Chapter 15: The Anchor and the Storm

Then, just as suddenly as it began, it stops.

The sound cuts out. The feeling of motion ceases. I slam into something hard.

My body. I am back in my body.

I gasp, a ragged, painful breath, and my senses come rushing back in. I am on my hands and knees on a cold, hard surface. Cobblestones.

I cough, the air I am breathing cold and sharp. I look up, my eyes wide with a terror so profound it is paralyzing.

I am in a city. But it is not Tokyo. It is not Paris. It is... nowhere.

The architecture is a nightmarish, impossible jumble. A Victorian gas lamp stands next to a flickering, holographic Japanese advertisement. A Parisian bistro with red-and-white checkered tablecloths is built into the side of a gleaming, futuristic chrome skyscraper. The sky is not black. It is a deep, bruised purple, with a crack in it, like a fractured piece of glass, leaking a sickly green light.

People are here. But they are like the city. A woman in a Victorian ball gown walks past, her face a blur of static. A man in a sharp, 1940s-style suit talks on a phone that seems to be made of water. They do not see me. They walk through each other, ghosts in a city of ghosts.

"What is this...?" I whisper, my voice trembling. "Hell? Is this hell?"

"Not hell," a voice says. "Just... the space between."

I spin around. A girl is standing there, watching me. She is the only solid thing in this entire, fractured landscape.

She is perhaps my age, with short, boyish-cut black hair. She wears a simple, practical outfit-dark jeans, combat boots, and a gray hoodie. Her face is sharp, intelligent, and utterly calm. Her eyes, a deep, dark brown, hold an unnerving stillness, a wisdom that feels ancient.

"Who are you?" I ask, my voice a croak.

"My name is Hitane," she says, her voice as calm and steady as her gaze. She does not shout over the distant, whining sound. She just speaks, and her voice cuts through it.

"Where... where am." I cannot even form the question.

"This," she says, gesturing to the impossible city around us, "is a pocket dimension. A... temporary construct. My apologies for the decor. I had to build it quickly."

I stare at her. "Build it? You... you did this?"

"No," she says, with a flicker of what might be annoyance. "You did. Or rather, your... condition... did. This is a manifestation of your uncontrolled spatial resonance. A bubble of chaos. I just... contained it."

"I... I do not understand," I stammer. "My apartment... Aiko... my friend... Is she...?"

"She is fine," Hitane cuts in, her voice sharp. "I diverted your jump. Your apartment is still where it should be, though I suspect you will have some explaining to do about the scorch marks on your doorframe. Your friend is safe. She is just very, very confused. And probably terrified."

Relief, so potent it makes me weak, floods my system. Aiko is safe.

"How... how did you do this?" I ask, looking at this impossible, calm girl. "The voice on the phone..."

"That was me," she says. "I have been tracking you for two weeks, Juiro."

She knows my name. The ice-cold fear returns.

"You have been hard to pin down," she continues, walking closer. She moves with a slow, deliberate grace, her boots making no sound on the cobblestones. "Your jumps are erratic. Noisy. You are... very powerful. And very, very broken."

"Who are you?" I ask again, my voice stronger this time.

"I told you. My name is Hitane." She stops a few feet in front of me, her dark eyes seeming to x-ray my very soul. "And I am the other girl from your dream."

The world, already fractured, shatters.

The dream. The hill. The two girls. Minaki, with her moon-white hair. And the other one. The whirlwind. The girl with the brown, pigtail hair and the mischievous, laughing eyes.

I stare at this short-haired, serious, black-clad girl. "No. That is not... you are not..."

"My hair was brown, once," she says, as if reading my mind. "A long time ago. People change, Juiro."

"But... how?" I am drowning, and this girl is the only solid thing in the void. "Minaki... she... she found me. She said... she said she was my friend."

"She is," Hitane says, her expression tightening. "She is my sister."

Sister. The word lands with the force of a physical blow.

"Minaki is... she is the heart," Hitane says, her voice taking on a new, strained tone. "She acts. She feels. She is a creature of 'now'. She found you, and she was so overjoyed, she did not think. She poured her hope, her light, her love into you, trying to fix the hole in your memory. She was trying to heal you."

