The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

U𒊹bi𒊹ici𒊹n 𒊹io𒊹nclo𒊹u𒊹e | 5:49 PM | 𒊹5,535th Day

"Oh, thank the gods," Kam said, with an exaggerated sigh of relief. "I was half-convinced you were going to try and drag this out for hours."

Only Seth and Ptolema looked particularly taken aback by the admission. Aside from Ran - who barely reacted at all save for narrowing her eyes - Ezekiel just sniffed in disgust, while Theo simply stared at his father, his gaze almost blank. I wasn't sure if he was in shock, or... Something else.

I probably looked shocked, too, in spite of having speculated along similar lines. Linos had misled us or withheld information repeatedly, of course, but this admission felt very different. It shattered all pretense that the Order had been our allies in any sense whatsoever.

But why would they be trying to fake their deaths? I didn't understand.

Linos spoke in a strangely neutral tone, his expression dark. "...it's as you say, Kam," he confessed. "We intended to fabricate our own deaths, and for your group to report what happened back to civilization. That was the true purpose of this event."

"Oh my god!" Ptolema said, her eyes going wide with outrage. "I thought Kam had just got the wrong idea about something again, but I can't believe you just admitted it! That's so shitty!"

"Come on, Ema," Seth said. "Cool it."

"'Cool it'? What the heck do you mean, 'cool it'!? I'm mad as hell!" She glowered at Linos, her fists clenched angrily. "We went through all this crap together all day, getting traumatized by like ten different things, and he's known what's really goin' on this whole time? And just kept it to HIMSELF?" She fumed. "That's so cruel and horrible, I don't-- I don't even know a good word for how cruel and horrible it is! If he weren't stuck in a chair, I'd deck him in the face right now!"

"Let's not start throwing punches," Ran said tensely, glancing at Linos. "...even deserved ones."

"Yeah," Seth spoke again, making a soothing gesture towards her. "We don't wanna escalate things, Ema."

"Why the heck not!?" Ptolema protested, almost getting angry at him too. "Why aren't you pissed off? Faking sympathy for what happened to Bardiya and Ophelia, when he was one of the assholes stabbing them in the back the whole time!"

"Let's not start jumping to undue conclusions," Kam quickly interjected. "As I said, I'm not accusing Linos, nor any of the inner circle, of murder--"

"I get that!" Ptolema stopped her. "You're gonna say that someone used this as a chance to start killing people for real, or some crap like that, right? But even if that's true, they should have stopped it the second Bardiya actually got killed! To let that happen, and then just keep lying to us over and over..." She ran her hands through her hair. "It makes me wanna scream!"

Seth looked shocked at just how upset Ptolema was, and I saw various emotions briefly flicker through his eyes - hesitation, anger, guilt. Linos, though, barely responded at all. His gaze was almost vacant, like he was a discarded mannequin.

"...I understand your feelings, Ptolema," Kam said diplomatically, trying to calm her down as well. "But we can't afford to get bogged down on something like this. If we turn to violence before we unveil the full truth, then all we'll do is grant our true enemy an advantage."

Unspoken was her obvious lack of confidence that we could even restrain Linos if we wanted to.

"True enemy?" Ptolema inquired. "You're sayin' it's one of the rest of us? Somebody from our class?"

Kamrusepa bit her lip in mild frustration as she turned back towards Linos, avoiding the question. "Mister Melanthos," she said. "Aren't you going to elaborate a little more, now that you've confessed the truth?"

Linos was silent for a moment, then let out a soft sigh. "I'm not sure there's much more to say. I mean, you've essentially put it together already." He clasped his hands together, furrowing his brow slightly. "After years of waiting for a suitable opportunity, we formed the plan when we realized there were to be three students in the Exemplary Acolyte's Class with personal connections to the Order. Once we'd confirmed the arrangement with the board of the Old Yru Academy, we set about making preparations here in the sanctuary."

"Go on," Kam urged him.

"First," he continued, "we made sure that no one else would be here for the event. We put out a notice to general membership informing them that this would be a curated event and not to attend and, just to make sure, closed off the majority of routes to access the sanctuary under the pretext of repairs, leaving only those known by ourselves and our most trusted agents. We picked the date for more or less the reasons that you already explained, then set to work contriving a suitable scenario. Durvasa arranged most of the specific details..."

