CHAPTER 62 – The Cat Came Back (2)

Tuesday evening.
The music rooms.

Zara was already present when Eppie came in.
The guitars were ready, and the Spanish girl was tuning her instrument.

When Zara saw her, her joy bloomed.

The two hugged. They were partners and old friends now, so the hug lingered and carried more weight than one offered for perfunctory reasons.

“You look different,” Zara remarked as they separated. “More mature, perhaps?”

“Well, a lot happened…”

Zara placed her chin on Eppie’s forehead. “Same height though.”

“Haha…” Eppie wondered if she should pick Zara up with her [Strength] and swing her like a flower pot.

Her friend picked up the guitar and took her seat.

Eppie took up hers and tuned the strings with [Perfect Pitch].

They started with free style. Zara had gotten better in the traditional sense. Her left hand was faster, her transitions cleaner, a new economy in her strumming that came from training with Paco at the bar.

Eppie had not practised, and it showed. But something else had changed. When she sang In the Pines, the song sounded… more textured. It sounded richer, deeper, like she was pulling up something from inside her that hadn’t existed before her NYC trip.

After the second practice, her friend grew curious.

“What did you do over the holidays?” Zara asked. “Your register sounds different.”

“What did I do?” Eppie inhaled and exhaled. “You ready for a STORY?”

“Eppie,” Zara rolled her eyes. “It’s been two weeks. What did you do? Change history?”

“Well…” Eppie strummed her guitar. “Let’s start with Juliana Vaughan’s house…”

After she finished with Kiritani-sensei returning to NYC, Zara set her guitar down and had to get a drink of water.

“She kissed you?” Zara asked.

“Is that…” Eppie slid the guitar to her side. “The thing that stood out to you?”

Her friend was blushing furiously. “The Kiritani stuff was nice as well. You did something incredible again, Eppie. The Japanese community here will talk about nothing else for a year. There are Nikkei in Fresno who had been in those camps, not to mention folk from Mio’s Church.”

Eppie looked at her Spaniard until she looked away, imagining Zara on stage, flashing her gams through a flaming red dress. I still got Strictly Ballroom… but that was work for after she was done with LAPA. Her Karmatron Trust was piling up nicely, ensuring that she would have no shortage of funds. Concurrently, she thought about her Sensei doing interviews and reorganising fifty years of his work, not to mention producing new ones for the new exhibition in March. The productivity of it all was very calming. “Yeah. I am glad it all worked out.”

Zara’s gaze lingered somewhere above Eppie’s chin, then the guitarist picked up her guitar again.

“From the top?”

“From the top.”

By day three, the week found its rhythm.

Kirby moved them through Act II. After Abigail’s accusation, the arrests began. Salem fractured along fault lines exploited for greed and grievance. Rebecca Nurse was taken. Giles Corey said more weight until he died. Private settlements became public executions. They read the lines out loud. They absorbed the common man’s tragedy.

In Cooper’s arts block, they performed the entry of the Andronicuses, the triumph that led to Titus’s first catastrophic decision, one made out of pride, before the play was twenty pages deep. Eppie read Tamora’s lines while keeping an eye on [Script Analysis]. Cooper taught them that Tamora’s hatred was not villainy but an injury. An injury looking for an outlet.

Costello ran them through the spatial logic of the combined stage. How a body moves differently when the audience is on three sides, how exits become statements, how to integrate Suzuki into the iambic pentameter.

Seyrova ran them haggard with spacing exercises.

Practice with Zara continued, each replay bringing back a sense of familiarity and deepening their mastery.

On Friday morning, the flash-forward lost its rhythm.

William Chen cornered her first thing at 7:30 AM, between the dorm and the Main Building, on the footpath with the least traffic.

The [Usurper] looked unlike his usual self. He had lost something, weight, gravitas, something. What he did not lose was the fox eyes that told her with absolute certainty that he was a predator. His shirt was still impeccably pressed. His hair, slightly undone, actually made him look cooler than his usually prim self.

He looked more dangerous, and accordingly, more conventionally attractive.

She hadn’t even noticed him until he stepped out from the bushes like a mugger and paced beside her, his hands thankfully kept to himself.

“What did you do to Val, little bird?”

It was a statement, not a question. The question mark existed only for rhetorical purposes. And clearly, the fact that he could no longer drain [Causality] from others did not apply to a fellow [Usurper].

She sped up her pace.
Her heart was hitting her throat.
As quickly as she could, she had to reach somewhere with more people.

William kept up easily.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“What can I do to someone like Val?” she said under her breath, wondering if she should sprint like Simone before William took—

MOTHER FUCKER.

His hand, with its long and thin fingers, found her wrist. He had arrested her.

“Don’t you dare lie to me.”

She pulled.
He held on.

She held his gaze for a full second. “I can scream very loudly.”

They were not alone, at least not after a hundred meters.

William freed her from his grip. Were her [Persona] not so well provisioned with stats, his grip would have left a bruise. He glared at her the way people look at hateful things. He looked at her like dog shit on a pair of expensive Oxfords.

“If you take Val away from me…” His words sizzled the space between them like acid.

Eppie could hear herself panting.
Her body no longer froze up. Now, it merely threw her into a rollercoaster adrenaline rush.