0---

 

Sera is about to surreptitiously reach for the tongue depressor lounging a foot away from the main pile when a claxon sounds. She settles for clamping her hands over her ears as the broad hallway goes dark, a flashing, violent red light the only illumination, as the window at the end is blacked out.

 

“What the hell is going on?” she shouts, watching Byuuta’s face blanche, his shoulders shake. He shudders to his feet, a queen, two sixes, and a five fluttering to take his place in the loose circle. Sera doesn’t have time to feel sick to her stomach, doesn’t know how terrified she should be, but Byuuta doesn’t look like he can find the words to explain.

 

“The pattern,” the commander says, words catching and tumbling as his mind obviously rejects them, “the pattern is breaking. We have to-” he hesitates, eyes racing around them, doctors, nurses, and orderlies alike spill out of rooms, the flashes of red highlighting the look of horror they all share.

 

Someone is screaming, their voice alternately smothered by the siren shaking anything not bolted down, and highlighted by its absence.

 

“Here,” Byuuta says, holding out a handful of face masks caught as they shudder over the edge of the nurses’ station. Sera stares blankly at the hand thrust out as understanding forces its way through the fog of panic, then takes them, and Byuuta spins away and the flare of his lab coat frees her from this paralysis.

 

She passes them around the group, to Melanie first, sitting at her left, and fits her own over her mouth and nose, hating how familiar it feels. “On your feet,” she says, using her fichus to steady her knees as she scrambles up, the other hand already reaching out to Melanie.

 

“By the elevators,” Donner says, seeing the question forming before Sera even looks round. “They’ve been locked down,” he adds, “solid metal door slid down first thing.”

“Alright,” Sera says, “let’s try not to touch anything.”

 

“And stay at least three feet away from the doors, and step lightly,” Galligher suggests, “if we’re going near the elevators; a lot of places have sensor plates near exits that can detect panic during lockdowns, and have, uh, measures in place.”

 

0---

 

“Shit,” Jase says, hands tightening unconsciously around Luke’s neck. There isn’t an actual strip of emergency lighting in the locker room, but the siren and flashes of light shining in from under the door do its job well enough. “Shit,” he repeats, and relaxes the muscles in his hands as Luke’s fingers scrabble against his, protesting the pressure on his windpipe.

 

“And once more with feeling?” Luke gasps, as the siren kicks it up a notch, and an octave. He rubs at the faint scarring that still circles where Jase’s hands were, but the deep bruising went with them. “You weren’t suppose to be able to do that, were you?”

 

“No,” Jase says, “aside from the fact that I plain wasn’t supposed to, regardless of ability.”

 

Luke snorts, stepping back to breath cool, clean air. “Yeah, I got that,” he says, cocking his head towards the siren speaker.

 

Jase sighs, rubbing his eyes with one hand, the other grabbing at the wall behind him, something solid through the noise and flickering dark. “This is bad,” he says, “really, really bad.”

 

“It’s not like you actually broke it,” Luke says, “right?”

 

“Right,” Jase says, but he doesn’t look away from the dizzying array of colors dancing behind closed eyelids.

 

0---

 

“D’you- feel that?” Bella asks, glancing up, eyes focusing somewhere beyond the ceiling. Her mouth curls into a pained frown, and she looks pale even in this clinical, bleached white.”

 

Gunner opens his mouth, poised to reply, but is interrupted by the frenzied sounding of an alarm, the room plunging into intermittent darkness as the overhead light strips die without so much as a flicker and the emergency strips running along them takeover, flashing in counterpoint to the siren. “It’s the pattern,” he says, shouting to be heard even in such close quarters, “something’s happened to it. Whatever you do, do not try anything,” he tells Bella, “on literal pain of death, do you understand?”

 

She nods grimly, and Gunner rushes out of the room, joining the fray gathering in the hallway.

 

“What’s going on?” Des asks, “what about the pattern?”

 

“It broke,” Bella says, but quickly adds, “momentarily, just momentarily, like it blinked. Either it’s begun failing, which will take at least a day to happen, or someone was tampering with it and stopped before they could do any real damage.”

 

The panic rising in Connor’s throat is quelled, and he gives up his death grip on Jamie’s elbow, apologizing with a soft touch below his shoulder. “Why would someone do that?”

 

Bella shrugs, distractedly, rocking back on her heels to get a clear view of the scrum. “I don’t know,” she says, “they’d have to want the virus given free rein in the hospital, and no one capable of interfering with a Jacob’s Pattern would ever want that.”

 

“Who would be capable though?” Jamie asks, sparing a backwards glance for the patient only now emerging groggily from sleep unpleasantly interrupted by the siren.

 

“It would take more than one person,” Bella says, “depending on who they are, it could take as many as ten. This one was put together by four, with five observers also tied into it should something happen to one of the four.”

 

“Did Gunner tell you this,” Des asks, “or is this something you just know?”

 

“Both, sort of,” she says, eyebrows pinched together as her line of sight is cut off by the large shadow of a group of orderlies. “I asked why they’d need nine people.”

 

“Uh,” Jamie says, gesturing at their now fully awake company with a jerk of his head, “what should we do about him?”

 

Bella crosses the room to dig through the drawer next to the bed, before triumphantly presenting a vacuum-packed syringe. She inserts the needle smoothly into the IV line, and depresses the plunger, one millimeter at a time. Des watches with wide eyes as the patient’s eyes roll up into the back of his head and he slumps back against his pillows.

