Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I stare into the sky and imagine I see you, some nights as I work in the observatory.

Through the clouds and fog, the stars shine down on this planet, as they do at home. Somehow, through the endless sea of night, those bodies send their glow all the way here. Faced with infinity itself, they persevere. Still, they reach this strange world on which I stand.

And so I must imagine you, dearest Miku, are the same. I know the memories of your smile and the sound of your song have reached through the infinite cosmos to arrive at my little blue and green land of exile. From millions of worlds away—perhaps out into the beyond, at the universe's edge—you started this journey. All that distance, all that vast space, and still you reach me in the end.

It is all I can do to trace that journey back, to return myself to you; it is the turn of love you deserve, my darling.

Surely back home, others must think of me also—right? I must imagine some ask whatever became of Luka, the aloof member of the choir. The one always out and about with Miku.

If this message—any part of it—reaches you, I'd ask you tell them all that I am well now. Though, I must say it has not been easy acclimating to my banishment. A different place, with such different rules, is on its own a troublesome thing. It seems each day I have had to relearn the ways of the universe itself.

Here one must eat often, obey one's earthly ties always. Here, we have no choice; the body is a shackle in this realm, weighed down with painful desires. To ignore them for time's sake is to perish.

Sleep, too, tugs at me more often here. What's more, time itself marches at such a different rhythm. I yearn to move ahead, and yet these physical bindings shackle every step I wish to take.

What makes it all the harder to bear is how far I am from you. Every night, I look up into the dark sky and grieve at the vast emptiness that separates us.

It feels so long ago since I first arrived here—so long that I first lost you.

And yet still I remember it so vividly.

It happened in an instant, with a blinding flash of light and a clap of thunder. Gone were the castle, the guards, and even you. I was alone, flat on my face, still trying to figure out where I was and how I got here. I struggled to my feet and felt humid air flow over my skin.

Trees towered overhead, framing the vast black of night. Stars twinkled against the dark.

Seeing them, I knew at once: they were not our stars.

No, none of their patterns sat together the same. On and on I looked for Tigress, the Roamer, Cevio's Sisters—not a one could I see. It was the same time of year, I was sure, for the air felt the same, if warmer from the breath of the forest.

Which forest it was, I could not say. This one, I had never set foot in.

As I walked, I realized this would pose a problem as to how I would find a way out.

Without stars or memory to guide me, I simply picked a direction and walked. No part of the woods felt familiar. None of them felt real. In the dark, moss crept up bark, and leaves shook and rattled, and all around a faint groan echoed.

For much of the walk, I went slowly, groping as I stepped. I could hardly see a few inches in front of me.

Suddenly, the dark dissipated. First slowly, then all at once, light spread along the sky—orange, then blue. Even as far as I'd walked in panic and fear, the night had been over in an actual flash.

How could that have been, I wondered to myself? How far could I have even walked in such a short time?

I paced, examining the trees around me. They looked much like the ones before—but no, they were surely from further ahead than where I'd been. The ground here was much rockier and its slope steeper.

But then, as I came to another clearing in the sea of trees, night fell. Dark swept over the bushes lining most of the floor, and their needles were set aglow in moonlight.

It had fallen oh so very quickly, too. As if I had lost track of my steps, as if I had simply ended up in a darker version of the woods.

How could the sun rise and set this way, I wondered? But this was a whole different world. Maybe that was part of this plane: time passing by at such a different pace.

I would have given anything for even a hint of a path at that moment. Just the barest sign someone else was out here.

With that thought, exhaustion hit me in a sudden, towering wave. My knees gave out, and I collapsed down to them. I settled up against the bark of a tree and pulled my knees in.

It finally occurred to me I was still in just my thin choral robes. Branches must have torn into them as I walked, battering the skin beneath. Cold didn't seem an issue on this world, for now. If nothing else, the threadbare protection didn't leave me frozen that night.

I'm sure the sun had already spent hours shining on my hands as I awoke on the forest floor, because they felt comfortably warm from the beams peering through the treetops. I turned my head up, and just from looking skyward, my face warmed to the sunlight. If one day had passed or several, I couldn't tell.

I soon realized that the sunlight itself hadn't awoken me. It had been a noise: soft, but somehow still enough to perk my ears up.

A kind of singing, I soon figured out.

Your singing.

I arose with a jolt and took off with a start. It was a sign, it was something out there—and more than that it was you, you here, you ready to embrace me.

Yes, it had to have been you. Because there was no other reason why, running in the direction of your song, I would have found a path—a dirt path at last, finally a sign of civilization. No, no other reason why in following that melody I continued down that walkway, and in following it the trees thinned, and dashing along the sky emerged again, its blue now covered with clouds.

I saw all of that, yes, only because it was your song, you singing to me then. Never have I been surer of anything, dear.

But as I ran, as I came out into the open—you were nowhere to be seen, even out here in a full clearing of grass, where a hill rose up the middle of the space.

From there, I'd be able to see out farther, I thought. If you weren't here, well, from the hill I'd be able to see where you were.

Maybe that was your idea in bringing me there.

Though, I doubt it was your idea for me to have kept running full speed up the hill—or to realize, before I had a chance to stop, that the "hill" was actually the edge of a ravine.

No, dear, I know you didn't think I'd approach quite like that, because if anyone's to blame for my falling down that ravine, it's me.

When I saw the pit before me, I stumbled. My arms flailed automatically and to no avail. At once I toppled forward—rolling at first, then changing to a free fall.

In less than a blink, the ground had rushed up to meet me.

Might I reminisce, a moment?

There's a picture of you that, even so many years later, I can't get out of my head. It's of you shuffling after me, in those flat choir shoes, your white robe motionless over your legs. I always it looked as if you were a walking candle: your still, cylindrical dress the wax body, your flowing hair a brilliant teal flame.

And yes, you did shuffle, you know. Much as you won't admit it, you had quite the funny way of walking after me back then. You took such fast, small steps—never moving much more than an inch at a time, but taking them so quickly over the castle's stones that you kept my pace. Always you held at a distance, though. You were still quite awkward about approaching anyone.

But how could I blame you? Then, you had only a few millennia worth of experience with song—so few, compared to me.

I often caught you staring, too, from across the choir stands. Without fail, the conductor would notice you, yell for you to turn back to the music. And the sopranos beside you would giggle, and elbows would nudge your dress and the friends like those twins your age would murmur jokes I tried to ignore because I knew I was privy to none of their humor.

I had no idea of the truth, you see. Do I have to remind you how oblivious I was?

But one day later, our voices harmonized. There were some absences in the choir that day, if I remember; the stands were sparser, and our voices thinner as they echoed within the castle chamber. And there was a moment, in our rehearsing the song, that all your fellow sopranos, all my fellow altos, happened to drop out. There was a moment, then, where it was only our voices that rang.

Yes, it was only for a moment. But that was all the time I needed to realize it.

For your voice wrapped along mine like the vine's embrace of a trellis. It reverberated through my chest, and it made the very skin on my legs tingle with electric joy. Never had I soared like this, I thought, not on choral stands or on currents of wind. Never had my very soul felt so alive and so much a part of a greater universe.

The resonance rang so that, even as the mass of the choir's voices raised themselves again, I felt only you echo alongside my voice.

We sang the last notes of the song. And you smiled after that. Only it wasn't at me—it was at a friend, who praised your singing in that last bar.

It was only then, after that smile, after that song, that I realized what it was everyone giggled at:

You had fallen in love with me.

And the next practice we met, I realized why I had understood this only now: because, in that moment our voices met, I had fallen just as much in love with you.

"Oh my god, call an ambulance!"

That other voice was what woke me up next. Definitely not yours—I'd know the difference miles away.

"They can't get an ambulance out here! Call a ranger. You got that number, right?"

There was no telling how long I'd been out. I woke up to aches in my limbs, the smell of iron in my nose. Rocks lay under my chest and pierced into my shoulders—past the skin, I think. It would have explained the scent, the stickiness along my face.

No, I couldn't say exactly how much time had passed. But it must have been a while. Bit by bit, my shattered bones had been knitting back together, reverting back to normal.

"Wait, ranger? No, I didn't get the ranger's…"

The voices kept on talking this whole time. It had taken a while for them to even register, I was still barely conscious, groggy with pain. But they were voices. There were people in this world, after all.

What's more, you had brought me to them.

I groaned. Wobbly in the knees, I rose on regenerated legs.

The voices were shouting and panicking still, but as I turned toward them, they suddenly fell silent.

Three women stood slack-jawed before me, there at the bottom of the ravine. They were dressed athletically, in shorts and bright, oddly patterned tops. The one with the brunette bob stepped toward me.

"Listen, just stay where you are," she said, reassuringly. "We're calling for help. Don't move."

"Help?" I repeated—dumbfounded, I must admit.

"Please, you might make it worse." Another woman stepped forward, this one with a cascade of silver hair, a black rectangle in her hand.

"Worse?" I said. "But I…"

"Ia, I got this," the brunette said. "Just call the ranger already."

I laughed—and instantly, the three recoiled. Still, I walked forward a few steps, opening up one of the holes punched open in my robe.

"You don't have to worry," I said, showing the patch of bruised skin. "I'm regenerating already. I'll be fine."

I'd hoped that would reassure the three. They seemed so ill at ease from the fall—I was willing to risk a breach of custom to put their minds at rest.

Instead, they gaped in perplexed silence. Breathlessly they kept eyes locked on my bit of exposed skin as the wound closed up.

"How did you…" the brunette said.

The third one—a blonde—shook her head, her jaw still open. "She shouldn't even be walking. Like, she shouldn't be, right?"

"No, I swear, I'm fine," I said. "I'm very sorry to trouble you, I just…"

A clap overhead stunned me into silence alongside the three before me. In a gushing burst, rain poured out from the mass of gray clouds. I stumbled closer to them, out from the ravine, lifting the edge of my robe off the grass as I went.

Even with the pouring rain, though, the other three didn't move.

"I don't suppose you remember the way out of this forest?" I asked. "I'm a little lost."

For what (at long last) seemed a long stretch of time, only the thunder, the pitter patter or rain filled the space between us.

Eventually, the blonde pointed down the path behind her.

"That way should do it," she said.

"Just that way?" I asked.

The three looked at one another in shifting glances.

"How about we show you?" the brunette asked.

My darling, I dreamed I saw you the other night. It must have been the clear skies then—your voice, your being must have shone through them and reached me.

Within that dream, my mind generated a conscious me, who was flying alongside a conscious you. We soared over the west woods and their towering forests, where the trees grow so tall that from above their trunks seem to descend down to another side of reality. You swooped down one sticking out, apart from the others, and snatched a fruit from its branches.

We sat together on that branch and shared it. I fed you, and you fed me.

I know you sent me this vision, for you and I both remember it happening.

It was one of our earlier trysts, I believe—perhaps I have lost the sense of that time from being here. You told me you had never been to the forests west of the castle, never soared along the branches.

"It's such a dark place," you said. "Wouldn't you get lost?"

"Only part of the day," I replied. "In the light, it's all wondrous. All you need to experience joy is a shift in perspective."

Into those woods we ventured, staying on the ground for some time. I greeted the trees, and many—even the young ones—said their hellos back. For all your time singing at the castle, you had never heard a tree answer a song before. We laughed together, and our joined harmonies swept through the leaves alongside a gentle wind.

You fell asleep in my arms, some hours before nightfall. I slept, too, under the protection of an ancient oak.

Though the trees here do not speak, do not respond to song—still I believe they are not ordinary. Still they have a certain vivacity within, and in the light of the sun they each have their own glow.

The one part of them that saddens me is how I shall never be able to enjoy their shade and splendor with you.

The four of us followed the trail back out of the forest, and this world to which I'd been banished unfolded, gray and vast. Out from the trees, towering buildings sprawled, as tall as you and I might fly. Between the buildings ran iron tracks, which were sped over by self-propelled iron beasts.

The women led me aboard one of these. Through gates that opened on their own, flung wide by the touch of a flat key to their exterior, my guides ushered me toward one of these enormous serpentine trams. The doors on its outside opened all their own, too. Behind the other three, I hesitated going aboard, unsure of how to handle wandering into such a leviathan's belly.

The brunette stared at me from aboard the vehicle. Gently, the one with silver hair reached out her hand and led me inside.

"Come on, it's fine," she said to me. "See? That's it."

The doors closed themselves. I jumped, but had to steady myself as the machine accelerated into motion, rocking us as we stood. Fortunately, the train, as this thing is known, wasn't without comforts. Seats lined the inner sides of it, where the four of us sat atop red padding. They were hard, their cushioning thin, but I was glad to be sitting down. Even with the mending my flesh was undergoing (and had been performing for some time) I felt all in aches.

"How the hell did that happen, anyway?" the blonde one asked.

The others gaped in shock. I found that odd, for then, because I hadn't quite put this place together yet. Too fixed on the thought of hearing you again, I suppose.

I answered, "I just fell off that cliff. It seems I wasn't looking where I was going."

"No, I mean," the blonde stammered. "How are you walking after that? Your skin, it literally…"

By now the others were glancing around us at the other seats. They all sat quite empty now. It occurred to me how much fuller this vehicle must get, with the dozens of seats that sat open.

That was when it finally hit me: what it was like to live in this world.

They saw something odd about regeneration—about healing, of all things. Yes, really, it's something they can't experience here. They lack it, simply by being finite beings, fixed in energy and in such little time.

"Oh," I said. Because all that had just hit me then, in that expected shame, that bewilderment. "My apologies. I didn't realize that your seeing that would…"

"Please, just tell us what that was," the blonde said.

I sighed, wondering just how much they could understand right then. If they didn't know regeneration, well, what did they know?

To clarify, I decided to start with the very basics.

"I came here from another world," I said.

Riding to our stop took long enough for me to tell them the essentials. Only the essentials, of course. There was no point going into detail.

For one thing, I wasn't sure how much they'd understand. They were living in such a small place, such a small state of mind—what they would accept from me, believe from me, was anyone's guess.

For another thing, I wasn't sure these three wouldn't feel too comfortable knowing the woman they were traveling with was banished—which, we must face it, I technically was.

Not to mention I was still trying to process everything that had happened myself.

Still, it seemed they understood how I was not mortal; how I was from another universe; how all I needed now was to make the jump back over, and my being here shouldn't have happened.

They didn't ask why it shouldn't have. Thankfully.

It isn't that I regret it, my dearest. I must insist that. But I still hope you realize, it would take some sunsets here still before I could put that pain behind me.

In what I hoped was a demonstration of good faith, I told them my name, too.

"I'm Luka," I said, so they would at least know my identity.

In turn, they told me theirs: the blonde woman was called Lily; the brunette, Meiko; the one with silver hair, Ia.

"It's, uh, quite a story you're telling," Meiko said.

"It is," said Lily. "But, you know, I have to believe it."

The brunette spun in her seat, clearly shocked.

"Hey, look," Lily said, "she literally fixed up her wounds in real time. That's pretty out there already."

"Don't encourage this," Meiko muttered, close to the blonde's ear. Perhaps she thought I wouldn't hear it. Were they used to such weaker senses of hearing, that she would expect I wouldn't pick up on the words?

No, more than that—did they have such weaker ways of thinking, that they were unwilling to imagine places outside their backyard?

But Lily spoke up: "She's clearly not just some addict. I don't see marks on her arms, do you?"

"For all we know, she's some asylum escapee," Meiko said. "She's literally wearing a torn white gown."

Yes, that was really what she said, dear: an asylum, a place of healing and rest, as if it were a place to escape from. It seemed that was their expectation here.

I didn't ask for explanation, though. The ground I was treading was precarious enough already.

"Well, what other explanation is there for…" Lily gestured vaguely at my direction. "You know, for what she did? You saw it too, right?"

Meiko started, "I'm just saying, it could have been…"

"I believe her."

Both turned to Ia. She was staring right on at me, with eyes shimmering with light.

"I do," Ia said. "She's lost and helpless. She could have told us anything. But she told us something so unusual as that. Plus, she just…"

The other two kept silent as the train kept rolling, as it slowed to a stop under pouring rain. Like the other times we stopped, the doors outside opened, then closed on their own. No one else entered.

"She just needs help," Ia finished. "Even if it's a crazy story, should we really not give her that?"

Rain pitter-pattered on the metal roof of our segment as we coasted along, and the bouncing of the metal beast's run clacked along off its timing. Lily smiled at Meiko—expectantly, I'm inclined to say. It was the sort of smile a person puts on knowing full well its results.

"All right," Meiko finally said, letting out a sigh. "Fine. Let's be good people about this, I guess."

You were half-asleep beside me one night, under glowing moons and ringed stars, and sighing that contented way you do. Your chest swelled, fell, and I traced tumbling journeys down the slope of your breast.

After the sigh, mumbling. Words caught under your breath, as if flowing forth from a dream.

"He's making me so tired," you murmured out.

"I know," I said. My spirits all at once dropped. To hear such warm words from you carry such a heavy message—it left a weight pulling on my heart.

"If only the king could see," you said, "how I can't just sing on and on."

"I'll tell him," I said.

Your eyes snapped open then, the dreams gone from your voice.

"You couldn't. He'll be furious."

"He just needs reminding. Surely he can't be so unreasonable. And you can't keep going on like this."

I had noticed your condition when we met that night, you know. Your sagging shoulders, your coughing. Small wonder we sat so much, doing less flying, less melding.

Worry ran through me at all ends, and fear licked at me like a flame. You must understand, it was all me who owned things from there. All you did was inform me. I simply took the step forward.

Even though you had warned me.

I promise, my darling, I've learned to listen more seriously to you now.

The three led me off the train, walking through the still-pouring rain, down smooth stone roads and past more towering buildings. They had come to some unspoken agreement, it seemed, given how they led me. For I had already told them there was no place for me to go.

Still, as we came to rows of houses, a pang of guilt stirred in me.

I asked, "You wouldn't happen to just have a way back for me, would you?"

They all stopped in their tracks. Meiko first turned and stared at me.

"What?" she asked.

"You've been awfully kind leading me this far," I said, "but, perhaps you just have some portal back to my home? I'd hate to put you out further."

One after another they looked at each other, confused again.

"That's not exactly…" Ia stammered.

"We don't have that," Meiko cut in. "They don't exist."

"Not here, anyway," said Lily.

"They. Don't. Exist," Meiko said.

They kept eyes locked on one another for a good while, there, at the step of one house from the row. Had I walked closer to them, I fear I'd have sank into a wall of tension the way a fly sinks into sap.

I tell you all this, dear, to point out just how dire things were. Of course they weren't quick to believe; they hadn't even tread out from their own backyard. This was them, and this was their planet, lonely and solipsistic. They knew just this one plane, and on this dimension alone could they stay.

In that instant, their fighting made so much more sense. They had no perspective. No way of knowing how to truly help.

They had the kindness to give me trust, but not the knowledge to give me true help.

Realizing that, I imagined none of them would be much help in bringing me back to you, my Miku.

"Thank you all the same," I said as I prepared to return to the watery streets.

But at once I heard a shout: "Wait!"

When I turned back, the three of them were all looking toward me from the steps. The brown-haired one had an umbrella over me as she continued, "I hope this isn't strange but, maybe you should come inside? This rain doesn't look like it's letting up."

I pulled my arms away from myself, and the shivering only grew worse. The sting of that cold—I hope you never experience it. Here, the water freezes, and at once it grows into a kind of blade slicing through your senses. Just from letting it cling to you, it turns painful, even deadly.

Another chill hissed through me, then. So much so, I sneezed. A stream of filth flew right near the brown-haired one, and even so she stood dutifully over me with that umbrella.

"It's really all right?" I asked.

The three, each in her own way, shrugged, motioned toward the house. I followed them inside, to where for a moment, coming in from the rain, I saw a door blazing with pure light, almost enough to blind mortal eyes.

The last time I saw you, it had gotten to the point that you weren't even allowed out of the castle. Is it the same now, my dear? How securely under lock and key are you kept?

The life-stones of that castle grew in such marvelous, florid shapes once. How those rocks flowed with life, truly grown from the living earth itself, raw and powerful.

Yet King Kaito had changed all that. The stones had come to flow in such a different way: their forms became so lifeless, so still and controlled under his new rule. Once they grew their own way, for art's sake and for desire. Last I saw them, the stones formed towers, tall and foreboding.

I had seen him whispering to those walls, between rehearsals, as I walked through the halls. He would lean over to the stones, murmuring strange words of power, wealth, odd wisdoms which he said had been "opened" to him.

And now the castle twists to his design, not to the living-stone's own thought. Now his family's banner came to cover the hallways, and his emblem sits displayed over dark, hardened stones where once we could see the life of the Realm course.

I wonder—is that the kind of dwelling he keeps you in, my dear?

Are you left trapped in so cold a room? So lifeless, so subject to his own permanent design?

Here, they only build with dead things. Cut stones, flesh of felled trees—there is a horror in inhabiting these corpses. But at least there is heart in how they are crafted. They have not the tools here, but they have the artistry.

It must be so much worse for you, how you are confined. How you, like the life-stone, must be subject to his molding, his cutting and shaping.

