The first thing I noticed was the warmth.
For a long moment, there was only the vague sense of comfort, of something soft cradling me and something equally as soft covering me in a blob of gentle heat, and I laid there for some time, completely relaxed. I forgot that I was on deployment inside a Singularity instead of safely ensconced in my room at Chaldea, surrounded by my books and my tea collection and all of the familiar comforts of life as I had known it for the last two-and-a-half years. I was comfortable, I was at peace.
Slowly, however, the details began to fill in. The easy pressure of a soft mattress at my back, the limp weight of a bedsheet and blanket both pulled up to my shoulders to ward away the autumn chill. The soft rasp of air moving through the vents. The insistent touch of the early morning sun peeking through the curtains and dancing upon my eyelids. The dance of my swarm as they went about their lives as best they could as the weather changed and shifted.
The tickle of hair brushing against my chin.
Abruptly, I was catapulted to full wakefulness, and my eyes snapped open to stare at the blurry colors of an unfamiliar room. An expanse of off-white stretched above me, painted in pale golds by the sunlight streaming in through the window. My mind raced through the night before, providing me an explanation for why I was lying in a bed in the Hyatt Regency hotel, why Mash was in the bed a few feet from mine, and why I was wearing a complimentary set of pajamas instead of my uniform.
There was no explanation, however, for why the freshly laundered bedclothes smelled faintly of sulphur, why strands of hair were tickling my chin, why a tiny arm was thrown over my stomach, and there most definitely wasn’t an explanation for why Jackie’s head was tucked into my shoulder as she slept cuddled up against my side.
I pressed my eyes shut tight, but it didn’t change anything. She was still there, little breaths of air puffing against my collar and through the gaps in the buttons of my pajamas.
I gave her a squeeze, and into her hair, murmured, “Jackie.”
“Mm.” A hum vibrated out of her nostrils, and she shifted against me, pressing her cheek deeper into my shoulder. Equally as quiet, she replied, “Good morning, Mommy.”
As though there was nothing at all wrong with this picture and it was the same as every other morning we’d woken up together in my bed.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I told her.
She shifted, pulling herself tighter against me and squeezing as though she was afraid I might disappear if she let go. “We know,” she admitted. “But we didn’t know how long Mommy was going to be gone, and we hated the idea of being away from Mommy, so we snuck into the Rayshift Chamber and Mommy’s coffin.”
The shiver in my coffin, the way the skin of my prosthetic arm had broken out in goosebumps — she’d been here from the beginning, I realized. All the way back when we first arrived, up through our meeting with Celtchar, Archer, and later Accord, and at no point at all had she been noticed — of course not, as long as she remained in spirit form and didn’t do anything to make herself known. Her Presence Concealment was high enough that she could have followed us around indefinitely.
A wry thought pointed out that she could easily win any game of hide-and-seek she played.
And after slipping under the noses of easily half a dozen Servants without any of them apparently any the wiser, completely dodging the attention of everyone from Arash to Marie to Da Vinci, she had gotten herself ‘caught’ by climbing into bed with me. Naturally, long after it would have been feasible to consider the option of sending her back.
“You realize how much trouble you’re in, right?” I asked her.
There was a moment of silence and hesitation, and then she nodded against my chest as though to hide herself from my anger.
That was probably the worst part, because I wasn’t really that angry. Annoyed, yes. Frustrated, a little. But more than anything, I was resigned, because I probably should have expected something like this and there wasn’t really anything I could do about it right now. It was honestly more trouble than it was worth to pack her up and send her back to Chaldea, and frankly, all things considered, having an Assassin around who could so thoroughly escape notice might wind up coming in handy in the future.
Especially if we had to face Jack and the Nine at some point. Her Presence Concealment might even be good enough to slip past Cherish, if it came to that.
“We’ll discuss your punishment later,” I whispered to her, and she nodded against me again meekly. “Okay. Time to get up, then.”
