Tanya took Winterwing in tow, and they walked the corridors in silence. He was sullen, and while she was aware that she had been the breakwater of an argument a half hour prior, she had little interest in being involved in it. It was trivial, and not her business.

Instead she mentally juggled all the other tasks she had been given.

The parasite, the missing rooms, the destroyed Mask, the raptor, and, yes, Winterwing himself, she was sure were interconnected. It all came to something, but she could not figure what. Perhaps the little angry human was right, and the problem was she was trying to work out logic where none existed, and she should have been looking at it from the perspective of pure chaos.

Winterwing allowed himself to be ushered to her lab, where she left him at the workbench that she had reserved for him, now covered in the piles of his notes, pads, and paper that he had steadily been filling over the weeks under her supervision. The saurian text also remained elusive, but a problem that seemed less urgent than it had originally appeared. It did remain a way to keep Winterwing occupied, and though he was still prone to frustration, for the most part he was a quiet enough companion that it was not intolerable to have him in what was usually exclusively her space.

When his morose and purposeless shuffling of pages began to turn annoying, she told him “I don’t think she will.”

Winterwing looked up at her, “What?”

Tanya realized that she had not spoken the rest of her thought. “I... think being more active in this investigation is more likely to help Emily than harm her.”

He blinked, in the way people did as they searched for the thread of conversation Tanya had been knotting internally.

“You don’t think it’s dangerous, what you do?”he said finally, looking through notes that he did not stop to read, making polite conversation.

“Oh, it’s dangerous,” Tanya gave one of those little half-laughs that she would only remember upon reflection were inappropriate. She contemplated her own work in front of her, “But, if she wants to take an active role in figuring out what they’re trying to do with her…. that may be safer than just waiting to see what happens. I think I’ve reached the end of what I can learn with d-d-diagnostic testing, maybe its time to give it stimuli.”

Winterwing’s face scrunched together in distaste, “So, she’s an experiment to you.”

“Ehhh, ‘experiment’ implies a level of control I don’t have over the testing environment,” she said. “More of a case study?”

This did not appear to be the answer he was looking for, as he seemed even more upset than before. “She isn’t like you people, she isn’t a trained soldier,” he insisted.

“What, you think I am? Before this my field was faster than light travel,” Tanya said. And then, after contemplating him for a moment more, “Why does it matter so much what she does? What are you two even fighting about?”

“We’re not fighting,” he insisted.

“You’re doing an awful lot of things that look like fighting when observed,” Tanya said, incredulously.

He stared at her, with mouth open for just a moment too long, before looking away again. “The drain in my shower is clogged,” he said.

She was completely thrown off her train of thought, “Umm?”

“I’m molting like you would not believe.”

“Oh. Well. Yeah. The climate is much warmer and drier. You’re not going to need the down,” she said. “I’m not sure why you’re telling me this.”

“I just wanted to say something now because it seems like a very small problem, compared to everything else going on.”

Winterwing was dodging the topic, which was also annoying. She disliked when people played the game of wanting to talk about something, but also not wanting to. It was time and emotional energy wasted on avoidance and preoccupation, instead of coming to a solution. She shouldn’t have said anything at all.

“I looked at what you’ve been doing,” Tanya gestured to his notes. “I’m not sure I understand the approach.”

“I told you, I can’t read any of this. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to, or anyone else here, either. I figured I could do a little bit of cataloging,” Winterwing shifted through some of the loose pages. “It’s like I said, the form of the writing is as important as what it actually says. I think this is older than anything I’ve handled before, but some of it seems to carry over. This one here, it’s daily life.”

“Daily….life?” she squinted at the page, confused. It looked to her more like lines of text that had not been appropriately placed on a ruler, and little crude drawings doodled around them.

“Mundane items, like food, crafts, things you find in a household. The written lines are supposed to be fields of crops.”

Tanya looked doubtfully at the writing. “It had never….never occurred to me until this moment that the Saurians had agriculture,” she smiled, slightly embarrassed. “I-I mean, they must have, right? You don’t have an empire without feeding it,” she looked back at the paper. “How strange.”

“I guess,” he shrugged.

“Do the colors mean anything?” she asked.

Winterwing seemed to consider her question for a moment, “You know? I’m not sure. Color is one of those things that has different significance depending on where you go, but I don’t think Saurian preference was covered in any materials I’ve seen. Color can tell you a lot about what they had at hand, though. More important things get rarer dyes,” he looked at the stack of papers, and at his notes. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

She considered the pile of work in front of him. “How much more is there?”

“Well, there’s three thousand or so legible pages. I have maybe gotten through forty, so this should keep me busy until I die.”

“Do you need me to give you something else to do?” she asked.

“What else is there?” Winterwing looked around the lab, nervously.

“I’m not sure. Maybe you’re right, and no one’s going to ever be able to do anything with this. Maybe I could find something more productive.”

