Mathématique: Chapter 81

“Wow,” Young said. “So this is how Shep dies.”

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges.

Text iteration: Early.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 81

“This is him?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Kind tomb, home to living song and unmaking mist, home to her vibrational chime, the sink for her charge, the quench for her shine. Her battle comes: unspooling life’s crystal coils, she’s begun before you’ve seen her. She is yesterday’s renown, would pluck chords when she could touch, would breathe long halls in the days of her breathing, she would sink, would soar, would flee. Friendly grave, it preserves her cries and they were legion. It recalls her anger and it was manifold.

It sings a fallenspark song.

“You sure? Sheppard said he was a good fighter.”

“I believe Colonel Sheppard described his fighting style as ‘nightmarish’.”

“Nightmarish is good, Teyla.”

“‘Nightmarish’ may mean many things.”

Knowing comes through narrow channels. It is forced and forced and forced. Stem, new-growing, branches with momentum from its own searing. The sea draws it. And, there is a net. //?// Nick Rush asks, trapped in it. //You are mine.// It pours overbuilt care and urban love through a narrow keyhole and pressure breaks a way. //Not Altera’s. Queen of Gore, she marks you. Queen of Avalon she calls you. Mine.//

“He’s better looking than McKay.”

“Ronon!”

“Kinda delicate though.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

Song riots and sings itself. Alteran ghost wound packed with salt and bound with darkness. But look: here the fall of light, there the rise of water, and there the growing vines that live in sun and breathe in chemical counterpoint, called forth by deep and making melody. The give of soft mattress, the support of clean pillow the pull and warmth of cortical suppressors the cool air over exposed forearms, the pinch of a needle the dig of a belt. Attending to a map and questionbound. There is no “getting up.” There are no pathways for that, there is buoyancy and stardrive, photonic momentum and atmospheric charge.

And the narrow gap to pour.

“Earth bullshit. Looks are looks. Acts are acts.”

“I expect I’ll be assessing his martial skills soon.”

“No way is this guy good enough to learn from you.”

“My impression from John was that he lacks control. And self preservation.”

Resistance is detected. Something returns from netted quiet. Pressure. Low-entropy sonic-heroics. In ages past, white and silver prefigured the end of the world. To stop the pour and to listen are the same. Combed signals: eyelids lift, hands brace, sitsitsit. None happen. The net bleeds charge. Spark and spark and spark. All fall away. 

“He talked to you about it?”

“It came up in passing.”

“How? Sheppard was unconscious for hours.”

“Weeks ago. Dr. Rush has been on his mind. It’s sweet, is it not?”

Wavelets-in-the-morning song on a downhill pier. Shing! Claspbreaker! This small want of language, that small want of flux, pry here the net and also here. With old/new energies Ganos Lal is a welcome of moonlight and rain and the music of rain, banked storms, and eroded mountaintops. But this one is a vectorhome greeting. He lands. Words also, Queen of Avalon, cast and mold. Directional! They are to!

Resonance brings frail patterns down. The net winds a dark wave over an Alteran Wound of Inhabiting. Why carve furrows in these coils? They overrun with song. Small picks for living tumblers. As it had ever offered courtesy to Morgan Le Fay—

