## Chapter 465 — Kanno Reaches Out

Monday, 22 May 2028, began with a photograph in the wrong place.

The client had supplied the correct image, then placed a cropped copy into the layout folder under almost the same filename. The crop removed just enough empty wall above the subject to make the page heading look cramped. Kanno found the problem before lunch, replaced the file, adjusted the spacing and sent a new proof.

Work scaled things usefully.

By the time the client approved the correction, the decision she had carried home from flat 202 the previous afternoon had stopped feeling like a decision she was still making.

Thomas and Isha had passed on Ian's message exactly as promised. He would like to see her one-to-one sometime. Her choice. He would not ask them for an answer.

Kanno had said, *I might.*

By Sunday night, *might* had become yes. She had still waited until Monday because there was no need to turn certainty into urgency.

The second job of the day supplied an ordinary set of problems: three queries from a client, one missing high-resolution image and a filename ending in *final_final2*. Kanno worked through them with her phone face down beside the keyboard.

The corrected image arrived shortly before she finished. She replaced it, exported the proof and closed the job.

On the walk home she took the longer route without bringing the camera out of her bag. A delivery bicycle stood badly parked outside a pharmacy. Someone had repainted half of an old shop sign and left the older red showing beneath the white. Three schoolchildren crossed at the lights while arguing over something on one phone.

Kanno noticed all of it and photographed none of it.

At home she put milk in the refrigerator, made dinner and waited until she had finished eating before opening the private thread with Ian.

Berlin remained part of it. So did the passport and camera he had moved after she had explicitly told him not to alter her belongings. Venus was there too, and the die, and conversations she had never turned into reports for Thomas and Isha. The history was neither simple nor especially difficult to retrieve.

Kanno did not need a cleaner label for it before sending a message.

**Kanno:** Thomas and Isha passed on your message. I have decided I would like to see you.

She read that once, then continued.

**Kanno:** Just us. Somewhere neutral. No trip, and no demonstration unless I ask for one. I am not bringing my camera. Coffee would be good.

**Kanno:** If you still want to meet, tell me when works for you.

The reply came quickly.

**Ian:** Whenever is good for you, however/wherever works for you. I'm really glad you messaged. :-)

Kanno looked at the smile for a little longer than the sentence required.

It was an ordinary little thing from someone who could arrange planets.

A real Sendai café briefly occurred to her and was rejected. Ian entering this Earth carried its own standing boundary, and ordinary strangers did not need to become part of a private meeting merely to prove the meeting could be ordinary. Berlin had already established that real places did not become neutral simply because the weather was disappointing.

**Kanno:** Tomorrow evening, then. Something small and neutral. A table, two comfortable chairs, coffee. A window is fine, but it does not need an interesting view.

She added another message before he could answer.

**Kanno:** And make it a fresh route. I don't want to assume any previous door still exists.

**Kanno:** Can you arrange that?

**Ian:** Yes of course, whatever door you wish to be the one will be the one. Just message me before you're ready.

**Ian:** I'm looking forward to it.

Her mouth curved.

**Kanno:** I am too. Tomorrow evening.

Tuesday behaved normally enough to make the appointment feel less like an event.

A different client wanted to know whether a printer's recommended paper stock would alter the apparent darkness of a photograph. Kanno answered, revised two captions and spent part of the afternoon locating the latest version of a file somebody had renamed twice. She bought coffee at lunch and refused to give the choice significance.

Her camera stayed home when she finished work.

By evening she had eaten, cleared the dishes and changed into comfortable clothes. She considered the doors in her flat before choosing the spare room. The front door was too much about arrival and departure. The bedroom was too intimate. The spare room was simply a room with a door which could open fully.

She sent the message.

**Kanno:** I'm ready. Use the spare-room door.

On the other side of reality, Ian prepared a small British café which belonged nowhere in particular. Stone walls held small windows looking onto an equally small village. Mild sunlight lay across the road outside. Inside were a few tables, some for two and some for four, with no staff or customers supplied for atmosphere. At Kanno's place waited coffee, Japanese tea and British tea, with milk and sugar in small metal pots. There were scones, jam, clotted cream and butter if either of them wanted them. Ian had a milkshake.

His message arrived.

**Ian:** Enter when ready.

Kanno opened the spare-room door.

The air beyond was a little cooler. Stone replaced the familiar wall. The village outside the windows had enough detail to look plausible and no obvious landmark asking to be recognised.

