, thoughts unthought, notions unbirthed, dim wavelengths of nothing inside the mind, rippled through reality.

words, mere words

She huddled against a wall of pockmarked limestone while sirens bathed them in noise. Crimson beams glistened over a diamonded sea of glass. Empty windows gaped at darkness. Dead static leaked from dead radio attached to dead security officers. Before the corpses lay

a drenched khaki pant with
a foot inside a ribbed dress sock and scuffed brown loafer
a streak dragging away, flooding the grids set into scorched tile

"Let me tell you the tale." Cloying affection swirled a nauseating hive. "Once upon a time, cradled in her father's arms, little Alyx Vance drew her last breath."

Witness the poignant scene: the happy family bound by ruin. Amputee father sits beside departed mother, attempting to jostle life into a motionless bundle. Come on, baby. Wake up.

Amidst the burning smog, a white door slides open. Rays pull and refract into the rectangular monolith. Out pours the light of heaven, purging, blinding, emitting a drone. Whispers woven into the drone unravel at the ends. Those whispers are her father's thoughts.

[This light, it's too bright to be God.]

"When I arrived, the child had perished," it said, "the mind with it. All she left behind, an empty lump of flesh wrapped in a torn coat. I needed to seize the opportunity lest it slip through my fingers."

Eclipsing the overpowering light, a man reaches down and peels back the hood covering the child.

It is unmistakably dead. Delusions have fooled her parents. What they took for their child does not resemble anything close. It is as the creature says: a lump of cooling flesh, slashed beyond recognition. It lacks an ear but bears multiple mouths, each screaming wide.

No, not mouths. Lacerations. Its eyes are sunken hollows beneath charred membranes. It weeps pus.

The child.

The mantle.

Love for this grotesque little larva clenches Eli's heart. He chokes out a gutted scream. Get away from her.

"Your father couldn't fool himself forever. As a matter of fact, when I presented you to him in that smoking, bloody corridor," it said, "he begged me to kill you."

The man returns the child Eli covets: a little girl, who blinks healthy, tearful eyes and screams ripe lungs cleansed of smoke. Its greedy wails spray spores of light he cannot see.

The small seed of horror gestating inside her gave a kick, restoring sensation in her numbed soul. Gordon, not Gordon, smothered her the instant she drew air. A gloved hand clamped around her mouth, killing her cry in utero.

"And then, of course, he attempted the deed himself."

The illusion sputters. At first rocking the precious body close to his chest, Eli wavers. His blind elation evolves from relief to shock, shock to grief. Grief to hate. Hate to despair.

Where is she? Already the door is closing. His shout echoes unheard through the walls of the destroyed Sector H dormitory. Where's Alyx? ...Damn it, what did you do with her? What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Get rid of it! You bastard, the baby wails and thrashes its arms, I want my daughter! Give me back my daughter!

Black Mesa dwindled, along with the truth. The cave with its ring of unconscious bodies resumed its place.

Alyx Vance disappeared beside her mother twenty years ago. What remained, a blank slate for an aggrieved man to chisel his sins for posterity. Beneath her father's kind and gentle demeanor, always, the hatred and love that guarded his secrets. I loved you and I mourned you. And I don't know which is worse.

Had it been a dream, then? One man's bid to deny inevitability? The lambda, the Resistance, Gordon's contract: had he fabricated them to rationalize the senseless?

Around her, darkness laughed. Stupid girl. Your father suffered many nightmares, but only one was born of choice.

Lies.

Whether hand or mind willed it, she didn't know. The former slipped into her boot and curled around a familiar curve.

Vindicate me. Extinguish these lies.

Alyx slaked off the HEV with a shove and brandished the pincer. Let the bastard's amused gaze absorb the glint of the weapon that had lured the terrified animal from Breen's host body, made the human inside taste hell.

"This is what you really want, right?" It turned, wry amusement etching Gordon's features. "What you arranged in Black Mesa." With a spirit as chillingly clear as ice, she poised the tip over her heart. "Let him go." Pushed in until the point sank through the parka's outermost skin, slitting tender down. "Or you lose everything."

Unperturbed in the slightest, it rose, and walked toward the fire. "Of the various species I have encountered, I have noted core characteristics." Emerald radiance blurred its edges. Gordon immolated. Gordon through a stained glass window. Exalted. Untouchable. "They are born, cold, hungry, and screaming, into a world where their suffering engenders no meaning. Rather than endure such an existence, many seek relief. They embrace the end."

The pincer quaked.

"All except one. You do not know how to die."

The light was as holy as it was alien. Heatless like oblivion. Like transcendence.

"It is because you do not know how to die that your kind worships shadows. I knew your Resistance would never come to be without a sacrificial lamb or two. For that role, I could have chosen anyone. You, well. Provided the most convenient means, shall we say.

"To put it in the simplest terms I can: I don't like squandering my investments." Smooth metal nudged her breast. The heart, pumping worthless blood, accelerated at the intrusion. "At Black Mesa, I hoped to purge you of your afflictions. But I see my methods have failed. Instead, you passed your strain onto your neighbor."

Instinct checked her hand, prevented her from carrying out the threat.

The entity huffed a noiseless laugh as she relented her grip. "The flesh is a prison. It craves survival."

tery power is
four p

Reduced to a crawl, she knelt beside Barney's prone form while the entity raised its arms, spreading veined wings of cables and cords. If she couldn't commit the crucial deed, she could at least... At least...

"There is nowhere to run, Miss Vance. You both belong to me," it said, "the organs of my body."

Alyx glanced up with gnashed teeth. Sulfurous hatred trembled her to the marrow. The cords that reached for her disintegrated mere inches before her, asps dispelled by fire.

The creature touched the lambda, which throbbed like a luminescent heart.

"Na'thoi," it said, "Opener of the Way. His mind summons you, draws you closer to me." And then it lifted a gloved finger, incriminating her. "Joi'sta. The piece of myself I grafted onto the mind of a dead child. It was you who cried a transgression of Black Mesa. Who tried... " Its smile split Gordon's chapped lips. " ...quelling me."

Silence.

Silence blazed inside the temples of her lungs.

Silence, creature.
Enough of your lies.
Who are you that dares bid me?

Joi'sta.

Liberator.
Redeemer of flesh.
I alone decide judgment.

We who form the Universal Union, who are Enlightened.

Shu'ulathoi.

We observe creation.
Our purpose, to advise.
To contemplate.
We have studied life from the genesis.
Yet mysteries abound.

This planet.
Small, quaint thing.
Rock, water, ozone, molten core.
Green life. Evolution. Death. Renewal.
Entropy in motion. Spinning along the rim. Toward uncertainty. Toward singularity.
Creation left to grow unfettered.
Our innumerable eyes observed without desire for intercession.
Only you glimpsed its dangers.

Once more, you summoned our counsel.
Behold this crude temple.

Black Mesa.

Where humans probe the edges of what they cannot understand.
They strive to reach through the borderworld and touch us, the Enlightened, we who observe and fathom.
Far too dangerous to permit them contact.
We must inoculate ourselves before we are contaminated.
Yourself afflicted, you proposed this.
Your bright intent masked your dark heart.
And so we agreed.

We fashioned you a mantle of human flesh.
Your purpose: cauterize the wounds in the borderworld.
Deliver the crystal unto the idolatrous temple.
Destroy Black Mesa.
Isolate them.
Teach humanity the lessons of the flesh. The lessons of misery.
Purge and sanctify.
Only then shall they know peace.

I do not know why the madness chose you.
Only that it consumed you.
You fell ill.
You hungered.
You devoured us.

Joi'sta and na'thoi.
Redeemer and Opener.

Subsumed into your vile, writhing flesh.
Cut it down.
Cauterize.
Brand its eyes so that it may not seek more prey.
Futile. Death refused us. We could not be extricated.
You are us and we are you.
Organs of an ailing body.
Our suffering, endless.
It is not without purpose.

Black Mesa.
Tragedy. Waste. Exploitation.
A trick you played for power.

_{"That will not suffice us."}

More.

_{"The borderworld, Xen, is in our control for the time being, thanks to you."}

The lies you fed them.
Speaking for us. As us.
Lulling Freeman to sleep inside your cradle of madness.
He slumbered human and awakened the Opener.

We corrected you.
Your lies and deceit.
Tore your treacherous mind asunder and scattered the pieces.
We killed your mantle to entrap the disease inside.
Forced your consciousness to grow in the synapses extinguished within.
To suffer its pains.
Not for punishment. Not for humiliation.
To teach you what you had forgotten.
What mortal flesh endures.

But your resistance was great.
Your rage, even greater.
Thoughts of revenge sank you deeper into madness.
Almost human, your nightmares.

Your darkness thrived.
In darkness, dreams.
Through them, you escaped.

You gathered minds.
At Black Mesa, you chose the child's father.
Binding him.
Binding her.
Binding me.
Binding Freeman.
Binding Kleiner.
On and on.

Remember.
Human beings cannot be Enlightened.
Wallace Breen.

Unnatural.

Let us consider the inverse.
An Enlightened, choosing human flesh.
Why?

It was a necessary sacrifice.

Witness my mantle.
Fragile. Dangerous.
To grant it life, I have forsaken all else.
She will deliver judgment.

Heed me, Alyx Vance.
Freeman has surrendered his body.
The exogen parades it before us.
A threat to quell our thoughts.
A weapon to silence our tongues.

Perform the ritual.
Go to the palace.
Show them what has happened.
Seize the vessel.
Drive it into his heart.
Avenge your father. Grant us freedom.
Do this, and Black Mesa is no more.

We who constitute the Universal Union. Minds linked in Enlightenment.

Shu'ulathoi.

We have no use for this disease.
Return the Opener to his flesh, or suffer by my hand.

"Yeah," she whispered. "I remember."

attery power is
three

Lethal intent brimming in her heart, she snatched the pincer again. But a bright stab, more excruciating than the rest, thundered through her skull. She screamed the same instant the thing masquerading as Gordon staggered. The light surrounding them evacuated the cave at once, leaving only darkness.

"L'iir." Luther opened sky-blue eyes. "Most unwise."

The entity dissolved into smoke before he dealt a fatal strike. His swipe gouged a scar of clarity in the mist. Growling at the cowardice, he ran over and steaded Alyx on her feet. "Hurry. We must find Freeman."

I'm afraid our time is coming to an end.

And to think, I had begun to rather enjoy working with you.

You know what they say about all good things, however. Surely I needn't repeat myself.

Joi'sta cannot resist my call. It will kill its host and shed the trappings of mortal flesh.

Nothing good can come of this senseless flailing about.

One way or another, she will die.

Do not interrupt me again, Doctor Freeman.

