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From: (Anonymous)

Olivia scanned the situation room as she strolled in with the rest of the midshift the next morning, sipping her tea (black, one half-and-half, no lemon). In Broyles’ glass-walled office, Aguilar leaned back in her chair, gesticulating to an invisible audience. A lot of serious faces manned the desks, including Lincoln’s.

“What’ve you got there?” Olivia asked Lincoln, leaning over until her hair brushed the desk.

“A Special Forces unit raided Nina Sharp’s residence at six o’clock this morning.” He tapped a snapshot of men and women in BDUs frozen in the act of rushing an apartment building foyer. “Charlie said Secretary Bishop ordered the raid. Colonel Aguilar’s been on a conference call with Liberty Island since she came in. She wants to keep anything related to the other side in Fringe–”

“I bet,” Olivia said, irritated. “Sharp’s our case. And I recognize those warrant exhibits - those are your leads. Why would the Secretary farm it out?”

Lee shrugged. "Manpower? Politics? There's been a lot of focus on tracking and apprehending the shapeshifters, but the follow-up was…” he hesitated, but plowed on, “...downgraded, more than once, when Colonel Broyles was in charge. I think we’re feeling the effects of that now.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “You think there’s another mole? C’mon.”

“I really hope not,” he said. “We’re missing something, but not that.” He flicked away the snapshot. “Some other connection. Sharp worked with Jones, Broyles was suborned by Jones… in your report you said Sharp told you Broyles was ‘just a pawn’. Small potatoes.”

“It was a bluff. She was trying to rattle me." Olivia said derisively. “You can’t really think someone’s out there, I don’t know, masterminding David Robert Jones.”

“Sometimes the best lie is the truth,” Lee countered. “The research team’s hit a wall tracing Jones’ history, even with the Nina Sharp investigation throwing new light on his possible associates. What if someone’s deliberately erased the information before we even knew we needed to look for it?” He leaned in slightly, glasses catching the overhead lights. “Take a step back. What do we know about Jones?”

Olivia opened a hand. “Well, most of our information came from Peter Bishop’s original timeline… he was some sort of biomedical expert, a terrorist connected to the other side’s ZFT movement. He died in that timeline, but didn’t in this one.”

“And over here, he’s working with this timeline’s Nina Sharp, running one of the most complex biomed programs we’ve ever heard of as a footnote to the multiverse experiments. Project management on a literally world-spanning scale.” He leaned back, absorbed in evidence reports highlighted in amber and red. “And almost no evidence any of this was taking place for, for years.” Lee was silent for a long moment. “We got lucky when we captured Nina Sharp, but the more I think about this, the more I really don’t like Jones running silent. Given his history, I’m worried how he might celebrate his re-appearance.”

“Astrid can run any tangible hypothesis we can tie to facts, but she can’t run lack of evidence,” Olivia said, frustrated. “It’s like the Chung case on your side... the hand of God, ‘tears of Ra’ guy?” she clarified. Lee nodded slightly, listening. “He made this compound that was some sort of paradox. To find Jones, it sounds we’d have to solve a similar paradox. We need to know what we’re looking for before we can look for what we need to know.”

Lee sighed slightly. “I wish–”

Olivia cocked her head at a familiar meep-beep, meep-beep. “Is that our cue?” Lee asked, watching her closely.

She held up a hand, listening for the shift in the monitor room’s low-voiced conversations.

“Anomalous energy signature detected,” one of the techs called out, over the whooping alarm. “Local… Manhatan. Confirmed, breach in Manhatan.” Olivia caught Lee’s eye, nodded sharply as she pushed away from the desk. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Aguilar emerge from her office as she tapped her earcuff off.

“Dunham. Where’s Francis?” she snapped.

Olivia looked at Lee. “Tea run,” he said. “Not a good time?”

Aguilar’s mouth twisted with lively gallows humor. “The Army task force at the Sharp residence tripped something that triggered a level one alert. The task force CO swears they’ve got it under control, but we’ve heard that before. I want our people on the scene before we have another Boston. Take Jessup and Lee, Hagen’s stuck on the Nixon Parkway.”

“Ma’am,” they said in chorus, scrambling for the elevator just as Charlie stepped out, balancing several take-out cups.

“Got the alert on the way back. What’s it this time?” he asked, with a resigned air.

Olivia flashed him a bright smile. “Someone ordered a wake-up call downtown.” She grabbed his shoulders, steered him right back into the elevator as Lee appropriated and set aside the other agents’ to-go orders. “Finish yours in the car, old man.”

***

“All right folks,” Charlie shouted hoarsely as the response team piled into the van, “first reports indicate an event on the 14th floor of a residential building at 5th Avenue and 119th Street. Someone triggered a device with the usual effects: blue flash, gravitational anomalies.”

“Is that Army-speak for ‘our guys floated to the ceiling?’ ” Olivia asked, half-seriously.

Charlie shrugged. “Could be a crusher – there’s been a casualty already.” He continued, “the officer in charge is a Captain Owens. Usual teams are responding from the NYPD and fire departments, just in case we need backup. Aguilar’s getting custody of the scene worked out.” Charlie looked around the van, made eye contact with each team member. “Other than the Army team, we’ve worked with all these people before, let’s act like it. Dunham will lead the evaluation team, I’ll be Fringe’s smiling face on the street with Jessup.” That got a few snickers from the tactical squad. “Agent Lee–” Lee looked up from a tablet, over his glasses “–is on science and risk reports. Lee says to move, you move.”

Olivia nodded thoughtfully. Putting their greenest agent in the technical hot seat wasn’t a great compromise, but leaving Lee out with the secondary teams, mixing the other agency personnel who had worked with her Lincoln, invited different problems.

