CONTENT WARNINGS
None
Have you ever seen one of those ultra-slow-motion videos of a bullet passing through ballistic gel? The projectile leaves a series of overlapping voids expanding behind it, the nominally solid gel encouraged by the extreme forces to bubble like a liquid. Milliseconds later, the forces that formed those bubbles have dissipated through the gel, so the cavity no longer has anything to hold it open and begins to collapse back in on itself. But the bullet drags outside air in behind it, and as the bubble collapses, that air is crushed and compressed, pressurized so rapidly that it ignites into a little explosion, a flare of light and heat that momentarily grants a second life to each bubble, glowing like fireworks before finally being snuffed for good.
The same thing happened when Hina struck the white-ripple field surrounding Yoyogi Park. The blazing blue comet pierced the field, and light exploded across the sky, a sapphire aurora both spilling outward beyond the barrier and following her in like leaking ink. Even though her mantle was barely visible as more than a pinpoint, I could see it was flaking apart, shards of LM trailing off of her and decohering into more ripple like the tail of a comet.
For a moment, there was equilibrium, the insane force of her arrival balanced against the field’s self-correcting shape. Then, like the ballistic gel, the field buckled and fell inward where she struck it, closing behind her and isolating pockets of the blue, compressing them inward, squeezing and concentrating the bubbles of ripple until they were a trail of blinding pinpoints suspended behind Hina’s dive.
Watching this collapse over a fraction of a second, I remember thinking how strange it was that there was no physical shockwave, no wind. As if responding to me, the colored guide-braziers flickered, and then their flames were being sucked inward too, an incandescent rainbow caught aswirl in the implosion of the ripple compressing Hina’s constellation of the Frozen Flame. The compression reached a peak, and like that hyper-pressurized air, the pinpoints detonated, tearing open Miyoko’s field. It curdled and peeled back, whips of white and yellow sparks dancing and igniting at the seam before they were overtaken by the tide of sapphire light. For a brief and blinding moment, Hina outshone the sun and dyed the whole world blue.
The sound reached my ears moments later, and everybody, flamebearers included, flinched and ducked for cover at the deafening, roaring rumble that was felt as much as heard, rattling my entire body, terrifying in a primal sense like a peal of thunder or erupting volcano; something early man would have worshiped out of fear. I remember that feeling more clearly than any other part, how my legs trembled and I hunched on pure instinct, how everybody was screaming, including me.
That was all before the ripple reached us.
I cried out as the lattice of my prosthetic flickered, red ripple hijacking my nerves and sending lancing pain from foot to brain stem while my stabilizer unit in my jacket pocket tried and failed to compensate. I fell to one knee, then on my arse, gasping and gritting my teeth as the pain overwhelmed my other senses. The device in my pocket was turning hot—an acrid smell hit my nose, and I tried to squirm out of the jacket even while phantom cramps made it feel like my foot was about to fold itself in half. Somebody helped pull the jacket off of me, and I immediately curled up on the pillow I’d been sitting on, cowering under the collapsing sky and trying not to scream at the venom in my nerves.
Over long, agonizing seconds, the pain ebbed downward from its peak. Gasping, ragged breaths became shallower and more even—and colder, as nature reasserted itself. The temperature was plummeting; with the barrier between hot and cold air destroyed, the former drove upward, and the cold air surrounding the park rushed inward, frigid, howling wind kicking up grit and shearing at my sensitive skin through the gossamer protection of my shirt. Familiar aches invaded my fingers, and soon I found myself curled up not in a futile attempt to escape pain but as a way of preserving precious body heat as winter announced its return.
I gritted my teeth; my fragile meat-body wanted to stay where it was and huddle for warmth, but I couldn’t afford to. Even without looking, I knew that this was an apocalyptically dangerous situation for the hundreds of thousands of average humans in the park. There was commotion around me, voices and shuffling, and I could hear yelling and screaming and sirens in the distance. The real flamebearers, the Radiances and Hikanome’s damn cultists, were probably already mobile and trying to help people, not fetal and blubbering. I had to get up and join them—it was pathetic to have been knocked flat on my ass.
“C’mon,” I murmured to myself, somewhere between a whisper and subvocalization. “The Spire stands, so can you.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Up we go. One, two—”
I sat up and cracked my eyes open.
Everything was dyed yellow. In that second or two of the detonation, the wash of blue light had indoctrinated my eyes to its overwhelming hue, so the natural sunlight seemed all wrong—all the colors were out of balance. The sky, actually a thin blue, appeared to be sickly orange. The remnants of brightest blue ink in the sky looked paler by the moment, thinning and dissipating into the aether. Distantly, I was relieved; that was a good sign as far as inferno intensity was concerned—no self-sustaining engine of magical tides, nor a wound in the world. Tokyo’s sky would not gain a second scar like the one over its harbor.
