After AnimeCon 2: Winneport Trip

    The lights in the workshop were flicked on, and Rebecca surveyed the room with a contented smile. There were too many happy memories in here—because the area remained firmly under her grandfather’s thumb, little had changed here since her childhood. A store of lumber for future projects was racked overhead, a long workbench with a wall full of tools filled one side of the small building, while the opposite side featured an antique enameled steel refrigerator, as well as the parking spot of her grandfather’s pride and joy; an old but carefully maintained riding lawn mower from the fifties which he took across the small property once a week.

    What had changed over the past few years was the gradual introduction of Rebecca’s Daegonhir project area just beside the fridge, but she had inherited her grandfather’s tidiness and organization. Two eight-foot spears with the stubby padded tips were tucked in on her edge of the overhead lumber rack, because any veteran player worth their salt had a spare in case one of them needed put aside from events or practices for maintenance. Just beside them was her six-foot glaive, which did in fact need mending, as well as her ‘red’-classed longsword, which to her embarrassment had never needed repairs, because it was so seldom used.

    I’m really just so much more partial to sword and board, Rebecca mused to herself.

    Her tower shield was standing up just to the side of the fridge, and she lifted it up to check that the padding of its bottom edge hadn’t compressed over time. She had it resting on a strip of leftover foam from one of her weapon crafting sessions, and after a moment of examining, Rebecca found no problems and returned it to its spot. A tall plastic waste bin just beside it stored over a dozen ‘blue’ class short swords in various states of disassembly, and she indulged herself with a few moments to tug out and remember each one.

    Like most who got into live action battle gaming and made their own garb and gear, Rebecca tried a little bit of everything, because each time she made a new sword was an opportunity to experiment with something a little different. Her earliest surviving examples had thick blocky foam crossguards wrapped with black duct tape, and as the collection progressed, fancier and more intricate designs with plastidrip rubberized coating became apparent. Most of these were broken, they’d had their stabbing tips of softer foam unseated, or sections of blade separated from the core and were too much of a hassle to take apart without destroying the crossguards to access beneath the sewn fabric covers. Quite a few of them also had pommel caps which had twisted off after a fall, or even broken and bent core rods after another fighter had stepped on her weapon.

    My LATEST was… you, yes, you, Rebecca fished a particular sword out from the others standing in the bin.

    This one would need completely rebuilt, so she picked a fingernail beneath the upper edge of the plastidrip crossguard and tore the rubberized sealant coating and closed-cell foam beneath it apart so that she could strip back the fabric cover and take a look at what happened along the blade.

    Excaliburg! You were so lovely. Half-inch square fiberglass core, if I remember right? Blade foam is completely chewed up. Not a problem with my FOAM, per se—the packing tape I use for extra support has ultra thin fiberglass strands in it so that it can’t tear… but some EXCEPTIONALLY violent smashing had those little strands constricting and starting to cut the the outer foam layer beneath into chunks. Which, from the looks of it then created stress points where EVEN MORE subsequent destructive bashing caused the softer polyethylene foam layer to tear away from the 'sterner stuff' closed-cell EVA foam I have right around the core.

    Remembering the way Brian had started to let loose and really swing at her kindled a tickle of excitement in her tummy. He wasn’t yet a skilled swordfighter, but there was something beautiful about the way she watched his own restrictive foibles and mental hangups clear away and his strikes become artful violence. When Brian stopped overthinking things, he seemed to fall into a sort of zen state where he began to achieve rare economy of motion with each stroke and he began to commit to strikes with speed and power that few of the trained fighters Rebecca knew could manage to achieve.

    THIS will be the start of Brian’s new sword! Rebecca thought to herself with a grin. There’s no sense in giving him another golf club graphite core one, it wouldn’t survive a whole event. Mostly we use the cheaper three-eighths-inch round fiberglass cores for newbie swords, but with his stupid sexy strength? Sword would flex too much under stress, and that would mess up the blade layers fast.

    After speculating for a few moments while she unwound the support tape and began to deglove the blade, Rebecca decided that three-eighths-inch round would probably be fine for the girls, until they found their stride with what weapons they preferred to use. Emily in particular Rebecca was still being strict with, because her overenthusiastic friend only ever wanted to dual sword always, and wasn’t particularly careful with how she oriented her ‘blades.’

