12 – To Value the Time We Have

Erika sat at the kitchen counter of the Walker rental house. School was out, Thanksgiving was tomorrow, which left several days without her having to worry about pretending to care. She really should just stop going—having a GED meant she wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place—but it was a decent place to meet up with Daniel, hear gossip from Kassandra, and otherwise have some amount of normalcy in her life.

She certainly wasn’t getting any normalcy here.

Leah—and Erika was relatively sure that it was mostly Leah—stood at the oven, curling the meringue of a lemon meringue pie; Carter worked next to her, opening a can of pumpkin for the other pie. Erika just watched from her seat, surprised they were even having any kind of Thanksgiving celebration this year. It wasn’t just all the supernatural stuff. Their house had burned down. That kind of put a damper on things, both financially and emotionally.

Rather than help out, Erika just watched from the sidelines. Too many cooks in the kitchen was a real problem, and this kitchen was even smaller than the one at their old house. Leah didn’t mind, humming to herself as she finished with the meringue.

It was very much like the first few weeks of October. Her mother was there, but things were just ever so slightly off now. It didn’t help that Erika knew what was off. How things used to be was simply broken, and it wasn’t going to come back.

Carter seemed to have accepted the situation. A little explanation that Leah was still there was all he needed to treat things as if they had never been different.

“What’s it like?” Erika asked as Leah slid the pie into the oven and set the timer.

“Hm?” Leah hummed as she turned around, wiping a bit of pie filling on her apron. “Tangy, lemony, meringue-y. You’ve had pie before, Erika.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Erika said, glowering at her mother. “What’s it like being… merged? Or whatever it is.”

Leah pursed her lips momentarily. She glanced over at Carter—currently doing his best to whisk brown sugar, eggs, and the pumpkin together—before rounding the kitchen island to sit next to Erika. “What brought this on?” she asked.

Erika shrugged. Her mother, as with Daniel’s parents, thought she had only gone out to see a movie the other night. Saying some little girl’s ghost gave her a few things to think about wouldn’t affect Erika much; she didn’t really care if Leah or The Fixer knew what she had really been up to, she just didn’t want them talking to Daniel’s parents and letting something slip. So, instead, she just said, “I realized I never really asked.”

Leah ran her fingers through her sandy brown hair, lightly scratching at her scalp. “It’s… different,” she said. “Most everything feels the same, except sometimes I’ve got a voice chiming in with an extra opinion on a topic. When he takes over, it’s like a wave of exhaustion hits me and I go lie down for a nap, except I tend to wake up in completely different areas and wind up a little disoriented.”

“And you have no control over it? You can’t say no?” Erika said, lips thin. “That’s…” She wasn’t sure what word she wanted to use for what she was feeling—disgust, perhaps.

“It isn’t like that.” Leah was quick to respond. “We communicate. For example, right now, he asked to take control so that he could explain things. I said no.”

“But he could, if he wanted.”

“Well, yes, but he won’t unless there is an emergency.”

Erika wasn’t sure how Leah could trust that. To her, it felt like Leah was being humored. Given that The Fixer had existed for at least a few hundred years, it was easy to think that she was just being strung along for the time being. Maybe something was different this time around. Presumably, The Fixer hadn’t knocked up all of his past aliases.

Which raised another question. “Is there anyone else in there with you? I only got to read the cover letter of The Analyst’s dossier, but I saw enough to know The Fixer had dozens of other names attached to him.”

Leah closed her eye for a moment, then spoke again in a softer tone. “Just because we’re like this now doesn’t mean I won’t die. I’ll still get old, and time will pass. Eventually, it’ll catch up to me.”

“But not to him.”

“From what I understand, he isn’t a being of this world. The world itself rejects his presence. He and other things like him get around that by using other people as cover, hiding from the gaze of reality.” Leah paused again, frowning slightly. “He’ll continue until he accomplishes what he came here to do or he has no other covers within which to hide.”

