“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” the voice was saying. She sounded impatient. She.
Hanna felt groggy, but she did her best not to open her eyes. She knew they’d be blurry and she couldn’t risk blinking and garnering attention.
“There isn’t much choice,” a second voice answered. Another girl. Hanna willed the sleep from her brain so she could identify the speakers from their hushed voices.
“Who knows what she’s found out, or what she could have told the others,” the second voice continued. Candace. Bad Candace, Hanna mused.
“Maybe,” the first voice replied. Isis? She sounded strange. Hoarse somehow, like perhaps she’d been crying. Does Isis cry? Hanna wondered. It seemed like a foreign idea with as cold and hard as Isis had been. Then again, Isis was still an Aema, and Aema had a good heart. There had to be some of that in there.
“But if it was you?” Isis continued. “If it was your body on the line?”
Silence. It stretched on for an uncomfortably long time and she heard Candace shift on her feet.
“I suppose not,” Candace replied slowly, a hint of doubt in her voice. After a long moment of terse silence, she spoke again. “So, what are we supposed to do here? I mean, she hasn’t seemed to be here, and what about Sol?”
Isis cleared her throat quietly. “Never you mind about Sol,” she replied unconvincingly. “This is the first one we’ve managed to turn into something half useful. If we couldn’t communicate with the Doctor, we’d have no use for her whatsoever.”
“Why can’t the Doctor just use her? You know, like the way we’re using Candace and Aema’s bodies here?”
Isis let out a heavy sigh. “That’s something she has yet to figure out. She thinks maybe there’s something different with her mind. Not that it’s stronger, per say, but more like it’s…out of sync somehow. That’s why she can only deliver messages and not fully inhabit her. The sooner we figure out what’s blocking it, the sooner the Doctor can explore these worlds herself.”
“Ohh,” Candace replied, but it was obvious she didn’t quite understand. Hanna wanted to lord it over her, but she couldn’t quite understand the reasoning herself.
“So then, what DO we do?” Candace repeated.
Isis’ footfalls paced the floor for a moment, then stopped. “We keep doing what we’ve been doing and we wait. Though the Doctor doesn’t think we need to worry about this Hanna. From what you said, she seems pretty child-like, and that’s not a threat to us. But she does want her watched kept isolated to her room.”
“She held me so tight.” Candace’s voice was almost a whisper, and she sounded so sad. Hanna wanted desperately to peek, but her danger senses told her this was the worst idea and to stay put.
“I know,” sighed Isis. “But she isn’t your Hanna. The Hanna that’s like a sister to you, she may be gone. We can’t know for sure. But this Hanna..” Hanna felt a hand gently stroke her hair, and it took everything in her not to respond, but to pretend to sleep deeply. “This Hanna is just another echo.”
Long after they left, there was something about their wording that bothered her. Another echo. It seemed to tug at something in her brain, something she was forgetting, but she pushed it away to make room for something more important: Sol was alive. She was alive and they were keeping her somewhere to use as some sort of communication to the evil Doctor Sol.
Hanna smiled to herself. She had a new side mission: Rescue World 2 Sol…and hope she wasn’t a complete dolt. They could use all the help they could get. She couldn’t wait to tell Soo.
-
Hanna was hungry enough to pretend to wake up and ask Candace for supper. She played the innocent card well enough, and Candace dotted on her, seeming to soften. Maybe, at the end of the day, she was just as much an unwitting puppet as the rest of evil Sol’s minions.
Feigning being unwell, Candace had brought her a hearty soup and some delicious bread which she used to sop up some of the remaining broth. “The carrots actually came from your garden,” Candace said with a soft smile. Hanna startled.
“My garden?” she asked excitedly, the words tumbling out before she could stop them. She tried to correct herself. “I have a garden?” She grinned brightly—an honest, sincere smile—and Candace flustered a moment before seeming to remember herself.
“Of course, silly! Don’t you remember? Oh, but you’ve been a little sick, so maybe you’re not quite yourself yet.”
