Katrin and Errod had had those things removed from their Dumines before being handed over to Hugh, and seemed to be in good spirits. Physically they were in better shape than I was; the bounty hunters had been unnecessarily rough with them and had made some comments about possibly killing them and taking the "dead or alive" bounty, but hadn't actually hurt them badly and once they'd been thrown in the jail they were treated well enough.

I retrieved Mister Creepy from Errod and re-attached him to his little mount, and then dug my magic diving helmet out of the wagon and was about to go for a swim when one of the men working on the barge Hugh had hired suggested I might not want to get eaten by eels.

"Damn it. I still haven't gotten to try this thing. How big are the eels?"

At this, Katrin pulled me aside and started pacing around.

"I'm... I'm really glad that you helped us get free," she said with the 'but' looming ahead almost visibly. I decided to cut to the chase, since I already knew the speech I was about to get.

"Yeah, I know, it was reckless and stupid and you'd be sad if I died and think of all the paperwork that..." no, that part was wrong. Wait, what was I remembering? Katrin raised an eyebrow, but could tell I was thinking about something and didn't interrupt.

"Uh. Sorry, just... something I was remembering. Something about bears? Sorry. Anyway, look, I know it was dumb. But Hugh said it would be okay, and I knew Shitheel would be fast enough. And... I mean, yeah. Things could have gone wrong, and almost did, but we have people after us. Multiple people. Nothing is going to be actually safe for a while, I think."

Katrin sighed and nodded, but didn't look entirely satisfied. "Callie, it's just that... well, I think maybe you got into this habit of being so reckless because you were used to it all just working out. But there's a good chance that it always worked out for you because you were using probability magic, and you don't have that right now. Not really."

"I know. I mean I don't think that's it, or not all of it. I do think it's mostly that I'm an idiot. But I know I don't have that safety net anymore. Although I guess I have a shit ton of fated stuff tied to me, so maybe that'll keep me alive. I mean I know that fate isn't a guarantee but with this many things... and I can see that look you're giving me. Okay. I won't test that theory."

Hugh stepped out of nowhere, having been somehow hiding behind a barrel that wasn't large enough to conceal him. "It is an interesting theory, yes? Calliope Smith, this is the first I have heard you are bound by fate and using probability magic."

Since I'd already told Hugh I was from another world I wasn't worried that he would be freaked out by the news that I'd had innate powers - after all, that's how it worked for beings from other planes. The problem was that I couldn't expand on the fate thing or on Katrin's comment about not having the probability magic "right now, really" since that would require me to mention that I had extra Dumines. I had already told him I had divination (Hugh had approved, because he'd been a soldier for much of his life and had a strong appreciation for good intel) but I said my others were thought and spatial, which didn't leave room for anything else. I trusted Hugh, mostly, but I didn't feel certain he would keep my secrets from Hammersmith who he seemed to like way more than I thought was warranted.

"Hugh! Yeah. Uh. Listen, it's a secret and might be nothing at all. I've been reading a book on fate. And the probability thing, that's just because I came from another plane which you know we can't tell people about, and it doesn't matter because now I've got my Dumine so that's shut down."

"There is more you are not telling me, is that correct?"

I hesitated, and then remembered it was Hugh I was talking to. He would get a kick out of making me nervously dance around the truth, but with him I probably just didn't need to. "Yup. That's correct."

He nodded. "Understood. You will inform me if it matters to my safety, yes?"

"Of course."

And that appeared to be it. I glared at Katrin, but I didn't really feel annoyed - I hadn't known he was there either. Had he just been spying on us? How had he known we'd stand right there? The man was baffling.

I walked with Katrin way over to the far end of the barge where I could be certain nobody was listening, and then let her know about my new ability to scry on myself.

"Can you use it to see the memories that are blurry?"

"I haven't tried yet, I don't feel like it's going to be able to rewind that far back but I guess I can give it a shot. I mean it's already just scrying on my own body so it shouldn't be too hard."