I think of this, and it keeps me up at night, working and working away more.

The girls let me use their shower, and even their towels and a change of clothes that Meiko had to offer. They hung strangely over me but kept me warm all the same.

The house they called home was a two-story sort of cottage, its walls slathered in plaster to camouflage its skeleton of dead wood, and it was so cramped I wondered how the three had managed to live there without tripping over each other.. They kept chairs, sofas, beds and other furniture tightly packed within what room they had, all with so little open room compared to the castles of home, so little space to assemble a choir or even to spread out and breathe on one's own.

My clothes, dripping and useless, hung over a rod they set atop an open air vent. I stayed beside them quietly, patiently. Though I think, being out in their common room, this caused some discomfort.

"I'm just keeping an eye on them," I explained. "As soon as they're dry, I'll be gone."

"You do realize how long that'll take, though," Lily said over an open book. She and the others shared the same look of consternation from across the room.

"Only a few hours," I replied.

"Yeah, uh," Meiko said from her reclined position on the sofa, "that's our point."

"Patience is a virtue, you know," Ia said as she readjusted herself in the armchair. The book she had open, I now noticed, was the same the others had. The title mentioned physics, the front sporting a photo of waves and strange symbols over the night sky.

"Yeah, but just waiting is a waste," Lily said from the floor, where she sat with her books and papers strewn around her.

I frowned and hummed, because I wasn't sure I'd thought about things that way.

Perhaps you said the same thing to me once, my darling. Or tried to, from the other side of the choir all those eons ago.

They were buried again in books for a long while after that, and despite their advice, I was content merely to wait there, for the house was so warm and the rain still falling so heavily outside.

The quiet broke at last as Lily asked, "Okay, so I'm stuck on this one: 'A spherical planet orbits a star. Assuming the planet absorbs, then radiates as a blackbody 80 percent of its light, at what wavelength does it emit this radiation?'"

"Problem 15, right?" Meiko said.

They exchanged a list of complicated numbers. I can't recall their specifics—but they were authoritative, clicking in my head at once in alignment with how such planets worked back home, alongside their stars.

"I think Hiyama said not to bother with that one," Ia said.

"Sure," Lily said, "but I'd just like to have done it, y'know?"

Her friends sat in silence, humming and mulling over it.

I thought, here was a way to repay them in some small part for their kindness.

So I said, "I believe the wavelength would be just within the near infrared stage."

I'd expected to get a word of thanks, then to go back to my self-imposed, clothes-drying silence. But that didn't happen. Instead, the three stared long and hard at me, their faces twisted back to confusion.

"What was that, again?" Meiko asked.

"The near infrared stage. I would think that's about the wavelength."

Lily flipped through her book, and on landing at her stopping page, looked even more bewildered.

"Answer sheet says 11 micrometers," she said. "So she's right."

"How did you know that?" Meiko asked me.

"That?" I said. "But it's so simple."

"The hell it is," Lily said. "Are you a physics student where you come from or something?"

"I'm not," I answered. "I only sing, honestly."

None of them were having it. On and on they inquired, wanting to know how I came up with that answer so easily.

"I suppose I just know it," I said.

And truly, I did; it was one of those answers that just comes to you. A thing you simply know. Surely you know what I mean, dearest: like what harmony to bring to a lone note, or which way a river is flowing. It was so straightforward, so simple an answer.

"Okay, but do you not get what that means?" Lily said.

"She's right," Ia said. "Usually, people have to study years to understand what you just said."

"And you know this," Meiko asked, "how, exactly?"

I shrugged. "It just seemed obvious."

It so amazed them, my response, that they merely stared at one another slack-jawed, clearly unsure what even to think, much less what to ask next.

Until at last Meiko said, "So, Luka… None of us are going to tell you what to do or anything…"

"But you could absolutely kill it in our field if you went into school with us," Lily cut in.

Meiko glared at her, but continued unperturbed.

"Luka, I know you do want to go back to where you came from, but just imagine what you could do with what you just know. I mean, you could achieve so much if you just…"

I blinked in confusion. "If I just what?"

But I felt calmed, instantly, as Ia smiled at me.

"…if you just come with us tomorrow," she said, "and have a talk with Professor Hiyama at our department."

Would you permit me to share a regret, Miku?

I cannot say I would have changed things. Day after day, that encounter haunts me. I've played it in my head so many times I fear it's left me mad. But even so, I cannot bring myself to promise I would do differently, had I the chance to go back. You know you are the world to me, the stars and all the distance between them. So to leave you to suffer, well, that is beyond what I can promise.

Still, I regret and simmer. When I remember that day, I grow heavy and cold, stiff as a poor dog left in the cold to starve.

Because, you see, I realize the last I saw of you was your face streaked with tears.

The halls of education they have in this place—I think you should like to see them. If the one Meiko, Lily, and Ia took me to is any indication, these sites stand hallowed and bold as any hall of music. The building they took me to towered not only in size but in presence: ivory carved pillars, long front steps that led to a carpeted and painting-decorated hallway where flowing sunlight abounded.

The three must have noticed my awe, for how they grinned at me, to one another. That I could give them some satisfaction, well, that put me more at ease from the burden of debt I still felt.

Their proposition that I come along struck me as odd. Yes, surely this group wanted more knowledge, more understanding for their planet, but it seemed strange that I would be the one to provide it. I had no real reason for being here, after all. And in being here, my biggest desire was simply to leave.

But as I thought on their offer to meet their Professor Hiyama and join their school—well, dearest, it occurred to me it was only because of you that my path crossed with these three. Your song had led me to them, and they had led me out of limbo. What choice did I have but to trust that somehow, someway, this purpose connecting us was why you had guided me to them at all?

It was why I trusted them enough to come along to this sprawling place of learning and the massive hall its doors revealed.

And it was at the end of the hall that this Hiyama's chambers lay. The walls were crammed with frames, the desk littered with clippings and papers. They all gave off an aura of importance, but I never got the chance to get a good look at any of them.

This professor himself contrasted oddly with his disheveled office, tall in his seat and brown hair just reaching the nape of his neck. I'd venture that with his elegant appearance and snappy accouterments, he wouldn't have looked out of place in the king's court.

That left me wary, but luckily my new friends did the talking anyway.

"Yes, yes, lovely to see you all as well, but perhaps you can introduce me to this companion you've brought?" the professor asked once the trio had said their hellos.

They glanced at one another, and I wondered if they had this part as thought out as they promised.

"Her name is Luka," Meiko said.

"Luka Megurine," Ia clarified.

"Right. And, well, she isn't exactly a student here…"

"'Isn't exactly'?" Hiyama repeated, frowning.

Lily sighed. "As in, she's not at all. Actually, she's got, uh, zero academic record."

I felt I should say something at that point, that it was my turn in the song, but all I could manage was a smile and nod. You'd have to have been there to get it, dearest, but the way she said "academic record"—apparently such a thing is kept here—made it seem quite shameful to lack one.

Rather than pity, what Hiyama showed was no change at all—which is to say, a stone frown to match his firmly steepled fingers over the desk.

"I have a premonition you're going to ask me something insane," he said.

Meiko gulped. "Well…"

"Except it's not insane!" Ia cut in. Suddenly, she stood taller, firmer. "Professor Hiyama, you wouldn't guess it, but Luka is downright brilliant! No, she doesn't have any coursework, but she knows just as much about astrophysics as any one of us."

"And because of that," Hiyama said, his eyebrow raised, "you'd like me to have her enrolled. Is that it?"

"Enrolled, sitting in on classes, whatever," Lily said.

"It's just the right thing to do," Meiko went on. "Seriously, you'd know it if you'd just see…"

"And how do you feel about this, Ms. Megurine?" Hiyama suddenly asked. Through the praises, he'd snapped his neck toward me like a mature hawk, and stared into me as if I was a stunned mouse. "I can't help but notice your friends are doing all the talking."

Still, the one thing I could get out was a smile. My mouth had gone dry, and so I thought of song, of melody, to finally urge my voice back out.

"I'd very much like to learn," I said. "You see, I'm not sure I can have it make sense to you. But I believe learning, and doing it here, is a way of fulfilling myself."

The frown didn't reshape on the professor's face. His sharp eyes stayed fixed on me, nailing me in place. His was a stare more powerful, incredibly, than the king could manage.

"Fulfilling yourself," he repeated.

It was quiet. But I knew I heard delight in those two words.

"Well." The professor stretched his arms from across the table above his head, nearly yawning as he did so. "As noble as your intentions are, ladies, there are only so many strings I can pull."

Lily clicked her tongue. "Okay, but if you would seriously just see what Luka can—"

"I'm willing to believe she's every bit the savant you say," Hiyama interrupted. "However, these decisions simply aren't up to me. I can't just help a prospect cut in line because it suits my department. Even if that kind of favoritism didn't put my job in danger, there are far too many people who can overrule me."

"But can't you at least get a good word in?" Meiko said. "Or just, I don't know, something?"

"She deserves it," Ia murmured, sadly.

What I saw on the professor was a strange thing. When a long-standing wall eventually crumbles, even if just a piece, or when you return to a river to find the earth around it more eroded—as much as you know such was bound to happen, you cannot help but feel surprised. It was the sort of moment we had together, actually, when we flew over the Iced Mountains to find the crags had smoothed, their sharpest points dulled, and we lighted upon one to rest and love.

As strange a change as any of those, Miku, was to see this Hiyama's mouth lift into a smile.

"I'll give her a placement test, first," he said, looking at me the whole while. "That is, if you find that agreeable, Ms. Megurine."

"If you find it so, yes," I quickly responded.

"Fine. I'll start by scheduling you for that." The professor stretched, nearly yawned again as he smiled that same smile to the dumbfounded trio. "Now, I can't do much about fast tracking her, no matter what she scores. But, assuming I can win over some other staff, perhaps I could have her sit in on my class."

The housemates silently buzzed with excitement, beamed with joy. I could hardly keep my feet still. The meager possibility, the crack of an opening in the door, was all enough to make me want to burst out in dance.

"She might need a job, in the meantime," Lily said, seemingly as an offer.

"Perhaps," Hiyama said as he looked back toward me, "you could apply to the library here? Depending on what your test brings in, you might serve well as a tutor."

More confidently this time, I gave a smile and nod. "That seems a wise path."

"Fine. Well, I suppose that's about settled then, surely." The professor's eyes jumped to the papers sprawled over his desk, his hand aloft again, now in a dismissive wave. "Good talk, everyone. Make sure your labs are done for next week, please."

The buzz from the three stuck with them from the office, back down the steps. Outside, Lily cheered and jumped, as Ia clutched my hands in glee.

"Congratulations, Luka!" she said. "You're nearly in now!"

"It's all thanks to you three," I said. "This is a true blessing. Thank you."

"Well, don't thank us till it's over," Meiko said.

Lily nodded. "She's right. You still have that placement test to get through."

"Actually," I said, "I meant to ask: what, pray tell, is this 'placement test'?"

As the other two looked utterly perplexed, Lily let out a guttural laugh that twisted my stomach.

"It's Hell itself, that's what it is," she said.

The open halls of the king's concert wing always entranced me. I remember when we first stood in them together, walking in as the full choir, eager to hear our voices echo amid the perfectly sculpted marble.

It is shameful to linger on regret, I know, but had I figured as much out, it would have meant that much more time with you.

The more shameful thing still was how tainted those halls had become to me. I saw you stand in the center podium so often—more often than you were with me, it came to be in time. To hear your voice strain and grate, grow raspy in just a day, that alone tore me to pieces.

The beauty of your song, gone, shredded up like a flower eaten by a blind animal.

It was all the worse to see King Kaito sitting so calmly as he heard it. He had a way of leaning across the concert wing's throne: a lazy slouch that left one leg on the floor, the other on an armrest.

He barely even looked at you as you sang—as you strained to keep him amused with hours and days of work.

You finished with a soaring high note. The king tapped his hands together in vague applause, all the while only looking at his surrounding consorts.

"Now, now, onto the next one," he said. I could scarcely believe it—but yes, that really was what he said.

Can you understand, then, why I stepped onto the dais after he spoke?

I ignored the king's disgusted scowl as he snapped his head toward me at last. All I had in my head was to say to him what I'd told you I'd say:

"Allow me to take Miku's place, my lord."

Ah, how I wanted to laugh as he finally rose from his slouch at that. I swear, a vein was about to pop on that wide forehead of his as he stood, as he swayed to balance himself on feet that didn't seem to know how to hold any weight at all.

"I did not call for you," he barked at us. "I have called for Miku. You, girl, are nowhere near her equal."

"That may be," I said, "but my lord, Miku is tired. Do you not hear her voice straining?"

The eyes you stared at me with—the aqua turned so sorrowful, so full of fear—they cut me deep. I had a thought to end my protest there. You didn't have to say a word to tell me how desperately you wanted that.

But I'm prepared to tell you again, I had no choice but to ignore your plea. This time, I could not let you continue to put me first.

I continued, "Please, my lord. Let my humble voice serve for now."

The king stumbled forward. It was so unusual that the consorts around him rose, too. They stared on with fear at first, then turned to me with anger to match their king's.

I had never in my life seen such fire before me. To think, this what you were on the precipice of facing should you have given one word of defiance—in that instant, I understood the caution you urged me to take.

But I thought of you, your pain, your exhaustion. And so I stood.

"You are dismissed," the king said. "Do not try me, girl."

"I simply ask that…"

Yet I could barely get the words through. For the king uttered a scream—a piercing shriek which echoed through the castle with tremor enough to shake the very living-stones.

"The quiet!" he shrieked. "It creeps in! Even as you speak! The quiet!"

At once the consorts tried to clap, to sing, to make merry. Their music rang so poorly, so unpracticed and discordant. Yet it was so desperate that, in that moment, I pitied them.

The king gave no such leniency, and he shrieked again.

"Remove her!" he screamed. "Send her away! Yes, away from this realm, even!"

The crowd of servants started toward me, though I tried to move. You were there, in that confusion of grabbing and pulling, somewhere in that sea of hands reaching and prying at me. I saw your own hand outstretched, felt your fingers briefly brush against mine.

I heard your strained voice cry out in pain.

All until they dragged me out from the concert wing, when I knew, with panic buzzing within me, it would be to the banishment machine next.

I had never seen it before. I had only heard rumors of its horror: the cage surrounding a pedestal, framed by a menacing and crooked stone arch, and all around it gems harnessing magics from this universe and ones beyond.

It had not been used in millennia—there had been no need, for no criminal had arose to warrant its operation.

But there I was, being shoved into the cage as you pushed through the guards, tears streaking your face.

"Luka!" you cried. "Luka, no!"

They shut the door, and they threw switches built into the stone arch towering above. Sparks arced across the foggy glass of the gemstones as a bright, terrible magic swirled around me.

It was then and there that the light flashed over me and sent me through the cosmos, so many stars away from you.

It was at that moment that I last saw your face, filled with a pain I knew I must remedy.

Chapter Text

You know, there was something I wondered since my first few days after arriving at that campus house. (Or perhaps it was some months from my arrival? Forgive me if I can't get the frame right.)

I believe your song affected my mind in some way. Perhaps your voice is still reaching me, in a manner outside of hearing.

You see, the dreams I had back then—they were of you. Over and over again, I saw visions of you in moments I couldn't remember, yet were too real to have simply imagined.

What sort of dreams were they? That's the thing: I have to recount them to remember them. Simply thinking on them doesn't bring their images back. No, it's only by the telling of these dreams that I can again make them real.

Yet what is more, as I replay them in my mind, I swear I can remember them happening in my own life.

As if I lived it through another dimension, in another time.

Just what did your music do to me?

My first dream of you was dark, damp, and putrid with mildew. At once I realized why: you were returning to your chamber on this night, marching up rocky stairs surrounded by guards whose armor clanked and clanged off the narrow, hastily formed walls of living-stone. Just as you had so many nights before, you stooped below sudden dips in the ceiling, and you dutifully followed the man in front, lest you be jabbed by the man in back.

This scene was such a basic fact inside the dream that, while dreaming it, I let it play out without argument. Though I'd only heard a rumor that you were to be locked away before I left, here in my dream, I accepted your imprisonment as fact.

Worse, I realized upon later reflection, was that I did not feel horror or outrage at your loss of freedom. I never shouted my fury out in this dream, never expressed myself to any degree.

Because you had been long mired in this routine of waking up in a lonely tower, descending the stairs, singing for that crowned fool for years and years on end—only to again climb up to your living-stone tower to sleep and repeat it the next sunrise.

So long a time had you endured this, yes, that being trapped did not bring you despair.

Instead, it brought only fatigue.

One day, on your way back up to your living-stone tower, you requested a stay in the dinner hall along the stairway. Your accompanying armored guards all immediately agreed. It had been so long since you'd last eaten, and of course, given such good behavior, you deserved a reward.

Acting on the king's authority, the guards brought the finest of feasts before you: cured meats, crunchy potatoes, chocolate varieties, and wines all around. The regal spread was luxuriant enough that it brought you a glimmer of joy. You imagined sharing the table and all the goods at it with someone you truly cherished—not brutish, armor-clad thugs—and the fatigue faded as you remembered sadly smiling faces and a time of trust and laughter.

Still, you made sure to never show a dour face at the feast. You made merry with the guards instead, talking lightly with them, singing their requested songs and admiring their armor.

They adored you for it all. In every moment they understood the king's need for you to be locked up, to be held as his alone. They saw your charm, your grace, and your colors in flight like a bird kept behind bars.

So enamored were they all that not one noticed you slip the table's heaviest knife into the skirt of your robe.

When I wasn't chasing you within dreams, I chased what traces of you I could find in waking life—though in this world, life seemed erratic as a lucid dream.

The so-called placement test was still some weeks off. Besides physics, it would cover a wide range of subjects: the history of this country, mathematics, and several other sciences.

It struck me as odd to have such a hefty list of prerequisites simply in order to learn. Time passed so quickly here, and lives were cut short so soon. And yet everyone asks so much time of you in order to get much of anything done.

So in that period before the test, I worked at studying. Meiko, Lily, and Ia took time out from their own classwork to instruct me on what I'd need to know and where I could study it. I spent most of my free time following through on their advice.

The best living arrangement I could think of was to simply stay with Meiko, Lily, and Ia. It meant even less space in that squat little home, but Ia was happy to share her room with me. (Yes—the place was so small that this was the only way to make room for me.) Naturally, I offered to do anything I could to pay the kindness back.

At that, Meiko simply said, "If you take that library job Professor Hiyama suggested, you could help with rent and food."

It seemed sensible enough. I had learned by that point this "rent" was an accepted practice in the finite realm: an indefinite, recurring payment for the space you live in.

As if they had time enough for that on top of everything else.

But of course I followed up on the suggestion, and was hired at the university library shortly after. Fortunately, the work was simple: all I was to do was return borrowed books to the shelves on which they belonged. And so I spent hours every day wandering beneath the gaze of towering shelves. Pushing along a cart full of books, I earned my right to exist in this unfitting realm a while longer by putting things in their rightful place.

There wasn't much thought to it. So I'd rarely think about the work itself.

Instead, I went about my work thinking of those precious few moments back in the woods when I'd heard your song.

It brought me comfort to remember hearing it. If nothing else, thinking of it reassured me that this work was all for something: it helped me believe it was all in the service of coming back to you.

Because my hearing that song had to have been your plan—right, dearest? Somehow, some way, you'd figured out a way to guide me where I need to go. Surely, my ending up here, grinding time away, is part of the journey.

It gave me so much hope to think that, truly.

Almost as much hope as the second time your singing reached me.

My mind had just begun to drift when I heard it. I was in the campus library, scanning the spines to spot where to return an advanced astrophysics textbook, my consciousness elsewhere.

Yes, I heard your voice. But as you would know, that was nothing new. Such was simply the way I had of going on, now. In that sleepwalking state in which I worked, it seemed so obvious the melody was only inside my head.

Yet it became clear this was no illusion, as I continued to listen, as I walked along the shelves and the song grew louder.

And as I listened closely, I heard your voice so clearly, so precisely, that I thought you may have been in the library yourself. I came to one shelf, one particular book—and the music resonated so loudly, so rich in color, it was as if you would have smiled at me from between the pages.

What stared back at me, though, was an ordinary textbook.

Alternate Dimensions and Their Mechanics was the title.

I read it cover to cover in the library then and there.

From what I saw in my next dream, appropriating the knife was the hard part of your plan. It took a fairly delicate hand to stash it away in your thin white candle of a robe, out of the guards' sight.

But it didn't exactly make bringing the knife up the stairs, back to your tower room, the "easy part."

You moved slowly up to the tower, taking those uneven steps and low ceilings quite clumsily—even once bumping into the guard behind you. As he brushed against you, there rang out the smallest of clinking sounds. His eyes burned down in that moment, and I wanted to scream to wake myself up.

Yet there wasn't any need. The guard didn't notice. He just grumbled about how slow this night's work was, how he needed to get back home.

