Chandra was trying to sleep—and failing miserably. She was lying in her mother’s bedroom, in her mother’s bed, as her mother, Pia Nalaar, slept soundly beside her.
It wasn’t like she wasn’t tired—exhausted, even. They were all exhausted. There probably wasn’t a soul on Ravnica that wasn’t exhausted after all they’d been through today.
But sleep simply wasn’t coming. Her brain just wouldn’t turn off.
Giving up, Chandra rose and dressed as quietly as she could manage. Her mother stirred but didn’t wake. Chandra watched her breathe for a time, then snuck out, feeling vaguely guilty about it, as if she were a teenager breaking curfew.
Moving down the short corridor, Chandra paused outside her own bedroom. She called it her bedroom, and certainly it was the room Pia had designated as hers, but the pyromancer could probably count on both hands the number of times she’d actually slept there. This wasn’t really her room. This wasn’t really home to her. Not yet, anyway. Maybe not ever. Not that there was somewhere else she could or did consider home. There was Keral Keep, but she dreaded the thought of returning to her role and responsibilities as its abbot. She’d had a bedchamber in the Embassy of the Guildpact for a while. Bolas and Tezzeret’s Planar Bridge had ripped the building apart. And honestly, it had been so long since she had spent any significant time there, she hadn’t even bothered to look through the wreckage to see if she could find anything she might want to salvage.
Pushing the door open just an inch, Chandra peeked into the chamber. Nissa and Jaya were both asleep in Chandra’s bed. Chandra watched Nissa slumber and remembered, after the battle, telling Nissa she loved her, and Nissa saying she loved Chandra, as well. It hadn’t meant what she had once hoped it would mean. Not to either of them. It couldn’t anymore. They had been mourning Gideon, and Nissa had wiped Chandra’s tears away. Chandra wanted to cry now. But she was drained, numb. She didn’t like feeling numb in Nissa’s presence. She nudged the door closed again and moved on.
She made her way through the living room, where Teferi slept on the couch beside a standing, dormant Karn, which frankly didn’t look all that different from a standing alert Karn. Or perhaps he really was alert? She seemed to recall someone—Jaya, maybe—telling her that Karn never slept. Perhaps he was merely pretending to be dormant in order to make his organic friends more comfortable. If so, she’d let him pretend.
She nearly stepped on Ajani, who for lack of another available bed was curled up on the floor in the corner like the world’s largest domesticated cat. It was a full house, despite the fact that Saheeli Rai had taken Huatli home with her. Chandra felt stifled among all these people though every single one was her friend. She had to get outside and feel the cool night air on her face. She opened the front door as quietly as she could manage and departed.
But there was no cool night air. It was a hot, sultry evening in the city of Ghirapur. Chandra had all this pent-up energy she needed to vent, all this fire she needed to channel somehow. Her face set, she headed for Dovin Baan’s home.
When he had planeswalked away from Ravnica, Baan had been hurt, blinded, in trouble. Off his game for maybe the first time ever. Chandra figured Baan would have—for once—followed his instincts and gone home. The odds of him still being there all these hours later were pretty slim. But if there was even a chance Chandra might get to bring him to justice for all the damage Baan had done on Kaladesh and Ravnica, she had to try. In any case, it was better than staring at the ceiling in her mother’s bed.
When she arrived at Baan’s home—with the windows boarded up and the boards completely covered with the kind of graffiti that would have annoyed Dovin Baan to no end—Saheeli Rai and Huatli were already there.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Chandra said.
“Neither could we,” Saheeli replied, nodding.
“Thought Baan might have come back here,” Chandra said.
“Had the same thought,” Saheeli said, still nodding.
“Probably not there anymore.”
“Probably not.”
“You want to break in or should I?”
“I’ll do it,” Huatli said, taking a step back and immediately kicking the door open. She entered first, blade drawn. Saheeli followed, releasing one of her little golden filigree mechanical hummingbirds into the air. Chandra was right behind them both, with a ball of fire hovering half an inch above the palm of her right hand. She levitated and expanded the flame-ball so that it lit the room.
The hummingbird zipped around everywhere, through every door, in and out, until finally it came back, landed on Saheeli’s shoulder and shook its tiny head at its mistress.
“He’s not here,” Saheeli stated.
“Probably hasn’t been here in the four months since he fled Kaladesh,” Chandra said grumpily.
Saheeli slid an index finger over the surface of a cabinet and examined it. “Then why is there no dust?”
This perplexed Chandra for a moment—and then her jaw dropped. She said, “You don’t think that…that all this time…while he was infiltrating Azorius, building all those thopters and taking over the guild to serve Bolas…you don’t think he was planeswalking back here every week or so…to clean?”
Saheeli and Chandra’s eyes met. Then in unison they nodded and said ruefully, “Of course he was.”
For some reason, this conclusion drove Chandra crazy. The ball of fire grew perceptibly larger.
Huatli said, “Over here.”
She had moved across the room to the kitchen. They joined her.
She pointed at the counter and said, “He’s been cleaning here, too. And recently. You can smell it. But I suppose being blind made it slightly more difficult. He missed a spot.”
They leaned down to look. There was a dark spot on the counter.
“Blood,” Huatli stated firmly. “Blood recently shed. He may be gone now, but he was here today. Tried to cover his tracks, so we wouldn’t know—or at least couldn’t confirm—he’d been on Kaladesh.”
She sniffed the air and moved on. She found another drop of blood on the floor. And another on the windowsill. “He went out this window.”
Saheeli said, “He had to. He had to know he was no more welcome on Kaladesh than he would be on Ravnica. Instinct might have brought him home, but his intellect would have told him he couldn’t stay.”
Chandra whispered, “But he climbed out or walked away. As opposed to ’walking away, if you get my drift.”
They clearly did.
Huatli opened the window and exited. Saheeli and Chandra followed.
Huatli was a decent tracker and found a drop of blood here and a drop of blood there. But within a hundred yards, she’d lost Baan’s trail completely. She muttered something about needing a dinosaur to track him any farther at night.
Saheeli apologized for the lack of the breed on Kaladesh.
Huatli heaved a long sigh. “We’ll not find him now. It’s just been too long.”
Chandra said, “But we know he was here within the last few hours.”
“And still that’s too long for us to draw any sound conclusions. It’s possible Baan has gone into hiding somewhere on Kaladesh. And it’s equally possible he already planeswalked away to planes unknown. Until someone we trust runs into him or hears word of him, I don’t think we can know.”
A frustrated Chandra clenched her fist and extinguished her fireball quite suddenly, leaving the three women in darkness.
It was either do that or let it expand to burn the whole city to the ground.
Peering through the night, Saheeli said, “Well, it was worth a try.”
“Do you think you could sleep now?” Huatli asked, suppressing a yawn.
“Yes, maybe,” Saheeli said as she lifted the hummingbird off her shoulder and put it away.
Chandra said good night to them both and walked off, heading back—for lack of a better option—to her mother’s home.