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The corridors of the Time Agency HQ stretched back and forth through three dimensions, but left the fourth well alone. They stank less of power than they did of occasional desperation and frequent bureaucracy, and the closer one got to the centre of control the less friendly the fittings and fixtures became, the more formal, the less oil-stained and scorched. It was safer there, for a given value of safe. If one was a commanding officer of the correct rank.

It was generally understood that being summoned for a one-on-one briefing with Lieutenant Colonel Brittan was a sure sign that one had fucked up, skidded spectacularly over the Line, and was about to embark on a voyage of humiliation around Cape Serious Bollocking. One could expect to be demoted, beasted, screwed over or Wiped: one couldn't expect to come out smelling of anything even remotely resembling roses.

The poster boy for recruitment in the Boeshane Pennisula (and later other parts of the same system), the man who would later go on to be known as Jack Harkness (though this was not what he went by now) was nevertheless familiar with the form. He'd picked up several decidedly black marks for misuse of supplies, chronoanomalous behaviour, and missing training sessions while he was still unqualified; no worse than his peers, of course – trainee Time Agents were fearsomely vice-riddled and loose-cannon type people, largely owing to the head-fucked nature of their work. It was the main reason why no one outside of the Agency was prepared to get into a relationship with one; at least, not twice.

However, Jack had been convinced that he was mostly behaving himself recently, that he was past all that (un)pleasantness now. As a qualified field agent he'd been doing his duty, filing probably accurate reports (sometimes), getting on with his partner at last despite their gaping religious differences and one accidental shooting … and what with one thing and another he'd assured himself that he was more or less untouchable.

He felt slightly less confident about this as he stood opposite the font of all authority at the Agency and shrank to a nanometre beneath Brittan's clear stare. She had the kind of stare that would terrify a supernova, and he congratulated himself on managing a pathetically weak smile in the face of it.

"Jack," the Lieutenant Colonel said, her steel-grey hair short and sharp as her sentences, "new assignment for you."

Jack blinked in the deep red light of Brittan's office; she kept it that way for the sake of her plants, which were numerous and slightly creepy, and which always hid behind the bin whenever he was in there, apparently fomenting some sort of anti-human rebellion, or spooked by his pheromones. They would not be the first plant life to be unnerved by the implants, but he wasn't having the bloody things removed, not with what they'd cost.

The office tended to fold away into shadows – a kind of geometry of fear and farcical physics distorted by several of the building's cloaking fields – and it was doing a fantastic job of suggesting lurking nastiness right now. Jack wondered if this was a deliberate psychological trick, along with the surprise mission.

He hadn't been expecting anything like this – for one thing, it wasn't Brittan who did such petty work as handing out assignments to field agents. That was left up to people with whom Jack was accustomed to arguing over things like the precise definition of "unharmed" and "one weapon".

For another, she looked astonishingly grim, even for Brittan, for whom "grim" was a standard modifier.

"And Kittin isn't coming?" he hazarded. The room did not appear to contain his partner. He would have noticed, because Kittin's facial tattooing and naked skull were immediately noticeable, the room was small, and Kittin tended to groan whenever Jack showed up. There was definitely no seven foot high man with shoulders like a continental shelf groaning angrily in Brittan's office in anticipation of another mission in the company of his less religiously-inclined partner.

"Kittin is returning home for a ceremony on compassionate leave."

This was the first Jack had heard about it, which wasn't really surprising given the levels of trust which Kittin harboured for him being … virtually non-existent. Especially after the shooting incident, which Jack maintained hadn't really been his fault as much as Kittin's report made it sound. Alright, he wasn't precisely the most cautious of Agents, and he had a mild propensity for shooting things rather than talking to them, and he did occasionally misuse resources, but he hadn't exactly done it on purpose.

Brittan's eyes bored through Jack and drove tunnels through his brain. "I understand the two of you have been able to go some way towards straightening each other out."

Jack said, very cautiously, "He's less uptight."

"Debatable," Brittan closed her eyes. "You have two objectives in this mission." No preamble, of course, because this was Brittan. "One is the stated aim, which I shall come to in a minute. The other," she stared through Jack again, "is to impose your allegedly relentless charm onto your new partner and achieve some measure of straightening out on them." She spoke bluntly, but the desert-dryness of her words was immediately recognisable. Jack would have objected for the sake of his wounded ego, but this was Brittan, and she would wipe the floor with the deflated scraps of his self-esteem if she wanted.

"… to what end?" Jack enquired, fighting the desire to tell her in a petulant voice that he was fucking unstoppable in that department. Hell yes, he wanted to say, his charm was beyond relentless. Everyone loved him. Even Kittin. Sometimes.

"Calm him down." Brittan took something from a box on her desk and threw it into the shadows. Jack pretended not to hear the carnivorous noises that followed. It was just the plants, he reminded himself. There was nothing there but the plants that already hated him -

"Highly-strung?" Jack guessed, leaning away from the shadows.

"You could say that. It's not what the psychiatric evaluation says of him, but then again yours called you a 'model of balance and decorum' and we both know that's a long way from the truth." Brittan steepled her fingers and eyeballed him again. "Please do not fuck the psychiatric team in future, Jack. It's unprofessional." Brittan leaned back on her chair, which made a low humming sound and extended roots under the desk. Jack fought to prevent himself from squirming away from them – one drunken sexual encounter with a sentient chair was enough for this lifetime.

He had to remind himself that Brittan was not possessed of the right glands to be psychic – none of the human members of the Agency were, it was not only illegal but also somewhat fatal to try and implant them – and that she disapproved heavily of the requisite enhancers in that area; she had spies and some very good computers and a fearsome mind, but she could not actually read his. Which was so much for the best that he almost sagged on the spot.

"I have various reasons for needing the agent in question away from anywhere sensitive, and from HQ especially," Brittan went on, "which I'm sure will become instantly clear when I mention the rumours of political manoeuvring and coups funded by … are you following, Jack?"

"No?" he shot for honesty.

"The Pogril-Copenbul Cousinry," Brittan sighed, throwing something else to her plants, "are thought to be backing a rather worrying coup both here and in other areas of the human empire, which we would prefer to prevent if at all possible," she closed in a rather sharper voice. "We have an intradepartmental bulletin for a reason, Jack, I would advise you to pay more attention to it if you intend to be promoted at any point in your life – "

"Pogril-Copen- " Jack's brain caught up at last and he groaned from the centre of his knee-jerk reflex glands. He tried to remain at attention as something vegetable and vicious galloped around behind him. "Oh no. Not him."

Brittan raised her eyebrows. "I was not aware that you'd had any contact."

Jack skipped over their shared training sessions and the occasional competition, because that really didn't count for much. There were quite a few people he'd met that way and subsequently forgotten, often without even sleeping with them. "He has a reputation," he muttered.

"So, for that matter, do you." Brittan pointed out, so dry that Jack thought she must be sucking the moisture from the air.

"Not that one – " Jack swore, realised he'd sworn in front of a Lieutenant Colonel, and swore again in a slight panic.

"Jack," Brittan glared, her hands laced around each other in the scarlet light, leaning forwards over the desk as if imparting a confidence rather than something he'd probably have known already if he'd bothered reading the bulletins. "He is useful. He is a potential source of leverage for keeping the blasted Cousinry under some kind of control, marginally in their place." Her voice was rougher than usual. "Not that I expect someone who doesn't even keep up with the news to understand this. If he is not retrieved by one of their infernal ships, he constitutes an asset to the Agency by his presence among our ranks." She drummed her nails on the desktop, and it cried out in muted pain. "If he's safely tucked away in the arse of nowhere he can't make them collect him … should his stand on not rejoining the Cousinry at any point weaken."

"I understand," said Jack, who wasn't wholly sure that he did. He stared at the desk. The desk stared back. "Lieutenant Colonel."

"Now. What do you know about the city of Thal?" she sat forwards again, eyeing him keenly.

"Nothing. It sounds familiar, though."

"Yes. Strange." Brittan brought up the display-graph motes and turned them between her fingers as she switched them on. "Thal is a region of a planet settled by the human empire and subsequently isolated," she went on, adopting standard agency Tense Deployment as the images flickered and expanded in the air between them. In the confines of the Agency, all times constituted now and the present was the correct tense to use, unless one was discussing one's own personal timeline. Jack hadn't really paid attention to the rest of that seminar.

Brittan continued: "Whether by accident or design, it is broken politically away from the rest of the empire and enjoys a pleasant climate, et cetera, et cetera. The population remain humanoid, but refer to themselves now as Thalites." She covered her mouth and coughed. "Now is the period judged to be the height of their civilisation, although for some reason we have precious little information on the following decline. A lot of the records are very badly damaged, and no one is entirely sure how much information we should have on it."

Brittan closed down the visual display with a wave of her hand, and Jack stifled a yawn. Briefings on the nature of location always bored the shit out of him, especially as they were invariably the same after about ten minutes anyway.

"An impressively intense temporal disturbance of type alpha five zero two has occurred there despite the lack of natural distorting species and minerals on that planet; the region of space it occupies is not known for detrimental space-time anomalies, and everything is rather suspect." Brittan gave him an unreadable look, which at least wasn't unusual. She was an accomplished giver of completely veiled stares.

"Copy." Jack rocked on his heels, wondering what she wasn't telling him. "Investigate?" he asked, preparing himself for a departing salute.

"And collapse if possible and non-damaging." Brittan nodded, fixing him with an alarming stare again. "Duration believed to be between a week and a month. Area is fixed, but proving unfortunately immeasurable – there is a lot of interference, I think. Distortion," she said, glancing at something on the wall behind him, which was even more unsettling than the direct stare, "of other forces is almost inevitable towards the epicentre. Now get out of my office and stop scaring my plants."

Jack got out, and stopped scaring the plants.

The region of Thal was like some sort of deciduous paradise mapped out on the sunrise side of a huge stone ridge of vertiginous cliffs; Jack, who had been raised in a desert-and-heath land of unsurpassed beauty and very little water before personal tragedy dragged him and his mother to the glittering, sprawling cities of the Pennisula, found it lovely as a jewel from above but claustrophobic as all hell from the ground.

The broad canopies of (obviously imported and modified) trees spread like great green umbrellas even in parts of the city itself, like lost travellers. The idea of vegetation in an urban place seemed quite crazed to him, although not nearly as fucking absurd as who he had found himself partnered with.

Generally the first thing anyone noticed about the man who would later be known as John Hart was that he was short; the second was that he had usually stolen something from them. In the wonderful fifty-first century, almost any genetic or physical defect could be corrected, and it had fascinated Jack from afar when John first appeared on his general radar that he hadn't had this deformity resolved in genetica. Or rather, it had fascinated him until Ceno Blackamoor gently pointed out just what stubbornly diminished height meant, and then it had just worried him.

Arriving on the outskirts of Thal's only and eponymous conurbation, dizzy and nauseous from the enormous distances of space-time they had travelled in a single and unprotected trip, Jack had got his first proper in-depth look at his new partner.

Or his first now that he knew he'd have to work with the guy, rather than occasionally vaguely recognising someone short going past at HQ on his way to somewhere else. Most of the training sessions they'd both been in were long enough ago now that other memories had precedence, and Jack only slightly recalled John showing up in his mind because when someone turns up at Weapons unable to fire straight but exceptionally good at battering things to death with a blunt instrument, questions get asked.

The answer had been, yes, several times, both hands, and John Hart had been sent away for bone transplants.

John was short.

