If Accord had any idea what that reveal meant to me, then he didn’t show it, and I did my best not to let him see. If Mash and Ritsuka noticed how much it had shaken me, then they wisely buried their concerns until later, and that lack of reaction more than anything helped me to keep my head about me as we went through the rest of the meeting — hammering out the finer details of our meeting with Coil — and bid our polite goodbyes to Accord.
“If everything you told me today is true, then it seems the appropriate thing to do would be to wish you a quick and safe resolution to these circumstances,” he said. “I shall endeavor to impress upon Coil the same sentiment.”
“Thank you,” I told him, ignoring the sour taste in my mouth. “Your help is most appreciated.”
Once more, we all stood, and then he shook each of our hands again before we left. Once we were out of sight of the office door, I secreted a few bugs into the room in innocuous places, just enough eavesdrop, as we walked away.
Accord didn’t disappoint. A few minutes passed as we made our way back towards the building entrance — stopping only long enough for me to pass Aífe my knife again, so that awkward questions weren’t asked — but once we were out of earshot and seemingly too far away to even hope of spying on him, Accord turned to his companion in the red tunic.
“It occurs to me, Assassin,” he said, “that you, too, are one of these Servants, summoned forth in this fight over the Grail. I must ask — are they correct? Is the Grail a trap which will doom mankind if left to fester in this place, and only they are capable of ensuring the continuation of the human species?”
Assassin hummed and took his time answering, voice careful and ponderous. “No Heroic Spirit of proper history would deny that their mission is just and their path righteous. There is much about this place which would seem incongruent with proper history as it should be, and so setting it to rights would appear the correct course, as they claim it to be.”
“Despite your saying so,” said Accord, “there are Servants in this…Singularity who are fighting against just such a cause. Are they truly so selfish that they would doom humanity for such a trifle when their success can only be transient?”
“Perhaps so,” Assassin rumbled. “I could give you a vague answer and claim some nonsense about how each must have their reasons, and for some, it would even be true. The allure of the Grail, as you observed so astutely earlier, has captivated many men across many eras. If we were to ignore those who seek the Grail for their own pleasures, however, then the question you must ask is thus: if Chaldea’s mission is just and righteous and no Heroic Spirit of proper history would deny it, why would they have cause to stand against it?”
“I shall assume your question is rhetorical and your answer is forthcoming,” said Accord.
Assassin huffed a dry chuckle. “Indeed, it is. The answer should be obvious and elementary: because not all of these Heroic Spirits believe these folk are capable of seeing their mission through. Some of these Servants that fight against the restoration of proper history do so because they believe that their path — even if it is less just, less righteous, and goes against the strictures of proper history as it was written — is more certain of success.”
“You mean that there are Servants whose goal is to supplant a failed future,” Accord clarified.
“Whether or not their success would achieve the intended outcome is another matter,” Assassin agreed. “Who can say with certainty? These magi certainly have their sound theories rooted in logic and experience, but equally so, even the greatest of them would not be infallible, or else you and I would not be here and their mission would be entirely unnecessary.”
“Your point is well-taken,” said Accord. “Are you one of these Servants, Assassin, looking to supplant the proper course of events with one of your own vision?”
Assassin shook his head. “Such things are beyond the scope of my purpose here. My singular goal is your protection, from all threats that might present themselves. Whatever path you choose to follow of your own will, I will respect it and act accordingly.”
Accord made a noise in his throat and turned away from Assassin. “Your loyalty is appreciated. For now, however, there is business to which we must return, not the least of which being that Coil will need to be contacted and the meeting arranged. Further data about the situation as it stands will certainly be of interest, particularly regarding its source.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Assassin.
As Accord picked up the phone on the desk and began dialing a number, I let the office slip from my focus to the back of my mind. Experience told me that I wouldn’t get much of use from listening in on the conversation, not from Coil’s end, so unless and until Accord said something else interesting, there was no need to keep a close ear on what was happening in his office.
