The world around me was on fire.
Sweltering heat ripped the moisture from my lips and tongue, trying to smother me beneath its oppressive weight. My breaths came shorter and heavier, but it seemed as though I couldn’t get enough of it no matter how much I sucked down. Sweat broke out under my arms, across my scalp, between my toes, but it dried almost instantly. I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t find steam rising off of me if I looked down at my body.
Beyond the edge of my roof, the flames rose like hellfire, trapping me. They cast ominous, flickering shadows on the buildings across the street, curling apparitions that reached up the brick as though clawing for purchase to pull themselves out of the pit they called home. Through the oily, black smoke that streamed up and into the sky, they looked only like vague, threatening shapes in the dark, illuminated by the blaze.
My heart hammered in my chest, beating a tattoo against my ribcage. My foot slid back a step, but I already knew I had almost no options. The fire escape behind me would be no such thing. The chalk dust? Useless at best, counterproductive at worst. The EpiPens were no better, because even if I could get close enough to use them, what were they even going to do?
My hand found a thin, pen-like tube, thumbing the safety switch and resting a finger on the trigger. There was no guarantee it would be any better, but a canister of pepper spray was the only weapon I had against the inevitable right now. My remaining bugs were dying in their thousands — my greatest weapon, the swarm of insects that obeyed my commands, was being whittled away with every passing second.
A pair of enormous hands appeared on the edge of the roof, sparking and ablaze, and they gripped it so hard that it bent beneath them. A head came next, then a torso, covered in layers of overlapping silver scales that danced with flickering yellows and oranges and barely recognizable as human. A single, smoldering eye glared out of the distorted maw of the face, glowing and molten.
I pressed the trigger on my pepper spray. A burst leapt out of the thin tube, and a ball of fire erupted briefly on the hulking, muscular shoulder, ineffective.
“Fuck,” I hissed, frantically fumbling with the device as a leg swung over the lip of the roof. I adjusted my aim, doing my best to point it in the direction of that glowing almond through the haze and the heat.
Another ball of fire ignited, uselessly, against his face, but the pepper spray did its job and the monster howled, reeling as he clutched at his wounded eye. It wasn’t enough — he didn’t stumble backwards and tumble over the edge of the roof as I had desperately hoped he might. But it still bought me a moment’s reprieve.
“Muh…Mother…fucker!” the monster screamed, hauling himself the rest of the way up.
There wasn’t going to be another chance or a better chance, so I turned, spinning on my heel, and sprinted towards the fire escape. It was the only option I had, the only hope of making it out of this: pray that I had bought myself enough time to slip down it and run, that the scant few seconds would give me enough leeway to slip out of his grasp.
A brief flash lit up the roof around me, and then a wave of heat and flame caught me from behind and nearly knocked me off my feet. I stumbled, skidding along the gravel, and slammed into the lip of the roof right by the fire escape. A short, frantic pat down assured me that I hadn’t been set ablaze myself — neither my clothes nor my hair had caught fire.
If this roof had been made with tar, I probably would have gone up in a puff of smoke.
The monster slowly stood, still clutching his face with one hand, and he lashed out blindly with another wave of flame. I had to curl in on myself, knees pressed to my chest and arms over my head, to weather the worst of it. Biting my bottom lip so hard it bled was the only way I could keep myself from letting out a sound as it washed over me.
With a limp, the monster moved, taking one slow, halting step at a time. The head, attached to a long, thick neck, turned from side to side, searching the dark.
“Cock. Sucker,” the monster seethed. “Move. Give me something to aim for.”
Indecision froze me, and I held my breath and stayed as still as possible, frantically trying to come up with a way out. The monster continued searching, stopping every few seconds to blink once or twice, and I realized with horror that the pepper spray was starting to wear off. It would be a minute, at best, before he could see well enough to distinguish me from the shadows.
What could I do? I still had the pepper spray, but even if I got him again, he was close enough now that he might just bathe the whole roof in fire and bake me alive before I could do anything else. If I just tried to make a run for it, he would probably blast me in the back before I could get anywhere.
There…weren’t any other options. He was too hot — so hot that my bugs fried before they could even get close. Even if I’d had the foresight to carry a knife or a collapsible baton, getting into melee with a monster that big and strong was just suicide by another term.
