When Desmond woke up, he knew what Clay had been trying to tell him.

The answers were in the Animus. They could censor and change words, but not images taken straight from the blood. If there was any answer to find for how the Templars had done this, it waited in the reconstruction of the old world. To one side of his mind, Desmond could sense an echo of the determination that Ezio might feel if it were him.

One month. Until what? Rescue? Abandonment? Until Clay gave in?

What he knew was that if the truth was in the past, he had that long to find it.

By now, Desmond put his hands out for the cuffs by habit.

Every time, when he was looking up at the tiled ceiling and his spine was cradled by the machine's gently humming surface, Robert gave him the look that asked if he was sure. He always waited for Desmond's nod before sliding the needle into his arm. By the time Venice appeared, his doubts and fears for the future were gone. Ezio cared only for now.

Desmond, riding in his skin, tried to understand him. Could people have really once been this way? So cavalier? Things that normal people would have to force themselves through a sick sweat to contemplate, these phantoms from the past did as easily as shaking hands. He became used to guards trying to kill him. It appeared to be their job. It was more difficult to accept when he was ambushed on the way to Venice and they thought nothing of killing Leonardo da Vinci, of all people, to get at him.

Desmond was getting better at holding on, but it was sometimes small things that wrenched him out. He thought he'd gotten a handle on how things worked. Guards were like police, he knew about those. They kept peace and order. It made sense for them to oppose an Assassin. Then he saw them harass and arrest a man for doing nothing more than selling fish, and before he knew it his indignation and bafflement threw him bodily out of the past.

"People made no sense," he groaned, rubbing eyes that ached from facing close white walls after the vibrant colors. "All over some goddamn money."

"When power could belong to anyone, people were driven by snatching for petty scraps of it for themselves," said Robert. He'd told the techs to pay no attention to anything he and Desmond said to each other. It was almost the same as privacy.

"So the Templars took it all for safekeeping."

"Someone had to." His expression said: Someone like you.

Desmond dove in again and again, though he would come out shaking and itching to wash away the dried blood from between his fingers. It was the kindnesses that were strangest, in the world where cruelty was possible.

One night there was a dream of slipping knives between the ribs of guards, hanging out of sight with his heart pounding and the thrill of the hunt high in his veins, leaping down and slicing his blade through the rich robes and into Emilio Barbarigo's heart, and what woke him into the shock of the dark and silent room was the murmur of Do not be afraid.

Desmond paced by the window and tried to stay in his own skin until the sky above the city bled its palette toward dawn. The sun was up when the door made its beep and click and Robert appeared. If the Templar noticed anything was off, he said nothing.

"How'd you get dragged into all this?" Desmond asked Robert over coffee and toast, bizarre normal things that existed inside the lair of a world-spanning regime. "You a volunteer?"

"Some, like you, can blend in well enough to stay secret. For others, the difference is obvious from a young age."

"Obvious how?"

"A boy in school annoyed me and I punched him in the face."

Desmond snorted a laugh. "That's pretty obvious."

"The way of the world was new at the time. I didn't realize I was different until they found me."

"So you never had a choice." Desmond stirred his coffee, watching the ripples spin around. Templars had some incredible coffee.

Robert looked surprised, like that had never occurred to him. "I had more choice than almost anyone else in the world."

A warm breeze toyed with the hair on the back of his neck. The blacksmith across the lane cried the quality of his workmanship. "That doesn't strike you as a problem?"

"You've seen the past, Desmond." The kitchen wall came back into place behind Robert, blocking out the sky. "Tell me if you would have humanity return to suffering, fear and want for the sake of a philosophical concept. I know what answer you'll find. You are not cruel."

"I know, I know," Desmond sighed. "What we've got is a perfect happy paradise-world, don't screw with it."

"Did I say that?"

There was something in his voice, somewhere between irony, acknowledgment, and restlessness.

After a while Robert said, "You have the choice. Choosing what's right doesn't mean you have to like it."

In the Animus, Ezio crept through the shadows and dispensed what he knew was justice, and Desmond realized that the cool satisfaction at an elegant kill was his as well. Every death brought him closer to something greater, the secret that was here and that Clay trusted him to find.

Time loomed over Desmond even as he lost touch with its immediate meaning. There was no certainty outside of the marks etched with his nail through the paint on the inside of the closet door, marching in ragged ranks toward thirty. Sometimes he would come out of the Animus knowing in his muscles and bones it had been days since he'd seen the ceiling with its florescent lights, but Robert would tell him it had only been a few hours. He never let Desmond stay in for longer than that at a time, and pushing too hard for more would raise suspicions he couldn't answer.