But the park still looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. It was an absurd relief to my social anxiety that I was not the only one who’d been cowering on the ground, bowled over by the sheer scale of forces—the entire park had. The spindly trees had remained standing, but I could see the big tents laying half-collapsed, smaller ones uprooted and tossed around. The tall braziers of colored flame that were supposed to mark districts of the festival stood dead and askew.
As for my immediate surroundings, I was surrounded by commotion. A cluster of people stood and knelt on the other side of the table from me, where Miyoko had been sitting. I spotted her at the center of the press of people, lying propped up on a hastily constructed stack of the pillows we’d been sitting on. The high priestess must have been the one maintaining the field, and thus took the full backlash of Hina’s arrival. But she wasn’t my highest priority anyway. I turned, rubbing my hands together rapidly to stave off the chill. I’d only been in the false warmth for an hour, tops—was the natural temperature supposed to feel this cold?
“Amane?”
A distorted, warbling ring came from behind me by way of reply. The Amethyst Radiance had mantled, standing tall, a purple statue unscathed by the devastation surrounding her. Once I made eye contact with her—or close enough—she acknowledged me with a nod, then her spike-snout swung back toward the chaos in the festival’s main section. Todai’s people stood clustered around her legs, barely coming up to her waist, like children against her stature. Heliotrope sat unmantled on her shoulder, leaning against her head. She was on the phone with her left hand while she dabbed something off her face with a napkin scrounged from the table—blood, I realized, trickling from under her bangs. I winced.
“You alright?”
She lowered the phone momentarily to curse at me. That was probably fair; I didn’t have better words for the destruction my girlfriend had wrought. Had her first rescue of me also been so explosive, when she’d saved me from the Peacies and that buried car? Or did the apocalyptic suddenness of her arrival mean she thought I was in even more danger now? It certainly displayed a stunning disregard for collateral damage; even if nobody had died in that initial flashbang of contact, the ripple churning overhead would have already begun to seep into people’s flesh. I needed to help contain it, or evacuate civilians, or both. What about Kimura?
I started to get to my feet and start making myself useful, but didn’t get all the way up before my ankle wobbled beneath me and I remembered that my stabilizer had been rendered useless. I reached for my cast-off suit jacket—it was warm, which I tried to savor while gingerly feeling toward the pocket. The stabilizer unit itself was cooked, too hot to touch; the component meant to convert interfering ripple to harmless heat had been overfed by the extreme conditions and amplified by the white surrounding it. The cocktail of ripple had gone to town on the disc, partially crushing it into more of a V-shape. It was fucked. I carefully shook the useless puck of ruined magitech out of the pocket, and it crumbled when it hit the plastic tarp; {ASH} residue. Don’t breathe that stuff.
I shrugged my jacket back on, grateful that at least the device’s failure had left me with a warm outer layer. Then I tried to kneel again, putting my bad foot under me to see if the prosthetic itself had also been fried. It seemed like the stabilizer had taken the brunt of it—so no walking for me, but at least the basic analgomantics in the prosthetic were working. I sat back down, trying to stay huddled up for warmth. There wasn’t much point in standing; it wasn’t like I’d be much use in the pursuit even if I was fully mobile—
A sound like tearing metal erupted next to me. Adrenaline surged. I flinched away, scrambling backward from—
“Cutie! Hi! Love the hair!”
Hina looked untouched by her meteoric arrival—but she wasn’t in her mantle. I suspected it had been sacrificed as ablative shielding.
“Hina? Christ, are you okay? What the fuck was that? A fucking inferno—”
She flowed forward, standing over me and bending over at the waist with feline flexibility, putting her hands on my shoulders and nuzzling the top of my head.
“Shh. Can’t stick around; I gotta get him. Listen—he’s not working alone.”
I automatically reached up and put my hands over hers. Most of me was still shaken and terrified by the forces she’d just unleashed, but her touch was soothing in a small way.
“Kimura? I don’t—he’s working with the stalker, right?”
“Yeah. Haven’t found her, but it was his Flame. But—there’s others. Here.”
“Hina, clarify, please. Other stalkers? Other flamebearers?”
By now, the others were taking notice of her presence. The Hikanome and Todai entourages had turned toward us. Yuuka was disembarking from Amane’s shoulder, and Hongo stepped to the front of the crowd surrounding Miyoko. Hina straightened and raised her voice, addressing us all, but didn’t abandon her protective position over me.
“Other Sugawara loyalists,” she growled.
A cacophony of confused, overlapping Japanese exploded from both groups. I could hear Amane’s wind-chime voice over the group, but she wasn’t the one who reestablished order. That was Hongo, speaking in a resonant voice amplified and tinged by magic. He barked something out that made everybody quiet down, then pointed at Hina.
“Fox. That’s a severe accusation.”
“Don’t trust my nose, Nacchan?”
