It couldn’t last forever, no matter how it might have seemed to. Eventually, the tears dried up and the agony died down, leaving me feeling raw and aching, like an exposed nerve. For a moment, I was embarrassed to have lost control of myself, but if there was anyone who knew me better than these two did, they weren’t there just then.
Once I got better control of myself, I shifted, straightened a little, and pulled Jackie into a hug so that I could press a kiss to the crown of her head and whisper, “Thank you, Jackie.”
“Mm!” she hummed into my chest.
When I let her go, it was only to stand up and take her hand, then turn around and tell her, “Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”
“Okay.”
She let me lead her back over to that fateful headstone, and I knelt back down again, addressing the two names etched into its surface. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. There’s someone I’d like to introduce you to.”
I slung my arm around Jackie’s shoulders and pulled her into my side, offering the silent headstone a smile. “This is Jackie. I know I’m a little young, and it wasn’t exactly the…most traditional method of adoption, but she needed a mother and I…I guess it turns out that I needed her, too.” I nudged Jackie. “Say hi, Jackie.”
“Hi…” Jackie said shyly, then hesitated and looked to me for permission. “Grandpa and Grandma?”
I gave her a smile and an encouraging nod, so she smiled, too, and with more enthusiasm, said, “Hi, Grandpa and Grandma! Mommy is amazing and we love her! We take baths together and eat together and sleep together, and Mommy even reads to us, too!” More somberly, she added, “We wish we could have met you for real, though. Mommy misses you very much.”
“Every day,” I agreed in a whisper. I craned my neck to the side, and a wry smile tugged at my lips. “And this guy over here trying to be polite is Arash. He’s…a friend, and a very reliable one, too. I’m not sure I would have made it this far without him.”
“I didn’t want to intrude,” Arash said demurely, but he stepped over to join us anyway, crouching down to smile at the names. “Hello, Mister and Missus Hebert. It’s nice to meet you. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this, but you raised an amazing daughter. I’ve been working with her for about eight months now, and if she’s anything at all like her parents, then you two must have been incredible people.”
“They really were,” I said wistfully.
Arash briefly turned that smile my way, before returning to what he wanted to say. “There’s too much to say to explain all of the specifics, but I want you to know that I’ll be doing my best to protect her for you. So you two can rest easy. She won’t be joining you anytime soon.”
We stayed there for a good twenty minutes more, telling my parents about the track my life had taken, just cutting out all of the stuff that was hard to explain or risked operational security. We talked about Rika and Ritsuka, about Marie and how she’d saved my life, about Romani and his fumbling good nature, about Renée and Emiya and their friendly competition in the kitchen.
Four years ago, I wasn’t sure if I really believed there even was an afterlife waiting for me when I died, except in some vague, wistful hope that I might someday be able to see my mom again at some far off, distant point in the future. Any belief I had was born of desperation and nurtured only by the fact that the alternative was too terrible for me to accept. I wanted to believe in it, so even if some cold, grounded part of me said that we were all just meat and matter, I had to reject that. I had to cling to the idea that there was more than just this.
Now… Now, I knew better. The soul was real, and it could be touched, with the right magic. Afterlives could and did exist in some form or fashion, although I still didn’t know what kind or which one Mom might have found herself in and whether we would eventually be reunited. I wasn’t sure I would even be worthy of wherever it was she wound up.
Whether or not Mom and Dad heard us was a different question. Maybe they did, but…probably not. Not unless their leftover regrets were lingering about, and I had my doubts about that, too. Even so… Even so, it helped a little. To imagine that they were there, listening, smiling, happy that at least some version of me was still alive, still fighting the good fight, still had something resembling a future.
As cathartic as it might have been to spend the entire rest of the day just talking at their memories and pretending that my words were reaching them, we couldn’t do that. This was still a Singularity, and there were still things we needed to do, avenues of investigation that we needed to pursue, and my feelings couldn’t get in the way of that.
So, reluctantly, I told the headstone, “We have to go. As hard to believe as it might sound, we have to save the world. Your daughter…” My throat closed around the words, but I forced them out anyway. “Your daughter became a hero. Because just like you guys, I can’t just stand by and watch.”
And no matter how hard it was, I stepped away.
“Bye, Grandma,” Jackie said as we turned to go. “Bye, Grandpa.”
