The next day, Alice finally found the time to sit me down and debrief the events of the Barbecue Inferno. It was a pale day; the clear and cloudless February sky held nothing to occlude the sunlight as it washed the Tokyo skyline into harsh, neutral off-whites, spilling through the east-facing window of the penthouse’s meeting room and onto the table, bright enough to overwhelm the warmer LED bulbs overhead.
The weather was similar to four days ago, when I’d gone to Yoyogi Park and everything had gone wrong. My phone said the temperature was roughly the same too. This time, though, instead of being shielded from the chill by a reality alteration field of incredible breadth and potency, it was the simple floor-to-ceiling windowpanes, a mundane barrier manifested from Todai’s money rather than Hikanome’s Flame.
Alice had called me in for a general review of that day’s events, but I was impatient to find a moment for my own objective: convince Alice that it was a good idea for Hina and I to go hunting together.
“For what it’s worth, I think you did great,” Alice declared.
I shifted in my chair, tracing my burn scars and savoring the warm sun, such a far cry from the abyssal cold. “Uh. Yeah, I guess.”
This debrief saw neither of us at our best; even with her first full night of sleep in four days, Alice still looked a little haggard, and I was still nowhere near a hundred percent. I’d practically collapsed into Amane’s padded chair after being summoned by the Radiances’ leader. I rubbed my nose, which made Alice smile.
“No, really. Both for the scheduled stuff and the crisis management, I’m really happy with you. Amane says you handled Hikanome’s introduction well. And the…well, not quite an argument…debate about the Spire was good enough. Shows you believe in something enough to stand up for it; they care a lot about that. I think you made a good impression.”
“…But?” I wanted her to hurry up.
“No but. You did well, really!” She nodded to emphasize the statement, faltering slightly as her eyes scanned down her laptop’s screen. “Well, we do have some notes for you, but nothing you won’t expect.”
“Notes?”
“Um…well, nothing important enough for us to talk about now. It’s already in your email, actually.”
A new email, a lighthouse.co.jp address they’d provided me in the rush to settle me in prior to my appearance at the festival. I’d actually already had a contact email, but they’d insisted I also have a second one for official communications. I shrank in embarrassment as I remembered I hadn’t been checking it even before the barbecue—nor my usual one, which now surely had hundreds of communiques piled up from fellow academics. Both accounts had slipped through the cracks—work I’d be putting off even further in favor of self-indulgent, bloody activities with Hina.
If I could find a moment to bring it up, that was, and Alice wasn’t giving me an opportunity.
“Don’t worry,” she insisted, mistaking my nervousness for one of my countless other forms of discomfort. “What’s much more important is what happens from now, yeah?”
I nodded. Was this my moment to bring it up? I looked down at my hands, building up the courage.
Before I could commit to it, she went on, sitting forward intently. Her voice changed, a little more hesitant and careful. “The big thing is that although you did great, Hina…”
“Did not,” I finished, drumming a scarred finger on the table with annoyance that I’d hesitated. I tried to segue into my pitch. “No—no need to tiptoe around it with me. I know she fucked up, and she’s got to make it right.” I took a breath. “I’m—”
“Hm!”
Alice’s monosyllabic interruption made me raise my eyes; her eyebrows had gone up. She seemed surprised. “I’m—yes. Yes. Yeah.” She sighed. “It’s honestly quite a relief to hear we’re aligned on that already. After Yuuka said you didn’t end up breaking up…”
I grimaced apologetically. What had been intended as a breakup had instead only redoubled whatever sort of strange bond I had with the sapphire-eyed girl, and Yuuka had not been happy in the slightest to find I was remaining a monsterfucker. But at least I was trying to help keep her accountable—shouldn’t that count for something in even the crystalline, vindictive eye of Heliotrope?
It counted with Opal, at least. She scrolled her laptop with one hand and rubbed her forehead with the other, trying to find her new talk track from her notes now that she knew she didn’t have to convince me of Hina’s guilt. Her eyes glittered beautifully in the sunlight, and I was momentarily caught off guard by just how pretty she was. They were all good-looking, but Alice’s face was practically sculpted—no, literally sculpted, by her Flame, into her image of her ideal self. With some dragon bits regrettably stapled on.
Facial beauty aside, Alice was also…hot. It had somehow become more uncomfortable to admit that to myself now—was I just attracted in the normal sense, or was I really feeling envy? The soup of desire-like feelings was so hard to suss out, even now that I knew the latter option was there. Neither possibility made it right for my eyes to slide down to her chest, though, and I quickly averted my gaze toward the window again.
That was another opportunity wasted by distractions. Alice was the one to fill the silence.
“They want a public apology from her.”
“Yeah. You said that, I think. Yesterday.” I cleared my throat, impatience battling with the more practical need to know what else Hina had to get done to clear her image in the eyes of both Hikanome and her teammates. “Um. That’s it? No new laws or fines or anything?”
I’d known Hina’s actions would have repercussions for her and Todai, of course, but the exact nature was quite murky. When we’d visited Tochou, Alice had hinted that Hikanome could exert significant pressure over them—a public apology seemed awfully light. Admittedly, Todai was in a bit of an odd spot legally; most VNT groups of Todai’s caliber were either more tightly controlled by whatever nation they belonged to, were quasi-religious ‘outside the law’ cults like Hikanome, or were more like states or fiefs in themselves.
Alice shook her head. “Well, I think you already know we’re paying for the damage to the park…and we’re also footing the bill for treatment for those affected by ripple sickness or more direct injury, to the tune of…” her eyes scanned down the spreadsheet. I wanted her to get on with it, even though I was the one who’d asked for details. “We’re still doing spreadsheets for the exact amount. Three or four billion yen, I’d say, to be paid out over the next thirty years. Technically it’s just a big donation to FVI, but I expect Ai will want to be a bit more hands-on in helping out.”
“FVI?”
“Foundation for Victims of Infernos. They’re like the Asian version of the PARC.”
“Ah.” I understood it when she phrased it like that; the PCTF’s Paranatural Aid and Relief Committee was the organization that had paid my welfare and provided my housing in Bristol.
As for the number, I whipped out my phone to convert to a currency I knew, but Alice preempted me.
“Twenty-five million dollars.”
“Jesus.” That was a mind-boggling amount of money to associate with the magical girl sitting across from me. Not much for a major corporation—technically nonprofit in Lighthouse’s case—but it was all effectively Alice’s money, since the others had little interest in the bookkeeping. The casualness with which she tossed around that kind of sum reminded me of just how powerful she was even in a non-magical sense. I spared another glance out the window, reflecting that it was funny how some of the most powerful people in the country lived in a 20-story building and not the 60- or 80-story behemoths surrounding us. An attempt to be humble, maybe. The Vaetna held no such pretensions.
But then, they were the Vaetna.
Alice shrugged when she realized I wasn’t going to continue from my interjection. “It’s the right thing to do. And that’s not all, of course. We’re paying for damages to the park itself—think I said that yesterday—and probably going to bankroll Hikanome’s next similar event. Which isn’t great for our image,” she added as an aside. “But, er, none of this really affects you, I just wanted to assure you that you did well and all of this isn’t your fault. You did commendably before everything turned to shit and made a huge difference after.”
“Even though I was the target and this wouldn’t have happened without me there in the first place.” I couldn’t help but be a little frustrated. I should have called Hina off, or at least checked in with her or something. It was nice to be praised for how I’d done before then, but honestly, that had all taken a backseat in my mind compared to everything that had resulted from what Hina had done. How had the day even begun? I’d been pink and itchy from my impulsive and ill-advised—though still totally worth it—magical epilation, and I’d been confounded by the air temperature bubble, and then Hikanome’s leaders had decided to ambush me—
My thoughts slammed to a halt and my breath caught in my chest as my idle, skimmed recollections of the pre-inferno barbecue brushed up against something I’d somehow almost forgotten.
“My dad. Uh—did I tell you about that?”
“Oh.” Alice blinked, scrolling with the mousepad. “You did, yes. On the phone. But there were bigger matters at the time. You said Miyoko offered necromancy?”
“I don’t… really know what she offered,” I admitted, feeling unsteady. I starkly remembered the disorienting discomfort of the strange space behind her eyes—seriously, what was it with flamebearers and eyes?—but I was having trouble recalling the exact details the trio had given, if any. “His ghost. To learn more about my flamefall. But it’s bullshit, right?”
Necromancy wasn’t real, not in any meaningful sense. It had been demonstrated that bodies could be animated with magitech, but that was just the magical equivalent of making muscles twitch with an electrode, not resurrection, not something with a soul. The idea of a soul in the age of magic was itself a subject of intense debate, and I even privately believed that there was something of the sort, the place where the Flame met its bearer, but the idea that Miyoko could pull my father’s essence back from whatever great beyond it had gone to was still farfetched. And horrifying.
Alice took an uncomfortably long time to answer. She leaned back in her chair and swiveled away from her laptop, turning to face the blindingly bright window and looking out at the skyline. East, I realized, based on the late morning sun.
“Hard to see it in daylight,” she muttered.
East was Tokyo Bay, and in the sky above it, the scar, the grave of where Todai had once fought a Hikanome necromancer.
“Hongo’s…sister?” I recalled dimly. “Failed to bring back her husband. Though ‘failed’ implies there was ever any chance of success. Which there…?”
“Is.” Alice breathed, more grave and careful than a sigh. She turned back toward me, the end of her tail making a soft hiss as it slid along the hardwood. “It’s—Ezzen, you told me when you agreed to join up that you wanted to understand what happened to your father. Miyoko will have answers. Maybe not the right ones.”
My skin crawled. “…You’re not saying it’s bullshit.”
Alice rubbed her face with a hand. No nail polish—too busy, I assumed. She looked at me intently. “I don’t have the energy for this conversation, and I’m honestly not the right person for it. I’ll…when things are a little less stormy, I’ll gather everybody and we’ll have an honest debate about the existence of the soul.” She said it lightly, almost a joke, but there was something uncomfortable in her voice. Her eyes fled back down to her laptop. “More to the point, I’m so sorry they got the jump on you and isolated you like that.”
“Uh. Oh, yeah,” I recalled, accepting the topic change. Whatever Alice was insinuating, it sounded heavy, and I’d had more than enough of difficult conversations in the past 24 hours. “How’d they do that, anyway? Pull the other people out of the car without me noticing?”
I’d almost forgotten that Hikanome’s leaders had isolated me for my audience with them; it had sort of slipped through the cracks since the rest of that day had turned out so insane.
Alice shrugged. “We don’t know exactly. It’s not their first time doing it—but they should know better than to do it to one of us,” she growled. Her brow furrowed. “But Yuuka wasn’t mad about it, I’m told?”
“Uh. No?” Not that I recalled, at least. A little vexed at most.
“Hm. Odd.” Alice typed something into her notes before her fiery irises looked back up at me. Her expression softened from tense and analytical to something gentler. “She’s got a bit of a complex about abductions, especially regarding Hikanome. I’d have thought she’d raise more fuss.”
“Maybe because she doesn’t like me,” I mused aloud.
Alice paused and stared at me. “She likes you a good deal, Ezzen.”
“What?”
My reply made Alice look very tired. “Take my word for it. Back on track,” she waved the topic away, “it sounds like you’re not too rattled about it, either?”
“I’m fine,” I confirmed hurriedly. But even as my mouth moved, a tangential idea was forming. “Wait, if Yuuka should be mad about that, shouldn’t Amane be furious? Being the actual subject of the abduction that kicked all of this off?”
Alice’s shoulders slumped, and I realized I’d stepped on a bit of a landmine. “She’s good at being angry quietly. Let’s just—listen, if you’re fine, then it’s water under the bridge. It has to be, because we’re not really in a position to demand an apology right now.”
“Okay.” After a moment of awkward silence, I added, “Sorry.”
“No worries. As for the offer they made regarding your father—anything else we should know? Timeline? Conditions?”
“Uh.” I racked my brain. The whole encounter felt a bit hazy and dreamlike in retrospect; perhaps that was a clue as to how they’d accomplished it in the first place, and why I’d nearly forgotten it despite how sharp of an emotional punch it had been, both then and just now. “They wanted an answer in…ten days? Though, er, that was before all the stuff with Hina and Takagiri. So I don’t know if that’s changed. Oh, and it was what they wanted in exchange for support against the PCTF.”
Alice nodded as she noted it down. “Bugger. Yeah. You’re going to have to go, if you’re willing.” She raised her eyes to me briefly and I nodded. “Let’s assume the date hasn’t changed, but it’s definitely not the top priority with them right now.”
This was my chance to bring up what I’d discussed with Hina. “Finding Sugawara.”
Alice sat up, squaring her shoulders and looking regal. She met my gaze. “And putting him in the ground.”
I blinked, surprised by the agreement and open declaration of violence. I’d said much the same thing to Hina, but that was Hina, and I’d come into this conversation expecting Alice to preach moderation and realpolitik. But Alice didn’t even sound resigned—there was a determined edge to her voice. She’d abetted our crime at Thunder Horse two weeks ago, after all. Mahou shoujo destroy evil.
That made this so much easier.
“Um, yeah, I agree,” I began, trying to find my footing for the script I’d written in my head. “I mean it just makes sense, right? It’s free real estate when it comes to clearing the air with Hikanome, but even if it weren’t, we’ve got Takagiri’s condition—what Yuuka and Ai put together is really just a stopgap until we at least have him in custody to understand how to break their connection, but that’s sort of half-assing it, isn’t it, because we could just instead kill the fucker and be done with it, right, and there’s also those two missing guys you sent, which let’s face it, probably means they’re already dead, but on the off chance they’re not, we should really go in guns blazing—and, um, Hina and I messed up by keeping my stalker—er, Takagiri—from you and we shouldn’t have, and so we wanted your permission to go after him this time, all above-board, which in hindsight doesn’t really seem necessary now that—hurk—”
“Ezzen! Breathe,” Alice laughed, unable to hold her composure entirely. “Yes, yes, we’re in complete agreement. Save the oxygen,” she giggled. “We’re going after Sugawara, that’s not in question. Hina especially—everyone involved knows she’d do it anyway, with or without permission.”
“Yeah, I meant—” I took another breath, “I meant that we wouldn’t do it without permission. That’s an—an agreement we came to. Yesterday.”
“Mm. When you were supposed to break up, supposedly.” Her voice was non-accusatory, even friendly, and I couldn’t really tell if she was upset or not. “Got her on a leash now, have you?”
“…Yeah.” I didn’t have a defense for that one.
“Thank fuck,” she sighed, then reflexively covered her mouth. “Oops.”
My brow furrowed slightly. I’d heard her curse worse, for one, but also, we were in the middle of planning a murder. That that was less of a violation of her personal code than simple profanity was interesting—and so was the reaction in the first place.
“That bad?”
She sighed. “It’s—well, after something like that inferno, I figured you were either done—with her or with us—or you were really stuck in it now. And I figured the only way you were going to stick around was if you found some leverage over Hina. Glad to see I was right. Last time was Jason, and he just left.”
“Ah.”
“But you’re staying. And you want to be on the front lines now, do you?”
“Well—I can’t much keep her on a leash if I’m not actually there when it counts, can I?”
Alice’s eyes narrowed, and her teeth flashed in a grin, more devious than her usual sunny, polite smiles. “If you want to hunt with her, you can just say it.”
I froze, then sighed.
“Oh my God, yes, thank you,” I admitted. Despite my lengthy ramble, I hadn’t been able to find the courage to phrase it like that. But that was silly—I’d come into this conversation expecting to have to make this pitch to Alice Takehara, the leader of Todai as a political entity, but she was also Radiance Opal, the paramilitary magical girl squad leader and Alice, Hina’s best friend. Of course she was both agreeing to it and reading the intentions behind it accurately. I still felt the need to justify myself, though. “I just—I want to help. I ought to.”
“And we welcome your support. But you’re hardly fit for active duty yet, are you?” She raised a hand and began to count on her fingers. “In the span of twenty-four hours, you ripped all the hair off your skin, got caught in the center of an inferno, overloaded on green ripple, and had a little jaunt through the beyond where you almost froze to death. Plus you’re not even on your final prosthetic yet. And that’s just your physical condition—pardon me for saying so, Ezzen, but you’d not be magically prepared for direct combat even at full physical health. No mantle, no snapweaving.”
“I rewove my foot’s {AFFIX},” I pointed out, but it was a poor shield from the truth; she was right, I wasn’t equipped to go out and inflict bloody retribution in the tradition of the Vaetna. I sighed. “I’m probably better off just sticking around and helping from the chair, eh?”
She nodded. “Right on. I’m not ethically opposed to sending you out there when you’re ready, if that’s what you want, but for going straight after Sugawara, getting our people back, all that? Leave it to your girlfriend; she’s a lot less squishy than you.”
“But she still needs supervision…”
“You don’t need to be right there with her to hold her leash,” Alice chided, smiling. “We’ll send someone with her—Yuuka, hopefully myself as well if I don’t get tied up. And we’re going to move fast—it’ll be tonight, once Hina makes her public apology and Yuuka’s out of classes.”
