Chapter 234: The Place of Answers.
We walked toward the building together as the afternoon sun dipped lower, painting long golden shadows across the quiet parking lot. The asphalt still held the day’s heat, radiating up through the soles of my shoes.
The two men at the entrance had spotted Venna long before we reached them. Their posture shifted instantly—shoulders dropping, arms uncrossing, faces softening in recognition.
"Well, look who it is," one of them said, warmth thick in his voice, a low rumble that carried easy affection.
Venna moved into them one at a time, quick, familiar embraces. The ease of someone who had been coming here long enough that the greeting was automatic, muscle memory born from years.
"Room’s taken," the second man said, glancing between us, his eyes lingering on me a beat longer than comfortable. "Wasn’t expecting you today."
"Then we’ll wait," Venna replied simply, voice calm and decisive, and walked inside without hesitation.
I followed her through the doors. The building changed everything the moment we crossed the threshold. The air grew heavier, thicker, carrying the weight of something ancient—cool stone and faint incense, old wood and time itself.
Stone-walled corridors stretched ahead, lit by soft, hidden sources that cast gentle pools of light on the worn floors. The noise of the city outside cut off completely, like someone had drawn a heavy curtain across the world, leaving only the muffled thud of our footsteps and the faint echo of our breathing.
I caught up with Venna as we moved deeper inside, our shoulders nearly brushing in the narrow passage.
"My mother brought me here when I was four," she said. Her voice settled naturally into the corridor, like the building itself expected it, absorbing the words without echo. "It’s been part of my life ever since."
I ran my eyes along the walls as we passed. Old stone, worn smooth in places by countless hands over countless years, faint grooves and discolorations telling stories I couldn’t read. Whatever this place was, it hadn’t been built recently. It felt like it had been waiting.
The corridor opened into a small reception room. Simple. A wooden table scarred by age, two chairs across from it, and behind the table an old woman with silver hair pulled back tight. She looked up the moment she heard us and smiled the kind of smile that knew Venna before her eyes had even fully focused.
"Venna."
We sat down across from her, chairs scraping softly against the stone floor.
"You’re not on my book today," the old woman said, eyes flicking between us.
"I’m not on my own book today." Venna lowered her voice just slightly, leaning forward. "I think I’ve found them."
The old woman’s eyes moved from Venna to me—slow, assessing, taking in every detail of my face, my posture, the way I held my hands—then back again.
"There’s someone in the room."
"We’ll wait."
"You will not." She was already reaching for her comms with steady, wrinkled hands, shaking her head. "Not today, you won’t." She spoke quietly into it, a few short words in a language I didn’t catch, then set it down with a soft click. "It’s clear."
Venna stood and reached into her coat for a card. The old woman pushed it back across the table without looking, her fingers brushing Venna’s.
"How long do you need?"
"Thirty minutes."
"Take it." She held Venna’s eyes for a moment, the warmth of long familiarity passing between them. "I’m sorry about your mother, dear."
"Thank you, Abuela." Venna took her hand briefly, squeezing once, then let go. She turned to me. "Come on."
We walked back into the corridor and headed deeper into the building, the air growing cooler and heavier with every step.
[You trust people too easily.]
The system quoted Owen’s voice as we reached the door. His tone found me in a place I’d never been, on a day I hadn’t planned, following a girl I’d met at a cemetery barely two hours ago. The words scraped against the inside of my skull.
The darkness inside the room was absolute. The kind you didn’t adjust to—it simply existed, thick and velvet-black, pressing against your skin like living shadow.
Venna took my hand without asking, her fingers cool and certain as they closed around mine, and led me through it, every step confident in the void. The space was clearly familiar to her in a way it would never be to me, her grip steady as we navigated invisible turns.
We found two seats facing each other somewhere in the black and settled into them, the wood creaking softly under our weight. Her fingers found mine in the dark, cool and deliberate, sliding between my own until our palms pressed together, skin against skin in the absolute nothing.
"There’s something you need to know before we start," Venna said. "The past is addictive."
Her fingers began moving slowly within mine, tracing something I couldn’t see.
"You asked me why I don’t have friends." A pause. "Do you want to know?"
"Yes," I said, my own voice sounding muffled in the thick blackness.
"Because I’m still living in the past. I go there looking for answers and I stay too long. By the time I come back, the present has already moved without me." Her voice was steady in the darkness, like she’d said this before, maybe only to herself. "That’s who I am. Someone who can’t stop going back."
My mother’s voice arrived without being called. Growth begins the moment you’re willing to move forward, even without all the answers. She had said it the day I asked her about my father, standing in whatever building we were hiding in that week, the plain quiet outside.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Venna asked again, her fingers tightening just enough to ground me.
[This is your way out.]
I looked at the notification in the dark behind my eyes. My way out of what, exactly. The system had been trying to redirect me since the cemetery.
"Yes," I said.
Venna exhaled slowly. "We can do this anywhere. But the reason I chose this place, the libra here, is because I believe your past connects to mine somehow. I want it to guide us both." She tightened her fingers slightly around mine. "I think we’re going to find what we’re both looking for."
"Can you take me to a specific moment?" I asked, my thumb brushing over the back of her hand.
"Yes," she said. "But—"
"Please," I said, cutting across whatever the warning was going to be.
A beat of silence stretched between us, thick and charged.
"Okay," she said. "But you help me after. Deal?"
"Deal," I said.
She held my hands properly now, both of them, her grip firm and certain, palms warm and slightly damp against mine. "Think about where you want to go. The place. The time. Hold it."
The plain, I thought. Before I walked toward the walls. Before the system. Before any of this.
[We don’t have time for this.]
"Close your eyes," Venna said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper.
I closed them.
The darkness behind my eyes was the same as the darkness of the room, and then it wasn’t. Something shifted at the edges of it, the way light shifts before it arrives, and my pulse beat steady and low in my ears, the present loosening its grip on me one breath at a time.
Wherever I was going, the system didn’t want me there.
That alone made me want to go.