Clay Kaczmarek descended the winding stairs of the Atlanta den with an unpleasant phantom taste left over in his mouth from the dream he'd been having. Blades of light poured in through one of the hallway doors, exposing the dust motes in the air that bred and stayed with tenacity; one of the downsides to having airtight security. The quality of light inside was forever poor, and Clay squinted into it bad-naturedly as he scrubbed a hand over his face.

After breakfast he descended another set of stairs, this time the ones leading into the basement. He jerked his chin without smiling at the technician who was sitting at the bank of computers by the Animus and, when she failed to look up, called out a greeting.

"Huh?" Rebecca raised her head, then shook it with a wry grin when she saw him. "Back again, Kaczmarek?"

"Well if you will keep leaving the door unlocked..." He strolled over to the Animus 2.0. It was dark and cool to the touch. "Baby sleeping?"

"Yes she is."

"How long will it take to get her warmed up?"

The dark-haired girl raised an eyebrow at him before standing up and picking her way over the snake pit of cables that were wrapped heavily over the stone floor of the basement. As she passed Clay she swiftly snagged the coffee cup from his hands and took a sip, grimacing immediately.

"Ugh!" she exclaimed, handing it back to him. "I don't take sugar."

She used a single finger to flick on a bay of switches along the side of the machine, and Clay watched her quietly, meeting her gaze when she turned around. "I want five hours," he said. "Give me a warning call when I get to four and a half."

Rebecca raised her eyebrows. "Another five?" she queried. "It's only Tuesday."

"I know what day it is. Can we keep this one off the books?"

She grinned and patted his cheek as she made her way past him again, ignoring the way he flinched from the touch. "Kaczmarek, every time you come down here I get asked the same question, and every time it's the same answer. Everything goes on the books. You get your twenty hours per week and your check-up with the shrink on Sundays. They don't want anyone else ending up like..." She cut herself off, but it was too late.

An awkward silence filled the air, and the coffee in Clay's mug trembled a little.

"You used to ask me how he was doing," Rebecca said quietly.

"What's the point? The only thing that ever changes is his sheets."

"Why don't you put a hold on the Animus session for a bit, maybe go and see him? Bill's not here right now, you're not going to..."

"When does Bill ever visit him?"

"When do you?"

Clay managed to put his coffee down without breaking the mug, and silently congratulated himself.

Almost a year had passed since the Assassins had used the information uncovered by Desmond Miles to prevent the destruction of planet Earth - though Mercury and Venus had been left ravaged and the government had suddenly sped up their Mars Reconnaissance program. It had been over a year since Desmond had last woken up, and much longer since he had last woken up as himself. The dangerous number of hours he had needed to spend inside the Animus 2.0 had taken the Bleeding Effect to extremes that not even the unfortunate test subjects at Abstergo had experienced, and Desmond had been left comatose, drifting, with no signs of recovery.

Rebecca was signing him into the system. "Clock's running, Animus is online, ready when you are." She looked up from the screen and added pointedly, "This will take you up to thirteen hours. Hope you've made other plans for the rest of the week."

It was a measure that had been put in place once the dust had settled and revealed one Assassin left permanently unconscious. Enough Pieces of Eden remained at large to make continued Animus use a priority, but measures were now taken to prevent the Bleeding Effect from reaching dangerous levels in the subjects. Even Clay Kaczmarek - unloved and untrusted as he was by the Assassins - was permitted to use the machine with the same leisure as the members who had never wavered or fled. His DNA was too valuable, and the Assassins simply couldn't afford to be picky.

He attached the wires himself and laid his head back as the HUD slid over his eyes. Rebecca said something to him right before he went under, but her voice was muffled and he was never able to figure out what had been said.

Skip that, skip that, Clay muttered in his head as he filtered through the memory strands. Most Assassins had to plod through all this crap methodically; he couldn't even imagine what the task might be like. He skimmed through the layers of programming like a stone across water and was able to accomplish more in five hours than most would in five weeks. Abstergo had given him that, at least.

There it was. It was a memory that he'd not paid much attention to when he'd found it the previous day, mainly because the nature of the discussion was so ambiguous, but he had been kept up last night thinking about it. Living with the Assassins again had done little to soften the contempt that Clay held for them, but he knew that William Miles was interested in Pieces of Eden, particularly in getting to them before the Templars did, and the interest was undeniably infection.

