Fic: Quadrangle (Times Square challenge)
Belatedly, but as promised...
Title: Quadrangle
Author lost_spook
Pairing/Characters: Sapphire, Steel, Silver
Rating/Category: PG (for mentions of death and suicide)
Word Count: 5330
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Sometimes a square is made up of two or more triangles; sometimes it’s more than it seems in other ways.
Notes/Warnings: Written for February’s challenge “Times Square” (although it was also sparked off by fan_flashworks ‘Triangle’ prompt). Anyway, it was much too late for either, and also far longer than intended.
With thanks to the ever-grammatical persiflage_1 for the beta.
***
The square was one of two in the layout of the 1930s building; an open space that could have been better used for extra rooms. Perhaps the original architect had envisaged neat paths and rosebushes in the centre, but now it was a drab, overshadowed inconvenience that divided the building.
On the east and west sides it was bordered by windowed corridors, and by blank walls on the north and south. Two doors diagonally opposite each other were joined by a paved path across the centre. It was not well-kept; the weeds were pushing their way up between the slabs and the cracked concrete and gravel on either side. There were three small trees, each ringed by low iron railings, and in the centre there was a bench with flaking green paint revealing the worn wood underneath. Today, even the sky was heavy and grey.
On the surface, there was nothing of interest here.
*
Sapphire stepped out of the door on the north side, and into the open area, surveying her surroundings with wary curiosity.
Sapphire?
She turned about slowly, with an inward smile. “Steel.”
He moved away from the south exit to join her on the path. “What do you make of it?”
“Time is… unreliable here,” she said, walking about the square. She vanished from one section, appearing a few seconds later a metre or so away. “Here, it’s the present. Over here, it’s five minutes ago. And here, ten seconds ahead.”
Steel glanced around him, but the disturbances were not visible. Even he could sense something of them, however. They were real, and they should not be. He strode to the centre, and paused beside the bench. “Pockets of localised time. Something must be bending it out of shape, causing it to fracture.”
“Yes.” Sapphire put out a hand to the air, as if she could touch the line between the two time zones. Then she turned away, and joined him at the centre. As she did so, she froze; her eyes widening.
“What is it?”
“Grief. Loss,” she said in a haunted tone, running her hand along the top of the bench. There was a small weather-worn metal plaque on it, and she sat, putting her fingers to it. It read: In memory of Martin Ayers and Thomas Morton 1975.
Steel moved nearer. “That isn’t anything unusual. Why here?”
“So intense,” said Sapphire. “So focused…” Then she shook herself, and said, in more usual tones, “No. It’s gone.”
“It could be the trigger?”
Sapphire looked over. “It’s possible.”
“There must be something more.”
Sapphire kept her hand to the plaque, her eyes glowing an unnatural blue. She saw the same area, but in a different time; the place better kept and with grass rather than the gravel and cracked concrete. The sun was shining, and there were people - many people, moving about. And one; one remaining like a phantom at the centre, here between the bench and the tree. “Loss,” she said, “and guilt, Steel. Overwhelming guilt.”
“Be more specific, Sapphire.”
“I can’t. Not yet.”
*
“I’m afraid you can’t go out that way,” said the secretary, turning back to her unannounced visitor. “The area’s out of bounds - something to do with the drains, I think. Anyway, it’s locked.”
“Oh?” said Silver, who was standing in front of the door, covering the fact that it had opened at his touch. “Well, I’m here to see about that, so -”
“You’re here to look at the drains?” she said, unable to keep the scepticism out of her voice. She looked across at him, and his suit again. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but -”
Silver smiled, and waved a hand airily. “In a purely technical capacity, of course. I imagine you’ve already met my two colleagues?”
“Nobody else has been through the office this morning,” she said. “At least - I was out earlier -”
“So, in that case,” said Silver, turning back towards the door and opening it, “I had better go and have a look at your little problem, hadn’t I?”
The secretary frowned for a moment, but then nodded, and smiled back at him. “And I’ll see that you get a cup of tea - if you’d like one?”
“How kind,” murmured Silver, hiding amusement. “Thank you.”
She nodded, and then turned back once again with a short laugh. “Mind you’re careful out there, though - we call it the Triangle.”
Silver paused. Humans could be baffling at times, but he would definitely have classified it as a square. He thought, and then offered, “I suppose a square could be two triangles, if you looked at it that way.”
She shook her head, faded brown curls bouncing against her face. “No, no. Sorry. It’s like having our very own Bermuda Triangle, you see. You should hear the stories - not that I believe a word of them, of course, and Annie Mayhew always was a law unto herself.”
“Things… vanish?”
The secretary shrugged. “It’s just a joke. Standard excuse for every pen that goes missing these days. Like I said - nonsense. I’ll go and get you that cup of tea - and I promise to tell somebody if you disappear!”
Silver arched an eyebrow, not finding that particularly reassuring. Then he looked out at the area in question. It was a damp, cold, overly shaded space; an open square in the middle of a building - an inconvenient sort of design - and it all looked very ordinary, not to say grubby and overgrown in places, and accumulating litter in the corners. He pulled a face and then emerged, pausing outside of the doorway in order to make an entrance, such as it was.
His efforts were wasted. The square was empty.
*
“Nobody’s supposed to be out there,” a man was saying, as Sapphire stepped back inside, into a long corridor, after Steel. He must be the caretaker, she assumed. “Out of bounds it is, now - but you’re new, I suppose.”
She took another step to stand at Steel’s side, putting a hand to his shoulder. “Yes. Steel and I have been transferred.”
“Well,” said the caretaker, moving across to shut the door firmly, “now you know. And what I’d like to know is who left it unlocked?”
“But why?” asked Sapphire. “Surely it’s quicker to cross directly, rather than walk all the way round the corridor?”
The caretaker folded his arms. “Ha. That’s the question, but you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Why not?”
“Not… ghosts?” Sapphire suggested, underlying humour in her tone, and she flickered a glance at Steel.
The man shrugged. “Not as such, although I’d swear once I was standing here, this very spot, right by the window there, when I looked out, I saw old Mr Cochran walking down the corridor opposite. Couldn’t have been, of course - he’d retired years ago and died by then. It’s that thing with Mrs Mayhew seems to have worried people. Got proper hysterical over it, she did. That was a month back now.”
“And what was that? What happened to…” Steel paused, “… Mrs Mayhew?”
