Chapter 102: Ch 81

Leah Armande wakes up on the floor of a stockroom. She scrambles to her feet and pats her hair back into place, running her fingers through it to work out the tangles. How long was she asleep? Dreams can be quick or slow, there’s no way to check…no clock…She pats her pockets and comes up empty. Where’s my phone?

“Everything alright?” A friendly face looks down into the room.

Leah nods distractedly. Not yelling at me for being late, so I guess that whole dream thing happened over a few seconds, maybe a minute or two. Whoa. She focuses back on her surroundings. “Um…you know when you walk into a room and you forget why you’re there?”

“The boss sent you for some guenilles.”

“Right, right,” Leah says, puttering about the shelves. “Where do we keep those again?”

“Check the bottom shelf if there aren’t any on top of the blue bins.”

Leah looks around for the blue bins and finds a cardboard box of the standard restaurant cleaning-rags. “Got ‘em. The whole box?”

“Just a handful. I’m done my closing tasks if you need help.”

“I’d super appreciate it, thanks.”

She returns up the stairs into a mostly-empty club. The lights have all been turned on to allow a proper, thorough cleaning. It seems larger than Leah had imagined, from the few times she’d passed by the outside. A handful of women sit around the back room, taking off stage makeup and costumes, putting on comfortable casual wear, all chatting loudly amongst themselves. Looking at the girls, she tries to guess if one of them is Gloria, but none seem to match Talesh’s somewhat rose-tinted descriptions.

The man – mid-twenties, boyishly cute but with stark cheekbones, dressed in a crisp black dress shirt – takes the rags and a bottle of cleaning spray, and Leah grabs another and follows him. Leah watches him run through the closing tasks, trying to keep up; most of it is the standard sweep-mop-disinfect-stack-tidy type of stuff that she remembers from previous jobs at fast food restaurants. She manages to get through what seems to be the last thirty minutes of her shift with no issue and no surprises.

So long as I don’t have to refer to anyone here by name…damn, I should have asked for that. I spent so long making sure she was okay to reintegrate into her world, and she gave me barely anything about this world!

She hesitates at the cash screen, once it is time to punch out.

“Problem?” a man asks. He is dressed in rather nice but functional clothing, with a haggard yet handsome face. The owner? The boss? The manager? He’s got to be in charge. And here I am, no clue how to punch out. Great, half an hour here and I’m making just the best first impressions. Well, not first.

“I’m more tired than I thought,” she says, gesturing to the screen. “I’ve forgotten my code.”

“End of the week,” the boss says sympathetically. He reaches over and taps a little piece of paper taped to the side. “Eyes not working right?”

Working properly for the first time in weeks, actually, Leah thinks as she punches out, realising that she’s no longer farsighted. This is a nice change. Back to normal. “Right, well, before I endanger myself with my exhaustion, I’m off.” She smiles and gives him a nod, and he returns it.

Outside on the street, she looks around a bit to try to figure out where she is, in relation to her apartment. To her surprise, she finds herself already walking in the right direction before she’s even confirmed where she is. A few of the girls call friendly goodbyes to her, and she waves back at them.

“Have you looked into getting a membership?” one asks – middling height, copper-red hair.

Talesh mentioned a redhead. Nothing more than that, though. Shit. “Um, not yet, no,” Leah says. Membership? To the club? Surely not…

“Get on it!” the woman calls back, teasingly angry. “I want a workout buddy!”

Oh. Gym membership. Pfft, yeah right, as though I have the money for that. “I’ll look into it on the weekend.”

The woman shoots her a thumbs up and starts walking towards the bus stop. No-one else tries to engage her in conversation, so Leah takes the opportunity to dart off towards home. She arrives at her apartment just before sunrise, and collapses into a bed whose sheets smell like they haven’t been washed in weeks and like they underwent several days of copious sex recently.

Laundry. Add that to the to-do list for tomorrow. Leah considers getting up to change the sheets right away, but her body feels tired. Well duh, this body just worked a night shift in the service industry. Not the time to be doing gymnastics, trying to put a clean fitted sheet on the mattress without waking up the neighbours by dragging the bed around. I can put up with the smell. Not like I haven’t slept in worse. Memories of the dungeon sift back into her mind, and she grins. Hey. That’s one bad thing I’ll never have to worry about again. How about that.

The exhaustion in her body begins to overpower her mind, and not long after settling in for the night she is asleep.

