Chapter 3: Scapegoat

Lalli's entrance in his safe area after falling asleep was welcomed by an amused grin on Tuuri-Ensi's part.
-Why are you smiling like that?
-Auntie told me this world's Emil is married to Helena, and my world's Sven… ah, too recent for me to mention… let's just say that anyone with working eyes can figure out he's into guys in my time. The two of you looked kind of cute together during lunch.
Lalli had figured out long ago that it was best to treat everyone in the "real" world as different people than those in his. He and his own other self had ended up different enough, after all. But at the same time, he wasn't sure what to make of the idea that there could be someone else that Sven could realistically end up with if things didn't work out between them, and that this someone likely lived in Keuruu if Tuuri-Ensi knew him. There had never been any competition between Lalli and Helena for Emil; his other self had taken him out any race there could have been as soon as he had made sure neither Tuuri nor him would be going on this world's first Silent World expedition. His mind fortunately found another element of Tuuri-Ensi's words to focus on:
-"Auntie"?
Tuuri-Ensi's somewhat apologetic grin had been replaced by an exaggeratedly… Tuuri-like pouting face:
-Well, it felt kind of weird to call each other by our names. And she is my aunt, in a way. Mom's relatives all live far away, so I don't exactly have one at home. Aren't we supposed to try new spells to open the passage back home?
She had a point. Someone in the "real" world must have noticed her absence from her safe area by now and be worried sick.

The good news was that some people besides Emil and Sven were acknowledging something was going on now that all ill children from the school, whose numbers had doubled since the morning, and transiting mages had been admitted into the hospital within a few hours of each other. The bad news was that the people in question were doctors or nurses who had lived through the Mora beast invasion of 96, and hence had their mind set on the phenomenon being a possible new epidemic rather than something that could have anything to do with the radio-wave based defense system. Strictly speaking, Emil had no reason to protest the possibility. The bad news came from the fact that anyone living with the patients was being quarantined as a precaution, regardless of their immunity to the Rash. The only small blessing in all this was that his room and Sven's shared the same thin wall; after listening to what Emil had to say, Sven had agreed that the new defense system could be responsible for the state of their "respective Finnish mages" per his own words, which had comforted him a little in the face of the epidemic-minded medical personnel. The reason for which Sven's name was now semi-recognizable in conversation meant that he actually knew and understood more about Finnish magic than Emil did, which made him a good support to have. Unfortunately, the only piece of the larger picture either of them was entitled to beyond what they had each already found out prior to being put in quarantine was the current state of their husbands, and, in Emil's case, Tuuri. Emil's mind almost froze again. The term "Sven's husband" couldn't stop feeling like something unreal to him. As far as he had been able to tell, Sven hadn't shown romantic interest in anyone when they had gone to school together.
-Lieutenant!
Emil recognized Claes's voice coming out from outside his room. He turned his head to the large window that made up most of his small room's front wall to see the boy there and greeted him.
-We got a message for you from one Onni Hotakainen. "I can't get in without being overwhelmed. I only made it out by turning back moments after I got in. Do you know if Norwegians and Icelanders from outside are having similar problems?". He said to just tell you that, and that you'd understand what it means.
-If he's expecting an answer, tell him I don't know yet. But this also means I need you to contact someone else.
He gave Claes Sigrun's contact information and told him to ask her if the Norwegian mages knew anything about what was going on in Mora. As soon as Claes left, Sven spoke:
-There is still something that puzzles me about what you told me earlier. Why would the people behind that defense system not consider the possibility that it could be hurting Finns a problem?
Emil let out a resigned sigh before answering:
-The product of your first year in Keuruu was taken seriously by some people here, even though they won't admit to it. Unfortunately, some of them have reacted as if the exact moment they started believing magic was real was also the moment the entire population of Finland became able to cast spells, and the first thing they are going to do with that is invade Sweden. Or at the very least the second thing after cleansing their entire old territory within the next one to five years. Some of this has made it into the army, and I'm not talking only of the lower ranks. Some higher-ups are now considering banning all Finns from entering the country or trying to come up with a technological means to keep them from using their magic while they are in any kind of Swedish settlement. So, an anti-troll system that cripples them as well suddenly becomes extremely interesting to some people.
Sven stayed silent for a few moments before speaking again:
-And how many people know that a ten-year-old who is more powerful than many experienced adults is in town? And the reason she's here in the first place?
This had been a worry in the back of both Emil's and Lalli's minds ever since Onni had put Tuuri in their care. However, their jobs first and foremost had been to be the people who were not scared of her and treated her like a normal non-immune ten-year-old to the extent to which they could afford to. The voices of the infected in the area surrounding Keuruu had become an endless cacophony to her, to the point of making her loose her grip on her powers, in spite of efforts to make better protective spells on the part of both her parents. Only putting a large distance between her and the Silent World seemed to have any kind of lasting positive effect when she was awake, but even Mora and its much larger surrounding cleansed area only reduced the cacophony to murmurs. Lalli's second job was making her skill progress faster than Onni or Cecilia ever could to get it on par with her power, along with figuring out a shielding spell that would keep her from being overwhelmed by the voices next time she ventured into a place in which they were louder. Emil's own second job had been to make sure that any higher up willing to listen about the subject without jumping to conclusions was aware of the situation, on the off-chance that Tuuri's combination of high power and low skill did cause trouble again. But now that Sven had mentioned it, it was very hard to not start wondering what would happen if the situation led to the wrong people finding out that Tuuri had once rendered an entire military base speechless for a few hours in her own efforts to shush the voices of the infected.

