Left as alone as they could be, unless Ari were to change her mind and end Claribel, they looked at each other, Ari and Natty, Natty and Ari. There were too many words to say; there was nothing that needed to be said.

Ari pulled Natty into her arms. It didn’t feel right, holding onto a smaller frame than she was used to. This Natty’s hair smelled of olive oil; there was no trace of the old Natty who smelled liked the air after rain. Was it the same with her? Did she no longer feel like herself to Natty, even though she’d kept most of her old face? She wanted to ask, but didn’t want it enough to let go.

There they stayed, breathing in, out, in, out. They’d held each other like this before countless times, trembling under the ledge of a stranger’s porch, praying that no one would find them. Sometimes, Ari would try to think back further, but there was nothing beyond that memory, nothing to explain why two girls found themselves alone, running, running from something: the bogeyman under your bed; the toothy mouth grinning from the shadows.

Claribel remained silent, withdrawn. Had she ever held Fabia in her arms? If someone had killed Natty and made her body a marionette, there was only one path that Ari would take.

‘Before we get started,’ said Natty, eventually untangling herself from their embrace, ‘there’s something I need to know. Did you ever binge that webtoon I recommended you?’

‘I’m afraid not... Can you travel into that as well nowadays? Is this the future of tourism? It just costs an arm and a leg, and the rest of your body. No hand-luggage allowed.’

‘I hope not? Because the male leads are crazy. I need to know what’s going on in that series…’

‘Haven’t you only been here for three months?’

‘Plus the stint of starving in the jungle. Ugh. Where the hell is Connor when you actually need him? I need to know if the female lead actually divorces her husband. I mean, probably not, but the handful of exceptions give you hope.’

They couldn’t delay the inevitable.

‘So… how’s life as a fool?’ asked Ari.

‘Suits me fine because I’ve always been an idiot,’ said Natty, letting out a gentle sigh. ‘I found myself in Aquilon, and the Duchess treated me like family. I ate everyday sat next to her and her son, even closer to the salt cellar than their Steward – you know, that’s how they rank people here: you get sat near the salt cellar if you’re an honoured member of the household. The only thing she asked of me was to hop around, make funny faces, and to read the books in her library and give her hot takes on stuff. The biggest problem is the farting… I just. I don’t know how Fabia managed it, but apparently she used to be able to fart out complete tunes. Like… how? But also… like, I can see how you can go pro with a skill like that.

‘Anyway, it’s… kind of good to see you,’ Natty chattered on. ‘I mean… it’s not good that I haven’t been able to complete the mission so they had to send you after me, but seeing you here…’ The body that once belonged to Fabia teared up. ‘You know, I really thought the Chief had sent me here to get rid of me. I mean, why else would he send a White to do a Blue’s job? But seeing you here, I know that it can’t be true.’

Of course that couldn’t be true. Not to Natty, who had never seen Ari fail a mission. A body drenched in the blackest paint, and where the heart should have been sat the corpse of a blood-red raven. Inside the raven was a simple message, not unlike one you’d find in a fortune cookie: I win, in this world and the next.

Ari blinked it all away. That was a nightmare from another world.

‘But since you’re here, that means you went back to the Programme, right? I was hoping that since you could cut me out, you’d be able to keep him out too.’

‘They sent Connor,’ said Ari.

‘Ah,’ said Natty, although there was nothing surprising about the answer.

‘Did they send Connor for you too?’ asked Ari, though she also already knew the answer. Their lives never deviated from the formula. Mission. Run. Connor. Death. Mission. Only the target of death differed; sometimes it’d be one of their own.

‘Do you think they’ve injected us with nanobots that track our location or something? Do you remember the mission we completed near Ambato? I went southeast from there until the mobile signal went patchy and it was just about possible to survive by reading, hunting and vitamin pills. Still, he found me. You were right. He’d find me no matter what. I should have just gone with you and lived a normal life.’ Natty sighed. ‘What was it like?’

‘I typed minutes from meetings, went for drinks in pubs and bars, learned some dances, and a co-worker’s grandfather wasn’t killed. He died of natural causes.’

‘Wow.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I should have tried that. I mean… I could have carried on gaming. We could have rented a flat together and grown tomatoes on the windowsill. Cherry tomatoes. We could have harvested them and eaten them with cucumber and feta cheese. Oh, and olives! I love olives.’

But back to this fictional reality… ‘Any news from Hannah?’ Ari asked.

Agents like Natty and herself specialised in different areas, and were honed for different skills. Agent Hannah Temple was a Blue, skilled at search and find, though not nearly as skilled as Connor, which was perhaps why the Chief had sent her first: that was the worth of finding Miri, his flesh and blood. If there were shortcuts to Ari’s mission-complete, finding Hannah was sure to hold the key to unlocking the puzzle.