The sky is blindingly bright when Leah finally wakes up. Judging by the sun she’d say it’s a little before noon, although she isn’t quite used to the summertime trajectory to be sure. She stares onto the street for a few seconds, soaking in the sight of brick and concrete and manicured lawns and wrought-iron balconies, then throws on a clean set of clothes and rushes to the living room, looking for her phone everywhere she goes.

She finally finds it on the kitchen counter; she unlocks it, thumb running through the code without hesitation, and goes to the contacts list. The names feel distant in her memories, as she scrolls down, but faces and personalities return to her mind as she reads each one. Finally she reaches to the one she is looking for, and she taps the little green phone icon.

She holds the phone to her ear, listening to the rings. It rings only twice before someone picks up.

“Hello! What’s the news from the front, soldier?”

Leah’s eyes water up immediately. “Hi dad. I’m just checking in, is all.”

“Everything okay there?”

“Everything’s great. Just felt a little…I dunno.”

“Actually, since you’re here; Sylvain’s been asking for the recipe, and your grandmother can’t remember where she put the little piece of paper. Could you email it to me?”

“Which recipe is this?”

“The lamb one, from the party.”

“Oh…I don’t know if I have it anywhere, I’ll have to check,” she says, eyes flitting. Lamb? What party? Is this something that Talesh did?

“Well, email it to me if you find it, and I’ll pass it on to him. Think you’ll come out again sometime soon?”

“Definitely. As soon as I can.” Leah nods, though he can’t see her. “First chance I get. I miss you guys.”

“Well there’s a change from the past month! Oh, I sounded like your mother there, didn’t I? Don’t feel guilty honey, we get that you were busy, and stressing over work. Speaking of, I heard something about a promotion?”

“Yeah…yeah, I’m training to be a bartender.”

“Well that’s cool! So you get tips now?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I’m happy to be here, is all.” Leah takes the phone away from her face and sniffles, then brings it back. “I’ll visit soon, okay?”

“I’ll let your mother know. Will you have any new recipes for us?”

Leah laughs. “Gods, you know, I…I’ve missed your guys’ cooking. How’s the barbecue doing this season, anything exciting planned?”

“Piri-piri potatoes for tonight, with hamburgers. Don’t suppose you could make it out in time?”

“For piri-piri? How many hours until the dinner gong?”

Her father laughs. “Supper’s at seven. We’ll set a place, okay?”

Leah laughs back. “Alright, I’ll see what I can do. Bye.”

“Bye honey.” The line clicks.

The apartment is dead quiet once again. Leah stares at a wall for a few seconds, her breathing choppy.

*

Other-Leah has been doing her laundry wrong. She can tell by the smell. Dish soap? Is that dish soap? You’ve been washing my nice underwear in dish soap? Gods…

Everything is just slightly wrong. Every time she puts something back in its place, she finds something else miles away from where it ought to be. Cleaning turns into a gargantuan task.

She finds a small hand-written note on the TV screen: Next time I introduce you to Jurassic Park ;)

Leah stares at it in bafflement. What is that? Is that code? Is that slang? Oh Gods, of course not; Talesh would never have seen any of these movies. I wonder what else she got to watch while here. I hope nothing too cheesy and pop-culture – although, I mean, who knows? Maybe that’s her jam.

And how do I pick up where she left off? I’ve got a girlfriend now, apparently. A co-worker girlfriend who thinks I’m an adopted immigrant from Morocco. Bloody hell. Why Morocco? Why?

And my job. I’ve got a job. I’m a bartender at a strip club. Honestly, that’s way cooler than anything I’d ever envisioned for myself. The pay seems basic, from what she said, but I guess tips are supposed to make up for it. Do people tip better or worse than average at a strip club? Apparently my cousin…hm. No, I think I’m going to chose to repress that memory.

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Gods, I bet the music is going to be so loud. Not looking forward to that.

After an hour of cleaning, Leah finally has the apartment back the way she likes it – or, near enough that she’s not constantly tripping over things. Not that it was messy, just that it was…different. Although I see the bathroom light still hasn’t been fixed. Well of course not, how would Talesh have known there was a problem? Frankly I’m amazed she figured out the electronics here at all.

One of the last things she picks up is a receipt from a store down the road. “Pagan Hallow?” Leah reads, laughing to herself. “Why the fuck…one pendant, and one tarot reading? What?” She turns the receipt over, and sees that stapled to it is another scrap of paper, with some scribbles: Seven Swords upright – Justice upright – Eight Swords upright.