“Miyoko did,” Yuuka cut in, typing one-handed on her phone. “Called him a traitor right before he vanished. You got a trail?”
Hina nodded, idly running her fingers through my long hair. She spoke in a rush. “He’s shifting and hopping all over, but still in the park for now, ‘cause crossing the seams after what I just did to Shiny’s bubble would be suicide. I’m gonna find him, you guys find the other: Takagiri Izumi. Ring a bell?”
Hongo’s eyes narrowed, and murmurs erupted from his people behind him. Yuuka pulled the blood-stained napkin away from her head and inspected it, not quite able to snarl through her wince.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Hina agreed. “So that’s why I’m in a bit of a rush.”
Yuuka shook her head slowly and deliberately, in spite of her injury, and gestured around. “Yeah, she’s a loose end, bad fuckin’ news. And we’ll get her this time. We will. But—look around, Hina. Innocents first. Clean up your fuckin’ mess.”
“C’mon, Yuuka, I thought you’d be totally—”
Hongo shook out his robe. “Ghost or not, the flock is terrified and in danger because of what you just did, fox. I would not call it very mahou shoujo to put civilians in the crossfire like this, and you’re interfering with our internal affairs in doing so.”
“Bite me, Nacchan. Didn’t you hear the name? She’s after cutie—and working with Kimura to make it happen. They were probably working together back then, too.” She looked down at me, determination shining in the blue of her eyes. “She’s the stalker, I think.”
Yuuka frowned. “The what?”
My blood ran cold. “You—”
A new voice interrupted, crackling through distorted cell signal from Yuuka’s phone. “Hina, I take it we can’t convince you to clean up your mess instead?”
A relieved smile broke across Hongo’s face. He gave Alice’s speakerphone voice a courtier’s bow, deep and flourished with hand gestures. Many of Hikanome’s people bowed as well.
“Lady Dragon, it is—”
“You, shut up,” came the curt reply. “Hina?”
“Sorry, babe. I gotta.”
“Figures,” Alice sighed, staticy. “Then I’m authorizing you to give them hell and keep them off the rest of us while we stabilize this situation. Don’t kill them, though; I’ve got a lot of questions.”
“You got it.”
“As for you, Hongo-san: Leave discipline to us.”
He bowed to the phone again. “I would not dream of it, Lady Dragon, my apologies. As I was saying, it’s a relief to hear your voice in this time of crisis. Will you be gracing us with your presence in person?”
“The inferno’s cut the park off from the rest of the city. I’m going to see if we can open up a stable passage for emergency services.”
My skin crawled for a different reason than what Hina had just told me. I whispered up at her. “We’re trapped?”
Hina shrugged. “So’re they.” She knelt to nuzzle my face. “I’ll get them both. Promise.”
Another staticy sigh came through the speakerphone. “—Human life comes first. Yuuka, Amane—help Hikanome tend to their people, stabilize this—this clusterfuck. Once we find an entry point, I’m going to need your help to punch through, but that’ll be a few hours.”
I tried to push aside the revelation of my stalker—Takagiri, apparently—and focused on what Alice was saying about our situation. The top priority of responsible flamebearers during inferno response and cleanup was to shield the humans, but “a few hours” would mean enough ripple exposure that we’d have dead or dying civilians by the time the evac route was open. Even with five active flamebearers, we’d be hard pressed to shield everybody completely; the park was huge, and therefore so was the inferno. That was far more important than a few people being after me personally, especially if Hina was dealing with them anyway.
“Hina can’t chase two people at once,” Yuuka pointed out. “She’ll have her hands full with Kimura if that shatter move is as slippery as I think it is. What about Takagiri? Bitch disappeared completely after last time, and my eye’s munted right now on top of that. I can’t fuckin’ track her.” She sounded angry.
“She’s not a flamebearer. If she is after Ezzen, we don’t need to know where she is as long as one of us is with him. And once we have a tunnel open, they’ll have to go through us. Hina, you started this, I need you to at least tell me where the rift’s weakest so we can anchor the—”
“Mou kiechatta,” Yuuka groaned.
My girlfriend had vanished when Alice had begun to give orders, leaving no trace but the ghost of a kiss on my forehead. Was catching my stalker more important to her than human lives?
“Fine. That can keep—is Ezzen there?”
“Yeah,” I called out.
“Give him the phone,” she instructed Yuuka. The Heliotrope Radiance reluctantly passed it over, turning off the speaker as she did. I raised the phone to my ear, huddling under my thin jacket.
“Ezzen,” Alice sighed. “What kind of mess have you gotten into?”
“Uh, ripple shockwave toasted my stabilizer, so I’m not exactly mobile.”
“That’s—fine, you’re staying right there anyway. But, er, that’s not really what I meant; Hina only gave me very piecemeal information, and she said you’d fill in the rest. So please explain to me: what the hell is ‘the stalker?’”
