(19)

"Aren't tests of courage more of a summer thing?"

Wakana Kelly's complaint came as she, her little sister, four other girls and one boy stood in front of an old Japanese style mansion that groaned in protest of the spring wind that had yet to quite forget the winter cold. The grounds, once a carefully manicured garden, were now completely overgrown and nearly unrecognizable as anything once cultivated by a human being. Vines scaled the building by hooking their tendrils into the wooden frame as lichen trailed more slowly behind them, lounging in the places the former loosened and opened up the fibers.

"Nobody is making you come along," Natsumi replied with crossed arms.

But Anna just raised her finger and spun it, causing the car keyring hanging from it to jingle. "You're totally right, as the only one willing to drive you, I could have made you all walk."

The redhead grit her teeth and stepped toward the college student. "I meant you don't have to stay in the house! I was trying to be considerate if it bothered you!"

Wakana just scoffed at the suggestion and jerked her head toward the boy. "Sorry, 'Sumi, but as the only adult here, I can't leave you girls alone overnight with a guy. Everyone's parents would take turns gutting me."

"Hey, do you have to talk about me like I'm some sort of dangerous animal?" Jack protested at the older girl's remarks before motioning with both arms to the ruins. "I'm the one that's getting us in here!"

As Natsumi shifted her attention to the poor boy, accusing him of making it all about him, Wakana noticed how closely Nariko had been watching the interaction between her and the redhead, and now the one between the latter and Jack. She knew the expression; Riko was studying what she was watching, analyzing it, deciphering it. It was in the eyes, that narrow focus they got that seemed like a laser beam.

Where it didn't match up was in the rest of the face. The rest of her expression was almost blank. Her little sister normally had a confident smirk when watching something like that, bordering on outright arrogance. Instead, aside from her eyes, the only thing was a slight frowning of the mouth that seemed more like focus as she committed things to memory.

Then Nariko noticed her looking and glanced over to her. Wakana pointed to the corners of her own mouth and drew her lips up into a smile. The look of embarrassment on her little sister's face as she awkwardly laughed at herself was genuine and very much back in line with how the girl normally behaved.

It'd been several days, and she was still trying to wrap her head around the idea. Too much of the time, it was just Nariko, to the point she found herself forgetting it wasn't. Not that she was entirely convinced. No imposter could be that accurate so often or so naturally. And yet there were things Nariko had known all her life that she suddenly, genuinely didn't. And there were times like this that some behavior was just enough off to stick out like a sore thumb.

But for now, Wakana didn't let herself worry about it. She just reached over and ruffled her little sister's hair.

Natsumi's tear-down of poor Jack was wrapping up with some of the other girls finally managing to calm her down, so Wakana took that opportunity to clap her hands twice to get their attention.

"So are we going to spend the whole trip standing around out here? We've still gotta find a decent spot to set up and a car to unload! Let's get to it, huh?"

* * *

The inside of the once-stately manor was completely different from the outside. Oh, it hardly looked new, but it was shockingly intact. Mats and cushions still lay waiting for derrieres, paintings and scrolls still hung from the walls, their occupants watching the children passing by underneath them as if it were a common appearance, and even the floor lacked meaningful clutter or debris.

"It is good that the weather tonight is supposed to be clear," Reina commented as her eyes searched the wooden ceilings for points of penetrative light. "It will be difficult to tell where any holes are until it actually rains."

"We should keep an eye out for spots on the floor," Nariko suggested instead. "Places where wood is discolored or raised, or where metal is tarnished or carpet is moldy. That'll be where the holes are."

Reina nodded in agreement and lowered her craning head. "Everyone, watch for spots like that when you're picking out a place to lay out sleeping bags. Until we can confirm the state of the second floor, assume that will be on this one."

The brunette chuckled at her tone. "When did this camp-out become a survey?"

Meanwhile, Haru was uncharacteristically quiet, lurking around the outer edge of the group and hugging her arms to herself, occasionally reaching out to brush her fingertips over some feature of the room that drew her attention.

Natsumi noticed and moved over to check on her. "Hey, you doing alright, Haru? You cold or something?"