“I’m not under any illusion that I have a lot of useful work to do here,” he shrugged.

Tanya regarded him for a moment, pondering.

“What?” Winterwing sighed.

“I have heard that before,” she said.

“Don’t do that,” he said, flatly.

“Do what?”

“Compare me to Wildwing.”

She sucked air between her teeth. “I’m afraid the comparison somewhat invites itself, heh.”

“Maybe. But, somehow, the only time anyone ever makes it is when they want to lament that I should be more like him, and never the other way around,” he said, pointedly. “So, don’t.”

She glanced at her own work, scattered across multiple workbenches, and contemplated everything that she was supposed to do. She pulled up a stool next to his, sitting down and straightening her back primly. “Okay. Let’s try it this way. Let’s pretend for the moment that Wildwing doesn’t exist and you and I have never met.”

“This feels very patronizing.”

“It is,” she agreed. “What would you want me to know about you?”

Winterwing stared at her, and then looked away, as if embarrassed.

“Oh, you really don’t know how to talk to people, huh,” she said.

“I’ve been talking to you.”

“Naw, you’ve been arguing this whole time. Talking’s harder,” she chuckled a bit. “No, it’s fine I’m the same. I’ll help out then. You said you knew about all this poetry because of a class?”

“That’s right.”

“Were you studying to be a historian?”

“No. I took that course because my mother recommended it,” he said, and then, after she sat silently and waited longer, “a writer.”

Tanya made a little noise of surprise before she could think to stop herself. As she had told him, he did invite the comparison by existing. She had heard mention of Canard being a top student, implying that Wildwing must have been in school as well. It had never occurred to her to ask what they had been studying. Now that she thought about it, it was extremely difficult to picture Wildwing in an academic setting at all. It was a persona lost to time and circumstance. Winterwing must have seen that thought in her face as well, because he looked very sour, but as she did not voice it, neither did he.

“What kind of things did you write?” she asked instead.

“It doesn’t matter,” he waved her away, looking back down at his pile of pages. “That’s all gone now.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m a physicist, that didn’t just stop being a thing because I’m here now.”

“You’re still a physicist because they need one. No one needs a writer. Not here.”

“Oh, just answer my question,” she said, exasperated.

“Fiction.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

Winterwing grumbled, and said something under his breath that she chose not to acknowledge. “Okay. I don’t know what its like for you, but for us, most records prior to the Saurian Empire just don’t exist. Nearly every piece of surviving culture is from during or after, and most of it is heavily marked by that assimilation.”

“I...guess that’s true,” Tanya said. “I never really thought about that, either.”

“It must be true for your field, too. That sort of advanced science didn’t exist before.”

“I-I believe most of my field was recovered from the digital archive of… Tigius the Cursed? The part of it that did not burn down, ha! The first particle accelerator was built from his designs, three hundred years ago.”

“It’s the same in everything. Almost all of our own knowledge was superseded by what they forced or left to us. For you, it means a head start. Someone else did the foundation that you built on. But, for cultural artifacts,” he looked at the poetry before him, “its just devastating. They took most of what we were, before. They stripped us of everything. There’s no way to even know everything that’s gone.”

“You feel very strongly about this,” she observed.

“I feel strongly about identity,” Winterwing let out his own little rueful laugh, acknowledging the irony. “Stripping us of all those things took normal growth away. If you look at any of the planets outside the nineteen worlds, they’re extremely diverse in traditions and beliefs, and histories. But, the nineteen, and some of the outlying territories, even hundreds of years later, remain strangely homogeneous.”

“This is history, you said that your interest was in fiction.”

It seemed that in the course of the conversation, he had forgotten his sour mood. Now, he was becoming intent and animated, leaning in as if he were telling a particularly good secret. “We have very little left, of what we were before. My mother was an expert in archaeological finds. Very old grave sites, sometimes things preserved in old bogs, sometimes stone architecture on a coastline. Physical things. The oral histories that existed before writing are mostly gone. There are two that survived, that you probably know. The first was the pantheon of gods that resided in the stars, that largely persisted in the south because the sea-faring people needed it for their servitude as navigators. There have been some very, very old maps and charts that have been recovered.

“And the second-” He prompted her.

“Would be the great mother myth,” she said, thoughtfully.

“Which only persists because it was grafted to the Drake DuCaine legend. It didn’t really survive the Empire, either.”

“That’s all still history,” Tanya said.

Winterwing seemed to remember himself, the animation draining from his face, and the somber mood setting back into him. “I was trying to use my mother’s connections to try to reconstruct some losses. I can’t replace it, no one could, most of it died with the people that last told it. In some cases there is enough written record and local myth accumulated that you could pull it together into a collection, with a few liberties taken.”

“That’s quite an undertaking.”

“Yes, I was stalling a bit on it,” he smiled, “I didn’t want to travel.”

