FIC: [Haven] CLOCKWORK, Chapter 15 (Audrey/Duke/Nathan, R)

[roseveare]

Chapter 15

Duke puttered around the small apartment, sated and kind of reeling, and resisting the urge to go back to the bed where Audrey was still talking quietly with Nathan, establishing things remembered and not-remembered, exploring the limits of both their altered memories. Duke had kind of had to pull himself away from wanting to touch the auto-- touch Nathan. Hell, it wasn't as though the guy was very cuddly. Not even when he wasn't made of metal, if the dual set of memories in his head informed him right.

He could get his head around wanting to be all over Audrey. That was all good and... human. The robot thing was still weirding out at least half of him. Or more than half, because the obvious half wouldn't have pulled up the word 'robot'. Admittedly, some of the discontent was because he'd be kind of fascinated to take Nathan apart to properly explore how he worked, and that was twisted as fuck.

Duke played with a little wind-up automaton on the bookshelf. Pinocchio, he discovered, as he put it back down after winding the key and it flailed little hands around a growing nose.

Nathan's bookshelves were something else -- yes, this was a life, and it was the life of a guy who didn't require sleep. Old fashioned, highly non-politically correct criminology and psychology texts provided some amusement as he skimmed over lines about the 'lower class base criminal type'. Intellectual mystery novels, foreign travel, zoology, engineering, architecture...

...Duke really wondered how much of it was a product of the Trouble, meaningless, and how much was a manifestation of what Nathan would be doing if he had time. All Duke had seen him read in months now was the odd battered crime paperback, true or fictional, and to the best of his knowledge Nathan hadn't touched his craft hobbies since not long after Audrey had come to town and the Troubles really exploded, which meant probably not since he'd become Police Chief, and certainly not while he and Duke and Audrey had been dating.

And Duke and Nathan and Audrey dating was so weird to think about, even if it was still the big thing he'd gone into this already knowing.

Was he going to end up stuck with this divergent two-fork history for good? Duke couldn't say he was thrilled by the idea, but he didn't want to forget his life... and it still felt like his real life was here in this world, in this city for large and unthrilling chunks of it. The point wasn't how happy, or otherwise, that life had been. The point was he had fought for it, his hard-won airship, his freedom--

The Cape Rouge was a wreck in a field on the edge of reality, anyway.

He sighed and went back to the other two, giving into the urge to bury his face against the back of Nathan's soft hair and kiss his neck, then slide his hand briefly over Audrey's naked leg as he kissed her, too. "How are we doing?"

"We were saying we should go into the police building," Audrey said, with the tone of a recap. Duke hadn't been aware of that conversation but he was instantly sure that he should have been.

"What is that crazy talk?" he shot back, with a stilted, nervous laugh.

Audrey rolled her eyes. Probably Nathan was doing the same behind him, and... Oh, fuck, cops... He'd been focused so much on the fact he was fucking a machine, and on the threesome part, that he'd let those overshadow the fact he was now outnumbered by the two cops that he was fucking.

"We need information," Nathan said. "We need to know who we're looking for. Now that we remember the real world and at least the names and faces they had there, we need to figure out who those people are here and how to find them."

"Malcove and his friends," Duke said. "I know Lillian. The other guy, what was his name? Chris?"

"Cristof Cooley," Nathan said.

"Nathan may have access," Audrey said. "Not necessarily clearance, but we figured we could go in there and see if we can use the police files that originated the warrant for my arrest to track them down."

Duke opened his mouth to say, "Public records office," but sighed. In Heppa, it was all the same thing. Heppa Central Security controlled the information. It even registered marriages. He groaned.

"It's not a bad way to proceed," Audrey added. "And since we have someone who has access, because this Trouble did this to Nathan, we might as well make the most of it when we can use his connections to help us out."

Nathan touched Duke's arm in some half-assed Nathany effort at being soothing.

