#God I wanna say the OC too but I know Gab's nosey ass reads tags first so I CAN'T

[rogueshadeaux]

Chapter Twenty-Nine — Paper Trail

“We don’t know enough yet to make any assumptions.” Dr. Sims said cooly from the kitchen, like he himself was trying to hold back from demanding answers from the universe. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something in the files today. If not, hopefully the tests will tell us something we missed.”

6k words | 30 min read time | TRIGGER WARNINGS: Illness, medical procedures [mentioned], racism, abuse, lore. so much lore.

⚠ AUTHOR'S NOTE: There are a lot of imbedded links on this chapter! Some are very low quality, as I had to work with what I could screenshot off of Youtube. If only SPP compiled their stuff in one place like a normal game company. Anyways enjoy!

I woke up to Dad sitting on the floor next to the couch, calling my name gently. “Jeanie, wake up,” he hummed. “C’mon, I made coffee.”

“Do I have to?” I grumbled, face still in the cushions. 

Dad and I had stayed up for nearly two hours after I had walked back into the house and talked about everything; the guilt, the anger, the truth. He wasn’t as mad at me as I thought he was—while he was upset, he didn’t blame me for it. Any of it. “Jean, you don’t know what to do o-or what’s going on,” he reassured me, “I can’t get upset at you for that. I just want you to be careful.” He wanted nothing more than for me to trust his judgment. And maybe I needed to; Dad knew what he was doing. I’d be safe if I listened to him, right? I had to trust him. 

But it was hard, when we both kept hiding things from each other. 

So I extended the olive branch first, and told him the truth; the pain in my back when I use my powers but how it eases when I’m in water. He listened intently to it all, simply nodding along. “I’ll tell Eugene in the morning,” he eventually decided, “We’ll figure it out, I promise,” 

Maybe it was wrong for me to not say anything about Mom as I was huddled into his chest, but I wasn’t sure I could get through that conversation without becoming a blubbering mess. And besides, maybe that was simply meant for me. No one else. 

The heart-to-heart led to us falling asleep on the couch, my head in Dad’s lap as he reclined back. Apparently I exhausted myself in my sobbing so much that I didn’t know Dad slipped away in the morning. Not until he woke me up at least. “Eugene needs to give you a look over and we…we need to talk to you about something too.”

That got me to turn to look at Dad through my curtain of hair. He was crouched holding two cups, Dr. Sims standing behind him with his arms crossed. 

This was gonna be fun. 

Dr. Sims assured me he knew enough basic medical care to know if I was okay. “Or at least, if something is wrong,” he added, looking me over. “Double majored while in college, I just never took the MCAT.”

I had no idea what that was, but nodded like I did as he checked my pulse, timing it against his watch. 

He looked over my scars, checked their stitches. The hole in my neck was barely touched but he at least seemed satisfied by how it looked under its clear wrapping, which I was beginning to think was just saran wrap taped down. “Your dad said it hurts when you use your powers?” he asked me, examining the scar on my side. It was settling into a nice purple, bright against my skin. 

“It’s — it’s not really a hurt,” I started, trying to downplay it. Dad was looking at me too intensely for me to be comfortable with just admitting the fact. “It’s almost like I feel sore when I do, in between my shoulderblades.”

Dr. Sims nodded, hand coming around to my back. “Right here?” He asked, pressing between my shoulder blades. My hand tensed around the coffee mug as I nodded, trying not to wince as he palpated the area.

“Yeah,” I eventually said. 

Dr. Sims hummed, moving his hand away from my back. “And does it hurt while you use your power, or after?” 

I shrugged. “Both? But it only hurts while I’m using it if I do it for a long time. Otherwise it’s usually this, like, twinge after.” 

He nodded, moving to the table to type out some notes on his open mini-laptop. Dad sat back down on the couch beside me, one hand staying wrapped around the coffee mug while the other came to wrap around me. 

I didn’t like that. He would give out affection often, sure, but holding? That usually came before bad news. 

Dr. Sims picked up his laptop and brought it close, sitting on my other side. “Jean, we got your test results back.” He began. 

My heart stopped. “Already?” I asked meekly. Dad’s arm pulled me a bit closer to his side as I slightly turned to face Dr. Sims better. 

Dr. Sims nodded. “I pulled some strings.” 