Perhaps to avoid digging herself into an even deeper hole, Jackie didn’t protest even the slightest, although the sudden rush of cool air that slammed into me when I threw the covers off made me rethink my choice for just a second. Only a second, however, because the importance of our mission trumped my comfort, so instead of bundling myself back up and lying back down to snuggle with Jackie, I forced myself to swing my legs around and off of the bed and stand up. The floor, at least, was carpeted, a small mercy that meant I didn’t have to deal with the shock of cold tiles. Jackie climbed out of bed behind me.
“Why don’t you head into the bathroom and get ready to get showered?” I suggested. “I’ll be with you as soon as I wake up Mash.”
Jackie nodded. “Okay, Mommy.”
She padded quietly over to the doorway that led to the ensuite bathroom, and I took the few steps over to the other bed and leaned down to take a gentle hold of Mash’s shoulder.
“Mash,” I whispered to her. “Time to wake up.”
“Mm,” Mash hummed into her pillow, and then, abruptly, she gasped and jerked around, taking swift hold of my wrist with almost bruising force. “Miss Taylor! There’s…!”
“Mommy?” asked Jackie, peeking out from the bathroom.
Mash’s head turned towards her, and understanding slowly dawned on her face. “O-oh. Um, hello, Jackie. Good morning.”
“Good morning, Mash,” Jackie replied politely.
Mash turned back to me, a confused question plain on her face, so I told her, “She stowed away during the Rayshift and has been following us around since the moment we arrived.” And with some humor, I added, “Apparently, she couldn’t resist climbing in bed with me last night, or else we still wouldn’t know she’d tagged along.”
“I see.” Mash sighed. “Director Animusphere isn’t going to be happy about that, is she?”
“Probably not.” But that was for me to handle. Jackie was my Servant, after all, so her punishment was naturally for me to see to, the same way Shakespeare had been for Ritsuka.
A glance at the clock showed it was almost nine in the morning, so everyone would have gotten more than enough sleep by this point. “You should go get the twins up. Jackie and I are going to grab a shower, and you can get one when we’re done. We’ll be leaving for Brockton after breakfast.”
Mash nodded. “Right.”
As Mash climbed out of her own bed, I went and joined Jackie in the bathroom, shucking off my complimentary pajamas while Jackie just dematerialized her clothes. We stepped into the shower together, setting the water just hot enough to be soothing and relaxing, and set about washing up. I tried not to think about who might have been doing what in there before me, if only because there was no way a hotel like the Hyatt Regency didn’t clean their rooms to a mirror shine.
While we washed, I reached down the thread of my bond with Arash and asked him, Did you know Jackie was here the entire time?
There was a pause. Then, She was, was she? I thought I noticed something earlier, but there was no ill intent, so if we were being followed, I didn’t want to spook them.
You still should have told me, I said.
Yeah, sorry, I really should have, he agreed. I didn’t say anything because it was only a vague suspicion.
A vague suspicion from someone like him went a whole lot further than he seemed to think it did, but I had put my trust in him enough times to let it slide. That he had decided not to say anything meant that even that vague suspicion was a lot vaguer and a lot flimsier than it sounded.
You can make it up to me by ordering breakfast for ten o’clock, I told him.
A burble of mirth not my own came across the bond. Aye-aye, Captain.
Once Jackie and I were as clean as we were going to reasonably get, we came out of the bathroom — dressed in the Hyatt’s complimentary bathrobes, because they were apparently sparing no expense for ‘Accord’s associates’ — to find Mash waiting her turn.
“Senpai and Senpai are up, Miss Taylor,” she reported dutifully. “I told them you were getting a shower, and Senpai thought that was a good idea, so they’re taking turns right now, too.”
“Good job, Mash,” I said. “Speaking of, feel free to take your turn now.”
“Of course.” She gave me a short bow; I’d gotten so used to her incongruently Japanese mannerisms that I barely noted it. “Please excuse me.”
And into the bathroom she went. A minute or so later, I heard the shower turn on again and the patter of water hitting the tile. Before I could sit down, however, there was a knock at the door, and when I went over and answered it, Emiya stood there, holding a hairdryer in one hand. He lifted it in offering.