“Not…right now?”
“Life takes precedence, Ezzen” she sighed. “Doing it today is already rushing it. I want to make sure we’re on the same page as Hikanome first, and honestly, the difference between doing it now and twelve hours from now is pretty minor. I doubt he’s even in that hospital anymore, or Yokohama at all.” She rubbed her forehead. “As for you: help us prep, stay here, hold down the fort. We’ve got several things you could help with today. Do you feel up to it?”
A little nugget of annoyance sprouted in my chest. I’d made it abundantly clear I wanted to help and didn’t need to be babied. I met her eyes with a nod. “Sure.”
“Great. The biggest thing is that Hina, Yuuka, Amane, and Takagiri’s mantles are all wrecked. I’ve got slightly different tasks for you with each of them.”
“Hina’s, too? Oh,” I realized. “Right.”
“Shorn apart when she did her idiotic dive-pounce-thing, as you recall.”
I winced. Yeah, I recalled; the way she’d dyed the entire world blue for a moment wasn’t something to be forgotten easily. “Does she even need it?” I mused aloud. “What with the strength and speed and healing factor? She did fine without it for all of the actual fighting.”
“Not necessarily,” Alice agreed, “so she’s the lowest priority, and probably doesn’t need your help. I’m sure she wants it, though.” She accompanied that with a wink before going on. “But Yuuka does need hers, and it was mangled by Takagiri’s sword. I want you to figure out how that happened, help her repair it, and patch that vulnerability. If there are more blades like that—and I’d bet there are—I want us to not be instantly incapacitated by them this time. Takagiri should be able to help there, of course, if she’s…lucid.”
Takagiri was coming up on her fifth day without sleep.
I nodded nervously. “Uh, yeah. Shouldn’t be too hard even if she’s not; we’ve still got one of the swords and all. How’s she?”
“Not great. Clock’s ticking, but the coffin’s Ai’s job.”
The coffin was a euphemism for the box Ai had pulled out of storage on Yuuka’s recommendation. It was leftover tech from right after Amane’s rescue, back when her red ripple sensitivity had been off the charts and they’d needed to be able to isolate her. With my help, Yuuka had foreseen yesterday that the device—little more than some basic life support and a whole lot of high-power red wards—could be adapted to help shield Takagiri from Sugawara’s nighttime soul-incursions and thereby give her the chance to sleep unmolested.
Ai had been working on modifying it since yesterday—pulling an all-nighter herself, apparently, which I would have joined in had my healing-exhaustion not caught up to me soon after my conversation with Hina. I had been intending to go help her finish it up after I was done here with Alice, but now it sounded like I had other work to do.
“Bit of a grim name, isn’t it?”
“For grim purpose,” Alice conceded. “But like I said, leave that to Ai. As for your part in helping our guest…her mantle was completely obliterated.” She rubbed her forehead again, clearly unhappy with that outcome given what we had learned about our opponent barely two minutes after that. “Obviously, I eventually want you to get it back up and running—she looks miserable in the old guy body, and I can’t imagine that’s helping her mental state. But more pertinently, she can do independent piloting. I’d love to know how.”
“What about the bomb?”
“What about the bomb?” Alice sighed. “We don’t know if it’s even in there. If you do find something attached to her soul, some last-resort horror Sugawara cooked up, then we’ll stop and reassess.”
“Okay. Uh…to recap, fix Hina and Yuuka’s mantles and get a schematic for Takagiri’s.”
“Yes,” she grinned, apparently pleased with my basic recollection. “This is all in your email too,” she added as a not-so-subtle reminder; I winced a little. She glanced down at her own notes again. “I think that pretty much covers it. Uh, Amane’s mantle needs some reconstruction too, and while I’m sure she’s more than capable of dealing with it herself, lend her a helping hand if she asks, would you?”
Something that sounded like resentment had snuck into her voice near the end there; frustration with her girlfriend’s stubbornness? She reached up and touched her forehead yet again, wincing. Always the same place.
Alice caught the direction of my eyes and lowered her hand hurriedly. “Just a migraine.”
“Uh huh,” I replied, an unpleasant theory beginning to form. “You didn’t wind up getting any more dragon-ka, did you? Um—as long as we’re talking about dealing with it yourself,” I explained. “I did offer to help.”
“Nothing,” she said. “If I have a problem, you’d know. Sort of hard to hide the tail getting longer, heh,” she chuckled mirthlessly.
“I meant…horns,” I clarified, tapping my own forehead in the same place she’d been touching.
Alice stared at me. “No. Nope. Not happening. Nope.” She twitched. “You’ve got a lot more urgent stuff on your plate, so just—don’t worry about me, alright?”
“Are you sure—”
“Really, Ezzen, it’s so nice of you to be concerned, but there’s really much higher priority things going on.” She stood abruptly, slamming the laptop closed. “And we’re out of time for now, anyway—I’ve got to run off to meet with Shibuya’s mayor.” She power walked past me and out the door, leaving me alone.
I frowned slightly at Alice’s retreating form as she exited the room. The glimmer of her tail’s scales shifted from reflecting the greyish blues of the outside sky to the warmer indoor lights as she went down the hall. I squinted past the twinkle and tried to assess the draconic limb as a whole, deciding it looked no more massive than usual; I believed her on that front. I just didn’t trust that she’d not undergone any additional transformations from the magic she’d done during the inferno—Yuuka had certainly been worried when she’d punched the tunnel open, and if the precog had concerns, so did I. It stood to reason that Alice’s Flame was lining her up for horns of some sort. Those were plenty draconic, weren’t they?
I hoped I was wrong, of course—more stress was the last thing she needed. I felt bad for even bringing it up, honestly; if I’d known it’d spook her so badly, I wouldn’t have said anything. Stupid. Should have waited for actual evidence.
I tried to put it out of my mind as I lurched to my feet. Foot and a half, really; in theory, I was due to go through the prosthetic designs Ai’s underlings had whipped up, but neither she nor I had the time right now, and honestly, I was much more looking forward to getting some glyphcraft done. Even though I wasn’t going to come along with tonight’s operation, I still had my own part to play, magic to work, mantles to upgrade—starting by reverse engineering Takagiri’s swords.
Thankfully, Takagiri herself was lucid after all. She’d been staving off the ever-encroaching exhaustion by making herself useful, primarily with the coffin itself, but she’d also done me the kindness of actually mapping out how she’d made her swords sometime in the past few days.
We were in another basement room across the hall from Ai’s workshop, a few doors down from the prosthetic fitting room. This one was basically just a computer lab for Ai’s students, maybe thirty computers in three rows of ten. It was empty except for us.
“So it really is pink all the way through,” I muttered. “Hits the control circuitry directly, not the structure.”
“Yes. The parallel {RESONATE} pair here makes the…beginning? The entry on contact.”
“And from there it does a few {INFERENCES}, yeah, and then just hits…” I glanced over at the diagram for Yuuka’s mantle I’d pulled up on the screen. “This part, right? The {ALIGN} before the control manifold. Throws everything out of sync, and then it hits the manifold and…what, crashes the motive connection? Oh, but there’s fallbacks…which don’t land,” I decided, trying to follow the chain of execution in my head. “Or rather, they do kick in, but the gyro module is already done for, so they get the wrong data.” I squinted. “That doesn’t look right.”
“Because it’s not,” Takagiri confirmed, pacing back and forth carefully. She said it helped her stay awake, and who was I to contest that? Her motions were a little jerky and delayed; she looked so bad that it dismissed any residual danger I might have felt around her. She was old and beyond exhausted; in no position to hurt anybody even if she wanted to. But her focus hadn’t wavered, and her voice was steady as she explained. “The gyroscope portion of the manifold leaks pink. Not normally enough to matter, but enough for the sword to overload it. If you fix that, the sword would only cause a momentary interruption.”
I was impressed by her English, at least for this highly technical stuff. I supposed it made sense that if most of the Radiances were fluent in the vocabulary necessary to upgrade, operate, and repair their mantles, then so was she, having effectively copied the design. Maybe it made sense especially for her, since it was—had been—her lifeline to what she considered her true body. How much had she upgraded it, beyond the dual-piloting capability we’d already seen?
“Oh, the gyro. That’s why Yuuka, uh, fell over, and then the control circuitry was all fucked. You’ve already got the fix in your own mantle?”
She nodded. “I just routed the free ripple into {SEVER}. I’m sorry I haven’t recreated the diagrams for the whole mantle. I think if I sit down in front of GWalk for too long, I’ll fall asleep.” As if by nervous tic, she prodded at a patch on her arm—a caffeine drip—fussing with it as if worried the adhesive would come off.
I didn’t really know what to say to that. “Uh. Okay. Yeah, {SEVER} should work,” I affirmed, as I glanced over the diagram of Yuuka’s mantle. If it worked in Takagiri’s, it was good enough for at least this quick patch. “You copied theirs just from observation?” Takagiri didn’t respond, and I looked over at her. “Takagiri?”
She blinked and pressed the patch against her arm more strongly. “Hai—yes.”
“Insane.”
I meant it as a compliment, but she frowned. “I know it’s not normal.”
“Uh—no, I meant I’m impressed,” I clarified. Maybe not the best phrasing to use with somebody slowly losing their grip on reality. “Like, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Maybe a shitty copy of the basic functionality, but not to the same quality, and definitely not with the upgrades you made. It’s not…well, I don’t think ‘normal’ plays into it at all, really. You want what you want, yeah? And from this…you must have wanted it really badly. I—I get that.”
Her eyebrows went up. “You do?”
“Yeah, I mean, like, remaking yourself in the image of something more.”
“Like the Radiances.”
I twitched. “Uh…no. Sorta? But it’s like—not the way you do, I think. The things they’ve got that appeal to me are the things they share with the Vaetna.”
“Not their beauty?”
That brought me to a total halt. “I, uh. I guess? I mean, everybody wants to be attractive, right, and I don’t think most people would mind looking like them.” This was a distinctly uncomfortable topic for me, of course, with how much I tried not to think about how pretty my flatmates were. Even after over a week of acclimating to them, I’d still failed to stop my eyes from wandering between Alice’s most attractive features earlier.
Takagiri paused her pacing and gave me a Look; something between mirth, exasperation, and empathy. She shook her head slowly and emphatically. “No, Ezzen-san, not most people.”
“Oh.” Oh no. “Really?”
“Really. I’m very jealous of them.” She ran her hand over her mouth and flinched at the stubble on her body’s male face. It squeezed my heart. “I made my mantle, let Sugawara do…what he did to me, because I want what they have. The beauty, the youth, the freedom, the…woman-ness. Is there a word for that?”
“Femininity?”
“Femini—femininity,” she repeated, working her way over the repetitious syllables. “Ah, yes, that makes sense. But you came to them without wanting that? Or without knowing you wanted that?”
“I mean, I didn’t have much choice in it.”
“You chose to stay.”
“…Point.” I didn’t like this conversation. “Uh—so just fix the pink leak on the gyro, and your swords—or copies, which I’m assuming Sugawara’s dudes have access to, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation—won’t fuck with the mantles?” I looked at the diagram again. “Well, wouldn’t break them. There’s still the interrupt. Maybe the control circuit needs sheathing.”
“It does. You’re avoiding.”
“Avoiding talking about…gender stuff with you? Being trans? That’s ‘cause—we’re not in the same situation. You want to be like them, sure, that’s your prerogative, but don’t assume I’m the same.”
She raised her hands apologetically. “My mistake. I just thought you’d understand.”
And maybe I did. Maybe I knew exactly what she was talking about. But I didn’t want to talk about it with her—I was far more comfortable talking to the Radiances about this, because…I’d known them a few weeks longer? Just some implicit understanding that had come from living with them? Because they were visibly, irrefutably girls whereas Takagiri was wearing a male face right now? I kicked myself mentally for that last one.
“I…you’re sleep deprived and overreaching,” I declared, trying to separate myself from the conversation by pulling up Alice’s and Hina’s mantle diagrams alongside Yuuka’s to drown the topic under a flood of interesting stimuli for my magic-obsessed brain. “I don’t want to…get into all this until stuff has settled down more.”
I said that instead of “I don’t want to be friends,” which was a bridge too far, unfair, and a little mean. The diagram before me was evidence of her own genius at glyphcraft, and I could acknowledge that, and I did want her as a peer. But she was intruding on an emotional process I wasn’t ready to expose to anyone outside the gaggle of women who’d adopted me, not yet. Besides, she had tried to kill or abduct me a few days ago, and forgiveness only went so far.
Takagiri didn’t say anything in response. I turned to her again, wondering if she was having another sleep-deprived space-out moment—and jumped in my chair at her expression. Her eyes were fixed past me, over my shoulder, peeled wide open. There was terror etched into her face, deepening the lines of middle age into a rictus of awful recognition. My eyes followed her gaze, dragged along, dread and terror building as I saw she was gazing into a far corner, more dimly lit, away from the cold fluorescent lights in the center. From her expression, I was expecting to see a monster perched in that corner, staring us down. My tattoo itched in agreement, and something in the back of my mind was whispering to reach for my Flame, to be ready to snap into action. But there was nothing.
Wasn’t there?
“Takagiri,” I whispered urgently. “Do you see something?”
She said something in Japanese, muttering to herself, then switched to English. She didn’t take her eyes off the murky corner where nothing was. “He’s here.”
Author’s Note:
And we’re back! Thanks for your patience over the long hiatus. This is a bit of a recap chapter and setting the scene for this arc — I’m hoping for this one to be shorter than Arc 2. Ez and the girls have murder on the mind, and can you really blame them?
New thing: I’ve gotten a bunch of commissioned art done over the break (instead of getting an actual cover done for Arc 3, lol)! The first five chapters in this arc will each have a picture of one of the Radiances down here in the author’s note! The theme for these is that they’re official Todai photoshoots/posters, so this is the public’s image of them, not necessarily Ez’s. The first of these is Alice!
Art by Mjeow, who has done absolutely fantastic work on this whole series. View their portfolio and commission sheet here.
All the art in this series will also have textless versions, which I’ll put up somewhere on the site for if people want to download them, as well as some rad alternate versions that will stay Patreon-exclusive for now until I figure out what to do with them. If you’re interested in seeing these available as real, physical posters you can buy as merch, please say so in the comments or on the Discord — I’m interested in opening a shop for that sort of thing, but I won’t know if people are interested unless you say so. That’s it for these for this week!
Unfortunately lighthouse.co.jp is claimed by another company in our real-world timeline, so I can’t do any funny bits with it, like redirecting it here. Oh well.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter! We recruited three new betas over the break: Altrune, mirrormatch, and Enigma, and they’ve done a great job.
That’s all for this week! It’s great to be back. See you next Friday!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!
Hello, readers! Welcome to another end-of-arc author’s note slash blog post slash postmortem slash peek behind the curtain. This time around, I want to talk a little about writing, and then we’ll get into what’s going to be happening during the hiatus and next arc. I’ll also be posting a writeup about the inspirations for various characters over on Patreon for supporters.
Announcement: Goodies!
Before anything else, I want to highlight that there’s a side story publicly available on the site/Patreon for when you’re done reading this AN. This is part of a larger paradigm shift regarding Patreon content; basically, everybody’s getting more stuff. The short version:
Side stories are becoming public! They’ll be posted publicly on the Patreon and the site. Right now, there’s just the one, but I hope to write another during the hiatus, and then one every few months going forward. There may still be some paywalled ones, but I’m gonna default to making them public.
Patreon backlog is increasing from one advance chapter to three starting next arc, and the price is staying the same if you sign up before May 1! That’s 15k-25k words of advance chapters for $5. After that point, the price will be $10, which is still a better deal than now.
Writing a webserial is hard. Sunspot posts one chapter a week (and I take every fourth week off), but they’re long chapters, 4000-10,000 words depending on the week. The total word count in this arc was 124,930, meaning the average word count per chapter was about 6,250 words. That’s a lot of words! Readers who come from other serials may observe that this is roughly half the weekly output of other authors like Hungry or Thundamoo, and only like a sixth of that of pirateaba, that monster of monsters.
This is something that sometimes weighs on me a bit—but then again, all of those writers have far more mileage under their belts, and are necessarily outliers to be as successful as they are. So I’m not too broken up about it. There’s a universe where Sunspot’s weekly wordcount goes up, or I start a second serial. But we’re a while off from either of those, I think—I’m busy! For example, this arc had a few interruptions in posting around 2.06 and 07; that’s because I was busy graduating from…a bunch of stuff, actually. Hopefully, I’m done doing that, because it was really quite a busy time. However, I continue to have Stuff To Do IRL, so it’s possible there’ll also be some interruptions in arc 3.
As I said, it’s hard. Writing at the pace I do is only really possible because of the beta readers. I thank them in every chapter for a reason—their incessant poking and prodding helps me maintain a reasonably steady input so I’m not just cramming for the deadline every week, and their insights into the story are invaluable. I truly could not write this story without their help. If you’re interested in joining the beta reader team, we’ll be recruiting 2-3 more during the hiatus via the Discord.
