I didn’t get the chance to speak with the others after that. Adrian made himself scarce the first chance he got. Max’s Father was also overly eager to leave the police camp and get back to their estate so he could overlook the clean-up process. Claude was forced to go with them back to his home – seeing the town they believed was safe was actually the location of the Scuncath HQ.

That was irritating. I wanted to have the last word on what happened and try to control the release of information. I was in no condition to go running after them, so I was forced to lay there and worry about what was happening during my incapacitation. There was one notable person who was sticking around until I was healthy enough to leave.

Damian.

I slept for several hours into the night and awoke late the next morning. He was sitting on the stool next to my cot with a pensive expression. Even when he noticed that I was awake, he refrained from saying a word to me until I spoke first.

“Hello, Father.”

I shuffled towards the top end of the cot and sat up. Even after a full night’s sleep, I could still feel my centre of gravity being kicked from pillar to post. The bruises and lumps were settling in and really putting the hurt on me.

He sighed and cupped his face, “What in the Goddess’ name did she do to you?”

“She punched me.”

“Yes. I saw that.”

I stared at him through my one good eye and waited, and waited, and waited some more. I was hoping that he would be the one to steer the conversation so that I wasn’t the one who had to break the ice. That was too optimistic. It was obvious that Damian was going to struggle to put what he felt into words. His ex-lover, who was a member of the government’s secret police, showed up out of the blue and beat her daughter until she looked like a cauliflower.

Not exactly the reunion he was hoping for.

All of this complex family history was secondary to me. I didn’t have any particular affection for the woman – given that we’d never met before. She was a stranger to me and in the case of recovering the book, an obstacle to get around. It would be out of character for me to not be curious about her. I had to think about what other people expected from me, rather than going with my gut instinct and acting as I pleased.

“That woman...” Damian started.

“I already know who that woman is. She’s Gwyneth, isn’t she?”

Damian peered out from between his fingers, “You knew?”

“Honestly. I was only blinded after seeing her. I would have to be a tremendous fool not to notice the resemblance between us.”

That sent Damian for a loop. He was planning on trying to break the news to me gently, in a roundabout kind of way. Now he had to scupper those plans and try to come up with an acceptable way to explain why she was absent for my entire life. He sat there in silence yet again and attempted to recollect himself.

“I suppose that you’re curious as to why we aren’t together.”

No. I already knew that too – but I didn’t want to give away that I was working with her the entire time to infiltrate the fort and rescue him. This was going to be difficult enough without introducing that concept into the conversation. I had to ask for the sake of my character.

“I know what you want to say. Let’s not dance around the issue. Who is she, really?”

All of the times he mentioned Gwyneth - he acted as if she was dead. For him, it was more convenient to pretend that it was a touchy subject since he didn’t have many actual stories of what they did together. I imagined that most were too sensitive in nature and gave away too many details, or that the lion’s share of their time was spent trying to hide from the secret police.

Thus, he constructed a carefully worded web of lies and half-truths to surround himself with. Half-truths that were easy to remember and prevented him from slipping up, exactly as I did when it came to dealing with Samantha.

“What you have to understand is that she and I agreed to this. We both believed that it would be safer and better for you to never know about her. It seems that my hand is now forced. You may already know, but during the Civil War, she was working for the monarchy’s secret police. They were rumoured to make enemies of the state disappear, but as far as I was concerned, she was a messenger sent to business people like me to secure support for the war effort.”

“She never touched you?”

“No. They used a lot of different approaches. Some factory owners were more receptive to persuasion than others. It did not matter what I chose to do. I could hardly pick up the factories and move them somewhere else, and many livelihoods depended on the income they generated.”

“I understand all of that – but how exactly did you become romantically involved?”

He sheepishly groomed his beard with the tips of his fingers, “To be frank, I don’t know. We saw a lot of each other during the conflict. At first, I thought her affections were merely manipulation designed to make me cooperate with the monarchists, but this was after I already agreed to produce what they wanted. She saw something in me that she liked, and it was enough to drive her to break rank and do something that she was not permitted to.”

“Start a relationship.”

“Correct. The secret police had a strict code of conduct for their members. They were not permitted to fraternize with their targets. Their loyalty had to remain with the crown come what may. After the Civil War concluded, we met on several occasions despite the risks that came with it. And then... she became pregnant.”

I couldn’t possibly imagine what her reaction to that was.

“At first, she was overjoyed, but that excitement was soon snuffed into nothingness by the realization that evidence of her betrayal would be clear to them. Even minor infractions would result in summary execution. So, she and I came up with a plan to evade their eyes for long enough to deliver you.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Having her disappear from duty for nine months would be too obvious. She continued to work with them for three months before staging her desertion on one of her operations. We whisked her away to the estate and kept her concealed on the grounds for the rest of her pregnancy. She chose the right time to do so. During that period the secret police were being reorganized and placed under the authority of the civilian government. They didn’t have the resources or care to find one missing agent.”

“They wouldn’t be pleased with her vanishing into thin air.”

