You Stopped Going to the Lab

“Huh,” she said, tilting her head at exactly the angle her dragon had. “That’s new.”

She didn’t move to help any of us up. She didn’t look particularly alarmed, either. Given the effort the arrival had cost, that struck me as somewhere between admirable and a little insulting.

“You’re going to want to say something,” she said, when none of us did. “I generally find that helps.” She wasn’t alarmed so much as delighted, the boredom of the last several months evidently having just ended. “Also, for what it’s worth, this is easily the best thing that’s happened to me since I got here.”

“Katherina,” I managed, from the ground, because apparently I was going to do this lying down. “This is Kou. That’s Mori.”

“Charmed,” Kou said, from somewhere near my collarbone, in a voice that suggested the opposite.

“I got that part from the falling-out-of-the-air. I meant the part where you explain why you’re wearing my own face.”

***

She let us up eventually.

Up turned out to be a mistake. On the ground I’d barely noticed the sweat drying on me. On my feet, the night air found every damp inch of it at once and kept finding it. Past the edge of the firelight, old snow lay gray in the hollows under the trees.

Snow.

“Neither of you,” I said, holding my jaw still on purpose, “thought to mention a cloak.”

“You didn’t mention one either,” Kou said, close to my ear. “You were busy taking out a warlock.”

“I own several winter cloaks. They came all the way to Vesperine with me.”

“And that’s where they are.”

“I should have thought of it,” Mori said quietly.

Kathi-1, out in front of us in a robe lined thick enough to sleep in, looked back at my sleeves. “Fire first,” she said. “Then the face. Then the warlock.”

Toward a fire ring a few steps off, a neat circle of stones, char built up in layers that meant it had held plenty of fires before this one, she followed the dragon, who flew ahead in short hops and doubled back whenever we lagged.

“Ryu,” she said, when he settled beside her, answering a question none of us had asked yet. “He doesn’t actually need the introduction. He just likes one.”

Ryu, for his part, looked entirely unbothered by three strangers, one of them wearing his own witch’s exact face, and pointedly did not look at Kou at all, which I decided was either professional courtesy or a complete lack of interest, and didn’t examine which.

Mori swayed slightly where he’d folded himself onto a log, caught it, and didn’t seem to notice he’d done it. Kou hadn’t left my shoulder since we’d landed, which was, on reflection, not entirely like him.

Checking it, I realized, against a memory rather than just taking it in, Kathi-1 studied my face longer than politeness generally allows.

“This isn’t the first time,” she said. “I’ve seen you before. Twice.”

“I’ve never—”

“Not in person. Through windows, both times. I knew that much going in. I built one myself, for my own graduation. What I never had the first idea about was how you were supposed to climb through one.” She held up one finger. “The first time, late at night, my own room. I’d heard something, or felt it, I still couldn’t tell you which, and by the time I got to it I was out of breath for no reason I could point to. It held long enough that I saw you, and you saw me, neither of us moving, and it didn’t close until it decided to. I spent a week convincing myself I’d imagined the whole thing.”

That was mine too. The night everything started, before I’d known to call it anything.

“The second time was shorter,” she went on. “You were in a carriage. I don’t think you ever turned around.”

I hadn’t. I remembered exactly not turning around, on principle, because turning around would have meant admitting there was something behind me worth looking at.

“Kou noticed,” I said, slowly, working it out as I said it. “He missed a step. I didn’t ask him why.”

“Convenient, all the things you decide not to ask about,” Kou said, from my shoulder. I didn’t argue the point.

“Why you, though?” I said to Kathi-1. “Why your window? Your carriage? Out of every hour, every place either of us has ever stood?”

“Both times were the same visit,” she said. “I’d gone home for a handful of days. My parents were supposed to be there. The first night, I was in my own room, waiting to find out whether they actually would be.” She shrugged. “That’s when the window opened.”

“And the carriage.”

“About a week later. They never did show, not in any way that counted. I was already back at the gates when it happened.”

She didn’t say anything else about it, and I decided, for once, not to make her.

I didn’t ask what climbing down from that carriage had felt like for her. Whatever the arithmetic worked out to, we’d both been standing at the same gates, worlds apart, when a rift had noticed.

I told her the rest of it, compressed: the warlock, Mori’s arrival, the theory, the forest, the crossing, my own voice coming out flatter than I meant it to, effort I hadn’t budgeted for going into keeping the sentences in order at all. She interrupted twice while I talked, both times to ask exactly the question I’d have asked myself.

“A warlock unraveling timelines,” she said, once I’d finished, “sounds like something a committee somewhere should be handling. Not two teenagers and three familiars.”

“We’re all there is. You already know we can’t trust adults with this.”

She didn’t argue that part.

“The committee in my own timeline heard everything Sikorska had to say,” I said, “and decided the correct response was discussing it to death. I’m not interested in giving another one the chance to reach the same verdict twice.”

“That doesn’t make it true,” Kathi-1 said. “It just means you got dismissed, which happens to plenty of true things and plenty of nonsense both.” She wasn’t wrong, and I decided not to say so. “The part I actually can’t get past is the warlock. Something powerful enough to unravel entire timelines, and nobody even has a name for them. That’s not ‘unlikely.’ That’s the kind of thing people say when they’d rather be somewhere else.”

“I crossed an entire timeline and nearly didn’t survive doing it to be exactly here, telling you this. That’s a considerable amount of effort to put into being somewhere else.”

She considered that longer than the sentence warranted.

Something crossed her face I recognized because I’d worn it myself, not long ago, in a chamber with a table too long to see either parent from the middle of it.

“You stopped going to the lab,” I said, not entirely sure why until it was already out.

Kathi-1 glared at me in response.