Arash lingered for a moment longer, and so quiet that I almost wasn’t sure I didn’t just imagine it, he said, “I promise.”
We meandered our way back to the road, leaving behind a pile of cooling vomit and the grave containing my parents and my younger self. I felt a little guilty for not cleaning up after myself, but we had neither the time nor the resources to handle it, so I left the remains of my breakfast there for whatever wildlife would decide to claim it once we were gone.
Once my feet were firmly back on asphalt, Arash and I climbed back on my bike, and a few minutes later, the cemetery shrank behind us as we rode away. I didn’t allow myself to look back or my thoughts to linger.
Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of the things that may be only? The only way to change this fate was to correct this Singularity and restore history as it was supposed to be, one where my father didn’t die on what was supposed to be my sixteenth birthday and where I survived my fight with Lung. The only thing I could find by dwelling on it was the resolve to see it undone.
It was late enough in the day now that I took us straight back to the house instead of pursuing other avenues of investigation, and it turned out that we were the first group to make it back. The twins, Mash, and Emiya were all still out for the moment, although I was expecting them to be back before too long.
It gave me some time to freshen up, because Aífe took one look at me and immediately knew something was wrong.
“Bad news,” I told her. “We…found out what happened to my dad and why the house is for sale.”
“Mommy’s name was on that gravestone, too,” Jackie pointed out solemnly. Aífe’s attention immediately snapped to her, eyes widening.
“Later,” I promised them both. “It’s something we’re going to need to go over with the whole team. Have you heard back from the others yet?”
I could see that Aífe wanted answers immediately, but she let it drop. “A few minutes before you returned. Rika and Emiya will be here shortly with food. Ritsuka, however, hasn’t contacted me at all.”
A brief thread of worry squirmed in my belly — but if they were in trouble, there was no way Marie wouldn’t have attempted calling me, no matter what the situation was, and Ritsuka was smart. He would have called for backup. I let the tension ease out of my shoulders.
“I’m going to get cleaned up before they get back,” I said.
Aífe arched an eyebrow at me. “Probably for the best. Those three would certainly have questions if they saw you in the state you’re in right now.”
Yeah, they probably would.
“It can wait until after lunch. My reaction was…atypical.”
“So it would seem.”
As she went back to what she’d been doing, I turned around and headed to the stairs, plodding up them as my hand trailed through the dust coating the railing and left a smear behind. I stopped at the top, hesitating, but I already knew what was in the bedrooms and what I wouldn’t find in either of them, because my swarm had already shown me earlier, so I soldiered on and stepped into the bathroom.
A wave of nostalgia hit me as I flipped on the lights, but the little touches were missing, the various bits and bobs that came with a space that was lived in, like Dad’s razor or the bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the shower. That pervasive sense of stepping into a place that felt unfamiliar despite being one I knew like the back of my hand returned, like the opposite of déjà vu.
The cabinets were empty and there wasn’t any soap, so I just turned on the water, cupped my hands under the stream, and bent over to splash it on my face. Brisk, cold — invigorating. I splashed another couple of handfuls on my face, gently rubbing away the flecks of dried vomit on my lips and the corners of my mouth and massaging the tracks my tears had taken down my face.
When I was done, the woman who looked back at me from the mirror was…presentable, at least. She was more worn down than I remembered from this morning, more weary, and she looked like she needed a good nap and maybe a day at the spa, but the more telling traces of what had happened at that cemetery were gone. Good enough.
The water shut off with a twist of the knob, and as I turned around to dry off — of all the things that had been left behind instead of packaged up and sold off or handed over to the next of kin, the towels it seemed weren’t one of them, and I wasn’t going to question why — the front door opened. I must have been worse off than I thought not to notice Rika and Emiya pulling up to the house.
“We’re home!” a boisterous voice called.
I dried myself off carefully and methodically as Arash greeted the two of them, helping to carry some of the groceries towards the kitchen. With one last glance at my reflection, I flicked the light back off and went back downstairs.
“— starting to get hungry,” Rika was saying. “Geez, I can’t even tell you, Arash! American supermarkets sell so many goodies! No wonder Americans have weight problems when there’s a thousand different cookies to choose from in every aisle!”
“Maybe we can get some for you later,” Arash replied.
“Or buy a recipe book so Renée can try baking some for you herself,” I added as I walked in.