    Thus! If I can’t convince her to switch to maces or clubs, I need to design a new covered grip that makes it extremely straightforward which way her edge is going, Rebecca thought. Because… yeah, she took the twin cutlasses we made her home with her last time, and I would bet anything she didn’t bother to store them properly. AGAIN.

    Hitting someone with the ‘flat’ of the blade not only wasn’t particularly safe and wasn’t supposed to count as an actual hit—it more importantly wasn’t good for the poor sword! These padded safety weapons were very carefully designed for their striking surfaces to bear the brunt of all that exerted energy. Some of the lighter-touch battlegaming groups used the big gaudy pool-noodle bats as ‘swords’ which were completely safe to hit from any side, but Daegonhir despite being full-contact had the much much better looking weapons that actually resembled weapons with tapered edges and clearly defined blade flats.

    And Emily, OH MY GOODNESS GYRATOS you CAN’T just prop them up in a closet somewhere standing up! That RUINS the stabbing tip foam over time! I have mine stored in my bin here in a very particular way, so that they’re keeping each other from resting their weight on their tips!

    Rebecca also had several javelins, shaped throwing weapons, and even a gorgeous flail with a padded ‘chain’ of interlocking foam rings hiding the fibercord that had taken days to construct to both Daegonhir safety rules and Rebecca’s even more draconian aesthetic sensibilities—but the different color coded damage system and play rules for those were more complicated to pick up, so Rebecca was going to keep their first practice simple and stick to sword and board for her batch of newcomers.

    Don’t want to throw too much at them at once! I think I’ll start them off with single blues, then go from there to blues and shields, and then from there you introduce reds that can break shields, and ahyup. That’s already pretty much a whole afternoon practice just with that!

    So, she turned her attention next to the rest of her shields—Rebecca didn’t have enough for everyone. A wire shelf rack up above the bin of swords held three large viking round shields; her nice new one with the plastidrip detailing across the front that was made to look like planks with wood grain and a ‘metal’ filigree with celtic knotwork, and then her older somewhat battered fabric cover shield with the celtic knotwork embroidered across the face, and finally a bare blue foam shield blank, meant as a spare to transfer the cover of the fabric one onto in the instance that their foam was damaged.

    Emily will be dual-swording like always and won’t need a shield, because in events she’ll be too busy dying immediately to an opportunistic hail of arrows and javelins and such. The same as every other unlucky sod who shows up to a battle without a proper shield! Shields are SO important! Brian… I REALLY want to outfit him with the tower shield. He’s so… TANKY! That leaves a shield for myself, one for Stephie or Kell… and then yeah, I’m coming up short on personal equipment to lend out. So, one practice maybe, and then we’ll have to have a group build session to make some new equipment?

    Her grandparents had always joked that Rebecca could outfit an entire brute squad with just her own little armory there, but the fact was that most of her swords were retired or in need of reblading, and Rebecca never liked loaning out so many weapons that there weren’t any spares to be had, because some of those weapons would break, and then some players would be empty-handed. That was just the nature of full-contact battlegaming with homemade weapons; even when they were designed and put together by veterans like Rebecca with years and years of experience it was a simple fact that for safety the weapons couldn’t be made too durable, or actual injuries started appearing.

    Now, what all do I have for TUNICS? Emily wears my old garb from when I was much younger… I have a few tunics that MIGHT fit Kelly and Christine. Probably nothing that will fit Brian. We’ll need to get started on all of that stuff right away, too…

* * *

    The drive out to Winneport to meet Christine’s father was a long one, about the same distance from Seneca as their trip to AnimeCon. The problem was, after a few increasingly awkward attempts at small talk, things had gone silent between them. Brian wasn’t sure if she was brooding about the upcoming confrontation, or if she was beginning to regret last night, and the unease which came with not knowing made him want to keep trying to get conversation going again.

    Anything was better than stewing together in silence as the boring breadth of interstate passed by their windows for another half hour—and Brian wasn’t exactly feeling hyped to have a tense first meeting with her father in a little while. Certainly not after everything he’d done to her last night, and it was hard to suppress those familiar pangs of guilt as they kept creeping back up.

    “You alright?” Brian asked, glancing over at Christine. “You got awfully quiet.”

    “Yes,” Christine answered. “...Sorry.”

    “No, don’t be, it’s just—” Brian let out a wry chuckle. “It’s like I could tell when the happy buzz was starting to wear off, for you.”