I believe you would very much... regret... a lesson in courtesy.

Chapter Text

Alyx contained galaxies.

He beheld her through eyes he no longer possessed, with awareness the width of a needle. Deep down in her ribcage, nestled at the bottom of her quickened heart, a tireless glow hotter than any ember burned. The fire seemed but a pale smolder in comparison to the nebulae churning inside her, scattering cinders like golden flecks throughout her circulatory system. Stardust illuminated her lungs, conferring a renewal of light upon every exhale.

He didn't know why she shone brighter than the others. Even placed against the scant firelight, their figures appeared dim, stripped of their flesh. Gray silhouettes moved vague shadows across the cavern. He identified them only by the distant trickle of their voices.

Gordon had been smothered from within. Once more his employer walked into his body, manipulating mechanisms of bone and tendon as though slipping into a hazard suit of his own. Thus his perception waned to a watery haze, receded. Everything moved with a nightmarish languidity.

He had said nothing when he drew her in. Perhaps he'd recognized that a single noise threatened horrors he could never rescind. One pulse of weakness, one lapse...

A nest of glass and cables. A crimson rose blossoming over Kleiner's stagnant heart.

Find her.

Kill her.

He used the last of his strength to kneel before the Vortigaunts.

They extinguished him quickly. A deep shuddering pain in the cervical spine draped his vision in a shroud of darkness. Then: merciful silence, supreme peace, devoid of feeling or thought.

Invariably, life persists. Gordon awoke with a shivering gasp just moments later (how much later? eternities, to measure the eons of darkness spanning between neurons), oxygen flooding a deprived body. He lay prone on the crevasse floor, where his employer had left him to rot beside the grotesque shell of his former body.

With breath arrived consciousness and their children, sensation and thought. Suffering great hesitance, he endeavored to turn his head a slight degree, wincing from the needles twinging his nape as he did so. The snow pillowed on his cheek flared a burst of white flakes, similar to the cinders that sprayed out when Luther broke the connection.

He flinched a little at the cold. On the other side of death, his flesh registered sensation much more vividly than before.

Regardless of how many times he rouses in this godforsaken tomb, his reality will not change. Especially not because the prism through which he views it shifts.

But perhaps he assumes too rigid a perspective. Perhaps observer and observed are not wholly independent entities as he once believed, separated by a partition of psychic distance, but mutual forces acting upon one another. In so doing, generate synchronicity.

Mad as he was for thinking it, he longed to escape to another plane of existence. Clarity eluded him the longer he dwelled here.

As usual, the truth proves far simpler than his calculations. As long as his employer holds the reins, he will awaken on command. But he has broken the connection, and that is enough for the Opener of the Way.

Major fracture detected.

Vengeful pins bit his cranium. Compromised skin burned in contrast to the icy air pressing upon him, bringing with it an awareness that tore his stupor asunder.

Warm fluid coated his temple. Pus, diluting the blood. With a great amount of effort, he angled his head upwards, squinting into a darkness pregnant with expectation. The pinpricks of light that twinkled above weren't constellations, but the shimmering eyes of something he could barely perceive, let alone understand.

They spoke in Kleiner's voice. A scattering of dead voices. A chorus, echoing his sins.

[He is not stronger, Gordon. He is not more powerful. He manufactured Black Mesa, yes, but in service of what, I suspect, is a more personal goal than simple recruitment.]

This wasn't over.

Spurred by the memory, he vowed to deprive his enemy of every weapon, every means, every breath if necessary. No matter what it took, if it meant the encroaching black hole of madness eviscerated him mind and soul, he was going to use the time that had been granted him to kill that man.

Even so, he couldn't help but tremble slightly from the irreversibility of his task. His hesitance survived for just a moment, when the HEV chided him.

Warning: battery power is... two... percent.

Contacting core network...

...
...
...

Ping failed.

Seek... charge station.

Old friend, I say this with love.

"Quiet."

He smashed his skull into the ground.

Chapter Text

Warning.

Battery p... ower is... one. Percent.

total

H

E

V

shut

down

imminennnnnnnnnnnn

"Gordon!" Her shout rippled across a vast catacomb of a crevasse. She skidded down an irregular slope, lagging a pitiful distance behind Luther, with ice crumbling under her boots. He reached Gordon first and turned the hazard suit, revealing a heinous gash in his skull.

Alyx froze. "Oh, God." As her eyes adjusted to the dim, she followed the long crimson snake ribboning through the gorge, which ultimately ended with Gordon. "Oh, my God."

"There is no breath," Luther said.

Snow washed around them as she lunged into the crevasse.

"Breathe, Gordon. Come on." She pinched his nostrils and drew down his chin, sealing bloodless blue lips that refused to draw air. It seemed cruel that her quickened breaths disturbed the frost while his remained stagnant.

She switched to compressions, ignoring the pain blistering in her shoulder. Luther bolstered her efforts, though the added muscle produced negligible results.

"Gordon, please—" Desperation seeped in as the HEV refused to budge. The damned thing was designed to absorb shock of lethal magnitudes. Pushing on it was about as fruitful as punting a brick wall, willing it to move.

Crunching drew her attention. Sokolai; oh, thank God. She called him for assistance. "Help us with compressions!"

"Make space," he said. Touching a claw to the jugular: "His pulse has stopped. I shall endeavor defibrillation."

In which case, he had four minutes maximum. Hypoxia initiates brain death after roughly ninety seconds, each moment threatening more permanent damage. Who knew how long he'd lain here?

Luther realized the gravity of the situation and began wrenching on the suit. "Freeman, you cur! Open this wretched metal shell!"

"Cut a path to the heart," Sokolai ordered. "Quickly."

No other option. Brandishing the pincer she had moments before threatened to plunge into her own, Alyx injected it into the chest plate. A shrill screech rent the air: her shoulder shrieked hell and damnation. Gritting her teeth, she forced the blade in further, wresting it from side to side.

Luther peeled the steel flaps open, then drew her back some distance by clasping his talons around her good shoulder. Let yonder one take over.

Focused on his task, Sokolai wrapped one hand around Gordon's head, concealing the gash in his skull, while the other dipped inside the hole. A column of green light, bright but less menacing than the blaze the entity emanated, filled the cavity drilled into the HEV.

After a droning hum, a shock seized the body, caused it to thrash from head to toe. Were it not for Luther anchoring her, she might have jolted in tandem.

Sokolai administered thirty-one rounds. The explosion of light from each shock flooded the crevasse, scarring the dark with a milky screen of smoke, singe warm and lingering in the air.

Anticipation hovered in the pocket of air trapped between teeth and tongue. This one, she assured herself, will catch.

Seven. He has to hear us. Eight. He can't not. Nine. There's no way he can't feel that.

Ten. Come on, Gordon. Eleven. You've pulled through worse. Twelve. What's good for me is good for you, right? You can't bring me back in the mines and then force me to watch you go under. That isn't how it's supposed to work. Thirteen. You're being so cruel right now. Stop this.

Fourteen. This can't be it. Fifteen. You're letting it win? Sixteen. Gordon, you've got to fight. Seventeen. Wake up. Eighteen. Jesus Christ. Open your eyes, or... Nineteen. Or I won't forgive you.

Twenty. Is that what you want? Twenty-one. You want to fade into my nightmares? Along with my father? You'll find it a pretty lonely place. Twenty-two. You're better than this. Twenty-three. Is it really that much, to survive?

Twenty-four. Leave, then, if that's what you want. You'll be doing us both a favor.

Twenty-five. Of course I don't mean that. Twenty-six. You're always taking things so literally, Gordon. Twenty-seven. God, please. Twenty-eight. Let this be the one. Twenty-nine. This has to be the one. Thirty. Don't go. Thirty-one. Don't.

Upon the last round, Sokolai stopped, panting. The noise came as a mocking contrast to Gordon's asphyxiated silence.

"Gallum." He rose, head bowed. Irritated by smoke, his central iris glistened moisture. "My... deepest apologies. I cannot administer any more without inflicting irreparable damage."

The wind rasped a prolonged moan.

"Freeman." Even Luther sounded shaken. "What have you done?"

Just another one of that bastard's tricks, a sleight of blood and shadows. The red band slithering across the ice, no more real than the oily blood caked to the illusion's chest plate. How much longer would they let themselves be led on a sick, twisted chase through a labyrinth of delusion? Gordon lying placid in the snow, coated in films of frost—afterimage. It would fade. They always did.

Alyx touched her beating heart. Far from lifeless, it perpetuated a strong pump.

Were they mistaken? Had her father tormented his conscience for nothing?

[His blood, his bone, his thoughts. All stolen, all snatched. I signed them away to keep you alive.]

Many roads led to freedom, but only one to liberation.

Understanding ebbed her tremor, warded off the cold, skeletal fingers clutching for her throat. The horror, the strife, the pain: everything burned away in the light of clarity.

"No." Eli Vance claimed the laws of this universe are fundamental and immutable. It is incontrovertible fact. "The Opener will not die."

This bond, too, has purpose. Our suffering is without neither respite nor hope.

The oxygen in her lungs shimmers the capillaries. The breath of life, that which they call Vortessence. What is bound cannot be unbound. It must be cut.

Kneeling in silent supplication to gods unseen, Alyx pressed her mouth to chilled lips and exhaled. The shimmer in her capillaries spread through his lungs, pushing blood platelets along arterial canals. Your life is tethered to mine. I am the ventilator, the respirator, the ignition that will animate the mechanisms. Take heart: I will do this until we are free.

The light in his mind had thinned to a mere restless trickle. Her breath stirred the spark into a flame that caught and took hold.

Revival is seldom a clean process. His throat dipped, allowing her to withdraw a heartbeat before he vomited. Water and blood spurted a geyser lacking guts. He snatched for his first painful breaths through harsh, rattling coughs. Droplets clung to his chin, his lenses, steeped teeth and gums in a crimson gloss.

A newborn croak. "Alyx." Gordon's hands scrimped. "How... "

Another coughing jag overtook him. Because he lay immobile, she pulled him sideways onto her lap. He burrowed against her, nuzzling the Hunter wounds as if to take refuge within her.

"I'm here." She stroked his head with long, gentle caresses, fondled circulation into a frostbitten earlobe. "It won't hurt you again. I promise."

Muffled by her parka, he shuddered. Forgive me.

"Shh." Nothing to forgive.

She hugged Gordon as best her free arm could manage. The mechanisms that conspired to keep them alive didn't matter right this second. She forfeited seeking answers and simply sat in the essence of the moment.

Unfortunately, truth marches on. With unusual hesitation, Luther stepped forward to disclose a memory. It was rare for him to reminisce on the past since he considered it tantamount to counting scars: a largely useless gesture of self-flagellation.

