Chapter 788: Gourmet Journey
“You’re not coming? Not only late — you’re bailing now, at the last minute?”
Roland held the phone several centimeters from his ear while Garcia caught her breath. “I have an unexpected guest,” he said, when the first wave had passed. “I can’t leave a 14-year-old to receive visitors alone. You know how that looks.”
“Room 0825 — I’ll come to you.”
“I’m not in the apartment right now.”
A pause. Then the volume increased again. “Do you know what I arranged for today? I told the senior members you were coming. I thought you were finally ready to take this seriously. What exactly are you up to? Come back right now.”
Taking responsibility, Roland thought. Such a flexible phrase. The taxi driver had been watching him in the rearview mirror with an expression of uncomplicated male solidarity.
Roland put on his best puzzled tone. “I’m sorry — reception’s breaking up. I’m just turning onto Oriental Road. Hello? Hello —” He pulled the phone from his ear and thumbed it off. Then, after a moment’s consideration, powered it down entirely.
Beside him, Zero said flatly: “We’re in the middle of the city. Reception doesn’t break up here.”
“You’re very perceptive.”
“It’s embarrassing. You’re embarrassing.”
He glanced in the mirror at Phyllis. She was still fixed on the window, face composed, eyes taking in high-rise buildings and advertising screens and the river of traffic without any visible attempt to process what she was seeing. She had been like this since they’d gotten into the car — motionless, a passenger aboard something that had no context to slot into, absorbing the exterior of a world she lacked the grammar for. Roland had given her his spare clothes that morning, and whatever the Taquila witches had maintained through the centuries, they had maintained their bearing: the cheap T-shirt and shorts looked almost considered on her.
The bra situation had been resolved by Zero, who had produced a length of cloth without commentary, wrapped it, and never mentioned it again.
Green Valley Park. Quiet, green, a commercial street close enough to walk to. The park itself would give Zero somewhere to be when conversation became too complicated for her presence. Roland had identified KFC and McDonald’s as the best approach: consistent quality, no guesswork, inexpensive enough to absorb the amount Phyllis was going to eat without bankrupting him, and the dining environment was clean enough that this could properly be called a gift rather than an obligation. Starred restaurants would have been better, but he’d done the arithmetic.
The toy in Zero’s kid’s meal preempted further budget commentary.
“Eat,” Roland said to Phyllis, and set a piece of fried chicken in front of her.
She looked at it. The skin was the particular gold that only came from high-pressure heat; the smell rose from it in layers — black pepper, thyme, garlic, salt — a combination of technique and chemistry that the boiled chicken of earlier centuries had never approached. She bit into it.
Hot tears. Immediate, uncontrolled, before she had finished swallowing.
Zero set down her toy. “What’s wrong, sister?”
“She’s been hungry for a very long time,” Roland said. “Her family wasn’t kind — they wanted a boy and were never able to forgive her. You’re too young for the full story.”
Zero looked at Phyllis. The particular sharpness she kept for adults drained away, replaced by something older in her face, something that knew what it was like to be in an unfamiliar place and understand that no one was coming back for you. She took a wet wipe from the dispenser on the table and cleaned the tears and oil from Phyllis’s face without asking.
Roland drank his cola.
The pile grew. Boxes accumulated. People passing by the window studied the table with visible confusion — three people, two of them slender young women, surrounded by enough food for five or six. Most of the passing judgment settled on Roland, which he accepted as the cost of his decisions.
He was glad he’d chosen the budget option.
Phyllis slowed when the edge of true hunger had been satisfied, and then slowed further, and finally put down the last egg tart with a long, complete exhalation — the sound of someone who has put a very old weight down on a solid floor.
“This is,” she said, “awfully delicious.”
“Ice cream cones next,” Roland said, sliding a cone across the table, “but first — the Dreamland. Before you entered it, was there anything unusual?”
She glanced at Zero.
He blinked once, a signal.
