“She hasn’t come out of her room since we got back.”
My stomach twisted. Last time that had happened, Hina had been stewing in remorse. This time, it served her right, but even so…
“Oh. That’s…bad, yeah.”
Alice sighed. “Very, very bad. Normally she just runs away when she gets like this, so the fact that she’s not…I’ve said what I can to try to cheer her up, but she’s a mess. She thinks you’re mad at her.”
“…I am.” I couldn’t entirely suppress the guilt that lurched through me. She was in deep shit and deserved to be—but I couldn’t help but feel bad. “And it falls to me to fix her?”
Alice winced, as did I a moment later; I could have phrased that better. Her tail thumped unhappily. “No. She’s…intractable when she’s like this, and that’s not your problem to solve. Or anybody’s, really. You feel the need to talk to her about your relationship?”
I avoided Alice’s gaze, looking out the narrow window on the far side of the wall to my right. “I…yeah. Both about yesterday and about…about pretense, I guess.”
“Yeah. Well—going to her won’t work, I’m sorry to say. I suggest you wait for her to come to you, because she will, eventually. She’s been waiting for you to be up, so probably in a few hours, but don’t try to force it, yeah?”
I nodded at that, trying to decide how relieved I was to be able to put off the conversation. As much as I needed to talk to her, I feared it was doomed to be an ugly, rocky thing, and I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for another heavy conversation quite yet. In light of that, I was alright with letting Hina decide when she was ready. In the meantime, I wanted to see how Amane and Yuuka were doing. Though I wasn’t exactly in a position to get up—I still felt very weak, and the painkillers made it hard to gauge how messed up my body was.
I gestured at the bed. “Could you ask Ebi how much more of…this, there’ll be?”
Alice stood from her chair, stretching her back with a pop and twisting to tug the base of her tail this way and that. “Being bedridden sucks, doesn’t it?”
I gaped. “Are you rubbing it in?”
“No, I’m trying to express sympathy—” She paused her stretching and seemed to realize what she was doing. The room got a degree hotter as she flushed. “Oh. No, sorry, just stretching because my tail really hurts if I stay sitting too long and you reminded me of that—augh,” she groaned, face red. “Insensitive of me, my apologies.”
“It’s fine,” I assured her, sharing somewhat in the embarrassment. That one had been my bad. “That’s a…normal ache, I hope? Not new?”
“Think so.” She looked uncomfortable with that topic and shook herself, then spoke to the empty air. “Ebi? Prognosis on Ezzen’s condition, please?”
The android obligingly appeared from nowhere. She was holding a platter like a waitress, and a meaty aroma wafted into the air. I blinked.
“Um?”
“You’ll be cleared to get up and walk around a bit, but not until you’ve eaten,” the android explained. “Hungry?”
My stomach was already gurgling at the smell of hot protein. I was urgently aware that I was starving, and I very much agreed with Ebi—nothing else could happen until that was resolved. This was a problem Alice understood well, and a grin actually flitted across her face when she heard my body’s complaint. The bed-mounted tray table swung over to my lap with a motorized whirr. Ebi set the platter down in front of me. The hunger was muted slightly as I saw what it held; I eyed the spread, deeply distrustful.
“Surely this is contaminated. Or just old.”
“Wrong on both counts. It has my seal of approval,” Ebi declared.
Piled before me were leftovers from Hikanome’s barbecue. There were roasted chicken-and-vegetable skewers, tandoor-baked buns stuffed full of kebab meat, and a plate of roasted corn ribs with some kind of mayo dip. It all looked and smelled suspiciously fresh for food that should have been three days old and rescued from the epicenter of an inferno.
“Miyoko did…something to save most of the food after she woke up, and Hikanome is distributing it to attendees who were injured,” Alice explained. “That includes you. She sends her apologies for the clusterfuck.”
“Not even slightly her fault, is it? All Hina’s,” I muttered, delicately holding up a skewer and staring at it. How had Miyoko done this? Some kind of state-lock in orange to keep it from having gone bad as it sat out in the weather, maybe, but cleansing it of any ripple contamination was an order of magnitude more complex. A miracle, in short, and a classic one—food for the sick. How noble.
I still couldn’t help but be suspicious. Even if the food did pass muster from Ebi in terms of food safety, if it was primarily intended for the cult’s own injured, then who was to say that preservation was the only thing Miyoko had done? I squinted.