She stepped through and closed the door behind her.

The table made Ian's uncertainty about her drink preference obvious. Coffee sat beside two kinds of tea, with the milk and sugar arranged neatly between them. The scones looked less overprepared than the beverages. Across the table, Ian had chosen a milkshake again.

Kanno sat and drew the coffee towards herself.

“Is the milkshake becoming tradition?”

“I like milkshakes but only have them for special occasions. I wasn't sure what hot beverage you wanted, so sorry for providing excessive choice.”

Ian smiled at her.

“How are you, Kanno-san?”

“Excessive choice is acceptable when the consequence is tea.” Kanno wrapped both hands briefly around the coffee cup. “I'm well. Work is ordinary. My photographs are refusing to organise themselves, which is also ordinary.”

She had expected the first minutes to require more effort. Instead there was coffee, a milkshake and Ian's smile across the table.

“And I'm less uncertain about seeing you than I was when Thomas and Isha gave me your message. That is probably why I'm here.”

She drank before returning the question.

“How are you?”

“I am good, my reality-work is good, I can't remember if I told you I had a new job—it was new when we met—so still finding my feet a little. This reality is a bit more complicated in some ways; far fewer IT issues, that's for sure.”

“You did tell me. IT, and the job was new.” Kanno considered the comparison. “Merrowford appears to have fewer password resets. The support environment includes badgers, gods and ancient machinery, which may cancel the advantage.”

Her coffee was better than it had any reason to be.

“Is it still the same job?”

“Yes, same job. Still learning about the people and the company. Smaller, nicer, than the big corporate I was at before.”

“How is the photography and book publishing going?”

“*Until Replaced* is still out. It sells occasionally. Small Works was useful and finite, which is approximately what I wanted from it. No sudden fame, no publishing empire.” Kanno's mouth moved. “So, successful.”

She looked briefly towards the mild village light.

“I'm still making photographs. The wall work has not become finished merely because I have spent more time on it. Some photographs may belong in it. Others probably don't.”

The impossible work remained more awkward to classify. Venus was Venus. Mercury was Mercury. Aelira's portraits were private. The universe image belonged in a different category again. Kanno had no interest in letting unusual access substitute for having something to say.

“Sometimes I like the scratched blue bucket beside the vending machine more than something objectively remarkable.” She took another drink. “That feels reassuringly normal.”

“I think I'd like the bucket on Mars. The incongruity would be interesting.”

“That wasn't an offer,” Ian added quickly, smiling with slight embarrassment.

Kanno looked at him over the rim of her cup.

“Good.”

She let the correction suffer for half a second longer.

“Because I was deciding how firmly I needed to explain that moving my bucket photograph to Mars would not improve it.”

The image in her head was funny despite the objection: scratched blue plastic, a vending machine somehow supplied beside it, red ground beyond.

“The moment you put the bucket on Mars, the photograph becomes about somebody putting a bucket on Mars. That is exactly the problem.” Her mouth curved. “You are getting faster at noticing when a hypothetical sounds like an offer.”

“I've been doing a lot more normal stuff in this universe, and some extremely different things that make going to Mars look as normal as a bucket next to a vending machine.”

“I think I prefer the former afterwards, but I like the excitement of the latter ... until I get into it.”

He paused.

“That probably sounds unusual.”

“From almost anyone else, yes.”

Kanno turned the cup a few degrees on its saucer.

“From you, it sounds consistent. You enjoy the approach to something impossible. Then it becomes a place with details and consequences instead of an idea.”

She glanced at the milkshake.

“And afterward you talk about houses, work and onions.”

Her mouth curved. “That may be more unusual than Mars.”

“You forgot tracking a badger. I'll let you decide what of the two categories that was in.”

Kanno considered this with unnecessary care.

“The badger was ordinary. The circumstances around why *you* were tracking it were not.”

She broke a small piece from a scone.

“So perhaps a third category: ordinary activity performed by someone whose definition of ordinary has become unreliable.”

“It was just a badger, in the end. It felt nice to do a normal thing there. I've been making maps of there, in my reality too, that's perhaps another attempt to get the average weirdness down to manageable levels.”

“I understand the maps more than you might expect.”

Kanno rested one elbow lightly against the table.

“A photograph can do something similar. It does not make a place less strange, but afterward there is a rectangle with edges. You decide what belongs inside it, compare one frame with another, notice what you got wrong.”

