Takagiri’s expression of gratitude was difficult to face directly. She bowed to a perfect ninety-degree angle, arms against her sides, black ponytail hanging over her shoulder, delivering the words with crisp clarity as though she’d been rehearsing them for days, which perhaps she had while in her extended sleep and recovery from driving out Sugawara’s ghoul. She looked down at the cold concrete floor, yet even without eye contact, I struggled not to cringe and shift awkwardly. Expectant silence stretched across the room, paralyzing me until Ai kicked my calf gently from my right.
“You’re welcome,” I managed. “It was the, uh, the right thing to do, yeah. But anybody who was there would’ve…”
Takagiri rose from the bow, mild brown eyes meeting mine. Her mantle’s face was soft and smooth, a far cry from the masculine edges and aging wrinkles of her flesh body. “It’s not something you should take lightly. You stopped him. You stopped him, even if somebody else could have. I don’t think they could. Not with this,” she gestured at the coffin, now powered down, “or with a Light that wasn’t yours. You reminded him that he should be afraid,” she spat, a bitter and wrathful expression twisting her features for a moment, a face I recognized from when we’d traded blows at Hikanome’s doomed barbecue. She took a deep breath, letting the emotion out, then broke into a thin, relieved smile. “So I must thank you. I must. I’m free because of you, and I don’t know how to repay such a debt.”
I swallowed, loathing how I had begun to sweat. “Okay. Uh. You’re welcome,” I said again, glancing at Ai. “Uh, if we’re talking quid pro quo, I’m not really the person to ask, probably? Alice is in charge. But, like, you don’t owe me specifically much of anything, I figure? Cause like I said, it was the right thing to do. And most of the credit for the coffin goes to Ai and Amane, not me.”
Takagiri chuckled, her smile becoming lighter and more amused. She turned to Ai and bowed to her as well, delivering another formal message of thanks, this time in Japanese. Ai bowed in return, which made me wonder if I should have done the same. They exchanged a few words and relieved smiles before Takagiri turned back to me. “And yes, I owe the rest of you my thanks and support as well. But you performed a miracle of magic to save me, something deeper than your expertise. Please allow yourself to believe that.”
I opened my mouth to deflect, to deny, to declare that I’d done no such thing—then realized I couldn’t. My Flame’s violent judgment, its unilateral assertion that the essence of Sugawara’s soul was repugnant, had been as potent as it was mysterious. At first, the temptation was to say that it wasn’t me, merely my singularly weird chunk of the Frozen Flame, but at some level, I knew that wasn’t completely true. I had thought the same and been the first to intervene, after all. My Flame had followed through on my actions to save Takagiri.
I felt the ghost of my own smile tug at my lips. I tried to force it back down, to remain somber and respectful in the face of Takagiri’s earnest thanks. “I’m glad you think so.”
Takagiri spread her hands, shedding more formality and growing more animated. “You did something befitting a Vaetna! You aspire to be like them, from what I understand, but what you did for me wasn’t in their shadow, it was of their level. It was real magic!”
At that comparison, my smile wriggled its way onto my face as I blubbered an obligatory denial I didn’t really mean. Takagiri matched it with an even wider and far more shameless grin. “See? It’s good, isn’t it? You drove away a monster.” She looked down at her hands, turning them over as though inspecting them. “Right now, it doesn’t feel real. I have never been able to be in this body without feeling him there, hand on my neck. But it’s mine now. I’m alive and free from the most horrible monster Japan has known since the Light first fell. That’s thanks to you, Ezzen, and is worthy of the comparison to the Vaetna. Or a mahou shoujo, if you prefer.”
Giddiness hit me like a truck. I realized I’d spent the last few days compartmentalizing exactly the implications of what I’d done, initially too exhausted and then too distracted by my escapades with Ai to fully process it. I’d saved Takagiri’s life, but I’d also set her free and denied a horrible soul-rapist ghoul access to the land of the living. It was as morally clear-cut as it got, with none of the horrible aching guilt that had followed our actions at Thunder Horse. I’d acted in the Vaetna’s image, saved somebody in a way I could have only fantasized about less than a month ago.