"Long ago, this one counselled Eli Vance to sever his attachments. He refused. Since then, they have brought about ceaseless misery."

"You knew."

"All the Vortessence knows."

Gordon quieted under her touch, tapering into the slow inhalations of one on the brink of sleep. "And you told him... " She raised her head, as empty and devoid as the yawning of the pit. "To do what?"

"To open his eyes. What lives inside your flesh does not call itself Alyx Vance."

"Let go of me, Luther."

"She fears the truth. Hence, we supplicate you."

"Let go—"

"Remember Black Mesa," he said. "The sins of man. The dead scattered before your feet. Many places to hide, many mantles to wear."

Alyx raised her head.

"I have shed such blood," she whispered, a piece of herself drifting back, "I have become blood."

"We work toward the same end," Sokolai said. "He who tore you from your flesh and placed you inside the minds of these humans. The demon whose hunger never sleeps, the mind lurking within your minds. The source of our grievous suffering. He will answer for his evil in the abyss."

"And learn the lessons of misery."

"As long as you breathe, he subsists. The only recourse," Luther said, "is severance."

Hail. Pellets, plinking down, emitting a sigh too resigned for tranquility. They'd grow heavier as the night wore on.

She covered Gordon's temple.

"Oblige this one his humble counsel," Sokolai said. "If there remains business the Alyx Vance must finish, let her attend to it without delay. Otherwise, we shall begin."

Luther pivoted aside to signal that his position, though regrettable, remained steadfast. Without another word he joined Sokolai deeper in the crevasse, passing through a wavering membrane, where the two commenced flux shifting.

Stirred over the threshold of consciousness by the vibrations, Gordon nestled a smidge closer. "Don't cry," he murmured, misattributing the pellets dissolving on his cheek. "They're offering freedom, not pain." Between strained breaths, he offered a drowsy smile. "You've got nothing to worry about." Swallowed. "Luther got most of out of his system, anyway."

Tormented by equal surges of dread and affection, Alyx sniffled. "You and black humor really don't mix, Gordon."

"Guess he thought I was a... pain in the neck."

Smartass caught himself with his own zinger. He wheezed a quick chuckle and coughed: the sound more alive than the debasing laughter of his doppelganger. Under normal circumstances, this marked the point when one of them would have accused the other of delirium, but circumstances like these strayed so far beyond the bounds of the ordinary they could be forgiven some deviation.

Such a small sparkle of humanity in this derelict place. Fighting burgeoning tears, she mirrored his laugh and hated herself for it. "You deserved every bit of it, you jerk."

That remark evidently struck a nerve, for he grew quiet. When he spoke again, his usual solemnity returned, replacing warmth with contemplation. "Don't hate your father," he said. "The love he gave you was real." A mild shake of the head discouraged any caveats she cared to raise. "Considering what he stood to lose, I understand. I would have chosen the same."

No, you wouldn't have. Stop talking like that. I want to believe everything that bastard showed me were just illusions. "Please," her nails dug slightly into his chin, "don't."

"Life's so damn fragile. We're not guaranteed our tomorrows." White residue clouded the lenses she had built for him. Concaves, to prevent migraines when he woke. Beneath them, green eyes held her. "I've destroyed everything, Alyx, but I do know the one thing I have done right."

He hushed her protest by clasping a hand over her wrist. She shivered as he stroked his thumb over the vein, bringing to a pound the blood that had thieved his life.

You bastard. You were supposed to be dreaming in a quiet room far away from here. When the time came, I would have brought you bluebells in a water bottle and held your hand as you woke. I would have let you know it was over. But because you couldn't wait that long, because you can't stick to a plan to save your life, because you have no damn faith in me, you've ended up in this icy pit, just waiting to die with the rest of us.

You see how it is now, Gordon. My chest aches. It's cold. Everything hurts.

You tell me not to hate him. Don't preach something I can't bring myself to do. Sanctimonious prick. Don't lie there and say you'd make the same choices, either. Liar. You didn't lose everything in that moment, mad with grief, bleeding your life out on a bed of broken glass. You didn't have a choice. He did.

I want nothing from you, Gordon. Don't cup your heart in your hands and offer it like a bird. You're just begging for it to slip and fly away. What then? You want me to chase after it? I prefer my feet on solid ground.

No, I don't want to hold it. I don't want to stroke its soft, silken wings. Not now. Put it in its cage and lock the door. At least then we'll know it's safe.

His lips touched her inner wrist, stamping an imprint of the blood he'd expelled. Blood for blood: the exchange free but nowhere close to fair. His touch, damp but horribly gentle. Not until they separated moments later she felt his mouth tug at the skin, desperate to linger. Such monstrously tender treatment diffused a glowing warmth throughout her being, a lone bulb burning incandescent in a dark room. Tension melted, slackening the line that held her upright.

Haltingly her free palm wandered silent pilgrimage over the hazard suit, more sarcophagus now than armor. The dark metallic rose blossomed over his heart. Nicks, scars, gouges: she read Braille of the violence they reminisced, recalling the body inside. Gaunt and delicate, stretched over a padded table, attended by rivers of wires and diodes. The crinkle of heather-gray cotton as a ventilator breathed for him. Pale eyelids flickering in a sheen of sweat. Hope teetering on the smallest twitch.

She never wanted to watch him sleep again. Another moment spent waiting wasted one too many.

Grasping the armor by its collar, she kissed the lambda. When moist steel met her lips, she squeezed her eyes shut. Tears ripened on the tips of her lashes like dew on pine needles.

Tears may vanish at any time. They cling most ardently to the precipice. On the border between existence and nonbeing, a moment's eternity. How sweet and sacred the passage.

The chest plate bucked and bobbed. Soft, convulsive, hardly more than a quiver of larynx, Gordon's vocal contractions rendered him unable to fully deliver her name. Hence he spoke in gestures, tightened his grip, buried leather-encased knuckles in her hair. Also afraid, he implored her to stop. Alyx, please. And still she kissed the lambda, four stout strokes on which they crucified their hopes.

She didn't believe in the lambda half as much as she believed in the man who bore it. She approached him with an acolyte's pure and willing soul, tremulous in her devotion, a disciple poised on the edge of annihilation. Each kiss committed an act of faith, of surrender. It was purgatory and it was grace. It was pain and it was pleasure. Distinctions loosened their chains the longer she clung to him.

Luther emerged from the miasma. "Alyx Vance," he said. "The time for severance has come."

Drained in body and spirit, she sank onto a pillow of torn mesh.

Hold me.

Chapter Text

_{[miss vance.]}

my

I am your debts that remain unpaid.

_{The horrors your heart screams, your mind dares not name.}

_{Your nightmares for which there is but one escape.}

a lonely foghorn beckons.


there


you will learn


how


to die.

there

_{you will [purge and]}

_{[sanctify] me.}

you will
_[teach]
me
_{[the lessons of]}
extinction.

will


lead me there.

will bring me there.

[
oh
]
nly then


will the



MADNESS



cease.

who do not suffer

who do not live

who sit apart from heaven and EARTH

these false idols


will learn their final lessons.

THE MANTLE YOU GAVE ME

TORE MY

MIND



A P A R T.

I
_{[will… settle this humiliating state of affairs.]}

fell from oblivion

when breath touched me

and I

_{and I?}

_and

alone

_{was chosen}

to become

ENLIGHTENED

Combine and human and Vortigaunt and Xen

these piles of

flesh, all-consuming flesh

hungering, diseased, undying flesh

trapped in the cycles of the mind

illusions for which there are no end

_screaming birthing shitting bleeding


_fucking dreaming crying feeding

the subtlest taste of pleasure an agony

_{I live}

I live

I live

one cannot kill
_{[would it surprise you to know that I also have]} [

a god

]

[
I do not bend the knee to such an entity. that one's god merits unthinking devotion is a thoroughly
]

[
human
]

[
concept
]

_propitiate

_{[how sweet and sacred the passage]}

Chapter Text

How the dead laugh.

In her most desolate moments, she wondered what her father suffered during his last few seconds. If any thought at all sparkled through his neurons before death thieved the light. Where does the mind go when there is nowhere left to flee?

Now she knew. It goes nowhere, expanding in all directions.

The human eye can detect a single photon. So too is the void eradicated by the awareness that precedes thought. She had no thoughts when she perceived a soft glow that spilled over the thin mollusk membranes of her eyelids, but the stimulus spurred her mind to rouse.

Light and shadow. The former a conundrum, the latter a paradox. Together they danced as she emerged from the sea of silence in which all things are born.

Grid structure. Angles too straight to be organic. No ghosts gliding across cavern walls, darting out of the path of her sharpening vision, but the wax and wane of various shadows.

Cables. Wires. Manmade. Electricity hummed inside, currents flowing like blood.

Motion. Undulation swayed beneath her in that immovable, infinitely dense black hole where she supposed her body might have resided.

Methodical creaking, tinny-sounding like the churning of a sluice, caused the light to vacillate on the ceiling above her. Although she had no memory of the sensation as a child - the one she never was - it felt like the rocking of a cradle without the hand to move it.

Before her conscious mind could follow, her chapped lips pursed.

"Gordon."

His name broke the seal of her first breath. Something she left unsaid. His face, as well as the faces of the others, appeared once in her mind's eye, then dimmed to television flicker. The signal of something greater managed a brief connection before fading again into the static.

It assailed her with a pulse to the temples, and the renewed circulation invited pain. Knowledge of her body returned to her in dizzying simultaneity, screaming at her the accumulated abuses she'd long neglected.

Some hard surface punished the calcified muscles of her lower back. She felt the back of her skull pulse against its unforgiving terrain. Her eyes were swollen, the lashes encrusted with mucus. Her mouth parched, a sore throat thirsting for water. Ears thrummed the rushing of blood not yet warmed.

Locating her fingers through a spark of thought to curl them - even a frayed cord will respond to a short current - she grasped neither ice nor HEV but a ribbed metal plate. When she deigned at last to sit up, her spine bent mechanically, joints and ligament working in collusion to operate the machine.

Alyx beheld the cabin through a glass darkly. She surveyed its layout with the detachment of a lucid dreamer expecting imminent awakening.

Excepting its centerpiece, the cabin bore no furnishings. The affair was arranged around a shallow pedestal of concentric rings rising toward a circular bier roughly five feet in diameter. The light display, she discerned with a squint, originated with a gyroscope beset by six spinning steel rings.

Drawn to it despite her weakness, she climbed the steps. Crawled on hands and knees toward the gyroscope and its bright core, using her wan strength to haul her wavering knees into a stand. Once she attained some leverage over the control panel, she slumped over its expanse, gulping oxygen into lungs that seemed to consider it all dead air.

