FIC: [Haven] CLOCKWORK, Chapter 16 (Audrey/Duke/Nathan, R)

[roseveare]

Chapter 16

There was a woman waiting with Malcove at the coach. Audrey didn't immediately recognise her -- a fact that didn't necessarily mean as much as it would have a week ago -- but a certain familiarity about her was already creeping in as Duke said, "Holy shi-- Lillian?"

Audrey took from that that the woman's usual attire was not the whole fantasy Victorian Lady Adventurer look. Audrey didn't know a lot about historical accuracy in costume, and her brain hadn't been indoctrinated to this world with false memories -- hah -- but she was nonetheless sure that this costume was incongruous in the society she had spent the last few days navigating. Still, the amount of leg and bust on display was of less interest than the multiple weapons, gun visibly riding one hip, a knife next to it, and at least two more discreet bulges in boot and at thigh.

The woman's gaze passed over Duke completely in favour of settling on Nathan, where her expression changed quickly to one of startlement. "Wuornos?"

It seemed that Nathan didn't know the woman, either, although his poker face had only been improved by his transformation. He looked at her stiffly, and bunched his hands tighter around Duke and Audrey's arms to push them forward like prizes. "I'm just a policeman."

"A police something," Lillian said. "Oh, this is just the best. Mal! Does Cris know?"

"Not yet," Malcove said. He was standing forward of the coach with the horses, a velvet mane twined between the fingers of one hand and a leather halter strap in the other. Well, at least the guy liked animals, Audrey thought.

"I'm a man," Nathan asserted, his mechanical words clipped. Audrey's heart jumped as she thought he'd given himself away. Then she realised he'd have made such a response before all of this began. "Not a thing. Heppa protects the rights of its citizens. You don't get to call me that no matter how rich you are."

"Oh, fine," Lillian said. "One of those. Was it you who was responsible for the uppity automata, Mal? I know that wasn't Lock's doing."

Malcove barely tipped a shoulder. His face had adopted a strange smile and he was looking at Nathan with calculation. "I apologise, Detective. Of course we acknowledge your legal stature. Please, won't you accompany us to keep watch over these prisoners."

Audrey didn't overly like that he wanted Nathan with them. Nathan would have been looking for an excuse to invite himself along, and she'd been anxious for how he was going to avoid being separated from them, but now it seemed they were all too happy for him to be there, that brought a wholly different anxiety. Too easy... They had something bad in mind for him, for sure.

"Lillian," Duke said, putting emphasis on the name. "Look at me. You know me, don't you? People are remembering. You must be remembering. You know me." He tapped both his hands to his chest. "Come on, it's me! Duke!"

She looked at him like she hadn't the faintest clue what he was talking about.

"...Duke! Duke Crocker! Your friendly neighbourhood bartender... Okay, but you recognise Nathan?" Duke shook his head. "I think I'm insulted."

"Have you dated every woman we come into contact with?" Audrey asked, mostly for Nathan, who was gagged by his ruse but definitely looked as though he'd like to say something.

"I can't be a friendly guy? C'mon, it's not like that," Duke sputtered, his expression changing in frustration. "How much do you remember, Lillian?" he asked, head-on, the same way he'd approached Malcove. "How much do you really remember from before?"

Perhaps he got through just for a moment. Her eyes clouded and her lips parted slightly as though she'd speak. But then she drew out from her belt, of all things, a whip. Audrey, standing next to Duke, cried out automatically as the lash curled through the air toward them. It didn't target her, but caught Duke across the cheek. He yelped in surprise and swore, cuffed hands rising to his face.

"You can cease your vile insinuations," Lillian said. "We escaped that world and made a better one. Made ourselves Gods."

It seemed to Audrey that when they got down to it, they all sang the same tune, had the same mythos, the conviction and awe and overblown grandeur when they spoke of this Trouble's genesis.

Duke caught the whip with both hands in a deft move, stepping forward into the curl of the lash as it came around again. "Jesus! Stop it, alright!"

Nathan cut in, fixing a metal hand around the weapon stretched between them. "Violence to prisoners is unnecessary and unseemly."

"Oh, he is no fun at all." Lillian looked at Malcove with accusation.

"You thought he'd be that in any world?" Duke apparently just couldn't resist interjecting.

"Don't worry," Malcove said, a glint in his eye. "He's not coming along with us to have fun."

Lillian pouted and yanked her whip back out of Nathan's hand. She coiled it up and returned it to her belt, where Audrey had simply failed to register its shape as another weapon. It wasn't exactly something she expected people to carry.

"Hey, Indiana Jane," Audrey snapped. "You didn't answer his question. How is it that you remember Nathan, even when he's not exactly himself here, but not Duke? Do you know me?" The events around the transformation of Haven that had led to her injury were still haziest of all, but she'd had the impression Lillian had definitely been there. She still wanted to know what the other woman made of the answer.