Rika whirled about. “Senpai!”
And then she cast a guilty glance at Jackie, who was munching on a cookie from a plastic box she and Emiya had evidently bought while they were out.
“Th-this isn’t what it looks like!” she insisted.
“It looks like Jackie is eating dessert before lunch,” I said bluntly. Rika cringed.
“U-uh,” she stammered, “m-maybe…it’s exactly what it looks like…?”
Instead of her, I addressed Jackie. “Jackie.” Jackie paused and looked at me, mouth mid-chew. “I’ll let it slide today, but we don’t eat snacks before our meals.”
Jackie blinked, and then simply said, “Okay, Mommy.”
I turned back to the others. “Run into any problems?”
“Unless you count my Master’s sweet tooth,” Emiya drawled from the counter where he was preparing sandwiches, “none.”
Rika hesitated, chewing at her bottom lip for a moment, and reluctantly, she asked, “Senpai…did you…?”
The memory made my stomach squirm, but my voice was steady and calm when I told her, “We found out a few things about where and when this Singularity diverged from proper history, yes. We’ll go over the details after we’ve all eaten lunch.”
She looked like she still had questions, and maybe like she couldn’t quite believe I could talk about it so evenly and matter-of-factly, but like Aífe, she let it lie for now. Maybe she’d gotten used to me brushing off questions about my past and my personal life.
I did feel a little guilty about that. But the only reason I wasn’t answering her right away was so that I didn’t have to go through it twice more.
By the time Emiya had finished making sandwiches for all of us (“Just find a spot and sit down, Rika, there really isn’t enough room for everyone at the table.”) Ritsuka and Mash were making their way across the lawn and to the front door, and I didn’t even pretend to be surprised when they walked through it a minute later. I just kept eating my sandwich, letting the subtle flavors wash away the last of the taste of vomit on my tongue.
“We’re back,” Ritsuka announced loudly.
“Welcome back!” Rika said around a mouthful of shaved turkey and rye.
“So it took a little while to find it,” he began, only to stop and pause when Emiya thrust a plate and sandwich into his hands. “Ah, thank you, Emiya — took a little while to find it, but we did manage to locate the Ley Line Terminal out in the docks…”
He looked around for a place to sit, and Emiya, seeing this, glanced over at the island in the middle of the kitchen where Rika had taken up residence. A mumbled incantation and a short nod later, and two more stools stood around the island, giving both Ritsuka and Mash a place to sit.
“Thank you, Emiya,” Ritsuka said again, and he took up one of the stools so he could set his plate down on the island. Mash accepted her own plate with a quiet thanks and went to join him. “We found the Terminal, but there wasn’t any sign of a Caster around to take advantage of it, so we marked it on the map and did a little investigating. We didn’t run into any other Servants, though.”
Since he hadn’t called for backup at any point or sounded the alarm to Aífe? That was about what I’d been expecting.
“See any gang members?” I asked him. He tilted his head a little, brow furrowing with confusion, so I clarified, “Any white guys with shaved heads and Nazi tattoos or Asians in red and green.”
The furrow of his brow deepened. “Not…really…?”
“That first one makes total sense, but the second sounds super vague, Senpai,” Rika chimed in. “Also kinda racist. Is it racist? Does it make me racist to say that you don’t see too many people in Japan running around in Christmas colors?”
“The first one is the E88,” I reminded them, “and red and green are the ABB’s colors.”
“Oh, right.” Rika rolled her eyes so hard that she actually rolled her head, too. “The Azn Bad Boys. Someone was trying too hard when they came up with that one. Super chuuni.”
I thought I’d heard her use that word before. Someday, I was going to have to ask her what it meant.
Ritsuka and Mash shared a look. “We didn’t…really see anyone like that, Miss Taylor,” said Mash. “Um. Or at least, no one who was very obvious about it? I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, no one who was wearing it proudly,” Ritsuka agreed. “If there was anyone like that, then I didn’t really see them either.”
No gang members? That…might actually track, now that I thought about it. Hadn’t that been a part of Coil’s plan from the beginning? Remove and supplant all forms of crime all the while establishing his alter ego as PRT Director, giving him control of nearly all aspects of the city. A feudal lord with a few extra steps.
The Singularity might just have made his plan come true without all of the backroom wheeling and dealing or half the convoluted schemes he’d been forced to use in proper history.
