The plane landed seven and half hours after the letter from Babylon, and Vanya spent the whole time wide awake, reading and re-reading the letter. Every time she unfolded it, she found something new to make her shoulders shake with suppressed tears. Then she’d think better of having it open where anyone could see, and fold it and put it away, sharpening the creases with her thumbnail each time. By the time they landed, she had torn the bed of her thumbnail and streaked the edges of the paper with coppery orange blood. She wrapped her thumb in a bandaid from the elderly attendant and occupied herself with the same page of Hamlet, over and over again--why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? As if she had nothing better to do, and maybe she didn’t.

She stepped onto the jetway and collected her carry-on, Hamlet tucked under her arm and the letter from Babylon tucked into her pocket.

Just on the other side of Customs, she looked around for the person they said would be waiting. A sign reading Morgenstern gave her a start, but she knew that they would be using the other name--and indeed, there was a placard for Gwen Rivers, in the hands of a man with pasty blond hair.

“I suppose you’re Doctor Rivers,” she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes and pressing a subtle hand to her hip, where Babylon’s letter crinkled in her pocket. She offered a hand and he shook it, tucking the plastic-coated placard under one arm as they walked towards the baggage claim.

“Jacob Rivers, yes,” he said. The roar of other voices--friends meeting friends, family reuniting, student tour groups gathering together--would have made him all but inaudible to those around them, but she was still surprised to hear him say aloud: “Our friends in common call me Arcelite.” She arched an eyebrow at him, adjusting her grip on her leather bag self-consciously. “It’s not nearly as dangerous to say that here as it would be in Destiny City,” he said, with some asperity. “The sailor soldier menace is entirely contained here. Most of the time, we get them right when they first transform.”

She missed the arcane, random peppering of Japanese terminology of her Destiny City home branch already. Henshin. Senshi. “Have you had many knights?”

“None that we haven’t corrupted in the first few weeks of their careers,” he said. “Most of them have taken mineral names.” There was a judgement there, she supposed; she could hear it in the brusqueness of his tone. How could she explain that she had had a choice between Anthracite and Avalon, and she had chosen the one more familiar? Chaos was supposed to be all about rejecting the natural order of things. Who cared if, in her heart, she was Avalon, a corrupted knight? “None of them have been Earth knights.”

“You’d think they’d be more common,” she said. Her baggage came around on the carousel, and she did not beat Jacob to the handle of the first bag--but she snagged the second, for about thirty seconds. Old World chivalry, she supposed, trying to hide the dissatisfied frown on her face. It made sense; the man was supposed to be her uncle, and she could hardly deny anything where someone might be watching. “Thank you,” she said, politely.

They didn’t talk until she was settling in to the two-room adjunct’s apartment at St. John’s. It was a long drive, an hour and a half if she was being generous--more if she was honest. ”We especially want you to investigate your Wonder,” he said, fussing with the electric kettle on the otherwise-empty countertop. He’d been expositing as she unpacked, on what her duties were as an adjunct professor, what he as her nominal commanding officer expected of her, the names of the others in their organization (one of whom was a dean of an Oxford college, surprising her). “It’s somewhere near us, according to you?”

She paused, trying to sort out distances. The kettle began to hiss as the water warmed up. “A little less than five kilometers off shore,” she said, finally.

“That’s not far at all. We must have been stupid to not realize that you were nearby.” She shrugged, examining her palms, the smudge of blue ink on the pad of her thumb. Babylon, she thought with a pang. Babylon.

“Maybe you were just lucky,” she said. “I wasn’t interested in much else beyond the power it could give me, then.”

Jacob poured the tea. “Be that as it may, we’d like to gain a foothold in this system the Knights have. It might grant us an advantage in Destiny City.” She nodded, and looked into the mug he passed her for a long moment. “Fraternizing will not be permitted,” he added. “We know why you’ve been reassigned, and we’ll be watching.”

“Of course,” she said.