Archive of Our Own ^beta

TUESDAY

Otis does his dissatisfied mouth-twist the moment the tubes spit them out into the park. Knowing exactly what it’s about, Olympia takes off one of her mittens and chucks it at him. “I told you it was cold.”

The mitten beans him right in the cheek. Otis fumbles to catch it before it hits the snow and stuffs one of his hands inside. “I think Orchid stole my winter gear for one of her projects. I haven’t found anything to bargain with yet to get them back.”

“You could always just steal them back,” Olympia suggests.

“And risk more of her wrath? I’ll stick with cold hands, thanks.”

“Singular cold hand,” says Olympia. “You know, since you’re only wearing one.”

Otis sticks his other hand into the mitten and waves his connected hands around in a weird little circle. Like maybe he’s trying to check his range of motion, or see how effective it would be if he just stayed like this, both hands in one mitten. It looks silly and largely doesn’t work.

She nudges him in the shoulder. “I’ll have one cold hand, too. It can be like another partner thing.”

They tuck their bare hands into their pockets and scan the park for Oddness. Sure enough: by the nearest set of trees there’s a woman who seems to be stuck in the centre of a very small snowstorm.

“Odd Squad!” the woman says when she sees them, which takes longer than it ought to due to the thick, aggressive snowflakes in the air around her. “Thank god you’re here.”

“I’d say what seems to be the problem, but it looks pretty obvious,” says Olympia. “Personal snowstorm? We can get that fixed up in a jiffy.”

She reaches behind her back for a gadget, but the woman throws her hands out in a clear request to wait. “Not quite. It’s just the snow that’s the problem. I’d like the cloud to stay.”

“You want to keep the cloud that is snowing on you,” Otis says. Olympia knows him so well, and she also knows that that’s his very slightly judgemental tone, not that he’d ever admit to it. Or maybe he would, just out of present company.

“Well, it’s my pet cloud, see?” Otis’ shoulders ease at the clarification. Through the mess of snow they watch the woman reach up and pat the air a few times, fingers slipping through the cloud’s crystal fog. “He’s called Fluffy. We’ve been best friends since I was in third grade. Usually he’s quite mild, only rains on occasion when he’s really sad. But the snow is new.” She returns her focus to Olympia, who has carefully stuck her (gloved) hand out to catch some of Fluffy’s snowflakes. “I’m supposed to meet some friends at a cafe here in fifteen minutes. It’s my first time ever meeting them and I can’t enter the cafe if I’m snowing all over the place. I’m from California,” she adds. “It’s a wonder I’m dressed for the weather at all.”

Olympia looks at Otis, who nods back at her, something settled and resolute in his eyes. They both know the answer to this particular Oddness. “It sounds like Fluffly’s having some trouble acclimatizing,” she says. “Kind of like he’s sick. We can’t cure cloud sickness, but we can speed it along so you’ll be ready to go by the time you need to meet your friends.”

The woman eyes the gadget Otis draws with suspicion. Olympia doesn’t blame her; it’s one of their larger ones, and somewhat unwieldy to boot. “Is it safe? For Fluffy, I mean.”

“Perfectly safe,” Otis assures her, but then he says, “Brace yourself.”

“What?”

The gadget, shaped vaguely like a preteen-sized rocket launcher, gives the cloud a hearty zap. The cloud shudders, the wind inside its storm picking up, and with a percussive flump it drops three nights’ worth of snowfall all at once.

“Bless you,” says Otis. The cloud lets loose another final dusting of snowflakes and, thankfully, stops precipitating entirely.

Olympia paws away some snow from the human-sized mound that now encompasses the woman. She’s in up to her waist, hat and shoulders each balancing a precarious several inches of snow the way the lip of a fence might. “Well,” she says, looking at her new predicament with a quiet resignation.

“Fluffy isn’t snowing anymore,” Olympia points out.

“He is not,” the woman agrees. She shifts her weight, and the snow around her hip cracks. “Well. Okay. I have ten minutes to get out of this. That’s plenty.”

Olympia and Otis pitch in to help dig her out, and before long she’s back on steady feet – still covered in a slight sheen of ice as bits of snow dust still cling to her, but able to move nonetheless. Fluffy the Cloud does a little wobble-bounce in the air.

“He says thank you,” says the woman, smiling up at her cloud. “And so do I. I’ve been looking forward to this meeting for four years. Thanks for not letting me ruin it.”

They bid each other goodbye. As the woman walks away, delightedly chatting with her cloud, Otis sticks out a low hand. Olympia slaps it. Another one done. God, she loves her job.

Instead of taking the tubes directly back to headquarters, they elect to wander for a bit, enjoying the life of the park and beyond. It’s good to take in the world every once in a while, remind themselves of the life they’re maintaining when they work their cases. Solo walkers enjoying the vibrant chill, young families embracing the snow, collections of partners in any sense of the word. Olympia breathes out and watches the plume of her breath in the air.

They’ve been at this for a while now, her and Otis, and every day that goes by Olympia loves her life.

“Hot chocolate?” she says. Otis readily agrees, and off they go, in search of a shop.

On their quest they end up running into three separate villains as well as another case, but it seems to be the nature of their lives, anyway; Olympia is reminded of the times they’ve tried to have work-free outings with little to no success. She’s never hated it. Just, the craving for hot chocolate is winning out over whatever shenanigans Fladam and Even Steven are planning and-or executing.

Like a perfect partner, Otis says, “I can handle them. Go get our drinks.”

Olympia hands him her other mitten in thanks.

She’s already halfway through her mug when Otis returns, harried and all askew, the tip of his nose red from cold. He drops into the chair opposite her and all but dives for his own mug. “It’s fine,” he says automatically, before Olympia can ask. “It’s handled. I did it. We’re fine.”

“Are you... okay?”

Otis takes a steady drink, then rubs at his forehead, tired. “You know how sometimes they want to make things a little weirder than usual, but it’s ultimately harmless, and sometimes it turns out that if they go through with their plan half the city might become two-dimensional and then just disappear altogether?

Olympia tries to sound sympathetic and understanding. “You could have called for help.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Otis says, going for nonchalant and sort of failing. “Besides, your skills were needed elsewhere. Ordering hot chocolate.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Olympia says happily. They clink their mugs together.

WEDNESDAY

Olympia is an overachiever, which generally translates to she gets to work early every day because she just really loves being there. She’s also extra lucky: she’s got a partner who, essentially, does the exact same thing. They often get to work around the same time–that is to say, early–and that kind of synergy really only happens once in a lifetime.

She’s the first one in today, which happens about fifty-six percent of the time – except she’s not actually. It takes her dropping her jacket and actually sitting down before she notices the note on her desk, held down by a fist-sized rock.

Partner –

Working in the interrogation room today. There’s room if you want it!

– Partner

“Okay!” she says to the note, and she gathers up the reports she’s been working on and heads upstairs.

The interrogation room turns out to be a good idea, because halfway through the morning something loud burns through the office downstairs–probably the copy machine on a rampage again–and everyone else also takes shelter until someone is brave enough to battle it back to normal. Olympia makes steady progress on her reports, and it seems like Otis is doing the same, which, teamwork. Always the best.

It’s when she steps outside again to check for an update on the errant copy machine that she notices.

“It’s really warm in here,” she announces when she steps back in. “Also, it’s still making a mess and I’m considering being the one to go save the day but I’m also, like, on a roll here, and I don’t want to break that.”

Otis looks up from his work. “It was really cold in the office when I got here,” he says. “That’s why I moved. Temperature controls.” He points to the box on the wall, then squinches his face into something considering. “I’m sure they’ll get the copy machine under control eventually. It’s not that hard to fix.”

“It’s not that hard to break, according to you,” Olympia counters. She wanders over to the thermostat, pulling off her jacket and laying it across her chair as she goes.

It’s at 25 degrees. No wonder she’s warm. “Did you set this?”

 “I turned the dial until it wasn’t cold anymore. Why, what’s it at?”

“Twenty-five.” Olympia twists the dial until it resets to 21. “I think that’s called overcompensation, partner.”

Otis makes a little uncaring noise. “Feels fine to me?”

“Maybe you run cold,” Olympia says, dropping back into her chair. “It’s the duck genetics.”

Half an hour later, Otis gets fidgety. Otis rarely gets fidgety. Olympia stares at him over the rim of her glasses until he finally breaks and says, “I’m cold again. You turned it down too much.”

“This is half a degree warmer than it usually is,” she says. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Apart from being cold, I’m fine,” says Otis.

Olympia wouldn’t put it past him to ignore the flu. She tries to remember what her parents do whenever she gets sick, and slaps her palm to Otis’s forehead maybe a little too forcefully. Otis wrestles her hand away – but from what she’d felt, it’s not warm. “Huh.”

“I’m fine,” Otis says again. “I’ll just– put on my winter jacket. Or something.”

“I’m going to make you hot chocolate,” Olympia declares. She pokes her head outside. Things are quiet. Either someone got the copy machine fixed or it’s lying in wait somewhere, ready to pounce on the next unsuspecting agent who takes a stroll through the bullpen.

Otis sounds slightly exasperated inside the interrogation room. “That’s really not necessary.”

“I’m gonna do it.”

“I can just work in the beach room–”

“You’ll get sand all over your reports,” Olympia says. Otis shuffles his things together and stands, following her out the door. Dissatisfied mouth-twist is back – he thinks it’s cold out in the hall, she can tell. “Maybe we should get you in to see Dr. O.”

“I don’t want to waste her time,” says Otis. “Maybe it’s like you said. Duck genetics.”

Olympia gives him a Look. He raises an eyebrow; what do you want me to say? Sometimes it’s fun that they can communicate like this, without talking. Sometimes–like now–it’s just a little bit infuriating.

They compromise. Otis goes to the beach room, and Olympia heads for the kitchen. There are fruit spatters all over the walls that suggests a machine has gone wayward in here, and Olympia really wants to know what’s been happening since they’ve been upstairs, but right now the hot chocolate is more important. She pulls out her de-fruit-inator and vanishes the colourful mess, and gets to work.

She runs into Dr. O on the way to the beach room and snags her with one hand, trying not to spill masterfully brewed hot chocolate from the mug in her other hand. “Do you have a minute?”

“I never have a minute, I’m Dr. O,” says Dr. O, but she follows at a steady clip as Olympia casually speedwalks her way through the office halls.

Despite Otis’ original misgivings about fetching Dr. O, Olympia knows she’s made the right choice when she finally spots Otis in the beach room, steadfastly grumpy and tucked into a slight ball, knees pulled to his chest as he scratches away at paperwork. To his credit, he’s got a set of folders and a little portable desk that he’s pulled from somewhere, so nothing is getting sandy per se, but Olympia doesn’t have much time to ruminate on how it’s possible to just sit and do paperwork in the beach room.

“I brought help,” she announces, when he doesn’t look up.

“I’m help,” Dr. O announces.

Otis frowns slightly when he looks up. “You didn’t have to. I’m not–”

“You’re fine,” Olympia says, because that’s what he keeps saying, even though it’s looking more like a lie by the minute. “So if you’re fine, this’ll all be fine, Dr. O will say there’s nothing wrong with you, and everything will be okay. Yes?”

“…Fine,” Otis concedes. Olympia gives into her own sympathy and passes over the hot chocolate.

Dr. O sits perfunctorily next to Otis on the sand. “You’re cold,” she observes. “I’m going to take your temperature.”

“Let me take a guess,” Otis says, sort of miserable.

“I think that’s called a hypothesis–”

“–Your internal temperature is low,” says Dr. O. “Everyone’s regular temperature is slightly different, but the average is thirty-seven degrees. Right now you’re resting just above thirty-six. How long has this been affecting you?”

“Since this morning?” Olympia says, because that seems about right, what with the twenty-five-degree interrogation room and such.

Otis looks immediately guilty. “Actually, uh, no.”

Olympia is blindsided by a momentary but strong flood of panic, terrified that somehow she’s been missing symptoms for days now and that Otis has been silently weathering this cold and she hasn’t noticed, despite noticing being one of her most marketable traits on the squad. “No?” she says, acutely aware that her voice pitch has gone up several octaves.

“It sort of started yesterday?" Otis explains. “I thought I'd just spent too much time outside. You know how it gets here.”

“We did a case,” Olympia says, partially for Dr. O’s benefit and partially so she can map it out in her head. “Cloud sickness. We got it solved, went for celebratory hot chocolate, and then came back here for the paperwork.” The thought dawns on her with mild fear. “Was the cloud sickness contagious?”

Dr. O shakes her head. “Cross-species illness is rare. Unless you’ve decided to take up shapeshifting into a cloud in your free time, you ought to be safe.”

“I don’t feel sick,” Otis points out. He lifts the hot chocolate to his lips and blows across it. Olympia watches the surface ripple. “Look, I just need to get warm and then I’ll be fine. We’re all worrying for nothing. Don’t you have work to do?” He directs this last part at Olympia, which is outrageous.

She tells him so. “That’s stupid,” she says. “Like, rule number two of being partners is to look out for each other. If I have work to do, I’m going to do it in here. With you.”

Otis doesn’t protest further. There’s an almost pleased curl to his mouth as he sips at his hot chocolate, and Olympia slots this in as another Partner Win (trademark pending). It’s something she’s noticed, occasionally, whenever she does something particularly considerate or partner-y. Otis is all over it; half the time he instigates the partner-y things, anyway. But sometimes there’s still a bit of surprise. An I can’t believe I’m allowed this kind of surprise. If Olympia had her way, she’d be giving him this kind of happy surprise for just about ever.

“Nothing else seems to be wrong,” Dr. O continues. “Have you interrupted any territory disputes recently? Are you going to sneeze uncontrollably every time you hear someone say a certain word?”

“I don’t… think so?”

“Hm.” Dr. O puts her thermometer away and stands, brushing sand from the bottom of her coat. “I want to monitor you. Come and see me again tomorrow morning.” She waits for Otis to nod, and then she’s off, heading towards the door again and then out, leaving him and Olympia alone in the beach room.

Olympia hooks her chin over her knees. “Is this odd? It feels odd.”

Otis gives her another look over his hot chocolate. “I’m cold, Olympia, it’s not the end of the world. This happens in the winter.”

“Yeah, yeah, duck genetics, it’s just – I don’t know. Like I should be capitalising it.” She traces lines in the sand with her finger, vague swirls and peaks that amount to nothing but visual static. Back and forth until she’s bursting through already-drawn lines. Over and on again. “We solve things for other people. I always get so nervous when we have to solve things for us.”

“And yet you always work it out in the end,” Otis responds, infuriatingly calm. He puts down his mug and resumes scratching at his paperwork. “Are you going to actually do work or just sit here and watch me do mine?”

All her paperwork is still in the interrogation room. Rather, that’s its last known location; if anyone else decided they needed the room her paperwork could be anywhere at this point. But loathe as she is to leave Otis alone, she does need to go find it.

“I’ll be right back,” she declares. Otis waves a hand: yeah, get to it. I’ll be here.

THURSDAY

Olympia is hopeful for the entire three minutes that exist between her seeing Otis’ jacket across the back of his chair and entering Dr. O’s office.

“You’re still cold,” says Dr. O, in that same flat announcement affect she always has, “and it looks like it’s getting worse, too.”

“It’s what,” Olympia says – and that’s how they discover she’s there, in the doorway.

Otis only looks a little guilty about it. “Hey, Olympia. Good morning.”

“Good morning? I don’t think so.” Olympia tries not to shriek, but sometimes that’s just a lost cause. “Dr. O, what’s worse?”

Dr. O double-checks the read on her thermometer. “He’s at thirty-five point six right now. That’s a point six difference from yesterday morning. And with the move down into thirty-five, I’m ready to classify it as hypothermia.”

Olympia suddenly feels cold all over, but in a far more metaphorical way. “Otis–”

“Okay,” says Otis, “I’ll admit it. Something’s wrong.”

They go investigating.

Olympia’s not thrilled about Otis wandering around outside with her again, seeing that as far as they know, that’s what caused this whole thing, but he insists–it’s always good to have backup–and then piles on so many layers that he’s nearly drowning in them. It tempers some of her nerves to have a partner shaped like a marshmallow waddling beside her as they make their way through the park.

The strange crater of snow that Fluffy had sneezed the day before is still there, flagging around the edges like ancient igloo ruins. Olympia nudges her toes against the pile. Snow cracks down onto her boots and stays in little clumps as she shuffles back again – the sun is out.

“This feels like overkill,” says Otis. His voice is muffled and Olympia can barely see his face. “But somehow I’m still cold.”

“Nothing is overkill when it comes to your health,” she tells him pointedly. “Anything here look odd? Feel odd?”

“My field of vision is a small square.” Still, he looks around, swiveling his entire upper half this way and that to properly examine their surroundings. His jacket zips and squeaks each time his arms brush against his body.

Olympia looks too, though not much seems out of the ordinary: a couple more footprints than before, no doubt curious passers-by exploring the remains of Fluffy’s outburst; some fat, bushy squirrels chittering furiously in a nearby tree; crystal blue sky and the sharp cloud of her breath in the air. With the sunshine, the entire snowy world is alight with sparkles, and the shine gives it all an alien quality – like maybe she’s expecting some grand surprise to pop out of nowhere. Or maybe it all feels dangerous with nothing to show. Winter is a place and time she usually loves. It’s unsettling, all this worry.

