CONTENT WARNINGS

None

There were a lot of things that sucked about the morning of Hikanome’s event.

First and foremost was the pain. I could feel what I had done to my body last night as a low-level burning, scratchy sensation, not unlike a rash. Every place where a hair follicle had been removed and backfilled by new flesh was its own pixel of discomfort which together formed a high-resolution screen of itching and irritation, lighting up wherever my clothes pressed against my body.

That brought me to the second thing that sucked: Ebi had rinsed my bloody afterbirth off of me and taken me back to my room after I’d passed out, for which I was grateful, but overnight, my new skin had oozed more fluids, disgusting side-effects of the adjustment process as the polyps of replacement flesh made themselves at home in my meat-suit. I’d woken to find my sheets thoroughly soiled by bio-gunk of all sorts, sticky all over from a mixture of sweat and pus. The smell had been the worst part, so rank and oily that despite my inflamed skin’s sensitivity I had beelined for the shower to rinse all the horrible slime off my body, still only half-awake.

It was only when I stepped under the shower’s water that I remembered what my Flame had given me in exchange for my body hair. My wig was fused with my head and had changed color to a truly bizarre shade, a color between yellow blond and bright-orange ginger but somehow distinctly unnatural, too bright to appear on a regular human head. I’d had to reach out of the shower and fumble for the light switch to verify that it was merely a very bright color and not literally aglow. My scalp was actually one of the few places of my body that didn’t hurt from the aftermath of the blood magic. 

Clothes sucked as well. No hoodie for me, not today—Alice had forced me into a button-down and slacks, plus a long coat that insulated from the cold well enough but still left me feeling overly exposed. A silver lining of our hurry to get me dressed and out the door was that I was spared the full lecture from Alice about the stupidity of what I’d done; she seemed relieved that my skin was merely red and inflamed rather than one giant burn scar, and I was subjected to only small mutterings about the shock of orange hair. She’d warned me that we had to talk about it later, but she needn’t have; I was already mulling it over by myself, silently gnawing on the ramifications as I was ushered into the waiting limo separately from the other two attending Radiances.

What exactly had happened, physiologically and magically speaking? Had my old hair under the wig gone poof, annihilated entirely? Had the Flame that had manifested the LM been permanently integrated into my body? The texture felt like real hair, as far as I could tell. Was it alive and growing? Was it magical in some way, other than the color?

We didn’t have time to test those things, but at least these weren’t entirely uncharted waters. Alice, too, had hair changed by her Flame. Then again, her shimmering, opalescent off-white was comparatively natural, some ways removed from how my body had incorporated a piece of magitech hardware. By some estimates, including Amane’s, that made me a cyborg. Ai, the resident authority on cybernetics, couldn’t be reached for comment, and her absence was another thing that sucked. She was still fast asleep by the time we were out the door, forbidden from being roused on Ebi’s orders. I was a little peeved that she got to sleep in and I still had to attend despite the fact that I was the one recovering from a full-body application of sanguimancy.

Amane: Think about it this way: you have little confidence in your appearance, but nobody will pay attention to your appearance other than the hair.

Ezzen: I guess, yeah.

Ezzen: Changes the first impression somewhat

Amane: For the better, I think.

Ezzen: I’m still nervous.

Amane: That’s normal!

I cringed a little at the non-sequitur detour into talking about my own feelings, but far less than I would have if this conversation were happening face to face. I hoped she wouldn’t mind.

Amane: What are you nervous about?

There was a lot—general social anxiety, the specific fear of screwing up etiquette, getting lost in the more benign cases or outright attacked or kidnapped in the more extreme ways things could go, fretting over my appearance. But vis-a-vis Amane…

Ezzen: It seems crazy that we’re splitting up.

Amane: We’re right in front of you.

Amane: And the bodyguards are good.

We were traveling in a little three-car motorcade, with Yuuka and Amane in the first, me—and Clipboard, who looked as nervous as I felt—in the second, and two more senior Todai staff in the rear, plus a driver and bodyguard in each car. The latter made me especially uncomfortable.

Ezzen: As meatshields?

That was a bit of a blunt way to say it, but accurately grim. If hostile flamebearers decided to attack our convoy, regular humans might as well be ants, and the cars around us effectively made of tissue paper.

Amane: They’re not that delicate. They have the same ward devices you do.

I was wearing a compression sleeve on my right arm, which manifested strong enough repulsion fields to turn away a blade or keep me from getting crushed if the car were to be rammed. More importantly, it also projected a sort of stability matrix across my body so that somebody couldn’t just pulp my insides remotely with magic. The armband itched incessantly against my still-raw skin. I couldn’t even scratch it properly, hidden under my shirt’s long sleeves, and it just made me feel more uncomfortable rather than safer. The Radiances had proper wards, high-power burst shields that made them near-invulnerable long enough to transition into their mantles. I had no such safety; most of my protection came in their assurances that there was nobody out to get us today.

This was supposed to be safe, diplomatic—even fun, from how I’d heard it described. Before the debacle with my hair, Alice had called it a mix of a traditional Japanese matsuri festival and a cookout. Yuuka had corroborated by calling it a “barbie;” I still didn’t know why her lingo was so Australian and had been dissuaded from asking by her demeanor—on that note, I also didn’t understand the sudden shift in her behavior at dinner yesterday. It had continued into this morning; she’d given me a begrudging compliment on the way down to the garage, when it had just been us three flamebearers in the elevator:

“You lost the stubble.”

“Huh? Yeah.”

“Was the right call. Tell me you didn’t choose that dye job, though.”

“I didn’t.”

“Good.”

I hadn’t known how to respond to that. It was an improvement from her outright hostility, but being in the dark about whatever had passed between the team was doing my anxiety no favors. Maybe it had something to do with Hina’s prolonged absence, but that itself sucked too. I could have used her confidence and energy today, and her sheer physicality would have gone a long way to settle my unease and feeling of nakedness. Also, some shameful part of me hoped she’d like the new hair—though it occurred to me that she might be disappointed that we’d not have another session of zapping away body hair.

I made an effort to steer my thoughts away from my girlfriend. Alice had assured me she was fine, and that was good enough. Regardless of the state of our relationship, I had bigger fish to fry today.

—

We felt Hikanome’s influence well before Yoyogi Park came into view. I’d been avoiding looking out the window, instead mulling over what little I knew of the cult and internally rehearsing the greetings we’d drilled, but a chance glance to the side of the road contained something amiss. The sidewalk was crowded with people walking the same direction we were driving; that wasn’t surprising given that the estimated attendance was to be at least three hundred thousand over the course of the day, but the attire seemed off. Some people were dressed in what I could identify as traditional Japanese garb, robes with thick belts and awkward-looking sandals, but many others seemed underdressed for the weather. T-shirts and crop tops abounded, and the longer I examined the crowd as we drove past, I began to pick out people who were entirely shirtless in the February cold, men and women alike. I averted my eyes before they could wander nippleward.

Ezzen: People are naked on the sidewalk.

Amane: They are!

Ezzen: A little cold for that, isn’t it?

Amane: In about thirty seconds, you’ll feel the air change.

Amane: Don’t panic and don’t worry about me.

As I read those messages, there was a burst of radio chatter between the drivers, and then I felt it. A sunny, suffusing warmth blossomed in my chest and spread outward, like the first rays of dawn on a summer morning except felt all the way through my body. What residual chill had crept into my limbs was chased away, melted and evaporated. Some of the pain across my skin lessened, too, the inflammation soothed by the warmth.

We’d just entered a field of red ripple the size of an entire neighborhood. At least, I assumed it was red; a magical effect stimulating the body’s thermoreceptive nerves to trick us into feeling warm seemed far more magically efficient than a blue-based effect that could actually warm the air at such a scale. More culty, too, a parlor trick to demonstrate their power while also dosing you with something that naturally felt good. I was naturally suspicious, and furthermore, if it was red ripple—

Ezzen: You okay?

Amane: 大丈夫

Amane: I told you not to worry.

Ezzen: …You did, didn’t you.

Ezzen: This is “good weather?”

Amane: It’s not red, so yes.

Ezzen: ??

Amane: Check the temperature on the dashboard.

I leaned sideways, trying to get around the driver’s seat in front of me, squinting.

“20 degrees,” Clipboard said, intuiting what I was trying to do.

“Thanks.”

The outdoor air temperature had gone from a proper wintry chill to a balmy, comfortable spring day in moments.

Ezzen: That’s impossible.

Amane: That’s Hikanome’s magic.

Ezzen: But it’s absurd.

I’d switched from the weather app to a calculator, trying to guess at some numbers in my head. Google said the park was 133 acres—538,000 square meters—and if the effect extended from ground level to, say, three meters in the air, that was far too high of a volume of air to heat by over ten degrees Celsius. It wasn’t just a matter of simple energy requirements; the blue ripple would compound into other physical effects, little ruptures and slips, bursts of kinematic irregularities that could rupture organs if they happened inside a person. And that was to say nothing of the challenge of keeping the intended effect equally distributed and not accidentally heating small sections to dangerous temperatures.

I relayed these findings to Amane.

Ezzen: They literally cannot be that powerful. The numbers don’t track.

Ezzen: There are only three flamebearers attending, right?

Amane: Yes. But your math is making a faulty assumption.

Amane: It’s white ripple, not blue.

I’m ashamed to say how badly that threw me for a loop. It presented an entirely different class of impossibility.

White ripple, like silver ripple, is special in that there are no glyphs that affect it; it is not a color that threads of Flame can be tuned to. It still occurs in nature, of course, and has always been closely associated with the Vaetna. That association led to a misconception that white ripple’s effect was “reality manipulation”, or “imposing one’s will on the world”, but I’d always considered that an unhelpful description. All colors of ripple did those things, defied what had formerly been understood about reality and replaced it with volition made manifest.

In reality, white ripple was better described as “multiplicative” ripple, an X factor that boosted the influence of the other colors of ripple further than they ought to go in the quantities detected. This explanation made sense mathematically and was consistent with its detection around especially great happenings of magic, like infernos, flamefall, and some of the Vaetna’s most extreme acts.

All this was to say that:

Ezzen: An effect can’t solely be white ripple.

Amane: “And Yuuka can’t see silver,” I think you said.

Amane: Have an open mind. Don’t be like Ai.

Ezzen: Working on it.

Really, what unsettled me wasn’t that this flew in the face of my understanding of how magical effects were categorized. No, what bothered me was the idea that this cult was performing magic that I considered the Vaetna’s domain, something above the rest of our station, forces we shouldn’t meddle in. Whatever Hikanome were doing to create this effect flew in the face of the natural order, challenged the Spire’s supremacy in magic.

I didn’t like it at all.

—

I liked it even less when our convoy split. The Radiances had an actual entrance planned, one that I was sure I’d see Star posting about later. It involved them descending from the sky in full mantle, followed by a meet-and-greet. I wondered how Yuuka participated in such things. I could see Amane pulling it off, being smiley and personable, but if there was one thing I had in common with Yuuka, it was that we weren’t extroverts. Granted, for me, it was less about misanthropy and more about how imagining myself as the focus of attention in front of that many people made my stomach do acrobatics.

The point was that Todai had stipulated in the terms of my attendance that I did not have to engage in those celebrity theatrics, and that meant that I was going to enter the park separately from the Radiances. I and the important Todai people in the car behind me were going through the VIP entrance via a closed-off road, barriers and armed guards blocking passage behind us. Once the girls made their flashy entrance, they’d rejoin me, but seeing their car turn away from ours left me feeling very alone.

As the park came into view, my anxiety redoubled. I was entering the belly of the beast.

Yoyogi Park did not feel inviting. For all Hikanome’s impossible aura of pleasant temperatures could mimic the warmth of spring, the mostly barren trees weren’t so easily fooled. They stood dark against the hazy blue of the sky, a reminder of the chilly reality beyond the illusion. That should have been grounding and comforting, but there was a spindly quality to their branches overhead that felt like I was peeking out of a net.

The barriers and guards continued on our right as our reduced group drove further inward. On the other side of the dividing line, the veritable sea of people came back into view. They clustered around canopied tents. Pillars of smoke or steam wafted upward from every other tent, billowing past signs advertising flame-grilled skewers, fish, and even less stereotypically Japanese dishes like kebab and pizza. Food cooked with open flame was the traditional fare for special occasions for Hikanome and many cults like it. If it hadn’t been for the rain of the past few days, the entire event must have constituted a massive fire hazard, given the park’s wintry lack of lush greenery.

Tall braziers burning with magically colored flames designated different areas of the event and imposed some order on the chaotic press of underdressed people. These nearby tents with food were the green section; further away, near the larger pavilions and tents hosting the event’s main attractions and gathering spaces, I could see pink and blue. I had a map of the layout on my phone that explained the color coding, but I doubted I’d use it. As a VIP, there was no need for me to wriggle through sardine-packed crowds just for a few slices of overpriced kebab—we would get a proper reception lunch, possibly the only upside of the entire event.

I had high expectations. My childhood meals had often been the leftovers from truly lavish galas and balls, whatever remained of the thirteen-course meals Dad orchestrated for the rich and famous the previous weekend. It depended on the kind of event, of course. Sometimes, if he was serving art critics or gourmands or particularly picky tech moguls, it would be all jellies and purees, molecular gastronomy advertised not as food but as an experience; those didn’t usually make it to our fridge, either because they were hilariously small portions or became basically inedible ten minutes after serving. But when Dad catered larger events with more conventional fare, he’d bring home things that had made kid-Ezzen’s eyes shine: pieces of a whole spit-roasted pig, rich and creamy vegetable soups, five-cheese mac and cheese with crispy breadcrumbs on top—gourmet versions of kid food, essentially, and in such quantities that I could eat them all week long.

Of such things was childhood made. Pulling open the fridge to discover what delicious secrets it would hold this week was magical every time. Sometimes, on days when he was in the kitchen on the weekend, he’d show me the fancy ways to reheat everything for service—so it had been crushing to realize I’d never eat like that again. It had been a slow kind of grief, waking up in my grandparents’ house and checking the fridge to see shitty Tesco ready meals in place of portioned-out bins of roasted meats and vegetables and grandpa’s beers rather than soup. So, too, after I’d left that horrible, tiny house and moved into my apartment. Leftovers didn’t just make themselves, and I’d had neither the money nor the emotional strength to pick up where Dad had left off.

All this to say that even in the worst-case scenario for today, where we would be treated to some truly bizarre molecular gastronomy—unlikely given Hikanome’s propensity for flame-grilled food—I found myself excited to revisit some small, nostalgic fragment of my childhood, especially since I was dining on the dime of the same type of cult that had stolen my inheritance. There was a nice symmetry to it.

It was this tentative hope that gave me the courage to sit up straight and internally rehearse my greetings one last time as the car rolled to a stop. I’d been lost in thought for the final few minutes of our journey, but now we were here, parked on the grass under the spindly trees. All I had to do was respond when greeted and then shut up; Todai’s higher-ups in the other car were going to do the vast majority of the talking. After that, I could busy myself with eating. Hell, talking about the food was maybe the one line of conversation I felt prepared for. Easy enough. I turned from where I’d been idly staring out the window, looking at my pants and trying to get my unfamiliar cascade of red-gold hair to behave, wincing at the state of my skin. I rolled my right ankle experimentally, making sure the field of white ripple surrounding me wasn’t disrupting the stabilizer module’s function. Everything seemed in order.

“Um, are we getting out first?”

Clipboard didn’t respond. I looked over at him—

He was gone. My heart thudded in my chest as I realized that the driver and bodyguard in the front seat were also absent, and there was no second car behind mine. How had I not noticed them all vanish? Had it just happened moments ago or minutes? My tattoo itched, joined in chorus by the rest of my crawling skin as I realized I was alone in hostile territory. For once, I didn’t reject the impulse, summoning my spear onto my lap, the tip resting in the opposite corner of the footwell. I checked my phone—no signal. I was alone. I undid my seatbelt and scooted into the middle of the car, further from the doors, and looked out the windshield.

That answered one question—wherever I was, it wasn’t Yoyogi Park. Or rather, it still looked like the park, with the same trees in the same places, but it seemed as though it were the middle of summer; the trees were covered in vibrant leaves, and no skyscrapers rose above them in the distance. No throngs of people, either—indeed, nobody at all, except the three sitting on a simple plastic tarp in front of me. I was still awful at names and faces, but I’d bothered to commit these ones to memory. All three wore long, flowing white robes with fire-red trim. Hikanome’s flamebearers, the three I’d been expecting to meet.

A single empty pillow sat in front of them. An invitation.

This glade must have been the epicenter of the air-warming effect. Perhaps this was the true effect, and the warm air beyond was merely a byproduct, leakage from this bubble of contained reality where Hikanome’s leaders had spirited me away for a private audience. Or worse. They weren’t armed, but they didn’t need to be.

Leftmost was Kimura. He bore little resemblance to the picture the Radiances had shown me. There, he’d been a businessman with a receding hairline and a creased face, easily confused for millions of others in Japan. Before me, he looked more like a retired samurai, lounging in stately repose. He was a co-founder of the cult and complicit in what had happened to Amane. His robe was tightly closed.

Rightmost was Hongo. He was older than me by a few years, perhaps in his early thirties. He sat cross-legged, with his back straight, and had a big grin on his face that instantly reminded me of Hina. He was Hikanome’s diplomat and supposedly had a massive crush on Alice—or maybe specifically her tail. His robe was partially undone, slipping down below his shoulders.

Between them, a woman the same age as the Radiances sat with her legs folded below her. Miyoko, the cult’s high priestess. She wore a knowing smile, and her eyes were too piercing. Her robe was entirely undone, leaving her front bare—

I averted my eyes. Seriously, what was it with the toplessness? That hadn’t been in the notes on etiquette they’d given me.

That aside, I was now in a predicament. The three were talking, but all watching me, and I had no doubt they could see me as well as I could see them. Stay in the car? That hadn’t gone so well last time. And I was better prepared, this time. I took a deep breath and reached for my Flame, trying to find the strength it had given me when I’d struck Hina. But no dice—my Flame didn’t respond to the tug. As stressed as I was, I wasn’t angry as I’d been then, and besides, now was not the time to experiment with magical amping effects.

Nothing else to do. I swung open the left door and disembarked spear-first, wincing at how the motion chafed my raw skin, and watched the three warily. They watched me back. Hongo snorted.

“There’s no need for panic.”

I raised my spear. “I’m getting pretty tired of abductions.”

Kimura shook his head at that as though disappointed.

“Abducted?” Hongo scoffed. He spoke English fluently; I’d been told the others were also conversational. “This is a grand welcome! Who do you take us for? The PCTF? Todai’s rabid fox? We’re giving you a greeting worthy of your status, and you draw a blade. Put that away and let us speak together.” He spread his arms.

I didn’t move. “What happened to the people I was traveling with?”

“They’re meeting with their equals,” Kimura replied. He had the voice of a smoker, gravelly, but also softer than I had expected, as though speaking to a frightened animal. “So are you.”

“My equals.” Flamebearers above humans, a near-universal belief among these cults. “I’m free to leave?”

“Yes.”

Hongo rolled his eyes. “Or you could come over here so we can get a good look at you. We don’t bite.”

They had a point; if they wanted to hurt me, it would have already happened. I begrudgingly banished my spear and took a hesitant step toward them, then found my gait and closed the distance, still trying not to look at Miyoko’s chest. I sat awkwardly on the empty pillow, calling up the greetings I’d learned. I bowed my head.

“Um—hajimemashite. Watashi wa—”

All three of them sighed. “Don’t bother.”

“Er. Alright?”

“English is fine. Give us your name,” Hongo urged.

I squinted at him, remembering Ebi’s joke toward Hina about cold iron. They’d already demonstrated that their magic operated outside the rules I knew; it was possible they operated on fae logic and could steal my name if I gave it. This isolated glade was adding to that impression, and I glanced around, wondering if perhaps we were encircled by mushrooms. Why hadn’t I been briefed on this? As for my name, just to be safe—

“Ezzen. Ezzen Colliot. An honor to meet you all.” I bowed my head again, surprised at my own comfort with the courtly affect. “I apologize for drawing my weapon. I had not been informed of this exclusive reception.” I raised my head, attempting to shift my eye contact between the three. “I greet you, priests of the Light.”

Hongo nodded approvingly. “Greetings.”

Kimura nodded more carefully. “Welcome.”

At last, Miyoko spoke as well. Her voice was soft and delicate. “Hello, Ezzen of the Spire.”

That made me stumble. “Huh?”

Hongo nodded again. “I didn’t take you for a believer.”

“Wait, no, go back to the other thing.” I pointed at Miyoko, momentarily emboldened to ignore the nipples. “Of the Spire?”

“That was a Vaetna’s greeting you gave.”

I frowned, then reddened as realization dawned. I had felt comfortable saying it like that because I had been quoting—specifically Heung’s first appearance before the UN.

“And you carry a black-tipped spear,” Hongo continued. “Well met, little Heron.”

“I—no, I’m just a fan—” I felt like I was going to implode, yet I couldn’t help but glow at the comparison. “Thanks, but I’m not the real thing.”

“You’re blessed,” Kimura said surprisingly softly. “The real thing is the real thing. Your hair is beautiful.”

“…Thanks?” The use of the word blessed reminded me that I was dealing with a Flame cult. “It was an accident, not a blessing, and I’m not a believer.”

“Ah, the skeptic engineer type,” Hongo sighed, shifting where he sat. “Like Miss Matsumoto, putting divinity in boxes. What do you think of her? Brainy, isn’t she?”

“Ai is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met,” I shot back, a little wrong-footed by the question.

“Ah.” Kimura’s voice was still soft. “He doesn’t know. You are a he, yes?”

I blinked, even more off-kilter now. “I…yes. What do I not know, exactly?”

“If the lovely dragon didn’t see fit to tell you,” Hongo said, “then neither will we. Has she been good to you?”

I couldn’t see an angle behind this line of questioning, so I hedged. “They did what anybody with the means should have done. I’m grateful.”

“And yet it was them, not the Vaetna. We’ve been wondering why. Haven’t you?”

Ah. I saw the angle. “Whatever their reasoning, I’m sure it was—and is—sound.”

“Of course, of course.” He dismissed the topic with a wave of his hand. “The Spireborn are always justified. But I’d still like to know the reason they abandoned you.”

I gritted my teeth.

“They didn’t abandon me.”

“Don’t torment him,” Miyoko breathed. She leaned forward, spreading her hands slowly on the tarp, watching the plastic crinkle under her palms. The sound made me realize how silent and still this place was; no animals, not even the wind. Against the silence, her quiet voice suddenly seemed loud. “Hongo-san is being uncivil, but there is truth in his words. Strangeness surrounds your Flame, things that do not fit. Twice-touched, being left for the fox instead of taken, the yari kara no kaminari. I did not call you of the Spire for your weapon—you glow like the Vaetna do. Do you not feel it?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you were chosen,” Kimura said. “We are all chosen by the Light, but you were chosen by the Vaetna.”

That was exciting to hear, but something about this felt off. I reminded myself to be suspicious of any kind of ‘chosen one’ narrative when it came from a trio of fey cult leaders. Alice had told me it was in their interest to make me feel special so they could search for information.

But there were things I couldn’t explain, questions I had no way of answering. Maybe this was connected to why my Flame had a voice—not that I’d tell them that part, if I could avoid it.

“Why would they choose me and then actively avoid me?”

“Maybe you were meant to be taken by the PCTF, as a trojan horse, and the fox’s interference was unforeseen,” Hongo pointed out. “But, as we established, the Vaetna don’t make mistakes.” He grinned.

“They might have,” I admitted. It felt wrong to be the one searching for fault in the Vaetna’s actions. “If that were true.”

“Enough speculation,” Miyoko interrupted, still looking down at her hands. “What is true is that your father was the first to ever join with the Flame.”

“I don’t know about first ever,” I hedged.

“But he was among the first. In an…inferno. What a terrible word.”

“He died. Horribly,” I added, my good humor evaporating. “My grandparents were convinced to give up my inheritance by people like you saying it was a good thing that he burned to death. I’ve long since run out of patience for it.” I bristled, reaching for the formal patterns of speech again. “Respectfully, I find these questions invasive and insensitive.”

Miyoko’s head jerked upward. Her eyes pierced me. Now that I was closer, I saw what was wrong about them; as her head moved, the hazel of her eyes stayed fixed, as though I were peeking through her irises at something behind. I shuddered.

“I do not bring it up lightly, Ezzen of the Spire. We are no pretenders.” She spat the word, straining her voice with disdain. “My Light can reach even the dead.”

“Bullshit. Every supposed ‘necromancer’ in the past seven years has been proven to be a fraud,” I countered. “Even your Blue Spark person.”

Both of the men bristled, but were spoken over by Miyoko’s quiet tones.

“Not necromancy. I cannot bring them back. I cannot even give them a voice. But I can show you.” She leaned further forward, bowing to me. “You are twice-touched, alone of your kind. The first may inform the second. I would ask your father’s spirit to show us what happened to him.”

---

Author’s Note:

The arc’s title begins to make sense! But there may yet be more layers to uncover. Only time (read: me) will tell!

You may have noticed that this site has gotten a facelift! That’s thanks to the hard work of myself and Maria, one of the beta readers. I’m super pleased with how it came out. If you notice any bugs or accessibility issues, by all means leave a comment on this chapter or in the Discord.

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!

January 10, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

Dysphoria, blood magic. Yeah, it’s one of those chapters.

Who hosts an outdoor event in February?