I swallowed.
“I—um—I don’t really know? It’s…a person I saw.” My voice was shaking.
“A person you saw,” Alice repeated, deadpan.
“Yeah.”
“And why’s this person got Hina disappearing for days on end, and when she finally does reappear, it’s to tell me one of Sugawara’s old ghosts is back and then immediately cause an inferno in the middle of the city?”
“Because—she thought it was Hikanome related. Guess—she was right?”
“Ezzen, you sound terrified. I’m not going to yell at you for her mess, I promise! Just walk me through it from the start. When did this happen?”
“Um. Sorry. When you took me to the paperwork place, once you left.”
“Wait, last week? Why didn’t you say—agh, Hina told you not to, didn’t she?”
I tried to affirm, admit that this was all because of a stupid omission that had gotten out of hand, but my voice didn’t work; I was too afraid. It came out as more of a choking rasp.
“Ezzen? Oh, that’s it, wasn’t it? You were—”
“I was scared,” I blubbered. “And she didn’t want you to worry! We were going to go shopping and if we told you then you would have told us to come right home and that made her really upset and she promised I’d be safe. And then after, when we did go back because of all the Thunder Horse stuff, that took priority, and then it was all a mess and she told me not to worry and she’d look into it on her own! I—I knew that was a bad idea at the time, but she really thought you shouldn’t worry about it on top of all the other ways I’ve been causing problems for you and—sorry. Sorry.”
I was making a scene with my confession, but I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to shut out the people around me.
“That’s—okay, shh, it’s okay,” she soothed. I felt even worse that she needed to calm me down because of this, not the magical disaster I was standing at the epicenter of. “Tell me what actually happened.”
“I was—I was at a crosswalk and I saw a…a girl. At first, I thought it was Hina, but it wasn’t, and something about her seemed dangerous, and she was surprised I saw her, and then she vanished right before Hina arrived. Like—like a breaking illusion, like the {MANIFEST}-{TRANSMIT} thing we did when—for Amethyst’s mantle, that’s where I got the idea. It’s—”
“Breathe, Ezzen. I understand, thank you. Deep breaths.”
I did as I was told, trying to steady my nerves. It felt good to get it off my chest, but some guilt still remained.
“…Sorry. Hina’s a…bad influence.”
“Trying to win points back with me? I’m not upset, really. Not at you, at any rate. Just remember that opsec applies to external leakage, not internal. The team should tell each other stuff, yeah?”
“Yeah…Is she fired?”
“Hina? No. There’ll have to be…consequences, but if we can pin this to Kimura, it’ll all work out, I think. Know anything about that?”
“No. Should I?” I winced and was grateful Alice couldn’t see it. “Hina’s—got me pretty much entirely in the dark about this. Did it all herself.”
“So you don’t know why she accused one of Hikanome’s top flamebearers of working with the person he carried out a coup against?”
“No.” When she put it like that, I felt very much in over my head and out of my element. “I don’t know anything about the politics or history here. Um…Kimura disappeared in the same way as the stalker. And you said Katagiri’s—”
“Takagiri. Ta-ka.”
“—T—Takagiri’s not a flamebearer, which means it would make sense if he’s the one providing the magic, so…hold on.” A dark thought had sprang up in that brief moment of interruption, one I was afraid to voice. “Did…did Hina plan this? Did she not tell me or you so that I could be bait today? Because they’re trapped now, right? Is that something she’d do?”
“No,” Alice countered immediately. “I…resent that you feel the need for that much suspicion, especially of Hina. She loves you too much to play it like that. This was just…bad timing, I expect. For all the…mess that this is, I can tell you with certainty that she wouldn’t have put you in the crossfire if she could have avoided it.”
“And everyone else?” I was getting more upset. “There are thousands and thousands of people here! I’m not worth that much more than them.”
“…She’s…listen, Ezzen, she’s more selective about how she values human life than I’d like, but we don’t have time to debate the morality of it—just know that I’m not happy about it either.”
“Fine, okay. Can I help?”
“Yes, with information first. When it comes to Sugawara…we thought the book was closed on that. He’s supposed to be in a medically induced coma in a prison in Yokohama, and everybody loyal to him should also be in prison or dead. Takagiri just…vanished. If she’s back, and Kimura is back under his thumb…” She took a deep breath. “Was Kimura being…suspicious? Anything that could back up Hina’s hearsay?”
“They’re all suspicious,” I muttered quietly enough that Hongo wouldn’t be able to hear. “Their ‘welcoming ceremony’ was suspicious as hell—they isolated me into a reality bubble thing—but…I don’t know. He wasn’t setting off any more alarm bells than the others were.”
“Isolated you?” There was alarm in her voice.