“Figured you might need this,” he said, “seeing as Master asked for one, too.”
I accepted it with a simple, “Thanks,” and he went back to the other room. I wondered if he was relieved or not that we would be going down to the Hyatt’s in-house restaurant for breakfast, seeing as that also came with our rooms, meaning that he wasn’t going to have to cook for once.
By the time I had finished drying my and Jackie’s hair, Mash was stepping out of the bathroom, also dressed in one of those complimentary bathrobes, and she blinked at the sight of the hairdryer.
“Emiya’s work,” was all I had to say for her to understand.
It was almost quarter to ten when we left our room and met up with the others in the hallway, all of our (relatively meagre) supplies packed away and ready to go. Ritsuka and Rika looked as though they’d had one of the best sleeps of their lives, such were the relaxed expressions on their faces, and since neither of them seemed at all surprised to see Jackie, Mash had evidently explained her presence earlier.
We meandered down the hallways and the plaid-patterned carpet to pick up the breakfast trays that had been prepared for us, courtesy of Arash calling it in earlier, and went down to the lounge and restaurant to sit at one of the fancy, polished wooden tables to eat. Several other guests were there with us, side-eyeing our group and especially Jackie in her quasi-Victorian clothing, but other than some murmurs, no one made anything of it.
Undoubtedly, we would have normally needed a reservation just to be seated, but Accord had gone several extra miles to see to our comfort while we were here in Boston. If nothing else, I could give the man credit for this: he did nothing by halves.
After breakfast, we checked out of the hotel — not without some regret from the twins, of whom Rika lamented the luxuries we were going to be missing out on later — leaving behind only a note to Accord expressing our gratitude for his generosity.
Just because he’d been surprisingly level-headed and calm during our meeting didn’t mean I was willing to trust the apparent absence of his neuroses. Better to observe the niceties, just in case.
Once we were back outside, it was time to mount up again. As I reached for the metal tube that was my miraculous e-bike, I addressed the twins and Mash. “Brockton Bay is about another hour north of here, give or take, closer to an hour and a half if the traffic is bad. We’ll be taking the most direct route there straight through, so if you need to make a stop for some reason, let Aífe know and she can contact the rest of us to pull over.”
“Senpai, I’ve got a question!” Rika’s hand shot up into the air. When I nodded to her, she asked, “Why are we headed straight there two days before our meeting?”
“So we can do some on-the-ground reconnaissance,” I answered. “There’s a lot that we still don’t know about what’s going on, but Brockton is apparently at the center of all of the important stuff right now, so the state of the city itself will tell us a lot about our…contact’s position and how much help we can reasonably expect.”
Ritsuka and Mash shared a look, but if either of them had any thoughts about what I’d said, neither of them gave voice to it.
“I guess that means the rest of us get to follow along out of sight,” said Emiya. He shrugged. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters that much, now that Da Vinci has her hands on that rifle.”
Right — we’d almost forgotten to pass that on last night. It was a bit embarrassing that we’d had to make an extra call before checking in at the Hyatt just so we could send it in for analysis.
“You should still stay close,” I told him. “If Brockton really is the bastion of proper history against the Singularity, then there’s no way there aren’t more Servants hanging out in and around the city.”
“What she said,” Rika echoed.
Emiya accepted this with a nod. Privately, as a twist of the tube and a trickle of magical energy formed my bike and helmet, I reached out to Arash and said, While we’re heading to Brockton, I want you to go west.
He paused. West?
We still don’t know much about what’s going on with these fluctuations, but I have a hunch I want you to check out, I explained. To the west of here are two towns, Lexington and Concord, that played fairly major parts in the Revolutionary War. Check them out, see what’s going on with them, but don’t engage if you run into another Servant.
Right, go sightseeing and get out, he said. After a moment, he asked, What are you expecting to find there?
My lips drew into a tight line, hidden behind my helmet, and I could only admit, I don’t know.