Durvasa?

...why did that feel surprising? Maybe he just hadn't come across as especially cunning.

"...and we set up the defenses of the sanctuary accordingly," Linos continued. "It would go like this: Hamilcar, the leader of the Order, has become disillusioned with our work after we abandoned █ █ █ █ █'s... Rather, Su's grandfather's project, and wracked with guilt that was all for nothing, would conspire with him posthumously to bring down the organization. He would free the undying remains of the child we murdered from where they were sealed beneath the research tower, and take advantage of his sabotage to the system to engineer our execution."

I frowned. "You were making my grandfather into a scapegoat...?" So much for his loyalty.

"Yes," Linos replied, either suppressing his shame or feeling none at all. "He was already dead, after all, so there was no downside to using him for that purpose... In fact, my own view on the matter was that he'd probably appreciate being used to destroy what he'd come to resent so much." He frowned bitterly and sadly. "Everyone would be 'killed' by being ripped apart by a monstrous incarnation of the child's vengeful ghost, framed in the context of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The violence being so spectacular would make it easy to create the impression that a body had been destroyed, when that actually hadn't happened."

"That must've gone out of the window fast," Ran commented skeptically.

"Neferuaten would die first," he explained. "Her body was supposed to be torn to pieces at the top of the bell tower. Then Durvasa would disappear before the rest of us arrived at the research tower, with his remains ultimately found in the mask room. Hamilcar would be killed in the underground by Zeno after Lilith's confession. Zeno would be killed in an ambush in the underground, and I would give myself up to placate the monster. Anna would disappear in the transposition out of the sanctuary, with only her severed arm arriving at the ultimate destination... Which was scripted to appear with our group beforehand, of course."

"Fuck me," Seth said, rubbing his eyes.

I kept wanting to interject, but I couldn't seem to open my mouth. It was uncanny to see Linos acting like this. Though it had been obvious the Order had been involved in a lot of sinister stuff for a while, in the back of my head I'd always imagined him to just have been a relative (relative) innocent left holding the bag on their behalf; forced to keep their secrets and account for their actions while the rest of them weren't even present.

But this... I was speechless.

"The rest of you would make your escape just before the final security measure of the sanctuary was due to activate-- The, uh, termination of the gravity," he continued. "...though, in truth, that function isn't even possible within the system, as the gravity generation actually comes from the Ironworkers' installation, rather than being something we created. Even the reduction to subzero temperatures was judged too dangerous to implement fully... Which is why, even though we've passed five, we haven't experienced much change, despite the fact that - isolated in vacuum as we are - the loss should be relatively dramatic."

"I was wondering about that," Ran said, shifting her clothes. "It feels a little chilly, but that's pretty much it."

Linos nodded. "That's just there to throw people off the scent while we approach the final deadline of 6:00 PM. In the case of shutting off the oxygen, though, there's more than enough in the bioenclosures to run out the clock without endangering anyone's life in any serious way... And since it's the first effect to take place, it would be under closer scrutiny. So that one was implemented straightforwardly."

"How could you hope to control us so precisely, to the point of our whole group moving from place to place on this kind of strict schedule?" Ran asked. "You're laying it out like you were so confident, but anticipating how a whole group of people will react down to the fine details is impossible outside of cheap flicks. Even if you set things up perfectly so that the obvious course of action would always be what you want, humans do illogical shit constantly. Like, what would you have done if we'd got derailed and gone over time?"

Linos stared at her tiredly. "...isn't that exactly what happened, miss Hoa-Trinh?" He held his arms together. "I feel like the situation makes our hubris unspokenly obvious."

"Okay," she said suspiciously, "let's not focus on how things ended, then. For example, when Su and the others went to pick a fight with Hamilcar, how would you have reacted if they'd tried to get involved in the fight?"

"There were many, many failsafes," Linos answered, closing his eyes for a moment.