“Everything seems normal,” Otis reports, shwee-shweeing back to her side.

“Crud,” says Olympia. “I knew it would be too easy if the answer was here.”

Nothing can ever be easy on the first try. It’s the nature of their profession, yes, but just this once it would be nice if things worked out in their favour.

The next logical step is to continue the path they took two days ago, down to the sidewalks and alleys. Olympia keeps a vigilant eye on all the suspicious bushes they pass, but none of them have the malice she’d expect from an entity that’s cursed her partner to eternal chilliness. They’re probably not the problem, anyway, but it never hurts to consider your options.

On the way, partially to distract them both, Olympia starts telling him the plot of the movie she went to see last week – this high school that had to build a boat to escape a flash flood, and also it was a musical! And she tries to sing some of the songs from it but only gets so far as the first one–something, something, let it shine–before they end up in front of the cafe.

“No, this isn’t right,” she says. “I went in alone. You were busy with something… two-dimensional?”

“Ugh,” says Otis. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

Olympia had peeked at his breakdown paperwork out of pure curiosity yesterday; it had something to do with a plot to turn an entire city block 2D just to be stolen away by Even Steven–two dimensions, after all, a very good number–and seemed like the kind of mess Otis would rather avoid completely. And while neither of those particular villains have any penchant for chilly exploits, she can’t rule it out.

She knocks her elbow into his puffy arm. “It would’ve been worse if you hadn’t talked them down. Let’s go track them down again? Maybe they know something.”

“Yeah,” he says. He perks up a little bit at the prospect of having a proper lead to follow. “Maybe.”

They don’t know anything. They also haven’t dropped their plan entirely, which means Olympia and Otis have to spend precious minutes reiterating why flattening and subsequently disappearing a city block is typically considered a bad idea. Yes, a flat city block would be a very cool thing to add to a collection of 2D shapes. No, not this city. No, not any other city, either, no matter how much you hate their hockey team. Olympia tries to draw a map on a sheet of paper and present it as a 2D city block; despite her lack of art skills under pressure, it seems to mollify Steven just long enough for her and Otis to make their exit.

Otis lets out a percussive sigh. “I didn’t really think they’d have something, but I was really hoping they would anyway.”

“Me too,” says Olympia, glum. “Back to headquarters?”

“Can we just… walk for a bit?”

Olympia frowns. “You shouldn’t be outside for too long.”

“I’m not dying.” Otis sort of harrumphs. “I’m just.” He doesn’t follow it up with anything, though, and something like nausea rolls through Olympia, there and gone again. “Is it weird that I kind of don’t want to go back in?”

“I think there’s a lot of things weird here,” says Olympia.

Otis stuffs his hands into his pockets. “It’s just, like. Outside it’s like I’m just regular cold, you know?”

The nausea returns. Olympia swallows it down, stares at the sky until sunspots take over half her vision. “Can we– not right now? Just, if I think about it too much I might cry, and I didn’t plan for that today, so if I cry it’ll put a wrench in my whole schedule.”

“No,” Otis agrees. “I never quite know what to do when you’re crying, anyway.”

“Usually it’s just a little–” She tries to mime a shoulder pat, but it turns into an awkward, pathetic little motion that does not help her mood. “Yeah. Whatever. Let’s just.” She starts walking, just to let her mind out through some movement. Otis schwicks along behind her.

They end up at a corner bursting with shops, this neat little square lined with string lights and shoveled patios with wooden benches and midday shoppers with ice cream cones and cute fluffy dogs. With the sun out and the sky a rich, marble blue, it’s almost like they’re intruding on a party: the world is alive and well and singing, and Olympia is here on the sidewalk grappling with existentialism. On any other day she’d stop to pet some dogs and admire the way the snow sparkles in the light. She kind of wants to, anyway. But she still feels a little bit sick.

Otis appears at her side. “I’m thinking... muffin?” He tips his chin–well, his whole upper half–towards the bakery.

“Yeah, okay,” says Olympia.

They bring one back for Oona as well, since she’s their next stop. Olympia doesn’t want to think of it as a bribe, because Oona is usually happy to help with things and this certainly falls in the realm of her job. “No, it’s a bribe,” says Otis. “Maybe this way we’ll find a solution on the third try instead of the fifth. Maybe even the second.”

“Oh, perfect,” says Oona, when they present it to her. “I love blueberry muffins.” She puts it under one of those glass-lidded platters and tucks it out of the way on a side counter.

“We did mean for you to eat it,” says Olympia.

“I will!” Oona drops her voice ominously. “If the lab rats don’t get to it first.”

Olympia looks around. There are no rats in sight, but that doesn’t mean there are countless others just hiding. Waiting. The lab seems a little less comfortable than it was two seconds ago.

“Nah, I’m just kidding,” says Oona. “Maybe. Probably. Are there really rats here? Who knows! Anyway, what are you bribing me for?”

“It’s not a bribe,” Olympia says halfheartedly. “Otis is cold, and we were hoping you could fix him.”

Otis hasn’t taken off any of his marshmallow layers yet, and Oona eyes him critically. “I see. Have you tried standing under the vents for a little bit?”

“Yes,” says Otis. “You can talk to Dr. O if you want. It’s chronic.”

“He has hypothermia,” Olympia adds. She’s trying to be helpful but mostly it just feels like adding insult to injury. Why doesn’t she just go ahead and tell Oona that she’s also kind of freaking out about it, since she’s saying things?

Oona hums and then spins away, scuttling to one of her cabinets to paw through the gadgets inside. “I can make you toast,” she says, “if you want.”

“I’m not really hungry anymore,” says Otis.

“Oh, no, I mean turn you into toast. I bet you’d be just the right side of not-quite-burnt, too. ‘Course, I prefer a lighter toast–if it gets too dark it, like, scrapes at my mouth–but hey, to each their own toast.” She takes something down, examines it, tosses it aside. “What’d you do to get yourself cursed, anyway?”

“That’s the thing, we don’t know.” Olympia does a dejected spin and sits all slumped on one of Oona’s clear work tables. “I like calling it a curse, though. It feels less like my fault that way.”

Otis does a weird, sharp little inhale. “Olympia–”

Olympia would really rather not get into that. “Hey, maybe we should find you a summer curse to counteract the winter curse! Something that makes you hot. Then maybe you’ll get back to normal.”

“I’d rather not have two curses in my body, thanks,” says Otis. “Besides, two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“But three lefts do!” Olympia smiles at him, all teeth. “I’ll keep it on our list of options. Which is totally populated and not at all empty because we have no options.”

There’s a small crash, and then a big crash, and they both watch as Oona shuts the cupboard door on a progressing avalanche of gadgets. “I’ll deal with that later,” she says, leaning on the door with her shoulder while she ties the handle to the cupboard next to it with a spare hair tie. “That’ll be fun for Future Oona. I think I found what you need, though.”

Something like relief, only sharper and heavier, melts through Olympia. She hops off the table to wander closer as Otis does the same.

“Usually I just use it to heat up my lunch when someone else is using the microwave,” Oona continues. “In this context, though, it might just work.”

Otis narrows his eyes at it. “Will it turn me into food?”

“If it does, I promise not to let the lab rats eat you,” says Oona. “Ready?”

“Am I ever?” says Otis, but he spreads his arms – have at me. Oona lifts, aims, fires. The beam from the gadget is orange-red like firelight, and it flashes the same.

Olympia flinches back as Otis is surrounded by a blink of unbearable light. When she lowers her arms again, he’s still there, still layered up and marshmallowy, though there's a faint smell of singed fabric in the air.

Otis tugs his hood down and wrestles with the zipper at his chin, an ultimately useless task with his hands encased in several pairs of gloves. “That feels better,” he says.

“Really?” Olympia bolts over to help. She ends up holding his gloves as he pulls all his jackets open, exposing the red of his tie like a strange silk organ. “You're not cold anymore?”

His voice is full of awe. “I forgot what it was like to be warm.”

“And now you know what my leftovers feel like when I need to reheat them!” Oona adds buoyantly. “I've always wondered.”

Otis holds his hands out for his gloves. Olympia dumps them all back into his cupped hands. Their fingers brush as she pulls back – it’s like making contact with ice cubes.

She stops abruptly and grabs his hands. His skin has the cold, stiff texture of, well, cold skin. Or ring sausage. Certainly not the hands of someone who’s essentially just been microwaved back to life. “This isn’t right,” she blurts out, quickly like all her words are quick when she’s scared. “No, no, you’re still cold.”

“I’m actually quite– Olympia, what?” He shoves her back when she tries to put her palms on his face. “I feel fine.”

“You’re not,” she says. “We have to go see Dr. O right now.”

Otis peeks over her shoulder, a blatant help me look to Oona. Oona looks at her gadget, then looks at Otis, and then at Olympia. “Hey, I don’t know. My lunch doesn’t usually tell me how it feels afterward. I can try to make some adjustments, see if it’s more, y’know, human-friendly, but that’ll still take a bit of tinkering.”

“I’ll take anything we can get.” Olympia starts pushing Otis bodily towards the door of the lab. Otis goes, if somewhat unwillingly, using that grumpy face he has sometimes where he wants her to know he’s just humouring her. “Keep us updated!”

“That’s interesting,” says Dr. O.

She doesn’t elaborate. She’s also impervious to Olympia staring at her, and then doing all her handwavey motions to imply that they need more context, now, thanks.

“What’s interesting,” Otis says, flat.

“Well, you’re warmer than you were,” Dr. O says, “but not by much. And judging by how your extremities are doing–that’s your fingers, toes, and nose, for the most part–I wouldn’t be surprised if you were back to the cold you were in a couple of hours.”

“So it didn’t work.” Olympia is starting to fill with restless energy, like a spring. She paces in a tight circle around the room and considers going outside to full-body scream.

Dr. O says carefully, “It wouldn’t be an ideal fix, as you would have to be under the gadget’s influence almost constantly to continue as normal.”

“I think I need a second,” says Olympia. She excuses herself, walks into the main office area, screams a quick screech, and returns. “Okay, so the gadget didn’t work, and retracing our steps got us nowhere. I don’t suppose there’s any chance this’ll just... go away with sleep?”

Otis has zipped his jacket back up and tucked his hands back into one set of gloves. Olympia misses the tie in a weird, visceral way that has nothing to do with the squad uniform and everything to do with its implications.

“No, I don’t think so.” Dr. O consults her tablet, stabs her finger into the screen a couple times perfunctorily. “Based on the levels I recorded yesterday and this morning, this seems like a steady decline. Maybe too steady. It’s almost safe to say that this isn’t just happening to you, this is something that’s being done to you. If you understand.”

“Well, it’s good to know that I’m not cold for no reason,” says Otis.

Olympia doesn’t think that’s so good to know.

“Here,” says Dr. O. She swipes a graphic up onto the wall. “Three data points makes a pattern we can use. There’s your normal body temperature – thirty-seven. I’m considering Tuesday, when you met the cloud, as your base point. When I took your temperature twenty-four hours later, you were at thirty-six point four – and then, just under a day later, thirty-five point six.” The graph is temperature versus time; the little red dots that signify Otis’ temperature are connected by a line that’s almost perfectly straight, a downward tilt like a triangle building block. “If we continue this trajectory, adjusting of course for your brief bit of warmth from Oona’s handheld microwave, I’d guess that you’re dropping a degree every, say, twenty-six hours.”

There’s only so low a temperature the human body can take. This is something Olympia knows just by nature of being alive. She’s terrified to ask, but even more terrified of not knowing. “What happens now?”

Dr. O pokes about some more, and more dots show up on the graph, these ones green. “At thirty-three–this point, here–” she points to the one overlayed over Saturday– “the cold starts to affect cognitive processes. Memory and problem-solving. Around approximately twenty-eight is loss of consciousness.” Twenty-eight is a week from today. Olympia has solved harder cases in less time. It’s a cakewalk, it’s easy, it should be–

“After twenty-eight?” asks Otis. His voice is rough, like he drank something that went down the wrong way.

“Well,” says Dr. O, not missing a beat. “Loss of body heat is typically called fatal at twenty-one degrees.”

Otis is still for a while. Olympia can imagine the calculations running in his head, the persistent and dedicated machine that is his working ability to solve just about anything. A bit of brainpower, sometimes a bit of improvisation. It works so well, and she usually loves it, but right now she feels like someone’s dumped a bucket of ice water on her head, all off-balance and shaking.

The gears in his head finish turning, and he faces Olympia with unwavering focus. “Well, partner,” he says, “we have two weeks to solve me. Are you up for it?”

There’s a little quirk to his mouth as he says it. Olympia turns on her heel and walks out.

He catches up to her in one of the door hallways.

“Freezing,” she says without prompt. “An unknown force is freezing you.” Which is abjectly horrifying, now that she’s spoken it out loud. Every single word of it. Unknown force. They don’t know what it is, which is the first step of every problem–figuring out the what–and even figuring that out seems like such an insurmountable wall she may as well be staring at a cliff face. Iceberg face. Whatever. The particulars don’t matter as much as the outcome, and right now it’s not looking good.

“Olympia–”

She walks faster. “Can’t talk, busy saving you.”

“Olympia!” Otis jogs to keep pace, grabs her arm. “Stop for a minute. Breathe.”

“I don’t think I can,” she tells him honestly.

Otis brackets her, hands on both of her upper arms, jostling lightly. “Yes you can, c’mon. You need a clear head to solve cases.”

Olympia’s chest stutters until the urgency loosens, just enough to take in air again. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Treat this like a case. We need the facts. Hand.”

Otis whips his arm up. They both stare for a moment at the place where his jacket covers his glove. Olympia pulls her own arm up instead, tapping her watch, and the points jot themselves down as she speaks: “You’re cold, and Dr. O says you’re not getting warmer, even though you worked in the beach room for all of yesterday and you told me you took the tubes straight home. The day this started, we worked on a case with cloud sickness. Then you saved the city. Then we got our drinks, and then we went back to headquarters.” She closes her watch and scrunches her eyes shut. “But nothing happened.”

“Maybe it wasn’t us,” says Otis. He wavers a bit on the M – like his jaw is shaking from the cold. “Maybe it’s an accident.”

“Some kind of accident,” Olympia mutters. “Here, have some more facts: Dr. O says not only are you not getting warmer, but you’re actually getting worse at such a steady pace that we can practically pinpoint the day you’re going to, like, pass out. And then maybe die.”

“You’re hyperventilating again,” Otis says.

“Get back to me when your partner’s the one who just so happened to stumble into literally deadly trouble," she snaps back. “Then tell me how your lungs handle it.”

Otis disregards her last remark, probably for the best. “Maybe what we did on Tuesday has nothing to do with it. We need to open our search.”

Olympia shakes her head to loosen her brain. Otis is right, she needs to get back on track; even if she can’t really help her anxiety, she can at least work through it. “I need a list of possibilities. Anyone we know who deals in… cold things. People we can talk to. Maybe Oona can shoot you with the microwave again.”

Something roars behind the door to her right, and then the whole thing shakes like something has just slammed into it. “It’s so handled!” shouts Ocean from inside.

“Maybe let’s go back to our desks,” says Otis.

FRIDAY

Thirty-four degrees, give or take. Otis is no longer bundled in all his winter gear plus some; instead he’s wrapped a thick blanket around his shoulders and is carrying it around with all the quiet dignity of a king’s cape. To some degree it makes this all seem less like emergency protocol and more like a weird work sleepover.

Olympia’s hair is freshly re-tied, her glasses are clean, her badge is straight, and–most importantly–she has a plan.

They’ve re-commandeered the interrogation room, if only so they can boost the temperature a bit and maybe not accelerate the worst of Otis’s chill. Olympia has a map up on the wall, little green push pins marking their original Tuesday route and little blue push pins marking the places she intends to go today. Granted, there’s only three of them right now–not many of their villains deal in cold, it turns out–but that’s more than enough to start. After feeling trapped underwater through the mess of yesterday, Olympia finally has a handle on her breathing. She has a handle on her life. She’s going to solve the heck out of this case.

“I know you don’t want me to come with you,” Otis says, “but I can’t just leave you alone. That’s not how partners work.”

His shiver-stutter is more pronounced today, and he sort of vibrates as he sits – earlier in the morning he’d accidentally knocked over a pen cup and took way too long trying to clean it all up. Even though Olympia has a plan, seeing the realised symptoms of his cold still makes her chest hurt. His clumsy fingers and uneven lisp, minor muscle seizures as the temperature catches up to him. It’s like a giant cosmic snake has wrapped around her ribs and squeezed. Maybe its next order of business is to eat her whole.

“I never said I didn’t want you to come,” she says. “I just.”

“You literally said, I should probably do this alone,” says Otis.

“Well, it’s just, you know. Outside. With people who are sort of maybe known to freeze people? And cause snowstorms? What if one of them tries to finish the job?”

“What if one of them tries to freeze you instead?” he counteracts, logically and reasonably. “Also, you don’t know they’re outside.”

Olympia doesn’t know how to properly articulate just how much she dreads the idea of trying another case with Otis, only to have it amount to nothing and leave them empty–and cold–handed. It would be an overlay of Tuesday, just with more consequences tacked onto the end, free of charge.

But Otis is right. She can’t abandon him just because she’s scared. Rule number six, or whatever.

