A/N: One chapter, just about on schedule. Featuring brand new setting notes at the end, because I'm doing actual research for a fanfic and all of you need to know that.

Aisling decides to stop by Jenny's house on her way home. It's four miles out of the way, but Jenny's her friend, and that's what Aisling does for her friends. She brings them gifts and plans their parties and lets them cheat off her on exams (not Jenny, though, never Jenny, Jenny would hate the implication that Aisling could know something she didn't).

She's halfway there when she sees a sign for an arcade out the rain-streaked bus window, and an awful little thought begins to take root in her head. Jenny thinks arcades are for hooligans, and she thinks Mortal Kombat is nothing but tasteless violence, and so Aisling doesn't go to the arcade. But Jenny isn't with her, and Jenny doesn't need to know.

The clanging and dinging around her is far too loud, and it's sort of thrilling, to be doing what Jenny doesn't like. She plays a pimply boy who can't be more than twelve at Mortal Kombat, and he beats her but it's close.

"Rematch?" she asks, digging through her coin purse. He nods.

This time, she plays as Scorpion instead of Johnny Cage, and she wins handily. The boy scowls at her and walks away. There aren't many other people in the arcade, and none of them seem to be interested in a match, so Aisling drops another coin into the machine and selects single-player.

Raiden kills her in the third match, and Aisling sighs and turns to survey the other games. Some boring shooting game, a creaky Pac-man, a long hallway with a shadowy figure standing at the end of it, another shooting game with two boys engrossed in it –

Aisling turns back to the hallway. The figure has stepped closer, and now she recognizes the uniform and braid.

"Jenny? I was just looking for you," she tries. Jenny looks at her, not speaking. Her eyes seem to glow in the light. Then she turns and walks back down the hallway.

Aisling follows, because that's what she does.

"Jenny, I'm sorry. I know you don't like arcades, but I just thought since you weren't here …" Aisling gives up. She can't argue with Jenny Joyce. "I'm sorry," she calls again.

Jenny keeps walking, looking less and less like Jenny, and Aisling keeps following her, because if she isn't behind Jenny Joyce she doesn't know who she is.

…

That night at dinner, Erin makes her move.

"Aunt Sarah, I found an old newspaper clipping with you in it." She slides it across the table and hopes nobody asks where she got it, because she hasn't thought up a good excuse yet. "And I was curious what happened. Do you remember any of it?" She smiles her best friendly, innocent smile.

Aunt Sarah squints at it.

"Oh, is that me? Gosh, I do look young."

"Well, you were nine," Ma says, looking over her shoulder.

"My skin was lovely back then, wasn't it? Now, do I remember – oh, yes, I remember all that. Mummy was dead pleased I had my picture in the paper. Showed everyone, she did."

"Do you remember the sewer, or the rescue, or anything?" Erin prods, and Aunt Sarah frowns.

"Gosh, but that was a long time ago. Oh, I do remember! I lost one of my shoes down there, so Georgie carried me out. Georgie's that one." She taps one acrylic nail on the picture. "Sister Michael. We all called her Georgie back then."

Georgie? Erin makes a face.

"Oh, aye, Georgie!" Ma says. "We used to play with her little sister, Gabriel, when we were wains, didn't we?"

"Aye, Gabriel was a lovely girl," Aunt Sarah agrees.

Erin nudges Orla with her foot. Orla blinks in surprise in the wrong direction and eats another potato. Erin kicks her harder.

"Ask her something!" she hisses. "So it doesn't look suspicious that I'm the only one asking questions."

"What was that, Erin?" Aunt Sarah asks, and Erin sighs. Suspicion be damned.

"Why'd you end up in the sewer though, Aunt Sarah?" she asks.

"Och, I don't know. I can't remember any of that. Forget me own head if it wasn't screwed on, I would."

"You remember that you lost one shoe, but not how you got in the sewer?" Da asks, and for once Erin's grateful that he's asking a few questions. "It says down here that you were missing for two days. You don't remember that?"

