Disclaimer: I am neither a two-headed baby nor Most Excellent, so...they're not mine.

Cassini's Rainbow

Truman marched into Sasha's office and dropped a file folder onto his desk, smack in between two mostly empty mugs of cold coffee and a flattened cigarette carton. "Giovanni Adriano Cassilani," he said by way of introduction—which was what, in the end, finally drew Sasha's attention.

"Cassini?" He glanced up from the computer screen, unable to hide his momentary surprise.

"The very same." Truman scratched at the side of his face. He had a few days' worth of facial hair that he had yet to go home and shave off. It fit in well with his rumpled shirt, however: the collar of it was unbuttoned, his tie misplaced, and the striped blue fabric sported several coffee stains on the sleeves.

Sasha picked up the folder as one would an expensive piece of china, or an explosive charge. He opened it just as gingerly and glanced over the first few pages, not entirely processing what he was reading as Truman continued, "Portland, Oregon. There was a double homicide there two days ago. You might've seen it on the news...pretty messy. Most likely organized crime related. Only one possible witness—"

"Cassini?" Sasha asked again. That name hadn't been mentioned around headquarters in years. Now, suddenly, it had become common discourse.

Truman pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, nodding. "Yes. Fortunately—or maybe not—nobody can find him. Not even the police." He sighed, picking up the empty, well-polished coffee can that held Sasha's collection of writing implements. Sasha watched with a wary eye as Truman began flipping through them, mixing the pens with the pencils and hopelessly jumbling the more colorful group of pens he'd been meaning to return to Milla. She had an unfortunate habit of leaving things in his office, as if it were her own.

"The murderer was psychic," he said at last, hoping to distract his superior from disrupting his office even further. "Has San Francisco—"

"They turned it over to us. Yeah," Truman added, setting the coffee can down on the opposite side of the desk from where it belonged, "it's that bad." He straightened, possibly in some vague attempt to reclaim an appearance of authority—though Sasha thought he might have better luck if he first tucked in his shirt. "I want you and Milla out there as soon as possible. Find Cassini. Get him to testify or get him out—hell, I don't care. Just clean up this mess before it gets any more out of hand."

Sasha closed the file and, for the moment, set it aside. His mind was already busy, running through the steps necessary to acquire plane tickets and a rental car, to say nothing of strategies for tracking down a man who most assuredly did not want to be found.

At last he nodded. "Understood, sir."

"Good. I want you out there right away, so...get moving." With that lackluster command, Truman turned and left, stumbling off, no doubt, in the direction of the nearest coffee pot.

Milla squeezed her carry-on under the seat in front of her with a last determined shove, then sat back up and, brushing a few stray locks of hair from her face, grinned at Sasha. "So! Would you like to tell me where it is we're going in such a hurry, darling?" She paused to check her boarding pass again. "Besides to a long layover in Minneapolis."

Sasha unburied his nose from his book (a more than slightly dog-eared copy of 1984, an old paperback edition purchased from some hole-in-the-wall bookshop in London, years ago). "Portland," he said as he handed her the case file, which he'd tucked into the pocket of his carry-on. She flipped it open and started to read. "There's been a double homicide with definite psychic involvement. At the moment the city police's one witness is another psychic, a Giovanni—"

"Cassini?" Milla interrupted, eyebrows arching up over the top of the folder. "But I thought he died...what, six years ago?"

"Well, yes and no. He...how is it the younger agents tend to put it—" he frowned, trying to recall the exact phrase— "he 'pulled a Cruller.' In more ways than one."

A stewardess walked by in Sasha's peripheral vision. Milla smiled at her briefly before turning her attention back to the task at hand. "Then—the incident in China...he didn't die?" Her eyebrows knitted together in some confusion as she continued reading through the file.

"No, although he was so badly wounded that there was some concern he would. He survived, but...taking into account the facts that the psychic underground had a vested interest in seeing him dead, that he'd killed several of their key operatives in China, and that our government was on the verge of suspending all field work to avoid an international incident...Cassini and Truman both agreed it would be better if he disappeared. Truman proceeded to fake his death and provide him with a new identity."

"So much for that idea," Milla murmured, gloved fingertips brushing over a bad fax copy of the man's photograph. It was an old, badly outdated picture from an expired driver's license. Cassini's features were in what seemed like slight perpetual disarray, with grizzled, chin-length hair flying askew. His strong, angular jaw was locked in a scowl, but he looked as if he could have been darkly handsome once, long ago. The photo was black and white; Cassini's eyes were dark but sharp, focused. A caption below the picture identified him as Giovanni Salvatore, although his resemblance to the dearly not-so-departed Cassini was, to Sasha at least, unmistakable.

"They'll have to find him a new identity, I guess."

Sasha allowed himself a snort, thumbing over a page in his book. "We'll have to find him, first of all. The agency's records are a bit lacking in that regard. His last known location before this was Ypsilanti, Michigan." Out of the way—just far enough, he remembered Cassini had said. What, he wondered, could have compelled the man to move thousands of miles west, off the agency's radar?

The overhead lights flickered, went out, and came back to life again with the dimmer glow of the airplane's internal power. "They lost track of him?"

"Yes." The engines whined to life as they began pulling away from the airport gate. Speakers clicked on overhead and an automated recording began to recite the well-worn safety speech in the background.

"Hm," Milla said, frowning. "I wonder how."

"Very easily," Sasha answered. The air in the plane had a stale, dry taste to it that made him clear his throat several times before continuing. "We seem to have an unfortunate track record with providing for retired or otherwise deactivated agents, in case you hadn't noticed." He folded down the corner of a page in 1984 to mark his place and snapped the book shut, absently thumbing the bent, broken spine. "I'm rather hoping that will be corrected before either of us reaches retirement age."

Milla swatted him with the case file and told him not to be so morbid, her grin playful—though as she turned to face the runway, her eyes reflected in the window as shadowed and unsmiling.

