A week went by. The season only got colder as autumn made its presence known. The raw wind nipped at your face in the morning, forming an ever-present layer on your person, constantly reminding you - it’s cold, it’s cold. Students shivered at bus stops, shivered on their walks to school, shivered inside school while dreading the thought of returning to the cold, and all the while a gray sky ruled over them.

A gray feeling ruled their minds as well, not simply due to the cold. Once Ruta’s lies became known, the ripples were instantaneous. BubbleBoy27 immediately went offline. AppletonCorp stock became worthless, creating an immediate chain reaction that plunged the global economy into a historically-unprecedented depression. Those with peanut allergies were shunned; hate and distrust rose to an all-time high; El Marcos underwent three revolutions a day.

But worst of all - people grew apathetic. If nobody could be trusted, then what was the point? People retreated into themselves, only to realize that they didn’t like what they had to see there, either. The entire human race grew into a rut, blaming others, blaming themselves, blaming Ruta the Liar. They placed all her hopes on her - and she betrayed them. What kind of world was that? People shambled along in the aftermath, not exactly sure what they were doing or why they were here in the world in the first place.

Everybody - except one person, at least, who currently sat in Holloway's office.

“I see, I see,” Holloway said to her. He held a golf club in his hand; he eyed the virtual tee thrown up onto a wall by a projector, then swung a graceful swing; the virtual golf ball flew over green hills until landing into a prime position to go two under par. “You’re concerned about young Ruta’s disappearance.”

“Well…” Edith tugged at her collar, because it’s not like she was particularly concerned or anything. “I just think it would be nice to hear from her. I mean, she’s been absent from school for a whole week.”

Holloway wiped his brow and drank some (real) water. “Don’t worry, Edith. Due to her betraying the very bond that enables human society to function, Ruta has returned home to reflect on her misdoings.”

“See, I feel like we’re really blaming Ruta too much,” Edith said. “It’s like we’re taking everything out on her.”

“She’s become a whipping boy,” Holloway surmised. He leaned his golf club across his shoulder and faced Edith. “Don’t tug at your collar like that, it gives away the act entirely. You’re concerned for Ruta’s well-being. But why, I wonder? Ruta was very much your whipping boy, was she not?”

Edith eyed him uncomfortably. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Holloway stuck the golf club under Edith’s jaw. The club felt cold to the touch, the man behind it menacing. “Only you can answer that. But I do have some theories. I seem to recall your taunting of Ruta during physical education. I also seem to recall your disdain for Ruta’s heart-rending rendition of a hit classic. You’ve treated the girl with nothing but disgust, but now you’re concerned about her absence. How curious.”

“It’s not just Ruta,” Edith said in a huff, crossing her arms. “Sarika’s been gone this whole week, too.”

Holloway gave her an amused look. For some reason, Edith could feel the approach of hundreds of snipping scissors at her, making hypnotic snip-snip noises. Yet when she looked down, none were there.

“Hmm. Yet you asked about Ruta first,” Holloway reminded her.

“It’s not about her-”

Holloway slid the club uncomfortably up her face, resting it on a cheek. “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,” he whispered. “Don’t yell. But don’t lie. Lying is what got our dear Ruta in trouble in the first place. Don’t lie to yourself. Soon enough, you’ll realize how out-of-tune with yourself you’ve really become. And by then, you’ll no longer have the chance to overcome your personal failings. Personal failings are what makes the person, after all. Do you wish for that? Do you wish to understand yourself before it's become too late? Or will you continue your current path and ignore them, and look down upon others because of your own feelings of worthlessness?”

Edith stood up, knocking over her chair. Holloway returned the golf club to his side and amusement twinkled in his eyes. “Sorry, couldn’t help myself,” he said. “I get lost in my teaching moments.”

Edith stormed out of the principal’s office, slamming the door shut behind her.

“You see, if your hand’s bigger than your face, then you need to see a doctor,” Rankin explained to Bass, guiding Bass’s hand over her face. Bass sat on a bench in the hallway, not suspecting a thing, while Rankin loomed over her, waiting for Bass to fall for the trap.

