Gettin’ the Band Back Together

Gettin’ the Band Back Together 20 MINUTE READ

Najma looked out over the streets of Grenoble limned in the golden light of damn. The hijab she wore, loosely wrapped over her hair and a brilliant red, waved in the slight wind as she took her morning coffee. Two-hundred yards away, through the scope of the sniper rifle set up at the railing of the balcony she breakfasted on, a plume of concrete dust and smoke went up.

“Breach!” Shahab called through the walkie-talkie sitting next to her flaky croissant and morning paper. “Site Ninety-Three is accessible!”

“Teams Scarlet, Gold, and Cadmium, proceed into the main halls with caution,” Najma ordered. “Teams Jade and Indigo, cut off access to maintenance controls. Do not let them instigate a containment breach to keep us out.”

“Understood,” Shahab said. “Scarlet and Gold teams, moving in.”

“Gotcha,” Mohsen said. “Cad— it’s fucking yellow, okay? Yellow’s on the move!”

“Jade and Indigo, proceeding,” Ahmad reported, with a sigh at his brother’s attitude. “We’ll keep you posted.”

“All teams, be on the lookout for traps,” Najma said. She flicked open the morning paper and scanned the headlines. Just visible beneath the spread of pages was a silenced 10mm pistol. “Do not expect the Foundation to take its destruction with honor.”

“Understood!” Shahab said. “Going radio silent unless I have an update for you.”

“Go with God,” Najma replied, and muted her end of the connection. There was a clatter from inside the house. She slipped the 10mm into her lap. Then she picked up the croissant and took a bite. The sliding door to the patio opened.

“Who the hell are you?” a man dressed in a hastily tied bathrobe demanded in clipped French. He pinned her in place with a .22 pistol leveled at her head as he took in the scene and the sniper rifle. He gestured with it to her loose headscarf and his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You’re Muslim. You’re Bright Star.”

“First of all, that’s profiling,” Najma replied in her own fluid French, breezily, as she dabbed crumbs from around her lips with a thumb. “Second of all, there is no need for guns. I’m here to talk. That’s all. Site Director Nathan Bernard, I presume?”

“I can’t raise my site,” Bernard hissed. “What have you done?”

Najma leveled a bored look at the shaking man over her paper. “Deployed a signal interrupter so you wouldn’t call down an air strike on me. Obviously. I’ve been in Syria as of late. You could say I’m not a fan of hasty drone bombings.”

“So, what,” Bernard said, lowering his gun a scant inch, “ISIS?”

Najma rolled her eyes. He lowered his gun further.

“Foundation?” he ventured. He almost sounded hopeful. Najma didn’t feel like ruining his day yet. She flicked credentials towards him across the table and he snatched them up.

“Agent Sara Fareed?” Bernard asked. She nodded and feigned interest in the sports section. He crumpled into the chair opposite her and rubbed sweat from his brow. “Apologies for the aggression. And, uh, the… assumptions. You understand that things are tense at the moment. We’ve lost four sites in the past six months.”

“Seven sites,” Najma corrected. At Bernard’s incredulous look she ticked them off on her fingers. “Site Sixteen to start. Then Twelve, Fifty-Four, Thirty-Seven, Thirty-Eight, Eleven, and most recently the deep cover outpost of Nine.”

“Christ,” he murmured, head in his hands. “I don’t mean to make morale worse, so I try not to focus on it as I run my site… but I don’t know where this leaves us for the foreseeable future. All the work we had in progress, the complex containments, the wealth of research…”

“Truly, it is tragic,” Najma said, “which is why I’m here. I’m part of a covert task force getting an idea of what information remains to us in these troubled times. MTF Sigma-10, nicknamed ‘Whispers.’”

Bernard held out a hand for her to shake. Hers were covered in thin leather driving gloves. His were bare. She could have laughed. If contact poison was her game, she would’ve won. As it was she shook his hand and gestured for him to make himself comfortable.

“My focus for the moment is on monitoring the status of research and containment of humanoid anomalies,” she said. She sipped her coffee. “If you would, please brief me on the status of your work in that realm at Site Ninety-Three.”