Ran stared at him for a moment, her eyes narrow. "No," she eventually said. "This is fucking crazy, and it stinks. You wouldn't go ahead with a plan like this unless you had a reason to be absolutely sure it would go your way. Even if that reason didn't pan out."

Linos sighed softly, changing the subject conspicuously. "I think some of you heard a little about this already... But this sanctuary, in its true form, is located in the Nekrokos, at the very summit of the Tower of Asphodel," he continued. "At this point, its presence at the bottom of the Atelikos's ocean is something between an extension and a tangible illusion of the real place... But most people, even most members of the Order, aren't aware of that truth. More than making this sanctuary an invincible fortress, that is its true value as a measure of security. Misdirection."

I blinked. If that's the case, why would Anna have confessed things so freely? Wouldn't that jeopardize things? No, wait. That wasn't the real Anna.

Something didn't quite fit. Was I forgetting something?

"What the heck is the 'Nekrokos'?" Ptolema asked, her face still twisted in anger.

"That's a term for the liminal plane between the seven governed by the Tower of Asphodel, and the original universe of the Milky Way and beyond," Kam explained, her eyes staying fixed on Linos even as she spoke. "It's a void of absolute nothingness, a vacuum with an infinite floor for the dispersal of energy."

"What's important is that it's an incredibly difficult plane to access, requiring extremely advanced arcana and a continuous tremendous amount of eris to even transposition to, and where finding anything specific that does exist is impossible," Linos proceeded, his tone still flat. "In other words, it's one of the only places in the Remaining World where it's possible to completely disappear. In the event that de-synchronization occurs, the version of the sanctuary in the Atelikos is set up to violently explode. Our intent was to create the impression that nothing remained of the sanctuary... Or us."

Theo's mouth hung open for a moment, then tightly clenched. He gritted his teeth, adjusting his glasses to make his face unreadable.

"Why?" Kam asked pointedly. "Why did you want to disappear? What drove you to these lengths?"

Linos lowered his voice, his hands around his scepter. "I'm not going to answer that, miss Tuon," he said.

"Why the fucking hell not?" she hissed. "And don't try to tell me it's not relevant. This isn't like with Su, where it's a one-off. You could still be hiding things, and even if you aren't, your motive might well be foundational to the actual culprit."

Even at a time like this, I appreciated Kam's apparent willingness to become a huge hypocrite on my behalf.

Linos just stared at her, his eyes cold, as if to say 'do you think you can force me to say it?', knowing that she obviously couldn't. In fact, maybe it was my imagination, but the entire scene seemed to grow incredibly chilly all of a sudden. Something felt tangibly tense.

"...fine," Kam spat. "Then for now, let's try a different question. You've told us your intentions, now tell me what went wrong with this plan."

"Everything," Linos said bluntly. "Things went amiss from the very beginning."

"Then start there," she instructed.

He was silent for a few moments, like he was considering something complex. When he spoke, the words came slowly, with an even greater note of resignation. "Well... I suppose it's not quite right to say the 'beginning'. After all, the first day went relatively smoothly. Everyone arrived on time, and our final tests confirmed that the system was set up properly. Despite some disagreement behind the scenes, no one noticed anything amiss--"

Something flickered in my mind.

"...what disagreement?" I asked.

Somehow, being questioned by me in these circumstances seemed to disquiet Linos quite a bit more than answering to Kamrusepa. He visibly shuddered slightly, recoiling. "That's-- It's of no relevance, Utsushikome."

Kam was about to chide him again, but I beat her to the punch. "Forgive me... But if part of the inner circle didn't want to go through with this plan for whatever reason, that seems like almost a perfect motive."

Linos hesitated and frowned, his lower lip trembling slightly in the first major show of emotion since his confession had begun. He inhaled sharply. "It wasn't like that. The disagreement wasn't over whether the plan should take place, just whether it was... Too soon. Whether things should go ahead, or whether we should delay our plans and find a different opportunity. It wasn't that extreme an argument."

"Hard to judge when you won't even tell us what those plans were," Kam remarked.

Once again, Linos stared at her coldly.

"Who was on either side of the argument?" I asked.