I’m still growing as a writer. Readers seem to think the back half of this arc was excellent overall, for which I’m very grateful, but I found the action scenes to be quite a challenge. There’s a lot of moving parts! I’ve learned a lot from it, though, and expect it to get easier moving forward. On the flip side, I think the weakest part of the arc was the slice-of-life sections in the first few chapters. I enjoy writing slower paced character stuff, and I’d like to think I’m good at it, but giving them strong momentum is something I’ve struggled with. I’ll do my best to polish that aspect of my writing in arc 3.
Overall, though, I’m really proud of myself for getting this arc done, and I’m blown away by the story’s growth over the five-ish months it took to get here. Between RR and Shub we’ve gained over a thousand followers! The ads I’ve been running on RR have also performed exceptionally well, which is awesome. And the Discord has been, to put it bluntly, popping off—370 members at time of writing is ludicrous relative to the follower count, and it’s been so, so rewarding to see a community form around this little story. The general story discussion, the theories, the live-reads, and especially the fanfic (yeah, we have fanfic now, what the hell) bring me so much joy to witness and participate in. It blows my mind to have fans, and I’m so very grateful.
The Hiatus
Sunspot is on break until at least May 1. I’ve got various IRL errands to deal with, a whole lot of story-related stuff to do, and then a bunch of backlog to write. Here’s some Sunspot stuff that’ll happen before Arc 3:
The Patreon restructuring mentioned above
The beta reader applications mentioned above
Probably one more side story
More website upgrades. We’re gonna add an RSS feed!
A Bluesky account for the story
I’m commissioning character art!
Arc 3 will be titled Threading The Needle. I’m a little embarrassed to say that there’s no new cover in the pipeline yet—I haven’t even picked an artist. If you have artist recommendations, by all means, send them my way!
That’s pretty much all from me for now. To recap: thanks for reading, check out the side story and consider joining the Patreon before prices go up on May 1. If you have questions or further thoughts about the story, I’m always around in the Discord, so don’t be afraid to start a conversation!
You’ve all heard it. You’ve all said it. An eight-kilometer-tall megastructure appearing out of the North Atlantic helmed by interventionist demigods is a threat to us all.
Of course, the phrase means different things depending on who you ask. The Spire should not exist, say the Consortium, because it is a physical impossibility. The Spire should not exist, says Washington, because the actions of the Vaetna threaten the very concept of international diplomacy. The Spire should not exist, say the Zero-Day nutters, because it should not be possible for ten people to rule a nation composed of tens of millions of refugees, plus dozens of flametouched, without mind control or at least the violence the Vaetna are so known for abroad. The Spire should not exist, say the billionaires to each other on their private islands, because it hurts the bottom line.
All of these are very valid reasons to not want the Spire to exist, which is why we have Eschaton; I’ll loop back around to that in a bit. But the fact remains: the Spire stands, and the world has had to adjust to its presence. In light of that, before getting to the meat of the matter, let me start this memo with a history lesson, because I know many of us try our hardest to not think about the Spire when we can help it, and it will help clarify the importance of PIR 5875 and the situation with V-06.
As early as three weeks after the Spire’s Raising at the end of the Firestorms, HUMINT operators from over a dozen NATO member states were sent amid the countless refugees, hoping to embed long-term and gain a better understanding of life on the inside, the Vaetna’s strategic capabilities, and the advanced magitech that allowed such a society to exist at all. It was assumed that such espionage would be necessary, because nobody could quite believe that the Vaetna’s purported transparency about these things was the full story. The preliminary reports justifying these espionage operations cited the Spire’s geographic isolation and tightly controlled modes of entry as a reason to suspect that there were far more sinister and totalitarian modes of governance at play, especially when taken together with the extreme violence of the Vaetna’s foreign policy.
Within six days, every operator was trivially flushed out, in some cases literally hoisted by the scruff of their necks. It was made abundantly clear they had been made from the moment they’d stepped through their respective Gates. The Vaetna claimed no hard feelings and personally returned each and every operative safely to the office of the leader of their respective agency. To those of you who were around for that, I need not recount how humiliating it was for us all.
The Vaetna then extended personal invitations to take a much more open look at the Spire, top to bottom.
So began the series of studies that would together become the United Nations Cultural and Economic Report on the Spire (UNCERS). These studies ran the gamut, from demographic and quality-of-life surveys of the various refugee cohorts that made up the population, to the technical details of the hydroponic systems used to feed them, to the systems of governance that maintained societal order. This report was concerned primarily with the Spire’s function as a refugee nation running on infrastructure quite literally created ex nihilo and was surprised to find at every turn that things just…worked.
The Spire has all the trappings of a post-scarcity society when it comes to the basic needs of its population. There is money, the suna, but it is reserved for luxury goods; housing, food, and basic household items are all provided. Housing is allotted to encourage different refugee blocs to mingle, though care is taken to not overly separate communities that arrived as a unit. Rations of staple ingredients and spices are distributed to every household, making best efforts to match to their cuisine, all grown from the hydroponic gardens.
The gardens are of note because they form the Spire’s economic backbone. Due to a near-total lack of traditional natural resources, the nation suffers from a critical deficit of raw materials. To combat this, the hydroponic gardens not only produce the nation’s food supply, but also engage in the magically accelerated production of renewable raw materials, especially wood, organic-derived polymers, and cotton for textiles. Metal is especially limited; where required for household objects and electrical systems, it is taken from automated shipbreaking operations on the south face. The Vaetna have displayed a strong preference for buying ships whole and dismantling them themselves or retrieving wrecks rather than buying scrap. Since the initial report, stoneware has also become common thanks to oceanic sediment mining operations within the Spire’s territory.
All of these materials are mostly for household use, and cannot be produced or synthesized in quantities sufficient for the sheer scale of the Spire’s physical infrastructure. For this, the Vaetna leverage the unique solution of lattice-manifest (LM) matter, deployed and integrated at a scale that remains unrivaled. This is thanks to their abundance of Flame energy; upper estimates put the Vaetna at 80% of the PCTF’s stock. Combined with their cutting-edge mastery of magical engineering, this has allowed the infrastructure of the Spire to operate with a labor force of essentially nil; maintenance of the Spire’s physical structure is carried out by the Vaetna themselves and various automated systems.
Thanks to this level of automation and social support, there is no expectation of labor for citizens. People are still permitted to work, and most pursue a craft or education thanks to the Spire’s aggressive poaching of academics worldwide. The 31 flamebearers taking asylum in the Spire at the time of the report did not yet have a clear role; there were loose expectations that they would contribute to the Vaetna’s magical research, but not to commit their Flame resources to infrastructure, and were otherwise treated as regular citizens. This has largely held true to today.
At the time of the UNCERS, it was unclear whether this social order would be sustainable, but thus far, it has stood the test of time, and the current strategic understanding is that there is little leverage to foment internal unrest even if operatives could be inserted without detection. By all accounts, the people of the Spire are happy, the society functions largely headlessly, and the nation enjoys a largely self-reliant economy with low dependence on strategically critical imports.
So, where’s the catch? As far as the UNCERS found, there isn’t one. Per the report, there were no secret sanguimantic engines to provide magical power and no draconian legal system to maintain social order. And, perhaps most tellingly, there have been no cases of the nation’s now 72 harbored flamebearers abusing their power, either in organized attempted coups or as the individual cases of megalomania or instability that seem nearly pathological among flamebearers on the outside.
Of course, it is entirely possible that the Vaetna are simply that good at deception or intimidation, and that there did or does indeed exist exploitation or a fatal flaw in the organization of the society, and we simply didn’t turn over the right stones. But as the years went on and further reports were filed, the initial report has been more and more validated; the Spire seems to be equipped for the long haul as a post-scarcity civilization helmed by the Vaetna, with no smoking guns to suggest otherwise (at least when it comes to their domestic policy; their foreign policy is beyond the scope of this memo).
The main takeaway from UNCERS and its subsequent reports has been that the Vaetna are the lynchpin of the Spire. Their magic quite literally forms its structure and automates so many of its operations that the people are near-redundant. And there are only ten of them.
This brings us to the classified strategic report appended to UNCERS, which was concerned with strategic weaknesses. It was determined that despite the Vaetna’s martial prowess, any attempt to destabilize the nation should target them over the Spire itself.
A successful operation would, at minimum, shake the public impression of their invincibility, and at best, take one out of commission in such a way that allows for their considerable quantities of Flame to be harvested. Taking out one-tenth of the Spire’s infrastructure would both sow internal unrest and weaken their overall military strength. If done in a way that could also allow for harvest, even a single Vaetna’s Flame resources would dramatically shift the global balance of power and set up the Task Force for new frontiers of paranatural research. Most importantly, though, it would hopefully cow the remaining Vaetna sufficiently to reduce their interventionism.
So that was the task: kill a Vaetna, or at least strike a meaningful blow against them. To this end, the Task Force established a classified unit, codenamed “Eschaton.” But despite the expenditure of considerable resources and impressive ingenuity, little progress has been made. Even the Vaetna’s most egregious blunders (Dubai, Jharkhand) have only served to underscore the absurd difficulty of actually bringing one down, and no plan has ever reached a stage where execution was considered. In July 2020, Eschaton estimated that another five years and $800B would be needed to crack the dermis alone.
The situation changed on 11 February 2022, and this brings us to the heart of this memo. At 0512 SST (0712 GMT), a standard-sequence flamefall (Ripple Emanator 1242) abruptly changed heading to launch itself directly at the Spire. It was intercepted by V-02 (“Heung”) and splintered into four segments, which dispersed to four hosts:
Dalton Colliot, United Kingdom (at large; see attached Paranatural Incident Report 5872 and collated documents on “Ezzen”, as well as Paranatural Actor of Interest 385 “Lighthouse”)
Noah Gaspard Holton, United States (at large; see attached PIRs 5873 and 5882 and further documents on the Thunder Horse Inferno)
Ana Baker, United States (contained; see attached PIR 5874 and further documents on PAI 554 “Zero-Day”)
Artek Konieczek, Poland (decohered; see attached PIR 5875)
Konieczek was a typical decoherence case and was safely eliminated with no casualties by V-06 (“Katya”) in the Polish countryside at 0544 SST, an entirely normal Vaetna response with their usual rapidity and cleanliness when it comes to standard-sequence flamefall. V-06 returned to the Spire without incident after.
Here’s where it gets interesting: her public appearances have dropped off a cliff since. She was present at her next scheduled event the following day, and has since then only been seen once, for a very brief and boilerplate press statement on the events of PIR 5875 on February 15. She has missed fourteen expected appearances between February 11 and the time of writing of this memo. Such absences are not completely unheard of, especially in the wake of Dubai, but it is highly atypical following such an utterly unremarkable inferno cleanup.
The current theory is that she was injured by Konieczek’s ripple emanations, despite how clean the kill was. The implications speak for themselves: a Vaetna being seemingly taken out of commission by a routine inferno control deployment is potentially world-shaking. It remains to be seen whether V-06 will suffer any sort of long term harm, but even if she doesn’t, this is the first recorded chink in the armor.
We have reason to believe that the other flamebearers carrying segments of RE 1242 may also have some quality to their Flame or its ripple emanations that have a deleterious effect on the Vaetna. At time of writing, this is speculative, but strongly corroborated by anomalous behavior documented in PIRs 5872 and 5873; in both cases, Vaetna were on the scene early enough to have complete priority over retrieval teams, but did not intervene. This is especially notable in the case of Colliot, where three(!!) were present but allowed a PAI 385 member to abscond with him rather than intervene, despite his status as a person of interest to both them and the Task Force. In the case of Holton, V-10 (“Brianna”) could have easily evacuated him off of the actively-burning Thunder Horse oil platform, and the fact that she did not is also anomalous.
Taken together, there is evidence that the Vaetna are wary of something about this flamefall cluster. This is the biggest lead Eschaton has had since its formation, and steps are now being taken to capitalize on this information.
Currently, the Task Force only has one member of this cluster in hand, Ana Baker, who entered custody willingly and has been cooperative. She is currently under care and observation at the Center for Paranatural Studies at Argonne Laboratories in Chicago, but plans are now underway to transfer her to Eschaton custody while further plans for testing are drawn up. She may be fit for field work; see the attached psychological report.
Eschaton also aims to retrieve both of the remaining members of the cluster. Holton was rescued from Thunder Horse by an unknown PAI and remains at large; resources are being diverted toward locating him. Colliot’s whereabouts are known with exactitude; he appears to be putting down roots with PAI 385, which complicates operations significantly. His status as a person of interest in paranatural engineering already made him worth diplomatic attempts to retrieve despite our thorny history with Lighthouse, but we are now diverting significantly more resources to guarantee his retrieval.
It would also be desirable to get Lighthouse themselves on an actual leash. They have consistently been a nuisance for Retrieval, and harboring Colliot in light of this new state of affairs is the last straw. February 19th’s “Barbecue Inferno” (PIR 5910) presents an opportunity for significant leverage in bringing them to heel. See attached documents on PAI 114 “Hikanome.”
To conclude, I’m very pleased to say that Eschaton finally has a chance of returning on its considerable investment, and that we already have a critical piece of the puzzle in hand. More concrete plans for analysis and retrieval to come by the end of February.
Adam Eckhart
NATO PCTF Subdirector of Retrieval Operations
Author’s Note:
Big end-of-arc Author’s Note available right here!
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I was caught off guard by how sudden and intense my desire was to leap out of bed and go to Hina. I was possessed of the urge, for just a moment, to flood my muscles with Flame enough to stand under my own power in spite of the egregious harm I’d already inflicted on them, to rip the intravenous needle from my arm heedless of the pain it would bring. She was hurting, and she needed me. I wanted to feel her touch, press my forehead against hers until she felt better, tangle our limbs together until our heartbeats matched—
Logic caught the urge by the scruff. What an absurd emotional response; pushing my body past its currently much-reduced limits was a terrible idea, especially because Hina definitely did not need me there that urgently. I did have to talk to her, but in the sense that we should talk, not the primal need I had just experienced. What a drug she was. But she could wait; I was in the middle of something here.
“It’s…fine,” I told the room, glaring slightly at Ebi in particular for apparently snooping on my text messages. “As for—what did you call it? Inscrutable egg mania? That has nothing to do with undoing whatever the fuck Sugawara did. It’s just the right thing to do.” Ebi’s perfectly controlled digital face betrayed nothing, so I shifted my gaze to Takagiri. “Say more. He only has access to what your mantle experiences? But we destroyed that, didn’t we? Before you even, uh, betrayed him. So even if he can still get that info from you next time you sleep, as far as he’s concerned, the last thing you were doing was trying to kill us, so all’s good—no betrayal, no need for blackmail or explosion. Right?”
Takagiri made a soft, choked sound, and I realized my mistake in casually bringing up the destruction of her mantle like that. In all practical senses, the construct was her proper body, her ideal form, and without it, she was trapped in the flesh of a balding samurai. My own dysphoria—which I was still coming to terms with labeling as such—must have paled in comparison. Regret and awkwardness made my stomach twist as I watched her take a breath and blink away the trauma we’d inflicted on her, straightening up to meet my eyes.
“It is not just my experiences. It is also knowledge, thoughts, feelings. He will know what I have done. It is all—his.”
Her voice broke in that horrible way, the sound of violation and despair and terror. It tore at my heart. I had to help her, to free her from this—while my mind raced, Yuuka stood from her chair and crossed the room toward her. Despite Takagiri’s currently masculine body, the misandrist Heliotrope Radiance showed no revulsion, and instead, gently touched the woman’s arm, speaking more softly than I’d ever heard her. I couldn’t understand the Japanese, but from the tender tone and steady voice I knew she was talking down her former enemy from the verge of a panic attack.
If only I could be half as helpful. My bedside manner was shit; I was not equipped for this the way Yuuka was. For all her abrasiveness, she was also Amane’s best friend, fiercely loyal, and so knew how to gently guide somebody out of the long shadows of cruelty and abuse. I couldn’t do the same; my job was to fix the larger magical crisis. But Ai had already been working Takagiri’s no-sleep problem for two days straight—and was probably therefore running on fumes herself by now—and I doubted there was anything I could come up with in these next few moments that she hadn’t already ruled out with all her genius and software and instrumentation.
So that left me stuck. Maybe I actually was better off just trusting that the Radiances would see Takagiri through this nightmare, and my time would be better spent having the dreaded talk with Hina? I ran through what Takagiri had said, the particular nature of how she was trapped. We weren’t in a position to defuse the literal bomb attached to her Flame, or the metaphorical one that was the blackmail, so all we had to do for now was just find a way to let her get some sleep without letting Sugawara into her head. And with her mantle destroyed, that might already be the case—the issue was that we couldn’t take that risk.
And when I thought of it like that, I had it.
“Yuuka.”
She turned back to me. “Ezza.”
