Chapter 1: Leviathan (Patreon)

The slap of Ms. Lane's glove on the wooden shelf almost made Elliot drop the Ming dynasty tea set, his fingers barely clutching the edges of the tray after an instinctive twitch backwards.

“Absolutely ridiculous. You understand this is an urgent matter, yes?”

Elliot forced a thin smile. “Ma’am, I sympathize, but unfortunately the shop is closed for lunch.”

“Lunch?” Her lips twitched. “I need the platters for the Fairlee Historical Society’s bridge tournament, an event which will raise hundreds of times your net worth for charity in a single afternoon, and which starts in one hour. You’re incapable of postponing your snack?”

“Unfortunately so, Ms. Lane. We’re closed for another hour.”

“Do you have any idea what Henric will say when I tell him you evicted one of his best customers so you could take your time savoring your food?”

Henric, Elliot’s boss and an ardent avoider of conflict, had told him to fend off Ms. Lane’s interest in the Victorian era servingwear by whatever means necessary. Elliot’s lunch hour technically ended in fifteen minutes, but now he knew she had somewhere to be in an hour, so an hour it was. “I’m so sorry. I know if he were here he’d make an exception, but he’s not, and I just can’t. I don’t have the authority.”

“Let’s see, then,” she replied, raising her phone to her ear. “Why don’t I give him a call.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Elliot said. “Just as soon as you get in touch with him I can bring out the pieces, but for now I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.” He placed the tea set down gently on a nearby shelf after checking it for dust.

She shot him a look that could have killed a small mammal, but then scowled ferociously and stared off into the distance. “Henric, when you get this I need you to call me back right away. Your new errand boy doesn’t understand that special customers get special treatment. Call me.” She tapped the end-call button with considerably more force than was necessary. “You know, when I walked in here, I was prepared to leave a generous tip. Now I think I might have to have your job.”

Putting on his best haggard expression Elliot took a shuffling step forward, forcing her to take a step back. “I completely understand. I hope you change your mind, but you have to do what you have to do.” He took another step forward, finally chivvying her out the front entrance. “Have an excellent day!” His foot flicked the door closed before she could snap a rejoinder.

He let out a harsh sigh. Audrey Lane was very rich, and very important to Henric’s bottom line, despite him not being in the mood to deal with her most days. He would welcome her back soon enough, and make something up about Elliot being disciplined. The people were the worst part of the job.

There was a sheen of dust in the sunbeam coming through the front window, and Elliot made a mental note to turn on the air filter. Then he pulled a sharpie from his pocket and wrote “AirF” on his arm, because he’d been getting worse at tracking mental notes. He’d always been a list-maker, but lately it was more necessity than choice. Too many things to do, and sleep was one of the few activities he could skip without any immediately intolerable consequences. The consequences were still there, just not intolerable. Not yet.

The front door opened, bell chiming. Elliot plastered on his customer service smile, snatching a dirty paper towel from behind one of the marble busts as he turned.

“Welcome to Henric’s Vintage and Antiques,” he said in a well-practiced cadence, “Let me know if you—oh, hi Rowan.”

“Hey. I got you a thing,” said the young girl, waving a purple muffin at him as she looked around. “It looks nice. Did you reorder stuff?” She unzipped her green puffer jacket and pulled off its hood, letting her long hair fall free. She had refused to cut even an inch since starting middle school, and now that it had been running wild for almost three years it nearly reached the small of her back.

Oh wow, Elliot thought, eyeing the muffin, I’m starving. Did I forget breakfast? I did.

“Thanks, I’m actually so hungry. And yeah, I just finished.” He looked over at the grandfather clock by the back wall. “And I totally lost track of time. Would you flip the sign?”

Rowan nodded, tossing the muffin at him before turning to open the door again. She grabbed the ‘temporarily out for lunch’ sign, flipped it back to ‘open’, yanked the door closed, then jumped back.

“It’s so cold out there,” she muttered, “why do we live in the Northeast? I checked the weather in Florida this morning and it was seventy degrees. Can you imagine if it was seventy degrees right now? Emma says Benji has a house in Fort Lauderdale they’re going to visit together.” She flicked one of the bronze Persian urns as she passed by, making a dull ringing sound.

Elliot winced. "Careful with the antiques, please."

"Sorry, sorry,” she waved a hand, “not thinking."

His eyes caught on her fingers. She used to beg mom for nail art before school—mostly stars and flowers. They'd been bare for months now.

Rowan dropped her backpack on the floor, making a soft thud as it hit the thick red-and-gold Turkish rug. “You remember you’re supposed to be taking me to practice, right?”

Elliot froze mid-bite, frantically sorting through his mental calendar before giving up and whipping out his phone. “Oh no.” His sister often visited him over lunch because the store was so close to her school—half the reason he’d picked this job—but today she had a half day. Her robotics team meeting was in thirty minutes.

Rowan smiled ruefully, a far more world-weary expression than he liked to see on her face. “Yeah, I figured. No worries, I’ll use the Lyft pass.”

Their father had worked as a paralegal in downtown Boston, and his perks included five free Lyft rides a month. They’d been waiting for someone to de-list it ever since the accident, but so far it just kept ticking. Elliot felt awful. He’d promised to take her today. It’s not like it cost anything to use the rideshare, but it made her remember their parents, and he tried hard to avoid putting her in that position.

“I’m really sorry. I should tell Henric I have to call out, he’ll—”

“No,” Rowan interrupted. “When are you going to make up the hours? You’ve already packed all your classes into the end of the week, and then you’re scheduled here Saturday through Tuesday.”

“He would let me,” Elliot began, starting to rifle through the contacts on his phone, “I can offer to add an hour a day to my shifts for the next few weeks.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just going to take the Lyft. I already called it.”