“Uh—wow, thanks, um—sorry, I’m just—haha,” I blushed, making an immense fool of myself. “It’s…thanks. Vaetna-like, yeah, thanks for saying that. But I’m not a member of the team—Todai, I mean. I’m kind of…provisionally hanging out indefinitely. I don’t know what the long term plan is, but I’m not a Radiance.”
I had to clear this up with her. Takagiri was as close as it got to a non-Radiance Radiance, having clearly been inspired by them in the construction of her body, so she might have formed some misconceptions about my status as a team member and my own personal aspirations toward magical girlhood. Maybe she’d been too sleep deprived to remember our brief talk about my gender identity, where I’d asserted that my tentative nonbinary status wasn’t just a stopover on the way to full femininity.
Even though I was getting dangerously close to making a mantle. But mine wouldn’t have any of the magical girl bells and whistles, so it really didn’t count. It was just operating on the same technical base, a different make and model using the same chassis.
Takagiri nodded quickly. “I understand. And—ah, I don’t mean to make it about you. I just…I’ve been thinking, while I was asleep. Dreaming of what comes next. And I still need your help.”
Her brow furrowed. She wobbled in place for a moment, and I reflexively stepped forward, worried she’d fall. But she raised a hand to stop me before a zip hissed through the air and her male body, the Kimura body, stood next to her. One mind, two bodies, a trick the Radiances hadn’t cracked—or at least had never had a real reason to explore. She sighed. “I want to be done with this life. Free from this body, free from leading Hikanome. I just want to be a normal girl.”
I stared. “You want to get rid of your Flame?”
She hesitated, her two bodies looking at each other. “I don’t know. I do want this body, my female one, to be my real body, as LM or as flesh, and to get rid of the male one. And after that…maybe I won’t need my Light anymore. I must be held accountable, and it would be a fitting punishment.”
I didn’t need to ask why. Over the years, under Sugawara’s orders, she’d hurt a lot of people. Exactly how many and how badly, I didn’t know, but she hadn’t been pulling her punches against me and Yuuka. The Radiances had called her an assassin, too, which was damning. And that was to say nothing of her involvement in the human trafficking that had taken Amane and probably others. That part was all quite hush-hush among the Radiances, so I was still light on details, but Kimura’s role as a key organizational and logistical head in Hikanome during that era implied at least awareness and facilitation.
My gut said Takagiri was not a monster, nothing near the scale of Sugawara’s rapacious, egoist malice. And maybe she had already personally suffered enough to atone; I didn’t know how to begin thinking about that. I glanced at Ai uncertainly, hoping she’d take the lead as the conversation turned toward more official Flamebearer-y stuff.
She took my cue, looking up and down both of Takagiri’s bodies. “I’m not comfortable being the judge of what you deserve,” she said, carefully enunciating the word. “Not on my own. I believe that that is a discussion we should probably all have together, all of Japan’s flamebearers, Todai and Hikanome and the others.”
“The others?” I asked. Per my initial Wikipedia trawl when I’d first arrived, Japan did have other flamebearers, but I’d completely skimmed over their sections, having been motivated to orient myself within Lighthouse first and foremost by my initial encounter with Hina. But it had been weeks since then, and I felt stupid for abdicating my responsibility to research my situation more deeply in that time.
Evidently, Ai also seemed annoyed at herself for the oversight. “Oh. We never mentioned it, did we? Sorry: Japan has two flamebearers who are affiliated with neither of our groups. One in the north, in Hokkaido, and one in Shikoku. They’re…” she looked to Takagiri for assistance.
“Strange,” the possibly-ex-Hikanome-leader filled in. “But you’re right; my fate should be held to my peers, including them.”
“Yeah, we’re obviously not turning you over to the cops,” I said. Ai blinked at me, genuinely surprised. I returned the look. “What? Aren’t we agreeing? Isn’t Todai already basically telling the government to fuck off about what we did the other night?”
“Pretty much.” I shrugged, feeling oddly put-upon. “Flamebearers gotta hold each other accountable, right? I don’t know about Japan specifically, but your average government will always opt to just siphon a flamebearer’s power for military shit if you submit to the courts, yeah? We saw tons of that in the first couple years before the Peacies cut out the middleman and went straight to abductions. So if they arrest you or whatever, then that’s not a fair trial no matter what you’ve done, cause the incentives are all fucked up.”
