The trail between the nearest town and our little camp was, for most of its distance, made by animals. The fact that those animals were large enough to clear a relatively decent trail as wide as one of our wagons was both a blessing and a curse since it meant we had could travel all the way into the jungle to where the mana levels were high enough to speed up my training, but also guaranteed some run-ins with the gigantic cat-faced gorillas. According to Kalyssi, our guide down the river, they weren't too dangerous so long as they didn't think you were challenging them for territory, stealing their mates, or fucking up a hunt. But since they were stupid there was no way to explain you were just passing through once they'd gotten the wrong idea, and when a tximinue was in a fighting mood they showed it by hitting you with a whole fucking tree.

Still, that main stretch of trail had been fine on the way to the camp and both ways when Errod and I went for supplies a few weeks back. We'd seen some, but they appeared satisfied with crouching off to the side of the path and glaring at us. The moskar - other than Shitheel of course - had limited themselves to a few warning hisses and kept moving without needing to be prodded and after a few tense moments everyone was on their way without incident on the way in, and the other times Shitheel had been left at camp so it went even more smoothly. That meant that in all likelihood Errod and Katrin hadn't run into any trouble, and with Errod getting better with the sword every day and Katrin becoming increasingly scary in her use of magic it was nothing to worry about. Certainly those little lines of fate were still there, stretching off into the jungle. They would have made it to the end of that animal trail by nightfall, camped in the jungle, and then hit the town the next morning some time - maybe closer to lunch since they left a little later than Errod and I had when we went.

After that it would have been most of a day in town, back into the jungle to cover a little ground and camp, and then back on the tximinue trail for day three. That would mean getting back late in the day, maybe even a teeny bit after nightfall, which is why I kept a light going for them on the wall. If things had gone slowly for some reason or if they just didn't want to rush, maybe they would have slept in the town which would in turn mean getting back on the morning of the fourth day instead. Nothing concerning about that.

It was the morning of the fifth, and there was no sign of Katrin or Errod.

Once again I turned on the fate strings, and there they were - the strings were intact, pointing the same direction as before. It seemed to be the right way for the town, but of course a difference of a few degrees wouldn't be something I'd be likely to notice. Had they moved? I began pacing again, arguing with myself. They'd abandoned me, just like my mother. But also, they wouldn't do that which mean they were in trouble. But nobody was after us anymore, and if they had been they wouldn't know where we were, and if they did they would have come for me too. So clearly Katrin and Errod were fine, and just taking their time in town. Maybe one of the moskar had been injured, and they were working on a way to get the wagon mobile again. Speaking of the wagon, maybe it had broken an axle.

That, or they hated me and were right now boarding a boat to head down the Nubasarri river and never come back.

The day they had left I'd done almost nothing, just puttering around the camp and playing with Mister Creepy. The remote control spider was pretty agile, and I was getting better at controlling it. I could only barely see through its eyes and it required me to have my own eyes tightly shut, but even that was pretty cool. It was like having a drone with an extremely low-res video camera on it. Even so that got old eventually, and I spent the evening staring at The Paradox of Fate but not actually reading it. I'd been hesitant to go into my memory palace because of the incident the night before, and hadn't felt like doing chores especially when nobody was there to make me feel guilty for being lazy. So it was mostly a wasted day.

The next two days I'd been more productive, checking on the tiny garden we'd started and trimming back the plants that seemed to grow a foot per day and mess up our walls. I cleaned the wagon, made a proper dinner, the whole thing. I'd even gone back into my memory palace to train, although I found some little signs that the rogue part of my brain was still poking around. Mom's antique scissors were stabbed into my pillow one day, and the next there was a clump of hair that I suspected was from Sarah Harkin. I didn't feel guilty about that shit though, making her hair fall out was an accident - if I did it at all - and she was a total bitch. Plus she'd tried to drown me afterwards so I felt like we were even. I didn't see the actual troublemaker though, and was able to spend some time trying to strengthen my abilities and even went on a few rides at a shitty little carnival that I found in one of my memories. The only real concern was that I was blind to the real world while I was doing all that, and so if something came over the wall I would be caught unprepared.

