“Do you not respect my intelligence at all?”

“I totally do. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be invested in your little theories about the world I can’t remember, and I wouldn’t be talking it to Babylon.”

“If you really can’t remember the world your Tower is from—”

“New secrets.”

“Sure.”

“Ehehe.”

“See, you don’t. You laugh at me like I’m an idiot, and you come up with dumb rules to obey while in faelands.”

“Don’t want the fairies to get you!”

“I don’t want to hold your hand.”

“And yet you are.”

And there she was, Tamara trailing behind Giovanna as she led them off into the distance towards some broken and buried apartment building left forlorn so many years ago. How many? Who knows. It doesn’t make sense for that building to be here, after all, or even the I-80. Everything’s anachronism here.

“Wait, Babylon? How did we get to Babylon? Which Babylon?”

“I dunno. You’re the Babylon expert.”

“You were the one driving?”

“And you were the one navigating?”

“Was I? I was too busy arguing with you to navigate?”

“But we were going to your house, so clearly you were the one navigating, given that you took the route forward—”

“I took the train here, we established that like ten hours ago!”

“Five hours. You’re sleepy but you rest quickly, you know.”

“Yeah, gotta stay up for Hannah.”

“You stay up researching arcane shit and writing inane scrawls. Like these,” Gio says, flipping through Tamara’s annotated copy of the Garden of Forking Paths, the one where her notes get so small they slip past the point of legibility, all microscopic, and Tamara remembers them all off by heart and says she can read them, or maybe she can read them, but… then, isn’t that a psychic type ability?

Ehehe, and Tamara is supposed to have confessed that she used to try to hammer her brains in with anomalous material so half-heartedly, until Hannah awakened her to that world and closed off the other routes.

“When did you get that,” Tamara ripostes, her grip on Giovanna loosening, Giovanna’s grip on her tightening.

“You gave it to me when you got inside the car.”

“I don’t remember getting inside the car.”

“That’s life.”

She’s so impervious to logic, Tamara wants to scream! Yet, she lets the princess of lies, the blonde beast, the clueless ditzy rich girl, march her or walk her half-focused across the American or non-American desert, either-ayther, either-or, Tamara coming up with guesses and half-baked possibilities with her knowledge, her understanding of the other members of the clique, of the world that she’ll so tirelessly study, like it or not (like it or like it) until she can protect Hannah and everyone else forever.

They come to the apartment building, an edifice of off-white decay, cracks and soots spreading through the whole thing like all-too-lively ivy, smothering the concrete until it gasps for air—

“What kind of Babylonian architecture do you think this is, Tammy?”

“It looks like an apartment building.”

“Or as they’d say in Britain, a block of flats.”

Wind frisks through the sand.

“I was trying to be helpful,” says Giovanna.

“I disagree. Why do you think this is Babylon, anyway.”

“Well, your notes were the map.”

Oh. That’s actually a relatively reasonable explanation for how Tamara could be navigator here.

...Relatively. That doesn’t make any sense.

“Wasn’t this supposed to be a cute scenic drive home?”

“It is. You said Babylon was my home, right?”

“No?”

“Eh?”

“Did you pay attention to anything I said.”

“You said a lot of complicated concepts. It went over my head. I’m illiterate and kinda silly, ehehe.”

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“Of course it did.”

“Lots of things are going over your head, too. We’re in a world dominated by anomalies, outside of human society. Yet, neither of us can see them.”

“That’s a surprisingly lucid statement from you.”

“Hmph. If you really knew me, it wouldn’t be.”

“Surprising or lucid?”

“Uh.”

They stare at the building for a minute. At some point, they forget that they’re holding hands.

“I’m kinda lost,” Giovanna says. “Maybe we should go back and watch TV.”

“It would be entirely like you to take me five hours into the middle of nowhere—”

“We’ve only been on the road for an hour!”

“—into some nonsense realm with secrets convoluted and intricate in their workings, as beautiful as they are dangerous to any semblance of a quiet life, and then tell me to forget about it and to go back, empty-handed, listless, to make the rest of us forget about it as we watch our friends with more skill than us play badminton or Idollaster or whatever.”

“Are we missing Camilla’s stream?” Giovanna pipes in.

“But I actually want to know things, I can’t carry on quietly. I’ll take the burden of knowledge so Hannah doesn’t have to suffer it or ignorance,” or because Tamara wants this, because it is her will.

“Okay?”

“Shut up.”

Giovanna does.

“Draw your sword,” Tamara orders without a clue of where or from whence this order came, and Giovanna follows it, and the illusory sun, one of many fake stars that were painted upon the sky by the third mass anomaly incident which humanity and the Second City prays desperately is the final every night and has since 2046, falls from the sky, and the real sun, the all too real sun, realer than the petty ball of gas responsible for all light and the many like it scattered in the firmament blazes in Giovanna’s hand.

The desert is covered in darkness. Giovanna beckons the light over to her chest and becomes its vessel. Tamara leaves her hand, takes the beige hairclip out of Giovanna’s hair and stabs her with it.

The vessel falls to the floor. No blood and no light pools around it.