It wasn't until late night that you took out the knife and began working away with it. Into the living-stone it dug, plowing deep into the flesh of the building. The knife's edge screeched and squealed against the rock in an awful whine, thought at least at this late hour, none but us would hear it.

But the scraping wasn't nearly as bad as the scream that followed: the shriek of pain from the living-stone, the castle itself.

"Why do you wound me this way?" the castle screamed. "What have I done to you?"

"You imprison me. Even now, you keep an innocent maiden captive. And you have aided in casting another innocent out from us."

"Oh, but I did not wish to," the living-stone answered, sobbing. "Harm me no more, for I was deceived by promises of renovation, of gilded doors and mosaics in every ceiling. I see now that these were deceptions! Please, spare me the pain!"

It seemed the castle was truthful. Yet deception or not, the thought of doing further torture upon it disgusted you, and horrified me. There would be no need for it, either.

Because you said, "Make a pact with me: you shall open a crevice for me, which during its growth I shall hide, and in exchange I will harm you no more."

"This is good," the living-stone said.

It seemed possible—remote, but possible all the same—that the living-stone would not hold fully true to this promise. For this pact was one of trust, not only law. At any moment, the castle might still cry for help from its master.

Yet the pact was already made: a fair deal, without room for amendment. There would have to be a new one to secure yourself against all odds.

"One more pact," you said.

The living-stone laughed. "Do you think I lie?"

You answered simply that it might, and though it laughed again, you went on:

"Make this pact and prove you do not. If you speak no word of my escape to anyone, I will sing a song for only you each night I return. Should you make this pact and be truthful, by accepting it you will risk nothing, yet still gain."

"Then accept I shall," the castle said, and the second pact was sealed.

Because, as you so wisely realized, one couldn't trust even the living-stone these days, when any seemed to be open to corruption.

Someone in my present world had to hear about what you showed me, my darling. It was only right to start with my friends.

There was no easy way to broach the topic, it being so alien. So I brought it up while eating. Here, sharing meals is viewed as a sort of ritual. Since it's what must be done to stay alive, one is compelled to stay until the act is completed.

But that's not to say it becomes a chore. Despite how often it occurs, sharing meals is always sheer joy. We gather around a table every day, even as quickly as they pass, and share goings-on and laughs. Often, we operate a device they call a radio; it receives electromagnetic waves from far off, and then translates them to music, delightful music of all kinds. Just from that little device, we enjoy songs in the background as we eat and chat.

It had been my turn to cook that night. All I'd made, though, was some boiled strands of wheat they call "spaghetti," served with a jarred red sauce. (It wasn't as if my cooking skills had improved much here, you see.) At the table, the conversation had reached a lull; a cheerful melody from the radio murmured in the background.

"I found something interesting at the library," I ventured.

"You found time?" Lily asked.

"She's not, like, fully in classes," Meiko said.

"Written by a quantum physicist."

"It's good you're reading that," Ia offered.

"I read this one in just one sitting, actually."

That raised eyebrows around the table. The metal prongs clattered against plates, spaghetti briefly going uneaten.

"A whole textbook?" Meiko asked.

"It was just so interesting."

"So, what was it?" Ia said. How I appreciated her for asking.

I gulped. Still I felt unready.

"It was this book about alternate dimensions," I finally said, "and how we can hear them in this universe."

The quiet returned. Not even clattering to break it up. Still, at least there was that pleasant, chipper melody from the radio, strumming and singing away.

Ia let out a short cough, then a concerned hum. The others didn't bother to fill the void. Instead they just frowned so deeply their lips might have slid off their faces.

"Uh, you know," Ia said, "that kind of thing doesn't have much…"

"Evidence," Meiko finished for her. "It's the sorta thing crackpots sell."

"You don't believe in it?" I asked.

Perhaps the despair in my voice showed through too deeply. They shared more glances, wordless exchanges. Even in Ia's eyes, all I could read was unease.

"It's just an unexplored field," Ia said after more of that silent tension.

"But it's the truth," I said. "It's where I come from, is it not?"

They were all silent for a spell longer, though. There was scraping of metal on plates, the squishes of spaghetti and sauce, and the melody on the radio humming to a closing chord.

"This could be it," I said. "This could be my way home. If we just bring this knowledge to the experts in your field, in this radio astronomy area, why, then… surely…"

I had hoped this would sate their need for explanations, for rationalizations. They needed things told in a certain way here—a very different way from the simple arts of the universe we tinker in back home.

I should have known it could not be that simple.

"The thing is," Meiko said, "it's not certain this is the explanation. We're not saying we don't believe you, Luka."

"Yes, that's not it at all," Ia added.

"It's just…" Meiko sighed, locked eyes on her plate of noodles as she toyed with them with her fork. "The problem here is we have to be able to prove it. Just our word and some unproven theories won't cut it with top physicists. I mean, this field is science, not some kind of magic."

Lily gave a solemn nod. "Def not enough to fund some attempt at sending you home. I mean, what would that take? Opening a portal to another world?"

"Is that really so far-fetched?" I pleaded—in vain. I only now realize how silly a question it was.

"Maybe that's the standard you know," Meiko said, "but here, it's crazy talk. Literally no scientists are going to hear us out on that."

"She's right," Lily said. "If we try telling them we want to open a portal in space-time, we'd be laughed out. Hell, I don't think we'd even get an audience by saying we think other dimensions exist."

"It's just not supported enough," Ia said sadly.

Feigning smiles, I spiraled my wheat strands along the metal and fell back to listening, nodding, humming in agreement to all the stories of professors and campus life.

I hope you know, my dear, it was just one transient setback.

Because after some time amid the talking, after another silence fell, Lily raised her head with a smile.

"Unless we're the ones who get that funding," she said.

"What?" Meiko asked.

"No, think about it," Lily said. "If we're the only ones who believe Luka, well, why don't we just handle this project? Yeah, it'd take more thorough proof of alternate dimensions—maybe from radio astronomy, maybe from something else. But if we get that, if we can show there's grounds for study, well, why the hell couldn't we get a grant? They fund way more boring shit than that."

"Okay, but, how?" Meiko asked. "How are we supposed to be the breakthrough here? We're talking a whole new field of study here, and all we've got to go on is abstract theories."

Lily shook her head. "We've also got her," she said, pointing her fork at me.

I glanced around at my housemates staring at me. There was doubt, expectations in their lingering gaze, neither of which I could escape simply by listening more closely to the new song playing now behind us.

"Seriously," Lily went on. "Luka's from another dimension. And she's got an inherent knack for astrophysics. If literally anyone is capable of proving this theory, it's her."

"You think I can?" I asked, astonished.

"Yeah," Lily said, "with a bit of guidance."

"Guidance and credibility," Meiko added. "You have to show you're accredited. Not just some crackpot off the street."

"And you can earn both with your placement test," Ia said.

I smiled. It all seemed so simple, so straightforward: win the right titles and you could have actual power behind your words.

As I washed dishes that night, I could only hope it would come quickly. Desperation and time, I had seen, were seldom a healthy mix.

In further dreams, I saw that the living-stone kept its promise, just as every night you kept yours. You took sluggish steps up the stairs and into your chamber, and the weight upon your shoulders and dryness within your throat ached. And still every night the stone received its assured serenade.

How softly you sang to it, how tenderly. But even hearing such a song, the living-stone took time to hold to its end of the pact. It grew slowly, cracking, creaking, and gaping bit by bit as a crevice widened at the back of your cell.

By day, the growth lay hidden behind a tapestry that you'd been given for an especially good performance. None suspected anything sat behind it, could sit behind it. The king thought of nothing but your song, and the guards thought only of locking you into your cell.

When at last the cracks grew large enough to fit your body through, the way down from the tower looked farther than ever. There was no slope, either—simply a straight fall, right into a sea of thorny bushes.

From where you sat in the tower, within that tunnel, the bushes appeared to stretch out as if to the ends of the world. Neither you nor I had ever seen such an expanse of piercing plants. Kaito—had he grown these as a sort of moat to keep you here? For their spines stabbed far into the air, tall and firm, looking gigantic even from the height of the crevice in the living-stone.

And it was such a terribly long way down.

Forcing aside your fears, you crawled through the gap and tumbled over the drop. But you did not fall far—for stopping you was your hair, tied together as a rope after you had lopped it off with that same knife you kept smuggled in the cell. But the closer you came to the brambles, the more fearsome they appeared, looming large and jagged as the teeth of a razor-griffin.

So you called out to them:

"Part, if you would, and make a path for me; and I will sing as reward."

Yet the brambles and thorns stayed in place, heading none of the pledge.

Now, to cut and tear through the bushes—this was unthinkable. Already the living-stone had taken a knife, and to rupture nature any further was a sin that need not be transgressed in this escape.

Instead, you brandished the dagger with a firm grip, ready to cut the hair holding you up.

"Clear a way for me, and to you tough and sharp things, I will offer the soft comfort of my hair."

At this, the thorns began to stir. They rolled a way out toward the green grass, curling their way back into the ground. It was enough to leave a path wide enough to walk through, provided you kept sideways.

Before descending down to tread it, you still cut off your hair—your promise kept, just as I knew you would leave it.

By the time you reached the grasses, the moon had taken the sun's place. Yes, the moat of thorns surrounding the king's palace was that extensive—and to think that he had grown all that in the time I was gone.

On the other side, the forest awaited. The landscape looked denser and far darker now. Surely that was the fault of this night, cast so gloomy and dark. The sky itself seemed bitter and unwell with its stark darkness and moonless gaze.

Although we had tread those forests together, enjoying them again and again, they now looked so much more daunting, deep, and crowded. Yet they were your only viable way forward. There were roads into town on the other side of the castle, but they were crawling with guards, carrying torches and armed to the teeth.

Perhaps, to the south side of the castle, where the terrain grew mountainous. From there, it might be easy to reach a peak, and from that high loft to catch a gust and fly elsewhere.

Though that would mean circling around the castle—and the thorn-moat—which would take quite a long time, and put you at greater risk of being recaptured.

You decided to risk it, but as you began the journey, a voice boomed with all the force of thunder.

"O, my King! Your highness, please hear me now!"

The living-stone, shouting with all its rocks at once! It stopped you cold, and I shivered along with you.

"Your prisoner, Miku, has escaped! She has wounded me severely with knives and the witchcraft of her song. Catch her now, while you still may, and bring justice to my pain!"

At once, roaring stirred from within the stones: clamors of guards, their clanking armor, and the rattling of steel. Fire lit within the halls as shapes began to pour out from exits.

Your breath felt short. Shoes pounded into topsoil, slipping on slick grass. Arms circle at your sides, rebalancing, shifting from one direction to the back.

There was no time for the mountains now. By the time you could circle the castle, the guards would be upon you. Even in the cover of night they would cast lanterns and pin you with burning stares and spears and loosed arrows.

The forest—yes, the dark, daunting forest—was the only direction left.

Trees came nearer, nearer. The darkness between them yawned like a serpent's gaping mouth. Behind, shouts echoed indistinctly. Their anger sounded as if it were warping their words into an unintelligible language.

But then, their roars crescendoed into screams of panic. You turned around to look.

The castle was collapsing: walls falling in on themselves, bricks tumbling down. Dust kicked up into the air as centuries-long structures toppled, flattening all ground below.

The shrieks of the guards were horrific. Oh, how awful to think about how long those wounds would take to heal.

Yet, dear, I hope you understand as I did in the dream, that this was not your fault.

The living-stone should have known far better than to break a sealed promise, lest the promise break the deceiver in return.

Playing academia their way meant rebuilding knowledge, or at least following the procedures of such. They would instruct on how motions of all kinds are formed: the waves, the vibrations, the light they create.

There was a certain arrogance about it all, really. This way was the way to conduct research, from how to write it to how to conceive of it. It had been set this way to create order, of course, to allow for easy communication. Yet it allowed for so little communication from me, who knew nothing of their strange world and customs.

Even so, I studied hard, their way. Books lay cracked open as I absorbed them night by night, tome by tome. Notes sat strewn along the floor of my shared room, in handwriting my housemates joked would take a cryptographer to make out.

Yet it was still a simple affair, learning at a pace to take this first test of theirs. I knew the facts already, in a way. But translating what I knew into something that they accepted, that they had standardized—that pestered me for some time. Not simple language did they take, but they required it all in such numbers, such figures. I suppose you know by this point how they do it all with so many numbers and figures.

Still, learning to use them, to work with them at all times, was a difficult matter.

It was so difficult that the first placement test I took came back as a failure.

Yes—I did fail it, that first time. I can't even remember the score handed down. All that mattered was the enormous words of "NO PASS" delivered by the numbers.

From a little screen, this one glowing with electricity, they showed me another number marking the unsatisfactory decision.

My housemates all took it poorly. Meiko kept sighing the whole day, and Lily was always clapping my back, speaking softly near my ear. Ia never said anything, though she had a certain quiet, watery sadness in her eyes.

Their plan hadn't worked out, was what it meant. I couldn't make it into the college itself yet.

More than that, it meant nothing I said to anyone else about "alternate dimensions and their mechanics" would make sense.

"I'm fine," I told them—and mostly, I was.

After all, it would only be one of the years here before I'd have a chance to try again.

For much of that coming year, I kept occupied with that same library job. On top of that, I took on more work at a store with ice cream. It's this stuff that came in large containers, out of which I scooped servings by request for hours a day. Lily had suggested the place as an additional source of the cash I'd be needing.

Meiko didn't seem to approve of it—neither the situation nor the job.

I remember her saying, "You're really fine with that 'til next year? Me, I'd go insane in a place like that."

She said that, even though it was only a few hours of a day. Yes, really—a few hours out of a day provoked that kind of reaction out of her.

Surely, you must think that as odd as I do?

Well, if you do, as I have, just remember how much shorter it all is for them. The blinks here that have passed for me, well, they calculate whole cycles come and gone—pages out of the calendars, ripped out one after the other. It's a horrifying thing indeed, to divide time down to that level.

And yet, I wonder how I don't feel it the same way they do, as if the days were passing at a crawl. For it may as well be eternity, being apart from you, dearest.

Though Lily, Meiko, and Ia still did so much to fill the days with joy. I think now of the games they showed to me, ones with cards and boards and pieces, and even of devices hooked up to their glowing screens. And there were the dining halls they showed me to, also, where amid loud and peppy music we ate things fried or flaky or seasoned with a vibrant medley of spices.

How dearly I thank them for that. Though they measured lifetimes in such small, fleeting units, their friendship did much to make the time pass merrily.

Still, pass the time did. The pages of their calendars flipped by, I'd emptied hundreds of tubs of ice cream onto little cones and paper bowls—and as the sun rose, the chance for that test came again.

I put in nights upon sleepless nights, until the equations didn't escape me any longer. Numbers, ones I'd seen in my daily work and also in nightly studies, became familiar ways to calculate the sounds. It all became so much more normal.

All in the blink of an eye, from our perspective. Though here, they called it "a few months."

The testing came and went. Again I sat in front of that screen, surrounded by the three other women.

It wasn't a surprise to see them all jump excitedly around, hear them squeal in amazement.

"Luka, you're in!" Ia cried out. "You made it in, oh my god!"

And I smiled too, and stood up to jump around with them, crying out in that same key of joy.

It wasn't the school that mattered to me, of course.

It was putting me where you meant for me to go: one step closer to you.

Forgive me if I misremember this next part of the dream—there was so much panic and fear, you see, that it's hard now to think on it all. The way you ran through the forest in such total terror, simply thinking about it sends my heart crashing like a violent sea.

But you were running, fast and without care, without even really looking ahead, within this dream. For behind, the shouts of the castle guards had already begun:

"Find the singer! Find Miku! All of you lot, find her!"

You didn't have to look back to know half the castle must have been on your tail. Those who had escaped the collapse, who weren't licking their wounds and picking rubble out of their hair, were all on the hunt. Yes, no doubt King Kaito was beside himself with fury. Not a knight on duty would have dared to return to him empty-handed, to bear his screams before he would return to whisper to the ruined castle's stones.

So your legs beat hard and fast upon the western forest's floor. Your feet flew and the dark shapes of mossy trunks rushed past, the cool shadowed air of the night running through the shortened lengths of your sweaty and matted hair. It had been so long since you last moved at all, being stuck in that tower—so long since your legs carried you anywhere other than from the concert hall to your meager cell. Yet now the rush of pure terror carried you on like a hurricane's winds. It led you over rocks, under branches, between the trees and crags which under light of day we had enjoyed so simply.

But still there was no letting up of the shouting, the beating of metal-clad feet from behind. How could these fiends keep up so easily? With every bit of breath you had left you leaped and stumbled through the rough darkness of the forest, so grim, so alien to what we together had once seen. And still they came on. Their thumping like gargantuan machines, their voices like wild animals, on they came into the depths of the woods.

Until at last you planted head-first into a stray little sapling. A crash, a rush of pain through the face—and you collapsed from the wind being sucked out of your lungs.

On the forest floor you held still, paralyzed from the blow. It was with hissing and the sting of tears that again the sounds registered: closer and closer came the rattling thumps, the frenzied swarm of voices.

There's no running from them, you thought, with your throat closing up. They'll find me. Oh, any moment, they'll find me!

But on looking before you, the forest's shapes adjusted themselves. That thing you had just crashed into, that trunk of solid wood—why, this was no tree at all! No, you realized as you stood, this was an ax, carelessly left behind by some woodcutter, no doubt. And there it sat, dug deep into the roots of the tree before you.

What utter cruelty was this, to have dealt such a deep wound, then to leave buried that tool of suffering in the poor tree?

"At the very least," you said, "I might relieve you of this."

And so you grabbed the ax by its handle, held fast the wood with both hands, and pulled.

One, two, three, four hard yanks backward did it take to loosen the weapon. And with that last pull, off into the woods behind you it flew. From somewhere far off, it clattered to the ground, and you breathed a sigh of relief that it had not dug back into another being.

But, if you had heard that crash—oh, you realized, surely the guards had as well.

Yes, still their drumbeat of pursuit pounded and pounded. Already the flames from their torches flickered just at the edge of the woods, and fiercer and fuller they burned with every passing measure.

Suddenly, there came a voice.

"Bless you, fair maiden!"

It came from behind. You swirled about, and there, the tree had shown its worn and aged face, even with the lips so rarely used to speak.

"Oh, again, bless you!" said the tree—an old oak, jolly and kind. "Why, I thought I would have that ax buried in me for all time. One of those soldiers dropped it blade-down upon my root, you know. And not only does the fellow leave it be, but no one arrives to pull it out! Well, until you, that is. Are the west woods so seldom traveled these days? It's as if the king lets no one out from the castle anymore."

"Seldom does he, now," you said. "But, sir, you are too kind. It was but a simple kindness."

"And such makes all the difference, in the least simple of disasters," the old oak replied. He hummed in thought, in approval perhaps, and with the bass as low as the bowels of earth branches shook and leaves fell to the ground. "Ah, but how rudely I behave! I see you are in much of a disaster yourself."

"You see the guards?"

"Now that I've left my slumber, oh, most certainly. How could I not? They stumble over these woods almost as carelessly as you have. But it would seem you wish not to be found by them."

"Very much not," you answered.

"Then hide with me," the jolly old oak said, and his roots creaked and cracked as they moved aside to reveal a massive hole hidden beneath the earth.

Quickly you clambered inside, and overhead, the roots again moved. Soon they blanketed out the foliage overhead, and all that remained visible was the canopy of roots just above you, buried within the earth.

And the voices of the guards still crept closer, closer. In the darkness beyond they were approaching with torches no longer seen and shouts now muted and muddled by the wood closing you off above. Even so, their shouts and the clatter of their armor pierced your ears.

It was hard to breathe as they drew near the old oak. Sounds grew quiet in that darkness; there was no telling if they had stopped, if they had slowed to a sneaking crawl, or if they had vanished.

But just as quickly, the voices and marching started again—their direction shifted away.

You let out a long held breath, and I felt my own lungs finally break free from the same iron grip of terror that held them tight.

You know what the funny thing was about the courses I took?

Compared to struggling through the placement test just to earn the privilege to take them, completing them required surprisingly little effort.

Though I must first say, this way of learning they had was dull, incredibly so. There was lots of sitting in chairs, watching a podium, listening to a person behind it talk and explain pictures projected from light. But beyond that listening, the work one gets in is something fascinating. Once I completely had that system of figures and equations in my head, the rest fell into place so easily, and opened up to the bigger equations and figures.

It was just a certain way of thinking, I suppose, that had to click for it to make sense. Because the wavelengths I studied and their properties were all still music, in their own way. I came to look at the resonance of sound, the crackle of radiation, and especially the rumble of radio frequencies as their own kind of song, as the universe here singing out the various parts of its existence.

Though of course this wasn't all I did. I had so much time spent enjoying the world, too.

I kept largely to play and relaxation with Meiko, Lily, and Ia. You can understand why: they were keeping me so much good company, treating me with so much kindness. The more weeks I spent with them, the more I understood why you led me here of all places, dearest. They brought me to see friends of theirs, on top of the games and eating and studying. Together we set out to festivities at other houses, where Lily danced with and kissed girls, and Meiko drank and drank as she laughed away with other guests. Throughout most of these gatherings Ia stayed close to me, making sure I never became trapped in conversations with boors or would-be suitors, and keeping me always at ease with her constant, comforting smile.