“Am I okay?” Bass asked.

Rankin grinned. “Not particularly.”

Before she could go in for the kill and slap Bass’s hand into the poor girl’s own face, Edith caught her arm.

“Well, well, well,” Rankin offered in her raspy voice. “The chief got any news on your missing Ruta?”

For the first time ever, Edith felt a little peeved about the way Rankin spoke to others. She tossed her arm away. “He says she went home.”

Rankin shrugged. “Well, problem solved.” She placed her hands behind her head and sauntered off down the hall, but Edith remained in place.

“Doesn’t it seem odd to you?” Edith said. “The way she confessed to her lie…didn’t it seem like it was forced? She even looked like she was behind bars.

Rankin stopped and sighed. Hunched over, she tilted her face back toward Edith. “You’re thinking too hard. I've read that those 'bars' are just tricks of the light. Don’t worry about it.”

Edith scratched her arm. “I don’t know. What do you think, Bass?”

“Bass doesn’t think anything,” Rankin interjected. She closed the distance between her and Edith in a flash. “And you shouldn’t be thinking anything, either. The real Edith doesn’t think.”

“I don’t…think?”

“You just do,” Rankin corrected. “You do what you want with no care for those below you. That’s the real Edith. The real Edith knows she’s the best and acts like the best because she is the best. It’s all about her. That’s the kind of ambition that will get you to the top. You could become the most powerful woman on earth if you stay true to yourself and become CEO of your father’s company. And I’ll be there as well, your trusted number two, to make sure you always act like who you really are.”

Edith looked down at her shoes, feeling uncomfortably small in Rankin’s presence. She caught her own reflection in the shiny floor tiles; the sight of herself made her angry. “That’s really who I am?”

“Yes,” Rankin encouraged. “Don’t let some little guilt trip distract you from your destiny. You’re the best, you’re the best.”

Edith’s hands balled into fists. “I see.”

She went to punch Rankin away, disgusted with her (and maybe herself), but much to her surprise, Rankin easily deflected her attack. Rankin stuck her leg behind Edith’s then hooked her throat with an arm; Edith’s eyes widened as she suddenly ended up on the floor, Rankin’s knee pinning her chest to the ground. Rankin kept a strong grip on Edith’s collar.

Bass rose to help Edith, but Rankin lifted her other arm and activated her Talent, a one-handed clap known as the Thunderclap. An unseen force immediately flung Bass into the wall; the sonic boom followed a moment later.

Rankin turned back to Edith. “Don’t go soft on me, Edith. We’re going to be so successful together. But, as long as boundaries remain between humans, you need to remain ruthless. How can you trust any of them? They’re all backstabbers and liars, everyone except you and me. I’m on your side, Edith. Always have, always will. I’m on your brother’s side, too. I want him to get better. So, if you oppose me, then you must oppose your brother, too.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Rankin tightened her grip on Edith, who could only choke on her own words, her feeble arguments. “I’m true to myself,” Rankin continued. “I enjoyed every minute stepping over people beneath us. And don’t lie to yourself - you have too. You try to be nice, care for this Ruta girl, but it’s an act. It’s just because she’s gone now. People can’t change. You can’t change. And that’s good. I’ll make sure you stay just the way you are, and we’ll ascend right to the top. So, drop all this nonsense about Ruta right now. I’m the only person you need.”

Rankin grinned, then pushed down on Edith to lift herself off the ground. She passed by Bass, who was still seeing stars from the attack.

Still on the ground, Edith watched Rankin walk off, her form disappearing down the hallway. It took a long, long while, but Edith finally got back to her feet.

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

Trying their best to avoid the cold - and because they felt pretty down - Edith and Bass burrowed their faces into the collars of their jackets as they trudged up the steps to Edith’s mansion, located on the other side of the county.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Edith complained, her voice muffled. “The day after Ruta and Sarika go missing, Quaid shows up with bandages all over his face. You think there was a fight?”

