Chương 26: Chapter 25: The Other Side

When I woke up, my phone had the usual carnage. Discord pings from the seasonal anime channel losing its mind over the new key visual. Crunchyroll alert that the episode I'd been waiting for had finally dropped. @everyone from a server I'd muted three times and somehow still wasn't muted. The normal debris of being online while unconscious. I thumbed through it half-awake, clearing notifications without reading them, until one stopped me. A message from my mom.

Sent at 4: 32 PM — seven hours ago, while I was dead to the world. The message itself wasn't unusual. My mom sent me stuff everyday. Pictures of her garden. Did you eat today. A stray cat she'd named even though it belonged to the neighbour three doors down. Normal mom things. This one said: Did you see what happened to Arcene's house? Arcene was my best friend. My mom knew that. She'd known him since we were kids. But she'd never — not once — messaged me about his house.

She usually didn't drive past his neighbourhood. She lived on the other side of town. There was no reason for her to be there, and even less reason for her to ask me if I'd "seen what happened" whatever this meant. Except there was a photo attached. Blurry, dashboard-angle, taken through a car window. The empty lot where Arcene's house used to be. Foundation gone. Just dirt. Smooth dirt, like the house had been erased from the bottom up. I stared at it. Okay. No. Houses didn't just vanish.

Foundations didn't unsubscribe from existence. Somebody was running a prank on my mom — AI-generated image, type "empty lot suburban street" into Midjourney, ha ha very funny. Or my mom was pranking me. Neither track record supported it, but both were more believable than Arcene's house being a hole in the ground. I messaged him. big-anime-eyes. gif dude your house it's gone, my mom sent a picture. Sent. Waited. Nothing. Sent another. Nothing.

Arcene was a night owl — he worked nights, he lived on Discord, the guy was basically mr. h24. He should have been awake. Maybe his phone was dead. Maybe he was still in the shower. Maybe — and this was the optimistic take — he'd finally touched grass and gone to sleep at a normal human hour. I looked at the photo again. The dirt was smooth. Not dug up. Not excavated. Not "construction crew spent the weekend demolishing a house."

Just smooth bare earth, like the house had been lifted straight up and the ground had closed its eyes and pretended nothing was ever there in the first place. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I zoomed in. Pixel soup. My mom's photography skills were about what you'd expect from a woman who still printed her boarding passes. Whatever. The dog needed to go out anyway.

I grabbed my jacket, found the leash, got the jingle-jangle of a sixty-pound animal who had no idea we were about to walk past a potential crime scene, a dimensional rift. Or — most likely — a completely normal empty lot. I'd walk over. See the normal empty lot. Send Arcene a picture of his completely intact house and a "lol my mom's losing it" message. The dog would pee on something. We'd go home. End of story. Ah — by the way. My name is Bill. Bill Mariano. The dog's name is Susanoo. Yes, from Naruto.

No, I don't want to talk about it. The notification chime pulled me back to the monitor. Another message from Bill. The third — no, the fourth. The first one really surprised me, of course, I'd tried to answer all of them. The spinner had failed me every time though. This one was heavier. Not just text — an attachment. The loading bar crept forward. The attachment loaded. A photo. Taken at night. Bad lighting, phone flash illuminating a patch of dirt and — Water.

The hole where my house used to be had filled with water. Probably from the broken service lines. When the house disappeared, the pipes must have been ripped apart, and the water would have kept flowing until someone shut it off. Long enough to leave a shallow pond where my house used to be. Bill's message came through under it. I'm here rn there's just a hole filled with water like a tiny lake what the fuck The timestamp said 3: 45 AM Earth. I checked the clock. It was about 9AM here.

arcene where the fuck are you I typed. I'm alive. I can't explain anything. I'm alive. Send. The spinner spun. And spun. And timed out. Failed to send. I tried again. Shorter: I'm alive. Failed. I hit retry on the failed message. It failed again. The internet worked one way. I could read Bill's words. I could see the photo of my own missing house — the hole, the water, the dirt that used to hold my foundation.

I could see the messages he'd sent before this, the GIFs that were so completely him I could almost hear his voice through the screen. But I couldn't tell him I was breathing. Yato found me at the desk sometime later. He jumped up without asking, tail sweeping across the monitors before he settled beside them. His eyes flicked between the middle screen and my face.

"I got a message from Bill." Ears twitched.

"He's standing where our house used to be. There's water in the hole." Yato blinked slowly. Houses come and go. More importantly, I want some fish!

"You don't care I get it, but he's scared you know." Yato pressed his head against my hand. He probably didn't understand the words. Yet he understood enough to get that I needed to be reassured. Morning passed. Routine carried me through it — fish trap, gutting on the riverbank, Yato at the door, the cleaning golem stirring when he shed. The thermal road steaming. The sweeper crossing the main street. The same as every morning for weeks. I even treated myself to a long, hot bath today. When I came back.

I checked the phone. 3: 50 AM Earth. No new messages. Bill had probably gone home. Poor Bill, he's waiting for an answer that will probably never come. The time I had waited for finally came the next evening. I was at the kitchen counter. Yato at my feet. I'd just set the fish bucket down when I felt it. A pressure behind my ribs that hadn't been there an hour ago. Not pain. Fullness. Like water pressing against a dam, waiting for a channel. The threshold. I stood still while it confirmed itself.

The First Circle had been working toward this since the moment I'd carved it. Gathering. Refining. Day after day until the tank was filled with mana of a higher density. I fed Yato an extra piece of fish. He accepted it with the quiet dignity of a creature who had always expected this and was about to leave some to spoil on the plate. Then I picked up the grimoire from the table and sat on the couch. The procedure was the same.

Map a second circle with mana — a new circuit, different geometry, designed to interlock with the first. Press it through skin and muscle to the heart. Let it settle alongside the existing circle. And let them spin together in opposite directions. Same pain. Same risk. This time I knew exactly what it felt like. I lay down on the sofa. Bill was on Earth. Scared. Waiting. Just like everyone else I loved. There was nothing I could do about that. For now I needed to survive.