“What does that mean?” Emiya asked me.
I didn’t know for sure. “Maybe nothing,” I hedged. “Maybe that more than half of the groups I warned you to look out for in this city wound up being pointless.”
Ritsuka, Rika, and Mash all traded looks with each other, like they were silently asking if they were supposed to be disappointed or happy, and they eventually settled on indifference. I envied their ignorance, just a little. The last time there’d been a power vacuum in Brockton Bay, half of the east coast had decided to try and lay claim to a piece of it.
Once we were done eating, Rika slid her plate away — to be picked up smoothly by Emiya, who started washing it immediately — and leaned forward on the island. “So, Senpai,” she said, “now that we’re all fed and watered with the righteous nectar known as lemonade, you found something, right?”
‘Something’ was a way of putting it.
“You did?” Ritsuka and Mash said in stereo.
“A few answers,” I said, “and what might be a lead on when and how this Singularity diverged.”
“We visited Grandma and Grandpa,” Jackie chimed in solemnly.
Confusion rippled across the group. Emiya, of course, was the one who figured it out first, at least by the brief hitch of his shoulders before he continued washing.
“Wait,” said Rika, “I thought your mom was already…” And as the realization landed, in a quieter, smaller voice, “Oh.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Yeah.
“The reason why this house was empty when we arrived and my lead are one and the same,” I told them instead of dwelling on it. “I can place the divergence point of this Singularity no later than April 11th, 2011.”
Like he knew he was going to regret asking, Ritsuka said, “What happened on April 11th?”
“My first night out in costume,” was the answer I gave. “Do you remember the dragon I told you I fought?”
“Wait,” Rika blurted out, “you beat a dragon on your first night out as a superhero?”
“I fought that dragon on my first night out,” I corrected her. “Beat him… No. Not by myself, at least. I threw everything I had at him, but all it did was make him angrier, and the angrier he got, the more powerful he got and the hotter his flames burned, so the less I could do to him. He had me dead to rights…until a group of capes riding monster dogs barrelled in and knocked him off the roof.” I nodded to Rika. “The Undersiders.”
Understanding dawned on her. “That’s why you had me look them up back in Boston!”
“Yes.” Although that wasn’t nearly all of it. “But something…seems to have happened differently here. I don’t know what, but whatever it was changed the outcome of that fight. Whether the Undersiders never showed up or if they wound up fighting someone else that night… My younger self died fighting that dragon, Lung.”
Rika blinked, and incredulously, said, “A dragon named dragon?”
Wait until she met the actual Dragon, if she was still around here.
“He was a gang kingpin whose super power was to slowly transform into a dragon,” I said dryly. “I never said he was imaginative.”
“I don’t understand,” said Ritsuka, “why does that mean that…”
He struggled with the words for a minute, trying to find a delicate way of asking his question. I spared him the trouble.
“We went to the local cemetery. That’s how I know when my younger self died. My dad… He died a few months ago, on what would have been my sixteenth birthday.”
In the silence that followed, it took them a few extra seconds to connect the dots, but once they did, their eyes went wide and their mouths dropped open with horror.
“Oh no,” Mash murmured softly, voice heavy with sympathy, “Miss Taylor…”
As much as I could appreciate that, it wouldn’t help just then and it wasn’t going to change anything. The only way to undo all of this was to set the Singularity back to rights, and wallowing wasn’t going to make that happen any faster.
“I’ll point out that it doesn’t mean that’s where things actually diverged,” I said. “Just that my younger self dying is the last place it could have happened. Whenever the Grail was dropped here and whatever wish was made, it didn’t affect things as I knew them until that moment.”
Because the Ruby Dreams job still happened. Whatever had prevented the Undersiders from coming to my rescue had to happen between that and my first night out, and there was no telling where the ripple started from, only where it ended.
“I’m…not sure I understand, though,” Ritsuka admitted. “The King of Mages… He said you did him a favor by taking out Scion, right? So…why would he create a Singularity where you couldn’t do that?”
I didn’t know. He was right, those two things didn’t really match. I…wasn’t sure I could say absolutely that the world would have been doomed without me there to save it — putting aside the arrogance of that statement, I knew about Grand Servants now — but it still seemed contradictory.