Lillian stared at her as if she'd asked the most ridiculous question. "You're the Adversary and the Great Danger, Audrey Parker. The only person who can shatter our mastery of this world."

"That's... wow, that's exciting." Audrey shook her head. "So how about him, then?" She pointed at Nathan.

"He's the one who forced us to reshape things. Who made it clear there would never be a place for us in the old world." Lillian's mouth curled. "He has been turned into a feeble-minded machine in punishment."

"Hey!" Nathan rapped crisply.

"Relax, officer." Malcove was way too close to Nathan for Audrey's liking, curling his hand around a metal shoulder in faux friendliness. "Let's get these prisoners into the coach. We can hash this out in private at our destination."

"Don't come with us," Duke said, intently, as if trying to get through to another amnesiac friend. "Nathan, go back to the station. Please." In reality, it was likely intended as a warning. Malcove didn't have any better fate lined up for Nathan than he did the two of them, once they had that privacy, but where it came to threats upon his own person, Nathan frequently did not notice.

"Don't touch me." Nathan shrugged him off and frowned at Duke. "You'd just find a way to wriggle out and escape without me around to watch you, Crocker." What can they do to me? the lift of his eyebrow said.

But Duke had known how to kill him and so had Lock.

Lillian pulled the coach door open and held it. "Do hurry up. Once this tedious business is done with, I want to get back to exploring the uncharted lands in the Calhoun."

Duke choked and muttered something that sounded like, "Lara fucking Croft..."

Audrey pushed back as Nathan's hand in the centre of her shoulders urged her towards the coach. Could they not make their move here? Safer, surely, than risking heading on to Malcove's territory and into his power? They were still missing Cooley, but three out of four might be enough to kill this curse. But Nathan's hand was insistent and her eyes fell upon the police automata still bustling in and out of the police station, on the paved concourse outside the building. It was a certainty that they would obey Malcove over Nathan, and they would be drawn by any confrontation...

No. Numbers were not in their favour here, and the illusion of comparative safety and freedom in the public setting was very likely just that. Lillian and Malcove were the secret elite of this world. Who knew what they could control? The police, for certain. The public? Even possibly the environment.

"It's become like some great mythology," Duke murmured in her ear as they settled inside the coach, squashed onto a hard perch with Lillian on one side and Nathan on the other. Duke spoke very low, but Nathan's ears were probably sensitive enough to pick it up, though he stayed carefully unreactive. "It's not so much that they don't remember it. They don't remember it real."

Audrey could only nod, afraid that Lillian on her other side would hear anything put into words. She lifted her eyes to search his face for cues.

"There's one more thing," he said, voice rising a bit with emotion. "That's not Lillian."

"Stop that muttering," Lillian ordered, hand going to her whip again.

"Don't." Nathan's glare could have snapped her in half. "I said--"

"All right, Officer Tinhead." She flapped a hand dismissively his way.

Malcove climbed into the coach and closed the door, veiling them almost in darkness. The windows were shuttered and the only light came from streetlights filtering in through the cracks. He bashed a fist on the inside wall and the coach jerked into motion. Malcove sprawled back, facing them, and he wasn't a big man, but he managed to take up almost all of a seat the same size the four of them were perched on, his back facing the direction they travelled. His contemplative expression was superior and his body language one of command and authority that far exceeded the personal charisma of the man Audrey remembered.

The background noise of the coach's progress was loud enough for Duke to continue with another whisper, as he raised his hands to his lips to fake a cough and kept them there an extra moment. "That's not Lillian..."

The coach bounced over a stone in the road and Duke coughed for real. Audrey's eyes had adjusted enough to the gloom to note that Duke's cheek was bleeding from the long gash drawn by the whip, blood sliding down slowly, unchecked. Malcove's face fixed on the three of them in turn with entertained calculation. A chill stole over Audrey. She hadn't had a lot of dealings with Malcove, enough to know he was kind of an ass and kind of obsessive when it came to doing his own thing, but then she knew plenty of people like that who wouldn't go this far. She got it in the moment before Duke said it.

"...That's her character."

***

Lock, then, was a casualty of their ignorance. He had, when Audrey thought back to the threat- and tension-saturated atmosphere of that train journey, always been too big, too outlandish and over the top, hitting the villain clichés by the dozen. She had wondered at the time how a geek set loose and unfettered had suddenly become that.

The four-fold nexus of this Trouble were as entrenched in it as the rest of Haven. When it had seemed Lock remembered them, he'd been remembering this apocryphal version of them, and in their dealings with him, the truth had not had chance to become clear.