The caretaker grinned. “Well, according to her, she went out the opposite door, taking the short cut, but she left on Tuesday morning and didn’t get to this side until Friday afternoon. So she said, anyway. Don’t know what really happened, but she was in a state all right - thought we were all having her on. It was after that, I got told to lock it up.”
“Locking it up wasn’t enough.”
“Oh?” The man shifted defensively. “Well, that’s all I was told. They said it was unsafe. I don’t know. When it comes to orders from above, I’m only here to do as I’m told. Don’t blame me if you don’t like having to take the long way round. You complain to head office and see what they say.”
“Was this place always a… printers?”
“No,” said the caretaker, cheering up again as they reached a starting point for one of his favourite complaints. “That’s half the trouble, if you ask me. It’s old - falling apart, half the time - and not what you’d call purpose-built.”
“Yes. People never learn,” said Steel.
The man glanced out the window again. “It used to be a school,” he said. “Well, you can see that. A small one, private, I think. Not a boarding school, just arty or something. There’s still pictures up in the offices.”
*
They walked back out into the square once he had gone.
“Then Time has already broken out.”
“It seems so.”
“She left on Tuesday and arrived on Friday.”
“Time is shifting about here. Like ice floes. As if it’s fragmented around the central point. The woman must have crossed from one time zone into what was for her the near future.”
“That should be impossible.”
“Yes. Perhaps the caretaker lied?”
“Do you think so?”
“No,” said Sapphire.
They walked on, down the path, towards the centre.
Sapphire? Steel?
The voice was a mere echo carried on the damp, chill air, and they stopped and looked at each other.
Silver?
Then the impression was gone, and there was no answer.
*
Silver had been leaning against the bench, looking at one half of the square, and he turned, expecting to see them there. He’d felt something, for a moment, but there was no sign of them. The brief whisper of their presence made the square seem suddenly quieter and emptier than it had before.
He frowned, and wondered where they had got to. It was, after all, never so much fun alone.
*
“You said grief. Loss. Here?”
Sapphire put her hand to the wooden bench again. “Yes. And guilt. Three friends - no, two. Three, then two gone and one alone.” She stared at something only she could see. “Steel, there was an accident - a terrible accident!”
“Here?” He looked about him.
She shook her head. “No. Not here. Somewhere else. But someone was here, someone who remembered. There was -.”
“Grief. Guilt. You said. The third friend. The one that was left?”
“It was his fault,” she said, sitting on the bench, playing with the peeling paint with her fingers. “Or he believed it was. They had held onto their friendship for so long, longer than most. It was special. Untouchable. And then he destroyed it - destroyed them -”
“But not here, Sapphire. You said it happened somewhere else - and time is fracturing here.”
Sapphire turned her head, and they both saw, nearby, but in another time, a faded image of three boys sitting together, on what had been grass then rather than concrete and gravel.
“No,” said Sapphire softly. “It didn’t happen here - but he came back here. He died here.” She shivered, and there was blood on her hands, for a moment.
Steel frowned, and then he sat down on the opposite end of the bench. “He came back here… and then he killed himself?”
She nodded; the tragedy of it there in her eyes.
*
Sapphire? Steel?
Silver walked about the square, frowning. He could feel time shifting about disconcertingly on either side of him.
He knew that they should be here, but were they here, in this place, but in a different time - or were they merely elsewhere in the building? Prosaic, of course, but entirely possible.
And over to the side of him, in one of the other time fragments, a figure, slightly blurry and transparent from the path, but visible to Silver’s eyes, took a photograph of nothing in particular, and then buried the camera.
Now that, thought Silver, was distinctly odd.
*
“There must be something more,” said Steel, his impatience audible. “The trigger, Sapphire. There must be something.”
“I know. It’s hard to see. Time is so uncertain here.”
“Can you bring the fragments of time back into alignment?”
Sapphire turned around to face him, and shook her head. “Everything is too fractured. Some of the fragments here are years apart. Some only seconds, but -.” She closed her eyes, and then opened them again as she realised something. “Everything keeps moving - different times, but only four years. The times change, but it’s always the same years.”
“Which years?”
“Now. The present. 1976. 1980. 1969. It’s shifting again - I can’t, Steel!”
“Hello?” called someone from the north entrance.
They both looked across, disconcerted by the interruption.
“Excuse me,” said the woman leaning out of the doorway, “but I think there’s a phone call for you.”
*
Silver had moved from the bench, trying to cross into the other fragment, the time when the photograph had been taken, but as he did so, time shifted again. Still 1976, but now two hours before the event he had glimpsed. That wasn’t any use at all.
He leapt back onto the path and thought for a little while longer. Then he crossed back to the doorway, putting his hand to the cables that ran up the side, and looking up at the wires overhead with a sudden smile.
*
“It’s your colleague,” said the secretary, leading the way into an office that was chaotic with paper everywhere on the desks, and notices of all kinds pinned to the walls. “The one I spoke to earlier. You are from the water board as well, I take it?”
The water board?
“Yes, that’s right,” said Sapphire, with another glance at Steel. “We’ve been with the water board for years, haven’t we, Steel?”
Sapphire.
She smiled at Steel, and then picked up the phone, before passing it to him; watching him put the receiver to his ear.
“Silver?”
“I hope it makes sense to you,” said the secretary as she sat back down at her desk. “I can’t make head nor tail of it. Does the water board use code these days or is there something wrong with him?”
*
Silver finished fiddling with the cable and sent his message, although he didn’t know whether it would reach them. He was fairly sure he had slipped back a short while into the past once he stepped out here, but if they were for any reason further behind him, as it were, rather than in front of him, this wouldn’t work.
“Hello, I hope you can hear me. We spoke earlier, and now I need you to pass a message onto my two colleagues, Sapphire and Steel. You’ll find them outside in that square. This is important -”
*
“- there is a camera, buried in the square. You need to reach the spot in a period after 1976 and find it. I shall keep trying, but I’m not having much luck. I’m afraid -”
*
Silver stopped abruptly as sparks skittered up and down the wiring, causing a couple of starlings on the roof to take flight and bringing a small line of smoke drifting towards him. He moved away and closed up his case of tools, then replaced it inside his jacket.
It would have to do, he thought, but it would be much more useful if he could get at that camera. That, he felt certain, was why he was here.
He glanced upwards, suddenly feeling as if the square had darkened, but the sky hadn’t changed. He had an uncomfortable sensation of being watched, as if his message had brought his presence here to the attention of something - something that hadn’t liked him very much.