“Da Vinci suggested that this Singularity might actually have been the King of Mages’ original plan to take care of Scion,” I said, “so no matter what he told us in London, maybe how personal it wound up being for me was just…”
“Serendipity?” Rika suggested.
“I’m surprised you know that word, Master,” Emiya teased.
“Hey, I’m not stupid!” she protested indignantly.
“Maybe,” I agreed, pulling back to the original point. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about what’s going on here in this Singularity. That’s why we’re going to keep investigating.”
The twins looked faintly surprised for a single moment, and then their faces settled into something like determination.
“Right,” said Rika. “Solly made this personal, so we’ve gotta unravel this place, take his Grail, and go punt him in the balls.”
“Th-that’s not the way I would put it,” Mash muttered.
“We’ve got to save your dad, Senpai,” said Ritsuka, “so what do we have to do next to get there?”
A faint smile tugged at my lips, unbidden. Against the weight of what had to be done, it didn’t stay long. But it was there, if only for a second.
I didn’t imagine he had the heart to abandon anyone who was suffering in front of him, Singularity or not, but it seemed he really had realized somewhere along the way that the best thing he could do for anyone here was to fix it as soon as possible.
“The first thing we need to do is figure out what’s happened to the Undersiders,” I told them. “So once our food has had some time to digest, we’ll be heading out to check on their old hideout, maybe visit a few other places and see if they’re still living where I remember them being. Later tonight, we’ll go out and check some of the places the other gangs hide out at and see what sort of shape they’re all in.”
And maybe visit the Palanquin to touch base with the criminal underground. As long as they weren’t out of town on another job, Faultline and her crew might be able to give us a better view of how things had changed since Coil came into power, at least from the perspective of the other villains. Somewhere in there, it might pay to check on what the PRT and Protectorate were up to, too, because I had a hard time imagining them letting Coil head the bastion of law and order on the east coast when they didn’t even want to let the Undersiders prop up the broken husk of Brockton Bay after Leviathan.
“Sounds like a plan to me!” said Rika.
So that was what we did. While Emiya finished cleaning up after us in the kitchen, the twins and Mash went out into the living room and claimed the couch, pulling off the sheet that covered it so they could sit down and relax for a few minutes. The TV might have turned on, but any cable or internet services had long since been cut off, because those were handled by a private company instead of public utilities, so the three of them just sat in the quiet and let lunch settle in their bellies.
I didn’t let myself have that luxury. Instead, I went back upstairs and started arranging the bedrooms so that we could use them later — Arash and Jackie joined me, helping out where they could. Unfortunately, there weren’t any spare bed sheets in the closets, so we were left with what was already on the beds and had been for months. Fortunately, on the other hand, they’d been covered up for the express purpose of keeping things from getting too dusty, so aside from a bit of a musty smell, they were clean enough to sleep on.
If there was any detergent in the house, I would have thrown all of the sheets in the wash so they would be clean when we went to use them. Since there wasn’t, we would just have to sleep in those beds as they were, and maybe put that on the list of things to get next, if we were going to be staying here for more than a night or two.
Getting my own room ready was easy enough, if feeling a little…awkward, knowing that my younger self had died. Dad’s room, however… It felt different. Like an alien world that I had stepped into, one that wore the trappings of a familiar place without any of the important things to make it real. This was Dad’s bedroom, and I recognized it from the color of the paint on the walls to the way the furniture was arranged, but all of the little touches that made it his instead of some stranger’s room were gone.
I never thought I’d feel so out of place in my own home as I did while we were preparing Dad’s room for Mash and the twins. Even at the worst, when I hadn’t felt like I could stay under the same roof as him, I had never gotten the sense that I would be unwelcome or like I was intruding. Not as I did then.
It was definitely for the better that I wasn’t going to be the one staying in there. I could only imagine the strange dreams I would have.
It was approaching two o’clock by the time I made it back downstairs, and I deemed that we’d had more than enough time to digest our food, so I strode back into the living room with purpose and declared, “Alright, let’s get going.”
Rika, who looked like she’d been about to nod off into a post-meal nap, abruptly snapped awake, and Ritsuka grunted a little as he straightened back up in his seat, then slowly leveraged himself to his feet. Mash was faster and had more of a pep in her step, but it took Rika an extra second or two to muster the energy.
“Whazzat?” she said around a yawn. “We heading out?”