    “I—” Christine didn’t seem like she knew what to say. “I should just apologize for how, um. Cringe, I was being. While I was high on all of that. I was being too forward with you, and going from that back to uh, to intense self-scrutiny because of my magic thing, I just… I’m so sorry.”

    “Christine,” Brian said. “You’re fine. I deal with Emily, for Christ’s sakes. Trust me—”

    “But, that’s the thing,” Christine shook her head. “I’m not Emily. I’m—I’m the one who’s done everything to you, and put you through so much. I have no right to just be so… flippant. About anything. Not with you. Not when—”

    “You have a certain amount of leeway to speak however you want,” Brian refuted. “Especially after last night. Last night helped. It hurt. It was, I don’t know, progress. It was this insanely intimate experience we shared together, and it’s like that makes us—I don’t know. We’ve been through thick and thin, at this point. You don’t have to lapse into the honorifics or distance or professionalism or whatever it is you’re—”

    “I do,” Christine said in a quiet voice. “Trust me, I do. Please.”

    “...Okay,” Brian sighed. “I’m not gonna get on your case about it, then. You do whatever makes you feel comfortable. I just—I just wish you were more comfortable relaxing around me. I’m not gonna uh, snap at you, or get angry, or—”

    “No, no I know,” Christine said. “I don’t mean it like that. I just—I owe you. Very, seriously, truly owe you. I’m very, very deeply in your debt in ways I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay. The two years as your slave thing actually—”

    “Whoa whoa whoa, maid, not slave—”

    “—Actually really does help,” Christine insisted. “Thinking of it as being something I can work towards absolving really does help. But, I’m just… impatient to actually start doing that. I want to just do that. To get into that mindset, because that would make me feel so much better. If I was your respectful maid, or, or personal assistant, or whatever we wind up calling this. I don’t care what we call it. So long as I can work at making this right.”

    “Okay,” Brian digested all of that for a long moment. “Then—does what happened last night count?”

    “Last night—” Christine blushed. “I, uh. Last night was… I don’t want to say it was mistake, because it’s not like that. I don’t mean that. But I was too—I was pushing you. And, I shouldn’t have kept pushing you, and I apologize for that. That wasn’t right of me. I was, um, upset, or I was—”

    “You spiraling,” Brian offered.

    “Yes, I was spiraling, a bit, and I don’t mean to use that as an excuse, either,” Christine said. “But, I shouldn’t have kept pushing you. That’s not my place and I don’t have the right to do that. As for what happened after, what ended up happening…”

    “Was it too much?”

    “No, no, I—I don’t want to say it like that,” Christine floundered. “The sex was… I don’t even know of a word that could describe it. Phantasmal? Fantastic? Insane? Terrific and terrifying? Just calling it ‘magical’ doesn’t really begin to do whatever that even was any kind of justice. It’s just—I kept pushing you and pushing you and pushing you, because I was selfishly wanting to bring out your dark side, just to gratify my desire to—I don’t even know how to explain it, now. It sounds crazy. I wanted to be punished, I think I just flat out wanted you to hurt me, and then I kept badgering and browbeating you until I got what I wanted. It made me feel like—like yeah, I’m still a lot more Chloe than I want to pretend. In the end, maybe I always will be. And that, the idea of that just…”

    “I hated it,” Brian admitted. “The sex. And, it was a lot of fun. Too much fun. It was a very surreal experience. I didn’t think I could ah, could vent some of that darkness in me onto another person. And still be able to look anyone in the eye afterwards. But, the way things worked out… I don’t know how to put it. It did work out. To my surprise.”

    “Okay,” Christine frowned, parsing each of his words again in her head. “To just clarify. For me, it was very, very good sex. The best I’ve ever had. Maybe the best I’ll ever have? I, um. I’m just saying that I wasn’t being very fair to you, or, uh, or I was somewhat feeling like I was taking advantage of you. That familiar feeling. Because—because it was always easy to just push and push you, until I made you compromise.”

    “Sure,” Brian nodded. “So just—let that work both ways. Compromise should work both ways. I did my best to uh, to accommodate what you needed last night. And that really did work out, turned out to be something I maybe needed, too. So, when I need you to, you can then do your best to help me with what I need. Give and take.”

    “What do you need?” Christine asked.