This one, the city will help.

~~~

Rush woke, but was unaware of waking. Candyfloss thought peeled from the stick of a locked body—heavy muscles lax against a soft surface, head angled, hair trapped, hands open, eyes shut—while sun fell warm on new-opened solar collectors, the waves lifted, and the planet spun.

“John is blessed with a good heart.” Teyla Emmagan’s voice flowed from upstream dreams of a silver city. Dreams of green worlds, of quiet mornings, of star-backed evenings. Without opening his eyes, Rush recalled her face: thoughtful, composed, irises flecked with gold. The sensors chilled in her presence but her quantitative cool coupled to warm regard. Many times, she’d saved the life of John Sheppard, and the city cherished the bright star of his mind, the coil of his crystal. 

“He’s balls at romance though.” Ronon Dex he knew from dreams of dark ships lined with corridors of bioluminescent blue, dreams of golf under maritime sun. That gun of his was bloody marvelous, or at least John Sheppard (beloved) thought so.

“He is,” Teyla sighed.

Rush slid from the helpless, thrown-back tilt of his own head through the geodesic arc of the wisp-thin shield, slipped to the tight bind of his boots over the arches of his feet, then through subtle harmonies of the desalination grid. His heart beat, the ZPM pulsed. Water passed over grids of long-dormant seeds and a lotus-eaten lassitude sapped strength and willpower alike.

McKay ran along a corridor, each footstep falling fierce, pressing off hard. A collection of bright crystal and dark circuits gleamed in his hand, waiting for direction from his mind, watching his heart. John Sheppard dearly loved Rodney McKay and the decks had learned to love him too, and the halls. He passed with a wave of sky-colored emission, its luminosity so faint that it would be visible only in perfect darkness, which would never fall.

The infirmary doors opened for McKay.

“Rodney?” Teyla asked. “Dr. Keller? What’s wrong?”

“SOMETHING WEIRD IS HAPPENING.” McKay’s robust sonic waves compressed and rarefied the air. 

“Ronon, Teyla, if you could step back, please?”

“My god, he is a brat,” McKay breathed. “He’s lockpicking himself out of his body!”

Geodesic shielding spread stress without struts, tessellating energetic patterns across an arc of unsupported space. And below, on the curving open-air path on the exterior of the tower, John Sheppard looked up at the shield, the wind in his hair, his hand shading his eyes. Shut out from the city’s charge-poured care, his Alteran wound knit and protected by a dark field, but not healing, still open, still a gap where Lantean light had poured in, placeholding.

“I see it; dial back the suppressor field.”

“Dial it back? Shouldn’t we be dialing up?”

“He’s jimmying the door because he’s shut out of his body, Rodney! Let him in!”

“Oh, right.”

Rush blinked his eyes open. The city looked down on John Sheppard with an intensity of machine yearning that coexisted with the wet retinal image of McKay staring into a handheld screen like a foregrounded gem. And Sheppard, the wind in his hair, limned by a decorative Lantean aura imperceptible under strong sun. He could see them both. And the crystal between, flattened like hidden layers in the running network he inhabited.

McKay’s hand moved, screen to ear. “Radek, I know. I’m working on it.”

“Gotcha!”

With a dimpled smile, a blonde woman with cherubic features exploded into his perception and into the room like she’d been dropped from a passing plane. Jennifer Keller, rare in dreams, the sweet curve of her cheek etched with John Sheppard’s brokenhearted envy. And she’d been here the whole time? Lost somewhere in the flow of air through vents, the stream of water, the shine of the lights, the standing-wave sustain of energy singing in Lantean genes. Teyla, too, gained resolution, a cold spring in a warmer world. Day-spectrum light clung to Ronon’s hair like a mist.

There were a lot of people in the room. Where had Nicholas Rush just…been?

No one was sure, and sun fell on solar collectors that had been folded into cold storage for millennia and it hit raw and welcome, like the wind on the wings of a chrysalis-shorn butterfly.

(And where was John Sheppard now?)

A distant gauze of physical panic sent monitors pinging, he lost feeling in his fingers, his feet, his breathing pumped fast and hard, words were sparse, separated by gaps in lexical webbing that should be denser—

“NEVER DO THAT AGAIN,” McKay shouted in his face.

“Rodney.” The blonde shoved herself forward.

“I wouldn’t yell at Sheppard’s man,” Ronon advised.

“JOHN SHEPPARD,” McKay shouted, rounding on Ronon, “SHOULD STOP PICKING ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICALLY DUBIOUS LOVERS.”

Rush didn’t like the way the light fell into his eyes and turned to biology, sopping electric. 

“Ronon,” Keller said, “could you please get Dr. Rush’s security team?”

Ronon snorted. “No. Sheppard told me and Teyla to guard him.”

“Get out of my infirmary, and take McKay,” Keller seethed.

“He’s mentally communing with a research lab on Pinnacle Quay,” McKay protested.

“Because you’re yelling at him!” The gold of Keller’s hair was lavish and fell like rich mythological rain. “GET. OUT.” 

“I will stay.” Teyla pressed Ronon and McKay toward the door.

Energy ran along a deep gouge, pouring, washing,  cleaning an open wound. Edges, exposed, glistened. //?// A lit-up wordless question poured with the bright stream, light flowing with light, no unweave possible. It drew an answer from behind a veil. A dark beginning. A cracked-open flower tower of glass. A possession. A carved hold for a killing grip. You were meant to die here, is the shape of the wound. I was meant to kill you. He’s speaking it to Sheppard under an open sky. But the city drops the veil and the memory (the only one he has) goes with its replaying.