*
Sapphire?
I heard. Then Silver is here.
“Oh,” said the secretary, watching as Steel put the phone down, “and whatever it is he’s done, or wherever he’s calling from, could you please get him to stop? The phone’s been like that for the past fifteen minutes and we can’t call in or out.”
Sapphire hid amusement. “We’ll tell him.”
“It really isn’t -” The secretary tried the phone again, and paused. “Oh. It’s stopped now. Thank goodness for that, although what he did -”
“It must have been a technical malfunction with the line,” said Steel, brusquely. He moved away as he spoke, back to the exit. He was cut off.
Yes.
Can you find him?
Only if we find the cause, and stop the fragmentation.
A technician could be useful. Then, emerging into the corridor, Steel turned back towards her with a frown. “What did he mean, someone buried a camera?”
“We should find out.”
*
Sapphire and Steel walked back along the path, towards the bench.
He said, “Can you sense Silver? Or the man, the one who was left?”
“No. There’s nothing now. Only time pulling away from us here, slowly, but in different directions.”
Steel circled the bench. “Why didn’t he say where the camera was? Sapphire -”
“Yes,” she said, crouching down to touch the stone of the ground, her eyes starting to glow a bright blue. “There is something, but it’s not…” She stopped, and stared ahead as the three boys in school uniform - there were blazers with a logo embroidered on the breast pocket - sat down opposite, laughing; one of them pushing at his friend, as the other waved a hand; talking, although the words were lost across the dividing decade.
What she did hear, though, was the click of someone taking a photograph.
The camera? Steel had moved to stand behind her.
Sapphire nodded. There was a vivid image in her mind of the resulting picture; the three of them captured forever - that moment in time held somewhere - and yet… She got to her feet, and looked at Steel. “I’m not sure. Silver said 1976. That image was from 1969.”
“We don’t know what Silver meant - we don’t know if it was Silver. Time may be playing tricks.”
Yes, it probably is, Sapphire agreed, but she gave him a sudden smile. It was Silver.
*
Silver had given up circling the area in the hope that he might find either an answer or a time fragment that could bring him closer to Sapphire and Steel. He knew they had been sent here and, in any case, he had sensed them when he had first arrived. He must have somehow crossed from the present into the recent past. They were a little ahead of him, but they were here, and he should be able to reach them, if he tried. That he couldn’t left him with the uneasy feeling that something must be deliberately preventing him.
He perched on the end of the bench in the centre, hands clasped around one knee, and watched the area closely. As the fragments shifted about him, he could glimpse moments and scenes from different times: sometimes the staff at the printers, Hilliers, stepping out for a smoke; in others the area was full of children or teenagers hurrying across, but in most it was deserted. There had been, he registered, years between the closing of the school, and its sale and hasty renovation for business use - a long period where everything lay forgotten, but Time had been gathering its forces.
Silver felt Time shift again. The fragmentation was getting worse, he was certain of it. A crisis had come and gone, sometime in the last few days, or perhaps even the last few hours and now it was a matter of urgency. Steel would say that it always was, which was true, but there were degrees in these things, and this one was now as bad as it could be.
He considered, and decided, that, given his greater expertise and skill with these things, it really would be much better if he could find a way to get his hands on that camera.
*
“Try to locate the camera. If it is here -.”
Sapphire stood very still in the middle of the area, her eyes blue again as she searched for something out of place, something that might be the trigger: a lightning rod for Time. Her mind passed through the floating fragments of time around her and hit it: a camera, buried almost directly under them.
It lay under the ground, with only one impression on the film; kept for all these years, intended to be hidden here forever. The three boys. An impossible image of the past, buried here by the one who had survived the accident, who believed he had killed them.
“Steel!”
He was already at her side. Sapphire?
“He wasn’t in his right mind,” she said. “The one who was left behind. Time used him. His pain, his guilt, standing here. He took the camera, as if he could photograph a moment from seven years before, and then he hid it under the ground, here. He thought it could take everything back; make that moment safe, make it last forever. Something pushed him to do it.”
“Here, in 1976?”
“Yes. He buried the camera, and went to be with them. That, or to pay. And Time got in then and now everything is stretching to breaking point.”
“Two different times… connected by the camera?”
“Yes. The image from 1969; the object from 1976. And it can’t, Steel; it can’t! Reality is shattering around it.”
“We have to stop it.”
Sapphire turned then. “We may be too late.”
*
From where he was sitting on the bench, Silver watched the man bury the camera again; a brief ghostly image from the nearest time fragment, and then it was gone.
If he could link this fragment to the next, temporarily, just long enough, he might be able to work a way around whatever was preventing him getting to that spot in the right time. And there were always things under the ground that would be present in all the time periods - pipes and cables and so on.
Silver straightened himself, standing in one graceful movement, before kneeling back down on the ground, and edging around the bench on his hands and knees. He moved briefly through another of the fragments and saw a boy stop in alarm on seeing him, and then run hastily towards the far door. He must have appeared as ghostly as the young man did to his eyes.
Now, he thought, and put his hand to the ground, searching for something he could use. Water pipes, gas, cables… There.
Silver vanished, reappearing a metre or so away, and in… He closed his eyes, unsure of the year. It wasn’t 1976, but it was… 1980. 1980 would do.
He knelt down again, and concentrated on the camera. It wasn’t difficult. Its presence all but shouted at him: one object connecting two time periods, pinning them together in a captive moment of pain and memory - a pact, a lost future and two photographs that had merged into one.
He closed his eyes and focused still harder. When he opened them again, the camera was lying in his hands. He smiled in satisfaction. “Aha,” he said. “Now, let’s see.”
*
Steel had pulled up a flagstone, alarming various earwigs and beetles underneath, and forced his hand down through the earth and stone with an effort. He stopped now and frowned. Sapphire. It’s not here.
It was. She crouched down beside him and put her hand over his, on the damp earth. “I can still feel it.”
“It’s gone.”
Sapphire rose to her feet and looked around her at the walled area. Suddenly everything seemed even quieter than it had been, as if something that had been watching them since their arrival had turned its attention elsewhere. “Steel. I think Silver found a way to get there before us.”
Steel brushed the dirt from his hands and got to his feet, glancing at her.
“It will try to stop him.”
“Yes,” said Steel. He scowled at her. He got the message through. He should have let us do what we’re here to do, not interfered.