I waited a moment for him to continue. “So then…what did the results say?” I asked. I hated that he wouldn’t start explaining without my prompting. 

Dr. Sims looked at the computer. “Well, the good news is that there’s nothing wrong with you genetically,” he began. “In terms of chromosomal makeup, you and Brent look perfect.” 

I nodded slowly. “That’s…that’s good,” I glanced over my shoulder at Dad. “But then,” I looked back to Dr. Sims, “Why am I not healing?” 

Dad’s arm squeezed around me gently. “That’s where the bad news comes in.” He said softly. “You know how we took samples of the stuff on your leg?” 

“Yeah?” 

“The results came back abnormal,” Dr. Sims said. “We’re not sure what that means yet, though. Once we’re done here with Mr. Dunbar, I want to take you to the nearest Accredited hospital to do more tests.”

I had to suppress a groan. More tests. “What would — what’re you looking for?” I asked. 

Dad took over the conversation. “Well, answers. We now know Augustine’s tar, one hundred percent, is what’s making you sick. We just need to know how, and why.”

“Mr. Dunbar already got in contact with someone who can examine the tar for us. He just left to mail it. They’re in Boston, so it will take a day or two to get the sample there — but I know this person. She’d be able to uncover any secrets we wouldn’t be able to see.”

 “And we need to make sure you’re okay, too.” Dad added. “See if anything’s changed since the last time we took blood, check your scars. Your arm could probably use a check-up too.”

“And I want to examine your conducrine gland, with your report of pain,” Dr. Sims continued. “I want to take a quantification assay and make sure you’re making enough proteins, and double check that you’re not having any complications. Maybe an MRI.”

I nodded once. “Okay.” I said, like I wasn’t both confused and dreading everything.

“Until then, if you have any more pain, you tell us, okay?” Dad practically demanded. Dr. Sims got up from his spot on the couch to set his computer back on the table, grabbing his empty cup and heading to the counter to get more coffee. 

There was something I needed to know, though. “Did Mom’s com–conducrine gland ever hurt? When she was sick?”

I could feel Dad’s arm around me tense. “It did,” he said. 

“So it’s happening to me too? I thought my test results came back normal, genetically.” I looked at Dad. “If it happened to Mom too, then how…”

A shadow crossed over Dad’s face as he scowled. “We’re wondering the same.”

“We don’t know enough yet to make any assumptions.” Dr. Sims said cooly from the kitchen, like he himself was trying to hold back from demanding answers from the universe. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something in the files today. If not, hopefully the tests will tell us something we missed.”

The hot cup did nothing to warm me as my blood ran cold. They both seemed angry at the idea that Mom had something put in her, too — and I didn’t like the fact that despite reassuring me they’re not sure what the cause could be, they both seemed settled on a reason to blame. 

Brent eventually stumbled downstairs looking refreshed after resting, which was a relief unlike any other as the image of his lifeless body began to lose its harsh edges in my mind’s eye. Dad managed to find and burn some eggs and turkey bacon as we waited for Zeke to return, and for a brief bit, it almost felt like I could pretend that everything was normal. That we were on some trip in a less-than-stellar rental and this was just breakfast after a night spent gaming or binging a movie series Dad insisted was fantastic. 

Imagining was all I could do to keep from dwelling on the what ifs. 

Zeke eventually came back — and then stepped back out, bringing in muddied ammo box after muddied ammo box. “They’re weather resistant,” he explained to Brent when he gave Zeke a bewildered look. “Which is needed when you live in a swamp. Good for hiding stuff.”

Dad crouched low and pulled his briefcase out from under the loveseat couch, saying, “I brought everything I could. Some stuff got damaged in Betty’s old storage unit, but I managed to salvage most of it.”

“Is that why you brought the briefcase?” Brent asked, glancing over at me. We had a bet going on what he was intending to do with it. “I thought you were just gonna start going back to work,”

Dad’s smile was half hearted. “Nope. Everything in here’s from my adventures,”

The way Dad sarcastically said adventures suggested it wasn’t the fun kind in the movies. 

Dr. Sims began working at his computers at the small table, the mini-laptop perched precariously on his lap as the other two shared the liminal space of the wood. Dad sat on the couch between Brent and I and opened up his briefcase, revealing a hell of random stuff; dozens of crumpled and folded pieces of paper, random little shreddings that almost looked like trash. There was some flier that was badly taped together and newspaper clippings, notes upon notes in Dad’s scratchy handwriting layered in margins of scrap paper and what almost looked like…

“Comics?” I blinked, pulling up the creased stacks of paper. “Did you make a comic?” 

