Apart Together

Ken sat at the kitchen table, as he had the whole day prior. The beer he held in his hand had grown warm as he just stared at it, not drinking. He swirled it around.

Was it all a waste? Ken took a long swig of the beer. He couldn’t even feel it; he was drinking them too slowly. He just felt dizzy. And tired.

Why did I even bother? He looked outside, blinking slowly, heavily. A large, disorderly pile of papers sat in his office, untouched since he threw it in there that day.

It had been three days since Irina had died. The taste of it still lingered in his mouth. Maybe that was why he’d begun to drink.

He couldn’t place why, but something was strange about the circumstances of her death. The masked girl… She had left Irina alive. It seemed a spur of the moment decision, but a decision nonetheless. And then her comrade shot Irina.

His stomach turned as he remembered the blood dripping from her head and stomach, and he nearly lost the beer he’d drank. But after a struggle, he forced back the nausea.

May walked into the kitchen, and Ken turned to her groggily. “Hi, Dad.” She stopped by the kitchen island.

He didn’t respond—just stared at her, both hands wrapped around his bottle.

They stood there in silence for a while.

But eventually, May spoke up. “So, are you done?” She leaned back onto the island and crossed her arms.

Their eyes met. “What?”

“With the work you’ve done.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, you’ve just been sitting around drinking.”

“Your mother is dead.”

“All the more reason not to just sit there.”

Ken felt a twinge of annoyance in his gut. “Can’t you show some respect?”

She scoffed. “Dad, we’re all gonna die. Of course I’m sad that Mom died. But that doesn’t mean her work should be for nothing.”

He shook his head, taking a drink of his beer. “You’re ungrateful. She was trying to protect the world, and I was trying to protect you.”

“Yeah, maybe I am being ungrateful. Maybe I just don’t want to think about it, or don’t know how to process it.” May stepped forward, taking a seat across from him at the table. “But… in order to honor her, we should keep working, right?”

He clenched and unclenched his jaw a few times. What does she know? he thought. I did this all for them.

“Don’t you feel that way, too?”

“No.”

“So, what, you’re just going to sit here and wait for the world to end around you? Wait for your kids to die, while you sit there and drink beer?”

“May, you know I was doing it to protect you. But there’s just no way, without Irina—”

“I never wanted you to protect me, Dad! Can’t you see?” She drew a spastic breath, tears streaming down her face now. “I didn’t need protection!”

“I don’t know what you mean. I was just doing what was best for us—”

“No, Dad, you were doing what was best for you. You wanted to ‘protect’ us.” She pushed back from the table, glaring up into his eyes. “You were too busy playing the hero, going off and ‘protecting’—by not even being with us, by the way. You neglected us! You abandoned me! And you ignored me!” She balled up her fists at her side, breathing hard. “All I wanted was to be together! And for you to trust me, and listen to me! For once!”

“...Come on, May. You should be able to understand I was doing it for you! Your mother was trying to save the world, but I was trying to save you! And there’s nothing we can do without her.”

“I don’t care! It doesn’t even matter if it works in the end! But to just give up like this is so… stupid! To give up on everything! On me…!”

Ken shoved back from the table too, sending it sliding forward. He stood up onto his one foot, fists clenched at his sides. His breaths came heavy and ragged, a scowl falling over his face. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You will show respect to me in this house, and to your mother. Do you understand?”

“Hell no, Dad!” she yelled, letting out a clipped groan. “I don’t understand! You feel nothing about having ditched us to deal with the end of the world by ourselves for six months? You don’t even feel any desire to continue with the work? To protect us again? It makes no sense! Was it just an excuse to see Mom?”

“Stop yelling!” cried Alice from by the table. Ken and May started, jumping back a pace each. Neither of them had seen her enter the room, or move to by the kitchen table—the top of her head barely met the level of the high tabletop. Tears welled up in her eyes, flicking back and forth between her sister and father. “Please…”

Ken blinked. His mind felt completely clear, sobered against his depression and liquor by Alice’s words. Why was he so riled up? He wasn’t sure he even knew.

May picked something up from the kitchen counter, throwing it down in front of him. A folder. He hadn’t even seen her bring it in with her. Why had he been so oblivious to them?

“I’m… sorry.” He looked at May, and then at Alice.

“Dad… you know how I knew that girl? The one that took Mom?”

Ken tilted his head, sliding the folder over to him. “How?” He pulled open the cover—

The first page within was annotated. In English, by another hand than his, or Irina’s. He flipped to the next one. And the next one.

“I met her in a coffee shop in January. She… knew more about the extirpations, and encouraged me, helped me grow. But I didn’t know who she was. I was just so… desperate.”

Ken was rifling through page after page now. Every last one was annotated carefully, and in more detail than he understood it with. “How…?” he asked, looking up at her, eyes wide with confusion.

Alice crawled up into the seat next to the spot he stood at now, and wrapped him in a hug.

“I’ve spent the past five days doing that. It was almost 600 pages.”

