The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

8:09 PM | The Ninsirsir, Deck 3 | December 31st | 1608 COVENANT

There was a long pause, during which Theodoros made an effort to continue eating normally, while Lamu simply stared down at her plate in thought. "I can't think of any particular reason I'd have to kill you," she eventually said. (It wasn't until the conversation was over that it occurred to her how awkward and unintentionally suspicious this phrasing was, and that she should have said something normal and natural like 'What?' instead.)

"It's obvious who you are," Theo stated. The way he spoke over the logic sea lacked his distinctive stutter, creating a surprisingly severe quality in his speech. "The way you've been looking at me since you first arrived almost in silence, your friend who clearly doesn't belong here and probably has some kind of military background." Lamu wondered how he'd come to this conclusion before remembering she was armed; he'd probably noticed alongside her build and mannerisms. "The fact that you've obviously been communicating with someone else over the logic sea intermittently the whole time. Are you the one who's been sending the threats, or are you just working with them? At least tell me that much."

Lamu sighed subtly. She despised misunderstandings. They always felt like trying to pick individual pieces of onion out of a soup. "You're mistaken," she said, taking the bluntest approach possible. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Don't try to lie to me," Theodoros replied defensively.

"I am doing no such thing," Lamu stated plainly. "I have no plans to do any harm to you, and any reason you might think otherwise is necessarily grounded in erroneous conclusions."

Theodoros's face visibly flushed slightly. To Lamu's side, Gudrun was excitedly trading numbers with Malko, who had the look of a man who had the look of a man starting to suspect he'd signed a contract with a devil.

"Then why are you acting like this?" he asked.

That ought to have been obvious. Lamu's perspective shifted.

"You haven't recognized me after all," she concluded.

"What do you mean?"

This was annoying. She'd been somewhat relieved that the need to confess her identity - and every possible reaction and complication that entailed - had been negated by Theodoros figuring things out first, and that they'd be able to move right along to the threat presented by Utsushikome. The fact that not only was that not the case, but that he also apparently had some completely separate crisis occupying his attention, meant that getting anything out of this would be an uphill battle, wasting precious attention that could be going towards the issues at hand.

For a moment, she considered inventing some kind of excuse for why she'd been acting strangely and aborting the idea altogether, but she wasn't confident in her ability to lie, not even over a logic bridge. Theodoros could easily become just another complicating factor. In fact, perhaps that was exactly it. Perhaps Utsushikome, or else the Brotherhood, had threatened him already precisely with the goal of creating this outcome.

No, she'd have to come clean. The rubicon had been crossed.

"Theodoros, it's me," she said simply. "Lilith."

He wrinkled his brow slightly. "Who?"

For fuck's sake.

"Lilith of Eshkalon," she elaborated. "We were in school together. In the Exemplary Acolyte's Class."

Theodoros double-taked. He looked up with wide eyes reflexively, quickly composed himself, then stole a much longer glance as he leaned down to take another bite from his steak.

"...I can't tell if you're being honest or not," he said. "You look so... different."

"Of course I look different. I'm an adult."

"No, I mean you don't even..." He sighed. "Good god, it's been so long. I want to say that you don't even seem the same on a fundamental level, but my memories of my childhood are all a blur, so I can't tell if my feelings are grounded in anything or not. Which means I have no way of knowing if you're being honest or if this is some kind of ploy."

Lamu found herself irrationally irritated by the fact that he could think of no other explanation for why she might come across differently than she did literally two centuries ago besides her being an imposter, but suppressed the feeling. He could just be feigning poor recollection for-- Well, Lamu could think of a few reasons. Either way, she'd have to play along.

"There must be some way I can prove it to you."

Theo glanced at Malko for a moment to make sure he was still preoccupied, then closed his eyes. "Let me think... Our class manager. What was his name?"

In a further aggravating factor, she found that she couldn't actually remember this off the top of her head. The minutia of who was involved in the academy's bureaucracy was not one of the elements of the class which had stuck with her; her younger self had barely paid attention to the people around her at all. She thought it was... Inud? Inada? No, Inadu. That was it.

"Professor Inadu," she communicated. "I think."

"You don't even know his first name? You could have looked that up on your logic bridge right now."