“Oh,” Hanna mumbled dumbly. “I guess that’s why I feel so weird today.” She laughed, feeling a bit rebellious. “It’s like I’m having an out-of-body experience!”
She only felt slightly guilty about grinning in triumph as Candace choked on her tea.
Later came before she knew it. Hanna had allowed herself a little rest, but mostly she couldn’t wait to get the hell out of that bed—and room. Shortly after a clock somewhere distantly chimed midnight, the wall slowly cracked open, creating a dark space behind the tapestry where Soohae’s eyes peeked out of the inky blackness.
“Ready?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.
“Ready,” Hanna replied. “Let’s go get some Sol power.”
Soohae broke into a grin at the old inside joke. Sol had once wondered if they could use the power of the sun somehow to power batteries for the garden’s lights. “So, in other words, Sol wants them to be Sol-powered,” Aema teased. Since then it had stuck. Hanna’s only regret was not saying the pun first.
As the two crept carefully out of Hanna’s room, stopping briefly to unlock Soo’s from the outside, it never even crossed her mind that the memory of that inside joke was never even her own.
--
Sol’s office was unlocked, which made Hanna instantly feel like it was some kind of a trap, but the undisturbed layer of dust on everything gave her a strange comfort. It was as if to say, ‘It’s okay, you’re safe here.’
They spent half an hour looking around before Hanna decided to go through Sol’s desk more thoroughly and Soo decided to look through the books in the bookshelf. Looking without even candlelight was tedious and Hanna’s eyes ached. Sol was notorious for stashing things away and then forgetting where she put them, which didn’t help matters.
Hanna once found a grocery list for the market folded and used as a bookmark in a rather racy novel. Another time she had found notes Sol had taken of a conversation she’d had with another leader, folded into the emergency Silver scrolls she kept bundled in a special, oversized coffee mug on a shelf. Okay, so maybe these things were less stashes than honest mistakes half of the time—but Sol always dug in, saying things like: “I needed that note there because it reminded me that I still owed Chris money,” or “It wasn’t MY fault I couldn’t find the bloody cat! That collar was the best way to keep that key safe—I didn’t know the bell fell off! What? Don’t look at me like that! They both jingled, didn’t they?”
Hanna smiled to herself and quietly chuckled. How was it they had ended up with such a funny leader anyway? With all of the weird things she’d done, if the other guilds knew they’d think it was a mad house.
“What is it?” Soo asked. “Did you find something weird again?”
Hanna grinned and shrugged. “It’s not my fault she never locks her drawers.” Soo giggled at the imitation. “No, but I was just thinking about that time she put the key on the cat’s collar, you know? Because they both jingled.” She grinned, but Soohae paused and shot her a strange look.
“What do you mean? What collar? Did that happen?”
The two girls stared at each other a moment before it sunk in. Different worlds, different events.
“Right.. I guess that didn’t happen in this world,” Hanna whispered sadly. But Soohae gave her a smile of encouragement.
“Do you remember the time Sol accidently glued that 5-million Silver scroll to the bottom of the cereal box?”
Hanna covered her mouth to hush her laughter. “No! She did what?!”
Soo chuckled. “She was so freaked out she actually almost cried! I thought she was gonna kill Chaos when she saw it on the cereal box he picked up during breakfast!”
Quietly they worked, exchanging whispered anecdotes and trying not to wake up the house with their laughter. Finally, after another exhausted half-hour search, they came up empty.
Hanna sunk back into Sol’s desk chair with a huff. “There’s got to be something somewhere.” She turned to look at Soo, who was busy dusting. She raised an eyebrow and opened her mouth, then changed her mind. It was going to be obvious someone was in here anyway, might as well make it harder to tell who. Hanna rubbed her temples with her hands and tried to think of where else in the house there might be clues. She had been sure Aema would have set up shop in here with Sol gone, but it makes sense she’d be smarter than that.
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Hanna was still racking her brain when Soo suddenly said, “Who’s this?” She held up a small framed photo from a shelf and frowned. “Who is this a picture of? Sol didn’t have any photos like this. Not before.” She looked at it again, her brow creased. “I swear this wasn’t there a minute ago.”
