The Entanglement of Cat and Rin Schrodinger

Chapter twenty
Cat

This time I really am back where I started. Only with a genuine reason for a headache this time. I’m back in my room in Pax Illume lying in bed feeling bittersweet about the whole debacle. Rin pulled me through into Pax Illume for some motive I’ll never understand. Everything was going so well up until that point. I could be home by now.
Home...I think, pausing to turn my head. It throbs. Home, where Peter is distant, my mother is always too busy and life is on pause until I grow up enough to understand it all. Sounds fun.
Then of course, that kind of logic means fighting a civil war in another universe is better than going home. This is where the bittersweet, confusing part comes in. Meina explained to me how after Rin and I came through the rift, no rifts have shown up anywhere, or to any world for that matter. None in the future too, she’s looked and it seems as though all the rifts of Pax Illume have simply dried up and disappeared. I can’t go back to home. Not for a while anyway.
Apparently I’ve been on bed rest since I ended up back here. When Rin and I fell through the rift, something went very wrong and I landed on a rock. From quite a height too, they tell me. Blurry memories of wrinkled brows and Meina getting in the way everywhere expand in my head and I try to push there out. They said it was a concussion. If I was useless before, I’m now immobile and have temporary brain damage. Must’ve been a joy to see me back again.
This room is the one place in the house most susceptible to sound, so I’ve found I can hear most of what’s been going on lately. I’ve heard Rin’s voice at first, scared and confused. Then Shomei’s strong and sturdy explanations and then mostly Meina’s unneeded, but well meaning interruptions. I’ve heard Rin voice get calmer and more mature and finally subside back to the confident, if troubled girl I knew when we were finding the rift back to Pax Illume. It seems even Rin doesn’t need me anymore.
The one noise I can’t figure out is the crying. It’s wasn’t Meina, because she was in the room with me once when I heard it first. She pretended not to hear anything. It’s not Rin either, because I know how she cries, as she showed me back in Terra. Her crying is a long and steady breath, the sound of someone who’s already given up on joy in life. Even when she was happy she sounded like that. In any case, the sobbing I can hear every night is very, very soft and almost transparent. And I still can’t figure out who it is.
Right now I can hear a gentle murmuring. I have to rise up slowly, as to not completely fall over, and pushing my fingertips against the wall to balance myself upright. I tip my head faintly to the side and listen. There’s a murmuring, probably down the hall and in the parlor. I make out Meina’s eager tone, then Shomei, then...I wait a moment and hear the husky overtones of Evada. Right, I’d forgot; she lives here too.
I limp pathetically down the hallway (my leg got quite a bruising too during my fall). I stop at the archway leading into the parlor. The sun is still forcing its way through the bamboo blinds, unwelcome for the first time. At first they don’t even look up before Evada senses something and swings around in her chair. I feel like someone just banged a mallet over my head again when her fierce glower hits me. Where did she learn to glare like that? Meina falters in her engaged conversation with Shomei and glaces up too. Shomei is the last, already knowing I am there and focusing slowly with an unreadable expression. I look down at my feet, shifting uncomfortably back and forth from each other and that’s not just from my injuries.
“Well, I’m up.” I say hobbling lamely to the vacant chair next to Shomei. Their eyes all follow me as I sit down. Maybe they forgot I’m still here, still trapped. I notice the untouched breakfast splayed out on the table and grab an apple. Always a good nonchalant fruit. I take a bite, “Where’s Rin?”
“Sleeping,” Evada answers tonelessly. Meina’s eyes flicker toward another hall I know leads to where Rin’s staying.
“She seems to do a lot of that.”
“You did too when you came through this time.” Shomei defends.
“Ah, but I had a concussion.”
Meina leans forward over the table, looking convincingly concerned , “Cat? Are you mad? At us or anyone?”
“No, of course not. Why would I be?”
Evada looks like she’s about to smirk but fights it down. I give her glare back. Shomei clears his throat and clasps his hands. “Cat, we were just discussing Rin and the plans for her.”
“Ah, you mean now that the Chosen One is here, you have no idea what to do with her?” I say.
“Incorrect.” He waves his hand over the fruits bowl, dislodging several fruit flies. “We have several courses or action we could take from here.”
