On the third day, Iz met up with the pair, with Myra again selecting the unpopular cafe as the meeting spot. Iz had come to similar conclusions as the last loop, though she seemed slightly less sure about them, but maybe that was just Myra’s imagination. The previous loop’s sleepover setting had made everything feel inherently warmer.
Still, Myra was washed with relief, and she didn’t hesitate to dump all the accumulated information onto her friend, and she let her theorize for a bit (though, again, she mostly came up with the same stuff she had in the last loop). This all took about several hours. Finally, Myra set about laying out the plan for the present loop.
“So, I’m going to go join the murk bogs,” Myra said. “I already discussed this with Shera, and she said she’s in.” Shera nodded her confirmation. “I think I’ll be able to learn a lot now that I know halfway what to expect. Also, I need to get more instruction on teleportation and infiltration.”
Iz nodded, though she looked a little uncomfortable. “That makes sense…”
“Now, I know you’re not gonna go, but I was thinking you could help by checking out Carmac Sermanol’s house in Ealichburgh—”
“Hang on,” Iz cut her off. “Why is that girl going with you, but not me?” She looked back and forth between Myra and Shera.
“Well… you said you didn’t want to go with me.”
“What are you talking about?” She looked vaguely offended. “Of course I’m going to back you up.”
“But you said—Well, I mean, of course you can come!” she said quickly before Iz could change her mind. “The more the merrier, right?”
“Naturally,” Iz said.
“Ah, thank you thank you thank you thank you!” Myra squealed, moving to sit next to Iz and wrap her in the tightest hug she could muster. “Ahh, did you hear that, Shera?”
“I h-heard it.”
“We won’t have to worry about anything ’cause Iz is gonna be heeere.”
“O-okay.”
“I do have a condition, though,” Iz said. “I want a bit more proof of all this before I… y’know.”
Oh. Myra’s heart plummeted. She remembered just what Iz had considered to be ironclad proof two loops ago.
“Is-isn’t it enough to trust your friend?” Shera asked.
Iz frowned. “She’s asking a lot. I just want more assurances that the consequences of this won’t matter.”
Her heart plummeted again.
Yeah, she was definitely talking about that.
It was so frustrating. Myra ached for a Helpful Iz Loop. A loop where the three of them teamed up and took on the obstacles in front of them. They would be unstoppable…
Maybe she should just do it, and prove the time loop, the way Iz was asking. Just suck it up. Iz was right. It was logical…
But then it all turned around. Iz went on:
“Just predict some things in the newspaper or something. That can’t be too hard, right?”
“That—that would convince you?”
She shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
Myra resisted with every muscle in her neck the invisible force that was trying to slam her face down into her plate. “Great!” Great! Yes! Helpful Iz Loop!
◆
“Is he expecting th-three of us?” Shera asked. She’d been silent for most of the train trip since most of it was devoted to catching Iz up.
“I told him three when he called me back,” Myra assured her. “But I did say two when I originally called, so he kind of gave me a hard time when I upped the number. He was like, ‘wow, the philosophers sure have been hard at work excavating the hidden depths of the integer 2’ or something.’ Uh, that’s like a typical Geel thing to say.”
“Do you know anything about this guy?” Iz asked. She was jittery—she had been jittery the whole train ride. It reminded her of when they had met in their first year, when Iz had seemingly been overwhelmed by her transition to university and was facing regular harassment from insecure students. It was quite a throwback, thinking of an Iz that didn’t approach every problem with a determined stoicism.
“Well, his full name is apparently Dr. Geel Hattuck.”
Iz squinted. “That sounds familiar.”
“I looked him up. He was an academic psychologist in Halnya—an Unkmirean-born immigrant. Sounded like he was somewhat influential. He went missing 13 years ago.”
Iz pursed her lips. “Yeah… I think I remember that. He came up in the psych elective I took last year. The murk bogs are older than 13 years, right?”
“Yeah, they were founded like… 30 years ago? They’ve been around a while.”
◆
There was a faint smell in the air when they arrived at the platform. It was the same gross smell that had been present the first time Myra had arrived for her interview. It had dissipated over the course of the day…
But more importantly, as Myra belatedly realized, it smelled the same as that awful substance the group had been smoking in the forest of Ralkenon. Which meant…
Something.
Maybe Geel would tell them? It probably wasn’t a weird secret or anything.
