The world runs by outside, but it’s only the brief shine of the narrow river bellow that holds my attention. As it drifts away, blending in with the bush and hills, I find my gaze looking back down at the table in front of me, and the papers in my hand. After another quick scan of the page, I square the few documents up and place them back into their file, then hand the thin folder to Alfred, who sits across from me. He puts down the lofty stack of sheets in his hand on the empty seat beside him.

“What’s this?” He asks.

I turn to look outside as I answer his question.

“It’s all of the important things.” I tell him.

Even though he’s not directly in my sight, I can tell he’s rather surprised, or perhaps confused. He looks over to the other side of the train car, where there’s another table and two bench seats, all stacked to the limit with documents of all kinds. Their positions having reached a stable equilibrium from the trains many turns, with what hasn’t balanced well enough now laying scattered on the floor.

A black wall passes by the view outside as we enter a tunnel in the hillside. The lights in the cabin flick on immediately as if on que.

Alfred has picked up the file I passed him, flipping through the thirty or so pages in its contents.

I wait for him to close the file before speaking.

“From almost every place he’s been, there are two things he seems fixated on.” I begin.

“The first is the railway map,”

Alfred opens the folder back up, taking a second look.

“and the second is a map of the locations of every Conservatory in the world.”

Though studying the pages quite carefully, Alfred seems to still be lost as to where to begin.

“If you look closely, you’ll notice that the hidden railway sections don’t match up with the locations of the Conservatories for the most part.” I tell him. “But if you look at the numbers, I’ve written at the top of some of the pages, you’ll see that some of them do match with each other.”

I give him a moment to check the differences for himself, enough time for the daylight to return and the lights inside to shut back off.

“From this it’s quite easy to see that there’s a good chance that many of these maps were made as decoys.”

Alfred nods, seeming to at least somewhat agree with what I’m saying.

“However, I do believe that of these sets of maps, one of them is the real thing.” I tell him.

I reach out my hand, and Alfred hands the folder back to me. I lay it down on the table and flip through for the pages marked with a ‘5’ in the top corner. I place the on the table and spin them around so they’re facing him.

“With so much data, it would probably be impossible anyone to find any difference between a fake and something real, but whoever they’ve got in charge of this project made one little oversight.”

My finger hovers over the sheet before landing on a single dot on the other side of the ocean from us.

“Out of all the sets of maps, there’s only one with a Conservatory marked here.”

I take my finger away from the map, revealing the area underneath it. Just a single dot, marked with the name, C1328. Home.

“This dot is certainly real. So, it would be a reasonable assumption that this set of maps is the real thing.”

Alfred places his hand on his chin and stares at the pages on the table for a good minute, seeming to not even take a moment to breath. He then straightens his back and sits up in his seat.

“How are you so certain that that dot is what you think it is?” He asks.

I reach my hand down, feeling the other page I’d left beside me earlier.

“Do you remember when we went to the old city? It took us three days to walk there, heading down south by the water.”

Alfred nods, waiting for me to continue.

I place the page at my fingertips on top the table over the pages from before. He takes one glance at it and seems to be satisfied with that.

“There’s one other thing, that more or less confirms my suspicions, which is that the location that was holding the half of this set of maps was the railway station that he hit before disappearing for a few months.”

A frown begins to envelop Alfred’s face. A serious look this time, one I’ve never from him before.

“So. That’s it then.” He says, almost frozen in time.

“What’s it?” I ask him, though already knowing fair well what he must be thinking.

He crosses his arms, falling deeper into his seat.

“I’m sure you already know.”

“Yes, but I need to hear you say it.”

He lets out a heavy sigh.

“Yesterday morning. It was a weapons facility.”

As I hear him speak those words, I realize that at some point I’d stood up, my knuckles pressing against the wooden table.

“You have to tell me now, what we were all raised for.”

I make my demand outright, worded more personally than I’d intended. But he just closes his eyes and shakes his head.

“I’m sorry.”

A sudden urge to cause some damage swells up from within me, without me even seeming to realize it’s there. Perhaps there for some time now. But as a sequence of the shadows of a line of trees by the side of the tracks draws a blur across the light through the window. I feel my fists rest, and I drop myself back down into my seat.

The sky outside is a pure blue.

“Just promise you’ll tell me someday.”

“Of course. As soon as I can. I can promise you that.”

----------------------------------

We step out of the black vehicle, greeted by a wide paved walkway. It stretches forward, lined by flowers of many colours, and fields of grass of a singular height and shade. A row of hedge trees draws the boundaries of the premises. An almost perfectly maintained garden, with hardly a person in sight.

Our driver sees us off, leaving just me and Alfred in the presence of a soft wind, rolling over the grass. I wait for him to take the first step, but when I realize he’s just standing still without what seems to be a worry in the world, he tells me of what the plan is supposed to be.

“I’ve been told it’ll just be you heading in first,” He says. “They want you to head to the back of the building.”

I take a look down the stone walkway, scanning both sides of the building for a way around.

“That’s all I’ve been told.” Alfred finishes. “I’ll come find you around evening today.”

I give him a nod, and without much else, start on my way down the path.

My attention is captured by the dull colourless building at the end of the walkway. It’s maybe two or three stories. It’s hard to tell from the outside. I continue forward at a brisk pace, trying to keep up with my shadow, and as I get ever closer, I notice that the floors of the bottom floor are actually made of glass, having looked white prior from the reflection of sunlight.

Looking from closer up, the building’s design is not unlike that of the Conservatory. The glass walls, and the many identical windows on the upper floors. A wide entrance and vast fields all around. There’s even a flock of white sheets set to dry on the rooftop, behind the ring of fences that surrounds it. If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought this place was just that, but there is one small difference that I can see. Mixed into the bedsheets is a line of monotonous clothing. A single colour top to bottom, matching the sky above. That’s all there is. It’s all the people here wear.

I reach the entrance to the building, and the glass door slides open, but I don’t enter right away. On the wall to my right there’s a sign. It reads from top to bottom:

Entrance, emergency room, back garden.

I head off in the direction the last arrow points me in, stepping off the paved cobble walkway in exchange for a narrow path of stone slab steppingstones.

As I loop around the building’s corner, the greenery becomes more and more lush, changing from flowers no higher than my ankles, to potted sections of plants, and trees grown in rings of stone. Taking a closer look, there seems to be a name written by each of the plants I pass by.

I turn the final corner, received by a small garden much like the ones I’d just been walking by. The path I’m on becomes smoother, and wider. It intersects with another coming from the other side of the building. There are more fields, and the hedge trees are still there in the distance. And in the middle of it all, there’s a single figure, casting a shadow at the place where the stone meets the grass. Just a few stairs difference is all that separates them. The girl waits at the edge, unable to bring herself down.

I step quietly towards her.

The two of us await next in each other’s company, both not speaking a single word. She doesn’t look up at me from her wheelchair, but even so,

“Shall I take you down?” I ask the girl.

She shakes her head.

“I’m fine up here.”

Her voice is weak. Much weaker than I remember it.

“How have you been these days?” The girl asks.

“There’s been ups and downs.”

“Is that so? I’d love to hear about it.”

“Well, I finally beat your brother at something.”

“Good for you, that’s no easy feat.”

“Not really. He kind of let me win.”

There’s a brief pause in our conversation.

“And what about the downs?” The girl asks.

“Well. Your brother is also now a terrorist. Cecile is nowhere to be found. And,”

I find my sentence trailing off into the wind.

A sudden warmth envelops my hand. Not another word is shared between the two of us for a while.