Her eyes moved briefly to the windows.

“Maps may be better for that. The world may contain gods and impossible roads, but a wall still has to be somewhere.”

She looked back at him.

“Do you make them mostly because you enjoy mapping, or because putting the place on paper makes it easier to live with?”

“Due to how I experience this reality, making something in mine makes it feel a bit more real, maybe? I also do like the process, using the software. There's a slight curation element to it, alongside the rest of the—”

Ian paused, both for the word and the implication.

“—reality curating... I can't think of a better term.”

Kanno looked from him to the invented village beyond the window.

“Curation is probably closer than *writing*.”

She considered her own work before continuing.

“When I edit photographs, I choose sequence, size, what sits beside what and what gets omitted. I can change what somebody encounters without changing what was photographed.”

Her gaze returned to Ian.

“But your material sometimes notices the curator.”

Kanno reached for one of the scones and turned it once on the plate before splitting it.

“That is where the analogy becomes less comfortable.”

“Do you look back on Venus and Berlin as fond memories?”

Kanno stopped spreading jam.

“Yes.”

The answer came before the qualification.

“Berlin is complicated because the beginning of that day was not good. You moved my passport and camera after I had explicitly told you not to alter my belongings. I was angry, and I still think I was right to be angry.”

She added clotted cream.

“But you listened when I stopped it. You returned the camera. We started again properly, and I chose to go.”

Memory supplied cold air, ordinary people, mediocre light in some places and too little time to know which photographs would survive later inspection.

“I remember those things more than I remember the argument.”

Venus required less sorting.

“Venus is easier. It was absurd. I asked to photograph a dead Soviet spacecraft on another planet and you said yes.”

Kanno took a bite of the scone.

“But it was still photography. The lander was where it was. The light was awful in its own particular way. My camera remained my camera. I made some photographs I liked and some I didn't.”

She swallowed and looked across the table.

“And you came with me without making the photographs for me.”

Her expression softened. “So yes. Fond memories. Very strange ones. I don't need the strange part removed for them to be good.”

Ian nodded and smiled at her.

“You were right to be angry, but your restraint helped me a lot. So, thank you for that.”

Kanno's expression shifted, without sharpness.

“I wasn't trying to teach you a lesson.”

“I was deciding what I still wanted after you crossed the boundary. Anger did not automatically answer that.”

She considered the amount of cream on the scone and decided it was already beyond repair.

“But I am glad you learned something useful from it. And I'm glad I did not decide that one bad choice had to define every choice after it.”

Ian smiled a little.

Kanno saw it and let the quiet remain. Porcelain touched saucer. Outside the windows, the village continued doing nothing worth noticing.

“You looked relieved.” She brushed one crumb from her thumb. “Was there something you were worried I might say?”

“I'm just taking in the moment, and a little nervous, but also happy.”

Ian took a drink of milkshake and prepared his own scone half.

“Nervous and happy seems more believable than either one by itself.”

Kanno ate another bite and watched him deal with jam and cream.

“Are you nervous because it's me, or because you're still getting used to meetings where nothing impossible is supposed to happen?”

“Not just you. Nervous of those I've interacted with and,” Ian paused for a moment, “not quite covered myself in glory. Thomas and Isha too, but that is deeper I think. I still am unsure for many if interacting with the world, with them, is a good idea or not. For everyone involved.”

Kanno set down the remaining half of her scone.

“Berlin and Venus tell me I'm glad those particular things happened after I chose them. They don't answer for anyone else.”

She picked up her coffee.

“I messaged you because, despite what went badly, I wanted to see you again.”

The sentence did not need expansion.

“Are you wondering whether you should withdraw from people generally, or whether there are particular people you think you may be making worse off by staying?”

“I hadn't thought of it that way, actually. With your Earth, I wasn't sure if it was better to just not contact anyone at all. I had felt like every time I did, I was making things worse. With the fantasy world, I guess it's different. I have friends there now, but I don't think I could bring myself to see Thomas's family again.”

“So, apart from that one trip further afield, I stay near the elves in the human town of Merrowford.”

“Then keep the questions separate,” Kanno said. “Lethira and your friends want you in their lives. Thomas's family is a different question.”

Kanno knew enough about that meeting not to reduce the reluctance to geography.

“Why them in particular?”

