From the Vast

Chapter 26: Traitor

Marco's heart hammered in his chest as he jogged through the snowy woods.

On any other day, he would've considered his current pace to be sluggish–to put it kindly–but at the moment, it felt like he was rushing headfirst into something someone would regret. Whether it would be him, his sister, the human girl with whom they had grown closer than either of them would admit to, or their entire village, he didn't know.

And it agonized him.

It'd be many more days until he fully recovered from everything that had happened with Cinder. And likely even more until all warmth would stop carrying with itself the all too familiar aching. It was the time he wanted to take for himself, time he knew he should be taking for himself, time Aria had stressed he deserved, but... the obvious loomed above him, above them all.

The task he'd decided on last evening ended up being an abject failure by any metric. Worse than that—he didn't just make no progress; he made negative progress.

Because now, he too doubted his sister's actions.

Marco trusted Aria; he trusted her more than anyone else in the world, and yet... doubt lingered. He felt the blatant uncertainty in her voice and aura when she'd relayed to them she'd wiped the memories of that human—the telltale sting of a badly kept lie—but deliberately overlooked it until now.

But now, with the light having been shone upon it in such a stark way, he couldn't look away.

He couldn't think of a motive that wasn't malice, and didn't have it in him to imagine his sister as a traitor, but... why would she lie about this? If he'd felt it right, if it was so blatant that even a non-psychic had noticed it, then the only question remaining was 'why?'.

He had no answer. As far as he was concerned, there was only one way to sort this harrowing enigma out.

Checking up on that human in person.

It was far from his first time sneaking into the human backwater, though he hadn't ventured further than the end of their path in years. What was once an expression of frivolous curiosity had turned so much more dire the more he learned about humanity, so much riskier.

He didn't need to do this; he doubted he even should be here. Even if his sister had kept that human's memories and lied to them about it, he couldn't accept that it was for any truly malicious reasons. Aria had to have had a plan for this; she was much too intelligent to knowingly expose their village to so much risk without gaining something from it.

But what if she had misjudged? What if she had acted in the best of intentions and ended up bringing on their home's eventual demise?

...

What if he had misjudged, too?

The movement in the Gallade's peripheral vision made him jerk into a combat-ready stance before easing out. Just a white sheet, much like the ones he saw Anne draw on. It fluttered in the freezing wind, attached to the sign at the end of their path. On it, a depiction of the girl's face, and an incomprehensible soup of blacks and whites, of meaningless symbols humanity comprehended all the same.

It might've only been a day, he might've only spent a few hours in Anne's company, but... he already felt close to her, closer than he probably should have. It was hard not to feel for her. The girl had bonded with Cadence further in a day than almost all the other children around in the six years she'd been alive, and that bond was mutual.

For crying out loud, he experienced so much more of their mutual memories than he'd ever wished to—enough to still see occasional flashes of them as he daydreamed or fell asleep. He didn't know the names of the two humans branded into his mind, knew nothing about them beyond them being Anne's biological parents and that Aria had apparently had a hand in the death of one of them.