“Of course,” Bernard began. He talked for more than an hour, detailing a range of contained subjects, experiments, and losses. Najma split her focus between him and her radio. She hadn’t bothered to mute incoming transmissions. She wasn’t worried about it. After seven trial runs, she knew how long it took her teams to take a site. But it didn’t pay to be inattentive. As Bernard wrapped up his report, she mulled over the details.

“No anomalies exhibiting abilities associated with intense heat and memetic transmission?” she prompted. Bernard shook his head.

“I haven’t heard of anything like that,” he admitted. “Something we’ve lost?”

“So to speak,” Najma said. She slipped a photo out from behind the credentials in her badge fold and slid it across the table to Bernard. The picture was a Foundation records portrait of a young woman with lank blonde hair and vacant eyes, clutching a stuffed toy. “Any report of an anomaly resembling this picture?”

Bernard picked it up and frowned as he studied it, squinting at the identifying number on the bottom right-hand corner. “Five-five-three-eight? No, we haven’t had it in or had report of it.”

Najma took the photo as he slid it back to her and tucked it away again.

“Well,” she said. “It was worth a shot.”

“Do you have the information you need?” Bernard asked. He was a naturally pale man but the stress had him bloodless, gray with sweat, hair limp and in disarray. He wrung his hands together and leaned forward over the table towards her. “Could you contact O-5, try to get us some additional personnel out here? It’s bad enough with rogue actors associated with ISIS roaming the streets of France. This Bright Star threat is one we aren’t prepared for.”

“That much is obvious,” Najma murmured. In a louder voice, she summarized, “If I have heard you correctly, at this site you have authorized the use of dangerous and painful experimental procedures in the research of humanoid anomalies, beatings and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on recalcitrant subjects, and summary execution of humanoid anomalies who no longer exhibit the anomalous behavior for which they were contained.”

Bernard looked puzzled. “All in keeping with general Foundation best practice, of course. At this site, I do insist on a more mild treatment for our subjects. None of that Montauk business here.”

“How exceptionally kind of you,” Najma said, flatly. She snapped her newspaper closed, folded it, and set it aside. “Yes, I think I have all the information I need.”

Then the radio crackled.

“Uh, Najma?” Mohsen called. Bernard’s eyes snapped to her. “We might have a little problem down here. Ahmad says we can’t get this kid out without unhooking the, uh, well the shit in his spine, and he doesn’t have the skills to do it. We’ve got the rest of the site suppressed, but this—”

Najma didn’t hear the rest of what Mohsen had to report. Bernard raised his .22 on the word “suppressed” and put a round in her head. Her body snapped back, toppling her chair, and she hit the ground in a sprawl of limbs.

“Fuck!” Bernard screamed, clutching his head with the gun digging into his cheek. “Fuck! No, not here! This can’t happen here!”

“—you there?” Mohsen called. “Hamshira?”

Bernard grabbed her credentials and tore the fold apart. Then he dumped her pot of coffee, smashed her cup, and tore open the remaining piece of the croissant. He shook out the folded paper and swiped the radio onto the ground. He snatched up the sniper rifle and clumsily tried to take it apart before tossing it aside and running his hands over the balcony railing.

“Where is it?” he hissed. “Where is it, you bitch? Where’s the disruptor?”

Najma’s eyes fluttered open behind him as the bullet, lacking power from the low caliber and partially stopped by the frontal plate of her skull, slithered back out of the hole in her head with a slurry of blood and ejected brain matter. White bone crept back into place as she found her feet and her silenced 10mm. Bernard whipped back around to face her at the sound of the chair scraping on the balcony tile. His lips flapped as he processed the image before him, producing no words.

“I told you there was no need for guns,” Najma chided, gently prodding the healing edge of the gunshot wound with a gloved finger and an annoyed frown. “They won’t help you.”

“What are you?” he screamed. “What the fuck are you?”

“Bright Star,” Najma admitted. “I just wanted to make sure you thought twice about stereotyping.”

She raised the 10mm and gave him a bullet in return. Hers went through his head with a muffled pop, and he didn’t get back up. Najma replaced her sidearm in the holster at the small of her back and righted her toppled chair. She frowned at the distant sound of sirens. Likely not for her, yet, but his gunshot wouldn’t have gone unheard. She grabbed the radio and keyed it on, then jammed it between her shoulder and cheek as she broke down her sniper rifle. Should’ve worn a tighter headscarf. It was a lot easier to talk hands-free with the walkie or cell phone tucked in the side of her hijab.