“The meeting with them was very, very hard for me. I assume the same or worse for them. I'm also not sure if I'd really have a connection, outside of Thomas.”

“Then I ended up with a house and deciding how many chairs we should have, it felt easier to stay there.”

A pause.

“Plus, I have a life where my body is.”

Kanno nodded at the last part.

“Yes. That seems easy to lose when the other place contains elves and gods.”

She picked up the coffee again.

“And chairs.”

“The house sounds bounded in a way Thomas's family probably never could be. A roof can need repairing. A room can need furniture. You and Lethira can disagree about where something goes and eventually put it somewhere.”

She took a sip.

“That does not require you to solve what you mean to an entire family.”

Kanno glanced towards one of the empty four-seat tables nearby.

“How many chairs did you finally decide you needed?”

“Six, we might have a dinner party at some point. I was thinking of asking if you wanted to come, at some point, but it's just an idea.”

Kanno's eyebrows lifted.

She looked at the remains of her scone while deciding rather than answering from politeness.

“I think I would like that.”

Her eyes returned to him.

“If Lethira wants me there as well, obviously. And when it becomes an actual dinner rather than a theoretical use for chair number six.”

Her mouth curved. “I would like to see the house. You've talked about it enough that I have an incomplete floor plan in my head already. So you can keep that idea.”

“You have prior authorisation to photograph our stream, anything else by future consent.”

Ian smiled at her.

Kanno considered the licence.

“That is an unusually specific photographic licence.”

She glanced towards the windows as though the village might contain a competing stream.

“I accept. And I approve of the second clause.”

She considered the invitation.

“Is the stream actually beautiful, or have you simply become attached to it because it is yours?”

“You'll have to tell me, I can't ever see it.”

Kanno went still for a moment.

“Right.”

She had forgotten that particular asymmetry while imagining the house.

“Then I won't photograph it merely because I have permission.”

Her expression softened.

“If I do, I'll try to make a photograph worth bringing back to you.”

“That would be fantastic.”

“Lethira likes it though, and the reality machine keeps mentioning its gentle sound through the windows, so it sounds pretty.” He paused. “I wasn't intending that to sound so melodramatic.”

“So that's attendee number 4, after myself, Lethira and Aelira, provisionally interested. Just need to decide on the other two, to get maximum chair value.”

Kanno's mouth tightened before she laughed.

“Your invisible stream making a sound you cannot hear was slightly melodramatic.”

She took another sip.

“The attempt to recover by turning your first dinner party into chair-capacity optimisation has helped considerably.”

Her gaze sharpened with amusement.

“Does Aelira know she is attendee number three?”

“Yes, I think so, or I've imagined it. Multiple worlds to remember operating in sometimes non-linear time, it's hard on my middle-aged brain.”

Kanno gave him a level look over the rim of her cup.

“That is not a reassuring sentence from someone who can alter reality.”

She drank.

“But *provisionally* is doing useful work. Aelira can remain provisionally chair three until you establish whether she has actually agreed to anything.”

Her mouth curved.

“You may need a guest list that distinguishes invited, interested and remembered from a possible future.”

“That sounds like an Excel spreadsheet in a world without the steam engine.”

Ian pondered the remaining places.

“That just leaves the last two. There are some options from that world.”

“You are dangerously close to planning the dinner now.”

Kanno set down the coffee cup.

“But I admit I am curious. Who are the options?”

“Two elves I met recently, old friends of Lethira. They're nice. You'd get on, very down to earth in a way. Plus they like embarrassing Lethira.”

“The other two are, well, different. Two ladies I met.”

Kanno's eyebrows rose at the change in phrasing.

“*Two ladies* sounds suspiciously careful.”

She folded her hands around the cup.

“The elves already have the advantage of being nice and willing to embarrass Lethira, which seems excellent dinner-party qualification.”

A beat passed.

“Who are the other two?”

“They are kinda gods.”

Kanno stopped with the cup halfway towards her mouth and lowered it again.

“The word *kinda* is carrying an unreasonable amount of responsibility there.”

The category itself was no longer new to her. Its appearance in a dinner-party shortlist was.

“So your current options include two old friends of Lethira, or two builder-gods.”

She looked at him.

“I withdraw my criticism of the spreadsheet. Which two?”

“Please don't judge, but one I think might be the goddess of fertility. She's also kinda my boss now.”

Kanno stared at him for a second.