“Um—pulled me into a pocket dimension, alone. They babbled about my Flame and offered to do a whole medium ritual with Dad’s ghost. I couldn’t really tell if it was grift or if they genuinely believe in their own magic.”
“Later, Ezzen. God knows we have enough to bolt down already—wait, his ghost?”
“I said no. It was just bullshit, right?”
“…Right, yes. You said your stabilizer was ruined?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re not thinking of resolving that with more blood magic to help Hina chase down Kimura, I hope?”
“No!” Christ, was that my reputation? Jumping at every opportunity to use blood magic to get myself into more trouble? “I—do you think Hina needs the help?”
“I…hope not,” she hedged. I didn’t like the uncertainty; in my mind, Hina’s physical capabilities were superior to all but the Vaetna. Alice explained. “Kimura was never a fighter, but Takagiri is dangerous, an unknown quantity, especially if they link up. Just—trust Hina has it under control, and we’ll keep another Radiance right by your side until we have you out of there. I don’t want to hear later that you were limping around covered in gore, sticking your spear where it doesn’t belong. Got it?”
“I wasn’t going to! But…I want to help with inferno control if I can.”
“Do you have inferno response training I don’t know about?”
“I don’t mean medical or crowd control. But—the park’s cut off by tidal shove, right? I can find the thinnest seam for you to punch through.”
Alice said something away from the phone, then picked it back up. “We don’t have readings yet, the crews are still setting up. Without Hina’s nose or Yuuka’s eye, Ai’s saying it’ll take hours and a whole server bank to chew through the data.”
I thought about this. This wasn’t a problem the Vaetna had to deal with; a vaet could literally cut through the storm. But we lesser flamebearers had to make do.
“Put Ai on, please.”
There was a rough, crackling noise as the phone changed hands. “Moshi moshi. Alice woke me up. Did you do something to your hair?”
“Later.” I was surprised at the grin that spread across my face at her voice. Finally, we were collaborating on something that mattered—saving people, not murder. “How many detection nodes are they setting up around the perimeter?”
It was good to hear her voice, but I was suddenly feeling the hurry; statistically, every minute we spent not evacuating civilians was taking weeks off the lifespans of at least a few of them, and I could potentially speed up the process of setting up a safe evacuation route by hours. I lowered the phone briefly and waved toward the group of Todai people, gesturing that I needed a pencil and paper.
“Sixty? Sixty-two. We’re pooling with Hikanome and the kanrikyoku—the Bureau.”
I had my phone in my lap and had pulled up the map of the park I had downloaded. I was facing east, and we were on the west side of the park, which meant—I glanced up at the sky, where the blue stain still remained in traces. The natural sky was otherwise visible overhead, but as I looked further down toward the horizon, the ripple at the borders of the park was combining in tides strong enough to distort the passage of light, let alone matter. I turned the map; Hina had come in from the northeast, so the backsplash and collapse of her cavitation trail would be concentrated on the west side of the park. That was making some assumptions about how Miyoko had set up her field—and how it even worked—but as far as I could tell, she still wasn’t conscious to ask about it.
“Any of them full-spectrum, 4-way flow?”
“Yes, ours. That’s only twelve. We don’t have many; usually Hina and Yuuka can do most of this without technology.”
“Well—” I glanced over at Yuuka, who was on her feet and talking to Amane, but still holding gauze over her magical eye. “That’s fine, I only need…eight of those on the southwest side bordering the VIP area, and three at points that superscribe a triangle around the park. Uh—” Clipboard came with my materials and helped me clear a spot on the table, and I scribbled out a rough blob of the park’s shape. “Thanks. Uh, Ai, I’m sending a picture of the layout on my phone.”
“Hai. I can picture it, I think—ah, there’s your photo. Alice—sou, acchi—” There was off-mic discussion for a moment. “She’s going to fly out the far ones. What are you planning, Ezzen?”
I had moved on to scribbling glyph notation onto the paper—where had Clipboard managed to procure graph paper in a situation like this? I drew lines, scribbled tension and offset and other notes, connecting shapes together. I didn’t need GWalk to know this would work.
“Gimme a few minutes. It’ll make more sense when I send the diagram.”
—
The chain of glyphs I drew was a bespoke data processing algorithm specifically adapted for the position and type of inputs the ripple sensors would give it. Generally, doing that kind of processing via glyphcraft wasn’t faster or easier than with a mundane computer, but this specific situation, simulating and guessing the behavior of ripple in a bounded space, was an exception.
I was banking on the fact that the field’s border nearest us, closest to Miyoko, would have formed one epicenter of the distortion effect; the other was obviously the stain in the sky, which marked the cluster of implosion points where Hina had first contacted the field. By using the ripple readings around those areas and the overall gradient of ripple tides picked up by the larger triangle of sensors that enclosed the whole park, it was possible to perform some clever reductions and triangulate the point where the effect separating inside from outside was weakest.