“Yeah,” I said. “No splitting up this time. If we get into trouble, it’ll be better if we’re all there to handle it.”
Rika shook her head as though to clear it of cobwebs. “Trouble? Are we expecting that? Should we make it double?”
Ritsuka grunted. “I’m not doing that.”
Rika took a brief second to stick her tongue out at him. Mash, just as clueless as me, blinked and glanced between them.
“The Docks are ABB territory,” I explained simply. “I imagine Lung will be quite surprised to see the girl he killed walking around.”
“Enough to make a second go of it?” asked Emiya as he walked in from the kitchen.
“Maybe.”
“Then we’ll just have to make sure he fails,” said Arash.
“Oh, goodie,” groused Rika. “I thought we were done with dragons after Orléans. And then again after the wyverns in Okeanos. Now we’ve got another one that pulls a Yammy?”
Pulls a what?
“Sorry to disappoint.”
She grunted and shook her head again. “Just tell me that there aren’t any other dragons here in America, Senpai.”
“Technically…” I trailed off. Rika’s cheeks burned.
“Shut up,” she said sourly, “I know, I realized it the second I said it.”
“At least the other one would be on our side,” Ritsuka said.
Rika groaned. “I didn’t sign up to be center stage for Godzilla versus Mechagodzilla!”
Despite her complaining, she didn’t drag her feet as we left the house, locking the front door with a simple spell in lieu of a proper house key (and hiding the destroyed remnants of the realtor’s lock under the porch, which was something we should have taken care of earlier). I pulled my black jacket back on, filing Rika’s envious look away for later as a reminder to get one each for the twins, and once we were out on the street, we summoned up our bikes as all of the Servants who could slipped into spirit form.
Mash was still going to get us strange looks, unless she went back to her usual getup instead of her Servant form, but hopefully Brockton Bay was still so inured to the sight of capes running around the streets that no one would bat an eye at her or do more than a double-take. Finding something that would let her fit in too might be something we needed to take care of as well, even if it got ripped whenever she had to don her armor and enter combat. Worst case, Emiya could probably conjure something up for her.
For the moment, however, I put that concern to the back of my mind and led the team down memory lane. Most people in Brockton probably considered my neighborhood as part of the Docks, although it was far enough on the fringe that you didn’t see my neighbors running around with guns and furtively glancing about for signs of the ABB or Merchants. The first spot I wanted to look for, however, was much deeper in, and that meant the humble, middle class homes slowly vanished around us, replaced with the rotting refuse that the rest of the city had cast off — peeling paint, broken windows, potholes, and overgrown yards filled with weeds. Single family residences steadily became rarer, giving way to the decrepit remains of abandoned warehouses, storage units, and old factories. Faded gang tags were graffitied on almost every building.
It was almost nostalgic to be coming back here after so long.
The people, too, were much the same: the homeless and the poor, dressed in rags and ratty coats to protect them from the autumn chill, with hair that hung in greasy clumps and a stench so potent that it clung to the streets and pierced through our helmets. Many of them were too occupied with their own misfortunes to give us so much as a glance, something that worked in our favor, at least for the moment.
Our destination was a red brick factory with a massive metal door so coated in rust that it might not have opened, even without the thick, heavy chain wrapped around it that was equally as rusty and liable to snap if too much force was applied to it — the loft, the abandoned factory that had been taken over and renovated as a sort of home base for the Undersiders. The main entrance was actually a smaller side door that was in much better shape, and its decrepit appearance and empty base floor hid the sprawling apartment that had been secretly built on the top floor.
I didn’t actually take us all the way there. Instead — navigating the huge gaps in the road from years of neglect and poor maintenance — we stopped just far enough away to leave the whole building in my range, and I slowly and cautiously explored it as my ravens completed a lazy circuit high in the sky, watching for any sign of a familiar face heading in that direction. Just in case I missed them otherwise.
The more I looked, however, the less I found. Out of an abundance of caution so that I didn’t spook Lisa or any of the others, I was careful, meticulous, and methodical with my exploration, peeking out from unusual angles and unexpected places to avoid notice, but with every passing moment, it seemed less and less necessary. I found what I expected to find, proof that the Undersiders had once called this place their home in the furniture and the various little personal touches, but not who, because not a single one of them was there. Not Brian, not Lisa, not Rachel, and not even Alec.