Bass shrugged. “It seems awfully fishy to me. But maybe Rankin was right. What can we really do?”

Edith kept quiet, not sure how to answer that. She leaned a shoulder into the mahogany door of her mansion and stepped inside into her hardwood-floor foyer, ready to sit in front on the fireplace-

The barrels of several guns immediately met her. Men dressed in black suits and black shades all started screaming in a different language. Edith felt too overwhelmed to do anything, Bass started crying, but a new voice from the top of a majestic staircase cut through all of it.

“She lives here!” a stout man in a military uniform called out, his arms crossed, in disbelief of the actions of the men who presumably worked for him.

At the words of their boss, the gunmen immediately backed off.

For a brief moment, Edith felt relieved about not being shot to death, but then she realized-

“Who the hell are you people?!” she cried out. She jabbed a finger at the staircase man. “And who the hell are you?!”

“My name is President Garcia of El Marcos,” he explained. When Edith went to protest, he quickly cut her off. “Please, we don’t have much time. Come upstairs. We must plan our course of action.”

Edith glared at the gunmen, then headed up the stairs, Bass in tow. Her footsteps thundered on the red carpeted stairs, painting and photos of past aristocracy and current millionaires looking down upon her with old eyes.

When they arrived on the second floor, Garcia led them down a hallway to somewhere he shouldn’t have gone.

Edith stepped in front of him, blocking his way. “Hey, this is my brother’s side of the floor! If you’re not careful, you could end up hurting him.”

“It’s alright, Edith,” a voice crinkled through a loudspeaker hoisted in a corner of the hallway. “He’s with me.”

“The President of El Marcos is with you?” Edith repeated in disbelief.

“I’m in the same groupchat with his son for our video game. I coordinated getting the president here. We had much to discuss. Please, step into the airlock so we can talk.”

Edith glared at Garcia, then crossed her arms in a huff. She led the party through a door, into the mudroom. An entire wing of their mansion had been converted in a gigantic bubble for her brother to move around in. Very much like a caged bird, Edith often thought, even now as she grabbed the door-handle to the airlock and spun it around until it unlocked.

Air hissed as Edith pulled it open. She nodded at her companions and they all stepped into a white, small room, formerly a walk-in closet now converted into an area that people could gaze into her brother’s living room.

Wharton - the bubble boy, they called him, but he was just her brother, nothing more - paced around on the other side. He had Edith’s blonde hair, but not her sharp eyes. Though he had an entire mansion wing to safely move around him, he was always antsy - why wouldn’t he be?

The sight of him trapped in there and the knowledge that she couldn’t do anything about it made Edith want to lash out at something.

“The President and I agree that the confession was made under duress,” Wharton began, rubbing his chin in thought as he paced.

That brought Edith back to the situation at hand. “I agree as well. But she still lied. Why should it matter to us?”

Garcia unpinned an old medal from his uniform and held it daintily in his hand. “I once thought the same way. But then my son reminded me of a story. In my country, we have a television show about a young explorer girl. Every episode, she encounters a shifty fox who mercilessly tries to steal her item of the day. The fox should lose a hand for such treachery, yet the girl forgives him every time. If she can forgive the swiper, then why should we not forgive Ruta?”

“He’s right,” Wharton continued. “Peanut allergy or not, she did make that speech, she did bring those people together, she did give this world hope. If the whole world goes crazy because of one girl’s lie, then perhaps we should look at ourselves instead of her.”

He then gave Edith a certain look. Edith frowned, because that look meant her brother figured out something before she herself did. “And nobody’s asked why she lied in the first place.”

“Because she sucks,” Edith surmised.

Wharton shook his head. “Perhaps she was just trying to get away from someone who sucks.” When Edith looked confused, he summed it up for. “Ruta Applesmith. Edith Appleton.”

Edith shrugged. “Yeah, we come next to each other in the alphabet, what’s so important about that-”

It meant that they would sit next to each other at lunch. The best way to avoid sitting next to Edith would be to sit somewhere else. The best way to sit somewhere else would be to sit at the peanut table.