Portland was cold, especially so for spring. And it was rainy. All the tourist brochures Sasha and Milla had passed on their way out of the airport, following their somewhat bumpy landing in the midst of a midnight rainstorm, all still tried to fly in the face of that. They hailed the city's beautiful skyline and recommended a hundred different fine spots for wining, dining, and sight-seeing.

Not a one of them mentioned the neighborhood through which the two agents were currently driving. It was beyond dismal, and its graffiti-adorned walls and trash-strewn streets were not helped by the dark, gray light of morning. The skies were threatening rain again, but Sasha, draining the dregs from his coffee cup, was rather more concerned with the group of teenagers loitering on the rotted out staircase of one of the block's condemned apartment buildings.

The teenagers eyed the rental car as it drove by—rather, Sasha thought, like a pack of wolves sizing up some passing prey. He locked all the doors and directed his focus to the patchwork road ahead. "We should have invested in a cheaper car."

"Hindsight, darling," Milla answered, her voice sounding upbeat despite the dreary weather and surroundings.

They came to a four-way intersection marked with a stop sign all but painted over with angry graffiti and with a few dings around the edges that, to Sasha, looked suspiciously like bullet wounds. "Are you certain that trace came from here? It was very faint, after all, and—"

They pulled onto a street only slightly better than the last few. Leery-eyed children and adults alike still watched them from porches, street corners, and shaded windows, and the store fronts were either boarded up or covered with bars, but there were at least fewer abandoned cars and overturned trash cans. "The trace came from here," Milla said, her tone bordering on flustered. They'd had this discussion before. "In fact..." A crumbling apartment building, its first floor windows all shattered long ago, loomed up at the end of the street. "This should be the place."

Milla parked them on the street between an Oldsmobile that was missing all its wheels and a pile of plywood someone had thrown out. Both were already beginning to rot in the soggy climate. Sasha unlocked the doors so they could get out and then locked them again the second both their feet hit the pavement. He glanced down, frowning. Somehow, one of their hubcaps had been stolen. Another looked loose.

"This can't be the building," he said, looking around now for any potential carjackers. The street was empty, however, as though their sudden intrusion had caused the neighborhood to go into hiding, to wait and assess them from a safe distance. Or perhaps it was just rearing back, preparing to strike. "Cassini wouldn't live here."

"This is the building, Sasha." Milla's heels clicked across wet, dirty concrete as she made her way up the front steps. The front door was partially ajar, its hinges slowly caving in on themselves. "He's here."

At that an unfamiliar, roughly worn male voice spoke up from below, causing them both to jump. "You lookin' for Nostradamus?"

Sasha glanced around in mild confusion, not seeing anyone, but Milla leaned over the porch railing—that it was cement was probably the only reason it was still intact—and smiled downwards. "Who's that, darling?" Sasha had to crane his neck to follow her gaze.

An additional set of dirty concrete steps lead down to the building's basement. There, perched on a couple of cinderblocks, sat an elderly African-American man, grinning back up at Milla. Several missing teeth made his smile more than a little crooked, and his layers of dirty clothes implied that he spent more time on the streets than off them. "Nostradamus," he said again, taking a long, shaky drag on a cigarette. "He lives upstairs." He paused, scratching his patchy beard. Like his close-cropped hair, it was just beginning to fade to gray. "He'll tell you your future. Five bucks. Ten if it's really ugly."

Milla looked over at Sasha, arching her eyebrows. He only shrugged in return. "Cassini was one of the agency's best precognitives."

She turned her attention back to the man on the steps below. "In that case, yes. We're looking for Nostradamus."

"He ain't here." He spat something—Sasha didn't even want to contemplate what—out onto the concrete in front of him.

Sasha pinched his brow, fighting back a wearied sigh. "Then do you know where we might—"

He was interrupted by a frail-looking hand that appeared through a broken second story window, waving to get their attention. "Let them in, Jeremiah," a voice said. It had a faint hint of an Italian accent to it, although mostly it just sounded old, as fragile as glasswork. "They're not police."

Jeremiah looked up at them and snorted, not entirely seeming to believe what he'd been told. He took another long drag from his cigarette before saying, "All right. He's up in 2B. Don't go near 2D."

"Why not?" Sasha asked. He was holding the building's front door open for Milla, who'd just stepped into a dark, confining lobby from which wafted a strong scent of mold and asbestos.

Jeremiah shrugged, scratching his knee through a hole in his jeans. "Portal to Hell opened up in there last week."

Sasha paused momentarily, staring at him, before he hurried inside to catch up with Milla. As soon as the door had clanged shut behind him, the hinges screeching in protest, Milla chuckled. "Cassini has interesting friends."

His only response was a terse "hmm," although he glanced over his shoulder more than once. It occurred to him in retrospect that Jeremiah was the sort of man Cassini would associate with, however peripherally. He had always been a patron of eccentricities.

The building's interior was even more abysmal than the exterior. The walls were all painted the same color of off-white, but time and god only knew what sort of grime had turned the paint a splotchy, dirty yellow. Half of the overhead lights didn't work while the rest only flickered, and trash lay scattered all up and down the stairwell. Sasha was very careful about where he placed his feet; Milla was less so. Upstairs, a baby was crying and a man was yelling in what sounded like Polish. The railing, as they made their way upwards, was mostly rotted away, and the swollen, light brown tracks that ran down the walls hinted at a leaky pipe hiding somewhere.

Someone in 2C opened their door and peered out—only part of an eye and a tuft of black hair showed around the side of the chipped wood—as Sasha and Milla approached 2B's half-open door. 2C slammed shut again just as soon as Sasha glanced in its direction.

Frowning, Sasha knocked on the door to 2B with the back of his fist. "Mr. Salvatore?" he called, nearly shouting to be heard over a police car tearing down the street outside, sirens blaring. "Cassini?" When that garnered no response, finally, with a drawn out sigh, "Nostradamus?"

"Kitchen!" The voice was the same one they'd heard out in the street. With a certain anticipatory wariness, Sasha pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped into the apartment, Milla following close at his heels.

