pieces of sundial

005 shade crossover(lapper)

Apparently, there was still some work to be done before anyone could be certain that Melanie was safe to go outside, so Dr Stoker had moved her into the “medical room”, where she had been eating and sleeping for a few days now on one of the beds. From the looks of it, she was in some kind of school, so there were sufficient supplies to basically keep tabs on her throughout her recovery. She had spent her time, with permission and a borrowed laptop, surfing the internet to try to get up to speed.

Wikipedia had been her first port of call for the basics.

In January of 2017, a new president had been sworn in. He had won the election by riding the waves made in the aftermath of Goliath, campaigning on the basis of bringing whatever terrorist group behind it to justice.

The war in the Middle East had ended in spectacular disaster in 2018, with the aftermath of Goliath prompting the United States to withdraw their military quickly for fear of a repeat of the incident. There had still been no answers, but the eagerness to blame terrorist groups for it had proven itself to be a kneejerk reaction at best. But in the eagerness for some kind of answer, misinformation was beginning to completely subsume genuine facts in the political arena.

In fact, the search for them had dominated a lot of world politics for a while. There was no way to pin the blame on any nation, and so they had resorted to posturing. Other major powers in the world would make shows of force to scare off any potential culprits from targeting them next.

Russia had begun annexing a substantial number of former Soviet territories in the Balkans, creating more and more repeats of the Crimea crisis that had happened before Goliath.

North Korea had stepped up their ballistic missile production.

China cracked down tenfold on information control.

The United Kingdom had begun an initiative to expand their armed forces.

International politics had become a standoff where the world powers all insisted that they would support one another in the fight against an invisible foe, while simultaneously holding guns to each others’ heads, all taking it as an excuse to encroach on one another. In the end, Goliath was only making them more boldly do what they wanted to do all along, perhaps…

Well, not that she could be sure, but one thing was obvious - it wasn’t helping with this COVID-20 business…

One name that was coming up a lot was Cardinal Enterprises. Obviously, it wasn’t a country. Rather, it seemed like some kind of international conglomerate that was taking advantage of the current world stage to great effect. It publicly had quite a few relations with America, Russia, and various other countries as an arms dealer and military contractor. On top of that, it was acting as a pharmaceutical company that had helped develop the first vaccines for this pandemic that had started, and it had suppressed the disease extremely effectively even with a huge amount of unpopularity in shockingly widespread anti-vaccine movements.

Apparently, although it was issuing a huge amount of its profits as funding to other scientific organizations like research firms and universities, it had gotten its start in diamond mining, or something…

This kind of trivia was perfectly interesting to Melanie, but it wasn’t helping her get a grasp on what anyone did know about Goliath. She was getting distracted. Having been there, with it fresh in her memory, she more or less understood that this wasn’t just some geopolitical phenomenon.

Her mind flashed back to the boy with the colored daggers.

There had been something inhuman about him.

Was it that he was truly something else, or was it that he simply appeared that way? It was hard to say that he felt alien, but the feeling he gave her had been at least foreign to her.

And it wasn’t just him either. There were unnaturally coloured flames and explosions, on the ground and in the sky around her. They didn’t seem to come from him - in fact, he had commented on their lethality himself, and had advised Sarah not to run away in case she…

…Yeah.

So there were definitely multiple forces at work during that moment, locked in some kind of conflict with each other. That guy had been nothing more than a spectator to that battle.

Whether it had come from somewhere else, or if it had simply crossed over into her normal life, what had happened during this so-called Goliath Incident had obviously been some kind of intersection with ‘a different world’.

What did that mean for her? She had no idea, but it seemed pretty important.

She also couldn’t think of a way to investigate it either ─ the internet was certainly useless in that regard, and she was still stuck in this school… Not that she suspected she’d be able to just go outside and ask someone on the street for the details.

She set the laptop aside, and fell back on the bed with an involuntary sigh. More than frustrated at her lack of progress, she was so bored that she was getting pins-and-needles in her brain.

Single rays of sunlight beamed through a row of small windows high up on the walls. They taunted her. Sure, she had the internet at her fingertips, but it wasn’t like she frequented anywhere, and she could only read for so long before it started to hurt her head.