“This isn’t ‘blessed’, is it? Something in green to aid regeneration? Is that a thing she can do?”
Ebi rolled her digital eyes. “There’s nothing off about it. We wouldn’t feed you something with unknown magical effects when your body’s still recovering from whatever the hell you did to it. It’s good food, or so I hear,” the machine grinned. “Eat up.”
She plopped a familiar milkshake onto the tray as well, the same nutritionally fortified type I’d been given for my first meal at Todai. I trusted that more than the cult leader’s supposedly-not-imbued-with-anything offering and took a few sips while I waited for my hunger to inevitably overcome my reservations. I tugged a piece of chicken off the end of its skewer with my teeth, chewed, and found it as fresh and tender as if it had just come off the grill.
I ate the rest of the skewer before even thinking, and then the feast began. Bite, chew, swallow, grab, dip, bite, chew—both of my hands were fully occupied with the task of replenishing my body’s nutritional stock. Grease dripped down my chin, and rather than reach for a napkin, I just wiped it off with a piece of pita and promptly ate that as well. I was aware my table manners were horrific, positively animalistic, but the food had to get in me. Was this how Hina had felt when she’d eaten that piece of fried chicken? Voracious and uninhibited?
As I ate, I rationalized that this was to be expected of anybody who’d gone through what I had and then slept for two full days; my body was naturally ravenous for energy and material to…do whatever all that green ripple had set me up for. And hunger truly was the best spice—everything was positively delicious, even though I only had moments to appreciate the flavor of any given bite and the culinary skill involved before my body demanded I swallow it to send it on its way to the stomach.
It was only when Alice cleared her throat that I somewhat came back to myself. I looked up at her and Ebi, my face invaded by a wave of flushed embarrassment as I remembered the women hovering over me. Alice had edged toward the door, apparently intent on taking her leave.
“Got to get back to it,” she explained. “Really, I get it. Glad to see you’re doing alright. Don’t, uh, choke?”
An eminently reasonable concern—a little undercut by the entire leg of chicken that had somehow appeared in her hand as she shouldered the door open. Hunger was contagious for us green-ripple-affected folk, apparently. With my mouth too full of food to reply verbally, I opted for a thumbs up, trying to transmit a wish for her good luck on whatever ordeals awaited. Her tail disappeared around the threshold a moment after she did.
Ebi was still right there, but she wasn’t looking at me directly. I got the sense she was somewhat disgusted by my organic, masticatory processes of fuel intake. That wasn’t enough to stop me from continuing to devour my meal, though. After a long half minute of trying not to watch my jaw unhinge, she emitted a ping sound and made a show of checking her wrist like she was wearing a watch.
“I gotta go too. Amethyst’s conspiring against me.”
I failed to swallow my mouthful of corn correctly, hacked an ugly cough, took a swig of iced tea, then rasped, “…What?”
But Ebi was already out the door, leaving me alone with my food. At least that meant there was nobody to watch me—aside from Hina’s specter encouraging me to eat with voracious abandon. That was far more shameful than being actually watched, so with more than two-thirds of the food now vanished into me, I eased back a little on the scarfing. I decided the best move was to distract myself and occupy one hand by checking my phone. I used the sole napkin I’d been provided to wipe off my hands and navigate to the chatroom.
I had a lot of worried DMs. I was also days behind on a lot of very intense discussion about the “BBQ Inferno”—temporary name, I hoped, too glib by half—but the running theme of the messages directed at me was much more mundane.
Photos of the fight between the Radiances and Takagiri had flooded social media, which was fine—but I was also in many of those photos, and had been correctly identified. This was…a little uncomfortable, and was probably going to happen eventually, but what everybody seemed to be talking about was my hair, the long curtain of freakish neon-orange that was easy to spot in all but the most chaotic footage of when I’d been with Yuuka and, later, Amane.
Disbelieving, I tugged a few strands into my field of view to make sure the hair was still there and hadn’t faded with time or been bleached by my brief excursion outside reality. What an absurd color; had I really gone through a life-or-death combat situation looking like that? But at least it was long, and that was far better than if all this footage had instead captured me in my horribly shorn state after the disastrous haircut—shit, that was a gender thing, wasn’t it? Was the satisfaction I felt from the curtain of hair actually gender euphoria?