Geel’s ‘interview’ was the same as last time—to fix the bridge. Myra was able to slip the question in before he left.
“Hey, what’s that smell, exactly? It’s not anything we have to worry about, is it?”
“Ehh…” Geel said. He seemed to at least consider answering the question. “You’ll need to spend some more time around here.”
“Oh, really? How long?”
“Maybe like…” He stroked his goatee, and with every fiber in his being working in unison towards the singular objective of being annoying, he transcended the boundaries of life and knowledge itself to pluck the answer out of the aether, the exact length of time that would maximally piss her off. “Let’s say four weeks. By the way, there’s an awful lot of you, aren’t there?”
“I informed you of that the last time we talked. It’s not a problem, is it?”
“No, no, I suppose it isn’t. One thing I’ve realized over the years is that runecrafting sure ain’t a zero-person job. We need all the hands we can get. I just didn’t expect our little organization to be such a popular career path for young academics.”
“We’re very open-minded.”
“Ah, youth. Maybe there’s hope for the younger generation after all.”
He clasped Myra on the shoulder and then left them to their own devices, whistling as he wandered off.
◆
Despite Geel’s usual obstinance, Myra’s renewed enthusiasm remained undampened, and she eagerly explained the bridge task to the other two girls.
“So you can see, it seems like it should be impossible because runes carved in wood will decay too quickly—”
“What do you mean, impossible?” Iz frowned, squinting off into the distance. “Isn’t that what runic error correction is for?”
“Hehe.” Myra held out a finger and spoke in her best instructor voice. “Well, I actually do use some error correction in my solution—”
“Then why’d you say it seems impossible?”
“Uh.” Myra tried to take the interruption in stride. “Well, it’s not exactly easy to apply error correction at this scale while preserving the geometric properties of the runescript.”
“What about Likzen’s Projection Method?”
“Oh. Uh, I mean, I don’t really know Likzen’s Projection Method.”
“I thought you would.” She put her hand to her chin. Myra noticed she had stopped jittering. “It’s all anyone was talking about last year, remember, when Alzergodin’s apprentice showed how to improve the expansion constant by like 1.5 or something.”
“Okay, I kinda remember that…” Though Myra thought it being ‘all anyone was talking about’ was somewhat of a stretch. Iz was showing her bias as someone who hung out in the study lounge on the second floor of the math building, down the hall from the algebraic geometers. “But I still don’t even understand the original Likzen method.”
“Oh,” Iz said. “Still, you personally not knowing something isn’t a reason to say the whole thing is impossible.”
“I mean, whoever made this thing clearly wasn’t using the Likzen method.”
Iz scratched the back of her neck. “Why the hell is someone out here carving runes in wood without using the Likzen method?”
“That’s what I was wondering!”
“Really? ’Cause it sounds like you’d just forgotten about the Likzen method,” she teased.
“I didn’t forget about the Likzen method.”
“Hey! Uh…” Shera had been watching this exchange silently for some time, but she finally spoke up, albeit looking somewhat hesitant. “I th-think Myra told me her approach is nice because it has a really easy bootstrap process? Something we can complete in a d-day.”
“Oh.” Myra puffed out her chest. “Yeah! Thanks for reminding me, Shera. The method I came up with has a really easy bootstrap process we can complete in a day.”
“Okay,” Iz said. “I don’t have a problem with her method. I was just confused because she said it ‘seemed impossible.’”
“You weren’t c-confused,” Shera said. “You were just p-pestering her about not kn-knowing the Likzen method.”
“What are you talking about? I wasn’t pestering anyone.”
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“Okay, okay, everyone!” Myra waved her hands frantically. “Nobody needs to pester anyone, or insinuate about pestering anyone or—My point is, this doesn’t really matter because I already have a solution that I know will let us pass the interview, which is what matters.”
No one had any objection to that plan, so they executed it. In fact, she managed it much faster than last time, both with the benefit of experience and with Iz’s additional suggestions.
◆
They finished late in the afternoon. Geel formally gave them a passing score on the interview, and then Myra (still the only one of them who could speak Unkmirean) negotiated their salary, somehow managing to fuck up even worse than the last time.
This put them out in time for dinner. The girls were brought in front of the group and introduced in much the same way as the last time.
“For too long,” Geel announced, “we have had a tremendous dearth of those practitioners of the most esteemed pseudo-linguistic art of precise [unknown word] geometric metallurgic craftswomanship. Today, that changes. Ladies, would you introduce yourselves?”