He came up to Jack's shoulder. He had taken some of the wildly popular hair supplement recently from the looks of it, and was growing out a shock of vivid – borderline lurid - red, yellow, and metallic-gold hair with natural mousy roots peeking out in inch-long streaks; Jack felt he was above such trends, but they were, annoyingly, sporting the same haircut. It was after all in style at the Agency regardless of how faddy one was in other respects. Kittin had refused it on the omnipresent religious grounds, like he'd rebuffed Jack's advances, couldn't work on all-water planets, and eschewed cheese.

Jack didn't think about what reputation he was bringing with him, on the grounds that it absolutely couldn't matter to someone like John.

"You do remember our cover?" he muttered as they moved through the 'city' outskirts, drawing curious glances but no open hostility from the citizens. They dressed like sacks of potatoes as far as Jack was concerned, but this was so often the case with various human civilisations that it didn't matter anymore; it seemed like no one outside of the central hub of the human empire had the good sense to dress like they wanted to be attractive.

They – the Thals - were also universally that peachy-beige colour that was inexplicably listed on census as "white", which was odd to his eyes but perhaps normal around here; an odd anomaly or sinister breeding programme, he had no idea. Jack wouldn't have asked Kittin about the cover, because Kittin usually all but tattooed mission details on his brain the minute they were briefed, but John just seemed like a cover-breecher. Among other things.

John sounded affronted in his reply.

He also sounded indistinct, having stopped to acquire an apple-like green-and-yellow fruit which was now taking up most of his mouth. It was an act of minor theft which Jack would have been entirely comfortable with committing himself, but for some reason the fact that John had got there first pissed him off. "I've been in the Agency longer than you have, you fucking twit," he said mildly and through a mouthful of Not-Apple. "Of course I remember." He tapped his temples with his free hand and managed to make a sarcastic face around his fruit.

"You joined up a week before me," Jack said. He'd made a very thorough study of the personnel database before leaving HQ. His own records offended him a little, making him sound like some inexperienced backwater hick with a self-image problem, but they were nothing on John's, which read like a series of cheap pulp novels. 'Suspected embezzling' had been only the tip of a monetary iceberg of misdemeanours.

The wide, quiet streets of the outer ring of Thal were littered mostly by women in long skirts carrying babies on their hips; Jack supposed this must be the wealthier side of the city. The buildings were low – less than four storeys – and wide, and all attached to swathes of gated greenery that had no place in an urban environment. Lizards scaled a nearby wall and flashed arrogantly in the sun like mobile jewels; at least, they looked vaguely like lizards and Jack wasn't in the mood for zoology.

"I know what I'm doing," John insisted, swallowing the Not-Apple's remains in one throat-bulging go, and wiping his fingers on his legs. "Do you?"

"Kaleds," Jack stuck his hands in his pockets. "Trading scout holiday." He frowned around at the passive folks chatting happily to each other on street corners. "Everything looks pretty normal so far …"

The wide streets and white buildings were, if he was honest, actually a bit creepy; technological advancements and plenty of living space did not often go hand in hand. Usually "civilisation" meant living in quarters that fit like a glove and implanting one's belongings below the skin unless one was astronomically wealthy… like John's family…

It was prosperous but not ostentatious.

Jack checked his Vortex Manipulator – and felt his insides sink gently.

It turned out that whatever passed for normal on the surface here, there were other, invisible ways in which Thal really was not. Several dials on the device were showing nothing for the first time since he'd been issued with the thing; thumbing surreptitiously through the menus confirmed it. The majority of non-monitoring segments were, not to put too fine a point on it, shafted. He stepped forwards and something nagged at his consciousness–

Jack jerked his head up in time to avoid being run over by a transport vehicle – nice lines but moving slowly, evidently in no hurry, SolarGen paint twinkling under the bright-but-cool sunlight.

"So you missed basic road safety," John observed, watching the vehicle slip past them.

"Too busy revising fundamental rules of Time Agency conduct," Jack bit back, stepping out into the road again a little more circumspectly.

"Not what I heard," John smiled. "I heard you found that repeat looping anomaly faster than most kids find their own dick." He swaggered rather than walking, an exaggeratedly masculine gait, compensating for his height, perhaps.

A few people in the street stared, but most of them seemed to either have better things to do, or better manners. Jack decided to let it go for now. He smoothed an imaginary crease out of his trousers, stared over the top of John's head, and said, "Since we're going to be staying here a little while for the investigation – "

"Until my much lamented extended family stop playing at Imperial Policy-makers," John corrected, grinning up at Jack's expression with uneven teeth. "Oh, I'm not stupid. Bit of a coincidence, me being sent away on a mission to a fucking nowhere planet just while all that manoeuvring is underway. Gosh. Wonder if that could be connected to the shit in the intradepartmental bulletins at all? Ha."

There was a silence as they regained the pavement proper.

"… we're going to have to stay somewhere," Jack muttered, refusing to be derailed. The streets seemed narrower on the left side of this road, suggesting they were closer to the city's centre than the one the agents were currently on. In his experience, anyway.

"Who's account are we on?" John asked, showing real interest for the first time, his hands burrowed into his pockets as if shutting out the cold, despite the clement and almost perfect air temperature.

"Expense," Jack pointed down one of the side streets, "and it looks like our luck's in."

There were several huge buildings which looked like they were probably hotels – at least, they had signs advertising vacancies and men standing outside the doors in uniform, they could just as easily have been military recruitment centres from Jack's experience – down the streets they traversed, but something about them made Jack uncomfortable. Or something about the idea of checking into one with John made him uncomfortable. John in general made him uncomfortable; he was annoying, he was full of himself (and how easy it would be to have him full of someone else, Jack's brain pointed out), and he overused the pheromones. Really overused them.

"Did you get specific instructions," John drawled, swaggering his stupid prison-breaker swagger a little behind and to the left of Jack, "or did Brittan just tell you to keep me out here until she sent word? Because if it's the latter – "

"Do you ever shut up?"

"—oh fuck off, you hypocrite. If it's the latter I want to know why we have to go through with this investigation farce. Can't I just have a little fun?"

Jack pointed his most charming and blinding smile at the man and said, "Are you suggesting that the investigation won't be fun?"

"Investigating a standard temporal anomaly of undetermined size?" John kicked something along the paved sidewalk. Jack couldn't see what it was and wasn't sure he cared enough to look. It bounced and skittered like a small stone. A light breeze was slipping between the tall buildings, ruffling their hair in patterns. It could have been a perfectly pleasant walk in some civilised suburbs, except Jack was habitually armed to the teeth (and part of his innards twitched for someone to just fucking try him), and from what he'd heard about John there was a good chance he'd start a fight. "Pfft. I'd rather investigate a hooker."

"On expenses?" Jack grunted.

"Of course."

"Don't be a prat," he sighed, finding that no stronger swearwords really sprang to mind. The weather was too nice for it, the clear air provoking more apathy than invigoration. "Maybe there'll be something else to look into while we're here."

"If you suggest a museum," John said with a kind of easy familiarity that made Jack's spine tingle inexplicably; there was a momentary sour taste in the air and his wristband vibrated with background residue that was just above a certain threshold, "I will shoot you in the knee and leave you to crawl to the hotel."

"Well that's just fucking charming," Jack sighed. "I cannot imagine why it was you went through so many partners so quickly – "

"It's not my fault they kept getting themselves killed," John said with an impressively out of place pout that looked comical, exaggerated, childish, and apparently completely sincere.

"According to the files, it sort of was your fault." Jack fiddled with the dials at the edge of his Vortex Manipulator with his thumb; apparently there had been a resurgent blip in the reja-vu levels a minute ago but no indication of what might have caused it. He found himself shrugging at the monitoring systems. Unhelpful. He might as well not have the fucking thing at all for all the good it was doing – but Jack knew he didn't mean it. There was no mileage in throwing away kit that could be fixed, and while caution might not have been his watchword, prudence occasionally was.

"Oh, and how much of what goes in supposedly permanent record is altered to suit whatever agenda's being advanced at the moment?" John asked with a sly fractional smile that Jack simultaneously wanted to punch and wanted to lick. "Internal politics are the Agency's stinking infected lifeblood. Jack."

He was forced to concede that this much was true. "And you know this because --?"

"Because I'm of the Pogril System and the Copenbul Cousinry and anything to do with the shifting of power is my stinking. Infected. Lifeblood." John kicked the fragment of stone with each word and sent it sailing away over the centre of the road. The conversation died a quiet but final death with this.

The façade of the hotel which they eventually stopped at – it advertised itself as a "guest house" which in Jack's experience meant it was a hotel with less amenities and less staff getting in the way – was genuinely beautiful. On Boeshane – in the Pennisula City – beautiful buildings all had scuffed bases no matter how heavenly their distant peaks, and their construction was metal and painted with SolarGen paint and occasional out-croppings of NewsMotes, until one's eyes grew apathetic with all the information that they were expected to process.

Here in Thal beautiful meant an unpretentious gallery of geometric shapes that tended towards arches and sweeps, studded with plant life in dimples in the architecture, with flowers just growing without bubbles or attendees, and windows that opened on stilt-like appendages and a smallish furry creature asleep on a column by the front door.

Jack was mildly enraptured.

"How provincial," John sneered, taking it all in with a cold flat flickering of his gaze.

And Jack had no idea if he meant the building or his reaction.

He found himself doing the business of checking them in; John was – Jack sighed – stealing things from the front desk like a petty criminal, with an admittedly impressive speed and delicacy of hand, and he didn't seem inclined to stop for chat with the middle-aged and slightly doughy woman Jack was talking to.

"New to the city? I can tell you were to find the best bread bars," she offered. She looked somewhat as if she'd been made of bread herself.

"What about hookers?" John's whole demeanour changed with the word; unfortunately, so did the receptionist's (her name plaque said "Mrs. Mugrum" in brass-engraved letters, leading Jack to suspect that she was in fact the only receptionist they ever had on duty; Thal was clearly advanced enough to have programmable plaques if they so desired. There were moons advanced enough for that), disintegrating with incredible speed into a look of angry, offended suspicion. She evidently understood the idiom and didn't want to.

"Please ignore him," Jack said with a careful smile that got lost before it reached his eyes. "He's doing it on purpose to make me look bad and he's not going to succeed John put that down."

Mrs. Mugrum gave him a wavering smile and said, "I do hope you get over your argument soon."

Jack looked back over his shoulder at John, who showed no sign whatsoever of putting down the ornament and who was instead examining it like a market trader for chips and cracks. "I … think it may be some time yet John put that down."

"Your room is on the third floor, second corridor," Mrs Mugrum said with a smile that came as close to her eyes as Jack's had. "Do you need me to show you –?" and she sounded very much like she'd rather not have to stir her bread-like body from her seat, much less do it in the company of John.

"We'll be fine," Jack said smoothly, tossing her another wholly insincere smile. "John. Now, please."

The room was what Jack imagined the older fictions meant when they referred to "a model of taste". It wasn't an opulent sprawling pleasure palace apartment, nor was it the frankly claustrophobic quarters he'd been living in for years now, on and off, between missions and excursions, spending more time outside than in for the simple reason that "in" felt like his skin was suffocating him. It was painted white with some sort of emulsified pigment – the smell was unmistakeable – and the walls were largely straight, with the odd shelf, and a few bumps wherein flowers had been planted, even indoors.

Jack sniffed. They probably weren't carnivorous. Too much time in Brittan's office had warped his perception of indoor vegetation, given him a tingling spine of crawling suspicion that the bloody things were moving around whenever he wasn't looking at them.

