The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

8:02 PM | The Ninsirsir, Deck 3 | December 31st | 1608 COVENANT

"Hey Lamu," Gudrun said unhelpfully, gesturing inspecifically towards Lamu's crotch. "I think your logic engine's going off."

"Is that what that is?" Malko remarked, sipping his drink. "Technically, you're supposed to turn those off on the way in, but back here that's about as likely to be enforced as the Covenant of the Mourning Realms." He chuckled to himself with slightly too much enthusiasm.

Lamu looked back up at the window. For a moment, she'd expected the figure of her uncle to have vanished - a phantom banished the instant she lost focus on it - but it was still there, looming tall over the glass. Though she lowered her head, her eyes remained fixed. "Sorry, I need to take this," she muttered.

If the call had come literally 30 seconds later, it might have been an incredible relief, because there was only realistically one person it could be. Obviously, Lamu hadn't brought the logic engine she'd been using in the Lavyrinthikos to this event, let alone the one she'd owned under her previous identity, which she'd destroyed along with everything else that the Grand Alliance could have used to track her. The one she had right now had been given to her by Nhi, though she hadn't actually offered a means to contact her, only saying she would do it in the event something critical came up.

Well, regardless of whether this was what it was about, something critical had definitely come up. She reached for the logic bridge, pressing her thumb into it at an odd angle as her hands did the work of her eyes.

Nhi began speaking immediately in her usually weird casual affect. "Hey, it's me. Sorry to bug you, Lilith, but something's come up. Did you get the message I left for you?"

"Yes," Lamu replied. "But--"

"We shouldn't talk much over this, but there's been a bit of an oopsie," Nhi cut her off. The nature of logic engine communications, and the fact that Nhi seemed content to use as little fidelity in the transmission as possible meant it was impossible to determine the actual severity of the situation. "On top of the one I already mentioned in the note, I mean. Not our night tonight, huh? I'm gonna need to bump back our meeting a little bit. It's gonna be a bit skin-of-our-teeth in terms of New Years, but let's call it 11:30."

It was incredibly hard for Lamu to focus considering the face still staring down at her from overhead, but focus she did, because this chance couldn't go waste and she had the nasty feeling that Nhi could hang up at a moment's notice. "I need to talk to you now. There's something wrong."

"Like I said, we can't--"

"It's urgent," Lamu told her. "Someone's here who knows me. They threatened to kill me."

There was a period of silence. "Who?"

"One of my former classmates from when I was in school. Utsushikome of Fusai."

A second pause. "From the Exemplary Acolyte's Class."

For once, Lamu's tendency to go still when under pressure was actually convenient instead of offputting, as it meant that her thoughts didn't reach her face as she reacted to Nhi's deduction, or possibly foreknowledge. But then, she knew everything about her, so she probably shouldn't have been surprised. "She's not one of the ones who were part of it."

"Huh. I thought the whole idea was that you didn't know?"

"It's different for her," Lamu told her. "She-- Some things came out a while ago when they were going through her grandfather's old files. She's just a normal person." In a manner of speaking, at least.

"Right. So what's the issue?"

Lamu was extremely uneager to repeat the exact back-and-forth she'd just had with Gudrun, not least of all with someone actually able to help in a way that went beyond cocksure bullshitting. So she cut to the lede rather than trying to explain her feelings or emphasize the personal threat she represented. "She has insider information about this event."

"Oh. How so?"

"The guest list," Lamu explained. "She's somehow manipulated it so, or at least knows about, everyone else from the class being here." As she said the word 'class', Hamilcar (it couldn't possibly be him, what was she thinking?) pierced her with his gaze. "And it's not a bluff. I've seen several of them myself. One of them is sitting right in front of me."

"One second," Nhi said. "I have some of the details in front of me right now. ...Hm."

"What is it?" Gudrun guffawed at some remark Malko made.

"She's on the list legitimately. Looks like she scored an invite from an old buddy on the Human Redesign Project." Her voice was growing a little more serious. "I knew about the others being here already, though."

Lamu internally lurched with suspicion. "Why would they be here."