“Fine,” she says. “Maybe one of them will see reason when they’re faced with your, uh.” She waves a hand at his blanket cape and general air of cold, disgruntled hardship. “You.”

“I don’t like what you’re implying,” he says. Normally there’d be a raised eyebrow with that statement. His forehead sort of twitches, and she knows that’s all she’s going to get for now.

“I wasn’t aware we had anything planned,” says Freeze Ray Ray when they show up at his door. “I was thinking of taking over the world next month, but there’s a bit of logistical preparation you need for that kind of undertaking. You’re too early.”

Olympia tries to project all the confidence and bravado she barely has. “Actually, I think we’re right on time.”

Ray frowns delicately at Otis. “Are you quite alright?”

“No,” says Otis.

“No,” reiterates Olympia, forcefully, glaring her best glare at Ray. “Because you did something to him.”

She has no idea if it’s really his fault or not, but they’d agreed the angry approach would probably be the most efficient. Plus, all the tension in her body has to go somewhere or else she’ll probably just explode in the middle of the street, and that wouldn’t be good for anyone.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ray says. His eyes are sort of stuck on Otis, who is trying his level best not to shiver everywhere and is only partially succeeding. “Would you like to come in?”

“Please,” says Otis.

“Fine,” says Olympia.

They go inside.

The house is appropriately themed, blue and glass and the occasional sparkle – all trinkets in neat groups of two, a pair of bookshelves shoved up next to each other to emulate a single bookshelf, sleek chairs two by two around a sleek dining table. Olympia lets her curiosity briefly overtake her anger. “Did you and Tommy figure out your roommate problems?”

“We’re… working on it,” says Ray. “We put a day schedule on the fridge. And a shopping list. And a chore chart.”

“Communication is important,” Otis agrees.

Perfect segue. “It is,” says Olympia, “which is why you need to tell us what you did to him.”

Ray spins his cane thoughtfully. “What exactly has been done?”

They summarise the past week’s events as best they can, aided unintentionally by the minor cold spasms Otis keeps shaking through on the couch. Ray remains politely contemplative. Nothing he says or does suggests a confession, or any admission of guilt. A seed of doubt begins to bloom in Olympia’s chest, and she’s sort of angry at it, now, rather than at Ray – what's the point of feeling steady if it’s only going to last three hours and forty-six minutes? Why can’t she have a plan that works, and lasts, and does something?

“Okay,” says Ray when they finish. “I’ll admit it does sound like something I would do.”

“Thank you,” says Olympia. She will take this win.

“But there are still faults in that logic,” he continues. “For example: you’re just cold, and not, well, iced.”

To illustrate his point, his hand flashes blue and the standing lamp on Olympia’s left is abruptly encased in a block of ice. Olympia yelps and scrambles for the pull-cord of her mirror suit. A second later, Otis jerks in a way that would probably be a surprised jump if not for the fact that he’s been doing that pretty much all day. Olympia adds this to her slowly growing list of things that are very much freaking her out: slow reaction time.

Regardless, there’s a giant ice cube around the lamp.

“That’s your only trick, huh,” says Olympia.

“Unfortunately,” says Ray.

“How do I know you’re not lying to us?”

Ray ponders this for a moment. “There are easier ways to get what I want,” he settles on, finally. “I don’t make complicated plans.”

Olympia raises an eyebrow at him – she had to run all over town for him.

“I don’t intentionally make complicated plans,” he amends.

Otis looks at the ice cube lamp, which is already starting to shine with wet melt in the heat of the house. “Do you know anyone who might have the, uh, c-capability to do this to me?”

 “I’m not sure,” Ray says, brow furrowed. “Most of us who… lean towards colder exploits, so to speak, prefer to work in areas where the general population isn’t already somewhat used to it.”

There was that notice on Olympia’s office computer the other day about someone causing a whiteout on a beach in Florida. Makes sense. Freeze enough things here and the locals would probably just call it an eccentric cold snap, go about their days armed with extra ice melt and three pairs of pants.

“I do hope you figure this out,” Ray continues. “Much as I’d rather be unhindered in my villainous career, you two are the best agents I’ve had to deal with.”

“Aw,” says Olympia, oddly touched and a little residually angry about it, “thanks.”

So that was mostly a bust. Whatever. Cool. Olympia still has options and she’s still going to explore them and not get nervous about it.

“You okay?” she asks Otis before they warp to their next location.

Otis stands still for a moment. Sort of like he’s buffering. “Yeah,” he says. “Well. I mean.”

There’s a thread of tension between them. She’s been hogging it, mostly, with all her fluttering and flapping and mental breakdowns, but Otis is carefully spooling it back towards himself. She wants desperately to get this solved before it all spills out of him again – but there’s no guarantee. Knowing their luck, it’ll get so much worse before it gets better.

“Yeah,” she agrees.

Their next destination is a ski hill, and Olympia has to haul Otis bodily out of the way before they’re bowled over by several colourful blurs of people going way too fast.

“This one’s a long shot,” she says. “I don’t actually know this guy, but Olive and Otto had to deal with him a couple times – I read his file. Smart, fast, kind of annoying but in a weirdly endearing way?”

“If he imprints on me like Noisemaker,” Otis starts to say, but he’s cut off by a voice shouting in the distance.

“Is that Odd Squad? Yoo-hoo, my friends!”

Olympia shades her eyes from the sun and looks halfway up the hill, where a red snowsuit is making its way down the hill in a slow, steady snake. It pushes out of the snake and starts more directly towards them, picking up speed, and then they’re both washed by a spray of snow as the man pulls up short next to them. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he enthuses. Then he frowns. “You are not the agents I know.”

“Hi, Olympia and Otis,” Olympia says, sticking her hand out and then taking it back faster than the man can reach out. “You’re Sven.”

“I am, yes. You have heard of me? Perhaps on the morning news?” He sticks his arms out widely, ski poles dangling from his wrists. “I was telling Frank just yesterday how much I love the skiing and the skating! And how lovely a time it is!”

“It can’t be too lovely, if you’re doing this.” Olympia motions to Otis like she’s presenting something in a game show, without the jazz hands.

Sven looks at them for a second, dully uncomprehending, and then he frowns. “Excuse me?”

Otis sighs. “Have you been using your temperature changer lately? Specifically on people?”

“Now why would I have to do that? There is no reason, everything is already frozen.” Sven lifts a ski for emphasis; a chunk of powder-snow slips off the wood and onto the ground. “Besides, the device is not supposed to work on people. Just water. And weather.”

“I think people are sort of made of water,” says Olympia. She remembers maybe learning about this at one point, or hearing the fun fact on TV or something. Thanks, Bill Nye. She turns to Otis. “And I guess if you really went technical about it you could say it’s the affecting the weather inside your body?”

“I also don’t have the temperature changer,” Sven adds. “Your old agents took away my first working one. I tried to make another but right now it is in Norway.”

Which – might be something. “Are you sure it’s still there?” Olympia asks.

“Where else would it be?”

Olympia shares a look with Otis, who, despite being stuck in an expression of stoic impassivity, clearly follows what she’s thinking. “Do you know of anyone who might want to steal your inventions?”

“Steal?” Sven sounds aghast. “I do not think so. I keep my inventions very secret until they are ready to be released for the world.”

There’s just enough ambiguity over the fate of the temperature changer that Olympia can hold it like a seed – a little piece of hope that maybe this is the thing that will make it all better. She makes a mental note to track it down. Maybe they can ask one of the mobile units for help.

Though, maybe– “We should find the original,” she says to Otis. “Maybe it’ll be like Oona’s microwave, but better. Change your body weather.”

“Are you not enjoying the cold?” asks Sven.  

Olympia wants to laugh, or maybe cry a bit, but it’s Otis who says emphatically: “No.”

SATURDAY

“Okay, so O’Donahue got back to me last night: the peace agreement’s still in place.” Olympia shovels a handful of breakfast fries into her mouth. It’s probably way too early for any of this, but time is sort of a construct, anyway. She’s here, Otis is here–thirty-three degrees, big whoop–and they’re definitely logging this on their timesheets. Weekend, schmeekend. There are leads to chase. “Looks like we’re going to need a gift, though–something to offer in exchange for what we ask–and. Oh.”

“What,” says Otis. Olympia shot him with Oona’s microwave again when they both showed up, which seemed to soothe the worst of the chill, and his blanket-cape has returned to his shoulders.

“She’ll only talk to one of us,” Olympia reads. “Doesn’t matter who, but we can’t outnumber her or it’ll jeopardize, like, everything.” That part of the email is sectioned off, bolded, highlighted, and underlined. O’Donahue was thorough. “I don’t–”

“I’ll do it,” Otis says. He studies the flat of his desk. Olympia wonders what he’s seeing in it; she’s studied her own before, when she was bored, came out of it with the same shapes you find in clouds. Little pencil scratches and imprints of the agents who have come before. But then he looks at her, right in the eye. Steadfast. Rimmed in red, thick white-pink in the corners. Not blue yet but probably soon.

A collection of reasons why he shouldn’t rise to the front of her tongue. She forces them down for the most part – all but one. “If you go alone then there’s no one around if things go wrong.”

It’s barely a reason; if she went alone the argument would still get made.

“You can’t–” Otis doesn’t sigh so much as deflate a bit, sagging in his chair. “Olympia, I know you want to, like, somehow stop the cold from doing whatever it’s doing just with willpower. It’s really, really good of you and if it worked I would have been warm like two days ago. But it’s not. It won’t. And if we want to figure this out I need to work on it, too.”

“I know,” says Olympia. “I just.”

Usually when they’re having an Odd Crisis, it’s don’t-think-just-go for an afternoon at most. Sometimes a day. There’s no time to ruminate – they either solve the thing or they don’t and someone else swoops in to rescue them. All this time to think–to get things wrong–it just feels like something sharp is digging into her bit by bit, worming around like it doesn’t know what it’s looking for, and god help her whenever it finds its prize. It’s like staring down a black hole. She doesn’t know how to stop it – doesn’t know if she can. But everything else feels like giving up.

“Do you remember the time I accidentally got turned into a prawn on the same day Ocean was relocating his carnivorous squid collection?”

“Ol-shrimp-ia,” says Otis, nodding. “What about it?”

“And you had to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it, while I was maybe lost in the creature ocean trying my best to run–er, swim–away from said carnivorous squids?”

“I remember.”

Olympia nibbles on her lip. “I was scared. Like, really scared. I didn’t – like, shrimp are really small, right? Way too many legs. And did you know squids have beaks? Like birds, except they’re not, and when one of them is trying to eat you, it’s like, whoa, please put that away and get away from me right now thank you very much. And also maybe don’t let me see you ever again. Those squid are, like, weirdly good hunters, actually, it’s a wonder I didn’t die. Also I could see way more colours and I think that changed something in me–”

“Olympia,” says Otis.

“Right. But you came back to the edge of the ocean a couple times. And even though you were giant, and all the colours meant that you didn’t look like you, every time you came back I was like, okay, you’re okay, you’re not alone. And so when the squid came back and I had to run–swim–away again, it was, like, okay. Because you were figuring things out.

“And that’s the whole thing about partners, right?” Olympia’s on a roll now; she’s not sure she could stop if she tried. “Like, the whole stability thing. That’s why there’s two of us – if one person’s in over their head, the other one can step in and pull some of the weight. And we’re so good at that. I’ve never had a better partner in my life. I’ve really never had another partner in my life, but that’s another thing, I just– if I can’t stand at the edge of your ice cube and be your giant shrimp-coloured constant, I don’t know what else I can do.”

Otis is silent for a long time. Long enough time that Olympia starts to worry about other things, like if he’s finally frozen solid, or if that was way too much emotion and he’s going to malfunction.

“I don’t know about shrimp-coloured,” he says finally. “Or giant. But I don’t think you could stop being that constant even if you tried.”

“Oh,” says Olympia.

“That doesn’t mean you need all the answers. You can just be. Here.”

But the last time I didn’t have all the answers I got you fired and almost destroyed the squad, she doesn’t say.

Otis wraps his blanket closer around him with the same official wiggle he often uses to fix his tie. “I’ll talk to the Troll Queen. If anything goes wrong, I promise I’ll call.”

“You’d better,” she says, instead of something sad like pinky promise?

“Hey,” says Otis. She looks up: he’s holding out a pinky.

She hooks it. It’s so cold. But it’s a promise.

Olympia gets restless after he leaves, stuck in the lullaby of Saturday as the bullpen quiets. She doesn’t want to start anything big in case she has to drop it, but then again maybe by waiting for something bad to happen she’ll manifest it. Instead she clicks halfheartedly through some old case files and tops up the pile of paperwork Orchid left on her desk. She hates to prove Orchid right–“I know you’ll break and do it eventually, so why should I even bother?”–but the paperwork’s right there and Olympia needs something to do with her hands, so. At the bottom of the pile is a sticker pad from the local zoo. Olympia shoves it in her desk drawer. Compensation for the paperwork, or something.

“Hey,” says Oona, popping up out of the nowhere she always seems to pop out of. “So I had a thought.”

“I had a thought,” says Ocean. They’re sandwiching her. Olympia spins in her chair to face them and wonders why this feels like an intervention.

“We had a thought,” Oona continues. “That maybe you might want to think about… band-aid solutions. For Otis.”

Olympia spins right back around. “Putting band-aids on him isn’t going to solve the problem. Unless they somehow heat him up and stay warm enough that it doesn’t stop working right away.”

Oona grabs the back of her chair and hauls it until she’s facing them again. “Nope, not what I meant. Though that’s always a possibility – something I could probably figure out. Anyway. Just… some other options to give you more time.”

“Ugh.” Olympia drops her head. “I don’t need more time, I need answers.”

“But if you don’t find those answers right away,” says Ocean, sort of leadingly, “wouldn’t it be good if you had the time?”

“What are you trying to tell me.”

“Well!” Oona swipes her hands together. “We could always put you both in a time loop.”

“I don’t–” Olympia doesn’t want to be in a time loop. What happens when they exhaust every lead? Does the hour of loop give them enough time to even get the temperature changer from Norway? “Did that once, would rather not do it again.”

“We could turn him into a frog,” Ocean suggests. “Frogs hibernate for the winter. Their own glucose levels stop them from freezing.”

Olympia imagines Frog Otis hopping around grumpily on his desk, croaking his displeasure. Then she imagines Frogsicle Otis in a little box, barely alive, hoping that maybe the Frog Organs will be enough to pull him through the extra time. Wonders if there’s a lower limit for frogs, too, one they won’t figure out until it’s time to thaw him and he simply doesn’t reheat.

She must be making a face. “I’ll let you think on that one,” says Ocean.

Her badge starts singing, effectively cutting off the conversation. Olympia wheels around again and grabs at it desperately. “Hi, you’ve reached Olympia, if you’re not Otis then I can’t come to the badge right now, but if you leave your name and precinct I can get back to you–”

“It’s Otis,” says Otis.

“Oh my god,” says Olympia, “is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine, I’m just–”

Olympia hovers her hand over the open badge and spins back to Ocean and Oona. “Gotta go,” she says. “Otis needs me. Catch you later. Maybe we never talk about this again, yeah? Okay. Bye!” She snags her jacket and starts jogging to the tube room.

“I was just calling to say I’m finished.” There’s a bit of feedback through the badge – wind, or something. “I’m not in trouble. I can meet you back at headquarters.”

“Don’t,” Olympia says quickly. “Ocean and Oona might ambush you.”

“Oh, about the frog thing? Yeah, they gave me that talk this morning. It’s worth thinking about. At the very least, I’d be a handsome frog.”

Olympia grimaces. “That sounds like the start to a fairytale I don’t want to be in.”

“Yeah, me too. Maybe there’s a third option there somewhere.”

She gets to the tube room and then stops. They don’t really have another place to go, is the thing – the answer was supposed to be somewhere in the three stops they’ve just made, and with their only lead currently across the Atlantic, they need time to regroup. Figure out where to look next.

“Okay,” she relents, half to her badge and half to the prospect of turning around and dealing with her mad scientist again. “Come back, we’ll talk about it here.”

Otis appears in the tube room mere minutes later, all bundled and looking no worse for wear. There’s a skiff of snow up one of his sleeves, and what’s visible of his cheeks are bone white. “So, the Queen told me it doesn’t look like their magic,” he reports. “She did, like, this whole diagnostic on me. Besides, targeting one of us wouldn’t look good on O’Donahue’s treaty, so there’s no way any of them even thought about doing something like this.”

Olympia scuffs her foot along the floor. “Well, if it’s not one step closer, at least it’s one step somewhere.”

Oona and Ocean have disappeared when they return to their desks. Olympia checks the area, suspicious. They’ll probably turn up again soon at some other random, inconvenient point in time.

Otis sets about unfurling the two meters of scarf wrapped around his neck, and Olympia joggles her desktop mouse around for something to do. Her email pings again.

“Oh, thank god,” she says.

“Hm?” says Otis. He drapes the scarf over the back of his chair and gets to work on the buttons of his coat, which is hampered somewhat by his shaking hands. This is one of his dignified sticking points: he won’t accept help, so to prevent herself from getting all complicated about watching him struggle, she stares resolutely at her computer.

