Al's daughters were finally asleep. He'd first put them down over an hour ago, but they kept wandering from their beds every time he left the room. This time, he was sure, they would stay.

Al checked the time. Mei's late meeting still had a half hour left. He picked up the telephone, calculating the time difference as he did. It was about midday in Risembool. Not a bad time to call his brother.

Ed sounded relieved to hear Al's voice. "Oh Al, it's you."

"Were you expecting someone else?"

"Half the town's been calling today."

"Really? Did something happen?"

Ed gave an exasperated laugh. "So much has happened, Al, I don't know how to say it. Uhh -"

"Are you okay, Brother?"

"I think so? I will be."

"How bad is it?"

". . . Not entirely. You're getting another niece out of it."

"Winry's pregnant again?"

"No. She's ten. Your new niece. Anneliese."

Al did the math. There was no way. "How . . ."

"I don't . . ." Ed spoke quietly, sounding more vulnerable than he had in years. "I don't know how to say this, Al. But . . . well . . . there's something . . . something that happened. When we were split up, before the Promised Day. I couldn't talk about it before. But now I have to. I . . . I didn't want it to happen, Al."

"So you're saying there was someone else, before Winry."

"I wouldn't put it that way. Winry's it for me. She's the only one I ever wanted. What happened . . . like I said, I didn't want it to happen."

It then became clear to Al, what Ed hadn't been able to talk about. Why he sounded so vulnerable. What he couldn't quite put into words. "Oh, Brother." A thousand questions raced through Al's mind, many of which he was afraid to ask, didn't even want to know the answers to. So he settled on a simpler one. "Does Winry know?"

The story that followed was a series of unhappy coincidences. Of all the people to become one of Winry's patients, it had to be Ed's attacker. And she'd undergone port surgery, so she was stuck in Risembool until she'd recovered enough to travel. Ed was right, the only good to come out of this situation was Anneliese herself.

"What's she like, Brother?"

"She's smart. Independent. She's had to be, her mother left her alone since she's gotten sick. She didn't make any arrangements for her, didn't even call to say she was recovering." Ed sounded bitter, Al knew, because he knew how it felt to be abandoned. He wondered how much of that bitterness was directed toward himself.

"At least she has you now."

"Until her mom recovers and wants her back. Al, I don't want her in my life. I don't want her in Anneliese's life. But Anneliese loves her."

"Until now, she's all she's had."

"I know, it's my fault."

"No, it's not. There's nothing you could have done."

"And that's the worst part about it! This mess - it all happened because I - I let my guard down at the wrong time and I - I couldn't stop her - I hate feeling this way! I hate it."

Al knew. Ed was a man of action. He could never stand being helpless. And he'd been made to be in the worst possible way. "I know, Brother. This must be terrible for you."

"I'm just trying to focus on Anneliese. On the kids. It's the only way I can think to get through this."

"Well, it would be easier to ignore her if there was a whole desert between you," Al suggested. Ed and Winry had talked with him about bringing their whole family to Xing for a few months sometime in the next year or so. "Shu Jin and Yi Ming would love to meet all their cousins . . ."

"That sounds so tempting right now," Ed agreed.

"Then come!"

"Winry would need to make arrangements with her patients . . ."

"I know, you've been saying that for the past year."

"I'll talk to Winry again. Maybe getting away from this mess is the push we need."

Despite getting so little sleep the night before, Anneliese was wide awake at bedtime. Still, she got ready alongside Henry and Ellen. Tonight, Ed had assured her, she wouldn't be sleeping on the patient cot again. He'd made up the guest bedroom for her. But Henry and Ellen insisted she come to their room when he told them bedtime stories. She didn't miss how Ed had hesitated before saying, "Sure."

Maybe that hesitation didn't mean anything. Maybe it did. Still, she felt slightly nervous as she sat at the foot of Ellen's bed.

"Tell us about the in-between place!" said Henry.

What on earth was that?

Ed said, "This is the first time Anneliese is hearing these stories. It'll be kind of confusing for her."

"Then start at the beginning," said Ellen. "Tell us about Xerxes."

That, Anneliese had heard about. Mostly from radio programs about desert ruffians and ancient magic, and her schoolteachers had mentioned it a few times too.

Ed gave Anneliese a curious look. "What do you already know about Xerxes, Anneliese?"

She shrugged. "Just that it was destroyed in a single night."

"Do you know why?"

She shook her head.

"They got turned into a philosopher's stone," said Ellen.

"Ellen! You're ruining the story!" said Henry.

Anneliese had to ask, "What's a philosopher's stone?"

"Just tell the story, Dad," said Henry. "Then she'll get it."

"Okay, okay. Hundreds of years ago, in the city of Xerxes, there was a slave with no name. One day his master took blood from his arm and used it in an alchemical experiment. The next day the slave went into the lab and saw what the experiment had made. It was a little black ball with one eye, stuck inside a flask."

"It couldn't leave the flask, or else it would die," Ellen added.

"Why?" asked Anneliese.

"Because it didn't have a body," Ed told her. "Things that don't have bodies need an object to contain them."

"But you said it had an eye," Anneliese said, confused. "Doesn't that mean it had a body?"

Henry and Ellen looked at Ed expectantly. But Ed just smiled at Anneliese, which was kind of weird. "You know, I'm not really sure. I wasn't - Well, maybe it only looked like an eye."

That sort of made sense to Anneliese. Ed went on to say that the creature was called a homunculus, and that it was smart enough to teach the nameless slave how to read and write. Also it knew how to make people live forever. It told the king to make the biggest transmutation circle Anneliese had ever heard of. When it was activated, it killed everyone in Xerxes and made the slave and the homunculus immortal. Also, the homunculus became the slave's evil twin.

"So philosopher's stones are things that make you immortal?" Anneliese asked.

"That's one way they can be used," said Ed. "But the slave and the homunculus didn't just make philosopher's stones. They became philosopher's stones. They're pure sources of energy that can't be degraded - only used up. They bypass the laws of equivalent exchange."

"Bypass what?"

"Equivalent exchange just means that matter can't be created or destroyed. You can only get out of a reaction what you put in."

"Well, duh. Everyone knows you don't just get stuff for free." Anneliese didn't see the point of making a fancy law about it. "So a philosopher's stone lets you get stuff for free?"

"It'll let you make something from nothing, sure. But considering that you have to kill people to make it, I wouldn't say it's free."

"So then . . . that law. It doesn't really get broken, then, does it?"

"Well that depends. On how much you think a human soul is worth." He opened and clenched his right hand absentmindedly. "The alchemy is ridiculous anyway. Stuff nobody has any right messing with."

Anneliese glanced across the room to Henry's bed. She wondered when he and Ellen had fallen asleep.

"I thought parents told their kids stories about Candy Mountain or something. Not . . . alchemy stuff."

Ed chuckled softly. "I guess I can't help talking about it sometimes. It was my whole life for awhile. Did . . . did your mom never tell you stories?"

Anneliese shook her head. "She sang me songs. My favorite was this one about trees and springtime."

"That sounds nice."

"Hey, Ed?"

"Yeah?"

"How much of that story was real?"

Ed smoothed Henry's bed covers. "Why do you ask that?"

"Well, Xerxes was real. And those people did all die. Did it happen like you said it did?"

Ed shrugged, still not looking her in the eye. "That's just the story my father told me. Anyway, we should let these two sleep."

That didn't really answer her question, but Anneliese let it go. Xerxes was long ago and far away, so what difference did it make?