68. Love trap

‘So… are you really going to go out even though we’re not allowed?’

Ray’s words echoed in my head, and I remembered his worried pout and me raising a hand to pat his shoulder and freezing just in time. I had nodded earnestly.

“Erma’s eyes were shining like stars. Now I’m kinda looking forward to seeing her meet that Immortal Witch. Don’t worry, I may be a Fury, but I can still ask Erma to beat me to a pulp if I do something wrong.”

“… That level of trust is incredible, yet somehow disturbing.”

Remembering our conversation, I smiled as I straightened up on the beach.

Our skin was dripping with water, our swimsuits were drenched. I wrung out my shirt, then put it on.

I had crossed the Neck at night. Without permission. Like a smuggler. And the reason was just before my eyes, though it was so dark that I could barely see her.

“Let’s go!” Linah said.

I followed her without a word. Just how much did she want to meet that Anastasia to break the rules on our first day of training?

We walked along the dyke, reached the water train station, then climbed the road to Phoenix City.

Instead of taking the path to the lighthouse, we went straight into the city. I tried to remember the way. The bar with a white whale on the front seemed familiar, as well as the blue scintillating fountain on a square. I recognized the park where I had seen that group of teenagers eating sunflower seeds, and finally found the small garden, a bit farther, where I had met the fakir-witch on her bed of nails.

“This is the place,” I said.

Linah looked around.

“She’s not here.”

“Yeah. She’s not.”

The glint of disappointment lingered in Linah’s eyes. I suggested:

“Let’s search for her.”

We spent about one hour wandering around the neighborhood. Phoenix City was huge, so we couldn’t really search for the Immortal Witch in the other districts. In the end, Linah started to lose her composure and began to ask people randomly. Some shrugged, some shook their heads without understanding a word, an old woman said:

“Ah, the ascetic, you mean? She’s been around for some weeks, now. I saw her the other day. I gave her a piece of bread.”

“She ate it?” I asked, surprised.

“Yeah, she devoured it!”

So Anastasia wasn’t an undead, after all… Was she really immortal?

“Do you know where she is right now?” Linah insisted.

The old woman had no idea, but we still talked for a while. She was from the Farskyer Peninsula, suffered from insomnia, and was on her usual night walk. She grinned.

“Well, what a lovely couple I met. It was a pleasure to talk Farskyer Yanganese again!”

Farskyer Yanganese? Did she mean that the language spoken in Phoenix was also a Yanganese dialect? As Linah kept asking the few night owls walking down the streets, I realized that, with a bit of concentration, I could understand them. They just had a very strong accent, even stronger than Taipei people did.

“Ah, dawitchamean?” a guy answered to Linah at one point. “Dasawer o dacliff ne deneck.”

I jerked up.

“Is that so? Thanks a lot! Linah! Let’s go!”

“Eeeeh?!” She ran after me. “Did you understand what he said?”

“Yeah, he said he just saw her next to the Neck’s cliff.”

“…! You’re amazing, Straw Head!”

Her words went straight to my heart. I grinned under my mask.

“Heeheehee…”

“You creep me out when you laugh like that.”

Linah’s eyes had been darkening through the hours, but now they were shining with hope.

When we arrived at the grassy slope that led to Kimberley’s lighthouse, we scanned our surroundings. The lights of the city barely lit that place, and we spent some minutes advancing in the dark, piercing the shadows with intent gazes.

“She’s not here either.”

I frowned, looked up at the lighthouse, and began walking towards it.

“I know the keeper of this lighthouse. Let’s ask him.”

“You know him?!”

“Yeah, he came to my lighthouse as an apprentice when I was a child. Kim’s a really nice guy. He may even help us.”

“Won’t we wake him up? It’s half-past two in the morning.”

“Nah. Knowing him, right now he’s playing video games.”

“… Sorry, Straw Head,” she muttered. “You even lost consciousness yesterday morning because of that allergy, and you must be tired after the race, yet because of me, you can’t go to sleep. Am I a devil, after all?”

Her last question sounded clearly sincere. I couldn’t help but grin under my mask.

“As far as I know, the devils never apologize like that, Lil Witch. But really, it’s okay. I’m doing this also because I want to see that Immortal Witch again. I want to apologize to her for mistaking her for a scammer.”

“You… thought she was a scammer?! The legendary Anastasia? Hwara-hwara-hwara!”

“Zeeta always warns me against scammers, so I’m trying to be on my guard, ya know.”

“Hwara-hwara-hwara! You’re unbelievable, Straw Head!”

Bah… Anyway, if Kim was sleeping, he had probably woken up to Linah’s guffaws.

I took a glance through the shutters, saw a light, and after exchanging a look with Linah, I knocked at the door.

* * *

“You will soon do your first ‘Hello World’, kid! Now add ‘return 0’… Ah, but don’t forget to add the semi-colon at the end of the previous line.”

“Oh, I see!”

