Chapter 113: 113 How Ending Starts, Part Three

Jin came to Angharad's door the next morning, neat and tidy in an olive green suit jacket and white shirt, his hair so heavily styled she suspected no wind was going to disturb its artful shape.

"You look good this morning," she said, as he leaned on the doorway. That was new – since when was he the kind of guy who liked to lean on things? "What's the occasion?"

He smirked out of one side of his mouth. "Freya is too hungover so I get to take you out shopping."

"And you had to get all fancy for that?"

"I have one nice set of clothes that isn't my funeral suit. I brought it with me. I'm wearing it. You can keep wearing that orange thing you have on. It's nice. I like the whole swirly thing."

"You better like it. It was my grandmother's in the 1960s."

The weather app in the hotel room control panel told her the day would be as unseasonably warm as the day before had been, but Angharad pushed a cardigan into her handbag just in case.

*

All around them the city was vibrant, bright. Many buildings had suffered severe water damage and had grimy windows; many shop fronts were empty; but people shopped instead from market stalls, shop trucks and half open vans.

Jin's steps were slow. Angharad had never associated him with the ability to take a casual stroll, but she supposed even he couldn't speed-walk through being a tourist on a crowded street.

"It's hard to believe we were at war just... however many years ago," Jin said.

"However many?" Angharad asked.

"You know what I mean. The time travel still makes my head hurt," he said.

"I do usually know what you mean."

He drifted closer to her.

As they walked closer to the beating heart of the city, the part where big companies still came to play, the buildings got cleaner, neater. Some stores had the blandly international set up Angharad had gotten used to seeing everywhere in the world, but some had quirky paintings and interesting text design choices, individualist and yet somehow all coordinated with each other. A lot of the decoration style reminded her of the graffiti she'd seen on the way into the city, as if all the tagging and slopping paintings on the outer edges were the amateur practise and all the real style of the central business district was graffiti artists gone pro. It was about as different from what she'd seen in the Northern Construct as she could imagine, and yet there Jin was right next to her, somehow blending into the crowd.

As they reached the more office-y areas, concrete and glass, the tones of people's clothing got more sombre and blandly business appropriate, and yet there was still colour and pattern, a little bit of quirk in the people walking around with take-away coffee and phone headsets.

It wasn't entirely unlike the other parts of the world she'd had the pleasure of getting to know. A city is a city is a city, after all. Angharad watched two people walk out of one boutique: a woman wearing a classic linen Yohji Yamamoto coat open over a vintage Scanlan Theodore dress, next to an androgynous someone wearing styles Angharad hadn't seen before. Still, the decreased level of contact with the outside world seemed to have done a lot to give Gazland a cultural identity of its own.

"How come all the buildings here are in good shape? I mean, I guess a lot of them aren't, but that's bad upkeep bad shape, not 'we were at war' bad shape," Angharad said.

"De-oxygenation bombs," Jin said. "Create a shape, suck all the oxygen out of it, kill all the people but keep the buildings intact. Nasty but efficient."

"I remember Rod Spark oozing smugness when he told me he only sold that technology to legitimate democracies."

Jin snorted. "That's a lie. He sold it to us and my country has never been a democracy. He sold it to governments on both sides of this conflict."

"I thought Gazland was technically a democracy?"

"Technically a democracy in the sense that it technically has elections but everyone's seen footage of the guys with machine guns at the voting booths, anyway. We all know it's run by the mob. Plenty of ostensible democracies are."

Angharad looked up at the sky as she strolled, aimless, by Jin's side.

"Do you ever think about how things would be if we'd met in a different place? I asked Sophie that once and I talked about it with Tsuyoshi heaps, how different things could be in a world where the gate sabotage hadn't happened and Zapville didn't exist," she said.

She'd talked about it with Josephine, too, in that little dark hospital room as they quietly danced. The memory of that moment felt like it had happened so long ago she was no longer sure it was really real, the edges of her memories of Josephine so ideal they felt more like teenage fantasies than something that could have been true.

"Angharad, in a different life where that never happened we would never have met," he said.

His voice was blunt, and when she looked back at him, two steps behind her, his eyes were honest.