Lamu pivoted. This was not the tactic. "When we did our first conference in Palaat, you started crying backstage because you were too afraid to face the crowd. Seth had to hold your shoulders and get half the class egging you on before you'd do it. Ezekiel said this was because you had 'low testosterone'."

Theodoros flinched. "...why would you bring that up?"

"I thought it would be more likely that you'd recall an embarrassing memory."

"If that's the case, then how did you behave on the trip we did before that? When we went to Knoron."

Lamu sighed. He was really dragging this out. "I believe, unless I am confusing one occasion for another, that you're probably referring to the incident when I refused to use the shower they had at our lodging because the water was too hard. And then screamed at my mother when she attempted to address the problem."

"It's just, you know-- In my line of work, journalism you understand, I take a lot of business calls and a lot of calls I suppose you could call on the borderline," Malko explained to Gudrun in the background. "The line between a friend and a contact can get a little blurred, and that's hardly the worst thing. But it does mean I tend to only use my private engine for very close family and friends, and that's the only one I have on me right now. If you'd write your registry down--"

"No, no, it's cool, I get it," Gudrun reassured him. "Why don't you just give me that number? I don't have any parchment on me, so I'll just give it a call now. Then it'll be in both our histories."

"I... suppose that works..." he spoke hesitantly.

Theodoros looked surprised, contemplating. "I want to say that you could have got that information second hand," he said. "But I'll admit that's a little conspiratorial. You're probably telling the truth." He stole another glance at her. "If you recognized me, why didn't you say anything when you sat down?"

"I thought it would be awkward," Lamu answered, which was honest if not the whole truth.

"I suppose it is." He paused for a moment. "I can't even remember the last time I spoke to anyone from back then one on one. I'd put those days all completely out of mind, at this point. I almost can't believe this is a coincidence."

"What did you mean, earlier?" Lamu asked. "Why did you think I was planning to kill you?"

"I apologize, but if that's the only reason you were acting strangely, I don't know if I want to get into it. Not to be rude, but you're essentially a stranger to me at this point, and it's a private matter. Not to mention the fact that it's not something you want to be involved with regardless." Theodoros shook his head subtly. "I'm embarrassed I even did something this awkward. Maybe we can catch up and trade stories properly later, I don't know."

Lamu considered her approach. On the one hand, sharing the details of her own fears could motivate him to draw his own conclusion about a possible connection, bringing him to her side deftly. On the other, saying that she also faced a homicidal threat could come across as too convenient, renewing his suspicions.

She decided to take refuge in ambiguity. "There's a matter giving me cause for concern on this trip too. I was planning to try to talk to you about it anyway when I had a chance, but it sounds as though our situations might be connected. It might have some connection to why we've been seated together, too." She took a sip of water, then another small bite of meat. "Tell me. If I'm lying or part of it, then you'll only be repeating something I know already."

"Did you catch that, Lamu?" Gudrun asked, probably in reference to Malko's number, which she had obviously not caught. "You should give it a call too."

"Uh. I don't want to fiddle with my logic engine right now," she said, contorting her arm oddly in an attempt to conceal the fact she was doing exactly that. "I'll do it after dinner."

"No rush," Malko said, with a testy glance at Theo and a sip of wine.

"I... there's a lot to tell, but I suppose I can say a little bit," Theo continued reluctantly. "Though in some ways there's actually not much to say, if you exclude my own harebrained theories. In short, for the past few weeks, I'm fairly certain someone has been trying to kill me."

"What makes you suspect as much?" Lamu asked.

"It started in November. There was a break-in at our house, and alongside the things you'd expect - logic engines, scanted objects, luxury credit - there were some documents missing. A mix of things, but... mostly ones personal to me." He grimaced subtly. "Since then, there have been constant little incidents. I threw away a lunch that my assistant ordered in for me at work, and this dog that always lurks around the campus got into it-- A couple hours later they found it dead in the gardens. There was a fire in my office... I don't know, lots of little things like that. It's hard to draw the line between what was part of it and what was me just seeing shadows."

Lamu was silent, letting him talk.

"In fact, until a week ago, I was fairly sure that it was all in my head. But then I received a letter. It was delivered to my address but didn't have a postmark, and arrived on a morning where Mal wasn't at the house, something they could only have predicted if they had personal information on both our working lives."

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Lamu asked the obvious question. "What did it say?"