“I am judging the phrase *kinda my boss* much more than the fertility part.”

She shifted the empty coffee cup aside and drew the Japanese tea towards herself.

“The Lifegiver, presumably.”

“You have mentioned working for her. Gardening, if I remember correctly. I apparently accepted those facts separately and failed to appreciate that together they meant divine employment.”

Steam rose as she poured.

“How did *that* happen?”

“I had no money. Why else do people get jobs?”

Kanno looked at him for a long moment.

Then she laughed.

“Of course.”

She lifted the tea.

“I was expecting divine obligation, cosmic politics or one of your increasingly complicated accidents.”

Her cup settled onto its saucer.

“But no. You needed money, so the goddess of fertility hired you to do gardening.”

Kanno shook her head once. “That may be the most ordinary answer available.”

“I had gone to see her because I was worried about her, and was also trying to figure out how to get any money.”

“This is a really hard problem if you ignore being omnipotent, as my ability to use Excel doesn't really translate to a world typically in the 16th century.”

“That is a remarkably specific disadvantage of choosing not to be omnipotent.”

Kanno drank the tea.

“Although the useful part of Excel is not actually Excel. You know how to organise information, notice inconsistencies and keep records.”

She considered the problem from Merrowford's side.

“The difficulty is persuading someone to pay you for skills they may not have a name for.”

“So instead you became a gardener for a goddess. I assume gardening was not on your list of transferable professional skills?”

“I'm not very good at it, I think it would be minimum wage unskilled labour, but she was quite a generous employer. It's nice though as it's normal and she seems a lot happier when I'm there.”

“Then, there is the other one, who is goddess of time, chance and choice—the Waykeeper. I don't work for her, yet.”

Kanno stopped lifting the tea.

“*Yet*.”

She returned the cup to its saucer with deliberate care.

“You have made employment by a fertility goddess sound reassuringly ordinary, then immediately implied that the goddess of time, chance and choice may eventually put you on payroll.”

Amusement remained around her eyes.

“I am beginning to understand why the elves are the safer dinner-party option.”

She studied him for a moment.

“Is the Waykeeper actually someone you would want sitting at your table, or is she on the list because your social circle has become statistically ridiculous?”

“I thought she was kinda cool when I first met her, then on the second visit she was also pleased to see me and we connected... I don't think we're friends yet, but she's someone I can talk to.”

“I guess for them I'm someone they can't control or the other things they did to people.”

He shrugged.

“Apparently hugging them was not what they expected.”

Kanno's expression changed at the middle of the answer, then failed to remain entirely serious through the last.

“No. I imagine being hugged was quite far down the list of predicted outcomes.”

She drew the Japanese tea closer between both hands.

“The part before that is probably more important. They can speak to you without being able to make you comply merely because they are gods. That must be unusual for them.”

She let the thought rest there rather than rebuilding the history she already knew.

“Although if you invite both of them, I would appreciate knowing in advance that two of the six chairs are for deities.”

Her mouth moved. “I need enough warning to decide what one wears to dinner with the goddess of fertility and the goddess of chance.”

Ian stopped slurping the milkshake.

“I don't think I'm qualified to design a dress code for several ladies of mixed divinity, species and plane of existence.”

“That is not the 'next quest up' from finding a badger.”

Kanno laughed briefly enough that she had to put her tea down.

“No. There should be several intermediate quests.”

She recovered the cup.

“Fortunately, I can dress myself. I assume Lethira and Aelira can manage the same, and if two goddesses arrive unable to select appropriate clothing, that seems beyond the host's reasonable obligations.”

“You only need to provide dinner.”

A beat passed.

“Although given your current progression, perhaps learn to cook it before inviting the gods.”

“I have battled and won against an onion. To be honest, that's probably more skill than I have in my reality.”

Kanno regarded him over her tea.

“I remember. Lethira taught you.”

She held the solemnity for almost two seconds.

“So perhaps *won against* is generous. You had experienced supervision.”

Her mouth curved.

“But if your other self would have ordered food instead, I will recognise the advancement.”

She took another sip.

“Badger tracking, onion preparation, map-making. Your campaign to reduce the average weirdness is going surprisingly well.”

“Maybe you can bring noodles.”

Kanno considered that.

“I can bring noodles.”

She nodded once, as though a practical responsibility had finally emerged from the discussion.