In answer, Natty pulled a book from the bottom right shelf that had an illustrated spine showing a man holding a sphere in his palm, with a golden sceptre in the other hand, and the blazing sun above him. Upon a closer look, it wasn’t the spine that was colourful, but…

‘Are all the books sitting backwards?’ noted Ari. So that was why the shelves looked wrong.

Ari sprung to her feet and took out a book that winked at her from the middle shelf. Literally. A picture of a half-woman half-bird creature winked at the readers among seashells and skulls, drawn onto the side of the pages, while the plain brown leather spine faced the inner end of the shelves. She turned the book around this way and that. The top edge of the book had been beautifully illustrated too, and showed a ship ripped in two.

~How else are they supposed to sit? How can you tell what it is otherwise?~

‘Exactly’, said Natty. Welcome to the world before the moveable printing press and foil stamping.’

~What’s this press that your friend speaks of?~

‘It’s where you have stamps of all the letters, and you stamp ink on paper super-fast,’ said Natty. ‘Once you have all that going, books will be cheap, and you’re going to have your whole country craving for books and knowledge.’

~We have those already, but what is the true benefit of printing instead of hiring a scribe when the paper itself is expensive? Even if you make it out of cotton and linen scraps, there is hardly enough material to make it any cheaper. Or are you saying that in Khuramma, you have found a way of making paper you can print on out of something else?~

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

An emotion that Ari couldn’t quite name bubbled up in Claribel’s spirit, strong enough for her to feel it. Greed? Excitement? No, there was something weightier mixed in. Like… responsibility. But more importantly…

‘Wait a moment,’ said Ari, turning to Natty. ‘You can hear her?’

~Wait a moment. You can hear me?~

‘Errr…’ said Natty, pouring herself a cup of turmeric tea, and another for Claribel, dumping a generous spoon of honey in each. ‘If you’re asking, I suppose others can’t?’

~Can you…see me?~

The spirit of Claribel floated to the side, anchoring only via her feet.

‘Yes.’

~And you can seriously hear me? Well. I want to say… never mind.~

‘What?’

~Oh… nothing. But isn’t it great! I can now talk to two people.~

‘So… no one else can see or hear you?’ said Natty.

‘Only people from our world, it seems,’ Ari replied. A hypothesis for now, but if true, perhaps they could find Miri by asking Claribel to fly in front of people’s faces and seeing who flinched. ‘Speaking of which, we are not from your world, Claribel. I’m not sure why you still think of us as Khurammians.’

Natty flicked open the book she’d lifted from the shelf earlier, and leaned back, savouring the sip of turmeric tea.

‘That’s the one. The have the exact same copy in Aquilon. And that,’ she said, pointing to a star at the centre of the circle that showed a map with dancing men and women, seas in blues and reds, and strange strips that might have been mountains, ‘is the Rock of Rebirth.’

What an inconvenient way to access a map. There was no sign to mark out where she was. Ari leaned in, warming Claribel’s ice-cold hands on her cup of turmeric tea. There, by the star, was a blot of black ink that seemed to extend out countless arms, but worse, its multiple mouths with jagged teeth screamed into the silence. A land of eldritch monsters.

‘Is that Khuramma?’ asked Ari.

~No, that’s Leth, in the Duchy of Taur. It’s the holiest city of pilgrimage for followers of the Fated One, which is, like, almost everybody.~

That name rang a bell. Apart from Eirene, it was the only other city mentioned in the book; it was the birthplace of the genius fire mage, Hesperus.

Natty trailed her finger slowly northwest from the centre of the world. ‘And now we are passing through the Duchy of Parime, previously the Duchy of Lyoness.’

That name was unmistakeable. The Duke of Lyoness had been the main antagonist in the book, and had plotted the demise of the previous King. It was thanks to the main character, Lady Rosalind, and the bravery of her love interest, Leolin, that the Duke was defeated and brought to justice, but not before the death of the old King.

A black line had been drawn through the map where Lyoness had once been written, and a neat, flowery hand had written ‘Parime’ a little above it, next to the drawing of a spiral castle with pink walls. The hatred for the previous Duke Lyoness was strong enough for the new King to rename a whole Duchy instead of simply appointing a new Duke Lyoness.

On crept Natty’s finger, tapping on a now-familiar picture of a raven pecking out a man’s eye. Aquilon. The Duchy of Aquilon faced a dark blue swath of sea to the north, labelled the Clarion Sea, but though ships travelled among the waves, there were other creatures too, all with human heads, but with the feet and wings of birds. With those human heads, they tore into the sailors aboard doomed ships.

They were inside a light-hearted fantasy romance. Right?

‘And from there, if we go down, southwest, we get to Eirene,’ said Natty. Her finger ambled an inch down from Aquilon. ‘It took me fifteen days in a carriage to get from Aquilon to Eirene. Further south, you have the Duchy of Carnell, and last but certainly not least, if we turn east from Carnell, that is the Duchy of Auster. They were speaking of Lady Oriana earlier. She is the third child of Duke Auster.’