“Got it,” he said aloud. He pinched his shirt between his thumb and index finger and gave it a tug. “Mind if I leave these clothes with you? They’ve kinda grown on me.”
Why not? “There should be enough room in my bag. Just be mindful of the spiders.”
“Right.”
For just a second, he dematerialized, and as his outfit dropped, he rematerialized and caught it. I shifted in my seat to give him access to my bag, and with a slip of the zipper, he stashed them inside, and then disappeared again.
“Stay with me, Jackie,” I ordered. She nodded.
“Okay, Mommy.”
And as she vanished, too, I turned back to the others, all helmeted up and straddling their own bikes. “Ready to go?”
Three heads nodded back to me, and with no more reason to delay, we wheeled our bikes out into the street, and with me in the lead, took off. The familiar comforting weight of Aífe and Emiya’s presence stayed, but Arash almost immediately peeled away in the other direction, heading towards two of America’s most historic sites.
At ten-thirty in the morning on a weekday, traffic in Boston was — perhaps unsurprisingly — fairly light, so it didn’t take us long at all to make our way back to the highway and start north on I-95. Even accounting for that, however, other vehicles were shockingly sparse, and there were long stretches of time where it was just the three of us and an endless, open road leading off towards the horizon.
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Shouldn’t there have been more people? Granted, I wasn’t anything like an expert on interstate travel and how common it was on the day to day, but it felt like there should have been a lot more people on the road with us than there were. Transports taking goods north and south at the very least, ferrying furniture or fruits, lumber or steel, or even just packing crates full of the latest smartphone.
The way Accord and Celtchar had made it sound, life had continued on largely uninterrupted thanks to Coil’s efforts. Had they oversold it? Or was there something I was missing?
As it turned out, yes, there was something I was missing, or rather, there was something missing that should have been there, because we made it maybe twenty miles outside of Boston before we hit a snag that also happened to be a clue: the highway abruptly turned from asphalt and pavement to a rough, dirt road cutting through the woods. No warning, no transition, just a sheer drop into the dirt as though someone had cleaved away a portion of the road with one of Defiant’s knives writ large.
I pulled up to a stop right in front of where the highway suddenly gave way, baffled. The twins and Mash pulled up next to me.
“Whoa,” said Rika. “That’s, uh, not supposed to be like that, is it?”
“No,” I said, “no, it isn’t.”
Looking closer showed that someone had clearly tried their best to even things out and keep the highway open. The dirt road that stretched between the two disconnected parts of pavement — because I could see further on, maybe a mile or two away, where the highway reappeared — had been leveled off as best as could be expected so that the drop wasn’t so jarring, and it had also clearly been done with modern equipment, too. In fact, I was willing to bet that this dirt road had been cleared through the forest around us specifically for the purposes of connecting one side of the highway to the other.
But that made it obvious this was a recent — and temporary — solution. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find out Accord already had a plan in the works to rebuild the missing section of highway.
“It’s strange,” Mash murmured. “It’s true that this area is supposed to be largely woodlands according to our maps, but…it’s almost like there was never a trace of North American industry here. Like a puzzle piece that shouldn’t fit, but the edges match anyway.”
“What could have caused something like this?” asked Ritsuka.
“I mean, it’s not like this is the first time something like this has happened, is it?” Rika pointed out. “It’s just that last time it was more people than places. Tohsaka was from the 1790s, remember?”
“Oh,” said Mash. “So then this… The instability caused by the Grail is making different eras bleed into each other? Miss Da Vinci would probably have a better idea, but I suppose it makes sense.”
“There’s a difference between a couple of people popping up decades or centuries from where they’re supposed to be and whole sections of geography,” I said.
“Unless it has something to do with the size of the Singularity,” said Ritsuka. “Orléans and Septem covered a lot of space, but compared to this one… I don’t think either of them are even close.”
Maybe. It might even explain the fluctuation between the eras on the sensors, because if the sheer size was causing more irregularities, then it might manifest that way. I just wasn’t sure it quite explained everything as neatly as it seemed at first glance.