“In a shocking turn of events,” she narrates, “Sven has agreed to let the mobile unit take him on a quick trip back to Norway to check on the temperature changer. They’ll report back on if it’s there, if it’s been used at all, et cetera. Which, if anything’s out of the ordinary, I’ll bet we have our problem…” she’s about to say solved, which would, of course, be incorrect. “Identified.”

Otis wrestles off his coat and piles it on with the rest of his discarded winter gear. “Hey, at least it would be something within our range of odd.”

“As opposed to, like, weird magic,” she fills in for him. “Yeah.”

They’ll have to wait for the team to actually get to Norway, which means she has to sit on her anxiety a little longer. Either they find a new lead to investigate in the meantime, or they just… wait.

“They told you about the time loop?” she asks.

Otis’s mouth turns down. “I don’t want to get stuck in another time loop.”

“That’s what I said!”

“Though that is probably also worth investigating.” He grabs a pen from her pen cup and swirls it in aimless doodles on the nearest piece of note paper. “Like, is there someone who might be able to… stop this with time?”

“Probably would stop you in the process,” says Olympia. But she allows herself to consider it; is there anyone who has that capability who would be willing to use it on him? Something Oona can make – has made?

Speaking of: “Howdy!” exclaims Oona, springing up from the same nowhere as before. Sometimes Olympia thinks Oona is summoned exclusively by someone thinking about her. “Otis, you’re back, that’s good. Have you thought about our proposals at all?”

“It’s been half an hour,” says Olympia. “Besides, he’s supposed to be fine until–” she thinks back to Dr. O’s calculations. “–today. Thursday at most. Oh, god, that’s in five days.”

She looks at Otis to gauge his reaction. He’s mostly just looking at his pen, scratching and scratching back and forth. There’s a vibe to him like water about to boil, everything just beneath the surface. “Five days,” he echoes.

“Yeah,” says Oona. “So we should maybe figure out a backup plan before then.”

Otis peeks up at her. “Do you think you could time-freeze just me?”

“An interesting thought,” Oona agrees. “There are things we could experiment with. Temporal bubbles. Maybe we could drag you to a different dimension.”

“No thank you,” says Olympia faintly. “This dimension, please.”

“If it buys time–”

“There are other ways.” Olympia does not want to be alone, a whole dimension away from him. She doesn’t want him to be alone.

They all pause to think of some other ways. Olympia spins in her chair some more. Otis tugs at her desk drawers, and then his own. Oona runs her thumbs up and down her suspenders.

“What if,” says Ocean, surprising them all out of their thinking stasis, “you were a statue.”

Oona lights up with understanding. “That might solve some of our time problems, actually,” she says. “I’d be worried about trapping you in a time bubble just because all that time’s got to go somewhere, right, and I’m not sure we’d be able to test whether or not that time would catch up to you at the end of it or not. But time still affects a statue.”

“We had issues with the time bubble?” Olympia says, because what. “Back up. Statue?”

“Oh, totally,” says Ocean. “Remember that time my little blue fella got loose and turned everyone in headquarters to stone? Including you?”

“Now that you mention it.” Olympia does remember that. She doesn’t remember being stone so much–her memories of that are sort of muddled, smooshed up into vague colours and sensations–but she certainly remembers a very angry Ms. O in the aftermath.

It might just work. At the very least, to give them more time. Stone isn’t living; there’s nothing there for cold to kill.

She looks at Otis again. Otis looks at her, unreadable.

“Your body,” she prompts.

“Consider it a backup plan,” he says.

The agreement doesn’t serve to loosen anything in her chest. He’s close to overload, she can tell. And also close to whatever Dr. O said would happen at thirty-three degrees, because, hello, thirty-three degrees. Real symptoms, or something. She has to watch for them.

“I’ll make sure the latest Oonabots are charged,” says Oona. “Can’t be too careful around here.”

She and Ocean make their exits, and after a moment’s consideration, Otis gets up too. “I need,” he says. More like a grunt. He gestures vaguely. “A minute.”

“Yeah,” says Olympia quietly. “Sure.”

When he leaves, too, she tugs his notepaper towards her. In the centre is a sticker of one of those rainforest frogs – a three-quarter view with big red eyes and round yellow toes. Otis has drawn a badge on its pale chest and little snowflakes around its body. Next to it is a large stick figure with glasses and a mouth that’s flat on one side.

Olympia grabs a pen, prints PARTNERS in neat script along the bottom, and leaves the notepad on his desk.

SUNDAY

That night, Olympia dreams that she’s stuck in the garlic bread dimension. Towers of garlic bread disappear into the sky, so wide and long that she’s trapped in a labyrinth of it. In the distance, Otis is calling her name, and she tries to find him, wades through puddles and piles of garlic bread until it sounds like he’s just around the next tower. But he’s never there.

When she wakes up she stuffs her head under her pillow. Thinks about not going to work. Thinks, then, about what might happen if she does–they could find a lead!–or if she doesn’t–another drop in temperature with nothing to show for it–and rolls out of bed, thoroughly dreading the day.

Otis tries to pick up a case file and ends up sliding it across his desk and onto the floor, scattering papers all over the place. He stares at the mess for a while instead of bending to gather it up.

Olympia thinks she might suffocate. They don’t make any progress.

MONDAY

“Well, the good news is, they made it to Norway,” Olympia reports. “Slightly less good news is, Sven has forgotten his own entrance code and can’t get into his lab.”

“That’s,” says Otis. He searches for the word, shapes it around pale lips. “Workable, at least.” He’s no longer wearing the blanket; she’s had to stop him multiple times already this morning from taking off his jacket.

Olympia pushes her chair back and barely resists thunking her forehead to her desk. “It would be so great if things stopped going wrong for once. Like, just write your code down somewhere, or something. Please.”

“Wouldn’t be us. Without trouble.” And then Otis tries to smile at her, she thinks, except it’s just a twitchy sort of thing and doesn’t really transmit whatever mood it is he’s trying to give her.

The notepad is still on his desk, PARTNERS with the shaky Olympia stick figure and the tree frog agent. Olympia finds her gaze anchored to it. It keeps capturing her attention when nothing else can, when she’s bouncing between the hustle of headquarters and the shocking stillness of her partner. He’s stopped shivering, too; sometimes if he sits still it almost looks like he’s not moving at all.

Thoroughly terrifying to think about. They’ll probably both need worker’s compensation after this is all done.

Or candy. Olympia decides she wants jelly beans.

She shoots off a quick response to the Mobile team, mostly a keep us updated, and have you tried this pattern yet? and then pushes off. “Come with me?” she says.

Otis nods, stands, and doesn’t say much else.

They make it to the bean room with little fanfare. It’s warm in there, slightly musty, like a pantry or the bulk spices room at the kitchen store she likes going to. Huge containers of beans line the walls, spouts built into their bottom edges: dry black beans, kidney beans, bean soup, Jack and the Beanstalk beans. At the end of the aisle stands the rainbow vat of jelly beans. Olympia plucks a bowl from the dispensary by the door and heads for it.

“Do you want some?” she calls over her shoulder. Otis doesn’t respond, just shuffles where he stands.

Olympia flips the trigger on the spout and lets a modest waterfall of beans pour into the bowl. She plucks a couple out as they come, pops them into her mouth – peachy, then sweet like cotton candy.

“That’s better,” she says, turning back around, “I– Otis?”

Otis blinks slowly but dazedly. He reminds Olympia of a confused turtle. “I don’t,” he says. “Remember the way back. To the bullpen.”

This is cause for concern, but Olympia tries not to show it, tucking her beans bowl neatly in the crook of her arm as she power-walks back to the front of the room. “Do you want to go back?”

“No, I.” Otis shakes his head, and his entire face twitches, twisting up at all the edges like the beginning of a funhouse mirror.  Olympia’s heart drops; on a regularly expressive face this would be the pinnacle of emotional overload, everything happening all at once. This is his balancing act. He’s tugged all the tension back towards himself a little too late, and now it’s all coming out when he can barely even get himself to speak.

“Here,” she says, and she drops the jelly beans silently on the floor, pulls him down with her. Presses their backs against the wall just shy of the door, in case anyone else decides to come barging in. She pulls a blanket from behind her back and drapes it over their shoulders.

Otis bats it off of himself. “Warm,” he says.

“I know.” Olympia re-adjusts it. “Humour me?”

And he does. If only because they’re partners, and even when everything’s so bad she can barely breathe, they do little things for each other. Like endure blankets. She grabs the bowl of jelly beans and puts them on her lap, in easy reach for them both.

After a while of sitting, their arms pressed together as Otis’s chest hitches and stutters, he finally gets out, “I’m so tired.”

Olympia waits for a little bit, in case there’s more to that thought.

“Not even cold anymore,” he says. “Just want it to be. Done.”

“I’m sorry,” says Olympia.

Otis lifts a hand, lands it inelegantly on the edge of the bean bowl. Olympia chooses a couple in flavours she knows he likes and drops them into his palm.

“Why?” he asks.

She watches him tip back and pour the beans into his barely-open mouth. Watches the stop-and-start of his jaw as he chews. “I haven’t figured it out yet,” she says, and then again, “I’m sorry.”

It might not be the first time she’s felt like an inadequate partner, but it certainly is the most grievous. It’s the kind of feeling that threatens to swallow her whole.

Otis swallows his jelly beans and sits for a while. Even with just their sides pressed together, through layers and layers of clothes, Olympia swears she can tell that he’s near frozen. Maybe it’s whatever the opposite of wishful thinking is–dreadful thinking?–that means she can feel it, acutely, without even really feeling it at all.

“Not you,” he says. “Never you.”

She presses into him. Doesn’t know if he registers the pressure, if he knows that she’s trying to lend him everything. She shoves her fingers through the beans until she finds the flavour she’s looking for and puts it in her mouth.

He presses back.

TUESDAY, AGAIN

It’s not supposed to be an event, per se. But they clear out Room 63 for the occasion, dust up the corners a little bit. There’s a small platform in the middle of the room, more like a jam crate, in case they want to make it more special.

Olympia is there. Otis is there. Ocean and Oona are off collecting the stone turner, which could take some time.

“You’re sure about this,” says Olympia. When they’re alone in the room, just standing there, she’s got the same weird anticipation she gets in the waiting room of the dentist’s office. Something is coming and all she can do is endure.

Otis lets out a long breath. “No more time,” he says. “Not– like this.”

She knows what he means. These past few days have been a lesson in patience, making sure Otis isn’t going to somehow pass out instantly in the middle of a slothlike conversation. Her attention has been thoroughly split and it’s not good for her efficiency in solving this mystery.

That being said, she’s not confident that turning him to stone is going to help with her efficiency either.

God help her, she’s terrified. “What if I never figure it out?”

Otis mulls for a bit. Or maybe he’s just grasping for what little energy he has left. “Someone will.”

“It could take forever.”

“Ms. O’s lived– basically forever. I’ll just. Follow her example.”

Olympia isn’t expecting that to reassure her, but something pulses warm, just under her ribs.

The door swings open, announcing Oona and Ocean’s arrival. “Stand clear, people, stand clear,” Oona yells. “Dangerous creature coming through.” Mechanical whirring follows her, and in marches an Ooonabot, arms outstretched in front of it, holding the disgruntled stone turner like a beach ball. “Keep your distance, I don’t want to get stuck with more statues than we’re meant to have.”

Ocean slips in last and shuts the door behind him. “Alright,” he says. “Have you decided how you want to do this?”

Otis nods jerkily and makes his way to the platform. He kicks it once, then steps onto it, wavering just a moment like the two-inch change in altitude makes his vision go spotty. Then he faces them.

“I’m ready,” he says. Folds his hands behind his back in classic ready position, chin up, only his eyes betraying the depth of his exhaustion. Olympia blinks: presented like this, in a position that should seem so steadfast, the difference between him now and him before is staggering. There’s no other way to put it – he looks sick. Like he’s barely there.

She casts around desperately for something else to pay attention to. Everything else has the same amount of gravity to it – the Oonabot, the stone turner, the clean corners of the room. All of it points towards the same purpose she’s trying to hide from.

“Okay.” Oona fiddles with the remote in her hand. The Oonabot steps closer to Otis, then closer again. “Remember, you’ll be stuck in this position for maybe forever. Personally, I’d do a handstand, or a cool dance move–”

Otis shakes his head. “M’fine.”

His gaze doesn’t move from its anchor straight ahead, which seems to land approximately on the right corner of the door frame. Olympia wishes he’d look at her. Or maybe not. She’s not sure she could handle that right now, the stone equivalent of a final moment.

“Alrighty-o,” says Oona, “just another little step–”

There’s nothing to announce it, no flash or fanfare or noise. One moment Otis is cold skin and cold bone, and the next he’s made of rock.

The stone turner chuffs. Oonabot whirs. Olympia forgets to breathe.

And then, like a snapped elastic, time returns.

Her lungs shudder as she drags in one breath, and then another, and Ocean says, “Cool, I’d like to put it back now just so nothing else goes wrong,” and he’s following Oona and the Oonabot back to the creature pens.

Olympia looks at Otis.

Otis does not look back.

She sinks into the rollercoaster, the feeling of time catching back up to her, all the compacted tension of the past week spilling out like a receding tide. It melts out of her, leaving her boneless, breathless, utterly empty, almost ghostlike in her newfound lack of urgency. She thinks maybe a small breeze could knock her over. Like a dead leaf letting go of its branch.

“Well,” she says. It rings in the–ha, not funny–stone cold silence. “See you soon.”

She hopes it’s true. It might not be. But she’ll try to make it true anyway.

WEDNESDAY

We figured out the code, says the latest message from the Mobile team. Hope we’re not too late?

Olympia regards the turn of phrase with an emotion she can’t quite place. Not too late, she writes back. We’ve got time.

It turns out that while the temperature changer is in fact still safe and sound in Sven’s lab, he’s positive someone has been fiddling with his blueprints. They haven’t found any evidence yet and are running off the hunch of a determined Norwegian winter sport aficionado, but there’s still a possibility in there. Maybe someone’s making a spin-off and happened to be testing it in the park that day. Maybe there’s a gadget out there that caused all of this – and if it caused all of this, maybe it can fix all of this, and they just need to find it.

Or maybe Sven’s just paranoid. Olympia can’t rule anything out.

She considers making a list of villains who have traveled to Europe in the last few years, if that’s going to be their next avenue of investigation. “Or,” she says out loud, waiting for attention that never lands, because Otis is in another room and also currently made of stone. “It’s someone we’ve never met.”

It would make sense: no recognisable pattern, potentially stolen blueprints instead of a stolen gadget, no situations even remotely similar cropping up in the week following. They can’t find a perpetrator because there isn’t one to be found, not yet at least, and they’ll be grasping at empty air until whoever it is finally decides to make their villain debut.

It’s plausible. It’s infuriating. Olympia can’t decide if she wants it to be true or not. And she wants to ask Otis, what would be better, do you think– knowing but not able to do anything, or searching but not knowing? But of course Otis is in another room and also currently made of stone. The spot he’d normally occupy, either hunched and shivering or even just constant, is glaring in its emptiness.

Everything seems displaced, just a little bit to the left. Hopefully she never has to get used to it.

She takes her lunch to Room 63 and fills Otis in on everything she’s rotating in her brain. Otis doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, doesn’t pick at his sandwich like he would if he was animate. She doesn’t touch him, either– doesn’t want to feel rough stone when everything in her would expect the gentleness of a full human body. Doesn’t want to deal with the mental canyon that causes.

But she carries a fine conversation by herself. It’s always been one of her strong suits.

She thinks of their early days, the stretch of time before Otis finally felt properly comfortable speaking without necessity forcing it. All the awkward silences she scrambled to fill, random little stories and narrations and errant thoughts that probably painted a way more complete picture of her than any personal introductions would have. Olympia said a lot of fluffy nothingness in those days. Otis also said nothing, but a different kind of nothing.

This is– sort of like that. But also not at all like that.

It sucks, is what it is.

“When we get the full report from Mobile I’ll be able to think about what comes next,” she tells the statue. “I’m just… a little nervous. If it really is someone we don’t know about, our search pool is basically the entire city. Maybe more.” She takes a bite of her sandwich, ends up pulling off half the crust when it doesn’t bite through. “Slow going. Slower when it’s just me, you know. But if it works.”

But if it works, I’d do anything.

The bread makes a gooey little lump in her throat. She feels it slide all the way down in her chest.

THURSDAY TO WEDNESDAY

Olympia collects data, makes lists, talks to people, writes notes. She amasses enough piles of research–the ever-elusive temperature changer blueprint front and centre, surrounded by flight dates, temperature maps, villain itineraries–to fill out the entire bottom drawer of her desk. On top of it all is the doodle of the frog. PARTNERS.

She’s reviewing the city’s temperature map from the day Otis got infected with cold again, despite having it nearly imprinted in her memory at this point. It is, all things considered, a spectacularly regular map. January is always the same beast year after year, diving near the end into a fissure of extreme cold before leveling out again. Predictable. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“I need your help,” Orchid announces without prompt, dropping a file folder on the map.

“Sort of busy,” Olympia says. She’s not looking for anything she doesn’t already know, and the lines on the map might be blurring a little bit, but this ought to take precedence, anyway. “Can you ask someone else?”

She shoves the folder off the map and Orchid shoves it right back on. “No can do, Sherman. You’re the only one here who’s ever met the Stitcher.”