The droning mass of my remaining swarm rose into the air around the building, and I surged to my feet, hoping they would mask the sound enough for me to pull it off as I swung my hand and the tube of pepper spray around. The monster’s head whipped about to face me, staring straight into the line of my attack and giving me the best target possible. My finger pressed the trigger at the same time as he threw a wave of flame —
Pain scorched the nerves in my arm, and this time, I couldn’t hold in the scream that was pulled from my lips as the tube of pepper spray exploded from within. The force of the explosion sent me tumbling backwards, the backs of my knees slamming into the lip of the roof, and my stomach swooped low in my gut as I tipped over. I didn’t even have the time to realize I was looking up at the sky before —
I jolted up in my bed, panting, chest heaving and sweat pouring down my face and neck. My hair clung to my cheeks and forehead, slimy and disgusting, and my front and back were both soaked through as though I’d run a marathon.
For a few seconds, I could still feel the crack of my neck snapping and my skull splitting open on the asphalt, the brief burst of pain before the shock numbed it. The uncaring stars above still swam in my vision.
But the phantom pain and the queasy twist of my gut and the ghostly pressure at the base of my neck slowly faded as the images melted away, slipping through my mental fingers like sand. The echo of panic and fear churning in my stomach and chest seeped out of me like sweat, leaving only the familiar environs of my room in Chaldea. There was no Lung there to burn me alive, no Brockton Bay outside my door, waiting to welcome me back to its own brand of Hell. That life, that world, had been left behind over two years ago now.
Slowly, my heaving lungs began to calm, and the pants eased into something more natural and less frantic. The cooling sweat and dissipating adrenaline left me chilled and shaking.
I had just woken up from a nightmare, hadn’t I?
“Mommy?” Jackie’s voice asked me quietly. In the dark, I had no hope of seeing her clearly. “Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine, Jackie,” I murmured back to her. “I just…had a bad dream, that’s all.”
She shifted in place next to me, and I felt the mattress dip as she hoisted herself up into a sitting position. Her breath wafted against my sweaty chest, warm where my skin felt cold.
“Was it scary?” she whispered.
I couldn’t help the anemic chuckle that huffed out of my mouth, not when my nerves were still a little raw. “Not now that I’m awake, but it seemed very scary when I was sleeping.”
“Oh.” She reached up and pressed a hand to my chest, and I wasn’t sure what she was doing until she informed me, very seriously, “Mommy’s heart is still beating a little fast.”
A puff of air burst out of my nostrils, not quite sharp enough to be a snort, and I placed my hand over hers. “I’m fine, Jackie. It was nothing serious.”
Although I very much doubted I would be getting back to sleep anytime soon. When I glanced at my clock, the numbers 7:38 glared back at me in pale, moonlight blue. It was only about half an hour before I would normally get up anyway.
I sighed anyway. Even missing just half an hour usually left me feeling a little foggy for a while. There was just nothing to do for it.
Giving her hand a little squeeze, I gently pried it away from me and told her, “I’m going to get dressed so we can go to the gym. If you want to stay in bed for a few more minutes, that’s okay.”
“Mm. Okay.”
I slid out of bed, and when her hand slipped out of mine, she shifted and laid back down, breathing in deep and then letting it out as a sigh. While I stripped off my pajamas and pulled on my workout gear, she laid there in the dark, lounging and relaxing.
All of the teenager with none of the sass, came the thought. It sounded a lot like Lisa.
Once I was dressed appropriately, I got Jackie out of bed, and she dragged herself out almost reluctantly. Not fighting me, not putting up a struggle, but as though my bed was so comfortable that she didn’t want to leave it. When I offered to let her stay there while I went through my morning routine, however, she outright refused to be left behind.
If she was actually going to grow up one day and have to move out and live on her own, that sort of clinginess would have been concerning. For someone who was perpetually somewhere around nine years old, however, and whose entire life had been ruled by some form of attachment issues, I guess it was really to be expected.
In hindsight, my mentioning of the Little Match Girl to Andersen had probably been more appropriate than I’d thought at the time.