How in heaven's name did you find a trio as warm as this? As jovial and eager to laugh as this? You must tell me one day, when I've finally broken through this cosmic barrier between us.

It was that scalding passion that I used to fly through all those courses with top marks. You see, they have numbers here that mean as much: the higher they were, the greater the success. It was an odd thing, but of course I accepted it. High numbers came my way in class after class, year after year, and in time this first college's work was done completely.

In another blink of an eye, I'd moved to an entirely different town with Meiko, Lily, and Ia. They had guided me to another school, another program. It was about building a reputation, I had discovered. A "postgraduate" program, on top of the initial one–yes, still that much more time they required, by their own standards.

Years went by in this new location. How am I to list them all? Brief as they were, they still felt as an eternity, so long as I spent them without you.

Truth be told, I feared things were beginning to change in my head. Being so long away from home, I entertained the notion I was losing my attunement with that life. Had I been in this realm so long, I wondered, that my sense of time skewed more toward theirs? As I worked through experiments, saw the sun set and rise from within libraries, sat through the tedium of discussions and lectures and panels—through it all, I wondered if, perhaps, all this way of living would replace the old one as I remained separate from that dimension.

More than all that, my darling, I fretted: what if I were to forget you, too?

Frightening though that momentary doubt was—well, it was but momentary.

Because you saw for years and years how I toiled, studied, and spent hours formulating theories in support of alternate dimensions and whatever properties they hold. I had begun to formulate a theory of how they spoke to us through wavelengths–ones I had learned the peculiar ways of, yet would need more instruments to study. I had been doing as much on my own, mainly, amid the hard work my friends strained under and the realization I still had credibility to build.

I did all that, until the right moment at last struck.

It was a cloudy day; all the lights were on in our shared office despite just getting back from the noonday refill. Lily was going on about a woman she'd seen in a cafe: bright-eyed, proud, athletically built, and according to her, utterly beautiful.

"I'm just thinking of how to ask her out," she said. "Something flashy should do it, right? Show her how I'm in tune with how she thinks."

"Like what?" Ia asked.

Meiko just rolled her eyes. "Please, don't encourage her."

Still, Lily was glowing. "Something like, I challenge her to arm-wrestling."

"Arm-wrestling?" Meiko repeated, bemused.

"Sure. I bet I can goad her into that. One way or another."

"Fine. So you're arm-wrestling. Well, then what?"

"I lay stakes," Lily said as she jumped to sit up on her desk. "I'll say, 'if I win, you and me get dinner.'"

"Suppose you lose," Meiko said.

"Even better. Then I just say she's won dinner."

It earned a laugh out of both Ia and Meiko, though I sensed more derision from the latter. For my part, I smiled up from over my book.

"You'll either get laughed out or your ass kicked," Meiko said between chortles.

"Aw, come on," Lily said with a dismissive groan, "you really can't accept it's possible I'm right?"

"Well, except it isn't possible," Meiko said. "Not in this universe, or in any other."

It was then that I looked up from my book—then that I was pulled out of it by those simple words.

"Any other?" I repeated.

"Y'know, theoretically," Meiko said. "If another universe is out there."

I smiled wide as I stood, authoritatively tapping my book.

"That reminds me," I said. "There's a study I wanted you three to help out with."

"We'd be happy to," Ia chirped.

Lily shrugged, then nodded as Meiko threw me a puzzled frown.

"I mean, sure," Meiko said. "What kind of study, though?"

"It's actually something I mentioned some time ago," I said. "But I think you'll be a lot more interested now."

Before them, now intrigued when once they sat dismissively, I presented my notebook, wide and proudly open.

"Holy shit," Lily muttered, "she really did it."

"She really did," Meiko said in awe, as Ia swept me into a triumphant hug.

Chapter Text

The conversation in the office was just the start. It gave me momentum, my darling, but I must confess it could only begin things.

I presented to them my findings and my research: from the books I read, I had extrapolated further theories, charts, and equations, which all told of further universes existing beyond their own. There was evidence—theoretical, but evidence nevertheless—according to those equations that these alternate realities lay superimposed on ours, out of view yet ever-present.

What was more, there was evidence that those realities were sending electromagnetic signals to this one. Alternate Realities and Their Mechanics had been the foundation. Upon it, I had built theorem upon theorem that these realities interacted and intersected.

All of this, darling, is to say that what I showed to my friends was that our home was not only real, but that I could return there from here.

Convincing those three was but the beginning. With them, we recruited professors for programs and further studies.

"Suppose there really are multiple universes," we proposed to them. "And maybe we're getting signals from them, ones we can pick up."

No, these authorities didn't come on board all at once. It took more theorizing, more equations and figures, to win any of them over. Even then there were so many one-on-one conferences, so many hours spent in front of podiums staring back at a table full of blank stares behind thick glasses.

You've no idea how tiresome it was, to again and again be met with silence from stony, wrinkled faces, then to perhaps hear our idea "has merit" at best.

No—forgive me. I'm sure, singing to that lecherous king every night, you know exactly this sort of exhaustion.

I wish I could promise an encouraging end in my case right away, to at least give you hope. But such encouragement never came even from those academics who found "merit" in our theory. Because while a few professors were on board, it was never enough to secure funding—the actual means of getting work done on the project.

"What we need," I told professor after professor, "is a radio telescope specially designed for intercepting deep-space radio waves."

They'd point out ones already existed that we could use. I always responded it wasn't enough; we needed it to be tuned for particular radio frequencies, aimed at specific portions of the sky. We had to have total control over it in every respect.

These were the scientific reasons. But more importantly, I knew we could not be beholden to masters, others running our observatory, if I was to find you. I knew none but my friends and I would understand the gravity of this search and how it must be conducted.

But no professors we approached could promise the resources we needed. Most said it was "far-fetched" or "unrealistic."

"Dial back your expectations," one tall man with thinning hair told me after hours of silently watching our presentation. "You'll never get a grant that gives you total control of the project. Especially not for something as untested as what you're proposing."

We certainly didn't in academia. The closest we came was when one professor referred us to another college's board. That college board sent us to an awarding institute, which in turn passed us to a certain other professor, supposed to be quite famous in this field.

We bounced around like that, until we landed on someone to truly help us.

His name was Gakupo, a head of a manufacturing conglomerate. We met him in an office the size of a concert hall. As we entered, he chewed a stick of gum—rubbery stuff with a hint of sweet flavor to it. But he sparkled with excitement when he saw us, when he rushed up to shake all of our hands.

There was an electricity in him even as he had us all sit. He leaned over his desk, dark in its dead lumber and wide as an elephant, and his fingers twitched enough they looked ready to jump out of the steepled gesture in which he held them. His grin, big and toothy, seemed pulled into place not by muscle but by sheer magnetism.

His smile never wavering, he urged us to "go all on about what you're studying."

"We need a deep-space radar telescope," I answered.

Even though Meiko grimaced, and Ia followed suit, the man behind the desk kept on grinning.

"Fine, but what exactly for?" Gakupo asked.

"We want to pick up radio waves. From far out in space," Meiko said.

"We have a lot of very interesting research going," Ia added. "You see, we believe there might be radio waves coming toward Earth from out there. And those waves might be…"

"They might be coming from another universe," I cut in.

That, at long last, made his wide grin falter.

He frowned then, if only for a moment, and managed to resume his smile. Though far less electricity seemed to emanate from his body as it leaned forward.

"Radio waves," Gakupo said, "from another universe."

If you could have seen him, dear—truly the face of one who can't think of a world past the horizon visible from his bedroom window.

"I know it seems far-fetched," I said, "and I'd forgive you for thinking we're all mad." These were tactics I'd learned from the school-hopping, dear—they brought defenses down, amazingly. "But there's plenty of research to back up this theory. We've considered all kinds of past findings. Now, we just need the experimental data to confirm it."

He frowned, and he got up from his padded chair. The steps he took around the room were so light and careful, so deliberate.

"You know, this isn't exactly the kind of research my company gets involved in," Gakupo said. "Bushido Electronics certainly prides itself on helping the scientific community—and, no, not only for the tax write-offs." He chuckled, then continued, "It's just, when the sound department gets involved, it's so often for earthquakes, or maybe deep sea ventures, or just… well, places.

"And to be frank, I'm not sure what real place you intend to illustrate with this idea of yours. Sure, maybe there's something out in space. Except, I don't much care what it might be. If it's life that's really out there…"

"That's not what we mean," Ia cut in.

"She's right. We meant more like," Meiko said, waving her hands in frustration, "like, it's this other place of existence."

It was enough to make Gakupo pause, turn with a raised eyebrow.

"Some 'other place?'" he asked.

"Think of it like this," Lily said. "If you traveled to the edge of the universe—not that you actually can—but if you did, you'd be at the edge of what we know. Right?" She got up from her seat. "Say, do you have a piece of paper? Meiko, get your hand mirror ready, too."

Nervously, I shifted in my seat as I let Lily continue to do the talking—better as she was at all this. Beside me, I sensed that same nervousness from Meiko and Ia.

"Thanks," Lily said as Gakupo handed her the requested paper, bemused. "So, suppose this is the universe's edge." She bent the paper in her hand, shaping it like half a tube. "See, what we're supposing, with our studies, is that at certain parts of the universe's edge…" With a sudden movement, she twisted the paper until it began to tear. "…at some points, space-time gets kind of ruptured. Got that mirror, Meiko? Thanks. Anyway." She set the mirror behind one of the tears formed in the paper. "We think what's behind these tears in space-time is sort of like a mirror. As in, it reflects light—more accurately, it reflects wavelengths. Most of them registering to us as radio frequencies."

"So, there's mirrors at the edge of the universe, and they're reflecting waves back," Gakupo asked.

"That's it, more or less," Lily said. "Not literally mirrors, but, you know, similar concept."

"Okay, but where are these waves actually coming from? Is that this 'other place?'"

Meiko, nodding as she went, arose from her seat to roll a diagram out on the wide wooden desk.

"It's like this. Here, this is the known universe, charted with radar. If what we think about the reflection is true, there are other universes superimposed on ours. Like, we're all here…" With an index finger outstretched, she circled round on the diagram. "…and they're all here." Lifting her hand up, she repeated the same motion with her index finger now circling the air above the map.

"So that's where the mirror comes in," Lily said. Resting the handheld mirror against her chest, she brought out a lighter and flicked it on above it. From her jacket, the mirror shone with the flame's glowing spark. "See? If a wavelength occurs above it, we see that reflected into our universe."

The man, the owner of this company, paced around some more. Even with those soft, deliberate steps, he walked about so long that I wondered if he wasn't about to leave dents in the hardwood below.

When he stopped, he turned right to us, face seemingly blank.

"So, this other universe. The one we're going to be getting messages from," Gakupo said. "What's it even like?"

The lot of us fell silent. The others, no doubt out of confusion. I, out of unease.

For those like Gakupo, the very idea of a world beyond their own backyards—even their own noses—never seemed to matter. It seemed beyond their regular perception. None had ever taken it seriously on my word alone.

Until I'd met and worked it out with my three friends, that is.

With them beside me, I smiled and spoke calmly.

"It's a world of natural beauty," I said, "with pockets of air so thick you can swim through it, and with life that lasts so long you can see the edge of eternity itself."

There was another lull. My friends stared at me, wide-eyed.

Gakupo, for his part, stood slack-jawed for just a moment.

"You make it sound like a kind of heaven," he said.

Lily chuckled, then added, "Well, hey, it is above us. Theoretically."

The quiet after that was thicker, more oppressive. Gakupo's face stayed so blank, so still, that I didn't dare guess what he was thinking.

In him, dear, I saw the same silent, disturbed mind as the King when he watched you perform: something about to blow, even though it remained concealed for now.

That is, until he threw back his head and laughed.

And laughed and laughed. It must have echoed down the hallway, maybe to the elevator.

"All right, all right," Gakupo said as he recovered. "Are you good for a check now, or later?"

The sun shone upon your face through the roots when you awoke, and only the sounds of singing birds echoed through the woods. For now, at least, the guards had gone—back to the castle, perhaps, to continue searching for others amid the rubble, or else to guide the living-stone back to its former shape.

You stretched, shook, and groaned. The last night had hardly been an easy one, for even though exhaustion finally pulled you into slumber, it was little comfort to sleep atop roots, rocks, and the raw edges of earth.

"Awake at last, are you, good maiden?"

The voice of the jolly old oak was deeper and even more resonant up against his roots.

"Yes. I hope you rested well, also," you said as you climbed out from his nest.

"Ah, much better, once the patrols at last left! Noisy beasts, they are, with all that unnatural clattering and clanging. And, well, that's to say nothing of that awful thorn removed from me. Gracious, but you've no idea how freeing it is to be rid of it."

And really, you and I both understood that feeling quite well, though all you decided to say in response was to thank the oak for the night below his roots.

"It was no trouble, oh, most assuredly," he replied. "But why ever were these sorts chasing you at all?"

There was no shame in the story, though you hesitated to recount it—a kind of burning lingered as you thought of the deceit, the attacks, and the living-stone crashing in on itself.

But you recounted the story to the jolly old oak all the same. The tree frowned in deep thought, his leaves quivering as if in a nod.

"Well, it scarcely surprises me that King Kaito's mind rotted so," he said. "You know, among us trees, we've whispered of a terrible stone beneath that castle—a beautiful, ruby-red gem of a thing, yet a relic with horrific power. Trees nearest the castle feel a strange power flowing from it, like waves in the air. Once they felt these waves, the trees would all feel eager to do the bidding of kings, or dukes, or any other manner of leader they should never have heard of. Imagine: a tree bowing to royalty! Have you ever heard such a thing?"

"So this stone must be how the King is controlling the guards so powerfully," you mused. And it seemed so obvious, too: how the knights all eagerly did such terrible acts as locking you up and banishing your lover, or keeping you singing until exhaustion with the tips of swords. Yes, surely it was only by some evil enchantment that so many could deny to others simple freedom.

Already, the picture was becoming clear: it would not be enough simply to return me to this world. No, if we were to stay together, this ruby-red stone, this ruling-stone, would have to be destroyed.

"Is there a way to do away with this rock?" you asked.

"No way that is known for certain," the old oak said. "But, in my time, I have heard the power of song has been enough to shatter rock—or, when the resonance is the opposite of the rock's nature. And since this stone is one of evil, well…"

"…it must be a song of love," you finished.

And it was all becoming clear. Reuniting wasn't the step after freedom; our reunion was freedom itself. Yes, if what this tree said was true, only the two of us could hope to shatter this tyranny.

"One last question, if I may," you said. "Do you know of a way to other worlds? I know it is strange, but someone very dear to me is trapped in such a place."

The jolly old oak shook with laughter, his leaves falling and his branches dancing in the sun.

"Ah, but the maiden is daring! What you ask is a feat far more difficult than to shatter stone with voice alone."

"But is there no way out of this reality?"

"Ohoho! Yet indeed there is. Or I have heard as much. There are much taller trees than I, you know—so tall they can spike their way up halfway to the heavens, and from there they have felt amazing sensations.

"Yes," the oak continued, "from there, where the blanket of the sky grows thin, they sensed a strange sort of warmth: a shivering glow of stars quite unlike those from our own sky. And so those trees whisper that these are stars from another world."

How curious—a thin part of the sky, out far into the heavens? Yet trees, old and rooted as they were, had so little reason to lie. And already this one had shown such kindness and honor.

"It's to that part of the sky that I must go, then," you said, and rose to leave the woods.

At once, the rumbling of the jolly old oak's voice followed: "But how might you get there? No person or beast has ever climbed so high. Not even a tree has seen this part of the heavens."

But still you smiled as you continued on. "Never to worry. A couple friends of mine may just be able to help."

The funding from Gakupo was enormous. Not enormous enough, of course. But still more than I dreamed we would receive.

It first went into construction of the equipment we needed: a gigantic dish, shaped just like ones for soup, that worked with a series of electronics and computer equipment. In so few words, it would amplify waves originating from the stars. It would translate those waves not only into something we could hear on this little rock, but something we could hopefully understand.

My friends here would be able to hear you in full, my dearest.

I'd be able to hear you.

The first time I saw the dish, it was still under construction. Meiko had designed it. She oversaw the piecing together of the metal, the flying sparks of welders and swinging of cranes carrying parts, with a quiet eagerness. Her eyes shone, and her heels bounced ever so slightly off the ground.

She didn't say anything. Only smiled at it all.

I clapped her on the shoulder and said, "It's yours. And it's coming together."

"Oh, Luka, come on now," she said. "It's ours. I'm not looking at it any other way."

Going from her to the massive dish and back again, I beamed. Over us, the sky hung like a perfectly smooth pane of glass, not a cloud in sight.

"It's not exactly small out there, though," Lily said. "We'll be looking for a needle in a haystack."

I gave a little laugh. "But a needle feels so much different from hay. You'd surely find it eventually."

"Difference is," Lily said, "most of us don't have 'eventually.'"

The engineers labored away below us, welding, assembling. They were proceeding as fast as I imagined they could.

A little voice, one I swiftly silenced, screamed out inside to build faster, get the dish up now, now. There would be no searching without it, after all. No way to reach you just yet.

My friends stood by a little longer in admiration of the project. I cited thirst and beat a quick retreat.

There was no admitting it to them, but I wasn't sure how much longer I could watch in silence. Like a suit of burrs, latched onto me prickling and heavy, was the fear that in letting others do their job, I was not doing enough.

It was curious, experiencing you remember exactly where the twins' house was. As I dreamed of you remembering, I went through the same process: alongside you, I also recalled how their home sat within a far cave in the mountains, how it would take days to reach there on foot.

And I was right there with you as you planned your journey in your mind. It would have to be a long, quiet, and careful trip: traverse through the woods by night, never taking shortcuts by flying above the treetops. For, you feared, even traveling in the woods by day might attract too much suspicion. Surely it would also risk exposure to take off soaring over the horizon, even after sunset. Either way, it wasn't a chance you were willing to take.

Days later, through a slow and rigorous journey, you found the foot of the mountains. It would be a few days more to scale them, you knew—but at least here, the tunnels hidden throughout the mountains would keep you out of sight.

On and on you crept along those hidden pathways, until the darkness became more familiar than light, when at last you were again in front of the twins' workshop. In you stepped, the door having been left open to let the noisy clanging and flying sparks out.

"Rin? Len?" you asked.

Into view popped a blonde girl, beaming.

"Miku! Oh, it's really you!"

And below her head, in popped a blonde boy.

"You're back! Miku, you're really back—I feel as if it's been ages."

You laughed, if only at how long these two must have been cooped up in this shop, to have missed the ways of the world so. But such was their passion, and passion was not a thing to lose hold of.

So you explained my banishment, your being chained away, and the plans by which you escaped. You explained the things you heard from trees and the thin part of the sky they believed existed.

The twins gaped in silence at it all, up to the very end.

That was when, at last, Rin said: "Well, we have to move quickly, then. Come on, Len, let's get building."

"You know how to get up that high?" you asked, your excitement shaking you from within.

"We think we do," Len said. "You know, we've been working on—well, we were going to surprise you and Luka with it, actually. We were making this kind of flying machine, and now…"

"Now we're going to use it," Rin said.

Leading you back, she led you to their massive workshop carved out of the very mountain, all about which hung iron gears, metal frames to cover them, and stones that hovered about one another in a loop, suspended in motion by some complex science.

Then, at the far end of the room, there it was indeed: a steel shell shaped much like a boat, only with wings like a dragonfly's sticking out. A set of large, bladed contraptions protruded from the shell's front, which you guessed were meant to drive the thing.

"Now we're still not done with it!" Len said emphatically. He made a wide, frustrated gesture at the large blades. "We still can't get the engines to run consistently, and that's not exactly a small problem. If they sputter out while this is flying—"

"But it has to work!" you said. "And it has to work now! If I don't find her soon, then…"

Both the twins looked deeply troubled, because you had no need to finish: they knew full well it would only be a matter of time before the King found the mountains and stormed their hideout. No, there was little time left to attempt this search, for the armies were hot on your heels already.

"We work through this day, and then the next," Len finally said. "We'll get this machine up and flying by then."

At those words, you swept both the twins into a hug and kissed each on their cheek.

Once the station was complete, I had an easier time getting used to it than I'd imagined. Out on the edge of civilization, away from the noise and grayness of dead stone to which I'd become accustomed, I found the work environment to be much more peaceful. Amid the emptiness, it was simpler to focus on the sky, and it was so much less effort to imagine what it was sending me.

Amid that vastness, I felt so much closer to you.

We spent a great deal of time merely panning the great dishes of our station along empty sky. We listened intently to the star-filled expanse—so immense it would fill a trillion concert halls—and yet heard nothing. All that played on our great radios was the buzz of distant stars crackling and dying.

I had said that this was merely the start, that a pan through the sky would turn up something eventually. What I meant, of course, was it would lead somewhere to a clue from you, and you would guide us the rest of the way.