The Saturday of Hikanome’s festival had seen the rain finally wise up and realize it was unseasonable for this time of year in Tokyo, so it had retreated and left streaky greys across a clear, blue sky which you could tell was chilly just from its hue. The blue was more like a hazy purple from where I rested my head against the limo’s tinted window. Honestly, it was more like a fancy cab, not one of those long limousines Dad and I used to ride sometimes. I winced as we rounded a bend and the centrifugal—centripetal, whatever—force pushed my bad foot against the car door. It was still sensitive.

I caught the reflection of the car’s interior in the window. To my left, on the far side of the limo, the aide Alice had assigned me for the brief journey was dragging a pen up and down his clipboard. He counted the items, double-, triple-, quadruple-checking them. I didn’t know exactly what was written, but I knew they were the safety procedures to get me there in one piece and un-kidnapped, since I wasn’t arriving with the two attending Radiances. They had a more spectacular entrance planned, but had stipulated that if I was to attend, I wouldn’t be held to the same standard of showmanship. I wondered how the man—Clipboard, I was calling him, since I’d instantly forgotten his actual name—saw me. Was I a different kind of entity from the Radiances, in his mind? Then a lock of my new hair slipped off my shoulder and blocked my view of his nervous tic.

Right, my new hair. Hard-earned; harder-earned than it had needed to be.

—

The barber’s shears left me numb. Kamihata was beyond apologetic, but didn’t understand the problem, and had no recourse other than to lead me back to the waiting room couch next to Amane. I stared at my phone and the messages I had sent Sky. The act of sending the messages had helped, barely—the panicked frenzy had ebbed away, replaced by a new kind of stress. The last time I’d sent Sky a DM, it had been to confess my stress about maintaining opsec over Todai’s involvement in the Thunder Horse inferno, the people we’d killed. He hadn’t even responded to that one. Perhaps his silence was itself a message; between that and what I’d sent just now, I might have been putting too many of my problems on his plate.

I reminded myself that I wouldn’t have ended up here without him. He had been the one to put me here with the Radiances instead of at the Spire, so it was his responsibility to help me with the fallout of that life-changing decision he’d made. And more to the point, he knew something that could fix my hair—Ai had mentioned that he’d grown his own with magic. So I waited, and to my relief, he responded.

skychicken: jesus christ ez how bad is the haircut

I started to type a response, but he was faster.

skychicken: okay holy shit actually im putting that on hold for a moment

skychicken: you CANNOT message me about lighthouse’s classified operations

skychicken: thats a huge security risk for you and them and me

ezzen: sorry

ezzen: They already told me.

ezzen: Wait, so you can admit to being a flamebearer, but I can’t talk about VNT activities? Are these chats secure or not?

skychicken: assume theyre not

skychicken: that specific fact about me is something that any listener worth their salt would already know, it doesnt count

Fair enough. I deleted the old message and averted my eyes from the screen, chastised, until a new message popped up in my peripheral vision.

skychicken: okay anyway

skychicken: im assuming those panicky messages are about a bad haircut

I ran my hand through my hair again. The lightness was alien.

ezzen: It’s not even a bad haircut, tbh

ezzen: But it’s way shorter and it feels all wrong and Ai mentioned you knew how to use magic to grow more

ezzen: For context, I performed some glyphless biomodding on myself the other day which I assume is similar to whatever you did since they equated mine to yours via having Hina as a mentor.

skychicken: ez, what did i JUST SAY

ezzen: fuck

I deleted that message, too.

ezzen: Okay without any more details, can you help me or not?

skychicken: i cant, not from here. the radiances CAN, but first

skychicken: is it WORTH using magic for this

skychicken: because itll be blood magic. it will hurt, it will spit red all over, and youre virtually guaranteed other residuals

I hesitated. He was right about the technical details: I did not know how to do this with glyphs. Biomancy was best accomplished through as little biomancy as possible, as the adage went—the green section of the glyph lexicon was the least-developed of any color of ripple other than white and silver. Setting a fractured bone was the kind of problem you could treat as a matter of telekinetics, but accelerating the cellular machinery for hair growth? I lacked both the glyph toolbox and the biology knowledge for that, and I knew better than to just stick my head in a bioacceleration field like the ones on Todai’s medical beds. That was glorified suicide, and I wasn’t that desperate.

I was, however, desperate enough for blood magic. I didn’t understand why, but the gut-deep wrongness and exposed feeling was enough to drive me back to panic or tears if I focused on it. I was only distracting myself by thinking about how I could work the problem.

ezzen: I’ll do it.

I’m grateful Sky didn’t question my conviction. If he had, I might have lost my nerve.

skychicken: okay. ask alice

skychicken: you are REALLY going to want to use the spell circle in the basement

ezzen: Okay, thanks.

With a goal in mind, I became aware of the world around me again. Amane had scooted to my left side and was peering over my shoulder, reading our chat. She shoved her phone between mine and my face.

Are you alright?

I looked at her, at those emerald eyes. One real, one fake. She had lost far more of her body than me—hair grew back, limbs didn’t. I didn’t have the right to be so upset when she’d suffered worse. I instinctively retracted my phone from her gaze.

“It’s—fine. Good enough for the event. Alice wanted me presentable, yeah?”

Amane gave me a look I didn’t know how to interpret and typed something else into her phone.

They shaved my head.

Oh. She ran her hand through the long, glossy strands of black hair.

“And you grew it back.”

It’s a challenge.

“Did—did you use magic?”

No. It took years.

Her face fell, and my hopes followed. If her million-dollar prosthetics and magic weren’t enough, what could Sky have had in mind? She brightened, squaring her shoulders, and called something out to Kamihata as her mechanical fingers danced along the screen.

But in your case, it might only take a few minutes.

—

That’s how it should have gone. Amane’s big plan for me had been to try hair extensions—the kind that fused to your hair with a little heat. I’d always known in theory that hair extensions existed, but like so many other cosmetic products, I’d never had a reason to interact with them. The problem was that even though Kamihata—or rather, Ms. Kamihata, since it was her last name, as I learned through hesitant, stop-and-go small talk—had a small collection of extensions, none matched both the wavy texture of my hair and the near-black brown. She had light browns and jet blacks, as well as a rich reddish brown that I was almost certain was specifically Hina’s and a strange, opalescent white that was definitely Alice’s, but nothing for me.

Amane and I were both frustrated by such a simple obstacle. My hair wasn’t outside the realm of types common in Japan; this actually made it worse, because at least if I was blond then it’d feel less absurd that Ms. Kamihata didn’t have a match. As it was, though, all she could do was shrug apologetically and offer me the next-closest match, which was the right curliness but in a jet-black like Amane’s, too dark for my head. It didn’t look right when she held up the swatch against hair. I would have gone for it anyway, just to alleviate the discomfort—but Amane waved her phone in my face. She had been waiting patiently for me to resolve my ridiculous issue before her own trim could begin.

Alice can help you.

“It’s fine, this works.”

She crossed her arms disapprovingly, flesh over carbon fiber.

“What? Nobody would know at a glance.”

She uncrossed her arms to type some more into the translation app.

Don’t cut corners.

She tapped her false-yet-indistinguishable eye for emphasis. I looked away, shamefaced. I was so used to just—bearing it, dealing with it, settling for “good enough.” That was why I was wearing a hoodie worth twenty quid and not eighty. Anything better made me feel guilty, even more of a burden, ever more indebted to their generosity.

You should go home and fix it with magic.

“No, it’s—it’s fine, I’ll deal.” When she looked at me blankly, I clarified, speaking louder and slower. “I’m okay. This is good enough.”

Amane replied to that with a tilt of her head and a deadpan glare. She understood me, alright, she just disagreed.

Talk to Alice.

“You mean a magical solution?” I lowered my voice, conscious of maintaining opsec—even though Ms. Kamihata was probably trustworthy if she had matching swatches of the Radiances’ hair, and she was the only other person in the room. Maybe it was policy to only have her in the shop when her special clients were in. “Like, sanguimancy? Regrow my hair with blood magic?”

Amane flicked my forehead with a carbon fiber finger. I flinched, out of surprise more than pain.

Alternatively, make a wig out of LM.

“Oh. That’s a thing? With magic?”

Amane full-on stared at me for a moment. I deserved it, really; even as the words left my mouth, I was already piecing together how such a thing could be accomplished. My habit of settling for less still tried to have the last word, though.

“But—I’m not sure this is worth interrupting her for. She was practically breathing fire when we left this morning.”

She’ll help, because she doesn’t want you to have ugly hair.

“And…what do I ask her? ‘Sorry, can you drop everything and help me throw away this perfectly fine haircut you told me to get?’”

Amane rolled her eyes.

I’ll text her. Go fix your hair, dude.

—

“Oh my God, yes, of course I’ll help.”

Alice and I stood where we had been standing three days ago, next to the spell circle with its halo of tentacle-arms in the basement, once again discussing body modification. This time, we were minus Ai; she was still working on the same aerospace project from before, and that work had taken her to JAXA headquarters elsewhere in the city. 

“Really? Nothing about how this is an irresponsible use of magic that will put Hikanome on my scent?” Or how I was wasting her time? She certainly seemed impatient, tapping away at the keyboard and monitor that controlled the assembly.

“Don’t be snippy at somebody trying to help you, Ezzen.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s hair. Hair is important,” she declared. “It defines how we look, you know, more than almost anything else.” I tried not to look at her tail when she said that. She ran a hand through her own hair, white and opalescent. “If I had known that Kamihata-san was going to do that to you…well, it’s nobody’s fault. If it’s anybody’s, it’s mine for not specifying to keep it long.”

“What do you mean?” It seemed unreasonable to blame herself, given that not even I had known how upsetting the short hairstyle would be for me. I began to run my hand through the short hair before jerking it away in discomfort. “Is it really that bad?”

“The haircut? It’s fine, it just doesn’t…suit you. We agree on that, I think.”

“…Yeah.” I scratched the base of my skull, once again uncomfortable with the lightness and the way it was exposed to the air currents. As always, magic was my distraction. “So, how’s this work?”

“Same way everything else works: LM. Get in the circle, would you?”

I hesitantly stepped closer to the glowing circle of green glyphs on the floor, remembering how Ebi had been wary of putting any part of her chassis inside. I glanced back at her.

“Should I be expecting…?”

“Analgomancy’s off, just step in.”

I did so, gingerly, and was relieved to experience no sudden, horrible transition between my prosthetic foot’s pain-nullifiers and those of the circle. I had a thought.

“Hey, why isn’t this a problem for my tattoo? Or Ai’s? Shouldn’t it damage the weave?”

“You’re fine. In, all the way in. Feet on the markers, stand up straight…straighter…good. You mean why Ebi can’t come in?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re hunching again. Up straight, c’mon…okay, stay there, don’t move.” Satisfied with my posture, she typed into the keyboard, and I heard something above me whirring. “The circle has a bunch of third-order components, some of them up to a meter ana of realspace. That’s also where Ebi keeps a lot of her auxiliary parts. Your spear is stored kata, isn’t it?”

I thought about it for a moment, resisting the urge to prod at my tattoo while Alice did whatever she was doing. The circle was even more complex than I had thought, then, if it had as many four-dimensional components as she was implying.

“Um, yeah, at least the original {COMPOSE} tuning I used was, but I actually don’t know whether Ai changed it. Must not have, if she didn’t see the need to warn me.”

“Stands to reason. Okay…done.”

“Done with what?”

“The scan. And now we apply the template, confirm, confirm, check the box, confirm…it’s going to need a few minutes to bake.”

A pop-up covered the terminal’s screen with an empty loading bar, an interface I recognized as belonging to a sibling program to GWalk.

“You’re making a glyph template.”

“Yes, so you can weave an LM version of a nice, full head of hair onto one of these.” She opened a drawer and pulled out a strip of fabric. “Wig base. We used to make these for Amane.”

“When she was regrowing her hair after…”

“Yes. I assume she told you.”

“She did.” To fill the silence that followed, I gestured for the cap, and she tossed it across the circle to me. I held it up, trying to figure out the orientation. “Are…I don’t know how wigs work,” I admitted. “Will I have to shave what I’ve already got?”

The prospect made me faintly nauseous. Bald Ezzen was—no, just no. Thankfully, Alice shook her head.

“No. Even a non-magical wig can get away with having a lot of hair underneath, and these caps include more than enough space-folding for what you’ve got. So you can just put it right on.”

I released a sigh I hadn’t known I was holding.

“Thanks. I…sort of thought you’d be mad at me.”

“For wanting long hair? Never.”

“Well—like, I thought—” I blushed, embarrassed at how I had been catastrophizing this conversation—then I realized why I had assumed we’d be doing this with blood magic. “Wait. I talked to Sky—Jason—first, and he made it sound like I was going to have to grow it back with sanguimancy. He said he’d done it before.”

Alice’s tail stopped moving, and she turned to me fully, reaching for the swiveling office chair and sitting sideways on it.

“He did. But there was no reason to do that here, yeah?”

“I…suppose not? This works. But he…” I dug out my phone, rereading the messages. “Definitely seemed pretty set on the solution being blood magic, not an LM wig.”

Silence as the loading bar on the screen crept forward. Alice looked up at the nest of soft-robotic tentacles stowed above me, and I hastily stepped out from beneath them and out of the circle. I was sure those had a gentler touch than I was envisioning, but I still wasn’t comfortable standing beneath them longer than necessary. Alice sighed.

“He thinks like Hina,” she sighed. “Why build a perfect fake when you can bleed for the real thing and hurt like hell while doing so?”

“Oh. Okay, yeah, fair. And this is a perfect fake?”

She gestured at the interface, where the progress bar had reached the two-thirds mark. “You tell me, self-made glyph genius.”

“You tell me, self-made LM expert,” I shot back with a smile, but I was already stepping toward the keyboard to click past the progress bar and look at the glyph diagram the program had generated. It had a number of telltale connections that you generally only saw in software-optimized designs, things that made it harder for most people to read but performed better. “Ai’s programming?”

“Yep.”

The diagram itself confirmed that the hair was generated using exact structural copies of the scan she’d just made of my hair. There were a number of sliders for different variables like hair thickness and length; currently greyed-out and unalterable while the current operation was in progress. The program was trying to calculate a template for the glyphs that would be 3D printed so I could easily follow it to weave the lattice.

“So this is how the mantles are made? Scan your body, tell the program to make the chains for an LM duplicate, then add on top of it for whatever features you want?”

“Yep. So all the design is in the diagrams, then we just print a template substrate and weave from that. Obviously that basic stuff isn’t Ai’s custom work, it’s the same full-stack that even a stock install of GWalk could…hm. I guess you’ve never done glyphcraft for production, have you?”

“No? I suppose not. Ai—” I stumbled on the homophonic name. “Ms. Ai—” No, that wasn’t better. What was her last name? I was embarrassed I couldn’t remember. “Ai-san had me manually editing the lattices for Amethyst’s prostheses.”

Alice covered a snort, betrayed by a twitch of her tail. “Drop the honorific, I know who you mean.”

“Sorry,” I replied, resenting the blush creeping up my neck.

“We don’t usually edit manually like that. What I was getting to was that Ai has automated away a lot of that, at least for the specialized tasks of mantles and prostheses. As a bespoke glyph craftsperson, I assume you object?”

“To programmatic glyph generation?” I scoffed. “As if. I love seeing what insane hacks the computer tries to do. It’s good stuff. Clever, inspirational. Especially when I know somebody as smart as her is behind it. There’s a lot of templating, right? Some of the motive and projection chains are pretty similar across all your diagrams.”

She nodded, checking her phone, idly typing on it even as she sat with me. I felt bad for wasting her time, but I was also really enjoying this conversation. “Our versioning’s gone to crap, a little, if you look closely. Nobody’s got exactly the same thing. But yes, being able to design one flight unit or what-have-you and then put it on all the mantles is convenient.”

“More convenient than altering your actual bodies, I’d wager.”

I realized as the words left my mouth that this was bringing us back to a sensitive topic.

“I mean…” she shrugged. “Design flexibility is the main thing, don’t get me wrong. But yes, the rest of us felt that this was much more true to the mahou shoujo transformation sequence than…bloody apotheosis.” In her London accent, it was unclear whether “bloody” was intended as a swear or in a more literal sense; probably both. “That went double after we got Amane back.”

“Apotheosis.” I rolled the word around my mouth. People sometimes used it for the Vaetna; I wondered if Alice was intentionally likening Hina to them. The hyena clearly liked to do so herself, but I wasn’t sure if that was just to push my buttons specifically. I decided to cut off this line of conversation before I managed to blurt something that would betray my incriminating desire to experience more of what Hina had shown me. “We’re, um, talking about a lot of classified stuff.”

“We are. Don’t worry; this room is off-limits to everyone but us, you know.”

“Is it? I’ve just been…coming and going as I pleased,” I admitted.

“Well, Ebi manages security and surveillance. Don’t need a keycard or anything when she knows it’s us.”

“I…see.” I supposed that was sensible, since she never left the building. I’d been a little worried when Amane and I had set out without her.

The progress bar popped back up to declare its completion, blocking me off from exploring more of the diagram.

“Done.” I squinted at the dialog box, but it was all in Japanese. “Was that the optimization step?”

“No, that was the printing.”

“Already?”

“Right? Ai never shuts up about the new printers. Come see for yourself.”

—

The glyph substrate was more complex in form than merely an outline of the sequence of glyphs. It followed the same path I’d ultimately pull the thread through, but the cross-section was more like a channel, a groove inset into the plastic to guide my hand through the various maneuvers. It also featured many more twists and turns than the glyphs themselves did, curves and edges where you could pull the thread taut so proper tension could be applied at the appropriate points. The resulting shape was a self-intersecting, coiled mess of dark polymer maybe forty centimeters in overall length but many times that if you were to stretch it all out end-to-end.

Because the LM was to be affixed to the wig cap, there was also a curved fixture for that, where it was held taut and in place by some clever grabbers. Even those bits were all the same part; like with my chopsticks, it seemed Ai had a soft spot for compliant mechanisms in her designs. Between those features and the overall shape, the substrate would be a nightmare to machine out of metal; even the monstrous, cutting-edge assembly in the workshop with its space-defying mechanisms would struggle, at least printed at this scale.

Alice had to leave me for more pressing obligations as soon as we’d freed the substrate from its embryonic bath of polymer goop and she’d shown me how to fix the cap in place, which left me a little nervous to do the weaving by myself. Each little loop was only barely large enough for me to keep track of the glowing thread as I pulled it through the groove, back and forth and around and over—word after word of the spell, for those inclined to think of it as such, although the translation for a chain of glyphs never sounded remotely grammatical in any language.

It turned out I had nothing to fear—the substrate made it dead simple to weave the design, even for an embarrassingly sloppy novice like me. Not all LM lattices are activatable and deactivatable, and this one was of the always-on variety, so it began to stitch in and grow the hair even as I was weaving. It was sort of unsettling to watch the matter manifest out of nothing, especially something as fine as human hair. The satisfaction of performing real magic outweighed the ick factor, though, and I was sad to see the process come to an end.

I was left staring down a full head’s worth of luscious, dark, shiny hair—my hair—hanging off the end of the twisting substrate. It was like the demented funhouse mirror of a mop, or the rebellious goth spawn of a Cambrian cephalopod and a curly straw. I disabused myself of the similes by removing the wig from its holder and trying to figure out which way was forward—I got there eventually. I ran my fingers through the hair and took a deep breath. My tattoo itched slightly.

“Again, not a problem you can solve, buddy.”

Just trying to help, I imagined my spear’s reply.

Before I could procrastinate any longer, I pulled the wig over my head. As promised, my existing hair was magically folded in under the cap, effectively removed from this slice of reality, hidden around a corner that shouldn’t exist—a process which would have thoroughly killed me if applied to the grey matter on just the other side of my skull. The wig sealed over my scalp, and for a moment I had a very strange feeling of disorientation and panic at the thing stuck on my head, get it off get it OFF—

And then I was fine. Better than fine, even, as I felt the weight on my neck and shoulders down to where the hair draped halfway down my back; not quite as unbroken and smooth of a glossy sable curtain as Amane’s hair, nor as long, but better nonetheless. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

Ezzen Colliot: All good now.

Amane Ishikawa: ദ്ദി´ ˘ `)✧

—

Trouble arrived in paradise that evening.

Amane had gushed about my new hair on her return, her joy evident as she circled me and ran her hands through it even though I couldn’t understand a word. She showed me how to put it up in a ponytail and did the same with her own hair, which had only received a minor trim, then went off with Ebi for whatever medical procedures filled their time behind closed doors—I tried very hard to ignore the easy innuendo there. Amane’s condition was serious.

Jokes in poor taste aside, the rest of that afternoon was spent on final prep for tomorrow’s big day. Alice eventually freed herself from meetings and gave my new hair—as I was thinking of it, rather than as a wig—the go-ahead. Hina was still absent without leave, which had me a little upset but not particularly worried for her; I was much more upset that Yuuka had deigned to grace us with her presence for dinner. It was one particular remark that set everything in motion.

“Doesn’t match the stubble, mate.”

The air on Alice’s side of the table heated up so quickly I didn’t have time to process the comment. I just flinched and scooted backward.

“Yuuka, we need to talk. Right now.”

“I meant he should grow out the beard! Have you seen Keanu? Beards with long hair are really in, and I think Ezza’s bone structure could totally—”

She shut up as a shadow fell over the table. Amane had been munching quietly—now she was a silent purple monolith, with one enormous hand gently cradling Yuuka’s cranium. She rumbled something at Yuuka, who flinched, looked confused, glanced at me, then at Alice, then back at me, and finally looked even more confused.

“I was trying to help!”

There was a flurry of Japanese back-and-forth between the three until she fell silent sullenly. I began to grow uncomfortable as an expectant silence took over the table, until finally—

“Sorry, Ezzen,” she blurted. Amethyst’s hand retracted, and she turned back into a girl, looking satisfied.

“Um. Forgiven?” I wasn’t even sure what had just happened, only that I’d never seen Yuuka look that contrite before in the short time I’d known her. She batted her temple with the heel of her hand, as though trying to dislodge something in her head. Troubleshooting her eye? Alice, for her part, still looked only marginally short of ready to skin Yuuka alive. At least the heat had died down, saving my poor pad thai.

At last, what she’d actually said caught up to me, and I reflexively reached up to brush my stubble. At some level, I’d recognized the need for a shave before the event, one to match my haircut, but since that had been thoroughly derailed by the circus with the extensions and the wig, I hadn’t—I didn’t like its texture under my fingers. I jerked my hand away and refocused on Yuuka, genuinely curious.

“You think I could…rock a beard? As it were?”

She didn’t respond until she’d made some sort of meaningful eye contact with Alice.

“With another…two or three weeks of growth? Yeah, I think so. Not like that, though. Should probably shave it.”

“Your foresight telling you that?”

“I don’t know what it’s been telling me, lately,” she groused, tapping her temple again. “Been a little on the fritz all week. Feel—” she glanced at Alice again, who was finally sitting back down, “feel like I should tell ya that, since you’re stickin’ around.”

—

That bizarrely non-confrontational encounter left me feeling a bit more cautiously positive about Saturday—but much worse about my appearance. I excused myself from dinner quickly and almost ran up the stairs, fast as my foot would allow, to shave off my stubble with the razor Alice had lent me. Now that I was aware of it, it felt almost…sticky, like a coating over my face and throat, nearly as intrusive as the wig had been in the first moments after putting it on. I ran the razor across my face, scrubbed off, and touched the skin again. Not smooth. 

I tried again, finding a few spots I had missed the first time in the crevasses where my neck met the corners of my jaw. Rinsed off again—still not smooth. The mirror claimed it was a clean shave at a distance, but up close, I could still clearly see the microdots of each follicle for the thick hairs of my beard. Maybe it was the razor: a dull blade or just the wrong type for this. Either way, I’d already imposed so much on the girls for my hair-related woes today, I couldn’t bring myself to ask if they had any others that might do a better job.

Dissatisfied with the shave, I tried to lose myself in random videos about magic and the Spire, old favorites and new releases I’d missed in all my newfound excitement. Once I’d handed over my answers to Overload’s questions, he’d finalized the video shockingly quickly, though there was precious little information about my flamefall that was new to me anymore. I still wondered where Holton was, who’d bailed him out—but whenever my thoughts strayed too far, my fingers would find my chin, and the tight dissatisfaction in my chest would return.

It got worse the later the night dragged on. Conscious of the fact that I’d have to be up early tomorrow—or at least early by my standards, out of bed by 8 AM—I tossed and turned in bed, still seeking refuge in distraction but unable to find it for long. I’d taken the wig off when I went to bed, nervous of some vague and ridiculous death by hair-strangulation in the night, but that just made the discomfort more gnawing, so I quickly re-donned the almost-real hair and occupied my hands by running my fingers through it instead. That helped, a bit, but still no sleep.

At half past two, I decided something had to be done.

—

Lighthouse Tower was different at night. The penthouse was still navigable, thanks to a mix of the city lights through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the main lights over the kitchen island, which remained on but dim. Familiar furniture was recast as alien, tenebrous shapes in my peripheral vision, a shadowy version of the space I’d just begun to call home. These failed to spook me as I crept my way down the stairs to the elevator. For all that the list of my various hangups and phobias was ever-expanding and had several recent additions, the dark didn’t make the cut. It would have been cozy, even tranquil—I was entirely too uncomfortable with the sensation on my chin and throat to relax. I hit the button and waited impatiently.

I knew from experience that there was an annoying chime to mark the elevator’s arrival at the upper, but not lower, of the penthouse’s two floors. The lower one had probably been disabled precisely for late-night comings-and-goings like mine. Why not the upper as well, I had no idea.