That warranted more introspection, but I also had to say something. I opted for a minimal check-in to confirm that I was, in fact, alive and relatively unscathed despite being at the center of it all. Doing remarkably well, in fact, no need to worry about me, no matter how bad things had looked during the inferno. I couldn’t provide too many details; I myself didn’t really know what exactly had happened, and didn’t want to accidentally spread misinformation, you see. And yes, the hair was new.
My closer friends deserved a slightly more honest update, and I waffled a bit about what to include. I’d never actually told them of the blood magic I’d worked to epilate away all my body hair. Hell, I hadn’t even told them about the intermediary step that was the wig, not even Sky, who’d helped me navigate the haircut crisis. I should have mentioned it on the way to the barbecue; I felt guilty to have let my friends slip through the cracks like that. Both he and Star deserved a more complete rundown of the magical details…
As well as my own tentative intentions to foray into the world of gender, I supposed. But that part had practical complications: how much could I really share about the recent gender developments? Of course, telling people that Alice or Takagiri were trans was right out, for reasons of both opsec and general decency. I couldn’t even reveal to Star that Alice had seemingly found the proverbial philosopher’s stone, a magical way to transition. That would utterly rock her world—but I could also easily envision it sending her into a horrible spiral of despair when she learned it was restricted to only flamebearers, and I didn’t want to do that to her.
But the cat was still out of the bag regarding my makeover, and Star was certainly the one I trusted most about gender stuff, so I took a deep breath, typed out a message in between bites of corn, and hit send before I could lose my nerve.
ezzen: Hey, sorry about not replying to stuff, been a little out cold like I mentioned in genchat. The hair was an attempt to fix a really bad haircut – actually a side effect of a panicky full body epilation. And I’ve been thinking about why I did that and yeah it’s kind of the Vaetna dysphoria smoothness thing we’ve talked about before with shaving my face but it could also be a not-cis thing and I’m not sure?
I found myself hyperventilating a little. The pulse monitor, until now a steady beep I’d been tuning out, had accelerated into a frenetic rhythm that matched the pounding in my chest.
Ebi’s head peeked through the door.
“Dude, you alright?”
“Uh—uh.” My panic increased as I realized I’d pulled her away from helping the injured Radiances to check on me. She strode over, and I pulled my phone toward my chest so she wouldn’t see the screen. “I’m okay, it’s nothing, I’m just overreacting and—”
“No shit,” came Yuuka’s voice from the doorway. “You’ll be fine, chill out.”
The Heliotrope Radiance was wearing a green medical gown rather than her usual arrangement of dark straps and corsets, but she made it look good. No bruises, and she was standing upright. Her hair was up in the usual twintails, and her bangs were bound back to show that her cursed eye was covered with a gauze eyepatch. Seeing her up and about distracted me from my anxiety.
“Hi.”
“Heya.”
Ebi made a staticky noise at her. “Tch. Stick with Amethyst, don’t come running after me. He’s fine.” She looked at me. “You’re fine.”
“I’m fine,” I repeated, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly through my mouth, trying to force the tension to leave my shoulders. “You’re fine?” I asked Heliotrope.
“I’m fine! Well, fine enough to be walking around.” She accompanied that with another step into the room and an annoyed glare at Ebi. “And Amane is fine too.”
That was a relief, though I’d feel better seeing her safe and sound with my own eyes. The way her mantle had melted had been very upsetting. “Can I say hi to her?”
“She’s asleep,” Ebi clarified. Her face shut off for a moment, then reactivated as…a live feed of a camera watching Amane’s sleeping body, hooked up to various IVs and monitoring equipment in a bed that looked significantly fancier than mine. “See?”
“That’s incredibly weird. But thanks.” It did legitimately make me feel better, though, and the slowing beeps of the heart monitor confirmed that.
“No prob.” Her face went back to normal.
“Don’t do that,” Yuuka sighed, turning away from the android. She was distracted by the food on my plate—or what remained of it, which at this point was mostly chicken bones, bare skewers, and smears of sauce. “Lookin’ like Alice over there. You about to grow a tail?”
“I hope not,” I joked. “Ideally just…uh…” I realized I didn’t really have a clear sense of what I wanted from any potential mutations. “More muscles? Er—not bigger muscles, just stronger ones, like Hina’s got…oh shit,” I muttered. That wasn’t very cisgender of me, was it? Or was my conversation with Alice just making me read gender into things that were on the Vaetna-aspiration side of my self-image?