"We can't talk about it like this," Nhi replied tiredly. "Okay, like, what exactly--"

"You can't just change the subject," Lamu replied, making sure to project her anger into the transmission. She was actually better at emoting over the logic sea than real life, despite the fact that the part of the appeal to her was that you shouldn't have to. "What's going on here? Are you setting me up? Is this some kind of plan to knock out scores of people you know to have an association with assimilation failure organizations?"

"Lilith, if I wanted you dead, you can be sure I could think of better ways to do it than putting you on a ship filled with VIPs, where if anything goes wrong it'll turn into an international incident." She sighed. "No, it wasn't my decision. I only found out about this a couple of days ago myself. But I really can't say more, because there's a better-than-not chance this line is compromised."

"Compromised by who?"

"Take a guess."

Lamu's throat hitched. There was no way she wasn't talking about the Brotherhood of the Scorned.

"So let's talk about what we can," she continued. "I need to focus on something in a minute. Where did she approach you? What exactly did she say to you?"

"She was sitting at the table behind me," Lamu explained. "She told me she was going to kill all of us that were in the class, just based on the possibility that we might have been involved in what happened back then. She said she didn't care about collateral damage or if she even made it out herself." Lamu remembered something. "There was more she knew, too. She knew the rest of the crew manifest, too. 25 members of secur--"

"Yeah, keep that part to yourself," Nhi cut her off.

"And she knew about what you said. About the end of the world coming very soon." Lamu paused. "At least I think she did. It's possible she was just being cynical."

"Right," Nhi said, distracted. "Okay, Lilith. Where are you right now?"

"I'm still in the ballroom," she stated. "She left, though. I went to the restroom to try and explain what was happening to my..." She struggled to think of the appropriate word to describe her and Gudrun's relationship. Aid? Friend? Hired goon? "...companion, and when we got back, she was gone."

"Okay," Nhi said calmly. "Here's what's going to happen. You're gonna sit tight right where you are for the next, like, 20 minutes. I'm gonna send a couple of my guys to keep an eye on you, and I'll try to squeeze looking into this with everything else I'm juggling tonight. We won't be able to go over anything serious until we meet, but if there's anything I learn that'll actually be useful, I'll call you back."

But I can't stay here for 20 minutes, Lamu internally protested but didn't know how to vocalize. Her uncle still hadn't moved. "Who are you sending? How are they going to protect me from a grafted arcanist?"

"One of them's an arcanist too, and actually military at that. He'd flagged clear by the system, so he might put some enchantments on you if he can do it discreetly. Keep an eye open. Okay, I need to go--"

"W-Wait," Lamu stopped her. "There's something else."

"Yeah?"

Lamu-- Lilith flailed, trying to find the right words. This was one of those situations where she felt like, if she could just express her feelings - the weight that was pressing on her - succinctly and elegantly, she'd be able to vocalize what she wanted in a way that wouldn't make her come across as a complete fucking lunatic. "You said you have access to the ship's data. Does that include the cameras?"

Nhi sighed. "Don't wanna be prickly, Lilith, but there's a pretty big difference in the pain-in-the-ass factor between accessing the manifest and the live feeds of the ship. If you could just leave this in my hands--"

"This isn't-- I don't know if it's related," Lilith told her. "But there's... there's someone watching me from the deck 4 garden. They've been staring this whole time, before you even called."

"Are you sure they're staring at you?"

Lamu, the rational adult, absolutely wasn't, but for Lilith there could be no doubt. "Yes."

"Just a second," Nhi said.

And then - just then, so perfectly that the chance of it being a coincidence felt as likely as a coin not just landing on its side, but bouncing back up to bisect the tosser's eye - he finally, suddenly moved, the shadow of his grand cloak sweeping to the side in a heavy motion as he drew back from the window, like a vampire retreating to its lair. Only the darkness of the Empyrean remained.

"I'm not seeing anybody up there," Nhi said. "There's a couple who like they might be having a private conversation, but that's it. Do you still see them?"