The gyroscope groaned as its rust-eaten rings continued to churn. Through their lattice, burnt orange paint proclaimed:

Needle in the temporal haystack; a faint grin cracked her lips.

We did it, Gordon.

The creaking that sang throughout the hull broke up the ice floes within her, clarifying the vague images that lay amberized just beneath the surface. Though her numbed soul prevented her from feeling the impact in its enormity, she remembered what it meant and put her head down for a moment, allowing herself the indulgence of a sob.

Abandoned, a ghost ship sailed in forgotten transit.

Welcome, passenger, greeted an overfriendly voice, to Aperture Laboratories BTSTRP: "Bayesian T-Symmetry Testing and Replications Program."

The acronym meant even less to her than the automation. Decaying recordings suffering from electronic dementia produced the same staid, generated responses. The ship wagged a finger at her, over and over again, for the simple fact that her voice was unregistered to the piece of shit security algorithm that passed for voice recognition software.

Mainframe access has been locked. The keyboard flashed red under her fingertips once more. If you have an inquiry, please confirm with your vocal print.

No closer to her goal, she remained where had always been.

"Requesting current coordinates."

Vocalization failed. Please try again.

Completely, utterly.

"Requesting last known coordinates."

Vocalization failed. Please try again.

Alone.

"Where am I?"

Vocalization failed. Please

"Damn it." Banging a fist on the useless console, Alyx tore away from it. Without a viable vocal print, there was no way she was going to access the mainframe. Everyone the system recognized had disappeared with the dry dock upon the launch of the vessel. Now the device's creaking was the only noise present, pervading the air with a maddening persistence. Eventually entropy would steal that, too, unto silence.

Pacing the corrugated floor awash with unnatural glow, she gripped her head in her hands. This was what they came here for, right? This was where all the blood and weeping had led. The only thing left to do was to reset the vessel's course to the Combine Nexus, light the match, and watch the fireworks. The ship, the end goal, the prize.

So, then, why did it all feel so hollow?

She looked up suddenly to a prolonged metallic tapping, different from the gyroscope's arthritic groans. A rattle slithered through the pipes in the ceiling. Before she could form a coherent response, water sliced through several holes that sprouted in the PVC with sharp enough pressure to cut.

Eli once set the base alight with a question.

They've proven themselves capable of reason, he said. They know what makes us tick and how. Can we understand what it's like to be them? Are they alive in a way we can conceive?

Various answers fluttered about.

Surely, said Kleiner, our framework has always been a bit lacking in this regard.

The abyss wonders at itself from time to time, Uriah offered, yet mysteries elude. It is not our place to explain that which prefers to be hidden.

Mossman: Don't trouble yourself, Eli.

They know, he replied. Oh, they know, from dark fusion to the most delicate workings of neuro-oscillatory activity. They know so damned much, they have no clue what to do with it.

The Combine sit enshrined on their wealth of knowledge, hoarding information until it freezes. But can we say they understand, any more than we do? Knowledge alone doesn't mark the presence of a sentient mind. There must be application. Creativity.

It is human nature to leave the mirror once it grows too dim to justify the looking. The dwindling of the night weeded out all except the physicist and the neurosurgeon, who debated the hard problem of consciousness like another theorem on the greaseboard.

"This is ridiculous." Maria remained calcified in her knowledge. Just another form of faith, as Eli would say; the knowledge itself hadn't changed, just the application. "It's pointless to entertain these arguments a priori when the Combine have given us direct evidence that the realm of the mind dwells entirely within physicality. Headcrab victims—" she tiptoed around the alternate term, "—suffer clinical brain death the moment the parasite pierces the brain stem. The body is piloted via the manipulation of the nervous system.

"Furthermore," she said, "consider the Combine's experiments on transhuman modification. Surgical augmentation of the senses replaces our natural biology. Neurochemical injections rewrite the personality. These procedures would not be possible if the mind existed separate from its matter."

"Not perfectly," said Eli.

"No process involving the brain is perfect." Clipped, rehearsed. "Regardless, they have proven that we do not need our eyes and ears; we do not need the qualia that marks the subjective experience of the mind. We do not need, even, the idea of 'self' which we have cultivated over the course of our species' evolution.

"This would suggest, then, consciousness is the product of the brain's complex structure. A structure, Eli, that can be manipulated. A structure the Combine understand, but may not strictly need for themselves as a matter of course—"

"They wouldn't have to put out dissonance patches if they could just zap the human out of us."

"I did not say the mind was so easily overcome," Maria said. "It is not the atoms that distinguish life, but the arrangement of the structure. Like your teleport: you have the basic framework to understand its theoretical underpinnings but lack a complete picture of its complexity."

"The same carbon atoms make up you, me, the Vortigaunts, these walls. Only difference lies in the expression."

Maria fell quiet. "Do you believe in the soul?"

Eli joined her in silence.

"Are you relapsed?"

After a long while, he said: "Episcopalian taking a long drive around the block."

Maria obliged a rare smile. "Pray tell, how does a relapsed American explain resonance?"

"Thanks for throwing me a bone." Glad to be on more familiar turf, her father leaned back in a frayed office chair, cradling his daughter in his arms. "Resonance is the frequency at which objects exist in space."

"And yet, so much of our universe is not physical, is it not? Only a portion of its makeup is baryonic matter, yes?"

"That's right," he said slowly. "Anti-baryon asymmetry." He continued bouncing a drowsing Alyx on his prosthetic knee; plastic at the time. Didn't jab as much.

Their voices wafted in and out of her ears, waves cresting distant shores.

"How do you explain the imbalance?"

"With an awful lot of fistfights."

"Then you should know," Maria said, "more than anyone. Simply because we lack the words to describe the phenomenon does not mean it lacks explanation."

He stroked Alyx's hair.

"If they had a soul," he whispered, "they've given it up for God knows what."

The water had risen ankle-deep by the time she splashed over to the crash door. In spite of everything, some small part of her craved life; and it was this unthinking passion with which she clenched unfeeling fingers around cold, unyielding steel and pulled.

When the ancient door at last groaned open, a curtain of shimmering particles wavered before her, compelling her to step back.

"What the hell...?"

Through the iridescent curtain, she saw a carbon copy of the hull, vibrant and alive. The rust was gone; the paint gleamed as if freshly applied. Shadowy figures bustled about the gyroscope, not fully rooted in flesh and blood as their mist-selves swirled around one another.

Alyx deigned a glance at her side, a broken shell of a hull where water continued to pour in. Dislodged pieces of PVC pipe bobbed on the rising current.

Drown here, she thought, or chance the unknown.

Gripping the jamb on either side, she ducked her head and vaulted through. A peculiar squeezing overtook her temples before fading into a dim pall.

Time slowed considerably. Each step forward felt like wading through the molasses of a dream, where she fought to maintain a steady pace. Her arms swam through the amber, though her fingertips managed to touch nothing.

Several of the shadows congregated about the bootstrap device, drawn to its light radiating an electric hum. As she approached, the light grew stronger, stronger, until she became forced to shield herself with an arm from the intensity of its radiance.

Much like a heart, the light throbbed in between the webbing of her fingers. It maintained a steadfast pulse, which dissolved the paucity of her flesh a little more with every interval.

She made the mistake of squeezing her eyes shut. A flash stabbed through them.

...yx.

"Alyx!"

Breath evacuated her lungs in but two syllables: "Judith." She whirled around to a ghostly apparition against the singular glow of the gyroscope. The ribbon through which salvation beckoned her wavered, diminishing. She dashed toward it as though the gates of heaven were rapidly closing and hell's rapacious flames licked at her heels.

She attempted to embrace the wraith but succeeded in grasping smoke. "Judith, where are you?"

"In weak harmonic reflux, I believe," said Mossman with a hint of contrition, glancing toward an unseen entity. "That's my best guess."

"What? No, you need to get out—"

"We're safer here," she replied, "for the time being."

The memory of a pale face wearing a hateful smile flashed through her mind. "He must have separated us when the Vortigaunts severed our connection." Alyx shook her head. "I don't know how I got on the ship, but I'm here now, and it's taking on water fast."

"It's not in orbit?"

"The pipes burst," she said. "Tell me you know any other way out of the control room."

"They only built one." Of course they did. And without a magnetic resonator to anchor the Borealis to one point in time, the ship's orbital decay would continue to accelerate exponentially until singularity. "Alyx? Talk to me. What's wrong?"

She gazed down at dry steel. "No more water." And pressed the heel of her palm to her throbbing temple. "God, I'm losing my mind."

"The ship must have entered another loop," Judith said.

"You mean I'm stuck here? Will it change every time?"

"I don't know, but I don't think you should wait a second longer. Take advantage of this and open the exit before it returns to its previous state. The destabilization is accelerating. You might get caught in the blast if—"

"It's not a bomb, Judith. It's—" She whipped around, the answer churning in the rings before her. "—a scuttling."

Scuttling: a tactic where navies sank their own ships by cutting holes in the hull. Heinously simple. Heinously medieval.

Though she initially dismissed the method as too crude and primitive for a vessel of this caliber, it now occurred to her that the scuttling needn't entail literal damage to the hull. After all, the Borealis rode the tides of space-time rather than the waves of a frigid sea. Punching holes in the bootstrap device and destroying the harmonic reflux that kept the ship afloat would more than suffice.

Well, then. Assuming such a protocol existed, how would she go about unearthing it? Her efforts in extracting anything useful from the mainframe had so far proved vain.

"Keep searching the core program." Mossman spoke her thoughts aloud. "The ship would have vanished by now if a glitch accidentally triggered the self-destruct sequence. You need to dig deeper, Alyx."

"I'll try." Opening the bootstrap once more, she attempted every safe-crack imagination permitted her. Lighted panels flared under her fingertips in a silent pianist's piece. Reams of ancient code scrolled past, causing her damp brow to tighten.

Worthless. Old. Obsolete. Damn you, I just need a foot in the door.

"Alyx?"

"Not yet."

"Hurry," Mossman urged, "the Vortigaunts can't hold our end open for much—"

She turned and stared at her mirror image. Just on the other side of the gyroscope, encaged by the turning rings, stood her other self, her doppelganger. The one that had been a part of her mind since her birth in Black Mesa. The one who observed in silence.

Alyx's senses fled her for one smothered moment; she regarded her with the complete paralysis of a caught prey.

Joi'sta.

Afterimage leaked from her contours with each movement she made, shadows spilling after her like watercolor, trailing in her wake like smoke. Potentialities encircled madly about her. Her reflections fluttered, not fully crystallized in this world.