By the end of that third day I was too anxious to do much, pacing around and checking the fate strings and waiting for Errod and Katrin to show up. I didn't sleep well, and spent the whole morning of the fourth day standing on the wall even though with all the trees it didn't help me see far. I thought about sending Mister Creepy out but the range wasn't great and it was likely something would eat him - I could re-attach the control plate to something else, but that was easier said than done since it would need to either be lobotomized or cared for. Still, it was tempting to have something that could fly. I'd promised Errod that I wouldn't wander into the jungle by myself, since I was no match for even a single tximinue on my own and those fuckers hunted in packs, but in the afternoon I headed out anyway. I didn't try to go down the trail, but instead did my best to compare the angle of the fate threads for Katrin and Errod with the sun and then headed off to the North for about a mile before coming back and doing the same thing in the other direction. They barely moved. Logically the movement should be more noticeable the closer they were, which meant that whatever was happening they weren't near the camp.

That brought me to the fifth day, and all I could think to do was pack. I'd spend the morning second guessing myself, but what it came down to is either they were abandoning me or I was abandoning them by not going to find them and between the two it seemed like the latter was more likely. I spend a few hours deconstructing the camp, cramming everything worth keeping into or on top of the remaining wagon. After that I got Dopey hooked up, and began the ordeal of wrangling Shitheel. He hadn't been attached to the wagon for a month, and had clearly decided that part of his life was behind him.

"You're an asshole, you know that?"

Hiss, he said.

"Yes, I know you hate me. I get it. You've mentioned it a few dozen times every day. But this is your whole fucking job."

Hiss, Shitheel rebutted.

"No, you can't quit your job. You've been on god damn vacation since we got here, I have been shoveling your shit and feeding you and -" (hiss) "- no, I've been feeding you every day. I know you've grazed on a bunch of random plants and eaten a few of those lizard squirrel things, but if it weren't for the bag of moskar chow you'd be in sorry shape."

Hiss, he conceded.

"I'm going to grab you by the harness now, and if you give me any attitude I swear to god I will just slit your throat and let Dopey pick up the slack. You understand?"

And it seemed like maybe he did, because while he snorted disdainfully at me and dragged his feet terribly he didn't go so far as to actually try to bite me. Right as we neared a mud puddle he headbutted me, but I'd felt him tensing up for it and managed to hop over the puddle much to his disappointment. After that he tried to lure me into a false sense of security by being docile so he could suddenly run away just as I went to hook him to the wagon, but that was what he did literally every time and so I'd long since learned to quickly loop the rope around a spur on the wagon so to give myself some more leverage.

"I hate you. So much. But I guess thanks for taking my mind off of all this. Dick."

I didn't make it as far as I wanted, and ended up pulling off the trail to camp once the moskar were cranky and tired and the sun was down. At first I was determined to stay up all night, but since I'd done that the night before I ducked into the memory palace instead so that I would at least be a little more aware as I slept.

"Oh motherfucker. I don't have the energy to deal with you tonight, will you just get the fuck out of here?"

She was sitting on the floor, cutting up construction paper. "I used to love this, you know. Scissors and colorful paper and maybe some cartoons and I would be happy my whole life."

"Great. Good. Take them with you when you go."

"No, if I leave then I am just in a dream. Better to stay here, in your horrible mind."

"Cool." I headed into the next room and took a seat on the bed, trying to decide if I should poke through some memories or what. Instead, the interloper followed me in.

"Why are some memories altered? What did you do that was so terrible you had to hide it?"

"I don't know. Fuck off."

"Do you think someone tried to make you less evil? I looked at memories before and after, and you seem... less of a monster, since whatever happened. Maybe someone dug into your brain and scooped some of the worst parts out. Like the bruised spots in an over-ripe fruit, chunks of your memories and personality all dripping and dark, thrown aside into the trash. There couldn't have been much left, with you."

I ignored her, got up and headed off into the memories.

"Or did you steal the better parts of someone else? Rip the humanity out of someone again?"

I kept walking, and headed through a door. It was the memory of Errod and Katrin leaving, and I just paced around looking for any sign that something was wrong.

"What are you doing now? Why look at so recent a memory?" She walked back out, leaving me by myself, and I followed Katrin as she moved things between the wagons - I could only really rely on the bits I'd seen the first time around, of course, but... or could I?