Audrey couldn't truly feel sorry for killing him, when she thought about the fall from the airship. His cruelty in that moment was caught in vivid snapshots in her memory. The damage to her memory, which had already been screwed around plenty, probably yet waited to reveal its full extent. That was quite aside from the things he had said on the train, his aggressive and threatening presence through the journey, Butler...

Duke had already asserted that he could not kill Lillian. What of the rest of them, now they knew they at least weren't consciously the perpetrators? The weight of maintaining this world seemed to be shared between the four of them -- three now -- in a joint vision Audrey supposed could help explain why it was so big in scale. But Malcove still had to be the crux. It was his Trouble...? A moment of doubt solidified her certainty. Malcove was their leader, and had always had his own sort of odd charisma. It would take that focus to shape the overall vision. It had to be Malcove.

Lock had forced her hand. Killing a Troubled person was absolutely a last ditch solution, but she was tired, and her head ached, and this particular Trouble had done such things. To her friends, to the world. Time was running out for both her and for Haven. The lure of that solution, if it could make all of this over quickly, was undeniable.

She looked at Duke carefully. They might be able to do it right now, even cuffed, if they were fast enough. Duke's face was stony. They hadn't had any confirmation that Duke's Trouble had carried over to Malcove's world, but this Trouble had already cracked a little when Lock died by her own hand. Malcove alone might be enough...

She held herself back through the rest of the journey, tension curling through limbs that wanted to move, muscles rigid. She felt Duke's hand slide onto her knee and rub soothingly through the dress.

Killing them could work, as it had with Lock, restoring further portions of memory to the world. But especially in light of this new information, surely talking them down was better.

They needed to get control of this situation and then, preferably, deal with the remaining trio one by one.

The coach drew to a halt. With the windows shuttered, it wasn't until Malcove kicked the door open that they could see they were outside of a mansion house, gleaming in a soft orange glow from the post-mounted oil or gas lamps ranged in front of it. Tucked back off the street, it squatted in a walled courtyard garden with a broad drive looping around it for the coach. The grass and plants were tinged slightly grey not just from the fast-darkening evening gloom, but from the persistent dust and smog of Heppa. As they disembarked from the coach, the towers were visible over to the west, but the mansion was on enough of a rise that the sea was visible in the other direction.

Audrey had almost forgotten that if Haven was on the coast, so too was Heppa. So much of this Trouble was focused inland and upward. Indeed, Heppa looked more like Haven from here than any view that she had seen of it. That seemed ironic, when this was the lair of those who most emphatically wanted it to not be Haven but a sprawling industrial steampunk metropolis.

She could see steamboats and ferries chugging out across the water, and wondered if they truly had anywhere to go. There had to be a boundary out in a seaward direction, too. If their destinations were also created ones, she hoped ending this Trouble didn't leave anyone stranded in the middle of the sea.

"Look," said Duke, pointing with his cuffed hands, cupping the same view between his palms for Lillian and Malcove. "Look at it. Look at it, you guys. That's our home. You can almost see it now. Haven--"

"Don't say that word!" Lillian lashed out with her open palm, her other hand reaching again for the lash to follow through more literally. Nathan grabbed her hand and she made a sound of frustration, glaring at Malcove.

"Yes, I think we can dispense with this now." Malcove twirled a finger in the air, generally toward Nathan. "So good of him to accompany us to keep watch over his former friends. Now we can freely destroy the automaton... and they can watch." He gave a leering smile and waved a hand to the disembarking coach driver disinterestedly. "Leave the horses. Find and fetch Cris."

Nathan had stepped back from Lillian, drawing his gun. "I suppose we're all revealing our true colours now." He rooted in his jacket and tossed a second gun to Audrey. Duke was kicking his shoe off to get at the handcuff key and apparently Nathan decided not to risk a second blind grab.

"Drop that whip on the ground, you bitch." Audrey said to Lillian, awkwardly holding the pistol with her hands still cuffed. "Now all the rest of the arsenal." She tossed her head at the coachman. "Don't bother fetching Cris. We'll find him ourselves."

Keys in one hand, Duke picked up Lillian's fallen weapons with the other and moved to unlock Audrey. She angled her hands so he could better score the lock, but kept her aim true, even though Nathan was also still covering both Malcove and Lillian.

"Well," Malcove said, taking a step further around Nathan and giving him an intrigued inspection. "I truly didn't expect that. Are you still in there, Wuornos? Inside this... shell of metal?"

"Uh-uh." Duke grabbed him, and re-cuffed him with Audrey's cuffs, then backed off from him like he might bite, and reached with the second set of cuffs for Lillian.