A pressure on the edge of my mind begged my attention. Master, you’re going to want to see this.
I think you’re going to want to see this, too, I replied.
A pause. You found something?
A stretch of land where the highway just disappears, I told him. You?
…Maybe something related, he said. Borrow my eyes for a minute?
My lips pursed. “Hold on a moment,” I said aloud.
And then I closed my eyes and projected my mind down the thread connecting me to him. In an instant, I was looking out at the world as he saw it, and for a second, I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at. But as I peered closer, letting myself take in all of the details while he swept his gaze from one side to the other —
“What the hell?”
“Senpai?” Ritsuka asked, concerned.
This is Lexington? I demanded.
His head turned, and he focused on a sign so that I could see it. The words on it said, ‘Welcome to Lexington, Massachusetts.’
It is, he confirmed.
But it couldn’t have been. Lexington was a historic site, that was true, with several historic buildings and memorials commemorating the Minutemen and the militia and their contributions to the Revolution, but it was still a modern town. It should have pavement and plumbing and power lines, cars and SUVs and traffic signs, aluminum siding and cookie-cutter shingles and boring taupe paint jobs. It was not Boston, but it wasn’t a time capsule from the nineteenth century either.
What I was seeing was none of that. The roads were dirt all the way through, as though they had never even heard of asphalt, without a single traffic sign or pickup truck in sight. The houses looked as though they had been plucked right out of Colonial times, constructed of brick and stone and wooden slats, and there were no concrete driveways, only worn, dusty paths framed by untamed grass. There wasn’t a single power line or telephone pole anywhere, not a solitary sign of a water meter or light bulb.
That was to say nothing of the people meandering about and seeing to their daily tasks, dressed like figures in a reenactment troupe or actors in a documentary, all rough wool and dark, muddy colors. White ascots and shirts with ruffled sleeves, dark brown coats, vests, and pants that cut off just below the knee, with only the occasional splash of color in the form of muted blues and greens. Everything that needed to be fastened was fastened with a button or a leather cord, because there were no zippers. No cellphones or sneakers either.
It was as though someone had taken Colonial era Lexington and placed it where modern Lexington was supposed to be.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I had Arash head out to check on Lexington and Concord, but this…wasn’t quite it. A hunch that something was going to be out of place or off — this was quite a bit more than that.
Was this what was causing the fluctuations in Chaldea’s readings of this Singularity? Or…was whatever caused those fluctuations the same thing that was causing this, too? Those militiamen, did they have something to do with this, or were they victims trying to do what they thought was right as the very world around them shifted and changed into something alien and impossible?
I wished just then that Arash had a camera, or maybe a smartphone. Some way of capturing this on film so that we could go back and comb over it later to look for more clues.
Head onto Concord and see if it’s like this, too, I ordered Arash. We’ll meet back up in Brockton and…try to figure some of this out.
Understood, he replied, and then his presence retreated from my head.
“Senpai?” Ritsuka tried again. “Is something wrong?”
“Miss Taylor?” Mash echoed him.
“Fou…” the little gremlin grumbled from in front of her.
“It’s nothing. We’ll talk about it later,” I said, brushing their concerns off. “For now, let’s keep going. As long as a T-rex doesn’t pop out of the bushes, offroading for a few minutes shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Wait, is that actually something that can happen?” Rika squeaked. “Is it actually a thing that we might run into Rexy?”
Rexy? Really? Had someone actually named the T-rex from Jurassic Park Rexy?
“Come on,” I said instead of dignifying that question, and my bike purred as it lurched back into motion.
“S-Senpai!” Rika called from behind me. “Wait, Senpai!”
The drop onto the dirt road was rough, rough enough even with our magical e-bikes that the lack of other traffic made a whole lot more sense, because for something that weighed several tons and wasn’t designed for it, it would undoubtedly have played merry hell on the suspension. The dirt road itself, however, was smooth enough that the ride across it wasn’t all that bad. Da Vinci really knew what she was doing when she made these things, that was for sure.