Only once we had stepped out of the doors of the JFK building and back into the afternoon sunlight did Ritsuka allow himself a moment to heave out a sigh.
“That was intense,” he said. “You were right, Senpai, that guy is wound tighter than a snare drum.”
“He actually wasn’t as bad as I was expecting him to be,” I commented. Ritsuka and Mash both turned to me with surprise.
“Really?” said Mash, disbelieving. “But there were several moments in there, Miss Taylor, where he really looked like he wanted to hurt us.”
“But he didn’t demand recompense for any slights,” I replied, “and he didn’t freak out about anyone speaking out of turn or starting sentences with conjunctions or anything like that. He was a lot calmer and more reasonable than I expected.”
I wasn’t sure why. I hesitated to call it Assassin’s influence — I’d only gotten a quick glimpse at him as we were leaving, because I hadn’t wanted to give either of them the impression I was sizing him up and judging our chances, and I hadn’t seen enough to judge — but Mash and the twins proved that it was possible in at least some circumstances for Servants to share the benefits of their skills with their Masters. London would have been a lot harder if they couldn’t.
If Assassin had some sort of mental skill to do with calming minds or controlling tempers, then that might explain how Accord was so…maybe mellow wasn’t the right word, but it was the best one I had.
“That’s…” Ritsuka tried, but never finished the thought.
“At least we achieved what we were here to do, right?” Mash offered.
Right. Even if the result wasn’t what I’d been expecting and fit into some of the circumstances for my worst case scenarios, we’d gotten our meeting with Accord’s ‘boss.’ How ironic that — four years later — I was being forced to work with Coil again for the greater good.
If that was all a part of Solomon’s plans, then I had yet another reason to see him put back in the ground where he belonged.
“We should head back to our meeting point and see if Rika’s had any luck, too,” I said instead.
Ritsuka sighed. “Knowing her, she got distracted watching cat videos or something and Emiya’s the one who did all the research.”
“We’ll see,” I said instead of agreeing with him. “She only had about an hour and a half to look, so she might not have found much of anything anyway.”
That one might be my fault. I should have specified before sending them off — I just wanted the cliff notes. More detail would be better, but the important part was just having a general gist of where everyone was and what had happened to them, so I didn’t need a three page essay on eating habits and arrest records.
We left the JFK building behind and made our way back to the Quincy Market where we’d contacted Marie, and midway there, Arash rejoined us, dressed once more in the clothes he’d abandoned when he went to take up his perch on the top of that building. He slotted back into the group as though he’d never left.
“Things went well, I take it?” he said conversationally as we walked.
“As well as could be expected,” I answered neutrally.
“He’s going to get us a meeting with his boss,” Ritsuka elaborated, “and it looks like he’s going to be on our side. We tried asking about the western people, too, but he couldn’t give us much information about them.”
“It looked like he really wanted the Grail,” Mash added, “but I think we managed to get through to him.”
“For now, at least, it seems like Accord’s siding with us and proper history,” I agreed.
“Sounds like good news,” Arash concluded. Ritsuka and Mash, having obviously sensed something in my reaction to Coil’s name, hesitated and glanced my way.
“For the most part, yes.”
But this wasn’t the time or the place to be talking about Coil and my problems with him, so I pushed it off to later, and we continued our short trip back to that round room where we’d set up the bounded field for our own privacy. It was, fortunately, still standing when we got back, but it was weak enough and hastily erected enough that I expected it would fade away overnight without any intervention from us.
Once we were sequestered back under its protection, we contacted Rika with our communicators. Sound only, of course, since that would have been awkward for her to explain in the middle of a public library.
“Senpai?” her voice echoed.
“We’ve finished our meeting with Accord and we’re back at the meeting place,” I told her without any preamble. “Gather up whatever you managed to find and come on back.”
“A-ah,” she said. “R-right, um, yeah. Give us…about half an hour?”