"Do you know me?" Nathan shot back at Malcove. "Because I don't know you. Malcove was an ass, but he wouldn't have done this. Or at least if he had, he wouldn't think it was a grand idea, and he wouldn't be planning to murder to keep it."

"You killed Lock," Malcove raged back. "You people don't get to make moral judgements on us!"

"I killed Lock," Audrey said, relief and confidence flooding in with her hands free again. "So Duke and Nathan get to judge as they like. Come on. Let's all go inside, nice and slowly and politely. We can take tea." She paused at the thought of the staff on the premises, starting with the coachman, who Duke was pointing at, face scrunched up in askance. "Damn it... Duke, cuff him to the coach for now. There's probably a dozen bystanders in this place who won't be on our side if they decide to pitch in on this." Bad enough to face the prospect of having to kill three people who weren't in control of their actions to win the day, without the potential for further collateral.

"They might not be real," Nathan said. "A lot of the police aren't real, I think, just creations of this Trouble. The automata especially." He looked a little morose and conflicted about that.

"Well, I for one am glad that clusterfuck didn't happen to anyone else," Duke said. "Buddy? Keep strong, huh." He patted his hand on Nathan's chest on his way to tie the coachman to his charge. He had no handcuffs left, so used Lillian's whip for rope.

"Oh, how sweet," Malcove sneered. "I guess you found out what Lock was playing at with the automata?"

"You're a cartoon, man!" Duke said, flinging out his hands. "Don't you get that? You were real, whole, three dimensional, and you turned yourself into a cardboard cutout of some fantasy of who you'd rather be, and you don't even know! Come on, Malcove! Mal! Woody! You know me. I mean, fuck, I was even kind of on your side in the whole event-arrangements deal. You have to sense somewhere in there that this isn't the real you! You're a dick, but you're not this much of a dick. The real you would understand that this needs to end!"

Malcove just glared back sullenly.

Nathan said, "Let's get inside, before the staff get on the telephones to call for help."

Audrey had forgotten that Heppa -- or at least the very rich of Heppa -- had that rudimentary phone system. "Why don't you go ahead of us and make sure the phones are disconnected, Nathan. Your presence shouldn't scare the staff. You have a badge to wave at them and a pretext to be here."

"But watch out for Cris Cooley," Duke called after him as Nathan set off at a pace almost a sprint. "Don't forget he'll probably recognise your metal ass, too!"

"Have you been emulating Lock?" Malcove asked with amusement, picking something up from their interactions.

"Shut the fuck up." Duke jabbed the gun at him and gave every impression he'd really like to pull the trigger. "That's actually my boyfriend, you bastard."

"Okay, we're following them into the house," Audrey ordered. "But slowly. Don't make any sudden moves, because I am so ready to shoot you after the last few days."

"I thought Lock killed you," Malcove said. "I still don't know how you survived."

"Yours to wonder. Move."

Duke fell in with Lillian, a few steps behind them. "I still don't believe that you don't remember me. We were even sort of friends."

She made a haughty little noise. "Many people who've followed my career think they know me."

Help arrived from an unexpected source. "Of course you know him," Malcove said testily. "He was supposed to help us in our original great plan, but he betrayed us to Wuornos in the end."

"That's how you remember it?" Duke asked flatly. "Does this all take place in some cloud fortress surrounded by Asgardian gods? Did you fall from the sky to recreate this world? This is a fucking fishing village in Maine. Sure, it attracts a few tourists in the summer -- not so many for Maine winters. Lobster and tourism, that's your great origin. You guys were just folks sitting around in a bar -- my bar -- playing board game campaigns. Which, hey, cool with me so long as it doesn't destroy my world and everything dear to me. I have a problem with that last part."

They'd passed the entrance lobby into a large hallway, but Nathan came through a side door, and he motioned them back. Audrey gestured the others into the lobby again and pulled the door to, returning Nathan's nod. She watched as Nathan led a troop of staff past and didn't open the door again until they were all out of view.

"I don't remember you," Lillian said to Duke as they walked into the hallway, her tone for the first time self-questioning. "Why would I not remember you?"

"Because this Trouble... this world... has fucked everyone's memory over," Duke said. "What you do remember from before isn't necessarily the truth. What you remember from here definitely isn't real."

"No." She shook her head. "I can't accept that."

"Stay with them," Audrey said to Duke, and went to peer into the rooms off the hallway. She found one that looked suitable, lined with bookshelves covered by glass doors, with nice plush chairs to sit in and just two doors in the same wall, entering off the hallway, to cover, and not too many potential weapons lying about. She motioned them all in, then hung back at the doorway, covering the front door and the stairs and waiting for Nathan.

"Where's Cooley?" she asked over her shoulder.

Lillian laughed. "You are in so much trouble you don't even know."