"She did," I whisper. "For a day. The world... it was not gray."

"She did not heal you," Hitane corrects, her voice sharp. "She overwhelmed you. She reawakened your gift without an anchor. She gave a starving man a ten-course banquet and was surprised when it almost killed him. And then, when you panicked, she panicked. And she ran."

"Ran where?" I ask, desperate. "Do you know where she is?"

"No," Hitane says, and for the first time, a flicker of raw emotion-of anger, of fear-crosses her face. "She is... lost. When she ran, she... she hid herself. From me. From the world. She is shielding her emotions. I cannot... I cannot feel her."

"I... I am sorry," I stammer, not knowing what else to say.

Hitane takes a deep breath, her calm, controlled mask settling back into place. "It is not your fault. It is ours. We... we should never have been separated. The balance is broken."

"Balance?" I echo.

"Minaki is the heart," she says, pointing to her own chest. "I... I am the mind. And you, Juiro... you are the anchor."

"Anchor?"

"Minaki can feel the emotions of the world. I can... perceive the flow of time."

The words are so insane, so impossible, that my mind just... accepts them. In this fractured city, under this broken sky, time travel seems almost reasonable.

"Time?" I whisper.

"I can... nudge it," she says. "See its echoes. Step outside its flow. But I cannot control it. Not without the heart and the anchor. And Minaki... she cannot shield herself from the world's pain. Not without the mind and the anchor. And you... you are the anchor. You are connected to space. You are supposed to be the 'here' in our 'when' and 'why'."

She gestures to the chaotic, impossible city around us. "But your anchor is broken. You are not tethered to one 'here'. You are... untethered. You are drifting. And you are pulling the world apart with you. This... this is a spatial echo. A wound in reality. It is the beginning of the end, Juiro. If we do not fix this, if we do not find Minaki and restore the balance... you are not just going to destroy yourself. You are going to take the rest of the world with you."

The weight of her words, the scale of this... this responsibility, is too much to bear.

"Fix it? How?" I cry, the terror finally giving way to a raw, desperate anger. "I am not an 'anchor'! I am a 24-year-old, failed student! I cannot control this! I do not even know what 'this' is!"

"I know," Hitane says, and her voice is, for the first time, genuinely gentle. She steps closer and, with a courage that astounds me, she reaches out and places her hand flat on my chest, right over my hammering heart.

Her hand is warm. It is solid.

"You do not have to control it," she says. "You just have to hold still. I will control it."

As her hand touches me, the whining sound in the void... stops. The fractured, purple sky... it solidifies. The impossible, jumbled buildings... they freeze.

"What... what are you doing?" I whisper.

"I am anchoring you," she says, her face a mask of intense concentration. "I am borrowing your gift, and I am focusing it. But I cannot hold it for long. This... this pocket is unstable. I am going to send us back. But I cannot send us back to your apartment. It is... compromised. Too much resonance. I am going to send us... home."

"Home?"

"To the last place all three of us were together," she says, her eyes closing. "To the hill. To the tree."

She grips the front of my jacket with her other hand, her knuckles white. "This is going to feel... strange."

Before I can ask what she means, she pulls.

The world does not shatter. It folds. The city, the cobblestones, the broken sky-they all fold in on themselves, like a piece of paper, with me and Hitane at the center. I feel that agonizing, squeezing pressure, a billion-ton weight.

And then, silence.

I open my eyes.

I am standing on soft, green grass. The air smells of pine, and of sunshine, and of a faint, floral perfume.

In front of me stands a colossal, ancient tree, its branches reaching out like protective arms.

And sitting under the tree, her knees drawn to her chest, her head in her hands, her white hair a waterfall of silver, is Minaki.

She lifts her head, her violet eyes wide with a pain so profound it stops my heart. She stares at me, and then at Hitane, who is still clutching the front of my jacket.

"You found him," Minaki whispers, her voice broken.

"And I found you," Hitane replies, her voice tight with a decade of anger and love. "We are done running, sister."

The three of us. The anchor, the heart, and the mind. We are all here, in the one place we have been dreaming of for ten years.

We are home. And the world is still holding its breath.