Origin Witch - Finding the Earth
Boiled turnip grease had dried into a yellowish crust around the rim of Corinne’s stoneware bowl, sticking to the clay so hard her thumbnail barely dented it. She set the dish on the corner of the Magic Desk, ignoring the quiet click against the smooth timber. Her left calf throbbed, a dull rhythmic ache pulsing behind her knee every time she shifted her weight from one heel to the other.
Standing on her own weightless lift still took work. Real grinding work. She flexed her toes against the oak floorboards. Her arches were stiff, the skin dry and faintly peeling where old hospital bandages had rubbed her ankles raw weeks ago, but the floor felt solid under her soles. No levitation drift around the room. No lime-green glow at her wrist.
Steelwool let out a sharp raspy click-click from the balcony railing outside the open glass sliding doors. The Glacial Strix had its ten-foot wings half-spread, catching the cold morning wind off the northern mountains, steel-gray feathers rattling like iron plates every time it preened its tail.
Ping.
A double-red system notification flared across the center of her Magic Desk display, with a strange garbled burst of electronic static like an old television tuned to a dead channel.
Global System Announcement: Dimensional Interference Window Activated. Temporal span, fifteen minutes. Source node, Earth, Sol-3 Federal Network. Note: due to regional boundary realignments across Sector 600 through 666, a localized text-data bridge has temporarily synchronized with former planetary archives. Read-only text transmissions available.
Corinne paused, black frames slipping half an inch down her nose.
A text bridge to Earth.
For thirty-nine days the world she’d left had been nothing but a dark memory, a place of sterile hospital smell, white ceilings, bad food, and six-lane highways where drunk teenagers in luxury cars ran over families without stopping. Nobody in Sector 666 talked about Earth anymore. You didn’t talk about things you couldn’t eat, chop, or trade for health potions.
The main regional chat feed on her desk was already berserk. Lin Feng called it Earth and asked if it was a rescue ship coming to get them. Zhao Dulai echoed the hope. Wu Gang shot it down, pointing out the notice said read-only, nobody was coming. Asang Singh wondered if they could message their families, and James Bellman confirmed the search bar pulled only old news, not live contact. Karapo told them to look at the headlines. That was as far as Corinne read of the public feed before she closed it. She didn’t need the noise.
She leaned her hip against the heavy timber edge of her desk, reached out with one finger, and tapped the search filter on her private terminal. She typed a city name into the query line: S-City Federal District. Then three names: Arthur Mercer. Helen Mercer. Dr. Richard Halloway.
The glass screen flickered. A wall of blue digitized news briefs, scraped from the S-City Police Department press archives and Federal Court dockets, flooded her vision. The articles weren’t new, most dated three weeks back, published around when the World-Wills initiated the global transfer.
Headline one: S-City Federal Task Force Arrests Three in Landmark Fraud and Human Trafficking Probe. Headline two: Former Guardians Accused of Siphoning One Point Four Million From Paralyzed Orphan’s Trust Fund. Headline three: Chief Orderly and Private Care Physician Facing Conspiracy and Body-Disposal Charges.
Corinne leaned her face closer to the screen, eyes scanning the dense printed text behind her wire frames. The story was laid out in dry sterile police-speak.
Three weeks ago, two days after Corinne had been dumped in the Sector 9 drainage ditch to rot on a pipe-frame cot, a Federal bank auditor in S-City flagged a suspicious series of wire transfers leaving her court-ordered medical trust. The money, over one million four hundred thousand dollars in insurance payouts and settlement funds, had been routed through four offshore shell companies in the Cayman Islands before landing in a private bank account registered to her uncle, Arthur Mercer.
When Federal agents showed up at her aunt’s suburban home with a search warrant, they didn’t find Corinne in her room. They found a garage full of brand-new luxury furniture, a jet ski on a trailer in the driveway, and a forged discharge slip signed by Dr. Richard Halloway at the private care facility.