"From Cris the ubergeek?" Duke asked. "Audrey, we'll find him locked away somewhere reading a book."

Audrey frowned. "They say 'watch out for the quiet ones'." She glared at Malcove. "Where is he? In this world, what is he?"

Malcove just smiled.

Nathan came back. "I've escorted all the staff I could find from the premises. Told them it was police business and they shouldn't come back today. The coach driver is still tied up outside, though, and I saw no sign of the fourth one."

"Cris," Audrey corrected. "Do you know anything about him?"

"I don't think he ever spoke to me. Don't think he spoke much to anyone."

She thought about it, then turned to Duke. "Do you know anything about his character?"

Behind her, the front door slammed shut, closely followed by the second door adjoining the room where Duke, Malcove and Lillian were to the hallway.

Nathan slapped his hand on the nearest door before it could follow and cut their party in two. It shuddered under his metal palm as though it was trying to slam, all the same.

Duke said uneasily, "That was a gust of wind, right?"

"Come on." Nathan waved Audrey in under the arch of his arm, then strode past her into the room, letting the door bang normally behind him. He headed for the huge bookshelves that lined the back of the room. He started ticking the subjects off with his extended gloved fingers. "Engineering, clockwork..." Lock... "Society and law..." Malcove... "Archaeology, history, geography..." Lillian... "Alchemy... Magic... magic..." He drew to a halt even as his words ran down, and cast a helpless glance back at Duke and Audrey. She could see it warring in him. What else were the Troubles? Jess Minion had said to him, all that time ago, but this was Nathan and there was magic and then there was magic.

But Lock, Malcove, Lillian and Cris had rewritten the laws of reality itself when they made this world. Nathan, and Duke, had lived a whole life inside it. They knew such things existed.

Audrey had... kind of known that magic existed in Malcove's world, although why Victoriana and steam technology should go hand in hand with such a thing was beyond her. She'd known it was used to create automata, to shape their memory and minds and do the things that were beyond the capacity of clockwork... There really was that little bit of magic in Nathan, at least right now. She did not know what to expect of a magical attack.

"Cris!" Audrey yelled, her mind a torrent of curses. "We're not here to hurt you or your friends! We just need to put the world back how it was. If you think about it... really think... then you'll know that's what you should do, as well!"

Lillian, perched on the couch next to Malcove under Duke's guard, laughed again and Nathan went so far as cuff the back of her head with the side of his hand, startling Duke a bit, although the blow wasn't hard. A moment later, Nathan was picked up and slammed into the wall by some unseen force. He dropped his gun, but Duke and Audrey covered their prisoners until he could pick himself up and scramble to get it. It tried to move out of his hand, but he pounced and clutched it firmly.

"Are you all right?" Duke asked.

"Yes," Nathan bit off, unhappily. "This is just great. Where is this guy?"

"I'm sure he'll be here very soon," Malcove said, his reassuring tone all mocking.

"Damn it!" Audrey heard Nathan's fingers lock around the gun. "He's a magic user. He's not infallible, he's not immortal. As long as these two are under control, we can deal with this. He can only use one spell at a time, and he can't do them while he's distracted. He has to pick his moves wisely because every one will wear him out, just like a round of a physical fight."

"I'm glad you know something about this," Duke said, "because I really, really don't. I mean, I met a guy once. Gave him a ride out to one of the outlying city-states. But he didn't do any spells in front of me, just... wore robes and used big words. But half of me can't even believe -- I mean, fuck, magic?!"

"'What else are the Troubles?'" Nathan said with a certain nostalgic wryness.

"If you say so," Duke shot back.

"We're trained in what to do if we encounter a magic user. I've got this."

Audrey nodded grimly as Nathan started backing for the door. "We came here to get through to these people. We need to break the conditioning this world has placed over them. If we can cause them to remember, maybe we can break this Trouble down further before anything else escalates." She cast a look uneasily around her.

Nathan nodded. "You keep trying. I'll try to find Cooley. I at least somewhat know what I'm doing, I'm the one of us he'll find it hardest to hurt, and I'm no use here anyway -- all I am is the person they remember spoiling their party."

"You do have a knack," Duke said. "I..." He took a step forward then looked dubiously at the two prisoners.

"Don't leave Audrey alone with them unless you have to," Nathan said, and crossed to the door.

"I hope he reduces you to scrap!" Lillian yelled at his back. Nathan ignored her and yanked the door handle. It didn't seem to want to open under his hand, but after another try failed, he shoulder-rammed it, splintering the wood, and punched and kicked through the edges of the hole until it was big enough to step through.

It was startling to see him do that and reinforce how much potential force for destruction his automaton body contained.

"Okay, so, what?" Duke asked.