I lacked the skill to actually implement the glyph diagram with Flame—but that was the same as it had always been. Theory was my strong suit, not execution, and there was no reason for me to try to force it to work with blood magic. I had Ai implement the lattice instead, and once she understood what she was looking at, she found ways to streamline the process further, get even more computing power out of a relatively short chain of pink-oriented glyphs.
Eight minutes after I sent the diagram, we had the location of the best point of access around the perimeter of the park. It was closer to the south side than I’d have guessed, near where the map said there was a group of large theater tents. Amane and Hongo were occupied corralling and pacifying the bulk of the crowd in the northern section of the park, snuffing the worst areas of ripple, and coordinating what limited first aid we had; that left me and Yuuka to link with Alice from our side of the barrier.
It was determined that I was probably safest with Yuuka, even with her eye crippled. Alice didn’t want me around Hikanome’s people, in case there were more Sugawara loyalists, and I very much shared the feeling; plus, once we did get the tunnel open, I could get out immediately, and then we could completely deny Kimura and Takagiri access to me with them still inside the inferno. Clipboard helped me limp to one of the cars, and we set off toward the chosen site, with a scout car screening the off-road route before us.
“Today was supposed to be fun,” Yuuka groused from the seat in front of me. Clipboard and I were where we’d been on the way in, which put me diagonally behind Yuuka, unable to see most of her face past her bangs. Periodically, though, a trickle of blood would appear below the curtain of black hair, and she’d hurriedly wipe it away. “Stupid fuckin’ animal, had to turn it into a fight.”
We’d actually seen Hina again, very briefly. She’d blinked into existence in front of the car, ragdolled off the road, struck a tree so hard its trunk swayed with a crack, then vanished again as she rose to her feet. Evidently, she was fighting one of the two somewhere in the fourth-dimensional spaces outside reality—maybe even explicitly trying to cover me. I tried not to think about the possibility of an ambush as I looked out the window, toward the devastation caused by her explosive entrance.
The car wound its way around destroyed tents and signs of abandoned festivities. Some had been conventionally crushed by the hurricane-force winds caused by the pressure differential, but others were damaged in more esoteric ways, melted or overgrown or fractured as though reflected in a smashed mirror—signs of how lingering ripple had fragmented and distorted reality in those places. Some of them would return to normality as the larger inferno died down, but others would need to be stitched back together with magic to repair the local fabric of reality. For now, all that could be done was avoid them.
There were people, too. The tide of civilians—I tried not to think of them as the ‘survivors’, too morbid—flowed toward the park’s center and away from the most violently affected edges. Hongo and Amane’s efforts to herd them toward the safest regions of the park seemed to be mostly successful, but maybe every one in three were visibly sick or injured. Burns abounded, and a number of them seemed partially blinded by the immense flash of Hina’s impact, led by their fellows toward safety. Many of them were shivering, too sparsely dressed for the cold, and were using picnic blankets and stage costumes as makeshift outerwear to make up the difference.
While I’d been working on the glyphs, Hongo had reassured me that the human suffering on display wasn’t as bad as it looked; one of Hikanome’s premier miracles was curing ripple sickness, so most of “the flock” would make a full recovery from the magical effects. But even if I were to disregard my doubts about the veracity of said miracles, people’s symptoms would only increase in severity the longer they were trapped in here, so time was of the essence. The sooner we could get a tunnel established, the sooner we could evacuate the area of effect and get people proper medical care. That took precedent over my own desire to be away from the renewed threat of my stalker.
I’d have felt better if Yuuka’s eye was working. But the more I thought about it, wasn’t it weird that she’d been caught off guard even before Hina had caused the inferno? Shouldn’t she of all people have been prepared, have seen the whole incident coming through silver ghosts of the insane quantities of red and blue Hina would create? Curiosity nipped at me. The extent to which she had been caught off guard felt like it contradicted her foresight.
Prodding at her ego about it seemed like a bad idea, though.
“Is your eye okay?” I hazarded.
“Will be.”
“Will it…heal normally?”
“Normally? Sure, and pretty quick. But in the middle of an inferno zone? Might heal fine in here and then be munted when we get out.”
“Because of the white ripple,” I explained to nobody. “How does…looking through it work?”
She twisted in her seat to glare at me with her normal eye. “What’s with the questions?”
“Uh. I’ve been seeing a lot of magic I don’t understand lately. Like, I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the cult’s people claim to be able to do. So I’m trying to have an open mind, because understanding is better than not understanding.” I fumbled, unable to leave the statement there. “And if I can understand your eye better, I might be able to fix it now.”
“Ah, yeah, glyph genius, gonna solve all our problems for us. Because we’re not smart enough to do it ourselves.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It is.”
“Is this about me being a guy, again? I’m not—I don’t mean to ‘mansplain’ your own tech to you, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
Yuuka frowned. “Are you making fun of me?”