Yuuka gave me a funny look. “Like Hina. Seriously? Haven’t fuckin’ gotten over her?”
“I—I’m working on it,” I deflected. “Alice said she’d talk when she’s ready.”
She snorted. “Yeah, let her stew. She knows she fucked up.”
“…Yeah, I guess she did,” I admitted. “We all came out of it in one piece, though. Er, Amane aside. I mean, she’s fine, but not in one piece because she’s…” I stopped talking before I could shove my foot all the way into my mouth, and searched around for a better topic. I pointed at the remains of my food. “You have any of this yet?”
Yuuka shook her head incredulously at my catastrophic faux pas, which was warranted, but didn’t seem offended on her teammate’s behalf. “Nah, I don’t eat meat.”
I blinked, trying to recall the handful of times we’d eaten together. I hadn’t really been looking at her plate at the barbecue, too busy trying not to fuck up opsec and arguing about the Omelas allegory, so it was entirely possible she’d had a plate full of vegetarian options and I’d just missed it. “Oh. Because, uh, your eye does something horrible when you eat once-alive animals?”
“What? Fuck no, that’d suck. It’s just unethical and bad for the waistline. Don’t know what all the fuss is about, anyway.” She put a hand on her waist for emphasis. “Doesn’t even taste that good.”
“Don’t get what all the deal with food is,” Ebi remarked from where she was fiddling with my IV.
I stared at the two women. Ebi got a pass, of course, she’d never get it. And Yuuka’s first two points were reasonable, and ones I could respect in principle, but I vehemently disagreed on the third. My childhood had given me a wide palette, so I was hardly an obligate carnivore, but it had also caused me to consider a well-cooked piece of meat to be the centerpiece of most any real meal until you reached the absurd molecular gastronomy Dad had resented so much.
“But have you tried actually good—”
“—meat that isn’t just a steak cooked to death at a cheap steakhouse, and instead something different like an iberico?” Yuuka interrupted. “Hina’s tried, believe me. Didn’t work.”
“…Okay, fine,” I conceded. Maybe it wasn’t a problem with the quality of her experiences with meat. Weirdo. “Wait—is your eye back online?”
She grinned. “Kinda. Still spotty.”
That gave me an idea. I mentally checked to see if my Flame would abide an ignition. “Could you…check something for me? I’ll light it up.”
Ebi reached over and flicked my temple.
“Ow.”
“No active Flame,” she said, indicating a readout panel under the heart monitor with a bar graph of the familiar spectrum of ripple colors. “Amane.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
Yuuka still looked interested, though. “Doesn’t mean you can’t ask. What’s up?”
“Uh.” I realized I didn’t know how to phrase it, but my conviction was growing. I was reflecting on the caustic, hurtful vitriol Yuuka had thrown at me in our first real conversation, and how much of it had been predicated on me being “just another fucking boy.” But since she could literally see the future, did that mean that I would wind up male? Could Alice be wrong about my gender?
Waffling in front of a precog is a bad idea. Yuuka squinted at me, briefly tugged away her eyepatch to reveal a mangled mess of dark crystal and raw, still-healing red flesh, and squinted harder.
“Dude.”
“…I’m a dude?”
She straightened, putting the eyepatch back. “That’s not my fuckin’ call to make. Even if I could see that far ahead—and I can’t, especially not right now—I wouldn’t tell you. But we’re chill already, if that’s what you’re twisted up about.”
“Responsibility of prophecy,” Ebi put in. “Especially for problems of identity.”
I twisted to look at her. “Uh. How do you know what I was going to ask?”
Ebi leaned in real close to me. Uncomfortably close, really, until her screen-face was practically all I could see. Then, like a PowerPoint slide transition, the image of her face dissolved into pixels and was replaced with a stock photo of an egg. I groaned.
“Jesus, could everybody see it but me?”
“Yep,” said both the woman and the android. I winced, uncomfortably seen.
“Okay, then…foresight notwithstanding, what do you think?” I looked between the two of them. “Who…what do I seem like to you?”
Yuuka shrugged. “I’d poison the well.”
Ebi mimicked the gesture, a perfect imitation minus the boobs. “Do I look like I know what a gender is? You’re meat, and you perform as meat, and that’s all a mystery to me. I could collate hundreds of thousands of testimonials of trans experiences and behaviors to map against all the data I have on you, but that’s not much better than just reading the future. Figure it out yourself, meatbag.”