"You're the one who knows them best," Audrey said. "Let's go over what really happened in the run-up to this, at least what you saw of it. The things they did and said in your bar. What did their group do? I mean, this was fun for them, right? Good times were had. Maybe that can call them back to their old, real selves."

"That's going to go sooo well," Lillian said.

"You," Duke said, pointing. "You're the one who came up and asked me if your group could use my bar every Thursday night for your gaming. You did that because we'd been talking on and off since you moved to this god-forsaken town -- hell, don't ask me why you'd ever want to do that -- and started coming to the Gull. That was about six months ago. I wasn't dating Nathan and Audrey then, so yeah, I was pretty flirty. Don't tell me you don't know me, because I know all your secrets, poured out over the vodka and blackcurrents to your trusty bartender on those late nights."

Lillian gaped at him.

"Yeah. Your great origin story is a table at the back of The Grey Gull. Your great grudge with the world comes from Nathan -- and much as I love him, yeah, the guy is still kind of a dick over that kind of thing -- saying "Um, nope" to your event in the sports hall because you didn't tick all the health and safety boxes because Woody thought that shit didn't matter. That does not make it okay to turn the whole town and more into a substitute for it!"

"You weren't that close to her," Malcove said.

Duke rounded on him. "Just because you're the leader of this little band doesn't mean the rest don't have a life that happened without you. Sure, you had ideas, imagination, scope, and I saw them all gather around you like moths to a flame -- but they still had their own ideas too. Or they, and you, would never have got here."

"Lock, for example," Audrey said quietly. "Tell me that got out of control, because I know for a fact that all those excesses weren't just following orders, but what I want to know is were they with your blessing?"

What the hell were they going to charge them with when this was over? she wondered. How culpable were they, really? Could she skew things to land them with a negligent homicide charge over Lock's death? Or anyone else's?

While Duke started in on Lillian again, Audrey glanced worriedly at the broken door out of which Nathan had gone.

A faint bang from somewhere that side of the house and vaguely above them made her jump and she dragged her gaze back to Malcove. She needed to fix this. She took a breath. "Moths to a flame, right, Duke? But this Trouble was held steady by four people... That's not something we've seen before. It has to be Malcove's particular influence and leadership which made that happen. If that's true..." She pinned his eyes with her own. "Then you're the one who killed Lock. You brought your friends into this, now one of them is dead. Never mind what you remember, that's why you wanted me to watch you kill Nathan, isn't it? So that I'd know what it was like to lose the friends who helped me to get this far. You want me to feel what you feel. You want to be able to blame me -- well, it's not my fault. Lock was trying to kill me and I defended myself. You wanted me out of the way. He did it for you! Whose fault does that make it, Malcove?"

His eyes burned hate at her, but he didn't have to like her to get the point. She needed -- she needed for him to doubt. To regret this, wish it undone, wish it away. Maybe that would be enough to put a crack through the world of his imaginings.

"I didn't know Lock outside of this world," Audrey said, "and Duke and Nathan didn't know him well, and even then, none of us had the right memories at that time. But from what Duke and Nathan have observed of the two of you, it was what you all made him into that ensured he had to die." She bent in toward Malcove as she said the words, and twisted her mouth into a nasty smile.

A thump sounded in the hallway outside, rather closer than the last loud noises they had heard. Audrey didn't particularly want to break the moment, and refused to allow the sound to pull her attention away. She barely registered Lillian staring at Duke in conflict, and Duke turning to the door, his step toward it and uneasy words of, "I'll go see--"

Nathan hurtling back through the broken shards of the door was not something she could ignore. Well... he didn't come through it, exactly, he sort of stuck in it, and the wood made an awful grating, splintering sound as he struggled to extricate himself. His metal body was faintly steaming, although his clothes weren't wet. Or was that steam or smoke? Audrey smelled hot metal, sharp in her senses.

"Nathan!" she exclaimed.

He looked up from his wedged position. "I brought Cris Cooley," he said, with a deadpan flat delivery that was trying hard to be a joke.

"Good work on that." Duke matched him for tone and offered a thumbs up. He reached to help Nathan, but pulled his hand sharply back with a yelp. "Shit, man, you're hot! And I mean, okay, yeah, that too, but!" He picked up a cushion and wrapped it around Nathan's wrist, this time. He was just in time to pull himself and Nathan out of the way of another blast of... something. They clattered to the floor behind the couch, a cry of pain from Duke suggesting he'd been unfortunate enough to land underneath.

A man strode through the door in their wake.

Audrey hadn't known Cooley. She could barely remember having met Cooley. They'd been dealing with Nathan, not her. She did murders and Troubles, not community events. That, she'd told him, that was his burden of being Chief, and have at it, tiger.

