Katrin looked around nervously, idly running her thumb over the unfamiliar surface of the tool in her hand. Finally she nodded to herself and drove the plastic fork into her carne asada fries, lifting a clump to her mouth.

"Yeah, that whole fucking thing. Shove it on in," I said, watching eagerly. She chewed for a minute, several different expressions sliding across her face, and then finally she nodded in approval.

"That's... extremely good. Wow." She reached for her soda, but was distracted by the straw. "Okay I've seen people use these before but why is it clear? It's too soft to be glass, and it's all one piece so it can't be chitin unless there's something that just has that shape already...?"

"More plastic, like the fork."

"And the cup is waxed paper?"

"Basically, yeah."

"It seems like they would be ruined so quickly."

"Yeah, we kinda focus on making things shitty but fast so we can just throw them away. Don't worry about that, just take a sip."

She narrowed her eyes as if she was suspicious, but placed the straw in her mouth and got a bit of cola before sputtering and pulling away. "Oh! That's... okay, uh. I don't like that at all. It's... tingly? And so sweet, I don't think I've ever had anything that sweet in my life! It's awful!"

I laughed and took the drink from her, slurping some down and smiling. "I guess it's an acquired taste. I'll snag you some horchata instead, you'll like that."

I walked around the counter and poured her a cup of horchata, then placed it on the red laminate table and kept walking to the door. When I opened it I could see out onto the barge, to the spot Katrin and I were sitting with our eyes closed - Hugh was sparring with Errod nearby, and I caught him glancing over at us casually as if he was ready for something to leap out of nowhere and attack us while we were vulnerable. I tried to give him a thumbs up, though Hugh probably wasn't used to that signal like Katrin and Errod were, but my arm barely twitched. I made a mental note to practice that, it could be useful to make my body move while I was in my head and clearly it was possible since I could talk out loud when I wanted.

"Hey this is much better, thank you," Katrin said as she put down the drink and went back in on the carne asada fries. I sat down with her and just waited and looked around while she ate, marveling at how real everything felt with the help of divination. I could smell the hot oil from the kitchen, and feel the cracked vinyl of the seat. It made me realize how flawed my normal memories and imagined scenes were. Katrin dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin - wouldn't want to get food on your imaginary clothes I guess - and then looked at me expectantly. Right.

"Uh. Okay, so here's the deal. I know right before you left camp I told you there was some shit I didn't want to talk about in my head, and that I didn't want you to see. And I'm assuming that's why you didn't immediately suggest doing this so I guess thanks for that. Well, I meant that and I won't be taking you to... certain memories... but you deserve to see Earth some so we can do a little road trip or something. But I have to warn you that there's something else in here with us, something that came in when we had that mishap. You know, when I tried to bring you and Errod in."

Katrin was trying to look calm, but she shifted a hand to the plastic knife next to her - as if you could harm anything with that piece of shit. "What kind of thing, Callie? Is it one of those men in the uniforms?"

"No, not one of the mysterious football jersey guys. It's like me, but all covered in scars and crazy. She's... like some self-loathing part of me I think. I saw her in my dreams before that, so I'm fairly sure she's part of my brain rather than something external but I'm not a hundred percent certain and even if she is it's troubling that she seems to have a mind of her own. So if you see another me, just... be aware. And if she starts saying embarrassing shit or making up stories about me like... stealing teeth or whatever... I might just kick you out to avoid dealing with it. Okay?"

"Okay... but Callie, that sounds... bad. Wait, why did you waste time on getting divination instead of setting up mental defenses?"

"Well, I only had enough once you guys were gone and then I wanted to wait until you got back, but then I kinda panicked about you maybe abandoning me and stupidly used it up on the divination so I could retroactively spy on you and make sure you weren't just leaving me in the woods alone like my mom did."

Katrin just stared for a moment. "Oh. Okay. Well, uh. Okay, sure. I would appreciate it if you didn't spy on me again but... I know that was... it's fine." She didn't look like she thought it was fine.

"Yeah, sorry. I didn't... anyway, I won't spy on you again. Anyway, I brought you here partly just because I wanted to show you Earth and partly because I got a better look at some other memories and found this."