“That should be plenty of time to finish up over here,” Emiya’s voice chimed in.
“Right, yeah.” Rika sounded a lot more confident. “Half an hour, Senpai.”
Ritsuka and Mash traded dubious looks.
“Half an hour,” I repeated back to her. “See you then.”
The instant the connection cut, I turned to Mash. “Let’s contact the Director and update her about what’s going on.”
Mash blinked. “Without Senpai?”
“Whatever Rika found out is more important for us than for everyone back at Chaldea. And it won’t change what we have to do next, only how we go about doing it.”
Mash didn’t look entirely convinced, but she set up her shield again as Aífe shimmered into existence, and I used it to open a line back to Marie. An instant later, her image flickered to life above Mash’s shield, a familiar wash of blue.
“Yes?” Marie asked as soon as we were connected.
I filled her in on everything that had happened in our meeting with Accord, from the agreement we’d reached with him to the presence of the unnamed Assassin class Servant he apparently kept as a bodyguard and the hints of strange behavior that might have had something to do with that same Servant’s contract.
Marie listened stoically, although her face drew into a scowl when she heard who we were going to be meeting with in the coming days. Since she knew so much more of my life and my history, she had a better grasp on exactly what I was thinking about it and why.
“Are you sure about this?” she asked me when I was done. “Him, of all people…”
I thought about toughing through it and pretending otherwise, but the truth slipped out before I could convince myself to maintain that image of imperturbability in front of Ritsuka and Mash. “No. But it’s not like we have much choice, do we? Cauldron and the Triumvirate are both gone, and Accord is deferring to him. Coil might be our best bet for solving this Singularity and getting history back on track.”
“Not if he wants the Grail for himself,” Marie said firmly.
Oh, I was almost certain that he would. Something like that would be an incredible temptation for someone like him, and if there was anything I could count on when it came to Coil, it was his greed and his callous disregard for others. He would do whatever it took to get what he wanted, and damn everyone who got in his way.
Fortunately, he also had enough sense to know when the stakes were too high to play around with. If he had to choose between indulging in his greed and dooming the world or showing restraint so that he could get what he wanted later, he was farsighted and level-headed enough to choose the latter.
“If the alternative is losing in the long run, then he’ll play ball and cooperate with us,” I said, even though it left a bad taste in my mouth. “We can trust his self-interest, if nothing else.”
“And if he finds out that you killed him in proper history?” Marie asked.
Ritsuka and Mash both looked at me with wide eyes, mouths dropping open just the slightest. The questions were going to come — I knew they would, and there was no avoiding that — but in the moment, I pretended not to notice.
“Then I’m going to have to kill him again,” I said, ignoring the even more startled looks it got me. “There are available replacements who can do his job. If all else fails, I’m sure Accord would be happy to take his place and pick up the slack.”
Marie’s lips thinned, and she didn’t exactly look happy about that, but she let it go. She knew as well as I did that a Coil who was determined to make a nuisance of himself wouldn’t let the matter drop, so we wouldn’t be able to afford to let him attempt screwing us over as many times as he liked.
“What about our money problem?” I asked, changing the subject. “Do we have a solution for that yet?”
Marie’s grimace drew tighter. “We’re working on it. Da Vinci came up with an idea,” and from the way she said it, it was a better idea than Marie’s was, “but it’s going to take at least another hour for her to finish it.”
In other words, long enough that we might as well think about taking up the offer to eat at the Black Rose again, since it would be free. That was part of the plan anyway, but we were going to have to be thinking about where to stay for the night, too, because there was no way I wanted to risk camping out here in the open surrounded by security cameras, forget about how cold it might get.
“We’ll stick around here then and go over what Rika and Emiya found,” I decided. “We’ll contact you again before heading back to the Black Rose for dinner, Director.”
“Of course,” she agreed, glancing briefly at something to the side. “Fortunately, there don’t seem to be any unknown Spirit Origins nearby, so you shouldn’t encounter any trouble.”