“Then what about the man he appeared as the night he met with The Analyst, the man from after the museum fiasco?”

“A cobbled-together collection of concepts taken from others to use as a temporary cover. His personas aren’t full covers, though, and will eventually wither away as the world asserts itself,” she said. “Useful for short amounts of time, but worthless in the long run. At the moment, I am his only proper cover.”

Erika drummed her fingers against the table. “At the moment.”

“Yes.”

Carter finished scraping the bowl of pumpkin into the pie filling during the short silence that followed. He turned around, smiled at Leah, and simply pointed toward the oven.

“Everything ready?” Leah asked, standing. She moved around the counter, wiped a large droplet of orange mush from Carter’s cheek, and then opened the lower oven door.

It seemed the conversation was over. Erika… wasn’t sure if she was satisfied or not. She hadn’t meant to grill them like that. Rather, she wanted something to talk about, some little bonding session so that, if something happened, she wouldn’t regret the cold shoulder she had been giving them over the last month. But then it turned out like this, another discussion that left her with a sour taste in her mouth.

She just couldn’t understand how they could be fine with everything—Leah more than The Fixer. A vampire probably didn’t see humans as more than blood bags. An Outsider probably didn’t see them as more than hiding places from the world. Perhaps The Fixer was different than others of his being classification, or perhaps it was all lies.

At least Leah had some autonomy; Erika could easily imagine a world in which The Fixer hadn’t cared and just completely took over. There was still some small doubt in the back of her mind that Leah wasn’t there at all, that it was all an act put on by The Fixer—including the slight shift in personality between them.

But that couldn’t be. There would be no reason—no point to it. Some entity like The Fixer wouldn’t pretend to care if they didn’t care.

They wouldn’t give Carter that little pinch on his cheek the way Leah did or bother with a fancy meal for a holiday.

Would they?

Erika shook her head. There was a limit to how much she could guess and second-guess every single little thing with no further hard facts to actually base her guesses on. Erika just had to trust that they were both in there and carry on. If she found evidence otherwise, she could deal with it then.

“How is it that The Mummy tracks me breaking things?” Erika asked as they all headed over to the couch while the pies cooked.

It wasn’t as comfortable as their old couch. Their old couch had been broken in over years and years, a product from a time when furniture designers made seating for comfort over looks. The couch here looked good, especially in online rental advertisements, but felt like a mound of moss balls covered with a fabric that made her hands feel like she needed to wash them every five minutes.

Leah looked about as uncomfortable as Erika felt, though for entirely different reasons. She frowned a moment, and shifted. There it was. It wasn’t a physical transformation into the Mister Dice persona, but there was a certain difference in their demeanor, posture, and even facial expression. Their back was a little straighter, their lips a little firmer, and their eyes lacked that softness that Leah had.

It couldn’t be an act.

“The Mummy’s cult possesses a number of Mage-class beings. There is a branch of magery called divination which can be used to ascertain information that the user may not be able to naturally acquire.”

“Divination?” Carter said. “Fortune telling?”

“Of a sort,” The Fixer said with a small smile. “Every mage has their own tactics and techniques, so I can’t speculate on the exact mechanics. Some might use traditional methods, such as a crystal ball or chicken bones; others might be capable of far stranger feats, such as fracturing reality to view all possibilities of any given event.”

Erika raised an eyebrow, somewhat bewildered by that idea. She was fairly good at breaking things and yet couldn’t fathom how she might break reality. It was probably best for everyone that she didn’t try, ontologically speaking.

“Right. Let me try again. Why are they finding me now? I’ve been breaking things my whole life, and yet they don’t show up until you show up?” Erika shook her head. “Seems a bit suspicious.”

The Fixer pursed their lips a little, taking a deep breath through their nose. “That is partially my fault, I will admit. Last year, I finally found a fresh lead on them, a golden mask I knew belonged to The Mummy, stashed overseas—revered by a small cult in rural China.