“No! I’m very confused right now!”
“Ugh. No, that’s not what I was insinuating. I’ve been told I don’t have to worry about that with you, anyway.”
Amane or Ai must have vouched for my character; I should thank them later. “Then what’s your problem with me? I mean—other than everything with Hina. I want to learn so I can help you; why’s that a bad thing?”
“She is the problem.”
“Alright, fine, fuck off, I guess,” I riposted, not quite able to disagree. “Just trying not to be dead weight.”
“Don’t start with the self-deprecating shit. ‘S not what I meant, and you’re not dead weight. At least you want to help, better than…” she gestured out the window, at the destroyed tents and refugees. “Her. That.”
“…Yeah. Not a very proportional response, is it? I mean, she’s here to protect me, and even I think this is overkill.”
“All this for your fuckin’…what did you call it? Stalker?”
“Takagiri, apparently. It was a…thing.” It was sort of a relief to at least have a name to the face, and an approximate location—even if I now knew that it was more than a one-off encounter. “But it doesn’t warrant this.”
“Wow, we agree on something.” She looked out the window, dabbing blood off her face again. “Yeah. She’s too focused on keeping them off of you when she coulda just…told us ‘n trusted us to do it. If it’s a problem for the whole team, we should handle it as a team.”
“Did she…I don’t know, expect you to see it coming?”
She must have seen something before or during the impact; the persistent blood on her cheek suggested she’d been affected intensely enough to overload the magitech organ, which made sense given the amplifying effect of the white ripple that surrounded us.
“Maybe. Don’t know if she was thinking that far ahead.”
“Alice said something similar.”
“Yeah. And—” she grunted with pained frustration, grabbing another piece of gauze. “Fuck. Like I said yesterday, eye was already on the fritz all week, but this is so big that I shouldn’t have been able to miss it. This is my fuckup too.”
—
We made it to the edge of the park a few minutes later. The inferno’s border wasn’t a solid wall separating us from the outside world; it was more like looking down into a body of water, gradually becoming denser and murkier the deeper you looked. There were flickers of motion within, a chaotic churn of magic that would corrupt and destroy any matter that dared enter it. Even going near it was a bad idea for unaugmented humans, so Clipboard and our driver were hanging back a healthy distance; Yuuka and I were afforded some protection by our Flames, which I could feel as a tingling across my body. Or maybe that was just the cold—either way, it was frightening to consider that the storm in front of us was the mildest point on the whole perimeter, according to the math.
We did have a few other human spectators: A crowd of Hikanome’s most die-hard believers, intent on seeing some of their divine lightbearers deliver them unto salvation. Many of them were praying. They at least had enough sense to not get in our way, but I wasn’t sure what they were so excited to see; Yuuka and I didn’t cut particularly heroic figures as we sat before the roiling storm of magic. That’s right, sat; I’d found a piece of shattered tent strut to use as a makeshift crutch, but when Yuuka’s complaints of a headache had turned into something akin to a migraine, she’d taken a seat on the grass rather than stand. I’d opted to join her. And we were both struggling with the elements; we’d thrown on extra layers to fight the chill, but huddled under them awkwardly. The ground was cold under me as we confirmed our position relative to Alice.
“Ten meters in front of us. You see her?”
“No. Should I?”
Another side effect of the ripple was severe radio interference, so we didn’t actually have contact with Alice. Supposedly, she was just on the other side of the storm.
“Nah, but I can hardly open my eyes to see for myself,” Yuuka admitted. “Hurts like a motherfucker. Let’s just get this done.”
“I’m, uh, following your lead here. Never done this before,” I reminded her, unreasonably ashamed of that fact. “Are we punching an actual tunnel, or just nullifying an area of the storm, or what?”
“Both. We’re locking down, Alice is punching through. You know how {ASH} residue is ripple-inert?”
“Ripple-invisible,” I clarified. “Not exactly going to block anything, is it?”
“The point is that we can make LM that does the same thing, a big block of it that the storm won’t fuck with, right through to the other side. Then Alice can punch a stabilizer lattice using that as a substrate. It’s just a fancy ward, but she has to do it from her side, because of, uh, relative reality baseline bullshit or something—you’re the math cunt, not me.”
“Yeah, I get it. Substrate is relative to our ripple-distorted space, lattice is relative to her baseline, bridges any desync. It’s really just LM?”
She shrugged. “We can’t just stab a spear right through it.”
“I—wasn’t thinking of doing it like Heung,” I lied. “Anyway, I can’t do {MANIFEST}.”
“That’s fine, just gimme your thread, I’ll stitch it in.”