They introduced themselves, and then the murk bogs introduced themselves by—as before—having every single member speak their own name in unison. This sort of thing was now normal for her, but it naturally creeped out both of her friends. Then they were free to go.
Myra piled her plate with the classic murk bogs meal of potatoes and canned something-or-other, she decided to go straight for the individual she’d most looked forward to questioning.
“Roc, my man!” She sat down opposite the older man, seated at a table near the corner, not too far to be isolated, per se, but still deliberately alone. He looked worse off than Myra remembered him, with bags under his eyes and his hair a tangled mess. “Sorry, your name’s Roc, right? It was kinda hard to hear everyone earlier.”
She took the seat opposite Roc, and Shera sat next to her.
“I am Roc,” he confirmed, looking not remotely confused at Myra’s supernatural hearing, or even responding with any emotion whatsoever.
“Neato. I heard if we got any mechanical problems, you’re the one to talk to.”
“That’s correct.”
He remained not the most talkative of men.
“So, Roc. You know much about stars?”
“About what?”
“Stars.”
He scrunched his brow. “Stars?”
“Yeah. Do you know anything about ’em?”
“What are stars?”
“Oh, uh—kyarsel,” she clarified in Roc’s native language.
Rather than elucidating anything, he only continued to look blankly.
Am I pronouncing it wrong? “… Y’know. In the sky? That sparkle? Source of the astral aura channel?”
Roc stared at her as if she had asked him about fairies living in his sinuses, then shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Um…” She looked to her friend by her side. “Shera, you like stars, right?”
“Y-yeah.”
“That’s good. For a second I was worried I slipped into an alternate universe… umm…” She looked around. “Where’d Iz go? Wasn’t she behind us?”
“Sh-she left with her food.”
Huh? What for?
“Weird—I’m gonna go find her. You can stay here if you want, or—whatever.”
◆
Shera did stay, though since the girl didn’t speak any Unkmirean whatsoever, she wasn’t optimistic about her chances of overcoming any language barriers.
Myra found Iz sitting on her bed, looking a little pale again. She’d brought a plate of food with her, but it went mostly uneaten, in favor of sitting with her hands around her knees, looking apprehensive.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I just didn’t want to eat in there.”
“Sorry. I, uh, know they’re kinda off-putting.”
“It’s fine. I signed up for this.” She sat her plate down, barely eaten. “I just wanna get to the investigating.”
Myra clicked her tongue. She was glad—really glad—that Iz was eager to dig into things, but there wasn’t very much they could do immediately. “Hmm… I wonder where we should start. It’s kinda hard to investigate before they all evacuate the damn place. We have free rein of the underground, but I think most of the junk there belonged to the village that was before here, not the murk bogs.” It would be virtually impossible to find a time when the barracks were empty, for example. Even now, there were a handful of members idling down towards the end, though far out of ear range.
A neuron fired in the back of her mind. Wait…
“We should investigate that village, though,” Iz said. “From what you describe, it sounds like there’s something about it they’re not telling you.”
Myra shrugged. “Fair enough. Hold on, though—” She grasped the thought before it could slip away. She had been thinking about the very end of Loop 11, when she and Shera had swept the entire barracks, digging into anyone’s stuff. They had found something, something they’d dismissed quickly. Now, though, the connection slammed into her like a train.
“Myra?”
“Fuck, hold on.”
She got down to the floor and looked down the long row of beds. The scrape marks were all there… And a very long ways down, there was a small object that was only but a speck from here.
She pulled it to herself with telekinesis. This was the pair of glasses that she had found by Roc’s bed.
“What’s this…?” Iz asked, now whispering.
“We thought this was weird,” Myra whispered back. “We couldn’t figure out who these belonged to. But—These are just like—”
It’s not just my imagination, is it?
“Like what?”
“Lukai. The guy—he had glasses just like these.”
“How’d you even find these?”
“They’re where the… scrape marks end.”
“What scrape marks?”
Myra pointed, and Iz bent down to take a look, and she immediately expressed surprise.
“We thought they were kinda weird, but I dunno.”
“‘Kinda weird?’ Myra, the floor is ruined. What the hell were they moving?” She stood up again. “And they were moving it… through the row of beds?”
