Noel Quick’s original strategy, with regard to his sister’s persistent badgering (“So when are you taking me to Syllabary, big brother?” “You don’t have to pay me back for the groceries. Just take me to work, we’ll call it even …” “Gee, sure would be nice if someone took me on a tour of Syllabary today …”), had been to do absolutely nothing, in the hopes that the topic of his workplace would be eventually forgotten.

But being that ten days of this tactic had proved to be ineffective—and given that, somewhat tangentially, Noel had found himself, since 3:30 that morning, locked out of his remote access—he asked his sister, on this eleventh morning of her stay, when she woke up, “Wanna go to Syllabary today?”

Which Melody agreed to, emphatically, as evinced by the way she, after the pair left the house, skipped along Petrichor, singing, as they set off toward the main campus road of Somnhaven University, “Syl-la-bary, Syl-la-bary, la la la!”

“Can you … can you not do that in public? It’s really embarrassing.”

“I’m just happy I get to go visit the headquarters of the Continuate’s biggest industrial and technological pride and joy, finally.”

“Well, that’s only because I’m locked out.”

“I know. I know. You won’t stop mentioning that. Can’t you just be a good older sibling for once?”

“No.”

At which dismissal Melody began to sulk, arms crossed, cheeks puffed, her sour mood wretched and unremitting, dispelled only after they crossed the boundary into Noel’s (not-quite) alma mater, when her nostrils caught wind of a variety of intoxicating aromas, some of which she had already encountered when she passed by on her first day in the city.

“Mel. Seriously. Just wait a bit. In less than an hour you’ll be able to get chef-prepared all-you-can-eat at our cafeteria,” said Noel to his sister, who was carefully studying the menu of a food truck, dabbing occasionally at the corners of her mouth where saliva pooled.

“B-But … Guacamole! A-and … Crispy lime chicken!”

(“Um … Excuse me?”)

“It’s barely even nine. Don’t you have any self-respect?”

(“Hi there, um, i-if I could just get your attention, please … for a second …”)

“Look here, dear brother. If they didn’t want people buying burritos at this hour, they wouldn’t be open now, would they? Besides, haven’t you ever heard of a breakfast burrito?”

(“If you don’t mind … I have something important to ask you … Sir … Miss …?”)

“Just because you eat a burrito at breakfast-time doesn’t make it a breakfa—hey, hey! who’s tapping on my SHOULDER!” yelled Noel, spinning around, forcing the priestess, whose meek appeals for attention had gone completely unnoticed by the siblings, to jump back in fear and scatter to the ground the stack of papers she was carrying.

The frazzled stranger in her traditional religious raiments dropped down to her knees, apologizing (“I-I’m sorry, it’s my fault, I-I shouldn’t have snuck up on you like that …”) while she scrambled to pick up the loose sheets, managing to salvage, before the rest were blown away by a sudden breeze (“Ah. Ah, no … come back …”), only a small handful of copies, which she clutched haphazardly to her chest when she stood back up to face Melody and Noel, the latter of whom demanded, coldly, “And what exactly do you want? … not that I can’t already guess …”

The priestess, trying (and failing) to regain whatever little composure she was capable of, stumbled through her hopeless pitch: “Ah, ah, yes, you see … Well, my family’s reliquary, um, which has been standing for over a hundred years, in fact, predating Year One of the Great Reconstitution, and i-is … in danger of being, um, torn down, a-and … See, here, please take this sheet, I’m sorry it’s a bit, um, dirty, from being on the ground, but it explains everything here … And if you w-wouldn’t mind, to sign my petition to save the reliquary …”

Noel, nodding unctuously as he pretended to read the handout, mumbled over the priestess’s words, “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Wow, that’s very interesting. Very, very interesting …” before violently crumpling up the sheet and yelling, “WHAT, YOU THINK I WAS BORN YESTERDAY!”

Startled, the priestess recoiled, allowing Noel to swipe the rest of her papers and throw them into the path of an approaching street cleaning automaton, which happily gobbled up every last sheet and continued on its programmed route, indifferent to the whimpering pleas of the priestess now chasing after it.

“That was kind of mean.”