“Taking risks is stupid. Can’t we just check the future? See whether any information transfer would actually take place if she went to sleep?”
Yuuka froze. Her mouth worked, as though she were searching for words and discarding everything she found, until eventually her shoulders slumped. “You dipshit.”
“What? Does it not work?”
“Fuck,” Ebi groaned. “You said that in front of a data conduit straight to Sugawara.”
The beeping of my heart monitor accelerated again. “Oh. Oh shit. Fuck, right, opsec, sorry—”
“It’s…whatever,” Yuuka decided. “The whole point is to make sure he can’t get in her head anyway. Stop shaking. Actually—Ebi?”
“Yeah, on it.” The android snapped her slender, carbon-fiber fingers, and the beeping went silent.
I took a deep breath. “Sorry. I should know better.”
“You should, but it’s fine.” Yuuka shrugged. “I mean, she already knows about Ebi, and that’s a hell of a cat to be letting out of the bag.”
“And we already suspected that your power was yochi,” Takagiri put in.
“There ya have it,” Yuuka sighed. “As for the idea—yeah, let’s do it. I’m not getting any good signal about how it’d turn out right now, but if you do the Statue of Liberty thing, I bet it’ll work.”
I resisted the urge to ask why she couldn’t go down the chain of events to see the hypothetical silver ripple exposed by my Flame’s illumination via the silver she could see now—probably just too noisy, I guessed. It’d be decoherent mush rather than anything resembling useful information. That was an obvious candidate to improve upon, though; if we were to reverse engineer exactly how her eye worked and give it some proper testing—
While the magic-enjoying part of my mind was chewing on that, Ebi was yelling.
“No open Flame! Not when we’ve got Amethyst on critical alert down the hall. I can’t believe I have to tell you of all people that’s a shit fucking idea, miss best friend.”
Yuuka made an annoyed sound. “I know exactly how bad of an idea it is—it’s not, and it’s worth it. She’ll agree. She’d say so herself if she were up.”
“And she is not here to consent to it, bitchface.”
“Go wake her up and ask her yourself, then.”
“Uh,” I broke in. “If it’s that much of a concern, can’t we just take this somewhere a bit further from her? Down to the…”
I trailed off before I could blurt out “the ripple-shielded room in the basement.” I wasn’t sure it was classified per se, but I had set myself on edge with my previous fuckup. Takagiri raised her eyebrows anyway as Yuuka shook her head.
“Nah, moving you or her is a pain in the arse. Ebi, if you’re that worried, go on over to her and have the TXA ready. It’ll only take a sec.”
“Don’t fucking tell me how to do my job,” Ebi spat, but to my surprise, she stomped out the door rather than argue further—insofar as an android without real feet could stomp, anyway. It was more like angry clicking that receded down the hall.
Takagiri looked guilty. “That is also my shame. That Ishikawa-chan must be cared for. I knew and did nothing.”
“Nah, it’s not. Sugawara’s a cunt, and we’ll kill him. Ezza?”
I thought for a moment. “I mean, part of what we agreed was that I wouldn’t be obligated to participate in murder, justified or otherwise. But in principle, yeah, I think everyone’s better off if he’s—”
“Flame.” She looked like she wanted to hit me, which was warranted. She was in the process of taking off her eyepatch entirely, shaking out her hair as she did. She fixed me with a glare of crimson crystal, and I flinched involuntarily under the baleful magi-organ.
“Uh—yeah, on it.”
I tried to call forth my Flame. Heatcold trickled out of my chest and down my arm—but the feeling just pooled in the scars on my forearm, no ignition into the blinding white fire. I didn’t have any pain of my own to feed it, too swaddled in the comfortable coziness of whatever painkiller regimen I was on. I also didn’t have the frustration I’d felt with Hina, or the desperation of when I’d saved Yuuka.
But I did have anger on Takagiri’s behalf, far more than I expected.
My hand burst into a swirl of fire, painting the room in white glare splashed by ultra-black shadows everywhere the light could not reach as well as a few places it ought to have been able. I gasped at my first trickle of real pain, strong enough to reach me even through the medicated numbness. Takagiri flinched at the burst of raw magic, which made me feel unaccountably guilty. Was I unknowingly following in the footsteps of something Sugawara had done to her? Or was that just because the last time we’d done this had been when we’d beaten the shit out of her?
But she met my eyes, and I saw that my anger at what had been done to her was a shallow reflection of the ocean of her own rage. She’d been abused beyond belief by Sugawara’s violation of her Flame, his intrusion into her mind and soul—the invasion of sleep was a realm of horror I’d hoped to never directly encounter.
We would set it right. It was in that shared fury that I found the energy to feed my Flame and keep my arm aloft for Yuuka. My arm shook slightly from even that simple exertion, a sign of how badly I’d overworked my muscles, growing worse with each second. But all I had to do was keep my arm where Yuuka could see it as she alternated between staring into the blinding cascade and looking at Takagiri.
After ten or twenty very long seconds of turning her head to and fro, a frown crossed Yuuka’s face, then a wince. She hurriedly waved for me to put my arm down. I extinguished my flame, and the unnatural light evaporated off the walls, the spots of abyssal shadow re-normalizing as the overhead LEDs reasserted their neutral, medical glow. I opted to bring in my other hand to gently lower my trembling, exhausted arm and give it a little nerve-stimulating shake, rather than let it flop haphazardly.
“Well?”
“Transmission would still take place. And it’s…” she shifted her weight, rubbing her head. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to fucking kill him.”
“Uh. Is that a prophecy?” I sort of hoped it was.
“I’ll make it one.” The anger was in her, as well, which I found oddly relieving. She put the eyepatch back on. “But as for what I saw…yeah, no, we gotta stop this. I think we can, is the good news.” She put a hand on Takagiri’s shoulder. “We’re gonna go talk to Ai. I’ve got an idea.”
Before Yuuka could lead her out of the room, Takagiri bowed to me. “Thank you.”
“It’s…fine? It’s the right thing to do. It’s what the Vaetna would do,” I decided. “Monsters die. And I was just, uh, the torch.” I gestured at Yuuka. “She did the hard stuff.”
Takagiri came up out of the bow. “Torch? There is a better word, I think.”
“…Lantern?”
“Lighthouse.”
—
I have no idea if Takagiri intended to set my thoughts so awhirl with that, but it stuck in my brain as they left, sending me teetering along a precarious tightrope of thoughts pertaining to the circumstances of my arrival at Todai, the fact that I was seemingly starting to fit in, and, of course, the “gender shit,” as I’d put it. I’d actually been intending to ask Takagiri about that, hadn’t I? Before I’d gotten sidetracked by her much more pressing issue, of course.
Latching onto that thought, thinking of my handful of interactions with “Kimura,” I realized I probably already knew where she stood—she had already been under the impression I was some flavor of not-cis at the BBQ. The way she’d repeatedly complimented my hair, her hesitant probing as to my pronouns, and most tellingly, what she’d spat at me right before Alice had revealed they were of a kind:
They won’t understand you. They will use it against you. It will end like this for you as well.
Grim. But she’d said all that under the misapprehension that none of the Radiances were trans themselves, that they would be so coldhearted as to hold my gender over me as Sugawara had done to her, and she seemed to have changed her mind in the sleepless days between then and now. Actually—had that been why she’d first sought me out, back when she’d simply been “my stalker?” To scope me out to see whether I was slipping into the same situation she’d been in for years?
I’d get a chance to talk to her more about it later, once we were both in better places…hopefully. I was glad that my combo trick with Yuuka seemed to have made a difference; moving the needle was both satisfying to my problem-solving brain and a salve for my justice-seeking brain.
Unfortunately, without that cognitive chew toy as a means of self-distraction, I was left staring at the text Hina had sent.
It felt plaintive and desperate, and I was no longer able to pretend I felt she deserved to be so miserable—censured, perhaps, and some guilt behooved her, but I could no longer deny the presence of that urge to go to her, to comfort her. Stupid, irrational animal-brain. We needed to have a serious talk about the pretenses under which she’d brought me to Todai, her own morality, the ethics of our relationship; instead, I was growing increasingly worried that, once we were face to face, I’d just…not do any of that and simply snuggle up against her and pretend everything was alright between us so that I could keep enjoying the animal comforts of her company. I liked having a girlfriend, and I liked even more that she was so…well, more. I didn’t want to give her up, so I was possessed of the desire to avoid the talk we needed to have.
I sent a message before I could give in to those feelings.
Ezzen: Hey, yeah, we should talk.
Where? Doing it over text would minimize the temptations and desires that came with being face-to-face with her, but…no. She needed my physical presence. Did I want her to come here to the 18th floor and sit on that chair Alice and then Yuuka had used, continue the parade of magical girls? That didn’t feel right, though it was certainly logistically simplest if I was still bedridden. My body still felt too weak to get up, and I didn’t want to try before consulting a medical professional. That would just be a mundane version of overloading my muscles with magic.
“Ebi?” I called out.
“Yeah,” came a voice from—I wasn’t really sure where. I looked around, then realized it was an intercom mounted into the wall next to my bed. I felt kind of stupid talking to it—I remembered the video feed of Amane she’d shown and looked up at the ceiling. Sure enough, there was a little black dome in the corner. I made eye contact with that; easier than with a human.
“What’s my, uh, status? Can I get up and walk around?”
“Not gonna ask how Amane is?”
“Uh. How’s Amane?”
“She’s alright, no thanks to you guys.”
“Oh. Yeah, that tracks. Sorry.” I resisted the urge to derail into arguing about the necessity of it. “So. Can I get up?”
“To go exchange fluids with your female?”
I bristled. “Dude, what’s with you?”
“Messing with you,” replied the voice from the terminal. “I think you can probably make the trip. On two conditions.”
I sighed. “No green to juice up my limbs, got it. And we will not be doing anything…untoward, relax, not a drop of red in sight. I’m sorry about Amane, really. Give her my apologies when she’s up.”
“Uh huh. Well, I’m tied up with her right now—literally, arm in her stomach—so you’re on your own. You know how to take out an IV?”
“Yeah.” Old memories. “I can manage, I think. Can I get, uh, crutches?”
“Cabinet to your left. Haven’t adjusted them since last time you used them.”
There was a click as the intercom disconnected. I went back to my phone.
Ezzen: Okay, coming to you, I think. Give me a few minutes.
Removing the intravenous needle was simple, just pressing some gauze over it and pulling it out carefully so as not to damage the vein too much. I’d done it a hundred times before, and the technology hadn’t advanced much in the past few years. As I reached for the roll of medical tape conveniently attached to the IV unit, I was pleased to find my arms were approaching something I could call regular function; though they still had that day-after-workout weakness, and would surely have the associated soreness once the medication left my system, they weren’t shaking. Slow movements were manageable.
After binding down the gauze with the tape, I gave the rest of my body an experimental stretch, quietly hoping that some of the superhuman speed and lightness had stuck around after my self-enhancement. No luck—I just felt weak all over, my core and my legs sharing my arms’ recalcitrance to exert themselves any further. But as I sat up a little more and extracted myself from the blanket, something did feel different: despite having slept for two full days, I didn’t feel stiff in the slightest. My muscles were mush, but the tendons were loose and relaxed. I tentatively put my legs in the butterfly position and tried to stretch my back. My forehead could now touch the mattress without effort.
That was new—and exciting. I tried a few more stretches of that sort and found the same, easily pushing all my joints to their maximum from a cold start. That seemed to be the whole of the changes, though—my foot had not magically grown back, my hand’s burn scars were the same as they’d always been, and I’d already established that my hair was still the new, mysteriously vibrant orange. Still, this one minor change was enough to set me abuzz with nerves as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed; proof undeniable that I’d been permanently altered by the ripple I’d commanded.
With a shimmy and a lean, I reached for the cabinet Ebi had indicated and pulled the door open. I found the crutches—plus, between them, my prosthetic foot sitting atop a new stabilizer module disc.
I grabbed the prosthetic first and gave it a look. It was the same one I’d been using, judging by the minor scuff marks on the underside of the toes. I’d broken the {AFFIX} lattice when I’d rewoven it to launch myself at Takagiri by anchoring it to the floor of Hina’s room instead of to my foot; it’d been useless after that, hanging loose in my sock for the remainder of the incident. It seemed Ai had repaired it, though, as the prosthetic attached to my amputation without issue.
The stabilizer module was entirely new, by the looks of it. The old one had been ruined beyond repair from Hina’s meteoric pounce upon the barbecue—and she’d made the old one, which meant this one was also her handiwork, put together while I was unconscious. Alice had said Hina hadn’t left her room at all, but her guilt evidently wasn’t just making her mope; she was already trying to atone, at least when it came to me specifically. The first stabilizer module had been much the same, an apology for feeling like she’d hurt me. She did her best work when she felt guilty.
That would make this conversation even more difficult.
—
The penthouse was vacant. With Ai in her workshop, Alice packed with meetings, and Amane and Yuuka in the medical ward under Ebi’s supervision, there was nobody around, and the common living space was showing its disuse. The midday sun shone through the panel of windows onto empty bean bag chairs and the empty easel. The dish rack next to the sink was empty, but the island was littered with takeout containers and empty bowls of instant ramen; Hina was the primary cook for the household, and with her staying exclusively in her room since our collective return from the disastrous barbecue, I suspected nobody had had the time or energy to cook real meals.
I’d only been able to distract myself for a few minutes by aimlessly wandering around the penthouse before my feet had dragged me inexorably to the threshold of Hina’s room to face the silly clip-art sapphire that dangled from the door by a lone piece of tape. I was a little nervous to once again enter this den of coziness and clove incense and candlelight; I feared it would suck me right in, such that I would be unwilling to have the conversation we both needed. But we’d managed to do it last time, after our crimes at the oil rig. I put my hand to the wooden door and knocked.
Nothing. I frowned.
“Hina?”
Still nothing. My frown deepened as I reached for my phone.
Ezzen: Hey, I’m outside. Can I come in?
Hina: always
I tested the doorknob and found the room unlocked. Swinging the door open revealed darkness; her flight simulator at the far end of the foyer sat inert, and no glow of candles shone from the archway into her bedroom. I gingerly stepped in, hobbling to where the rooms met and looking into her den. It was dark, blackout curtains drawn to repel the sun, and I debated whether I should leave the door open behind me just so I wouldn’t be drowned in darkness. But this conversation deserved due privacy, even with the penthouse as empty as it was; it was the principle of the thing. I closed the door behind me and called out.
“Uh. Hina?”
Still nothing. I scanned the darkness, looking suspiciously at the various lumpy blankets. Was she burrowed under one of those, nesting as deep as she could to shut out the world?
“Is this all just a prank? Are you about to pounce on me? Because I’m really not up for it.”
No movement and no reply. I went to my phone again.
Ezzen: ???? I’m in your room. Where are you?
I stared at the screen, the only source of light in here, waiting for a reply. It took a solid fifteen seconds.
Hina: the other room
Oh. That made sense. For something like her, that was the ultimate refuge, entirely inaccessible to anyone but her fellow flamebearers. But I wasn’t going back out there; even if she’d sealed the room back up after its catastrophic breach—not a guarantee, knowing her—the idea of going back out there filled me with dread. Besides, I physically couldn’t. Did she expect me to just dive up and out of reality and swim right to her? I couldn’t recreate whatever I’d done to reunite with my spear; it was right here in my tattoo binding.
Ezzen: I can’t go back out there. If you and I are going to talk, it’s going to be right here, in your room in the building. Please?
“Okay,” she whispered.
I jumped at the lump on the floor that hadn’t been there a moment ago. I’d been expecting her to put up more of a fight, and the fact that she hadn’t was, frankly, worrying. And my intuition was right; she had bundled herself up, mummified in blankets and darkness.
“Hina? You…alright?”
“No.”
Well, it had been a stupid question. I carefully lowered myself down to the floor, setting the crutches beside me, and folded my legs. We sat in silence for what must have been two full minutes as I waited for her to say more. In that time, my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and I saw that the room was a bit of a mess, wrappers and other trash scattered all across the floor. Next to Hina’s lump sat a fist-sized box. It was hard to tell the color in the darkness. Red? Maybe green?
When Hina did speak up, her voice sounded like crushed gravel.
“I hate this.”
My heart hurt, but I tried to keep stable, hear her out. “Which part?”
“I hate fucking up like this. I hate making Alice and Ai and Amane and Yuuka and Ebi and you all mad at me. You’re way too nice and forgiving to the…the fucking hazard I am. I hurt a lot of humans—a lot of people, and I didn’t care. All I could think about was that he—she—was going to hurt you, and I went so far beyond overkill. It happens every fucking time, because I’m just…broken. And I can’t stop myself, I don’t want to stop myself until it’s too late. And now you’re gonna break up with me and I deserve that.”
That was a pretty accurate assessment of the situation, and she’d reached the same conclusion I had: this was heading for a breakup. But as I’d feared, the depths of her remorse cut me and made it difficult to just come out and agree with her. I didn’t want to hurt her more than she was already hurting herself.
