Scholarly Entry #X51-207-Uw9:

  Missing Entries in the System Database

  The System, contrary to popular belief, is not omniscient.

  It does not, in fact, know the color of what underwear you’ll wear next Saturday. It does know the tax code of seven hundred parallel universes, the dietary habits of the Greater Moss Rat of T’pah, and the exact probability of you stepping in something unspeakable immediately after polishing your boots, however.

  According to its own publicity material, what the System knows is “the sum total of all knowledge worth knowing in the Underfold.” This is often translated by skeptics as “everything the System feels like keeping, minus anything embarrassing, incriminating, or boring.” By all means, the term “worth knowing” is a great subject for debate.

  Either way, with its dizzying repository of lore, gossip, and recipes for gluten-free cake that won’t turn into masonry, the System is—under the right circumstances, and assuming proper sacrifices to the paperwork gods—capable of granting you anything from the secret techniques of ancient swordmasters to a recipe for pickled starfruit that even your grandfather won’t complain about.

  And yet, despite its tendency to know exactly how many teaspoons of powdered basil are required to placate an irritable volcano spirit, there have been… omissions.

  Rare ones.

  Unusual ones.

  The sort of thing that makes historians rub their temples and conspiratorial-minded theorists rub their hands.

  Ask it about the Flrgl-flop, for instance. Go on, try it. You’ll get an empty screen and the faint impression that something somewhere is quietly whistling and pretending not to hear you.

  This would be less troubling if the subject in question weren’t, say, an entire species, or a forgotten war, or that uncomfortably detailed manual on self-replicating sock gnomes. Critics argue—when they’re not being shushed by larger, more official critics—that you cannot prove a negative. After all, how do you know what you don’t know unless you know it? And if you knew it, it wouldn't be missing, would it?

  The Flrgl-flop might be a myth, or a mistranslation, or possibly a tax-dodge invented by a desperate warlock. Or perhaps, as many conspiratorial-minded theorists insist, it’s been erased by them—the same shadowy cabal responsible for milk that spoils before it best-by date, plot holes in well-loved novels, and that sudden, inexplicable itch in your ear as you’re carrying something fragile and irreplaceable.

  For most people, however, the matter is simple: if it were worth knowing, the System would know it. And if it doesn’t know it, well… perhaps you’re better off not knowing either.

  But then again, that’s exactly what they’d want you to think…

  ***

  It was, by most practical definitions, the same building. Or at least, it was doing a very convincing impression of being the same building. A doppelg?nger of domestic architecture. A mimic of masonry. It had the same wonky tilt, the same slightly apologetic roofline, and even the same stubborn refusal to stay down when gravity made very good points.

  Of course, saying it was the same implied certain… continuities. Like still being neatly bisected by a flying anchor from last time.

  This one wasn’t. Not even a little bit.

  It stood upright, or at least as upright as a house could manage while composed of planks spaced just far enough apart to give passing birds a peek of the inside. “Intact” was, indeed, perhaps generous. “Unbothered by structural expectations” might be closer to the truth. The sort of place where the term indoors was more philosophical than practical.

  All of it, just like it had been when Lionel first stepped through its door.

  But it wasn’t a perfect sense of déjà vu, either. The mist didn’t surge, swirl, slither, or do anything else beginning with "s" that suggested something unspeakable was about to occur. It simply loitered.

  The emotionally devastating flashback Lionel was bracing for—like someone expecting a surprise slap from a ghost with unresolved issues—never arrived. The house remained as it was: dustily indifferent.

  There were no spectral footsteps. No eerie whispers. No phantasmal memories clawing their way up through the floorboards.

  Well… almost no footsteps.

  The Pink Menace shuffled about in a manner that suggested she was either a depressed zombie, or simply emotionally allergic to enthusiasm.

  “No bed,” she muttered. “No snacks. No nothing. Bah humbug.”

  For someone who, mere minutes ago, had been on the verge of becoming a very permanent addition to the late category, her priorities remained infallibly skewed.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Lionel shot her a glance, ears still tuned to the distant, wet, and disturbingly synchronized sounds of the maritime murder-horde they’d only recently escaped.

  Having been launched through several walls—facially, no less, and very recently—the girl looked strangely fine. There was not even the polite suggestion of blood in the mud she tracked across the warped floorboards, and her stride, while not exactly elegant, was still firmly on the living side of the ledger.

  Some quirk of her class? A rare skill? Or—

  Outside, an enraged bellow ripped through the night, followed by the groan of metal and the bone-rattling crash of an anchor—yes, that anchor—being swung into yet another unfortunate building.

  Meanwhile, his headache of a companion kept looking one bad decision away from curling up beneath the floorboards for a nap (the sort most people didn’t wake up from).

  Which, to be fair, would be marginally better than dying outdoors like an unlucky hedgehog. But Lionel, even when entangled in something deeply unfortunate, found it terribly difficult to do anything by halves. He believed in following through, be it in bad decisions or high water.

  Which was how he now found himself purposefully muttering aloud, “It was over here, wasn’t it?” as he crossed the room with the stride of a man who’d misplaced something terribly important, like his common sense. It would be so much easier to just let her die. She’s clearly not worth the trouble…

  But it was already too late for regret.