One would hope. It was entirely possible that the Teeth or Blasto had access to Servants themselves, but until we knew that they were even still around, there was no point in catastrophizing. We could deal with them as they came.
Once the call ended, Mash and Ritsuka turned to me expectantly, and all I could do was heave a sigh. “Wait until Rika gets back. She’s going to want to hear this, too.”
Although they didn’t look like they wanted to, they did, and we grabbed seats at the nearby benches to sit down and wait. It wasn’t long, however — with the clock just shy of 4 pm — before Rika and Emiya entered the Quincy Market and meandered down the path towards us. I was the only one who didn’t startle when she suddenly walked up and dumped a thick blue binder on the table we were sharing.
“Tada!” she declared.
“What’s all of this?” Ritsuka asked, peeling the cover back curiously.
“Everything we could find about the Teeth and stuff!” she answered proudly. “News articles, wiki pages, discussions on this weird forum called PHO — the works!”
“Fou, fou!” the gremlin chirped as it followed her in.
Ritsuka blinked and turned to Rika incredulously. “Really?”
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I pulled the binder over my way and started leafing through it, and I could admit I was a little bit surprised to find everything she had said there would be.
“Yup!”
Ritsuka didn’t look like he believed it. “And you did all of this yourself?”
“A-ah.” Rika faltered. “Mostly. Mostly by myself! Emiya, um, helped a little, I guess.”
“To keep it organized, more than anything,” Emiya said as he came up behind her. “Master’s instincts were right, but as expected, she doesn’t have the training for intelligence gathering, so I had to steer her onto the right path a little.” He smirked and arched an eyebrow Rika’s way. “Although Master was surprisingly competent on her own.”
“Hey, hey,” Rika huffed, crossing her arms over her chest. “Just what’s that supposed to mean, Emiya?”
“Merely that I underestimated you,” he said smoothly. “It seems I should have known better, after working with you for these past four Singularities. You’re not just a pretty face and a bundle of cheer.”
Rika regarded him with narrowed eyes and an exaggerated scowl.
“This is more thorough than I was expecting,” I admitted, and a lot more than I thought you’d find in the time you had.
Rika groaned. “Not you, too, Senpai! I’m not that dumb, you know!”
Ritsuka opened his mouth, but Mash shoved an elbow in his side, and all that came out was a sharp puff of air.
“I meant that I didn’t think you’d find this much in that short an amount of time,” I told her. “You did good, Rika.”
She smiled brightly. “Thanks!” And then she leaned over, propping herself up on the table. “So, so? How did the meeting with the big guy go?”
Mash and Ritsuka traded a look, and he said, “Well, we got our meeting with the boss, at least.”
Rika’s brow furrowed. “I’m sensing a ‘but’ in there.”
This time, the two of them turned to me, waiting. I could only heave out another sigh. “The big boss in charge of everything is Coil.”
The furrow of Rika’s brow grew deeper. “I thought he was a bad guy and we totally weren’t supposed to go anywhere near him.”
“You had him listed as an enemy on the chart when you gave that briefing,” Emiya supplied.
“Because I didn’t expect him to be running the resistance to whatever forces are making use of the Grail,” I said. “Given what I knew of him, I fully expected he would be someone we would have to fight sooner than teaming up with, but whatever my expectations, it seems he’ll be an ally, at least for now.”
“And the part about killing him?” Ritsuka asked pointedly. No accusation, more of a demand for answers.
I didn’t bother trying to talk circles around it or avoid it. It was better if they knew the sort of man we were going to have to work with. “He tried to kill me — twice in the same day, in fact — and almost succeeded. He didn’t give me much choice other than to put a bullet in his head so he couldn’t try again, and even then, he had to screw everyone over by releasing a monster he’d been keeping in his basement before he died. Yes, Ritsuka, if he finds out he’s doomed either way, then we need to be fully prepared for him doublecrossing us.”
“Even if it means killing him,” Ritsuka concluded, and there was the accusation.