*
Silver turned the camera over in his hands, examining it. It seemed strangely resistant to opening, so he pulled out his case of tools. As he did so, he registered the growing darkness for the first time, but he ignored it and turned his attention back to the camera. There was nothing else he could do. He couldn’t stop whatever it was, and he couldn’t put the camera back now that he had it.
He ran his hands over the back of it again, and then used a thin tool to try and prise it open. He needed to get at the film; he could see the image on it quite clearly inside his mind. That was the thing to blame, the pinpoint moment of time that was distorting everything else around it.
Including, he realised, rather belatedly, him. He was at the centre of the anomaly now and it was fighting back; it wanted to break him into fragments, different times - shards of Silver spread about the square. It was not, he thought, a nice feeling.
Silver kept working on the camera, but he tried to reach them again: Sapphire? Steel? If you can hear me -
He stopped, suddenly certain not only that they couldn’t hear him, but that something else could, the same something else that was trying to shatter him, twist and scatter him about the area, as it had done with time itself.
*
Sapphire turned around again, silently searching every part of the area. Everything feels lighter.
“Has the fragmentation stopped?”
She shook her head. No. “It’s getting worse, I think. Steel, if whatever’s trying to break through isn’t here, with us -”
“Sapphire. Can you link the two nearest time fragments? Bring them into alignment with each other?”
She paused. “I can try. But, Steel -”
“Good,” said Steel, and then gave her a short smile as she moved into the centre, prepared to begin. “It doesn’t have to work. Just get its attention.”
Sapphire smiled to herself, and then concentrated, her eyes glowing blue. The smile vanished, and she stopped again almost instantly, gripping the back of the bench with one hand. “I can’t, Steel! I can’t!”
Steel marched over, taking hold of her by the shoulders, and growled in her ear. “Try again.”
“Steel -”
“You can try, can’t you?” he said, still brusque, deliberately echoing her words. “One more time, Sapphire.”
It doesn’t have to work?
There was a fleeting edge of humour in his thoughts as he agreed: It doesn’t have to work.
*
There were supposed to be operators; technicians didn’t get assigned alone, or not for problems of this nature, Silver thought as he continued to fight with the camera. It appeared to be winning as yet. The complaint occupied the part of his mind that wasn’t fixed on the technical issue. And although he couldn’t contact Sapphire or Steel by the usual means, he did feel that it must be possible, if he grumbled enough, to reach Steel even across a divide of fractured time by the power of sheer annoyance.
Silver stretched out his hand for a different tool, but it vanished before he could grasp it. Of course. He was at the centre of the disturbance; anything could get carried into any number of different time periods. That was what it was trying to do to him - and why other people who had arrived first should have warned him before he stepped out into an area where Time had been treacherously cracking on the surface, like thin ice on a lake.
The pressure on him eased a fraction for no reason that he could see, and the back of the camera opened with sudden ease at his latest efforts. As it did so, he felt a wave of unreality ripple through him - not precisely unpleasant, but certainly worrying. Too much longer, and it was going to destroy him. And letting go, he knew, would only make that happen sooner.
“Well,” he said, under his breath, almost unconcerned now that it had reached this point, “I can’t stop now.”
Silver fished out the film, and the whole quadrangle flared a blinding white.
*
Time settled around them; everything falling back into place, softly and silently.
Sapphire and Steel remained standing at the centre, in front of the bench and looking down at the path, at the broken and old-fashioned camera lying there. Sapphire turned her head towards Steel, and then crouched down to touch it with the tip of her finger. Steel. Silver-
“Yes, and it’s good to finally see you two, as well,” the technician said from behind them, causing them to start. There was a definite smugness in his tone, but even so he sounded a little more subdued than usual.
They both turned, to find Silver half-sitting, half-lying on the cracked concrete at the base of the bench. He beamed up at them, as if it were a perfectly reasonable place to be on a damp, grey morning.
“Not much fun,” he said, more to himself than to the other two. “Still, you were lucky I was here.”
They exchanged a glance.
Steel moved forward. He frowned at Silver, but lowered himself down to join him. “Is it over?” He looked back up, directing the question to both of them, to Sapphire and Silver.
“Yes,” said Sapphire, as if she was surprised he had needed to ask. Then she paused. “Except -”
Silver turned his head towards Steel, and touched his arm. “You should finish that,” he said, with a nod to the camera. Steel said nothing, and pulled Silver up; an impatient movement that was also a lending of strength.
Steel stepped away from the technician, and picked up the camera. It was already cracked, and it had turned somehow brittle. There was no power left in it. He broke it in his hands without even trying, and passed the pieces to Silver, who gave a slight smile. The technician put one hand over the other, then blew on them. After that, what had been the camera was nothing but dust floating away from them, too fine to be seen.
“Don’t let’s do that again,” said Silver, sounding entirely himself now. “Very inconvenient.”
Sapphire glanced at him. “Yes.”
“Oh, another thing,” Silver said, searching in his jacket pockets, and pulling out a melted and scrunched up mess of black plastic. He dropped it into her upturned palm. “What do you make of that?”
She looked at it. “Cellulose triacetate - cellulose, sodium hydroxide, acetic anhydride. Camera film. Nothing else.”
Silver gave a short smile. “Good.”
“This was the film - the trigger?” she said, and she stared past both Silver and Steel, to the patch of ground by the tree, as if she could still see something that they could not. “Then there’s nothing left of them.” She shivered.
Silver put one hand to her arm lightly, and then closed Sapphire’s fingers around the lump of film with the other. “No, there’ll be something, Sapphire. Even here there are reminders - but not that, not the negative. That couldn’t stay.”
For an instant after he had spoken, it seemed as though they could see three shadows in that direction, but then they were gone, probably only a trick of the light. Or maybe it was a lingering strangeness here - their own shadows in the wrong place or time for a moment.
“Hilliers has lost its triangle,” said Silver, moving away, and then turning back to look at Sapphire and Steel, waiting for a reaction.
Triangle?
“This place,” Silver said, and indicated the square with a wave of his hand.
Steel frowned. “It’s a square.”
“I suppose it could be two triangles, if you looked at it that way,” said Sapphire.
Silver smiled, finally getting to share the joke. “No, no. Their very own Bermuda Triangle, apparently.”
“That was an entirely different matter,” said Steel. He frowned at the technician. Silver.
“Still,” Silver murmured, unrepentant, and directed a grin at Sapphire.
Then the three of them, as if to some unspoken signal, walked away from the centre, and away from each other before vanishing - leaving behind a square that now was exactly as ordinary as it appeared.