I placed the golden brooch down in front of Katrin, and then stole a quick bite of her carne asada fries while she examined it. It had what I thought was a stylized eye - or at least an eye-shaped thing - but rather than an iris and pupil there was a door in the center. The door was cracked open, and there was some sort of writing around the edge of the brooch that I didn't recognize.

"This one was taken from a memory back on Earth, I had it pinned to the inside of my sleeve as if I was hiding it. And this one," I said as I placed a nearly identical brooch down, "was one I found in the closet when I first made my memory palace."

"The one in your room from Bill's house?"

"The - what?"

"Sorry, I assumed... you said it was a bedroom you didn't remember, and then you said you had been living with Bill so it seemed obvious that the two were related."

"Oh. Shit, I... you know, I'd been distracted with some of the other implications of it and I'd just been thinking of it as the entry for my memory palace so... yeah, but you're right. You have to be. Huh."

I took another bite of the fries, as did Katrin, and once we'd both swallowed and she had stared at the other brooch a little she shrugged.

"It could be magic. I assume that's what you're thinking?"

"Yeah. And did you see the difference between the two?"

She nodded. "Yes, the door is closed in the one from the closet, and the writing is missing. Do you think it's just that you didn't remember it properly?"

"Could be. Or there are two of them, like it's a matched set. Or the brooch changed. Or... yeah, no clue. You can't read the writing?"

"No, but I can memorize it and try to look it up if we get back to the library at Sentortzi. We're going a little the wrong way right now, do you think Hugh will let us go there?"

Hugh and I had had a talk about that, and I had fucked it up. It had started promisingly enough, but I had assumed he had been sent directly by Hammersmith herself - instead, he'd met up with some people in those circles and had gotten some sort of writ of authority sealed by her to run general war-related errands but hadn't ever heard the full story of what we'd been up to. He knew enough that it seemed like he knew it all, so I'd let slip that I was the only person left that Hammersmith was aware of who could get her into Brynnklar. Hugh's eyebrows gave him away at that point and so thankfully I didn't say anything about the doomsday device, but it seemed like he was already taking things more seriously. It was the first day of the eighth month which meant we had exactly seventy-two days before the way into Brynnklar would open, and the original plan had been to wait another few weeks then travel overland across the continent for a month and a half. Instead Hugh would presumably find us a shortcut like a teleportation service and then we would spend two months just sitting somewhere "safe" until the day arrived. It sounded boring as shit.

"We can make the argument with him, I don't know. Worst case scenario we can ditch him, but with everything that's going on I don't really want to do that. I'll have to feel it out and see what kind of detours he'll allow. We... probably shouldn't let him know that we might be wanted for murder in Sentortzi as part of that conversation, though we'll still have to find out before we go in."

"Well at any rate, I can't translate the ring here. I could take a look at where you found it?"

"I mean it wasn't about the place, it was just pinned to me. I don't know where it came from, or how long I'd had it, or... wait, do you just want to see my school?"

Katrin shrugged, which I took as a yes. I grabbed one last heaping bite of carne asada fries and headed back onto the deck of the barge, where Errod and Hugh had taken a break from sparring and were just sitting near us looking out across the river.

"Okay. I'm getting better at this, I should be able to open a door right to the memory." I walked to the door that led belowdecks and pulled, revealing... the hotel hallway. Close enough. We stepped through, Katrin running her fingers along the wallpaper and staring at the acoustical ceiling tiles, and I yanked another door open - this time to the correct place.

"Oh this is so strange," Katrin said, "look at the clothes! And the lights, and the... everything! It's all totally foreign. What is this?" she asked, picking up an electric pencil sharpener from the teacher's desk. I explained, but she barely heard the answer because she was so busy moving on to the next thing.

"That's a computer, we talked about those. I don't know how well it will work in a memory, but you can give it a shot."

She poked at it a little, but it was clear she wasn't going to accomplish anything so I came over and turned it on for her. The Windows logo came up, and then after a moment the desktop - and right away I could see something was wrong. The icons said things like "Teacher" and "Class Tools" and "Grades" and it just felt very... generic. I picked up a book from the desk and flipped it open, but all the pages were gibberish.

"Okay, so the divination thing wore off at some point clearly. It's still probably more accurate than it was before, but anything I didn't look at closely right after spending all that mana is back to being made up. The book I took back to the bedroom should be okay, it doesn't seem like things degrade in the main rooms."