Linos's eyes flickered. He was obviously confused by the question, but answered nevertheless. "...Hamilcar, myself, and Anna wanted it to go ahead, while Neferuaten and Durvasa opposed it. Zeno was neutral, but we managed to sway him to our side."

That confirms it. My hunch had been right-- Even if the unspoken context was apparently incredibly different, what Neferuaten had told us on the morning of the second day about the schism over the event had been genuine. Which checked out; I knew Neferuaten was the type of person who never liked to lie directly, but would still conceal things by omission. Did that mean the rest of it could be trusted, too? Could I use that information, and work backwards towards understanding the motive?

What exactly had she said--

"We were originally deadlocked on the issue. Hamilcar was the one who proposed it, with Linos agreeing with him and Anna, to my surprise, coming around quickly... Usually, she's rather restrained on such matters, but in this case she seemed of a mind to make an exception. Myself and Durvasa, on the other hand, agreed it was far too soon for such a measure, and he brought Zeno around to our side-- Somehow, he's always had something of a way with the man." She chuckled to herself.

"But he changed his mind when they suggested he could invite a protégé, too?" I asked.

She clicked her tongue. "Protégé might be too strong a word. It's a little complicated... As I said, we had no idea who he even had in mind until a short time ago." Her tone became subtly more sardonic. "Without saying too much about what is really a rather personal matter for Zeno, Hamilcar suggested that he might use this event as an opportunity to pursue one of his own projects partially-independent from our collective work, which enticed him enough to sway his vote."

I frowned. When I'd originally heard that, I'd assumed that 'project' had meant something banal and academic... But as things were now, that interpretation made no sense at all. There's no way Zeno would have been convinced by something petty when the stakes of the situation were so high, and if their plan really was to fake their deaths, then their careers would presumably be over too. So she'd probably been using the word in a less formal sense.

Personal matter. I'd overlooked the significance of that phrase. When you set aside the rest, that made it sound like the reason he'd been swayed had been something private and embarrassing. What kind of 'projects' did people have that were personal and embarrassing, and involved much younger men? The only ideas which came to mind felt more like a product of me being a pervert than anything, even if Zeno had made insinuations during our conversation.

Plus, when I'd asked Zeno about Balthazar, he'd told me he was here as part of a favor to an old friend. That didn't connect with what Neferuaten had said at all - so was it just an outright lie?

Ugh, this feels like a dead end. Was Neferuaten just lying? I couldn't picture her being involved in a plan like this at all, so maybe my whole assessment of her reliability was wrong from the ground up. Or maybe Linos was lying about who was involved in this plan? But why would he? It wasn't like it'd do much to cover his ass at this point.

On top of that, it felt strange for Hamilcar to have been on the supportive side. Like Kam had pointed out, when we'd confronted him, it had seemed like he was barely even going along with the plan. Anna, too, had that air in retrospect - and even if she wasn't the real Anna, she was at least pretending to be. So wouldn't she have kept her attitude in line to avoid suspicion?

There was something I was failing to understand.

I noticed that Theo had turned his head, his short-ish hair just about obscuring his eyes from the side. What was going through his mind, hearing that his father had not only been deceiving him with a plan like this, but had been one of the people who insisted on it being enacted...? To know your own father had, at the very least, been willing to traumatize you for personal gain...

Again, I knew better than anyone that what people said and who they pretended to be on the outside meant almost nothing. But my irrational self still couldn't accept it. That Linos, the gentle, awkwardly, scholarly man who collected strange trinkets and liked cooking for people, was really capable of something so genuinely insidious.

"Things only started going amiss on the second day," Linos resumed. "Not only did Balthazar - who Zeno had insisted on bringing at the last minute despite how it might affect the plan - end up almost necessitating we cancel everything on account of his unreported prosognostic overlap with Ophelia, but late in the morning, our system suddenly detected Vijana's death--"

"You knew about it from the start?" Kam asked, but then quickly frowned and struck her head. "Of course you did. Ridiculously foolish of me-- Knowing what I do now about how your system tracks people across the sanctuary, there's no way you could possibly have just missed it. Why didn't I think of that sooner?"

