Chương 55: Chapter 54: The Waiting Game

The gate opened. Bill stepped through with two bags in each hand. He wasn't with Susanoo this time. He set the bags down on the stone and stood there for a moment, hands on his knees.

"That's not all of it," he said.

"Come help me get the rest." I followed him back through. The lot was dark. Late. The streetlight across the road was doing its best.

"We need to be faster," I said.

"Yeah. No shit." Bill's car was parked at the curb. The trunk was open and packed. I hadn't seen that much food in one place since the last time I'd been inside a supermarket. Frozen boxes. Dry goods. Cans stacked in columns. Bags of rice, pasta, flour. A case of instant ramen. Coffee — three bags of it, whole bean, the good kind. A box of soap bars. Tubes of toothpaste and a couple brushes. Frozen bread... Bill popped the back door. More bags on the seats.

"How much did you bring?"

"As much as I could," he said.

"I didn't know what you needed, so I got everything." We carried it through in trips. The gate rippled each time we crossed. The barrier fencing swayed in the wind. A dog barked somewhere down the street. No one came to investigate. No sirens. No flashlights. By the fourth trip, the carriage was full. By the fifth, I was stacking boxes on the floor of the gate chamber. Bill closed his trunk. Looked at the gate. Looked at the street.

"Same time tomorrow," he said.

"I'll have more."

"We need to be careful after what happened with the video." He looked at me.

"If anyone's watching the lot, they'll notice a pattern. We're done for now." He didn't argue. During the carriage ride to my house, Bill told me everything that had happened on the other side. The police station. Léon. The recruitment firm. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. The three of us sat in the back with the load, surrounded by boxes that creaked and settled with every turn. The kitchen filled up fast.

Thankfully we had a lot of space in the cold room because the chest freezer in the garage was already packed with meat. Ella appeared in the doorway as I was stacking the last cans into the pantry. She watched for a moment, then walked over to one of the bags Bill had left on the counter and pulled out a box. She turned it over. Read the label. Tilted her head.

"What is this?" I looked up. She was holding the condoms.

"Condoms," I said. She turned the box over again. Read the back.

"What are they for?" I explained. She looked at the box. At me. At the box again. Then she opened it, took one out, stretched it between her fingers like a balloon, watched it snap back into shape, and threw it back into the box.

"No."

"What do you mean, no?"

"They sound awful." She dropped the box into the trash.

"I refuse." Then she came back to the pantry. The days that followed settled into a shape I remembered. Bill stayed on Earth. The gate stayed closed. Each day he would bring a bit more food and other stuff we might need and I would bring him some more gold to bring to Leon. He'd said he needed a week to get the team ready. On his side, that was seven days. For us, it was fourteen months. A year and a bit. The longest stretch I'd spent in this world since the day I arrived. The first month was food.

Not in a bad way. In the way that comes after months of rationing, when you open a cupboard and find it full. Real rice. Pasta that wasn't made from ground fish. Vegetables that came from a can, something that would have felt like a luxury only months earlier. Coffee every morning, without counting the scoops. Ella discovered peanut butter and Nutella. She soon ate it straight from the jar with a spoon, standing at the counter, watching me while I was cooking proper food.

"This paste is really nice," she said. She ate the rest of the jar by the end of the week. I would have argued but honestly, it was nice to see her with a smile on her face when she ate junk food. The garden stopped looking like a garden and started looking like a farm. Tomatoes came in heavy and red, splitting at the seams. The peppers had more trouble producing, but we still got a harvest from them now and then. The courgettes grew so fast I stopped counting them; soon the space around the pond was covered.

Bill even brought us more seedlings. Pumpkins. Watermelons. Strawberries... He was very cautious about the seasons, checking what would grow before bringing anything new. Ella spent mornings at the pond, evenings on the couch with Yato at her side, an episode queued on my PC and the laptop on her lap as she worked through the calculations. She was still trying to solve the mathematics needed to move the gate. As for me, I spent most of those months in the archives. The castle had more records than I'd ever finish.

I worked through them in stacks, taking notes, cross-referencing dates, building timelines and throwing out theories almost as quickly as I made them. The disappearances. The gate project. The empire's expansion after Ella vanished. I found fragments. Pieces that didn't quite fit together. Enough to know there was a pattern. Not enough to understand it. The seasons turned. The forest thickened and thinned. The fish in the pond grew large. And the garden went from green to brown to green again.

The fourteenth month arrived slowly. My phone buzzed. I looked at it. We're ready. I read it twice. Then I stood up, walked inside, and found Ella at the desk.

"It's time."