James’s first impression was that someone was moving in. Or maybe out. Either way, the apartment was in a very messy state of transition. Stacks of boxes filled the entrance area, and they had to squeeze past them in order to get to the middle of what he quickly realized was a kitchen.

“Is this entire apartment just storage?” Jessamyn asked as she looked around the small space. 

She was right. There was nothing to indicate that anyone lived or was planning to live here. While the assortment of storage containers might hold household items, there was no furniture to speak of. Which wasn’t James’s experience based on years of moving from crappy apartment to crappy apartment. When he and Graham had moved a few months ago, there had been a sofa and beds to consider. But here there were just piles of various sized storage boxes.

“This is ridiculous,” Tim said, looking around at the mess surrounding them in the kitchen alone. “Why would they buy an apartment in a busy neighborhood and just use it for storage?”

“Are they going to use a fucking self-storage unit?” Bradley snapped as he popped the batteries back into the energy sensor.

“Bradley, that’s enough.”

Bradley looked up with a flash of surprise at James’s stern tone. James felt bad for a second, but tried to shove it aside. If they were setting boundaries, then they were setting boundaries. And he was the captain, so he had to act like it. No matter how weird it felt.

“It’s unnecessary, let’s just get this done.”

Bradley didn’t say anything else, but Tim looked mildly vindicated. James stepped a little further into the apartment, looking around the space as he considered what to do. On his other side, Rosa did the same. Jessamyn paused in the kitchen, looking out the window overlooking Comm Ave for a moment before opening a small pantry door in the corner of the room. 

“This is filled too,” she said, stepping aside to reveal two deep shelves, one filled with cardboard boxes and the other with alarmingly outdated food packages, the only sign of any humanity here in the past decade. “It’s going to take us all afternoon to do this.”

It was a one-bedroom apartment. To the right, James could see the bathroom door partially opened to reveal more boxes stored in there. A few sat in the bathtub as well, visible in the darkness. There was a bedroom off of the kitchen, with a scratched wooden door. The stove beside it was the only appliance in the house, James realized as he spotted the alcove where a refrigerator would go. It was, of course, stuffed with boxes. 

Just beyond the kitchen was a small living room and another closet. He spotted what he assumed was a back exit in the living room. If there was a private hallway back there, it might be full of boxes as well.

“The energy readers are going to get so messed up in here,” James said. “Do you think there’s an alternative that would work better?”

He directed the question to Jessamyn, feeling Bradley’s eyes on him as he did so. “I don’t think so,” Jessamyn said. “We can see if there’s a way to change the settings on it, make it a little more delicate. But I think we’ve all got different kinds and I’m not sure it’s worth spending the time to figure it out. Unless we come across something obvious, we may just need to test everything.”

They wouldn’t be done with that by six. Not even in an apartment this small. James looked over and saw the same thought on Jessamyn’s face, but she shrugged at him. “Not like we’ve got many other options,” she said.

James had to agree. It also didn’t help that the tension in the room was crushingly thick. Judging by how none of the other pairs had been fighting, that was his fault.

“Alright, let’s split it up,” he said. “Jessamyn and Rita in the kitchen, Rosa and Tim in the living room, me and Bradley in the bedroom? If nothing shows up in any of those spots, we tackle the storage spaces after. I mean, the actual storage spaces. Which include the bathtub for whatever reason.”

Rosa and Jessamyn voiced their agreement, and they all started moving toward their assigned spaces. James went straight into the bedroom, nearly walking into the door as it swung toward him on crooked hinges.

The room didn’t look anything like a bedroom aside from the closet doors and a single full-length mirror on the wall. “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings,” Bradley said as soon as James had closed the door to get access to the boxes behind it.

“You didn’t,” he lied as he moved through the boxes, pushing a few aside to clear some space to work. “Let’s do this, I want to go home.”

He turned to the first cardboard box he saw and opened the top flaps. It was all books. Fairly new books, which surprised James. He would have expected them to be storing ancient tomes filled with deadly curses. But instead, these were all dusty editions of Foundation-published books about home cleansing and mesmerism. He wasn’t sure what decade they were from, but they were definitely published in the twentieth century. Bradley might know, but James wasn’t about to start off on anything unrelated to the task at hand. He turned the energy sensor on over the box and it went wild, moving more rapidly than he’d seen even when the train derailed.

Bradley looked over at it hopefully, but James kept it going and ran it over the next box. Then a box on the other side of the room. Then himself, just to keep the test going. The pitch and speed of the vibrations didn’t change.

“This isn’t going to help,” he said, looking directly into the box of books as he spoke to avoid eye contact like a coward. “Everything’s too close together, we can’t narrow it down. We’ll have to search all of them. I don’t know what we’re looking for, so just note anything unusual and we’ll take a closer look at it.”

He sat down in the space beside the box and began pulling out books, flipping quickly through them. The pages were all ordinary looking, though Gabriella would probably be very interested in everything in this box. Would the Foundation even notice if he stole them? It was tempting, but they probably had some kind of security on this apartment and he couldn’t risk dealing with it, not even to get a souvenir for his full grown little cousin.

The next one was a wooden crate filled with jewelry. There had to be thousands of dollars worth of jewels in here and James swallowed down his joke about the Foundation holding out on them, paying so low and stashing jewels. Still, they were beautiful. One ring in particular held a blood-red stone that sparkled in a way that made James’s heart twist. He quickly hid it under the soft cloth the pile had been wrapped in. Jewelry was a common vehicle for magic, he could easily see it causing chaos on the trains. 

He turned the energy detector on again, just to try it. No difference. In fact, the vibrations seemed to slow just slightly when he slipped the sensor beneath the cloth with the ring. He wrapped up the jewelry and put it all back in the crate, noting the lack of labels.

