Gravel pops and crumbles beneath Percy's tires as he pulls the truck up into his circular drive. He pulls the keys from the engine, hesitates a second, his eyes on the criss-cross, black slats of the front door. He hadn't expected to be back here so soon. Neither had he wanted to.

"Percy?" Jude asks.

"I'm fine," he replies before Jude can finish that thought. "Jude, you come with me so I know what I'm looking for. Sylvia, Gatz, you keep trying to get Indy on the phone."

Gatz nods. "Hurry up, Percy."

"I know."

It appears Tina's already preparing for the holiday season, as Percy and Jude greet two gardeners hanging wreaths on their way in. The door bangs shut behind them as they enter the foyer, and Jude lets out a low whistle. "So this is how a senator lives, huh?"

"Shut up," Percy says. He turns a corner, down the hall where he knows his parents keep most of their art collection. "Describe this painting to me again."

"But you just told me to—"

Percy shoots him a look, and immediately Jude gets the message. "You're right. Sorry," he says. "It's...there was a field, I think. And there were two people standing in it, a woman and a man."

He's not sure he remembers a painting like that, or if the scene is even distinct enough that he'll know it when he sees it. Fighting fierce tides of fear rolling in and out of his stomach, Percy paces the Mitchell art collection two times, and then again, and again. He still doesn't see it.

He paces back to Jude, grabbing him by the shirt collar. "Are you fucking with me right now? Is this all a joke to you? If you really brought me here for some stupid painting that's not even here and then Indy...if Indy—"

"I'm not making it up, dude. These visions nearly kill me every time I have them. You think I would play around with shit like that?" Jude says, wrenching away from him. "Besides. You're not the only one who doesn't want Indy to get hurt, okay?"

Percy exhales, though his chest is so tight it's getting harder to get any air into it at all. When he speaks again, his voice is quieter, though no less tense: "Can you remember anything else?"

Jude pushes his hands up into his hair, closes his eyes, paces in an anxious circle. Finally, he looks up. "The woman's in all black. The man's in all white. And there's tulips. Yeah. A shit ton of tulips."

"Life After Fear."

"What?"

Percy pivots and barrels back towards the foyer, his body moving much faster than his mind can, as if propelling himself towards the edge of a cliff. "That's the painting. I remember it. My—my nanny used to like it. It was called Life After Fear."

Jude's voice comes from behind him now, echoing off the high ceilings of the foyer: "Where is it now?"

"Here," Percy says.

He has to stoop, to shove a side table out of the way, but there it is: the outline of a door beneath the stairs. It should be nothing but a storage closet, a place to drop the many once-used, now useless items his parents have gathered over the course of their life of excess. It should be nothing but a closet. It shouldn't fill Percy with a deep, unsettling dread, a weight he can't shake off.

I'll always be there for you, Percy. Whatever you need.

He is still waiting for the day his brain no longer conjures her voice.

"Percy?" Jude says.

"You open it," Percy gasps. "I can't."

"Percy—"

"Please, Jude?" Percy says, turning to face him. "Please. If it's not in the hallway, it's probably here, I remember us putting it there once my nanny passed but I just—I can't. You have to do it. Please."

"Okay," Jude says, stepping forward. "Okay, I will."

Jude grabs the doorknob, turns it, and for a moment Percy can gaze into the depths behind the door, but only for a moment. He turns again and stares at the wall again, a nausea so violent rising in his gut that he has to grab the banister nearest to him to keep from falling over.

The curse of this house has never been his family, but that no matter what he does he cannot enter this place without thinking of her, of Scarlett: the shrill of her voice rising in argument against the chef's, the bruises strangling her wrists, and her body, limp and still, discarded beneath the stairs like an old doll. And later, when both nanny and chef were gone and questions swirled, how no one believed a word Percy said. Or maybe they did. Maybe they just didn't care.

To this day, he can't stand it, being in the dark. The moment he is that fear, that shame, rises up again and he's just a little boy, scared and alone.

"Percy!"

There is excitement in Jude's voice. Percy swallows, turns toward him.

Jude bumps the door shut with his hip, and straightens, holding up an acrylic painting still in its frame. Percy recognizes it instantly: the stretching field of tulips like an earthbound rainbow, the two people facing each other from either side. The eerie, unsettled expressions on their faces.

"This is the one," Jude says, all his breath in his voice. "Let's go save Indy."

She clambers through the darkness, back up the way she came, the edge of Kelso's gun prodding into her back. She wonders if there remains anyway for her to get out of this alive. She wishes she'd listened to Jude, to Percy—to everyone who advised caution while she ran headlong into recklessness.

"Where are we going?" It's the third, maybe fourth time, Indy has asked it, but she still hasn't gotten an answer.

They reach the trapdoor again, a rectangular outline of light shining around it like a halo. There is no relief. "Open the door," Kelso says, and Indy obeys, not sure how she manages to hold the handle so steadily. "We're going to see a mutual friend."

Indy steps up into the kitchen; it's still light out, but the sky beyond the dusty window is a faded pink with the beginning of sunset. She's weighing her options, considering her odds of survival if she turned and kicked Kelso down the stairs right now, but the sound of another set of footsteps stops her in her tracks.

"Dr. Clover," Indy says, a shocked exhale in lieu of a greeting.

