Epilogue
Aijo couldn't know it, but across the little island, two dark-haired, dusky-skinned men frog-marched a stick thin woman dressed in rags and with a self-inflicted haircut into a small camp where a large tent had been set up by the shore. They forced the woman inside, where another woman in a pale yellow gown, hair done in complicated ringlets waited, gloved hands clutching the handle of a parasol.
One of the men held out something wrapped in cloth, and when the woman with the parasol stood the prisoner could see that she was pregnant.
The woman with the parasol said something in a foreign language, and her countrymen turned back a corner of the cloth, just enough to reveal a glint of the crystal and glass that made up the Shortsifter. More foreign words were exchanged, before one of the olive-skinned men turned to their unwilling guest.
"You had the Shortsifter on your person. You must know. Madam wishes to know if her husband is still alive," he said.
"I don't know who her husband is," she ground out, trying to shake off the grip of the other man.
"Tan. Penna. Madam is his wife. She came to the island to bear his son and raise the next Talos of this generation. Now that the labyrinth is destroyed, that is no longer possible, but we must know if Master Tan still lives."
Except for the fact that this woman was Penna Tan's wife and carrying his spawn, the rest of this meant nothing to the prisoner, who glared at the pregnant woman with malice. "He's dead."
This answer was relayed in their language. Instead of a crushed look, the reaction of a grieving widow, the pregnant woman's face brightened with hope.
"Nekros?" she breathed.
Her translator kept his face blank, as if he didn't quite know what to think or the appropriate way to react. His mistress tossed aside her parasol and took the Shortsifter, still wrapped in cloth. She ducked through the tent's flap, her men following her uncertainly.
Sensing that their guest was no longer of any practical use, they let her go, and she followed along behind them warily, curious.
Tan's wife stepped into the surf, unmindful of her fine shoes, threw back her arm and hurled the Shortsifter with all of her strength into the ocean. Her men gasped, as though she had committed a great sacrilege.
Tan's wife turned and looked directly at the other woman, her face jubilant. She gestured vaguely, indicating the world at large. She spoke rapidly in that foreign language again, translated by her man: "Go! You are free." As the woman touched her belly she added on her own in halting Japanese, "So are we!"
The former prisoner of the labyrinth didn't move right away, watching as Tan's wife—his widow—returned to her tent without looking back, her men following.
She stood there, wind tousling her messy hair. From the moment she'd found it on that man she and the others had caught back in the labyrinth, when the monsters came out of the deep and the walls began to fall, touching it made her feel a sense of power, and that intoxicating feeling was enough that, for a moment, she actually considered diving into those dark waters after it.
Then the moment passed as practicality asserted itself. She didn't know how to use the damn thing, and without that knowledge it may as well be just a very chaotic wind chime. She also knew the unlikelihood of her finding it beneath the waves in the dark as the sun was setting. More likely she'd drown before she ever found it.
Yes, it was better that it all went to a watery grave. She glanced once more at the tent. She wasn't so cold that it didn't disturb her more than a little that these people were going to bring this woman to the labyrinth to raise her unborn child there as a successor to Penna Tan. If Tan had a wife, then was there some woman out there carrying the child of Hikaru as well?
No. It didn't matter. With no labyrinth, no Mindsifter, and now no Shortsifter it didn't matter how many spawn they had growing out there. Their legacy had come to an end.
She turned away and started walking.
There was an uncertain future for her to explore, in freedom.