We caught Kimberley not playing games but programming, and somehow, I ended up sitting on his chair before his computer and typing my first program ever. Not only that: it seemed that he had let the fakir-witch into the lantern room, because ‘that good old woman wanted to talk to the wind from up there’. Linah had rushed to the stairs, and I had planned to do the same but then I changed my mind. Linah surely wanted to talk alone with her. Plus, I couldn’t ignore Kimberley when he asked me if I wanted to print ‘Hello World’ on a terminal, since he had been so kind as to let us in this late.

“Why the ‘return 0’, though?” I asked. “We want it to return ‘Hello World’, not zero.”

“Don’t worry about that… You forgot the semi-colon again.”

“Oh… Where was it again?”

“You should learn how to type on a keyboard, Armen, it’s useful. Want a beer?”

“Er… No, thanks.”

“Mm,” He sipped on his. “Now add the curly bracket. It will tell the compiler that the function terminates here. Very good. You’re done. Now, all you have to do is run the program. Ah, just a moment.”

He leaned next to me to type something. Too close. I pulled away, standing up a bit too nervously. I tried to compose myself as I said:

“You can sit down, Kim.”

“Mm.”

The text disappeared, Kim went back to his console, and then waved at the keyboard.

“Type Enter, and the program will say ‘Hello World’. Go ahead.”

I held out a finger, then hesitated.

“What is it?” he asked, surprised.

“Er…” I rubbed my neck, a bit embarrassed. “Well, I may be bold sometimes, but actually, I’m a bit shy. Th-That program… It won’t say hello world to the whole world, will it, or…?”

Kimberley blinked, then burst out laughing.

“Holy Gods, you’re too much, kid! As expected from Misae’s son! Don’t worry, it will print ‘Hello World’ on this screen, here, nothing more. You won’t bother the world with it.”

“Ah, is that so? Then…”

I pressed the Enter key. It returned a ‘Hello World’ right away. I was fascinated for an instant, then I rubbed my forehead.

“I’m probably going to ask something stupid but… why bother to write a ‘Hello World’ with a lot of brackets and strange symbols, if all it does is say ‘Hello World’? I mean, it’s fun, but wouldn’t it be faster to write ‘Hello World’ directly?”

Kimberly put on that face that said: you’re a crack up, kid.

He was trying to give me an explanation when we both heard a weird laugh coming from up there. It seemed that Linah was having fun with the Immortal Witch. Kim raised an eyebrow.

“Is that your girlfriend?”

“Yeah… I mean, that’s her funny way of laughing, but… we’re… not really… going out.”

“Oh?” He paused, then pointed at the game console with his thumb. “Wanna play? I’ve bought a new game, Survival Dungeon 3, I’m sure you’ll like it.”

“Eeeh?! I’ve already played it with a friend. I love that game! Let’s play, let’s play!”

We settled on the floor. We were choosing our characters when I mustered up the courage to ask:

“Kim. Say. What is love?”

The lighthouse keeper gave me a curious look.

“You’re asking that to a loner who never got married, you know that?”

I smiled.

“Yeah, well… Being married doesn’t mean you know what love is, nor being a loner means you don’t know how to love, right?”

Kim’s lips stretched into a smile.

“Well. I may know a thing or two.” He looked at the screen and picked an orc as his player character. “I’ve read once that love is something you can’t put bounds to but that, at the same time, is all about bonds. Parents will love their child because they are bound to it, they gave him a life, they saw him grow, laugh, and cry, and they learn about the world through him. Yeah, I think love is about learning how life works through someone else.”

His words impacted me. Love was about learning life through someone else? I didn’t quite get what he meant… but I quite liked the idea. Thinking about that, I picked a Witch as my avatar. I saw Kim’s eyes smile.

“Also, one more thing,” he said as the game was loading. “They say love is like a plant that you have to water every day, but I don’t think it’s quite right. It’s more like… an endless cake you eat from because you want to.”

“Huh? What was that? A cake?” I laughed.

He shrugged.

“Just my opinion.”

“You sure like food.”

“Are you saying I’m fat? But sure, I love food.” Well, I did too. Lifeforce, that is. He added: “The thing is, love exists because we want to. But it’s not always so easy to realize you love something if you never question yourself about it. Let me prove it. I’ll say some words: raise your hand whenever you don’t like something, okay? Games.”

I didn’t budge.

“Music, cats, artichokes…”

He lingered on the word, which made me remember out loud:

“Oh, right, I couldn’t eat them when I was a kid, but I can now.” At least, I could before I died.

“Is that so? Then… Spiders.” I raised my hand in a hurry. “Snakes.” Hand up. “School.” Hand up. What was the point of all that? “Wasps. Scammers. Wars.” Hand up. Hand up. Hand up. “Mosquitoes.” Hand up. “Linah.” Hand…

I looked at my raising hand, then at Kim with the face of someone who has been betrayed. He chuckled.

“See?”

“See what?! You only wanted to make me raise the hand, didn’t you, you jerk?”

Kim was laughing heartedly.

“Young people are always the same, they never know what they want! Now get your witch moving. The orc is waiting.”