Despite my dream, there was nothing unusual or concerning about my morning workout. Jackie cheered me on as she usually did, utterly ignoring the twins and Nero as they joined me and acting like I was in the running for first place in some race or another. Nero, at least, seemed to take that as some kind of challenge, which was kind of silly, really, since she was a Servant and could just start lapping me whenever she felt like it. It was all the more ridiculous that she kept herself within normal human limits instead, huffing and puffing as she tried to keep pace with me without relying on the superhuman speed all Servants possessed.
When it was over, we went our separate ways to clean up for breakfast, and between the workout and the shower, the majority of the fog from my missing sleep was cleared away, leaving me with just the thoughts about what I’d seen in that dream.
It was not, obviously, how things had actually happened. Lung had come very close to killing me on my first night out, that much was true, but I had never had the chance to try shooting him in the eyes a second time with my pepper spray. The Undersiders had shown up before it got that far, distracting him and knocking him out long enough for Armsmaster to arrive and administer his special tranquilizer. I hadn’t fallen, broken my neck, and cracked my skull open. Aside some singed hair, the worst injuries I’d taken that night were to my pride and my dignity.
In spite of everything, some small part of me was still offended that everyone had just assumed I was a villain that night. It wasn’t a rational feeling.
I was wary of the idea of strange, inexplicable dreams, especially since the last two times they’d happened had involved getting sucked into Aífe’s to help her fight Scáthach and Ritsuka falling victim to a curse that had probably been meant for me. Those two instances had proven that — whatever I’d said to Marie to help calm her down — there were avenues the enemy could use to attack us through our dreams. How easily it could be done was another question, but it remained possible.
Having said that… We’d watched a movie last night about a city being firebombed and the victims of that cruelty, and I’d spent the last month or two worried about what Solomon had meant about me returning home in the next Singularity. On the balance of things, I was more inclined to assume those things had mixed in my head to produce that twisted vision of my first night out. A nightmarish what-if where there hadn’t been any Undersiders to swoop in and rescue me, leaving me to fight Lung on my own.
It was enough to distract me at breakfast, enough that I paid no attention to the twins and Mash and what they were talking about, up until one of them mentioned my name.
“Hm?”
Rika’s expression fell. “Weren’t you paying attention, Senpai?”
“Sorry, just…” A brief breath hissed out of my nostrils. “I didn’t sleep well, that’s all. Had a bad dream.”
Immediately, the tension at the table ratcheted up several notches, and Jackie was alarmed, looking around at them with wide eyes, because she hadn’t been here for the whole Dantès fiasco, right. She had no idea that my dream could have been anything more than a dream.
“It was just a dream.” They didn’t look entirely convinced. A flash of annoyance sparked in my belly. “Really. You showed us a tragic movie about two kids suffering and dying from the horrors of the deadliest war in human history, and you didn’t think anyone might have a nightmare afterwards?”
Rika winced and let out an awkward laugh. “A…hahaha, yeah, that…might not have been my best decision. Maybe…I should’ve gone with something like Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke first? I just…wanted Senpai to realize, not everything I watch is meant for kids and teenagers! Anime can talk about some really serious, really deep stuff, too! It’s not all laser eyes and giant robots and the power of friendship!”
On that front, at least, I could admit that she’d succeeded. Beyond her wildest dreams, even.
“Consider me convinced,” I told her dryly.
“Maybe next time, you’ll listen to me instead of insisting you know better,” Ritsuka added for good measure.
Rika laughed awkwardly again.
“Anyway,” I said, steering the topic back on track to…whatever they had originally been talking about. “What was it you wanted from me?”
“R-right!” Rika jumped on the lifeline I’d given her. “So, um, Boss Lady said that we could go into London today and help Renée figure out what she wants to do with her room! I was just wondering if…you would be coming along, Senpai. Maybe you could bring Jackie along and let her see her home again?”
“Our home is where Mommy is,” Jackie proclaimed, simple and blunt.
Rika winced again. I wasn’t sure how much she knew about Jackie’s past or her circumstances, but it was almost assuredly less than I knew. I couldn’t remember ever explaining to the twins how it was that the infamous Jack the Ripper could be a prepubescent girl, and I still hadn’t found a good moment to broach the subject with Jackie herself to find out more than that.
Although I had experienced a few vague dreams about wandering the dilapidated streets of London’s poorest districts. Nothing really worth talking about or with all that much detail, but enough to lend some more weight to what I already knew and suspected about Jackie’s past.