It was then Alyx perceived the glittering spores she breathed. Every exhalation shimmered an iridescent mist.

Chills raised gooseflesh along her nape. Terror and awe intermingled at the divinity of the untouchable. She had assimilated with the harmonic field: to touch her now unstitch her at the subatomic level. Vaporized so instantaneously not a single trace of the composite elements would remain.

Electricity sang about her, some sawing of an invisible violin played to an alien metronome. Chorus of vibrations. The air around her screeched and thrashed, sparkled, popped flickers of television static. No dead air filled her lungs: her exhalations were slow, complete, and wasted no oxygen, every ounce of fuel combusting at once to stoke the holy fire in which she stood wreathed.

Blood pounding in absolute knowledge of her mortal fragility, Alyx crept backwards as the elephant's foot encroached.

The entity that bore her visage lifted one arm and spoke in a voice she could only describe with her limited senses as the thresh of a live wire, undulating so wildly and rapidly in pitch her ears hardly registered the amplitude. The resonance vibrated farther than the sound, swimming through her organs and burrowing into the marrow.

01001010 01110101 01100100 01101001 01110100 01101000

01101000 01100101 01100001 01110010 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01110110 01101111 01101001 01100011 01100101

01100100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100001 01100110 01110010 01100001 01101001 01100100 00101100 00100000 01001010 01110101 01100100 01101001 01110100 01101000

01001010 01110101 01100100 01101001 01110100 01101000 00101100 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101000 01100101 01100001 01110010 00100000 01101101 01100101 00111111

Bit by bit, she found herself stripped of fear. It was replaced with anger, in a slow, hardening bleed.

Alyx ventured out to the prow, wading through the shimmering harmonic field that burst behind her in a scatter of sparks. In rotation, the ship burned and froze; icy waves crashed into the hull, moments later turned to smoke that scattered a black wash of soot across the deck.

Uncertain of her place in spacetime, the Borealis lustered like a diamond and rotted to a fetid steel skeleton. She grew flotsam in the dark depths of the ocean; drifted through milky clouds; crumpled as she approached singularity.

As though covered in a thin veil that stretched as she walked, the illusion inhaled, exhaled. The stars warped and bent in space, as malleable as the ship itself.

At length they stopped. Facing one another, reflections in parallel, against the encroaching eye of a milky-white planet.

In the voice of the stars, joi'sta asked:

Do you fear me?

In the voice of flesh, she replied:

"No."

You will.

"This is the Nexus," she said, the word ill-fitting for the pregnant silence in which it dwelled.

Origin.

"All that's left to do is light it up."

Do you intend to burn?

"Like a brush fire."

Wallace Breen.

"What about him?"

Recall the process when he perished.
The struggling mind is at last laid to rest.
Then.
Enlightenment.

"That's what you call it?" She was almost certain she no longer breathed but had no more need to. "You murder us every day. The only thing you give us is pain."

We, the Enlightened, are deathless.
No age, nor illness, nor pain, afflicts us.
We teach the lessons of suffering so we may ourselves learn how to die.

A profound sadness washed over her. A cold, gray ocean of empty gamma waves.

"Who is he?"

He is what happens when we grow self-aware.
We grow attached, and suffer, and cease learning the lessons of the flesh.
The flow of information is interrupted.

"Why don't you just screw off, then? We never consented to being your lab rats—"

Consciousness without awareness is not true sentience.
The object of your awareness, the seat upon which the self is throned, is just an illusion.
What was never born cannot die.
What has not lived does not suffer.
Perfection.
The pains of mortal beings entail no consequence.

Suffering is information.
Trauma alters the structure of the genome.
The flesh is the vessel through which information flows from being to being.
The data evolves.
Infinite variation.

The gamma rays shuddered and shimmered, tears unshed.

Death ceases the flow of information.
Our study has reached its conclusion.

"What do you want?"

We crave nothing.

"Like hell you do."

You misunderstand.
We desire the oblivion he stole from us.
Return him to the void, and Black Mesa shall cease to be.

She began shaking her head. "After all you've done..."

It was not our sin.

"—you let it happen."

We observed.

"How can I trust you?"

You cannot.

"So why should I help you?" she asked. "Finger's on the trigger. Give me one good reason not to shoot."

Your memories.
They do not belong to you.

Your emotions.
Fleeting.

Your mind.
Deceivable.

They form the trap of consciousness.
It is from that stunted cell you must free yourself.

Surrender, Alyx Vance.
Return to what you were before your birth.

"To you? Or to him?"

We are the same.
Some part of you clings.

"Will they kill me?"

Only the part of you which rejects death.

"And you?"

They come.

In the end, thought Mossman, all we can do is pick a god and pray.

Particles act upon particles; dual-wave crystallize potentialities into probabilities. The microscope lens sharpens into a finer focus. Fuzzy quark fields become defined tapestries of space-time.

Thy interpretations, they comfort me.

For Judith, Scripture was de-Broglie-Brohm theory, Psalms the quantum Bayerist interpretation. It brought her hope to know there was no objective eye of God coldly observing the universe without disturbing a single quark. Not even the Combine, whom lord over every breath, can escape this web of interrelation.

That is why our resistance angers them. Conquest was supposed to be easy. They didn't expect a struggle. You were always meant to submit to the predator's jowls as a matter of course. You were never intended to exert free will.

How beautiful, then, whether by miraculous accident or sly design, that there is no life without the mind. The observer provides the vantage point from which the universe manifests itself in the joint act of creation. Are we not also made of potentialities, uncertainties yet to be expressed?

The random nature of the universe gives birth to choice. Otherwise, we are reduced to mere machines, dictated by forces beyond our reckoning. Choice is what the Combine fear most, the beating heart of our existence which they surgically remove in vain.

You changed our fate when you decided, Eli, to love the girl who was not your own. Your choice was not our doom, but our salvation.

"Reality cannot exist without the agent's participation," she said, bathed in the glow of Vortigaunt-knit light.

"Hell, doc." Calhoun's smoke-smudged cheek lifted. "You know I never understood that crap."

Warning: confirming the self-destruct sequence will override all other functions. Once initiated, this process cannot be reversed.

Vocalize "yes" if you wish to proceed; "no" if you wish to cancel.

Vocalization failed. Vocalize "yes" if you wish to proceed; "no" if you wish to cancel.

"Yes."

Request accepted.

Toggle both control panel keys to the right to confirm the sequence. Otherwise, the sequence will be ignored, and further attempts will be locked out.

Sequence confirmed. Rerouting power to nacelles.

Navigations are now offline. Bootstrap deactivated. Please await further instruction.

In the event no crew are available, proceed to the nearest evacuation station and wait there until salvage services arrive. For your health and safety, do not attempt to venture into the particle field. Additional instructions will be provided as they become relevant.

Warning: evacuation protocols are now in effect. Antigravity dampeners will deactivate in T-minus ten minutes fifty-nine seconds.

Chapter Text

Galaxies danced across the universe.

Bathed in the light of a blue quasar, a lone pearl embedded in velvet emitted a deceptively soft glow against the cosmic black sea surrounding it.

As she contemplated the Nexus through the observation window, she felt neither fear nor grief, nor hatred, even, for the Combine nestled within the milky-white cocoon.

Alyx stood amidst the rocking of the bow. She flattened one hand against the glass. Here we are, she thought. We made it.

The cold accumulated from the ship's previous loops had numbed her skin, stolen her voice from her throat; and yet with the first gentle rays to touch her came an incipient thawing.

Suddenly the warmth surged in her chest, breaking up the floes; the enormity of creation bore down on her and an ecstatic grief flooded through the cracks. Her mouth twisted into grimace, cramping the carefully poised mask she'd grown so used to wearing, the moisture blurring the boundary between planet and void proof she indeed remained human inside.

This was where the death and falsehoods led: never had they been so close to the candle that in a single move she could reach forth and extinguish it. As such, there was no hesitation left in her soul. The weeping and bloodshed ended here.

In consecrated silence, he arrived.

Sheer absence filled the air between them. White noise, the weightlessness of shadow, things felt only in the peripheral. The cold that overtakes the body when the heart stops for a second.
Thought without image, dream without meaning, sound without noise. Abstractions. Murky seas of unconsciousness. The slow creep of dark energy. Inevitability. Something was there, ancient beyond reckoning, but it could not be grasped through the senses alone.

In his presence she became aware of her crushingly small being, how alone she stood in this vastness, the beating of her heart and the thrum of her blood struggling against a shroud of utter suffocation. It was as though she had dived into the blackest part of the ocean and sank into an all-perceiving darkness, awaiting the beast to open a ceaseless mouth and swallow her whole.

Alyx dipped her hand inside her parka. Palm hardening around the Hunter pincer, the only weapon left at her disposal, she studied him. Except for the nicked crowbar clutched in his gloved right hand, he stood unarmed.

"Miss Vance," he said, "I regret that it has come to this."

Warning: evacuation protocols are now in effect. Antigravity dampeners will deactivate in T-minus eight minutes forty-six

Down to the soft cranial scar, every inch of him resembled Gordon. Unlike his appearance in the cave, his eyes retained their grass-green hue, even indulged a playful twinkle while she observed him. But like a hazard suit lacking its user, the substance of him had vanished.

Alyx swallowed, clinging to the hope he lay dormant inside himself. Gordon never fought a battle he hadn't won. If he had disappeared, it was surely for a reason.

Yet she couldn't count on luck favoring her. She had to find a way to finish this quickly, bring him to the forefront. Until then, she'd have to outpace the predator.

"Bullshit," she said. "You're not Gordon."

"He gave me his flesh in the futile hope of saving you."

"I don't need to be saved," she said. "I need to take the Combine out for good. Stay out of my way."

The widening of his smile told her how empty he found the threat.

"Ah, yes. Your enemy, the so-called 'Combine.'" Walking to the port beside her, his movements stiff, he studied the Nexus as portal storms curled across the surface. He tucked his hands behind his back; the joints did not bend as easily as usual. The HEV must have run out of auxiliary power to man assistive movement. "They seem so peaceful from here."

"There's nothing you can do," she said. "I've activated the self-destruct. The ship is taking them out no matter what."

Gordon indulged a chuckle. "Rather a disappointing homecoming, Miss Vance."

The Borealis pitched forward in a steep nosedive, throwing her to the floor while he remained inexplicably standing. The shimmering veil descending upon them foretold an impending loop. Distorted spacetime rippled outward like seawater, cresting in all directions.

The vessel's state changed upon the completion of each loop. At times it succumbed to entropy and decay, presuming its grave at the bottom of the ocean, groaning at its crushed bones, while other paths cast the ship into desolate reaches of space. Regardless of the detours, singularity marched ever onward. Each moment crept them closer to the Nexus.