"Huh?" The blonde looked to her as if surprised at being addressed, having been well and truly off in her own little world. Once her mind caught up, though, she shook her head. "No, I'm fine. It's just ..." She lifted her gaze to the top of the main staircase as if expecting to see someone there. "... This house ... it feels ... lonely, y'know?"

The redhead hesitated for a moment. "... You mean like how it's still full of stuff with no one to use it, right?"

She opened her mouth to answer, and even inhaled a little, but after a pause of reconsideration, shut her mouth and simply shook her head.

Natsumi took a step back before she could stop herself and gave an awkward laugh. "Ahah. Funny, Haru. Really funny. Buildings don't have feelings. Save the ghost stories for when we're ready to turn in, why don't you?"

Homura rallied herself quickly, however, and turned toward the group as a whole as she pumped her fist into the air. "Hey, why are we all just standing around in the living room, anyway, huh?!"

"It's the entrance hall," Ran quietly corrected her.

"Who cares!" the redhead declared in reply. "Are we exploring this place, or what?!"

* * *

The girls spread out through the house as their curiosity dictated. Haru and Nariko drifted toward the upper floor under the pretense of "confirming its state," but really, with the ground floor still furnished, Haru wanted to see the bedrooms.

The blonde led the way unerringly down the long hallways and past several other doors before sweeping into a single bedroom. It was obviously a child's room, with an appropriately sized framed futon bed with neatly tucked sheets. A colorful hagoita paddle set and a hammer-like kendama were in a box on a shelf built into an alcove. The box shared the shelf with a set of pillar-like kokeshi dolls and a daruma with one eye blank. Charcoal drawings and several tako kites were displayed on the walls. In one corner of the room was a child-sized tea table, set out for two. An inanimate figure knelt on the far side of the table, momentarily mistaken by the girls as a person. The remarkably realistic-looking child was only a life-sized doll, however, still waiting with eternal patience for the return of her hostess.

After the girls had a moment to take the room in, the brunette turned her attention to the one that had led her here with a smirk on her lips. "Been here before, have you?"

"Nope!" the blonde giggled as she airplaned about the room, her previous melancholy replaced with the excitement of exploration. "Just went where it felt the strongest!"

Again, another mention of the empath detecting something. "Haru," the brunette asked, her tone dropping to one more serious, "what, exactly, is it you're feeling?"

"Hmm ..." Haru stopped spinning about the room to consider the question, tapping a finger to her chin and looking up toward the ceiling as she did so. When she thought she had a good explanation, the finger pulled away to point upward as she smiled back at her friend.

"Oh! You know how it feels when you're the only one at the playground and you have all of the toys to yourself and at first it's great because you can play as much as you want but then when you're there for a long time you realize how much of it is meant for more than just you and you really start to miss having others to play with but no one comes and then how excited you are when another kid finally shows up and you can't wait to share all of your favorite stuff with them?"

The brunette stared at her and had time to give a long blink before she finally managed to formulate a reply. "... Uh ... not ... quite so specifically, but I get the gist."

The blonde beamed even brighter and gave a chipper nod as she clasped her hands behind her. "It's like that!" she simply concluded.

"... Right."

* * *

Back on the ground floor, Natsumi had found the manor's kitchen, and marveled at how well stocked it was. Pans still hung from hooks above a hardwood island, and every matching utensil still hung from the wall or could be found in the drawers.

"Hey, Wakana," she called as the college student happened to enter the room. Meanwhile, the redhead was sticking her head into the oven. "Everything's in such good condition, we could totally just cook in here!"

"Absolutely not." The sternness of the older girl's voice caused the redhead to pull out of the firebox and look toward her to see what was wrong. "Everything may look in good shape, but if we don't know for certain, then we aren't using any fireplaces inside the house. If the chimney's blocked up or full of debris, or if the fire wall has broken down, you could set the whole building on fire or kill us with carbon monoxide."

With a threat like that, Natsumi reflexively took a step away from the woodfire stove, even if it had nothing in it.

Wakana was already stepping back into the hallway, though, to shout into the rest of the house. "Hey, Riko!"

"Yeah?" her little sister's voice called back from what sounded like somewhere on the second floor.

"I'm in the kitchen! Come here, I've got something for you to do!"