The idea of going back to London itself wasn’t…exciting, not really, although it might be an opportunity to check that bookstore where Andersen had been hiding out to see if I could find something worth picking up. A first edition copy of one of Dickens’ works would have made Mom ecstatic, and I had to admit, the idea of owning one made me feel a little closer to her.
“Sure,” I said, “I don’t see why not.”
A smile broke out over Rika’s face, and a smaller one mirrored it on Ritsuka and Mash, too.
“Absolutely not,” a familiar voice said from behind me.
“Boss Lady!” Rika squeaked.
A look over my shoulder showed Marie, stern-faced and serious, with her arms crossed and everything.
“Why not?” asked Ritsuka, a little braver.
“There’s been a development, regarding the next Singularity,” Marie informed us all bluntly. My heart leapt in my chest. “As team leader, Taylor needs to be here to be briefed on it.”
“Shouldn’t we be here for that, too, then?” Ritsuka pointed out.
Marie’s eyes flashed as she glanced at him, and she didn’t hesitate at all to tell him, “The rest of the team will be given the details as and when they become relevant. This…preliminary briefing is going to cover a lot of things that you don’t need to know and a lot of things that may not be relevant as we learn more. There’s no point in telling you anything that doesn’t concern you.”
Ritsuka’s brow furrowed, and that furrow became deeper and deeper the more Marie talked.
“Relevant?” Mash murmured.
“This is about what that Solly guy said,” Rika concluded, scarily perceptive, “isn’t it?”
Marie’s cheek twitching was telling. “Like I said,” she replied, deflecting transparently, “you’ll be given all the information you need once we’ve decided what that is. As Taylor is both the team leader and our only American Master, her input is an important part of our considerations going forward. She needs to be a part of this briefing. You three don’t.”
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She continued, “For right now, your time would be better spent helping Renée Flamel decide on the layout for her room. Since you may be deploying within the next couple of weeks, there’s no reason to put that off any longer.”
“It is about what the King of Mages said,” Ritsuka deduced. He let out a ragged, frustrated sigh. “Fine. There’s something about Senpai’s past that you need to keep secret, so that’s why you don’t want us there, right? I might not like it, but I understand the reasoning, at least.”
“Senpai,” Mash said sympathetically. “Even the other members of Team A… We didn’t know everything about their lives either. The only one who knew who everyone was and where they came from was Director Marisbury.”
“But none of their personal histories might mean life or death for us,” he pointed out, and he…wasn’t entirely wrong.
Even so… Even so, this was confirmation, wasn’t it? Brockton Bay. Earth Bet. Somehow or another, our next Singularity involved my home. I…wasn’t sure I’d decided how I was supposed to feel about that yet, mostly because I still didn’t know what form it would take. What it would mean to ‘return home’ and face my demons.
Marie grimaced, and then softened just a little, letting out a quiet sigh of her own. “For what it’s worth, Ritsuka,” she said wearily, and she sounded thirty years older, just then, “you might just find everything out anyway. All of those things were kept from you as much for your own protection as for Taylor’s, because you couldn’t be forced to tell a secret you didn’t know, and yet…”
Solomon was forcing our hand. He had laid a trap down meant specifically for me, and we would have no choice but to walk right into it. Because he only had to win once. We had to win eight times.
“It might not be a satisfying answer, but there it is,” Marie went on. “So yes. What we’re going to discuss at this preliminary briefing is details of Taylor’s past and how they might be relevant to the upcoming Singularity. You wouldn’t want your life put under a microscope, would you?”
It was Ritsuka’s turn to grimace. “No, I guess not.”
Marie nodded. “You’ve fought beside Taylor for five Singularities. The least you can do is respect that she doesn’t want hers passed around this facility like gossip either, can’t you?”
And it was left at that. Neither of the twins protested anymore about being excluded from this ‘preliminary briefing’ I was going to be part of, although neither of them seemed all that happy about it either. Grudging, maybe, understanding of why they were being excluded, but not happy about it.
The rest of my breakfast tasted like nothing. I might as well have been eating ash, for all that I tasted anything that made its way into my mouth. Rika might have called it a tragedy, because Emiya’s food had never disappointed, but the knowledge of what was waiting for me robbed me of any enjoyment just then.