“That gives me a defined role which does not involve photographing gods, assessing impossible machinery or explaining Earth.”

“I approve.”

“I also don't know how to use chopsticks, because British.”

Kanno stared at him.

“That is not a recognised British disability.”

She folded her hands with exaggerated patience.

“I can teach you.”

“Compared with gods, badgers and onions, chopsticks are an appropriate next quest.”

“I'd like to see Thomas put *that* on a spreadsheet for scale.”

“I suspect Thomas would immediately add columns for difficulty, risk, transferable skills and whether divine intervention was permitted.”

Kanno counted lightly against the table with one finger.

“Badger: low risk, moderate tracking. Onion: low risk, supervised. Chopsticks: negligible risk, apparently culturally impossible for British people.”

Her eyes settled on him.

“Then somewhere several hundred rows later: dinner party with two goddesses.”

She lifted the tea.

“I think he would enjoy the spreadsheet far too much.”

Ian smiled.

“Would you like to see the map?”

Kanno's attention sharpened immediately.

“Yes. I would.”

There was none of the hesitation she had shown around offers of impossible places.

“You've described it enough that I want to know whether the place in my head resembles the one you've actually mapped.”

Ian handed an A4 sheet across.

“This is the main bit of it I'm working on. Let me get the other too.”

Kanno took it by the edges.

For a while she said nothing. Her attention travelled across the broad green mass of the Elven Woods, along the river towards Merrowford and outward through named settlements, schematic routes and borders. She found the Reed and Wheel, the fairy circle and smaller places whose importance was plainly local rather than political.

“This is much more specific than the map I had in my head.”

She shifted the page slightly to catch the café light without glare.

“You have an inn on it. And the fairy circle. And what appears to be somebody's family farm.”

Her fingertip hovered above the paper.

“I see what you meant about curation. This is not only recording where things are. You are deciding which places have become important enough to name.”

She left space beside it.

“Go on.”

“The software is a bit annoying, it makes labels appear for things that aren't even visible.”

Ian handed her the second sheet.

“This is zoomed to Merrowford, the pink is the main built-up area, the thin line with dots the palisade, and so on.”

Kanno laid it beside the first.

This one worked at walking pace. The built-up area gathered around streets, gates, quays and civic buildings. The palisade made a thin boundary around the town. The Reed and Wheel appeared again, now placed among roads and neighbouring structures rather than floating as a named point on a regional map.

She followed the dotted palisade, then the roads through the gatehouses.

“The labels are untidy,” she said, “but the map isn't.”

Her fingertip hovered near the page without touching it.

“This feels less like fantasy cartography and more like someone trying to keep hold of an actual town.”

She found the administrative labels and smiled.

“You've mapped civic offices.”

Kanno looked across at him.

“That may be the least romantic consequence of falling in love with another world.”

She returned to the page and found smaller practical places among the streets.

“No. That isn't fair. The romantic part is that you care where the bakery is.”

She compared the two sheets.

“A stranger could read this as a town map. It is also a town map filtered through your life in it.”

“Which bit did you map first?”

Ian handed her a third A4 sheet.

“I've tried to hide pointless labels, but this one I think I did first.”

Kanno placed it above the other two.

The scale changed again. The main continent occupied the page, with the Great Northern Lake, mountain routes, rivers, woods, the southern desert and the eastern island separated by open water. Merrowford had become a small point inside the larger geography.

“Yes. This looks like a first map.”

She followed one of the long routes with her eyes.

“You needed the large things to stay still first.”

Her attention moved back towards the Elven Woods and the small cluster around Merrowford.

“And now this tiny part has acquired a bakery, a bathhouse, property records and your preferred inn.”

“That is rather satisfying. You can see the world becoming less abstract as you get closer to where you live.”

“I do like the world building, or discovering depending on your metaphysical viewpoint.”

Kanno looked again at the three maps.

“I don't think I have enough evidence to choose between those.”

Her fingertip hovered over the continent.

“From my position, *discovering* is the safer word. Places exist before you know about them. People surprise you. Your maps contain things you did not apparently put there on purpose.”

She glanced towards the café around them.

“But you also have a machine that can make this place behind my spare-room door, so I am not claiming that settles anything.”

“Does it matter to you which one it really is?”

“Not really, I prefer not thinking about it. I don't think I'd interact at all if I felt it was just me building the response... then I'd be talking to myself.”

Ian stirred his straw in the milkshake.