Sure enough, two sets of footfalls made their way across the second floor landing and down the staircase before she and Haru came into view. "What's up," the brunette asked as they closed the last of the distance.

Instead of getting right to what she wanted, the older girl frowned. "I thought I said to stay off the upper floors?"

She watched Riko replay it in her mind right before her eyes. She could practically see the scene move across her face. Another notch for similarity. "No, Reina said to assume we're sleeping on the first floor until we saw what shape the second floor was in. So that's what we were doing, checking it out."

"You'll be happy to know it's in as good a shape as this floor, sir!" Haru cheerfully filled her in with a sloppy salute.

Wakana didn't look happy. She looked thoughtfully sour. She turned back toward Homura after a moment. "What's the boy's name, again?"

"Jack."

Riko was already covering her ears. The other two weren't quite quick enough to do so before she let loose with a, "JACK!"

The boy came hurrying in as if he thought he were under attack. "Wh-what? Is something wrong?"

"Maybe," the college girl said sternly. "Are you sure this place is abandoned?"

"Oh!" At the revelation there wasn't some sort of existential threat, the boy's panic lessened, and he nodded. "Positive. Whole family up and vanished almost a century ago, and nobody's lived here since."

"And you know this, how?"

"Uh, scuttlebutt, mostly," he admitted. "Oh, but some friends and I checked, this whole property doesn't even have an address. Nothing for the tax man to follow, nothing for the realtor to sell. I don't imagine you can get more abandoned than even the NTA not wanting anything to do with it."

Anna nodded at that, but then motioned to the kitchen. "Then how do you explain what condition it's all in? I could believe nobody's been here for maybe ten years at a long stretch, but nearly ten times that?"

At that, the boy had no good answer, reaching back and scratching his head nervously. "Um ... really tidy ghosts?"

"Besides the state of things," Riko put in as she stepped forward, "I haven't seen anything newer than the first half of last century. Toys, furniture, the designs all fit what Jack is saying. And if this place were actually being maintained as some sort of historical monument, it would definitely have been registered. Not to mention the garden wouldn't have gone wild. It's only the house that's been preserved."

"Right," Anna took in, letting the word lengthen as she said it.

But her little sister just shrugged. "You're the archaeologist, take a look for yourself. In the meantime, you said you had something for me to do?"

Wakana scowled at her lippy little sister, but the girl remained unflappable, and finally, she surrendered with a sigh. "I'm going to grab Jack and Sumi to help unload the van. We need a cooking fire, safe, outside and without damaging any structures. Sound like something you can handle?"

She thought for a moment, then nodded. "Sure, no problem. I'll get right on it."

* * *

All of the shuffling around as everyone was preparing the preparations so they would be prepared for the overnight stay had left Haru adrift. Riko had been given fire duty. Natsumi and Jack were unloading supplies. Reina had taken it upon herself to sort the drop-off. And Ran ...

At that thought, the blonde looked around for a moment. Where was Ran?

It took a moment before the soft sound of clicking guided her to the staircase, where Ran sat about halfway up with a tablet and a pocket keyboard on a lap stand. Still, Haru hesitated to approach her. Sure, you didn't interrupt Ran when she was focusing on something, that was just rule of thumb, but it was always a coin toss if the blonde followed that particular advice anyway.

No, right now, Ran didn't want to be approached. Instead, Haru took a few moments longer to watch her and sift through what she was seeing. Only then did she make her way up the stairs and plop down beside the bespectacled girl.

"So," she joked, "we finally get you out of one house, and you spend it sitting in another. Don't you even want to explore, Ran?"

"... I don't explore, Haru," the girl said quietly after her fingers came to a delayed stop.

"Well, okay, how about we go outside and check out the garden? I'll bet there's lots of hidden paths to be found."

"That would be exploring. And I don't do outside, either. Or sleepovers. Or big groups of people."

"Well, that doesn't sound very fun," the blonde girl cheerfully tried again.

"Maybe not to you, but none of what you described sounds very fun to me, either." She reached forward and pulled the tablet face-down against her lap. "But you know all of that, so why are you doing this?"

This time, Haru let the cheerful facade slide down as she frowned sadly at the smaller girl. "Because you aren't having any fun doing what you're doing now, either."