“I kinda thought they might be… shifting the beds over, you know. Like one at a time. I mean, the marks line up with the legs of the beds.”
She looked down the row to the other end of the building to make sure nobody was paying attention to them. “Come on, help me move my bed over.”
“Eh?”
It turned out Iz wanted to try moving her bed across the floor to see if she could reproduce the same scrape marks. It turns out, they could, only if they lifted the bed from one side and pulled it, dragging the two feet along the floorboards.
Iz also pointed out that no other part of the floor was damaged, which meant they had got all hundred-some beds into the room without issue (probably by levitating them, the only sensible way to move furniture).
“So whoever dragged the bed, or beds, wasn’t a mage,” Myra said. “And they were probably acting alone since it’s easier to move the furniture if you have help.”
“I guess so. Myra, which door is closest to the endpoint of the scrape marks?”
“Uh, it’s…”
She pointed. Iz dashed outside the building, seeming to have a hunch or other, and Myra followed in her wake.
“Look.” She barely had to point. Through the dirt outside the barracks, there were long indentations.
Myra could have cursed herself. “How did I miss that?” She ran her head through her hair.
The girls followed the marks and other signs for a ways leading off towards the edge of the platform, all while Myra mentally berated herself.
‘Oh, Lukai can’t be a member of the murk bogs. He’s just some unrelated guy also investigating the vault!’ God, you’re an idiot, Myra. ‘Who was doing runes for this group before I showed up? Why is everybody so dodgy about it?’ Surely that’s not related to this Lukai guy. ‘Why’d they suddenly need a new runecrafter right after Lukai disappears?’ Strange, Myra! Probably just a coincidence! God, fuck me.
They came to the edge of the platform, facing the massive Unkmirean trees that rose to around twenty meters above their own elevation, and descended to what seemed like infinitely far below. Iz flicked her eyes from branch to branch, looking for something…
“C’mon, there’s gotta be something…”
Nothing was obvious, though, until Iz conjured a light so they could see farther down. Myra gasped.
Around thirty meters down, fluttering around in the wind and having snagged itself on a jagged tree branch, was a white bed sheet.
◆◆◆◆◆
Nathan Talzatta had been a little uneasy when Myrabelle failed to show up for their first class together, Mastery of Sensing and Manipulations with Instructor Yam. He certainly wouldn’t have blamed his friend if she had taken time off, but he had heard that she was back on campus and was intending to attend class like usual. (In fact, Myra was the type who probably found the normalcy of classwork to be comforting at some level. The girl liked to pretend otherwise, but Nathan knew: Myrabelle Prua-Kent was a hardcore nerd. These sacred truths could not be hidden from Nathan’s piercing interpersonal insight.)
She didn’t show up for lunch either, though at least Iz was able to tell him that she’d seen Myra that morning. It was an interesting lunch—Iz had befriended an older student from one of her advanced classes: the sexy and mysterious Aurora Ferara, whose parents were rumored to be assassins for the empire.
Though personally, Nathan didn’t put much stock in those rumors.
Still, Myra didn’t show up for the next couple of days. According to Cynthia, she had gone back home for something (which was really weird, because Nathan knew how Myra felt about her stepmother), and then to make things weirder, Iz vanished, too, apparently going to some kind of conference.
And on top of that, Benkoten had run off for a sudden apprenticeship in Zaru.
Two is a coincidence; three is a pattern, right?
Anyway, he had heard Myra was back, but he still hadn’t seen her in person. To rectify this, he stopped by her dorm room and knocked, but he didn’t get any answer.
Am I still on her guest list? Nathan wondered. Myra had an abstract guest detector hooked up to her lock, and she had put him on the approved list, along with a few of her other close friends. It had been a nice gesture of trust, even though Nathan didn’t really have much reason to enter her room at random, so he wasn’t in the habit of utilizing it.
He checked.
Oh. He wasn’t still on the list.
Well. He wasn’t going to go in uninvited, anyway. Obviously.
He was about to leave when he heard an approaching voice call out to him. “Hey, Nathan~”
The voice belonged to Cynthia, who was approaching with a bright half-smile half-smirk on her face. “What’s up?”
“Oh, I was trying to see if Myra was here,” Nathan explained. “You said she was back, but—”
“Ah, yeah, she left already.” She brushed a strand of hair out of her face and twirled it around her finger. “I’m not sure she even came here. I just came by to pick up a book I think I left here last semester.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Said she was going to that conference with Iz.”