Ai’s surprise morphed into an approving nod that set my heart aflutter with pride. “That’s exactly how it is. Takagiri-san—Izumi?”
“Izumi,” she confirmed. “Yoroshiku.”
Ai looked between her counterpart’s two bodies, adjusting to the given name—or rather self-given, as the case was. I wondered what was so special about “Izumi Takagiri” in meaning for her to have chosen it. The request to use her first name was an indication of trust, as I understood it, one which Ai seemed to accept without objection. “Yoroshiku wa ne, Izumi-san. Yes, we were going to arrange a meeting anyway. The PCTF are coming soon, for Ezzen, and we were already going to seek Hikanome’s support to drive them away.”
“For Ezzen.” Izumi repeated, seeming unsurprised. “This makes it even more important that we kill Sugawara. If they can find him, they will bottle him and use him against us.”
She delivered the statement flatly, all business, and Ai shifted uncomfortably. So did I; neither of us had invested our technical abilities in the hunt for Sugawara’s ghost. Hina had been doing laps of the city with Yuuka in tow, trusting their innate abilities to pick up his scent, but that hadn’t turned up a trail; he’d vanished into the wind that night. We should have been helping. Until now, I hadn’t realized we were on a timer to find him.
“Shit. We’ll keep looking,” I hedged, glancing at Ai. “How long until we get my mantle running, you think?”
Ai’s voice was tinged with worried disagreement. “Ezzen, no. I know you want to be the hero, be the Vaetna, but you’ve done enough. Don’t give in to bloodlust. Let us finish him off.”
“Why not?” I asked, annoyed. Takagiri’s praise of my efficacy spurred me on. “I want to do this. Let me hunt an actual monster. With backup and in my mantle, I mean, let’s not be stupid about it, but I want to be there for it.”
Ai grimaced, reaching up to rub her neck, kneading the scar tracing down her chin with the heel of her hand. “I don’t want to argue about this when I’m hungry. Let’s talk about it over lunch. Izumi, would you like to join us?”
“No. I’m going to go search for him.”
“Now? Has Ebi-tan cleared you for—”
Before Ai could finish interrogating her, both of Izumi’s bodies dissolved into smoke and streamed out the door, taking a left down the hall toward the garage. We both flinched as the ripple siren blared in a violent shriek—for all of half a second before it clicked off. Ebi’s voice crackled through the intercom.
“Let her go.”
As my blood pressure settled back down, I gestured at the open door. “See? I’m specifically trying to not just run off like that.”
Despite my quip, I had to admit that letting Takagiri run off on her own when Todai was under police scrutiny seemed like a bad idea, and I couldn’t blame Ai for fretting over it as we went back up to the penthouse. The topic of what to do was raised to the other Radiances via group chat, which I was quickly added to despite the fact that most of the messages were in Japanese. Messages flurried up the screen for two hectic minutes before it was settled in person by Yuuka, who leaned over the upper-level staircase banister and delivered a casual prophecy.
“She’s fine, Ai. Not gonna get caught.”
Apparently, this was all the reassurance necessary, because Ai dropped the subject as she made a beeline for the fridge, hunting for an energy drink or one of those weird calorie jelly foil pouches. I wasn’t fast enough to intercept her on my mutilated foot, still a little bit unsteady despite weeks of acclimation and the stabilizer module, so I called her off with an assurance that I’d make some real food, waving her over to the sitting area. As she crashed on one of the sofas, Yuuka came downstairs to join us for lunch.
I was a little surprised to see the Heliotrope Radiance around the house; she was a university student, and it was Friday according to my phone, so I would have expected her to be in class. But I’d never attended university—indeed I was a secondary school dropout—so I had been surprised to find that the Radiances’ shared calendar listed only two full days of classes for her, plus one half-day. That was enviable until I remembered that I didn’t really have a schedule at all and hadn’t for years.