I looked up at Dad in time to see him grimace. “No.” He said, flat. “Those were all clues some crazy killer left me while she tried to frame us all.” 

I looked back down at the artwork in my hands. “Oh.” 

“But there’s—“ Brent began flipping through the papers Dad shoved in his hands. “There’s DUP documents in this?” 

Dad shrugged. “I had to hack into their database to get some answers. She was Augustine’s favorite lackey.” 

“Always leads back to that bitch,” Brent murmured, glancing over at me. 

“Brent.” 

“Oh c’mon Dad, you can’t keep getting onto me about it,” 

“Help me organize all this,” Dad commanded, ignoring Brent completely. “I printed out everything I didn’t have a physical copy of so this is…it’s gonna be a lot.”

“How the hell are we supposed to organize this?” Brent asked, incredulous. 

“There’s serial numbers on them all,” Dad said, pointing to a row of one on a DUP document in Brent’s hand. “Find the connected files if you can.” 

“Delsin, come here for a second,” Dr. Sims said at the table. Dad promised to return and help but asked that we get a head start while he was going over something with Eugene.

The comic wasn’t really a traditional one, but almost some sort of manga; a story about a rabbit that lost her family in an attack, and was safeguarded by a large dragon before being locked away. The art style was immaculate, I had to admit — but I didn’t get how some story with a dragon was supposed to be a hint, unless this version of the Zodiac Killer was hiding some code in the shading. 

Brent nodded my way as I looked over the first page again. “What does that say?”

I shrugged. “Nothing much. Just a bunch of drawings.”

“I meant the back.”

“The—” I cut off, flipping the page. 

Death is just a passing phase. I’ve danced with demise, and let me tell you, he’s a bad dancer (always stepping on my toes). But I’ve learned to embrace the macabre — to navigate its twisted depths. Conduits and “normals” are at a crossroads, and if we don’t look both ways, we’ll all get run down. All I want — all I’ve ever wanted — is harmony between people.  Follow my lead and I’ll show you the trail of bodies. Seek out the corpses and you’ll find the truth decaying within. 

“...Oh.” I said meekly. This had to be what Dad was talking about. Some twisted manifesto by a serial killer. 

I flipped over the others, and each of them had something on their backs — some, notes, others, puzzles. “Hold on,” He said, leaning forward. He grabbed the second page of the manga. “‘If you’re trying to get into the DUP, I’ve been there. In fact, I died there.’” He read off. “Look, there’s that serial number thing Dad was talking about.” 

I read off the row of numbers. “Do you have this file? Starts with, uh—” I glanced down again, “3485?”

Brent muttered the number to himself again and again as he flipped through the pages in his hand. “Here,” he finally said, pulling one out from the middle of the pile. It was a statement issued by Brooke Augustine herself on the death of a Conduit detained at Curdun Cay in a death by a thousand paper cuts — literally. Suicide by dozens of cuts created by paper doves. “Jesus Christ,” I murmured, imagining the pain. I read over the memorandum again, pointing to its first sentence, “There’s a number here, do you have a file for that one?” I asked Brent, “Ends in 2606,” 

“I was just looking at that,” He said. “Fuckin’ — here. Some girl named Celia.” He looked over to Dad, who was behind Dr. Sims, reading something on a screen. “Who was Celia?” 

“Paper conduit?” I asked, incredulous. She could control paper! Or, did — at least with enough control to kill herself. 

Dad glanced over. “She’s the one that made those drawings.”

I blinked. “Guessing she also did the murders?”

“Yep.”

“How’d she get out?” Brent asked. “This says she died,”

Dad breathed deeply, Dr. Sims waving him off and letting him return to our side. “Augustine faked her death to sneak her out of Curdun Cay. Killed some random guard."

“But why?” I asked, looking up from the row of manga strips.

Dad didn’t answer — not at first, at least. He sighed deeply before reaching into the briefcase for a manila folder, opening it and peeking past the flap to check its contents. He nodded once before reaching in to start pulling out photocopies of pictures, laying them out facing us. 

“Jesus,” Brent muttered.