~~~

The room was quiet. The alarms were gone and Keller sat cross-legged on the soft white at his feet, golden head bent over a screen, talking to herself. Or to him. “Don’t you worry.” Even the words fell like a young and beautiful curve, “Rodney likes to think he’s the Lord’s gift to neuromodulation, but who taught him all he knows?” A shower of gold slipped past her shoulder as she bent over a screen propped against sheets. Her hair. “It was me. Little tweak. Dialing back over the motor cortex, hang on now.”

He tipped into an abyss of sharp cold and physical crush. His body hurt, muscles tight with tension, the warm float of Atlantis almost wholly gone. He understood that he’d frozen himself with tension, smashed himself against the headboard of the bed, the wall behind, his shoulder hunched, his back curled, an arm wedged behind his legs. His other arm hurt, he didn’t know why.

“It’s okay,” Keller put a hand on his ankle. “This is yours. Come back here.” She tapped the laces of his military boots.

A hand closed over his shoulder. He flinched and tried to merge with the wall. It hurt. The pain drew him deeper into his own body.

“I am sorry.” Teyla didn’t move her hand. “John also found this unpleasant.”

Keller bent over her screen, brow furrowed.

The city’s keen for John Sheppard arrived like a slender bridge thrown over an enormous span. The gap morphed and narrowed, the bridge spun itself out like pulled glass and turned gossamer, and Rush panted against the low plastic headboard of the bed and the silver of the wall. 

“We knew you were a troublemaker.” Keller spoke with generous champagne cheer and restrained pewter-bowl sarcasm. “Everybody warned us. And so I put you under a heavy dampening field during the 1400 briefing so that we could talk about what to do. It should have kept you under until we’d worked out our whole game plan.” She scowled at the screen.

“I don’t know that he understands you.” Teyla’s hand was warm and steady on Rush’s shoulder.

“I don’t know either,” Keller said, “but I’m chattering because I’m working on language processing. And production.”

“I see,” Teyla said. “Nick, please talk to us, when you can.”

A metaphysical gap opened up at the base of his mind and he fell into it. He was more aware of his face, his cheekbones, the cortical suppressors warm against his temples, his headache, his mouth, tongue behind teeth, the teeth he’d clamped shut, the edge of cheek he’d bitten, the taste of blood, and “Fuck,” he breathed.

Keller smiled. “Agreed. Hi.”

“Hi?” Rush rasped.

Teyla gripped his shoulder. “I am Teyla Emmagan.”

“I know,” Rush uncoiled a leg, which freed his trapped arm. “I dream about you.”

Teyla smiled, charmed. Her honey-colored hair gleamed under the light of the nearest monitors. 

Keller grinned up at them. “Hi. I’m Jennifer Keller.”

Rush nodded. He shoved away from the wall with a shoulder, but couldn’t quite make it to sitting, he was too crunched into a little ball of disappointing meat. Atlantis thrummed like the underground river of his own blood, inarticulate, the gate of its senses drifting further from his own as Keller worked.

“This is very different.” Keller frowned at the screen under her hands.

“Yes,” Teyla agreed. “It seems so. John was more resistant.”

“Physically, yes, but there’s a lot of resistance here, actually,” Keller murmured. “It’s like patching chinks in six interlocking wave functions, without riding too hard over any one neuroanatomical piece of ground. But what I really don’t get is how overpowered he is. I’ve jacked the gain about four times. It’s like he’s got an energetic augment.”

Rush levered himself away from the wall. Fell back. “It’s the city.”

The city opened an emotional gate and poured a burst of Mediterranean enthusiasm into Rush’s thoughts—salt and sea spray and sun-drenched herbs. He had a visceral urge to make someone dinner.

“There!” Keller looked up. “What happened right there?”