Ezio's world folded up around him and Clay gently breathed the smell of Leonardo's workshop: acrylic paints and woodsmoke, mixed in with the smell of unwashed skin that usually meant Leonardo had buried himself too deep in a project to bother with trivialities like washing. The two old friends, still quite young friends at this point in time, were sitting peacefully in front of the fire. Ezio's wrist was bare, and Leonardo was bent over the upturning casing of the open wrist blade, fixing it with a long, thin metal tool.

"Ezio, my friend, whose poor throat did you break it upon this time?" he asked, a gentle note of reproach in his voice.

Ezio grinned at him without a trace of shame. "I broke it staying a blade from my own throat. A noble cause."

"Hmmm." There was a satisfying click and Leonardo smiled, testing the mechanism on the blade. "All this death, Ezio. Do you not grow tired of it?"

"I grew tired of it long ago." Ezio's brow furrowed. "Yet somehow it seems to keep finding me."

"Ah well." Leonardo handed the wrist blade back. "Perhaps you will not need it again."

The statement didn't seem to need a response. Companionable silence filled the room.

"This talk of death," Leonardo said at last. "It reminds me of something I read in that book you gave me." He looked sidelong at Ezio, who had been allowing the warmth of the fire to lull him into the beginnings of a sleep. Now he started at the sound of Leonardo's voice and blinked sleepily.

"Book? Which book was this?"

"One from your father's collection." Leonardo was already on his feet, brushing the topmost layer of parchment from a pile on the table, then making a small sound of triumph as he found the leather-bound tome he was looking for. "It is strange. This is a memoir, written by one of your ancestors. He was also an Assassin, and much of the book is..." Leonardo laughed. "Not to insult his writing skills, but it is a little dry. Mainly a record of important assassinations, all very factual and practical. But there is this section..." He flipped to a marked page and ran his fingers over the text until he found the correct section. "Ah, yes."

Clay could feel Ezio's sleepiness, the temptation to close his eyes, but he fought to pay more attention than his ancestor had as Leonardo continued.

"It is ... You might call it a fairy tale. It tells the story of a young Assassin who was killed whilst battling for some kind of treasure ... An artefact in the form of an amulet. His body was brought back to the Assassins and his brother, grieving and angry, insisted that since the Assassin had fought for the treasure alone, it should be buried with him. The elders argued but since the dead man had won the artefact it fell naturally to his brother to choose what should be done with it.

"He placed the amulet around the dead man's bloodstained neck, and instantly his wounds vanished and he breathed again. He sat up from the pallet and kissed his brother upon the cheek, and thanked him.

"The Assassin lived on for many years, always keeping the amulet around his neck, and he married and had many children. One day he was out walking with his youngest son. He looked up into the bright blue of the sky, over the green mountains, and finally down at his child. He was overcome with joy at the life he had been given back, and he picked his son up and placed him upon his shoulders so that he could better see the view.

With the curiosity of a child, the boy toyed with the old, rotted leather of the knot holding the amulet in place. He tugged it this way and that until finally it gave way. The amulet, the man, and the child all tumbled to the ground at the same time. They were found the next day: the man bore the wounds of the battle he had died in, and the boy's neck had been broken in the fall."

Leonardo finished reading and looked up, eyes bright and affected, at Ezio, who was only partially attentive. Clay's ancestor had obviously seen the story as nothing more than a slightly disturbing tale that was keeping him from sleep, but he made an effort to look interested. "What became of the amulet?" he asked.

"Well, that is the strange thing. The bottom third of this page is torn away." He held the book up so that Ezio could see the ragged edge.

Ezio looked at the book, a slight frown upon his place, but then shrugged whatever had been troubling away, smiling. "A true mystery, my friend. Perhaps one day I too will have to fight for this magic amulet."

The conversation continued, but Clay was becoming distracted by the fire in the hearth. It smelled stronger than before, and he could feel the room warming up in a way it never had in his previous visit to this memory. He stared at the flames in puzzlement, but if anything the fire was dying down. The nasty prickle of intuition laid itself in his stomach and he tried to make Ezio stand even as he felt a sharp tug pulling him away from the memory. The Italian Assassin did not so much as raise a finger, and Clay felt his synchronisation slip and then shatter abruptly.

"... Up ... Come on, Clay!"