“I…I’d like to think we can make this work,” I muttered. “Keep going with this. With us. And there’s a…” I wanted to broach the gender stuff, the pretense, but I couldn’t, not yet. It wouldn’t matter anyway unless she was able to control herself better, to respect the wishes of her teammates and me before she caused disasters and hurt people. So that’s where this had to start. “You want to be better, yeah?”
“So fucking much. But I can’t. I can’t,” the lump cried. “It’s not—there’s no control over it at all.” She was quiet for a few moments. “Yuuka’s right. She’s always right. I’m a fucking monster who can’t do anything but hurt people and you’re insane to want anything to do with me. They’re fucking stuck with me now, but you can leave. You should.”
Perhaps I should. But I didn’t want to.
“I can’t—how many people did you kill?”
The Hina-lump was quiet for a few seconds.
“None.”
“Really?”
“That’s what Ai said, but she’s just trying to make me feel better. Waste of her fucking time.”
“I don’t think she would lie to you about that,” I reasoned, trying to keep my voice soft. “I mean…we did act fast, and Miyoko supposedly performed at least one miracle, to save the food. I’d be surprised if she did that before doing everything in her power to save her, uh, flock. I…can believe she and Hongo managed to keep anybody from dying. Begrudgingly. Ai definitely wouldn’t lie about that,” I repeated. It was so weird for me to be defending Hikanome’s decency and capabilities like this; this storm brought strange bedfellows indeed.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Sure. I believe you,” she lied, voice dead.
“Hina,” I sighed. I had to switch tracks. “Just…so you want to be better, yeah?”
“Right now, sure. But it never lasts. I’ll just…run away again, find something to hunt until I feel better, and then it’s back to crazy kemono bitch. It’s just what I am. Not—not transcendent, not more, not a fairy. Just a really fucked up girl who’s better off staying right here where she can’t start hurting people again.”
I thought back to the ebb and flow of our encounters, how she’d fled from me on that first night, and more recently, how she had freaked out and run away to hunt Takagiri, the thing that had kicked off this whole debacle.
“That’s what happened after I, uh, hit you?”
“Mhm,” said the lump.
“Okay, uh…therapy?” That was the first thing that came to mind.
“Therapy is for humans.”
“Hina,” I groaned.
“I…” Her voice collapsed into a throaty whine that made my throat tighten. “Sorry. Sorry. I mean that literally, though. I’m just—yeah, I got a diagnosis from a psych. Borderline, bipolar. But I feel stuff so much stronger than a human does, so I can’t just…I can’t think my way out of it like you’re supposed to. Drugs don’t do shit either.”
“You’re not beyond help. Nobody is.”
—is what I was supposed to say, but I could recognize that would get nowhere with her. Instead, I was quiet, trying to think through what I knew of her, all the weird inhumanity and screwed-up priorities. I wanted her to be better. I needed her to be better; so did her teammates. What could make her be better? What did she care about?
So what I actually said was:
“Leverage.”
The lump shifted wordlessly, and I sighed a little, crawling toward her over the rolling pillow-and-blanket landscape. My limbs were weak, but this was the most forgiving terrain imaginable, and I eventually laid down next to the lump, on my back, looking up at the ceiling.
“Leverage,” I repeated. “Lesson one. You were trying to teach me that because you thought it was important for me as a flamebearer. It’s your…philosophy, I guess, or something like it. And that means it works for you, right? Even when you were manic—and you sure as hell were that night—you recognized it, valued it. So…I think you can be better, if we have the right leverage over you. And we do, I think. Because you love us—all of us. Right?”
The lump moved slightly closer to me, blanket rustling in the quiet, until her back—at least I was pretty sure it was her back—pressed against my arm. I found myself smiling and took that as a sign to continue.
“Thought so. It’s sort of…all you care about, isn’t it? And that’s not good, but it gives us a lot of leverage over you. I’m sure that…Alice, probably, has tried this before, and it sounds like it hasn’t worked. But as for me…I’ve got some idea of what you want from me, and I think—I hope—that you want it badly enough to stop you from acting on your worst impulses. And I know that’s not really a viable long term solution. Hell, it’s not even a healthy one, but we have to start somewhere, and I do mean we. You brought me here, after all. And I think you’ve felt guilty about it the whole time.”
She whined again, loudly. She knew where this was going. I rolled over a little so that my chest was against her back and hugged her with one arm.
“Hina, why did you bring me here? To Todai, instead of the Spire? What’s the real reason?”
“We could help you here. That’s what Jason said. I shouldn’t have fucking listened. I knew I’d get hooked and push you too far, and—and…”
I rubbed her shoulder through the blanket. “Help me with being an egg, you mean.”
“Oh,” she choked out, “they talked to you.”
“Yeah. And—you didn’t,” I said sadly. “I…I wish you had. I think.”
The lump jerked away from me. “No. No you don’t. I woulda fucked it all up. I am fucking it all up. So fucking stupid to think I could have actually had anything with you without talking about it, but I was so scared you’d run off, and…I’m so fucking selfish,” she whimpered. “I mean, fuck, that first night? How—why the fuck did I think that was okay?”
“Hey.” I squeezed her shoulder, trying to stop the spiral. “I’m…you didn’t force anything on me. Not then and not since. You were the one who stopped, because you knew you’d go too far—hold on, didn’t we have this exact talk like a week ago?”
“Mm.”
“Huh. Yeah, we totally did. But it’s different now, isn’t it? Because—fuck,” I groaned, remembering something. “On the date, when we were at…the clothing place. Uniqlo?” That sounded right. “I was so nervous you’d fuckin’. Force me into a skirt. And not because of anything you said or did! That was all me. And there’s been…Christ, probably so many other little things I just forgot about because I thought they were normal to think.” I facepalmed with my free hand. “Hina, if you’re really scared of being overbearing with me, or of ruining me, you shouldn’t be.”
“Okay.”
I squeezed her closer. “You listening?”
“Yeah,” she muttered, more genuine. “Just…do I even like you because of who you are? Or do I just see…Alice in you? Or Jason? Do I just fucking chase trans people because they want to be something else like I do?”
I hesitated. That was a scary prospect, and one I’d been avoiding thinking about since Alice had gotten through to me. Of course I wanted Hina to want me—to love me—for me, not for a label she’d assigned me all by herself. That was the core of the problem, really, the thing that had been silently hanging over our relationship without my knowing: she’d been assuming what I wanted, that me being some flavor of not-cisgender was a foregone conclusion and conflating it with my desire to be more than human. That she had been right was immaterial; the communication was the problem.
Also, had she just confirmed to me that Jason was trans? I mentally pocketed that one for later, forcing my indolent arms and abs to help me sit up.
“I think…that’s for you to decide. But either way, it sounds like I have just…so much leverage over you. An amount that frightens me, honestly. So here’s…here’s what I’m thinking. I’ve already given you a second chance, back after what we did at Thunder Horse.” The stumbling corpse, that handful of pixels of guilt, flashed through my mind. “But that was…all under a pretense of how I thought our relationship worked, what you wanted from me. I had been under the impression you just wanted to make me ‘like you’ in the sense of being, well, violent and powerful and manic, and you were happy to play into that. But that’s not what you were really after. So—do you want to make me a girl? Is that your endgame? I…entertained some ideas that you did, but dismissed them for reasons that I’m now kicking myself for.”
Hina whimpered again, then shifted around and rolled over to face me, though she was still a lump under the knot of blankets. I heard her take a deep breath.
“I just want you to be happy. Not…miserable, stuck. Same thing I wanted for Alice I don’t—fuck,” she sobbed. “But I don’t care whether that’s a boy shape or a girl shape or something else. I swear. And I…cutie, this is so fucking stupid. I’m fucking stupid.”
“I think we’re both really dumb,” I sighed, relief pushing away nerves and tension. I don’t know what I’d have done had she said that, yes, her endgame was simply to make me a girl. But this I could work with—I wanted to make it work. “Okay, okay,” I breathed, “let’s establish a new baseline. Last time, we said boundaries. And that—honestly, I think that worked?” I took lump-Hina’s lack of response as depressed affirmation and continued. I felt like I was about to drive a knife into her chest, but it had to be said. “But this time, about what you did at Hikanome’s barbecue…I want to give you a third chance, make us work. I really do. But.”
This time, I waited until she responded.
“What,” she rasped, tears in her voice.
“But we’re done if you fuck up like that again, make a mistake so big that your failure to control yourself is measured in human lives, lives I know you care about deep down. You—we—got so fucking lucky this time that nobody actually died, but there’s no way that’ll happen again. That’s my leverage. You can fuck up in smaller ways, even overstep with me personally, now that we’re on the same page with what you want from me. But you’ll lose me forever if you can’t rein in your mania when it counts most.”
It was harsh, and it hurt to say, but I got it out there without so much as a stumble. The words poured from somewhere inside me, really, rather than being consciously thought out; it was just the only way she and I could still work.
A sound split the following silence, an ugly, sniffling sob. Then another. Hina began to bawl under her protective layer of blankets. I desperately wanted to lie back down and hug her close, or better yet, squirm my way under the bedding myself and wipe away the tears, but I held my ground, blinking away my own tears. She needed me to say it. The sobs turned to a hoarse whine that split me open, and I just had to sit through it and wait for her to either cry it all out or run away again.
After a very long minute, one of the longest of my life, the heart-rending sounds settled into quiet sniffles, and she gave her reply.
“Fuck, I’m so dumb,” she sobbed, “I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve me, you deserve so much better. What—” she sniffled, seeming to compose herself. Her voice was a little clearer when she continued. “Cutie, yes, of course. Be something for me to lose, please, please, please. That’s all I need. I won’t fuck up again, I won’t disappoint you. Please don’t leave me.”
At last, that was enough to get me to start crying as well. I laid back down with her, cradling the lump of her form with my body so that we were facing each other. It would have been vaguely lewd if we were face to face, some kind of sixty-nine arrangement, but the veil of separation between us kept the emotional intimacy with none of the absurd horniness that could spoil the moment. I wept more quietly than she did, and I certainly didn’t whine, but they were tears all the same. We could work—she was at least willing to try, for my sake. That meant so much.
She eventually spoke again.
“Cutie?”
“Yeah?”
“I should have asked. What do you want to be?”
“A Vaetna.” The response was automatic, but it wasn’t the whole thing, and she waited for me to find the words to continue. “I mean…gender-wise, I have no idea. I’m like an hour or two into thinking about this. I talked to Yuuka and Ebi about what they thought of me, and…does ‘exotic cave lesbian’ sound like me?”
She didn’t giggle at that, but I did hear a smile in her voice, the first since…since I’d crushed her ribcage, a solid week ago, somehow. Was our relationship that fraught?
“Mm. Sorta? But I thought…you didn’t want me to define this for you.”
“I still value your advice. I mean, this would be, what, your third time?” I was putting the pieces together. “I mean, Alice explained her whole history with this, and it’s sounding like Jason is also trans. Trans man, specifically, yeah?”
“Mhm…”
“Which means you do not have a history of turning people to girls specifically. That’s a relief.”
“So…no girl?”
“I don’t know yet. Something in the middle, maybe,” I mused, “or something else altogether? I’m just throwing darts at the wall here.”
“I’ll help you with whatever it is. You deserve to be happy.” Her voice fell. “You don’t deserve me,” she repeated.
“Remains to be seen,” I countered. “Do you honestly think you can never be better, long-term, without the, uh, Sword of Damocles we just set up? Will it just be leverage forever? What if—hold on,” I said, an idea germinating. “You blamed your Flame for making you like this.”
“Yeah. It makes me worse, pushes me too far,” she sighed, despondent. “Makes the mania like…a brain fog, or something, where I only have to care about one thing. I hate it, but not while it’s happening. It feels awesome while it’s happening.”
“So you want to be…normal? Or at least less extreme?”
“I guess. You’re going somewhere with this?”
“Well, if your Flame changed you to be like this, maybe it can change you back?”
I heard her breath catch. “No. No, no nono. Cutie, I can’t give up being what I am, I can’t go back to being just a human, it’d—”
“No, no,” I soothed. “I love your…physicality, the power, the way you just flit around like it’s nothing. I mean mentally. You’re more meshed into your Flame than…any flamebearer I know of, though I really still don’t have as good of a grasp on that as I’d like,” I griped. “Point is, being a flamebearer is to be changed. You’re practically the embodiment of that. If you want to become less…extreme, if you really want it badly enough, wouldn’t your Flame hear that?”
Hina was quiet for a moment, considering this. “Alice’s tail,” she sighed. “Sometimes the Flame just…does shit. Dramatic irony, Yuuka likes to call it. I might be the same.”
“Maybe,” I hedged. “But maybe not. Don’t you want to find out? Don’t you want to try?”
“So much,” she sobbed, voice breaking again. “Please. Why are you putting up with me? The others all just…you remembered lesson one.”
I gave this a moment’s proper thought. “…Because I like you,” I decided. “Despite everything. Because of everything? Ugh. Hold on.”
I sat up once more and crawled my way across the blankets once more, toward the blackout curtains. There was a little pulley, and I tugged with what little strength I could muster. Bit by bit, sunlight spilled into the room, playing over the peaks and valleys of bedding and scattering through the crumpled-up tissues. It felt a little cheesy, but I was tired of darkness, especially after my brief jaunt outside reality. I blinked repeatedly to help my eyes adjust as I ambled back toward the Hina lump, trying to find the seam of her little blanket pod. She didn’t resist as I raised it, and finally came face to face with those blue, blue eyes. They were bloodshot, and the entire mask around her eyes was red from crying.
“Hey. Sunlight’s good for you.” Hypocritical, honestly, given my history of indoorsmanship, but it was still correct.
Hina nodded, looking nervous, and shimmied out from under the blankets shyly, sapphire eyes glimmering in the sunshine. The moment I dropped the hem, she pounced forward, tackling me down onto the pillow I’d found myself on top of, and nuzzled my neck.
“Love you. Love you love you love you love you!”
I stroked her hair, taking in the scent—not a particularly good one, as she clearly hadn’t bathed, and whatever no-body-odor thing Alice had going on obviously didn’t extend to my feral girlfriend. That was okay. Her hand mirrored mine, flowing through my obnoxiously orange tresses, then rubbed around my chin and neck as a giggle fluttered through her.
“No beard, wow. Very cis. Soooo cis.”
“I…yeah.”
I found myself smiling—how could I not, really? She pressed something into my other hand, and I leaned away from her a little to get a look at it. It was a little red box—Valentine’s chocolate.
“You already gave me one of these.”
“That was Yuuka’s. I never gave you yours, and you soooo deserve it.”
I tried to force the stupid grin off my face for a moment of seriousness. “Hina, this will still be a process. It has to be. If this is you swinging back into mania…”
The mask of joy cracked on her face. Her shoulders hunched. “I know. I know, I know. Not yet. Just…I was ready for you to break up with me. I wanted you to. It feels kind of unfair that you didn’t, and I’m feeling good. Do…should we stop?”
“Maybe,” I thought. “I…I think you have to fix a bit more of what you broke, first, before we can go back into the swing of things. My libido hates me for saying that, by the way.”
“Okaaaay.” She was giving me the puppy eyes. “How can I help?”
“Uh. I’m sure Alice has an entire file folder about Hikanome and the government and all that. But on my end of things…you want to hunt? Together?”
From what she’d said, hunting was an isolation tactic, a punishment by way of depriving herself of the people she loved, giving herself something to fixate on until the mania kicked in again. But it didn’t have to be that; it could be something we shared, a way for me to be there with her, to indulge our mutual desire to be more, to destroy evil together.
As I’d hoped, she lit up. “Keep going,” she whispered gleefully.
“Sugawara’s alive, and he’s even more of a monster than we thought. He’s got Takagiri in a…I don’t know what to call it. Psychic stranglehold, horrible shit. Let’s stop the problem at the source.”
Author’s Note:
And that concludes the regular chapters of Arc 2: Trick Of The Light. There’s still the interlude to go, which will put a bit more of a bow on the events of this arc, but is mostly going to be lore. Yay! Also, there’ll be the big authors note post.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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“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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If I dreamt after passing out in the grass, I don’t remember it. Perhaps I would have spoken with Holton again, or drawn the parallels between how I’d broken out of our shared dream and how I’d escaped back into reality from the abyss, or connected the gargantuan hunk of driftwood to the towering forest beyond the beach.
But instead, I just slept. I slept through finally being extracted from the inferno and taken back to Lighthouse Tower, through the remainder of the evacuation, through whatever the leaders of Todai and Hikanome had to say to one another in the immediate wake of the disaster. I slept through the inferno’s collapse and cleanup and through the initial news cycle for the biggest magical event since last week’s incident at Thunder Horse. I slept as Todai set me up in Ebi’s medical ward on the eighteenth floor, cleaned the awful dust-bunny-gunk off me, and scanned my flesh and bones for the changes my Flame had effected.
