Chapter 41| The Long Way to Washington
The summons from Geneva had come with an unexpected addendum three days after it first arrived — a preliminary domestic hearing, mandatory before the full WHRIB review, to be conducted at the regional office in Washington D.C. Inquisitor Reyes’s follow-up letter had been polite but firm about the reasoning: an anomaly of Allen’s classification warranted a documented baseline assessment on home soil before international review even began.
"Bureaucracy layered on top of more bureaucracy," Myria muttered, reading the letter over for a third time as the guild’s newly acquired transport van rumbled down the interstate. "Though I suppose I’d rather they be thorough than careless, given what’s riding on this."
"I still think we should’ve just flown," Irene said, sprawled across the middle bench seat with her boots propped against the window, red hair fanned out in a way that made Everlyn’s fingers twitch with the urge to braid it out of pure restless habit. "Fourteen hours in a van is a lot of time to think about how much I hate sitting still."
"Flying would have meant leaving half our documentation behind," Myria said without looking up. "Physical records, verified dungeon clear logs, sworn testimony from Association witnesses. The WHRIB doesn’t accept digital submissions alone for anomaly review. Everything needs a physical paper trail they can authenticate independently."
"Sounds like something invented by someone who’s never had to sit in traffic for six hours," Irene grumbled, though she made no actual move to argue further, settling instead into comfortable, restless silence.
Allen drove in companionable quiet for a long stretch, watching the miles of interstate unfurl beneath a wide, open sky, Vivian seated beside him in the passenger seat with her head tilted toward the open window, cataloguing the changing texture of wind and distant traffic with the same effortless precision she brought to everything.
"You’ve been quiet," she observed eventually, not turning her head. "More than usual, even for a long drive."
"Just thinking," Allen admitted. "About what happens if this hearing doesn’t go the way we’re hoping."
"It will," Vivian said, with the particular, unshakeable confidence she reserved for exactly these moments. "And if it somehow doesn’t, we adapt. The same way we’ve adapted to everything else."
"That easy?"
"Nothing about us has ever been easy," Vivian said, a faint smile touching her lips. "But we’ve never once failed to figure it out together. I don’t intend to start doubting that now."
Allen felt some of the tension in his shoulders ease at that, reaching over without looking to find her hand resting on the console between them, fingers lacing together in the familiar, wordless way that had become second nature over the better part of a year.
---
They stopped for the night at a modest roadside motel just outside Ohio, the kind of unremarkable, slightly worn establishment that would have seemed impossibly luxurious compared to the state of the Hegeville house on their very first night together, and impossibly humble compared to the guild headquarters they now called home.
Everlyn insisted on cooking dinner over the motel’s small kitchenette burner, refusing every offer of help with the particular firmness that had become something of a running joke among the five of them, and by the time the meal was finished, the cramped room had settled into a warm, familiar rhythm — Irene sprawled across one bed recounting increasingly exaggerated stories from their A-rank clears, Myria quietly cross-referencing tomorrow’s route against updated Association rift activity maps, Vivian listening to the muffled sounds of the highway beyond the thin motel walls with idle, habitual attentiveness.
"Can I ask you something?" Allen said, settling beside Myria as she worked, glancing at the scattered rift activity reports spread across the small table.
"Always."
"Do these reports ever worry you? Rift activity fluctuating this close to a major interstate corridor."
Myria’s gaze sharpened slightly, some of her earlier weariness giving way to focused attention. "A little," she admitted. "There’s been an unusual spike in low-level rift instability readings across three states over the past week. Nothing severe enough to warrant Association intervention yet, but the pattern is... irregular. Enough that I’ve been quietly tracking it since we left."
"Irregular how?"
"Rifts typically destabilize gradually, predictably, in response to identifiable triggers — proximity to other active rifts, seasonal mana density shifts, that sort of thing." Myria tapped the screen, highlighting a cluster of flagged readings along their planned route. "These spikes don’t follow any of the usual patterns. They’re sudden, localized, and resolving themselves almost as quickly as they appear. Almost like something’s testing the boundaries rather than genuinely destabilizing."
Allen studied the data for a long moment, something uneasy settling in his chest despite Myria’s carefully measured tone. "Should we reroute?"
"The current spikes are all several hours off our planned path," Myria said. "I’ll keep monitoring. If anything changes significantly, we adjust immediately. For now, I’d rather not lose sleep over statistical noise that may resolve itself before we’re anywhere near it."
Allen nodded, though the uneasy feeling lingered regardless, quietly filed away alongside every other instinct he’d learned to trust since Guardian’s Instinct first awakened months ago.
---
They set out again at dawn, the van’s engine humming steadily beneath a wide, pale morning sky, conversation drifting easily between comfortable silences and Irene’s increasingly elaborate hypothetical scenarios for what she’d do if the WHRIB actually tried to detain them.
It was just past noon, somewhere along a quiet, tree-lined stretch of highway roughly four hours outside Washington D.C., that Myria’s tablet let out a sharp, urgent alarm, cutting through the easy rhythm of the drive like a blade.
"That’s not statistical noise," she said, voice gone tight and clipped, all earlier reassurance vanished entirely from her tone as she stared at the rapidly escalating readings scrolling across her screen. "Allen, pull over. Now."
"What is it?" Allen asked, already easing the van toward the shoulder, adrenaline sharpening every sense as Guardian’s Instinct flared unbidden at the edge of his awareness.
Myria’s expression had gone pale, sharp blue eyes fixed on a single, rapidly climbing number at the center of her display.
"An S-rank rift," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "It’s opening less than two miles from our current position. And according to this, it’s destabilizing faster than any recorded rift formation in Association history."
Outside the van, the sky to the east had begun, almost imperceptibly at first, to bruise into an unnatural, pulsing violet.