    “To not feel like I’m some kind of shithead?” Brian shrugged, switching to a more teasing tone. “Maybe it’s just because I’m so used to you as Chloe, but sometimes when you put on your submissive maid act, it feels more like you’re trying to be some battered housewife caricature or—”

    “I am not,” Christine sighed, quirking her lip in amusement at the levity in his voice. “I’m trying to be… professional. It helps. My dad had a—well, I doubt he still has her with him, but the woman who was his assistant back then that I was, um, trying to be back when I first decided to be a new me and accidentally wound up going seven steps too far and became Chloe—well. Anyways. She was always all business. Claire was. I liked that about her. I, uh. I thought it was cool.”

    “And, you based ‘Chloe’ after her?” Brian arched an eyebrow. “Jesus. Hope we don’t ever met her then, if—”

    “No, no—I, uh, I intended to be like her?” Christine grimaced. “What actually wound up happening instead was… honestly more like I was turning into my mother? Huh. I… fuck, I never really looked at it that way. Fuck.”

    “Alright, I definitely know that feeling,” Brian chuckled. “I think Emily laid it out for me like that. Said that me trying to not be anything like my dad so hard made me into this total doormat for you. I mean, for Chloe. You know what I mean.”

    “It’s… it’s really horrible the way things went for us, there,” Christine sighed. “I’m sorry that everything went like that. I really, truly am.”

    “We’re moving past it,” Brian said. “We’ll get through this. And, moving on—let’s talk magic.”

    “Okay,” Christine agreed. “Magic.”

    “What do you think about it?”

    “Uhh—” Christine balked. “I don’t even know what to say. About my magic?”

    “Sure.”

    “Mine is just… it’s a mirror,” Christine shrugged. “I don’t know what else to say. You uh, you don’t mirror at people, or you don’t really mirror people. It’s not a verb word, it’s not something that you do or like a thing you even can do. It’s just a thing that… is? It’s passive. It’s a mirror.”

    “C’mon, your charm thing seems like the second most crazy useful thing, and that’s only because Kelly getting future bullshit is too overpowered,” Brian said. “We would’ve been super fucked in that situation with the Masters, if not for you and your specific mirror stuff you have, there. Have you figured out anything at all?”

    “It’s… not the same as it was,” Christine answered with some difficulty. “Or, not as strong? It doesn’t feel anywhere near as powerful as it did when I was part vampire. It’s like with the, uh, blood path of magic all of that unlocked my charm abilities the whole way right away. Like flipping a switch. From off to the whole way on. With how I have it now, it’s much more… gradual. Like I’m a quarter turn through the whole twist of a dimmer switch.”

    “Okay, alright,” Brian thought that over. “We’ll work at it. I guess yours is gonna be hard to figure out how to practice with. I wasn’t gonna throw you in between us and the Masters and try to reflect their death beams or whatever, I’m just trying to think of how we can do that safe space thing you were doing for Stephanie.”

    “We’ll have to see,” Christine said. “Even then it wasn’t like I was really controlling it. It just… was.”

    “Do you want to learn how to do the parlor trick magic stuff?” Brian asked. “The thing Kelly does, with making a bit of light at her fingertip.”

    “Is that what she did?” Christine blinked at him. “Is that what she was doing? I know you guys said that, but uh. I think at that moment there, I was really still Chloe and just… didn’t believe a word any of you said. About anything. I wasn’t capable of really listening and having an honest dialogue with any of you, even.”

    “Right,” Brian sighed. “Well, apparently there’s like—magic exercises for beginners, practice things you can work at to get better with? I think that’s what Emily’s up to right now, she left a note on the white board.”

    “Yeah, I saw that,” Christine said. “And, I mean. I guess I’d want to learn? Who wouldn’t? If it’s like, actual magic. The sex and uh, our weird interpersonal bond we have is magic, but it feels less like… video game magic, and more like… I don’t know. Mystical spirit journey kind of… abstractive psychedelic nonsense?”

    “Know exactly what you mean!” Brian nodded. “S’why I want to get Kelly to teach us how to do tricks. Learn to levitate shit with my mind, create balls of light, all that jazz. Start little fires from nothing. Hopefully there’s something like magic munition. Video game magic. I uh, look I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I can’t say I’m not jealous that it seems like everyone in the group gets their own unique special charm power thing, and then I just kind of… don’t.”