After breakfast, the group broke up. The twins and Mash went to get ready to Rayshift into London with Renée, and while Arash took care of Jackie, I went to my rune lesson with Aífe. I should have known better than to think she wouldn’t realize immediately that I had something on my mind.
“You’re distracted,” she said bluntly about ten minutes in.
I blinked and turned away from the runic array I was carefully constructing — to be judged by Aífe herself before I attempted to make it for real — to look her directly in the face. Her eyes were narrowed on me.
Taking that as a question, she pointed at the array sketched out on the sheet of paper I was using and told me, “Half of your set here is inverted when it shouldn’t be. You haven’t made a mistake like that since your first month.”
When I checked, I found she was right, and I let out a frustrated sound in the back of my throat, disgusted with myself. I shoved the sheet of paper away, because I was distracted, and there was no point trying to create an array that would explode in my face from the outset, and then I slumped back in my seat.
Aífe watched me, lips pursing and brow furrowing. “There’s something on your mind,” she said, stating the obvious again.
I considered brushing it off, just for a moment, but even if she wasn’t going to find out eventually anyway, I think I could say I trusted her enough to be upfront and honest with her.
“There’s been a development on the next Singularity,” I began without preamble. “The Director is going to be briefing me about it later, but…there’s only so many things it could mean.”
“Ah,” said Aífe. “An answer to the question of just what it was the King of Mages prepared for you in the next Singularity. Are you worried?”
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.” For all of the reasons that I had already told Marie about weeks ago. “There just isn’t anything I can do about it, is there?”
“No,” Aífe agreed, “I suppose not. Hm. There’s no point in continuing if you can’t maintain your focus, so perhaps we would be better spent helping to clear your head instead of bashing it against the wall.”
I wanted to deny it, to tell her that I could force myself to focus, but…that would half defeat the point, wouldn’t it? I was more likely to make more mistakes if I was forcing myself than if I was honestly and completely focused.
“What did you have in mind?”
“Practical application,” she said, mouth slowly pulling into a familiar grin. “Shall we make our way to the simulator?”
It was better than trying to make my eyes look at a bunch of symbols swimming across a sheet of paper. “Sure.”
That was how I spent the rest of my morning lesson with Aífe: in the simulator, practicing the use of the runes and getting a feel for how they might work when I used them out in the field. It became all the more obvious to me that I still had a long way to go before I was anywhere near Aífe’s level, but I was improving, and I could be satisfied enough with that for now.
Afterward, I met up with Jackie and Arash for lunch, and Jackie and I enjoyed a meal together in relative silence. Renée, I discovered, was missing from the cafeteria, and the twins and Mash were nowhere to be seen. They must have already made the Rayshift into London, I realized, and they might wind up staying there for the better part of the day. Emiya, at least, had stayed behind, so poor Marcus wasn’t saddled with the responsibility of manning the kitchen all by himself.
It was not long after I finished eating that I got the message I’d simultaneously been dreading and waiting for, a simple, single line of text from Marie telling me to report to her office.
I had no idea what my face must have looked like, but Jackie stayed with Arash again without protest, and I left them behind to make my way to Marie’s office. My gut squirmed uncomfortably, doing funny little loop-de-loops the whole way, and little bursts of nausea followed in their wake.
When I stepped in through her office door and it whooshed shut behind me, the click of the lock felt like finality.
Romani, Marie, and Da Vinci were all already there, of course, sitting around the table off to the one side of the room, and they looked away from whatever it was they had each been doing when I entered.
“Taylor,” Marie said by way of greeting. “Good. You’re here.”
“Director.”
I walked over to join them, and so that I wasn’t the only one standing, I took the empty seat to Marie’s right, putting me directly across from Da Vinci.
“Now that we’ve all arrived,” Da Vinci began, “I think it time we started discussing what it is we are all here for, yes?”
“Right,” Romani agreed. “The development with the next Singularity. Da Vinci, you’re the one who understands it best, so I guess it’s up to you to explain it.”
“Of course,” said Da Vinci as though it was obvious. “Then I should begin with what the problem was to begin with, shouldn’t I? As I’m sure everyone here is already aware, pinning down the time and location of a Singularity is not as easy a task as it might initially seem. Director, of course, you were…unavailable when we first discovered the presence of a further seven Singularities in the wake of Fuyuki, but Romani and Taylor have already seen the map, and therefore already know that we have at least a general idea of the location of all of them. Wouldn’t you say so?”