  The girl—despite having looked like the living dead seconds earlier—perked up like a cat hearing the word “fish.”

  “What was?” she asked, trying and failing to sound disinterested.

  “Nothing, don’t—” Lionel began, but was swiftly overtaken by the unmistakable squelch-plap-plap of wet shoes in full gallop.

  She launched herself past him in what could charitably be described as a sprint and less charitably as a determined waddle. Her destination: the rickety chair perched against the far wall, the one Lionel had been heading for—the one where the ghost of a man had once sat in a distant, faded memory.

  “—worry about it,” Lionel finished, somewhat pointlessly.

  In the back of his mind, Lionel updated his mental file on the Pink Menace: reverse psychology, dangerously effective. Opportunities for mischief will be jumped at.

  Perhaps too effective. He’d meant to keep her from causing trouble elsewhere. He had, however, failed to consider the amount of trouble she could cause right here.

  He hadn’t noticed the chair’s lone occupant—a weathered journal, sitting with the quiet gravitas of something screaming “Important Plot Device! Handle with Care!”—until he stepped closer.

  It was the sort of item that radiated significance, practically flashing a sign that read: Event Trigger Deluxe: Proceed at Your Own Risk.

  She, naturally, ignored the warning and claimed it with a triumphant, pirouetting “A–” as though she’d just discovered the secret of fire, gravity, and affordable rent all at once. The “–ha?” that followed, however, landed with considerably less confidence.

  The moment her fingers brushed the leather binding, the mist surged forward to swallow them whole.

  ***

  “Our world isn’t the only one. That’s what my father always told me. He’d say it like he was talking about the weather—casually, as if it was just a fact everyone ought to know, like how tides come in and debts never quite go away.

  I never knew what to make of it. More than one world? I’d never even seen beyond the crooked roofs of our little fishing village. My whole life was the sea, the gulls, the creak of boats, and the smell of salt in the air. That was the world, as far as I was concerned.

  Until they came.

  The day I learned the truth was the same day I lost everything else. I still remember the way my father burst through the door, his voice rough with fear, telling me to hurry, to run, to go.

  I didn’t understand. I didn’t know why.

  But it was already too late. Word had spread—about the Girl who Could Whisper to the Sea. And they were coming to take me away…”

  ***

  Lionel rubbed at his temples as if to hold his skull together by sheer force of will. The headache wasn’t new—it had been lurking, waiting—but it’d arrived with all the subtlety of a brick to the forehead.

  This memory hadn’t hit as sharply as the previous one, but it had settled deeper, like a splinter under the skin. Something—someone—had slipped past his mental defenses with the grace of a thief picking a very expensive lock with a battering ram.

  Whoever that memory belonged to, she wasn’t ordinary. And in the Underfold, where “ordinary” had long since packed up and left, that said something.

  And someone had come to claim her.

  They.

  Lionel pushed the thought away, if only because there wasn’t room for any more questions in his head.

  “What are you doing?” he asked instead, voice strained as he glanced at the Pink Menace.

  She still held the journal half-raised, her gaze unfocused, staring up and to the left and at nothing at all.

  “I—uh,” she murmured. “I…”

  It wasn’t her usual brand of hesitation—the kind that came with fiddling, a twitch, and the tell-tales of a poorly hidden lie. This was a quieter nothing. A heavier one. The sort of nothing that made Lionel wonder what, exactly, she was hearing in the silence.

  He didn’t get the chance to ask.

  Outside, another building gave up the noble art of standing, courtesy of an anchor—yes, still that anchor—swung with the kind of enthusiasm that suggested its wielder had unresolved personal issues.

  This crash was closer. Much closer.

  “Damn it,” Lionel muttered, kneading his temples harder as if sheer pressure could realign his thoughts. “We need to get moving. Now. Hurry!”

  He strode toward the centre of the room.

  There was a sound behind him—somewhere between a snivel and the squeak of someone trying very hard not to snivel. But as she strode past him, it was with a bounce in her step so exaggerated it looked like she was trying to convince someone (possibly herself) that she’d never been miserable in her life.

  “Yes, moving is good! We need to—”

  “...And where are you going?” Lionel asked, having stopped in the middle of the room.

  She froze mid-step, looked back.

  “The memory. You saw it too, no?” He pointed to the planks at his feet, to the ghost of a scene that still lingered behind his eyes: a father, desperate and hurried, shoving his daughter toward an uncertain fate.

  Downward, into the unseen, tangled maze beneath Ashenmoor.

  “Of course I did,” the Pink Menace huffed, sounding once more like her usual, irrepressible self. She slipped into it so naturally that Lionel, for a moment, wondered if the hesitant girl from a heartbeat ago had just been a trick of the mist.

  “Down. Obviously, we’re going down…” She paused, eyes flicking to the floorboards, which were—by their very nature—designed to make “down” somewhat complicated. “...Right?”

  Lionel crouched and pried up the same loose plank that hadn’t been quite enough in the memory. Darkness yawned beneath. The sort of darkness that didn’t merely look empty but gave the unsettling impression that it was waiting.

  “Right,” he agreed, quietly.

  Something unpleasant was definitely lurking here in Ashenmoor.