That was a hell of a pejorative, but her tone was light and accompanied by the egg image doing another, even lamer slide transition to display a thumbs-up emoji.
“Fuck you,” I exclaimed, frustration papering over the envy I felt that she could just do that. “Are you fucking with me?”
“Yeah.” Ebi’s face returned to a human grin. “I mean, you really want my honest opinion?”
“Please.”
“You’re some species of exotic cave lesbian.”
I gaped at her, trying to decipher how that made me feel. “…Are you still fucking with me?”
“I’m running diagnostics. How’s it make you feel?”
I frowned, annoyed at the tactic, but gave it a moment’s earnest thought. I found it made me angry; I didn’t want to be slotted into either side of the gender binary. “Don’t like it.”
“There you go. Data point!” the android declared smugly, smirking.
“Huh. Thanks,” I muttered. Then I registered the expression on Yuuka’s face; she was looking at me with something between doubt and amusement. I sat up a little bit more. “Don’t say you can’t weigh in and then make faces at me. If you honestly think Ebi’s right, that I am in fact some kind of cave lesbian, then say something, gimme something to go on.” The expression was already revelatory enough for where her opinions lay, but it got worse when I cross-referenced it with something else. “Hold on, you’ve called me Ezza, haven’t you?”
She crossed her arms defiantly. “Strayanism, not a girl thing.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
That was a relief. I was surprised by the grin that forced its way onto my face, how much it pleased me to not have been slotted into the other half of the gender binary, either. I reflexively raised my hand to cover the expression, but it was far too late, and Yuuka hummed.
“Mmm…okay, that being said. Foresight aside,” she covered her eyepatch with her palm, which was probably purely symbolic. “I’m sorry I was such a shit to you earlier. Really, I am,” she insisted in response to my dubious stare. “And the fact that I am sorry about that should say a lot about how masculine I think you are, ‘cause the fact remains that I hate blokes. And I don’t have a good sense for this stuff, so, like, grain of salt on that, but I do gotta agree with Ebi-tan here: whatever you’ve got going on with Hina is really, really gay. Which would be fine with me if not for the fact that it’s her.”
I redirected my stare to Ebi, whose poker face was superb, then brought it back to Yuuka. “I…uh. So you’re apologizing, but I’m still a monsterfucker?”
She nodded.
I sat back against the bed’s inclined backrest. “You know what, I’ll take it.” I told myself I was planning to break up with Hina anyway, and if Yuuka didn’t hate me for something intrinsic about what I was, that was a win in my book.
The implications about “what I was” were very concerning, though. Had all of Todai immediately pegged me as a trans woman? I was becoming increasingly sure Hina had, which was a primary reason why I was dreading talking to her. It was clear she had particular proclivities whereas the others didn’t—so it was a lot more damning if all of them agreed with her anyway. Still, if it meant they were more comfortable around me, instead of seeing me how I’d feared at first—as a guy intruding in a space full of women—that was good.
Overall, I wasn’t sure where I landed on it, other than that the probably-not-a-guy gauge was steadily rising.
“Can I get a third opinion? Ai? Or Amane?” I rubbed my face with my hands; they were still slightly greasy from my meal. “Alice has already said her bit, and…I nominally trust the six of you more than pretty much anyone else for this,” I admitted, a little surprised to feel that way. “Like, you have a better window into it than my online friends, even the trans ones.” I grabbed a few strands of my hair for emphasis. “Like, with this. I should have thought it was weird how helpful and non-judgmental Alice was about this.”
“It looks nice,” Yuuka said, and I couldn’t help but smile. It was weird to feel good about my appearance, but kind of addictive—which was part of why I’d been dragged along so easily by Hina.
“As third opinions go, there’s another trans flamebearer in the building,” Ebi said, grinning once more. “On this very floor, even. And she wants to talk to you.”
Yuuka shifted, side-eyeing the android. “I don’t know,” she mumbled, uncharacteristically nervous. “Sounds like a great way to have Alice tear my head off if it goes badly.”
“You’re a precog, there’s no ‘if’ involved. I’ll bring her in so you can forgive her. Alice already did—you really gonna let her be more mahou shoujo than you?”