I sat down, ducked into the memory palace, and went to the most recent obscured memory - right before Sunshine House. There was a car that dropped me off, but the make and model kept shifting and the driver's face was somehow blocked from view no matter what angle I tried. I reached out, trying to use divination to recall the scene, but after a moment I had to admit it wasn't working. I hadn't used any mana, it was like I just... couldn't get a grip on it. On a whim I tried to grab onto that partial memory that had surfaced about being more careful and... paperwork... and bears. And for whatever reason, this time something happened.

I felt my mana drop to literally nothing, even dipping slightly into that icy sensation of burning up my life mana to compensate - but as soon as it touched that danger zone it shut off, as if I was reflexively hitting the brakes. "Holy shit, Katrin. Can you hear me?"

"Yes, what's happening? Did it work?"

"Uh. Kind of? Not on the one I tried at first, but I got something from that thing I was just kind of remembering. Maybe I... maybe I need to already be remembering it some in order to get a handle on it?"

"So what is it?"

"Hang on, I'm going to watch it now. Give me a minute and I'll let you know when I'm done, I don't know how long it is."

And I was in a car, in the back seat. It was an old car, like from the fifties but still in great shape. In the front passenger seat sat me, from... I don't know, a few years ago. Almost certainly sixteen, since that's where the memory block was. And in the driver's seat was Bill, who I hadn't seen since he quit being my case manager back when I was fourteen years old. What the fuck. It wasn't a total shock of course, I'd had memories of him filter up out of nowhere, but it didn't answer anything - how did I end up in a car with Bill years after he'd stopped being my case manager? I tried to rewind, but it immediately went blurry on me so that wasn't going to help. Getting comfortable, I mentally hit play and let the memory unfold.

It was silent, and felt... awkward. Finally the me in the front seat spoke up, sounding nervous. "Sorry Bill."

"You need me to do the talk," Bill asked in his most dad-like of voices, "or do you think you remember it? It's been a while."

"Um. I think I have it still. Calliope Esmeralda Smith," she said, taking on a tone of voice that didn't even come close to sounding like Bill, "You know I'm not just your case worker. I also care about you as a person."

"The case worker line is a bit out of date, and your middle name isn't Esmeralda."

"I worry about what might happen to you, and there are a million ways you could die horribly out on the streets. Please stop doing this before you get raped to pieces."

Bill winced. "That's not quite the speech."

"Quiet, young lady. I'm not finished. You could get shot, or accidentally take drugs that you thought were harmless candies, or be eaten by a bear. A drug dealer bear. With a gun. Think of the paperwork I would need to do! Do you have any idea how much paperwork needs to be done when a child is mauled out on the streets? It's terrible for my carpal tunnel."

"That's still not the speech, although I suspect the paperwork would be daunting."

"You should return to the group home. It's not that bad, and it's just for another two years. Then you can run off to Hollywood and make it big as a movie star."

"Strong finish."

"Thanks."

Bill took a deep breath. "But seriously…"

"Hey, no, I already did the speech. No fair doing it again."

"But you made it a joke, and it's not not funny. I… seriously, don't scare me like that. Okay?"

"Okay. You're not kicking me out?"

"Not even when you turn eighteen. You can be a loser and live with me until you're thirty."

I was living with Bill? Again, not a total shock but still strange. The younger version of me rubbed her eyes, which seemed to be watering up. Huh. High empathy day, I guess. "Yeah, okay."

"Anyway," Bill said, "If I haven't kicked Greg out can you even imagine what you would have to do to make me tired of you?"

And just like that, practically before he finished the sentence, the world fell apart into fog. That was as much as my mana had bought me.

I opened my eyes and was surprised to feel dampness on my cheeks. It wasn't a high empathy day here in the real world, why would seeing myself in a car with Bill make me cry? Was it just because the memory of me was crying? Katrin was right up in my face, looking concerned.

"It's fine. It was... it was just a tiny memory, I was going home with Bill. I lived there, I think."

"So not a group home? But the blurry memories..."