"Okay, man," Duke said, putting his hand over the gloved metal fingers. They shared their divergent memories as Audrey did not. He sighed. "Okay. So... supposing we find Lillian and the other two. What happens then? Lock is dead, and his death broke this Trouble at least a little. I figure that's why we've really started to have our memories stirring up and coming back, now, and other people seem to be getting flashes as well. Does this mean we have to kill them all to break this? Because Lock was-- that guy, okay, I didn't know him except as some face in Malcove's Thursday night roleplay group, but he was seriously fucking flipped and he did not leave us a choice. But I'm not sure I'm okay with killing Malcove even if he is a dick, and I'm definitely not down with killing Lillian."

Audrey had been nodding through most of that. "You probably got your memories back more completely because the conditioning of the Trouble had already been cracked by going outside."

"And by contact with you," Nathan suggested in a rasp. He'd taken the sleeve out of his throat, but maybe he'd got a few threads from it caught in his mechanisms to explain the huskiness that lingered in his voice. "Could've intensified after your memory cascaded."

"I really don't want to kill the other three," Duke repeated flatly. "They can't all be murderous psychos. They're just regular guys that come into the Gull once a week to roll funny dice and play their board games and drink my beer."

Nathan grunted a gave a sober nod. "If we have no choice in order to return Haven back to itself, though..."

"We don't want to, of course we don't," Audrey told Duke. "But we must put Haven back. You saw the men investigating this out in the real world. We can't draw their attention to this town, with everything that goes on here on a regular basis! This Trouble needs to be dismantled as soon as possible!" She stood up from the bed and rubbed her fingers through her hair. "Nathan, does your shower work?"

Duke and Audrey showered together. Nathan had already washed himself up post-sex, a process that involved parts that detached for cleaning and then went back, and broke Duke's brain a little even while it fascinated him. Obviously it wouldn't break Nathan to dunk him in water, but it probably wouldn't do him any favours, all the same. So Audrey and Duke showered, leaving Nathan in the living room, no doubt plotting his infiltration of his workplace.

"This whole two sets of memories deal is a bitch," Duke said, running his hand down Audrey's back in the stream of lukewarm water. There was an antiquated boiler, not just antique in design but actually old, and it needed a lot more time to work than they were prepared to give it, which meant their shower was going to be chilly and hurried. "I mean, your memory got messed with, sure, but not like--"

She was looking over his shoulder at him in a judging sort of way and he thought back to her flashes of Lucy.

"Okay, okay, maybe you get it," he allowed. "But seriously, this one messed with us. I don't know if we can just slip back into completely normal again even if we do fix the Trouble. If we're ever going to be the same."

Audrey went quiet a moment before she said, "Me, either, if that helps."

Duke winced and said, "No, that does not help. You mean..." He waved his hand around, grasping. "Your head...?"

"It's not right," she said, frustration under her voice. He'd turned to face her, but she pulled him around again, her hands on his hips, and started rubbing him a little too vigorously under the stream of water as she returned the favour. "I don't know what it is, because I remember being me again, obviously, Audrey Parker, coming to Haven and meeting you guys, and loving you guys, and that weird case with the plants where we all hooked up. Even the stuff before Haven, which I know is false, I remember just fine. But I guess it figures that I don't remember just what I can't remember, right? I just know... I can feel... that something really important is missing."

Duke was desperately unsettled, but Audrey's hands were under his arms and she was manoeuvring his body as if planning to cuff him and put him under arrest. Turning around didn't seem an option, and serious discussion was kind of difficult to wrap his head around. He sighed. "I'm wondering if we're going to end up balancing two sets of memories in our heads for the rest of our lives. But then... I don't want to let go of this life, because I... I lived it. But I need to be real. This... isn't real. Was never real."

"Huh," said Audrey. "Well, we don't know how it works out, but I can tell you this much. That part of your memory that thinks washing is optional, that part can get exorcised from your brain right now. Seriously, I know Nathan has no sense of smell at the moment, but if I am sleeping next to you, this is unacceptable."

"Oh, right." And he'd thought that her being so handsy with his body was just some kind of aggressive affection. "Yeah, okay. Water supply's seriously limited on an airship, you do know that?"

