Part 2 / ?
Down in accounting, Helenora’s cube is inconspicuous but once inside it’s an oasis of Nihiran succulents and creeping, luminous plants from the Tropic of Viridi—how she gets them both to grow is miraculous—complete with fine, wooden file cabinets and bookshelves topped with collectable figurines. If anyone in this department deserves a private office, it’s Helenora. She’s got the fine taste for it.
Well usually. She also usually doesn’t miss work, so far as Sorrel can tell. (Did she requisition her best friend’s attendance records? No one in HR will say a word about it—they know who signs their paychecks.)
It’s the smell that has Sorrel running down the aisle of cubes, woodsmoke and veildust wafting over the cube farm so strong it’s drawn a crowd around the source. The first morning Helenora’s been a no call no show during her entire tenure with Tensule sees her desk piled with slightly charred pieces of offal. Periodically—every 16 minutes according to another gobsmacked bystander—another piece of papery birch bark or scrap of linen appears, flaming for the brief moment its suspended midair above Helenora’s keyboard before drifting down to delicately settle onto the small heap of ash forming.
Sorrel finally finds her voice. “She’s never going to get the keys clean.”
The smell of veildust is making her head swim with the sense memory of her ancestral home, the rainbow of colors always dancing on the horizon where reality had worn thin from millennia of spirits’ traveling to their ending place.
She pushes her way back out of the curious accountants’ cluster, pulling out her phone as she goes to call Helenora. The line doesn’t pick up or go to voicemail. An exceedingly polite computer program chimes into her ear, “I’m sorry, Sorrel, but the number you’ve dialed doesn’t exist. Would you like to try another?”
“Mira, I want you to call Helenora.”
There’s a brief pause and the line doesn’t ring out this time at all. “I’m sorry, Sorrel, but the number you’ve dialed doesn’t exist. Wou—”
Sorrel’s made it to the elevator and it’s a good thing, too, because she’s still dizzy from the veildust and having a hard time feeling her knees. She stabs the Close Doors button but doesn’t select a floor. “Mira, you’re useless,” she snaps into her phone and viciously shoves it into her back pocket.
Muffled against her butt she can hear Mira complain, “I’m sorry, Sorrel, I do not understand your request.”
Sorrel closes her eyes and takes a deep breath through her nose, letting it fill her lungs all the way down until she can feel the tense muscles of her mid-back expanding with it. She lets it out slowly. The angular handrail along the mirrored back wall of the elevator is digging into the sore parts of her lumbar spine. The floor of the elevator vibrates just enough to be sensed while perfectly still with its unused energy potential. The speaker is broken so instead of the latest Feirmetan pop on a low volume there’s only a thin whine of static.
She should really put in a work order to get that speaker fixed.
It wouldn’t do to overreact. Helenora’s probably out sick. Computer glitches happen all the time and it’s entirely likely that Mira screwed up Helenora’s number. Space-time anomalies have been known to occur in regions where the Veil is thin. There’s an explanation for this somewhere.
But then the Veil isn’t and never has been thin in Ashcliffe, not even in its coastal cities, the Mira software hadn’t had such major problems in the last five years, and most importantly, Helenora doesn’t miss work.
The thing to do when Veil anomalies occurred was to find a Mroz or a Niarii. Sorrel opens her eyes, chews her lip for a moment, then presses the call button for the lobby. With a quick gesture she shuts Mira off in favor of texting the PA Power Team herself, “I’ll be gone the rest of the day—hold down the fort and don’t let anyone call me” before she calls her grandmother.
__
Hamó Kyrá doesn’t answer her phone which, while expected, is frustrating– she’s of the opinion that scrying would be more efficient if something truly important were happening, which makes zero sense to Sorrel. She’s already buying her monorail ticket when voicemail picks up. “Hamó, you really should check your phone once in awhile. I’m coming up to the observatory– it’s an emergency– I don’t have time to explain. I’m going to need to borrow your old clothes. I’m coming straight from work. I love you and I’ll see you soon.”