Olympia grimaces. “I wouldn’t call that a meeting.” She’d warped in, announced her intentions, slipped on a couple handfuls of banana peels during a footrace across a space slightly larger than a closet, and stolen the woman’s main work handbook. Perhaps not the best way to endear herself to her future villains. “And you know what happened after.”

“You mean the way you basically exploded your entire partnership and left us in the hands of an evil ex-idiot? Kinda hard to forget.” Orchid rolls her eyes. “Every time I try to talk to Betty Butterfly she does her cocoon thing and I want to know what it’s made of.”

“So you can, like, open it?”

“So I can make one for myself, duh. Then I wouldn’t have to listen to you.”

Olympia could probably use the mental break as it is. “Fine,” she says, picking up the folder and pushing the map to the back of her desk. “What do you have so far?”

They spend the rest of their day tracking down the Stitcher, which ends in a minor standoff until Olympia removes herself from the premises under a promise that she won’t try to steal the new notebook. Presumably Orchid gets the information she’s looking for. Hopefully this doesn’t turn into another situation that ends up blowing up in her face.

And– it doesn’t. They get back to the office later than expected, with just enough time for Olympia to clean up and go home, and when she looks back at the bullpen before leaving, there’s a lightness in her shoulders. It hasn’t been that long–only two weeks–but she still almost missed the low-stakes, day-to-day casework. Running around and doing things. It’s like a breath of winter air: stings a little bit, but invigorating all the same.

FEBRUARY

It becomes a routine, loathe as she may be to recognise it. She’ll do her research, investigate the curse–she’s taken to calling it a curse, if only to make it sound like something a little more difficult to solve–and take on extra cases to get her mind off the curse’s constant pressing. With that ease always comes just a touch of guilt – it’s time she could be using to try harder, to search more, to think up new avenues of investigation. But the extra cases are like a fix. Olympia wants.

Well, she wants a lot of things.

There’s a message waiting on her computer one morning from the Mobile team. Bad news. Call when convenient.

As if there’s such a thing as worse news when it comes to the curse. Olympia hopes that it hasn’t picked another victim, that they’re not getting forced onto another timeline with their optimism already quashed – and then she initiates a call.

“Hey, Olympia,” says the kid on the screen. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Sven just contacted us this morning. He found the missing blueprint.”

Olympia frowns. “Why are you telling me this as though it’s not good news.”

“It was in his lab in Whistler,” the kid concludes. “That he didn’t tell us about. He’d moved it and forgot about it. There’s no mystery, no one was messing with his things. He’s just scatterbrained.”

“So the temperature changer–”

“–looks like a dead end for now, yeah. At least on our front.”

“Huh,” says Olympia. Everything seems wildly still; even the general office chaos in her periphery seems to be taking a break, frozen in apprehension alongside her. “I’d sorta hung my hopes on that, to be honest.”

“Yeah, I think we all did. Hey, if you need anything else international, just let us know. We’re happy to help.”

They bid their goodbyes and sign off, and Olympia sits and sits and sits.

Their main lead is no longer. Olympia is watching its potential spill out like a downed water glass. She can’t sop it all up and force hope back into the one solid thing they had going on, no matter how much she tries, how much she wants.

And her next step is– what, exactly? To find something out of nothing, the precise needle in a sea of other needles? She can’t find the cure without the cause, and so far that’s lent itself to a whole pile of dead ends.

Olympia goes outside.

It’s cold today, all wet grey skies and biting wind. Snow hasn’t started falling yet but there’s a distinct feeling of moisture in the air, this soupy precursor to another miserable evening. She walks a block until the visitor’s entrance is no longer in view, and then she just stands.

Like a statue. Like something–someone–unbothered by the wind.

She thinks of what it would be like to grow roots, impress herself like stone into this corner of the world, a centrepiece of eternal and unchanging stability. To not have to think about anything. To just be, persisting through the changing seasons – how the wind will ease, the snow will melt, the grass will poke up green again. The sun will burn away the last of the chill and weather away at her stone face, her stone shoulders and stone eyebrows. Leaves will turn and crumble. Snow will sweep through again. And still she would stand, alone and pockmarked over years of erosion. Never again worrying about mundanities or next steps.

When she goes inside again, her face is wet. Whether that’s from the air or the wind or her own stupid emotions is anyone’s guess.

MARCH

“I need another case,” she says, again and again, until she’s burned through the backlog of work on all the desks in her immediate vicinity. Burned through in efficiency, yes, but also in the sense that she feels like she’s on fire, that if she keeps moving, keeps working through it, she might just escape it.

It always comes back to time.

Because Otis is waiting on her, yes, but he can always wait a little longer. He’s made of stone and pinprick memories. He can’t judge her for failing until he’s moving again, and so she can always put it off just a little longer, push the guilt to the back of her mind with all the other failures she’s compiled over the past three months. Even over the course of their partnership. Keep moving forward, never looking back.

This fevered intensity doesn’t go unnoticed, which is how she finds herself in Orson’s office midway through March.

“You wanted to see me?” She pokes her head around the doorway.

Orson gurgles, and the voice box next to him says, “OLYMPIA, YES, COME IN.”

The science team had pitched in to make the voice box after a chaotic and confusing first week of Orson’s Mr. O-hood. Olympia doesn’t care to ask how it works, but those who do understand his usual mumbles agree that the voice box is reasonably accurate, so it’s become a permanent fixture in the office. Its only downside is that they can’t really change the volume, so it placidly yells at them pretty much all the time.

“A COUPLE OF AGENTS HAVE ASKED ME ABOUT YOU TAKING ON THEIR WORK,” he says. “YOUR EFFICIENCY IS BOTH SCARY AND LEAVING MANY AGENTS WITHOUT ACTIVE CASES.”

“Oh,” says Olympia. “Ha, ha. Sorry. I tried to ask, at first, if they actually wanted me to do their cases, but then I just sort of.” She twists a hand into her ponytail. “Yeah.”

Orson bops his fist on his desk. “I HAVEN’T BEEN GIVING YOU TOO MUCH WORK UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT YOU WERE BUSY WITH OTIS. PERHAPS THAT IS DUE FOR A CHANGE?”

“Well, I am still. Busy with Otis.” There’s something ashy and bitter on the edge of her tongue. “I know I haven’t had much success, yet, but I’m still working on it–”

“I’M NOT QUESTIONING THAT,” says the box, and Orson makes a noise that could be interpreted as apologetic. “I MEAN TO ASK IF YOU WISH TO BE REASSIGNED.”

“Oh,” Olympia says.

“I CAN GIVE YOU MORE CASES. PERHAPS EVEN ANOTHER PARTNER FOR THE TIME BEING–”

Olympia interrupts him with force: “I have a partner.” What does it matter that said partner has spent two months as a stone statue? He’s still real, he exists, he’s hers. She can’t just– replace him. “I’ll take the cases, but no one else.” Then it occurs to her that she’s talking to her boss, and that she should probably at least be polite about it. “Uh. I’d appreciate if you didn’t give me another partner. Please.”

Orson examines her for a second, a little too acutely for someone who still doesn’t have a full set of teeth. “I WON’T PUSH IT,” he says, “BUT IF ANYTHING CHANGES, LET ME KNOW.”

“Yeah,” says Olympia. Nothing will change, she’s pretty sure. But she’s still left with the feeling that she’s escaped something– dodged a metaphorical projectile pie, so to speak. “I will. Thanks.”

He doesn’t formally dismiss her so much as turn his undivided attention to the blocks in front of him. Olympia takes it as her allowance to leave.

She finds herself back in Room 63, relaying the entire conversation to a stoic audience. “It’s not like I’m running away from it,” she says, “it’s just that I’m useful, when I’m solving things, and it’s so hard to feel useful when all I’m finding is blanks for your, uh. Situation.”

Maybe once upon a time she’d get a response to that, something like you’re always useful or we knew it would be a long haul or something equally as reassuring. But she’s not too confident anymore that that’s what she’d get. Two months as a statue; that has to be some kind of record. Not the kind of record anyone would want to be breaking or making.

“But I’m not replacing you.” That’s the one thing she’s sure of. “If I never find the cure, I’ll never have another partner. You and me forever, Otis.” And then she sort of high-fives his shoulder.

It feels like, well, like slapping a rock. Somehow easier than she expected. The lack of softness in his body doesn’t throw her like she thought it would, doesn’t make her break down with the miserable final realisation that he really is just made of stone. She’s been through that already in a million miniature starbursts.

She thinks maybe, at that, he’d give one of his perfunctory little nods and point them both towards their next project. Whatever that would be. One of the new things Orson is about to send her way. The vision of that gives her another little starburst of loss.

Her chest clenches and she turns away. Out of sight, out of mind, or however that saying goes.

APRIL

The outdoor temperature balances out at twelve degrees after several days of hot-cold indecision. Olympia walks to work, sometimes, instead of taking the tubes. She’s never heard so many different birds in her life. There’s the usual suspects – the magpies, the pigeons, the sparrows, the robins. A huge, twisting flock of unidentifiable birds that swarms through the air like bees, clustering on one tree and then a bush, and then off they go again, trilling all the way. A small, pudgy blue bird that cocks its head at her from a fencepost. The sun’s out more often than not, these days, and the chill in the air only lasts the morning.

Olympia writes down the particulars of her life, as interesting things pop up: the folks down the street who have decided to paint their fence green, a visit from the stray cat that occasionally comes demanding pets, even just the way the clouds paint shadows like murals on the asphalt of the roads.

Spring is here. She enjoys it, for the most part. The promise of freshness and new life.

On the days that she lets herself think about it, she considers Otis, both the statue of him and the human of him, weathering this change. Human Otis would let down his guard slowly, and then all at once, as though the part of his heart that flies away for the winter has finally migrated back to stay. She’d goad him into silly things, like dancing with their arms out in parking lots to embrace the coming of the summer sun, or picking up reeds of dead grass to sprinkle as new green takes its place. It’s spring; she always gets a little giddy about it.

The statue of him, naturally, doesn’t regard the season change much at all. Perhaps if she stuck him outside for a while, the blur of his consciousness would eventually recognise that the light gets warm now, stays for longer and leaves a little slower. If she left him there, maybe ivies would spider their way around his legs, wrap around his shoulders like a blanket. Regal Stone Otis and his cape made of greenery. The robins can land on his head and pluck at the leaves until they form a crown.

Olympia continues her work as best she can, helps others when they need it, chips away at her curse files in her free time. Most of the time it feels futile, like she’s trying to drain a Great Lake with a juice glass. One cup at a time.

Otis will understand, she tells herself. I just need to be patient.

Still, she records the life around her as a testament to the time he’s missing. Maybe when she’s finally found the cure and everything’s back to normal, he can read it like a book. Lost history, or something of the sort. Overfull with birds and fence paint and everything that doesn’t matter, really, until it really, really does.

JUNE

Oona throws her own birthday party on the green ski hill, decommissioned for the summer but for a variety of activities thoroughly worthy of an Odd Squad birthday party. There’s a giant play structure that they all attach themselves to, then chase each other through the obstacles, way above the ground like they’re on the mountain themselves. They do a modified paintball tournament. Oona creates the biggest cake in the world, and instead of cutting into it they all just grab and go until they’re covered in frosting.

Olympia spends a lot of time teamed up with Ocean and Oriole, both of whom are having the times of their lives. At some point she finds herself bowled over by the bright river of their joy, and she just lets go and floats.

“She’s, like, the smartest ever,” Ocean says to the sky as they all dry off – having hosed each other down after the cake festival, now they lie on the grass, breathless and delighted about it. “Sometimes I think maybe I should bring her in and we can make her an agent. Honorary agent. Canine unit.”

“All of the creatures in your care and you want to make an Odd Squad unit headed by your dog?” says Oriole.

“Duh,” says Ocean. “I told you. She’s the best.” His dog is a collie named Lake, wholly excitable and apparently wicked smart. “We could get other pets in there too, if we wanted.”

Oriole buzzes her lips together. “I don’t have a pet. One of the kids I played soccer with had a hamster. He brought it to a game once. It rolled around on the grass like the soccer ball and all the moms were afraid we’d get them confused.”

“Hey, I also played soccer,” says Ocean. “Timbits forever.”

“Ugh,” says Olympia, throwing an arm across her eyes to block out some of the sun. “Way to make an agent feel left out.”

Ocean props himself up on one elbow, pushing a damp curl of hair back from his forehead. “Don’t tell me you’ve never played.”

“I mean. Maybe once or twice, for fun. But not, like, in a league, or anything.”

“I don’t think you can count the Timbits as a league,” says Oriole. “Pretty sure we were more motivated by the snacks.”

Ocean turns to his other side and hollers to Oona about a soccer ball. A couple seconds later, one comes flying through the air, and he snatches it with impeccable reflexes.

“Oh, I didn’t mean,” says Olympia, but it’s too late. Resigned to it, she rolls onto her side, scratching at the grass before shoving herself to her feet.

Oriole follows her, shucking off her jacket and piling it neatly on the grass. “Here, put yours down,” she says, and points with her foot to a spot a couple feet away from her own jacket. “Want to see if we can keep Ocean from getting through?”

“Oh, it’s on,” Ocean says, bopping the ball back and forth between his feet.

He feints to the side and starts towards them. Oriole immediately gets into his space, tangling her leg into the mix and fishing the ball out towards Olympia, who bunts it with her toe. “Go!” screeches Oriole, pointing to the grass a bit away– maybe a particular tuft of green, Olympia isn’t sure, but she kicks it there anyway. Ocean intercepts it before it can roll too far and goes back on the offensive.

“If we make it to that dirt pile across from Owen’s picnic blanket that’s a point for us,” Oriole challenges him. She steals it again, and this time Olympia knows what to do, runs and kicks and runs and kicks until Ocean appears in front of her, bending his legs like a prepped goaltender. She winds up, boots it quick enough that it slips through his grip. Oriole shouts wordless victory and grabs Olympia’s arm.

Ocean gets a point, and then another, and Oriole jumps on his back to prevent him from getting a third and Olympia runs away with the ball as he flails her off. Orchid slips in after the fifth point and starts hollering war cries as she aims for her own designated net, and a couple kids from the science department team up for a fourth goal. It’s relatively even-matched by the end. Olympia is too out of breath to care.

She makes their last goal, and Oriole grabs her around the middle and picks her up in a massive hug, and Olympia laughs and takes a deep, wild breath of the happiest air she’s tasted in a while and thinks: whoa.

“Hey, I don’t think I’ve seen you this excited in a while,” Oriole says when she puts Olympia down. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” says Olympia. “Yeah, I just.”

She’d forgotten, for an afternoon. Everything that had been picking away at her over the past half a year, slowly turning her to smaller pieces of herself – it disappeared, and she was whole again, wrapped in the relentless camaraderie of her friends. Even without Otis there. Even without his living ghost.

He flutters at the edge of her vision, but never makes it further than that. “Yeah,” she says again, and she means it, too. Even if it’s just for the afternoon. “Great party, huh?”

“Definitely,” says Oriole. “Oona knows how to make a good time. Happy birthday!” she yells over Olympia’s shoulder.

“I’m one hundred and three!” screams Oona.

“She’s one hundred and three,” Oriole repeats with utmost seriousness.

They both break down in giggles. Olympia’s guilt moves a little further away – just for the afternoon, but away nonetheless.

AUGUST

Oona gives her a blueberry muffin.

“This is a bribe,” Olympia says, regarding it with suspicion.

“Who says? Noooo,” says Oona, tucking her hands into her pockets and adopting an expression not unlike a skittish rabbit. “That’s totally not a food offering to soften your reaction to what I’m about to say next.”

Olympia digs a blueberry out from the muffin cap and puts it in her mouth, but she talks around it instead of biting down. “Why do you look like you want to run away from me.”

“Because I maybe sort of am?”

Olympia shuts her jaw. The blueberry is sweet, sort of flat, all its juice soaked dark blue into the muffin batter. She gives Oona her best Look™.

Oona relents after a few seconds. “Okay, I’m not running away from you. I’m also not, like running away. More like, running to?” She considers this choice of words. “And, really, I’m not sure about running. Maybe a brisk walk. I like a brisk walk. Really gets the heart pumping, you know.”

“I do like a brisk walk,” Olympia says. “But you don’t get to distract me with the benefits of a good walk. What’s happening?”

“So, I keep in touch with Oscar, you know? We talk a lot of science. And other things. But this is science-related, so.” She scratches at the back of her neck. “There’s a scientist-in-residence position open at the Academy and he asked if I wanted to try it. And I maybe sort of kind of said I’d like to.”

“That sounds cool!” says Olympia. “Like, guest lecturing?”

Oona grimaces slightly. “Um. More like, semi-permanent lecturing. Like, leaving this precinct and going there doing things full-time lecturing.”

Olympia blinks at her, and then blinks again. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re leaving.”

“I mean,” says Oona, and that’s not a no. Olympia unwraps the muffin and rips it in half, then stuffs one half ungainly into her mouth. “It’s– yeah. That’s what it looks like.”

As far as bribe muffins go, it’s pretty good. Olympia chews for the minimum amount of time and ignores the knot it makes as it slides down her throat. “Like, soon?”

