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It was an odd hour to be out.

It was an odd hour for anyone to be out, as evidenced by the deserted training fields as Taym made a second lap, but it was odd for Taym because it was an hour later than he was accustomed to. His schedule had been destroyed of late, sleeping more than he was wont after bone-weary crawling into bed after a day of manual labor, only to be woken up abruptly and at strange times in the teeth of one of the same few nightmares: a black-crystal strike against his shield that made Fiona recoil; a gunshot; or the older nightmares of empty cribs and a tangle of frail paint-flecked limbs blue-tinged behind a dumpster; of being routed from bathroom after bathroom just as he found a vein.

Tonight--this morning--it had been what he'd come to think of as The Skinning Dream, caps inclusive: the bloodless violence enacted on a body that was and was not his, a wordless scream in a voice that also was and was not his own.

It was always ill-advised to roam the Island grounds in less than a full state of awareness, but it was the training grounds, and Taym's mind was elsewhere, warring between his usual avoidance and the last remnants of the nightmare and the pang-thought of how much easier it would have been if he could have woken up not alone. And he had, besides, been lately channeling all the self-destructive energies that he could no longer put into active acts of starvation into other types of over-exertion, into bodily punishment that try as he might he could not seem to avoid. He ran until his ribs ached, and he was cresting up to the point of having to stop now. Ever since the Sahara conscious breathing had become a pursuit, a hobby. He didn't realize that he wasn't alone. He didn't realize anything at all, chasing his thoughts in circles amid the ragged, strained one-two-three of counting each inhale and exhale.

It was fortunate for Taym that the adage "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" had some measure of truth in it, because he found himself flung to the ground instantly, taken completely off his guard. It was less fortunate that it was only a measure of truth, as the breath was instantly knocked out of his lungs.

A couple of months ago this would have been a minor setback, a split-second hesitation before he reached out to retaliate. Now, however, it was marked with the onset of sudden irrational panic, Fiona barking urgent orders and reminders that this was normal, that it was temporary, that a second gulping inhale would reward him with air, all of it gone unheard and unheeded and swept up in a dreamlike fever of terror that seemed to last for several minutes.

The oxygen of a second panicked inhale slammed into him painfully, deliriously, beautifully painfully, and with it time shifted back into the proper speed, and reality sank its teeth back in: location training fields, problem attacker, solution violence. The hallucinatory panic had lasted perhaps a second, and rather than try and regain his feet under what his instincts told him would be an inevitable onslaught of blows, a bony, surprisingly-strong hand snapped out with snake-strike speed towards Ripley's ankle to try and trip him up and drag him down, instead, already surging to his knees as he did so.

And meanwhile, as his body and his weapon (unsummoned, but present) reacted, his brain lagged behind, processing Ripley's anger with bewilderment, too slowly for him to ask him what the ******** he meant.

Maybe you should ********' answer him, sir, said Fiona, and it was much the fact that she was advocating a course of non-violence (startling) as it was the cursing (very startling) that jarred him out of the red-haze rage that had descended at the gall of the man to b***h slap him instead of even delivering a decent punch.

Her warning didn't come fast enough for him to avert course, and so Ripley would find himself on the receiving end of what Taym considered to be an instructive blow, all knuckles and closed fists driven mercilessly into his gut as if to say: this is how you fight like a man.

"Tell me what the ever loving <********> you're talking about," he barked, "and I will. Are you ******** insane?"

And it was that, and not the punch, that had Taym reeling backwards, even though it was the punch that had him instinctively reaching for the blood that wasn't there but felt like it ought to be from the fog of pain.

He fumbled back a few steps, fighting now to escape instead of retaliate, a sudden, raw, sincere panic settling into his eyes. "Joy? Hope?" A reeling terror: "Oh god, not Grace. What happened to them? I thought they were safe now."

If he was acting, he was doing a good job of it, visibly distraught and clearly unconcerned with getting another fist to the teeth if it meant answers--although, then again, Taym had a reputation for being a good liar.

He'd caught the first one full on, and he'd barely processed Ripley's ensuing words in the second crest of panic that came of having the wind knocked out of him. This was, thought some distant, depersonalized, rational part of him, something he was going to have to work on. The terror of another was too much, and he scrambled back again, sucking in a lungful of air between his teeth, frantic as the pieces fell into place.

"Golem," he managed, sick. "Can prove it. Tell me you put it in the report. Tell me you told someone it was there." Desperate, he yanked down the edge of his high collar, craned his neck upwards to display the vivid scar that the ones he'd met at the hotel hadn't had. It was, appropriately, a gesture almost identical to a cornered dog showing its throat, bested.

"Ask Life labs. Ask Stephen. Ask J--ask Edith." And then, desperately: "Did it summon?" This was less an opportunity to prove himself and more a sudden panicked thought.

Taym, very suddenly, sat down on the ground in such a way that suggested his knees had gone watery.

"Did it really kill a--a ********' kid?" he asked, abruptly looking and sounding as though he were dangerously near tears. He did not look even remotely like the scowling, prowling tomcat of a man who stalked down the hallways like he was on a perpetual mission; the same man who had a sort of long-practiced, faux James Dean lean in doorways when he smoked. No one had ever looked less self-assured than Taym did right now, his distress naked. "A couple of them tried--Jesus ******** Christ, how many of them are there?" This, clearly, wasn't to Ripley at all. And then, brokenly, as though it were his fault after all, even though he had just gotten done proclaiming his innocence: "I'm so ******** sorry."

His face contorted with grief, and his answer was more a plea: "I didn't know. When I--when I saw them they were--like, frail little things, they were like our golems, they could barely talk and they ran away if you--so much as looked at them threateningly. Just decoys. I don't know what happened," he said. If Ripley were still expecting an attack, Taym clearly wasn't, or else he just didn't care. His attention was anywhere but Ripley.

And this had been what Taym had crusaded for, hadn't it? Common knowledge. A spread of information. And here he was, finding out that his inability to practice what he preached had resulted in the death of a civilian, and a teenager no less. Fiona offered up heavy doses of rationalization: you didn't know how far they'd gotten and you couldn't have controlled this and this is his fault, sir, not yours, but not even the novelty of Fiona blaming someone else rather than Taym for a catastrophe was not enough to alleviate his guilt. He knew that she said these things only partially from conviction, and the rest of it from fear of what he did when his conscience weighed heavy.

He found himself reaching for his phone, although his hands were shaking violently. "I didn't know," he repeated, and there was a note of pleading in it. He could not bring himself to say you are right, I shouldn't have trusted this broken Organization to tell everyone important things, I should have done this myself, and because of it someone has died. That was only a thought to push aside, not for later but for calculated, permanent avoidance, but in the meantime some steps needed to be taken, and the first was information.