I woke up, disoriented in the dark wagon that for just a moment felt bigger that it was. I closed my eyes again almost immediately and brought the mental image of my Dumines up, feeling the divination branch. I'd just unlocked an ability a few days ago but I had had more than enough - as had been my habit I had waited past the time I had enough built up to really commit to anything. Still, a week of spotty training hadn't been enough to add much so I knew I would have to find the most limited and cost-effective unlock I could. The more I tied to my memory palace the cheaper it was, so that was one obvious shortcut. Could I limit divination to only work while I was meditating? It seemed I could. Next, what was the bare minimum that I needed? Spatial awareness, of course, and then... hmm. What I wanted was a temporal aspect as well, and some way to extend it to others. That was too much for now, unless it only worked on people that were right next to me anyway. It seemed like I could probably use the fate threads as a connection rather than having... I don't know, blood or hair or whatever diviners typically used to zero in on a target, and that would let me find Katrin and Errod no problem - but it would mean another few weeks of training that I didn't have time for. Instead, the most I could do was to spy on myself. A little dash of temporal, to let me rewind a few days, and... I had just enough. But would it help?

It wouldn't hurt, and it was a stepping stone into some other things I wanted to do. And if I could crank up the temporal part it was possible I could use it to find out what memories had been... blurred. Divination was always going to be what my skillset was best for anyway, and at some point I needed to practice it so I could use it on the fate threads and figure out what the fuck they were doing, so if I had to start by divining my own past - the silliest, stupidest thing you can fortune tell about - then so be it. I invested the power into the branches I'd identified, and ducked back into the memory palace.

"Okay. Cool. Here we go. I'm just looking at myself, so this should be easy. But how?" I wandered into the hotel hallway, and there it was - a door with the room number of zero. I opened it, and stepped into the cramped space of the wagon where I could see myself laying in bed with my eyes closed. "Fuck yeah. Okay. So this is now. Good. And I can... go where?" I opened the door and stepped out of the wagon, but of course when I turned around the door was shut again. My mana usage was ticking upwards now that there was a wall between me and my body, which I hadn't thought about but wasn't too surprising. I could see Dopey sleeping, and Shitheel laying there with one eye open scanning the jungle. I took a few more steps but became uncomfortably aware of some kind of... tether... holding me close to my body. "Okay. What is that, twenty feet? I can work with that. Now the temporal bit. You can do this Callie. Come on."

I stepped back into the hotel hallway, then into the memory of Katrin packing the wagon. I concentrated, and felt my mana use amp up dramatically as everything around me became crisper, more in focus. I walked over to Katrin, and could hear her talking to Errod.

"She'll be fine, right? You saw how she got when we were going to go last time."

Errod nodded. "She was scared. Didn't want to be alone. Funny, considering what she's told us about her habit of running off and living in abandoned places."

"I think it's the difference between her choosing to leave and other people deciding to leave her. She hasn't gone into detail but I guess her mom sort of abandoned her, and then... I don't know, the whole thing seems bizarre but that 'foster care' thing seems to involve passing the kids around a lot."

"I still don't get why they wouldn't just be apprenticed out to someone, learn a trade."

"Who knows. Earth sounds awful, honestly."

"Well whether that's it or not, she'll get over it. We'll be back in a few days, and maybe she'll be in a tolerable mood."

"Speaking of, is your nose okay?"

"It's fine. And I don't know how deliberate it was, we were sparring and... she gets carried away. But if it happens again I'm going to bring up the idea of seeing someone about her emotional issues again. There's no shame in getting help, and she has the money."

"The mental security she wanted to get first shouldn't be hard to unlock at all, she should be able to do that within the week if not sooner. Maybe she could do it right now."

That had been true until I did this divination thing; as Katrin had guessed once I had the ability to let others in it wasn't a big leap to make sure anyone trying to come in would land in a secure room of my own creation. But I'd been worried about them almost right away, and I'd had this thought that I might need to spend my energy on something else. I still wasn't sure that this divination trick was the right one, but the fact that it had put to rest any fears Katrin and Errod hadn't planned on returning already made it worthwhile.

I was just thinking it was going to let me get some actual sleep when I realized the other implication - this meant that something had gone wrong and kept them from coming back, and I had no idea what I was going to walk into the next day.