    “I think you do have a charm thing,” Christine shook her head. “It feels like you do.”

    “Yeah?” Brian couldn’t help but sound hopeful.

    “Yeah. I think so, at least,” Christine said. “Maybe it’s—no, I don’t just want to throw out blind guesses.”

    “No, please—” Brian laughed. “Guess away?”

    “I want to say that we all fit together in mysterious ways, even when we probably shouldn’t,” Christine postulated. “Maybe that’s because of you? Some sort of slight nudges that adjust causality in little ways, or something.”

    “So—I’m lucky?” Brian nodded. “Could be, could be. I mean, I can’t say I’m not lucky, not when I have a whole damn harem and all of this.”

    “But, then again—you haven’t just been lucky, either,” Christine pondered. “You’ve definitely had a lot of bad happen, too.”

    “...True,” Brian shrugged. “Yeah. I guess.”

    “Or, if we look at it in dreamscape terms—maybe your charm power is that you’re the dreamscape?” Christine guessed. “You feel like our, uh. Like our foundation, there. Like maybe none of the rest of all of this stuff can even exist, if it’s not built up off of what you have going on. That could be your power?”

    “Hmm,” Brian thought about it. “Gets hard to guess what a power might be, because we don’t know what all we should just be chalking up to the nature of the charm ‘network’ tying us all together and all of that to begin with. There’s that magical refresh thing, too—that disappears all our sweat or whatever and makes us wake up feeling clean.”

    “Emily’s mom might know?” Christine suggested. “Or, she could give us more of a baseline for what a normal magic harem is supposed to be.”

    “Yeah, but…” Brian made a face. “Man. That’s gonna be an awkward as hell conversation. Damn. We uh, we couldn’t say anything right after ‘cause Emily was there, but… we talked to Emily’s mom last night. Kelly and I.”

    “You did?” Christine blinked. “Last night? When?”

    “Right there at the fuckin’ bonfire,” Brian let out a huff of a laugh. “She was right there with us the whole time. Disguised as uhh—I forget her name. Katie’s friend. The girl that was sitting there with Katie. Dahlia? Dolly?”

    “I remember her,” Christine frowned. “I think. She didn’t talk much.”

    “Yeah,” Brian nodded. “Right when they were leaving with Rebecca, she came to say ‘bye,’ and—I thanked her for coming by at the hospital as Actress. For them helping out with the healing spell frame shit or whatever they did. Then, she—”

    “Wait, so how could you tell it was her?” Christine asked.

    “I couldn’t,” Brian explained. “Her illusions are perfect. Kelly got a heads up from some future Kelly, or we wouldn’t have been able to tell at all.”

    “Shit, Kelly’s charm power is overpowered,” Christine said. “That’s totally cheating.”

    “Well, yeah but—so is yours,” Brian said. “Emily’s mom even said so—said she was being real careful to not step over too close to you, so your mirror thing wouldn’t break her cover.”

    “Really?” Christine said. “She didn’t seem to have much of a problem with that at the hospital. Figured it out and countered it or whatever almost right away.”

    “Well, one thing’s for sure—she’s crazy powerful,” Brian said. “She unmasked right there in front of us and then had it look like—to us—our part of the circle warped or bent or twisted way out away from everyone else, to give us a bunch of room away from everybody. Space to talk. And, no one else seemed to notice, a thing, so—”

    “Yeah, I definitely don’t remember anything like that.”

    “So, yeah she was showing Kelly and I one illusion, while at the same time making everything seem normal for everybody else, while also like she’d followed Katie and Emily and Rebecca way back out to the front where the cars were parked. So, she was splitting simultaneous stuff around to three different groups, there. Actually, come to think of it, from what she’d said her real body did follow them that whole time, so she was also projecting way, way across the whole property with her illusion stuff.”

   “Then, that means she still had a way to see and hear you,” Christine frowned. “Right? You two were talking with her?”

   “Yeah,” Brian thought about it. “I didn’t really think about that. She can interact through her illusions? Somehow? At extreme distance? Shit, it’s hard to even say what she can and can’t do with all that then, I guess. Or maybe I should say that stretches way beyond what I’d normally consider to be just ‘illusion?’”

    “But, that’s her charm power, right?” Christine asked. “Not a regular thing we can all pick up through practice, or whatever.”

    “I think so,” Brian nodded. “Had to be.”