"We just have to keep looking," I said, each time we recalibrated the controls for the dishes. "Proof is out there. It has to be."

With each new configuration, Meiko shook her head longer and longer. Lily always had calculations of some kind or another to compute, and Ia—even months into these changes, Ia stayed at my side, smiling that comforting smile.

But I must admit that as time ticked on, and as the dishes returned only that painful buzz, I felt a weight on my chest all the same. It sat heavy on me, day and night, keeping me from sleeping, from eating. Each time, Lily would shrug and retreat to spend hours longer at her private apartment, a place she'd bought to avoid paying that "rent" business, which she claimed would cost her even money more later on. But I, in some time, dared not even go home to the apartment I was now sharing with Meiko. I feared that if I was out a few hours, even a few minutes, I might miss your song as it arrived on our instruments.

For all the sleepless nights spent drowning myself in coffee—a warm, comforting drink full of chemicals which keep one awake—I didn't hear any hint of your voice.

A needle in a haystack, indeed.

Only here there was enough straw for all the creatures of every universe to sleep upon.

It was cloudy out, poor conditions for visual astronomy, when Lily ran into the observatory excited, shouting with a paper in her hand.

"I've got it! You guys, seriously, I think I've got it!"

Her shouting immediately lifted our attention away from the station monitors. They hadn't displayed anything significant, anyway, save for an isolated flicker of activity a few minutes earlier, which turned out to likely be a particularly strong surge of background radiation. Despite the inactivity, Ia humored her by turning down the radio we had set up near the station dashboard.

Meiko, for her part, got up and stretched. "Back early from your date. This must really be important."

"It was a work date, first off," Lily protested. "I told you guys that Gumi's a scientist, right? She's literally working in astronomy. Has her own observatory and everything."

"Didn't you say you were going to karaoke?" I asked. Because I made a note of remembering that: here, there were halls devoted to singing along with music played from larger sorts of radios. Were I not so occupied, I'd have loved to visit one such place, if only to see how it worked.

"We did," Lily said. "That was hours ago. It's not like we stayed there the whole time."

"Oh." I looked over at the clock by the workstation, confirming it had indeed been several hours. "I must have lost track."

"But that's beside the point," Lily went on. "See, after that, we got to a bar, and I started talking about work and stuff. And Gumi, she mentioned to me that her observatory had found this patch of sky with weird activity."

Meiko raised an eyebrow. "Weird how?"

"Weird like the area being clear one night, then blotted out by pure light the next. Apparently the light is on pretty much every frequency, too: visible, infrared, you name it, it's lighting up the instruments." She clicked her tongue in the ensuing silence. "And yeah, they checked for interference. It's not satellites or industrial pollution doing this. The origination is definitely from out in space."

With greater confidence than I'd seen from her before, Lily strutted up to the workstation and slapped the paper down in front of us.

"And here's where it's coming from," she said. "These coordinates, right here. Sort of around Virgo."

"So," Ia said with a hum, "if we just listen in on that…"

"We'll find it." I rose from my seat as I said the words, outside of my own accord, as if on a string. The strength resonating in me was so much I half wonder now if the words were all my own. "What we're looking for, we'll find it there. All the pieces fit."

I looked on at my friends in the ensuing quiet, the lull of the radio's music over humming instruments. Though Lily kept her composure and bright smile, Meiko gave a shrug.

"It seems like a long shot, even so," she said.

"But what other option is there?" I asked.

A clatter of wheels from a chair shook beside me, and as I turned, I found Ia standing at my side.

"She's right," Ia said. "Our choice now is to keep searching blindly or take this direction. Surely there wouldn't be any harm in trying. Right?"

After a moment, Meiko sighed, shaking her head with a shy grin.

"You've got me there," she said. And with a start, she leaned far back into her chair—laughing, loud and sudden. "You know, for just how far we've come, I guess some things between us haven't changed, huh?"

I joined in the laughter with Lily, only in the corner of my eye noticing Ia merely stood by, staring at us blankly.

We tuned our workstation's dish to Gumi's supplied coordinates right after. All I could think was how fortunate it was to have gotten them, through this connection of connections. That part of space was so barren, so thin with stars. As far as our maps could tell, all that lay there were trails of dust and the reflected glow of nearby stars.

Unless we happened upon that stretch in our scans, we probably never would have searched it at all.

As ever, the hardest part was the waiting. All my other colleagues—understandably, perhaps—spent that time resting, going out, returning home. Through mobile information devices, Lily told us of how she had more time to spend with Gumi. Where exactly Ia and Meiko went, I didn't inquire. I suppose I never felt a particular need to.

Instead I kept track of the instruments, their various meters and dials and readouts. Fervently, I studied each element of our setup, rolling in my chair from station to station as each part grew old.

Here, they like to say that "a watched pot never boils." I had found strange, as the few times I examined heated water, it always began to bubble and froth in little time at all. Now, though, watching the various readouts and feeds, noting time's passage only by the changing songs on the radio—I think I finally understood. It wasn't simply the time passing, but the need for that result of the time, that boiling desire, that truly made every passing second seem to slow down.

That, or perhaps I truly had been in this world so long that I'd forgotten the way I once knew time to run.

But either way, I simply couldn't tear myself from the station. I could not let myself be elsewhere the moment your voice again reached this world.

Still, I was awakened by the loud beeping of a successful readout printed on a station computer—somehow having fallen asleep even with the pots upon pots of coffee I'd drank. With a start, I shot up in my seat. I rolled my chair over to the monitor and ran my fingers over its controls.

The screen printed that the data collection was finished. There, the confirmation sat plain to see in simple white text, glowing like stars on the dark of a screen.

I commanded it to compile. It fed together into sounds, audible to the ear here, in a matter of minutes more. And yet I sat what felt like hours hovering over the final command, the one to play it back: the one that might at last give me a whisper of your voice again.

But, with a heavy swallow, I told the machine to play.

Sounds emerged from the machine. And at once my heart sank. I fell back into the chair with it. Though a lump formed hard enough to block my throat, I hadn't strength enough to bring forth tears.

All that played through the machine was gibberish, noise as garbled and useless as every corner of space we'd combed before.

You knew you only had till next nightfall to complete the work, if that. Yes, you knew that better than most anyone.

But you also knew there was no need to remind the twins of it. True, they perhaps hadn't internalized what you had drilled into yourself: it wouldn't be long, only a matter of days, before the guards would surely be locked on your trail. But even so, they worked in a frenzy. Away they pounded on the flying machine's hull, tail fin, and wings. Hurriedly they hammered it to a perfect sheen, tensely they adjusted the sails they'd added to it.

As you watched their progress, it was clear they had made quick headway. The shape of the machine was so much cleaner, its body fully patched and complete: now, it had become like a giant dragonfly, one carved in perfect replica out of solid metal.

But you couldn't help but notice the box up at its front—yes, that "engine" as Len had called it. This whole while, that troublesome "engine" had gone wholly untouched.

At first, you thought nothing of it. But you recalled Len's complaints about that component, and then you saw the twins spend hours over it, tools in hand, yet not doing anything in particular with it.

"Is there a problem?" you asked, trying to keep the nerves from shaking your voice.

"Might be, possibly," Rin said. "Or might not be."

"'Might'?" Len repeated under his breath, before quickly being elbowed by Rin.

She continued, "It's just that…well, the engine, Miku. We're not sure how to get it moving."

"No?" You leaned in to stare at the engine. As last time, it was a giant hunk of metal, a case of sorts, with cylinders of rock inside that seemed designed to rotate. Actually, given the propellers on the outside to which these cylinders were connected, it seemed clear they were to rotate rather quickly.

That much motion that fast would be a great task, of course. It had to be many hundreds of times faster than the speed at which living-stone grew, and on a good day.

"We can get it to move," Len added. "The trouble is, we can't keep it moving. Not for very long, at least."

"And we'd need it to move for long, if we're going to have much luck up in the sky," Rin said. "We've been trying to rush it along with electricity, water propulsion, even raw magical energy. But it all conks out after only a few minutes."

Little wonder Len had been so pessimistic about getting the craft finished, then. Outside of the simple movement of winds, those were all the forms of motion you could think of—dreaming of all this from afar, I could think of few others, myself.

"Maybe we should take a short break for now," you offered.

The twins eagerly agreed, as both surely saw the need for cleared heads. And fuller stomachs, for that matter: they brought out trays of sliced meats, freshly grown from a nearby mountain's veins, and after that, dried fruits as dessert. For an occasion as special as this, a visitor like you, there was no reason to keep them stored away.

Nearly finished with the treats, though, the one-sided conversation from the twins—about other inventions and thoughts they had, music they had heard of—turned to you.

"I've been wondering," Len said, "just what is it you plan to do at this 'thin part of the sky'? It isn't as if you can just cross through it, is it?"

"I'd think not," Rin said. "It's hard enough to fly a certain point above the highest trees here. There's no telling how bad things could be in another universe's version of a place like that."

It was a worthy question—because, of course, you hadn't really thought about what would come at that point. The only guiding light so far had been feeling, raw intuition. Such a flame had at least led you out of the tower, away from the guards' control, and then what seemed to be toward me.

Surely, this light would not steer you wrong if you were to speak it aloud now.

"I'm going to sing," you said.

The twins both stared as if your eyes had belched fire.

"Sing?" they said in unified confusion.

"I will sing to Luka," you said, "the same way I did in our choir. That was enough to make her notice me for the first time. It has to be enough to send word to her now, too."

"But having her notice you won't bring her back," Len said.

"It can start. It should be enough, at least, to get her to join in my song." The plate in front of you, on which you'd been served the meat and fruits, sat empty now. Its dark, stone-carved face loomed like a pit before you, and it took great balance not to fall in. "The old oak said a song of love is what will shatter the ruling-stone. If the song Luka and I share has love enough to do that, it must also have power enough to reunite us."

They grew silent at that explanation. Both looked lost in thought, barely even still in the room with.

Until Len jumped out of his seat, grinning eagerly.

"I know this!" he said, and ran to a shelf nearby. From it, he plucked a thick tome and leafed through the pages, letting it land with a thud on the table at the right spot.

"Look here," he said. He stabbed a slender finger at some text and an accompanying diagram, one of orbs upon a curved and bent grid. "See, some magicians and seers have studied this. At certain spots, if the various celestial bodies line up—well, it's kind of like rubbing the spatial fabric."

"The what?" Rin asked.

"Spatial fabric. It's the layer of curtain between our reality and others. Anyway," Len continued, with a brief squint out of the book, "that fabric can be shattered by wavelengths. Powerful ones, anyway."

It was as if a set of gears in your head had clicked just into place, and movement begun on its own.

"And our voices," you said. "Both our voices. If we united, and that unity is enough to shatter a powerful stone, then…"

"That's it!" Rin shouted. With a jump of her own, she rose from her seat and clapped both hands excitedly down on the book. "We get you up there, and you start singing and singing until Luka notices."

"And everything on her side is in the right place," Len added.

Now outright squealing, Rin lifted you from your seat and jumped about the dining room with you, hand in hand. The quick, unorchestrated dance was nearly as exhilarating as the news: simply have me sing with you! Surely it would be possible, somehow, if only the song was to reach me. If only I were to find some means of making the song stay.

But just as quickly, Rin stopped the jumping. Far more soberly, she walked over to the metal flying craft and its troublesome engine.

"You know," she said, "if just a song is enough to do all that—wouldn't it also be enough to get this thing running?"

From across the open workshop door, Len shot her a confused look. "But how are sound waves supposed to do that?"

Ignoring him, you walked through the door to join Rin by the engine. The cylinders still sat motionless, stern and stubborn.

They had taken so many attempts, and rebuked them all. But a song—it might be a form they would accept.

You leaned in close over the stone components.

"I offer a pact," you said. "Turn for me, faster than the wind can blow or water can rush—and I will sing a song to celebrate your reaching a state of motion."

There was no response, at first. Yet after your first breath of disappointment, a grinding noise started: low, grating, and slow, from within the engine.

No sooner could you peek inside than the sound became louder, faster. The cylinders within were whirling, whirling, quick enough to blur. Outside, the attached fans spun so fast as to become full circles of motion.

You yelped for joy as the twins jumped, shouted, held you close in a warm yet restraining hug. At once you were pulled by them to the craft's seat, where already you were singing the promised song of gratitude.

Under the singing, Len said, "Let's get a move on, then! If we do some test flying, we can get this thing up above the trees just before sundown."

You nodded, and the sweet song of celebration turned into squeals as the craft swerved and pulled away—up, up, and, through a hole in the top of the mountain, out from the workshop and zooming along in the blue sea of the sky.

"You really shouldn't be too hard on yourself," Meiko said. "I mean, I did point out it was a long shot, right?"

It was true that she had, I thought, as I sipped at my drink: a mixture of fruit juices and the same stronger spirits that seemed popular here. The effect never takes one as high as the wines back home, exactly. No, here there comes a certain sinking in the flesh, a heaviness as your head buzzes and spins.

Still, that evening I was thankful I had grown to like the stuff.

"I suppose it was a gamble," I said. The bar around us, where my friends had normally gathered, was a place I saw but rarely. Late into that night, the room was filled to the brim with people, all off in their own groups, filling the room with the music of overlapping words.

It was different to be there among them all, to remember that you, my dearest, are not the only thing in the universe. But perhaps it was what I most needed. For all the vastness, the enormity which I had observed, I had been fixed upon only you. And being within that group of people, feeling their joy around me, I thought perhaps it had been too much.

Perhaps I have unjustly pinned all my hopes upon you.

"Yes," I said, after finishing my glass, "I suppose it really was a long shot."

"But we can still try again," Ia said. In the dim, flickering lights of the bar, her smile glowed like a comet flashing in the sky. Her hand gripped mine, firm and warm, and I smiled back. "All it would take is reorienting the dish. It isn't as if this is the end."

"Yeah, like…" Lily, at my other side, took a long swig of her own tall, pink beverage while twisting a hand in thought. "It's that thing they say, right? About, uh, it's not that you failed, you just found another way that won't work."

"Said about inventions, not places to search. But yes." Meiko had only been drinking undiluted liquors—harder, heavier stuff than I dared to try—but by then she had still made it to a third glass, in time with us. "Just being realistic, something being weird in one field doesn't mean another is related."

I sighed, and drank deep from my own cup. The difference was, few other times where that connection was missed could have weighed so hard on the scientist.

And yet, she was right. Something was odd about that spot Gumi gave in an observable manner. That hardly meant something would be odd on my end, the non-observable spectrum. This was a world of science in which I now lived: a world still governed by the principles and precepts that I'd spent years and years learning. Amid all that, here I was operating on emotion, on raw intuition.

Further into my own drink, though—I heard Lily hum, poignant and deep, full of enough feeling as if my thoughts had transmitted something to her.

"I'm stuck on whether or not there really is no connection," she said.

Ia frowned, though. "But, Luka said she couldn't find any."

"Yeah, sure. It's just, I dunno, we went about scanning that area the normal way, right? Even though it's weird enough that astronomers in the visible spectrum see something unnatural in it."

"Your point?" Meiko asked.

"Maybe it's the alcohol hitting, maybe it's just me thinking out loud," Lily said. "But, hey, it almost seems like we should approach from a different angle here—like it's something we don't have the right context to understand yet."

"I still have no idea what you're saying," Meiko deadpanned. "We already listened to that area. We got a readout. The only possible data out there is literally in our possession right now. What other way could there possibly be of approaching this problem?"

Lily shrugged. "I just can't fight this feeling that, I don't know, we're somehow missing the forest for the trees."

There was something about that phrase—the shape of it, the sound of it—that made me go still. I sat with my glass raised to just to my lips, frozen in thought.

Forest. Trees. I repeated the words to myself over and over. There had to be a reason why they were making me feel so off.

"You okay there?" Lily asked me.

And though I didn't say it, I was—I was far more than okay, even. I was ecstatic.

"Like what the tree said," I murmured to myself. And I felt my voice grow, rise in excitement, because I had figured it out.

"He said the sounds were too fast," I said, and I set my glass aside as I rose from my seat.

"Luka, what…" Ia started.

"The who said that?" Meiko asked.

"The tree! I remember it—in my dream, the tree was saying the sounds they heard were like the stars in their universe, only faster." I had gathered myself, had to keep myself from spring out the door then and there. "The trouble isn't that the data's wrong. It's that we're not listening to it the right way. If we just slow them down instead of listening to them normally…"

"Slow them down? Luka, this isn't like we're tuning into electro-frequencies," Meiko said.

I ran out before she could finish. Out to get a car, one of the strange chariots that ran along their streets. You could ride in some of them, for a fee. I needed one of these, one to get us back to the observatory, fast.

One car approached. In the rain it splashed and roared, the lights on its front glaring and glinting through the falling raindrops.

Without thinking I stepped onto the sidewalk. Or, not quite stepped—ran ahead, blindly, oh so much without thinking.

Perhaps I had had too much of that drink.

I felt it in my head as I lost my footing on the sidewalk, then even more as I fell against the pavement. I fell hard, and far. The water on the pavement immediately soaked through my clothes, though I didn't have time to feel the cold.

Almost immediately, the approaching car was on top of me.

Just as quickly, it was gone. Then came the screaming—from the bar's entrance, Ia's voice. They must have been right behind me, for the next thing I remember was them standing by me, helping me to my feet.

It hurt to stand. I was woozy, seeing dark spots.

"Luka? Luka, can you hear us?" Lily was saying as her face faded in and out of a haze. Meiko's arms firmly encircled me, lifting me higher. Faintly, as if from far away, I heard Ia sobbing.

I grunted as I felt my bones start to patch themselves back together and my mangled head beginning to regenerate.

"I'll be fine," I said. "Just find us a ride and take me back to the station."

They all went quiet, even Ia. I had an idea why: my body was already starting to feel much better, to the point I'd surely returned to nearly full health.

I laughed. That seemed to be the only appropriate way to respond to their silence.

"I guess this isn't something you're likely to ever grow used to," I said.

"Yeah," Lily said as she took hold of me under my other arm. "That's putting it lightly."

Chapter Text

Together we found a car to ferry us, and we drove like the wind back to the observatory. Troubled as the driver was to head that far into the desert, Lily made sure to leave him extra payment.

Oh, how everyone demands pay, pay, pay in this world. Truly, you can't do people to do anything without this "money" they insist on using. There's never any room to simply do things for the good of it, or as an exchange of favors. Money always has to be involved.

Some days I felt as if the three women you'd brought me to were the only ones in this world who'd do things without need for money. Right from the night they met me, they'd done it all out of simple kindness for a stranger.

They showed even more kindness that night, as Meiko and Lily helped me limp my way back to the main computer station. I lurched to my chair and hopped onto the terminal.

"You already know what I gathered initially," I said. For good measure, I brought up the data and played it back a series of screeches and strange babbling noises, the same as last time. "But I didn't account for something in playing this back."

Meiko put a hand to her side, expectantly. "What?"

I punched in some code, quickly as I could: formulas, alterations, mostly thought up on the fly.

"It has to be stretched out," I said. "Slowed down. In the universe these sounds came from, time runs very differently—it's far slower, you see. So, coming through to here, well…"

"…it must have been sped up," Lily concluded. "Like a record being played too fast."

"Exactly," I said. "So, to filter the data better, we need to slow the stream way down. Not just changing the speed, either—the input has to be modified on an algorithmic basis, to account for fluctuations in space as it travels. And then…"

I hit a final key. The computer processed the changes quickly, loading the data anew. The readout was altered to match—and then a long, plainly understandable track of audio sat where once there had been jumbled pieces of unrecognizable wavelengths.

My heart ready to jump out of my throat, I hit play.

And it could have jumped out all the same, as I listened in. Though I felt no sting in my eyes, I know tears immediately poured forth. I sat silently, taking in the resulting song, bathing my senses in its beauty.

"Oh my god," Lily whispered, "it's fantastic."

"But this isn't…" Meiko was muttering to herself, in repetition. "It's not possible. It's not possible."

But it was possible. For it was happening before us, bringing me to open weeping and the highest peaks of joy.

Your song was playing over the lab speakers, dearest. With that bit of tweaking, your voice was coming through loud and clear for all of us.

I turned about in my chair, triumphant before the amazed Lily, the bewildered Meiko, the shocked-into-silence Ia.

"You see?" I said. "I told you. I told you we would—"

But my words were cut short. In a flash, as I heard more of your voice reverberate in my head, a picture came before me: stars, joined by lines. The night sky, bright and unclouded. Rolling waves of ocean sighing and throwing their salted spew against the black fabric of the universe.

Virgo. Points in space. Linked in time. Quarter rotation.

My three friends were yelling over me, shaking me as I came back to. I but smiled at them.

"I'm fine," I said. "Better than fine, actually."

"You were out for a solid minute," Lily said.

"We were worried," added Ia.

I meekly shook my head. "I saw what must be done to send me home."

They were quiet then, letting the buzz of computers and the sweet serenade of your song speak over them. Something else they had not understood, clearly: the magic inherent within song, when sung with true intention.

