It’s not long after that lunch is ready. We finish the prep work without another word to each other, and the first to arrive is Luna, smiling at the two of us.

  “Looks good today, girls,” she says. “Hopefully it wasn’t too much trouble to figure out.”

  “Finished without a hitch,” I reply. “Couldn’t have messed it up if I tried.”

  “That’s reassuring to hear, because it is very hard to mess instant mashed potatoes up. How do you feel so far, Melody?”

  Refreshed. Violent. Dignified. Unstable.

  “Alright so far. A little bored, if I’m allowed to say, though.”

  “Yeah, that’s fair. I’m sure we can find something for you to do tonight. Maybe the two of you can work it out so one of you does lunches, and the other does dinners.”

  I wish I could say it’s difficult for me to lie to people like this, but these sorts of lies, no matter how small, are the only way I’ve gotten as far as I have. Even under Asgard, I would have to lie to so many people on a daily basis just to get through a mission. There’s always a twinge of guilt when the people I’m lying to are completely innocent, but rarely do these lies hurt anyone, anyway.

  Purity heads a group of others joining the hall, most of which I recognize by name from this morning, and Tes and I join the group in filling our plates with food. There are three long party tables that have been put end-to-end to allow for everyone to sit together, and I pick a spot that seemingly isn’t reserved for anyone. The last person to filter in is a man in heavy armor covering every inch of his body. It’s some sort of silvery reflective metal, but most of it is painted with wildflowers and a blue, cloudy sky. Instead of taking a seat, he grabs a plate and leaves the building.

  “What’s that guy’s deal?” I ask the table.

  “That’s Copper,” Purity responds. “He’s… he has rituals. It’s part of whatever army he used to be in, or something to that effect. He’s not allowed to take the armor off around others, I guess.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s interesting,” Herb says, across the table. The chair beside him is empty, as if reserved. “Usually Biff is one of the first here, and for some reason he hasn’t shown up yet.”

  “Oh, no,” Luna says, not looking up from her food. “This is heartbreaking news.”

  “I’m sure he’ll turn up soon,” Oriana says. “He hasn’t missed a lunch yet.”

  Herb doesn’t press the topic further, and lunch wraps up after a few scattered conversations between everyone. Tes and I begin the cleanup process, and Luna hangs behind, offering some small help here and there.

  “What’s the problem?” I ask, doing my best to pretend to care about the clean-up.

  “Nothing,” she replies, turning to gaze into my eyes. “Just figured I’d help out a little on your day off. I’m working later tonight for setting up Miami’s funeral, so I have some time to… meander, pretty much.”

  “Okay.”

  At the same moment, Aloe steps into the room, their hair lightly singed. There’s an excitement in their demeanor that wasn’t visible at any other point today.

  “We’ve got something,” Aloe says, pointing their thumb out the door. “An anomaly.”

  “Anomaly?” Luna asks, breaking her eye contact to face my housemate. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we’re not sure. Whatever it is, it’s very small right now. But we’ve never had an anomaly in our readings the full six cycles we’ve been tracking data.”

  “Okay, but what do you mean? What readings?”

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  “It’s better if you—”

  I feel it again. The tips of my fingers, pulsing, in pain. A heat creeps up my neck, and a drumming beat slams against the backs of my eyes.

  Fuck. Not right now.

  “Melody, are you feeling alright?” Aloe asks. In my red-soaked vision, I see Luna turn back to face me before stepping back a bit.

  “Go!” I shout. I try to scramble to the wall away from the others, but as my back collides with a chair, the painful force is released, searing a crack in the floor and throwing me into the ceiling. There’s a moment where my motion is frozen, and as I begin to plummet back down, the same translucent platform Tes had made earlier catches my fall. She lowers me slowly, and my feet touch the floor long before she removes the platform.

  They stand and stare at me with varying levels of scared shock.

  “What… was that?” Aloe slides my way, adjusting their glasses to look at my hands. “May I?”

  I nod, drained, and they hold my hand, turning it around, attempting to see if there’s any remnants of my flare-up. I know there aren’t.

  “Are you alright?” Luna asks, cautiously stepping forward. “That looked painful.”