***
Title: Quadrangle
Author lost_spook
Pairing/Characters: Sapphire, Steel, Silver
Rating/Category: PG (for mentions of death and suicide)
Word Count: 5330
Spoilers: None.
Summary: Sometimes a square is made up of two or more triangles; sometimes it’s more than it seems in other ways.
Notes/Warnings: Written for February’s challenge “Times Square” (although it was also sparked off by fan_flashworks ‘Triangle’ prompt). Anyway, it was much too late for either, and also far longer than intended.
With thanks to the ever-grammatical persiflage_1 for the beta.
***
The square was one of two in the layout of the 1930s building; an open space that could have been better used for extra rooms. Perhaps the original architect had envisaged neat paths and rosebushes in the centre, but now it was a drab, overshadowed inconvenience that divided the building.
On the east and west sides it was bordered by windowed corridors, and by blank walls on the north and south. Two doors diagonally opposite each other were joined by a paved path across the centre. It was not well-kept; the weeds were pushing their way up between the slabs and the cracked concrete and gravel on either side. There were three small trees, each ringed by low iron railings, and in the centre there was a bench with flaking green paint revealing the worn wood underneath. Today, even the sky was heavy and grey.
On the surface, there was nothing of interest here.
*
Sapphire stepped out of the door on the north side, and into the open area, surveying her surroundings with wary curiosity.
Sapphire?
She turned about slowly, with an inward smile. “Steel.”
He moved away from the south exit to join her on the path. “What do you make of it?”
“Time is… unreliable here,” she said, walking about the square. She vanished from one section, appearing a few seconds later a metre or so away. “Here, it’s the present. Over here, it’s five minutes ago. And here, ten seconds ahead.”
Steel glanced around him, but the disturbances were not visible. Even he could sense something of them, however. They were real, and they should not be. He strode to the centre, and paused beside the bench. “Pockets of localised time. Something must be bending it out of shape, causing it to fracture.”
“Yes.” Sapphire put out a hand to the air, as if she could touch the line between the two time zones. Then she turned away, and joined him at the centre. As she did so, she froze; her eyes widening.
“What is it?”
“Grief. Loss,” she said in a haunted tone, running her hand along the top of the bench. There was a small weather-worn metal plaque on it, and she sat, putting her fingers to it. It read: In memory of Martin Ayers and Thomas Morton 1975.
Steel moved nearer. “That isn’t anything unusual. Why here?”
“So intense,” said Sapphire. “So focused…” Then she shook herself, and said, in more usual tones, “No. It’s gone.”
“It could be the trigger?”
Sapphire looked over. “It’s possible.”
“There must be something more.”
Sapphire kept her hand to the plaque, her eyes glowing an unnatural blue. She saw the same area, but in a different time; the place better kept and with grass rather than the gravel and cracked concrete. The sun was shining, and there were people - many people, moving about. And one; one remaining like a phantom at the centre, here between the bench and the tree. “Loss,” she said, “and guilt, Steel. Overwhelming guilt.”
“Be more specific, Sapphire.”
“I can’t. Not yet.”
*
“I’m afraid you can’t go out that way,” said the secretary, turning back to her unannounced visitor. “The area’s out of bounds - something to do with the drains, I think. Anyway, it’s locked.”
“Oh?” said Silver, who was standing in front of the door, covering the fact that it had opened at his touch. “Well, I’m here to see about that, so -”
“You’re here to look at the drains?” she said, unable to keep the scepticism out of her voice. She looked across at him, and his suit again. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but -”
Silver smiled, and waved a hand airily. “In a purely technical capacity, of course. I imagine you’ve already met my two colleagues?”
“Nobody else has been through the office this morning,” she said. “At least - I was out earlier -”
“So, in that case,” said Silver, turning back towards the door and opening it, “I had better go and have a look at your little problem, hadn’t I?”
The secretary frowned for a moment, but then nodded, and smiled back at him. “And I’ll see that you get a cup of tea - if you’d like one?”
“How kind,” murmured Silver, hiding amusement. “Thank you.”
She nodded, and then turned back once again with a short laugh. “Mind you’re careful out there, though - we call it the Triangle.”
Silver paused. Humans could be baffling at times, but he would definitely have classified it as a square. He thought, and then offered, “I suppose a square could be two triangles, if you looked at it that way.”
She shook her head, faded brown curls bouncing against her face. “No, no. Sorry. It’s like having our very own Bermuda Triangle, you see. You should hear the stories - not that I believe a word of them, of course, and Annie Mayhew always was a law unto herself.”
“Things… vanish?”
The secretary shrugged. “It’s just a joke. Standard excuse for every pen that goes missing these days. Like I said - nonsense. I’ll go and get you that cup of tea - and I promise to tell somebody if you disappear!”
Silver arched an eyebrow, not finding that particularly reassuring. Then he looked out at the area in question. It was a damp, cold, overly shaded space; an open square in the middle of a building - an inconvenient sort of design - and it all looked very ordinary, not to say grubby and overgrown in places, and accumulating litter in the corners. He pulled a face and then emerged, pausing outside of the doorway in order to make an entrance, such as it was.
His efforts were wasted. The square was empty.
*
“Nobody’s supposed to be out there,” a man was saying, as Sapphire stepped back inside, into a long corridor, after Steel. He must be the caretaker, she assumed. “Out of bounds it is, now - but you’re new, I suppose.”
She took another step to stand at Steel’s side, putting a hand to his shoulder. “Yes. Steel and I have been transferred.”
“Well,” said the caretaker, moving across to shut the door firmly, “now you know. And what I’d like to know is who left it unlocked?”
“But why?” asked Sapphire. “Surely it’s quicker to cross directly, rather than walk all the way round the corridor?”
The caretaker folded his arms. “Ha. That’s the question, but you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Why not?”
“Not… ghosts?” Sapphire suggested, underlying humour in her tone, and she flickered a glance at Steel.
The man shrugged. “Not as such, although I’d swear once I was standing here, this very spot, right by the window there, when I looked out, I saw old Mr Cochran walking down the corridor opposite. Couldn’t have been, of course - he’d retired years ago and died by then. It’s that thing with Mrs Mayhew seems to have worried people. Got proper hysterical over it, she did. That was a month back now.”
“And what was that? What happened to…” Steel paused, “… Mrs Mayhew?”