“Oh —” She understood. “That was long ago. Let me think. No, nothing unusual. I simply leaned against the wall and disconnected myself. It’s a way of resting without going fully unconscious — I stop controlling the body and send my awareness into the dark. I can still sense danger nearby; I just can’t see or hear it. The feeling is difficult to explain. Celine calls it a subconscious connection.”
Zero’s mouth moved. “Who’s Celine?”
“A physician. Adults are talking.” Roland gave her a look. “If you’re bored, go to the park. Watch the kites. Don’t go far.”
She snorted. She collected her ice cream cone and left with the pointed dignity of someone who has decided that being sent away is, on reflection, preferable.
Through the window, Roland tracked her until she reached the park’s edge. Phyllis followed his gaze.
“Is she safe alone?”
“Yes. It’s a safe era, and she’s not easy to fool.” He turned back. “Go on.”
“Once I’m in deep sleep, there’s nothing — only drifting in darkness. No light, no sound, no sensation.” Phyllis paused. “But this time, in that darkness, I saw your residence here. Your apartment. Your rooms. I was astonished — and then I saw you.”
Roland considered. “The only thing different about your sleep this time was where you slept.”
“Yes. I was in your castle.”
The ice cream cone vanished. She heaved a long breath of satisfaction, the kind that arrived at the end of something very good.
Roland watched the last of it disappear and was suddenly struck by it. “Beams of light,” he said.
Phyllis looked up. “What?”
“You told me — when I fall asleep, there’s a yellow-orange beam above me as wide as the city wall.”
“Yes, I did say that.”
“And you have a beam too.”
She understood before he finished. “You mean our beams overlapped.”
“Yes.” He pressed his palms together. “The castle itself has no power to bring you here — it’s an ordinary stone building. The only thing that could do it is the beams. But overlapping alone can’t be enough — otherwise Anna, Nightingale, every witch who’s ever slept near me would have come through.” He paused. “You also disconnected your consciousness. You cut the tether. That’s what opened the passage.”
Something else came loose in his mind while he said it.
The Taquila witches used the word soul easily, as though it referred to something they could hold in their hands. And in a sense they could — they had transferred souls into God’s Punishment Warrior bodies, into the strange carriers the underground civilization had left behind. But no one had ever explained to Roland what a soul actually was. He had assumed it was a metaphor for the pattern of a person — thoughts, memories, the electrical arrangements of a living mind. He had assumed that pattern ceased to exist when it left the body that generated it.
The underground civilization’s soul cores suggested otherwise.
What if it doesn’t cease? What if the Bloody Moon is the medium — the place where a person’s pattern is stored while magic power transmits it? What if beams of light are the transmission passages, and the soul core just activates a process the Bloody Moon already makes available?
If that was true, the thinning of God’s Punishment Witches’ beams after the soul transfer made sense: transmitting a pattern of memories and cognition required less bandwidth than transforming magic power into physical effects. And his own beam — as wide as a city wall — corresponded to the complexity of this world, which had required the full architecture of a human life’s memory to construct.
When Phyllis cut her consciousness loose inside his beam’s range, her pattern stored in the Bloody Moon had found the nearest available structure and flowed into it.
This world isn’t just in my head. It’s in the Bloody Moon. Through Zero’s Soul Battlefield, I built something that exists inside the divine domain of magic power itself.
He was about to speak when the window to his right blossomed outward in a spray of glass.
The restaurant next door. A roar of noise — screaming, feet, the hard crack of something structural failing. People poured through every exit, piling into one another in the hallway, phones already out and recording. Most of the street had turned to run.
Phyllis burped quietly. She pressed one hand to her full stomach, happiness undimmed, and looked at the chaos with polite interest. “Didn’t you say this age was quite safe?”
Roland stood. “That’s an accident. Come on.” He caught himself: “And yes. I may have overstated it slightly.”
He looked for Zero in the park and didn’t see her yet. He looked at Phyllis.
The name Fallen Evil had been appearing in news reports for weeks. More and more people awakening with the Force of Nature, and most of them unable to hold what they’d been given. He thought of what Garcia had said two months ago: erosion from an alien world.