Melanie wanted to go outside. If it really had been eight years, a lot would have changed. The only thing she had spotted in here was Stoker’s flashy-looking cellphone. Which was interesting, but only to a point, and that point was roughly ‘looking at it’.

Okay, that settled it. She was certain. No matter how she sliced it, she couldn’t stick it out in this room any longer. Throwing caution to the wind, she made her way to the door───

“───and the momentum of the first object is transferred to the second as they bounce off each other. The kind of collision where the objects bounce off each other is an elastic type, like rubber. Of course, it never goes quite so perfectly in the real world──”

Jett was half listening. Physics was one of those subjects that was somewhat cut-and-dry ─ once an answer had been reached, there was no more room to think about it. He’d never been a great fan of the more flowery subjects, even if he was better at them.

The questions in English and History were more like black holes, spiraling down into an oblivion of minutiae and nuance. He could descend into that pit forever, certainly, but he didn’t really care to. He had some kind of unconscious bias that led him down a garden path into either realizing the illogic of what he’d been writing, or something he preferred not to think about. Bluntly, it was bullshit, and he was a decent bullshitter, but didn’t like to bullshit. A dilemma for the ages.

Mathematics and physics were much more in his ballpark, since at least they could be completed, even if his talents weren’t really there. Or rather, because he wanted to get it over with, nothing seemed to stick for him… was more likely the reason.

But, yesterday──

If you want to improve your grades, then study the material on your own time and make the class into a review, Blaze had instructed, and forced textbooks onto him until he’d taken today’s classes early.

A great strategy, for sure. He had no doubt that this was part of the reason she was so able to overperform. But for this subject where he just wanted it to be over, doing it a second time was making it impossible to focus. His attention had long since drifted out of the window, his imagination superimposing the figures from Friday onto the empty courtyard.

At the time, he had only needed to fire a few shots into the air, and the hostages ─ Dr Stoker and Ms Gethart especially ─ had taken the opportunity and turned the tables. He hadn’t really done anything, so the praise he’d gotten had felt hollow, and nobody’s opinion of him had particularly shifted from what he could tell. Everyone basically understood that he hadn’t done anything special, and he was under no delusions to the contrary. But for some reason, even now, he could remember the exact placement of everyone he’d flagged as a threat the day before, their invisible figures standing vigil in the──

────Wait, is that───

His eyes narrowed at the very real figure standing outside.

Goddammit, why wasn’t someone like that under better supervision? He didn’t know what was going on with her, but he was sure that it wasn’t the best idea to let her just stumble about blindly. Before he even realized what he was doing, his hand was raised in the air.

“Is it urgent, Jethro?” Gethart asked.

“Puking tends to be,” he answered.

She conceded without a word. “Go on, then.”

His chair scraped as though in obligation against the floor as he pulled himself up, mindful of the gazes ─ especially a certain crimson-coloured stare ─ as he left as hastily as possible, one hand over his abdomen for effect.

“Tremendous tact as usual,” he heard Jamie’s voice.

He had no idea how many of them he was fooling as he stepped into the corridor. Every single person in that room was too damn sharp.

The sky was bright, but it wasn’t hot at all.

Well, that was probably to be expected from the middle of September. The air was largely quite still, with the occasional light breeze, so it felt like a chill was sticking to Melanie’s skin. Regardless, it wasn’t any less of a pleasant walk, strolling peacefully down the path through the trees. There was a lot of grass and greenery around here, and plenty of trees to give shade over the paths as she passed through what felt like the lovechild of a park, an open-air museum, and a suburb.

Suburbs tended to give her anxiety ─ perhaps because of how uniform it all was ─ but having so much greenery and open space alleviated that a bit. She had been flanked by exposed brick on multistorey buildings the whole way, which felt almost artistic when contrasted against the more typical houses.

Where on earth am I?

She had no idea what this place could have even been built for, but she was already finding herself quite taken with it.

