“I’m impressed,” Wilma said after telling the pair of interns to keep looking for more info and shooing them out of the conference room where she, Sylvia, Roger, and Darryl had been going over the same files and leadless loops with the minimal information they had. (Darryl had only joined their group shortly before the kids had come in. He’d been particurly huffy about being “asked” to join their brainstorming meeting, stating that he had a rge project he was working on. Rogers, however, had pointed out that that was almost always the case and, therefore, not a good enough reason to avoid contributing.) “I didn’t think they’d actually find anything useful.”

  Sylvia gnced over the old map. Damn it, she hated cursive. Walking over to a scratched-up, gray filing cabinet, she pulled open one of the drawers and ran her fingers over the beled folders. ‘It better be here,’ she thought, closing the top drawer and opening the one below it.

  “What are you doing?”

  Sylvia rolled her eyes at Roger’s tone. “Grabbing a map I can actually read,” she replied, finding the correct folder. “And one Miss Echo won’t potentially get upset about being written on.” The drawer clicked closed with a push and she returned to the center table, ying the newer map beside the old one. She quickly circled the sites the kids had pointed out – all three of the pces that had gone through what Darryl had so-brilliantly named “severe overps” and Cecelia’s apartment.

  “They’re all close together,” Sylvia muttered. That was an obvious enough thing to spot, now that they had an overhead view, but what else was she missing? ‘Too much,’ she realized. Tracking down spots of active activity and dealing with them — that was the job the agent was used to doing. But something so spread out and outside of the norms…. “Darryl, before the kids came in, you were saying that you might have figured out the cause?”

  “Officially?” Darryl asked, shrugging and closing his ptop. He looked like he’d gotten even less sleep than the rest of them. “No. But there’s only so many possibilities when you think about how ‘ghosts’ work.”

  “Get to the point,” Roger said.

  “The dimensional borders in the area are weakening.”

  Wilma jolted, almost knocking over the pile of folders beside her ptop. “Wh—? That doesn’t sound good!”

  The nerd sighed. “That’s how ‘paranormal’ stuff happens. Did you not pay attention to—?”

  “I know that!” The redheaded agent huffed. “But over an area this rge?” She leaned over, pushing into Sylvia’s space, and drew an invisible circle with her finger containing the four sites, centered around the section between the apartment complex and the agency. Sylvia grabbed a second pen and followed Wilma’s path with blue ink. “And killing people? That doesn’t sound like just ‘weakening’ to me.”

  “She’s right,” Roger had his chin resting on his interlocked hands as he studied the maps from the other side of the table. “I’ve been here the longest, aside from Miss Echo,” he continued. “That’s eight years, and I’ve never seen something like what’s been going on since yesterday.” The man looked to his side, where Darryl was frowning at the map. “So, again, get to the damn point.”

  Darryl’s only reaction to the impatience was to roll his eyes. “Just follow the logic train. If the boundaries can weaken — and do so regurly in small areas for short times — then they can break.”

  It took Sylvia a moment to understand the implications, but once she did…. “We got lucky with the blimp,” she breathed out. If weakened borders led to a handful of people being ‘smooshed,’ broken ones could lead to buildings being crashed into. And that was just the beginning of the possible consequences. People crossing the street in one world where there was no stop light in another. Different buildings ‘sharing’ the same space. That damn Martha pigeon bringing a whole flock with it. People constantly seeing ‘ghosts’ or getting pulling sickness. “It’d be like what happened at the restaurant all over the damn pce.”

  “Potentially, yeah.” Darryl’s shrug was far too casual for the topic. “Eventually, whole cities might overp. My guess is that anything the same will cancel out, resulting in a miss-mash of whatever differences there are between the worlds.” He paused to take a sip from his drink – coffee that smelled like it came from the agency’s break room expresso machine. “The more worlds that overp, the more chaos there will be. Until only one world remains. Then it would start splitting off into so-called ‘parallels’ again and, depending on the original cause this time, possibly go through the same cycle eventually.” Another heavy pause as Sylvia and the other two agents stared at the man. “That would be the worst-case scenario, of course. I’m going off hypotheticals here,” Darryl added after a moment, opening his computer back up and typing something as the meeting room door opened.