“Maybe you missed it”, Hanna murmured absently as she crossed the room and took the photo. The frame was small and antique, not something that would shine or catch anyone’s attention. The photograph was older looking, monotone and steeped in a muted sepia. The photo was of a young man with lighter hair, a soldier, staring out with an unreadable expression. Something tingled in Hanna’s brain as she stared at the image of the young man. She suddenly had the urge to turn over the frame, so she did.
Lifting the stand away from the frame, the photo loosened, but something else fell with a soft thump onto the plush floor at Hanna’s feet. She bent and picked up an old, ornate key that had long seen better days. The oxygenated metal had a slightly rusted look and seemed dingy, but what really caught her attention was the small open-mouthed head, the face’s expression worn, save for the hollowed out mouth and eyes that lay as decoration inside the looped end. The shaft of the key was long and slender with two almost crudely carved pieces stuck off towards the end on one side. Hanna met Soo’s blank expression with a shrug and slipped the key into her pocket. As she went to reaffix the stand to the frame, she caught small writing on a corner of the photo in a bold, faded pencil: N.I.
Hanna frowned, her brow furrowing until Soo’s brief ghost-touch reminded her they needed to keep moving. Hanna returned the photo to its place and gave it one last longing look before she moved on. Some part of her knew who that man was, but she couldn’t remember. Either way, she mused thoughtfully, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed.
--
The key was very old and ornate, and Hanna couldn’t rule out the basement—her least favorite place in the house—but she also couldn’t bring herself to go there just yet, so she suggested they check a few of the empty rooms on the first floor before moving to the attic, then the basement. The second floor held most of the bedrooms and would be last for sure, as the risk of getting caught was the highest.
Silently padding through the house on bare feet, Soo led the charge from room to room. Some were caked in dust, others were immaculate, as though waiting for an occupant it didn’t have to come at any moment. Time was ticking by and nothing was turning up anywhere. After the main floor, they did a quick second sweep of the parlor and library before moving stealthily up the main rear stairs that led to the attic.
There were two ways to get to the attic. Hanna thought they should take the servant’s stairs at the end, but Soo shook her head, her hauntingly sunken eyes looking solemn. “It’s better to use the carpeted stairs off of the library,” Soo whispered. “No squeaks or slippery stones.”
Hanna padded up the stairs, grateful for the carpeting beneath her knitted socks. At the second-floor landing, they moved quickly to ascend the next staircase. Hanna took a breath and did not release it until they were halfway up to the attic, relief swarming her. If nobody had found them now, chances are they were home free. At least, for a while.
“Hey,” she whispered to Soo in the darkness. Soo glanced back at Hanna as they neared the attic door.
“What is it?” she whispered back.
“Do you ever think it’s kind of odd that out of all of the rooms upstairs, that Sol has her room on the first floor? And it’s kind of out of the way..”
Soo gave a quiet breathy laugh. “This is just coming to you NOW?”
Hanna grumbled an unintelligible reply and Soo stopped at the attic door, turning to Hanna.
“I don’t know about your Sol, but our Sol had the servants’ quarters completely renovated into one enormous master bedroom and bathroom because she didn’t like having to take her coffee up the stairs. She kept spilling it on herself.”
Hanna chuckled to herself, but she knew HER Sol wasn’t that frivolous. Nor did her Sol use the entirety of the downstairs servants’ quarters as one massive en-suite.
“Ready?” she asked Hanna.
“Ready,” Hanna nodded.
Soohae took a breath and turned the attic doorknob.
