"What is that?"

Zaria looked around, her eyes settling on Cathy's flustered face. A familiar sounding male voice came from the phone in the Sanguine's hand.

"Hello, Cathy! Cathy?"

Cathy tucked her hair behind her ear and bit her lip before raising the phone to her ear. "Sorry father. I was explaining how the phones worked, and I accidentally voice called you!"

With the phone pressed to her ear, nobody else could hear his response. She apologized and spoke clearly "Voice speaker" and held the phone out in front of her as the voice on the other end grew louder and clearer.

"-that better?"

"We can all hear you much better now, father. As you can all see, by saying the word "Voice" before a command while the phone is active, you can control things like volume or beginning and ending calls, as well as a few other things. I will leave you a little list of commands to make it easier."

"I'm glad that I get to speak to all of you at once!" Speaker Vlachos spoke to everyone in the room, his voice so clear that he could have been sitting among them. "I would like to invite you all to dinner tonight! And I have just heard that Speaker Kimura is already in town. If it is alright with everyone, I would like to invite him as well. There is no use hiding anything from him. He is far older than even I am and will likely suss everything out about you as soon as he meets you."

"Oh, actually, father, we ran into him just now outside the building! I am sure he has many questions, but he is far too polite to ask while standing out on the sidewalk." The Vlachos parent and child laughed amiably together.

"Could we have just a moment to talk about it amongst ourselves?" Zaria saw uncertainty flash across Rika's face, and Hideki looked indifferent. Gu Cheng was clenching his jaw above her, but he did not say anything, and Yamada...

"Of course," the speaker said over the ...speaker. "Cathy dear, would you mind taking me out into the hallway so that they could have some privacy."

"Voice turn off speaker," Cathy smiled at them brightly and excused herself out of the apartment. Zaria looked around the group, trying not to call attention to the blush that was coloring Yamada's cheeks.

"You all have a say in everything that you do here," she said to them all quietly. " A lot has happened in the last 48 hours for us. It is okay to need some time to yourselves for now. Everything has happened so quickly since we arrived here. It makes it feel as though a lot of time has passed, but it hasn't."

"That is very kind of you to offer us time to adjust," Rika said, shifting in her spot on the couch. "We have not had the opportunity or the ability to give offerings for Ito-kun, or for Sensei, and I would like to at least light some incense for them. But we are used to carrying on with life after loss now. I at least would not mind seeing more of this world, even if it is just to help me accept that the nightmare is finally over..."

Beside her, the other boys nodded their heads, making it clear that they agreed with what she said. Zaria looked up at Gu Cheng next. "What about you? You seem upset about something. If you would rather stay in tonight, it is alright."

"Would you be staying as well?" He looked at her with something she could not identify in his eyes.

"I would like to go, I have many questions I would like to ask." Zaria felt as though he was angry with her, but she had no idea why.

"Then I will go as well." His dark eyes looked away quickly, and he pushed his hands in the pockets of his pants.

"Oookay, then I will go and get Cathy." She shot him one more inquisitive look before leaving, but he would not meet her eyes.

Outside, Cathy was no longer speaking on the phone. She stood at the door of the apartment across the landing, laughing at something the Japanese Speaker was saying. They both looked up smiling when Zaria stepped out, closing the door behind her out of habit.

"Miss Joseph! How did things go? Will we be seeing you at dinner tonight?"

"Everyone is alright with it on my end, but will Speaker Kimura and his family be alright sharing a meal with people they do not know?" She directed the question at the man who was looking at her with a welcoming smile on his face.

"It is only my son and I, and I do believe that we would both be delighted to share a meal with you and your friends. We do not often get to spend time casually with good company."

Zaria smiled guiltily. "I...I am sorry, I feel I ought to apologize ahead of time, then. We lost many people before arriving here, two just yesterday in fact..." She covered her lips with her hand, panicking. She did not know why she felt so comfortable and willing to share things with people the last two days.

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"Speaker Kimura already knows that you and your group came through one of the cracks between our world and the next." Cathy noticed the look of panic growing on Zaria's face and hastened to elaborate. "The speaker is one of the oldest of the Sanguine. He could sense it even before I said anything! He will not tell others, and there are very few in the entire world who could sense a fraction of what he can."

The stately gentleman stepped past the pregnant woman and bowed deeply to Zaria. "I did not intend to make you uncomfortable." He said after straightening again. "Please forgive me. I could feel the air of another world around you from our first greeting. I am sorry to hear that you have lost people you are close to. If you do not feel up to sharing a meal with me, then I will understand. I would very much enjoy seeing you all again, but it can wait if you are not ready."