It had been months, over half a year since I had seen the whole map, but… “Yes.”
“Only the general location, however,” Da Vinci went on. “The task since then has been finding the exact era and locality for each Singularity and its core. The further the Singularity deviates from the course of proper history, the harder it can be to determine its timeframe and focal point. That is why we’re still having trouble with the last two Singularities, as well. It’s possible — likely, even — that it will take a similar amount of time for us to determine the specifics of where and when they take place well enough to Rayshift the team into them.”
“These are all things we already know,” Marie pointed out impatiently.
Da Vinci held up a finger. “I’m merely ensuring that we are all on the same metaphorical page, Director. Now, the obvious conclusion that would have to be drawn from this is that the American Singularity is also one that deviates significantly from proper history, but you would actually… Well, you would actually be both right and wrong.”
“Wait,” said Marie, “just what is that supposed to mean, Da Vinci?”
“I mean that half of the trouble of pinpointing the time and location of the American Singularity is because it’s fluctuating,” was her answer.
What? “Fluctuating?”
“That’s possible?” Romani blurted out.
Da Vinci nodded gravely, her smile tight and grim. “As strange as it might sound, the readings we have of the Singularity don’t show us a singular era being affected, but two. The first is 1783 AD, shortly after the American war for independence. In fact, depending on the exact date, it may even be before the war was officially concluded with the Treaty of Paris.”
1783? That…actually made a whole lot of sense, when I thought about it. The formation of the United States of America was a major historical event. Throwing that off course or preventing it entirely could have dramatic ramifications for proper history. I could see that being a Singularity in its own right, where we had to go in and ensure that America actually became America.
But she said two eras.
“And the second?”
She looked directly at me as she said, “2011.”
All of the air abruptly left my lungs, and I felt suddenly like a deflated balloon. There it was, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Somehow, someway, my life and my world were a part of this whole fiasco, and I wasn’t going to have any choice but to face it head on.
There was a single spark of hope I could hold onto. “2011? Not 2013 or 2015?”
“Wait,” said Romani, “why is that significant? What would two or four years make a difference?”
“It’s the difference between whether or not Scion is a factor,” Marie answered for me. “In this case…2011 would be two years before he was killed.”
Which meant we might have to wind up dodging his attention. Fuck. How were we supposed to do that?
A sudden jolt of fear struck my gut, and I looked down at the table between us, nightmare scenarios springing to life in my head. Worse. Were we going to have to fight him again? Fight him and hope we could pull out the same miracle we had the first time? So many things had to go right back then, so many details that would be impossible to recreate. Could we even attack his weakness if he wasn’t already off kilter from everything else that had happened first?
I’d been forced to destroy myself to eke out victory last time. I didn’t know if I could do it a second time, if it would even work the same way or if it would be a pointless sacrifice.
“Scion would not be a factor,” Da Vinci said immediately.
I looked up at her sharply. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that the creature you know as Scion is what we would term a quantum observer,” Da Vinci explained. “The reason the Wizard Marshal, Zelretch, did not involve himself in London directly is because to place himself inside of a Singularity would mean it was no longer an unobserved knot of spacetime. It would have become a Universe of Record. Our mission would have failed before it even began.
“Similarly,” she continued, “that means that the presence of Scion inside of the Singularity would itself have made it a Universe of Record, and we would have failed the instant it stabilized enough for us to scan it clearly enough to get a reading on its timeframe and location. It’s impossible for me to say how, but by all accounts, Scion himself will not be a concern for us during this next Singularity. I daresay it would have defeated the point of the King of Mages’ plan.”
A knot of tension eased between my shoulders. So we wouldn’t have to defeat a monster that was virtually indistinguishable from a god. That…that was good news. And when I thought about it more, it made sense. Solomon had thanked me, and the only reason we had come up with was because I had taken care of Scion for him. Why would he purposefully undo that if Scion was somehow a threat to his plans?
“But then, why is it fluctuating?” Romani asked, confused.
Da Vinci could only shrug. It seemed that she didn’t know either.