“What conference is it, again?”
“I dunno,” Cynthia said, frowning. “She didn’t say, which is weird, you know. It’s Iz, you expect her to go on about some new spell she wants to see or someone she’s hoping to meet.”
Nathan was a little embarrassed by his own paranoia, but Cynthia herself had been so hesitant in her tone, that it seemed natural to voice his own concern. “It’s weird timing, isn’t it? Most universities are on fall break or just getting back from it.”
“Search me. I dunno how they plan those things. Maybe it’s not an academic conference.” She put her hand to the side of her mouth and whispered. “Maybe it’s something embarrassing.” She paused, then gave a more plausible explanation. “The conference is in Fishnia, I think. So they probably don’t give a hoot about whatever imperial universities do.”
She held her university ID to the knob like Nathan had. “Huh. I thought her fancy rune thing would let me in.”
“It didn’t let me in, either.”
“Don’t worry, I got an actual key.” She ruffled in her purse for a keychain.
“Are you sure that’s okay?” He asked as Cynthia let herself in. “Maybe she doesn’t want anyone going in.”
“Nah, it’s fine. She probably just locked the thing down before break. If she gets mad, I’ll take the heat for you.” She winked.
When they were inside, they saw that the rune module had not only been disabled, it had been removed from the door completely, resting disassembled on her desk, near a couple of folded-up sheets of paper. At a glance, nothing much else seemed amiss. The room felt a little empty, and it was obvious she’d packed up. But somehow, it didn’t feel empty enough. Something wasn’t quite right…
“Hold on, you said it’s in Fishnia?” Nathan asked. “She sure didn’t pack for it. Her coat’s still here.” He pointed to the wardrobe, where Myra’s favorite fluffy hooded coat was hanging.
The casual cheer melted off of Cynthia’s face. “Shit.”
“You don’t really think they were… lying, were they?”
“Well… earlier, there was something odd… they were headed for the train station, but towards the south-facing platform. At first I thought, maybe they were just taking the long way around or something… The truth is, I didn’t just come here for the book.” She did get the book, though, a mathematical romance thriller from Myra’s bookshelf called Body Count. “And the two of them—Myra and Iz—have just been acting odd all day—I saw Iz at the library, actually, and she was really dodgy about whatever books she was checking out.”
Having put her suspicions out in the open, she joined Nathan in his more deliberate inspection of the room. Her attention quickly caught on the two folded notes sitting on Myra’s desk. “What are these?”
She plucked one off to read it, and her expression changed drastically.
“What the—Nathan, is this your Ben?”
The contents of the note were shocking.
What the fuck did you do?
I’m not the only one you have to worry about, Myrabelle. Watch who you piss off.
— Ben.
“I—I don’t know. The handwriting kinda looks like his.” Nathan felt queasy.
Cynthia had picked up the other one. “This one’s even weirder.”
Myrabelle,
I sent the previous note out of frustration and haste. After some consideration, I decided it would be prudent to be a little more specific in my instructions to you, in case the meaning was unclear. The fact is, you can make the headlines all you want. It’s probably fine. But do NOT, under any circumstances, go after Mirkas-Ballam. That they were able to finish the synthesis in time despite your little stunt was nothing short of a miracle. Should they fail, the consequences will be disastrous.
— Ben.
“Did something happen between Myra’s father’s company and Mirkas-Ballam?” Cynthia asked.
“Well—” Nathan started. “The truth is, there’s not a company in the empire that that shit didn’t touch. So, yeah, tautologically. But in specific? I don’t really know. At least it’s gotta be a different Ben, though. This doesn’t make any sense at all from my brother.” He tried not to sound too relieved—the situation was still very serious.
“This doesn’t explain where she would have run off to, does it?” There was a bit of a hitch in her voice, now.
“I don’t think so…”
She plopped to a sitting position on Myra’s bed and buried her face in her hands. Nathan sat beside her and patted her on the shoulder. She angled slightly towards him, then rested her head on his shoulder. “What do we do?”
“Well… you said Iz was at the library, right? I have a friend who works there part-time. I think I can learn what books she checked out.”
The other girl perked up. “Really? That’s a great idea!”
Knowing it was cheesy, but also knowing that Cynthia liked cheese, he puffed out his chest and put on his most reassuring voice. “Detective Nathan Talzatta is on the case!”