“Do you see Zero?” Phyllis asked.
“Not yet. She’ll be safe in the park.” He turned toward the glass and noise. “We handle this first.”
He remembered the first one — the burnt-face man, who had been hunting martialists, who had made the nature of the game clear from the opening move. Leaving a Fallen Evil alive and unattended was not a reasonable option.
And there was the other thing — the warm current that had filled him when the first one’s Magic Cyclone had dissolved in his hand. The sense of replenishment. He had not been able to fully explain it. He was not sure he needed to.
“Our enemy is probably newly awakened,” he said. “Think of it as a hybrid demonic beast — the Force of Nature protects it from ordinary weapons. You need to meet it with the same force.” He bent, picked up a loose stone from the base of a decorative planter, and crushed it in his fist. The dust fell between his fingers.
Phyllis stared. “You’ve become an Awakened.”
“Only here.” He straightened up. “My ability doesn’t cross over. But here — yes.” He kept his voice level and did not quite manage to suppress what lay underneath it.
“You’re not ordinary in either world,” Phyllis said.
They went back through the KFC, found the door to the staff corridor, and located the passage that connected to the shopping mall behind the building. The stampede had emptied it. Abandoned shopping bags. Toppled displays. An ice cream melting in a slow pool near the entrance of a shoe store.
Roland stationed Phyllis in the mall corridor and asked her to summon her Blade Claws. The Force of Nature in her ability, released into the open air, would read as a signal to anything that could sense it.
The back door of the McDonald’s came off its frame. The smoke hadn’t fully cleared before a man ran through it.
He was newly awakened — Roland could see it in the cyclone, small and dim, barely stabilized. Nothing like the burnt-face man’s power. The warm current in Roland’s body barely stirred in response.
They had planned to draw him into the KFC corridor. The man ignored the plan. He stretched his left arm toward Phyllis and opened his palm.
The air in front of her expanded like a struck drum.
Roland had the angle to step clear. He didn’t. He moved behind Phyllis instead and held position. The explosion took them both through the wall of soundproof panels and deposited them against the base of the KFC counter in a rain of dust and fragments.
He lay still for a moment, taking inventory. His lower back reported something that faded before he could name it. Resilience, apparently, scaled with strength here.
He looked at Phyllis in his arms. “Are you all right?”
“I was careless.” She pulled herself upright. One claw had broken in the blast — she had turned it into a shield at the last second, catching the brunt with the claw’s flat. Her shirt had three new tears. “It won’t happen again.”
The Fallen Evil followed them through the gap in the wall. He was smiling in the way of someone who has recently discovered what they can do and enjoys it. He leveled his arm at Phyllis. “Time to die, martialist.”
He was looking at her face. He wasn’t looking at the floor.
The broken claw, lying near his feet, moved.
With a sound like a sharp intake of breath, it struck his neck. Clean, exact, unhesitating. The smile froze. His head separated from his body in a single motion and hit the tile. His blood reached the counter before his body finished falling.
Phyllis extended her hand. The claw returned to her. She used it to open the man’s left arm with surgical precision and removed the Magic Vortex inside — intact, the cyclone already decelerating as it left its host, settling into something that looked like a gemstone in her palm.
“As long as a broken claw is within ten steps, I still control it.” She held the vortex out to Roland. “The broken ones are more dangerous than the whole ones. No one expects them to move.” A pause. “Is this the Force of Nature you mentioned?”
“Yes.” He took it. The moment it left Phyllis’s hand the twirling had stopped; the moment his fingers closed around it, it began again — faster, the color shifting from red to blue, blue brightening toward white, and then a beam launched from it toward the ceiling and thinned and was gone.
The warmth settled through him. He felt complete in a specific, impossible-to-describe way — as though he had been slightly less than himself before, and was now exactly himself again.
He set the feeling aside to examine later and looked around at the ruin of the KFC kitchen.
“We should leave,” he said. “Immediately.”