"Yeah, they're all of a group home. Which means, I assume, that they're fakes. Someone or something, maybe myself, plastered over everything about living at Bill's house with generic memories of group homes. I just don't know why. Logically... I mean, it has to be something I did or saw or something. Bill was - is - a good guy, but he's boring as hell. And he's not the one that got yanked into another world. Whatever happened, it's got to be related to the fact that I ended up here. Right?"

Katrin nodded hesitantly. "That would make sense. Can you see more? There have been other memories you've had resurface, maybe you can investigate those."

"All tapped out. I'm going to have to refill my mana."

As soon as I had a teeny bit of energy again I set up a mana well right there on the deck of the barge, and was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked. Normally it created a sort of magnet so that mana pulled in and clumped in one spot, and I hadn't been sure it would function on a moving vehicle. But it caused a disruption that the mana had to flow around, and much like air currents it sort of forced the turbulent mana into a bubble that the rest of the mana flowed over. It wasn't the same, it was gathering more energy but also losing more - so the net result seemed to be pretty similar. I suddenly had an image in my head of a configuration I could make if I could tie them down with enchantment, a way I could possibly boat along just skimming all the mana from the surface of the river. It wasn't something I was able to try yet however, and even if I ever had the right skills it would probably take a lot of tedious work adjusting it.

The rest of the day was uneventful, with no angry bounty hunters showing up and trying to get revenge. I got my mana filled back up, and tried the divination trick on that memory of stabbing some foster parents to death with no luck. I thought about the soup kitchen stuff but that didn't feel like a specific memory, more like a whole category of them. There was another possibility, of course - I could try to use it on a memory I already had so I could get more detail. I started wandering my memories, popping in and out of different doors in the imaginary version of uncle Roy's hotel. It was going fine until I ran into that scarred figment of my imagination.

"You got Katrin and Errod back without dying," she said.

"Yup. Sure did. Do you need something?"

"I am disappointed."

"That I didn't die, you mean?"

"Yes."

I walked away, not really feeling like that deserved a response, and she followed along behind. The accent was almost entirely gone now, just like the broken English had vanished. I was still worried that she was some sort of mental parasite, but she'd clearly been in my dream before she was in the memory palace so probably it was nothing. Probably. Anyway, I hadn't thought of a way to get rid of her, and didn't have the spare points to set up mental defenses yet since I'd gone for the divination. When I did, if the figment got grabbed by them and locked in a mental jail cell then... I'd deal with that somehow.

"You are looking for a memory?"

"Yeah."

"I can help."

"You want me dead though."

"Yes, but that cannot happen here so... what memory is it you want?"

I sighed, and stopped in the middle of a rather depressing park in Arizona that I had for some reason ended up in by picking a random door. "I shouldn't be talking to you. I still think you're going to turn out to be some sort of evil mind slug."

"You are the evil one, and I promise I am not a slug."

"Fine. Sure. Fuck it, you're all up in my brain either way. I, uh. I don't know. I have some divination magic, and I can use it to see some place from my memory more clearly. Like really see it, as it actually was. Probably even... I don't know, find out what was inside a box I didn't open or something. I was thinking of using it on food I can't get here and don't remember well, or... oh, shit, I can get books to read!"

She grabbed my shoulder, roughly, and stared at me with an intense expression on her face that I couldn't quite figure out.

"No. You should... you should use it on your earliest memory of your bedroom."

"Uh. That's really far back, I don't know if that would even work. And I know what my bedroom at mom's house looked like."

"No, no. Before you ruined it. Before you wrote on the walls and tore the sheets and broke all your toys."

"Is there some terrible dark secret I'm supposed to realize or something?"

"No just... to remember."

"I don't think I want to remember that house any better than I already do, honestly. And I especially don't need to remember a bunch of baby toys."

She shoved me away, face distorting in anger. "Fine. Maybe you should do it a few months later, see what you did with that cat. And the man you killed."

"Okay, crazy pants. Simmer down. I didn't do anything to a cat other than kidnap it, and I for sure didn't murder anyone when I was five."

"Fuck you." And she stormed away. Cool. I went and found the first memory I could think of off the top of my head where I had a book - detention in high school. Zoey was there, that bitch that made my life miserable whenever possible. She looked at me, full of fury like that scar-faced version of me had been a moment ago. "I'm going to kill you, goat licker!"