The apartment's walls were the same off-white color, speaking to a decorator who, perhaps, had known what the building would come to and decided not to expend any extra effort on the place. In the living room someone, possibly within the last ten years, had put down a gray carpet speckled with brighter shades of red and orange; it was peeling back at the corners from mildew. Sasha did his best to ignore the sparse furniture—a couch sagging to one side as its springs collapsed; a coffee table that had lost its legs and was now propped up by cinderblocks.

A gap between the carpet and some cracked black-and-white checkered tile marked the entry into the kitchen. A broken refrigerator, its door hanging on by one remaining hinge, sat next to a few feet of bare, dusty counter and a kitchen table with only three legs and no accompanying chairs. The only food in the fridge looked like it was molding, and being sampled by vermin besides. And there, in the room's center, sitting cross-legged in a faint pool of sunlight trickling in through the a window, was Cassini.

Sasha stopped nearly in mid-stride when he saw the man. Cassini was the same age as Ford Cruller, but now he made the former Grand Head look young again. He'd grown wan and thin, his once healthy, if not muscular frame shrinking down until only skin and bone remained. Age had come along and stooped his shoulders, leaving him perpetually hunched over. His stark white hair was about as ragged as his clothes; it had grown down to his shoulders and there appeared to surrender, now beginning to fall out in patches, exposing a scalp pale and spotted with age. He was also cultivating a long, scraggly beard.

The whole while Sasha stood there, feeling suddenly trapped between the ruin of a man before him and Milla behind him, Cassini neither looked up nor acknowledged their presence. Instead he hummed some tuneless nonsense as he sat, putting together a multi-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle which appeared to be mostly finished. It was an old Flemish painting of the Tower of Babel.

Milla stepped forward, cat-soft, and glanced back and forth between Cassini and Sasha with a hint of disbelief and unease. If she could have seen past Sasha's sunglasses, he knew, she would have found a reflection of her face on his. "Cassini, darling," she began, leaning forward to Cassini tentatively, "we're from—"

She was interrupted by the sharp click of another puzzle piece snapping into place. Cassini ventured a glance up at her, then turned his attention back to more pressing business. The bottom of the puzzle was giving him some difficulty. "Ten dollars."

She stopped short, blinking. "What?"

"Ten dollars," Cassini repeated, nodding to each of them in turn. "Each. You're going to keep me a while; I charge extra."

Milla sighed, but put on her best patient smile and bent down in front of him. She was careful to touch neither the dirt-specked floor nor any of the puzzle pieces scattered around. "Cassini," she said in a voice Sasha recognized, with a twinge of annoyance, as one she usually reserved for dealing with upstart campers at Whispering Rock, "Agent Cassilani—we're not here for—"

"Ten dollars," he repeated again, monotone. "Pay or get out, you choose."

Sasha's jaw clenched, all the muscles in his neck tightening. "Just pay him, Milla," he muttered, pulling a ten from his wallet and holding it out towards Cassini. "We don't have time to waste arguing."

It wasn't entirely the truth—and from the way Milla took the money from him, with just the tips of her fingers and an arched eyebrow, Sasha could guess that she knew that. Still, she took the money, combined it with a pair of fives from her purse, and then presented it all to Cassini. He took it and dropped it into a torn shirt pocket.

"Stay away from public transportation on the 25th of July," he said, nodding towards Milla. "And you'll be kidnapped by a crazed mob boss if you take the Thailand case. Go to Alaska instead. You'll just break a few bones."

Next he looked up at Sasha. His dark brown eyes widened and he hurriedly returned his attention to the puzzle on the floor, murmuring, "Oh dear."

Sasha stared back, waiting—waiting for what? he wondered. Some sign of recognition—or maybe even of sanity—that, it was plainly obvious, would never come.

Milla kept trying to prompt Cassini in that same gentle, patient tone. "Cassini, we're with the Psychonauts. Truman Zanotto sent us. Do you remember..." —but Cassini didn't seem to realize she was there, alternating between dropping puzzle pieces into place and murmuring "oh dear, oh dear."

At last Milla straightened, dusting off her leggings with a worn sigh. "Maybe you should try, Sasha."

"I don't know what that would possibly accomplish."

She merely gave him a look, quirking her brow and setting her narrow jaw in such a way that he knew she was biting her lip to keep from saying something unprofessional. "I would appreciate the help, darling." Her tone was suddenly as tight as her jaw. "Besides, I thought you knew him better than I do."

"We were acquaintances, yes." He moved to the window and glanced out as a way of putting distance between them. The clouds that had cleared off earlier were now creeping back with reinforcements, promising yet another round of rain. Looking below, he was more than a little surprised to not only find that their car was still where Milla had parked it, but that it was still in one piece.

He frowned, diverting his attention back to a partial reflection of the room, caught in one of the window's few remaining shards of glass. Milla was staring at him with her hands on her hips and her lips pressed into a thin, firm line—an expression bordering on anger, and one he knew rather well. Rather than catch her eye, Sasha allowed his gaze to drift back down towards the rental car.

A shadow, a flicker of a shape on the edge of one of the window's jagged edges, caught his eye. He turned, half-expecting to find that what he'd seen had been nothing more than a cursory illusion.

Instead, he found his attention directed around Milla's shoulder to the wall behind her. Like all the others in the building, it had been painted that same weak color of off-white, though ruined now by water spots, stains, and splits in the paint. This particular wall, however, had one distinct feature that made it unique.

"Sasha? What's wrong?" Milla spun on her heel, trying to follow his gaze.

"What on earth—?" she murmured just as soon as she'd turned. Sasha almost sighed with relief: he had started to wonder if maybe he'd hallucinated the whole thing. It was the only easy way to explain how they'd both missed it when they walked in.

Written on the kitchen's east wall in a stern black scrawl that could have easily been mistaken for a child's were the words: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. They were repeated three times in rapid succession, each time in a hand slightly larger than the one before. A broken black crayon lay abandoned beside the scene of the crime, collecting dust mites.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

The sound of Milla's voice jolted him out of his unintended trance. "It—" he began, on instinct, then broke off. On the floor between them, Cassini chortled. At what, Sasha wasn't sure. "Never mind. Milla, the book I was reading on the flight—it's in the glove compartment of the car," he added.