"Now," he said, looking at his Vortex Manipulator and trying to work out which of the monitoring systems were still working. "To triangulate…"

John was not paying attention, but examining the room with something between disgust and interest.

"To triangulate the epicentre of the anomaly…" Jack repeated, a little louder. The monitoring systems were beginning to produce something of a vague idea – a good half an hour to an hour of walking to the sunward side of the city should put them within the area the Vortex Manipulator mapped out as being "very likely".

It took something like three hours to walk the distance Jack thought was half an hour (cursing himself for not having a more flexible view on Time by now, and cursing John for diverting himself down side streets with an absence of a sense of direction that bordered on the catastrophic), but they came at last to a wooden building several storeys high and dumped among the wrecks of other empty storage places like the hulk of a landed ship.

Dust motes shimmered in lazy stripes through the sunlight sneaking in, the mottled and honeyed afternoon light painting lethargy on the walls, across the empty floor. It probably looked quite beautiful, if you were into that; Jack thought it lacked interest or desert and was an excellent example of a shack that could be torn down and replaced with something properly constructed.

"Boring," John announced, throwing a stone.

The stone arced through the air, twisted somewhere around the zenith of its arc, and as it fell began to slow.

John said, "If you mention Einstein, Harkness, I will punch you in the kidneys."

The stone went on falling, slower and slower. Jack shrugged. "I can't remember that lecture."

"You were asleep."

"You were watching?"

"No," John said, as the stone turned more and more sluggishly, as if the air was so thick that it couldn't move. "But I know I was definitely asleep."

The stone stopped turning. There was a sense of motion about it still, the feeling of an object in the process of being somewhere else that Jack couldn't describe – a kinetic possibility, a tingling of joules being spent – but it hung in the air like a cloud, a hovercraft, a … a stone stuck in a temporal disturbance of type alpha five zero two. That was the language of the reports, that was what he'd have to record, sooner or later. Jack groaned inwardly at the prospect of hours and hours of official-ese and trying to keep a straight face while droning … and droning …

Oh well, he'd put it off a little.

The stone rotated at glacial speeds but didn't seem to drop visibly lower.

"Estimated time of impact?" Jack suggested.

John shrugged. "I'm hungry."

The wood was rough and oily under Jack's fingers; the floor under his boots unsteady and smoothed out with blood, gritted with a storm of sawdust. The dust still hung and whirled in the air of the epicentre of the anomaly, as turgid as the remaining thought in Jack's head as John's mouth worked the head of his as if it had been designed for that purpose alone.

Jack put his hands over John's scalp. The hair was soft and prickly, damp with sweat. Touch, touch, Jack could do, it was his other senses that were causing him all the trouble. His mouth tasted of his own bile, still, and his nose was clogged with it. He could hear the circular thunder of his heart as it raced through the same few beats like an unimaginative parade drummer, and the echoes of a shot fired two hours before bounced back and forth, reverberating from the compact timestorm over John's shoulder …

He shut his eyes and breathed through his mouth as John shuffled them back without subtlety or much grace, yanking on Jack's knees. Another step or two and they'd be inside the inner perimeter (roughly estimated) of the disturbance. Jack tightened his grip on John's head; John squeezed Jack's thigh and yanked him off-balance with it –

he is eight, eight boeshane rotations of 372 days, eight years old and gray has just made his bloody and damp entrance into the world; jack stands outside the tent and holds his father's hand, waiting for the okay with goggles over his eyes. gray is born in a sandstorm; jack was born in the calm, sloughing and slippery windless weeks of winter, when the sun and sand retreat and leave only sky. they said it would make an explorer of him. among the sand people, an explorer is no great thing –

– John's hand held Jack's thigh like he was drowning and Jack stroked his head, eight and twenty-nine and everything in between at once and all of them, strangely, with John's mouth on his dick, John's hand on his thigh, and the smell of vomit in his nostrils.

the slums of peninsula city are the same filth as any other human-centric city slum; at sixteen jack thinks them the vilest place in the universe but by twenty-two he's seen worse. just … not from his hands and knees, like this, just … not with the pollution of it all creeping inside his body like fingers in the absurdly long nights. like it's a stain he can't get off him. when he passes medical for the agency military arm jack has to have forty species of parasite removed and neutralised from his person. they give him a uniform and suddenly he's clean again –

– John's hand held Jack's thigh like he was drowning and Jack stroked his head, eight and twenty-nine and everything in between at once and all of them, strangely, with John's mouth on his dick, John's hand on his thigh, and the smell of vomit in his nostrils.

his feet stumble on paved and rainy streets and his coat – unfamiliar, archaic, or alien, he's not sure which, but in the him that feel it, it's like a second skin – billows around him as he calls orders back to his team. the impossible weight of years and responsibility is on him like a thousand kilometres of sea water, pushing him down, and in every atom of his aching empty being there is this bitter black longing for a death that won't come –

– Jack held the back of John's head as if he was trying to divine its contents (what was going on in there? Right now? Right… then-now-if-when?) and felt his breath, one single breath, recycled over and over and over and over and over, enter and leave, enter and leave, enter and leave his body. Sawdust clung to his eyelashes, clung to his sweat-slimed face, to his hair: slowly. Slowly as a soft explosion. Slowly as death.

the room is bigger on the inside –

– Jack held the back of John's head as if he was trying to divine its contents (what was going on in there? Right now? Right… then-now-if-when?) and felt his breath, one single breath, recycled over and over and over and over and over, enter and leave, enter and leave, enter and leave his body. Sawdust clung to his eyelashes, clung to his sweat-slimed face, to his hair: slowly. Slowly as a soft explosion. Slowly as death.

death is an endless plunge into a cold, dark nothingness; he sits up. death is an endless burning pain that strips his skin from his bones and turns his insides to ashes; he sits up. death is dissolution into a million subatomic shards, scattered like the sands of his birthplace on white atomic winds; he sits up –

– And with a gasp that was wrenched from the pit of his balls, whenever they were, Jack stumbled back, out of the epicentre, out of the timestorm, out of John's grasp. He had his eyes open just enough to register the way his come, ripped from John's lips, retreated back into his dick, extended, flew forward again.

He breathed once, twice, and John burst from the epicentre like a spawning salmon. Hit the floor too hard, and lay there making a sound he almost didn't recognise as giggling.

"There's something wrong with you," Jack said severely, tucking his dick back into his trousers. He leaned down over John, who had curled into a C on the bloody, gritty floor and started hiccupping. "Very. Wrong."

John's eyes were disturbingly bright when they opened, and his face red. "Again," John said between sniggers, "again, again."

"It's not Markham," John agreed as Jack traced the memory of letters over the once-again-whole wall of the wooden building. "Maybe she knows, though."

Jack shook his head, getting to his feet and giving the dust a kick once he was up. "We were at her four hours last time, I think she'd have said," he said dryly. He looked at his Vortex Manipulator more out of habit than expectation: they were into the twenty-sixth rotation of Week Two and he had a urinary tract infection that wouldn't budge and which John, irritatingly, didn't share; John's hair had long since grown out, been cut, and grown out again, and Jack had been losing and gaining the same three pounds like a yoyo.

"We're going to have to wait until Monday One again to question her," Jack said pointedly, and John wiped his mouth. There was no real improvement in his appearance – he still looked like he'd been rolling about in a slaughterhouse, largely because he had – but there was now a pale stripe over his nose and lips like a target amongst the spatter. "You're too enthusiastic."

"That's not what you –"

"Shut up," Jack grunted, sweeping his fingers over the remembered letters as if he was blind and trying to read them by almost-touch.

People swarmed around the fat silver phallus – some sort of silo, although what it was meant to store Jack couldn't work out from first glance – like ants around a spilled droplet of honey, staring and muttering.

The flowers by the pavement bobbed and dipped red and white and iridescent blue heads in little waves of colour as they passed, moving through the crowd with the ease of sharks slipping through shoals of baitfish; or to use a more Boe metaphor, with the ease of a dropped rock through sinking sand. Or to be entirely literal: like Time Agents who have been trained on crowd motion and side-walking.

The front rows of the crowd stood back from the base of the silo, covering their mouths and in some cases, their eyes. Two large men in black clothes laid, with deliberate care and awkward, delicate movements, several … chunks onto some sort of plastic-like sheeting, blue.

Jack peered. There seemed to be something approaching a whole person's worth of lumps, charting the dismemberment of a slightly plump – not distended, just podgy - woman who must have been in her … he examined her knees, squinting around the upper arm of a man with his hat in his hands … in her late twenties, assuming the absence of vanity surgeries or injections to the knee-skin. Most people ignored that area, in his experience, and …

"Does anyone know who she was?" asked one of the men in black. Jack leaned back toward John, trying to keep him in his line of sight, trying to indicate that he wasn't to go sticking his nose in. Someone in front of Jack shifted their weight and briefly obliterated his view of the corpse … pieces.

"Prisca Kirke," said a whispering voice from further back.

"This," John said, elbowing Jack in the side, "is the 'peaceful city of Thal'. Hah. Hah. Hah."

"Shut up, John."

Jack rolled the bloodstained cloth back from Markham's leg a gently as if he was sewing up the hole underneath. A simple bullet-wound, if "simple" was ever the right word for something like that – firing a lump of lead through someone's muscle was quite a brutal way of immobilising them and Jack wasn't sure he liked this level of primitivism at all. John, on the other hand, didn't look up from cleaning the barrel of the weapon.

"Cleaning" looked a lot like stroking it; there was more delicacy in John's fingers wiping an oily rag over the ridiculously phallic metal tube than there had been when he hefted Markham onto the table. Jack turned his attention back to the perforated thigh. It hadn't hit an artery, but it looked … strange and ugly all the same.

He blamed John entirely for what he did next; the old Jack, the Jack who'd accidentally shot Kittin with a sonic blaster and stolen all of the end-of-quarter bonuses and seduced the entire psychiatric team to avoid being registered as having compulsive behaviour problems, the old Jack would have stopped short of that.

But the new Jack had grown very, very tired of this fucking city and the same petty killings over and over, and the new Jack walked his fingers the length of Markham's naked, bloody thigh until the tip of one touched the very edge of her gunshot wound.

And he dipped it in.

The wound sucked like a hungry mouth at Jack's finger, and unbidden the image of last night, John's mouth a wound around his cock, flashed across Jack's mind. He left his hand where it was and looked up, catching John's eye across the dim-lit room.

"You're thinking what I'm thinking," John said, a little pink and all devilishly pleased with himself. It was unfair that he still managed to look attractive when he was being obnoxious.

"No," Jack said hastily, although he was pretty certain that he was. "And anyway, she's unconscious."

"Yes," John said, half-closing his eyes around his broadening grin, "so she won't find out."

The old Jack would have been appalled. The new Jack just took his hand away from Markham's thigh and stamped across the echoing stone floors of the barn. It took too long; the temporal lag this close to the centre of the disturbance, the anomaly's axis intersection, was extreme; Jack took ten minutes to make the three-second journey, but John waited for him, holding the oily rag like a silk handkerchief.

"You go and dig the slug out of her fucking leg," Jack said shortly, when he got within snatching range. John waited with an insolent, indolent, insufferable, irresistible smirk, the rag still raised, for Jack to take it from him. Only then did he pass Jack the gun, pushing the barrel into Jack's palm like he'd shoved his dick there the night before, smooth and certain that was where it belonged.