That was the cute little nickname that Zoey had given me, and the worst thing about it was that I couldn't figure out what it meant. I had never licked a goat, of course, nor had I made any jokes about goats or licking that I could remember. I didn't have pictures of goats on any of my clothes, goats had never come up in either of the classes that I shared with Zoey (or any of the others, for that matter), and I didn't think it was a commentary on how I ate my lunch. It was a total mystery. I was self aware enough to know that there were lots of other things that my peers could be mocking me for. I had once admitted that my hobbies were "parkour and throwing knives" which certainly didn't make me more popular but didn't seem to stick that much either. But I couldn't ask why, couldn't demand to know how "goat licker" became my name to Zoey and her friends, because not only wouldn't they tell me but they would know it bothered me.

I was trying to remember why we were in detention together. There'd been some sort of a fight, and... hmm. Anyway, it wasn't what I was there for. The memory-me was reading Jake Ross and the Sword of Destiny, and I wanted a copy. I'd tried to sneak books from memories before, but of course the words would just swim around or turn into a badly-written summary of how I remembered it. I concentrated, pulsed divination again, and felt everything snap into clarity. Little things all around me had changed - the color of the paint on the walls was a a little different, I'd popped over to a different desk, my clothes had changed, and... oh, man. Zoey's face. She had two black eyes, and some sort of brace on her nose. What the fuck had happened to... oh, shit. Right. How had I forgotten that? I'd broken her nose with Fundamentals of Chemistry.

She'd thrown a spitball at me, then I had thrown a very weighty textbook at her, and then she and her friends had chased me down and cornered me in a janitorial closet and... it got a little fuzzy there. I grabbed the copy of Jake Ross and the Sword of Destiny from my memory's hands and stepped out into the hall again before picking another door a few down and going back in. I didn't have enough mana left to use divination on things so it was a little indistinct and people's clothes changed when I wasn't looking right at them, but it was good enough. As I watched the memory began to feel clearer...

A big ball of wet paper towels slapped against the side of my face while I was walking to my next class. Part of me was wondering why Zoey or her friends would have been carrying something like that around, but that question was never going to get answered because the rest of my brain was in a bad mood and decided to retaliate. The thing about trying to learn to throw knives when you don't have actual throwing knives is that you get a lot of practice just kind of throwing things in general. You get used to things being a bit clumsy and badly balanced. So when I turned and whipped a textbook at Zoey's face, it hit dead center.

Fundamentals of Chemistry wasn't the biggest book I had, but it was still fairly hefty and as that weight left my hand the part of my brain that had been doing math to calculate the trajectory was free to switch to other calculations such as the physics involved in a textbook hitting someone square in the middle of the face. Initial back of the napkin math was all it could handle, but that was enough to raise a big red flag. An alert went off in my brain, a large flashing sign that said WE MAY HAVE MADE A MISTAKE. The next round of calculations were about whether or not I could somehow reach out and grab the book back which was quickly answered in the negative, and then after that for the rest of the half-second all my brain could do was sit back and watch.

There was a terrible sound, and Zoey's head whipped back in a way that made her hair seem to flip forward around it. She landed on her ass, her hair cascaded down around her face, and everything in the hall got extremely quiet. There were only a few other people, Zoey's two friends whose names I could never recall and four random students - only one of which I recognized. Zoey's friends kneeled down beside her, and the other very quickly walked away rather than get involved.

I was torn. I really hadn't meant to hurt anyone, and there was no doubt that Zoey was hurt. On the other hand it was a low empathy day and they had been the ones to start throwing things. Had they already had the ball of whatever ready to go and deliberately been looking for me? As much as I hated to, I felt myself ask What Would Bill Do? Well he wouldn't have thrown the book of course, and he would immediately confess and throw himself on the mercy of the vice principal. As always, I didn't like the answer and regretted asking the question.