All told, I rested unconscious for three days—and that meant actually three days of healing this time, no bio-accelerant fields for me like I’d been provided when Hina had first brought me here. Ebi and Ai had been wary of kickstarting more substantial mutations in my body, and given that I had actually been mostly unharmed outside of the self-inflicted overexertion, they just hooked me up to an IV drip and let me sleep until my body decided I’d recovered enough to wake.
Thus I awoke to a familiar sight, the same as my first moments of consciousness in Japan hardly two weeks prior: a hospital room. Not quite the same one as last time, but perhaps adjacent. As I blinked blearily and rubbed the gunk out of my eyes, I was pleased to see my phone on the little tray table next to the bed, and my spear leaning against it. I reached out to feel the haft, reassuring myself that it was still there. We’d need to redo my tattoo.
“Don’t try anything funny.”
Ebi had been standing very still on the other side of my bed, and my still-booting-up brain had skipped right over her as I’d taken in my surroundings. I would have jumped a little in surprise if I was more awake and less pumped full of drugs.
“…Hi, Ebi. What—” I yawned. “What constitutes funny?”
“Pumping yourself so full of green ripple you turn into an avocado?”
I glanced down at my arms. Still human skin down there, even noticeably healthier-looking, less red and raw than the mangled results of my magical epilation. Vaguely disappointing, though not because I dreamt of becoming a pitted fruit. “Think I’m good on that front.”
“Time will tell.” She stood attentively over me, arms crossed, galloping her delicate fingers on the carbon-fiber shell of her upper arm. “How’s your pain?”
“Zero,” I confirmed happily. I was incredibly comfortable, no aching pain in my foot, none of the frostbite I’d inflicted on my hands, not even the ghosts of aches from whatever I had done to my muscles in those bursts of superhuman speed. “You’re giving me the good stuff.”
“Oh, yeah. Dipping into Amane’s supply.”
“I take it she’s alright?”
“Eh.” Ebi’s digital face twisted in annoyance. “She’s fine. Awake. Mobile and healthy as she can get. There was a spooky moment when we were getting her set up in here, but weather’s been clear enough outside of that. She’s a few rooms down from you.”
“But?”
“But her prostheses and mantle are fucked for the time being. Self-inflicted, I’m told.”
“Something like that,” I winced, feeling guilty even though Amane had made it quite clear that she knew the risk. “Glad to hear she’s alright, though. Yuuka?”
“Damn, you actually give a shit?”
I mustered the energy to glare at the robot.
She sighed, which sounded suspiciously like an audio clip recorded directly from Alice. It was a little weird that I could identify the origin. “She’s the most messed up of the three of you, but she’s alright. Some broken ribs, a lot of bruising, a really messed-up bunch of hemorrhages around her eye, and right now, we’ve got her on the same red sensitivity alert as Amane, but nothing that won’t heal. I’ve had her on eightfold.”
I looked up at the ceiling, processing this information. I let myself be relieved she was fine, mostly past the point of bad blood after the life-or-death circumstances we’d shared—but the same sentiment did not extend to the person who’d roughed her up so badly. The last thing I’d seen of my stalker had been Alice embracing her and calling her sister. Was it all water under the bridge now, despite the fact that I’d traded blows with Takagiri to stop her from killing Yuuka? I frowned.
“Where’s Takagiri? Uh, Kimura? You know what I mean.”
“Too many questions for somebody on morphine,” Ebi deflected breezily, waving her hand.
My frown deepened at the evasion. I was still feeling sluggish, but the comfortable kind, and I wasn’t exhausted or distracted by pain, so I had the wherewithal to briefly run through the information revealed to me before I’d passed out.
Alice was trans. So was Takagiri. Both were surprising. Alice had seemed forgiving, and it was easy to imagine Hikanome would be much less so, given that they’d already labeled Kimura a traitor, and from Ebi’s response…
“Ebi, by any chance, is she here? On this very floor? You’d tell me if she were, right? Because we’re such good friends?”
“…Noooo,” Ebi lied, clasping her hands behind her back. “Did you know that we’re footing the bill for the damage to the park? It’s over three billion—hey, no, stoppit—”
She rushed forward to hold me down as I tried to sit up. That turned out to be mostly unnecessary; pain-free though I was, my muscles still felt like jelly, and I only really managed a sideways half-flop. I wiggled back into a more dignified position to address her seriously.
“Ebi.”
“Ezzen.”
“She attacked me. All this?” I waved weakly to indicate my state and the Radiances somewhere down the hall. “Her fault. She was trying to kidnap me! And you just have her posted up the next room over, like she won’t do it again?”
“She won’t,” came Alice’s voice from the door.
I looked to see her leaning into the doorway. She was wearing one of Amane’s hoodies and a ragged, irritated expression on her face…and not much else. Probably some very short shorts hidden under the hem, but it was clear she was not dressed to go out or look pretty. She was pressing an ice pack against her forehead.
My pique softened slightly. “You okay? Uh—”
“Fine. Takagiri isn’t a threat to you anymore.”
That sounded a little morbid. “…You didn’t kill her, did you?”
“We’re not killing her, Ezzen.”
I winced. “Not what I meant. Uh—I’m glad she’s alive, really. But does she have to be here?”
Alice hesitated, glancing briefly down the hall, before sighing. “Ebi, clear out, and soundproofing on, please.”
“You got it.” The robot walked out of the room. I noticed she didn’t have feet at the end of her shins; the leg just tapered to a point. Were those new?
Once she left and closed the door behind her, Alice grabbed the visitor’s chair from the corner of the room and hauled it to my bedside. She dropped herself in the seat sideways and leaned against the back, rubbing her head and wincing.
“We’re holding onto her while she recovers and things simmer down a little. It’s a mess out there.”
“And you know she’s not going to attack me again…how, exactly?”
“Because she’s on our side against Sugawara—ow, fuck,” she groaned, shifting the ice pack around.
My worry and anger about Takagiri were derailed by Alice’s pain. She’d been mantled up for nearly the entire fight, which meant it probably wasn’t a battle wound. More likely, given her magical expenditure, it was her body itself.
“Dragon-ka?” I hazarded.
“…Some.”
“Say more.” I sat up a little. This was something I could solve, maybe, make myself useful.
“It’s…my tail’s growing,” she sighed. “And I’ve got a killer headache, though I don’t know how much of that to attribute to some new mutation versus just…all this. The Ministry’s been breathing down our necks about damages and the fucking cleanup and Miyoko’s been very suggestive that they’ll sell us out to the Peacies if we don’t, which I can only hope she’ll turn around on once we explain Takagiri’s situation—” The air on her side of the bed was starting to heat up. “—plus the press wants Hina to make a statement—which I’m absolutely not letting her do—and we have to delay all the ‘make a splash’ summer merch because Christ that would not go over well and the guys I sent to see what the hell’s going on with Sugawara have gone missing and it’s all…sorry,” she muttered, tamping down the warmth before it could flare any higher. “I’m overworked.”
“Uh. You’re fine.” She was very much not fine in the more general sense, but to be honest, I’d only been half-paying attention to most of the rant; I was much more comfortable trying to figure out what her headache might entail mutations-wise than grappling with the political quagmire Todai now found itself in. “Horns?”
“Fuck me, I hope not.” She rubbed her face with her free hand, trying to regain her composure. “That’s what you’re stuck on? Not the public relations debacle?”
“Trying to stay in my lane,” I shrugged. It beat talking about Takagiri’s presence…or Hina. “I wanna…help with what I can.”
“Yes, fair enough, that does sound more your speed. Er—I appreciate it. And sorry for the language, really, it’s just all such a mess.” She looked at me more seriously, a little more of her public face reconstituting. “Don’t feel obligated to help us clean this up—I wouldn’t blame you for having had enough of this by now, honestly. I understand if you just want out.”
I eyed her. “Are…you saying I should leave?”
Did they want me out of their hair entirely now, after being essentially the trigger for the entire event? Had I finally crossed the line from asset to liability, and now Alice was subtly trying to hint at me that I should take my leave and head off for the Spire before the political situation disintegrated further?
She shook her head hurriedly, then flinched and moved the ice pack to the other side of her head. “Ow—no, absolutely not! You’re welcome here, always.” A curious look came into her eyes as she met mine. “Do…you understand why?”
I looked at her blankly.
She sighed. “Okay, no, I guess not.” She shifted in the seat. “Let’s start from the beginning. Where I probably should have, honestly, instead of giving it the walkabout for two weeks.” She cleared her throat. “Ahem. I’m trans.”
“Right.” We stared at each other for a moment as I searched for something else to say. This was a harrowing, precarious topic, and regardless of how this factored into Todai harboring somebody who’d attacked me, I felt obligated to be respectful. Star would have taken my head off otherwise. “Um. Since when?”
So much for being respectful. I would have to bury myself somewhere far from civilization.
“Um,” she fumbled, also caught off guard by my inability to hold a conversation. “Since…since two years before the firestorms. A few months after I met Hina,” she clarified. “But it starts before that, back when I was just a gross little larva of a person, barely sentient and stuck on the wrong side of a thick eggshell. You know?” She cringed, then raised a hand to forestall my idiotic reply. “It’s just…okay. Once upon a time, I was a boy who didn’t like mahou shoujo.”
My brow furrowed. “You’re literally on the Wikipedia page.”
“Yes.” She managed a smirk at that, some pride shining through. “But until I was fourteen, I thought it was stupid girl shite. To be clear, I was always a total nerd, but I was way into all the boy manga, for boys.”
“Ah. That, uh, didn’t last.”
“It did not,” she agreed. “I started to develop a…private fascination with magical girl media—er, no, that sounds much more pornographic than it was. It wasn’t like that—but of course I was afraid my peers—again, remember, secondary school boys—would make fun of me for it, so I…never told anybody, for fear of being labeled a weirdo and a pervert. I was ashamed of it. Parents didn’t help,” she groused. “And of course it was Hina who found out about it,” she grinned.
“Ha.” I didn’t particularly want to be reminded of Hina’s antics right now, but I tried not to let that show.
“Quite. Showed up at our door complaining I was way overdue to invite her over—nevermind that I’d never told her my address—and the first thing she did upon entering my One Piece-plastered room was dive for my laptop and check the search history. And because she’s Hina, there was no judgment whatsoever, and suddenly I had a friend to talk about this stuff with, and the floodgates opened pretty soon after. I figured out that the shame I was feeling was repressed envy for those girls, that I didn’t actually like being a boy. Hated it, in fact.”
“Huh.”
I am a little ashamed at past-me for being so reserved, so timid. Perhaps if I’d been more involved, asked more questions, I wouldn’t have needed Alice to spell it out for me so completely, as she was about to.
“—So by the time the firestorms happened, I knew I was a girl, but hadn’t…done anything about it. I mean, I was a sixteen-year-old boy-apparent in Japan, at a school with gendered uniforms and strict parents. All I could do was try on Hina’s clothes and feel my body hair grow in, feel my voice get deeper, week after week, dreading it. I stank, too, eurgh, glad to be rid of that.” She grinned.
“Um. Girls can smell.” Truly an incredible point at which to start being the peanut gallery, out of the wealth of details she’d just given me.
The grin rotted to an awkward smile. “Sure. True, yes, fair point. Girls can smell. But not me, because I transitioned with magic.” She raised a hand, curling and uncurling her fist in the same way I’d seen Hina do a few times. “This body wasn’t human-standard even before the dragon reared its head.”
I gaped, realizing the implications. Alice was saying she’d solved the problem that Star and I and countless others, plus real researchers, had met only dead ends on. “But—how? Even the cutting-edge stuff was nowhere near parity with traditional methods before the crackdown, and—”
“Oh, Ezzen,” she sighed. “Here’s where I start being a hypocrite. This body? These?” She reached down and tugged on her hoodie to emphasize her boobs. “Blood magic.”
“Still impossible,” I protested, trying to maintain eye contact. “People have tried.” I thought of everything I’d gone through with Star, long nights collating existing research and trying to extrapolate from it. We’d always come out the other end despairing—though her for a different reason than me. Right? “Tried quite desperately,” I added.
Alice stared at me as though I were an idiot. “With borrowed Flame. Sanguimancy, especially the mutagenic sort, is a totally different game for proper flamebearers. You know that firsthand.”
“…Okay.” I had to concede that much, given the changes presumably racing through my body as we spoke, even if I couldn’t really feel them right now. “Then what did you give up?”
“Nothing…I thought,” she clarified, again getting ahead of my interjection. “I transitioned on the 2nd of March, 2016, and it took three days of…have you ever seen Event Horizon?”
“I don’t watch anime.”
“It’s a movie, not an anime. What I mean is that it was impressively, disturbingly gory, and unbelievably painful, and then I was reborn anew, exactly as I wanted to be. Everything as it should have been, beyond what hormones or surgery could ever do, at least with the current tech, as you pointed out. Well, I still had to do some voice training, and there was learning makeup and fashion and all that—I’m getting off track. Since this was less than a year after the firestorms, we still didn’t really understand how blood magic worked, so I’d just thought that losing the, er, block and tackle, was enough of a price, given how much it had hurt. Besides, gender euphoria is a very novel emotion to feed the Flame—this was when Hina was really starting to explore her own options also, mind you, and she was having a great time with euphoria as a catalyst, so we really figured that I’d paid my price in full.”
“…But?” I prompted, before realizing where this was going. “Oh. But dragon.”
“But dragon,” she agreed with a sigh. “It’s wasted on me. Being a dragon-girl is—pardon my language—objectively kickass, and I’m sure there are lots of other trans people out there who would have been delighted for the Flame to do this to them—but for me, it’s a step in the wrong direction, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I’ll help—”
“I know, I know, and I’m so extremely grateful, truly,” she said hurriedly. “Let me finish. You know what would be worse than getting my ideal form and then having it slowly morphed into something else?”
“Dying?”
I was fortunate she didn’t punch me for that one. Instead, she leaned back in the chair and laughed dryly. “You’re really something, Ezzen. Worse than dying, depending on who you ask: having the power to undertake the kind of transition I did, but being trapped by circumstance so that you can’t. That was where Izumi Takagiri found herself. That is why I will give her whatever support and sanctuary I can. That’s non-negotiable.”
I glared at her for a long second while I tried to figure out how I felt about that. In the abstract world of ethics, I felt Alice was doing the right thing—and I could admit that my heart hurt for Takagiri, or at least for the abstracted idea of the horrible situation she was describing. It was eminently noble to help. But the actual reality of my situation, the things that had taken place the other day, made it hard for me to scrounge up sympathy.
“She attacked me. And Yuuka. Really didn’t seem very remorseful at all, frankly.”
“She was under massive duress. And we have a common enemy. Sugawara is active, somehow, and we know that thanks to her. Finding him is our absolute top priority right now, after keeping both of you safe. A flamebearer alone is a flamebearer who’ll get snapped up. You know that!”
I sighed. I couldn’t avoid talking about the politics any longer, apparently. “Hikanome’s not going to cover for her? Don’t they hate Sugawara too?”
“We…didn’t tell them about her situation yet. I think we will—Takagiri wants to, at least, but on her terms, once we’ve dealt with Sugawara. She’s tired of hiding. And…I want to believe that Miyoko and Hongo will ultimately be supportive of her, both for her sake and ours. It’d be best for her, and for Todai, because the situation is…well. The government isn’t happy, and neither are the Peacies. Hell, the Vaetna themselves might show up.” Before I could perk up too much at that, she reached out to put a hand on my leg through the blanket and gave me an earnest expression. “Listen, Ezzen—I’m not asking you to forgive what she tried to do. But you have to accept that she’s not evil, she was coerced, and we are not in the business of denying help to potential allies out of spite.” She sighed. “She’s not going to try to hurt you again.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.” It took me a long moment to swallow my personal sense of victimization, in part because—well, if Takagiri wasn’t the enemy I’d thought she was, then the far more unrepentant instigator of the whole debacle was Hina. And I still really didn’t want to think about Hina right now. “I’ll…try to get along. Is she going to be…sticking around? Long term?”
“I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “If Hikanome want nothing to do with her even after we clear things up…yes, I guess so. Would you like to talk to her?”
“…Why would I?”
Alice blinked at me. She opened her mouth, closed it again, opened it again, and closed it again. Fish-like. She put down her ice pack and sagged against her chair. “Forget it.”
She’d rallied her energy to explain all this to me, I deduced; now she was clearly approaching the end of her rope, and I didn’t want to impose.
“You can go,” I insisted. “Don’t let me take up your time. Thanks, for, uh—telling me about you.”
She nodded, glanced at the door, then back to me, and lastly down at the chair she was melting into. It didn’t look terribly comfortable, but at least the seat was padded.
“Actually, I’m good here for a little while,” she decided. “I’ve needed a break to just…process it all, you know? It’s been an insane few days. I mean…even all the politics aside, we knew Kimura. Talked with him plenty at dinners and such. And Takagiri too,” she rambled. “I mean, her really only in a combat and espionage capacity, and we sort of presumed her dead, but she was a known quantity. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that she’s him, that she’s been him this whole time.”