  I wipe a bead of sweat away with my free hand. “I’m fine. This just happens sometimes.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have any superpowers.”

  My eyes meet her, and for the first time since crashing through a roof and being here, the words that leave my mouth are genuine.

  “This isn’t a superpower. It’s a curse.”

  Trying their best to be hospitable, the three of them each find a way to help me relax for a moment, with a chair, an ice pack, and a blanket. As Aloe writes something down in their phone, Luna paces the floor, trying to reconcile this new variable with my being here.

  “How often does this sort of thing happen?”

  “Not usually often,” I say. “And almost never around other people.”

  “And it’s not something you can control?”

  “No.”

  “No rhyme or reason?” Aloe asks.

  “Nothing. The fuckers that did this to me couldn’t even figure out what they did. They determined that sometimes they could trigger it with an injection of anti-Boron, but I doubt if those mashed potatoes had antimatter in them.”

  Luna’s puzzled expression warps further. “Anti-Boron? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Anti-Boron?” Aloe remarks. “I mean, it’s not as if Boron is common enough to create any adverse effects on injection.”

  “Aloe! Aloe! Where are you?!”

  Loki’s voice echoes outside as she yells for her partner in crime, and she swings the door open, a long sheet of paper flowing beside her. “Oh, you’re in here. I’ve been running around everywhere. The anomaly spiked like two minutes ago. An insane reading. Never seen anything like it. The directional readings pointed… in this direction.”

  Loki stares at me, wrapped like a sick child in a seat, and makes the connection.

  With her staring, the others follow the dotted line, all turning back to face me as well.

  “You’re the anomaly,” Aloe says. “Rather, your outbreak is.”

  “Can one of you two explain what the hell the anomaly is about, anyway?” Luna crosses her arms. She clearly isn’t one for bullshit. I almost respect her for it.

  Loki straightens her posture, as if entering presentation mode. “Alright, so we know the End Lands is that space between the universes, right? And it ebbs and flows with readable data and information on a static, steady pace.”

  “There are calculable movements, changes, and events that we’ve been picking up on as we’ve been studying,” Aloe adds. “Most of which are arcane in nature, bleeding out of respective universes.”

  “No, it’s not arcane. It’s scientific data. Readable, decipherable. Like the time the radio waves came from Aug-28-ELP regarding the murder of a man in Europe on Earth.”

  “Okay, but what about the actual nature of the bleeds, or the other observable things we’ve found, like traces of spell aura regularly crackling out of Jun-148-CCH.”

  “Like I said, that has very clear elemental compounds that—”

  “That you said didn’t make sense together, and had to be something else, despite my insistence on the same makeup as an arcane fire.”

  “Nerds,” Luna says, trying to snap the two back to the actual conversation.

  “Yes, right. The actual data that comes from these bleeds is up for interpretation, but they’re all at regular intervals. Even when we detect new bleeds from new-forming universes, or find one with a slower interval, or so on, they’re incorporated in the algorithm.”

  “So what was the anomaly, then? What does it mean?”

  “We… don’t know. It was the exact opposite of a bleed in terms of the data presented. What’s the opposite of a bleed? We also don’t know. Removal of information, perhaps?”

  Luna seems to ponder the information, although it’s clear half of it means nothing to her. “What do we do with this, then?”

  Loki’s posture shifts a little. “Ideally… we study it.”

  All eyes are back on me, the proposed guinea pig of Loki and Aloe’s investigation into the unknown.

  “Let me get this straight—you want to try and provoke whatever painful, dangerous outburst Melody had just so you can try and figure out why it messed up your equipment?”

  “Well, with her permission, of course.”

  “No. We made it clear with Miami, and we’re making it clear again with Melody: we will not recklessly experiment with each other. The fact that we’re here is a miracle enough, and we don’t need to push our luck.”

  With Luna’s decisive statement, the two scientists nod in diminished submission, and quietly gesture my way before leaving the meal house.

  If my flare-ups show as anomalies on their equipment, then this isn’t the first anomaly they’ll have recorded. They’ll find out exactly when and where the anomaly occurred, and then my cover is blown.

  I am completely fucked.