I found her presence cautiously welcome as I threw together a low-effort lunch for the three of us. By my assessment of the historical trend, the risk that she’d start being needlessly cruel toward me had steadily declined ever since the mess last Saturday and seemed lowered further to effectively nil by Ai’s presence; Radiance Bloodstone respected her Emerald teammate quite a lot. I could agree with her on that. And when Yuuka wasn’t being an ass, she was even fairly pleasant to be around. With her help, I assembled some basic toasted sandwiches for the three of us within only a few minutes.
“Good bread,” I noted, inspecting the remainder of the loaf as I bagged it back up. It was perfectly golden, with an open crumb and pleasant yeasty aroma. “Doesn’t really come to mind when you think ‘Japan’, does it? Rice country and all. At best I’d’ve been expecting that fluffy white stuff you see on YouTube, not, er, real bread. Is this an expensive, celebrity-exclusive import? Should I be honored for the privilege?”
Yuuka squinted at me with her real eye. The crimson gemstone in the other socket continued its baleful, lidless stare. “Don’t talk shit about shokupan where Alice can hear you. And nah, Tokyo has plenty of really good bakeries.” Yuuka tapped at the toasted exterior of her sandwich with a long fingernail. “Why’re you good at this?”
“Your stove’s easy to use,” I deflected. I was proud of my handiwork, having nailed the browning on all three of the sandwiches, but I still didn’t know how to accept compliments. “And Hina stocks good cookware. These pans distribute heat pretty well, no hot spots.”
“Hmm,” Yuuka replied slowly, as though searching for an imperfection on the surface of her sandwich that she could twist into a barb to prod my self-confidence with. “Yeah, nah. I mean, that’s all true, but you’re also a good cook.”
“Cause of my dad.” I was getting some deja vu; Alice, Hina and I had had a similar conversation last week when we’d made gnocchi. “Was a chef. Taught me stuff.”
“Accept the compliment, shitass.”
I flinched. “I. Uh. Thanks? It’s just toasting bread. What kind of, uh, power play is this, exactly?”
Yuuka turned her head away from me in a petulant flick of her twintails. “Hmpf. Just testing something.”
Ai called out to us, what sounded like a reprimand, and Yuuka faltered slightly.
“Ugh, fine. I wanted to see how my eye reacts to you. You’re still kind of slippery and it bugs me. It’s all weird. Your Light’s weird and you’re weird.” She did the twintail flick again.
I wasn’t sure if that was actually supposed to be an insult; not only had there been at least two attempts at a genuine compliment in there, I was also still riding high on what Takagiri—Izumi—had said about me, and any comments calling my Flame unusual just wound up stroking my ego. It was weird, yes, but in ways that seemed distinctly positive so far.
A gear clicked in my brain. My Flame was weird in a good way—could I not also be weird in a good way?
That thought came just a little too close to genuine self-reflection, and she’d also just dangled a very interesting magical tidbit, so I filed it away for later. “Uh, about that. Does that mean you can normally foresee…most stuff? Including, like, sentence-by-sentence conversations?”
She looked at me like I was stupid. “Depends. I’m seeing ripple, remember, so it all depends on how much the shit in question matters.”
“…Meaning you expected a conversation about my culinary abilities to matter? Like, capital M, big-picture ‘matter’ ripple-wise in the way an inferno does?”
“That’s why I was checking.”
“Your testing system needs work.”
Ai sighed. “Stop arguing and let’s eat. The sandwiches are getting cold.”
After lunch, the conversation turned to Izumi. When we explained that she wanted the flamebearers of Japan to collectively pass judgment on her, Yuuka scoffed.
“She doesn’t have anything to ‘atone’ for.”
I raised a hand tentatively. “Um, what exactly has she done? Aside from, uh, hitting you at the inferno and trying to…kidnap me, or whatever she was actually doing there. There’s more history than that, right? You all keep using the word ‘assassin’, and if we’re going to be judging her crimes or something…”
Yuuka nodded. “Takagiri was the muscle. Good at it, too.”
“Izumi,” Ai corrected. Yuuka raised her eyebrows but nodded.
“So not murder?” I asked, hopeful.
Ai took a swig of the water I’d given her in lieu of energy drink. “Sometimes murder. When Sugawara actually wanted people dead, sometimes that was her.” she explained. “Because she was the perfect killer. No history, no identity, disappeared—” she snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
“Oh.” My heart sank. “As in taking out his political enemies, you mean. That’s why you call her an assassin.”
