I was left in the same waiting room area that Hugh and I had been in while they arranged rooms for us, which was the first thing that made me realize I'd been separated from Hugh. In theory it should be fine, they'd agreed to my demands and I'd done what I was supposed to and everyone was too busy to worry about me. But that extra layer of protection had been good to have. I had nearly twenty-four hours to wait around still, and I wasn't sure what I was hoping would happen during that time. If the assault went well, they'd have to let me go. If it went badly - in a specific way - then I'd get to see Brinkmar.

If it went bad in any other way, they would try to make me stay until the next alignment.

Technically they were required to let me go and then re-negotiate, but I wasn't confident in that part of the deal - especially when it came to Klinec and his iron manacles. While I waited to hear more, I ducked into my memory palace so I could use divination on the area around the portal. I was able to see through it from the other side, but mainly what I saw was that Halenvar had put up walls all around the entry point and tried to turn it into a meat grinder. Hammersmith's troops immediately started blasting holes in those walls and blocking most of the attacks, though I did see some pretty gruesome deaths as well.

Even when the walls had been totally obliterated I couldn't really see much because of the flashing lights, the cloud of debris, and the horrific mist of blood - not to mention an endless stream of bodies throwing themselves into the fray. I also couldn't go through the portal, probably because the divination worked via the planar membrane and the portal was a hole in that membrane. Regardless, it was all very disappointing. I did see some Knights of the Storm diving in, and whatever their beef was with Katrin and Errod they were one hundred percent down to fuck up Halenvar troops as well. I replayed the scene a few times so I could look from different angles, but to no real benefit. Inches away from the fantasy world I'd been so obsessed with, and I couldn't see jack shit.

Eventually I was summoned to Klinec's office, where he was sitting with his main henchwoman. He looked, as always, like he was equal parts smug and conniving - it was maybe the most punchable face I'd ever seen. He made a point of smiling extra big and greeting me, but then deliberately took forever poking around on his desk like he was getting organized even though I was sure he had been ready for this meeting. I was technically controlling my body remotely, but actually was keeping my mind overlapped with it just in case there was a security measure that could see spirits. It made it easy to keep my face totally still and not give him the satisfaction of seeing me look annoyed, or tired, or impatient.

All of which I was.

Eventually he decided he'd made me wait long enough. "Miss Smith," he started, "the Empire thanks you deeply for your services today. Since Lord Protector Hammersmith will be busy for the foreseeable future, I wanted to get some things out of the way for her. Plans for if we need your services again, where you'd like to be delivered to when you leave here - things like that."

"You can drop me off in Good Charl," I said, "and I'll handle myself from there." It wasn't an Empire city, and I'd been thinking about taking on some work while I figured out what I wanted to do. I'd thought about asking to go somewhere else as a fake-out, but the fact was that I probably wasn't going to be all that hard to find for the Empire if they were really trying - especially if they were tracking me from the moment they dropped me off.

"An interesting choice. Of course, it's too early in the day to say if we can do that just yet. Your assistance may be needed, or you may need to open the portal once more at the next alignment."

Yeah, just throw that in there like it's no big deal. Cool. "Well, I'm leaving at the end of the day regardless. If you need me for the next alignment, that's something I'll talk to Hammersmith about when it's closer to time."

He nodded thoughtfully. "I see, I see. Well, that would potentially cause problems. What if you were attacked, even killed, in the meantime?"

It was possible that wasn't a veiled threat, but that was the whole point of veiled threats, right? Anyway, I wouldn't believe for a second this guy wasn't planning something. "While I'm sure you'd be heartbroken to hear anything happened to me, I can take care of myself. Right now, per the contract I made with Hammersmith -"

"Lord Protector Hammersmith," he corrected.