She had to have been wandering through the quasi-streets for about an hour or so when she stumbled upon what was quite clearly a basketball court outside of a large, formal-looking brick building. It surrounded the court as though trying to grasp it, but this was clearly a part of it, and only half of the courtyard at that. The other side looked like some kind of garden, and they were split down the middle by a path into the building itself. It wasn’t out of the ordinary, but it was enough to pique her curiosity just from how different it was from everything else she’d seen on the way.

I mean, what’s a basketball court doing here?

She stepped onto it, looking around, and spotting a sign on the side of the building that read ‘New York Harbor School’. Below it was a red strip with a small chess piece ─ a bishop, it looked like ─ with the words ‘Cardinal Public Services’ across it. She knew that logo now, and she knew the name attached to it.

So Cardinal Enterprises is here too?

Hold on. That timeline didn’t add up. If Cardinal had expanded while she was… ‘dead’, then that──

“Hey.”

A voice from her left blindsided her, and her train of thought was struck dead. Her eyes darted to its source, and found the figure of a tall dark stranger──

Matt──?!

──No. Melanie quickly corrected herself. This was a tall dark stranger.

“What? Were you expecting someone to yell at you or something?” he raised an eyebrow, almost like he was making fun of her as he leaned against the doorframe.

She had no idea what her expression must have looked like to get him to respond like that, but she wiped it away with as best a smile as she could muster as quickly as possible.

He looked similar. Shockingly similar. But the way his stance drooped lazily was a stark contrast compared to Matt’s more rigid posture. Not to mention, his features weren’t quite the same, and his complexion was a few shades darker. On top of that, his voice had been entirely different, with an accent that she vaguely placed in Brooklyn. And most of all, she realized, there was no way Matt would have looked the same after eight years anyway.

“I’m… sure you don’t bite,” she laughed sheepishly.

“I’m not walking all the way over there,” he said flatly. “I’d probably just throw something at you instead.”

Yeah. This definitely was someone else. Everything below the surface was so clearly unique that the illusion eroded away without her even having to think about it.

“Aren’t you supposed to be under supervision or something?” he asked. “Or what, did Stoker set you free to roam the wilderness?”

The question came with a tone of knowing, and he seemed like he was testing the water to see if she could be busted for wandering around. She briefly considered lying, but the rational part of her brain pointed out that it wouldn’t fly. She wasn’t a great liar, and even if she convinced him, they were both just going to get in trouble.

She was tempted to take off, heading in some random direction at full speed so he wouldn’t be able to…

Uh, she mentally stumbled.

…to what, exactly?

Fleeing wasn’t going to save her from any consequences when she had nowhere to go but back to her room. And there was no way in hell she was fit enough to outrun someone for any length of time, no matter how unwilling to walk fifteen feet they were.

But how was she supposed to deflect something that direct…?

“Have, uh,” she scrambled. “Have you… and I, uh, met?”

“Yes.”

She blinked. “Oh, wow, really?”

“If you’re that surprised, why did you even think to ask?” he replied.

“I just…” she fumbled. “Where was it?”

“I walked in on you after your shower.”

Oh. That was him. Okay. So he’d already seen her naked. That was a fantastic start. Her ears were very faintly burning, as though they were mocking her.

“No, I didn’t see anything.”

“Even I can tell you’re lying!” she cried.

He simply glanced off to one side, like the subject would vanish if he stopped looking at it. As if it were that easy. That was one thing that was reminding her of…

Okay, I need a name.

There were still flashes of Matt here and there. She needed to separate them out.

“What should I call you?” she asked.

“Jett,” he replied. “Short for Jethro. You?”

She gave a small nod.

“Melanie,” she said. “But you can, uh, call me Mel.”

No, no, that defeats the point! she immediately scolded herself.

“Mel, huh,” he nodded. “That’s pretty nice.”

And just like that, butterflies passed briefly through her stomach and into her spine. She was doomed. It was locked in.

“You didn’t answer my question before though,” he pointed out. “What are you doing out and about?”

The dead end was marked. They had circled back around.

“I was just… getting some fresh air,” she said. “It’s not healthy to be indoors all the time, right?”

‘I was bored’ didn’t feel like an excuse she would get away with.

“Well, we got plenty of fresh air. No cars or anything here, unless you count the ones in the city,” he shrugged. “Depends on which way the wind blows.”