"Zoey? You okay? I didn't mean to get you in the face like that," I said, which was of course not quite accurate. I took a step closer, and then hesitated as Zoey's friends glared at me. Zoey was on her feet a second later, straightening her hair, and as she did I could see a fan of blood all down her shirt and the start of two black eyes. It had been a really good hit, had maybe even broken Zoey's nose.

"Shit," I said, less out of sympathy than because I was realizing that I was going to get suspended and... something. There was something important I wanted to do. Zoey's friends both looked around, and I realized that the hall was still empty. The bystanders that had wandered swiftly away hadn't been replaced, meaning there was a chance I was about to be in a three on one fight. I normally avoided fighting - I had been in lots of minor one-on-one scuffles over the years, and had been in one big fight at my first school in Arizona right after mom had gotten rid of me for good.

I'd been angry, and some boy pinched my ass. I got suspended that time too, with one teacher pulling me aside and telling me that, totally off the record, there was a lot of sympathy for smacking that kid down because he had done the same to other girls and needed to learn a lesson. But in the end nobody was willing to overlook the fact that I had essentially won the fight after the first groin kick and yet had gone on to kick it seven more times, possibly doing actual permanent damage. I'd had to go into therapy, and had almost needed to repeat the school year.

This day I wasn't feeling nearly as much misplaced rage, and could remember that lesson. I knew that even if I ended up getting the crap kicked out of me it would be best to keep my part of it to what had already happened. I could try to explain, I could ask for forgiveness, but that all went out the window if I gave Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum black eyes to match Zoey's.

They came at me, as she expected, and I ran. I thought I was probably faster than them under normal circumstances, but my feet were still recovering from... something, walking some long way the night before? Somewhere dark. At any rate, one of them snagged my backpack. I tried to let it just fall off behind me, but it didn't come off cleanly and one of them was able to grab me by the wrist. I forced myself to not fight back, still clinging to some hope that I would get detention or in-school suspension rather than being sent home for the rest of the week. But they didn't hit me like I expected. Instead, they wrangled me over to a supply closet and with some help from Zoey they shoved me inside.

Zoey grabbed an industrial sized jug of bleach, which probably shouldn't have been left where students could get to it, and pulled the cap off.

"Hey goat licker, suck on this!" she said, which disappointed me to no end; if I was going to have a nemesis it seemed like I should have one with a little bit of intelligence or style, and that had been the perfect place for a clever quip. At the very least it seemed like she could have stuck with the 'licking' theme rather than switching to sucking, but at that point I lost my train of thought because all the bleach started splashing over me.

Zoey had to keep thrusting the bottle to get more to fly out, and after a few tries some was starting to drip on her so she heaved the jug at me and they slammed the door shut. The bleach was everywhere, and the fumes were instantly burning my throat. I tried the door but unsurprisingly it was being held shut, so I felt around for the light switch and turned it on. There wasn't a lot I could use, just the expected shelves of cleaning supplies. There was a mop sink kind of like the one I had used as a shower at Universal Servicing Systems, but the knob was gone. I glanced for pliers or something to turn it with and instead I found something horrifying.

Some spilled cleaning goo had been covered in bleach and whatever was in there was undergoing a chemical reaction. Smoke was coming up, and while I didn't know exactly what was in the goop (and I had, ironically enough, just thrown my chemistry textbook away) some dim memory of a horror story involving chlorine gas came to mind. I pounded on the door, trying to explain about the toxic gas in the room. It didn't budge. I slammed against it, feeling lightheaded, giving up on explaining myself and trying to hold my breath instead. My throat felt like it was coated in bleach, and my nostrils were on fire. My eyes were watering, and I closed them tight as I reached inside the sleeve of my sweater for something - and then the memory dissolved into a blur.

I headed back to the memory I'd used divination on, the one from detention a couple days later. It was still perfectly crisp, all details preserved just as they had been. I grabbed the arm of the memory-me, and flipped the sleeve of her sweatshirt inside out looking for whatever she'd been reaching for in desperation as the fumes hit her. Whatever it was it was important, I just knew it. Why had that memory only really come back after I had used divination on this one? Why did it get all blurred out at the end?

On the inside of the sleeve was a little golden brooch that I'd seen before - but only in my dreams.