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I'll set fire to the whole place, I don't even care about our house, it's not the same in here since he left anyways, burn it down
Pearl’s hands shake as she packs. There’s not much to take, really—a change of clothes, a stack of blocks, her tools and weapons, some food. Eyes of Ender. That’s what’s practical. She owns more than just the practical, of course, but inventories aren’t made for sentiment, and she has so many feelings in her body already that she doesn’t feel the need to fill her pockets with them as well.
She finds herself looking up at the wall, the one she’d hesitated over when building her new base, filled with photographs and polaroids. Most of them are from Evo, from Old Spawn and Downtown Evo and her friends’ old homes, smiling faces and peace signs and long-gone laughter. Some are even older, slightly crinkled and faded with time, old friends from uni and nights out with red eyes glowing in the flash. The oldest photo sits in the middle, of her and her parents, taken on her fifteenth birthday, cake on the table before them as teenage Pearl beams at the camera, braces and all.
Almost every single photo surrounding it contains Grian. There he is holding her by the waist and grinning at the camera as Pearl visibly contemplates shoving her ice cream into his face; there he is ducking just out of frame, a red leather jacket all that can be seen of him. There he is in candid comfort, gazing out of a train window with golden sunlight caught across his face. There’s the photo of all of them at spawn, the night of Grian’s twenty-fourth birthday, arms slung around shoulders and grins splitting faces and joy so immense it practically leaks from the paper.
It’s gone, now, all of it, Old Spawn and Grian and any shred of joy in this miserable place.
Pearl can’t stand it anymore, so she’s putting her foot down. If the others won’t make a move, she will, and she’ll find Grian, wherever he is, and drag him back kicking and screaming if she has to. Then Grian will be back, and the tension and wariness that haunts all of them these days will leave, and they can be happy again.
She’s all packed. She takes a breath, squaring her shoulders.
All that’s left to do is go.
“It’s not going to work,” says a voice from behind her, and Pearl about jumps out of her skin. She turns around, hand pressed over her speeding heart, to see Martyn leaning in her doorway, arms crossed and expression flat.
“Jeez, Martyn, you scared the life out of me!” she cries. “Don’t do that!”
“Sorry,” Martyn apologises, sounding not at all sorry. Then, again, “It won’t work.”
“What won’t work?” Pearl asks.
“Leaving,” Martyn says. “That’s what you’re doing, right?”
Pearl steadies herself. “I’m going to look for Grian,” she says.
“You won’t find him.”
Pearl meets his eyes and juts out her chin. “Watch me.” Not waiting for him to argue, she stalks forward and shoulders past him, marching out into the afternoon air. It’s getting colder, the days getting shorter, and the sky is already darkening even though it’s only four o’clock. She pulls her jacket closer around her, shoving her hands in her pockets.
Martyn sighs and follows her. “He’s gone, Pearl,” he calls.
Pearl’s fingers curl themselves into fist. Her chest is filled with white-hot embers and every word Martyn speaks is stoking the fires. “How would you know?” she shoots back. “You never looked.” The paths here aren’t well-maintained, not enough time having passed for them to have walked them so many times that the earth remembers their footsteps. She has to hop over a rocky outcrop that splits the road, their usual cut-around currently too overgrown to consider. “Not one of you has been back to the End since.” She throws an Eye into the air and watches it shoot somewhere ahead, angling her path slightly to match it.
“Because there is no End portal anymore!” Martyn sounds frustrated. Good. “It only existed because they wanted us to find it!”
“Oh, what, so they spend all that time telling us to get to the End, and then the moment we find it, they take it away from us?” Pearl snaps. “Because that makes sense!”
“They got what they wanted,” Martyn says, tone low in a way that makes Pearl’s stomach curdle with dread.
Pearl finds the Eye of Ender, lying in the grass. She picks it up and throws it, noting the way it veers towards a nearby forest, and takes off after it. She walks a little faster, and the nasty part of her hopes that she’ll lose Martyn, that he’ll stop trying to follow her.
He doesn’t.
“I don’t care,” she says stubbornly, picking her way through thorny undergrowth. “I’m sick of just sitting around! I’m going to find him.”
“And what if he’s nowhere to be found?”
“He’s not dead!” Pearl cries, rounding on him, chest full of fury and eyes stinging with tears. She’s still shaking. The way her heart is pounding is making her feel ill. “He’s not dead, Martyn!”
“I didn’t say he was,” Martyn says, but she can tell that he was thinking it. They’re all thinking it—even Pearl thinks it, sometimes, in the dead of night when there are no distractions from her thoughts and she’s left sobbing into her pillow with the weight of it all.