"I say 'letter' but technically it was two things," he clarified. "The actual message just said 'You are cursed. Resolve your business before the new year. Your blood shall be returned to the one from whom it was borrowed'... but they also included a photograph. It had a picture of my family from when I was a child, taken outside our old house in Oreskios. My father's face was burned out, and there was a red line connecting the two of us."

There was a lot to unpack here. At the superficial level, the framing of this threat obviously somewhat matched the one just delivered to Lamu. The culprit had framed it in grand, almost religious terms, and drew a connection to his relationship to the Order: His father. Utsushikome had also spoken of how she was going to show Lamu specifically a sort of mercy, but that the others would be terrorized 'in accordance with their crimes'. The seeming-omniscience they had about his personal life could also suggest the same connections.

...however, there were little things about it that felt... off. The fact it didn't accuse him of any particular crime, but instead referred to him as 'cursed'. The line about blood being borrowed, the discrepancy between the fact he was tormented in the lead-up to this event despite Utsushikome framing it as a punishment yet to come. And the line drawn between him and his father...

No, looking at the minutia of the symbolism was pointless. By far the greater issue was the question of intent. Utsushikome delivering her warning with Lamu already on the embarked ship had a different weight to threatening someone free to act as they wished well in advance. Which too begged more questions:

"Have you told anyone about this?" Lamu asked. "And why did you come to this event if you were already afraid about what might happen?"

Theodoros looked embarrassed. "I'm in a public-facing position with a decent amount of authority in academia... one that's recently often at odds with the government and the prevailing cultural winds. This might sound hard to believe, but death threats aren't all that uncommon for me." He briefly met her eyes. "And even if it's been rather frightening, everything that's happened could well have just been coincidence. It's not as though the threat in the letter was particularly credible unto itself; the photograph they used was one that appeared in the papers when, er..." He swallowed the air. He was probably talking about when his father had died. "Well, it's probably all over the logic sea. And they could have just got lucky with the timing; Mal is often away a day or two a week traveling. I really didn't want to cause a load of trouble for nothing, so I convinced myself that was true-- No, I still believe that's more likely than not even now. But this morning it suddenly all felt different. I thought about telling Mal..."

Lamu blinked. "You haven't even told your partner?"

"It's been a difficult time for him lately. I know he might seem very flippant about everything, but the political situation has been getting harder and harder for us. They might well shut down the magazine, and it's not out of the question that I'll lose my position, too." He glanced at the man beside him. "I didn't want to worry him. And once we got on board and I saw all the guards and security they have here, I actually felt better than I had back home. Like this would end up being an unexpected reprieve. But then I saw you shooting me looks and it all came flooding back."

"I see," she said. She was taken aback that someone could be so reckless with their safety simply on the basis of it being awkward to do otherwise, but Theodoros had lived a very different life to her, and there was no point in lingering on the matter. "Do you know that there are other members of our class aboard this ship?"

"I mean, obviously," he spoke flatly. "I knew Bardiya would be a guest tonight, but we haven't exactly stayed in touch, and I was kind of planning on avoiding him. You can probably surmise some of the reasons for that."

"What about Ptolema of Rheeds?" Lamu asked. "She's a few tables up."

"Is she?" He raised his gaze, scanning the crowd. "I suppose that's not too surprising. She's one of the most important people in the Irencan shipping industry nowadays. And Konkhulion Citadel is practically in her back garden."

"What about Utsushikome of Fusai?"

At this, his eyebrows shot right up, and he lurched a little with surprise. It was the most suspicious mannerism either of them had shown so far. "I-- She's here?"

"She was sitting right behind me until a few minutes ago," Lamu told him.

"That was her? You're serious?"

"Obviously I'm serious."

Theodoros looked overtly uncomfortable now, sweat trickling on his brow. "I saw her get up. I even saw a bit of her face, but it just... didn't click. Why would she be here? I--" He shook his head. "No, it shouldn't be a concern to me. I've left everything from back then behind."

Lamu frowned slightly, finding this reaction inscrutable considering she hadn't even told him what was up with her yet.

"What are you trying to say?" he digressed. "That even more of our class are here? That we've all been-- Gathered here, somehow?"

