Leo had coffee, then left to get back to work. And abruptly, Charlotte finds herself in the café, sitting across from a man wearing a full-coverage suit and mask, with a curious symbol on his chest.
She recognizes him after just a moment. “Resister. The mysterious hero.”
“Ms. Palmer. It is time we spoke more frankly with each other. Will you accompany me to my base?”
Charlotte pauses, to evaluate her instinctive response to the enigmatic man’s invitation. But curiosity wins out.
“Provided I can take my coffee to go.”
Resister leads the way to an out-of-the-way corner of Halcyon’s Skyharbor neighborhood. He unlocks the door of a basement apartment, beckons for Charlotte to enter, then closes and locks it behind him. An indicator light above the door switches from red to green.
“Lest I alarm you, let me explain my precautions,” Resister says. “This room is a sort of Faraday Cage. Please don’t open any doors or windows, or otherwise break the seal of the room. This is the only place where it’s safe to unmask and relax.”
He pulls off the mask, and Charlotte immediately sees the family resemblance.
“I am the son of the Dread Queen of Vyortovia,” says Resister.
Charlotte, already curious, has been probing the mysteries of the room, and now with the suit unsealed can feel the truth. “The veil. The warding magic that kept everyone from remembering Vyortovia. You’ve trapped that magic, somehow, using your electrical technology. You’re using it to conceal yourself, to make people forget about you too.”
Resister nods. “Not even my own mother remembers my existence, now. Which is how I’ve been able to work effectively all this time.”
Charlotte looks at the room with new eyes. Surveillance photos of Alycia Chin on the wall, from around the time she first met and attacked Harry. The book of Vyortovian fairy tales that Taz lent to the team when the Yule Cat invaded. He must have been the source for that book, reflects Charlotte.
“How long have you been following my team?” she asks.
“I was shadowing Dr. Chin’s daughter,” Resister explains. “After the Hidden Family attacked Byron Quill and Dr. Chin on their way into the Sunken World, she came to my attention, because she wished to follow them. I expected the Hidden Family to pick up her trail, but somehow they never did. Your team became interested in it, but after your defeat of Hannibal Lectric - one of the Hidden Family - I believe they began to work against you behind the scenes.”
“The Sunken World? Oh, is that what we call the Sepiaverse?”
“I believe so.”
Charlotte hums. “And their opposition to us? Through Rook Industries? Devon Crowninshield?”
Resister sighs and nods. “He was my most promising lead to the remaining members of the Hidden Family.”
Charlotte’s lips curl in wry amusement. “I regret cutting off your investigation, but circumstances were such that I needed to ah, sever our connection rather abruptly.”
The young man smiles. “Oh, of course, I understand. I’ve hoped that ever since Jason Quill expressed an interest in rescuing people from the ahh, the ‘Sepiaverse’, that the Hidden Family would take a renewed interest in your activities, and I could trace them from there.”
“What is your interest in them? Or does your royal heritage explain it?” asks Charlotte.
“My heritage, and what I believe are their objectives,” Resister says.
He walks to a bookshelf, relieves a groaning shelf of the weight of an old tome, and hauls it to a wooden table for exhibition. Charlotte follows, and inspects the text.
The mystery hero explains, flipping pages from time to time in order to find an appropriate picture or stretch of text. “I believe that the Hidden Family has been resurrecting the spirits of our ancient monarchs and sages. Here, portraits… A quarter of our people died during the Mist Hardships. It was a great loss. Here, an illustration of the eruption. I believe that loss motivated them to seek out a way to secure our people from the reach of death itself.”
Resister flips further through the tome. “Here. Spells of resurrection, revival, and communication. Necromantic rituals. From what I understand about your interactions with Crowninshield, they have updated their methods, but not their aims.”
Charlotte processes all this. It makes sense, given Crowninshield’s plan. “They’d have an eternal council of the wisest rulers of your nation.” The implication dawns on her. “And what role would your mother have in this arrangement?”
“She’d become a figurehead - or worse, a medium for these ghosts, without freedom or will of her own. That is a personal reason for me to oppose the Hidden Family.”
There’s an important unasked question here. Charlotte suddenly hears it, and gives it voice. “Why did the Hidden Family want to stop Byron Quill and Dr. Chin from going to the Sepiaverse?”
Resister hesitates. “I don’t know. But I can speculate.”
“Please do.”
“I can find two possible reasons. The first is that ghosts are not bound to the reality from which they emerge, a fact I need not tell you about. But once you’ve begun to build an empire on shackled specters, you begin to crave larger and larger sources of them. Perhaps they feared two super-scientists would interfere with their activities there.”
Charlotte remembers all too well her part in using this source of power to achieve her goals, and shudders. She, too, is related to the Hidden Family. Will their ambition haunt her, even when she consciously opposes their aims?
“The more likely reason is that those two men were the instrument for the Sunken World’s final end. Their presence there could only cause more destruction - if not from the living, then from the vengeful dead. This, too, would deplete the resources the Hidden Family wished to tap, but for other reasons. And perhaps the Hidden Family’s members themselves had a revenge motive. I cannot know. But in their place, I would.”
Charlotte nods slowly. “Why is the Sunken World the way it is?”
“Nobody knows for sure. But the older ones called it the second eruption of Laki, another Mist that fell over our land. Like a miasma of sadness.”
“How long ago?”
“Decades, perhaps.”
Thoughts coalesce into Charlotte’s mind. “In other worlds, your world was flooded with negative emotions?”
She’s been watching the young man’s face throughout the conversation. He closely guards his feelings, but she can see the thoughtfulness behind his passive expression.
“Yes, I think you could say that.”
She remembers Leo’s explanation of the multiverse, and Concord’s interactions with the emotional barrier’s intelligence, and wonders.
Could the Concordance have created the Sepiaverse?