Bootsteps come thudding down the stairs—and I’m glad for it.
It shuts Mika up.
Arwyn returns.
I tuck the map into the pocket of my rain jacket, then zip it shut.
It’s another while longer before Samick is back and we move into a large, carpeted room, not unlike those cheap rent-a-rooms for weddings and conferences.
They always look so awful going in, but they end up with the best parties.
Samick tosses seat cushions onto the floor, Arwyn sets out blankets he stole from the rooms upstairs.
Mika drapes herself over stacks of pillows, like she’s trying to nest, and steals more blankets than she should.
I cape a quilt around my shoulders and huddle against the frosty air.
We eat out of our supplies, not from the kitchens at the hotel. No hotpots to fill my belly, just sweaty sticks of fae-world salami and crisps. The meat-sticks—smoky and chewy—are suspiciously filling, likeate my heart out at a restaurantkind of filling.
I just finish mine off when Samick and Arwyn go over the map again.
I hate the whole silver lining mindset. That’s more Bee’s thing than mine. But maybe there is one here.
The map is spread out over the carpet, right in front of me, under the glare of the torchlight—and I can make it out a bit better now.
Signals are inked onto the map, little backwards Ps and stretched Ws and upside down Vs.
All that, I don’t understand. I don’t even try to.
But the trails, I do.
The black lines have to be the routes of other units. The red line is theirs.
Red curves through mountain terrain, winds around waters, then cuts through land that looks a lot like the page in the map I have in my jacket pocket.
But on my map, there are no foreign signals and letters. It’s just plain old English, subtitled with French, and it says, ‘NEW BRUNSWICK’.
So I know that, if they unfold their map at the bottom, just a bit more, I’ll see the routes to Nova Scotia.
My dad lives just outside of Halifax.
Lived.
He’s dead.
Definitely dead.
I have no silly hopes or delusions that my dad is alive. And even if he was…
I wouldn’t give a shit.
Sometimes I wonder if something is wrong with me.
Mum used to wonder the same thing.
Took me to a counsellor once, when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. Then another. Then another.
Never found an answer.