Milla looked first at the scrawling on the wall, then back at him. "Yes? And?"

"Would you bring it up?"

Her eyebrows arched in confusion, but she relented nevertheless. "I...if you really think it will help, darling." Her heels clicked across the tile as she made her way out to the door. Sasha watched her go if for no other reason than to avoid staring at Cassini. As Milla slipped out the door, she shot him a look that implied she thought each man was as equally mad as the other. Which was a fair assumption, really, given the available evidence. Sasha couldn't fault her for it.

As soon as the door had eased closed behind her, Cassini cleared his throat—one sharp, rumbling cough that he always used when he wanted the whole room's attention. Sasha snapped to on instinct, his head turning so fast he felt a painful twinge in his shoulders.

"Still ten dollars extra if you want me to say your future," Cassini announced to the floor. Most of his attention was still bent on the jigsaw puzzle—his unfinished Tower of Babel.

Sasha's face pinched into a frown. "Ten dollars extra would make it twenty dollars, wouldn't it?"

Cassini's head bobbed up and down in something close to a nod. "Yes," he said, talking as rapidly as his fingers moved over the puzzle pieces. "Ten dollars extra for the nightmares you give me."

"Nightmares?" The question was out before he could think to stop it.

Cassini, however, did not answer. He'd been absorbed back into his jigsaw puzzle. His fingers were long, all the joints visible, with some of them warped by arthritis. Still, they moved over the puzzle pieces with the practiced dexterity of someone many years younger.

It was only on closer inspection that Sasha noticed the pinky on his right hand was missing, sheared off with only a stub remaining. Old patches of scar tissue crossed over the back of both his hands in sharp, curving arcs.

With a sigh, Sasha knelt down, still being careful not to let anything save the soles of his shoes touch the grimy tile. "You know, you told me once that precognition doesn't work that way. On demand, I mean." He kept his tone conversational but struggled to keep his eyes on the old man. As a distraction, he fished out a puzzle piece Cassini had been looking for, shook the dust from it, and handed it over.

Cassini accepted it with a grateful, gap-toothed smile, and for a moment their eyes met. Still—and to Sasha's sinking disappointment—no flicker of recognition or anything like it crossed Cassini's wrinkled face.

"Works sometimes," he said instead, at least managing to pick up the thread of their earlier conversation. "I make up the rest. Nobody knows the difference." He paused and then, with a nod over Sasha's shoulder, "Worked for your pretty lady friend—by the way, you should tell her to stay away from that man she met last week. The Canadian, with the funny mustache? No good."

Whether he'd genuinely foreseen that or just made it up on the spot, Sasha didn't know—or much care. Instead he stood, brushing off his pants (mostly on principle) as he went.

"Exactly how long have you been...doing this?" He nearly said "running this scam" but reined his temper in at the last moment. "Surely you must remember; you were given a new identity, a new life much better than this...there were resources set aside—"

Cassini interrupted with a faint, but somehow final—defeated—shrug of his shoulders. "They put the money in the tower. You know how that story ends."

Sasha's thoughts went immediately to Ford Cruller: the man would have ended up shut away in a madhouse if a few still loyal agents hadn't intervened. The new administration, of course, continued to half-heartedly protest that he would have been comfortably provided for; there were resources and facilities "set aside," research into his condition to be done...

To this day, Sasha had his sincere doubts. Truman meant well, but his prevailing tendency was to bungle things. Often horribly.

The apartment door eased open then and Milla returned, the worn copy of 1984 clutched in her hand. She offered a vague half-smile when she saw Sasha; Sasha, his thoughts in other, darker places, did not return it.

"You'll be happy to know no one's stolen our other hubcaps," she announced, handing the book over. "Jeremiah says he's been guarding them for us."

"Jeremiah's a good man," Cassini said from the floor. "He guards this place. Keeps the police at bay—and the O'Briens." At this his very voice seemed to darken, and Sasha caught him staring at him out of the corner of his eye.

"Charming, I'm sure. And thank you," he added with an absent nod in Milla's direction. Most of his attention was on thumbing through 1984's yellowed and tattered pages. They had been annotated once, in small, firm handwriting now beginning to fade away in patches. Half the writing was in Italian; the other half, though in English, was mostly illegible.

Sasha found what he'd been looking for fairly early on in the book, halfway down the page: he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.'

The passage itself had been circled and underlined so many times it was a challenge to read. In the margins had been scrawled, hastily, Why no darkness? Below that, in the same handwriting but different pen, was a treatise on light and darkness throughout the rest of the novel. It consumed both margins and went on for a dozen pages besides, easily the longest impromptu footnote in the book.

Sasha held the book out to Cassini, pages open. "I trust, if nothing else, you remember this."

For a moment Cassini didn't even bother looking up. But then something caught his interest, or perhaps he'd just decided to give Sasha the time of day. He glanced up, and his gaze fell at once on 1984's open pages. "Let me see that," he murmured, and quick as a flash—surprising Sasha; he had seemed so frail—Cassini was on his feet, the book now clutched tightly in his hands.

Sasha leaned forward, a thin thread of anxiety working its way up from his stomach. Cassini—the real Cassini, the impatient, sharp-tongued, but keenly intelligent Agent Cassilani—was still lurking in there somewhere. He knew it. Behind him he heard a soft step and the sudden warmth of Milla's presence, the cloying scent of her perfume.

"Yes, yes," Cassini said at last. He rapped the pages with the back of his hand like an angry professor. It was a motion Sasha remembered well. "Inverted, always inverted: darkness where there should be light, light where there should be darkness."

"Cassini—" Milla began, but he carried on as if he hadn't heard.

"That's the point, of course. Look for your O'Briens in the light—that is where they hide. Never in the dark." He chuckled at some private joke. "No monsters hiding under the bed, no, no."

Then, without even pausing for breath, he snapped the book shut and thrust it at Sasha. "You keep this. You need it."