I cringed a little. Now that she said it, the idea that we'd successfully concealed what had happened for any amount of time should have been obviously wrong for a long time. I knew what the security console could do, and even that Sacnicte had been sitting there all morning. I guess since Linos had admitted they'd known about the suicide as well, it just hadn't felt important...

"Death," Ran pointed out. "Not 'suicide'."

Despite it feeling like a bit of a reach, Linos nodded. "Yes. I don't know the details since Hamilcar was the one to handle it, but after discovering her body, it was decided it would be best to try and incorporate what happened into the narrative we were trying to create. So, a suicide note was fabricated that would foreshadow what was to occur--"

"Wait, hold the fuck on," Seth said, frowning. "You're telling us she was murdered?"

Linos hesitated. "It's impossible to confirm. There are no sensors in the room, since that would jeopardize its use as an ambush site, as I explained earlier... So it's not unthinkable that it was a suicide. But the fact that water was summoned in the chamber and used to clean the scene around the time of death strongly suggests that it was a murder, yes."

I knew it. From the moment Ran had found that incantation on our second visit, the whole thing had stunk.

They must have written that note fast, though. There was only about an hour and a half between when it had been cast and when we'd discovered the body.

"So you already knew that someone had been killed, and yet went ahead with the event anyway," Ran stated, eyes narrowed. "Are you insane?"

"It was not ideal," Linos said, in what might have been the biggest understatement of the whole weekend. "But things had already been set in motion. It was too late to call off the plan."

Kam's eyes boggled. "Are you fucking serious--"

"After that, there was what happened with Neferuaten and Fang," Linos said, the pace of his words increasing, like there was a pressure building within him. "She sprung that gesture on us completely out of nowhere, in utter defiance of what we'd agreed upon, knowing it was too late for us to do anything. Fang wasn't even supposed to be here at all-- They were too much of a security risk." His hands shook slightly as he gripped the rests of his wheelchair. "After that, it seemed like everything had calmed down for a while. I got into place for my part, but right away things were going wrong. Neferuaten's body wasn't in the condition it was supposed to be in. At first I assumed it was just improvisation, but then Bardiya died, and I..." His mouth hung open for a moment, listless.

"Bardiya," Kamrusepa said. "Were you responsible for his death?"

Linos swallowed. "No one was supposed to die at all." He took a heavy breath. "I didn't know what to do, so I just kept following the plan as best I was able. But when I finally met with Zeno and Anna - who I sincerely did believe was Anna, for the record - they confirmed that something was very wrong. We'd genuinely lost contact with Neferuaten, who was supposed to still be alive, and Durvasa..." He trailed off for a moment, hesitating slightly.

"What do you mean by 'lost contact'?" Kamrusepa asked. "How were you in communication? Surely you couldn't make use of the logic bridges without leaving a trail for the rest of us to follow."

"You're right," Linos said. "In case something went wrong, we set up a supplemental system that would deliver basic information about our status and location using the patrolling golems. It was rudimentary, so it was possible we'd simply overlooked something, and things were still broadly on track other than that one incident... But when we arrived at the administrative core and then the security center, we were able to confirm the situation for certain." He hesitated slightly, making a small, breathy groan. "...even so. We decided our only option was to revise the plan and try to salvage the situation. We expected that both Lilith and Hamilcar would adapt, as well."

"So Lilith was involved in all this too," I said.

"Yes," Linos said, with a stiff nod. "Though I don't know any of the details of her and Hamilcar's relationship, just that she would be compliant."

"This is sick," Ptolema snarled, sounding outraged. "'Compliant'? You're talking about a little kid! What's wrong with you?!"

Linos didn't reply, shifting his gaze neither towards nor away from her.

"Do you mean that she was aware of the real plan, or that she really had been indoctrinated?" I inquired further.

"...she knew the truth," Linos replied. "I won't say why, but I know that much. She wasn't under any real illusions about this being some sort of divine reckoning, but was rather working with us to realize the plan as had been laid out."

I frowned. "So all of what she said to us in the security center, that was just... Acting?"

"I--" Linos hesitated, seeming to cut himself off. He fidgeted anxiously. "I'd have to assume so, yes. But again, I don't know anything about Hamilcar's relationship, or her perspective on all of this. They only communicated with one another from the start."