The gunmetal-haired girl sighed. "And I don't expect that to change. I don't like these outings, so I stay out of the way and do what I can to make it as bearable as possible."

"Oh, Ran, you didn't have to come if you dislike it so much. We wouldn't have been upset."

"I have my reasons."

That answer caught Haru off guard, and she blinked a couple times as she processed it. "Like what?"

"That."

The glasses girl raised her hand and pointed just as Homura rounded the corner with a load of canned goods. They all went up in the air when the redhead stepped on a particularly noisy board and its screech sent her flailing and forgetting she'd been holding onto anything.

Frankly, the resulting crash was louder than the board had been, with cans rolling across the wood in every direction and the martial artist rubbing her tailbone and grumbling. That was when Natsumi thought to realize someone might have seen that and looked around quickly, only to find the pair watching her from the stairs.

Ran's face was unmoved, what of it wasn't trying to hide behind her tablet, but Haru gave an apologetic laugh and a small wave to her. This led to more grumbling as Natsumi set about fetching all of the cans again.

Haru didn't dare say a word until after the redhead left their sight again. "... Yeah, she's going to need the help, isn't she?"

"Always does," Ran confirmed. "I've had to sit through so many Halloween movie marathons just because someone dared her." But then Ran turned on the blonde, staring with an uncharacteristically hard glint to her eyes.

Haru was quick to wave her arms in surrender with a laugh. "Don't worry, don't worry! I can tell what's important, too! I won't say a word, I promise!"

Only when she promised did that glint fade back to the bespectacled girl's normal mousey expression that then returned to her tablet, and the quiet clicking began again soon after.

The blonde didn't immediately leave, however, instead allowing silence for a bit, then, "You're a good friend, Ran. Let me know if you need anything for your stakeout, okay?"

With suddenness, the girl's typing stopped cold as her gaze broke from the screen again. "Grape juice."

The mannerism didn't throw Haru at all, however, who immediately jumped to her feet. "You got it! One grape juice coming up!"

* * *

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

The brunette looked up from her hole in the ground with a doubting brow as she turned her attention to Jack. "Uh ..." she hesitated on how to phrase it. "Is there? You don't exactly cross me as, ah, particularly good with fire."

The boy flinched at that a bit as if it were a blow to his manhood, but rubbed the back of his head with a grimace. "Now that you mention it, no, not so much. But, uh, oh! You need firewood, right?"

She grinned in bemusement at his reactions. "Yeah, actually, that would work great. Just remember, only dried wood, and nothing with three leaves."

"Dry wood, no threes, got it!" And off he went.

She just shook her head with a sigh as she dusted off her hands before moving off of sitting on her feet to stretch her legs out. She couldn't help but wonder ...

"Hey, sis," Wakana's voice interrupted her musing from behind, "how's the fire coming?"

"Oh, hey," the brunette replied as she turned toward her and out of the way of the pit. "Almost done, actually. I figured we'd want a decently wide one for cooking and to sit around, so that took the longest part. I'm just about done packing the walls and then I'll start kindling. I should be ready for a full, proper fire by the time Jack gets back with the wood."

But Wakana's attention was on the fire pit, itself, and she circled around the hole in the ground that was as wide across as two-thirds of her arm and would have come up to her elbow if she put her palm against its flat bottom. She carefully stepped over the second diagonal hole that fed air to the base of the main one through a fist-sized breach in the main wall.

"Riko, you built a fire hole."

The brunette looked confused at the way the older girl said that. "Yeah, seemed like a good idea. Pretty much all of the rock around here is part of the landscaping, and we can fill this back in when we're done, so minimal impact. Plus, it minimizes smoke and hides a lot of the flame, so we're less likely to attract unwanted attention. Oh!"

She reached over and picked up the collapsible shovel from beside her, its matrioshka handle currently in a short, handheld configuration. "I, uh ... I don't know if Nariko actually has a camping shovel, but I couldn't find one, so I bought one of my own. Never liked not having one in a field bag. I'd say it paid off."

Wakana didn't seem interested in the shovel, though, as she crouched on the opposite side of the pit from her. "Sis, you don't know how to build a fire hole."

But the brunette easily shrugged this off. "Eh, if anyone asks, I'll tell them I looked it up online before we left."