He paused, eyes still fixed on his phone. “I’m really sorry. I can’t believe I forgot.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, furrowing her brow. “I’m fourteen, not four. You don’t have to do everything. I already worry about you.”

“You shouldn’t worry about me, I’m doing fine.” He tried to muster up his most relaxed grin. “I’m keeping up with classes, and I actually really like this job.”

She rolled her eyes. “Sure.”

“I really do,” he insisted. And it was true. At least the part about liking the job. It had been surprisingly engaging. He’d thought it would just be lifting and carrying, but Henric had him doing research, planning basic acquisitions, and learning how to differentiate authentic items from fakes. It was like solving a puzzle, adding a bunch of tenuous, disparate facts together and then trying to cross the threshold from I-think-it’s-real into I-could-show-it’s-real-in-court. Certainly when he applied all he’d been thinking about was making enough money to pay for an apartment to keep Rowan out of foster care, plus proximity to her school, but it had grown on him.

The keeping up with classes part, though…that was stretching the truth. He had yet to fail out of college, and that was about the rosiest way to put it.

“You don’t have to keep up the chipper act all the time, you know,” Rowan said.

Elliot winced.

She arched an eyebrow. “I’ve been thinking about getting a part-time job.”

“Absolutely not,” he replied, his grin fading. “You’re a child, and your life has already been interrupted enough. You’re going to have as normal a school experience as I can manage, and that’s it.”

“What about you? You’re twenty-one, not eighty. What about your normal experience? You were supposed to thru-hike the Appalachian trail next summer with Alan and Jess. Is that still happening?”

“That’s…it might.”

“Uh huh.” She crossed her arms. “It’s not fair. I’m not a baby. I know how hard you have to work. If I get a job, you could cut back to two days a week here.”

“You don’t have time for that, you have homework, and clubs, and what about your friends? You—”

“What about your friends!” Rowan snapped back. “Alan texted me last week and asked me if you’d gotten a new number. You’re working too much, and you need help!”

Elliot gritted his teeth. It wasn’t that she was being completely unreasonable. He didn’t doubt she could do it, and things had been tough recently. But it seemed so much more terrible to derail her life than his. He was struggling to graduate, while multiple colleges had already sent her information about their scholarship options. MIT had just reached out to see if she was interested in a summer program that was typically reserved for seniors in high school.

Not to mention the fact that he’d accepted responsibility for her. Their parents’ deaths had been awful for him as well, but he was twenty-one, a senior in college. It should be him sacrificing to keep her life stable, not the reverse.

“Listen,” he said, “I really appreciate what you’re offering. Can we talk about it later?”

“Fine. But you’d better start getting used to it. I’m not going to let you work yourself to death.” Her voice caught on the last word, and he thought he saw her lips quiver, but before he could say anything she spun around and grabbed her bag. “My ride’s here, I gotta run. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Be back by six!” he called after her, but she was already gone.

***

He was home by five, cooking a simple sheet pan chicken and broccoli dinner by five-fifteen, and by five-forty-five he was hurrying through a research paper on the keystone species of the tropical reef ecosystems of Australia.

It was six-twenty when Rowan came through the door, cheeks red from the cold and a light dusting of snow on her coat.

Elliot had been thinking furiously all afternoon. It was difficult to change Rowan’s mind once she’d made a decision. That had been true from a very young age. What worked best was reasonably sound logic combined with bribery.

“Hey,” he said. “Dinner’s on the stove. How was robotics?”

“Great. I gave Mouser treads, and he’s even scarier now.”

“Oh wow.” Mouser was a battle robot that went through a new iteration every month. Elliot struggled to keep track of its features, but he knew it tended to win whatever events it entered.

Rowan tossed her backpack onto the couch, stripped off her jacket, and beelined straight for her room.

Elliot sighed, turning back to his essay. Maybe it was for the best that they delayed things. He still had two worksheets to fill in after this, and he should really start the take home quiz for statistics, even though realistically it wasn’t getting done until the bitter edge of its due date.

Then the world changed.

It came out of nowhere, without even a faint premonition of warning. One second he was plodding through a comparison between reef sharks and groupers, and the next a giant blue box snapped into existence right in front of his face. It was a flat square three feet across, with neat black text printed clearly within.

Prepare yourself for entry into the Loom. Your world is ending, but you will begin anew. Opportunity will be commensurate with danger. May your souls light the void between stars, and your ancestors guide your way.

Elliot realized his mouth was hanging open, and he closed it with a snap. “What the hell?”

Was he going insane? This would be an extremely inconvenient time to have a mental breakdown. He reached forward to see if the blue box of text could be moved, and as his finger touched its surface his vision went black. A sharp pain spiked at the back of his head.

Then he was swimming. There was water all around, dark and churning, with a powerful current he could sense far below. It was almost impossible to pick out details, but he somehow knew he was a minnow, an inch or two long and coursing through deep water. He flicked his tail and sailed forward smoothly, knowing he had to move, had to—

Everything stopped. His body, his whole existence, flickered. And then he saw it. Far below him, far enough he shouldn’t be able to perceive anything at all, a leviathan swam. He couldn’t assess its size any more than he could have guessed the size of Earth by walking on its surface. But he could feel it. Cold, titanic, and deeply unconcerned with his well-being. And he knew, suddenly, that it was rising. Slowly, ever so slowly, but inexorably. And when it reached him, when it even drew near, everything about him would dissolve into nothingness like a cup of oil poured into an inferno.

He snapped back to his body, vision returning. The box of text flickered halfway through his arm, proving itself to be completely insubstantial. Jerking the arm back, he spun frantically towards his sister’s room.