“Please. Did she really think those fake robes and staff were enough to fool me? Come on. A priestess from the rural Undivided countryside, asking for donations to save her family’s reliquary? Oldest scam in the book.”

“I think you made her cry,” said Melody, accepting from the vendor her freshly-made burrito, which she juggled in her hands (“Ah! Hot, hot! Why is this so hot …”) as they walked across the courtyard, to the bus stop, where, for the first time since their reunion, Melody beheld her brother in the full glow of daylight.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I was just thinking about how out of place you look in the daytime.”

“Oh. I mean—that’s a bit rude.”

“Maybe you really are a vampire. But my question is: do you look this way because of your sleep schedule, or did your total inability to be in the sun cause you to be nocturnal?”

“Shut up and eat your burrito.”

Wagging her finger: “No, no, no, not yet. I want the experience of eating a burrito while enjoying a ride on Syllabary’s exclusive employee shuttles.”

“Yeah, about that …”

“Hmm?”

“Um. Never mind. You’ll find out soon enough.”

And find out she did, when the words SOMNHAVEN PUBLIC TRANSIT pulled up beside them.

“But this is … this is just a regular bus. I thought we were riding the shuttle to Syllabary.”

“They don’t have them around here. Why would they? The shuttles mostly service the commuters who live in the suburbs up north. Other than the one that runs from the corporate building in the finance district, there’s no reason to have them downtown.”

Melody grumbled, as they made their way to a pair of seats near the back, “I wouldn’t’ve minded walking more, just to ride the shuttle.” She tore open the burrito’s foil wrapping. “Oh, well. At least I still have you.”

The siblings sat down, and the bus set off toward Upper Somnhaven.

“Which reminds me of another thing,” began Melody.

“Chew, swallow.”

She did. “Everyone refers to Somnhaven as the home of Syllabary, but that’s not really accurate, is it? The headquarters is in Upper Somnhaven, which isn’t describing a section of Somnhaven—it’s another city entirely! But you never hear people call it Syllabary’s ‘Upper Somnhaven Campus,’ it’s only ever referred to as the Somnhaven campus. Which is totally cheating. And there’s nothing else in Upper Somnhaven, right? Barely anyone lives there, there’s no other industry there … So it’s like the city’s only purpose is to make it seem like Somnhaven has more than it actually does. You know what I’m saying?”

Noel, nodding off: “Hrm, yeah. Yeah. Yeah …”

“Yo!” Melody punched her brother in the arm.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“I was talking! Really, if you’re like this now, I have no idea how you’re going to last the rest of the day.”

“I can’t help it. I’m usually asleep by now. It’s going to be an all-nighter for me. Or, an all-morning-er, I guess. Also, you gotta admit, nothing lulls you to sleep quite as easily as the back of a bus …”

… a statement no better demonstrated than by the fact that he was soon dozing off again, his head pitching listlessly forward one moment, jerking abruptly back upwards the next, while beside him his sister, nibbling mindlessly on her burrito, stared out the window, imagining another reality where certain words were more easily said than they really were, turning her gaze every so often to observe the passengers boarding, one of whom caught her attention in particular—a figure without features, its face hidden behind the combination of a surgical mask, sunglasses and a baseball cap, its frame within an oversized, formless grey sweatshirt over which a knapsack was worn backwards, vest-wise; a figure which, after paying the fare and taking in the arrangement of passengers, decided on and sat down in the window seat directly in front of Melody, who nudged her brother awake.

“Zuh? Wh-what? What is it?”

Melody placed the burrito sideways on her lap and took out her phone and began typing.

person in front of me is freaking me out

“How so?”

what if shes a u know what

“A what?”

u know

“What?”

Whispering: “Like a … a ‘pe-tite soeur’?”

Noel scoffed. “That’s ridiculous, Mel. First of all, that’s not even what they look like. Secondly … you’re eating that thing all wrong. You’re supposed to unwrap it as you go, like a candy bar. Look how it’s coming apart at the bottom. Everything’s going to fall out.”

but what if i’m right? who knows whats in that backpack!!!

“Right. Sure. I’m going back to sleep.”

