LOST Chapter 16: Four of Us

Read chapter 16 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Riku arrived at seven exactly, which told me something about him, that he was the kind of person who arrived when he said he would, not early in the way of people who are anxious and not late in the way of people who are managing distance. Just at seven, through the kitchen door, still in his school uniform because he had come directly from home, the school bag over one shoulder, looking around the kitchen with the same quality of attention he had given the harbor wall the previous afternoon. Hana introduced them. Riku nodded at her the way you nod at someone whose existence you have been told about and are now confirming. Hana looked at him the way she looked at most people when she was still deciding what category they belonged to, which was carefully and from behind the tea she was making. I had spent the day thinking about how to do this. The problem with explaining world mechanics to someone who has been experiencing them without a framework is that the framework, once given, cannot be taken back. You cannot un-know that the second map is a real map. You cannot restore the condition of not having the explanation, even if the explanation is incomplete, even if the explanation raises more questions than it resolves. I had learned this from my own experience of the last two weeks, the way each new piece of information reorganized everything that had come before it, the way understanding accumulated not as a structure being built but as a picture coming into focus, each clarification making the previous blur visible as a blur rather than as clarity. Riku was seventeen. He had been living with the second map for two years and had told a school counselor some of it and had not told his mother and had approached a stranger at the harbor because he had run out of reasons not to. I owed him honesty. Not completeness, I didn't have completeness. Honesty. We sat at the kitchen table. Hana poured tea. Riku put his bag down and sat in the chair that left him facing the door, which I noticed and filed, the instinct of someone who has learned to know where the exits are, which he had acquired from the second map without knowing that was what he was doing. I said: what I know is still incomplete. I want to be clear about that at the start. There are things that Hana knows that I'm still learning. There are things that neither of us knows. What I can tell you is the shape of it as I currently understand it, and Hana can correct me where I get it wrong. Hana, across the table, made no indication of objection to this arrangement. This was her form of agreement. Riku said: all right. So I told him. I started with the structure of it, the way I had come to understand it over two weeks of combining my seven years of independent theory with what Hana and Nao had given me, which was: the worlds are layered. Not stacked, not parallel exactly, but layered, sharing the same geography, the same history up to various divergence points, occupying the same space in different configurations. Misakiura exists in all of them, or versions of it, recognizable and wrong in specific ways. The wrong ways are not random. They are the accumulated consequences of the divergence points, small differences compounding over time into the second maps and the wrong shops and the absence of stone markers. I told him that people crossed between the layers. That it happened spontaneously sometimes, at rupture sites, places where the boundary between layers was thin enough to breach. That it happened deliberately too, by people who understood the mechanism. That some people who crossed came back and some did not and some, like Hana, chose not to. I told him that the boundary between layers was thinning. That it had been thinning for a long time, for reasons that were still becoming clear to me, and that there was a machine under the shrine that had been running for three hundred years and that the thinning was connected to the machine in ways I was still working out. He li