Something of his eagerness must have shown, because soon, before letting him in, Robert told him, "The Animus is an irreplaceable tool, but it is also dangerous."

"How?" Desmond sat up on the machine and cracked his neck. His body was always stiff and ungainly when he came out, as though trying to reconcile the leaping, climbing, and fighting in his neurons with the lying still his muscles were certain of. "It's all an illusion. I've gotten killed a dozen times and it only hurt for a second."

"I don't mean physical harm." There was quiet concern in Robert's eyes, and he was not the kind of person who jumped at shadows. "The past is a foreign country, and the longer you stay, the more difficult it is to leave."

It was something else that he was right about but didn't matter. Desmond sought the mystery the past pointed towards, and every time he went into that senseless, painful, maddening world, it was harder to come out.

Robert asked him questions.

"What year is it?"

"Two thousand thirteen," said Desmond.

"Are you having headaches?"

"No," said Desmond.

"Experiencing hallucinations?"

"No," said Desmond, struggling to hear him over the herald's cry, and watching ghostly mercenaries stride behind his back.

It became a ritual of time as sure as the marks on the closet door, scratched with a fingernail through the paint.

The technicians for the Animus changed. The man who brought him food changed, though Desmond noticed this one also had a tazer on his hip, just in case. It was difficult to tell the difference. He wondered if his window was a screen that ran the image of setting sun or night sky or cars stopping and moving in endless cycles at the traffic light. He wondered if the world outside was changing. He wondered if there was a world outside.

In a month he would know the answer, either to that or to something else.

Ezio flew in a construct of wood and canvas, and killed men, and sought a prophet.

In the middle of darting across the rooftops with the night wind and a pair of guards at his back, his vision slipped. He jumped across a narrow alley and froze with his arm outstretched, fingers grasping for the edge, as Venice went bright white and dissolved in blocks with a sound like something cutting through the air.

Desmond was on his back and there was a voice over him barking words he couldn't understand until the echo of Italian gave way.

"-didn't you tell me it needed to be replaced?"

"Your orders were to have the Animus ready for use, sir."

"Not if you knew it would--" Robert broke off with a harsh exhalation and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"I'm sorry sir." There was confusion as well as honest contrition on the technician's face.

"Fix it."

The technician murmured assent and was soon placidly working at the console.

Desmond sat up and watched with calm interest. The hum of the Animus grew louder and softer according to whatever the tech was doing, and had an unfamiliar note of discord. Robert caught sight of him and approached.

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah, it just faded out kind of suddenly." Desmond touched his temple gingerly. It was always strange to see softer hands and wrists without gauntlets. Coming out of the past made the present distant in some ways, and in other ways clearer. He watched the technicians confer. "You hate them, don't you."

Robert gave him a look, then sat on the Animus beside him, folding his large hands.

"You would be surprised," he said quietly, "how little it matters."

"So you're saying everybody's drugged or something?" Desmond said.

"That's the thing," Lucy said, lips pursed. "We don't know."

Shaun had the focused, excited look he got when he was interested in something enough to forget to be insulting. "Something in the water, that's the obvious place to look, but from the records we hacked into-"

"You're welcome," Rebecca called.

"-from what these records say, this 'sanity' took hold over a single day. Twenty-four hours to affect every man, woman, and child in the world. Every single source of fresh water. Even for Abstergo the logistics simply aren't feasible."

Clay might have said not to underestimate them, but that was a day when he wasn't talking to anyone but himself.

"Okay," Desmond said, "What about something in the air, then?"

Shaun waved his hand. "Wouldn't work. There's the same problem of getting it evenly distributed over the entire face of the planet, and that's before even getting into the problem of dosage. Drugs, sedatives, they're fiddly things. They'd have to find an amount that would work on a twenty-stone man without hurting his little newborn baby. Any dose high enough to make a difference would've killed thousands, millions of people. And it would have to work for everyone in exactly the same way, no variation in response, no side effects. Completely impossible. No drug is that perfect."

"So they've got some sort of secret weapon that is perfect," Desmond said. "How can we fight that?"

"It's actually our advantage." Lucy put her hand on his arm. Her eyes gleamed with ambition. "Perfection makes them lazy, and lazy people get sloppy."