Edith stumbled a bit, then collapsed into a chair. “Is it really all my fault?”

“You take your own feelings of frustration out on others,” he reminded her. “You’ve used our family’s wealth and power as an excuse to separate yourself from those considered beneath us. And since they’re beneath us, there’s no reason to feel guilty about stepping on them, using them as a means of finding catharsis.”

Edith looked at Bass for support, but Bass nodded at her brother’s words. Even the President seemed in agreement.

“I see,” he said. “So, rather than taking out my feelings of frustration over my father’s death onto my people, I instead should find catharsis with my people?”

“What is this, a very special episode of a cartoon?” Edith interrupted, standing back up. “Enough of this. No more armchair psychology. I’m just me, and there’s nothing more than that.”

“Yes, you are you,” Wharton said. “But because it is you, that gives you the power to change. You want nothing more than for me to leave my bubble, yet your actions against Ruta might as well have placed her in a mental and physical bubble of her own.”

Edith slammed a fist into the wall. Because Ruta deserved it all, right? Ruta deserved to be the means of Edith’s catharsis because of everything she did to her, such as…being close to her, being an easy target, being convenient. Because they sat next to each other in alphabetical order, they were always near one another.

But Ruta surely betrayed her or something at the start, right? Edith’s mind came up empty. Ruta had done nothing against her. In fact, Ruta had tried to avoid Edith the whole time. And if she tried to avoid Edith, that meant Edith had limited the space she could move into, the safe spaces Ruta could feel at school or on campus or in class or even within her own mental landscape. And if that was the case…

“Then I really did put her in a bubble,” Edith realized. She collapsed back into the chair. “My God, what have I done?”

“There’s still time,” her brother said. “There’s still a lot you can do. I suspect Ruta’s disappearance is crucial to an evil plot.”

Her brother turned around in order to face the giant mainframe of his computer battlestation. His hands bounded across three keyboards (all of them light-up), pulling up webpages of research across his nineteen monitors. “I’ve tracked down where all those gorillas Holloway used in clinical testing ended up. Take a look.”

He pulled up a map, and those in the airlock all gasped at the shape the red virtual pushpins created.

“That’s right,” he confirmed. “All the cities and zoos and private owners they’ve been donated to - one group forms a giant zero, the other forms a giant one. And right in the center of those two numbers is Vyse Academy.”

“But what does that mean?” Bass asked.

“I’m not sure,” Edith’s brother admitted. “But a lunar eclipse will be occurring at exactly midnight tonight. I suspect that’s when the plot will begin. I have to presume Holloway is the one behind this.”

“What’s this have to do with Ruta?” Edith questioned.

Her brother zoomed in on the map, which now featured Vyse Academy and the surrounding county. “Vyse works closely with our family’s company. I’ve tracked down two concentrations of regular shipments to Vyse. One of them has been going to student apartments located in the south.”

Edith gasped. “That’s where Quaid lives.”

Her brother nodded at that. “And the other has been going right to the Academy itself. I suspect that Ruta is held at one of these locations. I’m not sure what they need her for, but…her Talent is called Nightmare, right?”

Bass glumly nodded at the memory.

“If she has the ability to throw people into dreamscapes…perhaps that’ll be useful to whatever Vyse is planning.”

Her brother looked over his motley crew. “I’ve already sent some allies of Garcia’s men to storm the student apartments. Edith and Garcia, I’d like you to probe Vyse's defenses until reinforcements arrive. Bass, I’d like you to stay here with the rest of Garcia's men and guard me. I have a very important video to release to ensure we get those reinforcements.”

“Me?” Bass repeated. “But I’m no good with guarding.”

“That’s alright, you just need to be competent. And I’m sure you can be competent.”

Bass didn’t look to sure about it, but reluctantly agreed to the task at hand.

“I must retrieve Ruta,” Garcia declared. “I can’t believe I threw the fate of a country upon the shoulders of a young girl.”

That just left Edith. She crossed her arms and looked away.

“Fine. It’s not like I care about her. But I guess I should go save her, too.”