Rush had no words on offer. He shut his eyes, pressed his fingertips to his temple, and—

Teyla snatched his wrist from mid-air before he made contact with the suppressor. Gently, she drew his hand away.

“I’m seeing functional shifts,” Keller murmured. “Your cortex is trying to punch through in places. I’m wondering—if I let it—maybe I can tighten down and refine elsewhere? Here we go.”

The city trickled back in, thaw-warm in dry ground, shut out of words, out of image, out of high-concept thought, out of abstraction. The dull blanket of the dampening field lifted, refined, shifted. The room thickened with detail and context: Teyla’s Athosian corset beneath an open expedition jacket, Keller’s over-familiar perch at the foot of his bed, as though they were childhood friends hunched in a small and secret space, the undignified, half-unpicked knot he’d made of himself at the head of the bed, the beauty of the infirmary, its mathematical proportions, the gestures toward fractal coral and flowing kelp and the sinuous forms of fish, a world of undersea life, and Atlantis, settling into a ripped open furrow at the base of his mind, beading below his running thoughts like liquid mercury in an undersea trench, reassuring and dense.

Keller looked up at him through the gold fringe of her bangs. “Sorry.” She fair dripped with sympathy, as though she could tell she’d saddled him with a sense of decorum. 

Rush straightened out of his reclined sprawl. Teyla let his wrist go and he arranged himself with a little more dignity, sitting with knees bent, forearms over his shins. There was an IV at the crook of his elbow.

“This is a good-looking pattern we’ve settled on.” Keller tapped her screen with easygoing grace. “It’s a qualitative match for what I have on file for you. Haven’t run a quantitative diff. That’ll take some time. How does it feel?”

Rush angled his head, probing the consistency of his sensorium. He felt more or less like himself, more or less capable of pulling an espresso or free-handing a circle on the nearest available wall. The only difference was that Atlantis had bedded down in the low-lying terrain of his mind. It hurt, having it there, but the ache was satisfying. Less a photosensitive headache and more the edgeless strain of deep-seated pathways coopted by something massive. Old. Dense with longing and memory.

“Fine,” Rush said. 

“Then we’ll let it ride for now.” Keller locked her screen, her face full of apology. “Welcome to Atlantis? I’m sorry you woke up paralyzed. That was my fault.”

Rush pressed two fingers to the space between his eyebrows and squinted skeptically at Keller, then shifted his gaze to Teyla, who favored him with a subtle and stately roll of the eyes that seemed to say, I’d accept the apology rather than construct a counterargument; there’s no reasoning with this one. 

“It’s quite all right,” Rush said. “Though I fail t’see how literally any of this could be laid at your feet.”

“I shouldn’t have left the field dialed up,” Keller fretted. “I had a feeling we couldn’t rely on standing electrostatics with the energetic shifts triggered by the new control crystal. I should have followed my heart. I—”

The doors to the infirmary opened.

Sheppard and Young entered together. The city stirred pleasantly at the base of Rush’s skull, enjoying the view of John Sheppard through biological hardware, maybe. Rush felt the emotional pang of mechanized pining, for Sheppard and through Sheppard, who carried a pattern older and dearer than the snapped-spark span of Rush’s whole life. Young was a Lantean afterthought, but Rush had Morgan Le Fay’s context now. Young, like Morgan, had a superpositioned aspect. With his reasonable tone, his solid disposition, and his stalwart good looks, Young seemed like he might apply for a job with the Normative Police for all the middle-of-the-road American values he sported. But he was the bloody worst problem of the lot of them. At some point, in some way, he’d become spatiotemporally unglued from reality itself.

“Hotshot.” Young leaned into his cane. “You okay?”

Rush nodded. 

They approached in tandem, a matched set of dark hair, dark uniforms, and concerned expressions. Young’s face was etched with pain. Sheppard’s eyes were red-rimmed and his uniform rumpled, as though he’d worn it to bed.

He wasn’t sure if it was a leftover gnaw from Midway’s whole body tech cravings, or the deep ache in the base of his head, or Atlantis’s machine yearning for a people long gone, or the careful mnemonic desert that stretched vaster and wider the more people he met who reacted to the ghost of his past self—but Rush wanted to be touched. Like he could tell. Sheppard slid an arm around Rush’s shoulders and pulled him into a tight hug.