“Sorry, Mohs, had my coffee interrupted. Have Ahmad do what he can to stabilize the child and make sure the rest of the site is secure,” she ordered. She caught another wail of sirens and estimated the time she had left. “I’ve got a mess to clean up here, but I’ll meet you at the forward outpost.”

“Oh, hamshira, what did you do?” Mohsen taunted in a childish singsong. Najma snorted.

“Got to go,” she muttered. “I need to find enough hydrogen peroxide to destroy a very substantial blood-based DNA sample.”

“Yours or his?” Mohsen asked.

“Bye,” Najma said.

A little over half an hour later, Najma swiped her keycard and let herself into the hotel room functioning as a temporary Bright Star forward outpost in Grenoble. She set down her gear bag against the wall with the others and stripped off her gloves. Mohsen looked up from furiously tapping away at his phone, cement dust still in his hair. He frowned and gestured to his forehead.

“You’ve got a pimple,” he said. “How old are you, again?”

Najma rolled her eyes. “It’s not a pimple.”

“You got shot in the head?” Mohsen asked. “Again?”

“You make it sound like I get shot every day,” Najma grumbled. She toed out of her shoes and wandered over to the mini-fridge to grab a canned soda and a packet of nuts. “Have you showered since taking Ninety-Three? You reek of cordite and boy stink, but then it is you.”

Mohsen jumped up from the bed, discarding his phone, and rummaged in one of his cargo pants pockets for something. “Rude. You’re the worst CO ever. Ahmad’s really worried about this kid, by the way. He’s stable, now, but he’s far from comfortable.”

“We’ve got to source more personnel with medical backgrounds and some familiarity with Foundation research,” Najma murmured. “More and more we’re uncovering things we can’t handle. I want to keep as much in the family, so-to-speak, as I can, but…”

She trailed off as Mohsen stepped over and stuck a Band-Aid to her forehead over the nearly-healed gunshot wound. He grinned as she scowled.

“Tell me it’s not My Little Pony, this time.”

“Pokémon.”

She smacked him in the chest. “Go shower!”

He wandered off to do that as she popped the tab and took a deep swig of her soda. She unwound her headscarf and used it to tie her hair up before sitting on the bed closest to the window air conditioning unit, letting the cool air wash over the back of her neck. She only got a moment of peace before Mohsen ducked back out of the bathroom in his boxers with an uncharacteristically contemplative look on his face.

“What is it?” she asked. He crossed his arms over his bare chest and leaned in the bathroom doorway.

“Our family is bigger than you think,” he said. She raised her eyebrows, then winced at the pull of the Band-Aid.

“What are you talking about now?”

Mohsen shrugged. “There are people you know you can trust, with the skills we need, who left the Foundation. Extended family.”

“You mean Agent Jade,” she said, staring down at her soda. “Talulah. Mohsen, she’s earned her peace.”

“She never seemed like a huge fan of peace before,” Mohsen said, spreading his arms. “She seemed like a fan of kicking ass! And we need her for this, even if we don’t ask her to do anything else. Come on, Naj. It’s worth a shot.”

“I hate it when you make sense,” Najma muttered. “It really warps my whole worldview. Alright, if we do this, we need to approach it with the utmost respect and seriousness. We’d be asking a lot of her, and she probably doesn’t even know I’m alive. The whole thing will need to be done with discretion.”

“Discretion, respect, seriousness,” Mohsen repeated, ticking the words off on his fingers. “Gotcha. No problem.”

Two weeks later found them walking up to a nondescript house in the rural outskirts of a town in upstate New York. Najma noted in turn the narrow driveway with good sight lines from the second story windows, the overgrown hedges, and the discreetly positioned bub-out bag stashed under a tree’s roots by the turn-in for the driveway. Mohsen jogged up the front steps with enthusiasm. She wished she could be so optimistic.

