Rewrite That Witch
CH1148 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 1148: Camilla’s Return

“Roland.”

He looked up. Nightingale was watching him from the window with her bag of dried fish in her hand and the particular expression she wore when she’d decided to say something.

“You’ve been staring at that paper for several minutes,” she said. “You look like someone told you the world was ending.”

He set the letter down. “I hope I’m wrong,” he said, and told her the hypothesis — the silicon-based bodies, the desert that had never been a desert, the picture underneath the sand.

Nightingale listened without interrupting. This was one of the things he had come to rely on about her: she listened to things before she decided what to think about them. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment, chewing a piece of dried fish with a meditative expression.

“So if you’re right,” she said, “what happens next?”

“I don’t know. It’s too large a problem for this generation. It would take at least two before—”

“Then that’s your answer,” Nightingale said.

He blinked.

“Two generations,” she said. “So the most important thing right now is to pass the information on. Make sure it gets to the people who’ll have to deal with it.” She shrugged, the minimal movement that meant and that’s all there is to say about it. “What happens after we’re dead isn’t our problem. We can only live once. We already have enough to worry about in this life without taking on problems that belong to people who haven’t been born yet.”

Roland looked at her for a long moment.

“That’s—” He paused, recalibrated. “That’s very practical.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

“I wasn’t surprised,” he said, which was not quite true. He was a little surprised. Not that Nightingale was practical — she was the most practical person he knew, in most respects — but that she had arrived so immediately and cleanly at something that had taken him several minutes of strained thinking to approach from the other side.

“Also,” Nightingale said, apparently not finished, “the future generations don’t have to figure it out alone. If you think someone from the outside might be able to help — some other race — record what you know and leave it where they can find it.” She glanced at the window. “Didn’t you find out about the radiation people and the tablet men from the murals in the Temple? Do that. Build something underground and carve the history on the walls. Something that lasts. If there’s a race in the future that manages to use it and end the wars for good, they’ll remember that humans tried to help.”

Roland was quiet.

He was trying to think of the last time anyone had surprised him quite this cleanly.

“Are you gloating?” Nightingale demanded.

“No,” he said, very quickly, and arranged his expression. “That was genuinely incisive.”

“Hmm.” She considered this, decided it was satisfactory, and held her head slightly higher. “If you fail, at least they’ll know you tried. And failing properly is better than failing messily and leaving everyone after you with nothing to work with.”

Roland poured her a glass of Chaos Drink, which she took without comment.

She probably doesn’t understand, he thought, how much weight that idea carries. Even if human civilization fell — even if the demons won — a record buried deep enough and built well enough might survive. Another species, another civilization, a thousand years hence, might find it. Might read it. Might not make the same mistakes.

He, personally, would rather be the person who won the war than the person whose name was carved on a commemorative wall. But if it came to that — if the choice was this generation loses and the next one has something to work with versus this generation loses and the next one starts from nothing — the answer was obvious.

He made a note to discuss it with Agatha. She was the one who understood underground construction.

Sean arrived in the afternoon to collect the stone samples. Roland flagged him down before he left and handed him a requisition note for Celine’s laboratory: high-priority delivery, full material analysis requested, no other handling.

Sean looked at the note, looked at the bags of crystalline material, and asked no further questions. This was also something Roland had come to rely on.

The samples were on their way out the door when Nightingale reappeared at the office threshold.

“There’s someone at the gate,” she said. “Camilla Dary.”

Roland came down immediately.

Camilla was standing in the front yard looking like a person who had not slept in three days and had been at sea for most of them. Her clothes were sea-stained. Her hair was loose. She had walked directly from the harbor, Roland realized — not to the guest quarters, not to find a change of clothing, but here.

He brought her inside, sat her down, and poured tea.

She drained the cup in one swallow and nearly choked on it.

“Something went wrong at the Shadow Islands,” she said. “Joan—” She stopped. Steadied herself. “Joan disappeared.”

He exchanged a look with Nightingale.

“Start from the beginning,” he said. “Take your time.”

It took half an hour.

The details came in pieces — Thunder’s expedition, the Swirling Sea, the underwater cave where everything stretched and distorted, Joan’s fingers elongating as she reached through what should have been ordinary water. Then Joan swimming deeper, following something, and not returning.

They had waited two days. Joan hadn’t come back.

Camilla looked at him with bloodshot eyes — not only exhaustion, Roland realized, but guilt. She was the butler of Sleeping Island. Joan was under her care.

“Thunder said you’d know,” Camilla said. “About what happens underwater. Those pillars that stretch. The distorted space.” She set down her cup. “Is it real? Is Joan—”

“She’s alive,” Roland said.

It came out more certainly than he’d intended, and he made himself slow down. He didn’t actually know Joan was alive. But Camilla needed a foothold, not careful epistemic hedging, and the physics of what she’d described gave him more reason for confidence than the alternative.

He picked up his quill and drew a circle on a blank sheet of paper.

“The Swirling Sea,” he said. “The tides at the Shadow Islands — Thunder’s observation was right, the water level does change, and it affects the Fjord Islands. That’s an enormous volume of water moving on a regular cycle.” He drew a second circle several inches away. “So where does it go?”

Camilla traced the space between the two circles. “Somewhere east of the Sealine?”

“Has to be. If the water just disappeared, the sea would eventually drain. If it’s moving east continuously, there has to be somewhere it’s moving to and somewhere it’s moving back from. The currents near the Sealine run westward — Thunder mentioned that.” He drew a line connecting the circles, then set his quill down and picked up the page instead. “The fastest way to move something from one place to another is in a straight line.” He folded the paper. The two circles overlapped. “Or—”

Camilla stared.

“That’s impossible,” she said.

“Nightingale can move through walls,” Roland said. “I’ve watched her do it several hundred times. It’s impossible by the rules I grew up with, but it happens anyway. If the space in that region is distorted — folded — then the water isn’t traveling thousands of miles. It’s traveling the short distance through the fold.”

“And Joan—”

“Swam through a fold in space.” He considered his next words. “You said her fingers elongated. Not stretched painfully — she wasn’t injured. Which means the distortion wasn’t violent. It was—” geometric. “—a transition. She crossed from one side to the other. If the other side is also ocean, which it almost certainly is given the volume of water involved, she survived the crossing.”

Camilla let out a breath that seemed to have been held in her chest for two days.

“She’ll be east of the Sealine,” Roland said. “In unknown water, probably alone. But alive.”

It was not certainty. He was careful to hold it as hypothesis, not fact. But the hypothesis was solid, and he believed it, and something in his voice must have carried that, because Camilla’s shoulders came down for the first time since she’d arrived.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice had gone very quiet.

She swung sideways and hit the floor.

Nightingale caught her before she landed — a clean catch, both arms, all in one motion — and looked at Roland over Camilla’s unconscious form.

“Three days without sleep, at a guess,” Nightingale said.

“Take her to the Witch Building. And—” Roland paused. “Don’t tell Lightning. About Joan. Not yet.”

Nightingale nodded once. Then she stepped into the Mist, and both of them were gone.

Roland stood alone in the office with two circles drawn on a sheet of paper.

He unfolded it. The circles drifted apart again, back to their original distance.

He stared at them for a moment.

Then he set the paper aside and began writing his letter to Thunder.

Discussion

Suggest a change