The investigation moved fast. The task force pulled security footage from the facility’s rear loading dock. They caught the chief orderly, the fat man with tobacco juice on his chin who had hauled Corinne out in a laundry hamper, loading her unconscious body into the bed of a rusted pickup in the middle of the night. They found the bloodstains on the truck bed liner. They found her empty wheelchair tossed into a scrap metal hopper three blocks away.
Arthur Mercer and his wife Helen were arrested at a seafood restaurant downtown while celebrating the purchase of a new vacation home. Dr. Halloway was pinched in his office, medical license revoked on the spot.
The police report concluded with a flat cold paragraph: law enforcement officers searched the abandoned squatter shanties in the Sector 9 drainage ditch on the night of the fourteenth. The target structure was found completely empty. No physical remains were recovered. Investigators suspect the victim was moved to an undisclosed location prior to the raid. The suspects remain in federal custody without bail pending trial for grand larceny, kidnapping, and body disposal conspiracy.
Corinne sat on her wooden stool, back resting against the Spire’s inner trunk wall. She read the paragraph twice.
Five years ago, when she was fifteen lying in a high-dependency ward with her spine shattered into wet gravel, she had spent every night praying for this exact article. She had wanted the police to show up. Wanted the judge to look at her aunt’s face. Wanted her uncle in a cold stone cell with iron bars on the window, counting days while his fancy truck was towed away.
She had wanted vengeance so badly her teeth used to ache in her sleep.
Now she looked down at her left hand. Her skin was rough, stained with yellow sulfur dust and dark blue star-iron oils that wouldn’t wash out. Her waistband held a Grade-C Moonstone Carver that could cut solid granite. Her storage vault on the ground floor held fifty thousand oak logs, twelve thousand iron ingots, and forty-two blocks of black obsidian. Outside her window an eighteen-foot steel-plated owl preened its wings on a wooden balcony forty yards above an endless ocean of giant green trees.
Corinne let out a long quiet breath through her nose. The rage wasn’t there. She tried to feel it, tried to summon that hot choking knot of hatred that used to burn in her chest whenever she thought of her uncle’s face, but it just wasn’t inside her anymore. It felt tiny. Pathetic. Like reading about two ants fighting over a crumb of stale bread in a gutter three thousand miles away.
“They’re sitting in a concrete box,” she whispered to the quiet room. Her raspy voice carried clearly over the wind. “Counting their fake money.”
Steelwool let out a low keek-keek, hopping off the balcony railing to land heavily on the floorboards beside her stool, metallic talons clicking the oak. It shoved its spiky gray head against her knee, seeking a scratch behind its ear. Corinne reached down, rough thumb rubbing the bird’s cold steel-plated neck.
Ping.
A private message popped up from Jasper Finch. He asked if she’d seen the Earth data bridge, said half the people in the southern camps were crying over old news feeds, and mentioned a man in Marnell’s squad who’d learned his wife sold his golf clubs three days after he vanished. Corinne asked if he’d looked up his own file. Finch replied that he’d been a corporate tax attorney in Chicago before the transfer and had expected his firm to audit his accounts the moment he missed Monday, and that reading Earth news was wasted bandwidth that brewed no potions. He added that General Caldwell’s trade team had dropped the three hundred pounds of copper ore at the southern ford and wanted to know if the first batch of anti-acid salve was ready.
Corinne tapped her spectacles, pulling up the administrative settings on her Magic Desk. She looked at the search bar where her uncle’s name was still typed in bold black letters. She hit Clear. Then she closed the Earth data bridge window entirely, letting the digitized blue police reports vanish into pale useless static.
She told Finch the salve would be ready at noon, and that she wanted five extra blocks of obsidian if he expected delivery on Steelwool’s back. He said consider it done.
She closed the messaging thread, rose off her stool onto her weightless lift, and walked to the balcony rail instead of drifting away. She set both palms on the cold timber and looked out at the green bowl of Sector 666, the search box finally empty, her uncle’s name no longer the last thing on her screen. The wind rattled Steelwool’s feathers beside her, and Corinne stood there until the chime for the noon salve pulled her back to the workbench.
— Origin Witch —