Sasha did not take the book, but kept his voice level as he answered instead, "First of all, Agent Cassilani, it's your copy, and should be returned to you. Second, it would be best if you came with us. We haven't the time."

Cassini looked at him: really looked at him, with a clear, keen brightness in his brown eyes, and for the first time recognized who he was seeing. "Sasha." The book shook in his still-outstretched hands. "Oh—Winston, my Winston." His whole body sagged, and for a moment Sasha was afraid he would faint; he reached for him, but Milla, always fast on her feet, got there first.

"Here, darling. Maybe you should sit," she murmured as she steadied him, glancing about for a chair. There was none to be found, of course, so she made do with keeping him steady herself, her arm at his waist.

"Sasha," Cassini started again. He spoke so softly Sasha had to step closer to hear him—then launched back a step, surprised, upon seeing the tears gathered at the corners of Cassini's eyes. "You spend so much...so much time trying to cast light on the darkness, but you just don't see...no, you never saw, never. A man can live comfortably enough in darkness, but not you. You insist on living—on dragging everyone you can out into the light with you!

"And now it's too late, isn't it? You've met your O'Brien already, haven't you? And there's no use in hiding—can't hide in the light, and you don't know how to live in the dark."

He paused to catch his breath, and a most peculiar silence descended. Milla stared at Cassini in wide-eyed confusion. So did Sasha for that matter, his thoughts a jumble. He was torn between defending himself—Cassini had insulted him, hadn't he?—and just demanding an explanation. Cassini had often been obtuse, back in his days at the agency, but this was just absurd.

"Cassini, what do you mean?" he asked instead, cautiously. Against all reason he was beginning to worry: what exactly was it that Cassini had foreseen? Or perhaps it's just some sort of fit, he reasoned. Cruel, but it put his anxiety to rest.

"You have met your O'Brien," Cassini answered, seeming now entirely calm and composed—save for a few tears still gathered in his eyes. "Or he has met you. Either way, the result is the same. You insist on living in the light, and so now you must die in it."

In an instant—as if someone had thrown a switch in the man's brain—Cassini turned to Milla and smiled. The gleam died from his eyes. "Thank you for the help, pretty lady, but old Cassini would like to sit down now, eh?"

Milla all but let him drop.. Her attention was entirely on Sasha, her green eyes still wide and, he thought, frightened. "Sasha," she started, even as Cassini sat back down and resumed work on his puzzle.

Sasha waved her off. "I believe it would be best if we brought him back to the police station. They'll want to speak with him, and it's clear there's nothing more we can learn here." He had already turned on his heel and started for the door as he finished, "Will you bring him to the car? He seems to respond better to you." As he left the apartment he thought he heard a string of Portuguese following him—but then again, he could have been hearing things. It was hard to tell over the vulgar Polish still spewing down from the third floor.

It wasn't until he stepped outside, where it had just begun to rain in a steady drizzle, that he remembered that Milla had the only set of car keys. The car was, of course, safely locked; he leaned his back against the passenger side door and resolved to wait. Though he did wish he at least had an umbrella.

He was still standing there five minutes later, steadfastly trying to ignore Jeremiah's snickering at him, when a small, yellowish object fell from the sky and landed in a puddle on the sidewalk with a plop. Sasha stared at it for a moment in dull incomprehension before he fished it out with his telekinesis. He preferred not to touch it with his bare hands—whatever it might be. To his surprise, the object, when he brought it closer, turned out to be nothing more than the battered, and now waterlogged, copy of 1984.

Sasha glanced up just in time to see Cassini poke his head out of the broken kitchen window. His beard waved in the breeze. "I told you! You need this!" A pause, and then, "And tell pretty lady here I charge fifty dollars for house calls!"

Sasha watched over the rim of his glasses as the hotel room's lone clock, lonely in its perch on a squat little dresser, clicked its way over to 1:27AM. Then all at once it whined, wheezed, and proceeded to die an abrupt and unremarkable death, freezing in time.

With a sigh, Sasha nudged his glasses back up his nose and resumed reading. He'd left 1984 spread out on the car dashboard to dry, and it had finally managed it, more or less. Its yellow pages were now much more fragile than before, and wrinkled, crackling under the slightest touch. The print at least remained intact, but many of Cassini's margin notes had dissolved into an inky blur.

Upon their return to the hotel, finally, some two hours past, Sasha had settled down to read the book again, from the beginning. What he was hoping to find...that he couldn't begin to guess, or maybe admit. But he worked his way through the pages at a snail's pace, if that, picking apart every sentence as if it were a chunk off of the Rosetta Stone. A few margins even held annotations in his own hand now.

It was all told a thoroughly useless exercise, he thought, but at least it kept him busy. Sleep still eluded him, despite an exhausting afternoon and evening.

Milla had had to exert considerable effort, as well as all her charm, to coax Cassini out of his apartment and down to the car. The man seemed to have a minor case of agoraphobia; for a solid hour, he had refused to leave the building. And yet even when Milla had brought him down and shown him to the car, the day was far from over. At the police station, Cassini remained as stubborn as ever—and less than lucid. He insisted on trying to predict the future of every detective who went near him before demanding payment from them. No one was amused, much less took the bait, though one new recruit to the precinct did entertain himself with asking "old Nostradamus" for tomorrow's winning lotto numbers. (Well, he had until Sasha caught wind of it and chased him away.)

It took hours, all of the afternoon and a better part of the evening, before Cassini agreed to testify. The police took his statement once, then again, then a third time to iron out the inconsistencies. Sasha couldn't understand why they put so much effort into it. Cassini was in no way a credible witness; his testimony would never hold in court, especially not against the sort of attorneys organized crime tended to hire.

All that was left, really, was arranging temporary protective custody—which the police asserted as their jurisdiction—and the more complicated question of witness protection. That was what consumed the rest of their evening, with lengthy phone calls to headquarters. The challenge lay first in unearthing Cassini's original file from wherever it had been mislaid. Milla spent far too much time muttering passive-aggressively into the phone, turning to Sasha to curse agency incompetence every time she was put on hold (which was often).