Katrin played with the computer some, but was eventually distracted by motherfucking Zoey.

"Who is that girl that keeps calling you a goat licker? And what happened to her face?"

We popped into that memory, which was a bit jumbled and chaotic since I hadn't even properly remembered it until the day before. Katrin watched the fight unfold, then followed me into the maintenance closet and kept watching from in there until everything went blurry.

"That's... odd."

"Yeah, I don't know why it cuts out there."

"No, that's not what I meant. That too, of course, but... why didn't you win that fight?"

I was a little taken aback at that. "I... well I don't know how it works here, but I'd already been in trouble a lot of times and nobody was going to believe my side of things."

"That makes sense, but... I don't know, it just seems out of character for you. What would be the worst thing that would happen? From what you've told me, you weren't likely to be imprisoned."

"No, I would just get suspended from school. So they would make me stay home and..." well shit, saying it that way did make it seem out of character. Running had always been my preferred way of dealing with things, but a good headbutt was a close second and 'what if they say I can't go to school' had never been a consideration at all. Hell, I'd stabbed people three times and not felt a lick of guilt about it. Maybe that even had something to do with it, was I maybe worried because I had a knife on me or... no, that didn't feel right.

"I think... I don't know, partly I think I just really wanted to not disappoint Bill for some reason? And then... well I mean obviously I didn't know the crazy bitch would throw bleach on me. There might have been something else, I feel like there was something I wanted to do or... well, whatever. It was a lapse in judgment."

"It's not a big deal, it's just... odd to see you have bad judgment that involves not fighting."

The bleach fumes were imaginary but so were our lungs, and that smell was lingering some even with everything all blurred out so we headed back into the hotel hallway to pick a new memory.

"Maybe I'll use divination on that one next, it'll be a bit before I have my mana back from the taco place. Where can we go in the meantime... oh! Duh! Come over here, let me just center the memory in my head. I was twelve, and I ran away and got on a train. Things had been a little better at home but I could tell my mom was headed for another... episode... and wanted to get out of there. Anyway, my goal in the short term was to make it up to this place I'd seen in movies a bunch of times, and in the long term I thought maybe I'd stay there forever and never go home. Turned out to be a real pain in the ass, you had to buy tickets and take multiple elevators and... you don't know what I'm talking about. Anyway. I just snuck past people by acting like I was with someone further ahead and eventually I made it."

I took a deep breath and opened the door, and we both stepped out onto the observation deck of the Empire State building.

Katrin looked like she was in shock. Her mouth hung open, and what little expression there was on her face looked tinged with panic. She stuck her face between the metal bars and looked out, then pulled away and ran to another spot to do it again. After a moment she stumbled back, and then just as I thought she was about to say something she instead caught sight of a huge airplane flying by - probably in a totally inaccurate way since this was a hazily-remembered thing and there might not have even been a plane in view originally - and that was the final straw. She hurried through the door, back into the hotel hallway.

"Sorry. Sorry, that was just... it was... I mean I knew you were from another world, I believed you, but that was... we were so high up! How high were we?"

"Uh, rounding to something that's a multiple of six for you, hang on. I don't know exactly, call it 1200 feet? No wait, your feet aren't the same as my feet so... whatever, it's like a hundred storeys up."

"That's insane. Even if you had magic, that would be... and it just keeps going! I could see city all the way out to... oh, god. How does that even work? Where are the farms? And everything was... I don't know, just all that glass and the lights and... it was too much."

"Shit, Katrin. You've been so unflappable about this whole thing I just never thought you'd have trouble with it. I just figured I'd show you something really impressive, and... anyway, sorry."

She shook her head, and took a deep breath. "No, it's stupid. I feel silly now, I think... maybe I don't like being high up, and it was just a lot to deal with all at once. I... I'd like to go back, some time. Later. For now... let's head back, and see if we can get Hugh to take us to Sentortzi. You want to stall anyway, to get your mental defenses up."

"Right. Remember, no mention of the extra Dumines or time travel or the apocalypse."

"Of course. What do you think, that I'm going to just blurt all that out?"

I dropped us back into the real world, and we sat there stretching for a moment before Errod came in close and whispered to us.

"I was practicing with Hugh, and he kept chatting with me, and... I may have said too much."

God damn it.