Her seat is cramped, sandwiched between two other tourists who are no doubt heading north for the trinkets and sights to be had in the southernmost Mroz settlements. It was the rare adventurer who went north of da Ęnhova– they had no stomach for real cold and Sorrel supposes she wouldn’t either if she were at risk of frostbite. She isn’t, though, and the economy car is full of oppressive heat and the muggy quality of air that’s being breathed by many people at once. She can feel her hair frizzing despite the variety of smoothing serums she applied to it not three hours ago. Her blouse is designer and the back of it is wrinkling against the textured, tacky monorail seat.
Hamó will have clothes I can borrow, she reminds herself, it may not be designer but I’ve always looked good in bone beads and niadze skin.
The monorail trip is the easy part, jettisoning hundreds of feet above Karesh’s spires before the city drops off to the wide valley that holds the ancient forests of Ashcliffe’s northern borders. If she keeps her head angled just so she can see out of a window several aisles up– the seat’s occupant is a dozing teenager and she takes a moment to recall that school is out for the summer festival season. While some, like the Feirmetans to the north, use this time for sowing and harvest, any student on the train with her is likely to be celebrating their months of freedom.
Growing up, Helenora seemed to have the most incredible adventures during festival season.
She finds herself wishing the pursuit of teleportation weren’t illegal. The Niarii had conferred, something like 75 years ago, with the world’s leaders and the result had been a complete ban on attempting teleporting. Use of extant Niarii teleportation devices is legal, but the red tape involved is daunting not to mention time consuming. Sorrel’s in the middle of wondering who to schmooze to get around all those bureaucratic hurdles and whether that would actually be faster than staying on the monorail when the person to her right says, “It’s a lovely view isn’t it?”
She turns to blink at them. Tur’lovian, based on their make up– a wash of deep green bisecting their face, symmetrical gold symbols that likely signify… Something. Sorrel’s never had a lot of interest in gods outside her own. Particularly the God of Valcrest.
“Yes.” It’s not like her to be monosyllabic but there are more important things than the view– why doesn’t anyone else seem to know that?
They smile at her, “Is your family looking forward to seeing you?”
Sorrel finds herself torn between “That’s remarkably insightful of you” and “You shouldn’t assume all Mroz have family up North– we live all around the world now”.
Instead says this: “My grandmother is going to help me figure out why there’s a hole in the fabric of the Veil in my best friend’s cubicle. It’s a magical mystery– I’m sure you know how sedate Ashcliffe tends to be in terms of thin spots in reality. We’re going to have to sacrifice at least one chicken.”
It’s a small, petty sort of tactic to throw magic at a Tur’lovian priest in the hopes that they’ll leave her alone, but when it works like a charm every time, why should she stop? It’s only fair, as far as she’s concerned, given the history between their peoples.
There must be awkwardness in the silence that descends but Sorrel can’t pick up on it. According to the news, the first two days are the most important for finding missing persons. Even if Helenora disappeared right after work yesterday, she can’t have gone too far. It’s there on the monorail, halfway to Feirmeta and intending to go to the end of the line, having just intentionally wigged out a clergyperson for no good reason that she realizes she may be overreacting. A little bit.
She’s a big enough woman to be able to admit when she’s taking things too far—gods know she does it all the time at work, especially when glitter or team building trips to theme parks are involved.
But then how would Helenora’s phone be not out of service but out of existence? Neither regular kidnapping nor eloping with a billionaire nor fleeing the country for being involved in industrial espionage can explain that one. Ditto the presumably-still-growing pile of charred wood bits and cloth wafting through a hole in the actual Veil—which is just too damn weird to be a coincidence.
No matter how she slices it, she can’t get her head around what’s happened to Helenora. It’s a big enough oddity that it makes sense to have bypassed mom and headed straight for Kyrá’s observatory in the ass end of nowhere, she assures herself, besides mom’s no more equipped to cope with weird magical shit than me—it’d be the blind leading the blind.
She does her best to reach around herself to tug the wrinkles in the back of her shirt flat without elbowing the people squishing her into her seat. The Tur’lovian leans farther away than necessary, sparing themself the pain of Sorrel’s infamous bony elbows; the smartly dressed woman to her left is not so lucky.
There’s something symbolic about that, Sorrel’s sure of it, and she wishes she could text Helenora about it to figure out exactly what.
The Illyrian Codices 