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Anabel basically walked into Finn’s house with a tray of vegetarian empanadas, and then she thought, I have got to get him out of here. Finn looked trapped and miserable, and yes, his father had just died, but he was sandwiched between two old people who seemed to be arguing back and forth about something and it was not appropriate. He didn’t need to be miserable and trapped by loudly arguing old people. It wasn’t a good grieving environment. She had a hunch that just grabbing him and dragging him away to a different part of the room would just make it worse. The old people would probably just follow them and she’d have to shout them down and make a scene.

Still, Abuela had said she shouldn’t talk to anyone unless spoken to first, and that… didn’t make any sense, but… she’d never been to a funeral. When her team for her graduate work died, she’d been in a coma; it wasn’t like you got bereavement leave from being nearly dead. She settled for sidling close to the woman who looked like she might be Finn’s mom and holding up the tray in her hands. Gwen--her name was Gwen, Anabel remembered--indicated the kitchen, and Anabel swung an arm through Finn’s and pulled him after her.

“Abuela says I shouldn’t talk to you unless you talk to me first,” she said as she pulled him after her, “so for the record, you totally talked to me first.”

With barely a thought, she slipped into the skin of Mistral Page (it was still weird) and mumbled the oath under her breath for the first time on her own. They appeared in the field of flowers, in the depth of Mistral’s night; she could only see because of the glow of their uniforms and the glow of the flowers. “You looked really miserable,” she said. “I figured… you can mourn in space as well as you can on Earth. Can’t you?”

“I’ll come with you on Babylon field trips,” she offered. “Or you can just come over to mine. Wait, Abuela said…” Babylon wasn’t Catholic, though, so it was bound to be different. Did they do the thing where you stayed in the house for seven days? It seemed rude to ask. “Well, uh, I mean… you’re allowed to do work if it’s necessary, right? So if you need to go light the lamps, I can go with. Like my abuela said, it’s not good to be alone.”

She looped an arm around Babylon and looked across the field of flowers. “I’m sorry about your dad,” she said. “It’s awful.” She didn’t know what else to say about it; she didn’t know any details aside from what had been published in the newspaper. It had to be a sensationalized story to get the killer to come forward due to sheer inaccuracy, she thought. A home invasion… but the doors were all locked. No broken windows. No accessibility from higher floors. Ice in the wound, an observed lower temperature in the room…

Mistral didn’t know what to say. She settled comfortably, and decided the best thing to do would be to go along as normal. “I brought that journal, in case you wanted to take it to Babylon next time and I was busy. And, uh…” She hefted the canister in her hand. The leather was old, cracked, and moth-eaten; but it was clearly embossed with the Mercury sigil in what might have been bright blue, years and years ago. It flaked as Mistral twisted the top off and pulled out a sheaf of parchment. She spread the thick old paper across her lap and Babylon’s.

“I can read it until about here,” she said, pointing to a place where the writing turned from recognizable Spanish to some Middle Eastern-looking script. “I think it’s the mid-1500s. See, they’ve marked someone every generation with the heraldry from my ring...” She pointed to the most recent generation, where it listed Anabel alone, with the sketch of the symbol of Mistral next to her name, and traced the symbol up through her father’s name until a bottleneck. Folding the genealogy, she looked at the letters she couldn’t read. “That’s me, I guess,” she said. It was the last generation written in blue ink, the place where the tree thinned out the smallest. “And I guess…” She pointed out someone a generation up. “That’s the symbol for Virgo,” she said, tracing the curly M. “Miss Virgo had a kid with… Space Uncle? There’s my mom. And Virgo and Space Uncle’s kid married…”

She flipped the page up, stopped, and kind of gagged.

“That kid married past me’s kid,” she said. “Look.”

“I remember Space Uncle’s name,” said Mistral, “I choose not to use it because I can’t pronounce the--” and here she tried to replicate the sound, and predictably failed “--sound. He is Space Uncle until further notice.” He’d had a nickname. She’d used it once, she knew. She just didn’t remember it.

She did smile at being cousins. “Yeah. Slightly important detail.” She wondered where, exactly, the lines split--but couldn’t really be sure, based on the fact that he didn’t have a tree for them to compare the symbols between. “Let’s not worry about it for now.” Her favorite question was, why did the two families diverge? If she had to guess… the genealogy didn’t mark the lantern after maybe three generations down from her own past self’s name. “Mine’s in Castilian Spanish around the fifteen hundreds,” she said. “But, um, that’s… pretty much the Latin alphabet. It’s not exactly hard to decipher.”

She rolled up the parchment. “We can bring them to Space Uncle Mendel,” she said, “D’you want to see what’s on the other side of the lobby?”

They waded together through the overgrown plants, when Mistral wasn’t stopping to examine some new bleeding-heart (in blue and white, shimmering like ice) or genus of ivy. The hyacinths and wisteria and winter roses of their last visit were but the tip of the iceberg, and she was looking at the depths now. (Depths which went down and down and down, these flowers that didn’t pollinate and yet, bloomed anew--for there were flowers growing where Mistral and Babylon had stepped upon them last time, sprung up from the corpses of the old. “Maybe they’re just asexual and reproduce from their own fruit,” Mistral posited as they walked, not expecting an answer.)