I sighed. "Right now, per the contract I made with my good pal Carol, I'm to remain on call for the rest of the day and assist with any reasonable requests - like re-opening the portal, or opening it in another location. I've verbally let her know I'm willing to go through the portal myself if needed even. But I can remain on call while in Good Charl, and I think you'll find that the wording of the contract allows me to demand to leave right now. So how about you give me the things you held on to when I first arrived, and then I'll see my way to the teleportation chamber to go back to the prime plane and get brunch."

"I hardly think that's necessary. We can discuss this further at the end of the day, when -"

"Nope! I'm formally making this demand. Are you breaking the contract?" There would be consequences for that, I was sure of it. He might or might not even be able to - I assumed there was some sort of loyalty oath in place, and that could mean he had to honor the contract as well. But even if he could ignore it, there was no way it would put him on Hammersmith's good side. Probably he just hadn't expected me to go right to demanding to leave, or he hadn't read the contract closely enough to realize it was even an option prior to the end of the day. It wasn't really intended to be, but there was always wiggle room somewhere.

His face went blank for a moment, and then he was all smiles again. His henchwoman wasn't quite as good at keeping her expression calm, and looked downright panicked. Interesting. "Of course not," Klinec said, "I wouldn't dream of it. I have the confiscated magic items right here, and you can of course have them back." He pulled open a drawer and retrieved the template Sentortzi had given me, as well as my keychain from Earth. He put them just out of my reach, forcing me to stand and lean forward to take them. When I did he tried to put a hand on my wrist, but he wasn't fast enough. I stayed standing, ready to run or fight.

"They're not even magic, really..."

"I suppose that's debatable with the template, although the wards on it would make it count to most. The keychain may be a trinket, but its probability effect is magic by any definition. Still, they're harmless enough. I have no problem with returning them to you while you're still with us."

Probability effect? From a keychain given to me by Mr. Bagmaw on Earth? I could think of three possibilities. Klinec was wrong, someone had swapped my keychain out at some point, or Mr. Bagmaw - who once gave me twenty bucks for memorizing the lyrics to a Weird Al song - was secretly a wizard. The second explanation seemed the most likely, but I'd need to get someone to take a closer look at it later. It wasn't like I was going to prolong this conversation and ask Klinec more about my own stuff.

"While I'm still with you? That's just the time it takes me to walk to the teleportation chamber."

"Of course! A shame, I'd been meaning to talk to you about your friends Errod and Katrin Runelighter. So interesting, I had no idea Sahrger ever formed genuine friendships."

"And I had no idea a moskar's cloaca could learn to talk, but here we are. Good for you."

His henchwoman nearly choked, but he just kept smiling. "Very clever. Well. If you don't want to talk about their current situation, I can of course have Helma here walk you to the teleportation room."

Ah, fuck. Their "situation"? God fucking damn it all. I'd kept my face still, thanks to being in my mind, and so I maintained that flat affect. "They were amusing enough. It was a good way to pass the time." See, you slimy ass? They're not leverage. You can't use them against me.

He nodded. "Well, I suppose all toys must be thrown aside eventually, yes? Helma, take Calliope here to the teleportation room and then send the Knights of the Storm a message and let them know that the Empire has no objections to the planned executions. So foolish of those children, to march right up to Storm's Keep with a stolen blade hidden in their wagon. It's assumed they killed the poor knight, whoever he was. They take that sort of thing... very seriously. I'd thought you might want me to request - on behalf of the Empire - that they be spared, but it is as you said... they were just amusements."

Klinec looked back down at his paperwork, completely ignoring me. The henchwoman - Helma - stood hesitantly, as if she was waiting for something to explode. I was certainly tempted. One thing was for sure, it wasn't bullshit. They hadn't known the guy we killed was a Knight of the Storm, and they did still have the sword - because I'd insisted on it. It was cool, and I'd wanted it like some stupid fucking souvenir. This was my fault. They'd probably gone there to help me, knowing it was one of the places that still had a portal to Brinkmar and knowing from Harmid that one of my fate lines led there. They'd wanted to be waiting for me.

Fuck.