--
The attic was dark, dusty and surprisingly cramped with odds and ends. A dusty full-length mirror that Hanna made a mental note to check her manor for, racks of old, outdated clothing, trunks upon trunks of things. They found a lantern and a book of matches sitting on a lonely crate near the door, which Hanna found highly convenient, and set upon lighting it and using it to search for a second. They managed to find a candle in a stand with a curled ring with which to hold it, which Soohae opted for, giving Hanna the lantern. Outside of the windows, the moon shone bright in the sky. Nearly full, but not quite. The night was clear and what light made it in illuminated the space well wherever it touched. Hanna only really needed her lantern to see everything in-between and, of course, those dark corners. Hanna and Soo separated, each taking a side and walking as softly as they could in the quiet. Hanna, after a moment, noticed that they left no footprints. Someone had been keeping up on the sweeping. In spite of dust, there were no cobwebs and the layer of dust was light. In Hanna’s world, no one in the guild had attic duties. Perhaps Sol took care of it herself? She shook her head. Everyone knew Sol despised dusting more than any other chore. She frowned, not liking where the thought was heading.
She tried her best not to linger on anything, reminding herself she could spend time going through the chests, crates and wardrobes at another time. It seemed to take no time at all to make it to the wall. Hanna and Soo frowned at each other. “This is it,” Soo said with a finality that even her own voice didn’t believe.
Hanna cast her light over the shadowed wall again and frowned. She looked down, hoping for scratch marks for a secret door, like in those mystery novels she’d read, but there were none. She frowned. How could this be it? There has to be something! But she sighed and her shoulders sagged. The next step was the basement. As they turned back, Hanna stopped, her brow furrowed. She looked at the length of the room, and the width. The occasional support beams which, now that she thought about it, were evenly spaced, but should have been too few to support a room the length of the manor.
“What’s wrong?” Soo whispered, frowning as she noticed Hanna’s scrutinizing furrow.
“There’s something off about this room.”
Soo tiled her head. “But we searched the whole thing. Right?”
Hanna shook her head slightly. “That’s not quite what I meant. Not exactly. It’s like it’s..”
Soo looked around then, too. Examining the space, walking halfway and then back. The girls looked at each other. “It’s too small,” they said in unison, earning an amused grin from Soo and a sly smirk from Hanna. The room was too small, which meant that one of these walls housed a secret!
The girls spent time walking the room. They determined that it was not only half the width, but the length was cut short as well. There were places where rooms had higher ceilings, which accounted for the length, but the width should have been the same—meaning the usable attic before them didn’t span the entire house, but it was clearly smaller than it should have been.
The area missing, however, was the one above the East Wing. It likely wasn’t East, but Sol had dubbed it that anyway, citing that she was directionally challenged and that, in the house of Aether, cardinal directions were simply to know where to walk. Another quirk that made Hanna laugh. “Think of the front door as South,” their Leader once said with a shrug, then announced, “We go East! To the Parlor!”
That led them back to their original dead-end wall. Hanna and Soo looked through the panels of knotted wood, searching for anything. They determined there must be a secret hole in the knots somewhere for their mystery key. They stopped to ridicule an ugly, large painting on the wall that was made to look like a doorframe, knob and all on the frame, the picture itself a door partially opening inward to a room that looked like some sort of nursery or playroom. They joked that it would be the worst secret door in the world because it was so painfully obvious. Then they shared a rather incredulous look.
“She wouldn’t, right?”
“It’s Sol. She’d probably find this funny,” Hanna replied, rolling her eyes.
“Oh, god, she would! But..still, isn’t it little..” Soo trailed off.
“On the nose?” Hanna finished, using an old phrase of Sol’s.
The girls looked at the painting, then at each other. Soo shook her head with a slight shrug as if to say, ‘So, I guess we do this?’ and Hanna turned to the painting, reached over, turned the doorknob, and pushed.
--
Hanna wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but it wasn’t for the painting to sit and do nothing. She tried pulling the turned knob, expecting the whole thing to come crashing down at them with a bang and ruin everything, but it didn’t. Instead, a panel BESIDE the painting popped open a crack with a soft click.
Hanna and Soohae exchanged glances before Hanna tentatively reached a hand under the panel and gave it a slight tug. Much like a hidden handle, it clicked and an adjacent door-sized panel popped out from the wall.
