It was sunny when Umi woke up in her airplane seat. Typing clacked in a furious rhythm behind her. Umi looked over to see Mary, hard at work on her too-small laptop.
"Where are we?" Umi asked.
"We're flying over China now. We'll be there soonish." Mary said.
Umi rubbed her eyes, so crusted with sleep. She had dreamt of the ocean, a peaceful dream where her coworkers had thrown her a birthday party and they'd drank alcoholic peach seltzers together. Beaches? Honoka had said something about the beach…
"You're awake." Other Honoka said. "We're almost there. I'll tell you more."
muse had become household names. They were critically acclaimed for their artistic and theatrical shows, backed by Mari's family money. Everything had come to a head around Maki's bizarre had gone more wrong, more off, more far away from the regular timeline. Honoka detailed the rock-idol opera concert at length, starting with its outline, its intertwining themes, the dance numbers, and its overall music as a hypnotic magical concept.
She looked pained as she spoke.
"What were you doing with this magical concert, anyways?" Umi asked. "Why am I apparently the only member of muse of did not engage in questionable science or occultist practices?"
Honoka made a careless hand gesture. "Does poetry you write in a half trance not count as an occult practice?"
"It really isn't! My life is complicated enough with my subconscious life boiling over like the rest of you." Umi said.
Honoka gave Umi a knowing smile before continuing. "Maki wanted to change something, big. She said we were going to keep getting caught, over and over, unless something bigger than ourselves changed. We weren't just acquiring fame, fortune, glory. We were rewriting fundamental laws of reality."
"What do you mean?" Umi asked.
"We traveled too far, knew too much." Honoka said. "We saw the end." She did not meet Umi's eyes.
A flurry of January dread settled into Umi's stomach. Her guts were ice water. "The end of what?" Umi asked. She already knew the answer.
Honoka didn't say anything for several moments. She watched the sun disappear behind the clouds. Light left her eyes. "The end of everything. The end of the world. The end of humanity. The destruction of a livable earth. I won't tell you how close it is. I will only tell you, that you won't see it in your lifetime."
A million obvious ways the world could end occured to Umi. "Can I ask how?" She asked.
"It doesn't matter. We weren't going to do anything about it, it was really too far away for us to even consider. But not for Maki. She had come too far. She had become one of the most talented musicians of the 21st century, she was set to become the next great composer. If humanity were to go extinct, no one would remember her."
The sheer arrogance of Maki was astounding, yet somehow, arrogance was the most realistic reason anyone with enough power to save the world would save the world.
"And I believed in Maki. I believed in my girlfriend. I didn't want the world to end in three hundred years. I loved her."
"Kousaka…"
"The Donkeyskin Princess makes up the first third of the story. Then the Swan Lake begins." Honoka spun her hair around her fingertips, looking for split ends, which Umi noticed several of. Her white hairs were fractals, trees, snowflakes.
"What about the third act?"
A strange look passed over Honoka's face, and her blue eyes flickered as if dreaming. "The Swan is Reborn." She said. "Or, The Reincarnation Cycles of Cyrus."
Cold water poured into Umi's bloodstream. She felt so odd, so off. "What does that mean?"
"Who knows? But it was creating, and recreating things in the minds of the audience. They were to join together in song, to make images of another world. Perhaps they were seeing into the world of the meteor itself." Honoka said.
A crackling came over the speakers.
"Attention passengers, we are to arrive shortly. Prepare for landing."