If Hugh had been with me he would have said something, or possibly punched that look off of Klinec's face along with his nose and most of his teeth - but they'd separated me from him. I could try to talk about how angry Hammersmith would be, but this wasn't breaking the deal; whether or not he stepped in to save them was unrelated to our agreement. I could talk about how angry Hugh would be, but Klinec probably didn't care - and politically it most likely would blow over with no real fallout. What other options did I have? I could say that rather than going to Good Charl I wanted to be dropped off at Storm's Keep... but no, he wouldn't have to honor that one because the contract had specified it would be a city of my choosing, and that wasn't a city. I didn't know what the closest city was, and it wouldn't matter since I had to remain available for the rest of the day - being at Storm's Keep would probably count, but the road on the way there for sure wouldn't.

He had me. I was trapped. I felt dizzy, like the walls were closing in. I'd been so close, I'd done everything right, and he was going to take it all away. What would he make me agree to? Was I willing to gamble with Katrin and Errod's lives?

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"I've changed my mind," I said. "I'll wait here to see if I'm needed. If you want to discuss future dealings with me, I'll make myself available tomorrow." That would buy them some time - he'd need them alive as bargaining chips - and if I did get called in to Brinkmar I would be able to leverage that for their freedom. Maybe. "I'll just go exercise in the training room until you need me."

"Helma," Klinec said without looking up, "escort Calliope to the training room please. Stay with her, leave the weapons locked up, and leave her Dumine lock on. I'll have food delivered for breakfast, and you can send a guard for lunch and dinner when it's time."

She nodded, not looking too pleased, and we left. I was in a fog the whole way, and immediately started working out in the most boring way possible so that I could pop into my memory palace and let my body continue on auto-pilot. I was pacing, panicking. I was a wild animal ready to gnaw its own leg off. The only thing I knew is that I wasn't going to be able to figure out a plan while I was this upset, and the one thing that calmed me down was my meditation with the old-timey prison keyring.

I called my duplicate in and synched up rather than trying to explain everything, then sat down with the keyring. Normally at this point I would just... zone out... but nothing was happening. It was a template, and I assumed it was built from my anxiety around being trapped - that I was somehow taking that feeling out of myself and putting it away much like I had for the torture stuff. But unlike that, I didn't really remember making it. I turned it over in my hands, trying to feel it, and when that didn't work I finally - gently - attempted to un-pack it some even though part of me was worried I'd end up in an even worse state.

Knowledge exploded through me, and I was suddenly somewhere else.

I could still feel where I was in relation to the bedrooms, but I'd somehow fallen into a room I'd never seen before but which felt deeply familiar. I knew, somehow, that the room itself had been folded into the keyring. The walls were covered in notes, maps, photographs, and red string - like a conspiracy theory corkboard. As I looked at each item, I remembered it and understood it perfectly. The pictures of every guard and janitor I'd seen here, the floorplan of the facility that was way, way closer to complete than it should have been, the plans and sub-plans and contingencies. No wonder I'd felt so much better every time I meditated on that stupid keyring - I'd been making plans to escape the whole time and then hiding them from myself so Barick the trouble-detector couldn't catch me.

I felt like an evil genius.

I dropped out of synch with my duplicate, and we circled the room in opposite directions looking at each scribbled note. "Okay, you're on devil's advocate duty," I told the duplicate, "you ready?"

"Yeah, I think you're getting a deeper understanding than I am - just based on the couple of things we looked at while still synched - so that's probably for the best. Where do you want to start?"

All of the plans were ridiculously risky, the kinds of things that were likely to fail five seconds in, but there were a lot of good ideas in there - most of the steps were somewhat modular, so I'd be putting one together based on my circumstances. Hugh wasn't here, which ruled out a few good ones, but on the flipside it being the day of alignment with Brinkmar opened up possibilities. I could get Helma to take me to my room if I needed, but for basically all of the things I might try the training room was better anyway; the janky plans to turn exercise equipment into weapons were... extensive.