Okay, that certainly piqued her interest.

“The city?” she echoed.

He frowned. “Oh, they didn’t tell you anything, did they?”

“Should they have?”

Jett didn’t reply, instead gesturing to follow with his head as he started to walk down the courtyard and onto the path she had come in from. She followed along as he led her down the path, around the corner of the building…

“Oh, wow.”

The words, devoid of all meaning but sheer awe, slipped free before she had a chance to claw them back.

A vast open blue and green merged together, the water flashing like a wishing well filled with all the world’s silver coins. Adorning the horizon was a cluster of angles, enclosing it like a lake, but…

“Hey, that’s Lady Liberty,” she spotted, pointing over at the distinctive shape rising above the water.

“Yeah, all over there is New Jersey,” Jett replied, before nodding over to the right, indicating another even closer skyline peeking out from behind trees and red brickwork, “and that’s Manhattan over there. There’s a bus to and from there that’s basically the only traffic we get here on Governors Island.”

Oh, thank god. She breathed a silent sigh of relief that she didn’t have to admit that she had no idea about even local geography. The name of the island only rang a slight bell, but she knew where Manhattan was compared to New Jersey, so that put her… a little east of Long Island, she was pretty sure. Wasn’t that right in the middle of three boroughs? Either way, she hadn’t been moved far. That was a relief; as big as the city was, at least she was still inside its boundaries.

“So that explains why I couldn’t figure it out,” she muttered.

“Surprised nobody said anything to you.”

She gave a sheepish smile. “Well, I don’t really catch on all too easy to most things, so I’m used to people just giving up on me! I owe you one for giving me the time of day.”

Jett stared blankly at her face for a moment, and then looked away. “No, thank you.”

She blinked. “Uh?”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing. I guess I was just thinking that nobody really smiles like that anymore.”

“What? No way. That can’t be true. I’m sure people smile.”

“Not… really.”

“Come on, I bet they do.”

He shook his head, mind scouring the past few days as he tried to think of even one time that anyone…

“Well,” he admitted, “I guess my classmate Draven is always laughing about something. Jamie usually rolls his eyes, but I get the impression he’s enjoying it too. And Lulu generally tends to fuck around, so I guess she’s having a good time…”

“See what I mean? It’s easy if you try,” Mel found herself beaming.

He supposed he just hadn’t appreciated it so easily.

“By the way,” she said, “shouldn’t you be in class?”

“I’m not going back in there,” he shook his head. Besides, he was starting to enjoy this himself.

Mel’s eyes settled on him inquisitively, as if deciding how best to scold him for slacking off.

“Then, do you wanna hang out?”

Her question felt like he had stumbled on flat ground, and he shook his head in self-derision.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. Why not?”

When the bridge to Manhattan was constructed, it had taken the place of the old dock where visitors would arrive at Governors Island by boat. Apparently, however, there had been merit to being able to do that, and so the southside jetties remained in use. There was, after all, only a single road to and from the outside world, and supplies delivered in bulk found it much more convenient to come by sea.

As Stoker stood in the open breeze, he offhandedly considered it halfway amusing that these people would use the same channels as cargo.

Two figures approached. On the left, a man of average height. Hooked over his nose were a pair of rimless glasses, and his face was entirely clean-shaven. His dark hair was combed back, presumably with gel, but only on one side of his head - the other side, a somewhat lighter taupe colour from a lack of cosmetics, fell almost to his shoulders. Either way, it did nothing to conceal the unusual glyph-like mark right in the center of his forehead.

The girl on the right was half a head shorter than her companion, but carried herself with such poise that Stoker wouldn’t have guessed it if the two weren’t side-by-side. In contrast to him, her chocolate hair was an untamed boyish tousle, but her aura was distinctly much colder.

Clearly not related, but nonetheless ordinary. Their fully black suits did nothing to deter Stoker from that thought. Perhaps he had simply spent too much time among the students here to get any other impression from those who lived outside of Governors Island. The only thing that reminded him of the necessary caution was the bottomless black eyes the pair looked back at him with, their pupils differentiated only by a thin grey ring. To an ordinary person, such things would seem barely even strange - brown eyes could reach a deep darkness, after all - but he was acutely aware that this was far from an ordinary phenomenon.

