AN: Quick next chapter. I read it through twice and I hope I managed to get all the errors fixed, but if you notice a sentence that sounds really weird, don't hesitate to let me know. I love concrit :)
Thank you all for following and commenting :) I'm happy I'm making someone happy with what I write. Yay :) As to the question - they will go, soon. Don't worry. 2-3 more chapters and they should be ready.
Emma hauled semi-asleep Henry up the stairs, holding his prone form steady on her hip. She cursed the breaking elevator more than ever before, as three flights of steep steps were a bit of a pain to traverse with a sick kid.
She juggled her handbag, her son, her phone and her keys for a moment before she managed to open the door without dropping any of these objects (she considered for a moment sitting Henry on the floor and propping him against the wall…) and was finally home. She carefully deposited Henry on the living room sofa, took off his shoes and covered him with his favourite furry blanket. Only then she could collapse bonelessly into an armchair and unclench her fists.
I don't think I want to repeat today, ever.
Henry had gotten sick during the second period.
In fact, half of his class had been coughing, sneezing and had teary eyes. Some smaller children had already developed fever by the time the parents were called in to pick them up.
Henry's face was flushed and he was breathing heavily, so she turned him on his side and started calling doctors, angrily deducting the money she would have to spend for a home visit from her monthly budget. Still, it was much better for Henry not to be taken to a clinic and she could afford it, even if it was a bit annoying to spend so much.
About three hours later a very perplexed young man was listening to Henry's chest sounds and nodding slowly with concern.
"We've been having this all over this side of Boston. Children, preschool, early school, getting very asthma-like symptoms. There is some research being started as to why, but the general suggestion is, it's pollution and the weather getting warmer. Combine into it plant pollen and kids spending more time outdoors at school and we have a wide-spectrum set of aggressive agents. Everyone is getting hit, if they are short enough. Plus the pollution, the whole thicker part of air is getting kept close to the ground, so mostly kids are affected, and if it gets warm enough, it may take even a few hours for them to develop symptoms."
He packed the bag and started scribbling on a prescription pad.
"He has to drink a lot, and give him this syrup for coughing – and I mean, to make him cough up this crud, actually. He should cough, and sneeze, to get rid of excess, or he could get pneumonia, if the mucus gets into the lungs. And, if you can, get out of the city. I tell this to all the parents. You at least live on the third floor, so you're actually better off than families who have houses, because you're higher over the ground. If he's doing OK at school, take him out, doctor's orders, and find some place in the country. Otherwise we'll probably meet again, at the hospital."
Henry was sleeping, curled up on one side, as Emma finished her last technical document of the day, sitting next to his bed on the floor. Door squeaked open and both her sisters tiptoed in.
"Is he doing any better?"
She shrugged and reached out to test his forehead and neck.
"No fever, but he is tired and he was coughing for the whole afternoon. The doctor said it was a good thing, as it makes him get rid of the mucus, but it made him rather miserable."
Elsa sighed and sat on the floor next to Emma, leaning her head on her sister's knee.
"Do you ever get tired of the Great Destiny that awaits you?"
"Great Destinies make for very good Great Funerals" Elena provided morosely.
"Come on! Stop saying that! We'll help her kick the curse's ass – or whatever that a curse may have – and she'll be done in next to no time. And we'll all live happily ever after."
"Shh" Emma pointed to Henry.
"Sorry. But, I mean. August – Pinocchio – said that magic will be prompting us to do certain things, right?"
Emma took off her reading glasses and looked down at Elsa's bowed head.
"What happened?"
Elsa sniffed quietly.
"The firm is splitting up. And they are getting rid if a third of the staff."
"Including you" Emma sighed.
"Including me, in a way. Celia asked me to stay as an off-site consultant – they will send cases my way for pre-reading and analysis. They just can't keep me on normal contract for court work. I'm supposed to hand all my cases over to Catherine and Maya and stop coming to the office starting Monday in two weeks. She promised to keep me in enough work to make it a fair deal, but she can't guarantee they will always be interesting. Or even challenging. So I'll probably be getting a lot of very standard crap."
Elena snorted.
"At least your guys have a proper reason. Ours are closing the Boston office and officially ordering everyone to work from home, because – and I kid you not – the waste disposal in the building failed and due to large-scale contamination of the offices nobody is allowed in the office until the security and health inspectors are done with it. They will probably require the building managers to redo the floors and part of the walls, and also decontaminate the air conditioning and all installations. Probably tear out some of power installation too, considering it was covered in, well. The effect of waste disposal going wrong."
Emma blinked.
"You mean the toilets flooded the office?"