The caretaker grinned. “Well, according to her, she went out the opposite door, taking the short cut, but she left on Tuesday morning and didn’t get to this side until Friday afternoon. So she said, anyway. Don’t know what really happened, but she was in a state all right - thought we were all having her on. It was after that, I got told to lock it up.”
“Locking it up wasn’t enough.”
“Oh?” The man shifted defensively. “Well, that’s all I was told. They said it was unsafe. I don’t know. When it comes to orders from above, I’m only here to do as I’m told. Don’t blame me if you don’t like having to take the long way round. You complain to head office and see what they say.”
“Was this place always a… printers?”
“No,” said the caretaker, cheering up again as they reached a starting point for one of his favourite complaints. “That’s half the trouble, if you ask me. It’s old - falling apart, half the time - and not what you’d call purpose-built.”
“Yes. People never learn,” said Steel.
The man glanced out the window again. “It used to be a school,” he said. “Well, you can see that. A small one, private, I think. Not a boarding school, just arty or something. There’s still pictures up in the offices.”
*
They walked back out into the square once he had gone.
“Then Time has already broken out.”
“It seems so.”
“She left on Tuesday and arrived on Friday.”
“Time is shifting about here. Like ice floes. As if it’s fragmented around the central point. The woman must have crossed from one time zone into what was for her the near future.”
“That should be impossible.”
“Yes. Perhaps the caretaker lied?”
“Do you think so?”
“No,” said Sapphire.
They walked on, down the path, towards the centre.
Sapphire? Steel?
The voice was a mere echo carried on the damp, chill air, and they stopped and looked at each other.
Silver?
Then the impression was gone, and there was no answer.
*
Silver had been leaning against the bench, looking at one half of the square, and he turned, expecting to see them there. He’d felt something, for a moment, but there was no sign of them. The brief whisper of their presence made the square seem suddenly quieter and emptier than it had before.
He frowned, and wondered where they had got to. It was, after all, never so much fun alone.
*
“You said grief. Loss. Here?”
Sapphire put her hand to the wooden bench again. “Yes. And guilt. Three friends - no, two. Three, then two gone and one alone.” She stared at something only she could see. “Steel, there was an accident - a terrible accident!”
“Here?” He looked about him.
She shook her head. “No. Not here. Somewhere else. But someone was here, someone who remembered. There was -.”
“Grief. Guilt. You said. The third friend. The one that was left?”
“It was his fault,” she said, sitting on the bench, playing with the peeling paint with her fingers. “Or he believed it was. They had held onto their friendship for so long, longer than most. It was special. Untouchable. And then he destroyed it - destroyed them -”
“But not here, Sapphire. You said it happened somewhere else - and time is fracturing here.”
Sapphire turned her head, and they both saw, nearby, but in another time, a faded image of three boys sitting together, on what had been grass then rather than concrete and gravel.
“No,” said Sapphire softly. “It didn’t happen here - but he came back here. He died here.” She shivered, and there was blood on her hands, for a moment.
Steel frowned, and then he sat down on the opposite end of the bench. “He came back here… and then he killed himself?”
She nodded; the tragedy of it there in her eyes.
*
Sapphire? Steel?
Silver walked about the square, frowning. He could feel time shifting about disconcertingly on either side of him.
He knew that they should be here, but were they here, in this place, but in a different time - or were they merely elsewhere in the building? Prosaic, of course, but entirely possible.
And over to the side of him, in one of the other time fragments, a figure, slightly blurry and transparent from the path, but visible to Silver’s eyes, took a photograph of nothing in particular, and then buried the camera.
Now that, thought Silver, was distinctly odd.
*
“There must be something more,” said Steel, his impatience audible. “The trigger, Sapphire. There must be something.”
“I know. It’s hard to see. Time is so uncertain here.”
“Can you bring the fragments of time back into alignment?”
Sapphire turned around to face him, and shook her head. “Everything is too fractured. Some of the fragments here are years apart. Some only seconds, but -.” She closed her eyes, and then opened them again as she realised something. “Everything keeps moving - different times, but only four years. The times change, but it’s always the same years.”
“Which years?”
“Now. The present. 1976. 1980. 1969. It’s shifting again - I can’t, Steel!”
“Hello?” called someone from the north entrance.
They both looked across, disconcerted by the interruption.
“Excuse me,” said the woman leaning out of the doorway, “but I think there’s a phone call for you.”
*
Silver had moved from the bench, trying to cross into the other fragment, the time when the photograph had been taken, but as he did so, time shifted again. Still 1976, but now two hours before the event he had glimpsed. That wasn’t any use at all.
He leapt back onto the path and thought for a little while longer. Then he crossed back to the doorway, putting his hand to the cables that ran up the side, and looking up at the wires overhead with a sudden smile.
*
“It’s your colleague,” said the secretary, leading the way into an office that was chaotic with paper everywhere on the desks, and notices of all kinds pinned to the walls. “The one I spoke to earlier. You are from the water board as well, I take it?”
The water board?
“Yes, that’s right,” said Sapphire, with another glance at Steel. “We’ve been with the water board for years, haven’t we, Steel?”
Sapphire.
She smiled at Steel, and then picked up the phone, before passing it to him; watching him put the receiver to his ear.
“Silver?”
“I hope it makes sense to you,” said the secretary as she sat back down at her desk. “I can’t make head nor tail of it. Does the water board use code these days or is there something wrong with him?”
*
Silver finished fiddling with the cable and sent his message, although he didn’t know whether it would reach them. He was fairly sure he had slipped back a short while into the past once he stepped out here, but if they were for any reason further behind him, as it were, rather than in front of him, this wouldn’t work.
“Hello, I hope you can hear me. We spoke earlier, and now I need you to pass a message onto my two colleagues, Sapphire and Steel. You’ll find them outside in that square. This is important -”
*
“- there is a camera, buried in the square. You need to reach the spot in a period after 1976 and find it. I shall keep trying, but I’m not having much luck. I’m afraid -”
*
Silver stopped abruptly as sparks skittered up and down the wiring, causing a couple of starlings on the roof to take flight and bringing a small line of smoke drifting towards him. He moved away and closed up his case of tools, then replaced it inside his jacket.
It would have to do, he thought, but it would be much more useful if he could get at that camera. That, he felt certain, was why he was here.
He glanced upwards, suddenly feeling as if the square had darkened, but the sky hadn’t changed. He had an uncomfortable sensation of being watched, as if his message had brought his presence here to the attention of something - something that hadn’t liked him very much.
*
Sapphire?
