The next thing I knew, I found myself back in Ward E, my consciousness recentered in my body, recoupled against my will.

I was alone.

Getting yanked back into my body like that was horribly disorienting, particularly now that I could feel enough of my transformed body to be painfully aware of how truly inhuman it had become.

But the body horror could wait.

What the fudge just happened?

I stood in the middle of a hallway, watching a procession of hospital beds rolling by, bearing corpses out into the Garden Court.

“Andalon?” I called, speaking her name softly. “Andalon, please, where are you?”

But I got no response.

I sighed, which only made the insides of my helmet that much more unbearable.

“Andalon!?” I said, nearly yelling.

This time, there was a response—but not a verbal one. It was a feeling, a powerful, all-encompassing feeling.

I felt fear, worry beyond belief, and tragic anger.

“Flibbertigibbet…” I muttered.

She was upset with me. Andalon was upset that I hadn’t pulled out of the memory.

“Andalon, please, we’re so close to the answer,” I said. “I can feel it. You just need t—”

—Suddenly, I staggered in place, as if I’d been punched. My body felt numb. I would have toppled onto the floor if I hadn’t used my psychokinesis to stop my fall.

“Andalon… please, don’t do this. I know it scared you, but you—you have to be brave. I can’t do it for you! I—”

And then her voice filled my every pore.

“I DON’T WANT YOU TO DIE!!”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“NO YOU WON’T!!”

Then, just as suddenly, I felt her presence retreat, like a child giving their parents the cold shoulder.

My lips pursed as my heart broke.

Angel… Andalon was mad at me because she was scared for me.

When she’d first appeared to me, her one goal was to save the world from the fungus. But now… had she grown so attached to me that she’d be willing to sabotage our mission just to keep from losing me?

“Beast’s teeth,” I muttered.

I got choked up.

“Andalon, I… I’m sorry. I didn’t know I meant that much to you. I…”

It’s hard to put into words how much it hurt to have a child terrified I’d be taken from her. It was like an inversion of the loss I felt for Rale. It was like my dead child had come back from the grave, only for me to be the one to put them at risk of losing the one they loved.

Me.

“Please, we have to talk about this. You can’t just…”

But she wasn’t listening. I could tell.

I could feel it.

“Andalon? Are you okay?”

But I got no response.

What about Yuta?

I focused, imagining Yuta standing before me. It helped that I genuinely wanted to keep talking things over with him. I wanted to access his memories of what Suisei had told him, to probe them deeper in preparation for confronting Dr. Horosha himself. Because, darn it, this time, I was going to get answers from our resident international man of mystery!

But Yuta’s spirit didn’t appear.

I had a dopplegenneth check on his soul crystal in my main menu. It was still filled with the light of his soul, but… there was a barrier wrapped around it, like a luminous web. I couldn’t get it out of the way.

I tried summoning Lord Uramaru’s spirit once more, only to feel something like a hand clenched tight around Yuta’s consciousness. And the ‘hand’ wouldn’t let go. It got to the point where I was grimacing and squeezing my fists from the mental effort I was putting into prying Yuta’s soul out of Andalon’s grasp.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Because of course it was Andalon.

In the end, all I got was a headache.

“Fine, Andalon” I muttered, lowering my head, “I’ll figure it out on my own.”

Sometimes, a person just had to let someone help them, even if they didn’t want that help.

Next stop? The self-help group. Suisei’s secrets were gonna get blown wide open, so help me.

I set off in a defiant, heartbroken march—or as much of a march as one could do without functioning legs—only to get sidelined by a buzz from my console.

As much as I hate to say it, at that moment, I actually resented my medical duties. I finally had a lead—stars, time, and Angels—and I wasn’t going to let myself get pulled away from it. Not this time.

Still, out of sheer force of habit, I couldn’t stow my PortaCon back into my hazmat suit’s belly pocket without taking a glance at the latest message.

Pulling it out, I read a deceptively simple text message:

Dr. Howle to Room E9.

And, just like that, everything changed.

E9 was Mr. Himichi’s room.

Isn’t it wild, how a couple of words can transfigure your emotions in the blink of an eye.

I made my way to E9 as fast as I could. On the way over, I nearly fell flat on my face.

There was a reception desk in the middle of the hallway outside of Room E9. A dead nurse sat behind the desk, lying face down in a puddle of her own fungus-tainted fluids.

Deborah, I thought, recalling her name.

There was a row of metal chairs up against the wall. Two dead patients were laid on top of one another there, left to lean against a section of the wall that extruded in a square support column. A male nurse sat across from the bodies, slumped over, coughing like a dying fountain. There was a console in his hand.

He looked up at me with blackshot eyes.