“End of the month.” Oona scuffs her sneaker against the ground. Her eyebrows are downturned, and for once she looks almost guilty about it, apprehensive about everything that ought to excite her. “Look, Olympia–”

“It’s not,” says Olympia. “I mean. You do what you want to, right?” She swallows again. It’s thick, even though there’s no food to swallow down this time. “It’ll be good for you to get the new experience, and stuff. You’ll be great at it.”

Oona’s hesitancy ebbs. “Yeah,” she says. “Thanks, Olympia. It’s been good, you having my back. You and Otis both.”

Abruptly, Olympia’s mouth tastes bitter, all the muffin residue suddenly sour. “Anytime,” she chokes out.

“Anyway, I’ll catch you before then. Still have another couple weeks. You’re stuck with me for a bit longer.” Oona plucks at her suspenders, tipping this way and that as she makes off for the lab. “See you!”

Olympia stands in her wake, holding half a muffin limply in her hand.

And she’s– angry.

Not necessarily at Oona, but also not not at Oona– at the circumstances that have brought them to this point, maybe, where Oona can say goodbye to only one of her, and it’s the version of her that’s halfway to grieving something else already. At the way this feels like a block taken from the very base of the Jenga tower she’s been desperately, precariously holding onto for the entire year.

At the way this feels like a betrayal, even when it isn’t.

She eats the rest of the muffin, because there’s no sense in letting it go to waste, and then she takes a walk.

The doors and hallways in Headquarters stretch out unimaginably far. There’s a mystery to them, even now, when she’s been through so many of them and at least knows what’s behind the rest. It’s like a dream she had once: this infinite stretch of doors, behind one of which was the key to whatever her dream self was looking for. Behind all the others– some sort of undefined evil. She never did know which door to pick, and so she didn’t; she spent the entire span of the dream wandering up and down until the ground wore itself into the shape of her feet.

Beach room. Bean room. Doors that would take them to parks, or wetlands, or mountains. Cloud room. The room that houses an identical doll-sized model of Headquarters, complete with doll-sized figurines of the agents that move to match their larger counterparts whenever no one’s looking at them.

It’s a world of exploration that Olympia loves. She adores her job, owes it everything, has poured her heart and soul into her adventures with Otis. And usually the job loves her back.

She scans Little Headquarters until she finds Little Room 63, with Little Statue Otis.

Usually the job loves her back, but sometimes it just takes– and takes, and takes, and takes.

She runs into Ocean on her way back to the bullpen. “Oh, hey, there you are,” he says, halfway out of breath. “Do you still have that jar of stone cure in your desk?”

They’d made one before even stoning Otis, partly as a failsafe in case someone else accidentally got turned and partly with wild hope that they’d find the cure to the cold within the next few days. It’s in a mason jar at the bottom of Olympia’s big drawer. She hasn’t touched it in months.

“It’s still there,” she says. “Why?”

“One of my assistants accidentally got himself stoned,” says Ocean. “Can I use it?”

Olympia shakes her head. “It’s for Otis. That’s what we made it for.”

Ocean crosses his arms and squints a little bit, like he does sometimes when things get a bit unchill. “We made it to unstone people,” he says. “Which.” He waves a hand around. “Y’know.”

“Yeah, but it’s– not just people. It’s literally our failsafe for him.” There’s some kind of warning light firing at the edge of her brain, this is irrational! screaming like an emergency alert, but she can’t find it in her to acknowledge it. “I don’t want to use it up.”

“Why wouldn’t we use what we have when it’s easier than making more?”

 “It’s Otis’s,” she says, which is both not enough explanation and far too much. “What if you use it up and we find the cure to the cold tomorrow?”

“Then I make another batch? Olympia, are you–” Ocean frowns like he’s worried. “What’s going on?”

Energy leaves her like a balloon fizzling out. She slumps against the wall, sliding all the way down to the floor and drawing her knees in. “I can’t just let it go,” she says. Her voice wavers like she’s going to cry, and she doesn’t want to–she hates crying at work–but it doesn’t feel like something she can stop. “If we stop planning for him to come back, then we’re leaving him behind. All of us.”

“Hey, whoa.” Ocean props himself into a crouch at her shoulder. “Where’d you get that idea?”

Olympia waves a sad, vague hand. “Ms. O left. Oona’s going to teach at the Academy. Agents are coming and going quick as ever–half the team’s new at this point–and I just. Look at me. Look at us.” She blinks furiously. Little spots are forming on her glasses – there’s gotta be tears in her eyes. “If we don’t try to hold onto something for him, who else will?”

She sniffs hard and ugly and shoves her nose into her sleeve. Ocean is silent for a long time, long enough that she knows he doesn’t have an answer, either.

He slides out of his crouch onto the floor. “Guess it’s kind of like time travel, huh?”

Looking for descendants of familiarity–or ancestors–in a world otherwise unknown. That’s time travel, alright. “But he’s alone,” she says. If it were time travel, they’d be together, be each other’s constant. “I need something else to be the same.”

Because she doesn’t know if it can be her. Something’s changed, between January and now, and she doesn’t know if she can describe it but she’s scared of what it looks like. What it would look like to a Otis who never got to see the aftermath of his own change in shape. All the wreckage it created in her.

“There’ll be things,” says Ocean. “Dunno what things, but there’ll be things.”

“Yeah,” Olympia echoes. Her voice breaks completely, and she buries her face in her knees. “Things.”

SEPTEMBER

Oona’s replacement is a scientist named Omille, and she is outgoing and scatterbrained and oh-so-smart. Olympia spends three days wanting–and, in fact, trying–to dislike her. After three days her brain does a forced restart and kicks her into gear: it’s rude, scarily out of character, and besides, Omille is doing her best. It can’t be easy to fill in a position that’s been headed up now by two of the best science minds in Odd Squad history.

So it takes a bit to get used to the lack of Oona around. Oona sends her varying wild messages at all hours of the night and day, little bubbles that pop up at the bottom of her computer screen full of vaguely incomprehensible emoticons or phrases that would be implausible from anyone but Oona – accidentally spent two months in a time vortex, whoops haha, but I got a new hat out of it! 🎩🎩🎩🎩. It feels less like she’s gone and more like she’s just out for the day, ready to come back at any time. Olympia just knows she can’t wait for that anymore.

 And then she gets called to see Orson again.

Someone’s turned his voice box down, but the general affect of the voice is still rather yell-y. “OLYMPIA, HELLO,” he says. “I HAVE A FAVOUR TO ASK.”

“A favour,” Olympia says slowly, because sometimes that means cool things–like meeting a unicorn–and sometimes it just means that she has to call the town waste management because their garbage schedule got changed again and whoever’s in charge doesn’t want to do it.

“I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO CONSULT ON A MATTER IN A PRECINCT IN OHIO. I WILL NEED TO TAKE AN EXTENDED LEAVE OF ABSENCE.”

It slips out before Olympia can help it: “Oh, not you too.”

Orson shoves at something on his desk with an open palm. “I WOULD LIKE YOU TO TAKE ON THIS POSITION IN MY ABSENCE.”

“I,” says Olympia. Everything else she was prepared to say vanishes from her mind. “What?”

“YOUR WORK ETHIC AND PROBLEM SOLVING IS ADMIRABLE,” Orson says. “WITH YOUR REFUSAL OF A PARTNER, YOUR SOLO WORK HAS BECOME A GREAT STRENGTH. YOU’D BE A GOOD LEADER, IF YOU WANTED.”

“Oh.” She blinks a couple times. The problem is– she does want it. She’s wanted it for a long time, but as one of those vaguely unattainable maybe one day sort of goals. Achieved through hard work and success that was shaped the way it’s always been shaped– with the silhouette of a high-five.

But if this is how it’s going to be from now on, shouldn’t she try to make it at least somewhat good?

Olympia wraps one hand around the other and squeezes until it turns white. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “I– I’d need to learn a lot, and make decisions, and–”

“AND DO WHAT YOU ALREADY DO,” Orson’s voice box loudly but gently reminds her.

Plus, says a traitorous voice at the back of her head, you’d have more reach in your search for the cold cure.

“For how long?” She doesn’t want to sound too accepting just yet– just in case she still can’t do it.

Orson makes a long string of noises. The voice box is silent for a bit, apparently calculating. “I DON’T KNOW YET,” it says, “BUT IT WOULD BE TEMPORARY.”

Temporary is good. Temporary is something Olympia can do. After all this mess of things that are permanent, alongside all those things that shouldn’t be permanent but certainly feel like that right now nonetheless, she’ll jump at the chance to take some impermanence. Another promise that not everything will change too drastically.

Besides, what can she feasibly lose– more than has already been lost?

“Okay,” she says, “you know what, yeah, sure, I’ll take it.”

“EXCELLENT,” the voice box says, interpreting one word from a string of happy noises. “I WILL SEND THROUGH THE PAPERWORK. WE’LL MEET AGAIN LATER TO DISCUSS THE PARTICULARS.” Orson gestures–probably–towards a container of cheerios. “IT’S SNACK TIME. YOU ARE DISMISSED.”

OCTOBER

So she’s Interim Ms. O now. She gets a whole office to herself.

It’s weird until it abruptly isn’t: over the past year she’s helped enough agents on their cases that she has a general feel of what their strengths are, and she assigns work accordingly. Her preferred manner of bursting in to help–and just as swiftly bursting out when it’s done–has lent itself to a sort of respectful distance between her and the others. Or maybe it’s just them giving her an increasing amount of space because of the whole partner is still a stone statue thing. Either way: the transition is smoother than expected. She’s Ms. O.

Having her own office comes with a few perks. She replaces the couches with beanbag chairs, frames and hangs her villain signatures, adds a little flair wherever she can. Just because she’s kind of in charge now doesn’t mean she can’t have a bit of fun with it.

Oona sends her a message: 👩💼🏆👀!!!!!!

Thanks Oona, miss you, Olympia sends back. After a bit of deliberation, she adds, Omille’s doing great but you’ll always be my favourite scientist.

aaaaww thanks I just made something explode, says Oona.

Ocean taps on her door later, poking his head into the office with a quirk to his grin. “Hey, Ms. O.”

“Oh, stop,” says Olympia. “Is this weird for you? I bet it is.”

“It’s cool,” Ocean insists. “Like, you’ve worked hard enough for it. You’re totally gonna be the right person for the job.”

Olympia thinks of her Ms. O, the things that made her as good a leader as she was. “I hope so.”

“Anyway, I was wondering if you were willing to OK a new creature transfer.”

“Are you only asking now because you think our friendship means I’ll let you add another dangerous creature to our zoo?” She smiles so Ocean knows she’s halfway joking.

“Noooo,” says Ocean, “…yeah.”

“What does this one do?”

Ocean eases the door shut behind him and sprawls out on one of the beanbags. That’s one of the good things about beanbags; it’s hard to do anything but sprawl in them, and that sort of relaxed tone leads to good conversation. Olympia plops herself down in one across from him.

“It’s called a squonk,” Ocean says, gesturing about, “and it’s only about this big, right, and–”

NOVEMBER

The first time the snowfall sticks, Olympia asks herself: what am I doing here?

And sure, there’s the simple answer– she’s still working, she’s been promoted, she’s doing the job she wanted so badly back when joining Odd Squad was still a dream-in-progress. There’s no, like, active crises, nothing life-threatening beyond the obvious, and she’s running her precinct pretty smoothly, all things considered.

But it’s like an ice pick, slowly chipping away at the blanket of contentment she’s constructed about herself: the snow is back–its season returns–and nothing has changed.

They still have no leads on the cold cure. Otis is still made of stone. She’s still without a partner, and she still keeps listening for a voice that she hasn’t heard in ten months, at this point, and–

Well, there’s the question, isn’t it. What is she doing here?  

Her office looks abruptly alien, like she’s just changed out her glasses and the new ones offer an entirely different view of the world. Her desk is too big, too brown, more cocoa than amber and all glossy smooth. When the doors are shut they cut off sound from the bullpen almost entirely, leaving her in unsteady quiet. Even the beanbags just look like blobs. The person who designed them– what were they thinking? Olympia is cold, and she doesn’t think it’s because of the temperature.

She has a File of Files now, this large folder that has a run-down of each case and who she’s assigned it to. It sits in her top right-hand drawer. Right on top of a piece of notepaper with a frog sticker in the middle.

She hasn’t visited Otis since September.

And she’s been doing such a good job of keeping all this at bay, of running a precinct with all the emotional detachment necessary for such a job,  that she should have known it wouldn’t last forever. It’s a wonder it’s lasted this long. She half expected to have a breakdown about it the moment the office became hers.

It keeps looping in her mind: it’s winter again, and nothing has changed.

Omille comes to track her down and finds her staring at the corner where the walls and ceiling intersect, thoroughly wallowing. “Ms. O?”

Olympia blinks at the ceiling, then shakes herself. “Hey, Omille.”

“Are you… okay?” She’s tentative about asking, like Olympia might not respond positively. But she’s asking, which is – it’s nice. Kind.

The thing is, Olympia’s pretty sure she’s not, and she doesn’t want to just pile that onto her agents like it’s their problem to solve.

“What can I do for you?” she says instead.

Omille twitches, but they’re not at the friendship level where she can push about it, so–blessedly–she lets it go. “I was wondering if you knew anything about this,” she says, and she pulls a gadget from behind her back and delivers it gently to Olympia’s desk.

Olympia knows it before she even picks it up. It’s Oona’s microwave.

“It was– before she left, Oona told me she’d left a pile of gadgets that needed fixing in this pocket dimension in one of her cupboards,” Omille explains. “And I’ve been going through it and fixing the ones that needed it, but I’m not– I can’t figure out what the problem is on this one. It seems to work fine. And I wondered if you might know something more about why it was in the cupboard to begin with.” She points to the gadget, does a little twirly motion with her finger. “It’s supposed to heat things up, I think.” As if Olympia isn’t acutely aware.

Her fingers tighten around the barrel. “Yeah,” she says. The word comes out just clear enough that she allows herself to keep talking. “It does, for the most part.”

“For the most part?”

She doesn’t look Omille in the eye as she hands the gadget back. “They just don’t stay warm.”

“Oh,” says Omille. “I see. I guess that’s difficult to do without a sustained ray, especially when you account for airflow and ambient temperature, but I can see if there’s something I can integrate that boosts the subject’s capacity to hold what the gadget’s giving them, and– oh.” She smiles a little sheepishly at Olympia. “Sorry, Ms. O, you probably don’t want to hear all that. I guess I should just say I’ll take a look.”

Olympia shakes her head. She feels raw and bare, like a fossil being uncovered for the first time, its dust slowly but surely brushed away. “It’s no rush,” she says. “What we needed it for– it stopped being urgent.” She forces a smile: “But Oona liked it for reheating her lunches.”

Omille ticks into a grin at that. “Thanks, Ms. O,” she says, and then she takes her leave.

Olympia digs her knuckles into her eyes and resists the urge to start crying uncontrollably. Her ribs must be exposed, her heart beating out of tempo for all to see, anything to justify this ache that feels more like she’s caving in. Stopped being urgent has never been such an overstatement and understatement all at once. Of course it’s urgent– of course they can wait. Of course they can wait until the entire world has spun on, because stone doesn’t age. Stone doesn’t know that it’s been left behind.

She wonders, briefly, what it would be like if they un-stoned Otis now. Reintroducing him to a headquarters where half the staff is new, where Olympia runs the shop with hands that are steady eight and a half of ten times, where the ripples of his sickness have run much deeper than they’d ever thought it would. Olympia strictly enforces the buddy system on outdoor missions and the general bullpen heat is a single degree higher than it was. The stone cure is always stocked. She holds onto her happinesses with the careful hands of someone preparing to drop them again. Whispers travel around the precinct sometimes that she has a history, but few are privy to the full details – Ocean keeps them to himself, for the most part, and no one else remains who’d watched it all play out.

Maybe Otis would take it all in stride. She’d offer up half her massive desk to him, and they could tackle this new set of problems and solutions together, and everything would click back into place like the ten months he’d spent as a rock never meant anything. Maybe the differences would leave him with an after-chill, wanting an impossible dynamic of the past that never quite made it to the present. Maybe he’d be so disgusted with her that he leaves for another precinct instantly.

She doesn’t think that would be the case. But there’s always room for surprises.

The rest of the day passes on this precipice, always just one wrong step away from a full mental breakdown in headquarters, and after all is said and done Olympia sees off the first night shift and steps outside into the new snow.

It’s not a huge layer, yet: shadows of grass still poke up occasionally from breaks in the snow, and the road is wet and puddly but the gutters are free of slush. No streetlights are on but there’s a grainy quality to the air that suggests an incoming dusk. Olympia tucks her hands into her jacket pockets and blows out a breath. Small cloud.

She feels loose at the edges, like static, or windy ripples across a lake.

But she can’t put herself back together with only the tools she’s got right now: her feet, her legs, her tired eyes. She can cry and walk and take another stab at tomorrow.

She nudges her foot into a pile of snow, makes a divot in the shape of the toe of her shoe. Snowflakes crack around the rubber. And then she walks home, this little pile of cold in the crevice of her shoe slowly melting– warming up in the way she wishes everything else could.