Aunt Sarah shakes her head, busy fixing her hair.

"All I remember was the piggyback ride out, love."

"Sarah was always an adventurous girl," Granda says. "We didn't worry much when she wasn't home one night, but after the second one we did ask around a bit."

"She was nine, and she was missing for two days, and you weren't worried?"

"Well, what was I supposed to do with her, Gerry?" Granda demands. "Lock her in the house? Clip her wings, crush her dreams, just so she doesn't lose a shoe?"

"You're supposed to not let your daughter fall in a sewer and go missing!"

"Ugh, modern parenting is too damn soft," Granda grunts, and goes back to his food. Da throws his hands in the air.

Erin gives up on getting any helpful information out of her family.

…

"Did you find out anything?" James asks, and Erin sighs, a rush of static down the phone line.

"Nay. Aunt Sarah doesn't remember any of it, and all Granda knows is that she was missing for a while. We're going to try Uncle Colm next."

James has been on the receiving end of one or two of Colm's monologues. Erin must be really determined to find Jenny Joyce if she's going to talk to him willingly.

"Aunt Deirdre says she remembers Sarah going missing for a bit while they were kids, but nothing else," James offers. "Any other ideas?"

"Hmm." Erin's probably furrowing her brow and making adorable faces as she thinks. "Oh, Ma mentioned Sister Michael had a little sister. Gabriel, I think? Maybe she knows something that Sister Michael told her. You can try to find her."

"I'll do my best," James says.

Gabriel Michael isn't in the phone book. She might have changed her last name, but there's too many Gabriels listed to just call them all.

"I remember her when she was a wain," Aunt Deirdre says, "but I don't know what happened to her after. Maybe she went to boarding school or summat."

"Maybe she changed her first name too," Michelle suggests. "If my name were Gabriel, I'd be at the courthouse the day I turned eighteen."

"Maybe she's an alien," Orla says, or at least the Orla in his head does. "She returned to her home planet."

James tells himself very determinedly that he isn't crazy just because sometimes he hears voices that sound like Orla McCool, and calls the parish clerk's office. He gets told that Gabriel Michael has a birth certificate from 1960. No name change, no marriage certificate, and no death certificate. Nothing else indicating she's a real person.

In despair, James goes to the library and asks about old records. A woman with half-moon spectacles and hands like bony claws shows him down into a basement lit by a single bare lightbulb. Precarious stacks of paper tower above him in the gloom. There's a scurrying sound in the corner that he hopes is just mice.

"Newspapers since 1880," the librarian croaks. The door leading in slams shut, and the lightbulb flickers.

"Great," James says to the mice, and starts sifting through the disintegrating stacks of the Derry Journal.

He finds a birth announcement tucked into the personals, a baby born to John and Saoirse Michael on January 7th, 1960. A list of children taking their first communion on September 25th, 1966 has Gabriel Michael's name on it. She got third place in a spelling bee in December 1967. She's a real person, at least, and there doesn't seem to be anything unusual yet.

The issue for June 4th, 1969, is falling apart in his hands. A worryingly large spider is crawling over it. He flips through it, not feeling particularly hopeful, then has to check half a dozen other issues to make sure he's not missing something.

He sprints out of the basement and calls Erin on a payphone. He's in too much of a hurry to go all the way back to his house.

"What's going on?" Erin asks, and James has to stop and take a few gasping breaths before he can answer.

"Gabriel Michael went missing a week before Sarah did. She was never found."

Setting notes:

The original Mortal Kombat came out in 1992. It featured seven playable characters (including Scorpion, Johnny Cage, and Raiden) and a single-player mode where a player would fight each playable character, controlled by the computer.

The Derry Journal has been around since 1772; it changed its name from the Londonderry Journal in 1880. Of Derry's two main newspapers, it's the more Catholic one and thus the more plausible one in this case.