It was Marv, the nurse I’d gotten into a scuffle with the first time I’d come here.

“He was asking for ‘the bow-tie man’,” Marv explained.

I bit my lip.

Angel, I thought, he must mean Mr. Himichi…

“The—” Marv coughed again, spewing flecks of black—“the fluid aphasia came and went. So quickly. He’s just… crashed.”

Once more, I felt a fear I’d come to hate: the fear of knowing. But I bid myself onward. I had to see him.

As I stepped into Room E9, no one noticed how I had to stoop to get through the doorway. I wonder: if they had, would they have even cared?

“Tie-bow,” Mr. Himichi said. “Boko-non.”

He lay on his bed. The sight of him made my lips pucker. I had to fight back tears.

Fungal lobes had begun to emerge from the sides of his head, like freakish sideburns. What was left of his skin were patches and valleys between stains and plaques of vulgar colors. The stool I’d pulled out to sit on during my first visit was exactly where I’d left it.

“Tachi-ta goni.”

Mr. Himichi’s native tongue was his last refuge.

His winter had finally come. Sheets of drawings covered him like blood-dripped snow, unmelted beneath the ceiling’s harsh, fluorescent lights. He tried to move, to reach for something, but his hand refused to obey him. It bent to the side, forcing his wrist to do the pushing.

Something like a bird slid off the edge of the bed. It hit the vinyl floor with paper wings spread wide. I didn’t bother trying to reach down to get it, instead letting my powers take care of it.

Mr. Himichi let out a frightened moan, staring at me, half-comprehending.

The “bird” in my hands was actually a booklet. It seemed Mr. Himichi had ripped the paper into thirds and made the booklet by stabbing it through with paper-clips to form a spine to hold it all together. I sat down on the stool, splaying myself side-saddle. It was an uncomfortable position, but I was too focused on the drawings on the pages to care.

Himichi rambled, as if in a dream. “Story tail,” Mr. Himichi said, rambling—as if in a dream. “Poniki. Riri. Riri…”

The booklet trembled in my hands.

This is what he’d fought for, I told myself. This was his hill.

I gently turned the pages, guided only by my memories of its author’s words. At first glance, it looked like unformed chaos, just lines and cross-hatchings, colored all the same. Here a helix, there a corner or curve. But then I saw it for what it was. It crystallized.

Wind danced down a boulevard, over a sea of busy heads. There were mountains in the backdrop, like wires, threading through the narrow spaces between the skyscrapers. Two figures were tucked away in the lower-left corner, a head shorter than the rest, barely larger than letters. But there was no mistaking who they were.

I played Mr. Himichi’s words in my mind.

In a city where the skyscrapers press up against the mountains and the sea, you might be forgiven for thinking magic had gone away—but you would be wrong.

I turned the page. I saw a pond, a fishing rod, and two children, sitting on a pier on the water, beside a moon bridge over reeds.

The tea gardens in Noyoko are the things of fairy tales. Sitting there, over the water, watching the koi among the lily pads, the sounds of the twenty-million footsteps melts away, until all you can hear are swan-wings beating on the water as time itself breathes.

I turned the page. Each page was harder to pass than the last. The sights began to blur. The work steadily degraded with every page.

I turned and turned, again and again.

And then I stopped, faced by a kiss, beautiful and clear. The faces seemed to hold one another, locked in an embrace. The lines were thick and dark. You could barely notice all the shadows of erased marks.

She was the girl with hair like the sun. I was the boy with hair like the night. We fell in love, her and I. We fell in love a thousand times over. They were halcyon days, the kind that make life worth living.

“Riri…”

I looked up. Mr. Himichi was watching, his head on its side, his eyes’ glassy gaze limpid with tears.

With my powers, I scooted the stool close to the bedside. I reached for him, my hands a-quiver with more mercy than they could hold. I clasped his frigid fingers in my gauntleted hands.

The dream-forgers. The makers of worlds.

With my other hand, I flipped back to the first page. He looked at me and the pages, knowing both, but remembering neither.

I took a deep breath. He’d said he’d loved story-telling. I was honored to oblige him.

I held the booklet up to the light, over his eyes. He looked up to see.

I paused time for a moment, to dream up a tale. It didn’t need to be good; it just needed to do justice. I had all the pieces before me; I only needed to weave them together.

“Long, long ago,” I said, “in a forest of steel and stone, there lived a boy. The boy had been born broken, and all throughout the land, no one knew how to fix him.”

I told the tale as best I could. I stayed by his side, wishing him sweet dreams for ever and ever until his eyes closed shut and he breathed no more, dying with an image of love etched into the light of his eyes.

“Thank you, Mr. Himichi,” I said, lowering my head in grief.

I set the booklet on his bed.

Thank you, and good night.