Then came the second, and perhaps insurmountable challenge, of coordinating with Truman to hash out the details of Cassin's next relocation. He would not only need a new home, identity, and funds, but also no small amount of assistance. Truman seemed interested mostly in tossing the man in an asylum somewhere, no doubt to be promptly forgotten. Milla was in favor of rehabilitation at the agency itself. Sasha, meanwhile, wondered if a stay at Whispering Rock, with its psitanium deposit, might be a better alternative, though not one to bring up with Truman directly. Then again, he also wondered if leaving Cassini and Ford Cruller alone together was such a wise decision, either. They had never gotten along all that well.

The situation remained unresolved even now. The only consensus they could reach was that Cassini should be relocated closer to headquarters, just as soon as the trial was over. In the meantime, he would remain the local police's responsibility.

With that in mind, Sasha and Milla returned to their hotel. Nothing was keeping them in Portland; a flight back home waited for them tomorrow afternoon. Sasha was content to spend the rest of his time at the hotel, reading. While he paged his way through 1984 the rest of his mind devoted itself to puzzling out Cassini's condition. For now at least, without any hard data, he could only make guesses at what had put him in his current state. There was no reason for it that he could discern. Had it been the incident in China? But no, that hadn't been—

A loud knock at the window jolted him back to earth. He jumped off the bed and to his feet before he was even really aware of the action; the book, along with one of his shoes, ended up flying off into some dark corner of the room.

"Sasha, darling? Are you in there?" Milla's voice came from the other side of the window, muffled by glass and thick, hotel-issue curtains.

Composing himself as best he could, Sasha went to the window and pushed the curtains aside. "Milla, what the devil—"

Milla was indeed hovering right outside his window, less than gently backlit by a nearby streetlight. The parking lot three stories below was at least devoid of life, save for an alley cat that stared skyward with wide, confused eyes. Milla didn't seem too concerned with her surroundings, or that anyone passing by on the street would be able to see her. She only rapped on the window glass again, her face tired and unsmiling.

"Sasha, open the window."

He fumbled for the latch without taking his eyes off of her. The headlights of a car, just rounding the corner, caught her long hair in a momentary halo. "Milla, honestly; I do have a door," he began as his fingers finally caught the latch. The window swung open on creaking hinges, letting in a burst of cold night air.

Milla, wrapped in her long black coat—she'd bought it in Scotland two years ago, he remembered, during an unseasonable cold snap in the middle of a case—just frowned at him. "I knocked on the door, Sasha. More than once. You didn't answer."

Sasha started involuntarily at that. Had she knocked? He hadn't heard a thing. Surely he would have noticed; of course, it wasn't like her to lie, either—he mentally shook himself. Now was not the time for second-guessing. "Well...the room is also equipped with a telephone."

Milla sighed. "I assumed you wouldn't answer that, either."

"And yet you thought I'd answer a knock at the window?"

One of her shoes was threatening to fall off: a common side effect when mixing levitation with gravity. Milla effortlessly reached down and slid it back on, all without breaking eye contact with him. "It worked, didn't it?"

"That's beside the point." He opened the window wider, as if planning to pull her inside. A pointless gesture, since the hotel's windows were well equipped with safety screens. "Are you planning on hovering out there all night?" His tone was more irritable than the situation perhaps called for, but—well, it had been an especially trying day, he reasoned.

Milla had to stop and contemplate the question for a few moments. "Not really," she said at last, to his relief. But then, "I mean, I don't want to. But I will if you don't let me in."

"I beg your pardon?" The response was an automatic one. What he wanted to ask, really, had to do more with why she was acting like a stubborn five year old. But that would hardly be polite. "I—well, I suppose if it will get you down from there, I'll—"

"Wonderful!" Her whole face seemed to light up, aided in no small part by a brilliant smile. "Actually, darling, I think it would be good for you to get out, just for a little while. I'll meet you down in the lobby in, say...five minutes?"

"I only said I'd consider it!" Sasha snapped back, but his protests were futile. Milla had already started on her descent—a remarkably graceful and controlled descent, at that—down to the pavement. She wasn't out of earshot, he suspected, but she could pretend she was. What's more, he knew if he didn't put in an appearance in the lobby in short order, she'd just repeat the whole performance until he did come downstairs.

With a worn sigh, Sasha closed the window and pulled the curtains shut. Maybe he could make her see reason when they were both on solid ground.

Sometimes, there was just no reasoning with Milla Vodello. Sasha listened to the crunch of loose, near invisible detritus under his shoes as they walked along the sidewalk. Back in the lobby, some three blocks away, Milla had looped her arm through his—and in doing so had been able to steer him out onto the dark, empty streets without much difficulty.

After they had been walking for well on twenty minutes—aimlessly, he thought, given Milla's tendency to turn down streets at what seemed to be random—Sasha cleared his throat. "Did you have a specific destination in mind?"

"Mm. Not really." She stopped on the curb to let a car go by, the glare of its headlights just barely catching at them. "Mostly I wanted you out of that dreary hotel room."

A brief jog, and they were across the street. Sasha didn't know whether to be relieved that Milla wasn't going to drag him out to some club, or annoyed that she'd dragged him out at all. The late hour was finally beginning to take its toll on him.

"There's nothing wrong with my hotel room," he answered to stifle a yawn. "Honestly."

Milla chuckled quietly. Their path was trending downhill now, the temperature dropping. Sasha thought they might be headed to the riverfront. "Maybe—or maybe not. I just don't like to see you cooped up in dark spaces all the time."

Her words struck a sharper chord than they should have, driving his thoughts straight back to certain twisting passages of 1984. In the next breath, he wondered if she'd chosen the words intentionally. "Maybe," he answered, a perfect non-committal response.