Jack wondered if shooting John in the head would constitute "acceptable casualty" in the final report. Or if it would even stick, considering how everyone else just returned back to life without a flicker at the end of each loop. Monday One rolling round again meant corpses returning to life as if some cosmic hand had flicked their reset buttons.

He went on wondering as John slowly, slowly paced through the temporal depression and came to rest beside the table, fondling the surgical tweezers – antiques, miserable things of steel that was imperfectly sterilised and impossible to manipulate with the kind of delicacy Jack'd been accustomed to before, even with the clumsiest of field-calibrated sonic equipment – between forefinger and thumb.

"I could just amputate," John pointed out, looking not at the knives lying in a haphazard heap on the chair but over the table at Jack, his uneven teeth bared in another of those inviting, punchable smirks. "It's not like it won't just –" he made an obscene squelching noise with his tongue in the inside of his cheek, "—grow back."

Even the dust motes fell at a glacial pace in the air between them. It was like watching a film in slow-motion playback, or the fall of snowflakes frozen in a photograph.

The gun weighed in Jack's hand like the soft pressure of destiny, something he'd given up on believing in a long stretch of his personal timeline ago. He let it drag his hand toward the floor, surrendering to gravity more readily than he'd done to anything else but – if he was honest – to John, and John's impulses which hardly warranted a title like "plans".

"I could just amputate all her limbs," John said softly, catching Jack's eye again and smiling. "But that would be dull. And I think you'd prefer it if I just left this within the realms of possibility. Let her wake up … thinking it was necessary."

"I think I would prefer it," Jack said, weighing the gun again, feeling his fingers fitting into the grooves like they fit into John's asshole, his mouth, the cracks between what passed for his sanity and the things he confessed to wanting to do… "if you shut the fuck up and took the bullet out of her leg." He patted the pistol against his leg twice.

"Or if you shot me," John said, squeezing the tweezers together in the air.

Jack startled. In the syrupy, time-screwed atmosphere of the barn it took several minutes to happen, but startle he did. He considered the possibility that any given bullet would, in here, burrow through the air like it was travelling through glycerine, leaving almost a tunnel for seconds as it passed through the depression; and he watched John's face as he remembered the fucking weapon wasn't loaded.

"You want to," John said, and his smile fled before a much uglier expression that curled the corners of his mouth up just the same. "Why not do it?"

The tendons in Jack's fingers twitched. "Don't be an idiot."

"Why not shoot me?" John pressed, stuffing the tweezers violently into Markham's wound, so violently that her leg muscle jumped and stirred. "Why not? If that's what you want to do, you worthless bastard, shoot me."

And Jack looked at the tweezers sticking up out of Markham's thigh like unnatural flowers from a crack in the pavements outside, felt the weight of smooth oiled destiny in his hand and started to laugh, shaking his head. He laughed, and he laughed, until he felt something come free in his chest and flap around like the thing that had already come loose in his head. He shook his head until his neck hurt, and threw the gun at John.

It turned so slowly in the hanging dust motes that it looked like it was in a sales video, rotating for the benefit of an audience of simpletons. End over end it tumbled, making a mockery of gravity as it fell sideways towards John, thudding slow and final onto the ground with a hysterically loud bang.

"It's not fucking loaded," Jack said, as the laughter swept through him, a fire in a hospital. "It's not loaded."

Shrugging, John pulled the tweezers out again with a schlup of flesh. "You won't do it."

Jack bit the inside of his cheek and watched John root around inside Markham's leg without a care in the universe or the slightest bit of interest in keeping her wound small. He was probably going to kill her, again, and Jack … wasn't going to shoot John.

Not yet.

Prisca
Unter ???
Markham
Zebe

"It's not going to collapse."

"It's not going to collapse if we don't figure out how to collapse it. Leave the fucking list alone."

"It's not going to collapse, Jack, and I'm going to DIE OF BOREDOM."

Jack woke, and the day was sunny and it was warm, the sounds of morning washing around him like a voice-filled tide of static. Cars swished by in soundless, smokeless uniformity; the smell of flowers crept in through the half-open window and all was right with the world.

"Oh not again," he groaned, holding one of the pillows over his face. Any minute now the landlady would be here to scream in shock and demand to know who he was and what he was doing here, and Jack was tired of explaining.

"Fuck, is it Monday One again?" John grunted. He was crushing Jack's knee, sprawled sideways over and through Jack's legs like a mangy but beautiful cat, and he absolutely stank of stale alcohol of some murderously high percentage by volume, and of sex. Both seemed to seep constantly from his pores.

"Fraid so," Jack sighed, regarding the window box and its vegetative tresses with savage disappointment. His irritation was truncated by John biting his thigh; Jack punched him in the shoulder and John snarled, closing a hand around Jack's skin for long enough to rub his thumb the wrong way over Jack's leg hair.

"I am sick of Monday One," John yawned, launching himself at Jack's abdomen with his mouth open; Jack stuck out a clenched fist and wedged it into John's jaws as if he was playing with a dog, and John gnawed on it, his hands on Jack's inner thighs, not quite touching the underside of his balls.

"I suppose this time we need to check out where Markham actually was during the catalyst," Jack muttered with nothing that could be described as any species of enthusiasm. "Get up."

"Fuck Markham," John griped, spitting out Jack's hand and displaying his teeth in that mockery of Jack's smile that he'd picked up along the way.

"If we solve this – "

"We're not going to." John nibbled distractedly on Jack's lower belly, until Jack swatted at his head again. "So fuck her." He squeezed Jack's thigh. "I mean, fuck her. Why not?"

"Because it's unethical," Jack muttered, lacking a little in the way of emphasis or authority. John's hand on his thigh was warm and distracting and close to being a very pleasant diversion indeed.

"Did you manage to convince yourself there?" John sneered cheerfully, "Because it doesn't sound like it." His hair had by now grown out to cheek length, and was more mousy than fiery. Jack wrapped it around his fingers and let the strands trickle back over his palm.

"Let me shave your head."

"Why?" John asked, paying more attention to an itch on his neck than to anything Jack was doing.

"Because I want to," Jack said, combing through the length of John's hair with his fingers a second time. "Let me shave your head," he repeated, catching John's gaze in his own effortlessly magnetic blue line of sight.

"Alright," John said, laying his head on Jack's stomach too gently to be head-butting him in it but too hard to be doing anything notably intimate.

There was a voice in the corridor, a shrill female voice of advancing years, and it cried out, "Who's there? I'm warning you, I'll call the police – "

"Your turn," John yawned, gesturing to the door.

"Is not."

"Is. You swapped with me last time," John grunted, making no effort to help Jack off the bed.

Jack sighed, rolled out from under John's surprisingly heavy body with no small amount of difficulty, and padded to the door. The carpet of the hotel room reverted back to this pristine and comfortable state at the end of each fortnight; John had even slaughtered a pig in there three Monday Ones ago, and they'd had an ill-conceived barbecue that burnt most of the storey away.

"Mrs. Mugrum," Jack said, yanking the door open with a tired sigh, "we are the police. I am Secret Officer Small and this is my partner, Secret Officer Broad."

From the bed, John waved hello without sitting up or even taking his other hand from his pubes, which Jack thought was a touch, although not really a nice one.

"We are here on a clandestine mission to penetrate the growing Kaled undercover intrusion and our main office should have sent you the paperwork concerning our arrival and needs, if not I can ask them to send it to you again – " Jack rattled off at speed, flashed Mrs. Mugrum a turbo-shined smile, and prepared to slam the door shut.

"Oh," Mrs. Mugrum said, apparently stunned. "Why are you naked?"

Jack didn't even bother to look down at himself, just winked outrageously and said, "If I told you, I'd have to kill you, Mrs. Mugrum."

"Tell her," John called, "I'm bored – "

"You will be handsomely reimbursed, Mrs. Mugrum," Jack continued, waving John quiet behind his own back with a threatening gesture. "But for now – "

"Of course." She backed out, pulling the door to behind her.

Jack picked up an electric razor on the way back to the bed – it was laid on by the hotel, along with everything else that they'd repeatedly trashed – and brandished it with a meaningful look. "Time for a change of image, Secret Officer Broad."

"They really will swallow any old shit when you smile at them," John snorted, dipping his head – he had struggled into a sitting position at last.

"Wouldn't you?"

"You have to ask nicely, Secret Officer Small," John put his chin against his collarbones.

Jack's boots slipped over the steep incline, scrabbling for purchase on the oil-black soil that rose in banks here at the very edge of the city, the sun dipping lower and lower behind them, leaving the bank in shadow. The air was thin and cold in his lungs, like tiny knives in his throat, a taste of copper on the back of his tongue. And the sounds of pursuit encroached on him like a shadow, snapping at his heels.

"WAIT," John shouted, somewhere back down the seemingly endless slope.

"Keep up, you idiot." Jack didn't turn, just dug his toes into the unyielding dirt, trying to get a foothold as he more-or-less flung himself upward on all fours. This didn't leave his hands free, and the lack of a weapon was grinding on him, feeling as naked and exposed as if he'd been spread-eagled on an examination table.

"Either you slow down and wait for me or I'm going to shoot you in the back of the fucking knee," John yelped. There was a pattering sound of falling soil, and a thump and a thud from somewhere far below.

Jack had never been much for vertigo, or for any kind of paralysing fear, but the sense of clinging to the side of an unsteady, slippery shooting range waiting for Unter's men to pick him off was starting to make him wish he wasn't so far above the ground. He hit a less intense gradient and tried to step up the pace.

"John I'm not fucking waiting for you—"

The shock of pain and the sound of the gun – some antique John insisted on lugging around with him along with the rest of his impractical arsenal – hit him at the same time, just after the slug. A colourless shockwave surged through his nerves from the back of his knee and hurled him onto his face, his fingers clawing at the soil until he lay in an impression the shape of his own furious, white-faced body.

Jack's breath grunted in and out of him as if he was some steam-drive device breaking down. He swore, and swore again, and tried to separate the murderous fury from the shrieking agony threatening to overwhelm his brain, tried to shove them both off his critical faculties. Think, Jack. Think. Easy to say.

The footsteps that followed him onto the shallower part of the incline were John's – the length of stride was too short to be any of Unter's men – and Jack could barely keep the red mist out of his mind. "You idiot. You're just going to fucking leave me here?"

"No. Maybe. No." John sounded out of breath, but he had definitely stopped. Jack could see his boots.

He rolled, awkwardly, onto his side, and hunched up, trying not to move his knee. Jack squinted up at John's surprisingly twitchy form, silhouetted against the dying daylight, and tried to keep his voice steady. "How the fuck did you think that was a good idea? Now they're going to catch up—"

"Well if you'd just waited." A petulant whine.

"I can't believe you," Jack groaned, trying to assess the damage without actually touching the epicentre of the agony; was the bullet still in there? "You just tried to make you shooting me in the fucking KNEE into my fault-- actually, no, wait. I can believe that." He winced. "This is exactly your degree of stupidity. Don't you ever think about consequences?" He was aware of sounding just a tiny, tiny bit like his field squadron leader from training.

John's hands slid easily under Jack's arms and somewhat less easily around his upper torso. "Er, I usually just deal with those when I come to – fucking – you're heavy."

"It's called muscle mass." Jack tried to brace his good leg to protect the bad, but it had very little effect. "OW. Stop that."

"You're fucking heavy. Weigh less!"