“That cult, as far as I could tell, had nothing to do with The Mummy beyond possessing the mask,” they said, leaning back on the couch to stare at the ceiling. “It was an enchanted artifact which the village leader used to receive portents of the future, mostly in the form of a crop growing aid, but also to prevent and mitigate disasters stemming from fire to earthquakes to droughts.”

“They… had a mask that could tell the future and used it to see what crops would grow well?”

“Indeed,” The Fixer said with a small smile. “I take it you’re imagining more valid uses?”

“Lottery numbers, sports betting.” Erika paused, thinking a little harder to find something to say that wasn’t completely financially motivated. Not having to break into ATMs anymore did sound nice, but… “Glimpsing medical breakthroughs, see some secrets to fusion power? Uh… warn people about collapsing buildings, bridges, and the like?”

The Fixer chuckled, shaking his head. “Humans require food. We have our base needs met, but not everyone is so fortunate. All across the world, there are people scrounging to survive. An artifact that ensures your group of people won’t have to worry about starvation is a powerful artifact indeed.”

“Right,” Erika said, not altogether happy about being exposed as someone a bit superficial. She tried to get back onto the original topic. “How does this relate to them tracking me?”

“I’m getting there,” The Fixer said, leaning back to look upward once more. “You recall the gateway you passed through to reach the Vermin Mother’s domain?”

Erika shot The Fixer a flat look. “Is that rhetorical, or do you expect me to forget something that happened just a few weeks ago? Humans might not be whatever you are, but our memories are not that bad.” Assuming I count as human, Erika thought idly.

“The mask turned out to be a similar object, except instead of a full gateway, it was a mere window. The visions the village elder had been receiving were twisted slightly, designed to pull some aspect of The Mummy out of its prison. It was a long and patient plot, reshaping the terrain into a massive ritual. Not that the villagers were aware, they simply carried out their farming according to the designs of the mask, not knowing those designs were nefarious.

“When I arrived at the village, it was in the guise of a Mage-class being I had been with for the last twenty or so years. An unknown to The Mummy. That was the only reason I assume I was allowed to get near the shrine holding the mask. I sought to remove it from the village, both to stymy the plot in the village and to investigate it elsewhere at a more leisurely pace.”

The Fixer paused, frowning a heavy scowl. “The moment I touched it, I heard chanting from nearby villagers in a language not Chinese nor any other Earthly tongue. The two nearest to me took out old, ceremonial daggers and slit their own throats. The—” They stopped abruptly, looking down at Carter. With a small look of apology to Erika, they continued, clearly skipping a large section of the story. “I managed to destroy the mask, but that was all I could accomplish. The villagers killed my cover and almost took me with it.”

Erika winced, picturing the scene in that otherworldly place. Leah, strung up by hooks and chains, cut and battered and broken. She still bore some scars, though most weren’t visible with sleeves on. The eyepatch over her eye was the most attention-grabbing part.

“That still doesn’t answer my question.”

With a small pop of their eyebrows, like they just realized they forgot about that bit, The Fixer said, “That Mage-class being I had as my former primary guise was capable of concealing oddities. A spell I enacted after Leah contacted me regarding your unique abilities. With that guise’s death, the spell faded.”

“You can’t just recast the spell?”

“I am not a Mage-class being.”

“Yeah, but don’t you know the magic words or whatever?”

The Fixer shook their head. “That’s not how it works. I’m currently using some of my abilities to affect a similar effect, but it only works in my presence.”

“You should have been clearer about that when you first showed up,” Erika grumbled, not happy at all with the half-shrug she got in return. “What about me? Can I do that? I’d like to be able to break things without having to watch my back.”

“Have you been breaking things again?”

“No,” Erika said.

“Erika…”

“Not really.” She huffed as The Fixer leveled a look at her. “Fine, a little. But I’m careful to do it where I’m not going to stick around.”