“It's really nice to see you, in any reality.”

Kanno kept her eyes on the maps for a moment longer, then looked up.

“It's really nice to see you too.”

“I was nervous about messaging you. Less than I would have been before Berlin, or Venus, but enough that I waited until I was certain I wanted to.”

“I am glad I did.”

“You were nervous?” Ian said, surprise and concern mixing in the question.

Kanno noticed the concern and shook her head.

“Not frightened of you. I knew I wanted to come. I didn't know whether we would be awkward, or whether you would try too hard.”

Her glance fell to the maps.

“We weren't.”

Ian smiled, a bigger one.

“I'm glad.”

He reached one hand forward, stopped and drew it back.

“Could I come with you photographing around Sendai, one day?”

Kanno's eyes flicked briefly to the aborted movement before returning to the question.

“I would like that.”

Then she remembered the promise Ian had made after Venus.

“But not while your promise to Thomas and Isha stands. Sendai is in this Earth, and you promised them you would not enter it.”

She considered the distinction.

“If that boundary ever changes by their choice, and mine, you can come with me on one of the days when I take the camera and walk until something looks worth stopping for. Not somewhere selected because it is important.”

“You may discover that ordinary photography involves a great deal of standing beside vending machines waiting for nothing to happen.”

“So cool. Can't wait.”

Kanno let the enthusiasm stand.

“Then keep it as a future possibility, not a route we already have.”

She gathered the three maps into a neater arrangement without stacking them yet.

“And there is one plan which does not require changing that boundary. You show me your stream and your house someday. If Sendai ever becomes possible, I show you vending machines and inconvenient light.”

“That seems like a reasonable exchange.”

“It's a deal.” Ian smiled at her.

“Deal.”

She looked down at the three maps: continent into region, region into town, town into streets and practical names.

“I think this was a good idea.”

Her fingers rested lightly against the Merrowford sheet.

“The meeting, I mean. Not merely the noodles.”

“And I am glad you asked Thomas and Isha to pass the message instead of deciding for me.”

She glanced towards the spare-room door.

“I should probably let you get back to your evening soon.”

“I have to perform my nightly exercises to avoid lower back problems, such is age. It's 21:20 here. I've also taken up a lot of your evening too.”

Kanno stacked the three sheets carefully, aligning their edges.

“I chose the time.”

“And lower-back exercises sound like an appropriately ordinary reason to end a meeting involving gods, Mars and impossible geography.”

“I've enjoyed tonight, Ian.”

Ian stood to see her out, then paused with his arms slightly open, uncertain whether a hug was acceptable across realities or ages.

Kanno saw the hesitation before anything else. Her gaze dropped briefly to his half-open arms and returned to his face.

“A hug is fine.”

Ian hugged her and held it perhaps a little longer.

“See you soon.”

Kanno returned the hug without hesitation. She did not hurry to end it either.

When she stepped back, her smile remained.

“See you soon.”

She turned towards the spare-room door, opened it onto her flat and glanced back once before crossing through.

Then the door closed behind her.

The spare room was exactly as Kanno had left it.

She stood there for a moment, adjusting to the smaller dimensions of her own flat. No stone walls, no village sunlight, no three maps spread across a café table. Her camera was still where she had deliberately left it.

Work, photographs, maps, badgers, onions, gods and six chairs followed her back into the flat. The stream stayed with her longest: a place Ian knew through words and maps rather than direct sight, and had invited her to photograph.

Kanno went through to the main room and sat down with her phone. The conversation with Thomas and Isha was there, quiet. They had passed Ian's request to her and left the decision alone.

She considered how much she wanted to tell them.

The maps were Ian's. The proposed fantasy-house visit was between the people who might eventually choose it. The possibility of a Sendai camera walk could remain only a possibility unless Ian's standing Earth boundary changed; there was nothing to report about it now. None of the rest needed converting into an account merely because Thomas and Isha knew both people involved.

Kanno typed only:

**Kanno:** I saw Ian tonight. It went well. Thank you for passing his message on.

She sent it without checking whether either of them was still awake and put the phone down.

Tomorrow was sufficient for any reply.

Across the room, the small blue-bucket print remained where she had left it. Kanno looked at it for a few seconds and remembered Ian proposing Mars, then correcting himself almost before the offer could become real.

She smiled.

The bucket stayed beside the vending machine.

Kanno turned out the light.