Later Lamu would regret that she didn't give more context - a physical description, why this felt targeted - but in the moment she was left dumbstruck. Two conclusions arrived in her mind at the same time. On the one hand, the obvious one was that their conversation was, indeed, being monitored, and that whoever the figure impersonating her uncle overhead had been was listening in. This idea alone was enough to bite into her blood like a leech, but it wasn't the one that stuck.

Instead, she suddenly felt convinced that no matter where Nhi looked, there would be no record, because what was seeing wasn't a person, but some kind of phantom. Lamu was a literalistic person; she did not mean the figure was a manifestation of her fears and regrets, she meant it was an actual fucking ghost. She was spooked.

"No," was all she managed to reply.

"Okay, well maybe they left. Or it was a trick of the light." Despite herself, she sounded increasingly impatient. "I really gotta go, Lamu. I'll try to look into it, but again, just stay where you are. Nobody's gonna be able to do anything to you in the ballroom. See you at 11:30."

She dropped the call. Lamu blinked several times as she continued to stare, but the figure did not return.

"...and would you believe it, the second time we go back there, it's a different dog."

Gudrun snorted. "What, he seriously thought he could get away with it? Just fuckin' gaslight you guys?"

"Apparently!" Malko confirmed, chuckling. "And I mean, he wasn't even wrong. I mean, some of us noticed, but who's going to say anything about something like that? It's psychotic. I'll tell you, I've seen more men take a divorce badly than I can count, but that's on a whole other level."

"God, that's crazy," Gudrun said, shaking her head. "Do you know what, like, happened to the first one?"

Malko shrugged theatrically. "Beats the fuck out of me. Sent to some shelter, one would think. Doubt he leased it from some canine acting agency. Maybe he served it in the stew out of spite." His eyebrows inclined upwards. "Speaking of which--"

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Lamu followed his eyes. A waiter was approaching with their dinner.

𒀭

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

I'm going to do something I haven't done before and qualify this next part, because I don't want you to think I'm an idiot. On top of already having suffered some blunt force trauma to the head, the events of the following hour played out in tight succession, with barely any time to seriously stop and think. As a result, I overlooked some things that were, in retrospect, pretty obvious. Please keep that in mind.

(In my defense, at least two parts were really stupid, and if you think about it, a lack of solvability in a mystery is actually a failure to signal clues on the part of the writer rather than the reader. Ergo, it wasn't my fault.)

"Detective," Hildris remarked with surprise. "You're alive."

"Last time I checked," he said, continuing to approach. "What's going on? I was just taking a nap in my room."

Eirene looked at me angrily. "What the fuck is the meaning of this?"

"I," I stammered. Reason and charisma failed me. "It was just there!" I yelled in a way that was probably out of character. "The room, it's... someone's done something! I stabbed him, I did!"

Tuthal shook his head. "She's gone into hysterics."

"You tricked us. It's some kind of trap!" Eirene coldly lowered the safety, leveling it straight at my head. I closed my eyes, preparing myself for the usual disorientation of being shoved out of normal time on Dilmun.

Before that could come to pass, however, Hildris intervened on my behalf. "Stop! For god's sake, stop!" She threw her arms halfway in front of me, a gesture that evoked the idea of putting herself between Kasua and the barrel and the gun without actually committing to in such a way that she'd die if the trigger actually got pulled.

"Get out of the way," Eirene demanded, proving the tactic at least partially effective.

"We're not killing anyone until we get to the bottom of this!" Hildris declared. "She's still covered in wounds; obviously something bloody happened!"

"She could have done that to herself," Eirene declared. The way she was looking at me was making me tremble with fear involuntarily-- I genuinely believed she was going to cut Hildris off at any moment and just shoot me dead. 5/5 performance on the player's behalf, bizarre levels of commitment to the bit, hijacking the entire game despite literally playing the cook. If Iwa were here she'd be asking for her autograph (and after the last few minutes probably halfway through a fanfiction where Tuthal and the original Rastag fucked, but that's neither here nor there).

"Why? That makes no sense," Hildris continued. "There's no reason for her to have gone to such lengths to bait us here. We were already wondering what happened to her, even before we saw the injuries. And besides, we're here now, and nothing is happening."