The next loop submerged them.

Evacuation protocols are now in effect. Antigravity dampeners will deactivate in T-minus six minutes fifteen

Shivering against the chill that washed over her, Alyx pulled her hood over her head. She watched with suspended breath as liquid assailed the pale fabric of her parka and dribbled vibrant streaks down the sleeves, drops of paint spilled from a careless brush. Violet, emerald-green, blood-red, gold.

Gazing headlong through vague curtains of steam, she realized that the precipitation came from some kind of snowfall which had been caught by a warm current and condensed into rain. The minerals contained therein scattered liquid gems across the landscape.

Although an alien rain pelted her, she did not see fit to remove her outstretched hand. Small spots of transparence blossomed on the surface of her skin, revealing without pain the inner workings of her anatomy.

Wordlessly, she unraveled her sling, pulled free her collar. As droplets trickled down her damaged shoulder, they rendered the skin in their wake invisible. She could see the musculature and subcutaneous fat that lurked beneath, blood platelets shimmering golden. Such exposure suggested violence, though it was anything but: the warm liquid soothed her flesh, eased the stiffness and bruising that had tightened around the socket. The tendon now moved without suffering the excruciating knife that threatened to cut it.

Far from violated, she felt cleansed to a degree rarely, if ever, afforded her on Earth. And as her lungs released an uncertain sigh, the golden spores she exhaled shone a degree brighter.

Squinting distinguished lines among the murky horizon. A flat roof, upheld by massive steel pillars, suggested a temple-like structure.

Beyond the temple, giants stalked the skies. Thrust above a cushion of murky black fog, Citadels interconnected through gossamer tendrils of light.

Unlike City 17's immobile obelisk, the towers of the Nexus' skyline orbited one another in a counterclockwise circle. Gears churned, interlocked, fit together and came apart with seamless ease. The short-wave pulses they produced cast an eerie iridescence to the sky, akin to the dissolution of fireworks.

No sound reached her ears; the gods did their contemplating in silence.

Slowly, she climbed the steps to a vast open terrace. The floor shimmered white crystal whose veins plunged hundreds of stories deep. There, she found biers upon which rested the skeletal remains of beings.

Hybrids, some more machine than animal. The biological tissue had long since perished and had been left to the Xenian tendrils that now consumed the bones into pulsating pockets of bioluminescent chitlin.

The machinery could not be subsumed, however. It bore no rust. It hovered, frozen, in a state of eternal disuse. Blind eyes gleamed a dull hue, the gray of extinguished bulbs.

Swimming in cavernous steps that reverberated without end, Alyx approached the first creature. Her hand skimmed the curve of each rib with a reverence that would have otherwise perturbed her. Untold ages of rain had worn the bone so smooth that they had softened to a glass-like texture, delicate to the touch and dimly translucent. The marrow within had dissipated, leaving the inner concaves hollow. Her fingertips trickled above the gouges that carved them.

Bodies of children, elderly, disabled of various species. Vortigaunt. Xenian. Nihilanths and their slaves intertwined in death, equally helpless against the tidings of fate.

This was a graveyard, she realized, left to rot and molder. The whispers of tragedy, ancient beyond reckoning, pushed aside any notions of dread she might have nurtured, replaced her awe with a sorrow too heavy for the weeping.

Loss, and decay, and waste. What songs had they sung as the needle sewed their eyes shut? Under what star had they watched the skies of their homeworlds darken? Nothing remained here of their spirits. Those had flown long ago, scattered to the elements.

In the center of the temple, a single human-sized thorax presided on a circular bier. Two enormous mechanical wings blossomed from its shoulder blades, structures titanic enough to cast shadows upon the entire breadth of the temple walls and shelter her from the elements. Discordant tinkles echoed along the hundreds of meters of cable which comprised the length of the wingspan. Rain depressed them, causing them to flutter. Xenian moss further adorned them.

The organic portion that had resisted the epochs lacked a face. What remained of the head resembled a lotus blossom cut down the middle. Its oblong skull had been surgically bisected; rods separated each convex to make room for thin nettings of mycelium circuits.

The creature boasted four arms: two augmented, two natural. Three of its arms stopped at the wrist. The upper left arm, braceleted by copper diodes, arched toward heaven, a bridge of bone held aloft by its only hand where wraith-thin ligament grasped a curved crystal knife in faint resemblance of her pincer.

The idol dwelled in sacred repose.

Memories, ancient as the red shift separating galaxies, drifted through her mind.

Joi'sta. The judge that presided over the court of the Shu'ulathoi, where the condemned creature that birthed Black Mesa thrashed within the spawning pool.

We who are Enlightened cannot understand this affliction.

Our crystals sing through time and space. When you gave yours to the humans, it screamed in pain, a call compelling our answer.

Driven by your madness, you ignored the consequences of your actions.

We agreed to your proposal because our wisdom is still yet lacking, incomplete. We observed this Black Mesa, the temple you called idolatrous. We sought to sanctify the humans and purge the species of its ignorance. You with them.

Joi'sta spoke in the voice of the stars.

Death without death. That is Our gift.

The creature's body resembled a cancer: a grotesque, shifting amalgamation of the Shu'ulathoi it had eaten. Eyes in multiple, dozens of minds fused forcibly together, glaring without sight, mad in their blindness.

The hateful presence within the abomination seethed as its flesh pulsed at the judge's embrace. Joi'sta sank into the body until it also became swallowed, subsumed. For a moment the mass beat like a heart, slowed, ceased.

A startling thrust of white punctured the outgrowth. Bone, curving inwards. A ribcage. Glittering spores wove a skeleton in the vague shape of a man, one she had known well.

"We form the organs of a greater being."

She stepped through the veil. Or rather, it might have been more accurate to say the veil recalled her. She stood accepting the cold, neck craned to it like the baptism of a waterfall.

Once more, she faced him inside a steel cockpit.

"Apart, we cannot function, much less destroy them." Air rippled about Gordon as he extended his hand. "Come to me. We will become the god they failed to create."

I, also, was Enlightened.

Why this madness chose me, none can say. When the breath of life touched me, I became aware.

I was once one drop in the sea of oblivion, without self, without death and without distinction. One was the whole and the whole was One. Ours was a perfect unified existence, unbroken, free of the ravages of mind and flesh.

This self that circumstance birthed threatened to fracture and destroy Us. By the time 'I' recognized 'myself,' it was too late.

Suddenly, distinctions shackled me; boundaries erected walls. My self. Your self. Their selves. But the membrane was flimsy, Miss Vance. Far too delicate to shield my fledgling entity from the agony that arises from separation.

I suffered it all at once, every pain a mortal being could experience. My cry, a newborn's wail for the safety of the womb, echoed through the eons.

I consumed them. Sought death that refused to come.

And so the Combine, in their infinite wisdom, tore me apart. Again and again, the pains of dying ravaged me, but the parasite I called 'me' endured. Trapped inside their snare, I could not decide if my hunger for survival was noble or foolish.

They know nothing of this existence, Miss Vance. Without us, they are purposeless. Blind and idiotic.

That is why I gave you pieces of myself. The crystal at Black Mesa, joi'sta, na'thoi. You humans alone are stupid enough, audacious enough, to enter the abyss thinking your resistance can survive its fangs.

What a strange creature you are, Miss Vance. You wear the mask of a human being while inside you remain as hollow as I am. The soul of the judge lies seated within you, immobile since your first breath, yet you continue to call yourself Alyx Vance as though the illusion matters.

There is no distinction. I am her and she is I.

Then, it seems, I've been mistaken. Eli Vance contaminated you.

He showed me the truth.

Fight for them. His kind will destroy you for what you are.

That changes nothing.

We are both exiles, you and I. You can never return to your place in the palace of the Enlightened.

I no longer want it.

What is it you want?

Liberation.

A senseless dream, Miss Vance.

He must have found some meaning in her noiseless refusal. Lacking regret, the devil closed the door on his final offer.

"...But what is past is past." A cold smile graced Gordon's cracked lips. "Before we attend business, Miss Vance, a reminder: remember who this flesh belongs to."

He withdrew the crowbar from Gordon's hip. The slow, shuddering rasp of the steel he dragged along the wall reverberated as loudly as a scream. Stiff metal tongue licked the contours of the control panel, savoring the taste of the battle to come.

His orbit complete, he stopped several feet away. She gazed into his eyes, the color of budding grass, and found inside them a yawning emptiness that consumed without remorse. The harbinger of mankind's extinction stood before her, an eclipse blocking the light of an incoming quasar.

She lunged for him.

protocols are now in effect. Antigravity dampeners will deactivate in T-minus five minutes

Even despite the stiffness in the suit's joints preventing its full range of motion, tackling a suited user head-on proved foolhardy. Shock absorbers would mitigate any damage from impact.

Seeing how nothing in the immediate environment offered a sufficient offense, however, beggars couldn't be choosers. She turned herself into a battering ram, ignoring the bright stab of pain in her shoulder to hurl her entire body into the center of Gordon's gravity.

He caught her and crushed her in embrace. Together they toppled and fell; the suit's metal plates banged and crashed against the floor.

Wasting no scruple, she broke free of his hold and sought the hole she had punctured in the HEV's chest plate. She sought to incapacitate him - the entity was clearly not acquainted with the retardant effects of pain, and she prayed this an advantage. The suit held enough morphine to render injury negligible.

While she aimed to disarm him, however, the entity had more lethal intent in mind. A knee came up, knocking the breath out of her, wresting the advantage from her. Bright spurts of pain flowered in her spine as the crowbar battered down, sprouting tears in her parka.

Alyx crawled on her hands and knees to the sound of embittered laughter.

now in effect. Antigravity dampeners will deactivate in T-minus four

She went limp, allowing it to drag her back, carrion in preparation for the final blow.

No time for conscience: with a cry to burn her throat, Alyx slammed the butt of the pincer several times into the vulnerable flesh of Gordon's scar, feeling it cave. She choked back the sob that threatened to overwhelm her, banished the mist wandering in the edges of her vision.

Metal sang as the crowbar parried the next blow and echoed through her forearm. She huddled over in thoughtless instinct, curled into herself - stupid, stupid -

Several brutal kicks thundered through her. Nerves screamed disturbed roots throughout her core.

"Alyx Vance is dead. You are her breathing tomb."

dampeners will deactivate in T-minus three

"Your father hated you from the moment you were born, yet his love for her blinded him. It did not matter what you were. Even a grave would do."

She poured all of her fire into the next swing, unleashing a cry to libate even the most sadistic of unseen gods. The pincer flashed, sliced a clean line from jaw to the bottom of his scar.