From there, it was a straight descent to B1F, where the lights remained on even at this late hour. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, given Ai’s propensity to pull late nights, but I hadn’t really thought it through until now. I felt out of place walking down these halls in my nightclothes—just a T-shirt and shorts, hardly an incriminating onesie, and there was nobody around to pass judgment anyway, but still. The narrow windows on the various closed doors to the workshop showed the vast ex-garage illuminated but motionless, the huge industrial machines powered down for the night. I didn’t want to linger; my actual destination was just across the hall.

The prosthetic fitting room with the spell circle was also closed for the night. Like the workshop, I could see its lights were still on through the sole window in the metal door. I bit my lip, debating whether it was even necessary to be here—but what I was planning to do would hurt, and hopefully sixty more meters of distance would limit how much red ripple would reach Amane. I felt safer hiding my crimes down here in this basement, assuming I could get in. Fretting that I was about to set off some sort of alarm, I tested the unassuming handle—nope. No blaring klaxons, which was good, but definitely locked up. I wondered how to bypass it with magic—

“Evening.”

I yelped and twisted away from the door, nearly overbalancing before my stabilizer kicked in and my prosthetic foot came down behind me. I held Ebi at spear-point. She was wearing…an actual polka-dotted nightgown, right out of a movie, nightcap and all. She yawned with her digital face and stretched sleepily, exaggerating the motions of her neck and shoulders to a degree that straddled the line between cartoonish and grotesque, then abandoned the act and crossed her arms.

“I said, evening.”

I sighed, banishing my spear and testing the handle once more for good measure. “Evening. Given you found me and haven’t raised an alarm, I assume you already have an inkling of what I’m up to at this hour. Accomplice or snitch?”

“Still deciding. Spell it out for me.”

I rubbed my jaw, wincing and impatient. It occurred to me that of everyone in the Radiances’ weird pseudo-family, Ebi might be the most sympathetic to this particular goal. She’d expressed her disdain for hair in all its forms before; it really came down to how much of a prick she felt like being. “Stubble. I want it gone.”

“Big oof. Totally get where you’re coming from. And you were gonna do blood magic about it?”

“Can we call it biomancy?”

“It’s meat.” She made a show of glancing through the small window. “Figure anybody’s in there?”

“Are you going to help me or not? I know you can unlock this door.”

“You were just debating semantics; can’t be in that much of a hurry. Y’know, we have sub-basements below this one, if you wanted to get further from the girls.”

“Do they have configurable analgomatic spell circles?” I’d take that option if there wasn’t some weird catch.

“No.”

There it was.

“Then I’m not interested. Let me in.”

She tutted. “That’s no way to talk to your doctor.”

“Let me in, please.”

“With feeling.”

“What’s the point of this, Ebi?”

“The point is that you do not fuck around with blood magic.” Something in the robot’s voice changed. Not the sonic, autotuned quality, something deeper, like the feeling in your sinuses before a storm. “Do you know exactly what you’re doing? Do you? Or are you playing with forces you don’t understand for vanity?”

“Vanity? I can’t sleep,” I shot back, trying and failing to keep my voice down. “Because of this. There’s something wrong with me, and I’m trying to fix it. Help me.”

“Quiet. You’re meat. You’re fragile. You’re not going to fix anything fucking about in the dark.” Her voice was icy. “Not when you’re so easy to break by accident.”

The door clicked. Ebi’s digital face twisted into a grin.

“Would be cool to see you try, though. Just one problem.”

My heart thudded. “Yeah?”

“Take a look. And really, be quiet. The soundproofing turns off when the door is open.”

I very gently tested the handle once more, slowly pushing the door inward. I looked through the crack and saw Ai, head down on the desk, surrounded by paper. Spent energy drinks were neatly stacked on the corner of the desk. Somebody—Ebi—had put a blanket over her.

I dropped my voice to a whisper, and gently closed the door, looking back at Ebi. “Ah.”

“Yeah. Be glad you didn’t come down sixteen minutes sooner.”

“What do I do?” My determination was starting to curdle into anxiety. “I can’t do this with her right there.”

“Maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it at all. I don’t want to wake her up either, for what it’s worth. This is the first real sleep she’s gotten in…” the robot mimed checking a wristwatch, “sixty-one hours. She hides it well, but I’m not letting anything wake her up until she’s gotten a nice, full nine hours.”

“We have to be out the door in…” I thought for a moment, not equipped with the same precision timekeeping. “Eight!”

“Sucks for Hikanome. She’ll still make the reception dinner, I think. But yeah, if you want to use the circle, we’re going to have to be real quiet. So I guess it bears asking: does it have to be blood magic?”

“Well…” To deal with the stubble, probably not. But Sky had planted an idea in my head, given me a stone that I was aiming at a second bird. “Yes. It does. And it’s not for vanity.”

“I know. Was just making sure you knew that.” She put a hand on the doorknob. “Ready?”

“I guess. Couldn’t you just, er, dose her? Give her something to make sure she gets her full night’s sleep even with us crashing around?”

“If I had something like that on-hand, I’d just have jabbed you in the neck before you noticed me.”

I shuddered. “…Right. In that case…”

—

The preparation was easy enough. Scrawl the most basic soundproofing glyph chain on a piece of paper, wince as I wove it shoddily, place the resulting lattice near Ai’s head. It was a poor solution even before my own sloppy implementation, but it was the least we could do, and it meant I didn’t have to literally be on my tiptoes. Still, just to be safe, Ebi and I were conversing by instant message even though we were standing right next to each other—me in the circle, her a safe way outside at the control panel. I’d had the good sense to take the heavy stabilizer module out of my pocket and place it outside the circle—I didn’t want to bring it in and ruin it or the circle or both.

ebi-furai: okay, how do you want it?

I waved in her general direction.

ezzen: Whatever the regular analgomantic configuration is, I guess?

ebi-furai: sure thing

She held up three fingers, more slender and angular than a human’s.

ebi-furai: counting you in for changeover

ebi-furai: 3

ebi-furai: 2

Wait. I had forgotten about that part.

ebi-furai: 1

“Fuck!” I covered my mouth to strangle the yelp as the low-power painkiller effect vanished from my prosthetic foot and I felt the full force of my still-healing amputation and burn. The pain had been steadily going down, but cutting off the analgesic effect cold turkey was still a shock to the system. Ebi glared at my outburst.

ebi-furai: cmon, man

Still, the moment was brief as could be, and then the circle’s full analgomancy kicked in, the relevant glyphs around the perimeter luminescing green.

ezzen: Uh.

ezzen: It occurs to me that this is Ai’s weave, isn’t it?

ezzen: This won’t wake her up or something?

ebi-furai: no backlash because shes actually good at her job

Alright, damn. I rolled my eyes at her petulantly as I sat slowly in the middle of the circle, glad to have confirmation that the painkiller magic was doing its job. It didn’t do much for the discomfort of sitting on the floor, though. I supposed that normally there would be some kind of seat or bed, like how Ebi had rolled my whole medical bed in the first time I’d been in here; as it was, only hard floor for me. I wasn’t actually sure what the floor material was, but it was tough and smooth. At this closer-to-the-ground inspection, there was a faint but definite slope to the floor, leading to—

A drain in the corner, outside the circle. For blood, one had to assume, although it looked like it was kept clean and sanitary. I hoped what I was about to do wouldn’t literally live up to the name, but I appreciated the thought given to ease of cleanup just in case. I’d probably ruined the backseat of that cab.

ebi-furai: oh. theres some fine print you might be interested in

ebi-furai: the red-dampening mode we have on right now is really fragile to green

I glanced down at the illuminated glyphs on the floor, eyes tracing around the circle, and I realized the problem. The painkilling effect basically took the red ripple produced in the circle and dissipated it as heat—but if fed green ripple, the mutagenic frequency I expected my Flame would radiate alongside the red, things could get chaotic. It was hard to say without GWalk in front of me, but it could easily spit out enough kinetic blue to shake the whole building; was that what had happened my first night here? Worse, it could burn out the lattice, and then anything could happen. I could turn to glass.

ezzen: Shit.

ezzen: Is there a mode that doesn’t do that?

I already knew the answer as I looked around the circle. There were only so many configurations of the glyphs available, and it was hard for most of what was available to tolerate both red and green. Ripple color didn’t exactly follow color theory, but by lucky coincidence, those two colors often paired off.

ebi-furai: theres a low power high stability mode for, as amethyst puts it, bad weather

ebi-furai: gonna be another changeover. want something to bite down on?

ezzen: Fucking hell.

ezzen: Yeah, I guess.

Ebi pulled off her nightcap and tossed it to me. I twisted it, shoved it in my mouth, and bit down. She held up three fingers again, and I nodded in reply.

ebi-furai: 3

ebi-furai: 2

ebi-furai: 1

The circle switched modes. Some glyphs flickered off while others flickered on, and—I groaned into the gag—a loud clunk noise.

“Mh?”

Ebi and I both went very still as Ai shifted in her sleep. Compared to the other mode, I did not appreciate at all how little pain this was killing. It would still protect Amane sleeping up above, but this was now going to hurt. A lot.

ebi-furai: thats all i can do from here i think

ebi-furai: youre up

ebi-furai: no, wait, hold on

She pulled something out of her pocketspace and tossed it to me. I caught it hastily, frowning at how it could have gone clattering across the floor, then figured out how to unfold it.

ezzen: Makeup mirror?

ebi-furai: so you can see what youre doing

ebi-furai: NOW thats all i can do

She accompanied that by replacing her face with a big thumbs-up emoji. I took a deep breath around the gag. Now or never—and with the limited painkilling effect, I was starting to think never sounded pretty nice. There were ways this could go very wrong magically, not to mention waking Ai up and getting caught—ruining her sleep in the process—and even in the best-case scenario, I was going to have a pretty bad time.

But the discomfort on my throat was somehow worse than that; a sufficiently sharp razor or even an epilator wasn’t enough. I wanted to attack the problem at the source, make more of myself, like Hina had said. Sky had seemed confident suggesting this, although I wasn’t sure if it was what he had in mind. And I figured that, at least in this small way, I would become a little more like the Vaetna—smooth—my own tiny apotheosis through magic. Not hurting anybody else.

I met Ebi’s eyes one last time, then focused on the little mirror, on the rough patches on my face. I reached for my Flame, and it was there, waiting. I told it I wanted the hair gone, picturing it, trying to will it into happening through sheer want rather than glyphs. Specifically the hair from my philtrum downward, I told it, not my eyelashes or brows or the tiny hairs in my ears and nose. Those were important, but my beard was just a nuisance.

I connected that to the idea of wanting the long hair that had been taken from me. I wanted the LM wig to become real, for that hair to become my own, for there to be no need for the wig. I deserved to be whole, as I saw it.

Maybe it was vanity, just a little.

My Flame understood, in its primitive, emotional way. It surged through me, icy and ablaze, up from my chest and through my throat like acid reflux from hell, seeping out through my veins into every pore, every follicle. It rushed and destroyed and combined and—it kept going, down and down and out and through and all around me, everywhere philtrum-down, arms and chest and legs and I was burning and burning and screaming into the gag all the while—

Blood oozed from my arms, legs, chest, belly, back, neck—all flowing down the gentle slope into the drain. Every follicle had been torn open, the very machinery of my cells removed. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was trying to escape my chest, each thud bringing another wave of oozing pain across my body. I was practically a fountain of blood—

Then fire, once more. Searing micro–cauterizations prickled across my body to seal every rupture in my flesh—not literal cauterization, as I’d find later, but we were past the limits of what my fragile nerves were designed to experience. Rather, new flesh grew where old had been removed, tiny polyps to plug the gaps. Some small pity so I wouldn’t have to do it myself once more.

As the Flame ebbed away, its work done, I slumped sideways. Everything fell into darkness—well, almost everything. Between the pain a tiny spark of annoyance bubbled up from somewhere inside me, at what I saw between the splatters of blood on the little hand mirror.

Had it made me blond?

—

My reflection in the limo’s tinted window said not quite blond. My new hair was more of an ochre; ginger but in the sense of the vegetable. The Flame’s hilarious punchline after it had upcharged me by taking all my body hair. In between Alice’s fretting over the ramifications of this decision, Amane had asked whether the new hair was LM incorporated from the wig, which had possibly merged with or replaced my scalp. It certainly hurt like it did, but we hadn’t had the time to check. It was still doing better than most of my body.

Every inch of my skin from the neck down hurt, red and irritated and so terribly dry. It wasn’t completely smooth; each torn-out follicle had left a tiny goosebump where the Flame had sealed the hole, so miniscule it was invisible even at close inspection and only faintly detectable by touch. It stung everywhere my clothes touched my skin, especially around the waistband of my pants, and that was after Ebi had loaded me up on a truly frightening amount of painkillers. Part of Clipboard’s job was to make sure I took more in a few hours. 

I’d put the clothes on nonetheless and gotten in the limo, a smile on my face despite knowing the cold and dry February air would make the pain worse. Everything hurt, I had a full head of truly odd-colored and likely magical hair, and my skin was not perfectly smooth as I had willed it to be, but it was worth it. The gnawing incorrectness on my skin had been rinsed off by blood and scoured away by flame. The long hair on my back and shoulders felt right, even if I had some serious questions about the Flame’s choices in color coordination. I’d insisted to the girls that I hadn’t picked that part. Maybe I’d dye it back.

Did any of this make me more ready to face Hikanome?

Absolutely not.

Still worth it, though.

---

Author’s Note:

We’re back! Happy new year!

This one was a lot of fun to write. Next week we get started with Hikanome. We’ll also probably get the new cover! Stay tuned!

If you enjoyed the chapter (or spotted a typo), say so in the Discord! Link below, blue button, can’t miss it.

The first exclusive side story is out for $10 patrons! The theme is Alice & Hina Go To The Pet Store For Christmas.

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!

December 27, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

Intense dysphoria

“I’m—mutating? Like Hina?” Yes, Ezzen, that’s what she just said, don’t ask stupid questions. I tried for something more cogent. “Related to what I did with the punch, I assume?”

Ai nodded, prodding the hologram of my arm. She had highlighted the tricep, deltoid and pectoral—the punching muscles.

“Maybe four percent higher muscle density.”

The electric excitement deflated slightly. Four percent didn’t sound all that significant, not enough to warrant the giddiness or the quiet horror.

“Density, not mass? Er, you know what I mean by that…obviously, higher density would also increase the mass. What I mean is that it’d look the same from the outside, yeah? Like how Hina doesn’t look strong at all.” I eyed Ai’s biceps, still bare from when we’d sparred. She was muscular and made it look good; honest gains from honest exercise, not Hina’s brand of magical transcendence which left her looking slender and petite until she pulled her shirt off and revealed how heart-flutteringly toned she was, the steely muscle under her soft skin.

“Yes. For contrast, she is closer to three hundred percent, and the way her muscles anchor is different from ours. I would assume you will also probably have changes in the bone, but nothing external.”

For some reason, I was relieved that I wouldn’t become any bulkier. Four percent more mass wouldn’t have turned me into a hypertrophic roid-monster anyway, and arguably would have pushed me into a more conventionally attractive zone of built-ness than where I was now, but wider shoulders would just mean more to hide under a hoodie. I realized my sleeve was still rolled up from when Ai had scanned me and hastily pulled it back down. No shade on Ai’s physique; I just found it uncomfortable to imagine myself looking more like her.

“Cool, cool, that’s—good. And, um, spitballing here—it’ll only continue if I put more magic into it? Keep aggravating the Flame? Like with Opal’s tail.”

Ai’s expression darkened. “That’s right. But it’s important to understand that, like her tail, this is not a controlled process.” She half-turned to pull up her top slightly and point at where it exposed her tattoo on her lower back. “This is calibrated. It’s enhancement, but also shock absorption and safety limits. Right now, your only mutations are only in your arm, so…let’s say it progresses to fifty percent higher density. Your arm would be much stronger, but the rest of your chest muscles and joints will still be regular strength. You could hurt yourself badly. Hina-san has changed enough now that she can take it, but for years, she just…”

“Let herself get hurt.” I sighed. “We talked about that. Well, not the history, but that attitude.”

“Yes. It’s horrifying.”

An awkward silence stretched between us.

“She’s not a bad person, Ai.”

Ai shook her head, deactivating the hologram and flopping into the chair at her desk.

“You have a bias.”

“I—sure, I guess I do. But the way she described it, she’s not being cruel. That’s your hangup, isn’t it?”

“It was yours, too, until a few days ago.” She spun the chair lazily, looking up at the assemblage of robotic tentacles over the bed. “I thought you understood why.”

“I do,” I protested. “She did make me uncomfortable with all the…masochistic moaning from having her bones broken. But that’s not externalized cruelty. I didn’t even harm my Flame for this.” I held up my arm. It felt basically the same; maybe a bit of an ache, but neither damaged nor noticeably stronger.

“You will, if she wants you to. Now that you’ve had a taste.”

“No, I won’t. She offered, after you left, and I pushed her away. Specifically because we had promised you, mind, and I didn’t want to betray that. Why are you treating this like such a slippery slope? Alice and Heliotrope have been doing that too.”

“Because that’s what happened with Jason. Her ex-boyfriend.”

“Sky? He got way too into the pain stuff?”

“He wanted power, she gave it to him.”

“Less cryptically?”

Ai sat back in her chair, counting on her fingers.

“More muscle, new senses, he got taller, hair in different places…”

“New senses. Like Heliotrope’s eye?”

And hair? That felt…mundane, but the rest was interesting. I pulled out my phone on reflex to ask him myself—was interrupted by a knock on the door and a shimmering white dome of hair peeking into the doorway.

“Ojamashimasu. There you are, Ezzen. I was wondering where you’d gone.”

“Oh. Hi, sorry.”

“No worries,” Alice hastily assured me, stepping in and closing the door behind her. “I’m glad to see you’re here with Ai. What’s all this? Door was ajar, so I assumed nothing too sensitive…”

I exchanged a nervous glance with Ai—I could see Alice getting mad if she learned what I had done with Hina. Given Ai’s own judgment toward Hina on the topic, would she even cover for me? Plus, Alice was also being transformed by her magic, which Amane had indicated was a less-than-euphoric process for the dragon-girl. I opted for a distraction, reaching over to the desk for my mikan. I lobbed it to her. Alice caught it and looked at me curiously.

“Thanks?”

“Not that hungry anyway.”

Alice shrugged and got to work puncturing the skin with her long nails. Ai looked at her own mikan, as though registering her own hunger, and hesitantly began to peel it, but Alice tapped her shoulder.

“Normally I’d be delighted to see you eating real food, but I had actually been intending to ask if you wanted dinner.”

Ai blinked, glanced at the clock, then scrambled out of her chair and toward the door. She yanked it open and started calling across the hall and into her workshop. Alice chuckled.

“Mm-hm.”

Ai turned back to us, signaled with her hands that she’d be right back, and slipped out the door.

“She showed me her tattoo,” I informed Alice. It wasn’t like me to start conversations like that, but I thought I remembered Alice telling me to ask about it at some point. If nothing else, it kept us off the topic of my arm. She swallowed a slice of fruit.

“What did you think?”

“It’s impressive. Um…really quiet for the output, and the ward integration is neat. I thought the kinetic dampening could use some work, but I’d need to look at the diagram; I’m not great at organics. Of course, that’d be different from how it’s done in the mantles, but the rest is fairly similar.”

“It’s different when it’s a basic human body being enhanced, isn’t it? More magical, I suppose.”

“Completely,” I agreed. “That was my first time seeing it in person, really, aside from a few times Hina’s been Hina, and it’s a lot more visceral in person. The gap is much more apparent, but there’s something more relatable in it, too, I think, kind of easier to self-insert into it and imagine what it’s like to move like that…” I trailed off. “Um. Hina was there, too.”

“Did she demonstrate?”

“Yeah.”

Alice shifted her weight, tail sliding on the tiled floor. I braced myself for more bile or judgment about Hina’s disposition, but Alice was smiling.

“She really loves the freedom of movement. That’s actually how we got to talking, back when we first met. We both loved how physical the action in a lot of the more modern mahou shoujo anime is.”

“Um. She really seems to love it,” I risked. This conversation could still blow up in my face, so I was trying to take it stage-wise before we got to the part where I had used my Flame.

Alice gave me a knowing look. “Gave you the parachute talk, did she?”

“That’s a specific thing?”

“She’s tried every metaphor there is. I still only half-get it, to be honest, but as long as she’s happy and not doing it on camera…”

Ai stepped back into the room, looking relieved.

“They just finished, no problems.”

“You don’t trust your best engineers?” Alice’s tone was dry.

“Of course I trust them, touzen. But we’re already behind, and…” Ai visibly shook off whatever grip the project had on her. “I said I was giving you this afternoon, Ezzen, and especially now that your arm is beginning to mutate, I want to make sure you have the support—”

Alice’s tail thudded heavily on the tile.

“It’s what?”

Ai re-activated the hologram in answer. “It’s very minor, low-red, just muscle density enhancements like we saw with Hina that summer. As mild as it gets.” Nervousness crept into her voice as the air temperature began to rise; Alice was gripping the mikan so hard it was leaking juice onto the tiles. “I didn’t expect Hina-san to provoke his Flame that quickly, I shouldn’t have let them spar. I’m sorry.” Ai bowed.

“They were sparring?”

“Hina was…being Hina,” I explained, guilty for having been baited in by my girlfriend’s antics no matter how authentic her neediness had been. “We—we stopped quickly.”

“Why did you bother at all? You don’t need combat training right now; you need public relations coaching and a haircut.” Alice pinched the bridge of her nose. “Ai, I thought you said you were going to brief him today? On the political situation?”

“I showed him mantle schematics and some of our interviews because—kanyuu no jouken dakara.” Ai glanced at me, wincing at her slip out of a language I spoke. “Ezzen agreed to stay because of his interest in our mantles, not for the politics.”

“We are on a time budget until Saturday. Until such a time as the PCTF stops hanging over our heads, politics are actually the highest priority.” She took a deep breath, stilling her tail. Her slitted pupils moved to me. “Not to say your comfort and interests don’t matter, Ezzen, it’s just—these mutations make the situation more complicated.”

“Um—fairly minor, isn’t it?”

“Not to everyone. On Saturday, Miyoko will see that, and she’ll make a big deal out of it and that will change the PR calculus for your whole presence at the event. It’s one thing to be a flametouched magical engineer, but mutagenic residuals elevate you further in Hikanome’s belief structure, even the smallest ones.”

I looked at Ai, wondering why she hadn’t mentioned this if it was such a big deal. Neither had Hina, but that seemed at least par for the course with her—the dour look that had taken over Ai’s face when Alice had mentioned Hikanome’s beliefs was the missing piece of the puzzle. She didn’t care about the cult’s peculiarities, if she bothered to know them at all.

“Takehara-san.” The Emerald Radiance looked and sounded tired. “Calm down. We knew Miyoko-san will care about his scars. I don’t think a few muscles being less than five percent more dense will change anything.”

Alice’s tail thumped.

“She will care, because it’s extra leverage.” The two Radiances glared at each other for a long moment, and Ai was the first to avert her eyes. Alice’s tail twitched. “Why are you even pushing back on me about this? We both know this is Hina’s fuckup for doing that to him. You ought to be angry, too.”

Ai’s eyes flashed.

“I am angry, but I am trying to direct it somewhere useful.” She looked at me. “Ezzen already knows to stop the mutations. No more channeling emotion with glyphless Flame.”

I blinked. “Um, yeah, I already had a bit of a fight with Hina about it.”

Of course, that wasn’t the whole truth; she’d actually talked me around on the appeal, and it was really only her behavior that we’d clashed on. But I didn’t want to piss off either of them further right now, so I was more than happy to kick that can down the road.

Alice sighed in relief. “Okay, that’s—better than nothing, I suppose. Then—shit, this is just a wake-up call, really. We’ve been slacking on prep to begin with; it’s already Tuesday, and we haven’t even briefed you on manners, let alone the talk track or—God damn it,” she fumed. “Three more days sounds like a lot, but it’s not.”

I swallowed. Alice seemed unable to fully smother her anxieties, and they were fanning the flames of my own. I felt unaccountably guilty for mostly lazing around and snuggling with Hina since our interference in the Thunder Horse Inferno; logically, I knew that it was Todai’s job to prepare me, but I still felt like I’d somehow been procrastinating. And it didn’t help that my girlfriend seemed to be persona non grata, even if her teammates were gracious enough to not extend that to me by association. I took a deep breath.

“Um, okay. I’m with Ai, for whatever it counts: solutions first, yeah? What do I need to do in the next three days?”

—

Two days later, I was now seriously regretting that question.

First, they’d given me homework. Todai’s PR department had scraped together a list of YouTube videos covering both basic Japanese formal etiquette for foreigners and some more specific information on Hikanome’s particular practices and beliefs—the latter including, ironically, a video co-authored by Star. Watching those had taken me deep into the night; it should have only taken an hour and a half, or half that at 2x speed, but I kept getting distracted.

The rain had returned, and I found myself missing the warmth of Hina’s body against mine. My bed was just too big for one person. I at least had enough experience with ennui to recognize that a hot shower would help, but it was still rather lonely. I kept glancing at the balcony, hoping to see her tapping on the glass, or catch a hint of purest blue. No such luck.

I entertained the idea of talking to Sky, asking about the kinds of mutations Hina had given him—or he had given himself—but there were two problems. First, I knew I didn’t need the temptation; that was also why I told myself that Hina’s absence was for the best. Second, now that it was apparently connected to the Hikanome event, poking Sky about it almost felt like work. So I avoided it and fell into a dreamless sleep.