Audrey let him go, finally. When he turned back to her, her hand moved downwards again and he intercepted it with a sigh. "Uh-uh. You start any vigorous rubbing there and we are not going to get any investigating of any kind done today. Well, other than further investigating of each other's orifices."

Audrey snorted, but her face was smiling, her expression soft and concerned, surrounded by her wet hair. She lifted her head away from the sight of Duke carefully washing his crotch, and his cock trying to stir anyway because he was still in the shower with Audrey and there'd been a sufficient break since earlier for it to be moderately interested in that again.

"Was it very difficult?" she asked. "Growing up here."

"Even if I didn't grow up here?" Duke returned wryly. "You know growing up in Haven wasn't a picnic?"

"No, but those streets look like a level of poverty on a different scale from anything Haven has." She shook her head. "It's okay, you don't have to tell me. I know you'd rather keep your mystique."

"Hah," Duke said, because he never had told Audrey about his mother, and the fact he'd basically raised himself and looked after his parents more than they'd looked after him, even in the life he'd started out from. Nathan had some idea, but he was guessing Nathan had never mentioned it either. Possibly because Nathan had always bought the cool-unaffected-rogue act and so considered it was no big deal.

Duke stroked a hand up Audrey's breastbone and neck, then through her hair, separating the strands into the streams of running water. "I'll tell you about it someday. Promise."

"There might not be many days left." She grimaced and shook herself. "This is getting colder. Come on, we should get out."

"To break into a police station," Duke said, with considerable depression, and sighed. "I will tell you that story. Before the Hunter."

"Okay." She turned the water off and squeezed her hair dry. Nathan only had one small towel between the two of them. Duke tried to shake his head dry like a dog, and she laughed and cursed at him, but fell back into grimness as she finished cursorily drying herself and handed him the towel. "How much time do you think we've lost? It has to be at least four days, right?"

"We'll have enough time left to figure out how to stop it, no matter what." Duke tried, but he wasn't Nathan, and there was a limit how much dogged faith and resoluteness he could inject into the insistence that they'd manage to stop a cycle that had already been going for hundreds of years.

"I don't want to leave you," Audrey said. "Either of you. More than anything I don't want to do that. Don't talk about this to Nathan, please." She pulled a face. "His first responsibility has to be to Haven."

"I thought you were mentioning it less." Duke nodded. He towelled himself dry and hung the towel on the shower nozzle, and grabbed for his clothes, because Nathan's apartment was not very warm. Audrey was already almost dressed.

"If I have to leave," she said slowly, "you'll both still have each other."

"Yeah. Yes, we will." And Nathan would be inconsolable anyway, Duke thought, and he did not know how he was supposed to handle that, alone. But he was not going to handle it by voicing it to Audrey.

She smiled in what had the air of a determined effort to be cheerful and said, "I bet you were a cute grubby street urchin, either way," before she slipped out of the bathroom door.

Nathan was hovering outside. Duke hoped he hadn't heard too much of that. "I guess at least I can say I'm no stranger to the inside of Heppa's police station," he offered sourly.

Nathan gave his mechanical smile. "I've been thinking about that. I think the best way to do this could be to take you both in. If I complete my original mission, then I won't need to creep around. I can return with my authority intact."

Duke felt all of the anxieties and suspicions from his life in Heppa slam down on him. "No, you--"

"Duke--" Audrey started worriedly.

Duke held up his hands, fighting habit and fear, his instinctive horrified response to not trust. Because Nathan was a still a clockwork cop, with a limited bunch of options built into him, who would complete his mission at their expense...

He wasn't, and Duke knew that. Nathan wouldn't betray them.

He wouldn't have before, Duke didn't even think, and now that his personality was strongly supplemented with the memories of his original self, same as Duke's own, he definitely wouldn't. Therefore this wasn't what it had sounded like.