  The meeting room door swung open. “Here’s some more hypotheticals,” Bobbie said as they entered the room, tapping away on a tablet in his hands. P.A.R.A.L.L.E.L’s fourth field agent pulled back a chair from the table further than everyone else’s for some extra room before sitting down, and he set the tablet down as he straightened out his purple sweatshirt. Out of the other three, the brown-haired agent was actually the person Sylvia minded working with the least. “Miss Echo had me scrolling through social media all day and—“

  (“I always forget how thin these walls are,” Wilma groaned. “I think it was just good or bad timing on Bobbie’s part,” Sylvia replied, gncing over her shoulder to check that the door had been shut and that two interns hadn’t used the chance to slip back into the meeting.)

  “—stacked up over the day, mostly te this morning,” Bobbie continued, not looking at the device while tapping a few more times on the screen, then handing their tablet to Rogers.

  A snort came from Wilma, who had been leaning towards Rogers to see the device’s screen. “I don’t think this is work-reted.” Unable to help being curious, Sylvia leaned forwards in her seat to see the tablet, catching a glimpse of what looked like a cat video, before a blushing Bobbie grabbed the tablet back and jabbed at the screen a few times.

  “It’s not the worst thing I’ve seen on a co-worker’s computer,” Rogers said, chuckling before switching back to his normal stiffness.

  “And,” Bobbie stressed as they tried to recover. “There’s been an increase in both ghost sightings and people suddenly colpsing all over the city.” He swiped to a different screen, setting the tablet down on the table and rotating it so all four could see better. Another map of the city. “I marked down the major ones that seemed like possible events.”

  Sylvia was already drawing little asterisks on the modern paper map. Most of the notes fell into the same area circling the four sites they already had marked out – Cecelia’s apartment, the airship, the restaurant, and the park – but a few nded outside of the assumed range. “There’s always outliers,” Darryl dismissed while Sylvia mentally debated re-drawing the circle to include all of the pces covered by Bobbie’s notes. “Or mistakes. If most events fall into one area, it’d be more logical to focus on those.”

  Sure, but… Sylvia scanned the notes again — one spot outside the circle was beled ‘severe pulling?; 5 people unconscious, 1 deceased.’ “This one seems comparable to the airship. If—“

  “Outlier,” the nerd waved off again. “It’s beside a high school. Most likely, it was drug overdoses. Kids these days don’t have a future and they know it. With politics and the climate, it makes you wonder if we should even bother trying to fix the dimensional boundaries, doesn’t it?”

  Sylvia frowned, disliking the way Darryl was talking. She would have to be a fool to say that the man was completely wrong about the overall state of things in the world, but she’d seen good changes over the years. Giving up didn’t help anyone. “No, it doesn't,” was her firm reply.

  A shrug was the response.

  “Then compare with this….” Wilma’s trailed off sentence drew Sylvia’s attention away from nerd. The other woman had both paper maps — the one the interns had found and the more recent one Sylvia had pulled from the cabinet — in front of her. “Anyone have a red pen? Or anything not blue?” It took a minute of searching, but eventually someone found a pencil and tossed it over to Wilma. “Thanks.” Hunched over the two paper maps, she hummed to herself as she started matching modern day locations with old notes of paranormal activities.

  A pattern emerged quickly. “Pces with the most notes on the old map are the ones getting hit with severe overps now,” Sylvia summed up. ‘And almost all of them are between here and the kid’s pce.’

  “She did have the missing separator,” Sylvia told Darryl a few moments the conference room door had shut behind Cecelia. She didn’t speak with the man on a regur basis, but if anyone would be able to guess what the kid had been doing, it should be him. “And quite the mad scientist set-up in her room, including generators and an old-school projector.”