The words 'nothing yet' were written plainly in the woman's eyes, but still, she gave enough pause for another interjection, this time from the detective. "Sorry, but I'm going to have to ask: What exactly is going on here?" His tone had its usual quality of graveled severity, but something seemed off. There was a markedly more casual undercurrent. "Who's been stabbed?"

"You, apparently," Summiri clarified. She was looking at Noah with an inquisitory gaze.

"Mister Tell-Rayf, forgive my brusqueness," Hildris began, pivoting from Eirene to him, "but if we're to believe you're not dead by Kassie's hand, then where the hell have you been?"

"That's a good bloody point," Tuthal agreed, his eyes narrowing. "How would you have slept through the wail Kasua made when she claims you attacked her, let alone the horse hitting the roof?"

"I use earplugs," he said. He reached into his coat and held up one of the little sponges to demonstrate. "What happened? What's this about a horse?"

"There's been a murder," Hildris told him bluntly.

"A death," Summiri corrected, her gaze still probing.

"We found Phaidime's body on the roof of the train after hearing a crash from overhead," Hildris explained. "It'd been placed inside a horse cadaver."

The detective's eyes narrowed. "A murder." As if this were some kind of trigger phase, he reached into his coat, withdrawing a cigarette and striking a match as he placed it in his mouth. "It's a good thing I'm here, then. I'll take a look."

"No you fucking won't," Eirene shut him down. "We wasted enough time inspecting the body already. We're headed to the rear carriage to set up a defensible position and figure out how we're going to get help."

Noah took a long drag of his cigarette, the smoke puffing out of his nose like an aging dragon. "No offense, but I'm something of an expert when it comes to matters like these. I'll probably be able to tell something you won't."

"What are your qualifications," Irene said. It came out more as an implicit insult than a question.

"Nothing formal," he said. "But I've seen more than my fair share of--"

"Then it's a matter for the police," Eirene retorted; among the classics in terms of murder mystery lines. "We're not going to risk going up there again for the sake of a glorified hunch. We're going to move now." She looked between me and the detective. "As far as I'm concerned, the two of you are both incredibly suspicious, and I'm going to be working off the assumption that you're involved somehow. You can make your cases, when we get there, but regardless you'll sit apart from the rest of us, and I'll be keeping a close eye on you all through the night."

The detective raised his brow, but shrugged, indifferent.

"Well, before we go, I'm going in for a moment," Tuthal declared, stepping forward.

"Why," Eirene questioned. "It could easily be a trap. Are you stupid?"

"I don't see any traps, and that's my painting in there," he said, gesturing at the Last Winter. "I'm not leaving without it."

Eirene looked again, then scoffed in obvious irritation. "You people are like moths around a campfire. It's like you're determined to die."

"No, we should go inside, if only to take a look," Hildris said. "I haven't wanted to say this, but... so many strange things have been happening that I'm starting to think this might be the work of an arcanist."

Summiri's eyes shifted for the first time since the detective had arrived, though Tuthal and Eirene's reactions were more extreme, the former's eyes widening with sudden anxiety and the latter's jaw hardening, his teeth likely gritting behind her lips. I probably had some kind of visible response too, though in my case it was more meta reasons: I'd sort of been operating on the assumption that, considering the rule that the culprit couldn't be an arcanist, that there was an unspoken rule for the players not to engage with the possibility at all. The Power had such an impact on the toolbox for a whodunnit that in the real world, 'harder' mysteries would often reveal whether the Power would be featured in the blurb. (There were even terms for it: 'Archimedean' for when it was only regular physics vs. 'Menesian' when it wasn't. Another subcategory, 'Caveman', also excluded elaborate mechanical tricks. The ones in this final category were often period pieces, and also usually a lot better written, since they couldn't rely on gimmicks.)

But if arcanists were conceptually on the table in-story, then the fact they hadn't come up yet felt almost silly. Arcanists were always feared by normal people to some degree no matter what the time period - this was one of Kamrusepa's pet topics, if you remember - but in this era, they were still in ruling positions over the majority of societies on the Mimikos, Rhunbard included. Normal people understood very little about them, and they were viewed with fear and awe.