Milla let silence lapse for a while. Across one more empty street, their surroundings transformed from urban to the carefully constructed nature of a riverfront park. Concrete still dominated, of course, but manicured grass and the occasional oak tree softened it at the edges. The park was a narrow one, intended for strolls along the riverside. The air was heavier here, more humid, making the river—lost in darkness over the safety railing that enclosed it—feel closer than it really was.

They made their way around a barricade marked with "park closes at sunset" and went down to the river's side. Milla immediately went for the railing, apparently with no regard for the fact that it was still spattered with raindrops. She peered down at the dark, sluggish waters in what seemed to be idle curiosity, inviting him to follow her gaze, before she glanced up to the city skyline.

"The city is beautiful at night, isn't it?" she sighed, leaning far enough forward that most of her hair dangled over the railing.

Sasha kept a more considerable, comfortable distance from the railing; god only knew how many germ-ridden hands—or worse—had touched it before. "I suppose so," he answered Milla, sparing only the briefest glance up at the cityscape. Truth be told he didn't see much that was unique or pretty about it. It was like every large city he'd been in: an obscene amount of light, air, and noise pollution, made a little more tolerable by the occasional striking skyscraper. Looking at Milla, he added, "Did you really bring me out here to discuss sightseeing?"

Milla's lips pursed into a thin frown, and at once she straightened and pushed away from the railing. Without even pausing to answer, she looped her arm back through his and steered him down the sidewalk. "That book you've been reading..I take it Cassini is fond of it?"

Fighting down his irritation at what seemed to be another pointless line of questions, Sasha cleared his throat before he answered. "That would be a considerable understatement. He used to swear by that book...quite literally, in fact."

Milla quirked a brow at him. "How do you mean?"

"When he was angry—which was often; he had a notoriously short temper—he tended to stomp about his office, gleefully referring to agency higher-ups as 'agents of Big Brother,' among other things." Milla snickered as he continued, "I was never sure why he adopted the book so—I mean, it's an excellent book, yes, but I never saw...well, what he saw in it." I still don't, he thought idly, his mind turning back to all the margin notes Cassini had scribbled down. He didn't even pretend to grasp the half he could read.

"So...when he wrote 'down with Big Brother' on the apartment wall..." She spoke slowly, as if thinking aloud.

"It was a reference to the novel, yes." A stray gust of wind came along and caught at his jacket; he drew it tighter around his waist. Humid or no, the breeze off the river was unseasonably cold.

Milla's step, meanwhile, had slowed. She seemed to be staring intently at the tops of her white boots. "And what about 'the O'Briens?' And...what was it he called you? Winchell? Winston?"

Now he understood. He should have grasped it from the first, really, or should have expected the question to come up at some point. Now he sighed, thinking over the best way to answer her. He wasn't sure if he could even answer those questions to his own satisfaction, never mind hers.

Finally, as they slipped under a tree branch still heavy with rain, he said, "I take it you've never read the novel, so I'll summarize: Winston is the main character, a rather pathetic protagonist in my opinion, and not someone to whom I prefer to be compared. O'Brien is his...friend, I suppose, who turns out to be working for their dystopian government. He betrays Winston."

He found he couldn't resist a glance over at Milla. She was still frowning, thin lines of worry etched plainly into her face. "So...he dies?" she asked, sotto voce.

Sasha thought it best to head the whole line of questioning off at the pass. "Milla, if you're at all concerned by Cassini's... 'predictions'—don't be. You saw as well as I did that his mental state is extremely fragile. He was raving, not making a genuine prediction." Even as he said it some irrational bit of doubt gnawed at him; he did his best to lock it away.

Milla, on the other hand, had always preferred to express her doubts—and any other emotions that came along. "You did say that Cassini was one of the agency's best precognitives."

"Yes, but—"

"And I know a precognitive trance when I see one, Sasha." Her tone had grown distinctly strained. They'd stopped walking as well, to Sasha's disappointment. His desire to go back to the hotel grew keener by the moment. "No matter Cassini's mental state, that was a real prediction."

"That doesn't necessarily mean it will come true. Precognition is not an exact science. In fact, I'd even call it inept, if I called it a science at all."

Milla heaved such a sigh that her whole body seemed to sag from the effort. "How long did you know Cassini, darling?"

"I..." He hesitated. It didn't take a telepath to see what she was driving at. "A long time," he confessed. "He was—well, something of a mentor to me in the years after I left the academy. The first prototype of the Brain Tumbler was his, you know. We worked on it together. Of course, he envisioned a much different purpose for it, but—" He realized he was rambling and all but bit his tongue.

"And in all that time, did you ever know him to make a prediction that turned out not to be true?" She started to walk again, though slower than before.

She's read his file, Sasha thought grimly. Overhead, lit by the city lights, clouds roiled—another storm was brewing. If she'd read Cassini's file, she already knew the answer. He knew that. And he had no reason, much less desire, to lie to her anyway. "Never," he said at last, voice weary. "Not one wrong prediction. The man was a psychic marvel."

"Mm." That quiet murmur sounded like an "I thought as much" to him.

"Why do you ask?" he at last ventured, swallowing his irritation. They were valid questions, he knew, and he couldn't fault Milla for asking them.

Milla stopped again beside a tiny hillock covered in tulips, all beaten down by the rain. Sasha, his arm still caught up with hers, had little choice but to stop as well. Not that he minded—exhaustion was catching up to him, and it seemed to be moving at an exponential rate. He resisted the urge to rub at his eyes like a tired child.

"Cassini's prediction...well, it seemed dire, didn't it?" Milla slipped her arm away from his in one sudden, frankly startling move. "I mean," she continued, moving now to lean over the nearby railing, "he did mention death. And from what you told me about this O'Brien character, well..."

Sasha shifted his weight uneasily. He knew he should say something, but what—I barely know what to say to myself, sometimes, he thought before dismissing the notion as absurd and sentimental. Finally he settled for taking a step forward, leaning his forearms against the cold metal railing. Leftover rain quickly soaked through his jacket sleeves; he resisted the urge to shake it off. Then, with a hesitant breath, he began.