The cupboards were empty, the lights were all off, and Alec’s game consoles were gone, but the TV remained and so did the spare costumes strewn about in whatever nooks and crannies each member had chosen to hide them. Like they had left in a hurry, taking with them only the things they found most important.
No spare Skitter costume, no scrap of spider silk, no fifth room amongst the others. If I’d needed any more of a confirmation that my younger self had never been an Undersider here, then I had it.
Outside wasn’t any better. No Rachel walking her dogs, no Brian coming back from getting groceries, no Lisa with a bag of clothes dangling from her hands. Inside the loft and out, there was no sign at all of the Undersiders, or at least not that they’d been here any more recently than a month ago.
“There’s no sign of them,” I announced to the group. “This is a dead end.”
“Wait,” said Rika, “how do you… Oh, right, yeah. Nevermind. I had a stupid moment.”
“You didn’t find any clues at all, Miss Taylor?” Mash asked.
“Just confirmation of what I found out this morning.”
Ritsuka shifted uncomfortably. “About how you…”
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t impossible that something else had happened if the divergence went back far enough, but Occam’s Razor. The date of death for my younger self was way too much of a coincidence to actually be a coincidence. The most likely answer really was that my younger self had died fighting Lung when no Undersiders came to rescue her, and it really wasn’t more complicated than that.
I turned my bike around and angled back the other way. “Come on. The next one’s a bit of a drive, so we need to head back downtown.”
“It’s your rodeo, Senpai,” Rika said, sounding a little dubious.
With the low purr of our bikes in our ears, we left the rundown Docks and made our way south, back the way we’d come. We didn’t actually pass through my neighborhood again, instead taking a more direct route, or at least as direct a route as we could, under the circumstances. The poor and downtrodden, the homeless and the decrepit slowly disappeared behind us, and eventually, they made way for the better kept, better maintained parts of the city. The skyline remained to our right, and to our left, residential buildings and apartment complexes, a war between the old fashioned townhouses from over a hundred years ago and the more modern glass and stone highrises.
But with the better off downtown during the mid-afternoon came more traffic and more attention. More people were out and about, so we got more looks from bystanders, and the drive that might have taken fifteen or twenty minutes before took closer to forty-five. Mash, unfortunately, had to deal with the sorts of attention that had made her uncomfortable back in Boston, including idiots with their smartphones snapping pictures and video of her, and I redoubled my resolve to find something less conspicuous for her to wear about when we were trying to avoid notice.
Eventually, however, we reached a familiar apartment building, a tall thing that stretched maybe eight or ten stories up, with balconies and windows that reached from the ceiling to the floor. I led us past it and around the block to park on the edge of the street with the building in view and in range, and in the meantime, I did as I had at the Loft, slowly sneaking bugs inside and out of their hiding places so that I could get a look at Brian’s apartment.
It was empty.
There were clothes in the closets, food in the cabinets and presumably the refrigerator, mail sitting on the table in the dining room, and small signs of life throughout, but nowhere in any of it was Brian himself. He was, it seemed, out for the moment, off doing who only knew what, if the Undersiders weren’t officially a thing anymore.
But it was there. A set of motorcycle leathers and a helmet with a familiar stark, white design painted across the front, hidden away from prying eyes and casual observers. His costume. Grue.
Something inside of me ached. An old pain. I wanted to reach out, I wanted to find him, to talk to him, to reconnect —
No. There was no Skitter here. If the Undersiders still existed as a group at all, then they had kept a low enough profile to almost entirely escape notice. No matter how desperately I wanted to see him again, to allow myself to revel in the fact that he was here and alive, the first person in this hellhole who meant anything to me at all that wasn’t in a grave, he wouldn’t know me. I was a stranger to him.
So if I wanted to talk to him, it had to be as a stranger. A random chance. An encounter on the street, two people crossing each other’s paths as they went about their day to day lives. I couldn’t just leave a note or stalk his apartment until he got back, I needed to be subtle. Natural.
And that meant a little research and a change of clothes that looked a bit less like a uniform or a government agent.
As I was turning away, however, and getting ready to tell the others it was time to leave, I noticed something off, something I hadn’t before. Not a person, not a presence, but clues that I had been too busy looking elsewhere to let myself see.