“We know that these Singularities are fundamentally unstable,” Marie said slowly and carefully. “According to the records, there weren’t that many anachronisms in the Orléans or Septem Singularities, with the exception of some of the Servants themselves, and they covered all of Europe, whereas the London Singularity covered only the city itself, but had far more anachronistic elements in it.”
“I see where you’re going with that, Director, but I’m afraid that doesn’t quite track,” said Da Vinci. “After all, by that logic, the American Singularity would cover only a single city itself, and yet the data shows it encompasses almost the entirety of the North American continent.”
Marie huffed and scowled, but didn’t have a response to that.
“Could it be a matter of time instead?” Romani suggested.
“How do you mean?” asked Da Vinci.
He grimaced and leaned over, propping his elbows up on his knees. “I mean, it’s taken us a lot longer than usual to get a read on this one, so maybe the fact that it’s had so long to develop is the reason why it’s fluctuating like that?”
“That’s not impossible,” Da Vinci agreed. Her index finger tapped thoughtfully on the armrest of her chair. “It would be incredibly difficult to prove, however, and it may wind up being disproven by the very next Singularity. Either way, it’s a theory we might not be able to conclusively find an answer to until long after the fact.”
Marie sank even further into the cushions of her armchair, frustrated. “So no matter what, there’s nothing we can say for sure about what’s causing the fluctuations in the readings of the American Singularity.”
“I’m sorry, Director, but there isn’t.”
“What else do we know?” I asked.
There was a lot that we were simply going to have to find out onsite, just because — as I hadn’t forgotten — Chaldea’s sensor suite couldn’t get reliable ground data without us Masters there as a reference point. But surely there had to be more than just a vague date — or dates, rather — for us to go off of.
“I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that a large part of the information we gather in each Singularity is dependent on the Masters’ presence inside that Singularity,” Da Vinci began, “but as a curious matter of note, it’s turned out that the focal point of each Singularity has in some form or fashion been related to how and why they formed — with the…notable exception of Okeanos, of course.”
Her staff materialized in her other hand, and she held it out above the surface of the table. The massive geometric crystal in its head flashed, and then a map was projected onto the table itself, showing a flattened image of the world. Eight points of light pulsed, each of them corresponding to one of the Singularities, I realized.
“The Orléans Singularity initially diverged, as far as we’ve been able to determine, in Orléans itself,” said Da Vinci, and she tapped each point as she named it. When tapped, the point swelled and brightened, highlighted, and a circle stretched out to encompass what the Singularity itself had. “The Septem Singularity is harder to say for sure, mostly because we never found out where and when the first divergence truly occurred, but it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine that Romulus was first summoned somewhere near the city of Rome itself.”
She briefly tapped the one in the Caribbean. “Okeanos was caused by the interaction of two Grails, so its actual geography resembled no real space counterpart on Earth, but based upon the data we have and the origin point of the Singularity when we Rayshifted you in, it’s likely it originally formed somewhere in this general vicinity of the North Atlantic Ocean.”
The one in Britain was the smallest. When she tapped it, it didn’t grow at all.
“London being so small makes it hard to determine if the pattern holds,” she hedged, and then she moved over to America, and the map zoomed in to show the point that sat on the Northeastern coast. When she tapped that point, it suddenly expanded, covering the entirety of the United States and a good portion of Canada, with the exception of Hawaii and Alaska. “But if I’m right — and despite my genius, it is entirely possible I’m wrong, no matter how unlikely — then the focal point of the American Singularity, its point of origin, is…”
The point she’d originally tapped, however, remained there, a beacon amidst the orangish circle that denoted the territory inside the Singularity.
“…here on the Northeastern coast. Curiously enough, according to our maps, there isn’t actually anything of interest in this area, just mostly empty coastline and woodland. I’m guessing, however,” and here, she looked directly at me, eyes fierce and challenging, “that on Earth Bet, this would correspond to the city of Brockton Bay. Wouldn’t it?”
I closed my eyes briefly and took in a slow breath. There it was, the final coffin nail.
“Yes, it would.”
“Hold on,” said Romani, “I thought that…whatever it might have been that was wearing the King of Mages’s face needed the events of Taylor’s life to go essentially as they were supposed to. Are you trying to tell me now that he was lying and he’s trying to mess with the history of her timeline, too?”