"Honestly my first impulse is to pull an Inception with a Nic Cage, and waltz right out."

The duplicate nodded. "Inception is super risky though, we don't really know if it'll work at all, and it's pretty likely Helma will catch it."

"Yeah, it's a longshot. But her being on high alert doesn't really stop us from doing the more... violent... plans anyway, so if it doesn't work we'll pivot to John Wick or, failing that, Spiderverse. It's a shame we need to get back to the prime plane, the plans to just get out of the facility are better in a lot of ways."

"Sure, but depending on what plane this is... anyway, yeah, we're on a time crunch so those are out regardless. What about Barick? We can budget some fate threads in, if you want to give him a parasite. That might set things off early though."

"Yeah, the timing is a real bitch. I think... I need to tether Connie's mind. I could use it as a backup so we can undo the Nic Cage plan, and honestly if we get caught I think it would be good if we tried Danny Phantom, which would be a bit safer with an extra mind."

"It might help with the Inception, too. Double the mind power. Yeah, you should do that. The big immediate risk is that it keeps you from going Cage if you keep it aside as a backup, and that's not the end of the world. Okay, so that's thread one, then Danny Phantom is thread two, and if it doesn't kill us we try to wait until we have some left to tag Barick with a parasite. Ugh, that's going to take forever." The fate threads were still taking almost three quarters of my mana to create.

"I could do that part with a regular thread, maybe. Targeting would be limited, and someone around here could probably break it. Still, it's an option - especially if I want to do a whole swarm or something. Ooh, we don't have a codename for that one. I mean I know we don't need to use codenames since it's just us here, but it's fun. Uh... Willard? That was the one with the rats, right? You don't know either. Whatever."

"I'll study the layout, get everything set up. Help me get in costume for Inception, and then go tether Connie's mind. God this is so strange. I want to talk about the implications of tethering her, but you really can't afford to wait if you want to get enough mana back to do the other stuff."

I took care of getting the duplicate started on her part, popped out to eat breakfast which had arrived while we were planning, and then went right back to exercising so I could try to find Connie's mind - I'd briefly thought about keeping them in the wagon room after the time we corralled them in there, but they seemed to want to wander and it was hard to fortify anywhere in the memory palace. Worst case scenario would have been them getting antsy and leaving entirely somehow, so giving them free rein seemed like the best option.

I found it pretty quickly, in the main bedroom, and before I could second-guess myself and chicken out I tethered it the same way I had with the duplicate - I went into divination view, lined everything up, and managed to target it. The thread pulled tight, and I very slowly started opening the channel to let information pass back and forth. Unlike with the duplicate, I was ready this time and didn't slip up and get everything full blast right away. There was a strange feeling, totally unlike what I'd felt with the oydirme, as if this other thing was both me and someone completely different.

"Did it work?" she asked. She walked over to the television and tried to turn it on, then smacked it when it just showed static.

"Connie?"

"I'm assuming it worked. Fuck, I hope you were out of range."

That was what she had said, in that strange moment as the mana exploded. That place where she'd been in Bill's house, and leaving an afterimage behind her as if she was two things barely held together. "Connie, is that you? Do you remember?"

She tilted her head, thinking, then her eyes got wider and she looked around. "That motherfucker Klinec. Right. I need to... to tether Connie's mind. Or... sorry, I think something is wrong. The time mana must have... it's an alternate timeline, maybe. I saw Helma again. God, how do you apologize to someone for killing them? She trusted me. And now I need to betray her again. I can't believe she's still working for Klinec, why didn't she join me on the task force this time?"

"Connie, you died. You're... I connected your mind, the spirit, to my body. We're both sharing a body right now."

She nodded, slowly. "Right. You're the duplicate, and I need to find Connie's mind so I can... we can't stab Helma again, okay? I had nightmares."

They were so vivid. That look in her eyes as she bled out in Ulren's lab. Wait. That wasn't my memory. "Okay, we're leaking some. That's... to be expected, I think."