The Duchy of Auster was merely given a quickly-sketched patch of forest next to a pale blue lake, drawn as an impossibly perfect circle that seemed to mark the meeting point of Auster, Aquilon and the new Duchy of Parime.

‘The problem is,’ Natty continued, ‘that this is the whole of Ventinon. One country.’

She could blot it from the map with three fingers.

‘I haven’t heard from Hannah at all. She could be anywhere in all of this.’ This time, she waved her hand across the whole map. Too many unknown countries and unknown creatures. ‘Same with Miri. I mean… I can hardly believe that I’ve found you. To be honest, if you want to look for them, all the power to you. I’ll give you a hand. Of course I will. But if you ask me, I’ll be spending my days making costumes. It’s much better hiding out here than in the Amazon rainforest for sure. Oh, and thanks for getting me some seamstresses. I’ll put them to good use.’

For a moment, Ari didn’t know what else to say. Should they forget about the mission then, and just make a life for themselves, while they still had each other?

She looked up. Nothing. The Fated One that they spoke of in this world offered no guidance. A whole life of this was like looking into the abyss.

Before her fiery exit from the real world, the world’s estimated population had been eight billion and rising. If this world was to have anything close to the population of her world’s from the 1400s or 1500s, then what were they looking at? 500 million?

Going with the conservative estimate of 100 million for calculating the probability of their meeting, that’d give her lower odds of chancing upon Natty than winning the lottery jackpot. Even granting the fact that she’d feel the same had she come across Hannah or Miri first, the chances seemed impossibly small. So much smaller than being struck by lightning.

An alternative theory would be that the exit point of a spirit being cast into this world wasn’t random.

Fact one: neither of them were named characters, so this wasn’t a case of possessing main characters.

Fact two: Ari looked like Claribel’s twin, but Natty bore no resemblance to Fabia. The relevance of the resemblance was still questionable.

Fact three: they were both part of the Aquilon household, though one entered via Aquilon, and the other landed in Eirene. Both were cities in Ventinon, which was but a small country in the context of the whole known world.

Sub-branch one of the theory above: there was a connection between their world and the Aquilon family, so Hannah or Miri would be disguised among Claribel’s household, as a Wardrobe, as a knight, as a father…

Sub-branch two of the theory above: there was a geographical portal between this world and theirs, so she’d need to comb through nearby regions to locate Hannah or Miri, though it’d only predict the initial point of a spirit’s entry, and would have no bearing on where the spirit was now.

Ari gulped down the turmeric tea and squinted at the map one more time.

There was a third thread for finding Hannah.

Tristram.

If Hannah had come to Eirene, like Ari had, armed with only one clue on how to find Miri, then there was only one person to go to: Tristram, Miri’s supposed favourite.

‘We are going to observe Tristram and figure out who else is observing him,’ said Ari. ‘We will complete the mission and go home.’

Yes. They’d go home to the charred remains of their bodies, though it was better if Claribel remained unaware of the truth.

‘Is Tristram in Eirene?’ Ari asked.

‘That’s the thing,’ said Natty. ‘I’ve tried to find out what I can from Aquilon, and all everyone talks about is Leolin, because he’s now King. Oh, and Rosalind, who’s, well, you guessed it, she’s Queen. I’ve asked about Tristram and Hesperus, but no one seems to know anything about what they’re up to these days.’

~It’s Duke Taur to you. Although he has been facing hard times recently, he is still the Duke of Taur. He is indeed in Eirene. You will find him drinking in the tavern near the port, almost nightly, I believe, though I have never witnessed it with my own eyes.~

‘What’s happened to him?’

Though the Chief had described him as a paper-thin character, the one certainty about Tristram was that he abhorred unsavoury habits such as excessive drinking.

~You people should know, unless you are truly not Khurammians?~

Natty pointed at a country near the north-eastern edge of the circle. There, a giant hand reached down from the sky, and the people kneeled before it, clutching their heads.

‘She’s talking about that,’ she said.

~Some of them are moving against the True Fate and worshipping the Creator God instead of the Fated One, the Devourer of All. The Church has found that they have taken to a type of dark magic, different from our own, and it allows them to possess the minds of the good citizens of Ventinon. Everyone is to keep a watchful eye on their neighbours, for the good of Ventinon. Should anyone stray from their normal ways of thinking, it is our duty to report it to the Church at once, because the Khurammians use that to spy on our people, and worse, to sow doubt among us and make us stray from the Fated One. No one else is supposed to have possession magic. I should know. I am from the Guild of Mages.~

‘We’re really not from there,’ said Natty. ‘And neither of us believe in the Creator God.’

~Oh, I do hope that is true. It is not good to be led astray. May the Fated One savour you.~

‘What happens to the possessed people?’ said Ari. Torture? Exorcism?

…Burning. The chambermaid had mentioned it while bring the tea.

The spirit of Claribel detached herself a little further from her body.

~We will be visiting the City Square soon enough,~ she said quietly. ~You shall see it with your own eyes.~