The college student reached down and rapped her knuckles against the packed side wall. "Yeah, sure, and just happened to immediately be doing it your first time like you've been doing it for years."

"It was a really good tutorial."

Wakana sighed as she switched to her knees and bent over to help pack the walls down with her little sister. "Y'know, here I was, worried because I asked you to do the fire and didn't stop to ask if you knew how."

"Nariko doesn't know how to make a fire hole," the brunette deduced, "but has plenty of experience making campfires?"

The older girl nodded. "Dad always tries to take us camping every summer. Ten days, minimal gear and rations, make your own shelter, and he refuses to call it a camping trip."

The brunette grinned. "Sounds more like wilderness survival training."

Anna snapped and pointed at her as she shared her grin. "Got it in one. Of course, he's not fooling anyone, he just wants to spend time with us. He even cheats with a food stash. But if any of us ever ended up lost out in the woods, every one of us would know exactly what to do." She chuckled. "Already saved my geology class team's suburban asses when we went out for field experience last year. Half of them hadn't ever even seen a tick before."

"Did you thank Dad after you got back?"

"Oh yeah. He told me to threaten them that he'd drag them along next time if they held me back."

After the two girls shared a laugh at that, though, Wakana turned her attention more seriously to her little sister. "Riko ... why do you have such a ready answer for remaining hidden? It's not for low-impact, a regular pit would have been just as disposable. It's not for the ease of keeping the fire going, there's not enough wind to threaten it. You picked a fire hole to hide it. Everything after that was excuses, including trying to distract me with your shovel. So why was concealment your first thought?"

The brunette's own motions on the hole slowed at that, and her expression went solemn. "Damn, you really are good at seeing through her ..."

"Watch your language," Anna immediately scolded. "And I've had way more practice reading my little sister than you've had lying to me, so I suggest you answer the question without trying."

The younger girl went silent at that, but to gather her thoughts rather than refusing to answer. "There wasn't really a conscious reason for it to be my first thought. It probably grew from you worrying about this place not being abandoned, honestly. So the hole occurred to me, had plenty of other advantages, and away I went."

"And you have plenty of experience in needing to stay hidden, is that it?"

The brunette jutted her lower lip out. "Technically, I have none, and I couldn't share any I might have been borrowing if I wanted to."

Wakana ignored her little sister trying to play cute. "Were you a soldier? Like Dad? Had to keep hidden from the enemy?"

But she shook her head. "No, not a soldier. Knew some, but only after they were out of the service. Military life wouldn't have worked for me, anyway."

Wakana gave a dramatic sigh at that. "Great, my little sister was a merc doing dirty jobs she couldn't risk getting caught over. How many assassinations did you do?"

"None," she replied flatly, and did her best to ignore Wakana trying to pry more out of her while making it look like teasing. "I wasn't interested in blood on my hands."

That gave the older girl a frown. "Okay, at this rate, I'm just going to assume whatever I think is ridiculous enough to be used as audacious sarcasm is actually what happened."

The brunette shrugged. "Hey, I had an exciting life. Pity I can't tell you about it."

"Uh-huh. So what kind of merc doesn't get blood on their hands?"

She patted the side of the hole down with the back of the shovel a bit more. "I was more ... acquisition specialist than soldier."

"Cat burglar," Anna intoned flatly. "You're saying you were a cat burglar." After a moment of that percolating, however, she gasped. "Oh my gosh, you're a cat burglar, you deal with soldiers, and you say you got hit by a cursed artifact. You're literally claiming to be Indiana Jones!"

She shrugged it off again, though not as easily this time. She wasn't meeting Anna's gaze like she'd suddenly gone bashful at the comparison. "Well ... I mean ... kinda ... on my good days, maybe ..."

Wakana leaned in over the pit conspiratorially. "Uh-huh. And on your bad days?"

There was some hesitation, but the brunette leaned in, as well, after looking either direction. "... Maybe a bit more Carmen Sandiego?"

That earned another bark of laughter from the older girl as she pulled back. "Oh, gosh, now I really wish you could tell some tales!"