"I thought that if I took you to a cell, booked you both in," Nathan said slowly, more wary now for the reaction he'd provoked, "I would have full access to the station. Perhaps as the one to bring you in, Audrey, I could even be privy to dealing directly with the people who were so eager for your arrest. It would be an excellent way to find out the information we need fast. Of course I would make sure you both had a means to escape without me should the need arise, and I would be able to help you from the inside if anything went awry."

"I prefer the creeping in and out plan," Duke voted.

"But this is so much more potentially rewarding," Audrey said. "And more quickly rewarding. The other way may not get us anywhere. But we know that Malcove and his people have been searching desperately for me. If they think they have me, surely they'll come. We'll have them--"

"Let's just send Nathan in to look up the names."

"I can do that easiest this way, and much more besides, without risk of being waylaid and reprimanded," Nathan said. "Do you... think that I'm doing this because I want my position back? Or that I perhaps want a promotion?" He looked hurt.

"No," Duke said quickly. "No, man. But this... we need to think about this, okay? Your plans are always insane and dangerous. And this, this is a solid gold Classic Nathan Wuornos Plan. Right?" He looked to Audrey for support, who managed to at least find a smile.

"My plans aren't bad," Nathan said, annoyed. "It's just that I'm always the one still coming up with plans when everyone else has given up on having plans."

"Because you hope unreasonably," Duke qualified. "Back to the 'insane and dangerous' point."

"I think he's right, in this case," Audrey said. "What we were just talking about... Time is so much a factor." Nathan looked between them curiously, wondering what he'd missed. "This could... it could take us straight to the people we need to find in one move."

Duke was left hanging with that. With the fact that their chances -- what chances they could possibly have left, with a matter of days remaining to save Audrey from disappearing, hung on this choice... He groaned and pushed the heel of his hand into his forehead. His two selves warred with tension. The Duke Crocker who'd grown up in Heppa did not want to do this. The Duke that had grown up in Haven didn't particularly want to do it, either, but for Audrey he would.

"All right," he groaned. "Although I would be happier if this plan didn't primarily involve me waiting around in a cell doing nothing."

"Hey, same here," Audrey said. "But in this world, he's the one with the badge."

***

Trying to infiltrate a building entirely populated with on-duty police automata was quite different from sneaking into Nathan's quiet apartment building earlier in the day. For one thing, except for the odd automaton they'd spotted in the corridors, going to and from their digs, that building had seemed deserted. Automata did not make unnecessary noise or move around much. Duke had wondered how many of them were standing in cupboards, philosophically speaking. He shuddered and hoped that the rest of the guys at Haven's regular police station had avoided that fate.

Heppa Central Security station was not quiet, even drawing into late afternoona and toward the end of a normal workday, and the on-duty automata were much more alert and interested than the ones in Nathan's apartment block. Duke wasn't going to bother telling himself he'd just been intimate with one to make himself feel better about this. He'd been intimate with Nathan. These guys were still creepy.

They had desks, little blank cubicles, unadorned except for piles of paperwork, and frankly Duke couldn't figure out why he hadn't expected that, given that this was Heppa and it pretty much ran on paper, and not steam or clockwork or gas, as advertised. Nathan led him past the desks, hand clamped too tightly on Duke's arm. The cuffs seemed to burn on his wrists and, sure, there was a key in Duke's shoe, but he couldn't get to it quickly, nor while he was being watched. Audrey, next to him, was less tense, despite receiving the same treatment, though she winced at the grip of Nathan's fingers around her arm. The tightness of the grip was probably a combination of Nathan's compromised ability to judge pressure, especially when distracted, and his anxiety about his own plan.

There were only a few officers Duke spied that weren't automata. Truth was that he had never liked the human cops in Heppa much either, but at least with them you had a chance of being able to talk yourself out of a situation. He was starting to seriously worry that some of the officers his other set of memories knew best had been reduced to the almost faceless things after all, until he spied Rebecca Rafferty at a secretarial desk, with her hair pinned in a bun, all buttoned down in an off-white corseted dress that looked... sort of kinky, to his other eyes. He looked again around the room and realised all the cops who remained were male, that the automata body pattern Heppa employed was exclusively male, and felt angry in an undefined way about something he'd never thought about before, that had been so far down the list of what could possibly piss him off about Heppa's security forces, but apparently real!Duke cared about.