 

“Ativan,” Bella explains.

 

0---

 

“Where’s Doctor Lambert?” Byuuta asks when Gunner pushes through the crowd to his side, face red and puffing, presumably from the four flights of stairs he just climbed.

 

Gunner stares at him blankly, taking deep, gulping breaths. “What?” he says, hands fisted together on his head.

 

“Doctor Lambert? Lieutenant Doctor Annabelle Lambert?”

 

“Crap,” Gunner swears, turning around and running back the way he came.

 

0---

 

“Jase,” Luke says, “don’t mean to interrupt whatever it is you’re doing, but probably you should tell someone that the system wasn’t actually being attacked.”

 

Jase lets go of the fistful of hair he’d been yanking on, stops muttering. “You might have a point,” he says, wiping his palm against his, ah, borrowed uniform. “Though chances are I won’t live to tell the tale. And it’s not a system, it’s a pattern, or, if you’d prefer, an abomination. They send Sam after anyone who builds an unauthorized Jacob’s pattern, you know.”

 

“Can’t say that I did,” Luke says, “Well?”

 

“Right,” Jase says, tugging nervously on the hem of his shirt, “can’t believe I’m going to die wearing this monstrosity.”

 

“Don’t worry,” Luke says cheerily, “I’m sure they’ll probably just burn your mutilated corpse.”

 

Jase gives him a dirty look.

 

“After you,” Luke says, pushing the door open to the full glow of the flashing lights.

 

0---

 

“Lieutenant,” Gunner gasps from the doorway, bracing himself against it as he struggles for air, “ne-need you to – to come with me.”

 

“We’ll be fine here,” Des says from her seat below the clock, concentrating on folding the piece of wax paper she’d found in a drawer with sharp, crisp lines. “Connor’s teaching me how to make a complete origami first aid box.”

 

“Jase taught me in exchange for the secrets to the horse and rider,” Connor explains, “when we were snowed-in in Andrachna.”

 

“I know that one,” Gunner says, “the first aid box I mean.”

 

“Do you know how to make the inflatable lungs?” Connor asks, “Jase couldn’t remember.”

 

“No,” Gunner admits, “but I can make a damn good beating heart, if I do say so myself; won a whole week of day shifts with that one about a year ago.”

 

Bella clears her throat, “we were going somewhere?”

 

“Right,” Gunner says, standing up straight, sighing in the face of four more flights of stairs, “follow me.”

 

0---

 

“Do you think that things going to shut up any time soon?” Sera asks, leaning heavily against Donner in lieu of a wall. She watches with tired, bloodshot eyes, as Melanie shifts nervously on her feet, visibly flinching every time a voice rises above the screech of the siren.

 

“I wish,” Donner says grimly, “it probably has to be shut off though.”

 

Sera eyes the nurses’ station wistfully.

 

“Is that Bella?” Melanie asks, voice cracking and trembling. She points down the hallway towards the stairwell, its door swinging shut, the metal barrier temporarily raised

 

Sera follows her finger with eyes squinting to see through the mess of light and dark; “yeah,” she says at last, “I don’t see Jase yet, though.”

 

“Disintegrated lab coat,” Donner reminds her.

 

“Atlas isn’t there either,” Galligher says, “but he was on the second floor, and those stairs are a bitch.”

 

0---

 

“Ten bucks says it was Jase’s fault,” Gary says.

 

Fosher shakes his head, “no bet.”

 

0---

 

Jase kicks the metal barrier, and quickly regrets it, clutching at his toes while hopping on his other foot. “Can you do something about this?” he says through clenched teeth, struggling to keep his balance.

 

Luke looks at him, the barrier, back again. “Not without tearing a hole in the building, probably not without maiming people.”

 

“Keypad,” Jase says, rolling his eyes, resting his foot gingerly on the scuffed tile.

 

Luke shrugs, “if you think you can lift fifty plus pounds of solid steel.”

 

0---

 

“Is Jase here yet?” Bella asks, glancing around, easily able to see over 9 out of 10 heads, but hampered in facial recognition by the flashing lights, frantic movement, and her own badly handicapped eyesight.

 

“No,” Byuuta says, “he was downstairs changing into a clean uniform.”

 

Gunner coughs.

 

“Ran into some, uh, trouble while at the pharmacy for some pills,” Byuuta explains, and Bella frowns.

 

“Pills for Luke?” she says, good eye narrowed. Byuuta’s nod is followed by a sharp intake of breath, her forehead wrinkling as her eyebrows pinch together. “That’ll be it, then.”

 

“That’ll be what?” Byuuta asks, stumbling forward into Gunner’s shoulder as another doctor’s elbow is driven between his shoulder blades. Gunner steadies him easily, bracing himself against the fray at his back.

 

“You can turn off the alarms,” Bella says tiredly, “and end the lockdown. Jase is the one who was messing with the pattern,” she adds before they can gather themselves enough to argue, “and seeing as it’s still in place, he’s done whatever it was he was doing.”

 

Byuuta swears under his breath, pushing himself away from Gunner with a stiff arm; it takes him barely thirty seconds to reach the nurses’ station and enter the all clear code. Bright white lights immediately take the place of the red, and the din of arguing replaces the piercing siren.

 

Slowly, silence falls, all eyes turning to Byuuta approaching at a jog.

 

0---

 

The steel door retreats neatly before Luke has to resort to desperate measures, and Jase jabs at the ‘up’ button impatiently.

 

0---