Yesterday had begun with me being woken up too soon given my 2 AM bedtime. My mission: hands-on practice of what the videos had covered. This had taken the form of a deeply embarrassing series of repeat-after-me’s with Alice until she’d had to rush off to other duties—including more yelling at Hina, I’d find out later—leaving me to continue with one of her bilingual subordinates whose name I instantly forgot. Slowly and excruciatingly, I achieved passable delivery of basic greetings and simple phrases which would mildly impress the average Hikanome member and give the impression I really was intending to stick around long-term.

The good news was that I wasn’t expected to do almost any of the talking, not with three of the Radiances at hand to field questions.

“In fact,” Amane had explained via Ebi at lunch, “the less you talk, the less chance you have of leaking something extremely confidential. It’s not that we don’t trust you, but many of Hikanome’s higher-level people, and especially the flamebearers, will be trying to extract useful information from you, and if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s pretty obvious you don’t have the experience or skills to gracefully deflect away from sensitive topics in that kind of social piranha tank.”

“I—yeah,” I sighed. “I don’t.” It stung to admit that I didn’t have a public face befitting a VNT; I’d always envisioned a Vaetna version of myself as being outgoing and loquacious like Heung. I resolved to try to channel that energy in a less high-stakes setting than what we were doing on Saturday; there, I’d just be doing the social equivalent of huddling inside my shell. “Will you be mantled up the whole time?”

The black-haired girl shook her head. “Not in private. We’ll be having a flamebearer-only dinner, and I’ll be human for that.”

“Isn’t that the most dangerous time? Surrounded by other flamebearers?”

Amane shook her head stiffly as Ebi translated what I’d said.

“They’re not that hostile. The show of trust matters anyway, and Yuuka would stop any danger before it happens.”

Her level of trust in her former kidnappers amazed and baffled me, even with the security afforded by precognition, but it wasn’t my place to prod further. I just nodded and kept working through my katsu sandwich. Ebi had me eating a lot, both because my foot was still healing and because it would take my arm another day or two to fully integrate the mutations, and that was apparently calorically-intensive. At least the food was good—but it was takeout, not home-cooked. I’d still seen neither hide nor hair of Hina since she’d vanished on me.

Yesterday afternoon had been a lesson on what the Radiances called “opsec,” the control of sensitive information. Overload had mentioned in the chatroom that I would be answering some questions for his next video, which Ebi had seen, and so I had wound up with Ai, Amane, and Ebi all hanging over my shoulder as I drafted my responses to avoid any leakage.

Q: What was it like being flametouched?

A: Disorienting. I heard voices.

Even as I turned to give a tentative, questioning thumbs-up to the other girls, I realized my mistake. Ai was blinking at me. Ebi crossed her arms.

“Say what?”

“It…talked to me. When I was first flametouched.”

The three women shared an uneasy glance. Ebi tapped her chestplate.

“I’m the only talking Flame I’ve ever heard of, and I’m a really special case. This isn’t the kind of thing you just don’t mention.”

“It—I kind of forgot,” I muttered shamefully. “There was a lot going on at the time. And it hasn’t really…done anything since then.”

“What did it say?”

“Um—I don’t really remember what it said the first time. No, really, I don’t, it’s all kind of a…haze. The only other time was in…the car, right before I was rescued. It wanted me to trust it.”

A tingle ran down my spine as I recalled the firelight dancing in pitch darkness. I still didn’t understand what it had meant—was it trying to push me down the same path as Hina, seeking pain? But in that case, it felt odd that I hadn’t heard it when I had channeled it into my arm yesterday. And there had also been the time both Hina and I had heard it, when she’d cleared the patch of hair from my skin the other night—but I definitely couldn’t tell them that. It was deeply private, for one, but I also really didn’t need them more on my case about Hina-induced Flame misuse.

“Trust, huh. Just words? Not a vision?”

“No. Is that how it is for Heliotrope?”

Amane nodded. Instead of translating for her, Ebi let out an autotuned sigh.

“I can’t believe you’re only bringing that up now. It’s been, like, five days, and you didn’t tell us.”

Ai poked my bad arm gently. Perhaps it was my good arm now, in a sense.

“Better that he didn’t. If Hikanome found out, they’d be much more interested in you.”

I was confused. “Isn’t that what we want? I didn’t really get Alice’s problem.”

“It benefits us to a certain point,” Amane clarified via Ebi. “We want them to be interested enough to work with us, but not enough that they want to poach you. This would be too much, with the arm. They’d think you’re some kind of prophet.”

Prophet. An interesting word, considering Heliotrope’s eye. I didn’t really want to think about her, either, though.

“So…delete it?”

“Yes, delete it.” Ai had her phone out, taking notes. “I’d like to test you more, but…I honestly wouldn’t know where to start,” she admitted. “It’s probably related to all the other strange things with your Flame. The second contact, how it came through the camera. But I don’t know what to do with that information.” She frowned. “We don’t have time for a serious investigation right now, anyway.”

Of course, cutting that part left my answer too sparse, so we back-filled with talk of my elation, framing it as a dream come true, mostly leaving out the parts tinged with nightmare.

Q: How did you end up at Lighthouse?

“Oh, God.” This was the exact kind of question I had been most nervous about answering—not only because I wasn’t sure of the policy surrounding discussing the PCTF’s actions, but also because nobody had actually told me what had happened between me burying the car and Hina whisking me away. Somehow, in our murky night whisperings, I had never thought to ask. And now she wasn’t around to give the answer.

Todai was one step ahead, though. Ebi practically yanked the keyboard from my grip and wrote out a response.

A: My flamefall had badly injured me with residuals (mainly the injury to my foot) and with the Spire already scrambling to respond to the other fragments of my flamefall and the immediate aftermath, they were not in a position to accept me. Radiance Sapphire was local for an unrelated event, and was first on the scene, and she made the executive decision to bring me to Lighthouse instead where I could receive the best possible post-amputation care and prostheses.

“Is that really how it went down?”

“Well, we’re obviously trying to omit the part about you getting hurt trying to escape the PCTF, but yeah.” 

That made me angry. I understood the need for some level of secrecy and diplomacy, but—

“We really can’t even say that much? Why does everything they do stay rumor when there’s people like me and Amane as living proof? Why can’t we accuse them of their crimes?”

Amane sighed quietly. Ebi translated.

“First, they’d disavow the actual force who came after you as an independent third party unsanctioned by the PCTF. Plausible deniability. That’s why they kill the cameras. Then they’d declare an investigation, find that the kidnappers and all their materiel had mysteriously vanished, and that would be the end of it. Everybody knows what they do, but accusing them wouldn’t make them admit it.”

“Opal told me that telling Hikanome what they did to you would be our diplomatic trump card.”

“Alice is an idealist.” Amane shut her eyes and shifted in her seat, gripping the armrest with her prosthetic hand. “She’s talking about a world where, if the average Hikanome member could be persuaded to believe our claim, the church’s money and influence would be enough to hold the PCTF accountable. But it’s not.”

“Then…?”

“Violence is the only language monsters can understand.”

“You mean going to war with the PCTF?” My heart sank. “More of what we did to that oil rig? That’s not—”

“Stop,” Ai broke in. “This isn’t related to what we’re doing now. Regardless of our long-term plans, this particular statement accomplishes all we need it to. People can infer as much as they want, but if the PCTF takes issue with this, they would need to admit that they went after you in the first place. That’s the goal. It validates your presence here.”

“Okay,” I sighed. I had to admit these kinds of political moves weren’t my strong suit—hell, that was why the Radiances were helping me with this, why this paragraph had been decided on without my input. But as I reread what Ebi had written, a different gap began to grow: What about the Spire? By now, I had a pretty good picture of the various reasons Todai wanted me here, and obviously, it was still far better than ending up in the PCTF’s clutches, but why had the Vaetna allowed Hina to take me when I was unconscious? That wasn’t like them at all, not when I had obviously been on the way to the Gate. With three of them there, there should have been nothing in the world that could stop them from taking me off her hands—taking me where I belonged.

Something was still missing. I thought about how Brianna had left the oil rig and abandoned Holton to his fate, averted only by our intervention. Could the Vaetna have done the same in my case? The idea of being abandoned like that was just horrible—I had to ask Hina what exactly had happened. Over text?

“Ezzen?”

“Huh? Oh.”

Q: What kinds of projects do you intend to participate in at Todai?

Texting was too insecure; calling her didn’t seem much better. But I hadn’t seen her in person since the day before. I supposed I’d talk to her about it tonight, next time she was in my bed and it was just us. I didn’t want to confront the possibilities in daylight. It was far easier to shove those thoughts to the side and talk about magic instead. Far safer waters.

We finished the questions, and I sent them off to Overload. I think he could probably tell that Todai had a hand in their writing, but that was to be expected.

Hina did not materialize on my balcony that night. I stayed up late, watching videos and holding out hope that she’d show up so we could make up and cuddle and I could ask my questions. But there was no sign of her. Around midnight, I texted her.

Ezzen: Hey, you okay?

I didn’t get a reply.

—

Now it was Friday morning, and I had been allowed to sleep in. I was again disappointed to find no hyena-like girlfriend pressed up against me—which was a little dumb, wasn’t it? I’d been sleeping alone for the better part of a decade, and I’d only shared my bed with Hina three, maybe four times, depending on how you counted. So it was stupid to miss her.

Even once awake, I didn’t properly get up for over an hour, not until I got a message from Ebi telling me to wash up. When I asked why, all she said was:

ebi-furai: haircut.

That one word sent shivers up my spine. I didn’t like haircuts. I averaged less than one a year, and those were always just to police the split ends and knots rather than take any real length off, so over the years, the hair that had been cropped short at the time of dad’s death had developed into a shaggy, unkempt mane. I had made occasional attempts to brush it after the hairdresser had cleaned it up, but those never stuck, and it always returned to a chaotic mess, especially in the dry winter air. The hair itself wasn’t gross enough to be called matted, and my new routine’s more frequent washings with better shampoo at least kept it from being greasy. Without the grease, though, the frizziness got worse, and I had to admit that Ebi had a point. So I threw on my clothes and trudged out to the upper common area, where Amethyst was waiting.

“Haircut,” I declared grimly, running a hand through my locks in a last-minute effort to defeat a few more knots.

In reply, she pulled out her phone—tiny against the crystalline frame—and showed me a map. Most of it was in Japanese, but in theory, the hairdresser was just around the corner, easily within walking distance.

“Oh, you don’t have an in-house stylist? Or cosmetologist or whatever?” I looked around. “Where’s Ebi, anyway? I’d have expected her to do this.”

“Just us today,” Amethyst replied. Between her accent and the natural glassy, vibrato chimes of her mantle’s voice, it was hard to make out the words. She tapped on her phone again with those too-long purple claws and showed it to me.

Text is easier. This is a hairstylist we trust. Her name is Kamihata.

“Okay, lead the way.”

Thus marked the first time I saw the front entrance of Lighthouse Tower. It was an odd mix of a standard office building lobby and a themed entrance. The centerpiece of the lobby was an assortment of oversized gemstones representing the Radiances, suspended in midair and floating gently with magic. We didn’t stop to gawk—and in return, only a handful of people did a double take at the three-meter crystalline mech striding out to the front door. The main doors were big enough for her, and I trailed behind as we made our way out onto the street.

Cold, as usual. At least it wasn’t raining this morning, but the sky was definitely thinking about it, with dark, heavy clouds softening every shadow below. The indirect lighting changed how Amethyst looked, muting the brightest facets of reflection in her body into a more suffusive, translucent purple glow. People paid more attention to us on the street, but as with Opal at Tochou, I was mostly a footnote to her distinctiveness, huddled in my hoodie and trying to ease the pit of anxiety fermenting in my stomach from being out in public.

We went down the street, skyscrapers looming all around, and turned the corner. I followed Amethyst into a nondescript building—nondescript by this city’s standards still meant eight floors, but compared to the titans of glass and steel to either side of it, the building looked downright cozy. Once we were inside, Amethyst dropped her mantle. The crystal folded and collapsed downward out of reality, leaving a thin girl in its place, warmly dressed in a sweater and long skirt. Amane leaned against the wall, supported by her prosthetic arm, taking deep breaths.

“You alright?”

As she looked at me with a smile and a nod, her eyepatch lit up, projecting her eye-facsimile. This was the fancier version I had assumed existed, one which seamlessly projected a three-dimensional LM copy of her other eye, the vivid sea-green indistinguishable from the real thing after a moment. She pushed herself off the wall, found her balance, and pointed down the hall.

“Elevators.”

My foot agreed; stairs seemed draconian. As we walked, she summoned her phone from pocketspace and showed it to me.

Nice to be out of the crowds.

“Yeah. And the cold.”

“Mhm.”

The weather is nice today.

“You think so?”

The elevator took us to the third floor, which had a perfectly normal-looking barbershop. Jazzy Japanese hip-hop played from hidden speakers. It was deserted except for us, probably bought out for the duration of our appointments, and also seemed to be devoid of staff until a head poked out of the back room and called out in Japanese. Amane called back and dropped herself on the plush waiting sofa—a little too forcefully to have looked entirely voluntary. I winced; I was having some misgivings about being the only person to come along. What if she had some kind of medical emergency?

But she seemed fine; the “weather,” by which she meant the local ripple, seemed to be treating her well enough. After a minute, the hairdresser came rushing to the front of the shop with a half-bow.

Kamihata—presumably her last name—was short, with angular features and a narrow face. She was older than the Radiances, maybe in her mid-30s, and had faint smile lines around her mouth. Her hair was dyed blonde, wavy and kept in a side ponytail bound by a decorated metal clasp. I could definitely see why this place played the kind of music it did; something about the funky beat just fit her aesthetic. Her brown eyes rarely moved as she exchanged greetings with Amane, remaining fixed on the other woman’s face until they were done speaking, and only then moved to me.

“Regular haircut?”

Her accent was thicker than Amane’s, but intelligible. I nodded uneasily. Kamihata glanced at Amane and asked her something, who grinned while shaking her head. I received no explanation on what the joke was as I was led inward and guided to the nearest chair, where I encountered my least favorite part of getting a haircut: the mirror.

My pale face and sunken eyes were framed in twisting shadows. Outcroppings of frizz shot in odd directions at the top of my head, and the ends around my shoulders were so split and unkempt it seemed almost like ocean foam—but dark and heavy, as though somebody had dumped the Thunder Horse’s pipeline out over my head. I really didn’t understand why Hina insisted on calling me cute; from eyes to nose to lips, to the way they were all framed by the shaggy mess on my head, I was not a pretty person.

But that was why we were here. A haircut would make me more presentable, clean me up enough for polite society, make me seem like I wasn’t a rubbish rat who had been dragged out of its den and into the blazing spotlight of fame by unlucky fate. As Kamihata got set up, I glanced back at Amane—her hair was glossy, smooth, a nearly impeccable curtain. If she felt like she needed a haircut, how bad was my state? Humiliation swept through me, made worse by confusion as I was coaxed out of my chair and over to a corner of the room. Hadn’t I just sat down? The confusion deepened as my chair was reclined, and I leaned back to suspend my head over a basin—then it made sense.

I’d never had my hair professionally washed before. My annual-ish barber appointments were bare minimum trims, about twelve pounds—this was far more full-service, and I let my eyes slide shut as the hairstylist’s hands did their magic. The hot water felt fantastic after our brief stint in the cold, and was gone too soon, leaving me with a soaked mop of hair sitting heavy on the towel wrapped around my shoulders. That problem was solved with copious application of a blow-dryer and brush, working in tandem to defeat knots. The dryer was loud enough to drown out the music, and although I wasn’t particularly fond of loud sounds, it at least filled the air with enough white noise that I didn’t feel awkward being silent. The blow-drying felt nice—I had an absurd moment where I wondered how I could scrounge together the money to buy one, before remembering that Todai was rich.

Once I was dry, I was led back to my seat and the work began in earnest. I didn’t pick a style; between my shyness, the language barrier, and Todai’s probable particularities about the look we were going for, I just trusted that wherever I was being taken was better than my current disaster of a mane. I shouldn’t have. In my defense, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate what I wanted—but what I got definitely wasn’t it. As it was, to avoid looking straight in the mirror, and feeling too awkward to pull out my phone, I just closed my eyes and let Kamihata do her thing.

Everything went wrong when I felt the shears close above my ear. My blood ran cold as a huge fluff of hair fell off my head and landed on my shoulder, where my hairstylist’s hands swiftly brushed it down to the floor. In my naivete, I had thought I was just getting a trim—in fact, I was being shorn. 

I kept my eyes closed and didn’t say a word, too afraid to face what had just been done. Snip by snip, my head got lighter as bundles of hair were severed. Eventually, Kamihata stepped away from me.

“Open, please.”

I complied, wincing open one eye to witness the damage—and it didn’t look like me at all.

It wasn’t a bad haircut; indeed, it was perfectly serviceable, an entirely average haircut I knew was in fashion among boys my age. It wasn’t even as short as it could have been, still leaving a fair amount of fluff on my temples, but the hair that had previously gone down to my shoulders was gone, and with it, my silhouette had changed completely. My neck felt exposed to the air as I reached up to touch the new style, disbelieving.

“Are—are we done?”

“No. Do you want it shorter before the fine trim?”

“N—no.” My chest was tight, and I didn’t understand why. “Keep it long.”

Kamihata met my eyes in the mirror, scanning my face. I was obviously distraught. “Did you not want it this short?”

“It’s fine. Too late now anyway.”

It was not fine. The growth of years spent in my apartment had been removed in minutes. It was horrible, sickening, as unpleasant as having part of my flesh pared away—and it was too late. The damage was done. I shook my head a few more times, feeling the lightness, the distinct absence of a weight I’d become accustomed to for years. More than the loss of that signifier of time, I just looked—wrong. Maybe this haircut would have looked good on another person, but on me, everything about it felt awful now that the shapes of my face were no longer being framed by the hair. And I felt so exposed, unprotected; my hair had been part of my armor, and I hadn’t even realized it. I pulled my hoodie higher up around my neck.

Kamihata looked grave, calling over to Amane. But she didn’t understand why I was grieving; neither of them did. It was a perfectly fine haircut. I’d look fine on Saturday. So why did it hurt so much? Why did it feel so wrong? The wrongness, the incompleteness, who could possibly understand how—

I scrambled to pull out my phone, typing with shaky fingers.

[Direct Message] ezzen: how do you grow yoir hair back

ezzen: with magic. what are the glyphs

ezzen: sky

ezzen: tell me you know how

---

Author’s Note:

Everything is going wrong for Ez. Girlfriend problems, work, haircuts…end of the world out here, am I right?

Thanks as always to the beta readers, whose names shall be inscribed in the halls of our ancestors forevermore: Cass, Zoo, Maria, Zak, Selenium, Penguin, and Softies.

Sunspot is on break until Friday, January 10!

In the meantime, on January 3 there will be a Patreon-exclusive side story. It’s for the $10 tier and is just going to be a fun bonus, so don’t worry, nothing important to the main continuity will happen. The theme is Alice and Hina Go To The Pet Store For Christmas.

Check it out, we have fancy automatic boilerplate with pretty buttons now!We live in the future! If you want to read 2.10 right now, right here on the site, go click that orange button!

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!

December 20, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

Severe injury, Boundary violation, Mention of suicide

“Hit me!”

Hina was in a mood. A giant, gleeful grin of pointed teeth covered her face, and the blue of her eyes held a fervor, a mania.

“Uh.”

“Punch me!”

“Um, we were doing spear exercises earlier—”

“No. Shut up and hit me, cutie. With your fist! Make it fucking hurt,” she panted.

My reservations were obvious. Even though my intellect and instincts agreed that there was absolutely no way I could meaningfully injure her with a simple punch, common sense had me hesitant to throw a punch at a girl who was almost a full head shorter than me and weighed easily 20 kilos less—no matter how disturbingly enthusiastic she was.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

“Hina-san,” Ai chided. The Emerald Radiance was sitting on the sidelines, cross-legged on the dojo’s padded floor. “Maybe it would be better if you let me—”

“Ai, baby, don’t ruin this for me.”

As Ai repeated the pet name to herself incredulously, Hina eyed me with what I could only describe as need. The blue of her eyes was being rapidly swallowed from within by the black of hugely dilated pupils, and she was clenching and unclenching her hands.

“Um, Hina, you’re freaking me out just a little. Can you…?”

That got through to her. She took a deep breath that exploded outward as a plea.

“Cutie, please, I’m just—I really need this, and I promise it’ll be fun and this is real training because you gotta at least be able to throw a punch and also we’re never gonna be able to have the good kind of sex without at least starting here and I’m trying really really hard to not unload onto you first and—and Ai’s here to stop me if I lose control.”

Damn her puppy eyes, and damn my desire to find out what “the good kind of sex” meant.

“…Okay.” I balled a fist, and Hina’s eyes lit up. “Uh…where?”

“Anywhere’s good,” she purred, before shame flickered across her face. She blinked away the haze a bit. “Um. Boob?”

“Boob.”

“Yeah.”

The open vulnerability of her neediness emboldened me to ask. “Any particular…reason?”

“I like it when you touch them.”

“I’m right here,” Ai reminded us. “This is not becoming…sex. I shouldn’t need to say that. Real training, Hina-san.”

Hina bounced on the balls of her feet, only loosely interested in gravity. “Real training!”

“Hina and I talked about this,” I informed Ai. “Um—with boundaries and everything.” Though Hina’s own admission that she needed Ai’s presence as a failsafe was undermining the strength of those boundaries more than I liked. “So, um, with that in mind, Hina, what’s the…goal, here, exactly?”

“We make sure you know how to throw a real punch.”

“With you as the punching bag because you’re into that,” I finished.

“Yep! Win-win, yeah?”

“Okay, sure, yeah.” I drew back my fist and changed my stance slightly, feeling a little lame; I’d never done a hand-to-hand martial art. At least I knew to put my thumb over my fingers.

Hina presented her chest for the strike in a distinctly sexual display, despite the fact that the tank top she’d changed into was fairly tame and unprovocative. Ai groused something at her in Japanese, and she sighed, standing more normally instead.

“Killjoy. C’mon, cutie.”

I punched her. My scarred knuckles squished into the fabric, and then her breast, stopping as they cushioned against her ribs. In that moment of contact, feeling my fist strike the meat of her body, the absurdity of this situation caught up to me. A pretty girl was begging me to punch her in the boob as a thin-veiled excuse to get off. And evidently, I was such an easily-strung-along submissive that there had never really been any question I was going to do it. What a ridiculous situation.

The moment passed as I withdrew my hand. Hina looked at me blankly, unsatisfied.

“Harder, cutie. Like you mean it.”

I reddened. I had meant it, but apparently my form was too bad to get that across, or I was just too weak.

“Um—okay.”

“Again.”

I complied, opting for the other boob this time, feeling even more absurd. But it still wasn’t enough to even move the needle on whatever criteria Hina cared about. Pain, presumably. She frowned.

“I know you’re not that weak. Stop holding back.”

“I’m not!”

“He is baseline,” Ai pointed out from the sidelines. “No augmentations, no mutations. You know he can’t hit as hard as we can. And it’s very normal to unconsciously pull your punches when your first time practicing a punch is doing it on a person, Hina-san,” she chastised.

“But he knows I can take it!” Hina stepped into my reach, leaning close. “Cutie.”

“Hi?” Subconscious pattern recognition observed that most times she had gotten this close, we were usually about to—

She yanked me forward by the collar of my shirt. Ai shouted. Hina’s lips—

Did not find mine. She growled in my ear, sending goosebumps rippling down my back and arms.

“Stop fucking disappointing me and hurt me already.”

She let go and casually dropped back to where she had been standing in the blink of an eye. The motion was fluid and weightless in that way that suggested she was more, that way which evoked the Vaetna. That alone was enough to send a spike of white-hot, jealous anger straight through my chest—but combined with her words?

The cocktail of envious frustration ignited sparks of my Flame, a tearing sensation in my chest like I’d pulled a muscle I hadn’t known was there, jolted to life from a cold start. Raw magic followed the path of least resistance from my soul to where it had first touched me all those years ago, into the seams of my scars, illuminating ice-cold magmatic flows of ivory Flame. She wanted me to hurt her, to hit her as hard as a flamebearer should be able—and in that moment of frustration, the third time I swung at Hina was with more than just the meat and bone of my fist.

Things slowed down around us. Maybe that was the adrenaline, maybe white or pink ripple from my Flame manifesting my emotions, but in any case, for that fraction of a second, I was moving and thinking and feeling at her pace. Those blue eyes caught the white firelight as they narrowed in satisfaction. She responded not by attempting to dodge, but instead by leaning into the blow, and I struck her square in the chest.

This time, when fist compressed skin and fat, it didn’t stop. I felt something crunch, bone failing. The force passed through her entire body in a shockwave as she crumpled around the blow. Then the energy ran out of ways to dissipate, and she was thrown down and backward, skidding to a stop in a heap on the mat a few meters away.

I stood there, panting, fire streaming from my clenched fist. It hurt, as the Flame always did, those channels of white light like frozen metal pressed against my skin, quickly turning numb in a way sure to leave criss-crossed lines of frostnip on my hand. And inside my arm, pushing my musculature past its physical limits had already begun to presage its consequences, a tattered cold front of soreness and aches. But I felt incredible, high on the surge of power, the blink-and-you’d-miss-it apotheosis. I was beyond the sluggish limitations that had weighed me down all these years, whole at last, the emptiness sated for just a moment—

Hina gasped, coughing flecks of blood onto the mat, a visceral, mortal sound that dragged me back to reality. I had tried to hurt her—to kill, really, because like when Ai had dispatched the dummy a few hours ago, a regular human would not have survived what I had just done to Hina. And while I knew my girlfriend was far more than human, able to take it, her wet coughs and the blood oozing from the corner of her mouth filled me with icy fear and doused my Flame with ashy guilt.