The angle was bad, Rush was sitting on a bed, Sheppard was standing, Rush got a face full of the colonel’s ribs, he held his aching, IV’d elbow straight, but he threw his free arm around Sheppard’s hips.

“McKay says,” Sheppard rasped into his hair, “that you ran with life support for about ten minutes.”

Rush nodded.

Sheppard let him go, stepped back, and looked at the floor while re-spiking his hair. “You have a good time?”

Rush wasn’t sure what to say.

Young and Keller watched Sheppard with concern. Teyla tucked her chin and lifted a brow, pride and pity on her face.

“Briefing’s over?” Keller broke the uncomfortable silence.

“Yep.” Sheppard clawed some of his existential California cool out of the ether. “You and McKay pretty well killed it when you sprinted out shouting at each other about life support. Woolsey said to tell you he’d love a report he can read over dinner, if you have the time.”

“His requests are always so civilized.” Keller crossed to the adjacent gurney and gave it a pat. “Pull up a seat, colonel. You’re staying the night for observation.”

“Me?” Sheppard looked hopefully at Young, as though maybe Keller had meant the other colonel in the room. “But I’m fine.”

“Doctor’s orders,” Keller said. “You come back with a city-altering, consciousness-altering Alteran control crystal that magically seats itself in the chair room while you’re unconscious on the floor…” She tapped the empty bed with one hand. “You owe me a night in the neuroICU.”

“I got stuff to do,” Sheppard protested.

“I heard about that.” Keller donned a pair of gloves, crossed to Rush, and pulled an alcohol wipe from her pocket. “Astria Porta, right? But no broadcast? Rodney said I could watch over his shoulder if I’m quiet.” She tore open the small packet.

“If you’re quiet?” Teyla pried up her emphasis like the subtle slide of a dagger.

Delicately, Keller gave Rush’s wrist a subtle tug and turn.

Rush extended his arm and she used the pocket-warmed alcohol pad to edge up the adhesive covering his IV.

“No broadcast.” Sheppard capitulated by trudging over to the adjacent gurney. “A-team is cypher central. Top secret. B-team’s taking over the limelight.”

With a small pinch, Keller removed the IV and pressed a square of gauze into the crook of Rush’s elbow. “Hold pressure there,” she murmured.

Rush clamped his fingers over the gauze.

Teyla eyed Sheppard forbiddingly. “‘A-team’? Why is this the first I’m hearing of this?”

“You’re on it,” Sheppard assured her. “But Eli and Nick need spots, so—”

Keller pulled a roll of paper tape from a pocket and taped the gauze in place. Rush nodded his thanks.

“Radek will be crushed,” Teyla said.

“Nah.” Sheppard, wounded and hopeful, looked at Teyla from beneath wall-etchings that suggested ocean currents. “He’s B-team captain.”

“He can very much have my slot,” Rush offered. “Someone can take screenshots of the cyphers and bloody well hand them t’me?”

Young leaned into the foot of Rush’s gurney. “You realize Eli’s put in something like sixty hours leveling your character for you? Mining gems and shit.” He grimaced. “Hell if I know.”

“Who else is leaving the team?” Teyla’s gold-flecked gaze bored into Sheppard.

Sheppard winced with theatrical apology.

Teyla sighed and turned her face to a decorative panel of inlaid stone that suggested the fractal growth of coral.

“But we need a technomage!” Sheppard protested. “We can’t have Rodney on the bench when there’s so much math in play. I was gonna break the news to Ronon, but…I’mkindastuckinhereso—” he trailed off hopefully.

Rush caught Young’s eye and they exchanged an economical can-you-believe-this side-eye.

Teyla frowned forbiddingly at Sheppard.

“I’ll do three hours of babysitting,” Sheppard offered.

“I would never leave a child with you,” Teyla fired back.

“Ouch. What? But you—” Sheppard quailed under Teyla’s fierce glare.

“You will owe me a favor,” Teyla informed him.

“Definitely,” Sheppard replied.

“A big favor,” Teyla clarified.

“Hyperdense,” Sheppard agreed solemnly. “Collapsing under its own mass.”