"Well it wouldn't be an issue if you hadn't SHOT ME IN THE FUCKING KNEE." Jack took a deep breath and braced himself as John pulled again, achieving nothing but a brick-solid wall of pain.

"Back of the knee."

"Don't come over all pedantic now." Jack tried to peer back over his shoulder, but in the fading light the wasteland was all but invisible, painted in indistinct greys and slate-blue shadows. "Are they – can you see them?"

"No, I think." John's voice faded off for a moment, and Jack watched him scan the horizon the way they'd come, staring into the gathering dark. "I… Jack."

"What?"

"It's Sunday two."

"That's nice." Jack tried to squirm out of John's grip, still currently too dignified to actually bite the back of his knuckles but seriously considering it. The bastard's hands still smelled of Jack's saliva from that morning. "You shot me in the fucking knee. I am going to destroy you."

"Jack, it's Sunday two, the sun's going down." John sat down on the soil behind Jack's head, out of easy punching range, and tightened his grip around Jack's chest. "Give it another two hours and we're in the clear, we hit reset."

"You shot me in the shitting, fucking, assraping knee, you Pogril piece of shit. I don't have two hours." Somewhere in the bottom of his mind Jack wondered if he was being unreasonable. Then he thought about the sentence shot me in the knee and unleashed a firestorm of internal cursing that nearly obliterated the next words out of John's mouth.

"Stop going on about it."

Jack wished he had just ignored him.

"STOP GOING ON ABOUT IT?" he barked, trying to worm free without jarring the wound. "YOU SHOT. ME. WHILE I WAS TRYING TO GET US OUT OF HERE."

"You were going to just leave me behind." John's voice was hot and truculent in his ear, like the breath of a teenaged desert.

"No I – I wasn't." Jack fell back against him and made a frustrated noise between his teeth. "You." He punched at John's leg. "Fucking lunatic."

"Anyway they're not following any more so it doesn't matter."

"It fucking does matter, you sh—"

"Yes I know."

There was a short, somewhat loaded silence. The atmosphere of the planet was, of course, thick nitrogen/oxygen blend, and the sky in daylight a commendable, "normal" blue, like Boeshane. Now, in the last gasp of Sunday Two's dwindling daylight, the sky above him was a strange, swimming teal and before him a liquid indigo shading slowly toward some sort of velvety black. Jack supposed that behind him, over the bank, behind John, the sunset was blasting an anaemic yellow sunset through the pollutionless air.

"I can't believe you thought I was going to leave you behind," he said eventually, scowling down at his leg. The pain wasn't diminishing, just steadying. That would be the opiod-implants getting to work. Give it another fifteen minutes, twenty, maybe, and he'd be able to walk. He'd regret it later, but then… what was new about that? "You're the one who just stabs people in the back and runs off. I've read your file."

"Stop saying that, all right?" John's hand descended over Jack's face and for a moment Jack flinched, a moment before he realised John was picking dirt out of his eyebrows with uncharacteristic delicacy. "What makes you think there's anything remotely accurate in those files?"

Jack made a non-committal noise and winced as he worked to straighten his leg.

"You've read yours, you tell me – was anything in there right?"

"Honestly?" Jack reached down to grip the sides of his knee as best he could in this awkward position; John didn't appear to have any plans for letting go of his chest just yet. There was, at least, an exit wound which, miraculously, didn't go through the fucking patella. Trust John to be a shitty shot.

"Oh don't be ridiculous." His breath was abrupt and dismissive on the back of Jack's neck.

He tried not to shiver. "Honestly; yes. Most of it."

It was getting colder on the bank, or the wave of adrenaline that had been keeping Jack heated, first of movement and then of fucking pain was starting to ebb away, leaving him chilly and sweat-stained up a fucking dyke on the outskirts of the town, totally at the mercy of Unter's men if they made another sweep. Jack chewed the inside of his mouth and felt at the stain on his knee; it was drying. There wasn't quite enough light, now, to distinguish it from the dark fabric of his trousers.

There was a soft, long inhalation behind him. John was clearly working up to something. "…I'm …not going to leave you behind."

"Is that what this is about?" Jack asked suspiciously, trying to unstick fabric from his knee.

"What?"

"Did you just shoot me in the fucking knee to make some kind of demented point?" Jack grunted. There was less than no point in trying to disentangle his clothes from the wound but he couldn't just lie here doing nothing.

"No." John sounded slightly too offended.

"I think you did."

"I can't help what you think." And now huffy. Of all the places Jack had been intending to spend this Sunday Two, this reset, this really wasn't on the list.

But he couldn't let it go. "John, did you shoot me in the fucking knee to make a point?" Jack tried to grab John's knee and squeeze it, drum the point home, but John was slippery and his own reactions were dulled by pain and synth opiod-release. "Was that it? Are you really that insane that you think this proves you're a better person?"

"… no." John said indignantly, and barely a second had passed before he added, "But now that you mention it—"

"You know your problem?" Jack interrupted.

"Oh … fff… enlighten me. Go on." John stuck his chin into Jack's spine. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Your problem is that you have no concept of loyalty." Jack jerked his head forward, trying to dislodge the pointy presence in his back, but neither John's chin nor the obvious outline of several weapons went away.

"I'm entirely fucking loyal to my friends," he said haughtily, his breath tickling Jack's ear.

That really was too much. "Your friends. A group of people defined as 'the ones who don't ask me to do things I don't want to do, ever'?"

"Well do yours?"

"John..." Jack sighed into the air and was irked to see that he could spot the beginnings of vapour forming from his lungs. Colder than he'd thought. How long was it until the reset? "Exactly how many friends do you have?"

"Eventually?" John's fingers dug into Jack's intercostal muscles, sudden, vicious, and sharp-edged as knives, so much so that for a moment Jack wondered if they would draw blood. "NONE."

"And that wasn't the point I was making, anyway." He shoved back into John's chest and was rewarded by the plink of teeth snapping against each other unexpectedly behind him.

"Shut up, Jack, and stop bleeding on me," was the only response, world-weary and far too put-upon for someone who was, least he be allowed to forget, responsible for the situation he was whining about in the first place.

"… you…" was all Jack managed.

A hand slid out from under his armpit and cupped his chin instead, forcing his head back to an uncomfortable degree. Jack, his own hands bloodied and covered in the luscious but unfortunately quite cloying soil of the earthworks, grabbed at John's wrist. Not in time to stop John pulling his mouth up to meet his own, and for a moment or two Jack forgot about the entire insane avalanche of stupidity that had ensued; thought with the opiod-release finally attacking his pain centres that things were at least bearable; kissed John back with disquiet that faded into a kind of aching uncertainty where his sternum lay.

John's mouth was not, this time, the anvil to Jack's hammer or anything so coarse; it was infuriatingly comforting (this is his fault), soft and moist and kind of … sucking the pain out of him with John's usual and aggravating ability to distract him (this is his fault, he shot me, he shot me in the knee), until Jack found his hand had crept up into John's hair (short bristles under his palm, he fucking shot me in the knee) and the other onto the back of his neck and he'd twisted himself into this absurd shape around John, on the blood-stained soil, as the darkness grew.

And John, kissing him back with a gentle urgency that made no sense, no sense at all, holding Jack's torso like it might break.

When Jack finally got free for air, he winced again and muttered, "Well, that's this coat pretty comprehensively fucked."

John wiped his palm on the back of Jack's thigh and said in a half-whisper, "I don't think your trousers are going to make it either."

"Well, fuck."

And with that the last of the daylight faded into a ghostly green glimmer out of Jack's line of sight, and he sank back to wait for Reset.

The flowers by the pavement bobbed and dipped red and white and iridescent blue heads in little waves of colour as another transport vehicle hummed past. Jack cradled the bag over his knees and watched John drag another chunk of the late Prisca out of the silo, his compact shoulders rippling with muscle as he tugged backwards and the blood-soaked sheet encasing it caught on a snaggle-edged rock. Sweat painted a dark stripe between his scapulae and the knot in Jack's groin tightened abruptly, his vision clouding.

"You want to fucking help me here?" John growled, trying to untangle his gruesome burden from the rockery without much success but with a lot of grunting.

"No," Jack said serenely, catching the sun on his face. "We were too late again."

"Yeah, well, maybe she died before Monday One," John pointed out, wiping sweat off his face. There were streaks of dried blood on the backs of his hands, pinkish-brown.

"Not with this level of decomp.," Jack corrected, getting up at last. The low light was in his eyes, along with his hair. He shielded them from one and brushes away the other, a heavy bag of human head and forearm dangling from his free hand and dripping onto his boot. "We know it's not Markham or Ünter now, or us …"

"Leaving us a city of half a million to go through yet," John complained, lifting the back end of the sheet with his foot until Prisca's torso dragged clear over the rough ground, streaming unshat shit from a severed intestine over a floral arrangement. Jack wrinkled his nose at the smell.

"We don't even know that they're behind all this," Jack muttered.

John put Prisca's torso down clumsily on the path and ran his palms over his close-shorn head and the simple gesture – distorting his biceps and dirtying his scalp – made Jack's cock twitch.

"You know what I think?" John asked, pulling at his forehead with the heels of his hands.

"No, but I'd put money on it being obscene," Jack drawled.

John gave him the finger. "I think Brittan or someone at HQ set this up to keep me out here, this whole anomaly – "

"That is impressively paranoid even for you," said Jack, who was getting tired of John's grandiose delusions as much as he was coming to believe some of them.

"It's fucking plausible," John scowled, ignoring the body parts littering the neat front garden and giving Jack a mock-wounded look (or perhaps a genuinely wounded one, it was never easy to tell).

"In your deranged head. It'd be a lot of very illegal hard work to get you out when she could just have locked you up."

"Think about it," John insisted, taking a bottle from his trouser pocket. "Maybe they wanted you gone too."

"Why?"

"You're a nuisance. I'm a liability." John flashed his teeth and unplugged the bottle with them. They were dirtier than Jack's and slightly too pointed in the canines, too far forwards; John said he'd refused the fixes Jack had taken 'on principle', which was news to Jack as he wasn't aware John had any such thing or even knew what one was. "I'm a – " he stopped and shrugged expansively, open bottle in hand. "We were making her uncomfortable. Them. You, and me. There were complaints."

"About you, maybe," Jack wanted to reach over and pull John's braces back up over his shoulders; he didn't, he wanted to reach over and pull his fucking trousers down.

"Have you seen the complaints division?" John stretched and scratched the line of his pubis, flashing hair at Jack and clouding his vision again. "They can log the word 'irresponsible' in their sleep now."

Jack frowned. "Who? Who was?"

"Kittin. Archer. Everyone who worked with you, more or less. Even Ceno."

"Ceno?"

"She said you were dangerously reckless."

"She said you were – "

"She said I was a rapist," John corrected sourly, pointing the neck of the bottle at Jack. "And so did everyone else for three months." He bumped the lip of the bottle against his bottom lip. "Funny how word gets around regardless of whether it's true, isn't it?"

"You're being insane," Jack said, annoyed by how often he'd had to say the same sentence, over and over, "listen to yourself. No one is going to go to that amount of code-breaking trouble to keep me out of the way, I'm insignificant and yes, all right, you're an important person - temporarily -"

"Too fucking kind." John swallowed another mouthful. "I'm only the scion of the most powerful fucking dynasty in the galaxy. No one who matters."

"Former," Jack corrected him, watching John's neck work. He knew well enough the exaggerated swallowing was for his benefit, and he wasn't about to deny that it was distracting from the waist downward (John had an unfairly and inexplicably magnetic throat, if Jack allowed that his teeth were … magnetised), but if he thought that cheap trick was going to work… "Former scion. Former member of the Cousinry. Current fugitive."