* * *

Wakana and Nariko did the cooking together. On one hand, Anna wanted to make up for having forgotten what her little sister may or may not know anymore. On the other hand, many hands made light work, and when she'd head back to campus, it would be months before she'd see any of her family again.

They had settled on Campfire Curry, a recipe devised during their many trips with their father, and one that this seemed an excellent opportunity to make sure Riko knew if it should ever come up. Usually, the ingredients were sourced in the wilderness as a test of their abilities to gather edibles and hunt small game, but this time they were making do with store-bought ingredients. Wakana wasn't much of a cook, herself, nor very big on the activity, to be honest, but this was a simple crockpot recipe, thrown into a cast-iron skillet that sat on a rack over the fire until done. So long as they remembered to stir occasionally, even she could make this dish.

Of course, the cheating was in the rice and the curry block. Both always came from the rations. Considering everything else didn't, however, it made those rations go a lot further. Y'know, if Marcus hadn't kept a spare stash, anyway. He had always managed to slip some can of something or other in when they weren't looking, too.

As always, her little sister was a deft hand with a knife, and made short work of the onions, potatoes and raw vegetables, which went into the larger pot with the water and the brick. A dash of mushrooms for that wild taste went in, too, followed by meat of various sorts they'd seared in a cast iron pan. The rice was boiled in a second, smaller pot.

It was at one point when they had the large pot open to stir the curry that Haru joined them, drifting in with her nose to the heavens like she'd ridden in on the aroma, itself.

"Oh, dinner is smelling wonderful, you two!"

Wakana chuckled at the compliment. "Eh, even I can manage something this simple. You get all of the exploration bug out of your system?"

"Exploration is for later," the blonde said with startling conviction as she pointed at the ground beneath her feet. "This is the place I need to be!"

"Hah!" the older girl scoffed. "I always figured Sumi was the foodie!"

Riko gave the twintailed girl a different look, though. Amusement was there, sure, but she seemed to almost be waiting for a shoe to drop. "Haru has a knack for surprising you," she put in. "It keeps you on your toes."

Whether this were a compliment or not, Chiaki beamed like it was. And then her expression slipped with the focus of her attention as it went off to one side of the clearing. Anna would have thought it a perfectly genuine change of focus if it weren't accompanied by her little sister's very blatant, And there's the other shoe, expression.

... It suddenly hit her how little time she spent gauging the rest of the slapdash group. Maybe she should be paying more attention to what they weren't telling her, too.

"Ah, and we have company," Haru was saying, full of sunshine and rainbows as she approached the bushes and knelt down. Wakana only then noticed a girl hiding among the reeds. "You look hungry, was it the smell that attracted you, too?"

The girl, surely no older than six or seven, had straight black hair and brown eyes. She was dressed casually, though aside from color and size, the clothes looked like some of what Nariko's friends were wearing on the trip. Maybe they shopped at the same stores, Wakana guessed. Though did that mean the teenagers had childish tastes or the girl had mature ones? Not knowing the answer suddenly made the college student feel very old and out of touch, and she didn't like it.

Haru had startled the child, and for a moment, the girl looked like she was going to bolt. Something about the older blonde's smile seemed to soothe the jumpy kid, though, and after a moment, she visibly calmed down and nodded.

The twintailed girl clearly had no boundaries and promptly ushered the child forward out of the bushes with a hand on her back. "What do you say, Riko? Is it ready enough for a sample?"

The brunette sighed and gave it another stir to test its thickness. "The rice isn't done yet, and some of the vegetables might still be on the hard side, but I suppose it's fine." She fished out an aluminum bowl from her pack nearby and dipped some into it, then held it out to the child with her best approximation of a reassuring smile. "Here, you can use my bowl."

After a moment of encouragement from Haru, the child accepted the bowl and dipped the simple spoon with it into the food. Her expression practically trilled with the first bite, and more quickly followed.

"Well," the younger Kelly observed with a smirk, "guess that means it's good!"

Wakana, for her part, waited a bit longer before saying anything. The bowl was half gone by the time she opened with, "You got a name, kid?"

The girl paused in her inhaling of the food and seemed to hesitate to answer the large woman. Her skittishness returned as she lowered her head. "S-Seiko, miss."

"Seiko," the college student repeated as she knelt down to the child's level. "Did you come here with your parents?"