There was another person living with Brian. A second bedroom in the apartment, adorned with the clothing and paraphernalia that could only belong to a teenage girl. Pads, tampons, bras for a girl significantly better endowed than me, graphic tees sized for women, skinny jeans meant to hug the legs and butt, all strewn messily about the bed and floor. A backpack flung haphazardly in the corner, zipper halfway unzipped and schoolwork hidden inside.
Aisha. And the very fact I could even remember she existed told me just as much as those clothes did. No Imp mask secreted away on the upper shelf of the closet, no costume. She hadn’t Triggered, this time.
They were here. Not just then, but in general. Aisha and Brian were still alive, and maybe they were even doing better than they had been in proper history’s rendition of things. And if they were alive, having apparently abandoned the cape scene and all of the troubles that had gone along with it, maybe the others had, too. Maybe Alec was off in his own apartment, spending his days playing video games. Maybe Rachel had been set up with her own dog shelter and was taking care of whichever ones she could rescue.
Maybe Lisa…
A new urge rose in me, a need to know for sure what had happened. I wanted to go up to that apartment and wait until Brian came home so that I could ask him what had happened to the others, where they went, how it was they had disbanded and why. I wanted to know why none of them had answered me when I called, if they were all okay or if Brian was the only one to make it out, why they hadn’t been there to rescue my younger self on that fateful night in April.
I wanted to know if they were happy. If this version of things — despite all of the problems it had — was treating them better than the one I’d lived through. I wanted…
But I squashed it all the same. It was just selfishness. These Undersiders didn’t know Taylor Hebert or Skitter or Weaver or any version of me. Lisa was the only one who had ever known that their boss was Coil before I came onto the scene and forced the issue, so she was the only one who could answer any questions that would meaningfully help us get a grasp on the sequence of events that led to Coil coming into power so decisively.
Bursting into Brian’s life for that would just be cruel.
Stick to the other plan, I told myself harshly. Casual clothes, research to find out if and where he worked, a “chance encounter” to feel out what had happened with him and my friends. That was the closest I was going to get to closure.
So instead, I reached out to Arash and told him, I need you to slip into apartment 404 and see if you can find anything about where Brian Laborn works, what he does for his day job. A pay stub, a bill, anything that would give us a business name or address.
Guess we’re taking the subtle approach, huh? he mused. Got it. I’ll see what I can find. Need me to bring the evidence back with me?
No, I answered. Just memorize it and let me know. The last thing we need to do is spook him.
Especially if he had Aisha living with him. He would be even more protective and guarded if he thought she was in danger in any way.
Right, said Arash. Understood. Leave it to me.
“Let’s get back home,” I said to the others. “I’ve found all I needed to here.”
The other shifted, surprised.
“Wait, really?” Rika blurted out. “That’s it? We’re just gonna sit here for a minute or two and not go anywhere or ask anyone any questions? No Scooby Doo-ing this do?”
“Really,” I answered. “Whatever’s happened, I don’t think my…old friends will be able to help us. Not the way we were hoping. There’s no point in hanging around here just to harass them.”
The three of them traded dubious looks, hidden behind their helmets.
“Are you sure, Miss Taylor?” Mash asked uncertainly.
“I’m sure. Arash will look around and see if he can find anything we can use, but the rest of us would just get in the way.”
I turned my bike back on with a quiet rumble, pulling slowly out onto the street. The others hesitated a few seconds longer, but followed my lead. As we pulled away and started the trip back to my house, I allowed myself one last indulgence, a single look back at the apartment where Brian had made a life for himself and his younger sister, accomplishing what he had striven so hard for in the entire time I’d known him.
Good for you, I thought, and turned my back on it all.
Have it a little early this week.
There's a lot the team has still to learn. Where did the Singularity truly first diverge? What's happened as a result of that? How did Coil come to be the de facto leader of the entire eastern United States? Who took the Grail and where?
There's so much still up in the air, and I can't wait to show you all the answers. Next chapter, we continue building up to the meeting with Coil, which isn't that far away now. Two more, and then we hit the first interlude of this arc, and arguably the most important one.
For now, though, this one is a little slower, a little more methodical, and there's not quite so much excitement going on. That doesn't mean that there aren't some important things happening, so I wonder which clues you'll all pick up on?
"I mean, he's a supervillain, Boss Lady. That kinda goes without saying."