And despite the ease with which her brother did so, Melody—resuming work on a burrito that was deteriorating further with every absent-minded bite—unable to focus even on its taste let alone its condition—could not feel particularly reassured by Noel’s lack of concern; rather, her head reeled with increasingly outrageous—yet, for her, genuinely convincing—imaginings which, as per their natural tendency, reframed her current circumstances as providence.

We’re all going to die. We’re all about to be blown up. And this has happened every September. My brother gets locked out on this day, and he gets on a bus to go to Syllabary, and this little sister blows everyone up.

So this is my purpose. I will die here. I have to accept my death, and when September begins again I have to find a way to stop it.

A noble cause, absolutely—or at least it might’ve been, had this sense of purpose not been cheapened by so many attempts before it, the most recent instance of which took place not six days ago, when Melody had claimed as her sole destiny in life—the one thing that was going to propitiate the endless September—the prevention of Elysia’s injury. (A destiny, tellingly enough, she hadn’t thought about once during the past five days.)

No, just as how saving that Uptown freshman from alcohol poisoning during the End of the Universe hadn’t freed Melody from the Void; and how placing first on her floor’s chicken nugget eating contest (a highlight of the traditional start-of-the-school-year ice-breaking activities) had similarly no effect; so completely irrelevant too to the Void was this issue of a little sister (or not) blowing up (or not) this bus, which now braked suddenly, jolting Melody forward and Noel awake (“Wha—what? Wha-happen?”), prompting not only startled yelps from the other riders but a long, sustained honk from the driver, who raged, “What the—what this asshole is doing, in front of me!”

Referring to the white van ahead, which had come swerving out, from the opposite lane, into the path of the bus—within two meters of whose complete braking distance the unmarked, opaque-windowed vehicle then came drifting to a perpendicular stop, doing so with such calculated, stuntman-tier precision that, had the safety of so many lives on the road not been at stake, the bus driver might have been impressed; but since it had been at stake, and he was decidedly not impressed, he continued to honk at, and curse out, the ‘asshole’ obstructing his path, until the van’s side door slid open and he, at seeing who was inside, immediately tore his hand away from the horn and cut short his rant mid-profanity, and then watched with mounting dread as the only people in the entire Continuate capable of inspiring such a drastic change in atmosphere emerged from the van and approached the bus.

With trembling hands, the bus driver, drenched now in cold sweat, praying silently that his honk would be if not overlooked then at least pardoned, pulled the lever to open the doors, letting on board the pair of suits, the agent and her partner, both of whom then began to march down the length of the aisle, past avoidant passengers who suddenly found themselves engrossed by spots of intrigue on the ceiling, or the floor, or even on the backs of their hands, which they kept, without exception, submissively folded in plain view atop their thighs, every stiff and unmoving rider holding the same collective breath—save one, the target of Melody’s earlier suspicions, who in contrast took many, many breaths as they hyperventilated behind their surgical mask, a behaviour Melody interpreted not only as an admission of guilt (at which justification of her own paranoia she felt not vindicated so much as astonished, having, for once, been right about something) but a confirmation that yes, the questionable character was indeed a little sister, and they all really had been about to perish had it not been for the all-watching eye of Societal Sanitation, at whose agents Melody now wanted to stand up and yell, Hey! Hey, over here! This is the person you’re looking for, right here! Sitting right in front of—

“Noel Quick, come with us.”

The agent who had spoken, yet another face in the growing collection of those whose fates would be inextricably tied to Melody’s, did not repeat herself, although she did allow some time for the current situation to register for Noel, who, once it did, came willingly, with no further words said by or to any of the people involved—no protests from the accused or his sister; no more demands or orders from the agents; no hushed judgments among the spectators—the only exchange being one last voiceless interaction between the siblings, his head turned back as he was escorted away, his helpless expression trying to convey whatever it was he wanted to say; and her own expression, in return, relaying back, Bro, I can’t read your mind.

The pair escorted Noel outside and forced him into the van, and the van drove off.

Inside the bus the passengers resumed their breathing. The person behind the surgical mask collapsed in relief, and Melody nibbled uncomprehendingly on her cold burrito.