So if this scenario was real, well-- It would have been the first place my mind went. To the point I might not even bother trying to find any other explanation for the crime.

"If it were an arcanist doing this, we'd be dead already," Eirene reasoned.

"Not if they're toying with us," Hildris countered. "Considering how far we are from civilization, they could feel like they have absolute control over the situation, and are free to boil us in our juices. Pull little stunts like this with Kasua to try and drive into a frenzy."

"It's not a matter of feeling," Tuthal said, for the first time showing real fear in his voice. "If you're right, we're fucked. Doesn't matter what we do, might as well lie down and die."

"No, we might not be completely out of options. They'd still only be one person. If we took them off-guard, split up and all made a run from the train, I doubt they'd be able to get all of us." She took a breath. "In any case, if they used the Power to clean this room, there would be signs. I've skirted this manner of affair dealing with insurance claims. They couldn't perfectly remove the blood from the scene this fast without removing other things, too, like fibers on the carpet."

"You're going to get down on your knees and check if there are spots where the rug looks thin?"

"I'm going to look for anything suspicious," she said, squinting at him. "Tuthal, we have the same goal. I would have thought you'd be supporting me."

He snorted, but then looked lustfully towards the Last Winter.

"If I may," the detective spoke up, "I'm guessing from context clues-- The girl thinks she killed me? In this room?"

"That's correct," Summiri said, something calculating in her voice.

"But now the evidence isn't there, so you think she's trying to pull something, or maybe I'm trying to pull something," he inferred. "How about this, then. If you're worried about it being a trap, let me go in. I'll grab the painting do whatever you tell me to, Hildris, maybe take a look at some things with my own methods too. Worst thing, something bad happens to somebody you already suspect, right?"

"That makes no sense," Tuthal said. "If you found anything, it would mean you really did die in that room! You can't bloody investigate your own murder!" He threw his arms in the air. "Everything's gone mad! Life and death means nothing on this train any more! We've ridden straight into Tartarus!"

"I have my own theory about what might have happened," the detective explained calmly. "I'll just need a moment to confirm it. Then Hildris can take a look afterwards too, if she wants, since it'll at least show the room is safe."

This whole string of logic felt about as thin as a spider's web, but Eirene had lost patience. "Gods, fine, just do it," she barked. "Go in, get the painting and do your stupid investigation. You have one minute."

The detective nodded a few times, took another drag, then finally stepped over towards the door--

Wait a minute.

Up until this moment, because of the detective's propensity for looking towards the ground broodingly and his comically thick mustache I hadn't got a good look at his face. But now that I could see him-- Now that he was close enough to make out the details of his face, it was a different fucking guy!

They looked similar, to be certain. Same rough height, same build, same face shape and general age. With the hair and the bulky outfit, they could pass for the same person so long as they weren't subject to much scrutiny. But this wasn't a full-on doppelganger situation; they were very obviously different people. The 'Noah' in front of me had larger lips, a rounder nose, and visible acne scarring on his cheeks. His eyes weren't even quite the same color!

Then I remembered. Obviously, this was an era where both distinction therapy was much more limited - basic surgery and petty tweaks to the anima script for the wealthy, the kind of thing that had been afforded to the poorest by the time of my birth - and where aging had a much more pronounced physical effect on people. If one went looking for someone with a shared seed, finding such a lookalike would be far from impossible on a practical level.

I couldn't stop myself from exclaiming. "That's not him." I pointed at his face instinctively.

Tuthal frowned. "What?"

"It's a different person!" I insisted. "Look at him!"

He turned towards the 'detective', squinting. "He looks like the prick to me."

Hildris bit her lip. "I have to admit, Kassie, I don't see it." Eirene also didn't look convinced, now regarding me even more suspiciously.

How was this possible? The differences were subtle, but if you were looking for them, they weren't something you could reasonably miss. How could I be the only one who saw it?