Teyla headed for the doors. With a last look of disapproval over her shoulder, she said, “And you will gift me your Elixir of Temporal Displacement.”

“And I will gift you my Elixir of Temporal Displacement,” Sheppard called as doors of amber and lavender stained-glass swept shut.

“She got you good.” Keller’s hazel eyes were full of human sparkle rather than genetically conferred crystalline lift, but Rush sensed a thread of worry running beneath her shield of cheer and charm. Her eyes roved over Sheppard, cataloging. Seeking.

“Astria Porta’s popular here, seems like,” Young offered.

“Oh it’s the talk of the town for sure.” Keller’s tiny, angelic smile belonged in a Renaissance painting. “I’m excited to watch over Rodney’s shoulder. The physicians on staff here have a team. I’m a Gray.”

There was an awkward silence that Rush quite enjoyed, actually.

“Interesting,” Young said, full of try-hard chivalry, unable to subject an objectively adorable doctor to social torture for more than a handful of seconds.

“Wrong crowd, I guess,” Keller’s cheeks flushed pink.

Sheppard tried to turn a laugh into a cough with little success. “That’s cool you’re a Gray. I didn’t know that.”

“Okay, well,” Keller rallied. “I’ll see about analyzing the data I’ve collected so far.” She held up the glowing screen she’d used to recalibrate Rush’s entire cognition. “Carolyn Lam sent me your file. I’ll compare your baseline to where you are now. Tomorrow we can run a parameter-level diff and filter for material differences.”

Rush nodded.

Keller headed for the sliding doors that would take her deeper into the infirmary. “I’ll send Rodney by later with laptops.”

Rush, Young, and Sheppard looked at one another.

From an information theory standpoint, this was a catastrophe. Rush suspected that, of the three of them, he (might’ve, at one point) had the clearest picture of what was happening. Unfortunately, an unquantifiable percentage of that picture’d been stripped by an LA drug that’d overwritten or siloed his personal narrative. It was abstractly upsetting. Rush, Sheppard, Local-Young, the Lantean Expedition Force, and the city itself was part of a system under, presumably, multiple levels of quantum observation. At least two layers had been implied by the Morgan versus Morgan debate he’d witnessed earlier: each Morgan represented a layer. In her case, it was local ascension versus superposition. In Young’s case it was local descent versus superposition. He, too, had a superpositioned aspect, though he hadn’t seen himself. An’ wasn’t that just bloody like him? He, personally, already had the strong desire to leave the mnemonically-privileged past version of himself (whom everyone seemed t’fuckin’ love) for dead, and he was in metaphysical continuity with the man. 

A warm wave of affection upwelled from the city-shaped ache at the base of his mind, swept through a recursive, devouring pattern, and settled back into the deep.

Sheppard’s gaze, bruised and load-bearing, settled on Rush.

Atlantis pulsed in the base of his mind as it must pulse in Sheppard’s. The city was in his head. Likely for the duration. And looking at Sheppard, he was bloody certain it was the same, if not more intrusive for the other man. He could make some guesses as to why Sheppard was so stubbornly silent about it. The kinetics question alone—the simple issue of when it had started would likely be impossible for Sheppard to answer, given he’d held his command for years without mentioning it.

“You got that look on your face, hotshot,” Young said.

Thrown, Rush switched his attention.

Young eased himself onto the end of Rush’s bed, transferring weight off his bad hip. The mattress dipped.

“What look?” Rush asked.

“Like you’re about to pitch a rock from a glass trebuchet.”

Sheppard chuckled.

“Show a little respect,” Young advised Sheppard. “I just saved your ass.”

Sheppard gave Young an ironic salute.

“Did you though?” Rush heard the predatory lure in his own voice as he turned from Sheppard to Young. He started a methodical sweep of his pockets, for his glasses.

Young unzipped his jacket, reached a hand into an inner pocket, and drew out Rush’s designer frames. “Guess we’re doin’ this. Whatever it is. Sorry, Shep.”

“What?” Sheppard asked.

Rush unfolded his glasses, slid them into place, swung his legs over the edge of his bed, brought an ankle to his knee, steepled his fingers, and said, “How long have you been in mental continuity with Atlantis?”

Sheppard shrugged and dropped his eyes. “I’m not.” He flicked the side of a cortical suppressor, shocking himself.