Audrey, beside him, seemed to be taking it in her stride.

Rebecca in the corset looked him up and down and he felt a few stirrings in him at the Victorian schoolmarm looks but tried desperately not to show it. If Nathan knew that he'd fooled around with a member of his department, even if it had been before they’d hooked up...

The inner voice that was connected to this world asked incredulously, What the hell is wrong with me that I can't leave cops alone?

"The fugitives?" Rebecca asked, eying Audrey. "It's been days, Nathan. We thought you'd been dropped from an airship and were so many spare parts being sold off in the slum district."

"As you can see," Nathan said neutrally, "I caught the fugitives and brought them back. Please book them in."

Rebecca leaned over her desk and picked up her pen, to scratch painstakingly onto a log book, double-checking the spelling of Duke and Audrey's names and the charges against them with curt questions.

"Holy crap," Audrey muttered as Nathan finally pulled them away and onward to the cells, apparently stunned enough to risk speaking up. "Talk about hostile."

"This place looked very different ten years back," Nathan said quietly, with an edge of discomfort. "It's not without reason that the living workers left don't like automata." Louder, he ordered, "Quiet!" and jostled her shoulder.

The corridors and the cells they led down to were impeccably tidy. One thing you could say for Heppa security, they kept clean jails. Duke had been in some other cities’ jails -- those arrests had been wholly misunderstandings -- and the squalor did not bear thinking about. But Heppa liked things clean, and automata didn't care about having to do the filthy menial work those high standards required.

Prisoners rattled the bars of their pristine cells, cat called at Audrey, and spat insults at Nathan. A few just spat. Nathan headed for an end cell that had a structural support beam, part of the tall building's core skeleton, running up from floor to ceiling. Duke could see its value to veil them from the view of the other prisoners.

Nathan reclaimed his keys first under pretext of searching them, then released them from the cuffs. He had stepped out of the door and locked the cell before Duke caught up to what he was planning.

"Hey, you can't just leave us here like this!" That wasn't pretence. That was being prisoners. Duke pressed up against the bars, grabbing through them for Nathan, curling his fingers in Nathan's vest.

Nathan caught his arm and shoved him back. "Get in there and behave, Crocker." Nathan wasn't particularly subtle, so Duke hardly missed the 'surreptitious' action of another key being slipped into the front pocket of his jacket at the same time. "Sit tight until I come back. I imagine there'll be people who want quite badly to speak to you, once word gets around that you're in custody. Now, I have to go complete the paperwork."

They could still get out if they had to. But what the hell was Nathan going to do, Duke wondered, when he needed to get back in, if he came back accompanied?

Duke watched him cross to the rack where the cell keys were hung up, and he pulled some sort of switch, his shoulders covering up his actions, because when he walked away, the rung on the hook marked with their cell number had a key on it.

"I guess when it doesn't work he'll have an excuse to source a spare or some cutters," Audrey murmured. "Probably blame it on you breaking the lock trying to pick it to get us out." She smiled.

"I am not comfortable with this situation," Duke said. "For the record." He didn't feel like joking as he bashed the heels of his hands against the bars and stepped back, heaving a breath.

Audrey put her hand in the centre of his back. "I don't exactly love it," she murmured, and then even lower next to his ear, "but we can get out if we need to. And we do trust Nathan, don't we?"

"...Unarmed in the middle of a police station full of super-strong mechanical men, we can 'get out'," Duke chuntered.

Nathan would have spare weapons to arm them, when he came back, presumably -- but that didn't help while he wasn't there, and while he wasn't there, anything could be happening to Nathan, who'd been missing for days, whose position was not remotely secure. Audrey knew all that, but didn't bother to voice it, just patted that hand in the centre of Duke's back a few times before retreating it. Duke made a noise of frustration.

"We're a trap," Audrey reasoned. "We just have to wait now for the enemy to show themselves to take the bait."

