Six months after the return to the world

There was a strange pleasure in using a passport with her legal name and booking tickets with it.

"The Constructed Territories are still kind of tense, apparently," Angharad said. "Not that we're going to talk about politics at all."

"And your friends are going to meet us here?" Leonard asked.

"Yeah, I mean. Unless there's a problem with traffic. There could be. I know nothing about traffic here."

Freya wasn't hard to pick out of the waiting crowd with the way her dark hair took on a purple sheen in the light, though she'd traded a bright red uniform for the dark blue of the regular air force. But it wasn't until Jin turned around that Angharad realised he was standing right next to Freya. His hair was still messy, but he was wearing casual clothing, and the fashion he wore looked more similar to the things she saw in Korean dramas than anything she saw at home. A leaner silhouette, that made him look a mile long. Had she ever noticed the shape of his shoulders, the slope of his jaw before? For a moment they were all she could see.

She waited until he noticed she was walking toward him to say anything, just to see how far she could sneak up on him. She could tell her saw when he started to roll his eyes. Yeah, that was what she'd missed seeing in person.

"Did you get taller?" she asked. "What are you, 5'11 now?"

"I know you didn't get taller," Jin said.

"I still could!" Angharad protested. "There's still time. Women have late teen growth spurts out of nowhere, too."

She could tell the moment he noticed her father standing next to her because his face took on a look of panic. His posture went rigid. He wiped his hands on his shirt, then offered a hand to shake and called her dad 'sir'.

Angharad burst out laughing.

After introductions were made they got into the car Freya had borrowed from her parents. The world that passed by the car windows was green around them, with bigger nature strips and middle of the road stretches of vegetation than she'd seen in Australia, and vines crawling up the outsides of buildings. If she didn't know better she would never have guessed the city was built on an island of literal floating garbage.

"So, catch me up," she said, sitting in the back seat with Jin on her left. "Mnemosyne and Maria moved to the southern islands together. Is it a one bedroom place?"

Jin scoffed. "It's a two bedroom house."

"That's because Andrew Nguyen rents the other bedroom," Freya said, in her best gossip voice.

"I knew it! I so knew they were together," Angharad said.

"And Sophie is settled down with her family?" Freya asked.

"Yes," Angharad said, and nodded. "I talked to her last week. She didn't say anything, like, deep or meaningful or anything, but there don't seem to be any bureaucratic hang ups with declaring her officially alive again."

"Who secured Tony's release?" Freya asked.

"Oh, that was daddy. He likes a project," Angharad said.

Leonard nodded. "Having something like this to focus on is the best thing that could have happened to my health. James made me cut my hours but retirement equals death. I went on a relaxing vacation and had a heart attack. Something like this, accounting for all these details, keeps me alive."

"We're still searching the news and everything to see signs of Tsuyoshi and Tabitha maybe coming through the gate," Angharad said. "I mean, daddy is. He made me go back to an actual school, which is super weird."

"I designed an algorithm to scrape through multiple search engines to check for increased incidences of any search terms we think might be associated with gate disturbances," Leonard explained.

"Couldn't you just check them on your own in the same amount of time?" Freya asked.

Leonard laughed. "Designing an algorithm is more fun."

"He's exactly like you," Jin mumbled. Angharad kicked at his foot.

*

On the way to the hotel they visited the cemetery where Jin's family was buried. Freya got deep into a conversation with Angharad's father about constructing languages, so Angharad and Jin walked along the rows together, mostly quiet.

There was wind through the trees and real sun on her face, bouncing off her many layers of make up and SPF. The longer she was away, the more Angharad suspected Zapville never had real sun at all.

Partway through one of the rows, Jin stopped her with a hand on her elbow.

"This is where they are," Jin said. "I had to do this whole big thing to get the headstones put up. I still don't know why that doesn't happen automatically. It's really annoying."

She looked at the signs marking his dead, simple and sweet, people's names written in English and Chinese just like all the signs she'd seen on the way.

"So you do have a last name. You're not just a one name wonder like a pop star."

"Of course I have a family name."

His hands clenched behind his back. The image of him standing next to her in semi-casual clothes with his eyes closed against the wind didn't match the Jin she'd pressed into her mind before they had left Zapville. She looked at how much extra leg he seemed to have gained overnight. She was sure they'd been the same height six months before.

"Why aren't you wearing your uniform?" she asked.

"Because I quit. The group we were in only existed for the special circumstances of the war. I'm not good at military discipline. I couldn't re-enlist. I'm Freya's unemployed boyfriend now."

He shrugged his shoulders but his body looked uneasy. She looked all the way up to his face at this strange new angle, and then he turned away from the breeze and looked down at her.

"You cut your hair," he said. He pushed her hair behind her ear with warm fingers.

"How can you tell? It's still long."

"Because I know you. I know what you look like."

Is that why she couldn't stop noticing how things had changed?

"I don't really know what I'm doing," he said. His fingers were still curled in the ends of her hair, like that held all the answers.

"I don't, either. That's why we have to figure out what happened to us and why together." She looked back at the gate, where her father was making big gestures with his hands while Freya bounced on her feet. "But we better go back or your girlfriend will run off with my dad, and that would be weird for everyone."

Jin let go of her hair and pushed her along the path. But she preferred to think of it like she led and he followed very closely behind.

"Did you really quit?" she asked.

"It was suggested strongly that I should. I decided to follow that suggestion."