Most people work their way up. They follow the preset paths of structural design. Any ordinary person was likely to enter through the front door, on the first floor, provided it was either unlocked or they had a key. If the wards were still functional, Salvador wouldn't have had this chance to break the codes of the norm.

After hours that could have been days, he broke off the futile contest he was having with the Eye and rose to his feet. He uncoiled from his crouch with a languid stretch that made all nineteen spikes lining his spine crackle and pop at their joints. A messenger running by with an important missive to deliver glanced up from the street below and saw a man putting one foot forward and stepping out. The messenger stopped dead in his tracks, sucked in a deep breath, and was fully prepared to yell out and up to the man not to jump, but when he blinked he realized there really wasn't anyone there after all. "Uh. Wow, I really need to lay off the caffeine," he told himself, shook his head, and then went about his business.

Salvador took one step and his boot did not land on empty air. He did not tumble and fall to his three story demise. He took one step and his boot landed on hardwood instead. One step took him from the concrete ledge of the neighboring building's roof to be standing on two-by-six planks of aged hardwood, sanded and rubbed to a soft sheen, instead.

A haze of red flickered and faded out of his vision around him. It was the only color he saw, tapering off in a blink to expose the clearer present grayscale of the here and now. Here he stood in the center of Fio's fourth floor apartment. Here he arrived in a single step instead of the dozens it would have taken him from the ground level up. Here, once, there sat a cello. He remembered; it was the one certain and solid thing he had been able to pick out of the haze he had walked through weeks before. It wasn't there now, and he wondered, vaguely, if it was even as important now as it had been then.

At least one intruder had touched that cello. Closing his eyes, he recalled the flickering vision of fingers caressing the wood. In that vision the room was clouded in that constant haze of red. The fingers pulled upward along the belly, near the strings, and then away. The arm those fingers belonged to was dark, shrouded in fabric, and drifted backward. The feet below walked backward across that one small section blanketed by a rug.

"In the Between places, rain falls up instead of down."

Upon that recollection of something he had once told Sin, he opened his eyes and gave up on that memory. Looking around the room he realized why it had been such a taxing evening the night he had tried. "Might not be so much interference this time," he mused. Nobody else had any opinion on the matter; he was the only one there. The last time there had been other bodies clouding up the history he had tried walking through. There had been too much, as he had said, the only words he could form clearly from the chaos he had witnessed.

"There's still too much," he realized, looking around the apartment. The air was filled with the echo of music. A dim and dull soundtrack of melancholy that followed him as he prowled cautiously around the room. The closer he got to the book shelves, further from the piano, the more that noise was replaced by the sound of rustling paper. He paused to admire Fio's literary collection, but he did not dare touch any of them.

Turning his head, there he saw the bed. Squinting hard at its framework he new at once it was not a mattress he'd ever be comfortable sleeping on himself, but for some reason it made him smile. "At least he can't touch her when she's sleeping here," he quietly told the walls.

The open door to the closeted privy caught the corner of his eye next. Drifting away from the small living space, he prowled into that closed off section of the room and took a moment to admire the floral patterns painted on the claw foot bathtub. A compulsion took over his hand and he reached out to caress the porcelain edges with his fingertips. The basin had been empty a second before, but now in a blink he saw the tub was full. Water was crawling up into the mouth of the faucet and the level was steadily receding.

"...rain falls up instead of down."

Nude legs stood beside him, watching the water retreat back into its pipes with him. Someone's hand was pulling ripples up and out of the surface. The hand drifted backward along with its arm. The rustle of some fabric sifted in under the burble of the water. Maybe it was silk, a robe, possibly even cotton, but when he turned his head to see there was nothing there. The sound was gone. Silence filled the studio's apartment again, all because his fingers had lifted off the edge of the tub. Watching Fio bathe in reverse was not what he was looking for anyway, as tempting as it may have been. He moved on.

Lifting his hands off the armrests, Salvador let the present slide in slowly back around him. His palms itched, and he curled his fingers in to scratch them with his nails. That wasn't enough, though. He rubbed them against his thighs and then scrubbed them over his face, groaning. He waited several minutes before daring to open his eyes.

This one room had so much history. It was likely that it had more history than any of the other three levels of the studio combined. Lived-in was an understatement. Looking around the room in its present state of longing and silence smothered him with a sense of melancholy. This was Fionna's home, her sanctuary; she belonged here and they had taken her away.