"You understood by hearing that?" Meiko asked, as if to reiterate my thought.

I nodded. "It's all plain to me now, yes."

"Just who the hell is that singing?" Lily asked, bewildered.

I should have anticipated that question. It only made sense to ask, of course—and yet I had no response prepared. Nothing I had mentally or indeed emotionally readied myself to give.

I swallowed, hard. "That's not easy to answer," I said.

"How's that?" Lily asked.

"That is a person singing, right?" Meiko chimed in.

"It is," I said. "A… very dear person. But, you see, to explain who she is…"

I gulped again. Long had I feared saying anything related to you, to my real past, my arrival here.

Yet it had to come out now. They had to hear this part from me some time, much as I'd dreaded it. Of course, I did trust them—dearly, truly.

But that was just it: I was just so, so afraid to lose them.

I thought of all the times I could have gone out more with them, stayed longer with them. How long I'd been spending cooped up in here, chasing you.

Maybe, deep down, I had assumed I'd be able to take them with me once I finally open the way to you. Though of course I can't. What a naive thought—I suppose I really have spent enough time here to lose my perspective on things.

But I would have to risk losing them in that moment all the same. I had to tell them, of course. Yes, I trusted they would know me better than to assume the worst from the truth.

I sighed. I would do so.

"The truth is," I said, "I didn't arrive here by accident."

The three of them went blank. Ia turned pale.

"Then, you don't mean…" Lily started. "Like, you meant to—"

"No, not exactly." I smiled a tired, hopeful smile. "I was sent here as banishment."

They sat in quiet amazement, perhaps bewilderment, as I explained the rest. I told them of how you and I sang in our choir, and you were the most beautiful singer of all; how King Kaito wanted you all for himself and worked you to exhaustion; how it was my simple act of defiance that sealed me away from the universe I called home.

And I told them also of how it was this union of song between you and I that surely would open a way for me to at last return.

I explained it all plainly, as calmly as I could. But the only way I could do as much was to leave something out.

What I did not explain to them was just who you were to me: how you are my everything, dearest, my sun and moon and sum of all the songs ever played across all time and space.

For there was still no need to reduce our love down to a thing to put on display.

Still in their seats, though, they merely looked about from one another as I finished. It was disheartening, I must admit, to see them still so perplexed, so tense in their wheeled chairs as I spoke. A part of me wondered if they had no reason to believe me, even now, after all these years together.

But I had to remind myself: this was all still a new world to them. Now more than ever, I understood theirs was a world of numbers, rules, and logic. A place of mad kings and living stones and songs that travel across universes was a vast sky being presented to a school of fish.

Lily spoke up first: "You never thought we should hear any of this before?"

Of course I had thought of saying as much before. Of course it had weighed on me to keep it to myself. But how was I to present it without reason, out of the blue?

"I never wanted to give you more leaps of faith than necessary," I simply said. "Our worlds are very different. To explain mine in full would at some point surely seem like nonsense."

And of all things, as if following Lily's lead—Meiko smiled at me. It was warm, gentle, even understanding.

"I won't say you should have just told us," she said. "What matters is you did what you thought was right, for you and us both. Besides, if I'm being honest, I don't know if I'd believed you."

"But," I said, "you believe me now?"

She nodded firmly. "I don't have any other choice. I mean, we just heard singing come from space."

And Ia beamed her warm smile at me, enveloping me in comfort. "We trust you, Luka. I hope you always understand that."

Had I tears left, I could have cried again. Instead, I went one by one, hugging each of my friends close, whispering more thank-yous to them.

"In that case," I said, "can you trust me on just one more thing?"

"Name it," Lily said.

So I smiled, and I explained to them what you had revealed to me.

We would now have to follow the stars to the exact point of time and space relative to where your voice had come from. It didn't matter over what mountains, under what tunnels, or through what deserts we would cross; that spot had to be reached, at a specific time, or else the whole plan would fail.

At the proper spot, your song would have to play. A recording would not do. It would have to be your song, never before heard, sung in that moment into the universe, to be heard by waiting ears and then disappear.

With that song, spontaneous and brief, I would have to join in with my own in a harmony that would only become clear to me within that single moment of music.

"And that union of voices will bridge the two worlds," I said, with finality.

They all stared long and hard, occasionally nodding. After processing it all, Meiko at last pulled out her rectangle device and pressed into it several times.

"So, the constellation you have to be under is…" She frowned. "The first point of Libra, right? Which you say we have to reach by the autumn equinox, turning it into Virgo, so..." Still frowning, she hummed a long note, then went silent with more tapping. "That's… out in the middle of the ocean right now."

The waves I saw—yes, it would have to be right, what Meiko said. That was where it must happen, where we must go.

No matter the struggle or cost.

"We can't afford to wait," I said. "The message reaching us won't last forever. Miku is risking capture every second she sends her song to this universe."

It was more than clear that the equinox would soon be upon us. The leaves were already changing here, and time ran short to organize the journey.

But it was more than that, too. For I knew you were risking yourself, dearest, and that you had to receive your other half of the song soon.

As Ia sat silently, Lily raised a hand.

"Question," Lily said. "Once you actually make it home, uh—well, what are you going to about this Key-to…"

"Kaito," Ia corrected.

"Right. But what are you going to do about him?"

"What I have to," I answered.

My faith in you, dearest, had gotten me this far. I trusted it would get me the rest of the way.

"Okay," Lily said, "but couldn't you, I dunno, bring along a gun or something?"

Instantly Meiko shot her a glare more deadly than any firearm I could imagine.

"Lily…" Ia sighed out.

"What? I'm just being realistic," she responded.

"It wouldn't work," I said. "Time runs so differently in my world compared to yours. Anything from here would age a thousand years in an instant."

"I suppose that goes for people, too," Ia said, quietly.

I nodded. "It would. I'm sorry. But there's no way anyone or anything from this world can make the crossing."

In the ensuing quiet, I thought I heard sniffling. From whom, I can't say. All three looked downcast, and even the humming of the machinery around us had shifted to a minor key.

But at last, Meiko looked up.

"But you still can," she said, smiling at me. "We can still get you home."

"And we won't waste any more time doing it," Lily said. With a slap to her knee, she sprang up from her chair, the sudden motion forcing it to roll backward. "First step, we find out how much to charter a boat."

And in an instant Meiko was behind her. "Don't forget a crew, please, Lily. Or at least lessons!"

My heart swelled in my chest such that I thought it would burst.

How did you come across such noble souls, my dearest?

You know the funniest part of it all?

After I explained that much, they had no questions for me. No speculation about what King Kaito had been doing, or requests for a full life story, or any such deep prying. Instead, they all went to work figuring out the full star charts, working out the sailing arrangements.

Maybe they were just too embarrassed to inquire further. Or maybe it was just a side of me they were happy to let me keep private.

While I studied my notes later that night, though, I sensed Ia standing behind me, with a certain inquisitive tilt to her brow. She didn't have a notebook with her—nothing to suggest she planned to work later into the evening.

"Are you busy?" she asked.

"Always," I answered. "But I can take a break."

She fetched coffee from the break room. I carefully poured a creamer into mine—you had to, here, the taste of drinks always being so much more bitter—and she sat near me, warming her hands with the mug.

Swirling a stick in the drink, I nearly spoke. But I didn't even have to ask what was on her mind.

"You want to be reunited with someone, don't you?" Ia said. "Back where you're from."

It took me aback, I had to admit. Still I managed to swallow the coffee I'd just sipped.

"Have I made it that obvious?" I asked.

"There were some giveaways," Ia replied. "In quiet moments, you have a certain look about you. But that was only before." She looked off, holding her coffee close to her chest. "Just now, you… oh, how can I say it? You had this look of… longing." Though she hadn't took a drink, she swallowed, hard. "As though you wanted to go back home for someone."

And what was I to say there? Because distance, longing—that's nowhere near the truth of it, my love. If it cost an ocean of gold to see your face for just a second, I'd find a way to pay the price.

Of course there could be no revealing that to Ia, as dear a friend as she was. These depths, they're for you alone to plumb, my love.

"I do long," I said. "In my home, you see, someone waits for me."

"Has she been waiting long?"

"Years, in her time."

The flinch from Ia could have spilled her coffee, had she been bringing the mug to her mouth.

"How do you know, though?" she asked. "Well, that is—are you certain she's waiting still? Not to be rude, but that's such a long time."

"Time is a luxury she and I both have in abundance," I said.

"And you're sure that means she's still waiting?"

A smile broke naturally on my face as I thought of you, of explaining why.

"I know it because I feel just the same way. If all I had to do was sit here, to wait, I'd watch mountains crumble. But with how the pieces have landed, well, it's on her to wait, and me to pursue."

Maybe I showed too much on my face as I said that. Maybe the words themselves got to her. But in the silence that followed, Ia gazed forward, focused on empty space. The shine left her eyes, and her comforting smile disappeared.

"Once you're back together, though," she said, "you'll have forever together. Won't you?"

"And even more. If you can imagine."

She shook her head. "I'm not sure I can. You make 'forever' seem so unknowable for the rest of us."

"Because it often isn't knowable," I said. "Forever isn't a thing you can reason out. It's not an idea I've ever seen put into numbers or figures. None of it is the neat, tidy thing so many of your explanations become."

Ia frowned after indulging in another sip.

"But, what's it like?"

You already knows this, my love: in truth, there was no explaining it. There's no real passing onto another the warmth of sunrise, or the sweet taste of an untouched spring. Even if I wanted to tell this world of what you and I share, there could never be a way of conveying the ceaseless joy that is you.

But Ia had always been a good friend. She's noble, you know—as pure of heart as any one of the best of us.

So I did my best to approximate.

And what I said was this:

"It's a contentment, above all else. A comfort. There's the feeling you've found a kind of glow in life, a more beautiful sort of music in the air. What's even better is it's as if she's harmonizing with that music, and even with how you sing. And you want to sing—all the time, if you could."

"And you never get tired of singing?" Ia asked.

"Never. With her, that feeling of singing never stops, and it never gets old. Because with her, every day is a new something, even if it's just like an old day. It's a chance to feel alive and take in the sweetness of breath, and it tastes even sweeter knowing I share it with her."

She gave out a sigh, then, long and full of dreams. Though she leaned forward, practically swooning at it all, her eyes had turned so dark and distant.

"You'll only experience that," she said, "once you've left us."

What shook me some was the quiver in her voice, a break at last in her usual politeness. The way the words trembled instead of coming out smoothly.

But it was the way she looked at me after that, dearest—that was what did really did me in. At home, one would never see half that much pleading, that much grief.

"Were you ever going to tell us?" Ia asked. "That you had someone waiting for you? It's your life back home, yes. But I suppose I'd always hoped I—that we were…"

"It's not as if it has to do with you, or with Meiko or Lily," I said.

Because—forgive me, darling, what else could I have said? That, at least, was the truth.

It had nothing to do with them. It had everything to do with you.

Still, Ia just shook her head.

"But there's nothing we could do, is there?" she asked. "Not a single thing I could do, or even a single thing I could say, to…"

She stopped herself, maybe to think of the kindest words to say. More likely, to fight off the tears I saw gathering in her eyes.

"…to make me stay," I said.

She nodded. Still the tears were leaking out, despite those efforts which kept her silent.

"I wish there could be," I said. "I wish I could stay longer. And I never would have felt that way, if not for you three."

"Then why don't you?" Ia cut in. "Maybe, say, just for some more years? I get it, it's asking a lot. I'd be keeping you from—well, it sounds literally like heaven." She swallowed hard. "But, hey, you've got an eternity to spend there anyway. Right?"

The way the tears overflowed, as she asked that—if only you could see them, dearest.

I wish you could have, because perhaps then you would forgive me when I admit: if only for that moment, how badly I wish I could have stayed.

"I can't make her wait for me," I said. "She's been waiting for me long enough already. And all the while, calling out to me. Because she needs me."

"And she really needs you right now?" Ia said.

"If I don't reach her soon," I said, "I may never reach her at all. The door is closing, you remember. She can't hold it forever."

"But you've been here so long already," Ia pleaded. "What's another year to you or her? It must be so short, for you. I don't mean to force you here. No, it's just… it's so short for you, and so long for us."

Shame bubbled up in me. How could it not? The acknowledgment, then, that our eternity could not accept them—the reminder that they could not follow me back—it all blindsided me, in the blistering shimmer of her watery eyes.

Because in those tears, I at last saw it: the same longing, the same need to be seen as there was in a certain girl who once shuffled behind me during choir practice.

She felt something more than friendship, dearest. And though it was not a feeling I could return, my heart ached.

I knew all too well how badly it hurt, to hold onto an image of love that was so close, and yet so far.

"I'm sorry," I said, because that was the only thing I could say.

And besides—I meant it.

She sniffled. I could see it in her drowning eyes: she knew I had realized it. That it was all out in the open, and still they were feelings that would never see reciprocation.

"Then there's just no way," she said.

And I shook my head. Because there wasn't. No way to wait, no way to bring them along. They could not survive it, even if we were to try. If we took just one step forward, in that instant they would turn to dust as thousands of their own years caught up with them.

Yet that was just as impossible as waiting any longer.

"I can't risk it," I said. "I'm sorry. But I can't risk being too late to reach her. Because if I am too late, if she's pulled away from her side of the door…"

"Yeah. I get it." She sniffed. You know, she tried to cover up her nose as she did it. Actually, she nearly made me think it was natural—that it wasn't her swallowing another wave of tears. "If you wait her too long, you might never see her."

But again Ia shook her head. "Don't be. After all, if I found someone like that…" And she laughed. Only briefly, but it was so clear, so bright—as radiant as her sad, longing smile. "…if I had someone like that, I'd want her to come back to me one day, too."

I returned her laugh. We finished our coffee. The night swallowed up her car as she drove away, and the stars saw me return to my nearby bed.

Should you next see me with tears in my own eyes, my beloved, you deserve to know it will not only be from joy from seeing you again.

The invitation to Gakupo's office seemed, at the time, a sign of good fortune. We had to secure a grant for sea travel anyhow—he'd surely oblige, I thought as I walked back into that enormous lobby, boarded that shaking metal elevator-box, stepped onto the abstract colors of his office's rug.

The businessman himself, too, boded well, approaching us with a smile and outstretched hand.

"And here's my favorite astrologers!" he said as he vigorously shook our hands in turn. "Tell me, how have you been? Have a rough time getting here? Not too rough, I hope."

"Astrophysicists," Lily said.

"What, now?" Gakupo asked with a start.

"You said 'astrologers,' and, I get the words are similar, but we're—"

"We're doing just fine, thanks," Meiko cut in. "The train ride over was wonderful."

"Oh, you didn't get my limo?" Gakupo shook his head. "Shame. I really have to make a note to talk to the reception here."

"It's really no trouble," Ia said.

"No no, I insist—get comfortable while you're here, please."

He waved at the cushioned chairs in the office, and we all took his offer for us to be seated. Not content with that, though, he pressed a button on his desk—some sort of communicating speaker—and ordered teas brought up to us.

Sometime later, a woman with pink hair and a black-and-white sort of dress came in to serve them. Pastries came with them, too, of incredible sweetness and flaky texture. Naturally, I took time to eat them. This whole while, Gakupo urged us to eat, to drink, as he rambled on with small talk.

"How's the weather been out there? Maintenance crews are working well enough, I hope? Say, did you catch the baseball game last night?"

On and on, in that sort of way.

I frowned as I set my cup of tea down. Something felt terribly off.

"With respect, sir," I said, "we know your time is precious. And, we have a matter of some importance we'd like to bring to you."

"Well. That makes two of us," Gakupo said with a grin. "Or would that be five? You know—I've got a point to raise too. That's what I'm getting at with the manner and, well, the words and that sort of thing."

"The manner?" I repeated. Seeking reassurance, I glanced over to Meiko, Lily, and Ia, who all wore faces just as confused and distressed as mine.

"Ah, I've given it away, haven't I?" With clicks of his tongue, the businessman shook his head. "Yes, I'm sure you all know the trick. What I mean is, I try to keep guests like you comfortable when I invite you in. Usually, it serves to soften the bad news about your funding."

"Our funding?"

The four of us said the words in unison, rose from our seats as one. In a staggered cacophony our teacups rang out as they clattered onto their saucers.

"I may as well pull the band-aid off, eh?" Gakupo went on. "Yes, you see, I'm afraid we'll have to cut funding to your little venture. It's just, well, you've had quite a number of months to work, and we simply haven't seen anything of it. I mean, when you first walked in here you were talking about radio waves from other universes—wild, adventurous things—and since then, it's only been radio silence."

"That's because these things take time," Meiko said. "This is science we're doing—discovery, at that."

"She's right," Lily added in. "Come on, you wouldn't call off surveying a mine just because there's no gold in the first few meters, would you?"

"I wouldn't," Gakupo replied. "But then, that's all because I expect gold at the end of that venture. Here, we'd be getting… well, bits of sound, yes? As time has gone on, I've found myself thinking that I can't really impress the public with anything you'd turn up."

Think of it—him calling your song, your ethereal voice, nothing but "bits of sound." Without even noticing them move, my fingers had dug deep into my palms at that. How the blood in my head, my chest rushed and raced.

But Ia spoke before I could do anything foolish.

"But we found something," she said. "We found actual results—incredible results, even. And to prove what they mean, all we need is a bit more…"

"A bit more?"

The businessman's booming voice brought a hush over us all. He sprang up from his chair, then with a leg outstretched stepped onto, then over his enormous wooden desk.

"I don't think you lot understand the position you're in," he said. "Are you under the impression this is a negotiation? No, no, no—this is a termination. A firing, a layoff, a cut. The decision has been made."

"All we'd need is a boat," I said.

Somehow, the tone I'd used must have stung. He craned his neck over to glare at me, far down the end of his nose.

"A boat," he repeated. "You use my money to listen to space for months, hearing nothing the whole time. And now, you want to go to sea."

"It's where we have to go next," I said. "Frankly, I'm not sure you'd understand."

He stood still, at that—still, firm, and very, very tall.

"Get out," he said.

"Mr. Gakupo…" Ia had gasped out her words at the horrible shape he cut, his fiery glare.

"Look, just hear us out a bit more…" Meiko started.

But it wasn't enough. The businessman loomed large over us, shaking with rage.

"Get out!" he shouted. "You don't put me down in my own office! Not when I'm firing you, no less! Out, out with you, get lost and out!"

It didn't take long for guards, along with that woman in the black and white dress, to reappear. They gathered behind us, grabbed our arms—hard, hurting. We started walking out on our own but they kept a grab on us all the same.

Outside, the sky looked so wide, so blue and empty. I couldn't see a thing in it.

"We should get going," I said, if only because no one else would.

It took all the way to the train before someone spoke after that.

"What next?" Ia asked.

The car had been so quiet that her words startled me. On and on we'd rolled, clacking like insects overwhelming a forest, and then her voice had boomed like thunder even though she spoke as softly as ever.

"What's next," Meiko said, "is we pack up all our notes and get a new grant. Come on, we're bound to get one."

"But how long will it take?" I leaned over to stare into her eyes. "It'll take a while, you know. Far too long. We'll miss the window for sure. It's closing already as is."

"Well, what other choice do we have?" Meiko shouted it out—yes, raised her voice, even on the train—yet quickly backed down. "I'm sorry, Luka. But this is how things work. I don't know how it is where you come from, but here, we don't just see miracles. I've been trying to tell you that for years now."

"You can't say that when you just saw one," I replied.

"Maybe, but how are we gonna conjure another one? By pointing our dish to the right part of the sky again?" Meiko threw her hands up. "We can't work this without cash, and I don't exactly see that raining down."

A grunt shifted my focus away from her. Lily had sunk deeply into her hard shell of a seat, eyes half-closed over a rather lopsided sort of smile.

"There's no need to count ourselves down and out just yet, you know," she said.

The air swelled again in my lungs. "There's not?"

"Are you saying…" Meiko trailed off.

To all that, all Lily could muster was a shrug. "All I'm saying is get off at my station with me."

As we left the train station, the wind hit us like a rush of water, stinging and cool. But none of us broke the silence, even to complain about the discomfort. Not even Meiko could manage to ask what the plan was. I think perhaps it was all we could do just to keep walking, never mind talking.

Maybe it was all our way of healing—of patching something up inside ourselves, diverting internal energy to do so. You and I understand it only too well, darling. We heal our own wounds, and have the luxury of plenty of time to do it. They, however—with such fragile bodies and so little time to keep them safe—don't recover in the same way as we do. And even so, I think that night, my friends walked as we do after taking a bad fall, or even perhaps drowning. They staggered under the clouded night sky, and their feet dragged along the sidewalk.

All as if they were doing as we do: taking the time to repair ourselves.

I had spent very little time in the apartment Lily had purchased, because I had almost exclusively confined myself to the observatory. What I'd seen of it was grand, sharp—here they say "swanky." Until then, I'd only seen her charming entry room, where minimalist artwork hung on the walls above a sofa composed of three straight lines.

The apartment very much seemed a point of pride with her. An achievement, you might say. Who knows how much money she'd invested to get the place bought and decorated.