I heard. Then Silver is here.
“Oh,” said the secretary, watching as Steel put the phone down, “and whatever it is he’s done, or wherever he’s calling from, could you please get him to stop? The phone’s been like that for the past fifteen minutes and we can’t call in or out.”
Sapphire hid amusement. “We’ll tell him.”
“It really isn’t -” The secretary tried the phone again, and paused. “Oh. It’s stopped now. Thank goodness for that, although what he did -”
“It must have been a technical malfunction with the line,” said Steel, brusquely. He moved away as he spoke, back to the exit. He was cut off.
Yes.
Can you find him?
Only if we find the cause, and stop the fragmentation.
A technician could be useful. Then, emerging into the corridor, Steel turned back towards her with a frown. “What did he mean, someone buried a camera?”
“We should find out.”
*
Sapphire and Steel walked back along the path, towards the bench.
He said, “Can you sense Silver? Or the man, the one who was left?”
“No. There’s nothing now. Only time pulling away from us here, slowly, but in different directions.”
Steel circled the bench. “Why didn’t he say where the camera was? Sapphire -”
“Yes,” she said, crouching down to touch the stone of the ground, her eyes starting to glow a bright blue. “There is something, but it’s not…” She stopped, and stared ahead as the three boys in school uniform - there were blazers with a logo embroidered on the breast pocket - sat down opposite, laughing; one of them pushing at his friend, as the other waved a hand; talking, although the words were lost across the dividing decade.
What she did hear, though, was the click of someone taking a photograph.
The camera? Steel had moved to stand behind her.
Sapphire nodded. There was a vivid image in her mind of the resulting picture; the three of them captured forever - that moment in time held somewhere - and yet… She got to her feet, and looked at Steel. “I’m not sure. Silver said 1976. That image was from 1969.”
“We don’t know what Silver meant - we don’t know if it was Silver. Time may be playing tricks.”
Yes, it probably is, Sapphire agreed, but she gave him a sudden smile. It was Silver.
*
Silver had given up circling the area in the hope that he might find either an answer or a time fragment that could bring him closer to Sapphire and Steel. He knew they had been sent here and, in any case, he had sensed them when he had first arrived. He must have somehow crossed from the present into the recent past. They were a little ahead of him, but they were here, and he should be able to reach them, if he tried. That he couldn’t left him with the uneasy feeling that something must be deliberately preventing him.
He perched on the end of the bench in the centre, hands clasped around one knee, and watched the area closely. As the fragments shifted about him, he could glimpse moments and scenes from different times: sometimes the staff at the printers, Hilliers, stepping out for a smoke; in others the area was full of children or teenagers hurrying across, but in most it was deserted. There had been, he registered, years between the closing of the school, and its sale and hasty renovation for business use - a long period where everything lay forgotten, but Time had been gathering its forces.
Silver felt Time shift again. The fragmentation was getting worse, he was certain of it. A crisis had come and gone, sometime in the last few days, or perhaps even the last few hours and now it was a matter of urgency. Steel would say that it always was, which was true, but there were degrees in these things, and this one was now as bad as it could be.
He considered, and decided, that, given his greater expertise and skill with these things, it really would be much better if he could find a way to get his hands on that camera.
*
“Try to locate the camera. If it is here -.”
Sapphire stood very still in the middle of the area, her eyes blue again as she searched for something out of place, something that might be the trigger: a lightning rod for Time. Her mind passed through the floating fragments of time around her and hit it: a camera, buried almost directly under them.
It lay under the ground, with only one impression on the film; kept for all these years, intended to be hidden here forever. The three boys. An impossible image of the past, buried here by the one who had survived the accident, who believed he had killed them.
“Steel!”
He was already at her side. Sapphire?
“He wasn’t in his right mind,” she said. “The one who was left behind. Time used him. His pain, his guilt, standing here. He took the camera, as if he could photograph a moment from seven years before, and then he hid it under the ground, here. He thought it could take everything back; make that moment safe, make it last forever. Something pushed him to do it.”
“Here, in 1976?”
“Yes. He buried the camera, and went to be with them. That, or to pay. And Time got in then and now everything is stretching to breaking point.”
“Two different times… connected by the camera?”
“Yes. The image from 1969; the object from 1976. And it can’t, Steel; it can’t! Reality is shattering around it.”
“We have to stop it.”
Sapphire turned then. “We may be too late.”
*
From where he was sitting on the bench, Silver watched the man bury the camera again; a brief ghostly image from the nearest time fragment, and then it was gone.
If he could link this fragment to the next, temporarily, just long enough, he might be able to work a way around whatever was preventing him getting to that spot in the right time. And there were always things under the ground that would be present in all the time periods - pipes and cables and so on.
Silver straightened himself, standing in one graceful movement, before kneeling back down on the ground, and edging around the bench on his hands and knees. He moved briefly through another of the fragments and saw a boy stop in alarm on seeing him, and then run hastily towards the far door. He must have appeared as ghostly as the young man did to his eyes.
Now, he thought, and put his hand to the ground, searching for something he could use. Water pipes, gas, cables… There.
Silver vanished, reappearing a metre or so away, and in… He closed his eyes, unsure of the year. It wasn’t 1976, but it was… 1980. 1980 would do.
He knelt down again, and concentrated on the camera. It wasn’t difficult. Its presence all but shouted at him: one object connecting two time periods, pinning them together in a captive moment of pain and memory - a pact, a lost future and two photographs that had merged into one.
He closed his eyes and focused still harder. When he opened them again, the camera was lying in his hands. He smiled in satisfaction. “Aha,” he said. “Now, let’s see.”
*
Steel had pulled up a flagstone, alarming various earwigs and beetles underneath, and forced his hand down through the earth and stone with an effort. He stopped now and frowned. Sapphire. It’s not here.
It was. She crouched down beside him and put her hand over his, on the damp earth. “I can still feel it.”
“It’s gone.”
Sapphire rose to her feet and looked around her at the walled area. Suddenly everything seemed even quieter than it had been, as if something that had been watching them since their arrival had turned its attention elsewhere. “Steel. I think Silver found a way to get there before us.”
Steel brushed the dirt from his hands and got to his feet, glancing at her.
“It will try to stop him.”
“Yes,” said Steel. He scowled at her. He got the message through. He should have let us do what we’re here to do, not interfered.