The professor stands at the mouth of the kitchen, looking utterly like himself, sleepy eyes and fedora and the slight slouch in his shoulders. Nothing, and still everything, has changed.

"I've briefed her," says Kelso, snapping the trap door shut, standing with one heavy boot on top of it. "Just like you said, she already knew most of it."

"Good," Dr. Clover says. He adjusts his jacket, flipping it open just wide enough for Indy to catch the glint of a gun at his hip. "Thank you, Indy. I'm glad you've agreed to cooperate with us."

"Like there's another option?" Indy snaps. "You'll kill me, just like Elizabeth, if I don't."

"Elizabeth's death was a mistake we're trying not to repeat," Dr. Clover says, and Indy's sickened by it, the kindness, the genuineness that still shines from his eyes. "We've learned."

Indy scoffs. The words are no doubt a lie, but it's clearly a lie they believe, and she won't waste her time trying to convince either of them otherwise. "Why is this painting so important to you, anyway? Why go this far?"

Dr. Clover's eyes lift over Indy's head, settling on Kelso for a moment. Out of the corner of her eye, Indy sees the detective shrug, as if to say, go ahead.

"Lydia wasn't the first person we conducted the experiment on," Dr. Clover said. "At the time, Dean suggested we start with people we were close to, people we trusted, just to keep anything from getting out of hand. We didn't know it would go wrong the way it did."

If he's searching for some sort of empathy, he won't find any in Indy's expression. "Who's in the painting?"

"My brother," Dr. Clover answers, "and his wife."

The weight atop Indy's heart doubles for a moment, but she exhales, ignoring it. "So you get your loved ones back, but no one else does. Elizabeth and Lydia don't. The Pine family doesn't. How is that fair?"

"It isn't," Dr. Clover says, and Indy exhales as she senses Kelso move closer, the cool metal of the gun hitting her spine once again. "There are always winners and losers, Indy. Wasting your time trying to play the game fairly is how you lose. Now. Take me to where the painting is."

"No need," says a voice that sounds a lot like Percy's.

Indy doesn't think. She sees Dr. Clover move and shouts at the top of her lungs, "Percy, look out!"

The bullet hits the wall, blasting a hole in the moulding and leaving a shower of plaster and dust. When it clears, Indy sees Percy in a crouch on the ground, Jude beside him, helping him to his feet. In Jude's hands is a painting, one Indy last saw years ago.

"Hey man. Don't shoot the messenger," Jude says, and Indy fights the urge to slap her palm to her face. He holds up the painting of the two lovers, a spread of tulips between them. "We've brought you what you wanted."

Indy looks at Jude, then at Percy, silently asking them, How? Jude just shakes his head, gently.

"My parents won it at an auction before I was even born," Percy says, as Dr. Clover turns, snatching for the painting, his grip on the frame nearly white-knuckled. "The painting's so-called 'mysterious origins' meant it cost a shit ton of money. I guess I understand why now."

"Let Indy go," Jude says. "You have what you want, don't you? It's over."

Dr. Clover turns again, back towards Indy, the painting still clenched in his hands like a million dollar prize. "You have good friends, Indy," Dr. Clover says. He sets the painting down gently, metal clinking against old wood. "But you still know too much."

"Indy, get down!"

She's not sure who yells it, but she obeys anyway, dropping to the floor as she hears two gunshots go off in rapid succession. There's a scream—Indy cranes her neck to look up, hoping to God it didn't come from Percy or Jude—but sees Kelso and Dr. Clover's guns pointed at each other instead. Dr. Clover curses, cradling his shoulder, his gun slipping from his grasp and clattering against the floor. Indy exhales a quiet breath. It's pure luck that bullet hit Dr. Clover and not her.

"Percy, the gun!"

He looks shaken, his face pale and beaded with cold sweat, but he nods and darts forward, snatching the gun where it's settled just out of Dr. Clover's bloody reach.

"Shit," Kelso says, raising his again, but Indy grunts and swings out her leg, sending the cop toppling backwards. He lands with a harsh thud on top of Indy's backpack, and though he's momentarily stunned into stillness, an object flies out of the pack and skids across the floor. Indy recognizes it a second later as Elizabeth's journal.

Indy gets to her knees, crawling towards it. The pages flutter in a nonexistent wind, until they settle on the journal's very last page.

Two words stare back at her: Thank you.

The painting beside Dr. Clover begins to glow.

Indy doesn't want to believe it at first, and blinks to clear what she thinks is dust from her eyes, but the faint, mist-like golden shimmer around the frame doesn't dissipate. Dr. Clover's eyes go wide with understanding, and following it, an unprecedented terror. Whatever is going on, he alone knows.

Indy grabs the journal, holding it close to her chest as she backs up. The mist grows and grows until it is a thick fog Indy can barely see through, and her eyes sting with tears like she's stepped into a cloud of smog.

There's a warbled cry—Dr. Clover's, she thinks—and all at once the fog disappears. Dr. Clover has disappeared with it.

For a moment, all of them are quiet with confusion, Kelso barely conscious. Then Percy mops sweat from his brow with a shivering hand and says, "Indy, look."

She looks, her hands so shaky she can barely hold the journal anymore.

There are no longer two figures standing in the tulip field, but three. Another man that looks a lot like Dr. Clover kneels between them in the high grass, as if in prayer, as if begging forgiveness.