  Darryl hummed, tapping his fingers together. “That’s actually somewhat impressive,” he said. “Depending on what she was doing, it’s not unreasonable to think that her little experiment briefly destabilized the dimensional boundaries enough for a small event or two. If she was trying to reverse engineer her own version of the separator, for example.” … “In theory, you could do a lot of damage with the right modifications and enough energy. What little we know about multiple worlds is that they aren’t nearly as separated as would be comforting. That’s why the separators can only be used for short bursts along with other regutions. This whole area of study is new. There’s a lot even I don’t know.”

  ‘What were you doing, kid?’

  “So how do we find the cause?” Rogers asked, csping his hands on the table in front of him. “Because I’m not reporting this to Miss Echo until we have a pn.”

  Bobbie was scrolling through his tablet again. “There also seems to be some overp in the timing — no pun intended. The block that started with the airship yesterday evening. Then there were some more around when Sylvia and Cecelia went out to the restaurant for the ghost murder st night. And then a lot te this morning.” They looked up from their device. “What was the thing that got called in about, anyway? I wasn’t kidding about being stuck reading social media posts all day.”

  “Passenger pigeon in the park.”

  Bobbie gaped at Wilma. “But—!“

  “Yup,” the redhead replied. “And it was solid enough for Neal to feed and hold.”

  “Huh,” Darryl said, attention back on his computer. “There must be a world where humans didn’t hunt them to extinction.”

  “It was a pretty bird,” Wilma noted, making Sylvia facepalm.

  “It was an oversized pigeon,” the older agent corrected. “And not the main thing we should be focusing on.” Raising her head, Sylvia turned to Bobbie. “So the events are occurring in time blocks, with at least one severe overp each time.”

  “And, looking at this old city map, in areas that had a history of paranormal activity,” he added. “Between that information and the circle on the map, couldn’t we make some guesses on where the next big thing will happen? So far, there haven’t been any repeats.”

  “That sounds pusible,” Roger agreed. “We’ll need to keep a close eye on the four previous severe overp sites, as well as the ones Bobbie has marked — I know you said one was an outlier,” he said to an about-to-protest Darryl. “But I’d rather be safe than sorry. I have some acquaintances who love to stand around doing nothing, so if Miss Echo agrees, I’ll reach out and ask them to set up camp for a bit in the previous areas and other high-risk ones.”

  “I would estimate that the center would be near that old apartment complex,” Darryl said. “After all, that’s where the first odd events started. The dual overp and pulling, followed by the airship nearby.” The man gave Sylvia a look, making it clear what he was implying.

  In response, Sylvia could only sigh. “I need to take the ki— Cecelia — home anyway,” she replied, pushing back her chair as she stood up. “She mentioned having something for school to do tomorrow.” The kid hadn’t, but it was the best excuse Sylvia could think of on the fly. “I’ll take a closer look around the area then.”

  “I’ll go check that Neal doesn’t need to get home too,” Wilma said. “Although, I get the feeling he’d be fine with skipping csses for this.”

  “Alright,” Bobbie said. “I’ll get started trying to figure out potential sites for another severe overp, since it seems we’re all thinking that there’ll be more.”

  Darryl closed his ptop with a click. “I’m heading back to my b. Besides my research, I have some other projects going that I don’t want to leave alone for too long. Text me if you need me,” he added, gathering up his materials. “I’ll pass on anything I find on my end.”

  ~

  As she left the meeting room, Sylvia reminded herself to remain casual. It was near the end of the evening commute, so hopefully the drive to the apartment complex wouldn’t be too painful. Yet, even the thought of sitting in traffic couldn't compare with the drumming sense of thrill that came from knowing she that had information now and was about to get more. Enough to maybe solve the whole case.

  It was past time to find out what the hell Cecelia had been messing with.