Ah. So… we’re at that part of the story, now.

Ani’s.

Though all of my spirits’ memories are precious to me, Ani’s memories would always be special. To this day, I still regret what could have been.

I could have done better.

I should have.

I owed Jonan a great debt. Yes, he had a stick up his butt, but… I never should have questioned his love for Ani Lokanok. It would truly stand the test of time. Even now, that love continues to prove its worth.

Talk about a kintsugi project…

Around itself, time did coil; static kissed the memory-fragment’s edge.

Ani was used to the world being crazy. It was just the degree of craziness that was all out of whack. Growing up, becoming an adult, becoming successful, finding a partner—that was crazy. It was crazy to expect that it would always work out. But people kept thinking like that, regardless. It was stupid and frustrating and really, really stressful, and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it. Dial that up to eleven, and then you got something like the zombie apocalypse.

That’s what she thought.

Zombies didn’t scare Ani, not in the existential sense, anyhow. They were just another part of the craziness. The hopelessness, though, that was what scared her, especially because hope had a really bad habit of disappearing when it was most needed.

That was why it meant so much to Ani—to all of us, really—when, after days of hopelessness, there was finally a ray of sunshine. It came with the dawn, as all good things did.

Hoshi had recovered—from darkpox.

Ani muttered a prayer of thanksgiving to the Angel. She didn’t need to go to the chapel to do it. She just walked up to a window and contemplated the morning cresting over the rooftops.

Ani didn’t know that Yuta Uramaru and his family were time-travelers. She knew Jonan thought they were, and it would have been really amazing (and also really scary) if it were true, but, right now, that wasn’t what mattered. All that had mattered was that there was a little Munine girl—mysterious and unchipped—suffering from darkpox, who needed help.

Ani had vowed to give it to her, and give it to her, she had.

Ani had taken great pains to ensure her patient was isolated from anyone or anything that might potentially infect her with NFP-20. The result was a miniature ICU inside Ward E’s ICU. By fiddling with the HVAC systems, Ani had transformed an ordinary patient room into a negative pressure chamber. Even with Hoshi within the protective enclosure of the darkpox bed, Ani didn’t take any risks, refusing to enter the room without the added protection of a sweltering hazmat suit.

She wore it now, as she stood in that little room, leaning over the darkpox bed, marveling at the miracles that had come to pass. The lights were bright overhead. Without the help of the analogue clock on the wall or the digital clock on the upper corner of her PortaCon’s screen, Ani wouldn’t have known what time it was.

Time didn’t matter when you were doing the right thing.

The first miracle was the darkpox vaccine. It was a simple thing, yet it was as mighty as the Hallowed Beast’s roar. But, as mighty as it was, it wouldn’t have been enough on its own. Hoshi had arrived in a fulminant state. Ravaged by the virus, the girl’s liver had begun to fail, setting off a sequence of medical dominos that had brought her to within an inch of irreversible brain damage—and would have gone all the way—were it not for the second miracle: an amino-acid cocktail, fresh from a matter printer.

Who says chemistry can’t save the day?

The third miracle was bunny rabbits, after a fashion. Even now, it was trickling down the IV drip from the IV bag on the stand beside Hoshi’s bed, releasing its magic into her veins. The xanthic brew of monoclonal antibodies was the fruit of transgenic rabbit blood, genetically engineered to save lives.

Medically speaking, now that the vaccine had taken full effect, there was no longer any need for Hoshi to be hooked up to the monoclonal antibody solution, but Ani didn’t want to take that risk.

Then there was the fourth miracle, which was Ani’s favorite of them all: a brand new liver, fresh from the matter printers in the hospital’s depths, printed from incubated cultures of the girl’s own cells. Ani was proud of herself for forcing the surgeons to do the transplant in the negative pressure chamber, and to wear hazmat suits while they did it.

One of the surgeons had called her crazy for demanding that. Said it was an “abuse of power”; Ani’s authority to order him to do it came from me, who had given her the go-ahead.

The surgery had happened in the middle of the night. The surgeon who had berated her was dead now, another victim of the Green Death.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

But Hoshi was as clean as could be.

Through the Angel’s Grace and the pluck of men, all things were possible. The demon wind was a threat no longer; darkpox was such a known quantity—the exact opposite of the Green Death. There were no mysteries left in it. Mankind hadn’t just found a way to cure darkpox; we’d conquered it. Thinking about it made Ani go misty-eyed.

And now?

Praise the Light, Ani thought. Praise the Light.

Ani’s heart smiled as the little girl’s eyes fluttered open, and saw her, bundled up in a hazmat suit after having crept through the plastic quarantine tunnel and emerging into Hoshi’s room like a traveler from another world.

Hoshi gasped and stared. The color had come back to her cheeks. The sweat and blood Ani had washed from her face and hair would not return again.

Ani tapped the console built into the side of the darkpox bed and activated the opening mechanism. The bed unsealed with a hiss. Ani couldn’t help but think it looked kind of like a vampire’s coffin, even though it was actually almost the exact opposite of that.

Slowly, Hoshi sat up in bed, and all on her own. She looked around, quiet, but wide-eyed with curiosity.