God, she hated politics. She wished the Secretary’s office would clear Lee already and end this, this waiting. Olivia chewed on her lip, tried to redirect her restlessness into last-minute equipment checks.

She wasn’t the only person with nerves. Charlie fiddled with an injector as Lee read off the vital stats, attention darting between spiky, erratic graphs. “Numbers are showing limited molecular dissolution, no failure… yet. Air quality’s good, no oxygen needed.” On both crowded benches, hands that had started reaching for bottled air relaxed.

“You heard the man,” Charlie said as he slipped the injector back into a pocket. “This is a little one, if we handle it right. But we don’t know what else Sharp’s got in there that might accelerate the breach, and we don’t know what else the Green Berets might’ve tripped over on the scene. Be polite, but don’t let their people get in the way of doing our job.” He popped the door and jumped out, Olivia hard on his heels.

NYPD had beaten them to the event. Men and women in Army BDUs worked under the rapid direction of civilian police, barricading the wide street and pushing back a milling crowd as the Fringe Division personnel roared in.

“Who’s in charge of the scene?” Charlie shouted, squinting into the morning sun.

“Over here,” a competent-looking woman in her thirties called out. “Captain Janet Owens, Special Forces.”

“Charlie Francis, Fringe Division. And my partner, Agent Dunham. How’d your casualty happen, and where’s your event witnesses?”

“Initial report was that Sergeant Vaschenko entered apartment 1441 with his team and jostled some kind of device on a coffee table, which exploded. The team was affected by reduced gravity and sporadic reorientation.” Owens nodded in the direction of several bloodied and shaken-looking young men and women huddled near an Army transport. “He was thrown against the ceiling–” Olivia and Charlie glanced at each other “–causing ultimately fatal injuries. His CO and the rest of his team are being held for medical evaluation.”

“We’ve got some field medics with specialized experience, they can look your people over if you want,” Charlie said. “Livvy, anything urgent?”

She shook her head. “Can you question his team?” she asked, shifting from foot to foot. “We should get Lee and the response team upstairs, see if this is proliferating.”

Charlie nodded.

“No one’s reported any other effects, other than the first gravity shifts,” Owens added. Owens’ dark face drew into a puzzled frown as she looked past them. Olivia glanced back and followed Owens’ sightline to Lee, in conference with Jessup and the other agents. “Good luck, Agent Dunham.”

“Thanks,” Olivia replied, and flashed a polite smile at the other woman before she jogged back to Lee’s side. “Got the field kit? We’re going up.”

***

“Remind me why we’re taking the stairs?” Lee huffed, somewhere around the tenth floor.

“What, not up for a little exercise?” Olivia said, teasingly.

“I want to the gym this morning. Today’s fitness plan didn’t include a second round of weightlifting,” he said, hefting the science field kit for emphasis.

”Well, on one of my first responses in Fringe, we had a class two vortex on the 64th floor of the Chrysler building. The first response team thought they could take the elevator.” She shook her head. “The debris thrown out by the vortex ripped through the primary and backup cables.”

Lee shifted the kit to his other hand as they kept climbing. “Failsafes didn’t stop the elevator?”

“Nope. Stage four degradation, something wrong with fundamental forces. Linc said it was an elegant fuckup. We ambered three offices, tried to call the elevator, and that’s when we found the first team.” Linc had lost his dinner while Charlie held his head out of the mess. “Fourteenth floor, here we are.” She pushed open the heavy fire door.

A bar of amber sunlight was flung across the hall, ending at the half-open door of 1441. Olivia looked at Lee; Lee looked back at her. She listened closely, frowning. Was someone – a looter, or a confused civilian – in Nina Sharp’s apartment?

It was unlikely, but just in case… Olivia met Lee’s eyes as she put a finger to her lips. He nodded, and dropped behind her as he swapped the decohesion detector to his left hand, using it to brace his service weapon in the right hand. The public image of Fringe Division, Olivia thought wryly, science and guns. Agent Lee might play it a little more buttoned-down than her Lincoln, but on him it looked pretty good. She gestured for the rest of the team to stick tight in the stairs. She slid into the hall ahead of Lee and pushed the apartment door wider as silently as possible.

This side’s Nina Sharp was a woman who valued silence. A hardwood foyer was covered with a boldly patterned rug in the aggressively modern style the other side’s Nina also favored. Soundproofing muted New York’s ever-present traffic to a distant hum. The little foyer opened to a sunny living room, with a kitchen to her right. Olivia’s boots sank deep into muffling carpet with each step. She drifted toward the kitchen, half-sensed Lee pushing into the living room as she cleared the kitchen.

“What the–” Lee shouted hoarsely, as a near-identical voice snapped, “FBI, on the floor.”

Olivia twisted back toward the foyer and around the corner as Lee replied to himself, “The FBI doesn’t exist over here. You know that, right?”

She blinked. Lincoln Lee was holding himself at gunpoint, a mirror image marred by one’s glasses and the other’s three-day stubble. An upended, blast-scorched coffee table and fragments of what might have been a briefcase bomb, the heaviest components stuck at improbable angles in the ceiling and upper walls, completed the tableau.

Lee thumbed the safety off. “Fringe Division, on the floor.” He didn’t move as he asked Olivia, “How hard do you think it would be for one of the shapeshifters to drop off the map?”

She swallowed as she brought up her own service weapon. Aimed for the double’s heart, just a little over from the last place she’d laid hands on her Lincoln.

“Another–” the double’s face was a study in contrasts as his weapon dropped out of position. Incredulous was winning out. “Did you– wait. Liv, I can explain.”

She didn’t move, hands steadied by cold, furious purpose. Olivia focused on her target, avoiding his eyes. “If you really are Lincoln Lee, prove it. Because if you’re not, if you’ve been walking around wearing my best friend’s face for the last two months, I promise you will not leave this room alive.”