She was mostly talking to herself, offgassing what sounded like some serious mental dissonance. I didn’t have to shift my understanding in the same way she did; I’d only met Kimura only a few hours ago from my perspective, and technically Takagiri, very briefly, hardly a week before that. While they did seem like very different people, vicious assassin versus reserved samurai—to say nothing of the fact that Takagiri seemed a solid twenty years younger than her male body—it was easy enough to just think of it like Takagiri using Kimura as a mask for the public. Ironic, given that she was the magical construct.
“Really advanced mantle,” I mumbled, then realized something. “Hold on. All your research into mantles, proxying LM for your real bodies—was that for the same thing she’s doing now? Like, before the blood magic, was the mantle the way you were going to have a female body? Why the switch?”
Alice blushed, gaze fixed on the floor. “…Yes, that was the plan. After the Vaetna released the glyph lexicon, Hina and I tried really hard to figure out how to give me a girl body. The LM-facsimile-and-neural-link trick came from Ai-chan, who was exploring that side of things for our transformation sequence and ways we’d be able to fight like magical girls. The ideas dovetailed. Blood magic just wound up being…better. More complete. And it makes sense that if Takagiri wasn’t able to make that transition due to all the fucked up societal norms and Sugawara holding it over her, she’d have picked up where we left off with the mantles. Somebody was going to, eventually.”
“You’re not worried she stole the designs? Or that they were leaked?” I shifted awkwardly. “Something something, opsec?”
She chuckled. “I don’t think that’s the case. The fact is that she’s been doing this for at least five years; I think she made some educated guesses the first few times we were seen in public, copied the basic principles, and has mostly developed in parallel to us. There’s a lot of open-source research into LM constructs, after all.” She ended that with a meaningful look at me.
I rubbed my neck bashfully and avoided the look. “I’m really not that big of an influence. It’s all collaborative, and we’re always ultimately working in the Spire’s shadow, so—”
“You’re a genius on par with Ai. And that’s…” she faltered, biting her lip, and took a deep breath, steeling herself to push through my deflection and self-effacing. “Ezzen, the heights and depth of your research into LM and magic in general is literally unrivaled among your non-academic peers. That’s why everyone wants you so badly. And you always deflect that it’s about the Spire and the Vaetna, but—is there really nothing more to it?”
I froze, a deer in the headlights. “I mean—uh…no? Not really,” I blabbered, then started to get an inkling of where she was going with this, in light of the previous conversation. “I’m…some of my friends have called me ‘dysphoric’ about the Vaetna, and emotionally…I don’t know,” I faltered. “I don’t hate my body that way.”
“Dysphoria is a lot of things. If you ask me, you’re quite clearly uncomfortable in your skin, and you want to be something else than what you are. Would it be inaccurate to say you yearn for it?”
“I’m ‘uncomfortable’ because I don’t talk about this stuff…ever, not out loud,” I jabbed. “It’s not a gender thing, if that’s what you’re trying to say. It’s, um, transhumanist, I guess?”
This offended Opal. A pulse of hot air rolled through the room as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Genius in some ways, so very oblivious in others. Alright: do you know why Yuuka started being nice to you on Friday? After your haircut?”
I hesitated, remembering how they’d quieted her with a few stern words and the threat of Amethyst’s massive claw holding her head. At the time, I’d just assumed they’d convinced her to be nice to me with some mixture of cajoling, threats, and attestations as to my character—but given Alice’s current line of insinuations, a different theory came to mind, one that even I wasn’t so oblivious as to miss.
“You told her I was trans?” I gaped. “Despite the fact that I’m not. What the fuck’s wrong with you? That’s massively—”
I was interrupted by the clack of the tip of Alice’s tail striking the floor. She held up a finger.
“Ezzen, you freaked out so badly at a haircut that you did last-minute blood magic to undo it, and took off all your body hair in the process. That’s not ever a cis thing.”
“I—I did that after that conversation! That doesn’t mean I’m—”
Jesus Christ, past me.
Alice held up a second finger. “You dress like I used to, like you’re ashamed of your body and feel the need to hide it, like you can’t fathom a version of yourself that other people would want to see.”
I winced. “I’m not ashamed! It’s just…” I floundered. “Armor. Carapace. Like—like the Vaetna, damn it, you know this about me.”
“Uh huh.” She held up a third finger. “You’re already they/them on the forums, and you ditched your masculine given name within hours of arriving here. We had a whole talk about legally changing your name at Tochou.”
“That’s an anonymity thing.”
“You’re not online anymore.” She gestured around us. “Your anonymity died the moment you were flametouched, Ezzen. Just—if being called ‘Dalton’ upsets you that much, that’s a data point.”
My automatic flinch at the name was incredibly damning. She winced as well.
“Sorry. Do you see what I mean?”
“…I just want to be called Ezzen because it sounds right,” I sighed. “Because it’s the name everybody already knows me by.”
“That can be true without your deadname—and I’m going to call it that, if you don’t mind—causing a flinch response.” She sighed, looking tired. “Ezzen, I’m asking you to engage in introspection that you’ve been avoiding for…I don’t know how long, all alone in that room of yours. You have trans friends online, and I know you actually talk to them about gender stuff, from how you’ve been treating me and Takagiri. Have none of them ever brought this up with you?”
Star had, in fact, and a few others I trusted to that level. But the conversation had always ended with how I dreamt of going higher than that. Any kind of human wouldn’t be enough for me; I wanted to be more, to go beyond.
“Transhuman,” I muttered. “Not transgender, that’s what we decided. I want to be a Vaetna.” Why was I choking up? “Doesn’t that answer all of this…interrogation, to your satisfaction? Can’t that be that enough for you?”
“Is it enough for you?” Her tail tapped the floor again. “I’m not saying you’re like me, that your discomfort with your body has to mean you want to be a girl. There’s so much room for things in between or things that are neither, and transhumanism is far, far from being mutually exclusive with gender. I’d bet the reality is somewhere in the middle. Is that so farfetched that you’d simply dismiss it out of hand? Do you trust us—hell, I understand not trusting Hina about this, but do you trust me—that little?”
I stared her down, trying to quell the emotions churning in my chest—defensive anger at her directness, juvenile rebelliousness at the idea of trusting somebody with this. Logically, I could admit that she was right, these things didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. But something in my heart was endlessly frustrated with the idea of aiming lower. Maybe, just maybe, in a world without magic or the Vaetna, I’d consider myself nonbinary, but that felt like it’d be giving up on my dream. I didn’t want to be a different type of human, I wanted to be more.
But being more meant going down Hina’s path, it seemed, and I resented that, too.
A crumb of self-awareness loosened from the knot in my chest. Maybe, even if just as a temporary measure, a stepping stone, I could be a little more adventurous with what kind of human I was. Maybe it’d help everything hurt less.
“…Maybe I’m due for a little introspection,” I sighed.
Alice smiled. It was a warm, gentle thing, and it only grew wider as she heaved herself to her feet, strong legs fighting gravity to lift her girthy tail. She stretched her back, which raised the hem of her hoodie just enough for me to see that she was indeed wearing shorts. I quickly averted my eyes, like I was seeing something I shouldn’t—then caught that thought, examined it in a new light. I still didn’t want to ogle the woman providing my room and board, but the sheer panic that arose when I perceived the female body was…something worth examining.
Unfortunately, examining it led me back to the same thing I’d been trying to avoid since I woke up. I met Alice’s eyes again with some difficulty and a tiny bit of foreboding.
“I need to talk to Hina about this, don’t I? She’s…thought I was trans since the start, hasn’t she?”
Alice confirmed that with a nod, but her smile faltered. “I—yes, but it’s more complicated than that. And you do need to talk to her about it…but I’m not sure now is the time.”
I eyed her. “Why not?” I’d expected her to egg me on—heh—and encourage me to follow the momentum of my tiny breakthrough. “She being…especially Hina? If we have to have this talk, I feel as ready for it as I’m going to get.”
That felt good to say…until Alice’s smile dropped off her face completely, replaced by something sad and pained.
“Yeah, but she’s not ready. She’s doing…bad.”
“Bad?”
“Bad.”
Author’s Note:
Gemder 2: the gemdering! At last, the egg cracks, albeit in a hairline sort of way. Baby steps, Ez.
I’m always nervous writing these one-on-one, dialogue-driven chapters, but I think this one landed where it had to. There were a lot of ways for me to go about finally making Ez confront all his egginess, but I felt it was most honest for it to come from a direct conversation, as these things so often do in the real world. Let me know how I did!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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If only getting back to reality were as easy as letting gravity drag me there. Even though we were supposedly ‘above’ the three-dimensional slice of the universe humanity calls home, the physics of the space beyond was a complex balance of countless other forces that overrode Earth’s familiar homeward pull. I was instead sent plummeting through the kaleidoscopic abyss.
I screamed for the first few seconds as Hina’s room fell out of view above me, pitch black from the outside. It was when my lungs ran dry and I gasped in a fresh breath that I realized that there was, improbably, still some air out here, though freezing cold and distinctly oily. At least I wasn’t going to die by asphyxiation after everything else I’d been through in the past few hours.
Aside from that, though, the abyss was a thoroughly hostile place, not at all meant for three-dimensional meat-creatures like me.
I call it the abyss, and it’s true that it was darker than even the emptiest voids of the night sky, the same kind of unnatural shadow that my Flame cast when I let it burn—but it was not truly empty, and I was not truly blind. I could see vast objects—the equivalent of asteroids, perhaps—and stranger shapes, some sinuous like Jormungandr or branching like the roots of Yggdrasil, others jagged arcs so vast and distant they could pass for confused horizons. I fell past shapes that did not seem to obey the visual laws of perspective and parallax, rippling in form as my view of them changed, distending, twisting, sometimes simply blinking in and out of existence in an instant or flickering between two different shapes.
The greatest wrongness lay below me, in the direction I fell. The shapes there were distorted in a way I can only describe as poisoned. There lay the only true colors in this place—an entire rainbow so scattered as to be random noise, the ruined and crushed-apart edges of the inferno in realspace being washed out here by the tides of ripple. So in a sense, I was still falling Earthward, but striking that border would probably be a worse way to die than impacting any of the mammoth objects blinking into and out of existence around me.
So, looking down as I hurtled ever closer to the chaos was a bad idea.
Unfortunately, so was looking anywhere else. The sights of this out-place inspired a nausea wholly unrelated to my acrophobia, and I understood why Hina had told me to close my eyes the first time she had brought me into her extradimensional hideaway. I needed to shut out the sickening view of the beyond—but when I tried, a whole different kind of terror burst forth in my subconscious. There was an unaccountable urge to peel my eyes wide open, to keep my head on a swivel, to be on my guard; a prey-animal instinct, a hundred million-year-old inheritance from some prehistoric rodent that found itself suddenly stripped of protective underbrush and left exposed to predators.
Of course, neither keeping my eyes peeled for monsters—that weren’t there—nor squeezing them shut in a vain attempt to deny my situation would have made my chances of survival any better. And the screaming didn’t help, but could you blame me? My composure was at an all-time low. I spent maybe thirty seconds falling through the space beyond space.
A new mass of darkness flickered into existence directly in my path, and I had all of one second to brace to be turned into a wet smear, not even enough time for one last attempt to spark my Flame that might avert the impact. But instead of becoming Ezzen paste when I struck the object, I instead dove into the universe’s largest dust bunny at speeds no human body was ever designed to go.
This felt as awful as it sounds. I couldn’t tell you what kind of stringy particulate made up the accumulated mass, only that it was dry and unbelievably filthy, and it rubbed excruciatingly against my exposed skin as my momentum carried me through the cloud, gradually converting the speed of my fall into friction burns. At least my clothes somewhat shielded me, though a poor excuse for armor. Bits of the filth stuck to me as I went, awful little cobwebs that threatened to invade my mouth. I was terrified that I would come to a tangled stop while still inside, and then I would suffocate, or otherwise simply be stuck here for who knew how long, lost in the void.
Thankfully, I punched through the other end of the disgusting mass. My fall turned to a lazier drift, and then at last, I came across a real object upon which I could land, something bizarrely familiar and maybe even more displaced than I was: a chunk of bona-fide driftwood out here in the abyssal sea. I thought it was a mostly intact fragment of one of the trees that had been caught in the inferno’s edge, but that was impossible; it was far, far too large, easily twice the size of the largest trees on Earth, practically a skyscraper of wood. Maybe it wasn’t an Earthly tree at all, which raised questions I was in absolutely no condition to consider at the time.
Regardless of its origin, I will be eternally grateful to fate or whatever other serendipity brought me to it. I half-landed, half-impacted the piece of wood, scrambling to grab hold of the crags in the bark before realizing that wasn’t really necessary.
I laid on the uncomfortable bark, suddenly too tired to even pick out the remaining clumps of filth from my hair and clothes and wanting to just rest here a while—I didn’t know how long I had until this new surface would abandon me, but my body didn’t care. My muscles had had enough action and pain for one day, burning in protest from how I’d pushed them so far with the Flame. Surely, I could just stay here for a few minutes and rest, wait for Hina or one of the others to swim-fly out to me and retrieve me after they’d won, which would be soon. We’d hopefully taken Kimura out of the fight, after all, and I’d struck Takagiri with a blow very similar to the one that had taken Yuuka’s mantle out of commission. I was in no condition to rejoin the skirmishing.
But, my rational mind argued, I still had to get out of here. As much of a boon as the gargantuan driftwood felt like it was in the moment, an island of distorted familiarity and something that at least passed for solid ground, simply lying atop it didn’t actually change my situation. I was no more protected from the freezing cold or the almost-too-thin air, and every moment we continued drifting out here still increased the odds I would die by some incomprehensible interaction with one of the other vast, dark objects overhead. I needed to get back to Earth.
How?
The problem was that I had no idea where I was. I could still sort of see the edge of the inferno, that most-fucked up of horizons containing the only splashes of color visible. It lay in all directions, since I was still technically on the inside of the bubble. That perimeter, that chaotic storm of ripple, remained the most dangerous of all, not a way out or even a useful landmark.
Pain and exhaustion warred in my body as I tried to think my way through it, crunching through everything I knew about my situation and the more general principles of fourspace navigation. It was cold comfort that this “side” of the outside was actually the less dangerous of the two, compared to going “down” from realspace. I stared up into the darkness with its churning shapes, feeling very small and starting to get overwhelmed.
For one, I didn’t even know how to maneuver across the fourth dimension; I fundamentally lacked the intuition for it as a simple three-dimensional creature. For two, even if I could move in that direction, re-intersecting with the main area of reality was not something to be done lightly. That Hina could do so with abandon was a sign of how far her anatomy had diverged from a typical, three-dimensional human body. I’d probably explode from a kind of dimensional depressurization even if I didn’t just pulp myself on impact. For three, there were more hazards to navigation than the simple risk of messy collision. Portions of outside-space were known to be curved in strange ways, and if I stumbled into one of those, I could wind up going in completely the opposite direction and not even know it.
And all that was to say nothing of the lingering feeling that I was exposed to things adapted for this environment that would view me as a snack—like Hina, noted some cynical part of my mind unhelpfully.
What about landmarks? I knew—in theory—how to use magic to calculate my location relative to a known reference point, and that would at least solve the problem of being lost; it was actually a fairly straightforward calculation, an almost idiomatic operation with {LOCATE}. But that wouldn’t work for me, because unlike every other flamebearer in the world, I didn’t have even a single persistent lattice of my Flame sitting somewhere in realspace to use as a reference point for that equation. My wig was made of my Flame, but that was right here with me, merged onto my head. When I’d been tugged out of reality in the first place, it had been via my hair, which probably meant something of significance, but I lacked both the energy and the analytical toolkit I’d have liked.
Just to cover my bases, I brought my aching arm to my head to spin a few strands of the oddly bright hair between my fingers. It felt…like hair, no great revelation there.
“Don’t suppose you have any hidden secrets to get me out of this?”
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the hair didn’t answer. At least the extreme isolation meant there was nobody around to catch me talking to inanimate objects. Did my hair even qualify as an inanimate object, now that it was apparently merged with me? That made it more like talking to myself, really. At least my spear would have solidly qualified as a separate companion and would have made me feel a little safer from the instinctual feeling of being exposed, but it was back in the grass on—
On Earth.
A jolt of adrenaline accompanied the realization, and my Flame shifted in my chest as it felt hope electrify my system. My hand reflexively went to my left forearm, where my tattoo conspicuously wasn’t. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I attempted to recall my spear to me at such a distance, in this space outside reality, but there was still an inherent link to the lattice embedded in my arm, and that gave me options. I just had to shift some parts around, re-weave the magic in place like I’d done in that moment I’d anchored myself with my prosthetic, so that it would point the way home.