I wasn’t prepared for it to be 90% bodies and death, of someone pinned to a billboard or being held against a wall by dozens of paper doves, bloodied and beaten and dead. “I need you both to look at this,” Dad said, looking up at us with a serious expression. There was barely any emotion in his face now, eyes peering at us like we were on the stand. “Augustine and Celia did this to keep up the narrative. Killed people that had ties to your mom and Eugene to make it look like it was them seeking revenge.” He leaned forward slightly. “And Archangel bombed COLE to try and get me to show myself. There are people out there that will see you as nothing more than a chance to hurt someone else. Nothing more than something to keep the story going. These are the kind of people I’m trying to keep from hurting you.” He looked between Brent and I. “Do you understand?” 

I swallowed hard, forcing my eyes to peel away from the imagery of death and look somewhere, anywhere else. I wasn’t prepared for that. Bodies. A path painted in bloodshed long before I even had the chance to walk it, and littered with fresher meat for the sacrifice of someone else's cause. It felt so hopeless; was this really all there was? All there could be?

Looking away wasn’t a good idea, because my eyes moved from casualty to casualty as they landed on a picture of Mom next to some detective agency’s logo. 

My hand was moving to pick up the file before I could even blink, bringing the black and white photocopy close to my face. I swear, if I concentrated hard enough, I could make her eyes move, almost see how she would bring her chin up and cock her head to the side like she did in the hallucination. 

And this time, I wasn’t too sad while looking at the picture. Zeke was right; was it wrong to treat it as a fact even if there was a good chance it wasn’t? Maybe it was better, knowing the hallucination was just that and yet still being able to be a bit indulgent. 

I forced my eyes off of Mom’s photo to the blurb under it, reading through the information this random detective agency had. “Wait,” I murmured, rereading a single line again and again. “Dad? This thing says Mom’s parents wanted to…wanted to talk to her again.”

Brent’s head snapped around to look at me. “What?” He demanded, snatching the page out of my hand and swatting me away when I tried to take it back. “Holy shit, that’s Mom,”

Dad meanwhile did nothing more than sigh hard. “We did hear from her parents. Shortly after we did the whole gender reveal thing.” His jaw tightened at the memory. “It didn’t go well.”

Brent lowered the page, brow knitting closer together as he looked up at Dad. “What do you mean?” he asked. 

I put down the manga drawings in my hands, giving Dad my full attention too. I had always wondered, if we had a mom, where her side of the family was. I understood Dad was an orphan, he never shied away from that fact; but he never elaborated much on Mom except that her brother passed. I never found the courage to ask about grandparents on that side, either. Brent had once, and the scowl was enough to make me realize it was something he never intended answering. 

Until now. “We had met somewhere in downtown Seattle, which was probably the first mistake. They both didn’t want to be in such a liberal area, and it didn’t help that Lifeline was protesting a lot more after the mass Curdun Cay release. Your mom was still on trial for her murders—”

“While pregnant?” Brent asked, eyes widening. 

Dad shrugged. “All of us were. You think they were gonna let all of us go without a fight? There’s a reason the Akurans found your mom so easily.” He inhaled hard, trying to bleed the anger out of his voice. “They weren’t happy about the publicity of the trial. Add that on top of your mom having children with someone that wasn’t white, and the fact that they refused to apologize for turning Abbs in to the DUP and…well, why keep them around?”

“Jeez,” I hummed, glancing back down at the page in Brent’s hand, Mom’s face staring back at me upside down. I couldn’t think of much else to say but that, other than wishing I could’ve somehow supported Mom during that time. Her parents wouldn’t even say sorry for giving her away to the government!

Brent could form more words than me. “None of the shit she went through would have happened if they didn’t try to sell her in the first place,”  He bit, angry at their audacity. 

Dad nodded. “You would think they’d feel bad after everything that started coming out about Curdun Cay — the experiments and all that. But these are the same people Abbs told me didn’t think conversion therapy was a bad thing, so I guess they just saw it as another form of that.”

“Assholes.” Brent spit. 

Dad didn’t reprimand him that time. 

“Let’s just go through these files.” He finally decided. “Jean, get together all the F.A.N numbers from the back of those drawings. Brent, start throwing things in piles by person or facility or whatever.”