Maybe it was more precise to say that they had chased her out. Not them, himself and Sin, Ali and Skid. The other ones, those wisps and shadows who had no names but one. Though they were all at fault. Michael and the unknown ghosts had instilled the panic that caused those who cared for her to remove her from her sanctuary. None of this sat well with Salvador.

He had far too many questions to contend with, though now he knew the answer to one. That one singular ghost who haunted her walls the most had a name. It didn't match the name printed in a child's bold scrawl on the inside cover of that prayer book. Though now perhaps he could put some perspective on it. All the priests he had ever known did not carry the same names they had been born with. The priests he knew, when they gave themselves to God, took on new names and new identities. They stopped being who they once were and became someone else entirely. They were reborn as servants of their Lord.

That one singular ghost was the important one of them all. He could name that one and connect to it in the sequences of history that permeated the studio. Who the others were, he couldn't say. At least not immediately.

It wasn't getting any darker outside than it had been when he first arrived. What had been weeks to months to hours in his previous vision had only been a short few moments in time in the present. What was then was not that which was now. The present carried on at a fixed rate. The tick, tick, tick of an analogue clock, somewhere, continued counting the seconds. He had all the time in the world to work with. All that is and all that was.

He knew what this was going to do to him, and he didn't like it, but he couldn't think of any other options. Steeling himself, Salvador took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and removed his boots. His bare feet hovered over the rug. He was reluctant to put them down, but on the exhale he did.

A thousand images hit his eyes. A thousand voices assaulted his ears. He sucked back a sharp gasp and closed his eyes against the overlap of the here and now versus the then. One by one he sorted through the hours, until they became days, and back farther still into weeks. The reel zipped through the last event he had concentrated on, where Fionna had confessed to the creation of a childe. Those ghosts he removed from the equation one at a time.

Sin out. Ali out. Skid out. Himself out. Fionna out.

Until all that remained were floating pieces of those who didn't belong. There was the one and there were the many. The one could wait. Fio's question still remained dominant in his mind. "Who are the other men who were in here? And what were they looking for?" When he found him, he brought the spinning sequences to a halt and found himself staring at a scene on pause.

Salvador pushed up out of his chair and crept cautiously on bare feet toward a trio of trespassers whose life had been brought to a standstill. There was an undercurrent of red haze that his ankles sifted through as he moved. This one color was a constant backdrop to the three dimensional imagery he passed through.

There were three of them. They were all dressed in nondescript clothes, apparel that made them impossible to pick out from any other random Joe or Jane who wandered the City streets on any given day. They could have been anyone. Any old mundane nameless body with unremarkable features and boring personalities. They were frozen in time and Salvador circled around them, one by one.

Beside the broken window stood one. He was the tallest of the three, a good three inches over Salvador's height. His hair was neatly clipped like all the rest of them, a lighter shade that may have made him blonde. Salvador couldn't tell, to him the color was only a dull and dingy gray that was rather close to white. This one had a sharp, chiseled face with sunken in cheeks and eyes. This one he decided to name Skull, because he could very nearly see that part of the skeleton through his taught flesh.

The other two were rummaging through separate areas of the main room. Or at least, they were caught suspended in the act of rummaging, from his perspective. One of them was bent over the piano peering in, as if maybe he, at the time, thought he would find a hiding space amidst the wires. Since he was bent over, Salvador couldn't tell how much taller or shorter he was than him, but he had a more portly figure underneath his clothes that suggested the man had an insatiable sweet tooth. Leaning in close enough and sniffing this ghost's mouth, he could almost pick up the memory scent of foul breath. This one he decided to name Sugar.

The last was a lean and wiry young man with shrewd, thin eyes. This one was stuck in a kneeling position, low to the ground and peering under Fio's bed. He was probably the only one of the three who could have fit under there. Salvador crouched down beside him for a closer look, and on this one he more clearly saw the one identifying object that gave them all away. Stuck in this position, a pendant on a thin silver chain was dangling from his neck and teasing at the floorboards. When he saw that symbol, Salvador frowned.

"That damned church," he muttered to the past. These men didn't hear him, because he wasn't actually there. This was then, not now. He hadn't been there. He wasn't now. He was still just an observer and nothing more. Rising up out of his crouch, he decided to name the last one. As with the other two, it was just for reference. "We'll call you Louse."

He didn't expect to hear any of these men give out their real names in conversation. Though if they did he was sure to remember them better than anyone he had ever met before. He always remembered his enemies. Forgetting them was a costly mistake.

Now that he had the answer to the first question, it was time to figure out the answer to the second. Who they were, now he knew, were either members or followers of the E.C.C. The church, any church. The one place he belonged least of all. Nor did they belong here, outside their sanctified walls. What were they searching for?