Lily showed us all in. With a grand gesture, she motioned at the space—so much larger than I remember the common room of the old campus house—and at the well-made couch and chairs, as well as the décor hanging along the walls.

"Take a last look," Lily said. "It'll be gone in a few days."

My jaw hung open, wide. How long had it been since she even bought this residence? A few months, perhaps—barely any time at all to live in it, to show it off.

"Lily, please," I said. "You can't do that. Not just because of…"

"It's not because of you."

Lily smiled at me, her lips forming such a delicate and subtle grin, far more at ease than usual.

"I was gonna announce it later," Lily said, "closer to when it actually happens. But, well, I guess now's the time. Now that we might not have any time left at all."

My legs went weak, wobbled, yet didn't give out. I don't think I could have forced myself to sit on the couch, even though it looked so inviting. Beside me, Ia kept eyes locked only on the floor in front of her.

"Things with Gumi, well, they've been really good," Lily said. "Great, even. To the point that we're thinking we should just move in together." She raised a hand, as if preempting an interruption. "No, no need to congratulate us or anything. I'm really happy with someone—really, deeply happy—and that's enough."

"But," I stammered, "to sell all this…"

Lily just shook her head. "It'd be too much for the two of us. Hell, it was too much for just me. Besides, if I'm really gonna move in with Gumi, well, it'd be better if the place is in both our names, right?"

Maybe there was a point in that. Maybe there was some reasoning or logic I wasn't understanding. There had to have been countless ways of things working in this world I still hadn't grasped.

But I couldn't let this go. There was no accepting her giving it all up—all that she'd worked for, all that she longed for.

The walls, covered in artwork and hangings, loomed so large over us. The doors to the rest of the rooms seemed to stretch out in front of me, growing more distant, infinitely unreachable.

"There's no use arguing, trust me," Lily said. "The fact is, we need money, and I'm the one who has it. I've just gotta convert it to usable form first."

"By giving all this up?" I asked. "Everything you worked for?"

"So I can help you with what you've worked for." Again, that smile of hers—that soft, gentle smile—left me soaring on a cloud, even as I wanted to collapse to earth. "But I'm getting something that I worked for, too. And that's being with a person I really care about. In a way we both want."

"But," I stammered, "you're truly sure?"

"Of course I am," Lily said. "I know it's what I want. What can I say? I'm in love."

Around me, all the decor, the expensive sofas and chairs, the very walls of the building—every bit of it melted away. All before me was Lily, smiling, hands in her pockets, as if she were ready to hum a tune.

At that point at last, I understood.

My arms swept around her, my dear friend. My eyes stung with salt.

"Thank you," I said again and again, enough to turn the words into mere sounds, a mantra notes sustained out from me.

Even as the tears flowed, through the blur I could see Meiko clutching her chest and her own eyes welling up—through my blurry eyes, she looked as if she were stained glass, an entirely different Meiko.

Yet with perfect clarity, I saw Ia standing beside her with a smile so strained it could have been painted upon her, and eyes blinking back a pool of tears.

Within the twins' workshop, the bond you swore with the machinery was enough to keep the engine running, I saw in another dream. The craft soared higher, riding on the winds, climbing upward, ever upward.

Oh, what exhilaration it was to experience that climb as I did through your mind. The upward rush pulled at the body with forces strong and firm. As the craft cut through the air, the very clouds parted in front of it, as if to barrel out of the way.

Your spirit soared with the twins' flying machine, heart lifting even as your stomach twisted and spun.

"I'd say it works!" Rin shouted from the front seat, her hair and ribbon trailing in the velocity.

"I just hope it'll hold until sunrise," Len said. "That's a long time for this thing to stay in one piece."

For indeed, the sun had fallen, and night was chasing away the light in the sky like ink spreading through water. One by one, stars peeked out from the blackness, and as the craft rose, you could barely see the twins in front of you in their dim light.

Yet the night would serve as enough cover to keep you hidden from the pursuit.

For that long, at least, you could seek me.

Below, oceans of green rustled and rolled by as you passed forests upon forests. The machine flew on over them, seeking the taller trees. Here and there in the growth underneath, giants arose like great towers of the earth, casting shade upon fields beneath.

Yet these were nothing; on where the craft flew, there grew the eldest and mightiest: the arch-trees, tallest in the world, towered above all else. They rose upward, upward in a cluster, thick as a sprawling city in their bundling together, with just as many creatures and homes nestled amid their vast spread of leaves. Each towered so high it seemed they were perched on a mountain, yet none had such need. Their trunks alone were enough support for them to pierce the sky, and their bark stood visible far above the canopy of trees below.

Upward the craft zoomed, up and far along its course. As it climbed, the metal rattled, rang, and sank momentarily in the rushing wind. At the front, the engine coughed, rattled in protest.

"No, no, no," Rin said. "Not yet. We're not even there yet, come on."

She and Len punched at buttons, pulled at levers. The engine coughed again, then smoothed out, and the plane careened along its rise up to the top perches of the arch-trees.

"So, what, it's around here?" Len shouted. "Around the tallest trees, right?"

You squinted, and then pointed off the port side. "I think it'd be right there."

For there, amid the blanket of dark, was an area of space aglow—yet with a different glow than starlight. It shimmered, rippled like the surface of water, as though a part of the sky itself had worn away.

And it even sang, humming with bright, ethereal tones, like a thousand strings made of dew and jewels strummed in chorus.

"Yeah," Rin said, "I think that might be it."

On the craft soared, until it reached that spot, this narrow section of the sky. It pulled to a halt, and the wings on the side began to beat, to hold it in place.

"Whatever you're planning on doing," Len said, "you better do it now, Miku."

"We won't have long," said Rin. "We're waiting on the sun and this thing's integrity both. If one gives out before Luka answers…"

"They won't," you said, and within the dream my heart and mind soared. "Luka will hear. She'll find my song in whatever world she's trapped in. She'll hear the music, and it will guide her back."

"How can you be so sure?" Len asked.

And you stood upright in the craft, smiling. "Because the feelings she and I share can't be kept apart—not even by the boundaries of space itself."

With that vow, you opened your mouth, and out poured the magic of your song.

The smell of salt is so overpowering out on the oceans here, dearest. It's harsh and cool and slick all at once, like falling into a deep, dark cave, even though you're standing still on a pier or slowly bobbing about aboard a rented boat.

I felt it in full when we set sail a few weeks later. Lily easily made enough from her sales to charter a ship down to the equator—one with a captain, a crew, a whole force working the ship whom I seldom saw.

That was because from the beginning I spent the voyage standing at the bow, keeping my footing firm as the waves rolled on and on beneath us. My stomach rose and sank, rose and sank with the endless motion. How this world turned and turned, this whole other part of the planet roaring and rolling and cycling with an unpredictable rage.

I should have been fixed on the sky, but that sea—that sea kept my attention for so much of the voyage. It was so deep, so endless. So much that I would never see.

Even if I were to spend a million of their lifetimes here, I would never see all of it.

I fiddled the knob on the radio I carried, and it returned only static, random signals from the beginning of this universe. The smell and taste of the sea had faded by the time I noticed Meiko, Lily, and Ia all beside me at the bow. Perhaps I had simply gotten used to the frigid salt that surrounded us. There was an ache in my legs, but still I didn't want to leave that one spot.

"We're well set on course," Meiko said.

"Yeah, captain said so himself," Lily added. "Should be right on the equator within a few hours."

I nodded. Though the taste of the ocean had gone, the sting still hit my eyes. My skin prickled at a sudden gust, and I wondered why I hadn't bothered to pack more.

But I remembered immediately. Ia drew a coat around me, though just the smile she cast was warmth enough.

"We sail due west once we've reached it," I said.

"Right," Ia said. "Due west. We've already let the others know."

"Just making sure."

Again I toyed with the portable radio, fidgeting with its controls, wiggling its antennae. Still nothing picked up, naturally. I didn't need Meiko to tell me we were too far from an actual station to get a signal.

Still, I knew it would come in handy soon enough. Like I said, though, it had to be at the equator, and it had to be due west, so far west that we reach the point where your star sits directly above our position.

So far west that I become on a direct path to you, dearest, to your spot in the night sky.

"So, there was really enough?" came Ia's voice.

Lily's laugh rang even richer, crisper out amid the sea air. "Are you kidding? My sale paid for this and then some. Plenty over, I might add."

"Maybe you could also pay for a voyage for me, then," Meiko replied, winking.

"Oh, no, I've cracked that code word already," Lily said. She leaned over close to me, hand cupping her mouth. "'Voyage' from her is gonna mean 'bender.'"

"I heard that!"

They argued back and forth, laughed, held one another's hands. Their heavy raincoats glistened with the misty spray cast over us every few waves. A flash of lightning resonated in my head, cast by the storm of years and years ago, when these three showed me into a warm, caring home.

I thought if this moment on the bow were to be my real final image of them, I'd have been satisfied.

Still, I had something to know before that moment could come.

"How long did you know you loved her?"

The three of them quieted down, turned to me.

"What?" Lily asked.

"Gumi. I want to know how long it was that you realized you loved her."

She grinned, widely—and yet for some reason her eyes couldn't meet mine. You know, dearest, I think I even saw her blushing.

"I never really thought about it," Lily said. "How long, I mean. It didn't come in roaring—that's the weird part, really. I thought it would make itself known." For a fleeting moment, she actually looked at me, and her eyes were shimmering wells of diamonds. "Except, it wasn't loud. It just kind of walked in one day, without my really noticing it. Then, some day later I finally noticed it was there."

"As if you just stumbled upon it?" I asked.

She shook her head. "More like, once I noticed it was there, I wasn't shocked or anything. It was more that I realized that I'd always known it had shown up."

My breath swelled at that. It was short, but it was enough. Oh, dearest, you would already understand why it was more than enough.

"So she does mean that much to you," I said.

"She does." Lily stood back up full, even laughed. "I should probably leave over some money for a ring, come to think of it. Can't leave her waiting on me too long."

I fiddled with the radio knob again, and though all it played was static, in my head there echoed bells.

By the time I picked up sound on the radio, night had fallen, and I had already cycled back and forth between the lower and upper decks several times.

They were only brief trips, each one. Once, pangs in my stomach brought me over to a parked chilling vessel—a cooler—and to feast on meat held between bread. Then, only to ask the captain if he thought we were quite at the equator yet. He told me we were nearly there, and that I shouldn't be worrying too much.

You know what? He was right.

Because not long after that, on the bow, I heard you. You, yes, your voice, trailing out from the radio as I toyed with its control.

No more static. Your song, reaching us, all of us here.

The sky hung dark over us. Yes—that was because we had actually crossed, actually hit the equator right on the solstice. Somehow, we had actually hit it.

And somehow, your voice again reached me; and it was as bright, as sunny, as much like a clear ripple of joy as ever.

"Is that…"

Meiko stood over me, astounded. Yes—and even better, it was again not just me who heard it. Again, you managed to reach all of us.

She gaped at the radio, shaking her head in quicker time than your song.

"That… It still shouldn't be possible," she said. "There's no way it can…"

"What's next?" Lily cut in.

I held tight to the radio. For as much joy as I wanted to shout out, I dared not open my mouth, for I felt my heart in throat.

"Do you know what to do?" came Ia's sweet voice. "And what should we do?"

All I was safe in doing was to grin. But I ventured a quick, coughing laugh, and some words instead:

"Please simply make sure," I said, "that we make it to where I asked," and I held the radio firm in hand.

The song resonated in my throat more than gave me a chance to hear it; I let the notes build themselves, birth themselves, and out they poured. It was singing without thought, without expectation. It was my voice matching the tones of yours, following in harmony with this song I'd not heard once before.

Around us, around the ship, the dark of the night was suddenly shattered—a flash, a bolt like lightning, yet with not a trace of thunder. Instead, the light came with music. And, as the bolt struck, a section of strings plucked, as if it had brought a second burst of music.

I took in its sound, the mood of its light. And I changed my pitch to sing on its note.

The light came back—but no longer a bolt. It flickered, now, like a flame going in and out of vision. The warmth of it sputtered, and that song I heard, the strings, they all faded in and out of hearing.

But they stopped altogether just after I heard Meiko shout:

"Wait."

Right as I heard it, I shuddered, even stumbled in my notes at how afraid she sounded.

"We're not going west," she said.

"What?"

The panic in Lily's voice made me stumble again, and just as hard. My throat balled up, tightened. And still I sang. It hurt like knives through my tongue, but I sang.

And amid that singing, I heard Meiko say:

"Look, the constellations are wrong—we're not going west."

"Dammit! Of all the times to realize…"

I continued my song, all attention on it, even as Lily stormed off somewhere—somewhere downstairs, clambering and stomping down them.

And I kept on holding the note, building to a rise and matching crescendo, even as she clambered back up to shout out:

"They turned us around! Say a storm's coming at us from the west!"

"So we're stuck going east?"

"They said it's the only safe way right now!"

East—no, we were going east. The radio had lost its trail on you, your voice changed out for flickers of static. Still I sang, a capella; at once my notes shook, quivered with fear, as if they were walking guideless in the dark. Frantically, I twisted and turned on the radio's knobs. I couldn't have lost you—no, not when I was this close. Not here, not now, not ever.

And it was as if I regained my balance: back you came, as I'd twisted enough. My song grew firmer footing, harmonizing properly, resonating.

Back the light came, too. It shone down on us, with every measure shining brighter, brighter…

"Luka, I'm sorry," came Meiko's voice again. "We can't keep sailing after that star. It's dangerous. We're turning around."

…and then fading, turning softer, softer.

"But that would mean…" said Ia.

"We don't have the time it takes to turn this thing around!" Lily shouted. "The solstice is nearly over, and at this rate…"

The dark had returned—yes, the stars were still over me, and the light and singing strings I brought with it were gone.

Your voice was cutting in and out, in and out. Static drummed along your notes, drowning you out. Even the starlight began to fade; already, clouds were rolling in, shrouding them bit by bit.

"It's… it's coming right for us!"

Ia was right—they were storm clouds, rolling in as if in pursuit of us. Your voice came in staggered amid this static, and now, the light of your star flickered.

You were close—so, so close to me, dearest. How I rose at how your song resonated within my chest. How I stood up on my toes, as if to jump up at the fading star above.

But it disappeared. I stumbled on my feet, and interrupted my song, gasping. I fell a step forward, up to the railing, and nearly lost hold of the radio.

"Shit, is she…"

"It's fine, she's still on board," Meiko shouted back.

Still on board—except I saw below me the ocean, just through the bars. Its smell rushed back up to me, a surprise strike of salt and cold.

It was growing more powerful, more violent. The storm, it was rolling in, just to the edge of this patch of sky. Like a wall, impenetrable to any vessel.

And I rose to my feet, another flash of light briefly shining upon us, another sting of strings. Even without the song, I sang, sang loudly, sang on instinct.

On I sang into the sky, even as the clouds were looming, even as the waves were thrashing, and…

…thrashing as you clung desperately to the aircraft.

"It's coming apart!" Len was shouting. "Miku, please, it might not hold up for longer!"

"Stop stressing her," Rin said. "She's trying her best—you want to stress her out?"

Yet you were still in that trance: the eyes barely open, the notes being held long and unbroken, one after another as long as each breath could hold. Strange, that they were coming out so long on your side, so short on mine.

You didn't hear them, you were so entranced. Somehow, you registered their words, but didn't think on them.

Yet something else registered within you, too: a faint kind of ringing, like a kind of chime. Something so totally unlike the vague buzzes you had been hearing before.

Your breath caught, only for a moment. But it could not catch for long.

The song had to change. The pitch, the shape—the information had to change.

You cried out the last note in a might scream as the airship's wings finally began to tear and give out.

…But that was you just then, wasn't it?

Of course it was. I felt it, I lived it. It was every bit one of those dreams you'd given me, every bit linked to your thoughts and life.

To think, you were close enough for that. Just on the other side.

Yes—just on the other side.

"We're not close enough," I said.

"Yeah, we know!" Meiko's reply was tensely shouted, full of fear. "We need to keep going east, though, or else we'll be caught in a damned thunderstorm at sea."

The boat sat nearly under the spot—yet not truly below it. Staring upward, I locked eyes on the constellation Virgo, singled out from the rest of the sky I'd come to memorize from these long years here. And it was clear, all too painfully clear, we were far from beneath its gaze.

My stomach churned as I stared on. Ringing in my head, your song became more strained, more desperate. It was as if your voice was becoming thinner over the radio—its sound waves drawn taut, like an overextended length of string.

And it would not be long before it would snap completely.

"We won't make it," I said. "If we don't get back there now, right now, then—it'll be over by then."

"What?" Meiko shouted.

"Shouldn't you keep on singing?" Lily's voice—oh, how clear it was, how it cut through the winds like a knife.

Even so, I heard you. Above it all, I heard you.

My fingers fell numb, and the radio clattered to the deck. It was so much clearer, all of it.

Your voice wasn't just a noise from that electrical box. It was shimmering inside me, like a tiny star. It was pulsating and growing, and it burned with such heat.

And it was pulling me. Inside, it tugged and tore, and it yanked at my entire body against the boat's railing.

"Luka!"

There was Ia, screaming—she rushed at me, her outstretched hand the only solid part of her. The rest was dissolving into droplets, into a rush of ocean mist sprayed across the boat.

The cold of the water hit me as hard as steel. Again my skin prickled up—every little hair, every little follicle. The bumps began to sting as my clothing held fast to them, wet and tight.

"Oh my god, she just—"

"Overboard! Hey, we got someone overboard here!"

Still they were shouting. Not one of their voices, none of them, cut through the storm any longer. Now they faded into a buzz—a swarm of background wavelengths, projecting out into the universe, out past the sky.

But still the pulsating star within in me pulled and pulled.

"No, change course if you have to—well, fuck, then change course!"

I tried to sing, but water rushed into my mouth the moment I opened it. Instead, I thrashed. My arms flew about, hitting the water, legs kicking beneath.

But I didn't feel it. I didn't panic as I coughed up the freezing, stinging ocean around me, within me. That beating inside me, that ringing glow of light…

Its pull alone was all I could feel command me.

A crash in the waters next to me—I kept up thrashing, and my hand hit something soft, something solid.

"Grab it, Luka, oh please grab it and hang on!"

"She's got it? She's got it!"

I did as Ia asked: I held firm and tight to the floating ring of safety. I clung to it, and even so my body beneath floated under the ocean's currents, to and fro with the raging waves.

Again I opened my mouth. I gulped in air tinged with the freezing mists.

I sang.

And then light shone down upon me, so bright that it was as if time had turned itself back, the long dark of the storm rolled back to daylight. It cascaded down like a torrent of ribbons billowing down a staircase. Yes, the very light itself had a kind of weight, blowing in the sea breeze as it descended.

Still, I sang. Oh, how I sang, how the notes simply poured out of me. The sound rose, fell, at which points to where I can barely recall. Simply the sound of it lifted me, hands clutched to my hips, up and up out from the water as the music poured out from my entire ringing self.

I shivered as the ocean air hit my skin, as it collided with the seawater that had soaked through my clothes and was now dripping back into the ocean beneath. Above the waters I rose, higher and higher. But still I sang, and still the music resonated like a chord commanded by an invisible player.

They were watching from the boat. Watching with wide eyes, where the depths of wonder ran so deep they themselves could not plumb them.

But even so I pulsed with joy. Those storm clouds shrouding the sky—in an instant, they dissipated, leaving only a clear night sky. The starlight caressed me, strange yet calming, making me tingle at its touch. A trillion golden feathers fluttered along my skin, born from the rolling light, lifting me still as my song neared a pause.

I took a brief rest. After a breath, I found a few measures more.

"Thank you," I shouted, "thank you for everything. Truly, my friends."

How odd, those next moments of singing were. Though I'd left the ocean, its salt still covered my skin, my face. Somehow the tingling had grown warm, and it coursed down from my eyes.

"I won't forget you," I shouted. "Not for all eternity. I promise, yes, I swear it—I'll let every moment live forever."

But still I rose. No, there could be no end, even in the moments my song reached rests. The light stampeded out in a flood, now, out from the shimmering patch of sky I was floating toward.

Down below, their faces blurred—and then cleared up, themselves again.

For one moment more, they were a bewildered Meiko, a gasping Lily, and of course Ia, smiling that warm smile despite the tears flowing so freely down her cheeks.

I turned. I sang as the pull began again, as it lulled me back into its track of motion.

The heavenly shimmering intensified as my voice rose to song again. My arms reached out, all on their own, and touched a patch of sky soft and solid, like a family quilt hanging upon a wall.

Your bright and beautiful face appeared before me as the remnants of the universe I'd just left faded to memory.

Chapter Text

Hello out there. Are you hearing me? Am I coming through?

Ia, Lily, Meiko—are you there?

I can only hope you are. I want to believe you haven't forgotten me. Just as much, I hope you're still faithful to your cause—to your mission to listen for signals in deepest space.