“A secret..pocket door?” Hanna grumbled incredulously, giving Soohae a look of annoyed amusement. "You know, I think I’m going to be judging her for this,” Hanna grumped flatly, causing Soohae to let out a girlish giggle.
The two slid the door easily into its invisible wall sheath and stepped through. Hanna wasn’t sure what she was expecting, really. Something dirty or dingy or…secretive maybe? But it was a fairly clean, if not disused, room. There was a chair in a corner by a window, a low table beside it, and a footstool set askew at the foot of the chair, which appeared to be a form of rocker. The light was dim in the room, which was unpainted and boasted the natural wood, but was otherwise empty. At the back of the room was a regular door, which was left slightly ajar.
“Yeah,” Soo said slowly, staring between the empty rocker and the cracked door, a slight quiver to her voice. “This doesn’t seem scary at all. I, in no way, want to run back downstairs and hide in my bed.”
“Yeah. Me too,” Hanna agreed grimly, noting the flat sarcasm.
The two entered the room. Hanna expected the floors to creak, but the wood seemed quite sturdy. There was something strange about the acoustics in the room. It was as if the sound were absorbed somehow, their footsteps near silent. Walking over to the rocker, she saw dust-covered papers that hadn’t been visible strewn on the other wise of the tiny ottoman. Bending, she picked them up and blew them off. The writing was very faint and small, the words too close together. Maybe with brighter light she could discern some of them, but the rest was too lost with the dust of time. Hanna set the pages back down and wiped her dusty fingers on her clothing.
The two stood awkwardly for a moment before Soo turned and carefully slid the panel-door back into place. It sealed with a click. “Just in case,” she replied sheepishly to Hanna’s questioning look. They turned to stare at the slightly ajar door, leading into darkness. “After you,” Soo said with a nervous grin. Hanna gave her a scowl, but moved closer to the door, swallowing hard. With a deep breath, she grabbed the handle and pulled.
It was anti-climatic. The door opened to a tiny dark hall with two other doors. The first door, which was on the left, opened into an enclosed, yet empty room. The room was long, narrow, and with many windows dotting it’s ‘Northern’ wall. During the day, the space would be brightly lit. Hanna had a sudden thought that it would be a great space to set up canvas for painting, especially as it overlooked the backyard easily, but she pushed it away, closing the door and turning to the other. The second door stood straight ahead from the empty room. Turning the knob carefully, Hanna cracked the door open to find only darkness. When she finished opening the door, it led only to a hidden spiral staircase leading down into further darkness.
“This house goes on forever,” Soo whispered, her voice seeming loud in the stark quiet.
“What should we do?” Hanna asked, more to herself than to Soohae. “There could be something down there that explains everything…or it could be some sort of death trap.”
Soo turned to Hanna, suddenly very somber. “We don’t have much of a choice. We have to go. Even if we don’t, somebody will wake up and find us eventually. We might as well give it a try.”
Giving Soo’s hand a reassuring squeeze, Hanna repositioned her lantern and began the descent down the strange black-iron staircase into the dark.
-
The stairs, too, proved anti-climatic, only wrapping around once and ending one floor below. Rather than soothing Hanna’s nerves, it only proved to irritate her. She suddenly wanted very much to strangle the architect of this house—or whatever twisted Noble had designed it to be so damn creepy.
The stairs ended in an empty little alcove with a simple walnut door. Annoyed by doors already, Hanna didn’t hesitate to open and push it in. It swung in without a sound, showing a spacious room with tabletops, counters, lots of papers, and a strange, medical chair in which—
“What’s wrong? Why did you stop—” Soo began, her words cutting off when she peered over Hanna’s shoulder. Her mouth dropped open in stunned horror.
Slowly, Sol lifted her disheveled head and weakly lifted a finger to wave, her wrists bound by straps to the chair. “Oh, hello there. Fancy meeting you here,” Sol muttered distantly, her voice an eerily high pitched whisper followed by a strained laugh, her smile manic and her pupils fully dilated.
“Well, we found Sol,” Soo muttered incredulously, staring at their leader.