    “Then…” Christine pursed her lips. “What are the odds Emily inherits a similar sort of thing? Her… charm aura stuff has interacted with my mirror in weird ways.”

    “I’ve thought about that, too,” Brian shrugged. “I’d give it a fifty-fifty. It’d make sense if that was a power thing that got passed down through bloodline, but also… I don’t know. The charm things so far have seemed very individualized, or like tailored to what each person seems to have needed to help with our personal issues. So, Emily would probably get something else.”

    “Uhh. I hesitate to even ask, but what are you thinking Emily’s… issues that a charm power would fix could be?” Christine asked.

    “She has some confidence issues,” Brian admitted. “Her height, her uhh. Stature. She has major problems actually working through her own issues, and she’ll put up a front and just deflect everything with humor as a crutch.”

    “So—each of those things makes it sound like illusions fits perfectly?” Christine said. “Don’t they?”

    “What? No, each of those is what makes illusion not fit at all,” Brian frowned. “Right?”

    “I guess it depends on how you look at it?” Christine shrugged. “What sort of power do you think she might get, that addresses her specific issues?”

    “Sense sharing, maybe?” Brian guessed. “Like, maybe she can see through each of our eyes, hear what we hear. Project her spirit out of her body for reconnaissance? I don’t know. That at least could put her in my perspective and have her really see that she’s more than perfect just the way she is. I think that’s what she needs. Her getting illusions would be like her… I don’t know how to put it. Like she already has her dark humor on one side as a crutch, then she’d have illusions on the other side as a whole ‘nother crutch?”

    “I think I see what you’re saying,” Christine nodded. “But, her thing is water, right? She could also probably get something to go with that. Like, healing or cleansing. Purifying.”

    “Ehh, maybe,” Brian said. “Stephie has fire and then empathy, those aren’t exactly tied into each other in common conception.”

    “Fire and empathy, a mirror and antimagic, then starlight and future sense?” Christine muttered. “The mirror still feels like the really odd one out, here. I mean, I know starlight’s not exactly a conventional element, but it’s at least sorta one. A mirror is just… a random fucking object.”

    “Isn’t there a mirror in tarot?” Brian said. “Or, something like that? Maybe we’re all just way off base and have been missing the real connective theme this whole time.”

    “It… this stuff with us doesn’t feel like tarot to me,” Christine shook her head. “Tarot relies a lot on flexible interpretation, whereas like… Emily being a river just means in the dreamscape she’s a river. It’s too literal. My mirror’s a mirror. Like, yeah there’s also some symbolic meaning to it—to a point—but, not like in tarot with the card inversions changing the readings into some completely different narrative and all that.”

    “I’m earth,” Brian said. “Which is what makes me feel like maybe I will get a power, because I have an element to my stuff. Although—you say our stuff doesn’t have flexible interpretation, I’d kinda disagree there. My ‘earth’ changes context depending on which of the other girls I’m interacting with, at least to some extent. With Emily I’m like the guide rails directing which way her river goes. When Kelly’s a falling star, it makes me a planet. To Rebecca it’s like I was something she could grow up out of, and similar with Stephanie because I was like fuel. Which… I guess kinda defies normal convention for ‘earth’ as an element?”

    “Dirt can burn,” Christine said.

    “...Can it?” Brian chuckled. “Isn’t throwing dirt on something one of the ways you can put out fires?”

    “I think it depends on the dirt?” Christine shrugged. “Whatever its composition is. Dirt can be like, decomposing organic stuff, compost. That would burn. Maybe. If it didn’t have too much moisture content to catch fire, I guess. If it’s more minerals or like sand, then it wouldn’t burn. Or, at the other end of that—really, anything and everything can burn, at high enough temperatures?”

    “Huh,” Brian said. “I guess you’re right. Does your mirror burn? When you’ve interacted with her stuff?”

    “It’s just reflected her burning,” Christine shook her head. “We, uh. Her and I haven’t been very intimate, though. So—who knows what’s possible, there? I think maybe the fact that so far I’ve reflected her burning instead of burning myself is the reason why she could stand inside my little area and have her empathy thing go silent.”

    “Could be,” Brian said. “Here, looks like this is our exit. Winneport?”

    “Winneport,” Christine confirmed with a sigh.

    “He knows we’re coming by?”

    “I left a message,” Christine said. “He should know.”

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