CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE #2
What if? What would that even look like?
Is that something I want to do? My heart says yes and no, and if I sit with the question for too long, surely I’ll be split in two.
I could take care of my mother, properly mourn my father, spend my life with friends I thought I’d never see again, and, and, and…
Talking to Valentin has made me reflect on my own feelings of being stuck, of wanting to move beyond the confines of what’s forced upon me, but also the possible ways to evolve within them.
What I do know is that no one’s going to wait around for me to make up my mind, and it wouldn’t be fair of me to ask.
Everest is awake, and there’s no reason to keep Valentin here any longer now that the carousel is up and running. It feels like someone else has taken the reins of my life, that it’s all moving quicker than I can manage while I’m bouncing along on the back of the ride.
“Something tells me that distraction wore off quickly,” Valentin says. She’s unbelievably perceptive, quietly taking in details that I don’t know I’m sharing.
“No, it helped a lot. There’s just a lot on my mind, and we might need more guitars to bash into pieces for me to work through all of them.
” I say the last part loudly, half-heartedly hoping the fair will grant my wish, but I’m out of luck.
No more running away from what’s right. “You must be eager to go home now that the anticipation around Everest’s fate has simmered down. We’ll start working on that tomorrow.”
“You know, I was actually thinking about that,” Valentin says. “I’d like to stay here until Everest is fully back on his feet.”
“But that’d be at least another two weeks.”
She shrugs. Above us, the lilac sky glitters with emerging stars. “It’s my job. I want to see my patient through. You can focus on taking care of all the other objects, and I’ll keep a close eye on him. That brother of his doesn’t come off as the best caretaker.”
Snorting, I reply, “Not at all. He’s an ass.” But the gravity of her offer wears down on me. “Are you sure?”
Valentin turns to me and smiles, and for a moment it could be Nova and me lying on our backs on the roof of my building. “I’ve been here, what, a month now?”
“Has it really been that long?” I ask. “I swear you just arrived the other day.”
“I’ve been keeping track.”
I’m going over everything that’s happened since she arrived.
Quill’s kept tabs on the days while I’ve lost all sense of how long this ongoing fiasco has tormented us.
But I trust Val – after all, I’d kept careful records of the hours when I’d arrived here too, trying to find some sense of normalcy in a decidedly abnormal experience. But that compulsion has faded.
“I guess I’ve been too distracted to realize,” I admit. A month can feel so long in a mortal life, but it’s negligible for me.
“You’ve been busy,” Valentin says. “But that’s my point. What’s another two weeks? It would benefit us all, don’t you think?”
And that’s when I know – that she can see the turmoil stirring in me. There’s a softness to her expression, not pity or worry, but a deep pain that I can tell isn’t hers. The gift she’s offering is too big for me to accept, a lifeline tossed when I’m up to my ears in anguish.
“Thank you,” I choke out.
Valentin pats my arm gently. “I’m here, whenever you’re ready to talk. Now come on, I have a book I’d like to get back to.”
I carry Valentin’s suit, helmet, and bat in a heap to the archives.
The pseudo Rage Room helped, but after our conversation, I want to make sure I have a plan for tomorrow.
Quill and I need to sort through artifacts; I’m hoping she’ll help develop a strategy for the most efficient return process to conserve my energy and even increase the number of returns per day.
I’m testing out paths in my mind: maybe I tackle the timelines chronologically, or perhaps (and this gives me hives) I have to make the returns in the order that I took them.
Engrossed and hidden behind a pile of objects, I slam right into someone as soon as I enter the archives.
“Do you normally stumble around buried in a mountain of clothes?” the individual says.
I groan, lowering my arms to reveal a particularly prickly looking Cyrus, who’s rubbing the shoulder which I may or may not have hit with an errant elbow. Should have put more weight behind it.
“As often as you walk around without an attitude.” I proceed on my path to Quill, where I set everything down on the table before stripping off my own suit. Cyrus and I haven’t even seen each other since our fight outside Everest’s tent, and I’m not in the mood to deal with his nonsense right now.
“My brother must have developed a liking for a sharp tongue,” Cyrus says. I cringe at his crass observation, but I don’t stoop to engaging. To my dismay, he makes no move to flee the premises as I’d hoped. Instead, he’s watching as I put a palm on Quill’s pages.