Cooley today was a thin, ginger-haired man wearing a battered frock coat in dark colours and a thing like a ruffled scarf that was mostly adrift and asymmetrical down his breast, but had little embroidered stars on it. He didn't especially look inordinately dangerous, as a person, but he looked pale and cross and the fact his form was crackling with a kind of silver-white lightning was off-putting, to say the least.

Duke and Nathan's heads peeped out from the top of the couch like they were kids scared into hiding by The Twilight Zone.

"That didn't fry any circuits?" Duke demanded with great concern, dragging his attention from the ginger lightning bolt to Nathan.

"No circuits to fry," Nathan said. "Magic he can do, mechanics he can't. Or at least, not my clockwork ones. I'm fine, just try not to touch me for another few minutes."

If he was alive, he'd have been cooked, Audrey thought. "Enough!" she yelled, adjusting her aim to cover Cooley, in the doorway.

"No," he said, and the weapon flew out of her hand.

She checked her impulse to dive after it. Duke and Nathan were right there behind her on the couch, and at least Duke was still armed. Instead, she held up her empty hands. "Okay, you know what? I don't need that thing, because I am not here to hurt you. We didn't find out about Lock until too late, but you guys are not yourselves. You've been twisted by this world more than anyone, only you can't see it because you think you control it." She turned and cast back to Duke, who knew these people.

"Your characters, man!" Duke said. "I mean, the magical kabam! is very cool, but at the cost of your self? It's not a deal I'd take. Audrey is not here to ruin your game. She's here to fix you and everyone else!" He rose from behind the couch to join her, but Nathan hunched down further and stayed where he was, and Audrey heard the reassuring small sounds of a gun being quietly checked. It looked like Duke had passed his across to Nathan. "You turned a dude into spare parts just for doing his job. You put people in poverty out on those streets, and some of them are real people. The guy who sold me take-out food since I was seven years old! Think about it. Have you seen the people down there in the streets? Did you bother to look? If this world is your creation, your ideal whatever, then I'm sorry but it sucks."

There was a choked sound from Lillian. "I've -- I've seen the children on the streets," she said. "We did that? Were they not always there? Before--" Audrey turned her way just in time to see her eyes mist over with a different note of remembrance. Confusion clouded her face, then a new clarity entered it. "Duke?" She looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. "What's -- what is--?"

"Lillian," Malcove said, intently. "Don't listen to them. They're trying to trick us."

"It isn't a trick," Audrey said, and reached for Lillian's hand as she stared down at the cuffs. Audrey thought it was too late already for Malcove's fight-back. She'd seen the same change in Duke's eyes, in Nathan's. Lillian remembered. "Let me get those for you. Nathan, the keys..."

"No!" Malcove raged. "No!" His hands rose to his head. "You won't trick me. You've some different kind of sorcery at work here! Cris, you must fight her. Find a way to undo this. She killed Brad!"

"Quiet." Nathan popped up from the back of the couch behind Malcove's head, clamping his shoulder heavily under the heel of the hand still locked around the gun. He edged toward Audrey, extending his hand with the keys in it. "He threw her off an airship, you bastard."

"Oh my God." Lillian gripped the arm of the couch with her fingernails and looked faint, while Audrey deftly turned the key to release her.

Duke was sort of blocking with his body, placing himself between Audrey and Cooley. Cooley had a sheen of sweat on his face and was breathing like he'd run a marathon. Too much magic too quickly, and by the look of it, Nathan was right. He wasn't immortal. He had limits that were getting increasingly closer. Duke risked a glance back to try and reassure Lillian.

"They haven't been out in the world the way I have," Lillian said. "They don't know. They haven't seen. Cris, all you've done is sit up there with your books, playing with magic that works. Woody's been fixated on the workings of the city, the official buildings, the infrastructure, the automated justice system... Brad... oh my God, what did he do?" She pressed a hand to her mouth.

Duke shook his head and made a discomforted grunt. He looked back to Cris, then away, distracted and vague. Nathan recovered quicker, blinking and raising his pistol again before it had completely dipped, keeping his hold on Malcove. "It's -- easier," he said, gruffly. "The memories of being me again feel closer... more like Chief Wuornos than the automaton." His eyes tracked down his arms, but they stayed metal.

"Two down," Duke said, tension making his voice grave.

Audrey turned her attention fully to Malcove, who looked stricken and furious, but was restrained by Nathan's hand on his shoulder. "If she remembers, that means you have to remember more, too. Even if you don't want to acknowledge it. We know that's how its worked before."

"When you killed Lock," Malcove enunciated, very clearly, looking at Cooley.

...Whose face set in determination as he reached out into empty air. Before Audrey was able to anticipate what he was aiming to do, her own fallen gun had flown to his fingers -- more sluggishly than he'd been flinging things around earlier, but still too fast for her lunge to stamp on it and keep it in place.