It was kind of a relief to summon my Flame; as uncomfortable as the blazing-white fire was, I welcomed the heat in my numb fingers. There was no need to hurt it, either; I had more than enough pain to offer it right now—and it seemed eager to spring forth. I was distantly relieved that it only erupted from my hand’s scars, as usual; I’d been a little worried that all my raw, altered skin might serve as an ignition point and I’d go up in a self-inflicted magical fireball. The clump of pale, living magic coalesced into a spool of thread around my forearm and hand; that part had become familiar, though the quality of the thread still left a lot to be desired.
“Sorry about how rough it is—what the fuck?”
Yuuka’s Flame wasn’t white like mine, and it didn’t come from her hand. Her bangs were being pushed out of her face by wind that wasn’t there, exposing her damaged eye. It poured thick droplets of grey Flame tinged with dark red, oozing out from the gemstone eyeball like blood in zero-gravity. She snapped her hand outward, and the Flame-blobs followed, swirling around her arm and coating it like a grey gauntlet. She grinned at me wildly, eye bleeding magic, then beckoned for my thread. I held my forearm toward her, and she plucked the tip of my thread in her gauntlet and tugged.
“Ow!”
“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. She closed her fist, then opened it slowly, and now a lattice of thread was spun between her fingers. She drew her hand back slowly, glyphs spinning themselves into existence in her hand’s wake, my thread woven through hers in a way that felt uncomfortably intimate. Then she clenched her fist again, and lattice…manifested.
It was a simple geometry, just a box the shape and size of an eighteen-wheeler’s trailer, lying on the grass and stretching from right in front of us into the storm until it faded from view. The light caught it wrong—it was a neutral grey, but it looked unshaded, and if I couldn’t see its silhouette, I wouldn’t have known where the front met the sides.
A cheer erupted from the cultists behind us, even though it was just a featureless block. For them, it must have been a miracle—I was just glad we’d done our part.
“That’s it?”
“For us, yeah.” Yuuka’s bangs had fallen back over the cursed eye, but did nothing to hide the self-satisfied look on her face. “Alice should be doing her part any second now.”
“And then we can start evac?”
“Yeah.”
Compared to the size of the park, this box would be one hell of a bottleneck, but that also worked to our advantage; Sugawara’s people wouldn’t be able to slip out undetected. Yuuka flicked her wrist, banishing her Flame and relinquishing mine, which hissed back toward me and returned to its spool, sending pinpricks through the bones of my arm. I let my Flame go and shook out my hand, wincing.
We waited. First a few seconds, then half a minute, then a full minute. She frowned.
“Something’s wrong.”
“Is that code for we’re about to be attacked, or more magical in nature?”
“Second.” She got to her feet, brushing the dirt off her butt. “I don’t—aw, fuck.”
“What?”
She sat back down, swearing. “Hina’s fucked it up worse than I thought.”
“Meaning?”
“This was a giant field of white ripple. So the storm’s bad, but more importantly…”
“…It’s amplified—more desync between inside and outside than there normally should be,” I finished, and she nodded. “So it won’t work?”
“It will, ‘cause Alice is strong, but she’ll—wait, do you know about that?”
“Uh. About what?”
“What happens when she uses too much magic.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. “Oh no. It’s going to push her…” I blanked on the word. “Dragon transformation?”
Yuuka nodded, lips pursed. “Dragon-ka.”
“We should stop her. There’s—there’s got to be another way.”
“Nope, not unless you want to wait for the storm to die off. Ai isn’t strong enough, and Hikanome’s other couple of flamebearers outside don’t—”
The featureless block of LM imploded with an awful whistling sound. The front end facing us crinkled inward like paper caught in a vacuum cleaner. We both flinched at the noise, covering our ears as the interior of the rectangular prism was devoured from within until it vanished, leaving only the edges of the box—and a stable tunnel to the outside world. There were familiar colors at the far end of the tunnel, the red-and-blue flashes of emergency lights silhouetting an unmistakable figure, one whose tail hung between her legs. I couldn’t make out how the magic had changed her body at this distance.
The people watching behind us cheered even louder. I was glad I didn’t know what they were saying, singing our praises or praying or just celebrating—but cultish worship aside, it was sort of a dream come true. I’d saved people with magic. It felt good. I turned to face them—
“I see her,” Yuuka said, urgency in her voice.
“What? Who? Alice?”
“Takagiri. My eye’s, uh, unclogging a bit now,” she explained. “She’s in the crowd, or will be soon. Was probably waiting for the tunnel to open so she could slip out after you.”
My tattoo itched as I scanned the crowd, looking for the face I remembered. No luck. “Fuck. So what do we do?”
“You? Stay out of my way.” There was something odd in her tone—I looked over and saw that the grin was crawling back over her face as she stared into the crowd. “I can see her. The rest doesn’t matter.”
Author’s Note:
Disaster! Escalation! Confrontation! What a mess Hina’s made. And at last Ez has to confront the silly lie she dragged him into. Shoulda just told Alice in the first place, smh.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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