It was Arash who answered for me: “It’s just like the Director said for the last Singularity, Ritsuka. Our mission — and the lives of you Masters by extension — is more important than any individual inside these Singularities. If Coil attempts to sabotage us… No, more than that, if he’s a Master and becomes our enemy, then we might not have any other options.”
All trace of humor had disappeared from Rika’s face, and Mash stared down at the table, her mouth drawn into a miserable line. Even Ritsuka couldn’t maintain eye contact, and his gaze wound up sliding down and landing on the binder.
“I know that,” he admitted, “but still. Isn’t there a way we could beat him without…?”
Without killing him, the words hung, despite being unspoken.
“I-I don’t…” Mash began, but her voice trailed off and she didn’t continue her thought. I could imagine what it was anyway. The first and last time she’d had to kill a person — Servant or otherwise — was Jeanne Alter back in Orléans, and while she seemed to have bounced back from it at least enough to tolerate the version who now called Chaldea home, it had still left its mark on her.
“If it comes down to it, I’ll handle it,” Arash said. “So you guys don’t have to worry about it, alright? You guys won’t have to give the order or carry it out. It’ll be on me.”
I slanted a glance his way, and without looking at me, he said, You, too, Master. Just leave it up to me.
Even if it wasn’t necessary, I guess I appreciated the sentiment. Better to leave it there, I thought, than dredge up old feelings and try to explain the complicated mess that was my thoughts on having to kill Coil in the first place.
I pulled the binder closer and went back to perusing the sheets of paper bound inside of it. There were even color coded dividers separating each of the topics I’d asked Rika to look up, because she’d apparently put a lot of effort into this.
“So you managed to find everything I asked for?” I said, changing the subject.
Rika blinked, and she took an extra second to catch on. “U-um, yeah, kinda? Some stuff had a lot more stuff and some stuff didn’t have all that much, so I did the best I could.”
The best she could wound up being pretty good. Blasto, as I should have expected, was a fairly thin subject. There were only a few sheets of paper dedicated to him, detailing mostly a series of drug sales that the sleuths on PHO had taken to tracking, and there wasn’t much else. Accord, it seemed, was too busy and too important now to pay him much attention, because he might have been pushed around a little, but he hadn’t been stamped out and no major campaigns had been waged against him.
Honestly, the most interesting part was the drug busts, a handful of police reports detailing truly staggering amounts of marijuana that had been seized. That, on the other hand, I could believe was Accord’s doing. It definitely fit his way of doing things.
There were a few other small-time gangs that had apparently cropped up and swiftly been put down over the last few months, but that didn’t tell me anywhere near as much as I would have liked. There was a list of names and their known activities, including their last known location and everything, but the sharp dropoff each of them suffered told me that they had been snuffed out, one way or the other. There were even a few arrest records that matched up with the rise and fall of a couple of them.
It was too consistent to tell me anything about the divergence, however, which only meant that — between Accord and the Teeth — no one had wanted the competition to flourish.
The Teeth, on the other hand, were a different story. At some point in May or June, they had apparently left Boston, although no one was sure of an exact date, and then abruptly disappeared. The Butcher and all of their capes had simply fallen off the map, and in the aftermath, any remnants left behind were ruthlessly squashed. Reports were mixed, but some of them detailed a man who bore a striking resemblance to the Assassin in Accord’s office, and some of them described speedsters who could only be other Servants. PHO had erupted in theories about a new gang or hero team, although those had died down when these mystery figures disappeared once any trace of the Teeth had been erased.
Servants on loan from Coil, no doubt, sent to pacify resistance and smooth out Accord’s transition to the local power here in Boston. How they’d managed to handle the Butcher without simply making a new one, none of the reports or theories knew for sure, but I didn’t doubt that Coil had come to a solution similar to the one we’d used to trap Cherish. A single good Caster would do the job easily.
