It seemed to me that my time inside the ether ways was becoming increasingly fraught with irregular occurrences. The outbreak goes without saying, but then I had the time with Karen’s sister and then…well I guess before this day that was really it, but when stood against nine years of repetition every instance felt like a multitude.

  It felt no less anomalous as I walked through the emerald tunnel bereft of my mop as the squirming lines glowed underfoot and overhead. It felt wrong to leave them be, but today that was not my job, my job was to study them.

  I was alone with Karen. We had naturally parted ways with the others for the assignment to cover more ground. It wasn’t as if we had a quota we needed to fulfill, we simply each needed to have some substantial accounts we could describe of stains that matched real world people and instances. They would ultimately be embellished by information that could never be found in the stains, and that the involved parties had no idea we had, but we wanted the lie to be coated in as much truth as possible.

  It was early morning in the twilight before sunrise and the normal cleaning of the ether ways had been delayed for the next three hours for us. We had to wait long enough that stains would manifest, so we couldn’t take care of this earlier in the night, but we also didn’t want to delay the cleaning for too long. Since use of the ether ways during daylight was disparaged, it wasn’t as if we couldn’t delay them further, so our time limit was mostly to keep from inconveniencing the local scrubbers of Monderlow. That was one reason, the other was that the basics of our activities would be known to the magistrate and court we were presenting this evidence to, and we didn’t want to give the impression we were endangering the capital in our pursuit.

  For the first day, we were not focusing on the queen at all, only on the profiles given to us by professor Eric. It wasn’t a matter of practice, we first had to show proof that we could determine hidden information on known cases through our expanded senses in the ether ways. We all had the profiles memorized and were trying to find as many corresponding stains as possible, the logistics of which were beyond difficult.

  In the past hour me and Karen had only managed to find one stain we were reasonably certain matched our information. It, at least allegedly, would have been left by Billith Carther, a convicted murderer waiting on the gallows. The stains paralleled what was already known in regards to the act as well as the sick sensual pleasure he had felt carrying it out, but it had more to tell than the muddy depths of his character. In the stain I was pulled into I experienced a second wave of euphoria synonymous with the fall of a second victim that the royal guard had secretly investigated under the nose of the capital’s law enforcement. I would be able to accurately describe Billith’s sensations and then, with the help of the guard, articulate how and where the act was carried out as well as where to find evidence.

  For Billith everything came together swimmingly, but that was only because it had been arranged for him to enter the ether ways earlier that night. There were two main issues that would make subsequent matches difficult.

  The first, and the one that would be easiest to resolve if we allowed it, was our tacit agreement with the king that our lie would only be used to convict and punish the queen. Ultimately eggs would need to be broken so we were being lenient with our interpretation. As long as someone was going to be convicted anyway, meaning information on their crimes was already known if not declared, we wouldn’t protest our involvement, but we wanted to focus on individuals that were already convicted or situations that were already known as much as possible. That left us with already convicted criminals and unrevealed details on the experiences of living victims. We couldn’t make our focus obvious, but since this was meant more as a showcase than a practical investigation, we did have some leeway to include benign information as long as it didn’t encroach too far into an innocent civilian's privacy. Too far to look bad in the eyes of the court at least.

  The second issue, and the one we couldn’t control for every instance, is that any individual on profile that didn’t enter the ether ways wouldn’t leave a stain. To some degree, we just had to accept that a portion of the profiles we memorized would be irrelevant, but that had made an already difficult process even worse. It had been after all just plain frustrating to locate those veritable needles inside that haystack. It would be impossible if we had to check each individual line, but we did have one thing going for us. Most of the stains we were looking for, for better or worse, would draw our eyes enough to go against our own wills even if we wished to avoid them.

  As expected, Karen danced in the glittering filth as we moved. Her fingers and hair almost seemed to trace the fluttering waves of the lines that slid against the glossy emerald as she spun. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate, a trick of the eyes, or if the strands were in fact pulled into her movements. She hummed a light tune; one I recognized as a classic that must be shared across the country. I did not question her behavior. I did not see a point any longer. To her this tunnel of filth was the only place that allowed her to see her sister under the filth that buried her mind in its waking hours. So, I would smile as she smiles hollow though it may be.

  Oh, string I thread, through blood instead.

  Oh, mud I knit for glove I can fit

  O’er a coat that I stitched with the hair of a witch.

  Oh, how fine I look

  Draped like the skin of a fox on a fence

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  I dance in the dirt with my mate and a wench

  What a stench what a stench

  Oh, how fine I feel

  I’ll start to cry as the blood starts to dry

  Cause the sticky clinging wrap will leave me entrapped

  Beneath the dirt with these my fine friends

  How would have Karen reacted if I had sung the version playing in my mind to the rhythm of her humming instead.

  “Oh, thread I seam through the water stream

  Oh, cloud I will knit for a hat that will sit

  On the yarndoll I will spin with needle and wind

  Oh, how fun it all looks

  When it’s adorned in a draft like the rain’s worn by sky

  Will it dance through the air with the birds that fly by

  What a sight what a sight

  Oh, how fun it must feel

  With wind it will sing thanks to the gifts the birds bring

  Cause feathers so soft might hold it aloft

  Far above the clouds where it’s fun will not end”

  My singing voice was neither good nor bad. It was slightly subdued in the way of us who are not accustomed to belting out a chorus, but it echoed down the tunnel.