“How quickly can I get rid of him?” I ask her out loud, making a pointed effort to not look at the intruder.
As quickly as you accomplish what you’ve come here to ask me, Quill replies. You might achieve this faster if you work with him, you know.
Absolutely not, I switch to mental conversation. We’ll kill each other sharing a room.
You’ll kill each other regardless.
“That we will,” Cyrus chimes in.
I jump. “You can hear my head?”
He examines his fingers. “I can hear hers; calm down. Don’t need to resort to any sort of physical contact, what an absolute waste of labor.”
Do you see what I have to put up with, I aggressively yell at Quill. Get rid of him!
You need him to make the time you require, she reminds me patiently.
“That you do,” Cyrus says.
Exasperated, I tear my hand away from Quill. “Why are you even here?”
“My question precisely.”
Geneva stands at the entrance of the archives, watching Cyrus suspiciously. No Keshav in tow, which is alarming in its own way, but I’m grateful not to be left alone with Cyrus.
He picks a piece of lint off his jacket and flicks it away, looking disgusted. “For the same reason you both are: to figure out how I’m going to clean up the mess she made.”
I grit my teeth. “I have it under control.”
Geneva floats to my side. “We have it under control.”
“Do you?” he asks, looking between us. “Why, tell me, then. What’s your marvelous plan? Does it require time that only I can make, or have you found a way to evade the rules of the space-time continuum?”
I don’t have many violent urges, but I would be fine seeing him fall face first into the river.
Maybe Calliope could ‘heat up the water’, too.
Imagining this obnoxious god boiling in lost thoughts is the only thing that gets me to steady my breath.
Geneva’s fantasizing about his demise too, I’m sure.
Cyrus takes a seat. “That’s what I thought.”
I’m so tired, and there’s enough on my plate without a soul-draining standoff with a god.
I turn to Geneva. “You don’t need to be here, you know. I can handle him.”
She purses her lips. “Have you considered that maybe I want to be here? You’re not the only one who finds this work interesting.”
We haven’t had a chance to truly talk in the last few weeks, but our conversation down at the riverbank has stayed with me. Geneva’s right: I’ve had tunnel vision when it comes to myself, and I’ve run with assumptions about so many people around me.
“Then I’d love your help,” I tell her.
“Wow, some appreciation!” Cyrus comments, still sifting through papers. “Finally.”
My eyes will carve themselves a new home in the back of my head by the end of this evening.
“This session is limited to work, and nothing else,” I tell Cyrus. And then we metaphorically roll up our sleeves and get into it.
Apparently, a common goal does unite foes.
As much as I hate to admit it, having him here shaved off several days of work – Geneva takes inventory of all the stolen items, while Cyrus calculates how long it’ll take to make each trip (very quick, given that I’m only dropping off a parcel) and, most importantly, how much time he needs to make for me to do it all.
“Now we need to find a way to optimize these returns,” he says, studying our notes.
Geneva peers over his shoulder. “Ryka can handle that.”
I blink in surprise, but she’s still studying Cyrus’s writing. The time god steeples his fingers and looks at me expectantly.
“I do have an idea,” I say hesitantly, and to my surprise, he listens.
Quill and I pull up all our records of my past trips; we’ve kept detailed notes on how long each trip lasted, how much energy it required, and the subsequent toll it took on me.
I dust off my old research on proximity of timelines and explain to Cyrus and Geneva how moving from timeline to timeline instead of returning to the carousel would conserve more energy.
“I’d never thought to formulate it this way,” he says, mildly impressed. “This is good work. I think I can fill in some of these gaps you have here – I can predict the strongest effects of fate. Lay out the butterfly effect, if you will.”
“And I can help populate these variables you have listed,” Geneva says, jotting down both physical characteristics (size, weight, material, etc.) of the objects as well as contextual details of the timeline to feed into my calculations.
It’s exhilarating, and Cyrus catches the intoxicated grin that takes over my face as he begins annotating my equations. We’re operating like the most efficient machine when Keshav pops by to ask for Geneva’s help with something.
I walk her to the exit, leaving Cyrus to continue working at the table. “Thank you for your help in there.”
“I needed to oversee you to prevent any further hijinks,” she says, but there’s a sparkle in her eye that I’ve missed seeing. “May I ask…All this research you’ve been doing, has it all been to go home?”