“H—Hina?”

She gurgled, coughed, and rolled onto her back. Fuck. I felt a hand on my arm—Ai was at my side, inspecting what I’d just done to my hand. I pulled away, pointing at Hina lying supine.

“I’m fine. What are you doing? Help her.”

“You’re not fine. Arm, please. I need to make sure you didn’t break your hand or that the residuals aren’t about to turn your muscles to marble.”

“I’m—” I winced as she ran her thumb along the back of my hand, checking the bones. “Okay, maybe I’m not completely fine, but she’s less fine.” Why was I the one receiving medical attention when I’d been the one to throw the damn punch? “I can deal with this myself, as opposed to my girlfriend, who is coughing up blood.”

“You’re not built for those forces or ripple exposure. She is.”

As if on cue, Hina sat up, wiping her mouth with her hand. She tried to say something—it came out as a cough. She tried again.

“Hehehe—hrngh—hiehehehehe. That was so good.”

“Uh. Are you alright? Ai, please give her first aid, not me. That cough can’t be good, and I definitely felt some ribs break, and that landing looked…bad.”

Ai shook her head as Hina babbled.

“I knew you could—” she hacked some more blood into her palm, “—could do it! Gosh, fuck, that was so good,” she repeated giddily, rolling her shoulders with a bloody smile. “I love you.”

I exchanged a look with Ai, pulling my arm away. “She hit her head.”

“She’s just like this. Do you see why we try not to enable it?”

Hina rose and staggered toward us, a crazy-eyed zombie. “I love you too,” she giggled to Ai. “So sweet, so thoughtful, so pretty.”

I was weirdly grateful that Ai avoided eye contact with her pain-drunk teammate. Hina had expressed similar affection for Alice before, and I was starting to suspect it applied to all her teammates. I tried not to be jealous.

“Hina, are you…alright?”

“I’m great. And I have you to thank for it, cutie, you cutie.”

Her giddiness was going from offputting to concerning.

“I—no, I hurt you. I feel like shit about it,” I added for Ai’s benefit. “I don’t—”

“Cutie. Ezzen. Ezzie!” She rolled her tongue over the new pet name, and I blushed despite the circumstances. “I’m already mostly better. Give me another five minutes and it’ll be like it never happened.”

“Are—you’re sure? That’s a relief.”

Hina stared at me hungrily, pupils huge. “Yeah! It means you can hit me again!”

“Hina-san,” Ai interjected, warning in her voice.

“Ai-chan!”

“No more.”

“I can take more! You know I can!”

“It’s not about you. Stop being selfish for once and think.”

“His arm’s fine,” she protested. “And we’re under the red threshold for Amane because of the wards in here, so we can go as hard as we want.” She licked the blood off her palm. “So c’mon, fuck me up, show me more of what you can be. C’mon, cutie, don’t you want it?”

Ai answered before I could. “I don’t want to be here for this. It makes me feel dirty.”

“Then don’t! It’s kind of weird for you to stick around and not join in. Just let us have our fun and go work on your stuff.”

“Your ‘fun’ could get Ezzen hurt. He can’t stop you from going…fight-crazy, and you can’t stop yourself.”

“I totally can stop myself! Ezzie and I had a whole talk about this! He’s keeping me responsible!”

“Not a huge fan of ‘Ezzie’,” I interjected quietly. There was more at stake here, but that part was the only bit I really had the bandwidth for at the moment. I was still reeling from the emotional whiplash of my momentary ascension.

“Sorry. Point is, I’m not gonna hurt him, okay? Walk away and we’ll prove it!”

Ai pointed at Hina’s chest, which the hyena was rubbing absentmindedly—whether to soothe or inflame, I couldn’t say. “What just happened is not ‘keeping you responsible’.”

That, along with Hina’s “don’t you want it,” made something click into place for me. I spoke up.

“Ai, I think we’re done.”

“Hey!” Hina pouted. “Don’t blueball me like that!”

“Hina, please. I need to talk to you. Alone.”

“Aw.” Suddenly, she looked nervous. “Did I fuck up?”

“No, I just…” I glanced at Ai, hoping she’d trust my judgment.

“Yes, you fucked up.”

“Ai!”

“There was no reason for you to do any of it like this. If you want to show him how to fight like you do, then show him how to fight, not how to enable your selfishness.”

Hina looked hurt. “I did! Look at his arm!”

“Unmanaged, anger-driven ripple catalysis is not a safe way to fight. You know that; it’s why you do it. But he is still recovering from an amputation! What if it had been transmutative instead of augmentative? He could have—” She caught herself, taking a deep breath. “Fine. I’ll leave, Ezzen. I have papers to grade anyway. Ebi will check on you later.”

As she stormed off, my rapidly regenerating girlfriend called after her.

“I’ll be good! Promise!”

—

I sat down on the dojo’s padded floor, catching my breath, taking inventory of the lancing pain on my skin and in my muscles. Hina did the same and stretched her shoulders, riding up her shirt to expose her belly—a normally tantalizing view, somewhat undercut by the crunch of bone healing in real time. That rather summarized the problem.

Guilt fought desire. I did want to feel that rush of power again, and part of me, perhaps a larger part than I dared admit, wanted to get swept up in Hina’s giddy high, let this mood of hers take us from fighting to fucking and maybe blur the line between those entirely. We had the room to ourselves now, after all. But at the same time, I just felt…gross. I opened with that.

“This feels like too much.”

“Cold feet, you mean.”

“What I mean is that this is…extreme. Insane. If I hit a human like that, they’d be dead.”

“I’m not human! And neither are you, cutie. I saw that look on your face when you hit me, y’know. It makes you so happy. Like it should!” She scooted closer to me. “Lap?”

“Um—not right now.”

“Aw. Why not?”

“Because—adrenaline. You,” I clarified, finding one of the things I wouldn’t have been able to say with Ai in the room. “You’re adrenaline, and I don’t know how to feel about it.”

“Violence, yep, love it.”

“Why?”

“It’s how I am!”

“What’s in it for you? What’s the—point? Fun? Kink? I don’t even really know what I’m trying to ask.”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t. You were—I mean, I know masochism is a thing, and you’ve been open enough about that. But I had been thinking, like, whips and chains at most…” I trailed off, realizing I was ostensibly open to that level of fucked-up-torture-fun. I’d have to unpack that later. For now, it was overshadowed by the uniquely extreme case that was my girlfriend. “Not—not injuries that would send somebody to the hospital. That was way too far.”

“Mm. Okay, so…yeah, I’m a masochist, no news there, but the pain itself isn’t really the big thing. Y’know how adrenaline junkies, like skydivers and stuff, don’t actually want to die?”

“Sure.” Wait, was she implying—“Holy shit, Hina, are you—”

“No! No, no, not what I meant. I loooove being alive, that’s exactly the thing. When a human jumps out of that plane, the thrill is in the fall. Those thirty or forty seconds of letting gravity win, that’s where the fun is at. The danger, the fear of a messy end, just enough to get the heart rate up and get that thrill of survival when they open the parachute and land nice and safe. And like, it’s a good high, it scratches that itch. For humans.” My stomach turned over at the imagery of skydiving. She looked at me with those blue eyes, tilting her head curiously. “Oh, right, acrophobia.”

I nodded, pale. “Yeah, heights, not a great topic for me.”

“Nah. Perfect topic! Imagine how much of a rush that feeling of survival is when it comes after you actually hit the ground. The power when you see earth rushing toward you and know you’ll win. Imagine not being afraid of heights anymore, not being afraid of anything anymore, because you know you’ll survive.” Her voice was dreamy. “I don’t need a parachute.”

Because I was me, there was only one place for my brain to go from that: the Vaetna didn’t need parachutes either. They had enough pride in that bit of trivia that it came up fairly often—hell, Heung had said it almost verbatim minutes before I had been flametouched. I hadn’t put the pieces together until right now, but—could that bone-deep envy I felt toward the Vaetna be related to my acrophobia? Or perhaps both were just symptoms of the same frustration at being so…human. Either way, when Hina framed it like that, about being more and being powerful rather than simply about being in pain, the appeal came into focus. I hated needing a parachute.

But the parallel between her and my idols broke down from there. I couldn’t imagine any of the Vaetna being so enthusiastic about pain, nor so willing to revel in their superiority. Sure, the Heron liked to joke, but the Vaetna were ultimately practical; they wouldn’t seek out excuses to push their limits like that. Hina, on the other hand, was gratuitous, entirely self-interested. Flaunting it like she did felt wrong on some moral level, and that was before factoring in my personal, gnawing envy.

She grinned as she watched the gears turn in my head. “Yeah, I knew you’d get it.”

“I…I do, I think. That’s what you promised me, right? Power. But—the high-minded ideas about invincibility and power? Sure. But the way you were acting, the…mania…that still puts me off.”

“Sorry. The rush makes me a little loopy, but only because it feels so good.” She rubbed her breast as though reminiscing.

“Um, good as in the high you were talking about, or are we back to the masochist ‘pain equals pleasure’ thing?”

“Both. My wires are definitely more than a little crossed. And now that you know all that—don’t you want to do it more? Power up with your Flame and get me all pain-happy at the same time? The sex after is god-tier, I promise.”

It was tempting, put like that. Very, very tempting. I tried to reach for some sanity to stave off how appealing that sounded.

“It—that feels like going too far. I feel it crosses the boundaries we set.”

“Hey, you agreed to all of this. You wanted to do that to me. That’s how the Flame works, y’know. You got mad, wanted to hurt me, it helped you. Didn’t it feel so good?”

And that was the problem. It had—or at least, part of it had. “That’s a trap.”

“Hm? Cutie, I just mean we should do things that feel good. The Flame helps you with that, if you let it.”

“The power felt good,” I admitted. “Hurting you…no. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be cruel.”

“Who’re you hurting?”

“You. I just said.”

“No, you’re not!” She sat up, fixing me with glimmering sapphire. “I know it looks bad. I know it does. But it’s so fun for me. It feels incredible, I almost came.” For once, she showed something like shame, averting her eyes. “So, uh, yeah, you did a good job. You know by now you’re not putting me in actual danger, and you’re making me feel exactly how I want to feel. Where’s the cruelty there, cutie?”

“I don’t know! I mean, you’re smaller than me, and I know that doesn’t really matter because you’re you, but I still feel gross for doing it, and—it just doesn’t feel like something I should be doing.”

“But didn’t you feel like a Vaetna, for that moment?”

“…Unfair to play that card again, isn’t it?”

She ignored me. “And compared to that, right now you’re all…slow. Bound. Mortal. And, cutie—now that you’ve had a taste of what it’s like to not need a parachute, what it’s like to be like them, like me, you’re going to want to feel like that again, chase that high.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t—”

“I want you to have that.”

“Why?” The question slipped out almost automatically, the uncertainty at the core of everything that had happened to me in the last week. It echoed in every moment I spent with the Radiances, but Hina especially. I didn’t deserve this. “Why me?”

“Because you’re hurting like I was, how I used to be. And I can make it better, make you more, with the power of love and magic and punching. That’s mahou shoujo, right there in the dictionary next to a picture of Alice.”

“Still makes me sound like your charity case,” I grumbled.

“Cutie, shut the fuck up.”

She moved, fluid and weightless, closing the gap between us. On hands and knees, she leaned forward to me, and this time the kiss happened. Her mouth tasted metallic, and despite all my protests and misgivings, I welcomed it, leaning into the flavor, shuddering at the way her purrs rolled through my chest. By the time we separated, my brain had thoroughly short-circuited, and the affection in her sapphire eyes banished any notion of this being purely a matter of selfishness or duty for her.

“I said you were disappointing me. That wasn’t just to rile you up, it’s because it makes me sad when I see you reaching for the parachute instead of growing beyond it. Use your Flame, cutie, like this.”

She put her hand on my chest, tugged for my Flame—

I pulled away, holding her wrist with both hands.

“Stop. No, Hina. We promised Ai no more magic, no more pain, right?”

“There’s—c’mon! I’m still all worked up.”

“Okay, but—not like that.” I looked at her seriously. “We promised.”

“Sorry, cutie, it’s just—I—I love you,” she whimpered, hurt.

“Do you love me, or do you love what you want to make me into?”

She snarled, and my heart dropped into my stomach, prey instincts rearing their head.

“It’s both! I just want you to be happy! Weren’t you happy?”

My tattoo itched, and the ache in my hand grew—unlike previous times she’d inspired this animal terror in me, this time I’d just proven I could fight back. But that wasn’t how we had agreed to do this. I took a deep breath and stood my ground against those impulses, pulling my eyes away from the bared teeth, meeting her eyes.

“Fucking hell, Hina.” She wavered, and my voice softened. “Stop—yes, spending time with you does make me happy. Yes, I felt powerful, and that felt…good. I want more of that,” I admitted, realizing that my desire for that outweighed my misgivings. “But…you’re really pushing it on me.”

The snarl disintegrated into remorse, shoulders hunching. She swallowed, sapphire eyes swimming in welling tears, and pulled her hand out of my grip.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Space twisted, and she vanished.

—

I snuck into Ai’s workshop half an hour later, clutching oranges in both hands. A spur-of-the-moment decision that she’d probably appreciate a snack had led me to pilfer them from their basket in the penthouse’s kitchen, and I’d awkwardly carried them all the way down the elevator and through the halls, attracting a few stares from passing employees. Fortunately, it seemed that the average person here was accustomed to far weirder flamebearer shenanigans, so nobody’s eyes lingered on me too long.

Ebi had given my arm a once-over shortly after I’d left the dojo. She’d confirmed that nothing was meaningfully damaged; her only instructions were to not exert it for the rest of the day, which was the plan anyway.

“We didn’t…aggravate Amane, did we?”

“No. Dojo’s warded. You peaked high enough that you would have, though. Mostly Sapphire.”

I averted my eyes shamefully, looking out my room’s window at the setting sun.

“Makes sense. Sorry.”

“No harm done. I mean, plenty of harm to you and her, but Sapphire knows what she’s doing. It’s why she only ever does that in the dojo.”

“Really? I’d have figured it’d be a great return on investment to also ward up her room, or Amane’s. Or just put buffers between every room in the penthouse. One-color wards are pretty cheap.”

Ebi shrugged.

“Bring it up with Ai; I’m sure she has a reason. Anyway, you’re all clear, and I need to get back to kicking Amethyst’s ass in Mario Kart.”

“What?”

“You think we spend our days with her just lying in bed and me standing over her attentively like some maid?”

“I—huh.” That actually had sort of been my image of it. “Okay, uh, have fun?”

“I will.” She turned and strode toward the door, but stopped at the threshold of my bedroom. “Sapphire was crying. Post-nut clarity?”

“Something like that,” I admitted, a little too guilty and tired of the drama to be bothered by her needling. “It’s fucked, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Ha,” she chuckled in autotune. “You should probably deal with that before Heliotrope gets back tonight. She’s at her worst when her insufferability gets validated. See ya.”

“Bye.”

I decided that if Heliotrope wanted to bully me for having a girlfriend who just loved me too much, then that was her problem, not mine. Maybe it was the newfound sense of empowerment, but I found myself caring slightly less if the Bloodstone Radiance wanted to be a shit. It could also have been emotional fatigue.

I was a little angry at Hina. I also felt bad for being angry at Hina, because if the way she’d exited that conversation was any indication, she was already kicking herself for forcing herself onto me like that. I felt bad for feeling bad for being angry, because she did deserve some anger. But empathy for her high, the desire to be more, the longing—and especially gratitude and joy that she wanted to share those things with me—they factored in too. But if we did continue, went further with this, would I be able to stay in control with her making every effort to coax me over the edge, her repeated promises to combine the euphoria with sex? To say nothing of how we’d obviously made Ai uncomfortable, or darker concerns about these parallels between Hina and the Vaetna—

It was all so complicated and tiresome, and I‘d just wanted to just not think about it for a little while. Thus, oranges. I didn’t even really intend to talk to Ai about it; working on glyphs was my usual escape, and I’d rather do that with her around than without, because Ai was smart and kind and often right about things. Plus, she’d said she’d be grading assignments, and I was sort of curious what that might entail. So I crossed the threshold into her domain—and was instantly derailed from my plans by the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

The massive construction matrix on the far wall was in full operation. It was a much more intense and involved setup than Ai’s simple, educational display from yesterday. Hazard stripes and glowing caution symbols floated all around the workspace, warning all that the vast candelabra of whirring machine tooling was not to be messed with or approached by unauthorized personnel. Since I was one of those, I kept a wide berth from both the signage and the actual machinists at the control station, content to just watch.

Motive glyphs rotated a huge metal plate in midair before {AFFIXING} it in place for the next operation. The cutting head came in to remove a groove diagonally down the side, and I saw flecks of metal skim off several other places on the part simultaneously, identical features being mirrored off the main one by magic. As the tool head swapped to some kind of grinder wheel to clean up the grooves in a shower of sparks, the array of glyphs on the wall also reconfigured, different symbols illuminating and linking together in new ways. It took me a moment to piece together what this new configuration was for, and I got even more excited when it was confirmed by a fresh batch of even scarier warning messages appearing around the workspace, ribbons of English stitched with Japanese. Of course, I could only read the former.

DANGER: HARD VACUUM. DO NOT PUT ANYTHING YOU LOVE INSIDE THIS BOX.

A new part, barrel-shaped with a number of rods sticking out one end, seemed to emerge from nowhere, pulled up into our three dimensions from fourspace storage. The rods fit perfectly against the new grooves on the first part as they slid into place. A few glyphs on the wall changed, re-enabling certain laws of physics, and just like that, the two parts were fused together, no fasteners required—and not even held together by magic, either. Instead, they’d simply cold-welded together in the vacuum, no oxidizing layer on the surface to prevent it, a procedure that would be nearly impossible anywhere but the vacuum of space if not for this magical array’s ability to simply prohibit the presence of gas and tell the two parts to not merge until that {DIFFERENTIATE} had been removed from the chain.

Beautiful stuff. For a few more minutes, I just watched the process, marveling at the sophistication. I would have pulled out my phone to take a video to flaunt to the chatroom—fortunately, that leaker’s impulse was obstructed by oranges. Somebody tapped my shoulder.

“No new bruises. You stopped.”

“Hi, Ai. We did, yeah.” I blinked, then held up the fruit. “Orange?”

“This is a mikan.” She accepted it anyway. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I started to peel mine, but she stopped me.

“No food in the shop.”

“Oh.”

“Come to my office instead?”

“Uh.” I pointed at the awesome assembly of magical machine tooling. “I’m pretty good where I am.”

Ai grinned warmly. “I thought you’d like it. The undergrads don’t even get to use it.”

“What are they making?”

“This is…an artificial gravity module. Making it in one piece—or rather, cold-welding—means fewer fasteners and potential points of failure. Important in space.”

“So this is going on the ISS?”

“Different station, but yes. NASA contracted us for a few parts.”

“Not enough Peacie manufacturing capacity,” I guessed. “All their plants are busy making the new line of gunships and stuff, I hear.”

“Yes. I refuse to make weapons.”

Neither of us pointed out what we had done the other day, opting for silence instead. We watched the machine go for a few minutes. Ai frowned at me.

“That doesn’t hurt?”

“Hm?” I realized I had been tossing my mikan back and forth from hand to hand. “Not really? Ebi said not to do anything with it, but I feel fine.”

“You should still be in pain even without using the arm. Hm. Come with me.”

She led me across the hall to the prosthetic fitting room, away from the machine. But health was important, and if Ai had reason to believe something was amiss…

“Into the circle?”

“No, let me just—” she dug around in a cabinet until she found the tool she wanted, a medical-looking wand with a readout. “Internal red ripple gauge.”

She put the tip on the back of my hand, pressed a button, waited a moment, then frowned. She repeated the process at my wrist, then elbow, then shoulder.

“Your residuals are almost a quarter of what they should be after that.”

“How can you tell? That was all glyphless.”

“Experience. Sit there.” She directed me to a chair next to a machine that resembled an X-ray camera, but she didn’t offer me a lead vest or anything. “Arm on here, please.”

I complied. She worked a control panel, and then her eyebrows went up. Her lips tightened, not quite a frown.

“Wow. That explains it, then. Look at this.”

She turned on a hologram projector that projected a scan of my arm in the air between us. A few more keystrokes highlighted the muscles of my arm.

“It’s not free red ripple, it’s filtering into green.”

Goosebumps emerged on my skin, ridged and bumped like Spire dermis.

“Green? But that means—”

“Yes. Your trick with Hina has changed the musculature. You fed the Flame, and it’s…rewarding you, like with her.” She didn’t sound angry like she had with Hina, just disappointed, but it was still enough to completely take away the excitement I should have been feeling. “You’re mutating.”

---

Author’s Note:

Hina…Hina. Well, for those of you who wanted Ez to get stronger, there you go.

Thanks as always to the beta readers: Cass, Zoo, Maria, Zak, Selenium, Penguin and Softies.

Sunspot has its own website now! Check it out at https://sunspot.gay (wow you’re already here)! It has Patreon integration, the long-awaited glossary of terms (forever WIP) and more.

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!

December 15, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

VNT: Vaetna-type. An obnoxiously inaccurate term; for one, none were equal to the Vaetna, and for two, the term was haphazardly applied to essentially any group where a flamebearer held a major role, not just ones that shared the Vaetna’s philosophy of violence. The PCTF and Todai were definitely tier 2 VNT groups; Hikanome was more like tier 3, from what I understood, although all the cults fell under the label to different extents. By comparison, a university with a department of Ripple Studies or Glyph Engineering would by necessity be associated with at least one flamebearer, but were generally not considered VNT groups in themselves.

Really, geopolitical impact was the main metric, and in that regard, it was little wonder that the Spire’s knights were the namesake. For years, I’d gone out of my way to avoid using the term, because I felt it diminished the Vaetna by proxy when applied to even the tier 2 groups, but eventually I’d caved—mostly for lack of any other term with the same colloquial clarity. “Influential flamebearer” and other such substitute terms just had a lot more ambiguity in forum threads.

But Todai were definitely VNTs. In fact, I was begrudgingly starting to think that they were some of the most Vaetna-like of any group. The parallels between mantles and dermis went without saying, of course, but my first up-close-and-personal combat training brought it into much more visceral perspective.

“You’ve never used it against somebody else,” Ai deduced, gesturing at my spear lying forlornly next to me. She’d casually sidestepped a thrust and wrenched the haft out of my hand entirely before sending me onto the mat. I sat up, groaning.

“No. I, um, looked a little bit for classes, but HEMA is specifically swords, and the only spear things I could find were closer to London, which is too far.” I checked my foot to make sure our seconds-long bout hadn’t already damaged the amputation site. “Way too far, now.”

“Not too far,” Ai shone a sunny smile, which I could pretend was the reason my face was hot. She hadn’t even felt the need to take off her jacket before taking me on. “Actually, I think you’re right where you should be.”

“What, on the floor?”

She winced. “Oh, no, not what I meant.”

“I need practice,” I admitted. “But, um, if Hikanome is safe, or at least this event will be, why are we doing this now?”

“Why do you think?”

“Because…summoning my spear is already my first instinct in danger?”

“Mm, yes, that’s part of it. It’s actually a good thing that you can arm yourself without thinking, so you should be able to use it better. But that’s only part of it. I agree with Ishikawa-san: You need to feel like you can fight back if you’re in danger.”

“Wow, way to just cut me right open.”

She frowned.

“I’m unarmed. Do you want to go spear-on-spear?”

“Uh, not what I meant, but…kind of?” I recalled the spear to my hand. “Feel like I’d get thrashed even harder, though.” It didn’t bruise my ego to admit that, or at least not as much as I’d expected.

“True. Your biggest problem right now…you’re trying to be faster than me. Your footwork seems good, and you understand your reach advantage, but even if you were reacting to me in time, I just have a speed advantage.”

“Okay? Is that just an experience thing?”

“Not entirely. I’m cheating.”

She turned away from me and shrugged off the jacket, tossing it to the side, then began to pull up the hem of her tank top—

“What are you doing?”

The question was answered once she pulled the garment off, exposing the tattoo binding Amane had mentioned and I’d promptly forgotten about. Down Ai’s spine ran a complex, interlinked glyph, in vivid, fluorescent green. Or rather, a 2D shadow of a 3D chain of glyphs, like my {COMPOSE} tattoo on my arm. My curiosity warred with my embarrassment, eyes tracing up her back to where the tattoo ran under her sports bra before reappearing and continuing its gradients and symmetrical patterns until it terminated at the base of her neck. It covered most of her back, especially wide at the shoulders and hips where it was denser with additional arrangements of glyphs.

The glyphs that made up the tattoo were clearly based on the same principles she had pioneered for prosthesis animation, enhancing the motion of her limbs, but the longer I looked, the more I could tease out other functionality. Most notable was the set of smaller, more-intricate patterns spaced regularly along her spine: ward segments to disrupt offensive magic intended to pulp her soft, squishy insides or slice her in half. Each of the ward sections—overall sort of hourglass-shaped—also had another node on the end, {AFFIX}-{DISSIPATE}: kinetic dampening applied inward so she didn’t shatter her own bones by throwing an enhanced punch.

Of course, I would have already known the technical points in intimate detail had I looked at the file Ebi had sent me last night, but my work ethic had been rather low between then and now—I’d been free from responsibility and enjoying my new PC and not gotten a whit of real glyph work done. I felt a little guilty for having not done my reading, but then again, Ai hadn’t given me much notice to come work out; she’d just knocked on my door and told me it was time to do some light diagnostic training.

“Do I need to explain any part of it?”

