I'll Be in My Room

I told her. Not all of it, and not in the right order, but I told her.

Because that was the part with the most urgency attached to it, the warlock first. Then Mori, who lifted one wing from the foot of the bed when I said his name. Then the forest, and the first slide, and the window that had held when it needed to, and finally Kathi-1, whom I pointed at, since she was currently unconscious on this girl’s pillow and seemed to be the thing in the room most in need of an explanation.

The girl at the desk, whom I’d already started calling Kathi-2 in my head for lack of anything better, listened to all of it. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t ask a single question, not even the obvious ones, which I’d had answers ready for.

I decided she was someone who let you finish before she started taking your argument apart, and approved. It was what I’d have done.

“The part I haven’t worked out,” I said, “is the order after this. There’s a next world, obviously. There’s always a next world. The real question is how many of them there are between here and…”

I’d lost the end of the sentence somewhere. I went looking for it and found the room had gone soft at the edges, and that the bed under me was a great deal more comfortable than a bed that narrow had any right to be.

“…between here and the end,” I finished, considerably later than I’d meant to.

Kathi-2 looked at me for a long moment. Then she lifted one hand and pointed at the bed.

“I’m sitting,” I said. “Sitting is already resting. I don’t need to be supervised into it.”

She kept pointing.

I looked around for support. Kou had folded himself into the crook of Kathi-1’s elbow at some point during the warlock, and hadn’t moved since. Mori was a small white shape at the foot of the bed, wings tucked, breathing slow. Ryu had given up on his wing and curled across Kathi-1’s feet, one eye shut and the other closing. Somewhere in my explanation, my audience had come down to one, and she was the one pointing.

The bed was built for one person. Apart from me, perched on its edge, it currently held one person, two bats, and a dragon, and the only space left was a gap along the wall about the width of me, provided I didn’t mind cold stone on one side and my own unconscious double on the other.

I minded. I climbed over Kathi-1 and lay down anyway, strictly because it was the most efficient available use of the time, and had just long enough to register Kathi-1’s elbow in my ribs and Ryu’s tail across my ankles before I stopped registering anything at all.

***

When I woke, the gray at the window had gone to black, and someone had lit the lamp on the desk.

Courtesy of my elbow finding her ribs this time, Kathi-1 woke a breath after me. Kou and Mori came around a moment later, unfolding stiffly and looking offended about it. Ryu didn’t wake at all.

The chair at the desk was empty.

“She’s gone,” Kathi-1 said. She sat up too fast, winced, and did the rest of it more carefully. “Five strangers fall out of the air into her room, and she lets us fall asleep and then leaves. I know what I’d do with that time.”

“What?”

“Go straight to Sikorska.”

I looked at her. She held my look for about a second.

“That was different,” she said. “I wrote a letter. I didn’t sneak out while everyone was asleep.”

“We wouldn’t do that to each other…”

Kathi-1 looked at the ceiling.

“I hope…,” I added.

The door opened before anyone could improve on that.

A writing board held flat against her chest in one arm, her other hand still on the door, she came in. It was a thin square of wood with a sheaf of paper pinned under a brass strip along the top, the corners soft from handling. She stopped just inside the doorway when she saw most of us awake and looking at her.

Then all four of us talked at once. Kathi-1 wanted to know where she’d been. I wanted to know who she’d told, which was the more useful question, and I asked it louder. Kou wanted to know whether anyone was on their way here right now. Mori asked something too, quieter, and it got lost under the rest of us.

She didn’t answer any of us. She looked at the floor, and then at the wall, anywhere that wasn’t one of our faces, and blinked hard at the stones, twice. The hand holding the board wasn’t steady.

She tilted it toward herself anyway and drew one finger across the paper, and ink followed it, her knuckles trailing through the wet line as she went.

It came slowly. Her finger moved, stopped, and moved again, each pause long enough to be its own decision. We waited it out.

Then she turned the board around, and it read, ‘I didn’t report you.’

She took it back, and the next line came a little faster: ‘I can only talk like this.’

And then, faster again: ‘Sikorska summoned me. She wants me back in lessons. She always wants me back in lessons.’

The room stayed quiet for a while after that.

I had talked at her for however long it had taken me to fall asleep. It hadn’t once occurred to me to wonder why she never talked back.

***

The rest of the explanation went better, mostly because Kathi-1 took over the parts she’d slept through the first time, and Kathi-2 answered what she was asked instead of what she was shouted at.

I asked her for the date, once the warlock and the windows and the two of us had all been accounted for.

That one came fast. No pause in her finger at all.

I worked it out against home. A hundred and fifty days. Five months, near enough, which put this world eighty-seven days past Kathi-1’s, where hers had been sixty-three past mine.

“So the steps aren’t even the same size,” Kou said. “Wonderful.”

“It’s more than we knew this morning,” I said.

We’d all slept. She was the only one in the room who looked like she hadn’t, dark under both eyes, tired in a way sleep had apparently stopped fixing some time ago.

Mori was watching her. Not the board; her. He’d gone very still at the foot of the bed, and he stayed that way after the rest of us had returned to the board, long enough that I noticed it, and then long enough that I stopped noticing it and picked up the arithmetic again.

Kathi-2 wrote something else and held it out without looking up: ‘Do what you came to do. I’ll be in my room.’

Then she went back to the desk and sat down with her back to us, in the same position I’d first seen her in, from the other side of a window.

We were all still in her room.

Kathi-1 looked at me. I looked at Kou, and Kou looked at Mori. I’d come braced for a second Kathi-1: an argument, a demand to come along, a plan before I’d finished stretching. I didn’t have anything prepared for a back.

“Where’s your Kou?” Kou said.

For a moment I didn’t think she was going to answer. She wrote without turning around, then held the board up over her shoulder, turned so we could see it, and it read, ‘I sent him away. Talking to him like this got annoying. I told him to go live in the wild, with his own kind.’

Kou didn’t ask her anything else. He didn’t say anything to me, either.