After Ira's collapse, the nature of their journey shifted. He no longer led, but shuffled, a ghost haunted by the living maps now tucked silently in his satchel. He clutched the brass compass not for direction, but as a man overboard might clutch a piece of driftwood, a small, solid thing in an ocean of impossibilities. The leadership, if one could call it that, had been silently abdicated to Sera. She now walked at the front, her pace unhurried but deliberate, her eyes fixed on a point in the fog only she could see. She didn't consult the maps. She seemed to be navigating by memory.
They walked for what felt like days, a miserable procession through a landscape of grey sorrows. Then, the fog thinned, pulling back like a theatrical curtain to reveal a village nestled in a shallow, mossy valley. It was the last thing Lio expected to see. It was small, no more than a dozen houses and a single, crooked street, but what was jarring was its condition. It wasn't a ruin. The wood of the homes was solid, the glass in the windows was unbroken, and the paint, though faded, was not peeling. Yet, it was utterly, profoundly silent. There was no smoke from the chimneys, no dog barking a warning, no child's laugh echoing from a yard. The air was still with the deep, breathless silence of a place that had been holding its breath for a very long time.
Ira stopped, his eyes vacant. "This isn't on any map," he whispered, a statement of fact devoid of his previous outrage. He was too broken to be angry.
Mina, however, stepped forward with a strange confidence. "The gate on that house squeaks," she said, pointing to a small cottage with a blue door. "He doesn't like the sound."
As if on cue, a slight breeze nudged the gate, and a high, mournful squeak echoed down the empty street, confirming her words. Lio's skin crawled. A cold sense of déjà vu washed over him, so strong it made him dizzy. He felt like he knew the curve of this street, the shadow cast by that leaning oak tree.
Hesitantly, they entered the village, their footsteps unnaturally loud on the cobblestones. They peered into windows as they passed. They saw tables set for dinner, books left open on chairs, knitting abandoned in a basket. It was a town of last moments, perfectly preserved.
The first echo they found was small. On the stone steps of the house with the squeaky gate lay a single, red woolen mitten. Lio stopped dead. He recognized the clumsy stitching in the cuff. His mother had knitted it for Mina two winters ago. He remembered the exact day she had lost its twin, crying because her hand was cold on the walk back from the shore. It was impossible for it to be here.
"My mitten," Mina said, her tone one of mild surprise, as if finding a misplaced toy. She picked it up and dusted it off. "He says I'll need this soon. It gets cold." She slid the mitten onto her hand. It fit perfectly.
Lio felt a frantic, buzzing panic in his chest. "That can't be yours," he stammered, looking to his mother for support, for any sign of rational alarm. But Sera's face was a mask of calm sorrow.
A few houses further down, Ira stopped, his gaze fixed on the contents of a dusty shop window. Lio followed his stare. Amongst a display of old bottles and fishing tackle sat a shaving mug. It was white ceramic, with a hairline crack running down one side and a faded blue anchor painted near the handle. It was his father's mug. The one he'd had since he was a young man, the one he'd been forced to leave on their kitchen counter because Sera had deemed it too heavy and impractical to carry.
Ira pressed a trembling hand to the glass, his breath fogging the pane. He didn't speak. The rage was gone, the confusion was gone; all that was left was a hollow, aching recognition. This was a piece of his life, sitting in a place he'd never been.
It was Sera who found the last and most impossible echo. She walked past the last house on the street, through a broken fence, and into a small, untended garden patch overgrown with weeds. She stopped and looked down. Lio and Ira followed. There, resting in the dark soil as if placed on a shrine, was the plate. The impossibly clean, white plate she had scrubbed with such fierce devotion just before they fled their home.
The sight of it broke through Lio's frantic attempts at logic. This wasn't a coincidence. This wasn't a town of people who happened to have items identical to theirs. This was something else. A trap? A message?
Sera knelt, her knees sinking into the damp earth. She reached out, her fingers tracing the clean, smooth rim of the plate. Her expression was one of profound, heartbreaking weariness. Lio watched her, his heart pounding, expecting shock, demanding tears, needing some confirmation that this was as insane as it felt.
Instead, his mother looked at the plate nestled in the dirt and whispered, so quietly Lio almost thought he'd imagined it.
"I always forget this part."