"They'd take me back," John said sullenly.

"They'd kill you." Jack picked up a loose chipping from the path and, without thinking, bounced it off Prisca's torso. John watched the chipping's flight and rebound intently before turning his gaze back to Jack, an eyebrow lifted just enough to be out of line with its partner. "And you don't want to go back."

"I don't want to spend the rest of my fucking life in this dump either." John aimed a savage kick at Prisca's torso, which leaked fluids onto the path like a squashed fruit. Jack felt he ought to have gagged, but somehow it didn't bother him.

"Start at the beginning again," Jack muttered, folding his arms over the top of his head. The flowers were getting on his nerves. Everything was getting on his fucking nerves; the obnoxiously bright weather that would break into light showers after noon, because it was That Day Of That Week. The fresh-laundered smell of his disguise, the texture of the wooden tabletop against his face, everything. It was like living in an fucking taunting commercial for healthier life via religion (like the ones that used to scroll past his home in the damn city at Boeshane, the ones that had always seemed like a bad joke), and discovering that however healthy and beatific your existence, there would still be serial murders, sleep deprivation, and John fucking Hart.

John made a disgusting noise, cousin to a snort, "Well, no trouble in doing that."

"Oh fuck off," Jack told the insides of his elbow. He tried to force what was almost certainly a hangover out of his eyes by scowling. "Who was the last person to report seeing Prisca alive?" He was sick of that sentence, too. The words were emblazoned on his brain, the answer on his ears, and nothing seemed to change the circumstances.

"Markham," John sounded bored. Jack wasn't exactly sure he blamed him; the name was beginning to grate on his ears, although not as much as having to keep asking her variants on the same fucking questions was.

"But she. Can't. Have. Been." Jack thumped the back of his own head wearily with an open fist. "It's. Not. Possible."

"She's the last person to report seeing Prisca alive and you threw a childish little humanitarian fit when I said we should interrogate Zebe – when are you going to get it into your annoyingly pretty head that it doesn't! Matter! If! They! Die?" John shoved the bowl of fruit at Jack until it bumped his elbows. Jack shook his head, but John didn't take the not-exactly-apples back.

"Because we're in the anomaly?" Jack asked the tabletop. At no point in Temporal Ethics had they covered morality in a time loop that lasted as long as this one had, mostly because no one had ever fucking well been stuck in one for this fucking long without being fucking rescued. This was also very definitely a hangover. Jack rubbed his face on the inside of his bicep.

"If you like," John said slowly.

Jack lifted his head to get his fill of that arrogant, self-satisfied grin. It was like bad coffee; not the Real Thing by any means, not enjoyable, but it filled a hole that would otherwise render him useless. That was, Jack thought, a perfectly reasonable and logical excuse. "You are a totally degenerate being," Jack said with feeling, massaging the back of his own neck. John's degeneracy tended to leave one bruised. And … sticky. And content.

His only answer was an expansive shrug, and a tap of fingertips on the polished wooden table. "I'm not the one sobbing into his breakfast," John pointed out.

"I'm not crying, you fucking –" Jack frowned, not quite incensed enough to lift his chin off the table.

"I can punch you in the nuts if you'd like," John offered, in the same voice a normal person use to offer the loan of his transport or a drink to be repaid later.

"I can punch you in the fucking testicles," Jack grunted, pushing the fruit away with the back of his hand. It would probably be advisable to get his metabolic implants looked at when they got out of this backwater - if they got out of this place. Hangovers weren't even supposed to the slightest purchase on his body any more. John raised both his eyebrows and did that hideous, borderline irresistible smile, that one that wandered up to Jack's libido and tickled it red before he could steel himself against it, every single time.

"If you like," John repeated, and this time it was lascivious. A come-on, once again.

"Who was Markham with before she saw or reports seeing Prisca?" Jack growled, trying to ignore how badly he wanted to take John up on that twisted offer.

"Zebe," John repeated testily, "which is why I want—"

"No, you want to interrogate him because you are a sick fuck," Jack interrupted. There wasn't enough vitriol in the sentence; there should have been more disgust, more hatred in the reverb. As it was it sounded almost affectionate to his ears. He tried to muster up the requisite frustration but all that happened was a gentle bubbling burp.

"Actually, I want you to interrogate him you're better at it," John poked the apples around their glazed bowl with his forefinger for a minute, grinning antagonistically at Jack; Jack picked up the knife from the table top and slammed it into the apple nearest John's hand – he'd move out of the way fast enough, he'd always moved like that, John's ability to evade danger honed to an edge far sharper than any blade. "Fuck you too," John snapped, white in the face.

He was up and gone from the café before Jack could yell that it was his turn to pay for the breakfast they'd failed to eat, not that it ever made any difference.

Jack watched John's shaved head flounce down the paved walkway under the uncomfortably clear morning sun: he looked strange without the half grown-out fire-coloured hair supplement leaving a comet-tail behind him, but he still looked very much himself. Jack watched for a little longer before turning his attention back to his notes, and to the blood on the apples.

Zebe's apartments were located half the way up the side of one of the few truly tall buildings in the centre of Thal, and even these buildings were miniscule in comparison to the urban space-scrapers of Boeshane's cities, the ones where the penthouse occupants had to have several feet of reinforced, airtight steel between them and the view, the ones where oxygen was piped upward in humming vents…

The doorman to the apartments – they seemed, in Thal, to really enjoy this blend of the archaic and the high-tech, a retinal-and-blood scanner sitting on a carved table beside the man in livery – gave John a cautious smile as he sauntered up to the arched doorway, and an even more cautious one to Jack as he hung back to see just what spectacular piece of fabrication John was going to extract from his anus.

John's boots clicked to a slurred military halt on the grass-flanked path, for even here in the centre of Thal plants flourished like a persistent green army, and shaded his eyes from the midday sun, leaving the doorman to squint into the glare of his uneven smile. He stood with all his weight on one hip, the hem of his shirt untucked, his eyelashes clotted with something dark and sticky, and Jack nearly lost track of what the preternaturally sneaky midget bastard was actually saying. Damn him. Damn him and the crazed womb he'd been yanked from.

"We're here to see Watson Zebe," John said, not changing his posture one bit, tipping his head back to look the doorman in the eye. It must have been quite uncomfortable for the doorman, getting the full force of those manic eyes, but Jack was beyond feeling sympathetic over such tiny things.

"He expecting you?" The doorman fidgeted.

"Doubt it, that's sort of the point." John drummed his fingers over his thigh, mere inches from here he was keeping the smaller of the three knives Jack knew about. "We're from the Kaled State Trading Unions Authority and we need to have a little unofficial chat with Zebe before the rest of our … colleagues … arrive." John gave the doorman a companionable pat on the bicep. "If … you follow me."

It was doubtful the doorman actually did any such thing, as Jack had barely followed the vague vagrancies of John's bullshit himself, but the man in livery looked a little less suspicious. "And you are?"

"We are Agents Broad and Small – is there something funny about that?"

The doorman straightened his face with the practiced muscle twitches of a man who's had to see more than his fair share of stupendously silly excuses, and dipped a minute apologetic bow. "No. No sir. But I will need to see some sort of documentation, just a formality—"

Here, Jack thought, here is where it all falls apart and John stabs him in the stomach for doing his job. Again. He fought the urge to close his eyes in utter frustration, a battle made easier by the urge's near absence. Jack wiped sweat from his face and watched, instead, trying to ignore the gnawing sensation in his chest.

"—this do?" John said, waving something small and papery in the direction of the doorman's hand. If it was documentation then Jack was a fucking Antillian Meditational Monk, they'd not had their hands on anything official from the Kaled city in the entire time they'd been here, and what the hell was John playing at now?

"Perfectly, sir," the doorman smiled, standing aside and with a deft flick switching the scanners off.

Moving over patterned tiles the colour of air-polluted sunsets and unblemished seas, arrayed in yet more floral swathes, Jack turned to John with his eyebrows raised into his sweaty hairline and muttered, "Psychic paper?" somewhat incredulously.

John reached up and brushed something possibly imaginary from Jack's cheek, shook his head. "Money."

Jack felt stupid then. It wasn't really like he'd never bribed anyone before himself, and certainly not as if John hadn't done exactly that in his presence, slipping folded leather fragments or heavy coins into the palms of those whose credit accounts were being monitored, offering either himself or (infuriatingly without consulting him) Jack up for sexual favours; in the time they'd been here, he'd done it all.

The tiled floor gave way to carpets, muffling their footsteps – the click-click of John's knee-high boots, the scuff of Jack's slightly worn all-terrain synthetic soles – as they hit the elevator system, housed in its own clear, green-tinted glass tube. There were bubbles in the glass like the breath of invisible fishes, and silence between the two of them.

"So, do we talk to him here or –" John began, and stopped as Jack laid his hand palm-flat on John's sternum like a warning. Floors rose and fell away as the lift climbed through the building. "—Or," John went on, rubbing his scalp idly with his free hand, "take him away and not get blood on the nice carpets?"

"Doesn't matter if we get blood on the damn carpets," Jack said shortly, watching John's hand, his fingers move over the stubble on his head. The hand stopped in mid-stroke.

"Say it," John suggested, giving Jack something that almost passed for a genuine, normal smile – it crouched on only one side of his face, warm and uncertain and out of place, nearest to Jack – as the platform's ascent began to slow.

"No."

Rather than stopping in a corridor as expected, the lift came to rest inside Zebe's apartments – visible in a fine slice from beyond a heavy, cherry-stained wooden door. John span off the platform and did the little pat-check dance of accounting for all his knives and other weapons that was growing as familiar as Jack's on shaving routine; Jack rather thought that he didn't deliberately throw in extravagant hip-checks while he was doing that, though.

Jack unholstered his blaster, and at a nod from him John knocked the door open with his hip, the flashy, flamboyant, competitive bastard. At least, that was presumably the intention; the door was as heavy as it looked, and not perhaps hung as well as it might have been, and so John had to heave his snakelike hip into it twice. Jack tried and almost succeeded in suppressing a snicker.

The air was still and heavy with unpleasantly familiar metallic scents as they edged into the room. Jack lowered his blaster and rubbed his eyes with the back of his head. "This … does not bode well."

For an answer, John inclined his head at the reflection of the room in the huge ceiling to floor curved window; distorted though it was by the concave bend, it was still possible to make out a dark red pool and a tellingly motionless body hidden from the door by the seating arrangement.

"Fuck," Jack groaned, stepping around the furnishings to test the wetness of the blood with his forefinger. Perhaps the settings on his Vortex Manipulator would still work for timescale analysis, but it didn't occur to him until his skin touched the floor.

"Start earlier in the week next time around," John said, without much interest. "Markham?" he added, inspecting one of the fruit bowls that were dotted around the place like edible ornaments.

The blood came away from the carpet on Jack's fingers, thin red film over his fingertips. It was the kind of cold that said it had been warm until fairly recently. "Someone who knew she'd come up here, perhaps." He stood up and gazed down at the crumpled-up figure – Watson Zebe was pitiful in death. He seemed to have shrunk substantially, curled around himself like a frightened millipede, but bodies always did: remove the vitality (and in this case, most of the blood too) and they seemed to sink into themselves, become people-husks.

Interrupting his morbid meditations, John waved a drawn knife at the pathetic death scene and repeated, "Markham."