She nodded. "Yeah, and if somehow we had met, if we'd ever been in the same place at the same time, we would never have been friends."

She stopped walking and waited for him to catch up.

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"I want you to know," he said, leaning in to tell her ear and not the whole world, "that the reason I said no to the threesome wasn't that I thought you were unattractive."

She leaned back a little. "I didn't think it was."

"Because you are. I think you're hot. I definitely... It was just..."

"No, I get it," she said, turning away to look at the hustle and bustle of the crowd. "This is an attraction I enjoy not acting on."

She grabbed the edge of Jin's sleeve and dragged him into a shop, made him look at gaudy souvenirs and delicate trinkets. She didn't pay much attention to whether he was really paying attention, only sure he was close from the familiar sound of his heavy steps, the occasional warmth of his body behind her.

He didn't speak until she was at the counter, paying with her plastic for a beautiful bracelet she didn't need.

"Do you think it's weird or offensive for me to be here like a tourist?" he asked.

"Is this really where you want to have that conversation?"

The woman at the shop counter, a warm-skinned white woman adorned with chunky, patterned jewellery, pursed her lips and rang up Angharad's purchase in silence.

Jin didn't speak again until they were out of the building and walking in who knew what direction. He put his arm around her shoulders and she let him steer her where he wanted to go.

"There's people from here who visit my city, too," he said, breath warm on her neck.

"I mean, this is not my conflict so it's not really my call." The day was cooling fast as clouds rolled in above, and she breathed out a fine mist in front of her face. "I thought you were angry at the people here."

"I'm more angry at the foreigners who tried to interfere toward the end of war and dragged out the conflict."

"That's... I mean, that makes sense."

He stopped her a block from the train station. The crowd was thicker there, louder, and the sounds of construction from the rebuild of the surrounding building even louder than that.

Jin's arm fell to her waist and she turned to look at him. That made it easier to take a step back. He was smiling, just a little, mostly with his eyes.

"You look happy," she said.

"I got a text from Freya. She's finally awake and wants to see me."

"Well, good."

"Maybe people here should hate me. I'm always going to know who I am, that I'm someone who killed people I knew and felt nothing about it."

"Jin, I mean, this is kind of heavy..."

"But I don't hate the people here. I hate what that war made us into. I keep thinking about Tabitha. I've been thinking about her for years. I'm glad she never forgave me. I don't think I could have loved her as much if she did."

*

Angharad slowly meandered back through the city after Jin left. Her head felt heavy, so she stopped in at a walk-in hair salon to lighten the load and walked out with hair short enough that she'd need to get a scarf to keep the bottom of her neck warm. And after buying a new scarf, big and thick and shiny silvery-grey, she stopped at a cafe to get lunch and a place to sit while she threw on her cardigan. And then from there she took a bus in a random direction and ended up in Port Rosemary.

Angharad was not really good at the tourist thing and Point Rosemary was mostly abandoned anyway. The southern island might have been as much a military dictatorship as the north, pretence at democracy notwithstanding, but the military weren't being particularly strict at dictating what was happening in the ruins of old shopping malls and overgrown parks.

The area around the travel gate was fenced off and patrolled by people in severe uniforms, but it was right near a park that was reverting to swamp and a pond full of ducks. Angharad felt overdressed in the humidity, even if almost everyone around her wore jackets. Families with kids seemed to avoid the old playground with its lurid plasticky paints, wood chip floor and perfunctory gym equipment, for the area where the birds swam about and sometimes flew up to surprise toddlers.

Two people shot out from an old building. They bumped right into Angharad while she was busy looking at the green and red leaves on the trees. The force of the bump spun her around.

A man and woman, strangely familiar. The man turned around just for a moment and Angharad realised it was Niall, about to make his escape into Zapville.

She knew it wasn't going to be the escape he hoped for. She wondered if she should stop him, but she didn't move forward. No, she'd already made that choice. If she accepted it as a stable time loop then she couldn't change anything. Wouldn't have to.

She walked back along the dusty footpath. She remembered the presence of the armed people across the road was when the alarm went up. She kept walking. Not her business to interfere.

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