“Don’t—do that,” Young said, fatigued.

Sheppard shook out his hand. “Suppressors are working.”

Rush tested a hypothesis.

He dug into decades-deep reserves of superlative academic dominance that he assumed existed. Though he had no explicit declarative memory of forcing university-wide committees to their knees, he had a strong suspicion there was no silence he couldn’t outlast, no rhetorical trick he couldn’t kneecap, no bashful neck-exposed display that would spark so much as a scrap of pity.

Sheppard stared into his eyes, transfixed and helpless.

“Wow,” Young said. “So this is how Shep dies.”

“Don’t rescue him,” Rush said with melodic malice.

“I’m gonna rescue him a little.” Young shifted on the bed, “by reminding him that I don’t report to Woolsey.”

“How long?” Rush repeated his question.

“From the beginning,” Sheppard rasped. “Our trip to Altera just—made it better.” He shook himself. “Worse, I mean. Our trip to Altera made it worse.”

“Don’t love that,” Young said mildly.

“If it makes you feel better, it’s not—” Sheppard paused, then restarted. “I think of it like a dog. In the best way. Like a smart, loyal dog, following some qualitative features of your thoughts. It responds more to emotional valencies as opposed to factual content. You were stuck in your body, right? And for all McKay’s hysterics about you hacking life support—I’m guessing a bit part of what happened was Atlantis, pulling you out of a place you didn’t want to be. Like little Timmy, down a well.”

Rush arched a brow. //Y’realize he compared y’to a dog, yes?//

The wash of pride and excitement that seeped from the base of his mind seemed about right. For a bloody Rough Collie.

Rush blinked, shook his head, and tried not to lose what little of his mind remained.

Sheppard gave him a seasick grin. “Let me guess. You’re a cat guy.”

“No comment,” Rush said.

“Oh yeah. No question. You’re one hundred percent cat, hotshot.” Young crossed his arms. “So I’m guessing that since you’re interrogating Shep about this, you’re in mental continuity with the city?”

Rush examined his own fingernails from the apex of the academic summit he’d set himself on. Rather than answering Young, he pinned Sheppard with an alpine gaze. “I told it you think it’s a dog.”

“I like dogs,” Sheppard said weakly.