It was almost ironic that something extraordinary even among that sphere of extraordinary things could appear so innocuous to those who were uninitiated.

But the most astonishing thing was───

───“I wasn’t expecting both of you,” he greeted. “It must be a particularly special occasion to warrant a visit from two members of the Board of Directors.”

The girl raised her right hand to adjust her necktie, the mildest hint of nuisance in her movement. It was completely black. Stoker wondered if it was some kind of prosthetic, but he couldn’t tell for sure. She seemed too young to have gotten such a dire injury. But then again, the two of them seemed too young to be serving on a Board of Directors; early twenties at oldest, if even that.

You literally haven’t aged a day, have you?

“Call it eagerness if you like,” she said. “There were going to be more, but the others weren’t trusted to take the visit seriously. Things have finally been put into motion, after all. I suppose I can’t blame them for getting excited.”

“It was a stroke of good fortune that we didn’t get caught up in any serious incidents since the founding of the company,” the bespectacled man said, “but there are those among us who would have happily shirked that meagre blessing if it had demanded less patience from them. I suspect certain colleagues wouldn’t have even minded failure if it meant that they would be allowed to move, but…”

Stoker nodded. “But it wouldn’t have satisfied Him for all that hard work to go up in smoke.”

“So you can count yourself lucky that you still have an island,” concluded the girl. “Although I hear you had some troubles on that front anyway.”

“It was just a few days ago,” he said. “No harm done. It seems like we’re dealing with an enemy by the name of ‘the Rogue’.”

An inquisitive look crossed the man’s face. “It sounds like the Shadow Conference have replenished their ranks with new seats then.”

Stoker did his best to come up with some fitting expression for his face, but fell short, and gave up. “So it would seem.”

The girl shook her head. “That you can even remember such footnotes is beyond me.”

“I feel they deserve at least some space in our minds. They are the closest thing we’ve ever had to opposition, after all,” the man replied.

“Is that how you see them? At their height, they were a mild hassle for one entire second.”

Stoker frowned. “We have… reason to believe that it will be different this time. For one, they have started to assassinate their own members.”

Silence.

“And?” asked the girl.

“Sorry, I’m not sure I see why that would…” the man raised an eyebrow, trailing off.

Stoker shook his head. “Yes, I suppose you wouldn’t understand.”

It wasn’t that surprising. He understood his own mentality to be foreign compared to the general populace, but even to him, the Board of Directors were almost like alien lifeforms at this point. Even if they had been born into this world where such things were a sign of things to come, which they certainly had not, they’d had nothing to do but go stir-crazy in that boardroom for years. Their egos had filtered through so many media that he could not possibly imagine what they must have been thinking anymore. It was as if the music of their thoughts had been recorded on phonograph cylinders, only for the sound of the playback to have been rerecorded at the bottom of the ocean for digital storage. How much of their logic was natural, how much nothing more than artifacts of their circumstances? How much of the melody was even left, and how much was mere noise? Or perhaps, rather than their minds, it was his question that was the warped thing to begin with. Stoker couldn’t say.

“Either way, you have prisoners from your raid, I assume,” the man said. “Make sure they’re disposed of as soon as possible. There’s no need for loose ends.”

“Isn’t it a good idea to at least interrogate them first?”

The girl looked at him as though she had been personally insulted. “Are you mocking us, Rhemn Stoker?”

“Of course not. Even if its members are indifferent to the circumstances, I’m sure the Board’s memory isn’t so poor.”

“We are aware of the circumstances in their entirety,” she replied. “Which seems to be more than I can say for the Harbor School, unless you mean to tell me that you already have a plan to deal with your little rat problem.”

He paused. “Rat problem?”

As the girl’s gaze hardened, the man adjusted his glasses with a pitying smirk. “Oh dear, oh dear… You’ve set yourself up for quite the lecture, teach.”

Yes, Stoker replied silently, I can tell.

With a gesture to the two guests──

“Let’s take this inside, shall we?”

──the doctor turned to lead them off the dock.