Despite the fact that I’d been joking with Rika and didn’t expect to actually be attacked by a T-rex, I kept an eye out with my swarm the whole way, because a bear or something could still decide to try and take a bite out of us for encroaching on its territory or whatever. No such thing happened, and we made it to the other side, where the asphalt road reappeared again, without being accosted. Our bikes pulled up the drop, and then we were back on pavement and driving away from that break in the highway.
Fortunately, it turned out to be the only such thing we encountered on our way up to Brockton. The rest of the way there was interrupted only by Arash prodding me to let me know that Concord, much like Lexington, looked as though it had come straight out of the late eighteenth century. He had, as he told me, elected not to get too close, so that he didn’t startle anyone, dressed as he was in armor centuries out of date by their standards.
It was another clue, but I still didn’t know what it meant. Not for sure. Maybe Coil would be able to help and tell us more, maybe not, and I wasn’t sure how much I was willing to trust whatever he said to begin with.
As I’d promised, a little under an hour and a half after we’d left Boston, the Brockton Bay skyline appeared on the horizon, looming over us and stretching up towards the sky. Around us, the foliage began to drop away, replaced by squat buildings and small businesses. A pizzeria, a dry cleaner’s, old buildings that looked like they had been constructed back when the city was smaller and everything was shorter.
At a traffic stop, I swung my bag around, reached inside, and pulled out my ravens. We were far enough from the biggest part of the city that there weren’t enough people around to really notice something that would so obviously scream ‘cape!’ to the average denizen of Brockton Bay.
It wasn’t long after that, however, before we entered downtown proper, and a city much more like Boston grew up around us, tall buildings made of glass, concrete, and steel that stretched towards the sky. The barren highway became a bustling city street, with pedestrians out and about living their daily lives, phones to their ears or briefcases in hand as they stepped out for a quick lunch. Brockton Bay’s rich and successful, the upper class, the upper middle class, all of the people who could afford to live in the most expensive part of the city without ever having to look at the people further north who were struggling to get by.
If I found a good spot, I could probably even pick out the Medhall building, where Kaiser and all of his friends had jobs during the day while they pretended to be champions of the poor, white underclass at night. Or the Rig, if it was still standing and hadn’t been washed ashore by Leviathan, or even the PRT HQ. Maybe Fugly Bob’s would still be open, and I could introduce Rika to the Challenger Burger and all of the other greasy, unhealthy guilty pleasures that place called food.
Look at me, getting all nostalgic.
Another presence prodded my mind, and I took hold of that tendril and asked, Something wrong?
Rika is wondering where we go from here, Aífe told me, and if we’re going to be spending the night in a hotel again.
Beneath my helmet, my lips pursed. It was a fair question, and with the hacked cards Da Vinci had provided us, we really could have gone to the most upscale hotel in the city to enjoy the next few days. It wasn’t like Brockton didn’t have its own version of the Hyatt Regency or other, equally fancy places in Downtown. Coil might even be generous enough to foot the bill the way Accord did, if only to keep up the appearance of generosity and magnanimity he had apparently cultivated over the last few months.
But…
No, I replied. We aren’t going to stay at a hotel, but I have an idea for where we can go.
…those were all places we could be tracked to. They left a trail that could be followed, and if Coil had other Assassins in his employ, we would basically be asking him to spy on us. As Jackie had proven, as long as they stayed out of sight, we might not ever know they were there.
Better to choose someplace unexpected, someplace that wasn’t so obvious and wouldn’t let him know we were here before the day was out. Someplace that would let us in first and ask questions afterwards, where my face would be enough to get us inside.
I hadn’t missed the fact that none of the stuff Rika found on the Undersiders even mentioned a bug-controlling cape, let alone the name Skitter. Either this Coil had never met me, or he had done something to remove my younger self from the picture already, and we were going to have to find out which fairly quickly.