“Put these on,” Mohsen insisted, shoving a pair of sunglasses into Najma’s hands as she came up the front porch steps and stopped at his side. She rolled her eyes but did as he asked. It wasn’t particularly sunny, but the man had a sickness only fueled by their appropriated wealth, and that sickness was Ray Bans. Once her sunglasses were in place, he cleared his throat and knocked on the door.

Tali opened it the barest of cracks. The opening widened a little in shock as she took in who was standing on her porch. Her hair felt in tangles around her shoulders and her lips looked chapped and bitten. Najma opened her mouth to speak but Mohsen beat her to it.

“Tallulah,” Mohsen said, in some terrible, affected accent. “We’re gettin’ the band back together.”

The door slammed shut. Najma felt a deep-seeded irritation with the universe at large for her situation. Mohsen yanked his sunglasses off and pounded on the door, yelling to be heard. “What? Tali, come on! Who doesn’t like The Blues Brothers?”

“Discretion, respect, seriousness,” Najma muttered. She took off the sunglasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Shahab would’ve made better progress getting us inside with his C4.”

Najma knocked on the door again.

“I apologize for Mohsen being… well, Mohsen,” she called. She ignored Mohsen’s offended scoff. “And I know my reappearance may be a shock. But we really do need to speak with you regarding a matter of some importance.”

The door opened again. This time it was the muzzle of a shotgun, not Tali herself, that greeted them. She held it level with the metal arm, a strangely-colored samurai sword held in her free, flesh hand. She wore a fuzzy gray housecoat and a t-shirt that read “SNUG LIFE” over worn plaid lounge pants.

“If you’re really Najma, and not something else,” Tali hissed, “what… what was the name of Lucas’ fish?”

“I’m in love with this whole situation,” Mohsen said, grinning. Najma kicked him.

“Dante,” she answered. “Dante, the warrior king of fish.”

Tali lowered the shotgun and the sword. Then she charged forward and pulled Najma into a crushing hug, though she was gentle with her metal arm, and cautious about where the sword ended up swinging. Mohsen still stepped back.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered, fiercely. “You were obliterated, you…”

“I’m sorry,” Najma whispered. Slowly, she raised her own arms and hugged Tali back. “I’m sorry, I’ve been busy, and with the way things ended… I didn’t think I had the right to darken your door.”

Tali leaned back and gave Najma a hard shake. “Of course you do. Even if I was pissed off at you. You’re family. Now, what do you need?”

Najma bit her lip to keep from crying. Mohsen stepped in for her.

“We need your expertise,” Mohsen said. Then he pointed at the katana. “And I need you to hand me that sword to check out because, man, that’s some Blade 2 shit, hand that over.”

Tali passed it to Mohsen and ushered them both inside, revealing a home that seemed fragmented in time. Najma had read about Tali’s condition when she assumed command of Epsilon-7, but she had never before seen its effects so apparent as in the way her house tried to cope. Some parts of the entryway and large living room they stepped into seemed freshly painted, the furniture pristine, and the flooring gleaming. Other swathes showed the harsh effects of years of use— discolored paint and, in some cases, panels of wallpaper, dusty surfaces, and worn-down wood planks. One sofa was actually two— a modern chaise sectional up until about half-way through the love seat portion, at which point it became an ornate antique couch. Throughout it all, Najma noted artifacts she knew for a fact weren’t supposed to have left Site 16.

“Well,” she observed, “I may know what to sweeten the pot with in your signing bonus.”

“What was that?” Tali asked. Najma just shook her head.

“Nothing, just… may I take a seat?”

“Yeah, of course,” Tali said. She gestured to an armchair, a high-backed mustard yellow Danish relic that looked like it had barely escaped the seventies. Then she swiveled in place, apparently not sure what to do next. She rubbed at her temples. “Sorry, I don’t get a lot of visitors. I… Do you want coffee?”

Najma smiled up at Tali as she sat in the chair. “I’d love some, Agent Jade. Thank you.”

“This is sick as hell,” Mohsen said, swishing the katana a little bit in the air, then turning it to look along its edge. “Wouldn’t this be insane to have on field missions? Just stabbing people right and l—”

“Give it back,” Tali and Najma said, simultaneously, though with wildly different tones. Najma looked up at the tight horror in Tali’s voice and then winced as several things resurfaced from her briefings on Epsilon-7 before she’d taken charge of it. She looked at Mohsen, who’d removed his sunglasses in preparation to engage his most endearing pout, and shook her head sharply. He handed the sword back to Tali without protest, who sheathed it above her fireplace.

