Canon Hub » Our Open Veins » No Volveré
Dr. Alma Sáez has failed to return to work following this incident. At 03:01, SCP-9270's storage system automatically restarted. Upon reinitializing, all stored nodes were found to be empty. Further use of SCP-9270 is suspended pending reevaluation of its effectiveness.
The vehicle's onboard display said there was only one occupant. Alma reached over and turned it off.
The road out of Braulio Carrillo National Park was a black ribbon between walls of dark. The cloud forest pressed close on both sides, their headlights catching curtains of mist and nothing beyond them. The Foundation SUV handled the wet mountain road well; she was grateful for that, but still took each hairpin with both hands on the wheel, jaw set, eyes forward. The altitude made itself known in the thinness of the air. Somewhere, in the canopy, a bird was screaming. She didn't know what kind, but she wished it was a Quetzal. Those were beautiful.
In the passenger seat, Rafaela had her shoulder against the window and her arms folded over her chest, watching the dark go by. Her curly hair was uneven, cut without care, and the dried blood on her forearms had darkened. She had not said a word since Alma had pulled her into the vehicle and floored it through the south gate, and Alma had not pushed her to. They were both still reeling from everything that had happened. Alma herself was still in that flat, buzzing calm that comes after the adrenaline wears off but before the mind can catch.
Alma's phone buzzed against her thigh. She had forgotten to ditch it when they left Area-34.
She left it. A truck materialized out of the fog ahead, and she tucked the SUV tight against the mountain wall to let it pass. Her mirrors went white and then dark again.
The road straightened for a stretch. She reached down and pulled out the phone.
One notification. A text from Dr. Akabi Hayk.
Area-34's external security got called back, if you need a calm drive. See you when I see you. — A.H.
Alma read it twice. She thought of Hayk across the desk in their therapy sessions. She was always composed, careful, understanding. She thought of what it had cost her to send this. What it would cost her when they went looking for how two fugitives knew the coast was clear.
She pressed the window button. The mountain air came in cold, smelling of moss and wet earth. She dropped her phone into it without slowing down. In the side mirror she watched the screen glow briefly against the road before the dark swallowed it.
"Was that important?"
She almost swerved hearing Rafaela's voice. It was low, roughened at the edges. But hers.
"No," Alma responded. "Not anymore."
Rafaela made a small sound and turned her face back to the window. Alma's hands tightened on the wheel. She wanted to look at her properly, had been wanting to since the parking bay, since the door panel, since — but the road demanded her eyes and she gave them.
The trees thinned at a curve and for a moment the fog broke, and she could see the valley below: San José, a scatter of amber light in the bowl of the mountains. Distant and small and entirely indifferent to the two of them. She began the descent toward it.
"Where are we going?" Rafaela asked. She was still watching out the window, her breath fogging the glass slightly.
Alma thought for a second before responding. "I don't know. Where can we go?"
"Cartago," Rafaela said. "I know someone."
Her reflection in the passenger window was faint, uncertain. The dark forest behind it showed through her face clearly, like her face wasn't there at all.
The road widened as they descended. The mist thinned. A roadside pulpería appeared and fell away behind them, shuttered. There was a hand-painted sign above the door that Alma couldn't read at their speed. The valley opened around them and the forest pulled back and the city lights came closer and warmer, and neither of them spoke again.
It was enough, for now, to be in the same vehicle. To be driving toward something. To hear her breathe.
Alma reached the highway interchange and signaled left. Her hands had mostly stopped shaking by now.
Gloriana was the person Rafaela knew in Cartago. She opened the door on the third knock.
She almost looked past Rafaela entirely. Her eyes moved across Rafaela's face without pause, as though she was processing the face of a stranger. Then something clicked. Gloriana's hand flew to her mouth.
"Dios mío," she gasped. "Rafa. Come inside."
Rafaela and Alma slept in the spare room on a narrow mattress, a single window looking out over a shuttered store. Before dawn, Gloriana took the Foundation vehicle somewhere. Perhaps to scrap it, it didn't matter. Alma didn't ask where. She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling. She listened to the street outside. A dog barking, a motorcycle, someone's television through a wall. She didn't know if Rafaela was sleeping. She didn't turn to check.
Instead, she lay there and thought about the dashboard. One occupant.