It gave us a little bit of a better idea of the timeline, at least. If Servants were here in May or June, then that was confirmation that the divergence went back at least that far. And since the last post was dated September 27th, I was going to hazard a guess and say that was today.
“The ones who took out the Teeth were almost certainly Servants,” I said, looking to Rika. “Were there any descriptions you could find about what they might look like? Clues about who we might be dealing with?”
Rika shook her head. “They were all over the place. I gave up after page two and just printed everything out.”
Frustrating, but there wasn’t anything we could do about that.
Lastly, on the subject of the Undersiders…
“Is…this all there was?”
…a handful of sheets of paper, sparse and threadbare. Most of it was rumor mongering, news reports about robberies or attacks on local villain teams in Brockton Bay that people thought might be them, used to bolster theories about what they were up to.
Rika shrugged. “Sorry, Senpai. Those Undersiders are ghosts, and not like the spooky kind either. Nobody had any idea what they were up to or where they went.”
“Choice of words aside, she’s not wrong,” Emiya agreed. “They had a few dedicated followers, but most people seemed to agree: they were a small-time group that fizzled out or died, although no one took credit for it.”
There was no attack on the Forsberg Gallery, no war in the streets fought against the Nine, no takeover of the city in the aftermath of Leviathan — there might not even have been an attack on Brockton by Leviathan — no villain team-up against the ABB, no bank robbery. There were a litany of smaller crimes that could have been them, but the only one I was sure they actually did was the Ruby Dreams job, the very same one that had put us on a collision course that fateful night in April.
A horrible thought occurred to me, and my heart pounded in my chest: what if they never met me? What if Coil was too distracted by his shiny new Grail, and they all died fighting Lung and Oni Lee? What if they made it through that by the skin of their teeth somehow, and then they were disposed of once Coil had the Grail and no longer needed them?
Two little words that terrified me more than anything else. What if?
I went back through the posts a second time, but they didn’t show me anything new. There was nothing. A single thing that I knew they’d done, and a bunch of ghost stories that might have been Grue or Bitch or Regent. That was all I had to go on.
It wasn’t enough. The possibilities for what could have happened were enormous, because I just didn’t know enough about what had been happening in Brockton Bay. This was just too little to go on.
I should have asked them to broaden their search, I thought regretfully. I’d thought… But that was the problem. I’d thought that I could place where we were and what was happening solely on what the Undersiders had been doing, and without them as a milepost, I was blind.
“Senpai?” asked Ritsuka, brow furrowed with concern. “Is something wrong?”
My head spun with thoughts, chasing each other around and around in circles. Possibilities, nightmare scenarios, questions without answers. Too much, I didn’t tell him. There’s so much wrong that I don’t even know where to start.
Focus. I had to focus. One problem at a time. Sitting here and catastrophizing wouldn’t help anyone or solve anything.
“One way or the other, we have to head to Brockton,” I told them all. “Where we go from there…”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know at all. If Coil had killed the Undersiders, and yet we had to work with him to resolve this Singularity and get history back on track…
One problem at a time, I told myself again. “…we’ll figure it out once we know more about what’s been happening.”
Ritsuka wasn’t the only one who didn’t look convinced, but I checked the time, and as though to prove the clock right, my stomach let out a low growl.
“For now,” I said, running from the subject like a coward, “it’s after five, so we should head back to the Black Rose and get some dinner.”
The twins traded a look, something passing between them silently, and dubiously, Rika said, “If you’re sure, Senpai.”
Beep-beep!
Da Vinci’s image appeared in the air, trademark smile firmly in place. “Before you do that, I have something that should make your time there in America quite a bit simpler.”
“I like simpler,” Rika said.
“Is this related to our money problems?” asked Ritsuka.
“It is, indeed,” Da Vinci said. “The Director, you see, thought it might be convenient to use… Well, to cut a long explanation down to its essentials, Singularities release a sort of quantum spiritron that plays something of a role in your presence inside one. She thought it might be possible to turn some of them into counterfeit money for you to use, but it would be quite inconvenient to carry around rolls of hard cash in your pockets, wouldn’t it? To that end, I came up with a bit of a more convenient solution. Mash, if you would?”