"No, for the love of regular wages, stop obsessing over Markham!" Jack growled. His thighs hurt surprisingly little for remaining in this crouch. At least the anomaly was good for his muscles.

"I meant," John said, throwing himself into the nearest seat, blood already smeared up his boots somehow (he seemed to be a magnet for the stuff – or just not possessed of the healthy fastidiousness everyone else had around bodily fluids; Jack brushed the thought away irritably), "are we actually sure she's what led it, them, her, or him here?" He sniffed the end of his knife for reasons known only to himself. Jack was too puzzled to be amused by the sudden lapse into report-ese this late in the … day. "Is this definitely to do with Prisca, that's what I meant. It could be anything."

"Argh," Jack said, putting his hands over his mouth and his weight on his toes. He wasn't even sure where the former gesture came from, perhaps the nausea threatening to overwhelm him again, but it fitted his mood. "Please don't be right about that."

John brandished his apple. "I rarely want to be right," he admitted, kicking the air as he repositioned his legs, "but I usually am."

Unter's arms lay limp against the dust. The dust hung in the air as if gravity had been switched off to allow light more options for lurking lazily in the upper reaches of the barn, and, twelve feet back from the centre of the anomaly, Jack shook his head. The wooden slats of the walls closest to the epicentre warped in a way it was impossible to describe, occupying – Jack knew – a further dimension which was trying its hardest to buffer into one of the three existing ones. He'd paid attention in that particular lecture but got a nosebleed as a result, and he wasn't the only one. Even the inclusion of a finely-sliced apple didn't make n-dimensional temporal physics training any easier to process.

John backed into the barn again, dragging Markham's body by the ankles.

"Oh thanks, I would like a hand carrying this fat corpse," he complained, jerking his head back to call over his shoulder. "So kind of you to offer."

Jack turned back to the weird warp and weft of the wooden boards as if hypnotised. The passage of time this close to something that could conceivably invert the entire order of the universe if only someone approached it in the right way … was uneven and patchy. There was no telling, without a properly functioning Vortex Manipulator, when it was likely to stretch, contract, or distort in ways that three-dimensional language didn't have the words for; John released Markham's ankles and they fell with a nosy thunk to the floor, sending up a cloud of dust.

As it passed through the air nearer the epicentre it stuck, swirled, and in some places began to almost knit together in strange, temporary shapes which collapsed as soon as they formed.

John stepped over Markham's body with the fastidious stride of an exterminator, and grabbed Jack's shoulders.

"What—" Jack found himself propelled backwards and performed a very quick mental calculation on how far away the wall was from his head.

All the air burst from his mouth as the wooden slats connected with the back of his ribcage. Not that far.

"—up," John grinned, knocking their teeth together for a second before he settled into a particularly violent and wrenching kiss. Jack considered shoving him, kicking him in the shin, kneeing him in the crotch, or just punching him in the smug, stupid, fucked-up pretty mouth, but he settled for kissing back even more enthusiastically and scowling at the same time.

There was no hint of moonlight on the surface of the pool at first; the angle of the buildings nearby cut off the double-shadowing light of the twin moons, the fifth (the third and fourth were permanently in shadow, the fortnight looping right through their 'new' phases and never reaching the wax) a tiny speck among the stars distinguished only by a faint blue corona. Jack moved his head to the side and there it was again, the recurring pond of gore seeping down the two front steps to Unter's safehouse.

"Dead?" John asked, lighting a cigarette. Jack felt the urge to yell rise and fall in him like a sand dune through the windy season. John was a shitty lookout: easily bored, more prone to watching Jack than the surrounding streets, but he was also a shitty reconnoitre: there was no telling what he'd steal if left unattended by the safehouse. Not, Jack thought wrly, that it exactly mattered. In five days, blam, reset. Reset. Refuckingset.

So instead of yelling Jack just nodded, hands in coat pockets, and said, "Again."

John leaned around the building's corner, his face made strange by the dim light of his cigarette, and pushed the wet end of his smoke abruptly between Jack's part-open lips. No innuendo there, or anything. Jack pulled on the carcinogen without steadying it. Gold flakes would, he knew from experience, emboss his teeth as a result of this; it was wrong to say that John had expensive taste, more that he seemed to enjoy waste of expense. After some thought, some observation, Jack was almost convinced he saw a hint of rebellion in it, in hiding wealth and ruining it, but he couldn't be sure.

"Maybe," John said in a tone that said definitely, "we should fuck this business in the ear, and find a bar."

The smell of blood was like a wash over the rest of the street stinks, tainting the garbage and the flowers with a fierce metallic overtone, and Jack tipped his head back to look up at the curiously dark clear skies around Thal's Terraen-class planet. This time he didn't argue; there was nothing much to be learn here that they didn't already know.

The bar had no sign outside, no advertisement of its form and function; reconnaissance and a kind of mutual alcohol radar had taught then of its purpose on previous sweeps, else Jack might have mistaken it for a storage unit on the edge of the civilised city streets. If he was a rookie idiot lifelong teetotaller. Perhaps. Sign or no sign, it was as obviously a bar as John was an alcoholic.

It was not the kind of bar where people looked up with hostile stares when a stranger entered, and the music played a mocking chord in the sudden silence; it was not the sort of establishment where roadweary travellers were greeted with friendly smiles and open arms and cries for their tale; it wasn't really the kind of dive where new drinkers were afforded any recognition of their existence at all beyond what they'd demanded to drink or how many drinks they'd failed to pay for.

When John shoved the door open with his hip not a single punter's face turned to look at him, just a sea of hunched shoulders and nursed drinks washing through a single-storey room, small round tables and spindly, breakable stools; a topography of private miseries held close to a number of booze-soaked chests between the entrance and the bar.

Thal had a sicker, sadder face than the shiny trade brochure culture they'd been wallowing in before, just like every city; you just had to go looking for it.

"Do you have to make an entrance every damn time?" Jack asked, sweeping his coat under his legs as he thumped down onto the worn top of a stool.

"Yes," John said with a warning grin, and a drink plopped between Jack's forearms like a drip from the ceiling.

"Any ideas?" The air temperature was suspiciously constant. For a cheap dive bar it was worryingly well-equipped with devices to make it easier to stay in there and drink more.

"Plenty." John leered over the top of his drink, which was already half gone.

"About these…" Jack made a feint with his fingers, the Agency code for 'murder' – plural and singular exactly the same.

"Not a solitary give-a-fuck." John downed his glass and turned a dipsomaniac's avaricious eye on Jack's. Jack tightened his grip on the dimpled vessel. "I think you should concentrate on your job," John added with a sneer that almost looked convincing.

"Oh really?" Jack was sure his eyebrows had all but disappeared into his hairline in the face of this fresh hypocrisy.

"Your job," John said a little unsteadily, trying to prise Jack's drink from his fingers with surprising-if-you-didn't-know-him tenacity, "is to see to it that I don't reunite with the Cousinry. Correct?"

Jack didn't answer, just clenched his hand around his drink and grimaced.

There was a second of nothing, and John thumped the table-top as if he was arguing politics (as if John had ever cared about them), and some of Jack's drink slopped over the side of his glass, over his hands in a sticky wave. "CORRECT?"

"Yes, broadly." Jack tried to jerk his drink back from John's hands, but about half of it lay across the tabletop and his wrists and there just didn't seem to be so much point now in getting back anything John felt like taking.

"So distract me." John made an expansive gesture with both arms just as Jack gave up on retaining his drink; the liquid flew in an arc in the air while the glass dropped in near slow-motion (it couldn't have been, they were too far from the epicentre, but it felt that way) to the gritty floor. Not a drinker budged; the bartender made a little dip of his head which indicated that this was going on their tab, and the glass shattered.

"That sounds like a pick-up line," Jack said, brushing imaginary dust from his coat lapels as if nothing had happened, in defiance of the actual and annoying stain slightly lower down. It wouldn't have had the same effect, and the stain – whatever it was – was unbudgeable. "Those tend to work better when you haven't already screwed someone thirty times."

John sat back on his stool, apparently stunned, and pointed accusingly at the region of Jack's stomach. "You've been keeping count?"

"Not remotely," Jack snorted.

"Has to be more than thirty by now."

"If you say so." Jack sat back on his stool and made a great show of looking for cigarettes he knew he didn't have.

"I'm about to make it so." John stabbed the tabletop with a forefinger that skidded only slightly in the sad remains of Jack's drink.

"You know," Jack said with a very slight tickle of worry beginning in the back of his mind as John made a determined bid to attract the attention of the bartender, dripping alcohol from his hand, "when you start bringing threats into sex we kind of start having a different word for it."

"Such as?" John peered at him from under his eyelids, hand still raised for the bartender. Jack was briefly struck by how, despite the amount of time they were spending skulking about in the sunlight, those eyelids had remained almost preposterously pale.

"Begins with an R, John."

John flicked some of Jack's sadly wasted drink back at his face. "Don't care."

For one icy, gut-churning minute that dragged him back to sixteen and the Peninsula City ghettos where 'no' was a matter of opinion and cost and the opinion was never yours, Jack thought he doesn't, does he? And he wondered if he knew precisely how easy his blaster was to reach, how hard he could fight, and just where he thought he'd run to, when John came after him. Wasn't his spec, his assignment, to distract this Pogril-Copenbul amoral fuck-up from … from …

The door opened and Markham's footsteps rang immediately recognisable in the relative silence. Well. Well. So this was where she came?

Or had she followed them? Had they distorted events again?

Jerking his gaze back to John, to check he'd spotted her too, Jack caught a muddy eye gazing at him with cheek-twitching intensity and revised his opinion. No, John wouldn't. Not with me. Maybe with anyone else, maybe with everyone else, but not with him. He wasn't sure how reassuring that thought was.

In the unexpected hot flush that followed it, Jack lost track of Markham.

"Did you see where—"

He didn't need to see or hear it. He didn't need to do anything stupid or showy like looking into the nearest reflective surface (which was either John's empty drink, or John's worryingly clear eyes) to check behind him. He didn't need to listen for a heartbeat or irregular breaths behind him. He just knew, because it was the single most stupid and dangerous outcome possible from his distraction, that Markham was standing behind him.

"John—"

John pulled the antique weapon from out of his armpit with what might have been a smooth draw on someone less drunk and cack-handed. He swept the remaining glasses onto the floor and with the catastrophically loud smash, Jack ducked sideways into the mess.

The explosion of blood that rained down on Jack as he lay panting amid the glittering debris said that John had rather uncharacteristically hit his mark for once, or at least a mark—

Markham's body crashed to the floor beside Jack, narrowly missing his face. The glass fragments flew up like water and blood began to seep immediately across the floor. Before he even had a chance to wriggle out of the way, John – unsteady and grinning like a shark on speed – belly-flopped over the table, pointed the pistol down, and let off another shot directly in the woman's face.

Blood sprayed over Jack like mist in the wake of a high-speed personnel carrier.

There was a long silence, in which John hung over the edge of the table and giggled drunkenly down at Markham's corpse, and Jack wiped slowly and pointedly at his face. The rest of the bar seemed to be utterly disinterested, which at least held with what Jack knew of the place. There was a cough from behind the bar and a bit of shuffling, but he suspected that just meant that the clean-up was going to be charged to them.

John rolled on his back and dangled his arm to Jack; the second Jack took it and hauled himself even half-way to his feet, John hand wormed upright and had Jack's forearm in a grip which would have been vice-like if Jack had not been certain that any given vice would never be able to compete with his partner.