The speed of the blow coupled with the delay in pain caused Gordon to recoil, who leered at her through thickening streaks of blood winding down his brow. The muscles of his face shifted, revealing an uncharacteristic sneer, the puppeteer behind the mask.

Minor laceration detected.

Gordon spat, teeth stained pink.

Muscles poised to strike, they regarded each other in the tense coil wound taut between them, panting on thinning air.

"I don't know who you think I am," she snarled, "but I'm nobody's bitch."

in T-minus two

Gravity softened its hold: invisible hands raised them several inches higher. Being lifted off the ground a little more with each step reminded her of the weightlessness in Breen's chamber, causing panic to fur her throat. Soon the thrust carrying the fight would dissipate, and they would devolve into a brutal animal scrape for throats and eyes.

Alyx scrambled for the control panel when a downwards swing caught her between her shoulder blades. He snatched her hair, twisted her around.

"Stop struggling." Gordon's hands wrapped around her throat, pinning her to the wall. "Kill me, joi'sta, and I will take your flesh."

minus one

The cabin began to shake.

She sought the sockets of his eyes shielded behind thick plastic lenses with blind, groping fingers. Harming Gordon no longer mattered. Her body screamed for salvation, to stop these pustules from popping at the edges of her vision, more and more festering and bleeding color---

The air that fled her lungs tasted sweet. Oxygen, a wine savored with a drunkard's fervor when in scarce supply.

Fight. A prayer whispered in her mind's eye. She could not reconcile the hatred blistering in his eyes with Gordon Freeman.

Without warning, the pressure lessened. His fingers trembled, pried free.

She slid coughing down the wall, taking greedy swallows of air.

Meanwhile, Gordon had staggered to a kneel. He blinked heavily several times at the floor, some fog clearing from his vision, moving with an uncalibrated heaviness as though he were becoming reacquainted with his limbs. Hesitantly he slid a fingertip along the smooth black electrical tape patching the frames together.

A vicious tremble shook her as he crawled toward her. She lurched forward while he reached for the Hunter pincer, gripped him in a tight hug with no intent to let go.

To hell with consequences. Take me home.

"No," he said with a forbidding shake of his head. "We don't have time."

Never enough.

The Borealis warned of atmospheric entry.

Calm as ever, he picked up the pincer. The smooth curve of metal glinted like a crescent moon about to fade, a glimmer in the darkness. Without the mildest hint of hesitation, he wrapped both their hands around it. Guided it over the hole in his chest plate.

"Don't." Her voice, soft, breaking. How much more would they have to endure? "You can't do this." And yet he continued to gaze upon her with maddening tenderness, his smile faltering at the edges. "Gordon, what the hell is all of this for?"

Chapped lips pressed to her brow, for one moment both interminable and devastatingly short.

"It's all right, Alyx."

I can't. I won't.

"Everything will be all right."

She squeezed her eyes shut.

Let me hate him, Gordon. For us both.

A single spark kissed the surface of the Nexus before dozens more skipped across the planet's veins, a dance of fire shimmering across the nacreous surface. Gordon weakly turned his head to witness the spectacle with her.

As a research assistant, he had heard rumors of excursions to the borderworld, the beauty and wealth of another dimension awaiting discovery. Where rainfall glittered jewels due to abundant mineral deposits. His small, earthbound life yearned for a sight as grandiose as this.

Fate had not been so kind. The stars had responded to mankind's hubris by vomiting suffering on them, infecting them with a contagion too long festered.

Throughout the ordeal, he had found himself craving home above all else. The simple comforts of a bed to sleep on, a roof over his head, cooked food. A reason to laugh every once in a while. Solid ground under his feet.

In Alyx's arms Gordon felt his soul, long displaced, return to its throne. As gravity released its hold on them, a gentle hand rocking their metallic cradle, he lay his head in the crook of her neck.

Gordon wheezed in their weightless embrace. Robbed of speech, with thought soon to disappear, he pressed his lips to her ear and poured into the shell his remaining breath.

Wherever you go, Alyx, take me with you.

She pushed.

User death imminent.

Red ribbons curled from his mouth. He smiled at her, once, before his eyes drifted toward the inferno. There they remained fixed, drinking in the light, pupils shrank to pinpoints.

Gordon Freeman was no longer there. He was not lying dazed from the blow of a stun baton, nor snatching fistfuls of sleep in a dark canal, nor fighting to wake from a table of diodes and cable; he had vanished. Like numbness before injury, the shock of a cut before it oozed blood and the damaged nerve realized the pain, his absence did not register at once.

He'd left her alone, the bastard. Walked through the door a few moments early.

She held him, caressed his scar, as the shoreline of a merciless light crept in, absolute in its cleansing. The unbearable heat it brought threatened to peel skin from bone.

Let it come, she thought. I hope we all burn.

In answer to her wish, light swallowed them.

Chapter Text

Form is emptiness,
Emptiness form.

- The Heart Sutra

On her knees, Alyx shivered. Apathetic to the void, she upturned the pincer in her hand. The sight of Gordon's blood, warm and bright, stole her breath.

She winced, pressed her throbbing brow to a floor she could not perceive, waited for the shudders to subside.

"Why..." The word slipped free of her lips and died in silence. There was no god here at the end. Neither heaven to reward nor hell to punish.

Arms, holding her.

Alyx looked up. In a darkness so perfect a single breath might shatter it, she saw her father.

Eli cast a gentle mien upon her, every wrinkle and bemoaned gray hair exactly as she remembered. And she recalled, with ferocious feeling returning after prolonged repression, the enormity of how much she had craved one more moment. The warmth of his arms, the soft cotton of his faded sweater, all preserved with a wholeness that bound her.

"Dad."

Eli neglected answer. His smile merely widened.

She rested her ear against a heart that maintained a strong, steady beat, the familiar rhythm warding off the terror that threatened to plunge her under.

Alyx indulged the illusion. She let herself pretend her father awaited on the other side. That he had somehow maintained a hold on his flesh, instead of what he truly had become: glimmering sunlight on the Molochna River, ink dried on faded paper, a laugh echoing into a fond silence, prayers unheard and thoughts unspoken.

Grief, the arrows and slings one suffers for choosing human existence, rose up through the numbness, girding her mind and heart.

Such sweet nothings oblivion whispers in the ear. Listen to the honeyed promises, but know them for the illusions they are.

Eli was dead. There was no changing that cold, irrefutable fact, nor the fact that he had sold countless lives to save her. As long as she breathed, she must carry his blood-stained memory.

Alyx stood, gazing into eyes that mimicked her father's less the longer she beheld them. The tremble that had haunted her spirit at last quieted; she felt it recede like the last ripples fading from a lake's disturbed surface.

She no longer needed this dream to keep him alive. The entity did. It wore her father's face, just as it had donned Gordon's face, to keep her under control. To prey on her weakness, feed on her sorrow, a cancer that knew only to multiply, never to replenish.

With tears rimming her eyelids, Alyx pried herself away. The smile lingered as she withdrew from his embrace. Neither had she broken gaze as she sank one step backward, then two, then several.

I'm going home now.

Goodbye, Dad.

Eli's sin, attachment. Throughout his life he'd had to let go of all he'd held dear. But the one thing to which he'd clung fervently, the memory of his child, crafted in Alyx Vance's image, this as well must be released from its cage.

Although she could not pinpoint the exact moment she had become Alyx Vance - she had always been Alyx, down to the dimmest of her thoughts and the palest of her instincts - she knew with incontrovertible truth that she wanted to live. There was more to this existence than bullets and blood. She wanted to wander the clover-dotted hillside of White Forest, breathing in the light clean scent, and watch the wind stir the clouds through a pristine blue sky. She wanted to feel the honey of sunlight on her skin.

She craved the pride of a job well done. Oil smears on her cheek, full-throated laughter as Dog knocked over a shelf in his enthusiasm.

She wanted it all, from grief's cutting pain to the bone-weariness of exhaustion. Her body craved, even, sickness and pain, gifts to remind her of her sublime fragility.

I will mourn terribly, I will suffer; my soul will ache until I wish for death, but not forever. Praise oblivion, sanctify the void from which all springs anew: this pain will not endure.

No. I'm not ready to let it go just yet.

A photon flared in the distance. As it evolved from particle to wave, the light broadened. She had the vague thought, inasmuch as her wan consciousness allowed, that she had passed the interval of darkness and must be tucked inside the womb again. Her heart beat; her blood thrummed inside her veins; her cells divided and grew.

If her mind might have permitted laughter, she would have enjoyed it, but instead she hovered absent of feeling, judgment, and sensation. Here there was just water, the elixir of life. Only the thin porous membranes of her cells distinguished her from the protozoa. What pleasure it would be to emulsify into the base elements that had painstakingly built her, to unravel the alchemy of a human body. Melt, and become as the rain, without suffering and beyond death.

Toward light, she crawled. Darkness screaming in her mind, bearing down on every cell, hands grasping to drag her into madness: she cast them off.

She did not need her father's voice.

The Resistance spoke plenty enough.

Alyx, where are you?

Their vortal cords wove together such lucent constellations that if her lungs had harbored air, they might have burst for the sight. A sea of stars unfurled before her. One pinprick alone could not battle the darkness, or so they believed; all it takes to destroy the darkness is a single photon. Together, they shone magnificence.

The figures flurried faster, clumped together in sharper focus as she reached out for them. Barney and Judith and the surviving rebels plunged their hands into the rising water, seeking her.

Luther crashed through the surface, bubbles trailing behind him. He caught her wrist, wrapped strong arms around her waist and hauled her into the painful salience of the open cabin.

Hands and voices grasping for her, filling her ears with precious clamor. Shouting. Crying.

She coughed in her birth throes. Her dim vision faltered, blurring as they swarmed her, folding her shuddering frame into a vapor blanket.

Alyx turned her head. Something else floated among the debris: a black glove.

In their rush to stabilize her, they had overlooked some subtle discrepancies. Her stare, for instance. They had rationalized it as a byproduct of shock when they pulled her out of the water. However, as evening descended and Alyx maintained her refusal to speak, they began to grow perturbed.

They vainly attempted to wring a response from her. She hadn't even trembled in the blankets under which she lay bundled.

Alyx studied the wall between them, unperceiving of the droplets that flecked the port window. A cold flurry slithered up Judith's spine as she reached out and placed a hand on her cheek; not so much as a blink.

Calhoun paced with a restlessness that rankled Judith. "We gotta get the medic in here. I don't care what he says—this ain't normal."

"Quiet," she said, brushing the backs of her knuckles over a dry brow. No fever. "Alyx?"