“Ah!” Mash leapt out of her seat. “Right, of course!”
She strode quickly back over to the center of the room and placed her shield back down, and then stepped back. A quick flash of light and a small surge of energy later, a box slightly larger than a chequebook sat atop of it innocently.
“That’s it?” Rika said skeptically. “I was kinda expecting something more than that.”
“You might be singing a different tune once you look inside,” Da Vinci told her knowingly.
Mash bent down, retrieving first the box and then her shield, and she brought it back over to us to hand it to Ritsuka. He took it and slid the lid off, blinking down at the contents, then reached in and pulled out —
“A debit card?” said Rika, confused.
“It has your name on it,” her brother said, passing the first one over. As Rika examined hers, he pulled three more out of the box, one each for me, Mash, and Ritsuka, and he handed each one off to the person they were labeled for.
When I took mine, it didn’t seem like anything special. It looked like an ordinary bank card, with the Chaldea logo printed on the front in black against a silver background, and the only thing differentiating them from each other was whose name was printed in blocky lettering on them. Heavier and less fragile, like it was made of some other material instead of simple plastic, but in just about every other way, completely indistinguishable from something I might have picked up at a local bank branch.
“Of course, there’s no such thing as a Chaldea bank, not in that era nor in this one,” Da Vinci acknowledged. “Technically speaking, there aren’t any funds for all of you to draw on, so I suppose it’s quite fortunate that those aren’t ordinary bank cards, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that they’re significantly heavier than normal — that’s part of why. You see, although you can use them as you would any ordinary debit card, what those cards do is create ‘ghost’ money.”
Ah. I think I understood where she was going with this.
“Ghost money?” Mash echoed, confused.
“Something tells me Casper’s got nothing to do with this, Da Vinci-chan,” Rika said wryly.
Da Vinci chuckled. “Indeed not. As I said, you can use these cards like normal debit cards, and when you do, they will convince the card reader that the payment has gone through without any problems. You will — almost literally, in fact — be creating money from nothing. As far as anyone else is concerned, you will be making a completely legitimate purchase.”
This would almost certainly never work on an Earth Bet where Watchdog was still a thing, and definitely not when Number Man was still around to handle finances and make sure the numbers lined up. Here, however, where Cauldron was missing in action and Coil was the one holding civilization up in at least this part of New England… Maybe it would actually work.
“This sounds really illegal,” Ritsuka said.
“Oh, it certainly is,” Da Vinci admitted. “The UN will confiscate them without a doubt, and government watchdog organizations will probably spend the next ten years scrutinizing your every purchase to make sure you’re not using them once this is all over. For now, however, as a matter of operational success, I think the rules can be bent in this case.”
“What if we get caught?” I asked.
“They work in tandem with your mystic codes, so it’s not as though simply anyone can make use of them whenever and wherever they like simply by having one or the other,” Da Vinci explained. “And in the worst case scenario where the federal government sends agents after you… Well, that would still give us a point of contact with whatever remains of the federal government, wouldn’t it?”
Not a very amicable one, I thought, although she wasn’t entirely wrong. If the government was still in a strong enough position to arrest us for bank fraud amidst everything else, then that would tell us quite a bit about what was going on and give us an angle for contacting more legitimate authorities than a supervillain.
If it came down to it and no one in the government wanted to believe us or help, then our Servants broke us out and we were fugitives who had to rely on the likes of Coil and Accord to continue our mission, and that would just put us back where we were now, wouldn’t it?
I pocketed my card, slipping it into my utility pouch with the rest of my tools. “Thanks for this, Da Vinci.”
“Just don’t go on a spending spree,” Da Vinci teased. “People are still going to notice if you drop a hundred thousand dollars on a new car, you know!”