“Yes. It wasn’t all…terrible. Sugawara was a large presence when he was the leader, and he made enemies of everybody, not just Hongo and Miyoko or the Japanese government. Yakuza, other organized crime in Asia, they were his enemies too, especially if they had their own flamebearers. Izumi-san killed human leaders in organized crime, made it too dangerous to work in Japan if you didn’t respect Hikanome. Which was good for Japan, overall, I think.”
“Damn right,” Yuuka added.
“But she also hurt police and people in the media who tried to interfere with Hikanome. Politicians, too. She sent the message that you couldn’t oppose them.”
“She killed reporters?” I squawked. Political assassinations I could understand—if not condone—and regular criminals who decided to face down Flame-wielding groups sort of deserved what they got. Power had gotten bloodier in the age of magic. But going after the media felt beyond the pale to me, at least in a civilized country that was still nominally ruled by regular humans and not flamebearer god-kings. Maybe that was what Sugawara would have eventually gone for if he hadn’t been deposed.
Yuuka chuckled. “She tried. We stopped her. She didn’t try again after that.”
“That’s still fucked up.”
“Mm. I mean, we don’t exactly love the paparazzi, but the investigative journalism folks? Those are my people. We didn’t let Sugawara touch them. That’s mahou shoujo.”
“Absolutely,” Ai agreed. “Izumi was…dou ittakke…” She said a word to Yuuka, who nodded sagely.
“Acting under duress,” the goth explained in her still-weird-to-me Australian accent. “Like, knowing what we do now, it’s tough to really be mad about much of what she did. And I think she was already going rogue sometimes, avoiding carrying out hits or really giving it her all where she could, especially near the end. When we really got close to getting Amane back…” I swore I saw some of the crystals in her eye glow for a moment, perhaps looking into the future—or an emotional tell like when the air heated around Alice. Hard to say. “Well, she stepped out of my way when she didn’t have to. Dunno if we’d’a found Amane if she’d fought me there.”
“Oh,” I recalled. “Yeah, that, you said something about that at the barbecue after we took her down. Or Alice did, or somebody,” I hedged.
“Yeah. On the other hand…fuck, it’s still weird for me. That’s all only half of it, because she’s Kimura. And he, well…”
“She?” Ai interrupted. “Sorry. English grammar. Is that how it works if we’re talking about past gender? She wanted to be Izumi already from then?”
Yuuka flinched. “Ah, shit, I think so, that’s how it works with Alice…yeah. Okay, she knew about Amane’s abduction and other trafficking like that. Aided and abetted, even, since she was, y’know, kind of the logistics person for Hikanome.”
My blood ran cold. Something about Yuuka’s nonchalance sat wrong with me; of all of us, she was by far the most devoted to Amane, and I’d come to understand that she had also sacrificed the most in finding and rescuing her, though not the details thereof. This was just as heinous as the murders, but the Radiances somehow didn’t seem overly concerned with either. “That’s fucked up, it is.”
Yuuka snorted. “It is? You’re so British when you’re not being weirdly American. Listen—I don’t know how much she was actually involved in that. It’s possible she didn’t know until after the fact, and…part of me’s still mad at her. But even before all this shit came out, she did turn on him. We’re the ones who put him in that coma, but she’s the one who sent some of his other lieutenants out of Tokyo before the coup. Flame-imbued fuckers, scary stuff. It made a difference. And she helped steer the whole cult out of the schism intact, and they’re pretty cool now. So it’s sort of water under the bridge, we think.”
I wondered: who did “we” entail? Sure, Yuuka might not hold a grudge—remarkable for her disposition—but she said it as though she was speaking for the whole team. And she wasn’t the one who had been most wronged, that was Amane…who, it occurred to me, had come right down to the basement to help me with the coffin, and then stood beside me against Sugawara. With only one functional arm, in the middle of a vicious storm of ripple, she had helped literally drag Izumi’s body to the coffin.
The stiff plates of my mutated forearm were rough under my fingers as I thought this through. “And even though Amane runs on anger, she’s just brushed it off too? Total unconditional forgiveness?”