Salvador stepped back away from the one he named Louse. He crept lightly through the frozen scene, back to the center of the room. A little further back until he was in the perfect vantage point to watch all three men at once. Once he was certain he in the best viewing location, he pushed those mental buttons to allow time to resume its course.

Time started moving again. The room was still dark, but the pale light slipping in through the windows suggested the moon was at a different phase. He dropped in on the event mid-conversation. The voice he heard first was closest; it belonged to Sugar.

"--woman had anything to do with it?"

Across the room, Louse answered him with a snort before shoving himself further under the bed. His voice was muffled. "Certain enough. We wouldn't be here if he wasn't." He was shoving boxes and nick-knacks out from under the bed, rummaging through them.

Sugar pulled himself out of the piano and headed over to a collection of other boxes near the easel. He knelt down to begin searching through those. "How do we even know what we're looking for? Does he really think she left a diary or some notes that confess her sins?"

"We're looking for the prayer chain too," Louse reminded him. "And that blasted key he lost."

"Don't know how he expects us to find a key in this mess," Sugar complained. The other man grunted with no further comment, and the one standing by the window said nothing. They continued the rest of their search in silence.

At least, as far as Salvador was concerned, the rest of it didn't matter. He had picked the perfect time to replay and listen in on the past conversation. This choice little tidbit of conversation he picked up on made him smile wickedly. He slipped a hand into his pocket and brushed his fingers against the bow and bit of a tiny little object he kept hidden there.

Another memory entirely infiltrated the past scene he was caught in, and he closed his eyes to concentrate on that one for a moment.

"What've you got there?" Sin asked.

"Mm? Oh. Nothing," Sal replied. He slipped the key into the grooves of his armor and rose, turning to await further instructions.

A muffled thump lured him out of that overlap trance. When he opened his eyes again, the apartment was empty. The ghosts were gone but the thin red haze still ebbed and flowed around him. There was a book laying on the floor in the middle of the room. He blinked and it was no longer there. Time jumped out of sequence, and he wasn't sure when he was now. The soles of his feet continued to soak in the studio's history.

There were so many trails to follow, illuminated ribbons of energy that marked the paths a living thing had traveled. Salvador turned and saw a shadow slithering down the ladder that lead to the third floor, swallowing up its own trail. This time he followed it.

This was the ghost who was more important than the rest. Now he knew. Months after his initial attempt to tap into the history of the studio he finally found some answers. If only he had been as aware then as he was now.

Unlike those three from the church, this one moved with certainty. Every step was slow and meticulous, not cautious and erratic like those that didn't belong. From what he could See, this one looked as if he belonged here. Or at the very least, he behaved in a way that suggested he believed himself to be a part of this world. Fio's world. Her life and her sanctuary. This one ghost believed he belonged here.

He knew the ins and the outs, though he never came through the door, as far back as he could See. Down and down and down his trail spiraled and twisted. Deep down into the cement casings of basement walls and sewer grates. Salvador prowled the paths on bare feet and let himself sink into the ghost's skin. He didn't like it. This was an entity whose remnants of memory made his skin crawl.

"What was his name, Fionna?"

"Michael. He was the Triene Prelate for the Council. He... he was sent here to open the Palais for them."

Sighing out of that intermingling memory, he put his forearm against the wall and leaned. By now he was regretting having left his boots upstairs. A swirling flood of visions kept clawing into the soles of his feet and trickling across his eyes. He struggled to blot them out.

"Who was he?" he asked the hard, cold walls. That much he already knew, but that wasn't the question he had meant to ask. That wasn't the thought tumbling through the back of his mind. The real question was, "Who was he to you, hermosa? How did you meet?" Then he had to ask himself if he was even going to find those answers locked within these walls.

He knew so few things. From this point, down here in the cold and the damp, is how the man got inside most often. The residue was thickest here. Something he knew he had to report to the others. If they wanted to keep him out, they could block the way. That wasn't Salvador's job. Hell, he wasn't even sure what his job was here. He certainly wasn't getting paid for this investigation. Nobody had asked him to come back and snoop around again. "So why are you here?" he asked himself.

Himself had an answer. Your stupid curiosity's got the best of you again. He scowled, and sighed, then turned to sway and shuffle his way back upstairs. The air was too thick down here, too smothering, and he was taxing his reserves.

Maybe it was best to take a break, come back another time.

The universe is not a clockwork creation, and chaos is necessary.