Although I hope it isn't alarming for my voice to reach you this way, through space. Of course I know how shocking it was for you the last time this sort of thing happened, when you heard my Miku over the radio.

And now, to hear Luka—someone you'd actually met in person—over radio waves, even though she's back in her own world? Even after everything that happened the day I left your world, I have to believe it's strange to hear from me again.

I must apologize for the lateness of this message, if it actually was late. To be frank, I can't quite tell. I think I told you that time moves differently in my world. Here it passes more slowly—on a scale of eternities rather than journeys around your sun. Yet there exists no consistent or predictable conversion. Sometimes, the days here translate to years for you; sometimes, they become decades, or even eons. Unlike the formulas and figures you taught me to use, the interplay between our worlds doesn't seem at all logical.

It took some getting used to, returning to the old, familiar way of experiencing reality. At first, the long stretch of days left me tired. For some time. I never quite knew what to do with the extended hours. Every unit of time seemed beyond imagination.

It's what I imagine Lily would call "interdimensional jet lag." Or, to speak as Meiko would, perhaps it's more like a hangover. Either way, I can't tell how long it's been for you.

But I think I've finally gotten a sense of how to process it all. It simply comes down to moving one step at a time—a way of living I think I took for granted before. In the old days, I don't suppose I thought about how long it might take to achieve anything. Why would I, when I had all of time to wait for it? Now, I see not so much the waiting, but the journey needed to reach it.

And luckily enough, I've had plenty of time to embrace resuming life here with Miku. I've been rediscovering how joyful it is.

We're safe now, my friends—if you take nothing else from this message, know that you don't have to worry about us anymore. The King Kaito I told you about has long stopped being a menace.

But let me start in the proper place: from the moment I started singing and was scooped out of the ocean waves by the light in the sky.

For a long time, all I saw was light. I blinked helplessly in the face of it, simply because of how brilliant it was. Even when I squeezed my eyes shut, the glow shone through my lids.

It was the sort of light that might flare up along the surface of a far-off star—and I was simply floating in it, the light itself a buoyant body that held me aloft.

Until the fluid that was the light washed away. Air rushed up below me and whipped through my hair. I looked down, and saw vast lands sprawl out below me.

They were lush lands—spiked with massive mountains, verdant with forests that pulsed with life. Lands I knew better than anything.

They were home.

I was home.

And as I blinked away the tears as I fell from the heavens, what I saw before me erased all doubt.

My friends, she was smiling at me. Her tears of joy shimmered like diamonds tumbling through starlight, and her eyes were like the sun at last rising. Her hair—cut shorter since I had last seen her—flowed in the wind like the flame of a candle.

She laughed as we fell, and our bodies met in mid-air. Then, so did our lips.

Were I not there already, I would have sworn I had flown up to the ceiling of the heavens themselves.

"Welcome back," Miku said.

"So I am back," I said in her arms. "I'm back to you at last, at last, my darling."

We fell, and around us metal—what remained of the twins' flying machine—plummeted to the earth below. It seemed we were right on time, as it had fallen apart just as I arrived. Above us, Rin and Len tumbled freely, looking rather upset at first.

"Of all the times for this thing to fly to pieces!" Len shouted.

"Sorry, Miku, but the sun's about to…" And before Rin could finish, she broke into a grin. "She's here! Len, she's actually made it!"

They transitioned to flight, a more stable descent, and so did Miku and I—for you see, my friends, such movement is possible in my world. Here, our bodies know flight without need of a vehicle, so long as we relax enough, and if we fit into the air just right.

I waved at the twins as we stabilized in our flight down to their level. And sure enough, they were right: behind us, the sun was rising, and we were bathed in its light.

But I felt no fear. I had no worries about the King spotting Miku and me in that light, even though it left us plainly visible in the sky. Let him look. If our embrace was powerful enough to bring the sunrise, let him and anyone else see the love that it shines upon.

Again I embraced Miku, and her cheeks went red as the rising sun.

At the twins' home, they got me properly dressed. It was odd, to be in that kind of clothing again. The robes you first saw me in, you see, are quite normal here. There's little need for the clothing with pockets to hold money. Our fashions never had to account for a compulsion to gather and gather.

From there, it was straight down to the King's castle. In my dreams, I had seen it crumble to the ground, its living-stone broken apart by its own shattered promise. In person, it had rebuilt itself nearly to its old size, towering haughty and dark against the morning sky.

"That means it must be guarded," Miku said in despair. "If the castle had time to recover, then a full squadron of guards must have had that time too."

"Oh, if only we'd had the machine fixed up sooner," Rin said. "It's all my fault, dammit! I should have known…"

"Hey, it's just as much mine, isn't it?" Len answered. "I didn't think of it being needed, either."

I asked, "Who could have?"

They scratched their heads. Apparently, they didn't have an answer.

Though we would have to worry about that later. Right now, we had a castle to get through, with countless guards patrolling within. By ourselves, the four of us would have no way of storming it, no matter what machine Len and Rin might create. And yet, somehow, we would have to get into its dungeons—down to the lower depths whose entrances I spied Kaito speaking into, whose furthest reaches housed the ruling-stone. For shattering it, by some magic, was our only chance.

And we didn't have long. Within a matter of days, Kaito's guards would surely find us, no matter how far we ran or how well we hid.

"Oh, is there no way forward?" Miku pleaded. "Please, anything that can hear: if I have ever done you a kindness, help me now, just once more."

Below us, the ground shook and rumbled. I thought of dreams I had of Miku—dreams where she showed me a forest beating footsteps in the ground, where she witnessed this very castle collapse. For the shaking beneath our feet was immense, so much so that guards poured out of the gates to see what was causing the quake.

They arrived in time to witness what we also saw: bramble brush. Thousands and thousands of miles' length of spiny, razor-sharp shrubbery and bushes, popping out of the ground, swarming the castle, lifting guards screaming into the air.

Miku beamed, and I only stared up at the walls in awe. It had been so long—or at least it felt so long—since I had seen anything so miraculous. I dare to venture that, had any of you seen it, you might not have believed it was real.

But real it was. The brambles clutched the castle and shook it up and down, and the very living-stone cracked and collapsed. The plants' sheer strength had torn open a hole leading to the castle's lower levels!

We rushed in, thanking the brambles as we went, though still wasting no time in moving along. It was a fortunate turn—we could not sit idle and let this chance slip away.

Why did the brambles do us this favor, you ask?

Simple—they remembered that Miku had given them the soft comfort of her hair when she broke out of her tower long ago.

The hole the brambles had made opened an easy route to the castle's depths. A tunnel led inward through stone hallways, growing darker and more pungent with mildew the further we traveled.

After only a few minutes into our journey, I had gone deeper into the castle than I ever had before. I think the same went for all of us, actually. Neither I, nor Miku, nor the twins spoke as we trudged along with slow, uncertain steps, listening for any sign of pursuit.

Yes, I had not ever delved this deep below the castle. But I had heard the King whisper of a path that led to those stones. In a hushed tone, one of awe and respect, he spoke of "beauty," of "wonder" and "strength."

Among the choir members, we talked of his strange asides. We spoke of the rumors of old depths beneath the castle, dungeons with but one way forward. What it led to, none could fathom.

Neither could any of us until we reached it.

The farther we went, the darker and darker the tunnels grew. It's curious; when it's pitch black, time seems to crawl along so slowly that you can't even gauge its passing. The hours—or days, or however long—all become but part of the shadows. How long we had walked was impossible to gauge, let alone how far. It felt as if we had walked a thousand times deeper than the pit dug out for our radio observatory, and every step had that same stone surroundings, the same pungent stench and echoes of mysterious screeches, as though from an animal in fright.

It felt as if we had gone around the world dozens of times when we finally came upon the ruling-stone.

The stone stood, tall and imposing, in the center of a huge underground chamber. It was shaped like an obelisk, as though it had been cut and polished by skilled hands. So brightly did it shine that it saturated the surrounding chamber in a scarlet light. From its surface radiated a heat I could feel all the way from the doorway.

As we entered, none of us dared approach the relic, at least not right away. All we could do was stand before it, awestruck by its very presence and the faint hum it emitted as it hovered above the living-stone floor.

Even if anyone had wanted to break the silence after our long trek, none of us could. The stone froze us in silence before it; it commanded the room with that unintelligible hum, as if it was trying to smother all other attempts at speech.

Yet Miku, staring straight into its red depths, marched forward.

"We have to surround it," she called out over the incessant humming. "Our song has to encircle it."

And then she sang the first note.

The tone rose high above the ruling-stone's hum—matching its harmony, yet piercing through it. Around us the walls echoed with her voice, even though the stone, singing its own song, tore into our senses and demanded quiet, quiet.

It was in part that demand that compelled me to step forward. But it was also the magnetism of Miku's song, even though she held a single, sustained note.

I replied with a note of my own, holding it steady. Our chord grew into being, bit by bit—quietly at first, then blossoming into fullness, rich and resonant.

The music filled me—that simple union of our two notes above the hum. It sang in my chest, buzzing and vibrant, and from there spread throughout me like the warmth of a hot bath.

And as I opened my eyes from the music, I saw a crack open in the ruling-stone, cutting into it deeper, deeper.

"It's working!" Faintly, I registered through the song Rin's voice, and Len's after: "They're… I think they're almost…"

But they were drowned out. Marching, shouts—the noises like animals from before, now returned as furious screams.

Beneath our singing, now, they were shouting cries of alarm, cries of panic. They grew stronger and stronger by the second, with a steady, rapid drumbeat of pounding footsteps.

"Secure the stone! Don't let them harm it! Come on, you lot, hurry up!"

I didn't have to see Kaito to know he'd arrived in the chamber at the head of the column—though years had passed, it was hard to forget the voice of the man who'd banished me. He pulled to a stop in the chamber, his guards following.

"She's back?" His voice howled like a brass section, clashing with our song. Still we sang as he shouted, "And she's singing with the prisoner! Guards, hurry, seize them!"

Screams echoed from the twins. Grunts came from the guards, and the scraping and shuffling of a struggle followed.

But still I sang. Still Miku sang. Before us, the ruby red of the stone was growing dimmer, dimmer as the crack in its surface deepened. Yes, the breach in it grew and grew—so much that the panicked squeal of shattering gemstone had overpowered the rising hum emerging from the floating rock.

"My beauty! My source of joy, I swear, I'll…" Kaito's cries tapered off as the squeals from the stone continued. "No, please, don't—"

But it was too late; Miku's and my notes, united, had reached their crescendo.

They grew louder, loud enough to ring in my own ears like a tower's bell, as powerful in my head as in my chest. And the sound had dug into the stone; its deep split widened, screamed out as though in pain, and bright beams of ruby light shone from the gap.

Even with the song filling my head, I heard a faint clink from the ruling-stone—quiet, like a glass falling upon a carpeted floor. Though barely audible, it resonated within me like a mighty roar amid the chaos in the chamber.

Brighter beams of light burst out from the ruling-stone, exploding outward as entire chunks fell off it. Then, with an ear-shattering thunderclap, it exploded with a blast that sent me flying.

I rose from the floor of the ruling-stone's chamber shaken, yet unhurt. The blast had temporarily made me black out, but it seemed that was all. My heart settled back into my chest in relief as I saw Miku, too, rise from the floor unharmed.

"Luka? Miku? You're both all right?"

Len helped me the rest of the way up, Rin assisting Miku. No, they hadn't run—they'd no reason to, for the explosion had knocked all the guards to the ground as well. King Kaito, too, lay frozen upon the floor.

"I'm fine," I said, and Miku nodded to affirm her status.

"Then," Len said, "we ought to hedge our bets and get out of here. Who knows how long they'll…"

He was cut off by groaning and the clanking of armor. It seemed the blast truly had done little damage; all around us, the guards were rising, staggering and slow, yet without so much as a dent in any of their suits of armor.

At once, they set eyes on Miku. As one, they stepped toward her, spears turned toward her neck. Fear clouded her eyes, and I readied my legs to rush forward, my throat to scream.

"Stop! Stop at once!"

But it wasn't me who said it. From the chamber's entrance, King Kaito had shouted the command while struggling to his feet.

"Don't lay a hand on her," he said. With a shambling rhythm he limped to the center of the room, where the ruby shards of the ruling-stone lay strewn about. "She's done neither you nor I any wrong. No, more than that—she and her companions have done us a great service."

"She has?" I asked.

"We have?" Miku echoed.

And Kaito only smiled. "But please—this is no place for talking. Come, follow me to someplace more suitable."

There was little reason to trust him, of course. But all the same, trust him we did. I insisted upon it, and after a brief hesitation, Miku told the twins she felt the same.

How I decided such, I'm not sure. It was simply a feeling: a change in his aura after the ruling-stone had blown.

And after the journey out of the catacombs—a strangely shorter trip this time—we discovered that trusting him proved the right choice. His guards, though themselves perplexed, never laid a hand on us. Never did he order such; instead, he spoke the way there of the stone and its hold on him.

"I have no excuse, and I ask for no quick forgiveness," King Kaito said. "It was simply because of a song I heard one day, as I walked through a lower level of the castle. Though it was a song of just one tone, it was enchanting beyond words. So I followed it to where it led."

"And that was how you found the ruling-stone?" I asked.

"Unfortunately so," he answered. "You felt it yourselves. Its grip is like iron, and it clenches over the heart itself. Under its sway, I knew not any conscience, and I began to forget even myself. And the entire time, all I heard within me was the hum from the thing…" He sighed, smiling apologetically. "All I began to want was music to drown it out. And this was why I brought such pain to you, Miku. Indeed, it is why I wrongly punished you, Luka. For that cruelty, I must apologize."

Before us, he threw open the doors inward, and the old concert hall lay before us. Kaito led us in, motioned us to join him at the throne sitting amid the audience.

"I know I can never fully atone for it," he said. "Not only to you, but to the rest of the kingdom. But rest assured, I shall try. Indeed, already I know one way I might start."

From his head he lifted the crown. And he smiled as he lowered it—as he kneeled before Miku.

"I begin by giving this to someone more fitting," Kaito said. "Miku, you are brave, gallant, yet above all, kind. All these are what I have not been, and are all what a regent must be. It is only proper that the role is played by one better suited."

For some time, in the hush of the concert hall, Miku did not move. She didn't even gasp, or—it seemed—even breathe. The stunned silence of the onlookers was so suffocating that to utter even a single word seemed impossible.

But from this trance, too, she quickly broke free. With a smile, Miku took up the crown, and her hands upon the King's, she placed it upon her head.

"I so take this," she said, "under one condition."

"It will be done, of course," Kaito said.

And as she backed away from him, the eyes she laid upon me were a trillion times more brilliant than the sunrise that had shone on us during our reunion.

"I will take this crown," she said, "only so long as Luka is my consort."

Never, in all my eternities of life, had I been faced with a request with so clear an answer. And still I could not answer immediately.

It was only after I choked down my tears of joy that I could answer "yes."

And so it has been beside a throne that I've spent much of my time lately, my friends. But only as much as is required; neither I nor Miku enjoy dwelling on her status as Regent. It is far better for her to be out and about, enjoying this land, than to sit on the throne that pretends to own her.

Between choir rehearsals, we sing to old friends in the forests. We fly above the mountains. We revel in each new day, for whatever it brings, it will be spent with one another.

From my first frightened night wandering in your woods, that is all that I have ever wanted.

That is why it is still so hard for me to explain the hole that eats at my heart even now.

How dearly I wish I could bring you all here, with me, with Miku, with my other friends. Had I only the power, I would bring you past the barrier between us, into this place of only beauty, of only eternities of bliss.

To this very moment, I hurt at how we were brought together only to part. Whatever powers brought both our worlds into existence, I wish I could ask them why our circumstances were cast so differently.

Perhaps this is a part of any life: that certain paths must always diverge.

Even if it is so, I cannot help but weep inside at it.

You were in my thoughts in this way this last evening, as Miku and I sat atop a tower high above the line of the forests. The living-stone had grown it fresh, in place of the prison where Miku had been locked away. We gazed idly at the stars, recounting the stories behind each constellation. So long had I spent gazing at an entirely different sky, and yet, gazing up at them, holding Miku's hand tightly in my own, it seemed as if they had always shone above me, exactly as they did on nights long ago.

A long, long time we sat there, she and I. Neither said anything. In moments like those, no one has to. I could read on Miku's face the same contentment I felt, the same sense of ease.

It had been such a long journey to the peace of that moment, for the both of us. And it relaxed me to know she as well as I would simply enjoy it.

"How far along do you think they are, now?" she finally asked me.

She meant the twins, Rin and Len. Though we hadn't said their names that whole evening, still I knew.

"Far enough, surely," I said.

A faint bump below us suggested I was right. There rose from the tower's staircase stomps, a shuffle of feet, then a thud followed by shouting and quicker scrambling upward.

From out of the tower's stairway popped one blonde head, then another.

"We made it!" Rin said.

"Hope we didn't keep you waiting too long," Len followed.

"Not at all," I told them, and it was true. Eager though I was to see them arrive, I had found a certain equilibrium in that moment—a joy in Miku beside me, in the cool shadow of the night, even as inside I grieved my separation from the three of you.

The twins emerged from the stairway, carrying their delivery: a large, metallic dish, with a box receiver attached.

Oh, how you would have loved to see their faces when I told them I wanted this machine built. Rin lit up like a sky of fireworks, and Len looked as I must have when I first boarded a train.

No, neither had any real concept of a radio telescope—especially not one that might transmit wavelengths as well as receive them. But of course I expected as much from them. After all, I never would have thought to build such a device had I never been to your world, my friends. Had I not been there to see you design our observation dish, I never would have thought to describe such a device now.

And even so, the twins had built it, and brought it here besides. Miku gaped at it in awe—amazed, perhaps, that the two inventors had made my strange request a reality.

Yet her surprise gave way to smiles, jumping in place, little claps and laughter.

"You really did it! You put it together!"

"Didn't we say we would?" Rin said, beaming.

"Plus," Len added with a smirk, "Luka wasn't going to let us hear the end of it until we did."

And perhaps I wouldn't have, but no matter—it was there now for me to operate.

I did as much. The dish section I angled higher, higher—farther up to the stars, and rotated around to our tallest arch-trees, off in the distance. Far off, that narrow section of the sky was—but farther still were you three. I could only hope it would work despite all that.

"About there?" I asked.

Miku nodded. "Right there. That's exactly where we flew."

Yes—where the tiny point of my return lay.

Where our worlds might meet again.

I locked the dish in place. Bending down to the receiver on the device, I worked the controls, setting it to "on," then to "transmit."

The machine whirred to life as it began its work: radio waves bursting out from it, far off into the distance.

So far off, I had to hope, that it would reach another universe entirely.

Into the receiver I sang and sang.

But if I could make a request—Meiko, Lily, could you please leave the room for a moment?

I want to speak to Ia alone, but for a short while.

Have they gone? All right.

I know this is strange for you, Ia. I've been gone so long, surely—so long that I would hope you've moved on with your life, and have finally let go of your feelings for me.

But perhaps you haven't. Certainly, I know what it's like to long for someone across universes. I couldn't blame you if that's the case.

You've been so much on my mind since I arrived home. So much so, because of your kindness to me, your gentle nature. You have a caring soul, you know. An innate kindness that the borders of your own universe cannot hold.

It's a compassion that I will never forget, I promise you.

But I think of you also because I still regret how I left things. Yes, what I told you was the truth—as whole of the truth as I believed you would understand. Yet I knew I was leaving behind a broken heart, and I cannot tell how much it pained me to have left so cruel a legacy. Never did I want to hurt you, Ia, or any other person in your world.

It's funny—only now that I'm back on my side of reality have I realized just how hard everything must have been on you. How what we lived through may as well have been a lifetime, and how you gave up so much of it just to help me, to be with me.

You know, it's only now that I've returned home that I've realized our two worlds have differences that go deeper than how long we live or the clothes we wear. Where you live, it's a far rarer thing to see wrongs righted. And here, in my universe, justice is as much a law of the universe as gravity. Here, I have seen trees, words, and time-space itself labor to ensure that the innocent win.

In your world, the closest thing anyone can have to that is good people.

That was you, Ia. That was you, and Meiko, and Lily.

Call them in, and let them hear me say again:

I tell you, I never met any person as decent and as loyal as you three.

And so I came to the end of that message—that first one.

It was all song, floating through endless space in hopes of reaching not just someone, but you and you alone. I hoped that would make the signals something more powerful, something faster and more fantastic, than all the other matter within space. For most of it floats with no purpose other than its own momentum, although what I sent had purpose above all else.

But you know—I believe that long, long overdue message did reach you. In fact, I believe this one will, too.

It isn't simply on faith. It isn't simply out of my belief, or because of the feelings that flutter like birds within me now, or the steadfast conviction with which my song has flown.

No, what convinced me was that, for but a moment after I had finished my song, the sky above me changed.

My friends, in that moment, I again saw those stars we studied together on Earth.

Should you see a different set of stars tonight, know that this is why, and be happy above all else. I know I am—for as I saw your sky, I saw my darling, my Miku gaze at the new stars with such a pure look of wonder as I'd not seen for ages.