Yuuka looked at me carefully, then glanced at Ai. “You told him?”
“She told him,” Ai explained. Then she sounded alarmed. “Ezzen. You said you wanted to feed your Flame with…the feeling of justice?”
“Yeah?”
“Whoa,” Yuuka said.
“What?”
“Your hand.”
I looked down at where my hands met on the table. A white glimmer was running up and down the crevasses between my burn scars. Not full ignition of my Flame, but a clear indicator that it was riled up, stimulated by my anger.
“Pretty active,” Yuuka observed. “You’re pissed?”
“I—yeah, a little.” I was surprised by that; intellectually, I agreed with Yuuka’s reasoning, and moreover, it was a little shameful for me to be mad on Amane’s behalf when the woman herself had chosen forgiveness. I searched for an explanation. “Not…not at Amane or you,” I clarified. “But…a little at Taka—Izumi, I guess?” My eyes traced the shine in my right hand. “Even though I think I nominally agree with your reasoning that she was acting under duress. And besides, I wasn’t even there, right…but I’m still sort of mad, like there’s a loose end.”
Ai looked at me sympathetically; Yuuka looked a little exasperated.
“Feedback loop, I’d bet. You prolly get that from Hina, total lack of control she’s got. Take a breath and let me talk you around.”
I took the requested breath. “Feel a little manipulated when I’m being told what to do by a precog,” I admitted, surprised that I was running hot enough to voice that kind of thought.
“Ezzen,” Ai chided.
I winced. “Sorry.”
Yuuka sighed. “I’m about to express some vulnerability, you cunt. Shut up and listen, because you’re not gonna get much more out of me.”
“Oh.” That did indeed shut me up.
Yuuka took a breath. “After…the other night, when I was hanging out with Alice and Amane in their room, our great leader asked if I was gonna have any more issues with Izumi, after I said that shitty thing at dinner. And we talked a little, whether it was all evened out and we wanted to keep protecting her now that she was out from under the evil, rotting thumb of that fucker. And I voted yes, we stay on her side. The slate is clean enough, and she deserves our help. Amane agreed, Alice agreed, she agreed,” she nodded at Ai, “and your bitch turned around on her before we had even cleared the field at the barbie anyway. As far as we’re concerned, by first helping depose Sugawara and then, uh, half-killing him, it’s all good now.”
Ai put her hands on the table, gently touching mine. “Izumi-san has done bad things and good things, but we’re not going to judge it as just a balance; it’s not that simple. I think she’s still basically a good person, or trying to be. What matters is whether she’ll hurt more people from now, and I don’t think she wants to.”
“As far as I can tell, she won’t,” Yuuka added. “And I can tell pretty far, trust me.” She looked down at my hand, voice dropping to a mutter. “Maybe even further.” Her eyes came back up to mine. “That make you feel better? I still can’t fuckin’ tell,” she complained, bopping her temple in mild annoyance.
I tried to reason it out. The vague sense of injustice was much more external than internal, buoyed along by the emotional link with my Flame even past where it should have been sunk by Yuuka’s excellent points. My Flame demanded justice, almost growling for it in my subconscious as a thrum below my throat and down into my arm as an aimless desire. It was primal and emotional, not a specific list of grievances and punishments. If anything, it felt far closer to the animal desire for revenge, albeit on another’s behalf rather than my own. And that was sort of unsettling in a stupid way. I sighed. “Okay. Yeah, yeah, you’re totally right. But I’m still mad, and I think it is from my Flame, you’re right. So, uh, what do I do about that?”
I felt like Hina would tell me to work it off in a cathartic release of undirected violence—probably involving her—but Yuuka simply stood, drawing up to her full 150-something centimeters and peering down at me with that baleful gemstone eye. “Wasting it would be stupid. Point it at a more useful target.”
“I’m already gonna go after Sugawara once I can,” I clarified.
“Yeah, and that means we have to find him.” She beckoned toward the stairs, gemstone eye glinting. “Come on. I’m putting you to work as a searchlight.”
Author’s Note:
This chapter is very, very late for patrons, but it’s out nonetheless! And to a pretty high level of polish, I think. Thank you to the beta readers for that! Next chapter will be the end of the arc.
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