"No, it is alright with us if you are really okay with it." Zaria felt her lips turning up in response to his warm smile. "Then we will see you again at dinner?"

"I look forward to it." The speaker smiled so brilliantly that she found herself smiling in response. With a bow to both ladies, he stepped back into his apartment and closed the door.

Cathy focused her attention on Zaria, giving the younger woman a penetrating look, a strange little smile on her face. She shook her head, and her normal expression was back in an instant. "Let's go finish setting up these phones, yes?"

The rest of the afternoon was spent learning how to program their phones, and by the time Cathy left after the first hour, they all had each other's contact information stored inside. They learned how to activate a small screen above the number pad where they could send text messages, but text and voice were the extent of the phones abilities. The boys seemed a little sad at not being able to play games and watch videos like they had on their phones in their own world, and Zaria made a mental note to ask what activities people did in this world in their spare time at dinner that night. There was no television in any of the rooms, and the screen on the phone was low tech, words and numbers only. There were no books, but there was a stereo that picked up dozens of different stations, each with a different style of music.

The boys spent a while browsing the different types, flipping to a new station whenever they got bored of something. Zaria was surprised to realize that the sound bothered her. Sensory overload, she thought to herself, waving Gu Cheng back when he moved to follow her into the bedroom. Things changed too drastically, too quickly this time. Barely a day had passed since she watched teeth as long as her forearm bite into a friend, taking him away from them all. Then she was surrounded by smiling people, sunshine, and music, as though the losses never happened. Since getting back from their attempt at a walk, Gu Cheng had been hovering, staying to where she could hear him breathing at all times. Noise, light, joy, and closeness it were just too much. She laid down on the bed and pulled her knees to her chest.

With the door closed, it was much quieter. In the master bath attached to the bedroom, a nozzle was not turned enough, and the steady drip of water could be heard over her heartbeat. She thought of the woman in the apartment that she and Gu Cheng had arrived in when they landed in the last world. She had been trying to get through the shower stall door to get to the sound. Zaria got up and turned the knobs in the shower and on the sink until the dripping stopped before getting back onto the bed.

The curtains in the bedroom seemed to be more for the idea of privacy rather than the attaining of it. Thin and wispy, they blocked the view of the small back courtyard only enough to blur the lines of everything out there and give the world a faintly orange tint. Thin lines of embroidery traversed the material, and with the afternoon sun shining through the west facing windows, they cast shadows that looked like vines on the opposite wall. It was pretty, but even alone in the bedroom, she felt like there was no privacy.

Privacy...

"How do I not hurt Gu Cheng's feelings while telling him that he is hovering too much sometimes?" Zaria thought of the brief encounter in the park with the Lykos woman. The arm around her shoulders felt possessive, and she wasn't sure if she felt like it was a good thing. Feeling wanted was nice, but it had felt more forceful, more "this is mine" than it had felt sweet. A romantic fantasy of a possessive man who only wanted you and behaved like a stalker could be sexy in a good story, but in real life it was too much. Plus, that kind of behavior was not going to go well when they got back to City C, where everyone behaved as though holding hands was as bad as having sex in public while having it streamed live on the internet. With the number of women that threw themselves at him every day, Zaria could see a lot of embarrassment in her future if he grabbed on every time he felt the need to assert his ownership.

When it was time to head to dinner, Zaria pulled herself out from inside of her warm comforter cocoon. The air in the bedroom felt cold, but she knew it wasn't. It was an odd feeling. She followed the others out of the building and into a long car that was waiting at the curb. The excitement of the others was unfortunately not contagious, and the laughter and cheerful voices made it hard to enjoy the food, as delicious as it was. She tried to make small talk about music with the speaker from the Japanese Sanguine Congress in between courses, but Gu Cheng insisted on sitting between them and made it hard to hear what was being said even though they were only a meter away. Any time she caught some of what was said and tried to reply, Gu Cheng was leaning forward, offering more food for her bowl. There was too much going on. It was just too hard to concentrate.

Zaria looked down at her bowl, filled to the brim with meat and veg loaded in by Gu Cheng. There was a dull roar in her ears, and she tried to concentrate on picking up each piece of food and carrying it to her mouth. It felt like the one time she got a bad sinus infection, sounds were distorted, and the room wanted to spin a little. And she was so cold, even though the others in the room looked a little flushed from the heat and the close quarters. A tiny part of her wondered if she was getting sick from something in the new world, and she realized that her breathing was picking up. She stared at her food and tried to ignore everything around her, hoping for just a moment to get herself under control.