JANUARY

“I MAY HAVE MISLED YOU SLIGHTLY,” says Orson over the screen. “THE POSITION WAS ONLY TEMPORARY FOR AS LONG AS IT TOOK TO UNDERSTAND THAT YOU WERE A GOOD FIT FOR THE PRECINCT. AFTER THAT IT BECAME PERMANENT.”

“Oh,” says Olympia.

“CONGRATULATIONS, MS. O.”

“Oh,” says Olympia again. Then, again, politeness– “Thank you.”

She’s not sure what to think about scratching the Interim off her title. So she doesn’t think about it. Just like Oona, just like the cold cure– wait for it long enough and it’ll eventually slot itself where it needs to go.

APRIL

For three days it’s spring, and Olympia briefly rediscovers her lungs – and then it snows again.

It’s not bad–really, it’s barely snow at all, just a grey and windy mess of thick, wet precipitation–but it’s enough of a weather event that the entire city loses its civility for a day. Olympia takes the tubes instead of walking so she doesn’t have to deal with it all.

The rest of her agents file in with much the same disgruntled attitude, unwinding scarves and brushing wet spots from their jackets. There’s a vibe across the bullpen that the day is just one to get through rather than embrace. For once Olympia agrees with them; everything about the day screams go home and nap it off.

She does consider calling it a nap day. Unfortunately, there are things to do.

The next day brings with it a surge of sunlight, burning off the snow in a misty, early-morning glory. It’s amazing how the whole office can go from morose and tired one day to joyfully livin’ the life the next, all from a change in the weather. Blue sky, gentle breeze – Olympia would objectively call it perfect, if that was, you know, a thing.

Except– it’s not all perfect. Because she gets a report, halfway through the morning, that one area of town has decidedly not warmed up. In fact, it’s gotten colder.

Olympia has seen this movie before. She does not like how it ends.

The old stone that’s been settled in her stomach for months now rolls on its head, grows a couple sizes. She ignores it, because even though she’s scared–terrified, more so than she’s been in a long time–they’re a public service and she has a job to do. To delegate. Whatever.

If the agents she assigns to the case wonder why she demands every single update as it comes, they don’t ask out loud. Olympia hovers–more than she should, but less than she wants–and watches them run into the same questions she’d asked a year and a half ago. Over and over like a bad dream. Intentions, effects, solutions – it’s as much a puzzle as it’s always been, just without the threat to life. Olympia can’t help but feel like this is the make-or-break: if they solve it now, everything will change. If they can’t– well, there’s something in her that might finally be ready to learn the meaning of mourning.

And then. And then. Her agents meet a woman.

She’s rather ordinary, when Olympia first meets her, in the same way everyone in the world is rather ordinary: full of all the individual quirks that constitute a regular person. She’s a scientist, something historical, and she wears a lot of blue to the point that it almost bleeds onto her skin, and she has huge glasses that magnify her eyes, and she looks at people like they’re puzzles. Her name is Irene, and she’s the one person at the park when the second area to drop in temperature is reported.

They pass her off as a witness. And then there’s a third drop. A fourth.

And it all comes back to her.

Olympia, painfully, doesn’t get to see the action–another minor emergency pops up at headquarters that she has to deal with, slight lava spillover from the floor-is-lava room–but she inserts herself into the aftermath well enough. With her tie straight, her hands steady, and her newly patented Director Glare on.

“I hear you’re going by Ice Age Irene, now,” she says when she walks into the interrogation room. It’s warm in there. She hates it–likes it–feels some sort of way about it that she can’t parse out right now. Something cyclical.

Ice Age Irene wiggles her eyebrows behind her massive blue glasses. “You finally figured it out. I was hoping you might.”

She’s got that same slightly condescending friendliness a lot of villains tend towards when talking to agents for the first time, all sweet voices and underestimation. It claws up Olympia’s arms and across her neck. She’s facing down their best lead yet as to the force that froze her partner, and she has no interest in playing along.

But this can be a slow game, she’s learned, and it’s best to play it until they figure out a better plan of attack. “Why ice age?”

“For research,” Irene says, folding her hands together pleasantly. “I study transitional and glacial ecosystems. What better way to study is there than to watch it directly?”

“You want to start the next ice age,” Olympia interprets. For a second it clangs around in her brain, uncomprehending.

“Well, it doesn’t have to be everywhere,” says Irene. “I could do with a small sample, like just the city.”

Olympia breathes in. Breathes out. Some people like ice ages. Just like they like flat things, or things you spread on toast, or puppies or bananas or whatever else. It’s not her place to judge, it’s her place to stop. “How have you been freezing the parks?”

Irene flicks her nose up. “Do I have to tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm, I’m not sure about that one.”

“Is it a gadget? Personal magic? Weird team-up?” Olympia frowns. “I know most of the villains in this city, I can and will ask them.”

“But you didn’t know me,” says Irene, smirking.

Whatever Olympia wants to say next gets interrupted by the ringing of her badge. She turns her back on Irene to answer it. “Go for Ms. O.”

“We found a gadget,” says the agent on the other end – Oregon, she’s pretty sure.

Olympia turns back to Irene, who looks a little chastened. “There may be a gadget,” she says.

Which, this might be– this might be it. Something in her blood has picked up, started buzzing again, bees beneath her skin. This could be the lost thing she’s been waiting for.

“Bring it to Omille,” Olympia tells her badge. “I want it figured out as fast as possible.” She tries to keep her tone level. Doesn’t quite succeed.

She shuts her badge and returns her attention across the table. Irene has dropped a portion of her attitude and watches Olympia curiously, but she doesn’t say anything.

“Okay. I have some questions,” says Olympia, “and you’re going to answer them.”

“I’m listening,” says Irene.

“Is this week the first time you’ve used your gadget in public?”

Irene runs her thumb across the pads of her fingers. “Have you noticed any other icy spots?”

Olympia bristles. “As a matter of fact, yes. Last January.”

“Last January,” Irene sounds out. “I was still testing–”

The bees in Olympia’s blood go furious. She thinks she might be shaking. “In Wharton park, maybe? Remember someone with a personal cloud?”

“I– maybe? But I hadn’t let anything loose yet.”

“Oh, you did,” says Olympia lowly. She leans forward, turns up the glare. “Does your gadget work on humans?”

Irene purses her lips. “It… shouldn’t.”

“Did it?”

“It– could have.”

“No, I’ll tell you.” Olympia feels a smile grow unbidden across her face; feels a little manic about it. Like everything she’s been holding onto over the past year has grown into something monstrous and it’s finally finding the light. “It did.”

“I wasn’t aware,” says Irene. She drops her hands, showing her first bit of concern through a slight eyebrow furrow.

“No,” says Olympia, “you weren’t. Because it has been a year. We have been looking for a cure to your stupid cold gadget for a year. Do you know the mess it’s made?”

Irene adjusts her glasses. “Well, clearly not–”

“I am making you someone else’s problem,” Olympia interrupts, shoving a finger in her face. It’s unprofessional to directly scream, long and hard, into anyone’s face, no matter what they’ve inadvertently done to you, and so Olympia needs to remove herself from the premises before that happens. The scream is building and she’s vibrating with it. “Have you tried making an ice age in Florida?”

“And try and get grant money there? No thank you,” says Irene. But she sees Olympia’s monster for what it is and doesn’t push it. “I– should I be helping you? With the gadget cloning?”

“You’ve done enough,” Olympia snaps. Yes, it probably would be helpful, but there’s been a line drawn straight through her chest the moment they turned Otis to stone, and this is on the wrong side of it. “We’ll be in contact. Someone will escort you out.”

She shoves open the door to the interrogation room and slams it shut again behind her, startling whichever poor agent happens to be walking by. There’s so much tension in her body she might go insane with it – bees, monsters, whatever the creature has become at this point, she needs to run and also yell and maybe cry a little bit to relieve some of the overwhelming everything. She can’t even find the relief yet. It’s there somewhere, hidden under all the pain, but to find it means digging up everything else first.

Olympia asks Oregon to finish up with remarkable restraint, and then she goes outside.

Well– she goes to one of the rooms that spits her out on top of a cliff. Which is still outside, just. A different outside, where no one can accidentally run across her, where she can cause no further incident. No-Name Grand Canyon.

There, she feels everything.

Just a waterfall over a cliff. The bees, the monster, the guilt, the cold, the authority, the grief, all of it – even the snatches of joy she’s been finding. It goes and goes until she’s nothing but a silhouette, just the material parts of herself.

She stays like that for a while. Then she drags all her pieces back together and returns to work.

Over the next few days she’s out of focus, switching rapidly between hope and fear in a rollercoaster way she hasn’t felt–again–in a long time. The weather turns springlike and stays, this time: insects are beginning to poke their way from the thawing ground, small city creatures, resilient sidewalk grass. Olympia enjoys it– she makes herself enjoy it.

Maybe nothing's changed at all, but she can taste a little bit of it anyway. Something that’s shifted in the air.

Omille gets the gadget clone online after about a week of working at it, disassembling and re-assembling in equal measure. They test it on the cold patches of the city and watch those parks slowly warm up in balance with the rest of the world. Olympia thinks about the tension she had at the beginning of Omille’s tenure, the fear that she was replacing another piece of the world Olympia was trying so very hard to hold onto, and then considers their place now: it’s different, but it’s not bad. And she doesn't have to be scared of her friends.

“It should work,” Omille says. “Obviously you don’t know until you try it, and I don’t really want to ice someone to test it just in case it doesn’t, but, you know.” She shrugs, tugs on her tie, smiles a bit. “Worth a shot.”

“Worth a shot,” Olympia echoes with the same smile. “Omille, you are incredible.”

Omille waves it off. “Ah, psh. Doin’ what I love, and all that.”

It strikes Olympia that she’s not sure Omille actually knows why this is such a big deal. Rumors fly, sure, but Olympia has been careful to never confirm them, lest she accidentally lets herself be defined by them. “Here, come with me,” she says, and Omille follows easily.

Olympia pauses with her hand on the doorknob of room 63. It’s been actual, literal months since she’s come to say hello to Otis, and now that it’s at the front of her mind it’s starting to feel like a monumental betrayal. But it’s not– she can’t change that. Not like she wishes she could.

Although–

Guess it’s kind of like time travel, huh?

–there’s something there. A possibility she wants to hold onto, tumble it around in her mind like a dryer when she has the time.

“I’ve been here before,” says Omille. “When I first started getting a feel of all the rooms here, it was like, you know. Everyone always tells you to check out the pillow room, the creature habitats, all the places we went on rookie night. But I was curious about this one because no one ever really talks about it. It’s just. Here.” She tucks her hands inside her pockets and bounces on her toes. “So I went inside.”

Olympia knows she’s waiting for nothing, now. She opens the door.

“Hey, Otis,” she says.

Otis, with the same grey, unchanged face, stares back.

“Agent Otis,” says Omille. “Your partner.” She makes a little duh face at Olympia’s raised eyebrow. “I do my research.”

“Oh,” says Olympia. She hasn’t– it’s been a bit since she’s been known, in the way that this entails. The way someone else might understand the depth of her failure and respect her anyway.

“Plus I talked to Ocean,” Omille adds, smirking a bit. “He told me stories.”

Olympia eases the door shut behind them and finds that it’s not so bad, losing some of this tension. “Oh, god,” she says, “I can only imagine.”

Omille snorts out a laugh as she wanders closer to Otis, studying him like she might a piece of art, taking him in ridge by ridge. “Can I tell him his reputation precedes him?”

“You can tell him whatever you want, as long as he can hear you,” says Olympia. Then she freezes: she’s said it out loud. A promise of what will come when he’s animated, a mixing of what she knew and what she knows – an acknowledgement of hope. Grounded for once in truth.

It leaves her breathless. She lays a hand on Otis’s stone elbow, digs her fingertips into the cold of it. Thinks about her thumb impressing into fabric instead of stone.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it,” says Omille softly.

Olympia doesn’t look away from the statue – though she’s too close to really take in his face, she finds herself caught on the finer details, the texture of the stone and the way it melts from cloth to skin without a breaking point. “A year,” she says. “Plus some. But it feels like longer.”

Omille doesn’t respond, but she walks a slow circle around Otis, and then says, “Hi, Agent Otis. I hope we get to be friends.”

A knot of emotion swells up in Olympia’s throat. She snatches her hand away from Otis and presses it deep into the sockets beneath her eyes, trying to stave off the inevitable tears. They’re going to get him back, and it’s going to be to a place that he may not recognise – and maybe the others will make it home, too.

“Are you going to do it soon?” Omille asks.

Olympia makes a little snorfling noise and then forces all her emotions down again. “I don’t know,” she says, and it’s true – she’s barely thought about anything past the nebula of possible tomorrows. “I– I’ll need to figure some things out first, I think.”

“Okay,” says Omille easily. “The gadget’ll be here when you need it.”

MAY

Olympia turns it over in her mind for a long time.

Time travel.

For the most part it exists as this thing that just happened to her, twice upon a time, and not necessarily something she can instigate. But then – why not?

Well, morally and, like, professionally, there’s a lot of reasons why not. But for a moment, none of them are nearly as loud as the single line blaring through her head: I could make it different.

She could take a year’s worth of guilt, and waiting, and reaching, and wanting, and turn it to dust. Vanish it all away, so that no one even considers this to be a potential future, all caught up in the euphoria of the present. She could ease the transition on Otis, who could warm up inside a familiar headquarters in a familiar world with a partner who hasn’t quite lost her soul yet. She could give herself grace.

And it slams into her, just like it had when Otis was first stuck in stone: she wants.

This time it’s bittersweet. She wants it for herself, yes, but it would never truly be herself at all. The last year has seeped into her and mixed irreversibly with her bones, and it can’t be siphoned out again. No matter if she goes back in time or someone else does: her body is the one that carries the mess.

But there’s a world, somewhere, in which she uncovers the cure within a few days–even weeks would be alright–of pausing Otis’s time. And it’s not like she’s envisioning constant sunshine and rainbows and another visit to the unicorn – but she is thinking about spring. About the lifting of the air when the seasons change. How that version of her would be able to taste it.

Olympia thinks and thinks and thinks about it.

It’s a bad idea, objectively. Messing with time is never good. It’s foolish and possibly disaster-causing and should, probably, make her break out in hives.

It’s also the best idea she’s ever had.

She calls Ms. O. Who is also the Big O. Who is also her boss again, technically, but in a lot less direct way, which happens when you’re suddenly dealing with Every Squad In The World instead of just one of your own.

So she doesn’t necessarily expect Ms. O to pick up, and for a while the video screen futzes like it’s proving her point. She fiddles with items on her desk, pens and files and a little keychain stuffy she’d found in the sale bin at Dollarama last week. Its huge eyes stare at her and reflect the screen in equal measure. Olympia swallows down a suddenly dry mouth.

Then Ms. O’s face fills the screen. “Olympia,” she says. If she’s surprised, she doesn’t show it, classy as always. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Hey,” Olympia says, stretching out the sound. “How’s it going?”

Ms. O smiles and shrugs, comfortable in her position. “I’m the Big O. I can’t complain.” She zeroes in on Olympia, narrowing her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

Two years since Ms. O left and she can still, somehow, read Olympia impeccably. “Would you believe me if I said I just wanted to talk?”

“Olympia, you haven’t wanted to just talk in months,” says Ms. O. There’s an extra frown to her frown, like the fact pains her more than she’s letting on. Another flash-fire of guilt races up Olympia’s chest. “Something’s wrong. Out with it.”

“Okay,” says Olympia, “this is just a chat, I guess, except.” She does miss it, too, the easy contact they used to have with Ms. O before all this happened. “It’s important, too, I guess.”

“What are you about to do?”

Olympia slumps a bit. “I hate that you know that’s what’s happening.”

“I know you,” Ms. O says, more gently than Olympia would have expected. “You’re not asking permission, you’re asking forgiveness. Or however the saying goes.”

“Ms. O,” says Olympia. Her voice breaks.

Ms. O raises her eyebrows, carefully expressionless but in a warm sort of way. “Ms. O,” she says right back.

The title from her seems alien. Olympia shakes her head. “I shouldn’t– it feels so right, and it doesn’t feel right at all, and I– I’m going to do something stupid.”

“No such thing,” says Ms. O. She considers this for a second. “Nope. Definitely such a thing. And you’re telling me about it?”

Olympia feels small when she asks: “Can you come to headquarters? Do you have time?”

“I’m the Big O, I don’t have time for anything.” Olympia is about to say oh, okay, nevermind and call it off when Ms. O continues: “But I’ll make time for you.”

“Oh,” says Olympia. “Thank you.”

“Half an hour?”

That works. “See you then.”

Ms. O smiles at her again, and the screen goes blank.

Olympia takes off her glasses, presses her fingers into her eyes until purple spots bleed into the darkness of her eyelids. She’s bullying off a headache with pure willpower – everything’s itching beneath her skin, the bees are back, and she wants this all to be over, but there are still loose ends to deal with.

She replaces her glasses and picks up the remote again. There’s one more call she has to make.

She forgets to give the operators a heads-up, so there is understandably a small sense of alarm when she runs to the tube room. “Sorry!” she says, herding O‘Ryan and O‘Connor back into a regulated professionalism. “It’s not–we’re not–no problems. Just a visit.” She turns to Ms. O and dips to a knee. “Ma’am.”

“Rise,” says Ms. O. “Your office?”