She stopped at another door, this one a great sheet of frosted glass like the door they’d explored before. “I don’t want to yell at this one,” she said, but even as she spoke it was sliding aside, like it had somehow magically recognized her. She didn’t say anything as they started down a sloping corridor, until she--

Mistral flailed a hand in front of her face. “I think I just walked into a spiderweb,” she said, scowling. “Are you coming, Babylon?”

Mistral wondered if these were cold-weather plantings. Babylon didn’t seem to have much in the way of pleasure gardens, or even a source for basic nutritional needs, and yet it had been sustained. Could this have been the first go-round of weather-resistant food strains? She was still puzzling it when she heard the bang of the trap she’d passed through springing.

“I don’t know,” she said, surprised. “Are you okay?” He was blinking a lot, like he had spots in his vision, and he was talking louder than he ought and there’d been that noise. “Hey, uh, Mistral?” She spun slowly in place, heels clicking on the floor. “Can you not attack my friend?” If the wonder heard, there was nothing to indicate it. She worried at her lip and offered Babylon a hand, as if maybe hanging on to him would help the Wonder stay confused about whether or not he was ‘her’ long enough to get him through any more traps. While going through Mistral alone to find the ‘control room’ was an option, she wasn’t exactly excited about it…

There was a stairwell, and a warning chime at the back of her head advised she make Babylon wait at the top if she chose to go down it. She looked into the blue-hued darkness and looked past the stairwell to the long hallway. “If we go down the stairs,” she said, “I think I might be able to find something where I can… key you in? But the traps just get worse, probably. It’s basic dungeon management. The first one is just trying to dissuade anyone who, I dunno, broke through the glass and is trying to get at Mistral’s secrets.”

Mistral took a few steps down the stairs and then stopped. “What if it’s something worse than a bright light and some noise, dimwit?” She peered up at him, but the bright light of his lantern made it almost impossible for Mistral to make any sense of his face. Well… if he wanted to go on an adventure through Mistral, they could certainly give it a try. She laced her fingers through Babylon’s and descended to the next floor of her wonder.

She pulled Babylon through an open doorway, into a long sterile hall. It looked like it had been bored straight out of the stone of the valley floor and polished smooth, and Mistral trailed her free hand along the wall as she walked.

Then she got another faceful of spiderweb and stopped. “Babylon, hold on,” she said.

“It’s a laboratory,” she said, as if this were obvious. “And I just got another faceful of spiderweb or spellweb or whatever. So I think it has, in fact, activated another trap.”

Without knowing exactly what she was looking for, Mistral spun slowly in place, looking for anything that looked… out of place. She should’ve stopped to see exactly where the flash-bang effect had come from a level up, but she wasn’t sure if her passage activated it and Babylon simply bore the brunt of it, or… maybe there wouldn’t even be anything to see. Maybe there was just a simple, stupid switch…

She took a few steps further down the corridor, but had to stop due to lack of light. “What I really want is to find the lightswitch,” she said, “you’d think if it was so high-tech, they would’ve left the lights on.” But maybe the generator or whatever had run out? Mistral took a deep breath and ran her hands carefully the length of the wall, ignoring a warning twinge in her abdomen. “Can you swing your lantern more this way?” He obliged, and with the blue light of the lantern shining more directly on the sterile smoothness of the stone, there she found a tiny scratch in the wall.

Mistral tapped her finger on it, ran her thumbnail through its curves, and determined it wasn’t a scratch. It was a mark, and what it meant, she didn’t know. “Babylon, don’t move forward, but can you come this way? I found something, a deliberate mark? But I don’t know what it says?”

She shook her head. “I thought it looked familiar, but it doesn’t really… ping… as anything.” If this were a video game, she’d have at least a dungeon guidebook to use, something to tell her where she ought to be looking next. This mark, it had to have something to do with the trap, it was too close and too convenient to not. She scrubbed at it with her finger again, like she might scrape off some dust or dirt, but there was nothing. “This sort of looks like…”

Mistral paused, and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know.” She started down the hallway again, away from the slightly unnerving pool of glowing water.

Down the hall, there was a door. Though the hall continued further, Mistral thought it might be better to explore each room as she came to it--it’d at least lower the proportions of the traps. Theoretically. She tried the doorknob--this door at least had one--and shoved it open.

It looked like… living quarters. A bed was tucked neatly into an alcove, a table and a few chairs occupied the space between that and a rudimentary fireplace. The fireplace itself was something of a revelation: rough-hewn stone, nothing like the surgical smoothness of the Mistral that they’d encountered so far.

Between them and the bedroom space was a desk and a single chair. Mistral rounded it uncertainly. “So… I guess we’re…” She didn’t know. The room was, other than the furniture, completely empty. Abandoned. The bed didn’t even have a mattress on it. “I don’t know what to make of this,” she said. Were there other stairs down from the lobby area? What was she missing, here?