Rika’s cheeks colored as though she had been planning exactly that, and a huff of air made it out of my nostrils, not quite a snort. She didn’t think we were going to be able to take a Ferrari back with us, did she? There was no way Marie would have let her get away with it.
With her piece said, her gifts delivered, and the explanation given, Da Vinci let us go and the connection dropped.
“Well,” said Aífe into the silence, “that will certainly be convenient, won’t it?”
At least for now, anyway. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do if the fluctuations bore out and we found ourselves in an 18th century town, but I suppose in that case, we’d have to see if Emiya’s counterfeiting ability was up to snuff.
“It feels a little weird,” Ritsuka admitted, “but I guess it’s better than having to steal money from people, isn’t it?”
“I still say we could have hit a drug house,” Rika opined; she tucked her own card away, “but this is a pretty cool thing, too. And, hey, bright side — no need to worry about being pulled over by a drug sniffing dog!”
“Fou, fou-kyu!” the little gremlin agreed.
Mash sighed, but slipped her own card into the storage compartment of her shield. “It feels dishonest using something like this, but I guess it can’t be helped.”
“We can worry about it later,” I said. “For now, let’s go get some dinner.”
No one protested that idea, especially when Ritsuka and Rika’s stomachs both growled to show they were hungry, too, and so in the twilight of the setting sun, we made the short trek back to the Black Rose. Greg — still on duty at the front door — gave us one look and immediately let us inside.
I wondered if he’d been told we were working with Accord now or if Celtchar’s name still carried enough weight to get us in a second time.
The bar in the back was much busier now than it had been at lunchtime, but there was still enough space for Archer to gesture to a stretch empty enough for all of us to take a spot with relative privacy. We all picked seats and sat, leaving only Aífe to remain in spirit form this time, the only one who didn’t have the clothes to walk in without drawing immediate attention.
Note to self: one of the things we were going to have to make sure we had was casual clothes for everyone. The convenience was simply too big an issue to leave alone.
After a few minutes seeing to the other customers — serving up drinks with a grace and aplomb that I might have thought him an actual bartender in life — Archer meandered over to our end of the bar. He retrieved another set of menus, but with a deft sleight of hand, slipped something in mine before he slid it over. He leaned forward just a little as he pinned me with an intense stare.
“Regarding your business with Mister Accord from earlier,” he murmured, barely audible amongst the buzz of other voices. And then he straightened, leaving behind a small slip of paper tucked neatly in the edges of my menu. I leaned forward, surreptitiously dropping my own hand over it, and Archer’s mouth eased into a smile even though his eagle eyes remained sharp.
“Now,” he said, “I believe I told the lot of you earlier that your meals for today are covered, yes? What would you like to order?”
Ritsuka and Rika both glanced my way, eyes shooting to my hands, and picking up on what must have happened, they acted like normal.
“Actually,” said Ritsuka, turning back to his own menu, “I think I want to try something different, this time. Can I start off with some curry chips?”
Archer whipped out his notepad again, twirling the pen around with a deft motion of his fingers. “Certainly!”
“Jameson wings for me!” Rika chimed in.
And as the others ordered their food, I lifted my hand and glanced down at the slip of paper. In Archer’s neat, looping cursive, there was an address, two different phone numbers — one marked with an ‘A,’ the other with a ‘C’ — and a time and date. Noon, three days from now, at an office building in downtown Brockton Bay.
My fingers twitched, but I managed to control myself enough not to crumple the note.
Our meeting with Coil.
The plot thickens.
I feel like I haven't shut up about the surprises yet, but there's still a lot in store and a lot Taylor and you guys have to learn about what's going on in this Singularity. For every point of familiarity, there's something new and different, and I'm just loving writing this.
This chapter, to that end, is all about building up some more of the mystery, answering a few questions just so that I can hand you a bunch more. There's so much going on and we've just scratched the surface.
"Whoa. That's, uh, not supposed to be like that, is it?"