The only evidence left that a man had hung from the Studio's Eye were the four spikes embedded in the wall. The Watch had come and gone, the blood had been washed away. Blood never washes away.

"Michael staked a man to the wall that the Eye is painted on, a few days ago." Ali tipped a nod toward it. "He wrote the word 'Fidelis' in the man's blood, above it. Lucien Mallorek and I got him down and called the Watch. We've not heard anything about it since."

The stumps of the stakes were still visible, just, given the streetlight and the angle. Salvador looked in the direction indicated, slowly uncoiled from his seat on the next lowest step to stand up. Without a word, he drifted toward the Eye, walking slowly.

It was pertinent to the dream Ali told him about. Nightmares. Ali had told him he was having nightmares. But that wasn't what drew Salvador to the Eye. The fact alone that Michael had strung someone up there was enough. Ali didn't call him back. Instead, he followed after.

When Salvador reached the wall the Eye was painted on he paused to look upon it with a sort of quiet reverence. Though, he squinted hard at the blend of colors he could never see. He lifted his hand and dared not touch it, not yet, but it was clear he was taking it into serious consideration. His fingertips hovered just over the bricks and the mortar, mere centimeters away.

"Be careful," Ali warned, likely unheard, though hardly uncaring. "It was...it was bad. It gave me the nightmare."

"I don't have nightmares," Salvador murmured. "They're only dreams." A blessing and a curse. Never to wake up sweating and screaming, though oftentimes wanting to desperately because it was appropriate, but he couldn't. Closing his eyes, he touched his hand cautiously to the wall and submitted to the visions that were sure to come.

Ali's voice trickled in from a distance. "That's not what I meant, Salvador, and you know it." The present world of the here and now ceased to exist entirely.

The insides of his closed eyelids became the projection screen. The reel ticked backward in reverse. What he Saw was a panoramic view of the street just before the Eye, living events playing in constant rewind.

There he was, his ghost standing there with his hand on the wall. Though his eyes were closed, the lashes and the lids fluttered instantly. Mere slits showing the white sclera behind them as his eyes rolled under the shutter. His head lolled back, but his hand seemed glued to the wall. His stance was unsteady. How he held on was sheer force of will, or a sudden forgetfulness that he possessed a material body.

Ali was standing in front of him, watching his face. He turned a ninety-degree arc of backward steps to stand at an angle beside him and said, "Ti wonk uoy dna, Rodavlas, tneam I tahw ton s'taht."

Salvador watched his own ghost pull his hand away from the wall, open his eyes, and murmur, "Smeard ylno er'yeht. Seramthgin evah t'nod I."

Stop, he thought. The vision paused. A scene frozen in time. Continue, he thought. "Eramthgin eht me--" Faster. Then the voices were intelligible, completely. They were a slur of buzzing noise as two ghosts raced in reverse down the street. He watched himself zip away in backward stepping haste, Ali ahead of him, and the pair removing themselves from the scene.

There were other ghosts, unimportant ghosts. Wisps of traffic that flickered in and out of the scene in a rapidly chaotic strobe effect. They were there. Then not. Then there again. Some standing here. Some standing feet away. Never in the exact same spot as another at any given time. Flickering in and out of focus on a burning reel. The moon chased the sun into the east in the moment of a blink, down the horizon. Once, twice, three times before he saw a blip of something worth pausing on. Stop.

Two ladders were frozen flush against the wall of the Eye. There a man hung crucified. The same iron spikes had been hammered through the meat of his palms, his ankles. The stretch of his repose was honorific of Christ on the Cross, though a morbid tribute to be seen on this one piece of frozen film.

Two men stood frozen on the ladders, one man to either side. They were stuck in time like manequins in a storefront window for a time. These are faces he recognizes. Ali is leaning over the top of his ladder, eyes narrowed as he gets a closer look at the dead man hanging on the wall. Lucien Mallorek is balanced standing at the base of his own ladder with a pair of bolt cutters in one hand, looking up. Ali's mouth is hanging open, frozen forever mid conversation. Lucien's face is stuck with a serious expression. Play forward.

"--need the crowbar after all," Ali is saying. "Have you ever noticed that no one seems inclined to talk their differences out, in this place? Come up the other side and pass me the cutters, if you would, sir."

Lucien nods and starts to climb up his ladder with the cutters, but he stops midway to offer a suggestion while surrendering the tools to the Egyptian. "Feet first."

"No...I'll get this arm, then I'll hold him and you do the other arm and his feet. I can carry him down," Ali counters.

"Alright," the Barrister answers succinctly, climbing the rest of the way up the ladder to the man's outstretched arm.