He grimaced, “That was the risk that Gwyneth chose to take, for the sake of ensuring that you were allowed to live the childhood she did not. She was going to beg forgiveness, rather than spend the rest of her days in hiding. The moment you were born – she packed her things and left the estate for good. We both agreed that it was the best course of action. Even the simple knowledge of who she is comes with a looming danger.”

“Do you really believe that? Or is it simply convenient to say that’s the case?”

“The organization she used to work for? I have no doubt in my mind that they would have killed me, you and her if they discovered why she went missing.”

“And she told you that.”

Damian shook his head, “I had no reason to doubt her assertions. She was stringently honest with me after the war.”

“What about WISA?”

“I presume the public-facing agency is less violent than the one that preceded it. As you might guess, I have not spoken to her since that day. I have no way of knowing for certain. Gwyneth was convinced that the best course of action was to keep you away from her with a zero-tolerance policy. No matter how badly she wished to have a normal life with us, she sacrificed her own desires for our sakes.”

And there we had it, the full, unredacted truth about why my Father was entangled with a monarchist assassin. Damian could be a charming man when he tried, but it still confounded me that a woman like her would become interested in him. Not only that, but interested enough to risk being killed by the agency she worked for. There was no accounting for taste.

Veronica, or Gwyneth, wasn’t completely full of crap after all. Damian was backing up what she said to me before we arrived at the fort. All of this was intended to protect me by shrouding me in ignorance. It may have worked on anyone else, or under different circumstances, but Veronica and Damian never accounted for the interference of an unseen deity. If I were the original Maria from the game, I wouldn’t have the skills, the resources or the drive to go seeking her out.

Damian chuckled, “I thought being a single father would be simple with servants at my beck and call – but I was always worried about steering you down the right path. You’ve grown so much in the past three years that it’s almost difficult to believe that you’re the same girl.”

I averted my eyes and tried not to show any reaction to what he said. The fact of the matter was that I was not the ‘same girl.’ Durandia claimed to have created this vessel for me. Damian was confident that I was his daughter, so it was more likely that she somehow interfered in the process and prevented a ‘soul’ from taking root in the physical body.

Souls and second lives were not things I believed in during my first go around. For a long time, I was convinced that this was the last delusion of my brain moments before my death. Why else would this second chance take the form of a game I was familiar with? After years of living as Maria, those doubts were increasingly scant. It was too real. There were no discrepancies from what I could see.

How could she encapsulate all that I was into a vessel that could be moved from place to place? The spirit was not where memories were made and stored. A human being is a collection of experiences and electrical signals shooting between nodes in an infinitely complex structure we call the brain. For all of her power, I could not see Durandia perfectly replicating that and making adjustments as needed.

She was simultaneously so powerful and wise that she could reincarnate me, but also too weak to intervene and correct this world’s problems without speaking through an amplifier, which she had to direct Sir Snow to construct. It was an infrastructure investment designed to make future contact with mortals easier for her.

There was another, darker thought that struck me.

Moving my essence from one place to another was the nicest way of putting it. It was also possible that the original me died there in the hotel, and my current self was simply a copy created using his memories. Some would say that it was a distinction without a difference – and I had no way of confirming it, but it was an idea that weighed heavily on me as the years wore on.

“I cannot understand your perspective on the ways I’ve changed. It feels all too natural to me.”

“I realize that I have not always been here for you. I have many responsibilities that call me away from the estate. In this case, it was something of a blessing. Now I’m left to wonder if I was too hand-off with rearing you. When you fought with Gwyneth back there - you had the same look in your eyes - and I can’t pretend to be happy about that.”

I remained silent on when and where I’d learnt those skills. There was no easy way to explain it and no excuses that I could provide that would be convincing to Damian. I knew that the staff at the manor would send reports back to him about how I was behaving. If I disappeared or started acting violently, he’d know. He sensed that he was going to get no answers out of me and leaned back on the stool.

“I came to the fort to try and rescue you. That’s it.”

He chuckled, “While I appreciate the thought – it would be better to leave that to the police in future. Now, I’ve talked your ear off for long enough. You should get some rest. We’ll be heading back to the estate soon.”

He stood and left me alone in the tent. I laid back on the cot and stared up at the undulating fabric above my head. I had no end of problems to deal with now. Adrian and Max were the biggest ones. I’d need to talk with them and find out what they were going to do, but it would have to wait until we returned to the academy for our second term.

It was going to be a restless week.

---

Picking up the piece of the estate was a distressing process for all involved.

Damian was always personally involved with the staff. He liked having a group of servants, handmaidens and groundskeepers whom he could trust. It wasn’t quite a friendship – but he did want to give them all a good impression of him and the work they were tasked with performing. He knew all of their names. His face fell as he read the list of the deceased staff who were killed in the original attack.

Damian ordered that their funeral expenses be paid in full, and for some additional money to be sent their way as a means of support. It was easy to be generous when you were a multi-millionaire businessman and industrialist, yet most still couldn’t find it within themselves to dispense with even a tiny fraction of their total wealth. I credited him for going the extra mile.

