Tidelands: III-Two (37)

Suggestion. Turning Point.

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“And how is she today?” he asks.

[Still reacclimatising,] Azimuth replies, [but stabilising well.]

Caulden toys with the pen on his desk – not actually his pen, of course, and not his desk either. Pointless, really; a museum piece. When did he last write anything by hand?

Using the original was an enormous risk. They could have lost her completely. Faced with the truth at the end of the game, she might have rejected it, retreated into the fictional persona and refused to re-emerge into reality – well, perhaps that word should have scare quotes. Or, she might simply have gone insane – again. Either way, they’d have a hard time finding another one as powerful. But what could he do? They had to try something. The balcony was the last straw, a straw that had come within a hair’s breadth of exposing everything – and that not for the first time either. But Azimuth’s hypothesis had proven correct: the immersion had been greater.