Rewrite That Witch
CH141 · Rewrite
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Chapter 141: Kisses

Roland sat with the steel ruler on the parchment and tried to draw a straight line.

The line went where he put it, which was not the problem. The problem was in his head, and it had been there since Shawn left the garden: a Church that armed both claimants, watched them exhaust each other, and had already seized Eternal Winter. An organization that had been planning this for longer than the current king had been on the throne, and that was now — according to the report, according to Heather and Mayne and Tayfun — looking west.

Stopping an armored force enhanced by the pills would require weapons that could fire faster, farther, and with more precision than anything currently in Border Town’s arsenal. The flintlock was the ceiling without mercury fulminate as a primer. Mercury fulminate was not yet available. Everything between now and available had to be bridged by something.

Anna’s black flame was that something.

He lined the ruler along the parchment and drew the second line.

Before her ability evolved, the production of each flintlock component had required a skilled blacksmith working individually, slowly, on parts that were close to specification but not identical. Now, Anna could stack multiple pieces and cut them simultaneously to tolerances that no blacksmith could match by hand. The bottleneck had been manufacturing precision. The bottleneck was gone.

With the unified measuring system — still in its first week of existence, reference strips going out to the working groups now — and a universal education system building toward common technical literacy, he had the preconditions for actual industrial production. Not yet. Not soon. But the shape of it was visible from here, and Anna’s ability was the hinge everything else pivoted on.

He did not allow himself to think of it only as an industrial resource. She had stayed up one night with a textbook about atomic theory and emerged with a fundamentally different relationship to her own power. That was not a tool evolving. That was a person thinking.

He made a note on the parchment and heard the knock at his door.

A guard would have announced himself. Nine times in ten, a knock at this hour was a witch, and most of the witches were downstairs in Scroll’s reading lesson. The exception was the one who didn’t need it.

“Come in.”

Anna entered, closed the door with care, and came to the table with a book held open in her arms. She set it flat in front of him without preamble and pointed to a passage.

He recognized the page. He’d written it himself.

“You said everything was made of tiny balls,” she said. “Different kinds of balls, different properties. But here—” her finger moved “—you say the same thing can behave as a wave.”

“When you throw a stone into water,” Roland said. “The ripples that spread outward. That’s a wave.”

“I understand waves.” She looked at him with the patience of someone who had already covered this definition herself. “What I don’t understand is how the same object can be both.”

Because I don’t understand it either, he thought, and I was hoping to never reach this page. Quantum mechanics was a thing he knew existed, knew was real, and could not explain to anyone — including himself — with any confidence in the details. He had written about it the way a man writes the warning label on something he cannot open safely.

“The short answer,” he said, “is that they do both because they do both. This isn’t evasion — it’s genuinely the answer. An object at that scale doesn’t obey the rules we observe at our scale. We’re too large. Our mass is too great for the wave-behavior to be detectable.” He paused. “Think of it this way: you cannot experience a four-dimensional space because you only have access to three dimensions. You can know it exists without being able to imagine it. This is similar.”

“What is a four-dimensional space?”

He put the quill down.

The conversation that followed took longer than he had planned for. Anna did not ask questions in the way people usually did — to fill the silence, or to appear engaged, or to have something to respond to. She asked because she wanted the answer, and when she received it, she tested it against everything she had already accumulated, and if it didn’t fit she said so. He had to explain fourth-dimensional spatial relationships by analogy, then correct the analogy, then acknowledge that the analogy couldn’t fully survive scrutiny but was the best available approximation, and then explain why approximations were the standard tool of any mind working at the edge of its own comprehension.

By the time she stopped asking, his cup was empty and his voice had taken on the slight roughness of extended use.

He looked at her.

She was reading again, slightly turned away, one hand keeping the page. Her hair had been arranged carefully this morning but some of it had come free across her cheek, and he reached out without deciding to and moved it behind her ear.

She turned.

The distance between them had been ordinary a moment before. Now it was the kind that has a weight to it.

She opened her mouth.

He could read the words from the movement before they had sound: Nightingale isn’t here.

It was not an invitation stated directly, because she did not do things directly. But the meaning was exact, and the room was quiet enough that he could hear her breathing, and the particular quality of the silence said that she had done the arithmetic on this moment carefully, and the result was something she was choosing.

He closed the remaining distance.

She closed her eyes. Her cheeks went rose at the edges. He could smell something clean about her — soap, something warmer underneath — and then their lips met, and time did what it sometimes does in moments that are actually happening, which is nothing at all.

He didn’t know how long it was.

She pulled back a fraction. Then she rose to her toes and kissed him again.

“Hey — hey!” Mystery Moon sat cross-legged on her bed with her eyes shut and both hands raised in front of her, thumbs and index fingers touching. “I’m a particle.”

“You’ve lost your mind,” Lily said. She was unwrapping the towel from her wet hair.

“I’m meditating,” Mystery Moon said, not opening her eyes. “I’m thinking of myself as a particle. Manifesting a new perspective on my fundamental nature.” A pause. “You’re a particle.”

“Thank you.” Lily got into bed.

“I just don’t understand why it worked for Anna.” Mystery Moon dropped her hands and looked at the ceiling with genuine bewilderment. “I’m doing exactly what the Prince described. Matter is made of tiny balls, the balls behave like waves, everything I see is particles — I’ve been telling myself this for three days—”

“You don’t believe it,” Lily said.

“I do believe it.”

“You don’t.” Lily was flat about this, the way she was flat about most things. “Anna doesn’t just tell herself the information. She believes what the Prince tells her without qualification, and then she thinks about it until it becomes part of how she understands everything. That’s a different thing from knowing facts.” She shook her head. “And she’s also considerably smarter than you. That probably matters as well.”

Mystery Moon was quiet for a moment. Then: “Don’t you want stronger abilities? Doesn’t it bother you — to know you could be doing more?”

Lily considered this with apparent seriousness.

“My ability lets me keep food from spoiling,” she said. “I would need to evolve my magic so that it could keep food from spoiling longer, or keep more food from spoiling at once, or perhaps extend to other perishable materials.” She yawned. “No.”

“You’re not curious at all?”

“I’m curious about sleep.” Lily patted the space beside her. “Come here.”

“You say you’re not interested,” Mystery Moon muttered, rearranging herself on the mattress, “but you’re the most attentive person in class besides Leaves. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

The pillow that came at her face was not hard, but it was deliberately aimed.

“Let me sleep.”

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