The estate was in a bad way. Windows needed to be replaced, walls cleaned, doors fixed, and decorative items recovered or swapped out. Certain rooms were worse than others. My bedroom was completely untouched, for example, but the dining hall was vandalized from roof to floor. It took two days for all of the refuse and dirt to be cleaned out and then they started replacing what was broken.

Going to Channery and dealing with the Scuncath cut my break in two, so when the time came to return to the academy and begin our next term, it felt like I’d barely had any time to relax at all.

The bruises and lumps were less aggravated by that point. I turned down my Father’s offer to remain at the estate while they healed. It would take too long, and I wanted to have my ears peeled for what the students were talking about. Still – I’d be walking through the doors with a heavy layer of foundation to try and cover the yellow splotches around my eyes and lips.

It was unconvincing to say the least. It was obvious from a distance that something was wrong. The different shapes and forms that defined my face gave it an entirely different impression than what it normally did. At least I could wave them away with an excuse about the kidnapping of my Father.

True to form – the hot news on campus was exactly that.

For every highly influential and wealthy noble who sent their child to the academy, there were at least two to three who weren’t important enough to be threatened with kidnapping and execution via demon summoning. That meant there was enough separation from the events for them to become extremely trendy gossip fodder. These kids didn’t care one bit about sparing anyone’s feelings.

The instant I stepped down from the carriage and started moving my suitcase down the main avenue, they were whispering all kinds of odd stories about me.

“What happened to her face?” one girl gasped.

“I heard that her Father was one of the nobles they kidnapped...”

“They must have tortured her!”

“But she doesn’t seem to be bothered by it.”

“Obviously! Lady Maria would never let some brute crack her composure!”

All in all – it wasn’t that different to what usually happened when I walked towards the main building. Security around the campus was even tighter than before, with extra police and hired guards outside, patrolling the grounds and watching the fences for intruders. Negative headlines about the academy were becoming a common occurrence and combining it with the flavour of the month about raving mad cultists would make it even worse.

I hurried up the stairs and into the first-year dorm before they could stop and pester me with a thousand needless questions. It was difficult for the sour atmosphere on the campus to get worse than it was in the wake of the attacks at the party and theatre building, but this kidnapping story had managed to do just that. I crossed my fingers and hoped for a quiet few months so that everyone could reset and go back to normal.

My Father did bring up the subject of the gun I was using at the fort, but he had completely forgotten that it was the one he’d bought and buried under a stack of paper in his office desk. I successfully bluffed and said that I dropped it during the fight with Veronica, eventually sneaking it back into my trunk before we left the inn and returned home.

His forgetfulness was legendary.

The gun and some fresh ammunition were stored safely at the bottom of my wardrobe. I hoped that I would not need to use it for at least the rest of the year. How many life-threatening calamities could we get dragged into during a compressed period before it started to become too much?

Thus, I found myself face to face with what I could only describe as a table of the damned. Adrian, Max, Claude and Samantha were all sitting loosely around the booth in the back-right corner of the study. Claude looked catatonic, Adrian was a nervous wreck, Samantha had bags under her eyes, and Max looked like he was about to rip his own hair out from anxiety.

At least they didn’t have a tenderized face like me.

Max and Adrian could barely muster the energy to shoo me away before I took the last seat. They certainly woke up once they noticed that I looked like the rolling hills that surrounded the campus grounds.

“Bloody hell! You look even worse than you did back then!” Max declared with a harsh whisper.

“It appears that my coverup efforts were in vain.”

Adrian sat up in his chair, “Are you here to keep me from saying anything about what happened? You know just as well as I do that nobody is going to believe me. Claude doesn’t even believe it – and he was there.”

I frowned, “Claude doesn’t believe you?”

The junior detective leaned into the discussion, “If something that important happened, I think I’d remember it!”

“I already told you! You don’t remember because you wrote it into that book, and the book was cursed!” Samantha griped. Her tone made it clear that she’d held this same debate with him on several occasions already. Claude was always his own worst enemy, and this was further proof of my theory.

Adrian cut back in and returned to the point; “Anyway – there’s no reason to tell any of the gossip mongers around campus about it. What are they going to do? Come to my defence?”

“If it’s reassuring to say, I promise that I’m not planning to shoot you.”

Adrian was not amused; “Oh gee. Thanks.”

The negative air was caused by all of the trouble. The four teenagers sitting with me were not well-suited to combat or life-and-death situations. It was stressful. It would keep them up and night and isolate them from others. They wanted time and space to ruminate on the experience, but there was no time to offer and an awful lot of people who wanted to get information about what happened out of them.

Lance, completely oblivious to all of this, approached the table with every ounce of swagger he could muster, planted his hands firmly on the surface, and asked a very silly question.

“Did you lot enjoy your holiday?”

I turned to face him, revealing the absolute mess that Veronica had made of my face.

“Oh yes. It was fantastic, actually.”

Lance clammed up. He backed away from the table and cleared his throat by coughing into the palm of his hand. He knew what he was about to say was inappropriate, but the momentum of his previous statement carried him over the cliff edge.

“Uh. Glad to hear it.”

Samantha grumbled, “Don’t dig deeper into that hole, stupid.”

Good words to live by.