Chapter 135: The Final Correspondence

Mara had avoided Marek long before he reached the Botanical Institute, though she never thought of it as running from him.

Venielle had started moving the Gemini group more carefully once Mara’s name appeared in too many public records. Registration desks were difficult to avoid completely. They needed water, food, medicine, and somewhere to sleep when Venielle could not immediately open another route, but every form with MARA VALE written across it left something behind.

Old Gemini mirrors could still answer traces that remained after the Veil fell. Once Sareth Venn began reaching into records and events that should have already ended, Venielle stopped allowing Mara’s name to remain in one place any longer than necessary.

Marek complicated that without knowing.

Wherever he passed, somebody remembered him asking about a fourteen-year-old blonde girl. He copied names and addresses, photographed notices, returned to registrars when an answer did not make sense, and wrote down anything that might become useful later. Mara knew how he searched. He did not throw information away simply because it had failed him once.

Eventually, even Venielle began noticing how consistently his trail followed theirs.

During one light period, they stopped at a northern relief center that had been set up around an old school gymnasium. They did not register. Venielle only wanted enough water for the younger Gemini bearers before moving again, so Mara remained near the side entrance while volunteers carried boxes of supplies past them and civilians waited beside tables covered with forms.

Venielle came to stand beside her after checking the route they would use next. "Your brother is still following the places we’ve passed through."

Mara turned toward her. "How close?"

"Not close enough for you to see him."

Mara glanced toward the entrance. "So he’s still behind us."

"Yes."

She picked at the edge of her sleeve before asking, "If I stay somewhere long enough for him to catch up, can Sareth use that?"

Venielle was quiet for a moment.

Mara watched Venielle for a moment. "You still haven’t said no."

Venielle met her eyes. "Because I can’t."

Mara’s hand stopped at her sleeve. She looked back toward the entrance, then away again. "Right."

For several seconds, she said nothing.

"If I stay," Mara asked quietly, "how bad will it be?"

For a few seconds, she imagined Marek walking through it. He would probably look exhausted. He would ask if she was hurt before asking why she had been moving so much, then pretend he was not angry when she told him she had known he was searching for her.

One of the younger Gemini minors called for Venielle from the waiting reflection.

Mara stayed where she was.

"Do we really have to go now?" she asked.

"We do not have to," Venielle replied. "But I need you to understand what staying may give someone else."

Mara almost wished Venielle would just decide for her. At least then she could blame someone else for leaving.

Mara rubbed beneath one eye with the heel of her hand. "Open it."

Venielle followed.

Mara waited until the others had crossed before stepping toward the reflection herself. She still checked the entrance once more, even though there was nobody there she recognized.

By the time Marek reached that relief center during the next light period, Mara and Venielle were already gone.

On the other side of the route, she managed several steps down the corridor before her vision blurred badly enough that she stopped. She rubbed both hands over her face, annoyed at herself for crying when she had been the one who chose to leave.

Then, she kept walking.

Venielle had shown Mara one more line from Ilyara Sen’s record before she returned to the shelter. She had refused to tell Mara what she thought it meant, only that the surviving versions disagreed on enough details that she would not pretend one reading was certain.

"From the mother who is two, the Twin without equal shall be born."

Mara read it twice. "That’s supposed to be me?"

"It may be," Venielle said. "Ilyara Sen saw something real. What everyone built around it afterward is another matter."

Mara read the line again and stopped at the word born. It made her life sound planned before she had even existed. "So what, I was supposed to happen or something?"

"No." Venielle’s answer came without the carefulness she had used with the rest of the record. "A dream does not get to decide what you belong to."

At the time, Mara still did not understand the first half of the line.

She understood more after she returned to Marek.

Outside the shelter, he told her about Celeste for the first time. Celeste had been a real Astral identity before she died, had once reached Cycle XI, and now shared Amara’s body and parts of her life without replacing her. Most of her old Authority had not survived, but she had been part of Amara’s life since before Marek was born. Mara had grown up with both of them there without knowing enough to separate one from the other.

Venielle believed Mara’s manifestation might be connected to the same coexistence. The paired mirrors had already accepted two valid answers around her, although even Venielle would not call Ilyara Sen’s dream proof of what Mara would become.

Mara cared far less about becoming anything than she cared about Marek finding out what was about to happen.

By then, Sareth had already used her brother as a witness. The House of Gemini had active systems on Earth, and Ilyara Sen’s record was no longer something Venielle could rely on obscurity to protect. If Earth was given a lie about Mara’s death, Sareth could eventually find the lie. If they hid her without giving the public route a real ending, the unfinished connection would remain something he could follow.

Mara listened until Venielle finished, then asked, "Can I see my brother before we do it?"

Venielle warned her that returning to him would strengthen the family relation they were trying to close.

"Then close it properly after," Mara said. "I still want one night."