I take another bite of my apple. “Let’s hear them then.”
“One option is publicizing Rin as a symbol of hope in a campaign to stop the rebellion and to appeal to the Choa. Perhaps in Tomiichi.”
I shake my head, dimissing the idea. “We’d be acting just like the rebels then, only without the violence. It won’t work.”
I see Evada’s fist clench tightly together, like she’s suppressing a memory or keeping back harsh words.
“Another option is to continue fighting the rebels—” Shomei continues calmly, almost sounding bored.
“Wait, we fight rebels?”
“I do. She does. Sensei does. You do not,” Evada growls at me.
I raise my apple in submission and turn to Shomei, “Continue, please.”
“If we continue to fight the rebels, there will be bloodshed no matter what. Ours or theirs, it doesn’t matter. We will be going nowhere.”
“Exactly!” I say. They all look at me again, as if they forgot I was there. “You’re not getting anywhere. Ever. I don’t understand what it is with you people. You’re holding on blindly to a prophecy that has no basis on fact. You’re going on nothing but—” I scan my mind for the right word, “You’re starving yourself on nothing but an unfounded hope. Rin’s not going to save you anymore than you can save yourself. She’s just a girl. Like me, like Meina. Like that girl in the village who picks bluebells.”
I pause for breath, waiting to be interrupted, but I receive only dead silence. So, I continue, “You’ve created a reality instituted on a wild faith that your savior will come someday to liberate you. You haven’t thought logically about this. Is it that you care about Pax Illume so much that you can’t see it falling to ruin? Which I assume it is, but I certainly haven’t seen anything like that while I’ve been here. It’s seems like all you’ve been doing is hoping, hoping, hoping everyday and you’ll work with anything that will help you continue that hope, that different reality. And destroy anything that threatens it. Shomei, you said this whole country was founded on foolish hope, and now look, it’s falling to ruin. But you’re doing the same thing. Which, all leads back to, you aren’t really doing anything and you never will.”
I stop abruptly, choking on my own words. A long dark lock of hair swings in front of my face, obscuring it from view as I duck my head. They can’t see me, I can’t see them. Did that just all come out of my mouth? I wish violently that I could take back the long string of eloquence that I didn’t know I posessed. But I can’t and I find that I don’t really want to.
I tuck the hair behind my ear, then look up. Meina looks upset, Shomei is gazing passively out the window to my right and Evada...looks amused. Incredibly pleased, even.
“Cat,” she half whispers in her accented English that somehow mocks my right to exist. “It never ceases to entertain me how people like you will accuse someone else of the very crime they are committing.”
My face turns fiercely red, but I manage to hold her stare. We stay like that for a while, locked into a silent battle of egos and there is no one in the world but us. Finally she looks upwards, away from me, and I think I’ve won; that she was wrong and completely mistaken when she smiles over the top of my head and greets: “Rin, good morning!”
I swing around and there She is: Huge eyed and languid with tangled short hair and an annoyingly neutral expression. And I know it’s time I left. I rise painfully slowly from the chair, careful not to look at Meina and wait for my head to clear—from the concussion and my outburst.
I take one, and then another heroic step—before falling flat on my face five feet away from the table. I feel a hand that I think is Meina try to help me up but I throw it off. I stand and find myself face to face with Rin. Her unsettling eyes boar into me and I lean against the wall, trying to act blasé about the incident. She doesn’t even notice.
Rin sits at the same chair I was just occupying. That’s a metaphor in action for you. I have to get out of here.
“I’m, uh—” I stutter “Going for a walk.”
No one but Evada makes any move to acknowledge this. She waves her hand toward the door and smiles “The sakura blossoms are in bloom. Perhaps they will help you find some of the hope you seem to so badly want.”
“I never said th—” I stop myself from being baited.
I grab a long gray woolen coat from a brass hook by the door since it’s still early morning and cold. When I shoulder the huge wooden door, I catch a blue spark of Rin’s eyes as she watches me leave. I hate when she does this, because I can usually understand exactly what she’s saying. Perhaps because, in theory, we’re the same person.
I roll the blue flame of her words over and over in my mouth as I head down the steep stairs like I’m trying to get a bad taste off my tongue. I heard you also, They hiss and spit, And I know how a foolish hope can be too.