“He was lying?” Marie began, outraged. “He forced us to divulge essential details of her history on a lie?”
Da Vinci shook her head. “That, I’m afraid, I can’t tell you. All things considered, this may have been part of his original plan to remove Scion from the field to begin with. There’s no way to say with any certainty, and the King of Mages himself most definitely won’t be telling us his true intentions anytime soon. What I can say, however, is that there’s something odd about the focal point of this Singularity.”
She tapped the hologram twice, and movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. When I looked up at the upper left corner of the map, I noticed a date — 1783 AD — and I must have missed it before when it said 2011 AD. This time, when Da Vinci zoomed in on the focal point of the American Singularity, it was further south, what had to be maybe a hundred miles south of Boston, and sitting just barely out into the water, something like a mile or less out from the shoreline.
“Cape Cod?”
“Cape Cod Bay, to be precise,” said Da Vinci. “The odd thing is, when the fluctuation occurs, there’s a sort of…echo of the focal point, located out in Cape Cod Bay. Why and how, I couldn’t begin to guess.”
Neither could I. Frankly, while the basic premise sounded like it made sense, when I looked at what she’d actually given us for evidence, it started to look flimsy.
I was willing to believe that Brockton Bay would be involved in this next Singularity somehow or another, especially if Solomon was looking to screw with me in particular, but I couldn’t think of anything that happened in 2011 that was important enough to cause catastrophic damage if it was changed without being so important it would completely change the outcome of Gold Morning.
“Are you sure that’s even how this works?” I asked her. “You said it yourself, you’re mostly basing this whole thing about focal points on Orléans. That’s the only one we know with any certainty started where you say the focal point was.”
She smiled tightly. “As sure as I can be. Much as I might not like to admit it, this is largely conjecture based upon a singular data point. As I said earlier, it is entirely possible that I am, as they say, barking up the wrong tree.”
“It might even be that the focal point is nothing more than the location of the Grail at the moment the Singularity gained enough stability to be detectable,” Marie pointed out.
Da Vinci winced. “That is also…entirely possible.”
Romani sighed and ran a hand through his hair, flopping backwards in his chair as he lamented, “So at the end of the day, no matter what we do, there’s still a limit on how much information we can gather on a Singularity before sending the Masters in.”
“Unfortunately,” Da Vinci agreed. “In either case, whatever the cause for the fluctuations and the displaced echo of the focal point, the one thing that I’m afraid we can say for certain is that — for better or worse — it seems that the next Singularity is going to take place not here in this world’s timeline, but in proper history as Taylor knows it.”
“Earth Bet.” Going home, indeed. Fuck Solomon.
She nodded.
“Even with the improvements and calibrations we’ve made to the sensors over the last several months, it still won’t be possible to say for sure what that will look like, not completely and not until you’ve Rayshifted into it,” she hedged. “I should still be able to get a decent enough look at the projected landing zone to tell you something about what to expect when you get there, however.”
That was better than nothing, I guess. And 2011… At least that would mean that all of my fears about what might have happened to everyone after Gold Morning wouldn’t become anything more than vague worries I never had to face. I could live with that. I had lived with that for the last two and a half years. I’d learned how to be okay with the not knowing and the uncertainty.
Having to see my younger self, the younger, less worn, less traumatized versions of my friends, well, that part I wasn’t sure I’d fully come to terms with yet.
“I appreciate that, Da Vinci.”
“You know what this means, don’t you?” said Marie quietly. When I turned to her, she stared back at me, lips pulled into a tight line and face grim. “The twins and Mash. The rest of the staff. Everyone left in the facility. We’ll have to tell them everything.”
A block of ice dropped suddenly into my stomach.
Fuck.
America looms. The inevitable can no longer be delayed. Rejoice, Taylor Hebert, for you will finally have a chance to lay your demons to rest.
The top section was written very deliberately. I went back to canon Worm to make sure I got the important parts right without simply copy-pasting anything.
And the bottom? Hints dropping everywhere. All over the place. So many hints about what's going to be coming in America. I can almost guarantee no one is going to catch all of them.
Next — Chapter CLXXIII: Parahumans 101
“H-hold on a second, Director Animusphere! You can’t possibly be suggesting…!”