(End of Book 2) Chapter 101: Epilogue
The man on the stone bench was muscular, despite his apparent advanced age. As big as he still was now, he must have been an absolute monster back in his youth. That might have been true too, if he was really a man, had really attained old age, or had ever had a youth. He wasn’t and hadn’t. This was just who that portion of him was, at that time.
He sighed as he watched another incarnation of himself walk the garden path towards him, a young adolescent girl moving with all the brisk hurry of youth in her straw hat and flowered dress. He suppressed the impulse to dismiss the image of the tenth floor safe zone and the accompanying data screens related to it. She’d bother him about them even if they were gone.
“I see you’re still staring at the situation down there, gramps.” The young girl sat down on the bench and scooted closer, leaning in front of him until she all but blocked the view of the screens. “And nothing changed, right?”
“No.” The old man put his hand on the girl’s shoulder and gently pushed her back. “It doesn’t mean that I can’t be watchful. That’s who I am, to us.”
“And I’m the one that tells you to stop. There’s only so much monitoring that can help here. Anything new will be noticed, and soon. There’s plenty of us on this particular instance, anyway.”
“I suppose so.”
“Actually, for the sake of conversation, and nothing else. Say one of us hadn’t bothered to do the reading on this particular safe zone. What would be the bullet points they should know? Just the short summary, I mean.”
The old man shook his head.
“Well, first, it’s just at the beginning of the period. The contestants who didn’t already encounter each other in the tower have been delayed or pushed forward in time to make the group more or less even, in a scheduling sense.”