Chapter 922: Hole in Reality 2
No seam was showed.
There was no seam to show.
Reality had been edited.
And reality, unlike every author on this island, kept no drafts.
"Right?" Delilah pounced on it instantly, sitting up. "I haven’t seen Mom at all since yesterday. I assumed she was holed up with Sienna, but—"
"But Sienna hasn’t left her room since yesterday either," Victoria said, frowning. "Hasn’t so much as ordered food. Which for Sienna is practically a medical event."
"Patricia." Maddie spun on her. "When did you last see the Queen?"
And just like that, Patricia was the center of the car — as she would be, sharing a penthouse as she did with the uncrowned and yet entirely unchallenged Queen of the whole operation.
Patricia, who had somehow drawn the roommate assignment other women would have committed felonies for, and who wore the privilege with the serene obliviousness of a woman who’d been handed a dragon’s hoard and mostly appreciated the lighting.
She shook her head slowly. "I left her with Emily. Before I went down to the lounge with Valentina. Since then, I’ve been with all of you."
"Confirmed," Valentina said. "She was with me. I have receipts. Literal ones — she made me pay."
"You offered."
"I was being polite. There’s a difference, and the difference was four hundred dollars."
The cabin’s eyes swung, as one, to Emily.
Who was somewhere else entirely — folded deep into her own thoughts, gaze parked in the middle distance, the conversation washing past her unheard.
She felt the collective attention land on her like a spotlight, surfaced, blinked.
"...Yes?"
"Are you alright, dear?" the goddess asked, gently.
Emily smiled — soft, a little sheepish. "I’ve just been thinking about something. Sorry for spacing out. Did you say something?"
Patricia’s whole expression melted. She reached over and petted Emily’s hair, then simply gathered the girl into her arms and tucked her in against her side, settling her there with the quiet finality of a woman repossessing a stuffed animal.
"Don’t apologise," she murmured. "We were only wondering — when did you last see Melissa?"
And before Emily could answer—
"I took her to Paradise," Phei said mildly, eyes still on the sleeping princess in his lap. "I’ll be bringing her back later."
The car went still.
Then eleven faces rotated toward him with identical, dawning indignation — the slow synchronized turn of a jury that has just discovered the judge committed the crime.
"You—" Delilah’s finger came up. "You knew."
"You let us sit here playing detective," Victoria said, "for five entire minutes—"
"Interviewing witnesses—"
"Establishing a timeline—" Maddie was already cackling. "Valentina produced receipts, you absolute menace—"
"—while you held the answer the whole time?" Sierra finished, flat as an execution order.
Phei laughed — easy, unhurried, and entirely without remorse, the laugh of a man who has watched a fire he could have put out and rated it four stars.
"And whose fault is that?" he said. "Who told you to skip me in the questioning? You want the whereabouts of my woman and you canvass everyone in the vehicle except me? Is it not natural — is it not, in fact, the opening move — to ask the man where his woman is before deposing the rest of the household?"
The logic was unassailable, infuriating, and delivered with the smug serenity of a dragon reclining on a hoard it had recently audited.
Helpless against it, the car answered with a unified roll of eyes — Madam Ashford’s the most elegant, executed with the practiced grace of three decades of boardrooms; Maddie’s the most violent, performed with her entire neck; Amber’s accomplished without opening either eye, which everyone privately agreed was the most impressive of the set.
"One day," Maddie informed him, "we’re going to unionize."
"You’d never agree on a leader."
"...He’s right," Sierra admitted, to general dark muttering, "and I hate it."
And the chatter closed back over the moment like warm water, laughter and scheming and Valentina still defending her four hundred dollars, all the way until they arrived — a carload of brilliant, dangerous, terminally alive women and one dragon, rolling through gold light.
And not one of them noticed the other absence.
Not the women, sharp as razors every one. Not the goddess, who missed nothing. Not even Phei — Phei, who tracked presences across a convoy without trying, who catalogued every heartbeat he loved as automatically as breathing — even he did not notice that since the night they’d arrived on this island, a certain girl had been missing from among them.
Not missing the way Melissa was missing: located, anchored, expected back by evening.
Missing the way a word is missing from a torn page. Missing in a way that had stopped being absence and become architecture.
A girl who was now nothing at all but a hole in reality.
But now, at last, someone... ***
The lake lay vast and silver under the climbing sun, and Eira cut across it low and fast, a small fierce shape skimming the bright water — and somewhere over the middle of all that shining emptiness, the last piece dropped into place, and the whole terrible picture assembled itself at once, the way pictures always did: at the worst possible altitude, with no one to tell.
The strange void in her heart, the smooth, sourceless ache she and Phei had circled and prodded and wondered at and never once been able to touch — the emptiness that refused examination, that slid the mind off itself the way ice sheds water.
It had a name.
Maya Scarlett.
The young girl had not vanished in a day. She had been subtracted — slowly, gently, syllable by syllable and memory by memory, dissolving out of every mind that loved her so gradually that no alarm ever tripped, no instinct ever flinched, until not one of them could see that she was even gone.
Until there was nothing left of her in any of them but that: the emptiness.
’The ache with no author.’
The warm hollow in their souls, shaped exactly like the space where she used to be.