Tanya stood up and stretched. “Well, uh, I don’t think I have anything useful for that task here. Talk to Grin. I don’t remember how far back that monastery was est-esta-built, but it seems like a place to go for old knowledge. He might be able to share something with you.”

Winterwing nodded, but seemed doubtful. He scratched at some of the feathers on his arm, which came away and drifted to the floor.

She watched them fall with a furrowed brow, before remembering she was supposed to be the taskmaster. “Why not just help me organize this place? Might be more interesting than paper.” She gestured to the lab around them. It was true that it was a slight disaster, and perhaps getting the pieces out the way would have the added benefit of clearing the detritus out of her internal focus as well. “It’s a mindless, repetitive task, but if you behave, you can have some of my oral history. I’ll start with the fire I set when I was seven.”

Winterwing left his pile of notes and moved to observe one of her abandoned projects—an attempt at a personalized teleportation shield that had required a power source of infinite density to work—and squinted at her handwriting. “These are as unreadable as the book.”

“Yep! Now, I suggest that we start-”

He sneezed, unexpectedly. A flurry of feathers and down came tumbling from him. She watched the mess drift to the floor, and pointed out the shop vac. “With that.”

“Sorry, I-”

They were interrupted by wailing of Drake One’s alarm.

It had been weeks since she had last heard that alarm. They had ceded most problems of a human nature to Klegghorn. It was, after all, what he had insisted from the start he wanted them to do. Most things that happened in the city were insignificant, and it was inappropriate for them to appear in military hardware for every small problem. Drake One was re-tuned to better focus on the things that were saurian, and the things that were not saurian, but were also so strange that equally strange intervention was called for.

There was something almost nostalgic about hearing the alarm again, and reassembling themselves from all corners of the Pond in the Ready Room. A strange energy that radiated silently from them, something that she would not have been able to measure, but could have described as an anxious anticipation. They had spent so long underground, dealing with the inexplicable, that a regular catastrophe seemed a relief. Six of them had assembled at Drake One’s platform dutifully, and the other two came in tow of their minders, standing with a buffer of at least one person between them at all times.

The team tried to rush her to conclusions.

Upon analysis, Tanya could not tell exactly what the system had found. What appeared to her was a small distortion many miles away, in the largely barren and open hills to the east. Possibly a hint to where the Raptor could have been hidden, but she was unsure. It did not seem large enough, or persistent enough, or consistent with a previous pattern of sightings. The map claimed it to be an abandoned shampoo factory, owned by a company that had gone into bankruptcy some years prior. As she looked at the signal, a search function happily pulled up documentation of the ongoing legal battle for intellectual property rights.

“Dragaunus could be making his next move,” Wildwing pressed. “This might be the clue that we need.”

“Or it’s another trap meant to lure us out,” Mallory grumbled.

“I’m... I’m not sure I think that it’s either,” Tanya said. “It’s so small, it’s not a ship. It’s not teleportation energy. It’s more like…. I don’t know. Something funny.”

“Funny,” Wildwing repeated, as if he didn’t quite believe her.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Tanya said aloud, “you can see it, right there, a point where gravity was wrong, for nearly three seconds.”

Around her, her teammates looked at the same map that she did, though none of them seemed to find it any more clear than she did.

“Can...gravity be wrong?” Nosedive asked the room.

“Oh, gravity can do all sorts of things! On large scales,” Tanya said, “tides, orbits, time-dilation, neutron stars!”

Nosedive gave a thumbs up and smile that suggested he was sorry he had asked.

“But, a large change in strength, localized in the California hills? That’s someone playing,” she looked at the giant screen before her, leaning in closer and squinting, and then catching herself doing so, as if letters a meter high would be any clearer a centimeter closer. “Distorting space even at that size should require a massive amount of energy. Why can’t I see it?” she asked aloud.

She was beginning to become very annoyed by things that refused to have plain explanations. The parasite, Dragaunus, Wraith, the book, their guests, the Pond-

She looked back up at the map. “Wait, I know what this is,” she said, aware that every single person was focused on her. “We’ve been spending weeks with distortions powered by something I can’t measure.”

“You think whatever’s shifting the Pond has moved outside,” Wildwing clarified.

“I... still think it makes more sense that these things are connected than a bunch of unrelated weird stuff would be happening at once,” Tanya corrected.

Wildwing regarded the little spot on the map. “We’re going to have to look at it up close,” he said, and considered the screen for another moment. Finally, he cut through whatever was making him hesitate. “Nosedive, Mallory, Duke, the four of us will go,” he nodded back to the remainder. “Tanya, I want you here in case we need to shut down the generator after all. Grin, expect to be with Emily the rest of the day.”

Wildwing moved to the elevator, looking back on the four remaining on the platform with the implicit threat that he expected them to be well upon his return. His three companions followed close behind. The doors opened and closed, and they were gone.