Leah chews her lip. That seems statistically unlikely. Three cards upright? When’s this from… She has to cross-reference with her phone to know the day’s date. A month ago. Sheesh. Oh! Months! Interest! Shit!

She rushes to turn on her dust-covered laptop, opening every tab in her finances folder and paying off everything that needs to be paid – after double-checking that her bank account has enough to cover it all. Wow. She was a frugal spender in her time here. Wait, what’s this about another boba shop? Did she betray my boba shop?

Wait. Boba…

She puts on her shoes, grabs her wallet, tucks her phone and the receipt into her pocket, and is out the door within a minute. Her bus pass is expired – no surprise – but the shop is within walking distance.

Along the way, she feels herself settling back into the rhythm of the city. The crooked streets and their sporadic crosswalks are still second nature, as is the Montreal-native urge to jaywalk at every opportunity. The cars rumble by, loud and dusty in the high heat. Leah can already feel a small sunburn threatening her shoulders by the time she reaches her preferred bubble tea shop.

She goes in and orders her usual, smiling broadly to the cashiers whose faces are almost more familiar to her than her own is – looking at her reflection is still a little unnerving, and she finds herself avoiding shiny surfaces.

Extra-large oolong in hand, she squeezes into a space on the bar that runs around the shop. Man…the stuff Edvellu had was nice, but boba is just… She snaps out of it. Edvellu. That’s a real person. A real person from a parallel world. What the fuck.

Comfortably anonymous in the crowd, she pulls out her phone and connects to the wifi. Checking the note scribbled with the receipt, she finds some tarot sites and begins reading. What do the astral-types have to say, eh? What was I even up to, a month ago? Early days…was I even in the Enterlan yet?

Seven Swords: deceit, trickery, false friends. Justice: justice. Pretty self-evident, that. Also includes consequences and truth. Eight Swords: feeling trapped, anxious, facing a dilemma or crisis.

Gods, she was a nervous wreck, wasn’t she? But it fits in with what she told me in the dream-state, and what I found out on my own. She was lying a lot, keeping her relationships secret, keeping her loneliness secret, keeping her family’s death secret. The first one is the past, right? That’s how this works?

Then what’s the present? Justice being done. Something needs to come to light? She needs to apologise? What were the consequences of her lies, exactly? Well, coming here, I suppose.

And the future: hopelessness. Wow. Well, no, you’re supposed to look at them in context, so…I guess, she was lying, the lie was about to have consequences, and the thought of facing the consequences had her frozen with fear, so she…

She ran away.

Leah stops mid-sip of her bubble tea. A slow pop song plays on the radio, one that hadn’t dropped by the time she’d left and is new and strange to her ears. Don’t do this to yourself Leah…don’t do this…don’t… She looks up the meanings of the cards inverted. Just for curiosity, yeah? Just to see. One month ago, right? I was just about to turn coat.

Seven Swords, reversed: a truth revealed, your conscience driving you to come clean. So like, finding out that the missives weren’t actually…No. Don’t do this to yourself. It’s over.

Justice, reversed: injustice, dishonesty, corruption. Living in denial. So, like…the whole interrogation and prison thing. Fuck…

Eight Swords, reversed: escaping, finding solutions, facing fears, taking control. So, breaking out of prison. Going to Seffonshold. Deciding to find things out for myself. Taking the risk. No longer being passive.

She takes a long drag from her boba. “Hmm,” she says, into the air, bitterly. “Interesting.”

*

The door to the mysticism-shop activates an electric bell chime when she opens it. She can remember most of Seffon’s set-up, the way he placed the gems, the patterns he drew on her head and hands, the words he spoke. I doubt I’ll find exact material matches, but let’s be honest; I’m flying by the seat of my pants.

“Bonjour, hi!” a perky older south-east Asian woman says, her malong deep red and purple and embroidered with gold.

“I’ve got a list,” Leah says without preamble, holding it out. “How much of this do you have?”

The woman’s eyes widen as she reads down it. “This is interesting. What’s it for?”

Leah shrugs. “School project.”

“Ah!” the woman beams and gestures for her to follow, leading her around the shop, picking up components as she finds them and crossing them off Leah’s list – tumbled agate, tea light, rat skull, white quartz. “Any specific quality of quartz, my dear? We have – ”

“The best,” Leah says, without hesitation. “It has to be clear. Herkimer point, preferably.”