So my big revelation back at the security center had actually been playing right into their hands all along, I realized. Great.

"This is so sketchy," Ptolema said. "You won't even tell us why Lili knew about your psycho plan in the first place? Why the heck are you still trying to hide stuff, even now? What's wrong with you?!"

Linos ignored her, continuing his explanation. "This is only my guess through inference, but they must have communicated with one another before everything happened. The original plan had called for Lilith to still be with our group, and be caught trying to kill Anna as she worked on re-routing the runework underground. That would lead back to Hamilcar, as eventually happened. Her being split up presented a complication... She must have improvised. The message she sent was probably intended to foreshadow that attack and bring things back around." His eyes grew wider. "But that was hijacked, too, so that Sacnicte and Yantho could be murdered."

"They weren't involved in this, then," Kam deduced.

"No," Linos said. "Though we were prepared to kill them, if it had come to that."

"Points for fuckin' honesty, I guess," Seth muttered.

"The explosion in the Nittaimalaru was planned, as well. We'd been afraid it wouldn't occur. Neferuaten had been the one charged with arranging it, and with everything that had gone wrong with her, I was worried it had never happened..." He closed his eyes. "And, well, you've already surmised much of the rest, miss Tuon. Zeno fabricated the appearance of the monster underground as a way to establish his own 'death', and used the projector in this bioenclosure, combined with my own appeals to save Theo's life, with the intent of driving everyone indoors..."

"And when that failed, you used the gunshot," Kam said.

Linos his head. "No."

She frowned. "No?"

"The fire from the roof was completely unplanned," Linos explained. "When it happened, I was genuinely terrified-- I thought that whoever had killed Bardiya and the two stewards was finally moving to finish us off. I rationalized that it must have been Anna improvising once we got inside, since it was helpful, my wound aside." He touched the according spot on his shoulder. "But now I'm certain that wasn't the case at all. It was probably whoever ultimately killed Fang."

"Sorry for beating a dead horse," Ran spoke flatly, "but this is legitimately fucking insane. You can't just say that 'backing out was impossible' and expect us to accept that in light of the fact that, apparently, you knew there was still an actual murderer on the loose."

Linos actually turned to her, his expression strange and distant. "But it's the truth, miss Hoa-Trinh."

"No, it's horseshit," she almost spat back, seeming actually frustrated - something rare for her. "Unless you guys really are in some kind of actual cult, no motive you could pull out of your ass would make the idea make any sense whatsoever. It's flushing self-preservation completely down the toilet."

"It's not a matter of motive," Linos told her bluntly. "It's a matter of causality. We could physically not have abandoned the plan even if we had wanted to unanimously."

"'Physically'?" She squinted at him. "What the hell does that mean? Is there a bomb strapped to your chest, or some shit?"

Linos said nothing, just staring at her, eyes wide.

"But you're abandoning the plan now," I pointed out. "By telling us this at all."

"No," Linos said, shaking his head. "You're wrong, Utsushikome. The plan is ruined, yes, but still cannot be aborted. We, meaning the members of the inner circle, are still all going to disappear here." His words were firm. "It's unavoidable."

What the hell is he talking about?

"From there, we continued with the finale as it was originally intended to occur," Linos continued. "I would disappear, and you would all escape... But unfortunately, Fang was apparently on to us. And then..." He shook his head. "I don't know anything about what happened after that. Even though 'Anna' disappeared without leaving a body, that wasn't part of our plans. And Balthazar wasn't supposed to be involved at all. And Ophelia and Fang--" He winced. "Again. No one was supposed to die. We'd never intended this."

"You let them die, you asshole!" Ptolema cried out. "If we'd known all this, it would never have happened! Take your creepy fake guilt and shove it up your butt!" She looked like she was struggling to prevent herself from punching him in the face, her whole body tensing and leaning forward.

Linos looked to her. "You're right, miss Rheeds," he said, eyes glazed over. "It's all our fault."

"You've skipped over something rather important, don't you think?" Kamrusepa asked pointedly.

Linos said nothing in response.

"Namely," she continued, "what we found in that room where you were supposed to die."