“It’s dangerous. Now they know for a fact that you can break those chains, they’re going to hunt you down…”

“All the more reason to teach me how to hide it,” Erika said a bit more aggressively than she intended. “I’m not going to not break things—or avoid using anything else I can do—my entire life. The Mummy is going to regret messing with my life, I promise you that, but until then, it would be best for us to be safe. For me to not lead these fuckers home again.”

The Fixer pursed their lips, frowning lightly. If Leah had been in charge, she probably would have admonished Erika’s language. “I’m not sure you can, is the main problem. It’s a temporal effect. Any evidence is basically thrown a hundred years into the future. Anyone wanting to track you would have to know where and when to look.”

Erika closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose. “That can’t possibly work.”

“I’m a bit better at such edits than you are, Erika,” The Fixer said with a small smile.

“No, I mean, you just said they have a mask that tells the future.”

“Ah. I’ve seen no evidence that The Mummy is capable of seeing that far into the future.”

“Apart from the generations-spanning plot to terraform some rural village, you mean?”

The Fixer shook their head. “When the humans constructed the Hoover Dam, I was there. It had been scouted and proposed since about 1900. Construction started thirty years later, and it was completed six years after that. None of the humans could perceive the future, and yet they still carried out their plan, did they not? Just because The Mummy has far-reaching plans doesn’t mean The Mummy has far-reaching sight.”

That was an idiotic view on things, in Erika’s opinion. If she could see decades into the future, she sure as shit wouldn’t tell anyone. She would do her absolute best to disguise any actions derived from that future sight, perhaps by claiming she got information elsewhere or just acting randomly and having one of her actions a bit less random than the rest.

“Fine,” she said after a moment. “Assuming that is true, what about Cart? Could he learn?”

The Fixer looked down at Carter with a thoughtful look on his face. Carter looked up, expression far more neutral. “Maybe. I thought about it, but decided to wait a bit while I investigate a few other options.”

“Look, Fixer. You might be some kind of time abyss who can’t tell the difference between a week and a year, but we aren’t,” Erika snapped. “If you can teach him, you need to do it now, not wait until it is too late to learn to protect ourselves. I’m not worried about me so much—I’ll break every bone in anyone who comes after me—but Cart can’t do that. You teach him how to hide the weird stuff we do, and you teach him now,” Erika said, jamming a finger down into the couch.

For a moment, nobody moved. The Fixer and Erika stared at each other. Carter, between them, glanced back and forth. Erika didn’t break eye contact to look at her brother; she could only see him in the corner of her vision. She was too busy trying to impart the seriousness of the situation to The Fixer.

Ancient beings just didn’t have a clue.

A light beep came from the oven timer. Neither Erika nor The Fixer looked away.

“The lemon meringue pie is ready,” they said softly. Maybe soft enough that Leah was bleeding through a bit more.

Erika rolled her eyes. “Well, get the pie. Then teach Carter. Understand me?”

The Fixer finally broke eye contact, looking down at Carter. Carter offered a slight, small smile as he looked back up.

“Very well,” The Fixer said, standing. “After dinner, I’ll see what I can do. No promises that it will work, however. Carter is better than you at this, true, but still a far cry from where I’m standing.”

“Just do your best. Please,” Erika said, watching as Leah’s posture took over The Fixer.

She gave a mostly proud smile to Erika before heading back to the kitchen.

Erika dropped her straight back into a lazy slouch, giving Carter a mild glare. “You’d better pay attention. This is your homework from now on. Practice whatever they tell you every chance you get.”

“Mommy told me homework doesn’t actually matter,” Carter said in a completely flat tone of voice.

“You…” Erika narrowed her eyes, glaring until Carter’s face blossomed into a smile. “Ugh.” She clapped her hands on her knees, standing. “Tell them I’m going out to buy a new guitar,” she said as she stomped off to her room to get changed.

It wasn’t exactly how she planned for the evening to go, but at least she had talked to her mother—her parents. That was a step forward.

A frustrating step, but a step nonetheless.