Chapter 114: 114 How Ending Starts, Part Four

On the way out Angharad felt envious of Jin and Freya. They had to go through a bunch of special checkpoints but at least they could go home through the tunnel that connected their country with Gazland. Angharad was stuck taking another boat ride before her long haul flight.

Lucky for her Mnemosyne and Maria offered to drive her to her point of departure.

"I know it's out of your way, but any time you want to visit again, we would give you a place to stay. We have a couch you could sleep on," Maria said.

"And, frankly, you won't even notice that Andrew is there," Mnemosyne said.

Angharad nodded, smiling towards the mirror between the seats. She couldn't imagine coming back. At the wake it had been easier to talk to them, but as they drove her to the harbour she realised she barely knew them at all.

*

The boat ride was tiring and uneventful, the taxi to the airport even less interesting.

She checked the messages on her phone when she finally reached Changi Airport. Freya had sent a message of her way home: a picture of her winking and making a V-sign in front of the 'You are now entering Northern Constructed Territory' sign. Behind Freya were the bright buildings and street lights of West Garbage Scow, and the side of Jin's back.

Angharad sent back a picture of herself sitting in a chair at her airport gate with a sealed up bottle of water wedged next to her body.

To Sophie she sent the message: 'It's over.'

Sophie replied almost immediately: 'How was it?'

Angharad: 'Depressing. Is it weird I'm happy you weren't there? Jin was a mess.'

Sophie: 'Oh, no! Don't tell me. It doesn't sound good.'

Angharad: 'I guess it's just as easy for you to grieve Tabitha from home, anyway.'

Angharad put her phone away and waited for her boarding call. I was a mess, she thought, trying not to remember Jin and Freya pressing her between them.

On the plane she couldn't help thinking about her conversation with Maria at the wake. Maria had stood straight in her uniform, the jacket casually open. They had clustered by the hors d'oeuvres, Angharad with a canapé that she was pretty sure wasn't safe for her to eat.

Andrew had been sitting nearby. He was still living in Maria's spare room and not really working but he looked better. He even made facial expressions.

"Mnemosyne and I already tracked down Darren's parents and informed them of his death, if you were wondering," Maria said.

"It didn't even occur to me to wonder. I sort of forgot about him," Angharad admitted.

Angharad pulled her hand toward her face to bite at her nails and almost mushed the canape into her face. She felt sorry about it, but that didn’t make it less embarrassing.

Maria stood taller, then gestured with her wine glass. "It's not your job to worry about him. You can leave that to me and Mnemosyne."

"Okay, sure. Sounds like a good deal to me," Angharad said. Even as the words came out of her mouth she knew they were pointless filler. Tabitha would have gone for a cutting remark. Tabitha would have known what to say, because she really knew these people, but Tabitha would never get to speak again and none of them could be her replacement.

When Mnemosyne finally reappeared at the wake she put her hand over Maria's hand and launched into a long explanation of the latest developments in their deep dive into what went through the gate. "There are still shipments of goods that have paperwork that obscures both the content of the shipment and the final destination. Unfortunately Freya has yet to crack that information."

"Well, she's busy with stuff." Angharad had looked across the room, to where Freya stood, straight and tall in her neat uniform, next to Jin's increasing slouch. The lights in the room turned Freya's hair faintly purple, her lips a bright pink. The recycled air was too hot, but Freya looked cool and unruffled, even as Jin seemed to be slowly melting next to her. Angharad looked away, face too warm. "Anyway, I guess that could be a lead or it could be, like, organised crime."

Mnemosyne nodded. "My thoughts were the same. I've also taken note of which places receive shipments of multiple varieties of large industrial lights that could give off the same high beam intensity we grew to expect from the sky in that place, under the assumption that we were in a covered area and never exposed to true daylight."

"So far it's mostly film studios and people working on sports arenas, but they're also going to a few unexplained places," Maria said, shrugging. "A building in Chicago, some sort of facility in Port Arthur, one of the space stations."

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"That's maybe a start, right?" Angharad asked.

Mnemosyne clapped a hand onto Angharad's shoulder then stood back, face even more serious than before. "I want to thank you for your continued friendship with my cousin."

"Your cousin?" Angharad asked.

Maria coughed into one elbow, and said, "Freya and Mnemosyne share grandparents, but they just assume that everybody already knows this so it's always a surprise when you find out."

Angharad put her mostly squashed canape down on a passing waiter's tray. "Oh, that does explain a lot."

"There are things that I chose to do in my career, because I felt that someone like me taking care of these things would be less damaging than somebody else doing it. So many times I chose what I thought was the lesser evil, when a sensible person would have protested anyone having to do those things at all. Freya isn't like me. She knows when to refuse an unreasonable order," Mnemosyne said.

"Yeah, I really don't think that's my doing," Angharad said. "That's just Freya."

*

When Angharad checked her phone again at LAX, there was one message from Sophie: 'What you bury is just a body. The real Tabitha is in our hearts.'

Once, Angharad might have said that sounded like the sort of thing Tsuyoshi would say before he laughed it off as too embarrassing to admit he said it. It occurred to her that for the first time in years she could send him a message to say she was thinking of him. She wasn't sure that would be welcome.

Angharad sent a message back to Sophie: 'When you're right, you're right.'

*

Back in the California office on her way home, Angharad stopped to inspect one of the cleaning bots in the apartment her father was sharing with James and his family. Once she connected to its control panel it finally stopped trying to sweep in circles and cut out all its strange noises.

James had to walk up and ruin the fun, of course.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I'm just here to visit daddy before I go to my own place."

"Hurry up about it. The news online is full of pictures of you dancing at a club in that filthy country, like a stupid tramp. I don't want you here to ruin our reputation, too."

"Oh, James," she said, as she stood and dusted off her skirt. "I'm so glad you don't pretend to be nice anymore. It saves a lot of time."

She walked past him up the corridor to her father's room.

"What did you do to that machine?" he demanded, before she reached the door.

"Just fixing the steering control. Wouldn't be a problem if you'd actually pay for routine maintenance."

Fixing the steering, installing a surveillance system that would do a daily dump of audiovisual files into several accounts at once – she could do them both and James wouldn't be the wiser. It wasn't like he knew anything about the products they were selling. She didn't trust him. More importantly, the California office was losing money and she didn't know why. One by one she made all the little bots in this apartment and the office her friends, talking to them like they were alive, fixing their parts, and all James did was stare at her like she was a sad child who didn't have a dog.

"I don't like your new haircut," he said.

She touched the ends of her hair, the short bob so neat and new that her head still felt light. "You don't have to."

She smiled at him, sincerely pleased with herself when he scoffed at her and walked away.

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