In Duke's opinion, the only trap here was more likely to be self inflicted. But he made himself calm down. They could expect Nathan to be gone for hours while they waited for the information of the capture to trickle through to the interested parties.

They were in the end cell, the cell next to them was empty, the support beam gave a blind spot in the line of sight between themselves and the rest of the cells, and it was clear that Nathan had engineered the situation as well as he could for their advantage. They could talk without being overheard. They could even work, carefully, without being seen. That didn't mean the neighbours were great company, and the intermittent calls of "hey, pretty lady" and much cruder things jarred their wait. A few calls of that nature were aimed at Duke, too. He blamed the suit.

They rattled uneasily in the cell as the time ticked by. Audrey stopped pacing and made herself sit down on the hard bench, only getting up every so often to stretch, exercising her body to be ready for quick action when the time demanded it. Duke could not relax, even though his memories now contained esoteric positions and breathing exercises designed for just that purpose -- he couldn't even bring himself to try them. Maybe that was just his orneriness, self defeating, because actually, he had a number of memories of far more benign sojourns in cells not unlike this one: Nathan's idea of a sense of humour all those years they'd been more like enemies than friends.

He thought about Audrey and Nathan, in bed earlier... Thought about a world where all three of them were flesh and not hunted, and their end goal of returning there. Then he thought about Audrey disappearing for twenty seven years, not coming back until they were both old, and with a different name and another set of memories besides, unable to recognise them at all...

The goal of this plan was to give them at least some last-ditch chance to stop that from happening.

Duke had still only calmed himself down somewhat by the time approaching footsteps echoed along the corridor.

Audrey set a cautionary hand to his arm, up on her feet in an instant -- and yeah, it could be someone coming down for an unrelated reason. He got better control of his reactions and did breathe, then, accessing memories of calming yoga rhythms. He had to be ready. Right...

The last time Duke had seen Woodrow Malcove, he was swearing up a storm in Duke's bar, mostly about Nathan. Duke had held a measure of sympathy for the guy, honestly, and he could've added some interesting tidbits to that rant about Nathan's parentage, but his loyalties were firmly claimed already and he was damned if he was going to say anything to compromise them and risk it getting back to Nathan's ears. Nathan was absolutely capable of withholding physical affection when he got pissy, and Duke liked getting laid.

His first thought now was that Malcove didn't look like he was dressing up any more... and there was a lot about what he did look like which pinged on Duke as dangerous.

Lock had -- now that Duke remembered Lock, he knew he hadn't had a sense of the man himself. He'd just been a guy, and there were four of them who hung around the table in the corner of the Gull on Thursday nights, sometimes joined by others who swapped and changed but always those core four. There were models and dice, and a lot of discussion about rules and airship fuel, and how the physics worked. And Duke hadn't really known Lock because Thursdays was Tracey's evening shift, and Malcove was the gobby one, and Lillian had done all the liaising.

Duke supposed it wasn't surprising that the question Malcove strode up to ask, forceful in his tense posture and clacking heels, was, "What happened to Lock?" What had happened to Lock was already an increasingly churning unease in Duke's belly. He'd been someone Duke knew, and for all he'd done to them on the train journey and to Audrey before that, he'd at least never seemed...

"I did," Audrey rapped, from behind the bars, her hands reaching to tighten her fists around them. "Malcove, what the hell do you think you're doing? You have to put Haven back!"

Malcove looked confused for a moment, but reclaimed the thread of his anger fast. "My friends and I changed the world," he snapped, "to make ourselves as gods. I have been down at Heppa Grand Station, where they dragged out my friend's body from the train, all afternoon, and now you're going to tell me, what happened to him?"

He drew a gun. Audrey backed off from the bars, bumping into Duke, who caught her shoulder. "You're going to use that in front of all these witnesses?" Duke demanded, gesturing toward the occupied cells down the line. Unencouragingly, at least one voice heckled back, "Kill 'em both, we don't care!" A few others whooped and jeered.