"Honestly, Milla...I don't know. Cassini is unstable, but his prediction seemed true enough. Then again, you know my thoughts on precognition—despite the man's record." He paused briefly to consider the irrationality behind that train of thought, then dismissed it. "In either case...there's no point in dwelling so much on a future that could happen next week, next year—or never. Especially with so few concrete details to go on."

Milla stood leaning at just a slight angle, her head bowed so that her hair covered her face. She kept her shoulders hunched, and the tension in those muscles was clearly visible even through her heavy coat. "Well, darling—I'm sorry, but I am worried."

So am I— He buried the thought before it could leap off his tongue. "There's no need to apologize," he said instead. "I only said you shouldn't be consumed by it."

Milla took a shaky breath, looking up for a moment to run a hand through her hair. "Sasha, how can you be so—clinical about all this? About everything?"

A heretofore unseen duck below them splashed and took off with an angry quack, a winged silhouette against the city lights. What had irritated it Sasha couldn't guess—maybe Milla's voice had been louder than they'd both realized. "I'm not sure what you mean," he began. "I'm simply trying to approach things rationally. I've found it an excellent response to an otherwise irrational world."

Milla stared at him as if he'd started speaking in tongues—then burst out laughing. "Now it makes sense, darling."

"What does?" Some truly exhausted part of his mind began to wonder if Cassini's insanity wasn't contagious.

"What Cassini said to you." She shook her head, hair flying in all directions. "All that talk about light and darkness...I know what he meant."

It only took him a moment to pick up on her train of thought. "Rational and irrational?" he murmured, resisting the urge to scratch his chin in thought. A memory stirred, belatedly. Cassini had been a constant, though constructive, critic of everyone he knew. When he wasn't commenting on Sasha's telekinesis techniques, he'd felt compelled to harp on his personal life. You work too much, eh? Go see a movie. Read a book. Meet a nice girl.

"All that fuss over how I choose to live my life?"

Milla was smiling now, her face and body language more animated, like her usual self. "Maybe he just thinks it's time for a change."

"I'm perfectly satisfied with my life," he retorted, perhaps too sharply. It was the standard response he'd used on Cassini.

"Mm...maybe. But I can think of a few things I would change." Before he could ask her to elaborate, she again took his arm, starting to walk back the way they came. "I'll tell you what: why don't we talk about it over drinks? I saw a twenty-four hour liquor store not far from the hotel. We could both use a drink after today, don't you think?"

Sasha was hardly inclined to drink, much less talk, but of course once Milla Vodello had an idea in her head...well, he wasn't about to try to talk her out of it.

Later that night—the clock still read 1:27AM, but he suspected it was closer to 3:30 or 4:00—Sasha sat behind the room's provided desk, reading under the glow of a small table lamp. All the other lights in the room were out, and only a few spare traces of light from outside crept around the curtains. Alcohol had loosened his spine such that he sat less rigidly than usual. His shoes were off, in fact, discarded by the dresser, and he sat with one leg less than neatly folded under the other. A half-empty bottle of vodka stayed within easy reach, though he drank from it only sparingly now. The room smelled enough of alcohol as it was.

In the bed, hugging a pillow to her head, Milla slept. He almost envied her calm, even breath, the peace that had settled over her—but he suspected alcohol had played at least some small part in that.

They had both imbibed a bit too much by Sasha's assessment, particularly considering the quality (or lack thereof) of the drink. Still, he couldn't complain; Milla had been right. He'd badly needed a drink. So had Milla, for that matter, or so it seemed. She'd wound up drinking so much that in the end, when the day's events finally caught up with her, she'd opted to fall asleep in Sasha's bed rather than her own.

"You don't mind?" she'd asked him—already more than halfway asleep.

He hadn't minded, in truth. The room had taken on an unprecedented warmth since she'd joined him, and he had no particular desire to banish it. So, he let her stay. It was easier than trying to roust her, besides.

It wasn't as if he'd be using the bed any time soon, for a peculiar insomnia had seized him. He didn't know why he couldn't sleep. Yes, he was tired, and yes, he'd been drinking, but his eyes didn't seem to want to even close. So he read, slowly plotting his way through 1984. At least he'd stopped scrawling notes in the margins.

The rational versus the irrational: it still didn't make sense to him. Was that all Cassini had been getting at? Surely there was more to it than that. Then again, knowing Cassini, perhaps not. He and Milla had pondered over it in between drinks but had never gotten anywhere near a conclusion. Possibly because of the aforementioned drinks.

He glanced over at Milla again. She'd suggested that he simply live a bit more in the irrational, the so-called darkness. "The experience might be good for you," she'd said in a tone he couldn't help but classify as hopeful.

"Why?" had been his immediate retort. Indeed, why should he change his entire life out of fear of some vague threat? It was absurd. He refused.

"I didn't say your whole life, darling. Just part." She spoke as if it were as easy as changing clothes. And while Sasha knew she was only concerned about his future and well-being, the idea that there were ulterior motives at work still tugged at the back of his mind.

Paranoia, he thought with his next breath, dismissing the thought. Already. He glanced down at 1984; the water-worn print was blurring together—a side effect of exhaustion, not water damage. Maybe he should attempt sleep after all.

Sasha snapped the book shut and, quite deliberately, set it aside. Then he unfolded his legs, standing with a slow stretch. The bed was, of course, already occupied; he flexed his feet against the floor, wondering if it would be comfortable enough to sleep on.

Milla stirred in her sleep. She was little more than a shadow in the lamp's weak light, her hair a dark frame around her face.

A man can live comfortably enough in darkness, Cassini had said. Sasha still sincerely doubted that, but there were times when he would wonder...

"Just part," Milla had said to him. No need to overhaul his entire life—just change part of it.

Assuming I feel any need to do so, he thought around a yawn.

Though he did feel a pressing need to sleep, and the floor, he'd decided suddenly, would not do. With another stretch, Sasha moved to the other side of the bed, turned down the sheets, and climbed in. Milla stirred again beside him, but did not wake. Sasha pulled the sheets up around his shoulders and, with a telekinetic twitch, at last put out the light.