Chapter 1115: The Soul: Crack in the SNAP

Yet still he looked. Once every minute, perhaps twice. A glance, sharp as a scalpel, toward Anastasia. A glance back, measured and precise.

He knew something was amiss.

Of course he did. Peter noticed everything. He noticed when a headache bloomed unspoken across a room. He noticed when the numbers on a stock chart lied through their teeth.

But he did not know

what

exactly was amiss, and that ignorance sat upon Soo-Jin’s chest like a small, cold, intelligent stone—polished smooth by secrets it had no right to hold.

Because Soo-Jin

knew

. She had come to this breakfast with knowledge that should have been erased from her like dust from a lacquered table, yet there it remained, perfectly intact, lodged in the center of her being like a second spine.

’Peter had

died

today.’

She let the thought linger in her mouth, savoring its bitterness as one might a rare, poisonous vintage, for Soo-Jin had been raised to grant terrible truths the courtesy of a long, deliberate chew.

He had died.

Not metaphorically or some dramatic, recoverable, cinematic flourish that allowed for last-minute heroism.

No—he had

died

properly, with all the requisite paperwork filed in triplicate across whatever celestial bureaucracy oversaw such things, a death that carried a soul out of its body and deposited it somewhere cold, indifferent, and entirely unconcerned with loose ends.

And the world, in response, had flinched like a debutante discovering a spider in her champagne.

The

SNAP

—that strange, increasingly unionized divine

eraser...

wielded with the casual proficiency of signing a lunch receipt—had reached out and rewritten the moment. Had plucked the death from the fabric of reality, folded it neatly, and filed it away in a drawer no one else could open.

And those most affected—

Peter

himself,

ARIA,

Anastasia

—had been gently, efficiently scrubbed of the memory, the way one wipes a fingerprint from a wineglass moments before the guests arrive.

But not

Soo-Jin.

Not, it seemed, Seraphiel either.

The angel of Purity, who had—Soo-Jin had watched kill him, the pulse of an outraged celestial who had been subjected to the

eraser

in one violation too disrespectfully—flown off to lick her wounds, recalibrate her halo, and presumably draft a strongly-worded grievance in triplicate, the manner of angels of Purity forced to confront something that offended their internal ledgers.

Seraphiel was somewhere now, far from this house, gathering herself like a storm cloud deciding whether to rain or merely thunder.

Of course, the angel would strike back eventually. That was the whole thesis of angels of Purity.

That was, in fact, the only predictable thing about them.

"Future Problems."

She turned her attention back to the breakfast table.

She looked at Anastasia again.

Anastasia, whose memory had been politely erased, who ought to have been sitting here perfectly composed, consuming perfectly adequate eggs, offering perfectly reasonable commentary—and who was instead very obviously, visibly,

unwell

.

Fraying at the edges like antique lace left too long in the light.

Soo-Jin had a

theory

about that.

Erasure,

she had come to understand, was a clean operation on the surface and a profoundly messy one beneath. Souls were not tidy things. They carried imprints the way old leather carried the shape of the body that had worn it for decades.

One could wipe a memory from a mind with the efficiency of a divine delete key; one could not wipe an event from a soul. And when something as cataclysmic as one’s husband dying had occurred and saving her as the last things he did last, the

soul

knew

.

The soul remembered, even when the brain had been gently informed otherwise, and the soul—having neither language nor vote in the matter—expressed itself through symptoms. A tremor in the hands. A distance in the eyes. A coffee cup held but never raised to lips.

Anastasia, in Soo-Jin’s reading, possessed a conscious mind told that nothing had happened and a

soul

screaming, in a very small but very persistent voice,

something happened, something happened, something happened

.

’Poor thing.’

That was Soo-Jin’s theory.

That was the assumption she made, sitting there with her plate, watching Anastasia not drink her coffee.

Of course, Soo-Jin did not know—could not have known, for Anastasia had not breathed a syllable of it to anyone—that Anastasia’s haunting had nothing whatsoever to do with the SNAP.

That Anastasia had seen something else this morning.

That Anastasia, in the small grey hour before the household stirred, been down to the med bay with ARIA and Peter and as she watched the girl upon a bed and felt the very floor of her own life shift beneath her in a way no amount of celestial bookkeeping could ever explain.

Soo-Jin did not know about the girl in the med bay.

Soo-Jin only knew her master had died.

And so she made her assumption—gentle, intelligent, entirely incorrect, in the precise manner intelligent people make assumptions when they clutch one piece of a puzzle and have not yet noticed the puzzle possesses two... or possibly seventeen, given the peculiar arithmetic of this household.

Helena nudged her again.

"You’re being weird," Helena murmured, in that lazy Australian drawl where the word "weird" arrived as a soft accusation dressed in concern. "What is it."

Soo-Jin considered telling her. Considered, briefly, the indecent relief of saying it aloud.

Our boss died this morning. The world rewound itself like a poorly edited film reel. I remember. I should not, but I do.

She did not.

She picked up a slice of melon instead, placed it carefully in her mouth, and chewed it twice before answering—because some sentences deserved a pause, and others deserved an excuse.

"Nothing," she said. "She is merely tired."

Helena looked at her sideways. Helena was not a stupid woman. Helena did not, even slightly, believe her.

But Helena—being Helena, which was its own ongoing diagnosis—let it go.

For now.

Across the table, Peter glanced at Anastasia again.

And then, slower this time, the way a hand turns a key in a lock it has been contemplating all morning, his gaze slid to

Soo-Jin.

And held.