"I haven't confirmed it for myself yet, but yes, I believe that might be the case. I think there's a threat that may be facing all of us." She glanced to Gudrun, who had said something to her again off-handedly; Lamu muttered 'yeah' and hoped it wasn't anything important. "I understand why you wouldn't fully trust me, but there are some things I'd like to discuss with you as soon as possible. But unless you do want to involve your partner, then we need to find another way to do it than this. It's probably becoming rather suspicious."

Lamu hoped he wouldn't. She wanted to share the details of the situation with as few people as possible.

"Your friend already knows about this, then...?"

"Yes," Lamu said. "In a manner of speaking. You were right that she's here as my guard."

Theodoros hesitated for a few moments. "I don't want to involve Mal... not yet, at least, but you're right that I still don't really trust you."

"I understand," Lamu told him. "Then, is there a public place the two of us could go--" Not yet, she remembered, not until Nhi's men had appeared, "--after dinner, where we could discuss all this alone?"

Theodoros glanced along the right wall of the ballroom. "We'll go to the bar. Mal always likes some of the drinks they have there more than what they serve by default with the food. There's often a queue between acts, so us being gone for a few minutes shouldn't seem amiss."

"That sounds fine."

He eyed her for just a moment, then ended the call.

𒀭

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

I realized instantly where this was going. The gun was at my feet! There was no way the three could have killed each other in perfect synchronicity - ergo, the logical conclusion on its face was that final killing had to come from an outsider. Despite having pistols in their hands, Eirene and the false detective were paradoxically 'exonerated' by the fact that they were dead. Either of them could have shot Tuthal, and then one could have shot the other, there would be no one to kill the survivor. So the scenario was clear: It was me! I ran over, shot the survivor, and dropped the pistol!

Oh my god, this was exactly what I'd been waiting for. An actual, no-qualifiers-or-weird-gimmicks closed room murder mystery, one that only I was in the position to see objectively. My mind spun. How could it have been done? Obviously something about my theory of the carriage's design had been wholly mistaken. No matter how you shifted the empty space around, it should have been impossible for the doors to both my and Tuthal's room to have led to clean, unremarkable bedrooms. And there had been no sign of the sound Hildris had described, of the rooms shifting around behind the walls, not that I could imagine a way such a thing could be done quietly even without this account. So what had happened? What had I misunderstood?

No, even that was the wrong question. The room moving wouldn't make it any less of a locked room.

Hildris approached from behind me and screamed predictably. "Oh my god! Tuthal?!"

She ran into the room, sobbing, and fell to her knees before his body, the blood from which was still rapidly pooling into the carpet. She ripped a section from her dress off, trying to tend to his wound, but...

Wait, no, I'd been mistaken. Tuthal wasn't quite dead after all. The bullet has pierced the side of his cheek under his ear - the entire area was marred by a huge amount of blood - but his eyes were still moving, albeit without focus. The bullet could have missed or only scraped the edge of his brain.

Still, he was likely doomed. He reached up a hand toward Hildris weakly.

"H... Hild..."

"Tuth! Oh, Tuth." She moaned in sorrow, pressing the cloth to his face. "What happened to you? Who did this?"

"I... I don't know, they just... I just heard..." He swallowed the air. "Hild... I'm sorry, I... we couldn't... I couldn't..."

I blinked. I supposed, though I'm not sure I made the conclusion completely in this moment, that this meant Hildris and Tuthal had actually been in a relationship again the entire time. Obviously there had been plenty of hints in that direction I'd already absorbed, most prominently around the drawing and the aftermath, but I wondered what the deeper implications of this were. What had been the point of the act? Was it just about the money, to disguise an attempt at getting the Last Winter that had been subverted? How would it have worked? I didn't have the time to come to any conclusions.

"Don't speak, don't speak," she urged, then gasped, a wailing sob escaping her lips. "Bahram!" She cried out desperately. "Bahram, we need your help!"

There was no instant response, and really it was odd that 10 seconds had passed and the other two weren't here already. I glanced to the side.

In what probably ought to have been a predictable scene, Bahram, now free from the intervention of Kasua and I, had grabbed hold of Summiri, practically hefting her off the ground. She yelped.

"I'll take you back to him," he hissed. "I'll expose you. We'll end this-- This disgusting charade. I won't be controlled again. I won't bear any more burdens! I won't!"