I jumped, realizing I’d been staring at her exposed back for inappropriately long. I averted my gaze hurriedly, pretending to inspect the hexagonal, interlinked pads lining the lower part of the dojo’s walls.

“Um, I think I get it. Strength, speed, and durability? Wards, too…wait,” I recalled my spear into my arm, returning it to its tattoo form, a simple, dark line that shone with iridescence when it caught the dojo’s lights in just the right way. “Yours is an actual chain of glyphs, but mine is symbolic.”

“We’ve gotten better at it over time. If you look here—” she pointed at her lower back, seemingly unembarrassed at the exposure as she indicated a more roughly inked part of the chain “—this is the oldest part. Also, this is all kinetics, no {COMPOSED} matter, so if I make a mistake when I alter the weave…”

She mimed an implosion with her hands and made a hissing, gurgling noise like something wet being sucked through a tube. A messy way to go.

“Ah.”

“Yes. That, and I really like the design.”

I swallowed my embarrassment and looked intently again at the expanse of bare skin, but if she meant a specific element, I didn’t see it.

“Uh? I mean, it’s got clever propagation channeling, I suppose. Really good.” I squinted. “Oh, and the way you split the channels for {DEFLECT}, that’s—”

“Not the glyph design, the artwork.”

“Artwork?” I repeated dumbly.

Ai sighed and paced away from me. As she receded, my eyes stopped being able to make out the individual details of each viridian glyph, turning the tattoo into, well—a tattoo. Now I saw the design.

“Oh, wow.”

“Deshou? Ebi-tan did a great job.”

Ai had a pair of feathery wings folded on her back, each line of glyphs coalescing into the negative space of a shadow cast by the feathers. Some of the more geometric chains, too symmetrical and boxy to mimic the play of light over organic shapes, instead took on the look of pistons or lever arms, as though the feathers were attached to a mechanical frame mounted to her back. I followed the train of logic.

“Can you fly?” I hadn’t seen the type of anti-gravity lattices one would expect, the sort that were in Heliotrope’s jetbike.

“Not as well as the wings suggest,” she admitted. “Ah…right, Hina jumped you home the other day, didn’t she?”

The memory of falling out of the sky made my stomach churn.

“Yes?”

“It’s more controlled than that,” she assured with a smile. “Big jump, then glide. I can show you, but I don’t think it’d be very helpful for you right now.”

Not helpful, perhaps, but I was suddenly paying much closer attention. I’d written off her enhancements as what was often termed “human-plus,” but limited flight gave her three-dimensional maneuverability that put her in the realm of the Vaetna, to an extent.

“Um, if it’s not too much of a hassle…”

—

To my slight disappointment, Ai did not immediately leap into the air and begin bounding around the dojo. She gave a much more practical demonstration—one which included a spear. It was a simple training spear, plastic haft, foam tip, and on the short side by my standards. Mine was longer than I was tall; the one Ai had selected was roughly her height. She brought one of the wooden dummies to the middle of the room and began a simple training sequence.

Her movements were distinct from mine in a number of ways. My style was modeled on—inspired by, really—Heung’s moves, with a lot of powerful strikes to abuse range, as she’d noted, and I generally tried to emphasize control of my footwork, lacking the spearmaster’s ability to supernaturally correct out of overbalance and put force behind any blow no matter how improbable. In doing so, I achieved what I thought to be the closest imitation to his motions that one could approximate, accounting for the fact that I had to deal with things like momentum and gravity and the limited space of my old living situation. And Ai’s warm-up sequence was still—loosely—abiding by those basic rules of physics, but the way she was striking—

She barely used the spear tip. She switched freely between one-handed and two-handed stances, striking with the haft, more like a quarterstaff than a spear. Too, she fought with her body as much as the weapon, an up-close-and-personal style with knee strikes and dancing footwork; variations on the same moves she’d used to take me down in our brief bout of sparring. This time, though, she fully engaged her magical augmentations and wasn’t holding back anything; each blow was full-force, as far as I could tell. She’d go for the head, ribs, stomach, knees, groin. Cracking noises filled the air in a staccato rhythm of violence.

Then she began to speed up.

It’s difficult to express how exactly Ai’s movements changed. The closest example would be as though she were a video played fifty percent faster than normal, which captures the way her movements seemed to lose inertia as though the spear were practically weightless—but that comparison also gives the image of cartoonishly jerky motions. Instead, her motions took on a sort of grace. The dance went from the exertions of muscles and tendons fighting momentum and gravity to something else, destructive motion flowing through her body and depositing lethal energy into the dummy’s wooden frame. Each enhanced strike was loud enough to make me flinch and sent splinters flying.

I saw in her movements the barest shadow of the Vaetna’s aspect. Lesser—closer-in and more brutal, still half-tethered to the dojo’s floor. If the dummy were a real, unaugmented human, they’d already be dead from blunt force trauma—a far less clean death than by a vaet or LM dart, merely straddling the border of supernatural violence without transcending to the level of true, unfettered destruction. Ai swung the butt of the spear into the dummy’s shoulder and followed with a low leg sweep that was distinctly unlike anything a Vaetna would do—the first strike would have been with a blade and ended the fight there. As it was, the enhanced kick was forceful enough to defeat the dummy’s stabilized base and send it tumbling.

The next few moments were a blur of further-accelerated violence that I only parsed after the fact. Ai flipped, spun, and then there was a whistling noise, a crunch, and a bang. The sound echoed through the room as Ai doubled over, hands on her knees, glyph-woven wings aglow against her muscular back as she caught her breath. After a few measured breaths, she raised her head to join me in looking up at her grisly handiwork.

The dummy had struck the top edge of the padding on the far wall, impaled through the chest, some four or five meters up from the floor. It was split down the middle around the speartip. The spear’s plastic haft had been partially melted and distorted by friction as it had left Ai’s hand. That was a singular strike more suited to the Vaetna; a pang of jealous excitement ran through me at the thought, chased immediately by awful guilt for envying such a killing blow. The jealousy won.

“Um. Didn’t—didn’t it have a foam tip?”

“Yes. So don’t do that with yours.”

“I can’t. And you’re the weakest of them?”

She looked at me with some surprise at the bitterness in my tone, muscular arms glistening with sweat as she rolled her shoulders—but those weren’t where the real power lay. The intricate green lattice was what had enabled this. My mind was racing a mile a minute: with only that enhancement, Ai’s display of physicality just now had grazed the bottom edge of the zone of physical power that I considered solely the Vaetna’s domain. She nodded.

“Hina is faster than me and has more tricks.”

Hina’s elevated physiology was even more powerful, those changes she’d subtly promised me if only I was willing. Of course, I’d already seen little tastes of her power, but not simple, transcendental physical prowess, not really. No wonder her predatory aspect alarmed me deep in my bones—I made a conscious effort to stop biting my lip.

“And…mantles? I was under the impression that Amethyst’s g—gun,” I stumbled over the instrument of violence I’d enabled, “was fairly representative of the overall fighting style, ranged rather than melee combat, but that doesn’t look to be indicative of…”

“It’s quite physical. Kinetic. You haven’t seen many videos of us fighting, have you?”

“I was going to get around to it.”

“You weren’t,” she countered bluntly. There was no accusation in the tone; she was actually smiling. “I say that all the time and then never get around to it unless Ebi-tan or Takehara-san remind me. But I’ve set aside this whole afternoon anyway—let’s have lunch, and I’ll show you some combat footage. You’ll understand the lattice diagrams much better with practical examples.”

—

Ai’s idea of lunch was cup ramen. While the noodles rehydrated in hot water, she disappeared upstairs briefly, returning with a laptop and cables. She set up the laptop to feed into the big TV in the common area and started queuing up YouTube clips and opening up an instance of GWalk.

The noodles were honestly pretty good, at least relative to the miniscule amount of effort they had taken. Ai and I had different types; she’d given me what was supposedly the default, where the extra bits were little chunks of unidentifiable salty meat and tiny shrimp, but her own was a curry soup variation with a tempting aroma. I stirred the noodles with the training chopsticks she had made for me, which had apparently been living with the other silverware in the kitchen.

“I, uh, don’t think I ever thanked you for these.”

She smiled.

“You’re welcome.”

“I mean, they fit really well. Perfectly, in fact. Did you scan my hand or something?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.”

The first video we watched was, of all things, a TV interview with Alice from two years ago. The dragon-girl looked slightly different; her tail was only half as long as I was used to, and not as thick. It was awkwardly tucked behind her as she sat forward in an oversized, padded chair, shifting uncomfortably. It was easy to imagine why, with the limb squished behind her like that. I glanced over at Ai, who was wearing a sympathetic grimace.

“Didn’t you say combat footage?”

“In a bit, but this is a really good interview. Very helpful.”

TV-Alice was soldiering through the pain, bantering with the trio of hosts. It was about a minute into the interview when I brought up the obvious issue.

“…This is in Japanese, Ai.”

“Oh.”

Ai physically flinched at her error, reaching over to the laptop to turn on subtitles, revealing that Alice was discussing mantle transformations. After a few more minutes of introductory discussions, consisting mostly of Alice introducing her team and being humble in the face of the interviewers—two of whom were obviously star-struck—some slides with graphs came on screen. I blinked at the numbers involved and the graphic of Alice’s mantle in flight next to a jet fighter.

“Seventy kilonewtons of thrust?”

“Yes!” Ai sounded so proud, pausing the video to tab over to GWalk, where she had Alice’s mantle diagram loaded. She moused over the propulsion section of the lattice. “Going fast is really easy when you don’t have to worry about holding the craft together, carrying fuel, any of that.”

I knew that, of course; I was already mentally comparing these numbers to the Vaetna’s. Between Gates and teleportation, it was actually somewhat uncommon for them to fly long distances, and they didn’t tend to use direct thrust in a way that was easily quantifiable as force—but I knew that when Heung wanted to go fast, he could output over two hundred kilonewtons to break the sound barrier in under a second. He’d done that sort of acceleration to intercept my flamefall. So at least for this metric, the Radiances still only measured up to a fraction of the Vaetna—but a significant fraction.

So it went with other statistics. Alice’s interview didn’t disclose things like armaments or exact quantity of magical power being used, for obvious reasons, but I had those numbers right in front of me in the lattice diagram, and every time it was the same story: not a direct match for the Vaetna, but close enough that they were in the ballpark…with one exception.

“We can’t compete on ripple leakage, of course. We’ve lowered FRR by almost ninety percent since the first prototypes, since of course that’s critical for Amane’s well-being, but compared to the Vaetna…” Ai trailed off.

The Vaetna famously produced zero free ripple—the extra uncontrolled stuff which had zany and often deleterious effects on its surroundings—when casting magic; the running theory was that the Spire itself modulated that as a byproduct of the fact that every Vaetna’s Flame was partially woven into it, but as usual, there was no official word on the subject. This dovetailed with their other environmental efforts, since magical pollution was a special kind of ugly. TV-Alice agreed, asserting that it was a completely unacceptable form of collateral damage for mahou shoujo.

We eventually moved on from the interview to the promised combat clips so that I could see these abstract numbers in action. And in action, they did look a lot like the Vaetna, enough that my jealousy for that unattainable form, cooled to bare embers by years of resignation, was starting to reignite. Refocus.

Maybe it wasn’t so unattainable.

—

At some point, Ai’s series of videos and data sheets tapered off, and we wound up just chatting about magic. The broth-stained plastic cups on the table had been joined by a bag of potato chips from which we both snacked freely while we curled up on the sofa. Soothed by Ai’s calm demeanor, I found it in me to open up somewhat about the Vaetna, my fascination for them, my desire to see the Spire with my own eyes—and my contradictory resolution to stick around in spite of all that and the forecasted danger. I shared with her what I had overheard from Yuuka.

“Three weeks.”

Ai seemed to think hard for a moment, running numbers in her head. When she refocused on me, she was confident, solid. I was grateful.

“We’ll be ready.”

“Ready for what, exactly?”

“It won’t be fighting right away, I think. They’ll try to buy you first. Etto…poach. Poach you. Every year, I get huge offers to work at one of the US research groups. Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon, General Dynamics…”

“The ones who develop directly for the PCTF,” I followed.

“Yes. And I never will, of course.”

“Neither will I,” I assured her. “I mean, if they wanted me, they had years to come pick me up. But I’ve rather…soured on them, of late.”

“Soured on them,” Ai repeated, trying out the expression. “I like that phrase. Suppakunatta. Doesn’t work as well in Japanese. Has she been better to you?”

I winced.

“Haven’t been face-to-face since then, so I don’t know, but…it wasn’t great, when she was talking to Alice.”

A burst of rent air interrupted us. Hina pranced her way into three-space, startling me and setting my thoughts awhirl as I registered the cozy, intimate situation Ai and I had spent the last two or three hours in—it can’t have looked good, if Hina were the type to care about such things. But she just happily flopped onto the sofa next to me, of course.

“Hey, cuties!”

“Hina-san. Oshigoto wa?”

“Bleh. Meetings! They don’t need me.” The puppy shimmied to snuggle up against me, and I tried very hard not to look down her blouse as she undid the top few buttons. “How’s it hangin’?”

“Good,” I spluttered, trying for nonchalance and failing. “The, um. Mantles. Yep.”

“Ooooh. Getting in that circuitry, huh?”

“You could say that.” Ai hummed. “Actually, we were just talking about Yuuka-chan. It seems like your shitsuke hasn’t worked.”

Hina pouted. “And I took away her chocolate and everything…”

That made Ai’s eyebrows go up. “Ara. I was talking about the violence, but that’s more serious for you. Did you give Ezzen some?”

“Of course! And it was good, right, cutie?” She snuggled closer against me.

“Um, yeah.”

“It’s very expensive,” Ai informed me, mock-stern. “She’ll bankrupt us.”

“‘S good though, right? Right?”

“It is,” the muscular girl admitted. Hina purred happily, then her expression soured.

“Man, Yuuka’s being such a jerk. She’d be way nicer if cutie here was a girl, too. That’s not fair at all!”

I recalled that Yuuka had implied something along those lines. Being the subject of such intense and directed misandry felt awful, so I distracted myself with a switch to more practical matters.

“Um, well, about that. She insisted on going on Saturday.”

“Ah. So, three of us?”

“I guess so. I don’t think she has a problem with you going; she just wanted something about her classes.”

Ai nodded. “That makes sense. The rally is in cooperation with environmentalist groups, and Yuuka-chan is a rather extreme…”

“Activist,” Hina supplied. “Eco-terrorist!” She sounded so proud of her teammate.

“Excuse me?”

Ai grimaced. “She thinks of herself as…a protector. Because of everything with Amane. And once we became stronger, a lot of what her eye tells her is…oil in the oceans, rainforests being cut down. She thinks that’s evil. And it is the duty of mahou shoujo to destroy evil.”

“That’s why she was in the Gulf! Because of the rig!”

“Oh.” I was reevaluating her, somewhat. The Vaetna were definitely also classifiable as ecological activists, and yes, sometimes…“Eco-terrorist?”

“Not publicly,” Ai glared slightly at Hina for revealing the information, and I could see why. Another thing to keep straight, to make sure I didn’t accidentally leak.

“Right, right,” the puppy agreed, immune to the judgment. “It’s more of a hobby for her.”

“Um. Got it. Okay. I can’t blame her,” I admitted.

Hina dug a claw into my arm and growled. Not loud enough for Ai to hear, but I could feel it radiate through her torso into mine. It still freaked me out that I found that so attractive.

“I smell sweat. You sparred. Three hours ago, maybe?”

“Y—yeah?”

She looked up at me with those sapphire eyes, pure hyena, pupils tiny—all predator. I shivered.

“I need a piece of that action. Make up for missing last night, and get you ready for Saturday.”

I tore my eyes from her, a monumental struggle, to look at Ai on my other side and ask a silent question with my eyes: from what she and Amane had said, such physical preparation wasn’t necessary, so was Hina just making excuses for her own desires? Not that the butterflies in my stomach cared about whether it was necessary. Ai returned the question with one of her own.

“Last night?”

“Oh, um, she was out—”

“Not sex,” Hina clarified for me. “Just fighting.”

“Not much difference with you,” Ai pointed out grumpily.

“Well, Yuuka’s always so unsatisfying, doesn’t fight back at all, just runs! Need to get some real hits.”

Ai shook her head. “She gets like this, sometimes. Alice would stop her, but…you did want to see how she moves, right?”

I swallowed, unable to deny my excitement to see firsthand how my girlfriend would compare to my idols in combat. I wanted to know just how far beyond me she was. And, in turn, how far I could go, what I might be able to become—a path toward their ilk.

“I do.”

---

Author’s Note:

This chapter is two weeks late! Three weeks? Plus two days. Either way, late! And it is because I was so incredibly busy doing important things like graduating. But that’s behind us now, and for the foreseeable future I shall be less busy, so Sunspot is back!

I haven’t been doing no work on Sunspot. I was also doing other stuff like finalizing the release version of Sunspot’s website, which has been waylaid by some final changes I wanted to make, so that’ll go live sometime tomorrow, probably. Also, we have an updated synopsis, and I’ve done a minor editing pass on 1.01. Now the story itself may resume, more powerful than ever before! Also, we have a cover for arc 2 in the works which should arrive soon.

As usual, thank you to the beta readers: Cass, Zooloo, Maria, Zak, Selenium, Penguin and Softies. They also helped keep me on track with all my crazy busyness of the last few weeks, and helped with the website, so I’m very grateful to them.

It’s good to be back. See you next week!

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!

November 22, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

It’s cold.

That’s weird, because temperature isn’t the kind of thing one normally notices in a dream. Nonetheless, it is undeniably cold here. I can feel it on my skin, in my teeth, and especially from the ache in my hand.

Where is here, anyway? It is not the waters below the ice, nor is it the flat expanse above, nor the beach or great and incomprehensible forest beyond. Instead, I sit upon an outcropping, some vast block of hard and rough material that could be stone, or bone, or perhaps the Spire’s dermis. It’s large enough for me to sit comfortably in the middle without feeling worryingly close to the edge and thus in danger of falling off. The outcropping is somewhat uneven, with high and low points gently rising and falling until the sides slope worryingly downward. Perhaps this is the tip of some great, buried femur, protruding up from the mists shrouding whatever may be below. Always mist in these dreams. It’s cold.

More to the point, I’m not alone. Someone else sits next to me, a man, older by maybe ten or fifteen years, with a salt-worn face and grainy stubble. His skin is darker than my pallor, tanned by the sun and stretched taut over a muscular frame. No bodybuilder physique, rather the practical muscles of a man whose trade is contingent on a functional body. He is whole, unlike me.

I recognize him from the news; this is the pivotal figure around which the whole debacle in the Gulf of Mexico revolved. Noah Holton. Now something like my adoptive sibling, perhaps—being from the same creche of Flame as I, another fragment from when the Heron shattered fate. In theory, there were four of us—but one had turned inferno and been put down by the Vaetna, so now, only three, and only two right here on this strange outcropping surrounded by cold mist.

“You’re Ezzen.”

It is not a question. His voice is as weathered as his face, gravelly. Perhaps he smokes. His accent is of the American South.

“That’s me,” I confirm. “You’re…Noah? Mr. Holton?”

“Just Holton. You’re some kind of magic expert, they tell me. And just a kid. Have any idea where in God’s name we are?”

“Haven’t a clue, sorry.” I scrape a fingernail on the hard surface; it leaves no mark. “But this is a dream.”

“Figured as much. More weird flamebearer shit?”

“I…guess so. Haven’t heard of it, but this isn’t my first. Third, I think.”

With my full recollection available here, I realize I hadn’t dreamt the previous night, when I’d slept with Hina. Odd.

“Huh. Sure isn’t where I went to sleep, that’s for sure.”

“We won’t remember this when we wake up, either. At least, I don’t.”

“Huh. Then what’s the point?”

We fall into silence for a while.

“Where do you think the third guy is?”

“Probably not asleep. It’s morning back home.”

“Oh, right. So, then, why are you asleep?”

“Healing. Ripple fucked me up good, they say.”

“You look whole to me. Who’s ‘they’?”

“What are you, a cop?”

I blink.

“I’m just—trying to look out for you, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Because…” I thought about this. “I should?”

He grunts.

“Thanks. But I’m not telling you anything. I don’t even know if you’re real. You could be somebody from the Peacies trying to trick me into giving up my location, for all I know.”

“I’ve got no love for them,” I object. But he’s right; I have no way of knowing he’s real, either. I change the topic, hoping that if he is indeed real, he can answer this question. “Why did Brianna leave you?”

“Who? Oh, the Vaetna?”

“Yeah.”

“She said she couldn’t take me.”

I sit further up in alarm.

“What does that mean?”

“Beats me.” He says nothing more, looking out into the mist, rubbing his hands together as though to warm them up. It doesn’t work.

“Well—did she say anything else?” That couldn’t be right, but he just shrugs.

“Don’t remember exactly what she said, but yeah, that’s what it came out to. She couldn’t take me to the Spire. Couldn’t even stick around to bail me out. Didn’t give a real reason, I think. I didn’t beg her, either, so she just left.”

“That doesn’t happen.”

“No? ‘Cause that’s what happened.”

“It doesn’t. They don’t leave flamebearers out to dry like that. They didn’t, for me. I mean, I didn’t wind up going with them, but three of them showed up for me. That doesn’t make sense.”

“Eh. They didn’t really ‘leave me out to dry’, I guess. Helped clean up the guys I was fighting—scooped out the whole east side of the superstructure. Poor fucker right in front of me was caught at the edge, didn’t get him all the way.”

Guilt seeps through me like poison. That hadn’t been the Vaetna—should I tell him that, admit what I had done? Would that make anything about this better? He’d mentioned he was recovering from ripple exposure—I would feel guiltier if that was our doing. But it could well have been his, or just the ambient residuals from his Flamefall. I can’t risk it.

“Even—even so. They left you there. That doesn’t happen,” I repeat. “There has to be a reason.”

“Probably is. Doesn’t really matter to me.”

“Why not? It’s unprecedented, it means something.” I feel myself growing annoyed at his apathy. “And we’re from the same cluster, so even if you don’t care, I do.”

“Still can’t prove that.”

A fair point. But there has to be a way. I rack my brain, trying to picture glyphs, my ingrained expertise far more slow and sluggish to respond than usual, dampened by the swaddling other-ness of the dream.

“I can prove it somehow,” I promise. “I’ll find a way to remember this, contact you.”

“Cool.”

I frown. He just—doesn’t care? I don’t know what to say in the face of the brick wall of apathy. So I say nothing and stand, to better investigate this strange locale. Even with no prosthetic, this dream lets me walk without pain or difficulty. I move to the edge of the mostly level area of the outcropping, where it begins to slope downward, getting as close as I dare; as I thought, no surge of acrophobia rises to meet me as I peer down into the milky mist. But it is cold. Why does my hand hurt, but not my foot? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere below, beyond my sight.

“Gonna jump?”

“What? No, just looking.”

“Why not?”

I turn to him, befuddled.

“Why would I?”

“Well. Assuming you are real, I’m just thinking…maybe this is some sort of test. Like we won’t wake up until we leave the platform, or something.”

“And your evidence for thinking that?”

He shrugs.

“Guess.”

I turn back toward the fog, trying to glean something, anything. But there are not even swirls of atmospheric motion. It is instead a heavy, impenetrable stillness. It occurs to me that perhaps we are high above that forest beyond the beach, and that somewhere within the fog lays a surface of treetops. That doesn’t answer the question of what we’re actually standing on. I hope it’s not bone; the implications of that would be dire. As I look, I speak.

“My last dreams didn’t have any kind of…test, or whatever. And this isn’t the same place. I did have somebody else there, but it was…just a manifestation of my Flame, somehow. And it was different from you. I think you’re real, but my gut says that we’re supposed to talk to each other. Our Flames, or somebody else, want us to communicate.”

“Huh. Well, kid, from where I’m sitting, the Frozen Flame isn’t our friend. Real bastard, even. I’d think real hard about what I assume it wants.”

“It’s not evil.”

“It runs on pain. I learned that from minute one. How much more evil can it get?” He shifts. “I don’t want to find out. I didn’t sign up for any of this shit. But I can’t even get away from it when I’m sleeping, seems like.”

For me, this has all been a dream come true, albeit a twisted one. But for somebody without my obsessive passion for magic, somebody who was trapped in the middle of a standoff between world powers rather than whisked away to relative safety?

“I don’t blame you,” I concede. “But we ought to make the most of the hand we’re dealt.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m not playing.”

“Meaning what? You—can’t go to the Spire.” The words are ash in my mouth for their implication. He has to have misunderstood somehow. “If that’s what Bri meant. And there’s no other safe haven, not really, other than…the Peacies, or their equivalents. Who you don’t seem keen on.”

“I’m not, nah. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. But I’m not gonna go to war with them or whatever else the fuckin—what’s the word—VNTs get up to. And especially whatever this shit—” he waves at the mist around us “—is. No thanks. I want out.”

This enkindles an unfamiliar emotion in me, one that sweeps away the sympathy. I glower.

“That’s not a choice we get to make.”

He shrugs again.

“It’s the choice I’m making. You gonna jump or what?”

“Why would I…?”

“No other way off this rock. You’re the type who needs answers, and they’re not up here, I can tell you that much.”

I glance down again; still no dizziness or primal terror, because there’s no sense of distance for the fall. A perfect chance to face my fear—assuming this is indeed just a dream, a normal one where I can’t get hurt. But there’s no guarantee of that, not in whatever strange Flame-derived non-space this is. So instead, I turn back to him, surveying the empty expanse around us.

“Not up here, no. But that doesn’t mean I need to jump to find out.”