"They're just criminals," Malcove said. "Who would believe them?"

Duke privately thought that there was no way Malcove would ever risk finding out if anyone would believe them. If he shot them here, everyone in these cells would have some kind of accident before the week was out. A gas leak, maybe, or food poisoning from the jail kitchens. It wouldn't help to say it, though.

"What are you doing with the prisoners?" Nathan's voice right then was the sweetest sound Duke had ever heard, as he materialised out of the shadows of the corridor, stepping into the open.

Malcove scowled and turned, his hand tensing further on the gun, then stared at Nathan. His face changed, and it was like the moment hung there strangely. Malcove's expression didn't add up. But he still pointed the gun at Nathan's face.

"People are remembering," he said. "That means you're remembering... Chief Wuornos." His intake own of breath was, weirdly, sharp and surprised.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Nathan said, looking down the barrel. "Is that weapon loaded? In respect of your standing, I believe you may be unaware you are currently committing an infraction."

"Leave him alone," Audrey said, with barely restrained fury that added layers of conviction to her voice. "You've done enough to him already! Look at him, Malcove! He's a machine! He brought us here! Was it your idea of petty revenge to do that to him, just because he was doing his job, and wanted to see you people abide by the law? Are you proud of yourself for that?! How dare you!"

Malcove's face twisted and the confusion there made Duke's heart flip oddly.

He spoke up. "Malcove... How much do you remember?"

Malcove cast him an angry glare but returned his attention swiftly to Nathan and the gun in his hand. "You..." Nathan was doing his very best impression of the dumb machine, gaze fixed and flat, and it seemed that Malcove swiftly felt silly and gave up, for he lowered the weapon and snapped to Nathan, "I want these prisoners transferred to my personal estate, tonight! See to it!"

"It would be highly irregular to--" Nathan began.

"God damn it, you mindless metal drone!" Malcove seethed. "Follow orders! This isn't a matter of regulations, this is my city. I'll take these two out of police hands." He glared daggers at Audrey. "I intend to get the full story of what happened to Lock, and then we are going to take time seeing that his death is properly redressed."

"What else was she to do but defend herself, with your psychotic dog trying to murder her?!" Duke seethed.

"I expect you to escort them personally, officer," Malcove said nastily, and something in his voice made sure that Duke was instantly very nervous of the reasons behind that request.

Nathan didn't question, as he had to place himself as their backup anyway, but Duke hoped he'd spotted it too.

Malcove turned on his heel. "You'll bring them. I'm going to ready my coach."

The seeming unlikelihood of Nathan's humanity surviving such a radical physical transformation was clearly playing in their favour, because Malcove actually stalked off and left them in his custody once more.

Nathan took the key from the wall and came back to the bars, where Duke slipped him back the real key to let them out. Nathan cuffed them both again before he unlocked the cell door, and sure, he was just being mindful of appearances, with the other prisoners only tens of feet away and Malcove potentially hovering in suspicion just out of sight, but it still gave Duke some pause. He could absolutely understand how Malcove would buy the machine act, when one half of his own psyche couldn't shift it.

Duke consciously and deliberately threw the suspicion and fears off once more. "You be careful," he said in a low hiss, leaning in to Nathan. "I don't like the way he looked at you."

Nathan's glass eyes blinked slowly at him. "So far as he knows, I'm no more than gears and bolts."

"Just -- yeah. Okay?" Duke prodded, and fell into an uneasy silence. He broke it not more than half a minute later, to Audrey, as Nathan was escorting them side by side back through the building. Duke couldn't tell if it was the same anonymous corridors or new ones. "I don't think Malcove's all there. I mean--" He internally cursed himself for his insensitivity, and especially that little waggling of his finger next to his head.

"I know." She cut him off, tight and tense. "Lock at least seemed like he understood what had happened when we -- I mean, he was overblown and weird about it, but he knew who we were, he recognised us. He had a recognisable version of the story behind how this happened. Now I wonder, I'm wondering, if any of them really know what they're doing... any more than everyone else in this world."