Summiri tried to protest, but he shoved her head under his arm, muffling her words. He began to drag her down the hallway.

"Bahram, help!" Hildris practically screamed.

He seemed indifferent to her pleas, his eyes possessed by fanatical mania. I looked down at the gun, realizing that no one had bothered to point the finger at me after all. No one was even looking - I could kick it to the side right now. What a waste of a perfectly good framing attempt!

I guess it was bound to happen eventually. Again, in a roleplay, there were many factors you could bend in terms of recreating the tropes and setpieces of a genre work faithfully, but you were still living in reality, not a narrative, and at a certain point it would all come back to that. Sometimes you could put the obvious right of people and they still wouldn't see it. Sometimes a perfect plot could be felled not by someone being too smart, but by everyone being too stupid. You can't control a brick with puppet strings.

I looked down at the gun and decided there was no real downside to picking it up in this situation. I pointed it at Bahram. "Let her go, Bahram!" I ordered. (Kasua would do this, for sure. Summiri had promised her answers, and she had none of my baggage that might predispose her negatively towards the girl-- Like Tuthal, she'd probably just see her as brainwashed.) "Let her go or I'll shoot!"

Bahram did not respond; either he was too consumed with the task at hand or didn't take the threat seriously. Maybe it was the adrenaline rushing through me after being confronted by the mystery, but I found it surprisingly easy to aim for a non-lethal area of his body - the upper left leg, I decided, since there was less risk of hitting one of Summiri's by mistake - and fired.

I was not a particularly good shot, my experience being exclusively relegated to shooting at targets with an air gun during festival and carnival events, but something must have been done to adjust my capabilities as Kasua, as I trivially hit him just below the knee. He cried out, and to my extreme surprise Summiri immediately took advantage of this bringing her hands around his chest and suplexing him into the ground. I caught a glimpse of Bahram's shocked face as he descended towards the ground.

Meanwhile, Hildris and Tuthal were still talking. "It's-- It's a curse..." He muttered, what strength he had left quickly leaving him. "For our sins, it's... I'm sorry, Hild..."

"Tuthal, you have to hold on!" She urged, shaking him. "Stay awake! Stay awake!"

"I'm sorry I... couldn't save... I... Ugh...."

In the hallway, Summiri was recovering. "What's going on in there?" she asked anxiously. "What's happened?!"

Before I could answer, Hildris suddenly spoke up again, sharply around the room. Perhaps some part of her had already accepted Tuthal's impending death. "The killer-- All of them were dead. They must still be in the room!"

She scrambled up, then reached over to Eirene's body, grabbing the pistol from her hand. She looked at the bed. She looked out the window. Then, finally, she turned in the direction of the lavatory.

"They must be in there," she concluded, advancing through the door.

"Hildris, be careful!" I called out on instinct, then advanced after her. The room, as I entered it, betrayed no obvious clues: There was a brown luggage trunk that looked like every other from this era by the bed, alongside a small box about the size of my hand that had been wrapped and sitting on the desk. There were no spots on the walls where a bullet had passed through, the window was unbroken and - if you forgot me saying so in the last chapter - locked from the inside, and there weren't any obvious spots for anyone to be hiding. Still, I kept the pistol levelled ahead.

Hildris, obviously, had opened the door to the bathroom. I moved quickly inside.

The bathroom was empty.

The bathroom was... empty.

Well, not quite. It had the same things mine had: The toilet, the sink, and the ridiculously small bathtub, currently flipped over. There was absolutely no sign of Hildris, who had entered it literal seconds earlier.

My eyes boggled. How? How was any of this possible? Was the creator cheating? This was insane. Ridiculous!

I checked the walls, pushing my hand against the brickwork, perhaps expecting there to be some secret passage; obviously there was nothing. I looked down into the toilet. Had she crawled through it into the septic tank, or whatever a train in this time period would have? No, that was ridiculous. Obviously the pipe would be far too small. But maybe she could have bent down to look? I kneeled over--

I heard the click of the pistol's safety being lowered behind me.

I turned sharply. Summiri was standing there, wearing a neutral expression, having taken the only remaining gun from the detective's hand. It should probably go without saying that it was pointed squarely at my head.

"I'm sorry, Kasua," she said calmly, smoothing over her hair that was still messy from her scuffle with Bahram. "I'm going to need you to come with me."