There was an incessant, shrill, deafening beeping in the air, with a much deeper thrum beneath it, both of them shaking Clay physically with their intensity. And he was being shaken, dragged out of the Animus, still reeling. He unglued his mouth and said, with extreme eloquence, "Wass happening?"

Rebecca growled in frustration and, with surprising strength for such a small woman, pulled him to his feet. Yelling to be heard over the beeping sound and the drumming she said a single word: "Fire!"

Fire.

That was when Clay noticed how his eyes were stinging, that it was harder to see than usual. Smoke was curling into the room from beneath the basement door, and the air was much, much warmer than it had been. In the distance, he could hear someone screaming, but not loud enough to drown out the drumming sound, which had grown louder than the beeping, louder than anything, enough to make him wince. He glanced over at Rebecca, who was entering a code to open the alternative exit to the basement - the one that led directly up to the street - but she didn't seem to be affected by it.

Swaying on the spot, Clay covered his face with one hand, closed his eyes, and tried to focus on the deep, pulsing sound that was echoing through his head. It was becoming clearer now as he realised it wasn't a sound coming from outside, but a song within him, growing in urgency and meaning. He listened, and realised that what he was hearing was this:

Desmond DESMOND get Desmond get Desmond DESMOND DESMOND get him get Desmond...

Clay didn't even realise that he was running towards the stairs until he had already reached the top of them. His hand slammed onto the doorknob and sizzled.

He's standing in the shower at Abstergo. The pipe red hot, astoundingly painful, and he feels the burning as gravity: holding him in place as he methodically rattles out a message to someone he doesn't even know, someone who might not even be able to hear and who probably won't understand...

"Don't!" Rebecca screamed, ludicrously. Clay turned the doorknob, feeling the motion tug at the skin which had fused to the metal. He was greeted at the door by a wall of flame that burst through with grunt of relief and threw him all the way down the stairs, tiny flames wakening on his clothes, his spine impacting on the wooden floor before he rolled backwards into a cabinet, causing computer parts and wiring to rain down on him.

The door to their escape slid smoothly open and Rebecca was at his side, forcibly dragging him across the floor and shouting at him to help her out, for Christ's sake. She was pulling him away from the stairs, away from the fire, away from...

NO NO NO DESMOND DESMOND GET DESMOND GET DESMOND HELP DESMOND...

He started to fight Rebecca, weakly, and she swore at him and tightened her grip. He tried to drag his heels but the floor was too smooth and frictionless, and Clay was too injured. With a cry of effort, Rebecca yanked him out through the doorway and slammed her hand down on a button that closed the door and cut both of them off from the rest of the Den. Panic roared in Clay's chest and he braced his back against the wall, pushing himself up until he was more or less standing, and tried pressing the same button. Of course, it didn't work from this side, and Rebecca was pulling at him again.

"Clay, seriously, we don't have time for your shit right now, we have to get out!"

"Desmond," he managed at last. "We need to..."

"The door doesn't open from this side. Even if it did, there's no way you'd be able to get to him." She didn't quite meet his eyes as she added, "Maybe one of the others..."

She was saved from finishing by a deafening, wall-shaking crash that sounded that the very structure of the building was tumbling down. Dust fell from the ceiling of the small tunnel and they both simultaneously experienced an unpleasant premonition of what would happen if the roof caved in.

"OK," Clay said, inwardly amazed at how normal he sounded. "OK, let's go." He was hurt, but he perceived the injuries as though he was seeing them on another person's body, and only imagining how they might feel. Holding onto the rail for support, he dragged himself up the stairs and hit another button that was set into the wall, slumping a little in relief as he waited for the mechanised doors over their heads to open up.

The smell, which had been temporarily dulled when they'd cut themselves off from the fire, hit his nostrils before he registered the heat on his skin. The places in which he'd been burned flared up in sudden pain at the rise in temperature as he climbed out onto the pavement outside, behind a crowd of staring people who failed to notice him. They were staring open-mouthed at the building across the street, and Clay followed their gaze to a sight that crippled him, dropped him to one knee.

The Assassin Den was already a hollow shell, filled from foundations to rafters with fire that licked out from every window. A fire crew had arrived, but they were prioritising the buildings on either side in an attempt to stop the fire from spreading. They recognised that the Den was a lost cause; if there was anyone left in there now, they wouldn't be in any condition to benefit from a rescue party.