*
Silver turned the camera over in his hands, examining it. It seemed strangely resistant to opening, so he pulled out his case of tools. As he did so, he registered the growing darkness for the first time, but he ignored it and turned his attention back to the camera. There was nothing else he could do. He couldn’t stop whatever it was, and he couldn’t put the camera back now that he had it.
He ran his hands over the back of it again, and then used a thin tool to try and prise it open. He needed to get at the film; he could see the image on it quite clearly inside his mind. That was the thing to blame, the pinpoint moment of time that was distorting everything else around it.
Including, he realised, rather belatedly, him. He was at the centre of the anomaly now and it was fighting back; it wanted to break him into fragments, different times - shards of Silver spread about the square. It was not, he thought, a nice feeling.
Silver kept working on the camera, but he tried to reach them again: Sapphire? Steel? If you can hear me -
He stopped, suddenly certain not only that they couldn’t hear him, but that something else could, the same something else that was trying to shatter him, twist and scatter him about the area, as it had done with time itself.
*
Sapphire turned around again, silently searching every part of the area. Everything feels lighter.
“Has the fragmentation stopped?”
She shook her head. No. “It’s getting worse, I think. Steel, if whatever’s trying to break through isn’t here, with us -”
“Sapphire. Can you link the two nearest time fragments? Bring them into alignment with each other?”
She paused. “I can try. But, Steel -”
“Good,” said Steel, and then gave her a short smile as she moved into the centre, prepared to begin. “It doesn’t have to work. Just get its attention.”
Sapphire smiled to herself, and then concentrated, her eyes glowing blue. The smile vanished, and she stopped again almost instantly, gripping the back of the bench with one hand. “I can’t, Steel! I can’t!”
Steel marched over, taking hold of her by the shoulders, and growled in her ear. “Try again.”
“Steel -”
“You can try, can’t you?” he said, still brusque, deliberately echoing her words. “One more time, Sapphire.”
It doesn’t have to work?
There was a fleeting edge of humour in his thoughts as he agreed: It doesn’t have to work.
*
There were supposed to be operators; technicians didn’t get assigned alone, or not for problems of this nature, Silver thought as he continued to fight with the camera. It appeared to be winning as yet. The complaint occupied the part of his mind that wasn’t fixed on the technical issue. And although he couldn’t contact Sapphire or Steel by the usual means, he did feel that it must be possible, if he grumbled enough, to reach Steel even across a divide of fractured time by the power of sheer annoyance.
Silver stretched out his hand for a different tool, but it vanished before he could grasp it. Of course. He was at the centre of the disturbance; anything could get carried into any number of different time periods. That was what it was trying to do to him - and why other people who had arrived first should have warned him before he stepped out into an area where Time had been treacherously cracking on the surface, like thin ice on a lake.
The pressure on him eased a fraction for no reason that he could see, and the back of the camera opened with sudden ease at his latest efforts. As it did so, he felt a wave of unreality ripple through him - not precisely unpleasant, but certainly worrying. Too much longer, and it was going to destroy him. And letting go, he knew, would only make that happen sooner.
“Well,” he said, under his breath, almost unconcerned now that it had reached this point, “I can’t stop now.”
Silver fished out the film, and the whole quadrangle flared a blinding white.
*
Time settled around them; everything falling back into place, softly and silently.
Sapphire and Steel remained standing at the centre, in front of the bench and looking down at the path, at the broken and old-fashioned camera lying there. Sapphire turned her head towards Steel, and then crouched down to touch it with the tip of her finger. Steel. Silver-
“Yes, and it’s good to finally see you two, as well,” the technician said from behind them, causing them to start. There was a definite smugness in his tone, but even so he sounded a little more subdued than usual.
They both turned, to find Silver half-sitting, half-lying on the cracked concrete at the base of the bench. He beamed up at them, as if it were a perfectly reasonable place to be on a damp, grey morning.
“Not much fun,” he said, more to himself than to the other two. “Still, you were lucky I was here.”
They exchanged a glance.
Steel moved forward. He frowned at Silver, but lowered himself down to join him. “Is it over?” He looked back up, directing the question to both of them, to Sapphire and Silver.
“Yes,” said Sapphire, as if she was surprised he had needed to ask. Then she paused. “Except -”
Silver turned his head towards Steel, and touched his arm. “You should finish that,” he said, with a nod to the camera. Steel said nothing, and pulled Silver up; an impatient movement that was also a lending of strength.
Steel stepped away from the technician, and picked up the camera. It was already cracked, and it had turned somehow brittle. There was no power left in it. He broke it in his hands without even trying, and passed the pieces to Silver, who gave a slight smile. The technician put one hand over the other, then blew on them. After that, what had been the camera was nothing but dust floating away from them, too fine to be seen.
“Don’t let’s do that again,” said Silver, sounding entirely himself now. “Very inconvenient.”
Sapphire glanced at him. “Yes.”
“Oh, another thing,” Silver said, searching in his jacket pockets, and pulling out a melted and scrunched up mess of black plastic. He dropped it into her upturned palm. “What do you make of that?”
She looked at it. “Cellulose triacetate - cellulose, sodium hydroxide, acetic anhydride. Camera film. Nothing else.”
Silver gave a short smile. “Good.”
“This was the film - the trigger?” she said, and she stared past both Silver and Steel, to the patch of ground by the tree, as if she could still see something that they could not. “Then there’s nothing left of them.” She shivered.
Silver put one hand to her arm lightly, and then closed Sapphire’s fingers around the lump of film with the other. “No, there’ll be something, Sapphire. Even here there are reminders - but not that, not the negative. That couldn’t stay.”
For an instant after he had spoken, it seemed as though they could see three shadows in that direction, but then they were gone, probably only a trick of the light. Or maybe it was a lingering strangeness here - their own shadows in the wrong place or time for a moment.
“Hilliers has lost its triangle,” said Silver, moving away, and then turning back to look at Sapphire and Steel, waiting for a reaction.
Triangle?
“This place,” Silver said, and indicated the square with a wave of his hand.
Steel frowned. “It’s a square.”
“I suppose it could be two triangles, if you looked at it that way,” said Sapphire.
Silver smiled, finally getting to share the joke. “No, no. Their very own Bermuda Triangle, apparently.”
“That was an entirely different matter,” said Steel. He frowned at the technician. Silver.
“Still,” Silver murmured, unrepentant, and directed a grin at Sapphire.
Then the three of them, as if to some unspoken signal, walked away from the centre, and away from each other before vanishing - leaving behind a square that now was exactly as ordinary as it appeared.
***