We headed further into the city, and like it had been in Boston, once we got to areas of denser population, people all over started to notice us in our sleek, futuristic e-bikes. Phones came out, and pictures were being taken, especially every time we had to stop for a traffic light. Without a fight going on, we weren’t quite drawing a crowd, but we were riding around on what was obviously Tinkertech, and people weren’t any less capable of noticing that here than they had been back in Boston.
The twins and Mash weren’t comfortable with the attention, but the fact I was ignoring it told them that they should, too, so they tried to put it out of their minds and focus on following me. I could tell, just from watching them with my ravens and with my bugs, that they weren’t entirely successful, but there was nothing I could do for them just then.
They’d never really had to deal with something like this before, had they? Fuyuki had been empty of everything except us and the Servants, Jeanne Alter had left a trail of devastation and dead bodies in her wake in Orléans, Nero had largely absorbed any admiration directed our way in Septem, Okeanos had just been a bunch of pirates who treated us like comrades, and London had forced all of the citizenry to stay indoors or risk death. Being the center of attention for a bunch of gawking onlookers was new for them.
Maybe it was better that way. If they let it all get to their heads, then they’d be in for a rude awakening once this was all over and the Association came knocking.
We went further north, traveling through the center of the city and meeting no other Servants and spying no signs of capes hanging about, and eventually, the tall, towering office buildings fell behind us and we found ourselves once more among older, squatter buildings made of brick and wood. The trappings of urban living gave way to something a little more suburban, and as we started riding through neighborhoods and residential areas, our pace slowed just a little.
I wondered if the twins had caught on yet. It was true, I hadn’t come out and said it directly, but if we weren’t going to stay at a hotel in the middle of the city, then where else would we find a place to settle down for the night without leaving it entirely? Had I been too subtle, or had us heading out here into the suburbs clued them in?
Some part of me even felt guilty. For the twins, it would still be months and months and maybe the better part of another year before they could even hope to glimpse their parents’ faces again. They wouldn’t get to go home until the Grand Order was completed, Solomon was stopped, and the world was saved, and by the time they did, with Mash’s fate on their minds, they might not even be able to enjoy it.
When I looked at it that way, this was just selfish. Convenient, but selfish. Right then, however… I guess I wanted to be a little selfish, because this was the closest I would get to closure for the foreseeable future.
It wasn’t even really the same person. Dad, my dad, had gone through so much more, had come face to face with everything I was and all of the things I’d done, and he wasn’t perfect, we were never perfect, but all of the masks had been stripped away and the wounds had finally been given some air to start healing.
My dad…might already be dead. So even if it was selfish, just once, I…wanted to pretend.
The further we got from Downtown, the poorer the neighborhoods became, although they were still very clearly well off enough to afford the amenities of modern American life — clean, running water, electricity, things like that — and eventually, they started looking more and more familiar. I stopped having to check the street names or double-check which turn to take, because I already knew, and a powerful sense of…something kept growing inside of me.
Nostalgia? Longing? I couldn’t give it a name.
By the time we arrived on a street I could have navigated with my eyes closed, my heart was thudding in my chest, and anticipation bubbled uncomfortably in my stomach. Scenarios bloomed in my head, and I imagined different ways this could all go. What should I say first? How should I explain things? Somehow, it didn’t seem as simple as, ‘Hi, Dad, long time no see.’
I never did figure it out. Nothing I came up with seemed good enough to cut through the awkwardness, and if my younger self was there instead of at school or in Chicago, that would only make things stranger, wouldn’t it? At worst, I was four years older and a whole lot more jaded than my sixteen-year-old self would be, and there was no way he wouldn’t notice, wouldn’t cotton on.
Would his first move be calling the PRT? Was…there a PRT still here, with Coil in charge?
All too soon — and yet not soon enough — we pulled up to an old house that must have been built at least fifty years ago, and it looked it. Not run down, not dilapidated, but clearly not as new or as well-maintained as some of the better homes closer to Downtown, and clearly in need of a few minor repairs here and there.
I bet that front step still creaks, I thought with a kind of fond exasperation.
In peeling letters, half worn away by the elements, the mailbox said, ‘HEBERT.’
“We’re here,” I announced.