Aside from her desperate, desperate need for a win, one of the reasons Ani felt so passionately about Hoshi’s case was because of how the girl reminded Ani of herself, back when she was young and had still thought the world was as simple and true as it was in her dreams.

Before Hoshi could even open her mouth, Ani handed her a cup of water, which the girl downed graciously, after politely bowing her head.

If her father was any indication, Hoshi likely didn’t speak a word of Trenton, and so, after setting the cup on the counter, Ani addressed the girl in Munine.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

Then the girl spoke her reply, which made Ani feel a bit awkward, because she could only understand maybe three-quarters of it. The first part was very clear.

“Where am I? Where’s Mommy? Where’s Daddy? Where’s my brother?” Then she looked around. “Big Brother Ichigo?”

But then she started talking more, and that’s when the awkwardness set in. Some of the conjugations she was using didn’t sound quite right, and some grammatical particles weren’t there at all. Whatever dialect it was, it sounded quite old to Ani’s ears. Then again, when a dialect was so niche that you couldn’t even understand what a person’s name meant—and Ani certainly couldn’t; she’d never heard the word “hoshi” before—it was probably no surprise that she was having difficulty with it.

She talked a lot about Big Brother Ichigo. She was clearly aware that she’d been sick.

“How did I get better?” she asked. “How did you do it? Are you a wise onmyoji?”

She asked her if she was a spirit.

Ani shook her head.

The girl’s eyes widened even more. Her face, though healthy, paled in shock.

“Are you Ichijō no Hana?”

Ichijō no Hana, the Daikenja’s one, true love, was, according to legend, Mu’s greatest sorcerer. Her role in Munine culture was kind of like Lassedite Athelmarch’s in Trenton culture, except she was viewed as a paragon of good.

My favorite legend about her is the story of how, at the end of her life, the Cloud King—the chief deity of the traditional Munine pantheon—offered her the chance to become a goddess, but refused, because she wished to escape the cycle of reincarnation, as her love had done.

“I am not a sorceress,” Ani answered, “least of all Ichijō no Hana.” She smiled. “Though I certainly appreciate the compliment.”

“Where are my Mommy and Daddy?” Hoshi asked.

That question again.

Ani swallowed hard. She found herself unsure of how to respond. How could she tell this miniature of herself that her brother and mother were dead? Ani was confident Hoshi would understand something as straightforward as “your mother and brother are dead”, but, considering the situation, that was the last way she’d ever want to break the news to her.

Then, to both girls’ surprise, Ani’s console rang from within the pocket of her hazmat suit. Pulling it out with her bulky green gloves, Ani poked and prodded the thick plastic casing as she touched the screen and answered the incoming videophone call.

Hoshi gawked at the device. “What is that sound?” she asked. “Is that your magic, Ichijō no Hana? Is that how you saved me?”

At least, that’s what Ani thought she said.

But then Ani read the name displayed by caller ID, and her throat went dry and tight.

Mom.

Around itself, time did coil; static kissed the memory-fragment’s edge.

As a kid, Ani had played violin. Yes, it was very much a stereotype—child of Munine immigrant kid playing a musical instrument to satisfy her tiger parents—but, she’d been rather good at it. Unfortunately, it had never brought Ani as much joy as she would have liked, mostly because of the unbearable weight of her parents’ expectations. In a family with a healthy dynamic, Ani would have been able to talk to her parents about it, and maybe figure out a way to make everyone happier with the situation. Unfortunately, her parents preferred yelling to talking, at least when she’d been little.

Any hopes of making things better, however, died when she was in fourth grade. Ever since then, Ani couldn’t play the violin without thinking about car accidents, which made it pretty much impossible for her to play the violin at all.

It happened on a lonely, cliffside drive along a darkened coast on the way back from the Tonevay East Trenton Violin Competition. A car came racing around the bend of the road, with their headlights set to blinding. Her mother had briefly lost control of the vehicle, and that brief loss would have plunged them to a watery grave on the craggy rocks of the coastline below, had a particularly stubborn strip of metal guardrail not gotten in the way. Much of the rest of the drive was spent fighting over who was to blame: Ani, or her mother, even though it wasn’t the fault of either of them.

The Angel came into Ani’s life not long after that. Her mother was the first to find Him. She never would have overcome her alcoholism without His help. For that alone, Ani would love Him forever; her faith would never wane. But, in those days, Ani’s faith was still weak. She hadn’t truly understood the Angel’s message. Not yet.

Enamored with the faith, Ani had learned as much about it as she could, and, in doing so, she discovered the great darkness that dwelled within Lassedicy’s history. For a brief time, she was lost, still faithful, but unsure of herself. Who am I meant to be? she wondered.

And what would the ancestors think?

Her father was always concerned about what the ancestors would think.

But then, in a sudden spark of epiphany, everything settled, falling in place just like Sister Mary’s sermons said they would. In that moment, everything changed: Ani’s faith had matured. She finally understood the Angel’s message, and with that knowledge, she found confidence and purpose. It was the most beautiful truth she’d ever know. It was as if gauze had been lifted off her eyes, freeing her to gaze upon the supernal colonnade that stood below the march of time and made life into something worth living.

Around itself, time did coil; static kissed the memory-fragment’s edge.