Ken rubbed the back of Alice’s head idly as he read a few pages’ worth of annotations. “This is… incredible…” Every page, every gap in the margins, was filled with notes and calculations. Notes he couldn’t make. “How did you learn all this?”

“This is what I’ve been doing! And you’ve been ignoring me! When I finally buckled down, and just looked at the work you’d been doing, I realized… I knew what everything meant.” She sat down at the table across from him again. “Ever since that day you told me to get studying, that’s exactly what I did. And you still ignored me.”

Ken’s heart squeezed in his chest. “I guess… I hadn’t considered that. I thought I was doing something good, something right.”

Alice squeezed him more tightly. “You did your best, Daddy…”

May just folded her hands in front of her, but he saw tears welling in her eyes, too.

“I… I’m sorry. Both of you.”

“But even with that,” May continued, voice wavering, “I’m still not sure what we can do without more of Mom’s work. I don’t think I can break any new ground. But I can understand what she wrote. I just have no idea where to go from there.“

Ken sat, silent. He also wasn’t sure whether they could make any progress. Though what May did was inspiring, and unbelievable, it didn’t completely dispel the despair swirling inside him: Irina had more knowledge on the extirpations floating in her head, more theories and algorithms, than she could ever have written down. And now, she, and all her genius, was lost. All because he hadn’t just pulled her through the boundary.

Alice’s voice peeped from buried in his shirt. “Sis, you said before that it doesn’t matter if it works?”

“I… guess I did.”

Alice reached into her pants pocket. “I… picked this up on the day Mom…” Her voice trailed off, but she tossed a silver oval onto the table. It had buttons on its face, and Ken could see a small light indicator flashing on the front of it as it clattered forward and then slid to the center of the table.

“Wait…” he muttered. “Is that…?”

“I got this from the roof. With Mom.”

“What is it?” May asked, picking it up.

“Be extremely careful.” Ken held out his hands to caution her. “Some combination of the buttons on the front will create an extirpation. Or, that’s what that girl claimed.”

“Woah…” May gingerly set it down, steering clear of the buttons on its face.

“Great job, Alice.” Ken ruffled her hair, squeezing her close to him.

“Wait. If it can manipulate the extirpations, then…”

“Well, no, I think it just creates them.” Ken studied it as he spoke, also handling it with extreme care.

“But… wait. Check this out.” May ran out of the room, and a short while later, returned with her laptop. “I’ve been working on this map overlay.” She pulled up a map peppered with lime green dots, with red lines interconnecting them in a spiral, and a blue spiral approximately interpolating them. “So, this is every extirpation ever. Or, recorded ones at least.”

“Woah, nice job. Looks good,” Ken said, staring at it.

“Thanks.” May smiled wistfully, and she clenched her jaw in an effort to stow away her emotion for now.

“Does it have predictive power?”

May nodded.

“Zone sizes, too?”

Another nod.

“Okay. Can you put in the date ‘December 24, 2026?’”

She set to typing, and the map began to shift, computing the state of things on that day. “Christmas Eve? Why?”

“Just wait. If it’s what I think it is, you’ll see.”

And, sure enough, the screen was covered in lime green.

“That’s…” May trailed off, staring at it.

“The final extirpation.”

May visibly shuddered at seeing it on the screen. “It really is the entire world, huh?”

“Indeed it is.” Ken, too, gazed at it. The entire screen, covered in an extirpation boundary. Even if it was just a projection, it was unsettling.

And the presence of the lime green boundary meant that it had passed by that day. It had triggered. Seven days early.

“Why don’t you wind it back to the present, though—no reason to get depressed about that now.”

May nodded, shaking her body to rid herself of the doubt. “Okay. So, check this out: there has never been more than a single extirpation at once.” She glanced at her father, raising her eyebrows and cocking her head expectantly.

“I don’t get it.”

“So, we can assume Bianca used this thing more than once, right?”

Ken nodded.

“Then, I think it’s safe to conclude that it doesn’t create extirpations. It redirects them. Or else we would’ve seen more than one at once. We know they occur naturally; one spawned just yesterday, and we have their device.”

“It’s possible they have another.”

“But why would they only use one at a time? If they were so focused on global catastrophe, wouldn’t they use the ones they had?”

Ken leaned back, stroking the stubble on his chin. “That’s… true, actually.”

“But a question still stands, I guess: why are they redirecting extirpations?”

Ken leaned forward again, picking it up. “I wonder how it works.”

“Do you think we could use it?” Alice asked, pulling away from her father.

They all fell silent. None of them knew the answer. By trying, any number of things could go wrong. But if they didn’t try, who knows how far they would get.

“Well,” Ken muttered. “I suppose it’s worth a shot.”

May nodded. “We’ll figure it out. Together. Right?”

Ken nodded in his turn. “Together.”

“Together!” shouted Alice.

“And… whether we fail or we succeed, we’ll do either together. For Mom.”