I snuck a chance at reading more of the manga as I scribbled down everything I found on a torn bill envelope Zeke passed over to me; it was Celia’s life story, pieced together by the files and clues connected to it. A girl who lost everything like so many others right here in New Marais before being found by a dragon and locked away in some cells carved into the side of a mountain. There was imagery of the child rabbit being torn in half as a being more sleek and pure colored rabbit, which I had to guess had to be her ‘death’ and rebirth, if the note on the back was anything to go by. In fact, I died there. 

It never showed how she escaped, but the next page did show three others as they rushed away from the dozens of wyvern pursuing them — it took me longer than I’d admit to realize who they were. The next page spoke the representation clearly though; ‘Inazuma…vengeance now her drug of choice.’ The peahen was slaying shady looking shrews with needles slinging away from their hands. 

Mom. 

The next page featured a rooster named Ushinatta who had ‘went back to playing games’, the rooster opening its huge wings and calling down hens to peck at some bullies. That had to be Dr. Sims. 

There was a third guy, though, that I realized I didn’t know. 

Kemuri. Some sort of lizard…or maybe a gecko? “Who swore he’d never harm anyone” the page read as the gecko attacked a caravan driven by an elephant. There were three people that escaped that van, weren’t there? Mom, Dr. Sims…and someone else. 

I lifted my head and was about to ask Dad when Brent said, “Here, this dude matches the drawing,” under his breath, handing me another DUP file. An incident report, in fact:

Despite our best efforts to isolate the detainees in as safe and thorough a manner as possible, two ward-mates developed a relationship that threatened to undermine the careful work being done with both: inmate 007-3171-8404 began looking out for 056-7339-2606, warding off any bullies and establishing a friendship.  RESOLUTION: Inmate 007-3171-8404 was relocated to the maximum-security ward, due to his history of escape attempts and insurrection.  Monitoring of inmate 056-7339-2606 has been increased ever since she used her daily paper privilege to create the attached image:

A full body drawing of the gecko was photo scanned with the DUP file, creased lines doing nothing to hinder the artwork.

My new friend was taken away today, the words under it read, It was my fault, I’m sure. I was just trying to be nice…just like he was nice to me. He told me I reminded him of his daughter. And now, just like my real parents— He’s gone. 

“You got anything on this 8404 inmate?” I asked Brent. Dad was busy organizing a bunch of little tags, not even registering that we were talking. 

Brent’s side of the floor looked way more organized than mine; perfect piles of paper with shredded clippings on top of each one, numbers or names scribbled on top. “Yeah, uh—” Brent’s eyes scanned the piles in front of him before he reached out, snatching the page away so fast that the clipping on top of it fluttered off somewhere. “Here. You plan on organizing the comic thing, by the way?”

“Fuck off,” I murmured, nearly laughing when Brent’s head snapped towards Dad as he waited for the reprimand, and balked when he saw it wasn’t coming. I stuck my tongue out at Brent before looking at the inmate file, trying to keep my snickering as quiet as possible. 

Hank Daughtry. Apparently some guy that was a criminal before puberty, who’d rob or break out of jail every chance he got — but never harmed a civilian when he did. Curdun Cay was the first place to keep him in place. At least, till that military vehicle.

The power section, though, held all of the answers I needed; he could wield smoke. Embers and fire, too, if the paper was to be believed. I could hear the echoes of Dad’s voice in the back of my head: “She thought the guy I got smoke from told me about her plan — the breakout and DUP funding, all that.” 

Betty had said Dad helped bring down her warehouse when he first got his powers. The first power. Smoke. 

But that didn’t explain why Dad was so quiet about this guy. Why, before this moment, I had never heard of him. “Dad?” I asked. 

He tore his eyes away from the newspaper clipping in his hands. “What’s up?”

“What happened to this Hank guy? You know, after Seattle?” I glanced down at the file again — there wasn’t even a picture of the inmate on this one. There was a wall of blacked out text at the bottom of the file, though. “Did he not help you guys?”

Behind Dad, Dr. Sims stopped typing, looking over to where we sat. Even Brent stopped to see what Dad was gonna say. 

“He didn’t.” Dad said simply, jaw clenched. “It was just me, Eugene and your mom that took on Augustine.”

Brent blinked. “What, did he not want to?”

“I wouldn’t have let him if he did. He was a piece of shit, anyways.”

I glanced down at the inmate file; moral code, immense self discipline. Whatever issue Dad had with him sure didn’t seem to match the document. “What happened to him?” I asked.