My bike evaporated beneath me, dropping me unceremoniously on the pavement as it took my helmet with it, and I mentally mapped what I remembered of the inside. It would be a little cramped having to accommodate the four of us — five, that was, if Jackie stayed materialized — but I was sure Dad could be convinced. My younger self might be frustrated at having to give up the hiding places secreted in the basement, but in the worst case, we could spruce things up down there and have enough space for our team to sleep in.
Maybe it would be better if I went alone first. Explained things. It was going to be a lot to take in no matter —
“Senpai?” Ritsuka’s voice cut into my thoughts. I turned back to him; he was still on his bike, still had his helmet on, but even muffled a little, the concern in his tone was clear. “Are you sure?”
“Sure…?”
He pointed to the side, and I followed the direction of his finger to the other side of the driveway, where a wooden post had been driven into the dirt a few feet from the sidewalk. An aluminum sign hung from it, green and gold — my heart skipped a beat.
‘FOR SALE,’ it said, in big, bold lettering. A smaller sign dangling below the first listed the name and number of what could only be a real estate agent.
My feet started moving before the rest of me caught up, and the swarm that had been resting and going about its daily lives surged into action. The ants that lived in a colony beneath the neighbor’s backyard, the nest of wasps hiding behind a treehouse three houses down, all of the spiders and creepy crawlies hidden away in the walls of my childhood home — they answered my call and converged upon that old, residential home, squeezing through the cracks and the gaps to begin searching in ways my eyes alone couldn’t.
“Dad?”
I took the front steps two at a time, avoiding the one that creaked more by coincidence than intent, and slammed into the front door — locked. Of course it was locked. One of those oversized things real estate agencies put on the doors of houses dangled from the knob, and I reached out with my gloved hand, activated the runes woven into the silk, and crushed it like so much cheap plastic. The pieces clattered to the porch.
“DAD, ARE YOU THERE?”
For a second, I fumbled with the doorknob, too, until I remembered the simple unlocking spell that was one of the basics of magecraft, and then it opened with a click. The door swung inwards suddenly and violently, leaving me to stumble into the darkness of the front hall, with the spindly shapes of the railing that led upstairs looming out of the gloom. A thick layer of dust had settled upon it, a gray film that dulled the luster of the polished wood.
There were no lights on. None in the living room, none in the kitchen, none streaming down from upstairs. The entire place was cast in shadows, a pall that smothered the whole house beneath its weight, heavy and oppressive.
My feet took me further into the house, guided more by the sense of my swarm than by sight, and the more my bugs explored, the deeper the pit in my stomach became. Sheets had been draped over the furniture. The refrigerator was silent and empty. The furnace was cold and dark. Curtains were drawn across all the windows. The pictures that had been framed and hung from the walls or sat propped up on tables were gone. All the miscellaneous items that people left out as they went about their daily lives had been gathered up and disposed of, leaving only the furnishings that might entice a new owner to buy the property.
Even the bedrooms had not been spared. All of my belongings — all of the journals that I had once kept of the Trio’s daily injustices, all of my clothes, all of the trinkets I had gathered over the years — were gone, missing. Dad’s room was the same, just an empty casket housing the barest remains of personality in the color of the walls and the antique wood of the chest of drawers.
There were no signs that anyone lived here, no signs that anyone had for at least a month.
“Dad?”
Silence was the only answer.
Did your stomach sink at the end there?
There've been a few theories going around after the last few chapters about what and when this Singularity's deviation occurred, and some of them get kinda close at times, but some of them are way off base. A few more hints get dropped here, but there's still a lot of mystery about what's happening.
I'm not done punching you guys in the metaphorical gut. There's still a lot that Taylor has to face, too, and none of it is going to get any easier on her.
We're due for another interlude soon. I'm sorry to tell you that it won't be Jackie's - again - but only because this one has been in the works for months. I've been waiting a long time to get the chance to finish it and put it into the story proper.
"We're sorry, the number you are dialing cannot be reached. Please hang up and try again."