She thought, also, about a footnote. The second one in her personnel file, which she had seen once and which she had produced, in a sense, through eleven months of Noospheric study she had been proud of. Work that had been cited in four papers, three journals, and two facility reports. Work that had indirectly led to the further refinement of SCP-9270's targeting system. She had known, very well, what the system was used for. She had told herself it didn't concern her.
She had never thought of it as a weapon.
Beside her in the dark, Rafaela breathed steadily. It took a long time for Alma to sleep.
When she woke, the morning light was coming through the window in a flat yellow bar. The space next to her was already empty.
She found Rafaela in the kitchen, standing at the counter with a borrowed phone to her ear. She was talking low and quickly, her free hand tracing something in the air as she spoke. Alma had forgotten about this habit until this moment, the way she mapped plans with her fingers as she thought, drawing the connections out of nothing. In daylight, Alma could see that the bruises on her arm had deepened overnight, purple at the centers and a sickly yellow at the edges. Her hair was not as uneven as it had seemed on the mountain road.
She looked up when Alma appeared in the doorway. Her hand slowed. She whispered something brief into the phone and lowered it.
"Good morning," Alma said.
"Morning." Rafaela set the phone on the counter. "We can go this afternoon."
Alma nodded. She leaned against the doorframe and watched Rafaela's face, which was doing something it always did in the mornings — working through something, still half-inside whatever she'd been thinking. Alma had forgotten this too. She had forgotten so much.
"Are you ready for this?" Alma asked.
Rafaela looked at her for a moment. "No," she answered. "But we need them."
They drove south from Cartago into the hills in a used car. This was coffee country, the fields rising in green terraces on either side of the road with the cordillera enormous and blue behind them. Rafaela gave directions from the passenger seat. Gloriana had lent her a plain shirt and jeans that were just a bit too long.
The place they arrived at was an ordinary house behind a roadside sodita. Three other vehicles sat in the dirt lot. A hand-painted menu board leaned against the porch railing, next to which a man sat on the steps, looking at the ground.
He looked up when they pulled in. He looked at Alma. Then at Rafaela. His eyes went back to the ground before snapping back to Rafaela. He got up and broke into a sprint towards them. Rafaela opened her door and met him halfway.
"Rafa!", he exclaimed.
"Beto!" She brought him into her arms when he reached her. He was broad-shouldered, heavy. He hugged Rafaela back with his teary eyes closed, as though trying to confirm her presence by touch alone.
Alma stayed by the car and looked at the mountains.
Inside, the house smelled of coffee and wood. Four more people sat around a table covered in printed maps and handwritten lists. One by one, as Rafaela came through the door, it happened again: The pause, the catch, the return. A man stood up from the table to meet her. Taking turns, they all approached Rafaela and embraced her, two of them holding back tears.
Well, all except one. A young woman near the window — twenty, maybe less — sat with her arms crossed, her jaw set, and watched Rafaela move through the room without expression. When her gaze passed Alma, it stayed for a moment, flat and measuring, before catching up to Rafaela.
The conversation that followed was practical at first. Beto laid out what had happened to their group in the eighteen months Rafaela had been gone. The northern cell had gone dark after losing two members; they were alive, as far as anyone knew, but were radio silent. The coastal group had fractured. A disagreement about a mission, or something more personal, Beto wasn't certain. The cell in Pavas was still active but running reckless, acting without planning.
Five of them had already been picked up by Foundation teams. Not a word from them since.
"They're combing through Braulio Carrillo right now," he added. "Probably looking for the two of you." He glanced briefly at Alma. "They're persistent."
"They always are," Rafaela sighed.
A silence settled. Beto refilled his cup. "Some people thought you left. You know, before we… forgot."
"…I know."
"N-not me. I figured something happened. But—" He stopped himself. "Some people thought you left."
"I know," she said, quieter.
Later, while the others bent over the maps and Rafaela was deep in conversation at the far end of the table — her hand moving again, drawing her thoughts in the air — Beto came and stood beside Alma. He pressed a cup of coffee in her hands.
"You're the researcher," he said. He didn't sound accusatory or questioning.
"Yep."
He watched Rafaela across the room. He drank from his cup. Then, he quietly asked, "How did you get her back?"
Alma held her coffee without drinking it. She had no answer she could give him. None that would mean anything, none that didn't incriminate her in the same breath. She said nothing.
Beto nodded, taking the silence as an answer, and walked back to the table.