The child jerked her head back and forth in the negative rather forcefully, but after a moment of silence, realized she should probably elaborate. "Oh, but they know I'm here!"

"You have their permission?"

The nod was equally as forceful, but the grin on Seiko's face made it seem much more enthusiastic. "Yeah, I come here all the time!"

At that, Wakana relaxed a bit. "So this place really is abandoned? No one owns it?"

The girl got more sullen at that thought. "Yeah ... nobody ... It's been empty for so long ..."

Haru knelt down next to Seiko as she rubbed the girl's back. "Well, at least for tonight, the place has us, right?"

Seiko didn't say anything to that, but her grin returned at the encouragement.

"Finish your food before it gets cold," Riko spoke up, nodding toward the dish still in Seiko's hands. "Then you can show Haru your favorite places around the property until the rest is ready."

That really got the girl excited, but Haru dug her heels in just long enough to add in a request. "Riko! I want buried baked potatoes!"

The brunette chuckled, but shook her head. "For breakfast maybe. You need coals from the fire for that, and there's no way they'd be ready in time for dinner, anyway."

"Breakfast then!" the blonde replied as she was led further away. "I'll hold you to it!"

* * *

Wakana scraped out the last of the ash from the cast-iron pot as she held the edge in an oven mitt, as it was still quite hot from sitting in the fire. Once she finished, she set it aside to cool beside the pot for the rice.

She looked up from her work toward the sounds of laughter and watched the girls as they played with Seiko, and she smiled. It was good to see even Riko joining in. It had taken a nudge, as her little sister had a knee-jerk, Too old for that, reaction at first. Once she got started, though, it seemed she had no trouble running around and goofing off like the kid she kept forgetting she still was.

That thought made the smile on Anna's face a little more melancholy, and she sighed. It would be wonderful if it were just that cliche part of growing up, her little sister trying to act older than she really was. It was depressing to remind herself that it was actually a symptom of Nariko not being her little sister at all.

And then there was Seiko, the strange little girl that had happened to wander in at the same time they were there. The kid was a horrible liar, but Wakana hadn't quite puzzled out where, exactly, the lies were. She believed the girl really did have permission from her parents to be playing around the ruins, but couldn't shake that there was more to that than was being said.

At least dinner had been a success, and there had been enough to go around for everyone. She'd initially questioned the sheer quantity her little sister seemed to have been preparing, but that Homura girl could eat. Wakana remembered Haya having quite the appetite, but she had nothing on her little red devil of a sister. In the end, though, there had been enough for everyone, even Seiko.

... Zero leftovers, though. It was gonna be the snack bag if she got munchies in the night.

She sighed and dusted her knees off as she got to her feet. "Hey, Riko!" she called to her little sister. "You'd better get started on those potatoes if you're serious about having them for breakfast! You're gonna be running out of light soon!"

Without thinking about anything but getting her own tasks done, Wakana reached down to grab for the pot again ... and immediately jerked her hand away with a hiss, shaking it out.

* * *

The group had spread out throughout the house to bed down for the night, one or two to a room. Jack had been restricted to the tatami room by Wakana's decree. Technically, that was the best room in the house to sleep, given its design, but it also meant that after lights out, he was basically a prisoner.

Haru had insisted that she and Riko sleep on the floor of the child's room on the second story. There was plenty of room for both of their sleeping mats, though for some reason, the blonde seemed insistent on curling up right against the frame of the room's futon.

The brunette had made the mistake of asking if she thought she was trying to comfort Seiko, who had gone home for the night, and Haru had just grinned and held her finger up in front of her lips to indicate a secret.

She decided she wasn't overly fond of Haru being creepy, but if she was having fun, that was more important, and it wasn't long before they settled down into a quiet, peaceful slumber.

* * *

The brunette stirred at the sensation of her shoulder being shaken.

"Riko, wake up!"

She opened her eyes with a groan and focused on the worried face of the blonde above her. "... Haru? What's wrong?"

"She's scared, Riko!" The girl's face was difficult to make out in the dark, but was obviously tensed.

"Who?"

"The house!"

Before her sleep-addled mind could make sense of the words, a high-pitched scream of terror split the air from somewhere down the hall.