Tamara draws the clip out. She raises the Sword of Harut to the sky, an obsidian blade from out of history. Obsidian is brittle, after all. Her blades are short and fickle. This is a polished and unsheathed sword, about the length of her arm, with weight and hilt.

And Giovanna—

is in the driver’s seat, stopped at a gas station somewhere in rural Pennsylvania.

“You just don’t die, do you.”

“Huh? Why would I be dead? Don’t say weird things all of a sudden. Maybe you’ll have been possessed by a fairy. Oh, I’m sorry, there’s no fairies in the faelands, just anomalies!”

“You know exactly what I did.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah, otherwise you would have asked where I got the fucking sword from.”

“It’s a family heirloom! I gave it to you as you got into the car.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yeah, I just lied.”

The discordant chirping of nightbirds all around them.

“You were so willful.”

“You, are so demonic.”

“I could have lured you deeper.”

“Really?”

“No. I don’t like remembering.”

“What did you remember?”

“Why I don’t attend classes. I understood a little bit of why you don’t, either.”

“That’s…”

“Illegal driving is such fun, Tammy! Should we take a selfie together?”

“I’d rather not. I always look like shit.”

“Don’t I?”

“You look like an untameable princess.”

“Ehe. Thank you.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Be my knight.”

It stops, the chirping.

“Is this a coup?”

“What? Don’t be daft. It’s just, you can’t handle inertia, can you? It’s so blatant, nearly as blatant as me. And I’m obvious, so—”

Tamara undoes her seatbelt, moves across the cupholder closer to the driver’s seat, as if sitting on it, not sitting on it.

“You’re obscure.”

“Ehehe.”

“Ehehe.”

“You want things to happen, even if you want Hannah to be okay. You want someone to carry out all of the wishes of, but you don’t want those wishes to be looking out the window as others to do something, waiting until someone does something to you, overpowers you and calls you irresponsible, says you have to act or they will, and they’ll break you. You little traitor, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” Tamara accedes, and she lets the little devil’s voice poke her stab her pierce her.

“You’re tired of loving a girl who so ardently pretends to be straight, even if we know, and we know so well, it is the most right feeling in the universe which orbits around her.”

“Yeah,” and Tamara drifts forward and Giovanna catches her.

“You’ve come to my tower. You enjoy dealing with my pettiness, my mysteries, my obtuseness entirely too much for your own good, or really anyone’s good.”

Tamara kisses Giovanna’s hand.

----------------------------------------

The next day, two girls go to a study room. Let’s presume that they’re there to study.

“—I wish that she’d feel jealousy like the rest of us, you know? I’m so normal, and pathetic, and subhuman, and it’s sickening and I, if I am even one, if I am even real, sicken and tire and harangue myself and I just wish she’d suffer a little, even a little like the rest of us do. Have the girls trapped in her spell give her ninety nine and nine hundred points of attention instead of a thousand one day—”

Perhaps this was the wrong presumption.

“Carmen, look!” says Lily, the shorter of the pair by quite a bit.

“What.”

“Someone broke a chair.”

“Who cares.”

“I do! Look at the chair. He looks so… broken like that! He must be in agony.”

“Okay?”

Indeed, it is. The chair, now just a frame of metal and madness, screams into the morning light as Lily opens up the curtains and the Second City sun blinds Carmen.

Blind is apt, really. She has red eyes, maybe albinism with how pallid the rest of her skin is, but probably not considering the deep black curls which pool around her to about her waste, so bright light ruins her vision.

Luckily, as a proficient esper, she has other ways of seeing. She mocks a gun against her head, regains a sense of vision, and stumbles over to a chair next to the dead chair.

“It’s an eyesore. Can’t you get rid of it?” Lily asks her.

“Probably.”

“Will you get rid of it?”

Carmen stares into nothing for fifteen seconds exactly. Lily counts them all. Then, time reverts. The chair stands intact. Carmen stares into nothing for fifteen seconds more. Lily doesn’t count this time. Sometimes Carmen is just quiet, but you need to keep up a good partner relationship if you want to pass the bac! Even if you’re absolutely sure that they’re going to dig themselves into a hole without intervention, Lily thinks that you should treat them like an equal: don’t shepherd them, don’t condescend to them, be stern if you have to but cheery the rest of the time. As the forgotten middle sister, she’s super good at keeping a good balance!

Carmen finally speaks. “I understand your fascination with inanimate objects.”

“Thank you! It’s a great fascination.”

“I suppose this room only attracts failures.”

Lily doesn’t say anything. Even with her useless rank zero psychic power, she knows that Carmen is just going to say whatever she wants to next.

“She’s so pathetic. Such an idiot. It’s almost cute. Almost.”

“She?”

“The girl who broke this chair. How easy do you think it would be to manipulate her.”

“I don’t think very much about manipulating other people.”

“Liar.”

“Okay?”

“Ah. I think I’ve found a second worst.”

“That’s great, Carmen, but we have ten hours of Doctor Chen homework to get through. I know you’re Lydia Wark’s rank seven K-barrier breaking genius but—”

“It’ll be fine. We’ll start in ten minutes.”

“In ten hours you’ll be up crying and calling yourself a worthless idiot!”