“Does it matter?”

Dad’s voice bit with a ferocity that wasn’t usual from him unless we were in trouble. “I mean,” I scrambled to say, the tone activating the fear of getting grounded in me, “I guess not? I was just wonder—”

“Then there you go. It doesn’t matter.” Dad inhaled deeply before continuing, “If Daughtry’s files don’t have anything useful in them, then do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Throw them in the trash.” Dad said flatly, moving to get up. He left towards the kitchen where Zeke was messing with the discarded stuff from another ammo box, roughly grabbing the stale pot of coffee to pour a cup and drink it black in one go like it was a shot. 

I looked over at Brent, bewildered, who was already turning back to face me with his eyebrows shot up so high they were close to disappearing into his unkempt hair. He mouthed What the fuck? at me and all I could do is shrug, taking the rest of the papers in Daughtry’s pile to look over. May as well double check them before they became landfill food. 

Not that there was much left in his pile; There were three more pages with no more than three paragraphs on the largest one, each following reports of Daughtry possibly being seen somewhere in Seattle after he broke out blowing up cars in an attempt to assassinate that asshole senator who was caught years ago saying something about how Hitlers policies at least were keeping people safe in that leaked audiofile as he admitted to trying to replicate them for Conduits. 

One of the bullet points on the results of the DUP’s investigation caught my eye, though: no residual signs of Ray Sphere radiation detected. Radiation? Why would there be radiation in the middle of downtown Seattle? “Does anyone know what ray — Ray Sphere radiation is?” I asked the room.

Over in the kitchen, Zeke’s head popped up, looking to Dad for a moment. Whatever he was trying to ask, Dad gave him permission with a shrug of his shoulders. “The Blast in Empire City was from a Ray Sphere.” Zeke began. He took a moment to dig in a box before pulling out one of those leather journals that always looked a little too light brown to be real, brass metal corners of the journal catching the light as Zeke flipped it open. “The First Sons made it.”

He began walking towards us with the journal as he flipped through pages, humming when he landed on what he wanted to show us. “Here. Journal’s useless in some spots ‘cause it’s written in code, but this is what the thing looked like.”

He flipped the journal over and held it out for me to take; the page was a sketch, one side full of components, the other what they all looked like pulled together into one device. 

Brent snorted beside me when he scooted over to look at it, and I knew it was because we were thinking the same thing. “It’s shaped like a Death Star,” He said humorously, looking at me with an eyebrow raised. 

“Just as powerful, too.” Zeke responded. “Thing blew up six blocks and killed thousands.”

That shut Brent up real fast. 

“But I don’t—” I cut off, looking down at the drawing. The etchings beside each piece were all code, the only one highlighted being a jagged piece of rock. “Why would the DUP look for Ray Sphere radiation at an explosion site? Unless they thought someone was trying to take out Seattle.”

Dr. Sims moved off of the barstool, walking over. “May I?” he asked me, giving a nod of thanks when I handed the journal over. He perused the page and then looked at Zeke. “Where did you get this?”

“It was Wolfe’s,” Zeke answered.

That one word was enough to make Dad’s head snap up, and he turned around. “Raymond Wolfe?” He asked. 

Zeke shook his head. “Sebastian, his brother.”

“Oh,” Dad said flatly. “The First Sons scientist. Great,”

Zeke shrugged, gracefully brushing off Dad’s disapproval. “Hey man, sometimes you have to be willing to drink the poison if it means you find out how it would kill someone. We used this to figure out how the RFI worked.”

Dr. Sims flipped through the next few pages, eyes lighting up. “I know this code,” he murmured, before looking up at Dad and Zeke and repeating the words. “I know this code — it was in one of the DUP files I stole. I could decode this journal,”

“Y’think it would have anything that would help us in it?” Dad asked. 

Zeke looked over his shoulder. “Wolfe was the First Son’s top scientist. If there’s anyone that might have information, it would have been him.” Zeke shrugged. “I reckon it’s worth a shot.”

Dr. Sims snapped the journal shut, nodding. “I’ll move upstairs to the spare room, I’m going to need the space.” He said decisively. Each laptop was put in rest mode and shut, stored away at a speed I didn’t know what possible out of someone so lanky. “D, come get me if you all make any progress down here, okay?”