After an entire evening of trying many variants of the spell Tuuri-Ensi has used to open the passage and couple of different spells that has looked like they could have the same effect, the two of them were no closer to opening a passage than they had been a few hours ago. Lalli ended the session when he saw Tuuri-Ensi starting to yawn, deciding that fatigue was the last that thing necessary in the precarious balance between the girl's powers and her innate capacity to keep them in check. He made the raft as comfortable for her as he could, using his fur cloak, realizing it may be better to just have her spend nights in Tuuri's safe area, which had real beds in it, in addition to its owner being in Iceland in the real world. He decided to have a little rest of his own when he realized he and the girl weren't alone. Reynir emerged from the swampy forest, treading the duckwalk at an unusually slow and hesitant pace compared to his usual visits. This could mean bad news for all Lalli knew of Reynir, so he mentally prepared for it and asked him the reason of his presence. Reynir's scattered answer only made things stranger:
-How… is… she… here?
Lalli noticed that he was looking at the sleeping Tuuri-Ensi.
-Are you overtired or something? You brought her here early this morning.
Reynir stayed silent for a few moments before speaking again:
-Other… Mora… dangerous… for… mages… Going… back… now… bad… for… her…
Reynir started toppling forward but vanished before reaching the ground.

Sven let himself relax a little for the first time in a couple of days as the medicine flowed from the syringe to his body. He knew the medical personnel was on the edge, but he couldn't believe it had taken so long for him to get the treatment for which he had come to Mora with Matti by his side, while stuck in a hospital. He hated thinking of how close the doctors and nurses had gotten to let a condition that was actually on his medical file in big red letters re-emerge because they where too distracted by the fact that he could have something completely new. However, in what Matti called "the world's own way of working itself out", the fact that fixing the oversight about his treatment had required waking him up in the early hours of the morning allowed him to witness something that he was most likely not supposed to see from the corner of his eye. Soldiers using a stretcher rather than a noisy trolley, the content of the stretcher being both too small to be an adult and sporting braided hair that was a shade of blonde eerily similar to Cecilia Hotakainen's. While anything from her father was hard to spot, Matti regularly swore that she was growing into the spitting image of an aunt from that side of her family who had died a couple of years before her birth. Sven had never met the aunt in question, but Matti had happened to share a birthday with her when she was still alive, guaranteeing them to see each other in the communal dining area once a year.

xxxx

-And why didn't you do anything?
Emil sounded as furious as he had the right to be. Sven himself had trouble finding a term for what had been done to Tuuri that wasn't "outright kidnapping".
-Considering the kind of effort they put into taking her away discreetly, I got the impression that giving any indication that I knew who she was would have resulted in me no longer being your next-door neighbor by the time you woke. When you see something that you shouldn't have, the timer onto you being silenced in some way starts as soon as you tell someone else. I thought it was best to keep that first divulgation for you.
Emil took a little time to reply:
-Uh… thanks for that, I guess. But that doesn't change the fact that someone took her away who-knows-where in the early hours of the morning.
-Your husband and yourself are those who let such a dangerous child inside the town, downplayed the threat she represented and tried to lay the blame on something else when your supervision turned out to be insufficient to keep her in check. She has been taken to one of the outposts in the cleansed area. Rest assured that she will be as comfortably housed as possible and well-guarded.
This sounded awfully like she was being kept prisoner, as far as Sven was concerned. He couldn't see the man who was speaking to Emil, but he sounded like he was right in front of Emil's room. Emil was soon peppering the new arrival of various questions about the outpost, including how close it was to the edge of the cleansed area. As he listened to the answers, it didn't take long for Sven to realize that he had actually seen only seen the second person that had been snuck out of the quarantine ward in the early morning.

That was really strange. Lalli and Tuuri-Ensi had wanted to make sure that they had tried all the options that they had found out about the previous day before he woke up and went back to the library. Their first try of the morning had been to add something at the end of the spell that Tuuri-Ensi had first used to open the passage. However, the passage had opened just as soon as Tuuri-Ensi had finished pronouncing the last syllable of the original spell whose failure to work the previous day had left her stranded in the first place. Between that and Reynir's strange warning, he told Tuuri-Ensi to stay in his area while he checked the other side of the passage. Lalli immediately found his other self lying on his side on the dream living room's floor, his back to the passage's opening, nowhere near any of the dream living room's good sleeping spots. Lalli slowly moved towards his other self, made sure it was really him, and tried to rouse him. His other self started moving:
-Who…
The handle of the living room door, near which Lalli's other self was lying, started to move. Lalli only had time to move his other self out of the way to keep the door from meeting his head before it opened, revealing a familiar, if a little older looking, mess of red hair:
-Lalli, sorry to barge in like that again, but… what?
It took Lalli a few moments to realize that the sight presenting itself to the other world's Reynir must be very surprising indeed.