The Eye -- Salvador -- watched on as the two men struggled together to haul the victim down. An elderly gentleman, mostly naked. Completely nude but for a swath of cloth wrapped around his waist. A strange sort of generous modesty for Michael to award a corpse. Once Lucien cuts the spikes, wrenches his feet and hands free, Ali gets his arms around him to ease the body down.

"Sinjin said," Ali remarks as he slowly eases down the ladder with the body, "that he thought that Michael was doing what he did...to get at him." His boot's toe finds solid ground; he lays the dead man down and looks him over. "And at Salvador. I don't know why he thought that, or what this poor bastard would have to do with Sinjin. You haven't any idea who he is?"

The barrister's dour expression had not changed this entire time, since the moment he caught sight of the crucified man. "To get at Sin and Sal?" he asked.

"I...there were some temporary tattoos that Missie found in a box on the bar with her name on them." Ali blinks, once, as if stricken by a sudden revelation, a painful one. "They had iron shavings in them. Salvador is half-fae, and when Missie put the tattoos on him...things went badly for him."

Skip, he thought. This information was irrelevant. Though he absorbed every second in time. He could sort through them later. The memories. No matter what speed he viewed them in, they were always there. Would always be there. Until he figured out how to be rid of them.

The reel moved in fast forward. Ali and Lucien together moved in jerky movements, flipping and turning the corpse from its back to its side. Examining the-- Stop.

The skin is broken at the back of the man's head, but not from a pointed instrument. Ali is holding the flat of his hand against the damage, draws it away, brings it back. "The angle's strange," he remarks. Lucien is only watching the Egyptian while he speculates. "As if he were bent over. Blunt instrument. Hard to say what around the swelling." He settles the man onto his back once more, and sits back on a heel. His hands dangle loosely from the other updrawn knee.

"Kneeling in prayer?" The Barrister throws that suggestion out there quietly, with a nod back to the note of the victim's crime.

"Possibly so," says Ali. Noticing Lucien's scrutiny, he adds, "Fidelis." He takes one of the man's hands--it's a bit of work, as the body's beginning to stiffen up--and considers his fingernails. "Faithfulness?"

Further speculations about the old man's identity continued. Salvador knew neither of them were going to provide the answers he was looking for. These were all merely speculations. Stop, he thought. The scene froze again. Backtrack. "Tseirp rehtona? Sey," the Barrister is saying. Faster.

Once again the two men jerked and twitched rapidly. Ali's hand, for a fraction of a second, looked as if it were the instrument that had cut into the back fo the dead man's head. They hoisted him back up, scrambled up their ladders like squirrels up trees. Limbs were shoved back onto the broken ends of the spikes, and the bolt cutter glued them back on. Faster.

Ali vanished with a ladder, reappeared, vanished again with the other, then reappeared again. Lucien stood swaying like a monkey standing high in a tree. Their mouths moved in blurs until the Barrister rushed off in backward steps and vanished from the scene. Ali joined him in vanishing in a blink after. The moon chased the sun back into the east again, and it was dark.

A tall figure was rocking and swaying in backward steps into the scene with the corpse hanging crucified on the wall of the Eye. He moved faster than blinks. There he was standing, then suddenly perched on the wall over the jerking body like a spider on a fly. Clinging to the painted brickface like he had no notion of gravity at all.

Blood rushed into the victim's ribs with the hand that plunged into them. A hammer head ripped spikes out of ankles and hands. The spider and his fly dropped away from the wall and scurried backward down the street. The tall man pushing the corpse to be away from the scene. Stop. They stood in forever in time this way. The tall man grasping a limb, one leg extended forward in frozen stride. The body sprawled limp in his shadow.

Play forward, Salvador thought, and he alone stood witness. Ali had been right about this much, the vision was horrifically overwhelming.

He could See it. He could Feel it. Etched into every stone. More than what he expected. There was more than just the crucifixation of an old rancher. More than the blood absorbed by porose brick and mortar. It was nearly like walking through Fio's studio all over again. Salvador wavered, swayed like a drunkard.

With a sucked back sharp breath and then a moan, his hand fell away from the wall of the Eye, and he crumpled. Everything went black as the reel burned itself out into an inky nothingness. His eyelids became eyelids again and the here and now flooded back in like the irritating buzz of a radio station that refused to tune itself in.

The next voice he heard trickling in from the distance was hers, "Is he okay?"


_________________________________________________
(Adapdation mostly from live events, with thanks to Lucky Duck, Ali al Amat, FioHelston and Michael Maleficio.)