“Alright,” the woman says, adding it to the basket. “Some of this I don’t have here…the powdered pearls, the sinew…”

“Sinew I can get elsewhere,” Leah says, taking the basket. “Any regular pearls?”

The woman fetches a string of river pearls from a corkboard covered with gem beads. “Like this?”

My poor mortar and pestle…oh, you have served me well, and this is a fine way to die. “Yes, perfect.” She pays for her purchase, not even wincing at the total cost. It’s not really my money after all, is it?

She jogs home, unlocks the door, and digs through her apartment to find her littlest travel bag. It’s going to be a lot of stuff, but if I show up with a huge backpack they’ll ask questions…

For a moment she pauses in her preparations. Am I going through with this? This is really impulsive, even by my standards. What happens if I show up and I don’t have the guts to leave them a second time?

Well, not like I chose to leave them the first time. Wait, no, that’s worse!

Leah sits on the rug, her head in her hands. I was ripped away from people. That sucked, but at least it wasn’t my fault. If I leave them again, of my own volition…man, this is too convoluted for me. What’s the smart thing to do? What’s the sensible thing? Damn, I wish I had Vivi’s advice right now, she was always so –

Her thoughts grind to a halt. Huh. I guess I’ve answered that for myself.

No. One more hurdle. One more chance to bail out, to chicken out.

Pulling out her phone, she opens the message history between her and one of her old high school friends, the one who had gone into philosophy. Now, how to phrase the question without sounding like a lunatic, or alerting anyone to the fact that something’s off…hold on. She double checks the calendar, then looks again at the conversation. He never texted me? In over a month, he never reached out? Man, he must have been busy…or maybe he thought I was giving him the cold shoulder for some reason. I guess that was smart of Talesh, not to talk to my friends; too hard to play the part in front of people who knew me so well.

Then again, my parents…

Then again-again, it probably wasn’t a decision on her part; she didn’t know what a phone was.

Did anyone else try to contact me?

There are a handful of texts from the missing month, most from family members, one from a college friend, and one from the ‘leader’ of her tabletop friend group. Nothing from anyone else. The group chats, when she opens them, are filled with weeks’ worth of jokes and gripes and memes, but nothing that she can spot that relates to her disappearance. One side conversation, from a high school ex, has a pair of messages asking why she has dropped off the face of the internet all of a sudden, and whether she’s doing okay, but no follow-up.

Leah surprises herself by realising that she’s fighting back tears of bitterness. They noticed I was gone. Some of them. The rest…well, everyone’s life gets busy sometimes. And if they thought I was busy, they wouldn’t want to interrupt me. It’s fine. It’s fine. She goes back to packing her bag.

 She grinds the pearls in the marble mortar and pours the sparkling powder into a little plastic bag, hoping that no-one decides to stop-and-frisk her on her way. That done, she closes up the apartment for the weekend, takes some bills from her stash of emergency transit money, and heads off towards the nearby butcher’s shop, the same one she used to go to when she was still taking classes at the college, to get all the best cuts when they were freshest.

It’s larger than she remembers, and the owner’s face is only distantly familiar, but he recognises her on sight and immediately moves over to the chorizo. “C’est bon de te revoir,” he says. “J’avais peur que t’as décidé de dev’nir végétarienne.”

It takes a while for the French side of her brain to kick in. “Bien sûr que non,” she says with a laugh.

“Combien de grammes, alors?”

“Enfin je’n’suis pas ici pour d’la viande. Avez vous du…” She waves her hand, frowning. “Sinew? Tendons? À peu près comme ça en longueur.” She holds up her hands, about thirty centimetres apart.

“Tendons? Euh…” He holds up a finger and doubles back to the processing area, a gust of cold air escaping the door as he opens it. A few minutes later he emerges with a length of extremely fresh sinew. “Comme ça?”

“Oui, parfait.”

“Bon, oké. C’est pour faire quoi avec?” he asks.

“Un projet d’école,” she says casually, and he accepts this with a magnanimous shrug. He staples some pink butchers’ paper into a little envelope and tucks the sinew inside.

“Ça va sécher vite,” he warns her, and shakes his head when she holds out money. “J’ai confiance que tu saches c’que tu fais. On le jette à la poubelle, d’habitude.”

Leah smiles and gives him a half-bow, much to his bafflement, and then she is out the door and jogging towards the inter-city bus terminus.

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