“It’s just Tali, now. And I’m guessing this isn’t just a social call,” Tali surmised, her back to them in front of the hearth, the sheathed katana rattling slightly in its stand from the force with which she’d put it down.

“Perhaps the coffee, first,” Najma suggested. Tali nodded and turned towards a hallway to the kitchen. As she disappeared from sight around a bend, Najma pulled out her cell phone and pressed a button.

When Tali came back Mohsen was sprawled on the floor, tapping at what looked like Pokémon Go on his phone and jiggling his right foot in impatience. Najma seemed to be reading something on her phone. Tali shook her head at the both of them.

“Short attention spans,” she teased, setting down a wooden tray with three mismatched mugs and a dinged metal coffee pot on an ottoman near Najma’s chair. “I leave for five minutes… and you could sit on the sofa, Mohs, like a person.”

“I did sit on the sofa, but I got bored,” Mohsen drawled. At Tali’s confused look, Najma closed the document she’d been reading and opened the application she’d tapped when Tali left for the coffee. It was her phone’s clock. She swiped to the timer and held it up for Tali to see.

It read three hours and fourteen minutes.

“I feel as though you might not be doing well on your own, Tali,” Najma said, quietly.

Tali looked at the timer for a long moment. Then she stepped over and took a heavy seat on her couch. She reached for one of the mugs of coffee and took a bracing swallow. Then she looked up at Najma over the rim and said, “Lucas was taken, William’s gone, Thirty-Eight went insane. You two disappeared. I had to claw my way out of Afghanistan alone, confused, with these problems. I’m not going back. I’ve washed my hands of the Foundation.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Najma said. She reached for her own mug and somehow maintained a professional air as she spooned five teaspoons of sugar into it before stirring. “We have, too. I don’t know how much news of our former employers you’ve gotten recently, but…”

“Nothing good,” Tali murmured. “My last contact just said something about a coup.”

“In most things are sown the seeds of its destruction,” Najma said, tapping the teaspoon against the edge of her mug before passing it to Mohsen. “I don’t know how much you know about what I and the others were raised to do, but it makes sense. The Foundation created Bright Star to destabilize and take control of a covert, SCP-containing organization and use it to our own ends. It turned out to be theirs.”

“Whatcha gon do?” Mohsen added, with all the gravitas of a philosopher. He took a sip of his coffee and immediately spat it back out into the mug. “Shit. I forgot Americans don’t know how to make this.”

“Fuck you, too,” Tali said. Then she turned her attention back to Najma. “So, you’re what? Tearing it all apart?”

“Trying to build something better,” Najma hedged. She looked down into her mug, back at Mohsen, who looked offended on behalf of his tongue, and set it aside. She leaned forward with her arms braced on her knees. “I won’t claim for a second that you have anything but an absolute right to skepticism and mistrust. I haven’t always been the CO you or any of the others deserved.

“But in seizing Foundation sites and assessing the condition of the people inside… it has become obvious that we are in over our heads,” she said. “That we need you. And if what I read about the stability of your time matrix while working with others is correct… you need us, too.”

Tali took a pointed sip from her mug. Najma picked hers up and had some, diplomatically hiding her immediate grimace behind it. Only then did Tali look up, over the ruin of her home and the relics of her old life. She set her empty coffee mug back on the tray.

“You don’t have to give me the hard sell,” she said. “You weren’t the new nurse who disappeared on her rounds, leaving her patient to code. The Foundation may be the only place left I can do some good. Or… Bright Star? Are you sticking with Bright Star?”

“Seemed less shady,” Mohsen said. Tali laughed.

“All jokes aside, that is the aim,” Najma said. “To be a light in the darkness, not just a grayer part of it. To be transparent, humane… better. To mend the mistakes the Foundation made and leave no one behind. If you would like to come visit our base, we would be more than glad to host you. Take a look at things and make your choice then. Mohsen can get you there.”

“You’re not coming with?” Tali asked. Najma gave her a rueful smile and shook her head.

“I’ve still got one stop left to make,” she said.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 2016 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024