I squeeze my eyes shut and pull the rip-cord dangling off my soul, tearing the stitches where it meets my Flame. It and I both tremble at the lance of agony, and my hand ignites. The cold does not dissipate, nor the ache, but instead coexists with the searing heat of fire, tongues of Flame in the same milk-white as the mist around us, because in my gut I know that they are one and the same. I raise my hand, reaching out to the edge, telling them to meet and merge, that my shard of the Flame may connect to whatever greater whole composes this ephemeral realm. I might not have access to glyphcraft, but I still have this most basic magic, the basis, its fundamental form.

My hand takes great effort to move toward the edges of the fog, as though I am pushing it through a viscous fluid. It grows denser the further I reach, until I am straining with my entire body for a single extra centimeter. I am close; it will give, with just a little more, and I will make contact. But before I can break through the barrier, stretch the elastic goop to its limit and shear it apart, I hear Holton move behind me.

“Stop,” he whispers, voice grave. “Something is here.”

“A bit—ngh—late for that, I think.” At this point, it would be as much effort to extract my arm, douse the Flame, as it would be to see it through. “What kind of something?”

“I don’t know! Something’s moving out there! Big, white, like a…tooth, or a fin. Cut through the mist. They got fucked up space whales in here?”

“Let’s not find out.”

I push through, and the dream tears.

—

Tap tap tap tap…

I awoke to the sound of rain. A retina-blast of light from my phone shattered the predawn veil of darkness as I confirmed the time—5:47, a truly ungodly hour, a time during which no sane person should be up. I squeezed my eyes tighter shut and rolled over in bed, hoping the pitter-patter of the rain outside would lull me back to oblivion. I’d just been having an interesting dream, though I couldn’t recall the details and had the sense that it had reached some kind of conclusion. I wanted to get back to it and see what else my subconscious could spin up while I rested a few hours more.

Tap tap tap tap…

If the Radiances wanted me up early to prepare for Saturday or paperwork or something else time-sensitive, well, they could just text me or knock on the door or something. Until then, I was going back to sleep. I might miss breakfast, but that was fine if it meant I could avoid another unpleasant run-in with Yuuka.

Tap tap tap tap…

Just as I had snuggled further into my blanket and hooked my arm under the pillow, my hopes of returning to dream-land were sabotaged by the human brain’s propensity for pattern recognition; I realized that the sound of the rain contained an oddly rhythmic component. Of course, there was the generally random white noise of countless raindrops, but there was also a distinct sequence of tapping noises, four at a time.

Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap.

Curiosity got the better of me. I peeled one eye open, turned my head, craned my neck—

There was a silhouette on my balcony, visible only as a dark void, a humanoid shape where the lights of the skyscrapers beyond weren’t, half-obscured in the misty condensation.

Adrenaline flooded my system as I parsed the figure. I bolted upright and scrambled to disentangle myself from the blankets. With my prosthetic foot still on the nightstand, I was limited in how far I could move, but I managed to roll off the edge of the bed and land behind it in a crouch, then half-knelt, half-stood to direct the speartip over the top of the bed like a Roman soldier hiding behind a barricade. Emphatically not Heung-like, in hindsight.

Moments before filling my lungs to yell for backup, I looked at my balcony again and assessed the figure more carefully. During those few seconds of panic, my eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and I realized who this was. I caught the shine of rain-soaked hair matted down over shoulders, the silhouette of slender legs. And of course, when the light caught her face just right, an unmistakably brilliant blue shone from my girlfriend’s eyes. Perhaps obvious in hindsight. Hina glinted a toothy grin and waved enthusiastically at me. Her other palm was pressed against the glass; the rhythmic tapping sound had been her galloping her fingernails on the door.

My face turned hot as I realized how my maneuver across the bed must have looked. I averted my eyes from hers—always so difficult to look away from that beautiful sapphire—and hurriedly banished my spear. I knew rationally that I had probably done the right thing, but I couldn’t stop my body from repurposing the adrenal energy of my erroneous fight-or-flight response toward embarrassment. On the balcony, Hina seemed to giggle, shoulders shaking in mirth—or perhaps shivering from the cold, but that didn’t seem like her. While I tried to keep myself from cringing at my reaction, she pointed at the door handle and tilted her head, a wordless request for permission. She was drenched, so I did the decent thing and hurriedly waved assent. The open door brought the dull, distant roar of the rain into immediate clarity, making me flinch and move to cover my ears.

As Hina stepped in, closing the door behind her to re-establish the barrier between cozy interior and unpleasant outdoors, I had to wonder—

“Why the balcony?”

“It’s pretty nice out there!”

I gaped at her, glanced out the window to confirm we were seeing the same rainstorm, then back at her, soaked head to toe. She was already on the move, wringing out her hair with her hands.

“Mind if I dry off?”

If it were any other person, I would have insisted that she make full use of my towels. But because it was Hina, I instead had a terrible premonition that she was about to do something distinctly dog-like.

“I just built that,” I declared, pointing at my PC, hoping to head off the spattering. “Please don’t ruin it.”

“What? Wasn’t gonna. I mean, that sounds fun…” For a terrifying moment, she seemed to be genuinely considering it, ultramarine eyes scanning across my belongings, “But I’m not gonna ruin your room. You think I’d do that?”

“Uh…I guess not? In any case—” I pointed at the bathroom, relieved by the sanity, “Yeah, use what you need.”

“Oh, I was just gonna, uh, blow-dry. With magic. Can I?” In response to my suspicious look, she clarified, “Won’t make a mess, I promise! And I’ll be so warm after.” She batted her eyes at me, probably trying to look alluring—a little too wet-dog at that moment to pull it off, but the message was received.

“Uh, sure.”

“Yay!”

Then there was heat.

—

I woke up again as dawn began to break. This time, the puppygirl equivalent of a heating pad was entangled with me, radiating wonderful warmth across everywhere our bodies touched and our limbs wrapped around one another’s. My hazy return to consciousness brought a dim wonder to the post-coital embrace—before my brain came slightly more online and I remembered that nothing sexual had happened. She’d just stripped her most-soaked outer layers, blow-dried herself, and hopped into bed with me, and I’d fallen right back asleep in short order.

Now, shifting and readjusting slightly against her smaller form, I very much didn’t want to get up, even less so than before. I just wanted to stay here with her in my arms and be warm and safe forever. And I did feel safe, paradoxically—Hina was being very lovey, all snuggles.

“Making up for lost time,” she explained. “Sorry I was out last night.”

“Mm.” Her hair still smelled a bit rainy; tricky to identify, not wet-dog, more like earthy notes layered over the aroma of her shampoo. I felt unimaginably spoiled to have my face pressed into her mane like this. “Find anything?”

“No,” she muttered dejectedly into my chest while her hand idly ran up and down my flank. “I went to run some tests with a friend in Kyoto. Oh! You probably know them, maybe, they’re on the forums. On there, they’re…Gorogorosan?”

I blinked, pulling away from her slightly, enough to look down at her. In hindsight, it wasn’t surprising at all that she knew one of Japan’s premier experts in ripple propagation, but I hadn’t made the connection myself.

“Oh, yeah. So you were testing ripple?”

“Mhm. Trying to figure it out. What they did, where they went. But we didn’t really find anything. Sorry.”

“For what?”

“Not solving it!” She wiggled unhappily.

“‘S fine,” I murmured, letting my eyes slide back shut. “You really don’t have to go that far. How far away is Kyoto, again?”

“Mmmm…two-fifty miles? Sum’n’ like that. Sorry, yeah, I know I’m getting wound up about this, I just don’t want there to be something out there that can hurt you. Any of you,” she added hastily, squirming again. “I think it’s just nerves about the Peacies. I’d rather they just showed up so I can tear ‘em apart and we can be done with this. But that won’t be for a bit, says Yuuka.”

I grimaced a bit at the mention of her abrasive teammate.

“You…talked to her? I seem to recall you saying you were going to…enact violence.”

“Yeah. Took a few swings at her, but she’s always so slippery. Got my point across, though, I think.”

“That being?”

“Stay away from my cutie.” She injected a spine-tickling growl into the words. I shivered at the goosebumps that raced across my arms, heady with the surreality of our intimacy. She ran her hand down my arm possessively, approvingly, and dug her claws into the rough scar tissue. I winced, heart pounding. “Or at least, IDK, treat you with basic respect. That’d be good too.”

“Thanks,” I squeaked out. “Mmf. Ow.”

“Hm? Oh.” The claws retreated and she rubbed the stinging depressions contritely. “Sorry?”

Something giddy and vulnerable took control of me, urged on by the protectiveness on full display. She wouldn’t let anybody else hurt me—but cocooned here together, I was happy to let her do so.

“I didn’t say stop.”

—

Half an hour of ragged-edged gasping and delirious giggles and nibbling kisses later, Hina finally had to get up for work. My collection of hickeys had grown and my hand stung in all sorts of interesting ways, the result of clawing and gnawing and kneading. She seemed positively fixated on my flame-touched limb, seeming to prefer when I touched her with it over my other hand—and touch her I did, all the more reason for me to curse the tyranny of the clock and her presumably important responsibilities when she had to disentangle from me. Then again, an eyeful of mostly naked Hina was a lovely note to end on.

Some time later, I dragged myself out of bed as well and spent the morning enjoying my new PC setup. There was more work to be done, customizing and tuning increasingly miniscule settings, but mostly, I just relaxed with the chatroom on one monitor and YouTube on another, catching up properly on the few days I’d been out of the news cycle. It was good to be back. There were new glyphcraft papers, updates on the Vaetna—nothing pertaining to Bri at a glance—and continuing ripple effects of the non-magical sort from the Thunder Horse Inferno. And beyond my little bubble of awareness, the world kept turning as well, random new politics that I had little time for and banished from my feed as soon as they appeared.

The great invisible algorithms of the modern internet seemed to have picked up that I was now in Japan, and I chuckled dryly as I saw that my interest in magical studies had been correlated with my location and resulted in a slew of Todai videos dotted across my recommended page. I had a degree of academic interest in those, scrubbing through, looking for things to fill in the gaps in my understanding of what they did all day. The through-line across all five of them was that they did a lot of brand collaborations, but I was still a bit hazy on the day-to-day.

As it happened, though, I wound up getting mezzanine seats to exactly that subject in person. My hunger reached a tipping point and overcame inertia to send me creeping out of my room to the top of the stairs, intending to raid the kitchen for snacks and possibly a full meal if something in the fridge struck my fancy. I didn’t make it that far—I stopped short of the top of the stairs as I overheard a pair of raised voices, British and Australian. Fortunate, perhaps, that they were having this conversation—argument, really—in English.

“So you decided without me that I wasn’t going?”

“I’d have assumed you would be fine with it.”

“I would have been, if we’d decided this when it had first come up! But I’ve planned my whole day around it now, so I’m going.”

“This is a serious event, not an excuse for you to hang out with Amane all day.”

“That’s not what I mean. I was going to get some field advocacy work done!”

“Ah. For your research?”

“Yeah!” Yuuka sounded annoyed, as though this shouldn’t need explaining. “I was talking to Inoue-sensei and told him I was going, and he said I could count attendance instead of going to lecture next week because of the whole environmental focus of the fundraising. I was just going to take some pictures with the FOEI people there, y’know, we do that stuff all the time—”

“And were you going to tell me about this? Or PR?”

“Tch. Probably!”

“Probably isn’t enough, Yuuka,” Alice chided. “We’ve been over this. If you want to do a marketing campaign, collab, whatever, you have to run it by us first. And how were you going to juggle that with keeping an eye on Ezzen?”

“You’re sending Ai instead! Why does he have to be my problem? Now there’ll be three of us to keep an eye on the monsterfu—on him.” There was no contrition in the self-correction, but her resigned tone at least suggested that Amane had gotten through to her, even if Hina’s message perhaps hadn’t stuck. “Don’t know why you even fuckin’ bother—”

“Language. Can’t believe you got this vulgar after two years down there—”

“Piss off, it’s part of my brand. There’s a reason my merch sales are the highest—”

“Two reasons.” Alice retorted with uncharacteristic venom in her voice. I could picture her tail lashing angrily. “And they’re both attached to your chest.”

The bickering collapsed into very angry-sounding Japanese. I’d been crouching, a reflexive but pointless attempt to be stealthy as I eavesdropped from out of view up above them—now I sat down more carefully to relieve the stress on my foot, waiting to see if they’d return to English. I didn’t like to pry, but…I was already learning a lot. Yuuka was some kind of environmental sciences major, for one. For two, her relationship with Alice was a little…incendiary, not unlike a rebellious teen and her mother. Weren’t they only two years separated?

“Listen, Alice. Point is, cunt’s a problem.”

“He’s a victim. Like Amane! It’s almost the same situation.”

“He’s a guy, and he’s balls-deep in that thing. I thought after all the shit with Jason you’d be done letting her bring her chew toys back here!”

“Yuuka,” Alice’s voice went gentler. “Have they caused you any actual problems? I think you’re projecting some of your own experiences onto him; he’s been nothing but pleasant and polite. Help me understand where the problem is so we can solve it together. You’re a smart girl, you know—”

“Ugh. Sonna ni yaru na yo. Fine, here’s a reason: Having two of those things here is fucking terrible for Amane. Ai wants him to help with the hosougu for some fucking reason, but with how much red Hina’s gonna make because of him, it just winds up giving Amane a bunch more flare-ups.”

“Is that foresight, or an assumption?”

“I pinged for something this morning! They’re biting each other or some shit.”

I blushed—then my stomach lurched. Had we contributed to some “bad weather” for Amane in our selfish, giddy exchanges of passion?

“And yet Amane has been fine,” Alice retorted, and I sighed in relief. Yuuka’s silence was damning—her foresight was imperfect, it seemed. Alice sighed. “Amane wants him here too. She told you that this morning, so just…I’m not even asking you to get along with him. Avoid him, if you have to, just…right now, you’re being a bigger problem than he is.”

“Right now? You know what’s not right now, Alice? Three weeks from now, when the PCTF will start making offers to take him off our hands. Which we’ll refuse, of course, and then they’ll stop asking and start moving assets up from Okinawa. He is a mess waiting to happen. That’s foresight, and I’m not wrong.”

“Alright,” Alice allowed. “Thank you for the heads-up, it’s good to have some precision on that. Add it to the chart sometime today, please. I’ll inform Hikanome that you’ll also be attending on Saturday. Be nice to Ezzen, please.”

“Fine.” I heard furniture shift, a chair being pushed back. “Don’t know how you can be so calm about it, Ally. He’s going to fuck us all over just by being here. That’s my professional opinion.”

---

Author’s Note:

To sleep. Perchance, to dream. Our first time properly meeting Holton! And Yuuka is still being Yuuka.

Consider next week my break week for this month; next update is Friday, Dec 6. But I’m almost at the end of the tunnel, and then I’ll have way more time to write.

Thanks to the beta readers: Cass, Maria, Zoo, Penguin, Selenium, Softies, and Zak!

That’s all! See you in two weeks!

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!

November 22, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Did I want to go to the Hikanome rally? Not particularly. But it was worth discussing.

“You should go,” Ebi opined. Her voice sounded quite distinct from when she was interpreting for Amane, drier and deeper in timbre. “We’ll be a little bit fucked if you don’t.”

“How fucked? Uh—no, stupid question, fucked enough that I should just go, right?”

Amane sipped her juice slowly and carefully through a metal straw, holding the cup in her prosthetic hand.

“Let’s walk it back a little bit.” Ebi’s real-time interpretation for Amane was much less stilted and more articulate than the texting. “Talk us through what you’re worried about. I don’t want you to feel like you’re being pushed into this, but I think you’re underestimating how much we can do to make this safe and painless for you.”

“Safe and painless…”

I looked around my room, at the bed and the skyline through the windows and the newly online computer. The water-cooling system which Amane had helped install buzzed dully, probably the pump—a different auditory character from what I was used to, but not unpleasant. Her assistance had cut down the difficulty of the build dramatically, smoothing over that most nerve-wrackingly unfamiliar part and saving me hours of time, and I was grateful. Despite the language barrier, she was quickly becoming among the most comfortable of them to be around—and more importantly, I believed her when she said they’d be able to keep me safe.

…If not for the uncertainty around my stalker. I had to admit that my recalcitrance about the rally heavily stemmed from that fact, and probably looked pretty unaccountable without being aware of it—it was solely by the team’s general graciousness that I wasn’t being pressed harder. Attempting to bring the encounter up to Yuuka had been a complete and total failure, and Alice was off the table as per Hina’s anxious insistence. But Amane had advocated for me—so she at least deserved to understand that I wasn’t just being generally agoraphobic and anxious. I sighed, avoiding eye contact.

“I do have another reason I don’t want to go. Can you…promise to not tell Alice? Hina doesn’t want her to know.” I knew that sounded unreasonable.

“I thought we already established that I don’t like hiding things from my teammates.” Ebi-Amane’s tone was light, though, and the Amethyst Radiance looked intrigued—then squinted in dramatic suspicion, muttering something to Ebi, who rolled her digital eyes and shook her head, replying in her own voice.

“She promises. So do I. Do tell.”

“Alright, uh. When I was out with Hina yesterday—well, rather, between after I left Tochou and before meeting with Hina, I saw…something.”

I recounted the event and my stalker’s description, the goth-ish woman who was apparently not Yuuka. Amane’s eyes widened, and she rubbed her robotic arm again—but shook her head with disappointment when she couldn’t provide an ID. Her green eyes flicked up to mine, then she leaned back and looked away from me, considering this. Ebi didn’t show any outward response until she translated for Amane once more.

“It’s not Hikanome, as far as the rally is concerned. It could be the Sugawara loyalists, the other Hikanome, but that’s not how they do things. The physical description doesn’t resemble any of the other flamebearers in Japan.” Ebi’s voice changed to give her own take. “And I’m running a general sweep of all flamebearers and not coming up with much that would click with that description. You said she sounded Japanese?”

“Or Korean, or Chinese,” I admitted. “Sorry, not very good with Asian, uh, phenotype—accents, faces—not a racism thing, I swear, just—”

“You’re good, man.” Ebi shrugged. “Not a Hikanome flamebearer, and I have no idea why one of Korea or China’s ops would be plainclothes and cloaked if they were scouting you. Well, cloaked or projected or whatever. Amane—” she conferred with the girl sitting between us, then looked up at me. “Obviously, we gotta figure out who this is. But it’s almost certainly not Hikanome, and it sounds recreational.”

“Recreational?”

“Well, like it wasn’t somebody out to find you, and it was dumb chance. Or they were investigating ‘Todai’s new flamebearer’ but didn’t know that would be you specifically. My point is that this doesn’t sound like a narrowly averted abduction attempt or anything.”

“Meaning…it won’t be a problem if I go to the rally.”

“Yeah.”

Ebi’s voice switched back to faux-Amane as the Radiance kept talking.

“We’d be able to confirm for sure if you went. If they are somehow affiliated with Hikanome, they’ll likely either show up there—and we’ll deal with it then—or it’ll be unrelated and you have nothing to fear. Hina’s nose didn’t give you any other clues?”

I was grateful to get back into the grit of the magic.

“She identified the vague ripple, red-white, and—well, remember yesterday’s thing? With the gun?” I needed a moment to calm myself with a sip of juice and a pistachio, annoyed at the way my heart rate jumped even thinking about it. Amane nodded, clearly following along as I explained. “The remote projection lattice we used is close to whatever the stalker was using, according to Hina.” Was “stalker” even the right term anymore? “Without actual scanning hardware, it’s hard to do ripple tracking or anything. Hina said Yuuka could do that too, so I tried to talk to her about it earlier, which…”

We all sighed. Yuuka’s dislike of me was tangling this. Amane thought on it for a few moments.

“We’ll work on Yuuka; she’d probably be willing to help if somebody other than you or Hina explained it. So, is that it? Any other things you want us to address about the rally? I know it’s a lot to ask, and if there’s anything we can do to make it feel less overwhelming…”

I resisted the urge to bring up how I didn’t trust cults. From how the Radiances had spoken about Hikanome, that seemed likely to turn into an argument with Amane especially. I’d ask Hina about it later, maybe. So other than that…

“Uh…” It was embarrassing to admit the emotional subtleties. “Yesterday, I discovered that crowds stress me out, apparently. But I’m not sure how much that’s my anxiety about the stalker specifically versus just general…inexperience? Being outside?” I winced. “But I know that’s not really enough reason not to go, and I don’t want to be even more of a burden when this is such a critical thing for the—” I cut off my own rambling. “It’s not important. I’ll go.”

Amane shook her head.

“Don’t be hasty. Let’s talk it through, this is why I brought it up. You mean you feel unsafe, even aside from the ‘stalker’?”

“…I guess so, yeah.”

She nodded knowingly.

“I get it. I never turn human when I’m outdoors.”

“What?” Her phrasing on that was weird. “Like, you stay mantled?”

“Feel exposed without it. I mean, I have all sorts of wards in this,” she brandished her arm, “but it still makes me nervous. We can get you some wards of your own, for sure. I’ll help you with it tomorrow, probably, if the weather holds.”

Somehow, despite the violent nature of the events that had brought me to Todai, I hadn’t even considered passive means of magical defense. In retrospect, it immediately felt irresponsible of Alice and Hina to have taken me out without even mentioning it. The two must have been sure of their abilities to defend me from abduction, but if somebody had actually wanted me dead and deployed quick-kill magic to make it happen?

The people I’d murdered were a perfect example of how utterly vulnerable a standard human was to magic. The human body is a terribly squishy, frail thing—and being a flamebearer didn’t inherently make me any better protected, just a juicier target. Hina and her ilk, if they existed, were the probable exception, but even she wouldn’t survive even something far lower-caliber than what we had used yesterday.

My spear—already demoted back to toy status, little better than a safety blanket—fell further in my estimation of its ability to seriously defend me. I wasn’t Heung, whose onyx blade could sever ripple to cut spells from the air and who could walk astride the lightning. I needed wards, passive defenses that would at least buy me enough time to snapweave or activate more serious countermeasures. I was almost certainly fine within Lighthouse Tower, but outside? Amane had pinpointed my anxiety exactly.

“I—yes, please, that’d be great. Um, do the others have their own projectors, or…?”

“It depends. Alice has a…” Amane conferred with Ebi for a moment. The teal robot shrugged. “She has a pretty standard personal ward kit. Sticks to the inside of whatever she’s wearing, on her back.”

All first-order, then, for a flat, ergonomic, two-dimensional form factor. Not as powerful as it could be with other choices of glyphs, but that was the sort of tradeoff you had to make. I ventured to guess at the others.

“Hina doesn’t strike me as the type to bother with those at all?”

Amane mustered an impressive scowl.

“Nope. She’ll smell or hear it coming, or however that works, and then not dodge completely, just let it graze her, because it’s fun.” I winced. She mastered her expression and continued. “And Yuuka has what Alice does, but if she’s ever in a position to get hit, shit’s gone sideways, so it’s a formality.” She stopped and glared at Ebi for that vulgar translation, and got a shit-eating digital grin in reply. The robot turned to me of her own accord to finish the set. “And Ai has her tattoo binding. Which—wait, we haven’t told you about that yet.”

“Her what?”

My phone buzzed; Ebi had sent me another zip file.

“Take a look at this once you’ve got your gamer cave all nice and set up.” She looked down at Amane questioningly, who nodded. “We’ll stop interrogating you until that’s done, I think. Ready to get back to it?”

—

Even with the PC itself ostensibly up and running, it still took another half hour to get the various peripherals and furniture set up. I was supplied with a worryingly expensive mechanical keyboard, paired with an ergonomic mouse; secondary and tertiary monitors, joining the primary one for a trio of swing-arm displays I could orient however I pleased; zip ties galore to contain the growing mess of cables. Ebi got under the desk to install those instead of making us frail, disabled humans do it. The warzone of spent packaging materials was tamed into neat piles organized by type, and what began to emerge in its place was an eye-wateringly expensive PC setup whose specs would probably give some of my friends a stroke.

We chatted through the process; for instance, Amane filled me in on some of the specifics of Yuuka’s cursed eye. Ebi had helped put her hair up in a ponytail as she had for Ai the other day. Amane’s hair was comparatively longer and straighter, well-cared-for and jet-black.

“So it’s more like one of Hina’s mutations?”

“More willingly chosen than that. It was a blood magic deal.”

“Was it…worth it?”

“She thinks so,” Ebi put in for herself.

I swallowed.

“Um—the fact that she doesn’t like me, could that be…not so baseless? Like, could I do something nasty in the future that she’s responding to now, and doesn’t care for the difference?”

Ebi shrugged, and Amane shook her head.

“It’s not that precise. Her clarity is proportional with the ripple generated by an event, so it’s minimal for mundane stuff and only really big for significant magical events. But yes, you’ve read her character right, that kind of lack of distinction between present and future does sound like her.”

“And,” I was still trying to wrap my head around this part while I fiddled with the swing arms of the monitors, “how does this not violate free will, exactly? If the silver ripple must always eventually be reflected in forward-facing standard-spectrum? Don’t those become fixed points in time? Otherwise you’re not accounting for time symmetry.”

“The fourth dimension doesn’t make sense either,” Amane pointed out. I grimaced; magic had indeed poked a variety of holes in our understanding of physics, and the addition—or discovery—of a fourth spatial dimension was probably the biggest of those. “I think they’re connected.”

“My will feels free enough,” Ebi countered. “And if I’m fine, so are you guys, probably. Not that anybody knows for sure.”

“Other than the Vaetna,” I replied on reflex. Amane tossed a spent piece of bubble wrap onto the plastic pile. The Radiance was favoring her prostheses, unsurprisingly.