As Yuuka frowned at that, looking conflicted, I sat up a little further, bristling. “Not Takagiri.”
Ebi tutted. “Hey, you too. You both need to get over your shit with her, and this is the fastest way to do it. She wants to apologize, and she needs your help. Let her.”
Yuuka considered this, then took a deep breath. She flipped up her eyepatch and turned around, looking out at the doorway, toward the rest of the building and whichever room Takagiri was in. She was quiet as she inspected the eddies of silver only she could see.
I wasn’t convinced. “It’s one thing for me to go ‘hey, it’s okay that you attacked me, apology accepted’, and another for me to ask her for advice about my identity. I don’t even know her.”
“Better than Hina,” Ebi pointed out. “I mean, they both tried to abduct you, but at least she feels bad about it. And I don’t just mean ‘needs your help’ about her general situation. Heliotrope gets it.”
On cue, Yuuka made a sound, a sharp intake of breath that sounded like a strangled cry. She turned back to me, face serious. “We—yeah, fuck, Ebi’s right, she needs our help.”
“Wait, what? That makes it sound like she’s being attacked.”
“No, but—we should hear her out.”
—
And so it was that Yuuka, Ebi, and I spoke with the person who’d attacked us; when a precog had that kind of urgency in her voice, it was sensible to listen. She couldn’t explain what Takagiri would tell us, but insisted that it was important enough that we ought not to delay with more waffling.
Takagiri wound up coming to us; I was still too bedridden to easily make the journey down the hall except by mobile bed delivery. Ebi walked her over and announced her arrival with a knock on the door. I took a deep breath and exchanged a glance with Yuuka, who’d taken Alice’s seat and moved it so that she and I were both facing the doorway, presenting a unified front. There was nothing to fear, I told myself. We held all the cards. When I felt ready, I called out.
“Come in.”
The door swung open, and there was—not Takagiri, not in body. We’d destroyed her mantle, after all, so the physical body that actually entered the room was that of Kimura, the middle-aged man who’d given the impression of being a samurai. But despite being in the wrong body, this was clearly Takagiri; there was just a little bit of a hunch to her posture rather than straight-backed formality, and the impassive placidity I’d seen in Kimura had been replaced by an alert, almost paranoid energy, brown eyes darting around the room. And she looked haggard, more exhausted than even Alice, with bags under her eyes and a weight to how she stood. She had a patch on her forearm—a pain-blocker like the one I’d used, perhaps.
Her frantic eyes came to a rest on Yuuka, and her expression twisted into something a little painful. It was easy to see why; Takagiri wore the same kind of nominally androgynous medical gown as Yuuka, but it fit very differently on the taller male figure than the busty Radiance, not nearly as curvaceous. The envy passed quickly, and her gaze moved to me instead.
“Hello, Ezzen.” Her voice was softer than it had been before; still deeper than that of her mantle—though that had mostly been yelling—but modulated quieter and higher. More feminine.
“Hi.” I tried to sit up a bit more to look intimidating.
Takagiri stepped a bit further into the room, then bowed deeply. “I apologize for my actions three days ago. I was weak and desperate, and I take full responsibility for the harm I caused to you all and to the flock. Thank you for granting me mercy, despite my failures.”
I blinked. I’d been expecting contrition, but taking the blame to this extent felt like self-flagellation. “Uh. Hina caused the inferno. That one’s not on you.”
She held the bow. “I should have stood up to Sugawara and refused to harm you. Instead, I was a coward and believed I had no choice but to attack you. I believed I was alone. I underestimated your kindness, and I beg your forgiveness.”
My kindness? It had been Alice’s decision to spare her and take her in, not mine. I glanced uncomfortably at Yuuka, who bit her lip, and said something softly to Takagiri in Japanese. She rose out of the bow, replying uncertainly, to which Yuuka shook her head.
“Forgiven, as far as I’m concerned. Ezza?”
I frowned. “I mean—I feel like I’m still missing a bunch of the pieces of the puzzle, here. I…I want to forgive you, I think, because it sounds like you’re under a horrific amount of duress, but you still tried to kill Yuuka. What’s with that?”
Yuuka blinked at me, surprised that I was prioritizing her. “Eh, that’s water under the bridge; she had orders,” she explained hurriedly, before Takagiri could. “We fought…a lot, back when this shit was all going down. There were plenty of times one of us might not have walked away from that, I get it.” She narrowed her eyes at the ex-assassin. “But…I remember one time you just walked away. You could have stopped me from getting into that office, but you didn’t.”