"Flooded, ha! This was a bloody deluge. Shitty deluge, more like. And there was no Ark to sail away in. We barely got out with our personal stuff, they were hurrying us so quickly. I have my laptop and all my papers, but some were not so lucky. Cristine lost her pair of ballet flats, the ones she was using in the office. They got stuck to the floor."
"Ick" Elsa made a gagging sound.
"Oh, yeah. It is so. I suggest if you have any kind of business with someone from my office block, just… don't. Especially not if they invite you to the office."
"I won't be having any business with anyone soon, considering Celia just put me on strict home office, no client contact. I'm still better of than the guys from next office down the corridor – they just got fired, no options, no contract change. The old fart Maxwell just decided he'll be keeping his assistant and just a part of the cases and so he's just letting the boys go."
"This all sounds massively idiotic" Emma finally provided. "And I mean both these cases. A law firm splitting after how many years? What are they going to do with the cases, split equally? Who will pick up the slack after the missing people? What will happen to the building?"
Elsa rolled her eyes. "No idea really. Not that I had a chance to ask. I was just glad to get off with some work that will pay – easy task and clean options."
"And your office is just letting employees work from home?" Emma turned to the other sister. "There will be no backup office rented. Nobody really cares who works how and delivers what. Will there be any oversight? Management checks on their subordinates?"
Elena shrugged.
"I suppose it's hard to keep people performing at high level without some kind of direct control, and they were planning to make this kind of virtual teams thing, including daily meetings with reports and all. But our boss has actually left this week on a sabbatical…"
Emma rolled her eyes and rubbed her eyes with her thumbs.
"Am I the only one seeing a pattern here?"
Elsa looked up at her and shrugged.
"Probably. As usual."
Emma counted to five silently.
"Do you see all these three things happening together on one day as a coincidence? Because what I see is a lot of magic used to get us to agree to something. It makes me itch, like a storm brewing. I hate that feeling."
"We're getting manipulated."
"By some stupid force which has plans for Emma."
They sat in silence for a moment, Elena leaning on Emma's other side and all three thinking worriedly.
"Do you suppose we should go along, or should we rather try to work against it?" Emma asked finally. "I mean, I hate being manipulated. You two, too."
"But on the other hand, whatever is doing it, it is making it easier for us to leave Boston – whichever direction we choose once out of town. We were all worrying about Henry's school and our work…"
"And I know you two were worried that I won't be able to leave the firm, because my job is the least mobile" Elsa added quietly. "And however much I dislike being treated like a pawn on the board and just moved here and there by an unknown force, it makes it so much easier to pick up everything and move now than it was yesterday."
Emma combed through Elsa's hair with her fingers, making soothing patterns on her sister's scalp.
"Yes. Now it seems we could just pack everything, load up the car and go."
Elena scowled and undid her hair tie, sighing with relief at having her hair finally free.
"I think we should plan. Properly. We have enough information from August to make some approximation as to where the whole Storybrooke may be, but we still didn't put anything specific on the map."
"Actually, I did" Emma said, a bit hesitantly. "I made a program that eliminated parts of the map based on the characteristics August provided. It's supposed to be twenty miles from any other civilisation, so I made the program identify cities, towns and smaller settlements and "draw" a twenty-mile radius circle from the centre of it. I must say, after careful elimination not much is left. Especially as this town needs to be of reasonable size… And in some of the places left there are hills, or bare dry patches that don't qualify for a town of any size. Basically, I see only this one strip of a road as our potential aim. It's something around fifty miles of the road, so not that much to search through."
Elena gaped at her, mouth open.
"My sister, the programming genius!"
"What is fifty miles of a good road?" Elsa quoted to nobody in particular.
"Whatever it is, it is far, far from here" Emma mumbled morosely and leaned back on the couch. "When I think about leaving this place, I get goosebumps. The bad kind. I just hate thinking about actually moving that far away."
Elsa patted her knee.
"But we have a chance of finding your family. Think about it. We can always pay for the flat to be kept reserved for us for, maybe, half a year, and put the stuff in storage to avoid burglars. And if we want to stay there after that time, well, we can drive over here and order some movers… or if this doesn't work out, we'll have a place to come back to."
Emma sighed and closed her eyes.
"I just feel that if we leave it's like leaving behind the safe hideout and going into this bad, cold, strange world out there. We'll be away from everything we know - work, school, shops, cinemas… do they even have a cinema in that Storybrooke? How would they get new copies of movies if they are magically hidden away from the rest of the world? Will cellphones work? Do they have a hospital? A school? A hotel?"
Elsa shivered slightly.
"Do they have net access? We can't work without at least access to e-mail."
Elena fished a notepad out of her voluminous bag.
"Let's make a proper list of all stuff we'd need. I just hope they have electricity, because if I'm supposed to wash my clothes by hand, I'm outta there in three days. Tops."