That was why she stepped through the mirror at the shelter.

Marek never realized she had already spent days choosing not to see him. When he hugged her, checked her arms, asked about training, and worried over the changes in her Mark, Mara let him think she had simply grown more responsible since they separated. Correcting him would have meant explaining why she had been learning how to leave.

She spent the evening doing things she had never considered worth remembering before. She moved the gauze in his backpack because he kept putting the noodles above it, repaired the loose seam beside his left trouser pocket with gray thread, and dropped the egg from her noodles onto his plate.

"Why are you carrying sewing supplies through mirror routes?" Marek asked.

"Mom raised at least one competent child."

When Mara noticed an older repair beside the seam, she studied the uneven stitches. "Did you do this one yourself?"

"Yeah."

"It looks like insects died on the fabric."

Marek glanced down. "It stayed closed at least."

"Barely."

For a few minutes, the coming procedure felt far enough away that Mara could pretend there would be another night like this one.

Later, she asked whether Marek had heard anything from the university, whether the laboratory was still standing, and what had happened to the equipment he used there. She also asked whether he still skipped meals whenever he became too focused. Then came the plant beside their kitchen window, the coins in the ceramic cup beside his bed, the charger he had borrowed months ago, the neighbor’s folding ladder, and the bakery near her school. Marek answered without asking why she suddenly cared about things she had spent years calling boring.

Mara listened because those details proved he had once possessed a life that did not revolve around finding people. She wanted to remember that version of him, especially after watching Day 367 reduce his world to routes, records, injuries, and whichever member of their family had disappeared next.

Outside the shelter, she leaned against his arm while Marek remembered a blackout from years earlier. Mara had been nine when the power went out during a storm and she appeared at his bedroom door with a pillow, insisting that her room was hotter than his. When he told her to open the window, she complained about mosquitoes and the hole in her net. She eventually slept on the floor beside his bed. Thunder woke Marek later, and he found her hand curled around the lower edge of his blanket. He lowered one arm from the mattress and let her hold his wrist instead.

Now she was leaning against that same arm.

"What?" Mara asked when she noticed him looking down.

Marek shook his head. "Nothing."

She almost told him not to do that annoying thing where he remembered something and would just keep it to himself. The complaint reached the back of her throat before she swallowed it. If she started asking for old stories, she was afraid he might notice how carefully she was saving them.

The next day, beside the shallow reflecting pool, Mara pulled out the last two noodle packets she had been carrying and the folded note tucked between them before pressing everything into Marek’s hands.

DON’T EAT BOTH. I WILL KNOW.

She had written three different notes before settling on that one. The first sounded like goodbye. The second sounded even more like goodbye because she had tried too hard to make it casual. She tore both apart and wrote something Marek would complain about instead.

Mara folded the note and slipped it between the noodles before she could change the words again.

Later, when she asked Marek not to interfere, she said please because she knew exactly what that word would do once he understood that the choice was hers. Marek could be stubborn about almost anything except someone else’s right to decide what happened to them. Mara had watched him give her that choice before, and then she used it.

At the time, she had told herself that knowing her brother that well was part of loving him. Watching him cry at her funeral had made the thought much harder to defend.

The white room had grown dim by the time people began leaving the church. The mirror still showed the cemetery, although darkness was gathering around the edges of the reflection and swallowing the damaged walls piece by piece.

Venielle touched the frame. "The viewing route is closing."

"Wait." Mara moved closer until her toes nearly touched the glass. "Just one more minute."

Marek and Rhovan were already walking away from the grave. Dario, Nadia, Kellan, Eren, Silas, and Rafe remained near the church behind them while the white lilies with gold running through their petals covered the fresh soil.

Marek looked back once, then again several steps later. Mara pressed her palm against the glass.

"I’m..." Her throat hitched. "I’m... I’m still here... Kuya Marek."

He kept walking.

The reflection blurred around Marek as the mirror started to close. His shoulders blurred first, then the edge of his backpack, and Mara thought about everything still inside it: his notebook, old family notes, the papers he had collected while searching, and the death record he had signed because neither of their parents had been there to do it.

For more than a week, Marek had refused every easy answer Linden gave him. A registry entry was not enough. An empty facility was not enough. Someone saying they had seen Mara leave in another direction only sent him after the next direction. He kept looking because nothing had ever been complete enough to make him stop.

This time, Earth had given him a body his own Mark recognized, a death he could not remove, a funeral, and a grave carrying her name.

Marek disappeared beyond the edge of the mirror before the reflection finally went dark.

Mara continued speaking after his image disappeared, repeating his name into glass that no longer showed anything beyond her own faint reflection.

Mara’s breath fogged the glass again.

For years, she had not called him by the childish nickname she used when she was small enough to cling to his leg. It came back now without effort.

"I’m sorry, Kuya Rekrek..."