Takagiri met her gaze. “I was hoping you would find what you needed. For Ishikawa-chan. I thought I could turn a blind eye and lie to Sugawara that you had avoided me.” She looked at the floor and clenched her fists. “But he sees everything.”
“Everything?” I asked, suddenly wary. She’d said he was in her dreams, hadn’t she? “Even here?” When she didn’t respond, I growled a little, which made Yuuka raise her eyebrows at me. “Stop being cryptic. What’s got you so far under his thumb, and why turn away from him now?”
Takagiri took a slow breath.
“He helped build my mantle. And in doing so, tied part of his Light to mine. I am—was—not only his assassin, but his spy. Everything Takagiri Izumi saw, he would learn when I slept. Even now, even when he is in a coma, every night he flays me open and takes it.” There was bile in her voice. “To be in my proper body is to give him his only connection to the world the next night. So I have not slept since I betrayed him, because until I do, he will not know.”
Horror rose up my spine like damp floodwater, seeping into the base of my skull. I stared at Takagiri and saw how she was swaying slightly, how dark the circles under her eyes truly were. My eyes dropped to the patch on her arm. “That’s keeping you awake?”
“Yes. And online shogi.” Her face split into shattered mimicry of a grin. “I don’t know for how much longer. You destroyed my body, and I have been praying that that may be enough for me to finally be free, for the connection between me and him to be broken enough that I can rest. But I cannot take that risk.”
“Why not? What’s he got over you? I mean, there’s the blackmail, but Alice seemed confident she’d be able to turn that around, and people keep saying he’s in a coma. What can he do to you?”
“Turn her Flame into a bomb,” Yuuka whispered. My heart dropped into my stomach as she continued. “He’s done it before, though only with parceled Flame, not an entire other flamebearer.” She shifted. “Hard for me to see if they’re not about to explode, though, so it’s just a guess. I thought you were loyal, didn’t need that kind of thing.”
Takagiri hesitated. “I was, once. He was kind, at first. I told him my secret and he accepted me, told me we would build a world that would accept me, helped me build the person I wished to be, until he had a door into my soul and I could never leave.” Rage flashed in her eyes, though not directed at us. “I thought I would be free when you finally won.”
“We should have fucking killed him,” Yuuka snarled. “Shouldn’t have fucking handed him over to the cops. Mahou shoujo destroys evil.”
I agreed. This was much more along the lines of what I expected when I’d heard that Hikanome was a Flame cult, coercion and abuse far beyond what even the most horrible of mundane cults could commit. The Vaetna destroyed a few cults like that every year and took in the survivors or at least paid to help them rebuild their lives. That they hadn’t with Hikanome was…well, they couldn’t be everywhere at once. There were only ten of them, and the world was soaked in evil.
I was absolutely ready to drop all charges against Takagiri, now, and was entering problem-solving mode, fueled by anger. A person could only go for maybe a week at most without sleep and degraded very rapidly after the first few days. She’d been essentially sentenced to insanity and then death if we didn’t do something about it.
I looked past Takagiri, at Ebi, who was standing behind her in the doorway, a threshold guardian. “Ebi? It’s already been three days. Why the hell haven’t we fixed this?”
Ebi glared back at me. “We’ve been fucking trying. Ai hasn’t slept either.”
“Then why isn’t this the first thing you told me about when I woke up? Why bring in Alice to talk about the gender shit first?”
“Gender shit?” Takagiri asked.
“Because we were pretty sure that once you heard, you’d try to blood-magic your liver into glass if you thought it’d help,” Ebi retorted. “And we wanted you to at least get a meal in you before that, and Alice was nervous as hell about you having this talk while driven by inscrutable egg mania.”
Then my phone buzzed.
“And so we could get ahead of that,” Ebi added.
Her tone told me who it was. I lifted my phone from where it had been lying face-down in my lap, turning it on with all the finality of an inmate approaching the electric chair. It was a single text, and it broke my heart in half.
Hina: im sorry i love you i need you can we talk
Author’s Note:
Gemder 3: The Gemderinginging! A day late for patrons on this one, apologies.
This time including some food because we were robbed of it by the Hina Pounce. Also, Takagiri’s situation is wildly fucked up.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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