"Yeah. Yeah. It's all so foggy, you know? Everything since I got here the second time seems fresher. More real. The first time around is like... mist."

"Shit, am I overwriting you?" It didn't feel like that though. We were just... merging... but there was less of her left.

"Yeah, a lot less," she said, answering my thought.

I walked over and hugged her, and we stood like that until I knew I was just hugging myself. There was no Connie, because we were one person. Slowly my minds stepped away from each other, and shared a sad smile. It felt so much more natural than with the duplicate - I just had two bodies here, with no confusion. I wasn't seeing out of both sets of eyes at once, but all the memories that were formed seamlessly meshed together so I had all the collected knowledge. It was a strange extension of myself. I popped one mind back into the body and was still somewhat aware of my memory palace, new thoughts filing themselves away as the other half of me worked. This was going to be wild.

I took a break from working out, and watched Helma for a moment as she wrote something in a notebook. There was a fuzzy memory there, of us working late and taking notes about possible upcoming threats that might rear their heads on the day of the Grand Alignment. My emotions had dulled, my empathy atrophied even further ever since I killed the wild mage - not that I'd known who she was at the time - but even so I had some affection for Helma. She'd given me the journal, the one that I'd brought back with me when I altered time. I couldn't remember most of that, it was almost like I'd watched it on television years ago or read a summary online rather than living it. But if I was trying to recover memories anyway, could I recover the ones from when I was Connie?

In my memory palace, the other mind turned on divination and tried looking for a day I could picture well enough. It was hard, with the memories so decayed, but after a moment the world snapped into place and I was standing in front of Hammersmith and... some other people. I couldn't recall their names, they were representatives of other nations that were part of the task force.

"You said I had to back this up with research, and I did it. I've barely learned the language and I had to get help from my..." I muttered 'babysitters' in English and then hesitantly said "infant... watchers...? But I did it. Now you're saying it's not possible, but I don't think it matters if it's possible. It matters that Ulren thinks it's possible. You're making me work for you -"

Hammersmith held up a hand to stop me. "We're allowing you to work for us. You're more than welcome to just wait in a secure facility until the alignment."

"Fine, whatever, the point is - look, I don't think he's just helping Halenvar. That guy you captured, the materials he talked about - Ulren doesn't give a shit if Halenvar gets what he wants, you said yourself that he had to be getting something out of it. So now we know he has a lab, and we know he's building something. And I went back, and I found his old shit from years ago that shows he thinks it's possible, and it shouldn't matter if he's right or wrong because if it works even a little bit it could be a serious problem. What if you attack and he goes back even fifteen minutes and is able to plan around your assault?"

"The Clockmaker and his finest scholars all studied this, and -"

"I know, yeah, and I think you're wrong. But again, it doesn't matter. If Ulren is wrong, he's still building something scary. This task force is supposed to be about nasty shit going off at the Grand Alignment, and I'm saying you need add a secondary goal to shut him down too. Just in case. Look, I'll make you a deal. You need me to be able to read these schematics if you want me to help anyway, right? Half the shit you have me working on is about runic devices and crazy rituals, and I can't read any of it. So let me use the Duminere now, you already promised I could once I helped you. And if I don't get a dud, I promise I'll get Comprehension so I can understand all this shit. And if I get a second... you let me take Temporal, and I train it the way Ulren speculated on in his old papers. And if I can go back in time, before the alignment, you let me go in and help."

One of the others - someone from Erathik judging by the look of her, looked amused. "Make the deal, Hammersmith. She's a pain in the ass, but you've been wanting to get her locked in to an oath anyway."

I ended the divination, knowing that I really needed to conserve mana. Anyway, I remembered the rest of the meeting now - dimly, and full of holes, but I remembered it. There was no time to think about what it meant though, because I was in the middle of planning an escape. I'd lost Katrin and Errod once before, and I wasn't going to lose them again.

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