“Sure,” she says bitterly. Her eyes sting, but no tears fall. She turns and keeps walking. He keeps following.
“What do you think you’re going to find?” he asks as she rounds a particularly large oak and finds the Eye resting in its roots. She tries to throw it, but it pops in her hand, and she scowls in frustration as she pulls a second from her inventory.
“Grian,” she replies, throwing it and following it through the trees.
“What, you’re just gonna walk into the End and he’s gonna be there? He just couldn’t find the portal back home, is that it?” His tone is spiteful. Pearl hates it. Pearl hates him, she thinks, for just a moment, and then she feels bad, because she doesn’t really.
She hates the Watchers, really, but the Watchers aren’t here.
Martyn is.
“Maybe!” she snaps back. “Maybe that’s exactly what happened! How would you know?”
Because that’s the other half of it: Grian had disappeared, and they hadn’t looked for him. They’d just accepted he was gone and moved on with their lives. Martyn had taken his place as admin, and they’d all just danced around the topic, like Grian’s life and sudden disappearance was something they could dance around.
So Pearl’s taking the initiative. And she won’t let Martyn, who has been trying so hard to fit himself into the space Grian left behind and failing in every way that he isn’t Grian, stop her from finding her best friend.
“Look, just because you’re in denial, doesn’t mean that I can afford to be—to be willfully naive!” Martyn snaps.
“Wilfully naive?” Pearl echoes, incredulous. “If anything, it’s the rest of you that are in denial! Just—just acting like everything’s fine, like everything’s okay, like everything’s normal, like our lives haven’t been completely turned on their heads!” She snatches the Eye from the ground and throws it. It lands back at her feet. She pulls her shovel from her inventory and begins to dig with seething ferocity.
“You’re the one dragging us on this wild goose chase when you know as well as I do what’s going on here!” Martyn cries. “Just because you won’t admit it—”
“I am not in denial!”
“—doesn’t stop it from being the truth!”
Pearl’s shovel hits stone. She switches to her pick and falls down into a stronghold, twisting her ankle and jolting her knees on the landing. She hisses in pain, shaking her leg more in frustration than anything else, and then starts walking, uncaring of anything else. Martyn follows her down more carefully, following her as she picks her way through the crumbling maze.
“Why are you here, Martyn?” she asks. “You clearly think this whole thing is stupid, so why are you still following me?”
“Because I told you,” Martyn says, “the portal isn’t gonna be there! There’s no way out of here. I already tried.”
Pearl pauses. “What?”
“I tried to get out,” Martyn says. “Before the End. I found a Stronghold, and I tried to leave. There was no way out.”
“Why?”
“Why else?” Martyn laughs sardonically. “Because of the Watchers, obviously. I was done with them, and their rules, and their stupid challenges, and just—everything! This place is cursed, and I could tell that something was coming to a head, and I wanted out before everything went wrong.” He sighs. It’s the type of world-weary sigh that resonates not just through his own bones but Pearl’s as well. “Obviously, that didn’t work out.”
“Obviously,” Pearl echoes. She feels cold.
She breaks into the next room, and there, in the space where the portal should be, there’s nothing. Just the familiar bedrock symbol of the Watchers.
“Told you so,” Martyn says, placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Oh, shut up,” Pearl sobs, throwing her pickaxe to the floor so hard that it breaks. Martyn squeezes, clearly an attempt at comfort, but Pearl doesn’t want it. She shakes him off, stepping forward, reaching up to wipe the tears from her face as she stares at the not-portal.
“Pearl—”
“Where is he?” she demands, and she’s not sure if the question is directed at Martyn or the Watchers or herself.
Martyn answers anyway. “They took him, Pearl. He’s gone.”
“But why?” Pearl’s voice breaks.
“I don’t know,” Martyn says, voice small. “I really don’t know.”
And Pearl wails, turning and throwing a punch into the wall so hard she feels her knuckles crack, before throwing herself at Martyn. He catches her, pulling her into his arms, and he may not be the best admin or her best friend, but she has to admit, he does give pretty good hugs.
“I miss him,” she sniffles into Martyn’s chest.
“I know.”
“I want him to come back.” A hand strokes itself through her hair. “He’s not coming back, is he?”
“I’m so sorry, Pearl.”
(And it’s in that moment, shaking herself apart in Martyn’s arms, that Pearl truly accepts that there is no way out of this. And it’s that moment, when Pearl looks back years later, that she’ll claim was when she knew she’d die on Evo, all other exits closed.)