Ryan stared at himself, at his double, and knew what the grief meant. Even as his Stef gently hugged him, smearing his blood onto her uniform, the man standing across from him had only loneliness and a burial in his future. ‘Take her home,’ his double said, the words evident, even without sound. ‘You-’ he took a step forward, fading as the dimensional cracks continued to heal themselves. It had been…too much. An indulgence that he should have ignored – this type of operation was too far outside of her current skills as a recruit, but she had asked, and- He put a hand on her head, and brushed away…

The owner of the rather impressive scream was still fighting against whoever was causing him pain when they reintegrated. Curiously, Ryan hadn’t shifted them directly into the fray – instead, they were a few metres back from two fighting men, hidden from view by a couple of industrial bins. Stef looked down to her hand as Ryan pressed something small and hard into it – a headset, which she dutifully slipped into her ear. ‘On a night like tonight,’ he said, the sound only coming through her headset, rather than from his voicebox and mouth. ‘It never hurts to be careful. Too many would take advantage of a recruit’s –…

There was change from without and change from within. Both were valid, and both expressed themselves in different ways. Both meshed in an infinite feedback loop. One causing the other which rolled and twisted and- She still recognised the person in the mirror. Stef splashed her face again, dried off with a required towel, then required a fresh uniform. On her first morning in the Agency, she’d hidden in the bathroom. She’d been unable and unwilling to face how things were supposed to go – but Ryan had adjusted for her, simply throwing her at Curt instead of insisting that she meet an overwhelming number of new people all at…