There were no labels on anything in here. The Foundation must have fired their archivists during one of their many budget-cutting rounds of layoffs.

He set the crate down and continued to try and focus strictly on what they were doing. Open a box, inspect the contents, be disappointed. Rinse and repeat. Even still, this repetitive searching only allowed him even more time to think.

Amelia didn’t think of him any differently, but maybe the rest of the team did. Graham was his roommate, but it had been ten months since he’d started at the Foundation, so maybe he didn’t want to be roommates with James any longer than necessary. It had to be weird to live with your boss. And the others were probably fed up trying to placate him, so he should just leave them alone. Maybe that was for the best. He could detach from them a little, for their sake. And for his own. 

This wasn’t even the first time he’d felt like this. The feeling was familiar from a particular moment following the day he’d been named captain hours after checking Robin’s mangled corpse for any signs of life. It was when he had to talk to Amelia after she’d accidentally shot Bradley with a tranquilizer dart in the field. He saw the look on her face and how Madelyn had sat with her as she waited to meet with him. He didn’t want his friends to comfort each other over him, but maybe he didn’t have a choice anymore.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out.

AMELIA

How is it going?

He’d answer her later. Right now, the more he got done, the faster they could leave.

The next box he opened was full of papers. Like before, he expected old manuscripts, maybe some kind of Necronomicon in there. But no. As he looked at the top booklet, he realized not only was there nothing about summoning demons, but it was a stack of vehicle records from 1972. But James had packed enough dishes in newspaper over the years to know that there had to be more in here. He set the sensor down and picked up the top pile of papers to move them aside and check the bottom of the box.

Music was playing behind him now, rolling drums and a steady synth line under nasally vocals. After a few seconds, he recognized it from his mom’s record collection. “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who, on vinyl. It was crackly, but fresh sounding. Like the record was brand new. Bradley was gone, the boxes were gone, and he smelled coffee brewing somewhere nearby. 

James stood up so quickly that he almost fell back down. The box of vehicle records was also gone. He was alone in the middle of the room with a handful of crispy papers. The room was an actual bedroom now, a twin bed with a blue quilt tucked in the corner. Above the bed was a giant Led Zeppelin poster and a handful of photos taped haphazardly to the wall. A squat shelf full of paperbacks and textbooks sat at the end of the bed and there was a bedside table with a bong sitting on it. Smoke curled lazily up toward the ceiling as though the smoker had just stepped out of the room. 

“Bradley!” he called, turning to the now-open doorway, where a fully stocked student kitchen had replaced the mess of storage. There were shadows of people moving on the floor, but he couldn’t actually see who any of them were. “Bradley, where are you?”

“James!”

Then the papers were out of his hands, and he was back in the storage room. Bradley’s face was so close to his that James screamed as he took a step back, bumped into a box, and started to fall. Bradley caught him by his upper arms, looking terrified. 

“What happened?” he demanded, shaking James slightly. “What the fuck was that?”

“Is everything okay in there?” Jessamyn yelled in.

“Yeah!” James managed to get out. “Yeah, we’re good, don’t worry.”

He looked around the room, waiting for it to flicker out of existence again. “I picked up the papers to move them,” he said breathlessly. “And Jesus Christ, man, the room was gone. Or, you were gone and all this shit. And it was an actual bedroom. I could smell coffee and bong water. And The Who were playing. Like…”

He trailed off, trying to get his breathing and pounding heart under control. Bradley seemed to realize he was still gripping James’s arms and let go like he was on fire. Then he turned and looked at the papers James realized he’d apparently knocked out of his hands and thrown across the room. 

“The Who?” 

James nodded rapidly. “‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’”

“Stay away from those fucking papers. Look, 1972. Those aren’t actual vehicle records, they’re time stamping technology. I’ve heard of this. It captured a photo of a moment and when you touched it, it showed you that scene.”

“I time traveled?”

“No?”

“It was so real though,” James said. “Like back at the Jarvis Street School that time, but everything felt wrong this time. I was there. And you were gone.”

“You were here the whole time,” Bradley said. “You picked up those papers and just started yelling for me. I mean, you were looking around, but like you were looking through everything.”

James shuddered. “Maybe we should get some gloves.”

“Yeah, maybe we should.”

James went to walk out to the kitchen and find some gloves. Maybe run down the stairs to the convenience store on the corner. But his legs weren’t quite listening to him yet. Instead, he sat down on the floor, as far as possible from the box of vehicle records, the top one of which now read 1983.

“Are you alright?”

He must look bad. James nodded, trying to stop his body from trembling as he did so. “Fine,” he said. “Just shook. I mean, I need to catch my breath. Give me a sec and I’ll get gloves. Sorry.”

Bradley sat down in the other small empty patch of floor, a couple storage boxes away. They were there in silence for a moment. Then Bradley spoke.

“Bong water?”

James laughed, some of the chill dissolving as he shook his head. “I swear to God,” he said, motioning toward the space under the window. “There was a huge Gandalf bong sitting on a bedside table right there.”

“I could-”

Bradley stopped what he was about to say, as though James possibly wouldn’t know how that sentence was going to end. He snorted. “God, same.”

He stood up, remembering too late about boundaries and shutting up. “I’m going to go buy some gloves if there’s none in the kitchen,” he said. “I don’t think there is.”

“I’ll come with you.”

That was a surprise, but he was still a little too shaken and disoriented to say no before they were out the door to the kitchen.

“We’re going to get some gloves,” James said as Jessamyn looked up from the box she was opening on the kitchen floor. “Um, you guys might want to wait til we get back to keep going with these. There’s some deeply magic shit in here.”

“Are you alright?” Jessamyn asked.

“Fine,” James said, waving her off with a hand that was still shaking more than he’d prefer. “Just a jolt. We’ll be right back.”

---

CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 17