Easier said than done. I didn’t dare try this with blood magic, not out here; reopening the old cut on my arm in this unnatural cold and strange atmosphere felt like it’d be gambling with my life even more than I already was—and my instincts were warning me against it, too, saying that whatever was out here would be able to smell my blood in the water. Irrational, of course, especially given that lighting up my Flame to do it manually would be the equivalent of a beacon around here anyway, and moreover there was nothing alive out here to hunt me.
That’s what I kept telling myself as I tried to ignore the shapes moving in the darkness. They were just debris.
Manual re-weaving it was, but the conditions were abysmal. My Flame was infuriatingly sluggish to ignite, seemingly out of energy after my stunt to strike Takagiri, and the act of forming it into thread in the abyssal cold stung my fingers with frostbite, making my already poor dexterity even more stiff and cumbersome. I was starting to shiver, too, and that made it even worse. Why was my Flame so cold now, when it had been searingly hot when I’d been pushing it through my body? But I couldn’t split my attention between a simple heat-generating lattice and my attempt to find my way home.
It felt like it took minutes to simply spin my Flame into usable thread. Then I had to feel around for the weave in my arm, an awkward process halfway between feeling with my fingers and trying to pay attention to the not-quite-pressure my Flame exerted as it responded to the space in my arm where the thread lived. After that, I had to partially unwind and loosen the lattice so that I could stitch in more of my thread, but not too much or the whole binding would decohere and then I’d be stuck.
It was slow, delicate work, and now I really did feel like I was torturing my Flame with how it was being crudely contorted. I whispered apologies as I wove, which rapidly devolved into a kind of prayer for survival, a mantra I could focus on to stave off the pain and cold and just keep going.
Unfortunately, my body failed before my willpower did.
My fingers turned blue, eaten through by the cold. The shivering became worse and worse until attempting to work the thread with the necessary precision became hopeless, fingers pathetically twitching against my forearm, so very cold. Yet simultaneously, I could feel myself getting hot—the final stage of hypothermia. I was going to die of exposure, not be eaten by some monster of the void. Salvation did not lie in more useless fiddling with my tattoo.
The cold brought a dream-like haze as I began to die.
In that fugue state, on my way to the final sleep, a memory bubbled to the surface of my mind. An action, divorced from context. I let the thread in my fingers decohere back into Flame and engulf my hand, and then reached out toward nothing in particular, as I’d done once before, in another space beyond space, in a dream. And as I had then, I touched…something. Resistance, a barrier I could not see or even truly feel. With my muscles failing in the deathly cold, sweat freezing on my brow and in my armpits, I reached out as far as I could, pushing, desperate for survival.
Take me home, I pleaded with my Flame.
And my hand brushed something else, something solid, something rough and round and cylindrical. I grabbed the haft of my spear—and something grabbed my wrist. I was yanked forward, through, out—or perhaps back in.
Then there were arms around me, something wonderfully warm and soft against me and rumbling deeply. Something warm moved through my chest as Hina’s Flame chased away the deathly cold. She hugged me close.
“Hey, hey, hey, I’m here. You’re okay. I couldn’t find you and I don’t know how you did that but you’re here now and I’m here and you’re okay—”
“Nngh,” I groaned in reply, sinking into her arms, high on the feeling of grass under my knees. The ground was cold, but it was a familiar cold, a natural one, not the abyss, and the air was clean and breathable and not oily and Hina was so warm. I snuggled as close to her as I could go, all our drama temporarily wiped away by the animal desire to seek the warmth of life. I didn’t let go of my spear, though. “Mm. Hi. Home.”
“Home,” she agreed happily, stroking my back.
As the worst of the cold began to ebb away, I regained some higher brain function.
“Is Yuuka okay?”
“Hospital. And you—”
“I’m here,” I groaned. “So it’s over? Please tell me it’s over.” I didn’t even have the energy to open my eyes at this point.
My reply came as an earth-shaking thud—which the Ezzen of a few hours ago might have panicked at, but at this point, I was just too tired to give a fuck from my dwindling supply. I sighed and forced one eye open to see that Amethyst had landed next to us. I blinked a few times, trying to get my vision to focus properly as I looked up at her glittering form looming over me.
She was untouched—not a scratch. She warbled what sounded like a greeting, but hadn’t turned to face me. Instead, she had her enormous arm-cannon raised, pointing at something away from us. Her spindly, digitigrade legs were set in a wide stance and dug into the dirt, acting as enormous stabilizing piles for the walking artillery. The chilly air momentarily dropped to the abyss-cold again as her cannon flashed, loosing a lance of purple light at something in the sky a few hundred meters away—where Takagiri was still brawling mid-air with Alice.
“…You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” I slurred, wincing at the blast of fresh life-sucking cold caused by the weapon’s discharge and automatically huddling closer to Hina again. Frustration blossomed in my chest; I had really been hoping my blow against Takagiri would have taken her out of the fight, like she had done to Yuuka, but everything I’d done, the haze of exhaustion and pain I was feeling, hadn’t even been enough to stop her.
Hina sighed. “God, you look great.” Her hands groped over my body, and I winced in pain as fingers felt my abused muscles. Her hands were so wonderfully warm, but the pressure was unwelcome. I pulled away from her, frustration mounting.
“The fuck? We’re still in a warzone.”
The hands stopped. “Sorry.”
“Why are you with me and not stopping that?”
“Um. I can. Aren’t you cold?”
“…Hina.”
She winced. “Yep, sorry, on it.”
She disengaged her limbs from mine, stood, and catapulted away from me, bounding toward the fight. I groaned and sat back on the grass, still struggling for function but trying to refocus on the danger at hand. I squinted as Amethyst fired again, another flare of light and cold snap, and this time, I saw the shot make contact with Takagiri—but deflect off her wards. That jogged my memory, the last thing I’d been thinking about before falling into the abyss. I rubbed my head, trying to drill into the chaos and remember despite the way my brain felt like jelly. What had it been? We’d taken out Kimura, and then Takagiri had showed up and hurt Yuuka, and I’d grabbed the sword and lunged at her, and—
Right. No blood when I’d cut her.
“She’s a mantle!” I called out to Amane, realizing that I should have told Hina before sending her back in. “Um. Fuck. Tell the others that. Do you have, uh…anti-LM munitions?”
Amane’s spike-snouted head turned to look at me, and even though it completely lacked facial expressions, I could tell from how she slightly lowered her cannon that she was asking if I was sure.
“Yeah. Cut her with her own sword. Looked like…uh, what happened to Yuuka. I don’t know if you saw that. Pink ripple disruptors in…in the blades,” I rambled, vision getting wobbly again as I went through the events in my head. I gasped for air to keep talking. “Thought it would cut her connection with Kimura, but that’s not…” I gave up on trying to explain the full thread of logic in detail. “…point is, anti-LM.”
The mech-girl’s massive shoulders shifted in what looked like a sigh, then she projected a hologram of light at me. Translated text, like a blown-up version of what she usually did with her phone to talk to me.
Don’t have it.
“What do you mean you don’t—” I caught myself. “Why’re you using beams instead of the void munitions thing we did last week?”
I didn’t like invoking our collective sins at the oil rig, but I had to admit the situation was getting uncomfortably similar. But we were trying to destroy a construct, not kill a person—and besides, I had a plethora of bones to pick with my stalker at this point, even disregarding the fact that I was so very exhausted.
Because of the inferno.
“Oh. Right.” Of course using the highest-power options in her arsenal would be dangerous in this ripple-amplifying zone, so relatively close to squishy civilians. And me, but I was finding it hard to care about that part. “So that’s the best you’ve got.”
She shot another beam at Takagiri by way of confirmation, rather than nod or say something else in reply. It lanced past Hina, who’d leapt up several dozen meters and was now slashing at the assassin with oversized claws of a familiar, painfully bright blue. It was hard to make out much more detail at this distance, other than the periodic flashes of light as the flamebearers flew around and traded attacks, sword against claws against lasers, a properly spellsword-y battle. So anime. I might have appreciated it more if I were watching from the comfort of my chair, curled up in front of my computer screen with a warm mug of hot chocolate in hand.
That was the exhaustion and lingering wooziness talking. This wasn’t a livestream or a TV show—this was still life and death combat, and I was right there with them.
I squeezed my eyes shut once more, focusing, trying to picture the general diagram for the Radiances’ mantles, the basic template of commonalities from which each of theirs were customized. From what we’d seen of how well Takagiri and Kimura had dealt with the Radiances, it stood to reason that the former’s LM body was at least based on the same core principles, likely somehow copied or stolen—though seemingly upgraded, given that she was still fully functional despite taking a similar blow to the one that had taken Yuuka out. The idea that she was advanced beyond the Radiances themselves was a distressing prospect, but I had to trust that she wasn’t too far beyond, that the same chinks in the armor would apply if I could find any.
No luck. I was too scattered, and didn’t know the intricacies well enough off the top of my head anyway. But Amane surely would, as the one who had most extensively customized her own mantle and spent the most time in it.
“Amane—”
I was interrupted by a warbling, ringing noise, and opened my eyes to see that Amane was way ahead of me. Her gun had begun to change, and even through my exhaustion, I managed to extract a little interest at watching the massive arm-cannon reconfigure. The concentric focusing rings shifted around, their mounting spines rotating in place and producing those strange, unearthly sounds as the gemstones flowed. A piece underneath the barrel slid further back, up to her elbow, and more lumps of crystal emerged to mirror it. The result hardly looked like a gun. I eyed it warily; even without knowing exactly what she had done at a glyph level, the improvised, hacked-together nature of the design was obvious.
“That’s…not gonna blow up in your face, is it?”
It might.
“And if it does?”
Only me.
She dropped to one knee and aimed down the sights again. Well, the weapon didn’t have sights per se, but the message was still clear. Despite that brisk assurance, I edged away from her a little, scooting on the cold grass as though another meter of space between me and the jury-rigged weapon would make a difference if things went wrong.
The Radiances engaged with Takagiri got clear, signalled by some radio communication I wasn’t privy to. Hina peeled away by propelling herself straight down, and Alice jetted sideways. Takagiri seemed to understand what was happening, but instead of going to ground, she launched herself directly toward me and Amane, covering hundreds of meters in moments—
Amane fired with little fanfare. Unlike the clean beams of light previously cast from the tip of the barrel, there was no flash of light, no clear line of energy reaching from cause to effect. The first signal that anything had happened at all was a crack from next to me. Amethyst’s body fractured. Pieces of gemstone began to melt and slough off her titanic figure as the backlash of her weapon catastrophically damaged her mantle.
But Takagiri’s destruction was far more complete. Her body fractured mid-dive, and she screamed—a horrible noise, the same kind of broken, glitching screech that Yuuka had made after being stabbed. Then she shattered into a million shards.
Shards that were still flying directly toward us. She was weaponizing her destruction as a plume of twinkling death, a final blast of glassy shrapnel. It happened too quickly for me to do anything but cower uselessly, but Amane was faster. She lurched forward, putting herself in front of me, a disorienting purple blur that moved far too quickly for something so big and so heavily damaged. The shards struck her with hissing vengeance, like a storm of hail striking a glass roof, interspersed with more ear-splitting cracks as the impacts took their toll on her already damaged body. Then it was over, and silence reigned for a few moments
“Amane!”
Alice skidded to a landing next to me, white-hot jets of flame arresting her momentum, scorching the grass in front of her. She looked terrible, parts of her mantle cracked and warped with fuzzy distortion—but that was superficial compared to the horror show that was her girlfriend’s ruined body. She knelt by the inert mound of half-melted gemstone.
“Is—is it supposed to disengage?” I asked, heart pounding.
“Yes!” Her voice was distraught. “Amane, no, you can’t have—”
There was a snap as Hina appeared next to us. She was gently propping up Amane’s true body—sans prosthetics, eyepatch dark and inert—in one arm. Alice abandoned the destroyed mantle and rushed over to her. She shed her own transformation and wrapped Amane in a hug, babbling something full of relief.
Hina’s other hand was holding Kimura by the throat. He made no attempt to escape her grip, stoic and sullen.
Alice turned to him, still hugging Amane close, and said something in Japanese before switching to English.
“—explain.”
“I have nothing to say to you.” He sounded defeated, as exhausted as I was.
“Bullshit,” Hina snarled. “Why the fuck are you after cutie?”
“Sugawara wants him.”
“Sugawara’s in a fucking coma. You’re the one who helped put him there!”
“And you should have killed him,” he growled.
Hina exchanged a confused look with Alice. “…Okay? Then why the hell are you working with him?”
“He is in my dreams. I had no choice.”
Alice held Amane tighter. “Why not?”
He didn’t respond, looking down at the ground, avoiding all of our eyes. Hina brandished her free hand, blue sparks playing off her claws. “Talk.”
“Fine,” Alice sighed, waving her off, but there was something dangerous in her voice. “We’ll cover for you if you give us the names of everybody who’s working with him. Where’s Takagiri?”
Where indeed? My brain still felt like soup, but the well-worn grooves of magic were still functional. The mantle couldn’t have been remotely operated across the inferno’s boundaries. And according to Hina’s nose…something finally clicked in my head.
“I think we’re looking at her,” I muttered.
Kimura raised his head and glared at me.
Alice looked at me, frowning. “Ezzen?”
“She’s his mantle. You’re my stalker,” I declared, staring back at him, too tired to be afraid. “The same weapons. The same tricks. Bailing each other out at the last moment every time. Hina says you smell the same, and she only named you two when she first showed up. Nobody else could have been operating the mantle from inside the inferno. More advanced, too. Both bodies at once?”
Alice had gone very stiff, looking from me to him. After a long moment, Kimura’s expression broke into a vicious smile, and instantly, my suspicions were confirmed. That was the same expression I’d seen Takagiri make. The anger, the loathing. He turned the hateful countenance on Alice.
“He’s smart. And I did it better than you,” he spat.
Alice met his eyes. I expected her to snap back at him, for the air to heat up in a display of imperious anger, but she looked—so sad. She said something softly in Japanese. He laughed dryly and spat something back at her. She made a sound, a strangled yelp of shock and horror. Hina whined and dropped him.
“No,” she breathed.
Kimura knelt in the grass, coughing, then sat, resigned and angry, with none of the poise he’d had before.
“They won’t understand you,” he told me. “They will use it against you. It will end like this for you as well.”
I was lagging way behind the conversation. “Use what against me?”
“He blackmailed you,” Alice interrupted shakily, horror in her voice. “Sugawara. That fucker. God, no, you should have—”
“You do not understand—”
“You could have told us!” She was…crying? Her voice was hoarse, and she looked terribly shaken, and I still didn’t get why. Stupid. “You didn’t…this didn’t have to happen. We would have helped you.”
Confusion flitted across Kimura’s face, before being covered again by anger. “How could you?” he challenged. “You don’t know what it’s like to live like this. You perfect fucking mahou shoujo.”
“Oh my God,” Hina groaned. “He doesn’t fucking know. Alice—”
“Mm.” She shakily separated from Amane and stood. Hina hopped over and took her place, settling between me and Amane. I sagged against her, muttering into her neck. “I’m lost.”
“Cutie,” Hina sighed. “Don’t you get it? Seriously? She literally said it straight to you.”
“Uh.”
She shifted. I felt her poke my forehead. “How are you so—okay. Cutie. Ez. If Takagiri is his mantle, why’s she a girl?”
“Because…the design is copied from you guys, and changing the—”
“No! Fuck, you’re even denser than she was. We gotta talk about that later,” she muttered. “Just—look.”
Baffled, I watched as Alice approached Kimura. He let her do so, no more fight left in him, just simmering resentment. His expression turned to complete confusion when she knelt and hugged him tightly.
“We will help you. I promise.”
“…Doushite?” He sounded lost.
“Because—I do know what it’s like to live like this. You’re not alone, sister.”
Hina pointed at them. “That’s her. This is what Sugawara was holding over Takagiri to make her do his dirty work. She’s trans. They both are. Get it now?”
Oh.
Oh, of course.
I looked at the two women hugging each other. Takagiri looked back through the eyes of the old man she was trapped inside. She was sobbing as Alice held her—I had the unaccountable urge to cry with them. Something tight had grabbed my heart.
Trying to process the cocktail of emotions and implications overtaxed the last dregs of my energy. I fainted with tears running down my cheeks.
Author’s Note:
Thus concludes the debacle at Hikanome’s cookout: with a glimpse of what lies beyond the veil, heavy artillery, and a gender reveal or two. Gemder reveal. Get it? Because Todai’s whole theme is g—
Anyway. Sunspot says trans rights! Moreover, Sunspot has always said trans rights. I invite you to go back and reread the story with the knowledge that Alice is trans, and pay attention to how that colors her interactions with Ez. You’ll be wondering how you missed it the first time.
Extra huge thank you to the beta readers for helping me refine this chapter and get everything just right. Cass, Zoo, Maria, Penguin, and Zak, you all rock.
Three more chapters until we’re done with the arc: 2.17, 2.18, and the story’s first interlude. And, of course, then there’ll be another big author’s note post where I’ll be talking about character inspirations, the writing process, and some exciting stuff in the works for arc 3!
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