  “You know sky dress?”

  “I think everyone knows sky dress. Girls were always singing it back in Second school and all the boys would make fun of them by singing parodies in high pitched voices”

  “Oh? And did yoooou make fun of them.”

  I scratched my cheek a bit to feign embarrassment. I was much more ashamed of my current thoughts than my youthful antics.

  “Ah, well, I was pretty standard as far as boys go. You can more or less imagine how I was I’m sure.”

  “Hmph well at least you’ve learned a proper appreciation as you grew up. There’s plenty of men who will drunkenly make a mockery of it even at our age, and I hate that because I quite like this song. I used to sing it to my sister when she could barely walk. When she entered starter school, she made a yarndoll dressed in leaves and stems that she felt was the same as the doll from the song and kept losing it when she tried to throw it into the air. She even got it stuck in a tree once at such a young age.”

  “It sounds like you’ve always been close. Was she different back then?”

  I belatedly realized it was the first probing question I had asked about their situation. It had slipped out from my mouth so naturally I could have believed I had been bantering with her this openly since the beginning.

  “No, she was always the same, but it wasn’t always so complete. At least a part of her was just an ordinary little girl.”

  What happened? Did it get worse? What did you two go through? These were the words I should have spoken, but the momentum of impulse didn’t carry me that far. She carried on regardless. My first strike must have been enough to pry open a door if not reveal the whole story.

  “I didn’t know about her other side until I was around Twelve. My stepmother took me on a trip to Monderlow, we had been living to the east in Burnap at the time, and she let me use the ways to talk to Paula who was still back home. I was shocked to find her a complete ball of energy as if the shadow that always hung over her had completely evaporated. If I’m honest, I found it off putting at first. She acted like a completely different person and showed no indication that she was aware of the difference. For a long time, I remained afraid of her, but that trip turned out to be the beginning of something bigger. We never returned to Burnap and I wouldn’t see Paula in person until two years later. She was far more withdrawn and neurotic than when we left her, but I would never be able to tell from our time speaking in the ways. Even when we were reunited, I continued to take her into the ether ways. Eventually I began to value the way the ways let me see past the wall she put around herself. It’s what led me to sign up as a scrubber.”

  It was such a heavy story, but she told it with the same wistful smile and cheerful tilt to her voice. There was only the slightest hint of a dampened ring at the end of her words that could indicate the story weighed heavier on her than any other. I had a new anxiety to join my self hatred for my unwarranted disgust. Fear of the depths that must lurk beneath that still lake and the certainty I would drown if I tried to navigate its currents. Yet my mouth put assurance on a line that might pull me beneath the water.

  “That’s a commendable motivation. Most of us just want the pay and time it brings as long as we can face the discomfort. In my case…”

  In my case what? I thought to myself. It’s not that I didn’t know. It’s that it didn’t matter anymore.

  “I was interested in dreams. I was fascinated by the idea of peaking into their remnants. I thought I might find something there.”

  Every word was true, but I spoke them lightly as if that truth hadn’t long evaporated. I had been searching for something, something intangible, but when did I stop looking? Probably my first day at the academy when I learned what it really meant to gaze into the filth.

  “That’s beautiful.”

  Wasn’t it just? If only it could have remained so. I smiled at her as if it was. That’s right, I smiled in the ether ways, what I claimed no one sane would do, even as my eyes were drawn…

  It looked like we had skipped ahead a bit in our assignment. My smile collapsed into a grimace as the impression invaded my mind, but hers only shivered. It was a small reaction, but far more than she would normally show.

  It was not the stain we needed to ultimately find, the memory of the queen's partner in adultery, but it was tangentially related to the case.

  The innocent confusion told me that the stain was left by a child. The flood of anxiety spoke of abandonment. It spoke of the eyes of a mother that wouldn’t look his way. I could feel how cold and regal those eyes were. They were eyes that belonged to a queen.

  There was cruelty in the neglect that went much farther than just ignoring him. The child didn’t understand, but my adult brain could analyze the ways she let her disdain be known indirectly. It would take real effort to cause such an important individual who is surrounded by servants to suffer from hunger, and there where echoes of treatment at the hands of various tutors that was clearly unusual and consistent between them. And last of all I saw confusion over intertwining lines just as I had seen many times before. The child knew and now so did we, for whatever it was worth.

  “Well, that wasn't easy to watch at all, was it?”

  “Certainly, eases the guilt at using her more than a bit.”

  I didn’t feel any shock. I could easily understand her reasons and just as easily not respect them. It was nothing more than another stain to be cleaned among many, but it would also one more notch to tally against the queen if the royal guard can find some evidence to correspond with the prince’s mistreatment.

  On the glassy wobbling splotch above me, the one that contained such a terrible vision, I imagined it took the form of a Nachtenwarb just as if I was playing the cloud game. With everything that happened it had been easy for me to imagine that soon the world really would change.