“You know what, I hadn’t gotten that far,” Olympia says, “so yeah, sure. That’s probably smart.”

They situate themselves on opposite bean-bag chairs. Ms. O looks uncomfortable for all of five seconds before she finds a sweet spot. “I see you redecorated.”

“The couches just weren’t cutting it,” Olympia admits. “Too formal, you know? Like, yeah, I didn’t want to be too approachable, but these are just so much nicer.” She pats the mounds that have formed her arm rests like they’re pets. “Can I get you a juice?”

“I will never say no to a juice,” Ms. O says, dignified.

Olympia gets up and heads for the fridge, trying not to shake too much. But Ms. O has always had a keen eye, and she zeroes in as Olympia collects a box and carries it back. “Have you… talked to anyone about this?”

“Barely,” Olympia says, flumping back into her bean-bag. “The squad therapist is eight. How am I supposed to talk to an eight-year-old about existential grief? Besides, only, like, three people here know the real story, and I have given Ocean so many rain checks on weekly lunches I could almost fill a bucket. It’s– I know it’s not how I’m supposed to have done things, but what else could I have done?”

Ms. O’s voice is a little sharp. “I thought one of the biggest lessons we learned together was about leaning on your friends, Olympia.”

“I know,” says Olympia. “I just… never thought it would turn out like this. Like I did something wrong. Again.” She sighs. “It’s been so long since I’ve actually acknowledged Otis as something other than, like, this rock in the back of my brain, and every time that fact makes itself known to me I kind of want to throw up. And it – I want to apologize but it won’t matter anymore, because everything’s changed. I had a constant. And then I lost it. And now it’s been a year and I can barely even make myself feel right again.”

Ms. O narrows her eyes. “What is it you’re planning on doing?”

“Well, we finally figured out the curse – what caused it, hopefully how to fix it.”

“That’s great!” says Ms. O. She’s relieved, too; it strikes Olympia somewhere in the chest. She’d forgotten how much this would have weighed on the other people who loved Otis. “Isn’t it?”

“I mean.” Olympia chews on her lip. “See–”

“I’m here!” says a new voice, and following it is Oona, bustling through the doorway. “And I brought the time machine like you asked!”

Ms. O’s gaze flashes back to Olympia. “Time machine?”

“Oh! Hello, Big O,” says Oona. “Or, well.” She takes a knee and promptly drops the time machine. It clatters but doesn’t break.

“Rise,” Ms. O says, still staring at Olympia. It’s like being under a microscope all over again. “Olympia. Time machine? What are you thinking?”

“I’m being selfish for once,” Olympia snaps. She’d prepared a calm and logical defence, but now that she’s confronted with the actual speech it just flows out of her, all the misaligned bits of self she’s been holding into place with, like, tape and authority and snatches of good feeling whenever possible. “I have spent so long spreading peace and joy and making sure everyone is okay except the one person I couldn’t save, and I have been carrying that failure all the way up to this stupid office, and it’s not fair. It’s not. And I don’t care that that’s the way it is, when there’s something so concrete we can do to change it all.” She sniffs furiously. Not going to cry again. She’s not.

Oona points towards a beanbag. “Can I?”

“Go for it,” Olympia says tiredly. “I just– is it fair to him, to bring him back to this? New headquarters, new people, new structure… new me. I don’t know how to ask him to adapt when it’s my fault he’s been stuck so long in the first place.”

Ms. O is silent for a long time. “I understand,” she says finally. “But I wish you’d stop seeing it as your fault.”

“But it is,” says Olympia. “I could have– I could have found Irene earlier. I should have.” Then the other half of Ms. O’s statement registers. “Wait, you understand? That’s it? I thought I was going to have to fight you, or something.”

“You’d lose, but thank you for entertaining the fantasy,” says Ms. O. “Olympia, you are not the sole keeper of your partner.” She takes a sip of her juice. “Besides, we’re here to solve oddness, to make things easier for other people, right? Why can’t that include us, too?”

“I’ve made a few adjustments since the last time we used it,” Oona adds. “Namely, it’s harder to break now. You could toss it across the room right now and I reckon it’d stay together just fine.” She hefts it playfully but doesn’t actually throw it.

“I don’t think this one’ll be quite as dangerous,” says Olympia. She thinks of the Todd Squad debacle and shivers. “I hope it won’t be. But it’s good to know that whoever’s holding it doesn’t have to worry about dropping it.”

“Not you?” says Ms. O.

Olympia deflates like a sad balloon. “I have to see this through,” she says. “Whatever the aftermath is.”

“There might not be any aftermath,” Oona points out. “Our running theory on time travel is that when you go back to edit something, the timeline that is just sort of… disappears.” She stares up into the corner as she thinks about this. “I wonder what that’s like.”

“If this timeline disappears, would we even be remembering this conversation right now?” asks Olympia.

They all make some very existential gazes towards various walls.

Eventually Olympia comes back to herself, shaking her head like a dog. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “I just– I have to give Otis something. I have to give myself something.”

The quiet that follows is agreeable, sweet. Olympia breathes it and it doesn’t hurt.

Before they head out again, Olympia takes Oona and Ms. O to Room 63. She pauses once again in the doorway, tracing the 63 with tired eyes. Maybe this’ll be the last time.

Even as stone, Otis has been steadily radiating cold, and the room temperature has balanced out at a chilly fourteen degrees. Oona whips out a gadget and conjures a few blankets, and they huddle up in a bruised mirage of the quartet they’d once so familiarly occupied. Ms. O and Oona. Olympia and the stone plinth of Otis’s feet.

They talk about nothing for a little bit: Oona’s time at the Academy, and all her various shenanigans; the daily responsibilities that come with being the Big O. Ms. O tells them about a precinct in Lithuania that’s been having difficulties with errant clouds that take raining cats and dogs a touch too seriously. Olympia tells them about Ocean and the squonk.

Eventually the cold gets to be too much, seeping as it is through the blankets. Ms. O and Oona say goodbye to Otis, leaving Olympia to watch the lines of his grey shoulders, grey sleeves, grey hands folded behind grey back. “Hey,” she says. “I’m fixing it. For real. You should be proud of me, or something.”

Chin raised, Otis’s stone eyes look somewhere above and to the right of her head.

“It’s about time,” she says, in a poor imitation of a lower voice. “Yeah, I know. But, funny thing about time. Oona’s conquered it.”

She hovers a hand near his elbow. Doesn’t touch it– not this time. No more. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us,” she says finally. “Theory is, we’ll stop existing. But the science has never been in our position, has it? You never really know what’s going to happen until it already has.” She takes a long, deep breath. “I’ll fix it for them. And if we’re still here at the end of it– I’ll fix it for us, too.”

If she stands on her toes, she can pretend they’re meeting eyes again.

First time in months. Last time as stone.

Olympia shuts the door and goes to find the others.

Headquarters looks the same as it always does, watching it from the landing. Agents milling this way and that, going through files and working on gadgets and creating and resolving minor emergencies. It’s an easy sort of busy. The kind that means things are okay.

Oona and Ms. O flank Olympia as she leans against the railing. The occasional agent trips up at the sight of the Big O just standing and watching them, but for the most part they’re an unremarkable part of the background, and Olympia likes it that way. That’s been one of the perks of leading her own precinct: sometimes–on rare times, but sometimes nonetheless–she gets to separate herself from the dailies of Odd Squad life. Marvel at how it all fits together.

“Did you ever do this?” she asks Ms. O.

“All the time,” says Ms. O. “Makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it?”

“Oh my god, so powerful.”

“Sort of kinglike,” Oona agrees.

Olympia looks out at her precinct – her precinct, her agents, this entire little world that she’s lent herself into building. All her anger and her grief weaved into the love that this work demands, like brickwork. This is her life, too. For the first time it looks like a life she could fit into, comfortably. Even with a partner. Especially with a partner.

“I’m sorry I didn’t reach out,” she says.

Oona pffts out an easy scoff. “It’s not like you’re the only person in the world who forgets to call their friends.”

“No, you are,” says Ms. O. “I should demote you for that.” She keeps a straight face for just long enough that Olympia starts to get uneasy about her conviction, and then she breaks into a giggle.

Olympia finds her own laugh and slots it right inside the sound of her friends’– and it’s real.

“So you flip the polarity here,” says Omille, flipping a glowing blue pill-shaped thing in the centre of the gadget, “and then you set it to the target temperature–in this case, thirty-seven–and point and shoot.”

She hands the gadget to Olympia. It weighs a little more than it looks, solid and heavy in her hands. Olympia runs her fingers along the smooth edges, the little pill that makes things warm up or cool down. The hand guide and the trigger.

This is the thing that’s going to fix him.

“You’ve showed this to Olanna?” she asks, still holding it carefully – reverently. “She volunteered to deliver it.”

“She’s got her own, actually,” Omille says. “Once I reverse-engineered the first one, building another was easier than pie. Literally. I tried to make a pie last week and it did not go well.”

“And it’ll work.”

“’S far as I know.”

Olympia holds it tighter. “He’ll get better.”

“And if it doesn’t,” says Omille, steady, “we’ll try again.”

Olympia gives Olanna the gadget, the time machine, and an envelope.

“It’ll be different when you come back,” she warns.

Olanna grins. “I’m looking forward to it.”

And when she steps off, triggers the time machine with a flash of light–

 –Olympia remains.

FEBRUARY – THE FIRST ONE.

The day after the Mobile team breaks the news about Sven, a box appears on her desk. There are two things inside it: a gadget and an envelope.

She pulls out the gadget first, because it’s bigger and more interesting. It looks almost like something that’s already in their gadget rotation, except for a couple small details: the white’s a little different, the edges are a little rounder, the little flashy thing in the middle glows a different blue than what she’s used to. There’s a small screen on the side that would face her if she were to point it at something. Poking out next to the screen is a dial.

The envelope, in contrast, is exactly what she has in her desk drawer right now. Plain paper with an Odd Squad badge and her precinct information in the top left corner. They barely write lettermail, but it’s good to have envelopes on the rare occasion they’re necessary.

Only the point of the triangle has been sealed down, and she breaks it easily with her thumb. Two pieces of paper flutter out.

GADGET INSTRUCTIONS, the first one heads. 1) make sure the red light on the blue pill is pointed towards your target. 2) roll dial until desired temperature is set. 3) point and shoot.

Olympia reads desired temperature three times before the meaning fully impresses itself into her consciousness.

It’s a temperature changer. One that might actually work.

She nearly drops it. “Don’t do that,” she says to herself, setting it down hurriedly on the nearest surface. “Don’t you dare break it.”

The other paper is addressed to her.

Olympia–

I really, really hope this works. For both of us.

And if it doesn’t – forgive yourself. I forgive you. I hope you can forgive me.

Love you forever and ever.

It’s not signed, but Olympia has written enough reports to know what her own printing looks like.

The story knits itself together in her mind, in little spurts and starts – the fresh sleekness of the gadget, like it came from different hands, the quiet maturity in the letter, the existence of the package at all. It’s not a good story, she thinks; not at the beginning, anyway, and maybe not in the middle, either. But maybe she doesn’t have to live it.

“Hey,” she says to Orchid, who is reading a magazine at her desk across the aisle. “Did you see who put this here?”

“Uh,” says Orchid, “an agent, I think. Could’ve been anybody, I barely know faces around here. She went up to talk to Orson.” She flips a page sort of pointedly, stop bothering me. Olympia stares desperately up at Orson’s office: the door is closed, and she can’t see anyone through the glass.

It doesn’t matter, not really – especially not if time travel is involved, like she suspects. She’d rather not cause a catastrophe looking for answers she doesn’t truly need. What matters is the gadget, and Otis, and the possibility that they can make it all better.

“Oona!” she yells. She picks up the gadget, holds it extra tight, and starts speedwalking for the lab. “Oona! I think we have something!”

Oona pops up from behind one of her counters. Half of her bow tie is charred from experiments unknown, but she looks no worse for wear. “We have what?”

“A chance,” says Olympia, and when she presents the gadget, she presents herself with a fragile thread of hope.

When she grabs his hands for the first time after they un-stone him, they’re warm. No more ring sausage – just regular, malleable skin, the way it should be.

“You did it,” Otis says, chuckling a little in awe. “I knew you would.” Then he tugs his hands away. Olympia figures it’s a little weird that she’s just holding onto them like that, but she couldn’t make herself stop. He’s warm. It’s stunning.

But it’s also not quite the victory she was expecting. “It wasn’t me.” It’s important that he knows– she’s not the hero, here, just the one who gets to reap the benefits. “I– there was time travel involved, I think.”

“I’m gonna be honest with you.” Otis unbuttons his jacket again, tucks up his sleeves. Olympia drinks it all in with hungry eyes, the mundanity of it, how real it is. “I don’t really care how you got to it. I’m just really, really glad to not be cold.”

“Me too,” she says. The relief might swell through and collapse her. It feels like it has that sort of cataclysmic potential.

They stand there for a while as he tests out his joints, the feeling in his fingers, all the little things that slowly disappeared in his decline. Wiggles out a few dance moves that make her giggle. Finally, he deems himself satisfied. “Okay,” he says, “you know what I could go for?”

“What,” says Olympia, wary. There’s a little glint in his eye. She’s missed it – right now she sort of hates it.

“Ice cream.”

“Oh my god.” She swats at him. “If you get really cold again it is not my fault and I will not save you from it. Ice cream. You’re hilarious.” And then, because she’s thinking about it, suddenly she wants it, too. “Oh, why not. Sure. Let’s go freeze ourselves again.”

Otis laughs, and it’s the most incredible sound she’s ever heard, and even just the sight of his joy is the most incredible thing she’s ever seen – and she knows there will be more incredible things in their future, just beyond whatever they can plan, but for right now it is downright electric.

Later, after ice cream–after they’re not both cold again, thank you very much–Olympia finds him sitting at her desk, sort of frowning. “You said it wasn’t you,” he says.

“It wasn’t?” She drops into his chair.

He holds up the note Future Olympia left for her. “This is you.”

“Oh,” says Olympia. “But– I mean– it’s not me. Not me me, at least. Like, she did all the hard work. I just lost a lead and almost cried about it.”

“I think it still counts,” Otis says. “Maybe she did it so you could give us our lives back. So, you know, you chose you.”

Forgive yourself, says the note. I forgive you. I hope you can forgive me.

Something happened there, Olympia thinks. Like maybe this was an act of kindness towards everyone.

“Still you,” Otis reiterates.

Olympia taps her fingers on his desk. Quick piano movements. “Still me,” she says. Tries to agree with him.

“Anyway,” says Otis. He puts down the note. Then he picks up another piece of paper – the one with the frog. “Thanks, partner.”

Thanks for unstoning me? Thanks for curing me? Thanks for trying? Olympia can’t tell exactly what he’s thanking her for – or if she deserves it. But she doesn’t want to ask.

“Anytime,” she says. Means it. She’ll try for him, any day, every day. Hopefully he knows that.

Otis grabs a pen and ticks up the other side of doodle-Olympia’s mouth so she’s fully smiling. PARTNERS. Happy Olympia and a chilly cartoon frog Otis – a warm, pleased human Otis – both of them, glorious, alive.

MAY – THE ORIGINAL TIMELINE.

Their greeting party is small: Ocean, Omille, and Olympia. Something old, something new, or however that saying goes. They can build up from there.

Olympia holds the jar of stone cure in minutely shaky hands. It’s the same rollercoaster feeling she’d experienced back at the beginning of all this, when they stood in this room and watched her partner turn into a statue. And maybe that’s because it is that time, for him – frozen as he is, the year will be little more than an extended blip of muddled sounds and colours. She’s living in two times at once. She’s starting the clock again.

As a precaution, they’ve already shot him with the gadget – about a week ago, so the stone had time to warm up. None of them wanted to revive him directly into a fifteen-degree body. The room temperature is back to normal, and when she lays a hand on his arm, it feels as though it’s been slightly sun-baked, no longer ice beneath her fingers. It’s worked.

“Ready?” says Ocean. He leans back a little bit, picture-perfect casual but for the nervous pinch of his mouth.

“Will I ever be?” says Olympia.

But she is – she has to be. There’s no more putting this off. Tear off the band-aid, deal with the aftermath.

Olympia inhales, holds it, exhales. Then she twists the lid off the jar, and without thinking about it, she upends its contents onto Otis’s head.

It’s not as instantaneous as the stone turning was. The cure trickles in small streams down the ridges of his hair, the side of his face, the lapel of his jacket. Wet stone shimmers like stars against a lake. And then it flakes off into nothingness, a disintegrating cocoon from top to bottom, revealing a whole human beneath – the most welcome sight Olympia has ever seen.

For a moment Otis stands frozen, as though he’s still convinced he’s a statue, and then he twitches. Pulls his hands in front of him, flexes his fingers, scrunches his eyebrows. Then he looks up.

There’s a puzzle running in his head, Olympia knows – the dip in his forehead, his sharp eyes. Internally she rejoices at still being able to recognise it. She stands, letting him take in what he can: Ocean and his easy, relieved smile, Omille and her polite newness, Olympia’s own purple uniform. Evidence of an unlived year – a lot of time passing.

All they can do is give him their world and hope he likes it.

He blinks, slowly, shifting into focus at Olympia’s face and whatever he finds there.

“Hey, Otis,” she says quietly.

And he smiles.