Duke moved to remain between Cooley and Audrey as Cooley moved.

"Cooley," Nathan snapped, rising a fraction more from behind the couch as he set his gun to the back of Malcove's head.

"Aim for his eye!" Malcove shouted, raising his voice a split second after Nathan, ducking and squirming from his grip. He couldn't move far or fast, but he didn't have to, to be just out of Nathan's line of fire for a second, and clear a path between Nathan and Cooley.

Cooley pointed the gun at Nathan's head and fired.

"No!" Audrey yelled. There was a metallic impact, and something splintered, and Nathan dropped.

"You fuck," said Duke, and charged to tackle Cooley. But the gun was already lowering in his hand, his mouth was wide and horrified, and his expression spoke of anything but ongoing danger.

"Chief Wuornos?!" he squeaked, and Duke skidded to a halt, watching him warily.

Audrey almost didn't care. She was already moving. She planted her feet on Malcove's toes and then in his gut, climbing on him as she launched herself over the couch. "Nathan!"

He lay on his back on the floor, utterly still. One eye stared up to the ceiling. The other eye... was an empty socket. Audrey felt like her heart had just dropped out of her chest. Until she saw something else that robbed her of breath, and sagged against the back of the couch, only staying on her feet by its support. She froze there, holding her breath, unable to move or speak.

"Chief Wuornos... Wait! I didn't mean to..." Cooley was overtly panicking now. Duke stepped out of his way to let him move freely, and he rounded the couch at a staggering run and dropped beside the clockwork body -- Cris Cooley had clearly never contemplated shooting anyone in his life. "No. No, no, no, no..." His hands grasped the floor, clawing the pile of the carpet for a moment before they dared catch Nathan's shoulders.

Audrey looked with concern at Duke, who was moving up behind Cooley, his steps as mechanical as an automaton's.

"Cris..." That wheeze was Malcove, struggling painfully to rise and speak after getting Audrey's full weight in his stomach. He turned and faced backwards over the couch. "You... weak..." But when his eyes fixed on Nathan's body, his breath started to draw in and out in even more pained wheezing, as though he was having a fit. "That's... that..." Shaking, he covered his face with his hands. Lillian came up close behind him to grip his shoulders, shock in her face as she stared between Audrey and Duke.

"I'm so sorry," she babbled. "He didn't mean to... He'd never... Oh, God, you can fix him, can't you? In this world, he's a machine. You can fix him..."

"His brain is destroyed," Duke growled. He swallowed and his throat twisted down on the words, choking them. He surged to his knees, shoving Cooley out of the way. "...Damn it, Nathan..."

His hands roamed over Nathan's body, his flare of emotion already giving way to resignation. His eyes showed too much white. "Nathan! Damn, damn, damn..." He cupped the wood-carved face in both hands, and pulled Nathan's body up over his knees.

Audrey opened her mouth to speak.

"It's not going to be this world for much longer," Cooley said, staggering back, voice and limbs trembling, expression hunted and guilty and lost. "Can't you feel it unravelling...?"

Audrey could see the reflection of that truth in the eyes of everyone else. Maybe it even broke through to Duke, who was making a low moan through his grit teeth as he clung to Nathan, in a way that made her ache.

"Duke," she said.

She said it almost the same time as Nathan grunted and said, with exasperation and a significant amount of guilty tension, "Duke."

Audrey added, urgently, "Nathan! Put your eye back in before the world changes!"

Duke dropped Nathan onto the floor with a clank and a raw curse. "You absolute shit."

"Um..." Nathan scrabbled with his hand, slewing his body to one side to reach up to his face, and Duke caught on and grabbed, helping to guide the hand that couldn't feel what it was doing, still swearing at him all the way. "Oh, you shit, you utter, utter... I am going to make you fucking pay for that, forever, you..."

"Heard Cooley start to break," Nathan gasped, his voice airbag wheezing from his twisted up position on the floor. The glass eyeball clicked back into its socket. "Thought I'd run with it. Bullet hit me in the neck -- he's not that good a shot. Jolted the torsion spring in my spine and knocked me down, though."

"...Bastard. You're just a bastard."

"I tried to tell you! Audrey got it!"

"Tried to what, how?" Duke raged. "Fuck you!" Duke was flailing his long arms, crazy mad with the flip from grief to relief, and the world was melting around him. Even Audrey could see it now.

"I twitched my foot! It's not my fault if you don't pay attention!"

The world was melting around them, and Duke and Nathan still found time for argument.

"You owe me. You owe me so hard..."

"What... what did we do?" The hoarse question from the man himself was the last plaintive note Audrey heard before Malcove's world bled out of existence.