Dad looked at Zeke. “Do you still have the stuff from the runaround with Wolfe?” 

Zeke turned to face Dad fully, watching Dr. Sims disappear up the stairs. “No, I gave it all to Alessia. She might still have it, if we’re lucky.”

Both Brent and my head shot up. “Wait, like, Aunt Sia?” I asked, looking at Dad.

Alessia was known to the world as the chairwoman of COLE and an old ringleader of Project Sanctuary, the nationwide underground anti-DUP movement. In those seven years the DUP had control and were hunting down Conduits to bag and tag, Alessia was trying to sneak Conduits over the border, stage protests, and…well, give the DUP a hard time. If it involved picketing or slashing tires, she was there, coordinating the attacks. 

We didn’t know her as that woman for the longest time, though. To us, she was Aunt Sia; the woman who would watch us when Dad had to go take an exam while he was in school, or needed a break. A babysitter that cared so much about us. The cool lady who brought these fancy Japanese candies every time she’d come over and would take us to things like renaissance faires. I remember her teaching Dad how to braid my hair and making huge masterpieces out of legos with Brent, indulging me by declaring every little drawing I made a masterpiece. She had moved away six or seven years ago and we really only got to see her when there was some big COLE event near Portland. 

But I was surprised to find out that she knew Dad as Delsin and not just Damion.

Dad’s eyes wandered off as he thought. “I…I could call her, see if she still has anything from then.” Eyes snapping back to Zeke, he added, “You’d have to show me how to make calls with your setup, though,” 

“‘Course, it’s in my shed. C’mon, I’ll show ya,”

Zeke was heading towards the door with Dad hot on his heels, who only stopped in its frame to turn to Brent and I and say, “Take any notes on anything you don’t understand, okay? Maybe we’ll figure something out.”

He was gone before we responded. 

“You think this was what he did the whole time?” Brent asked, looking at me and holding up the stack of files he hadn’t gone through yet. “Just reading files and shit?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know. Last I heard he was attacking innocent civilians and killing random passersby.”

Brent rolled his eyes. “How he dealt with all of this without killing someone, I’ll never understand.”

We worked in silence for a while, me taking the time to finish the story and begin to piece it to its pieces of evidence; Saisei had found a new friend, a bird with two heads, and it wasn’t hard to make the connection on who that was supposed to represent. He would tell her stories, and they would laugh for hours on end, the page said, largely contrasting the story Dad had told us. It had to be some sort of mockery thing; I send you running around, and you try to figure out why I’m a psycho. What a laugh! 

But the dragon came down, disapproving of their banter. I fail to see the humor, it said, to which the two-headed representation of Dad replied look harder before beginning to fight her. The personification of Augustine. An epic battle of good and evil…but the roles were debatable the page read, like I was supposed to sympathize with Augustine as she fell to Dad’s talons. 

I wasn’t ready to read the little bunny call Augustine’s character Mama. 

“Look at this shit,” Brent murmured, handing me a page. It was an email log between two people. “Does this make sense to you?” 

It made a lot of sense, too much sense, as I read the first message title: Purotekutā to me (“Saisei”).

I explained the comic to Brent as we reread the email chains together, the pieces of the truth falling in place. “Augustine asked her to stay in the shadows, that she can’t protect Celia.” I looked at Brent, bewildered. “D’you think she adopted Celia? Like, as her own kid?”

“Well she calls Augustine Mama in this thing—” he waved around the stack of stapled manga, “So I’m guessing so. Or whatever fucked up version of ‘family’ they were playing up there in Curdun Cay,”

“‘You have done everything I asked and more, but unless he can be controlled, Delsin is our enemy.’” I read from the email chain. “‘He is blinded by his power, he thinks he’s invincible. But without walls, without his brother, who will protect him?’” 

Brent scoffed. “What a bitch. I should have killed her when we were fighting in the Sound.”

“Think that’s crazy, you should read the last entry on this thing.” I said, offering the paper with the email chain. “Celia messages Augustine saying something about needing to know whose purpose was stronger and that’s why she didn’t try to help her.”

Brent shrugged, taking it. “Raise a lunatic, and don’t be surprised when you’re eventually their victim.”

“Augustine really made everyone her pawn,” I hummed. “Mom, Dr. Sims, this chick. How much of it do you think was to protect Conduits?”

“Not enough, considering she lost.” Brent huffed.