“Let’s start again. Jackie, I will do my best to help you. I may not be able to help you. More often than not I can’t. But I always try.”

“That’s great, dude, thanks.”

The mayor rubbed her hands together.

“King City is becoming a problem for Night Vale. I know there are papers in hands and there is confusion and frustration and fear. No, not fear. Concern. There is concern.”

“I’m not afraid and I’m not concerned. I’m ruined.” Jackie tried the word on her tongue and found that it felt right, so she said it again. “I’m ruined.”

“I don’t know why King City has connected to Night Vale. Sometimes other places have a mysterious connection to our own. A little fishing town in Russia. Our unfriendly neighbor, Desert Bluffs. That desert otherworld which trapped me for months. We cannot always keep the outside world on the outside.”

“So I should go to King City?”

“Sure.”

“You think so?” Jackie was glad for an authority that would finally tell her what she should do.

“Probably not. I’m not even sure if it’s a real place. It could just be an idea on paper.”

“But I spoke with—”

“I don’t know what a King City is,” the mayor continued, yawning. “I don’t know a lot of things. I do know there will always be problems for Night Vale. There are so many. Usually they pass. Often they kill many people, but what are people but deaths that haven’t happened yet?”

“Births that already happened?” Jackie said without thinking.

The mayor laughed. She looked different when she laughed, and then she stopped laughing and she did not look different anymore.

“Thank you, Jackie. I needed that. As for you. Well. I know you came here hoping that I would have an answer or a piece of advice that would fix things.”

“So—”

The mayor stood, a wordless pre-good-bye. Jackie stood too, a wordless capitulation.

“You say your life is unraveling. Your life cannot unravel. Your life is your life. You haven’t lost it. It’s just different now.”

“Do you feel the same thing about your brother? That his life cannot unravel? That it is just different now?”

Dana blinked. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do.”

“Fair enough, man, but I want my old life back, whatever my old life was.”

Dana shook her head.

“You know, Jackie, before I was mayor, I was an intern at the community radio station. One of the only interns to survive that program. Being an intern at the radio station is dangerous and terrible work. But there are days, sitting in this office, with responsibility past my years, working in a system I barely understand, that I miss my time as an intern. At least I was allowed to be young. At least I was allowed to be Dana, not Mayor Cardinal.”