This was absurd. It had to be some kind of conspiracy. That's why Summiri was giving him funny looks. They were all just playing along!

No, wait. That wasn't the only explanation. If you thought about it, had any of the others actually got a good look at Noah over the course of the entire evening? I'd had close one-on-one conversations with him when he'd first arrived, and again over the dinner table (well, if him delivering that speech counted as a 'conversation'), but during the latter he'd been sat at the absolute terminus of the table, with only me opposite him.

The only other time he'd been actively conversing with the others had been when we'd been in the observation carriage, and during that time he'd actively sat away from the rest of us, even during the brief period in which we'd been playing board games.

Oh my god, that had to be it, didn't it? They'd never noticed, other than her!

Now that this had occurred to me, it was like an illusion had shattered, and suddenly logical explanations for the entire situation came to mind. As established, I'd learned that the rooms belonged, from left to right, to: Summiri, myself, Tuthal, Phaidime, the detective, Hildris, no one or an unknown party, and finally Bahram. But between Tuthal's and Phaidime's rooms was the gap-- Where there was obviously space for a room, but nothing was actually present.

I'd been thinking about that in terms of secret passages, but an alternative idea occurred to me. What if what was important about the missing space wasn't what was there, but what wasn't there? Rather, what if the rooms moved?

Say there was a mechanism sort of like a railway - a train-within-a-train - on which all the guest rooms sat. Using this, they could each be shifted into one of two positions, moving the cavity across the carriage as a result. By doing this, one person's room could be replaced by another!

But where would the controls for such a mechanism be in such a limited environment? I wasn't sure about this part, but one answer quickly came to mind: From outside the train. After all, I'd only ever seen it from the side facing the front door and the hallway of the rest carriage. There could easily be some mechanism on the other by which the rooms could be dragged into new positions, and now that the train had stopped, it wouldn't even be difficult to do so.

But who would operate such a mechanism? Again, an answer came to mind: Gaizarik. That would explain his suspicious absence on our return to the engine car: Sure, we'd heard his voice, but that didn't prove shit. It could have been a recording, or Williya impersonating him, or even some kind of device to carry it deceptively from a different location!

Or, more boringly, it could have just been fake Noah, whoever he was. He could have climbed out of the window of his room, or something like that. He could be used to explain how there was an untouched version of the Last Winter here too - it was probably a fake he planted.

Yes, all of it was falling into place. And the best part? This theory could be proven. Not later, but right this very moment.

Because of the facts that there was only one cavity and that my room was already almost at the end of the line, there was only one possible configuration that could have created this situation. Tuthal's room would have had to have moved to the left , filling the 'default' position of the cavity, behind the doorless wall. And then my and Summiri's room would also move to the right.

So right now, we weren't looking at my chambers, but hers!

(Did you spot the mistake in my logic here? Again: See the qualifier. Though more interestingly than that - from a perspective of a self-psychoanalysis, I guess - was that none of my actions here served the goal I'd given myself barely five minutes ago. This twist should have been exactly what I wanted: A refuge from explicit suspicion in confusion and ambiguity, where I could much more comfortably use my own deductions to cruise to the confusion. But I was so enraptured my means had become my ends.)

That meant that all I had to do to reveal the truth was to convince either Tuthal or Summiri to unlock one of their doors, revealing either the true crime scene or empty space respectively. But how could I convince everyone? Especially with Eirene looking about ready to snap if there was a single further complication?

The fake detective (well, the original was also a fake, but in a more everyday way) had started to move into the room in spite of my interjection. I knew exactly what he was going to pull, even if not exactly - probably 'find' some piece of evidence that would confirm I was drugged or hallucinating, or otherwise tie some tidy bow in the situation.

I had to say something-- The first argument which came into my head.

"The... cigarettes," I managed. "You all saw he was smoking a pipe at dinner, but now he doesn't have it. He's smoking cigarettes instead."

This felt incredibly clever as I said it, but it only caused Hildris and Tuthal to regard me even more skeptically.

Fortunately, this turned out not to matter.

"No," Summiri spoke up. "She's right. It isn't him."