"Let go," Jack muttered, trying to shake his arm away from John before someone else tried to shoot them in the head.

"Say it," John said. He sounded like his lower jaw was wired shut.

Jack rolled his eyes and gave his arm another shake. The bar tender was scrupulously and circumspectly ignoring them as hard as he could, but that couldn't possibly last. "I'm grateful for you saving my fucking life, now let go of my arm."

"Not that," John half-growled, glaring at him as if Jack had missed something incredibly obvious.

And what with it being that obvious, he really hadn't missed it. "Let go of my arm." He just didn't … feel … like letting John win.

"Say it," John repeated, his fingers about to destroy the circulation to Jack's hand, even through the thick fabric of his coat. Jack shook him off at last and put his hand over John's face like a shield.

"No, you say it, you evasive prick," he muttered.

"You say it." John brushed his hand down again, his voice louder, his face redder.

"I'm not fucking saying anything." Glass crunched under Jack's feet. Blood oozed around the soles of his shoes. John looked at him with eyes that could have out-stared the sun. "You say it."

"I'm not saying it until you do," John half-shouted, pushing back against the table. Jack wondered idly if it was possible to keep shoving at him like this until he snapped, and what would happen if he did; would John really kill him? Would the thing he was trying to avoid saying stay his hand and just lead to a flesh wound? Or would John's inherent … fucked-up-ness … override all that?

"Then I guess it isn't getting said at all, is it?" Jack asked. Pushing. Pushing.

There was a crash like the suicide of forests, and Jack leapt backward as the stool he'd dived off splintered under the butt of a pistol. John's eyes didn't so much dance as whirl like sandstorms. "SAY IT, JACK.."

"You're a liar."

"Say that again."

"You're a liar."

"Say it again."

"Liar."

"Mmm."

"Liar."

"Hypocrite."

"They're never coming for us."

"Now who's the liar?"

He counted scars, because they ran out of stars too quickly in this black backwater of a planet, and John kept claiming that meant they were going to be stuck here forever. Jack counted the nicks and chips accruing on his skin, no matter how carefully he used the rePatch function on his blaster, no matter how delicately he stitched. He counted the dips and scores in John's back, the places where tiny amounts of ink had remained like immobile shadows just below the skin.

Jack counted scars and the degeneration of the blaster recharge, and watched as the monitoring systems on his Vortex Manipulator banked time on time, and five planetary cycles mounted up while Thal went through the same fortnight over and over and over and over and Jack contemplated shooting himself in the head.

Or John. Or.

Or.

John said, "I have an idea."

And Jack thought, how much worse can it possibly be?

John said, "We're fucking clever. They've got resources. We could help ourselves to a… slice of some… incredible… cake."

At the time Jack had just choked back a laugh, because John had in actual fact been eyeballing a confection in a nearby window that looked like it had been constructed out of dreams and fantasies (and quite a large amount of whatever synthetic it was they favoured for sweetening here) and become so hopelessly distracted by cake that he'd lost the thread of his cunning plan entirely.

Then John had gone into the place and tried to punch out the owner, which hadn't worked, so he'd shot the woman instead, with the unpleasant unclunky antique pistol that he insisted on finding again and again, dragging it out of the museum warehouse every Monday One like a lucky charm. And he'd eaten the cake in handfuls, because Jack had declined a slice and called him a couple of choice names in a voice that, Jack suspected, was more fond than censorious.

When had that happened? The fondness. The … lack of concern? Oh, they'll come back to life in a few days, a week or two. Who cares? Nothing makes any difference.

Nothing's real.

But later, later when he was lying in a pool of someone else's blood letting John draw strange shapes on his sternum with it as it dried, knowing full well that in fifteen hours and forty-two minutes and thirteen seconds everything would revert, revert again… later, when John was spitting mouthfuls of words at him with gusto, talking about plans and schemes and what-ifs, later he picked up all these threads of possibility and wove them into a mat.

And John said, "We could take whatever we wanted. You and me."

Jack smiled. "Pogril-Copenbul to the core."

John shrugged. "If I was my family, I'd have stabbed you in the back by now."

Jack twisted up an arm and made a mocking search for blades. "I'll sprout eyes in the back of my head, then."

They came without comment or apology. John said something about five fucking years and no one batted an eyelid. Richen punched him in the face when they got out of orbit; five fucking years dealing with the repercussions and fallout and damage from a failed Pogril-Copenbul coup. He just wanted to sink his fist into something that belonged to that rotten dynasty and know they felt pain like everyone else.

John licked his own blood off Richen's knuckles and smiled prettily and called him a bad word until Richen punched him again. Jack just laughed and played with the cuff of his jacket, glad to finally, finally get moving again.

Jack could feel the small muscles of his jaw jumping as the field closed up behind them. It was only the provisional cell, and he'd been here a couple of times before, but there was something very final and very cold about the way the field reformed this time; it took a moment to notice the blue shimmer, the added intensity which meant it had become impermeable for even air molecules. Private air supply. They really weren't taking any chances…

"You fucking idiot," John growled. For a moment Jack assumed he might be talking to himself, but as the hall light dimmed in simulation of night, faded to blue by the field, Jack caught John's red-rimmed eye and considered pushing himself into the field to see if death by electrocution hurt for long. The expression he found waiting for him was ugly.

"I don't recall being the one who said let's turn this mission into a holiday from ethics, John," he said, instead. The vowels stuck behind his teeth.

John's cheek was blotchy from the immobiliser; somewhere amid the galaxy of genetic defects was an allergy to about 50% of the chemical formulas it contained, and three of the original ingredients. Jack folded his hands in his lap and tried to think calm blue-green thoughts about tranquillity and inner peace and not smashing John's face into a broken-boned bloody catastrophe, the way Kittin had repeatedly tried to teach him.

There was a shrill beep from somewhere outside the cell. Jack ignored it and went on trying to breathe calmly.

"I don't recall you telling me to stop," John said, in direction contravention of the thirty or forty times Jack distinctly remembered trying to drag him back on the path of something resembling righteousness … in the first six months or so.

After then, Jack admitted, he'd more or less stopped caring so much.

"As if you'd have listened—"

"As if you cared."

"Congratulations, John, we're going to be Wiped and ejected from the Agency," Jack muttered. Blue-green tranquil thoughts didn't work around John and, he was rather suspecting, hadn't worked for Kittin around him, either. There was something very un-tranquil about the way John smelt, walked, talked, and lived; something which got under Jack's skin like a parasite and brought out the worst in him.

"Congratulations Jack, shut the fuck up," John said with a cold, pleasant politeness in his voice.

There was a sonic blaster in his face.

He inhaled, and the smell told him everything he needed to know about how the fucking thing had got into the cell with them. Jack considered raising the alarm, and considered how long a response would take verses how long it would take for John's thumb to hit the firing button hand how likely it was that his one-time partner would have set the thing to a non-fatal setting. He considered how badly he wanted to grab John's wrist and break the bones, the impulse in his belly like a fire, and how he was pretty sure he'd never wanted to torture anyone so badly before he met the scion of the Fifth Integration. Fucking Pogril bastards really did destroy everything they touched.

The sonic blaster hovered over his nose and travelled, with a John attached at arm's length, until it jabbed him in the rim of his ear. Unnecessary. Unnecessary. As if it couldn't turn him into atoms and so much extraneous energy from the other side of the room. Or the building.

"You're not going to kill me," Jack said flatly. The cold nozzle of the sonic blaster all but buried in his ear (still smelling faintly of faeces, to add insult to upcoming fatal injury) seemed to contradict this rather.

John took a box out of his clothes – where he'd hidden that or why he'd been allowed to keep it, Jack was at a loss to explain – and gave Jack a concerned look which didn't exactly mesh with the weapon he was holding to his head. "Of course I'm not going to kill you, that'd just make me look guilty and mad," he said, opening the box one-handed and giving it a peremptory shake.

"You're both," Jack pointed out, furious.

John balanced the box on his own knees and fished out something white and octagonal between forefinger and thumb. He regarded it briefly in the low light. "You missed the third thing off the list, too."

"What?" Jack sneered, trying to concentrate on the approximate likelihood of being blasted if he tried to kick John in the face. It was annoyingly high. "Sadistic? Greedy? Arrogant? Stubborn? A compulsive fucking liar? A total and utter bastard coward? St—" John shoved the large pill so far into Jack's mouth, so hard and so fast and so unexpectedly, that it nearly triggered his gag reflex. Sadly, he'd trained himself out of reacting to that, and just swallowed out of surprised instead. "What was that?"

"Resourceful is the word you're thinking of," John said in answer to his own rhetoric, and he selected another pill. "This is going to take a while," he explained, and Jack clamped his jaw shut so hard one of his teeth cracked, "and I've got a lot of other shit to get on with afterward. So if you start playing hard to get I'm going to have to knock you out, and I can't really have that … there are a … a couple of things I need to say to you, first."

"I have something I need to say to you too, you fucking back-stabbing piece of shi--" John slammed another pill past Jack's perfect incisors before he could finish the sentence, nearly chipping them on a gunmetal grey ring. Jack tried to spit, and John waggled the blaster warningly in his ear.

The Retgone was strong; they were annum doses, the octagons, and the yellow haze was already beginning to creep over Jack's field of vision like smoke from a summer fire.

"I would have lied for you," he muttered between his teeth, wondering if there was any reason not to just reach up and try to choke John's brains out before he pressed the trigger mechanism.

"No you wouldn't," John wriggled the blaster in Jack's ear canal. It felt somehow more obscene than anything Jack had done or had done to him in the last five fucking years. "You love the Agency."

"I love you." He hadn't meant to say it, not now, not ever, and not now when he meant it least of all. John froze and examined the pill in his hands.

"…I know," John said after a long pause. "I do. And … I do. But you'd have fucked us both," and he rammed the third pill in over Jack's bitter but unresisting tongue. "And I don't want to die."

"Temporal crimes, and massive fraud. Eventually."

"So… how did he end up staying on at the agency while you … have them chasing you like a pack of wild dogs?"

Jack pointed his drink at the bartender. It appeared to be empty. The snail-trails of foam down the sides were bursting in slow-motion, fascinating and frigid against his finger tips. "You know the thing about amnesia?" Jack asked, shoving the glass at her.

"Your tab is going to need paying by the end of tonight," she said, avoiding his eye. The only other remaining person in the bar was asleep in a bowl of something sticky, their – the species was not gendered, and Jack was too drunk for singular pronoun tap-dances – breath or digestive system whistling the first three bars of the Boeshane Regional Anthem quite by accident, over and over.

"The thing about amnesia is that you don't remember," Jack said peevishly. The drink returned to him, cold and already crystallising at the bottom, he tilted the glass at her again and readjusted himself on the bar stool. "But I suspect - whoops – " he scooped up the diamond from where his elbow had swept it, and coughed for a moment, "—scuse me. I think he stuffed me full of Retgone and pinned everything on me."

"It does seem likely," the bartender said, eyeing his diamond with avarice that was, in Jack's opinion, not nearly naked enough.

"And," Jack muttered, shoving the diamond back into his pocket, "I think he killed Ceno."

"Who?"

"And some of the monitoring teams."

"Uh-huh."

Jack inspected his drink. "Just in case you were wondering," he said, pushing it away from him and reaching for his blaster with a sigh, "I can taste the slemnic. And I have a pretty good tolerance. And," he pointed the blaster at her forehead, "the rock you're eyeballing is a fake."