Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 697: Meeting Garcia at Night

After dinner, he waited until Zero had retreated to her room with her homework and the door had closed. Then he knocked on 0827.

Garcia opened it quickly, as though she’d been on her way to something else and answered out of momentum rather than hospitality. Same ice-cold expression. She stepped back.

“Come in.”

The apartment was considerably more finished than his. Real wood underfoot, not the cheap laminate. A shoe shelf by the entrance, crystal chandelier overhead, walls painted with something that had clearly not come with the apartment. Someone had invested thought and money in this space and then chosen to live in a building that required both.

“I don’t have extra slippers.” She indicated the bottom shelf without looking at him. “You can use mine. I prefer them large, so they should fit.”

The slippers were winter ones, large indeed, and decorated with furry rabbit ears at the toe.

Roland put them on. He was immediately too warm. He looked at the ears. He found it genuinely impossible to construct a mental image of Garcia in this apartment, padding around in these, and was not sure whether it was reassuring or alarming that she owned them at all.

He made his way to the sofa. “Could I have some water? Dinner was salty.”

She looked at him with an expression that filed this request under unreasonable. “Only cold water.”

“Cold water is fine.”

While she was in the kitchen, Roland looked down the corridor. He knew the layout. Every apartment in the building was a mirrored pair — he’d worked this out from his own. The corridor opposite the entrance led to the storage room in his unit.

Garcia had done something with it. The door at the end was a louvered sliding door, pale slats catching the light from the hall. Not lockable, by design. He catalogued this without changing his posture.

She returned and set a glass on the table beside him.

“Thank you.” He accepted it. “You live here alone? At the meeting today, people were saying the Clover Association—”

“I have nothing to do with the Clover.” Her voice cut across the sentence without particular heat, the way you correct something that doesn’t deserve argument. “If anything, they’re enemies of mine.”

“Enemies.” He processed this. “Then your cousin—”

She set her glass down. Her expression hadn’t shifted much, but something underneath it was working. “They use him to pressure me. If I leave this building, the Clover Association moves forward with the demolition project. So I stay.”

“The mall expansion next door — that’s them?”

“Who else demolishes century-old buildings?” She looked at him with faint confusion. “You live here. How do you not know this?”

She’s sharper than Zero. The thought landed before he could decide whether it was reassuring. Zero was a child operating at the level of someone much older. Garcia was an adult, and apparently carried into the Dream World whatever observational precision she’d developed elsewhere. Which meant the conversational margins he was used to were narrower here.

“I’ve been — between jobs,” he said, with complete accuracy. “Six months without leaving much. I missed things.” He turned the conversation before she could pull on that thread. “You were going to tell me about the other responsibilities. Martialists, outside fighting competitions.”

Garcia appeared to accept this. She settled back and considered where to start.

“The competitions are training. The actual work is fighting erosion.” She said it as though she’d explained it before and still found people’s unfamiliarity with it puzzling. “The Fallen Evils — you’ve heard the term?”

“Once or twice.”

“They’re not awakened people who lost control. The Force of Nature, when it goes wrong in that direction, usually just burns the person out. The Fallen Evils are something else — people who’ve been reached by forces from outside and transformed. Changed into something that isn’t quite a person anymore. Conventional methods don’t work on them. That’s what martialists actually do.”

“The outside world.” Roland kept his voice curious and mild. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“Nothing I can tell you without a hunting license.” She met his gaze flatly. “And that’s not evasion — it’s the condition. Not everyone who awakens chooses to side with us. Some actively want what’s coming from outside to get through. So before we share information about what we’re actually fighting, we need to know which side someone is on.”

He sat with this. “And if someone just… doesn’t choose either side?”

“Centrists. Some awakened people refuse the Martialist Association without going over to the other side. We don’t move against them.” She paused. “The Fallen Evils do, though. They operate alone, usually. They get picked off. It’s safer to affiliate.”

She said this without pressure, just accurate. Roland found himself recalibrating whatever he’d decided about her before walking in. His first impression of her — in that first meeting in the hallway, when her hand had moved immediately toward the weapon on her back — had registered as the automatic aggression of someone who classified everything as threat or not-threat.

“When we first met,” he said, “you reached for your weapon before I’d said anything.”

“You appeared in a stairwell without warning.” She didn’t sound remotely apologetic. “You should feel lucky you didn’t draw yours. You’d have been in a hospital by now.”

She said this with exactly the confidence of someone who believed it entirely. He did not argue the point.

Her phone rang. She looked at the screen and her expression did something brief and complicated that she didn’t bother to disguise.

“I need to take this.”

She walked to the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The sound of the call began, muffled by the wall.

Roland was on his feet before the door had finished closing.

The rabbit-ear slippers came off. He moved in bare feet down the corridor, quickly and quietly, and reached the louvered door at the end.

Through the slats: a walk-in closet. Neatly organized — racks of clothing, different lengths and weights, the kind of wardrobe that required some space to function. Several categories he registered and immediately chose not to have opinions about. The whole space smelled clean, slightly floral, nothing that matched the apartment hallway.

He pushed the door.

At the far end, behind the hanging clothes, the wall held a gate.

Dark turquoise. The color of deep water in late afternoon light. He would have guessed a gate from the shape alone, but there was no mistaking what it was when he found himself standing in front of it — the same quality of presence as the one in his own storage room, the same sense of surface that was also a threshold.

The handle was covered in dust. Thick, consistent, the kind that accumulated over years of not being touched. The clothing around it was clean. The floor near it was clean. Only the handle had been left alone, as though someone had made a point of not approaching it.

Has Garcia never opened this?

He didn’t have time to think through the implications. He took a breath, gripped the dusty handle, and turned it.

The smell came first — salt and open water, the particular cold freshness of a coast. Then sound: waves reaching a shoreline and retreating, reaching and retreating, steady as breathing. Then sight: the deep blue of a wide sea, unfolding in front of him from horizon to horizon, the light falling across it at a low angle that turned the surface to hammered silver and blue-black in turns.

He stood in the doorway with the smell of a woman’s wardrobe at his back and an ocean in front of him, and looked out at wherever Garcia’s memory had taken hold.

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