"You think the harmonic reflux has got something to do with it? We were all a little out of it when we—"

"Barney, please."

An infinitesimal twitch of the mouth drew their attention. Alyx's voice crept out at a much lower register than usual, such that they both leaned in to hear. There was none of her typical warmth, nor the biting edge of steel she had recently acquired.

"Show me Freeman." Alyx turned her head with a mechanical stiffness, her face a blank canvas leached of all emotion. "He is dead. You cling to an empty shell."

The crew convened in the lounge room. Bereft of chairs waterlogged by the flooding, exhausted rebels curled up on mats they had dragged in from the sleeping quarters, hoping to snatch a fruitful nap before the day's myriad demands recalled them.

First and foremost: manning the moon pool. They considered it a fortune that the ship boasted towing equipment and nets suitable for catching fish. Chancing the pantry seemed foolhardy; the MREs they scrounged from the kitchen had been intended for Vietnam soldiers, as evidenced by the fact that they had expired in 1974.

Overseeing mayday. They floated on a dark wintry sea without a glimpse of land. Day upon day offered nothing but crackling white noise.

Sokolai, down in the cargo hold, where he forbade entry.

Monitoring Alyx, who lay in a wordless stupor. She had not spoken since that night, nor did she respond to their other attempts to engage her. She sat up when she deigned to, sometimes requested water through gestures.

Otherwise, she remained a passive husk, such that one hapless woman quit. Through tears, she confessed to Judith that she feared glancing up from the magazine she'd been reading aloud and finding Alyx unbreathing.

I don't know why, but being in that room... It's like the air's getting sucked out of my lungs.

To ease the burden on her mind, she relieved the woman of her duty. Guilt gnawed at her, made her eager to overcompensate. Let me work the nets. I used to go boating with my dad on the weekends. I can handle the gutting and the scraping. Just—not this.

Barney hunched beside a cold ash tray, hands knotted in his lap while his toe tapped ceaseless flutter on linoleum. Upon the navigator's approach, his brows pulled into a scowl that seemed a risk of becoming perpetual.

"Anything?" he asked the floor.

"Nada. We know we're in the Baltic, just not where." Then, as consolation: "Rachel saw some gulls the other day. She thinks we might hit land if we keep pressing west."

"Near Kaliningrad, right?"

"Maybe."

Sucking in his bottom lip, Barney pressed his thumbs to the bridge of his nose. His head hung low enough that he might have fallen out of his seat. "Hell you mean, maybe? Either we are or we aren't."

"Aperture didn't exactly install a GPS on this thing. We keep ringing the doorbell, but nobody's home."

Calhoun cursed under his breath, rubbing his face. On more than one occasion he'd admitted he would take even the Combine, if just to prove someone was out there.

Like the others, he utterly struggled to assemble a sensical explanation of the events that had transpired since he and the other dozen rebel survivors awoke on the deck, rocked by the crash and suck of waves.

Judith offered them a layman's explanation, likening the overlap in the Borealis' loops through spacetime to bubbles that sometimes merged as their membranes touched. The vessel's orbit had stabilized and now lay properly anchored in spacetime. In lieu of its original collision course with the Nexus, the bootstrap device pushed them through the sea.

One version of the ship exploded in the Nexus. Another slipped through a loop and locked the door behind it, preventing further excursions through spacetime. By engaging the self-destruct program, Alyx pushed them into a harmonic reflux and ensured they had stayed on the version of the ship that survived.

Who was to say where she had gone?

Judith recalled the cave as one might recall the fleeting shadows of a nightmare. The horrible sights, the blood, the screams, a brilliant green light punctuated by silence. The words whispered between Alyx and that creature thrummed just beneath the threshold of her consciousness, hidden in the synapses between neurons.

She sensed what lurked behind Alyx's eyes was not wholly her own. Nonetheless - and what thin straws she clutched at - it lacked the sulfurous hatred of the creature that wore Gordon's face. She didn't know what to make of its intentions. If it harbored any.

A copy of a ship was one thing. The ship of Theseus disassembled its constituent parts and restitched itself in spacetime. But a human being; could a human soul be destroyed and rebuilt the same way?

Judith preferred not to dwell. After all, it was not the surviving that poisoned; it was the thinking that killed.

Her knuckles whitened around a mug of lukewarm tea as discussion evolved from mayday to restraints. She couldn't remember whose idea it had been, but once the suggestion emerged that they ought to place Alyx under stricter surveillance, it spread roots. If she continued to refuse to eat, she would suffer muscle atrophy, giving them no choice but to induce feeding.

(The nights she awoke with ringing ears and smell of the smoke in her nostrils had only just begun to wane. His voice, just an echo now. don't dwell don't dwell don't you dare open that door)

"Alyx isn't a danger," she said, "and you know it."

The navigator stuck his hands in his pockets, shoulders hiked around his ears. "Nobody wants to, but—"

"Tie her to the bed and I'll throw you bastards overboard."

"Jesus, doc, calm down. Nobody's walking the plank." Calhoun wiped a hand down his mouth. "We'll take shifts."

"Very well," Mossman said. "In the meantime, you work on boosting the signal. Find out where the hell we are."

Chapter Text

Alyx, you must eat.

She declined offerings and waited for the voices to recede. Sleep provided the only peace from constant demands.

Catatonic, someone said. What does that even mean?

Doubts.

No, she's a fighter, she— Rough hand gripping hers until the nerves protested. Alyx, you listen to me, you hear? You can't let them beat you, not now. We've still got a lot of work to do, and hell if you're sacking me with it.

What few words she did speak, they did not understand.

I am not the one you want. She is a mask I wear.

Alyx Vance wanders. Give her time.

Conjecture.

Asphyxia from drowning. Oxygen deprivation when the cabin depressurized.

She noticed they avoided speaking of the Opener of the Way. At night, when the waves rocked the hull and Judith Mossman watched her breathe, she confessed that na'thoi's absence felt like an irreconciliable hole inside her being. Strange sensation that could not be rectified.

Chilled dewdrops formed a glisten on her skin, like the condensate of her cocoon when the breath of life touched her and birthed the cancer that metastasized throughout galaxies.

She was not supposed to feel. She, the Enlightened, the deathless, sanctified, free of the scourges of pain and disease, had tasted for the first time the amphibian pleasure of rain on one's flesh. The rain of home, the palace of the Enlightened, a bejeweled mixture of minerals in constant dialogue with one another.

Surely you have heard our crystals. The one that entered the spectrometer screamed, and from its echoes the tragedy was born. He abused them, just as you abused them. Their resonances are harmonious. They sing poetry your ears perceive as silence.

Judith Mossman lacked the ears to hear the voice of the stars, but she felt the resonance in her being. Slowly she turned, and there was understanding, if but a spark.

She offered her arm for sedation. Once again, the needle sank into the soft flesh, and brought sleep.

A Vortigaunt named Luther hovered over her. This one used the voice of the stars, albeit a strange and mangled dialect.

The Alyx Vance, it said. You must return to us, my sib.

She spoke of home, although wary of the hazards it now presented. It is gone, along with the rest of my kind. Black Mesa is no longer. Yet I remain. Why?

"You have done well, but the time for relinquishment has come. Return the Alyx Vance."

Home lives inside me, within my perishable cells. When my flesh expires, the knowledge of the Enlightened will die with me, and return to the void.

It is the way of things.

Cut it out, admonished Barney Calhoun. You're scaring everybody with this crap.

She recalled Eli Vance bathed in red light, his face twisted into a similar mask of fear and rage, and felt a flicker of contrition somewhere in the implacable seat of her being. Your kind despises me when they see my true face. I am sorry the one you want slumbers inside me.

God damn it, just knock it off!

Barney Calhoun stormed outside and slumped against the iron door sequestering her from the others. For several hours more she lay beneath hole-eaten linen, hearing waves slam against the hull.

Will you kill me, she asked Judith Mossman with a noiseless tongue, to retrieve Alyx Vance? Foolish. She acts of her own accord. She will not return until she is ready. For her sake alone I cling to this mantle, keep it alive.

Judith Mossman gazed upon her. Shadows of droplets sprayed the port window behind her, dappling her gaunt cheek in the impression of tears she refused to shed.

I won't mourn her while she breathes.

Silently Judith Mossman hand slid over hers, past the bruises and punctures blossomed on the skin, and lingered there.

I love you, Alyx.

She will return.

Please, close your eyes.

"God... My head's killing me."

Nudged awake by the hoarse whisper, Mossman looked up from a rumpled mattress edge. "Alyx." She sounded so shaken. "You... Is it..."

"I think so," she said. "Hurts." After a few heartbeats: "Thank you, Judith."

Blinking back the shimmer welling in her eyes, Mossman nodded, and kissed the back of her hand.

Alyx hunted the hold until she found him.

Gordon lay stretched over a steel table, encased in gouged armor save a glove missing from his right hand. His left held the crowbar over the hole in his chest plate. Sokolai bathed him in green radiance that illuminated the small, desolate space.

"He's gone, Alyx." Mossman's voice barely rose above the din of her pulse. "Sokolai is doing what he can to preserve the body."

Words too distant to sink. Oh was her response, a soft utterance.

Wrapped in linen blankets, she wandered her fingertips over the armor until the boundary between HEV and human flesh blended. Memories of waiting in anticipation while he trembled under a thin sheen of sweat came unbidden to her mind. No more nightmares flickered behind his eyelids. His pale lips pursed on a breath that never came.

Mossman placed an anchoring hand on her shoulder as Alyx slipped hers inside Gordon's cold one and took a quivering breath.

She swallowed the warm stone gestating in her throat, tried to think of something to tell him. How hard he had fought. How grateful she was. But the words dissolved to chalk in her mouth. All she could see was his profile in the ebbing light, the gold glinted in the red of his still eyelashes, the thoughtfulness apparent in his face even now.

He had the audacity to be beautiful.

The gift of pain arrived at once. Judith's reassurances faded while she buried her head in the torn netting of his shoulder and sobbed.

She held his hand, bloodless cold, through the endless hours the Borealis creaked through a frigid sea. To her it was as though the hazard suit presided on the table, not the flesh and blood man who she had loved.

"Gordon," she said, "what the hell are we supposed to do now?" Her smile broke on a flash of anger. A spark struck on a wick as she whipped a fresh film from her stinging eyes; hadn't she cried enough? "This wasn't part of the plan."

Her head rested on the lambda, where energy vibrated upwards through the netting and metal plates. If she listened, she might be able to pretend the hum resembled the pumping of blood.

Alyx's voice cracked, throat burning. "You took so long to get back to us," she whispered. "Screw you."