Young sighed, world-weary and rueful. “You guys need to stop being so exciting.” 

~~~

Night in the Atlantis infirmary had an ethereal, undersea quality. Amber lights glowed from tracks at the base of the walls where water ran, shimmering and silent. The etchings on the walls picked up the faint light. The stained glass of the doors and interior windows darkened to colors of the deep sea—navy and purple, the earth tones of red rock and brown sand.

Young sat in a chair backed against the wall between Rush and Sheppard’s beds, his bad leg propped on a low stool. The man had stubbornly stuck with Rush through the afternoon and into the evening, allowing his team to settle in and get some rest before, presumably, a night shift started.

Rush very much hoped that Young’s obsessive preoccupation with security would loosen as the days passed.

Sheppard hunched over the screen of his laptop, its light giving his face a spectral cast. He typed furiously in quick bursts.

“You tryin’ to launch a nuclear missile over there?” Young asked.

Sheppard looked at Rush, as though he were the offending party.

“I believe he’s talking to you?” Rush suggested with acid-wash delicacy.

Sheppard straightened, rolled his shoulders, and stretched. It was a good performance. Unfortunately, it came approximately fifteen minutes too late to retroactively apply even a shred of the effortlessness it aimed for. “Oh, uh. No. Just texting with McKay. No big deal.”

Rush and Young glanced skeptically at one another.

“We need to either get headsets or invite everyone here.” Sheppard adjusted the position of his laptop against the wadded sheets at the foot of his bed.

“What?” Rush asked.

“For the game?” Sheppard elaborated. “To coordinate.”

Young snorted, amused. The tiny exhale was enough to trigger a wince, followed by another positional shift.

Rush slid off his bed. The floor was cool under his bare feet. He offered Young an open hand. “Is this necessary? I could very easily place myself on mathematical standby. It’s not clear to me why I need to actually play the thing?”

“You gotta play,” Sheppard said.

Young frowned at Rush’s waiting hand.

Rush flexed his fingers, then snapped them open, as though he could sleight-of-hand Young into a good decision.

With experimental skepticism, Young grasped Rush’s forearm and let himself be drawn to his feet. “I’m not leaving,” he said, “until Greer shows up at 2300.”

“I fuckin’ know, don’t I?” Rush indicated his own gurney. “Lie down.”

“Nice,” Sheppard said to Rush, then resumed typing furiously to Rodney McKay.

Rush helped Young lie back, adjusted the bed, and stood over the colonel with arms crossed, surveying the man. Young’s face was lined with pain and his forehead shone with sweat in the dim infirmary light. “You’re useless like this.”

“I don’t need an intact spine to pull a trigger,” Young growled.

Rush reseated his glasses. “Unacceptable.”

“Unlike Shep, I don’t get off on your Math Professor from Hell routine.” Young gave him a smoldering look from beneath lowered brows that seemed to belie his own statement. “You’re gonna have to try a little harder.”

“Hey,” Sheppard protested.

Rush leaned into the edge of the bed and angled himself so he could see the pair of them. He felt Young’s eyes on the insolent press of his hip against the mattress. “I’ll not be playing your bloody game.”

Both colonels looked up at him anxiously.

“Astria Porta, or—” Sheppard trailed off.

“Astria Porta,” Rush clarified. 

Sheppard and Young locked eyes and exchanged a long look, as though jointly participating in a cost/benefit analysis.

Young seemed to win. (Or lose?)

“Hotshot,” Young began. “There’s an unofficial consensus that, uh, you should play. The slower the better.”

“Why?” Rush asked, astonished.

“The minute you crack the whole thing,” Young said, “you box leadership into a corner. There’s some reason to think that might be a bad idea.”

“Am I t’understand that you’re undermining your own command hierarchy?” Rush asked.

“Yeah,” Sheppard said.

Young winced. “No. We’re putting a little flex in the timetable.”

“You’ll crack that tonal cypher in two days, max, if we let you at it directly,” Sheppard said flatly. “I might even be able to solve it, based on what we saw on Everett’s walls.”

“Jackson and I strongly advised him not to,” Young said.

“Which is why I haven’t been talking about it nonstop since your dinner party.” Sheppard’s gaze turned to galvanic slate. “The idea carried weight with me mostly because it came from Everett. He might be wearing fatigues, rather than athleisure Expedition gear,” he paused to trace a line across his black fatigues, where a civilian stripe might run, “but I find he’s got a pretty good head on his shoulders.”

Implication and counter-implication resonated between Rush and Sheppard in the dim infirmary. Sheppard, presumably, had arrived at the same conclusions about quantum observation that Rush had. And he didn’t advise a nine-chevron dial. Not yet.

“Things are happening on Atlantis.” Sheppard drove his case home. “Jackson was told to come. A new control crystal has been seated.”

Atlantis stirred at the base of his mind, warm and heavy. Rush felt the ghost of a cool fall and fine dispersal. Rain, he realized. 

“You gonna throw in with us, hotshot?” Young asked.

“Is the plan to continue indefinitely?” Rush demanded. “Making sham progress until—what? Humanity loses what I gather to be a war for its existence?”

“Heard about that, did you?” Young asked, solemn under pelagic light.

“My intern has his sources,” Rush replied.

“The plan,” Young said, “is to buy Jackson a few weeks. He’s our best shot of making it through. He has the only line of communication with a higher plane that we’re aware of. If we win this, we need him to chart the path.”

Rush and Sheppard locked eyes.

A current of anxiety thrummed through the room, and it occurred to Rush that they weren’t telling him the plan—they were asking his permission. If he wanted to scuttle their quietly mutinous delay, he could. Easily. All it would take would be going to Administrator Woolsey. An email to Homeworld Command. A well-laid argument to Rodney McKay, even. But—

“Delay is the right move.” Sheppard’s sear and surd gaze bored into him. “And I have a feeling,” he paused, “that you should play the game.”

Rush reconsidered Astria Porta. A collection of code, powered by photons, running a simulated world on Lantean servers. A hidden layer, maybe, in a nested reality?

Sheppard’s city-deep gaze suggested as much.

“All right,” Rush agreed.