---Em---
Staring at the mess of blood and guts that litters the forest floor, I don't even gag. Maybe that's a testament to how much I've changed. I'd like to think I haven't but it's been, what, years since the world ended?
That changed me. Or maybe it's the guilt talking. Guilt that, when I really think about it, I don't miss the old way. Not like I should. I don't care that I'll never see my parents again. I don't care that everybody I knew is either dead or... changed. Like Colby.
Like me.
I look at the strixes torn limb from limb, their blood pooling around my feet. Flies swarm the corpses, feasting on the tender flesh. We did this. Desensitization. Or maybe part of me is just sick of at all. Of all the gagging. The nausea. The cold sweats.
"How do we go back?" I put that thought out into the void, but no one's listening. Melody's sifting through the gore, knee deep in strix blood. Colby's scavenging strix talons, yanking the nails right out of their feet. He probably means to use them as projectiles.
And Mya's sloshing through a heap of corpse gunk, and then she's looking at me with a pained look on her face. "It's Edgar," she says, her voice wet through her tears and her shaking. Hard to tell whether it's real or an affectation. Back during the zombie apocalypse, after every raid, we'd all have a moment of silence to mourn our fallen comrades. But we weren't mourning. Not really. I'd look into Mya's eyes, into Gail's eyes, into Keigan's eyes, and we'd all be thinking the same thing: thank god it wasn't me.
So Edgar's dead. The first thought that crosses my mind isn't "poor Edgar." It's "who else?" I take in the scene. Flies biting at my neck. Blood everywhere. Some of it's ours. Some of it's theirs. You can't tell which is which. We all end up the same way.
"Em?" Mya sniffles. "I think... this was Crawford's." She picks up half of a pointy metallic twig. Dried strix blood is crusted over the metal. "It's his ice pick. He never goes anywhere without it."
I take another hard look at the carnage. Look for anything recognizable amidst the gore. Try not to breathe through the nose. "Well, he's not here."
"But what if...?"
"What if what?" I snap. "What if they ate him, like they did Jun?"
Her lower lip trembles. She stares at the blood-soaked ground. Doesn't say anything else.
Colby wades over to me through the muck and rests a hand on my shoulder. "A little compassion, huh?"
"Compassion?" I scoff. "Tell that to the gods."
Colby just gives me this wide-eyed look. "You've changed, man."
"Part of it was a retcon." Courtesy of pseudo-Olivia, but no need to resurrect that old nonsense.
He raises an eyebrow.
I shake my head. "It's a long story. To be honest, I'm sick of long stories. I just wish they'd all end." There's a smell in the air. Not a smell, exactly, but that's the only way I know to describe it. It smells like... absence. And in that moment, I know. "Comma's gone."
Mya frowns. "Gone how?"
"Wish I knew." Is this what it feels like to be psychic? Cryptic flashes of feeling that amount to absolutely nothing but still insist on being heard? I think about Gail and how her whole life must've been like this. And that was before she got a shikigami crammed into her skull.
"You may be onto something," says Melody, her shoes splashing through the blood. "I distinctly remember dropping my Q-blip here when we were attacked. Well, it's gone now. She must've seen an opportunity and, well..." She sighs. "Looks like she pulled a fast one on us."
I could be angry. I could hate her for leaving. Assuming that's even what happened—again, my intuitions, for lack of a better word, are cryptic at best. But the thing is, she had friends she was trying to get back to. A few hours ago, I'd have broken down at the thought that I might never see her again. But now? The numbness works like a salve for the pain. And you know what? I'm kind of happy for her. I'd like to think that she found what she was looking for.
We don't dwell here any longer than we have to. Once we've confirmed that Edgar's is the only body, we tread deeper into the woods—anything to distance ourselves from all of that blood. We trek through the trees, and what we find is a pair of bloody footprints. A trail of breadcrumbs. A trail that leads us back to Crawford.
It warms me a little to see Mya throw herself into his arms. To see that she hasn't lost everything. I guess there's a little humanity left in me after all. But Crawford didn't survive. I can tell when I look in his eyes. Sure, his body's in one piece. But the guy I once shared a meal of hairy fish with died back there. So did I. Over and over and over.
There's no sign of the others. Whether that means they're dead or just lost is anyone's guess. Lost. That one makes me chuckle. As if any of us have a clue where we are. Or where we're supposed to be. I steal a glance at Colby. Supposedly, that runic symbol on his chest was preventing him from communicating with Olivia. So why hasn't she gotten in touch with him yet? Or, more to the point, why didn't she just tell me how to get to Ganeden when she had the chance?
And that's when it hits me like a bullet train: she did.
A pleasant scent wafts my way, something vaguely familiar. I know this smell. From where or when, I can't say, but I know it. But I can't quite put my finger on it. A memory tugs at the back of my mind.
"Anybody else smell that?" I ask, approaching the nearest bone tree. No, that only smells of chalk and sawdust. This is something else.
"I don't smell anything," says Melody. "Other than blood and rot, I mean. Are you feeling all right?"
Crawford's face darts up from where it was buried in Mya's shoulder. His red eyes widen. "I smell it too. Smells sweet. Kind of like... syrup?"
"It could be sap," Melody admits. "There's a patch of maple trees down by the—"
"Sea," I say. A wide grin spreads across my face. "Pancakes and sea salt."
They all give me an awkward look. Fair enough—they weren't there when I dreamt it. Pancakes and sea salt. Tree sap and ocean brine. Funny how dreams tend to slip a nugget of useful information in with all the nonsense.
"That's where we've got to go," I say triumphantly.
A look of determination flashes across Melody's face. "I'll lead the way."
Nothing happens by chance. Rex was meant to get us here. Melody's meant to take us the rest of the way. I feel a metallic clanging inside, like a rusty bullet ricocheting off the walls of a hollowed-out cavity crusted over with disappointment. I get a bittersweet taste in my mouth. Sweet because I smell sap. Bitter because Comma isn't here to see it. Wherever she is in this hellhole of a multiverse, I hope she finds what she's looking for.
Author's Note:
Sometimes things just work out nicely. For example, it occurred to me while writing this chapter that it wouldn't make sense for Olivia not to have tried to tell Em the way to Ganeden. So I read through the dream chapter, hoping I'd written something that could be construed as a clue, and sure enough, there was that pancakes and sea salt line staring me in the face. That's kind of the magic of writing, isn't it? Despite for the most part making the story up as I go along, I can't count the number of times I've realized that some throwaway line in a previous chapter is actually the missing piece to whatever puzzle I'm currently trying to solve. Anyway, I can't say for sure how long it's going to take to get to the end of this volume, but we are definitely in the final stretch now.
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