“Says who?” Ebi waggled her eyebrows. “They don’t know everything, Ez.”

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” I needled.

“Oh, don’t be a dick.”

Amane giggled at that, picking up on the joking tone even without translation.

“Thanks for not pressing my beliefs about that,” I conceded, wary that this was a complicated subject, the sort of thing that routinely turned into huge arguments on the forums. “I, um, tend to default to the Spire for this stuff. I’m sort of…everything I’ve seen from you in the past few days, I’m just automatically referencing it against the Vaetna. No offense.”

“Completely understandable,” Amane replied through Ebi. I was surprised at how easily I’d acclimated to the strange interpretation setup, where both people’s voices were coming from the same mouth. Speaker, really, but whatever. “It’s pretty inevitable to compare. There’s a lot we have in common. Power. Ability to make a difference.” Amane said something else in Japanese, which Ebi crossed her arms and apparently refused to translate. They bickered for a moment, and then my phone buzzed.

ebi-furai: amethyst is making an effort to be nice right now, but she’s a bit touchy about the spire

ebi-furai: they didn’t rescue her, ya know?

That hadn’t occurred to me, but I really didn’t want to get into it and potentially ruin what had overall been an extremely pleasant evening with the worst possible intersection of our conflicting personal traumas and more broad-scale politics. I tried to change the topic.

“Um. I’m trying to change the topic.”

“Smooth.”

I shouldered past Ebi’s needling and circled back to a bit of magic-related curiosity, an inquisitive itch that needed scratching.

“Uh. So, mantles.”

“Go on.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” I muttered. “Right, yeah. And—well, I haven’t really taken the deep dive into your mantles’ diagrams yet, so I’m spitballing here—the ward bindings from earlier. The mantles themselves have those too, I assume? On top of being physically tough?”

“Yeah.” Ebi left the rest to Amane.

“Yes. Our transformations might be dermis-derived,” she said, catching on to my implicit comparison to the Vaetna, “but that doesn’t mean they’re invincible. It’s configurable, like everything else. So we can modulate power draw for wards, weapons, mobility, and sensory input; turn them up or down as we need to. It really is like piloting a mecha.”

“Thus your choice of…shape?” I ventured.

“Yes.”

“So—I’m trying to get a picture of, uh, power levels. ‘Not invincible’ implies your transformations have taken real damage in combat before.” The same could not be said for the real thing, proper Vaetna dermis.

She shrugged, rising from where she’d been sitting on the floor to return to the edge of the bed. Ebi remained standing, but moved slightly to still hover just outside arm’s reach of her charge. Amane carefully, gently, undid her ponytail, letting loose a wave of glossy black hair that cascaded down her shoulders.

“If we get hit hard enough, the mantle shuts down so the blue channels don’t overload and set the whole thing ablaze. So, no, the dermis itself has never broken, but there are effective upper limits. And bad weather can disrupt the LM, too, like the other night. That’s mostly just a problem for me, since I’m more sensitive to red, but in theory, it can happen to any of us. That’s why Yuuka is so valuable; she lets us know if we’re taking a bad fight.”

“Ah.” I mirrored Amane’s shift in posture, at last sitting in the office chair I’d been focused on setting up for the last ten minutes; I finally registered the soreness that had been building undetected in my lower back. Thankfully, the chair’s plushness was such that I could sink my hips into it for relief. I appreciated that it wasn’t one of those racing chairs; I wasn’t really in that gamer demographic. “So if I’m understanding right: your mantles can just…fail, if the ripple conditions are bad enough? That seems like a liability.”

“Bad and specific. Your average inferno won’t do it. And your average flamebearer wouldn’t be able to put together exactly the right frequencies to make it work.”

“Could…the Hikanome ones?” That was my anxiety talking, more than anything, but there was also an academic hunger for knowledge.

“Hikanome? None of them are as good at the technical side as you or me. Well, the two auxiliaries are, but they’re not fighters, it’s all distributed. The whole appeal of the cult is that you get a greater and greater sliver of Flame as you rise in the ranks. But they’re not dangerous anymore.”

“So this combat experience of yours is from…”

Amane waved her mechanical hand in an “I give up” motion.

“You want me to say ‘from fighting the PCTF’, which is somewhat true, but not as much as you’d think. We didn’t really start working on the mantles until after I came back and we got the flame donation. So a lot of that combat data is from the Blue Spark Incident, which was the first test run of the mantles, and then from some classified counterespionage stuff. Like I said, that’s the kind of thing you don’t have to touch, you don’t have any duty there.”

I digested that for a minute.

“Wait, so, if I have the timeline right: from the start, through the firestorms and the first few years, up through their, uh—rescue of you?” I side-eyed Ebi, wondering if that was an acceptable term. Her digital face momentarily flickered into a thumbs-up emoji. “All of that, you weren’t using mantles?”

“I’m not the right person to ask about that,” Amane pointed out. “I wasn’t there. But yes, in short. They used wards and other techniques.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense. You wouldn’t have been involved on account of the, uh…” I took a gamble on a joke. “Kidnapping.”

God, I was terrible at levity. I cringed. Amane didn’t seem to mind, thankfully—though Ebi spiced her interpretation with a deadpan look.

“Mhm.” Amane nodded. “Ask Ai. She’s the clever one, and she still uses the old methods.”

“Why’s that?”

Amane said something in Japanese which Ebi didn’t translate. The cyborg poked the android in annoyance, who returned the poke and released a distinctly digital imitation of a sigh, clearly more fabricated than her usually flawless imitation of human voices. Her own voice, not Amane’s, and especially autotuned, signaling…annoyance? Discomfort?

“Mantling really pushes Ai to her limits, magically speaking. The weave is sparser, because a lot of her Flame is tied up in…me. So if her mantle were to overload in the wrong way, and the lattice got shredded, it’d snap back across her whole Flame, and it’d be lights out for me.”

“Holy shit.” I hadn’t thought that through until now, but it made sense. “So your life is—contingent on hers? And…oh, Christ, there’s probably a range limit too, isn’t there?”

Ebi nodded slowly and seriously—then clapped her hands as if to banish the unsettling line of thought. She crossed all her fingers but the index ones and pointed at me in dual, spliced-together finger guns.

“So—you going on Saturday?”

I gave her a flat look, but the topic change was warranted.

“What happened to not being hasty?”

“Eh, Amethyst’s itching to talk you around, I can see it.”

Amane reached out and flicked Ebi’s waist plates with a tink, more reminiscent of ceramic than carbon fiber, and added a light verbal admonishment to go with it. Ebi raised her hands innocently.

“Hey, alright, yeesh. I’m just a bit antsy for what might happen if we have to fight the Peacies over you without Hikanome’s cover. Ai risks my life too when she goes out there.”

“That’s—a good point. Fuck.” Another reason I should just go and stop waffling.

Amane waved for interpretation, and Ebi’s vocal timbre shifted.

“I wanted you to know that part as well, from Ebi herself. The others sometimes—well, they don’t forget she’s there, but she and I don’t have as much…agency.”

Ebi switched to her own voice and continued. “So, that’s the cards on the table on my end. I—we know it’s a lot to lay on you, but that’s the reality.”

“So I should go.” I rubbed my hand contemplatively, not quite resigned, weighing my options. There was an obvious alternative. “Or—I get out of your hair entirely, go to the Gate, right? Then I’m safe from the PCTF, no fight to put you all at risk, they wouldn’t dare bring it to the Spire. Hell, I could even come back here in the future, or collaborate on those projects remotely, just—sit out the storm in the safest place, yeah? Until things move on and the Peacies get occupied with other stuff.”

It was the most elegant option, free of political bullshit, safest for all.

“Not to undercut Ebi’s concerns, but I think the danger isn’t as great as you think,” Amane countered. “Not yet.”

For reply, I sat up in my chair and squinted in confusion at her prostheses—almost certainly impolite, but at that moment, I was genuinely baffled.

“The PCTF are…plenty dangerous. They kidnapped both of us. They…” I gestured vaguely at her prostheses, then mine.

“They did,” Amane acknowledged. “But one thing at a time. The PCTF knows you’re valuable,” Amane practically spat the word; Ebi imitated the tone of disgust. “They’ll apply a lot of diplomatic pressure and that could escalate. But they move slowly for things outside their territory, and Japan qualifies as such. They know better than to rush into fucking with us. They’re not a problem yet.”

“What does ‘yet’ have to do with it? It’ll still be a problem eventually; I could still head it off entirely by going to the Spire.”

“Hear me out, please. By contrast, Hikanome are the ones pressuring us now, and I want to show you that they are not a threat in the same way, not any more. They can be opposed to us, but if you go on Saturday, you will not be in danger.”

“She’s saying that because all the dangerous parts are six feet under or comatose,” Ebi added cheerfully. Amane glared at her, but she didn’t shrink, returning the gaze insolently.

“Okay,” I began, trying to sort it out. “So—yes, alright, that does make me feel better, but if Hikanome don’t have teeth, why is Alice pushing so hard for me to make goodwill between you and them?”

“Not being dangerous isn’t the same as not being influential. The average Hikanome member likes Todai too much for the church itself to ever be real political enemies, but we won’t get their backing—and by extension stronger support from the government—when the PCTF do show up, unless we take steps to appease them right now. And you’re critical to that, unfortunately.”

“What’s your point? Still not really seeing why I should stay here instead of solving the whole issue by leaving.”

“I stayed.” She said that in English, in her own voice, before motioning for Ebi to continue interpreting. “And I’m glad I did. I could have gone to the Spire, run away, and I didn’t. I was afraid! But I stayed, and fought, and won. We took apart Hikanome, we forced the PCTF back, and we founded Todai as it is now.”

“So you want me to fight, after all?”

Amane rubbed her face with her organic hand.

“No. I want to show you that you can be less afraid. Don’t you want that? To feel safe when you go outside, instead of having to cower in the Spire for, what, the rest of your life? You’ve just gained the power to make a difference, out here, the kind of power people dream about. That shouldn’t be a reason to run and hide. That’s the evil of the PCTF.”

I couldn’t deny that she was winning me over. I’d wanted this power so desperately, and so far my main response to receiving it had been to run away, because it felt like that was all I could do—and I was planning to continue to do so. Was that what I had dreamed of? She went on.

“And if it really doesn’t work out, you can leave. At any time; the Gate will still always be there. And if you’re still here when the PCTF arrives—that won’t be your fight. It’s ours, and we’ll win. Is that enough safety nets for you?”

With her plea complete, she at last allowed herself to double over and lean onto her side, wincing and suffocating a groan—but didn’t break eye contact with me. She let Ebi help her sit back up and waited for my reply. I had an obvious objection.

“Going to the Spire is my dream. It’s not cowering.”

“Nah, it is.” Ebi replied while she shifted her hand to some device in a blur and interfaced with a slot in Amane’s mechanical arm. “I know that’s, like, your thing, being a Vaetnaboo. But if you go to the Spire, you don’t become a Vaetna. They’re around, sure, but you’d stay in their shadow for the rest of your life. The Spire doesn’t give a fuck about you, sorry.”

Ow. “Hey, the fuc—”

“But the girls? They care, man. They give several fucks, if you haven’t noticed. Trust me, they don’t want you around because you’re politically convenient. And I’m pretty sure you don’t just want to ditch them either. Do you want to be friends with them or not?”

That was so direct that I had to abandon my objection to her attack on my beliefs.

“What’s it to you, Ebi? You’re okay with the idea of me staying here, with what you said could happen to you if Ai has to fight? That feels contradictory, and you haven’t exactly been nice.” I immediately walked that back a little, muttering. “…although the standard of care has been respectable, and I’m very grateful.”

The robot shrugged carefully, arm still attached to Amane’s, and nodded to the cyborg girl.

“I trust her judgment. And you’re alright.”

That was definitely an understatement of Ebi’s feelings. Amane agreed.

“Tsundere,” she rasped, earning what was definitely a “stay still” from Ebi, clear and familiar even though I couldn’t understand the language.

“Um—fuck. This is a lot.” How had her asking about the Hikanome rally turned into a debate about the Spire? Ultimately, they were connected; it was now clear to me that my choices were either to stay and attend or just leave for the Gate now. And of those two…

“It’s the same things I had to think about, and yes, it’s a lot.” Ebi-Amane sighed, free of the pain in the woman’s real voice. “And I do want to make sure you have the time to decide, like you wanted. But it was important to me that you made an informed decision. I’m sorry if I upset you. And I’m sorry if Ebi upset you.”

Ebi switched to her own voice. “I’m not.”

“No—it’s fine. I think…you’re right. I should go on Saturday. It’s…being afraid sucks, you’re right. I do want to go outside. I’m in fuckin’ Tokyo, for fuck’s sake, might as well make something of it, even if it’s just for Star. The Gate will always be an option, right?”

“It will. If things get too hot, we’d still completely understand if you want out.”

“But you wouldn’t come with, would you? Even if this escalates to…all-out war with the PCTF. Which is sounding distressingly plausible.”

“No. We have unfinished business.”

Her tone was chilling.

“Alright, fuck. You’ve won me over,” I admitted. “We’ll…give it a shot on Saturday. I’ll go to the thing.”

It felt good to reach a resolution, even if I hadn’t taken anywhere near as much time as I’d expected. Amane’s reasoning resonated with me, even if both she and Ebi had mildly upset me with arguments I’d need some time to process. And I couldn’t quite believe the latter was willing to risk her own life and limb for that, not to mention the overall, larger-scale ramifications of what would happen if Japan’s premier VNTs went to war with the West—one thing at a time, I decided. I had an out at the Gate if I changed my mind.

—

Amane had to adjourn to her room soon after, as the energy expenditure of the evening’s labors and her final plea caught up to her. She left in good spirits, Ebi closely in tow.

I was left alone once more, but for the first time since coming here, I had a big swivel chair to sink into and a PC to hop on, a far more natural state of being for me than struggling in bed with my laptop’s too-small screen. We’d almost entirely completed the physical setup of my new workspace, but the digital side, my usual suite of programs and settings, would take hours more to entirely set up—or at least that’s what I had thought. In reality, the penthouse had lightning-fast internet; what I had expected to be at least two hours of downloads alone was done in hardly ten minutes, and I was neck-deep in installation wizards and config settings when my phone buzzed again with a text from Amane.

Amane: Thanks for spending time with me (and hearing me out)!

Amane: Dinner’s ready if you’re hungry (っ˘ڡ˘ς)

Amane: I won’t be there (stupid stomach) but neither will Yuuka, so it should be nice ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧

Amane: (written by ebi-TL)

I couldn’t help but smile at the little emoticons. Anxiety followed shortly after; what was the correct way to reply to a message like this? I gave it my best shot.

Ezzen: I had fun too. Are you feeling alright?

Amane: Good enough!

Ezzen: real

That got a dry chuckle out of me. It was almost inevitable that somebody in her position would develop a droll humor about it; there was just no other way to live. Even I, socially stunted as I was, was able to joke about my hand in the chatroom—and more recently, about my foot. The hours of work had left it aching a bit, and I knew that running it under some warm water would probably help…but this chair was so very comfortable.

My stomach broke the tie: out of the chair, Ez, there’s food. I pushed myself up, stiff and a little sore in my hips from all the leaning over, feeling rather like some kind of reptile leaving its den for a bit of sun and sustenance. Well, the sun was already down, but in this case it was more metaphorical, the wonderful and nerve-wracking warmth of social interaction—because Amane was right, I did like the Radiances.

To my surprise, dinner was not home-cooked. I’d sort of assumed that Hina would whip something up as we had done with lunch, but instead, I found Alice slumped over the low table next to a bag with familiar golden arches. Her face was buried in her crossed arms. Had she fallen asleep right there, still in her suit? I was already treading lightly to spare my foot, and she didn’t stir until I sat gingerly across from her and reached for the bag. She raised her head slowly, tousled hair falling messily over her face.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” I pointed at the bag questioningly.

“Yeah. There’s a plain one. Didn’t know what you liked.”

Her head flopped back down onto her arms.

There were things to discuss—but she clearly needed the rest. I helped myself to the bag, searching to find the hamburger and an associated baggie of fries. McDonald’s Japan was apparently indistinguishable from its English cousins. No drinks, so I got up and poured myself a glass of water and realized in the process that I had learned where they kept the cups: the cabinet directly opposite the dishwasher. A little more like home—a little bit harder to leave, if it eventually came to that.

As I sat back down and got to eating, I wondered where Hina was.

ezzen: Where’s Hina?

ebi-furai: need a blowjob already?

ezzen: wtf

ebi-furai: :3

ebi-furai: hunting your mysterious friend, maybe

ezzen: You don’t know?

ebi-furai: she likes to stay out at night, idfk what shes up to

ebi-furai: back before midnight probably

ezzen: Could you ask for me?

ebi-furai: you dont have your girlfriends number?

ezzen: No. And she’s not my girlfriend.

ebi-furai: im not engaging with this

ebi-furai: one sec

A few seconds later, my phone began to buzz. A jolt of surprise curdled into fear in my stomach—I hated phone calls. Fuck you, Ebi. The caller ID said it was unknown—but I knew what Ebi was playing at. Conscious of Alice apparently asleep across the table from me, I hesitantly stood and moved past her toward the rest of the sitting area, maybe twenty feet away, and cupped my mouth as I picked up.

“Hello—”

“Heyyy, cutie! Ebi gave me your number!”

There was a lot of background noise on her end. Driving, maybe?

“Um, hi, Hina,” I whispered. “Sorry, Alice is…asleep, I think? So I’m trying to stay quiet—”

“You busy?”

“Not really? I’m eating dinner, and then I was just gonna hang out and keep setting up my PC…”

“Cool, cool, uh—you wanna come out and spend some time together?”

“…No? Sorry,” I added hastily. “Just…not my comfort zone. Going out and partying.”

“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant.” I heard a fuzzy slap noise that might have been a facepalm. “I’m chasing a lead on your stalker!”

My heart rate spiked.

“Did you find something?”

“Well, I’m in Kyoto right now, dropping in on a contact who I figured might be able to identify them, and they’re sending me on a bit of a chase into the mountains.”

“Wait, hold on—Kyoto? You wanted me to come to another city? How was I supposed to get there?”

“Uhhhhhh…”

Now it was my turn to facepalm, but a grin was infecting my face. What an adorable oversight.

“Hina.”

“Cutie!”

“Stay safe, yeah?”

“I will! Love you too! Mmmm—not gonna get home until pretty late. Like, three AM late, so…no fun Valentine’s stuff tonight. Sorry.”

“No—problem?” I was wrong-footed by the casual use of the word “love.” “I’ve got my hands full with computer stuff tonight anyway, I think.”

“Okay! I’ll let you know if I find anything! Texting okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Kay! Byebye!”

“Bye—”

I was cut off by the beep of the line going dead. Alice spoke behind me.

“That Hina staying out late?”

“Yeah.” I turned to look at the dragon-girl, hoping she wouldn’t ask about what exactly Hina was up to; she was still in the dark about my stalker. Maybe I should just tell her? But I wanted to discuss that with Hina first—realized I’d missed my chance on the phone. “Sorry if I woke you.”

“No problem, I wasn’t really asleep anyway. Just dozing.” She rubbed her eyes with one hand while fishing in the takeout bag with the other. “Have a nice time with Amane?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She extracted a wrapped burger with a wince, reaching back to rub where her lower back met the base of her tail. Her clothes were modified to make room. “Sore,” she explained.

I wondered if I ought to tell her that I knew about the situation with her dragon parts. Perhaps Amane should be present? I walked back over to the table to resume my own meal.

“Just from sitting down?”

“Yeah. It was meetings all day today, and after lunch, I didn’t get a chance to do my stretches.” She gestured at where she was sitting. “This didn’t help either, being folded over like this. If you catch me sleeping like that, poke me, please?”

“Um, sure.” Fuck it, easier one first. “Listen, uh—Amane told me what’s going on with you.” Alice went stiff, frozen mid-bite. A bad sign for sure, but I forged on, avoiding eye contact. Instead, I admired how the scales on her tail caught the light. “She—well, I get why you didn’t want to tell me, but I want…to help. If you’re open to it.”

“You want…to…help? How so?” Her voice was halting, uncomfortable. I felt bad for bringing up such a personal topic with so little overture, but I didn’t know how else to lead into it.

“Uh, well, I’m not really sure yet. It’s a pretty unique case, right?”

“Probably. There…could be more. I’d like to think there are.” She took a deep breath. “The only other cases I know used more mundane means.”

“Mundane? Like, surgery?”

“Yes?” She sounded confused, as though it were obvious.

“Then…well, okay, obviously we’re not going to hit on a solution right now, but the first place my mind goes is, I guess…have you tried just cutting it off?” I shuddered to think of how messy such an amputation would be as I eyed her tail. “The best biomancy is no biomancy, yeah?”

Alice unfroze, resuming her bite, and didn’t respond until she’d chewed, swallowed, and taken a drink. She twisted to look back at her tail as she thumped it and released a dry sigh, apparently warming up to the topic.

“Yes, when it was smaller. Damn thing grows back, gecko-style.”

“Really.” That was intriguing. “Over how long?”

“Maybe five months, and it’s all real flesh. If you think my appetite is bad now…argh, I’m grumbling. Sorry for not telling you about the dragon stuff.”

“It’s alright. Um—I’d like to know more, but it sounds like this…isn’t a great topic for dinner,” I conceded, eying the bite marks in my burger.

“It’s not,” she agreed, doing the same.

“Sorry for bringing it up.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

We fell into silence as we ate. Alice went through two chicken sandwiches, a bag of fries, a box of onion rings, and a milkshake in addition to her soft drink. It wasn’t the voracious rapidity with which I’d seen Hina eat yesterday, but she just didn’t stop. The laptop remained on the table, but it was pushed to the side, seeing as how both of her hands always had some kind of food or drink in them. After a few minutes, I was done with my own comparatively meager meal.

“Uh.”

Alice held up a finger to stop me, chewed, swallowed, and took a sip of her drink before replying.

“What’s up?”

“So I talked to Amane.”

“Yeah?”

“She…convinced me? I don’t know if that’s the right word, but—I want to go to the thing on Saturday.”

“Oh!” Alice perked up. “That was faster turnaround than you said.”

“Yes, well, uh…”

“No, that’s great, really! Can I RSVP now? You, Amane, Yuuka—ah, do you not want Yuuka there? I still need to talk to her, but even once I do, your comfort is paramount, and she’s, er, not great at that. So…”

She had already produced her laptop from pocketspace, eager to get this over with.

“Uh. I don’t know. Amane…she definitely wants to go, but she’d need at least one other Radiance there, right?”

“Yeah. I appreciate you being considerate of her needs. Um—it’d probably be Ai, then. She’d have to reschedule, but it’s far enough out…”

“If Ai is alright with it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Uh, Amane and Ebi…told me about her issue too. Power draw concerns, if my understanding is accurate.”

“Ah, yeah, that was going to have to come up eventually.” Her face fell slightly. “Sorry again for not telling you these things. I just didn’t want you to feel pressured or—”

“I mean, of course I felt pressured, but I wouldn’t say that’s your fault—”

“Your circumstances are really quite messed up, and properly acknowledging that—”

“I’m not going to run off to the Gate,” I interrupted, and she shut her mouth, looking sheepish.

“Oh. Really? I, er, didn’t want to bring it up, because I was worried you wouldn’t consider any other option, and…” she admitted, shamefaced.

“It’s complicated. And I still want the option. But Amane said some things that really, um, hit me where it hurt, so to speak. In a…good way?” I was still working through that part; I forged on. “So I want to…try being a flamebearer before I go hide in the Spire, I guess. Because it’d be good for me, or something. That’s how she framed it.”

A smile broke through Alice’s hasty remorse.

“Yeah. It’s been good for her.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there in silent…camaraderie? It was a little too awkward to be called that, but it was nice. Whatever it was, it felt like she and I understood the same things about Amane. She broke the moment by returning to her laptop.

“Alright, then…Ai can be the second, I think. I’d have to ask her for some of the scheduling, but about the Flame issue…I really can’t picture the situation turning dangerous, let alone enough that she’d be at risk of overextending. And she’ll definitely want to go if the idea is to chaperone you.”

“If you say so,” I conceded. “Um, Amane insisted really hard earlier that it was safe, but…they’re really alright? Not…dangerous, or even just generally sinister in that way cults tend to be?”

“They’re legit. They’re…eccentric in some of their practices, and you remember how Ai was talking about them this morning. Some of our beliefs don’t mesh. But that all pales compared to how they used to be. If you’re really worried about danger…let’s say the worst-case scenario happens, and it’s all a trap by Sugawara’s remaining goons, somehow conspiring with a PCTF grab team. Which, for the record, is not a scenario that could actually happen in reality, for a whole host of reasons.”

“Okay…” I nodded along.

“Then, in that impossible hypothetical, things could get explosive. Violent. But even then, Amane could clean them all up herself, and honestly, push comes to shove, so could Ai. She’s far from useless in a fight, believe me. Plus, I’m sure that once Hina hears about this, she’ll want to be around, even though neither she nor I want her to be officially present. So that’s three Radiances, in effect. Feel good about that?”

“Good enough,” I admitted, feeling reassured. It was nice to get some confirmation of Amane’s confidence—but my apprehension wasn’t completely gone, and ultimately Amane was right that it wouldn’t dissipate without some exposure therapy.

“Good.” Alice nodded, stretching, looking less tired, more energized. I was reminded of when I’d first met Ai, the way she’d lit up and revitalized when working on my spear binding. This was similar, but in a different specialization. “I’ll ask them to be considerate about limiting how much you have to appear in front of the crowds, all that. Leave that stuff to me. Where’s the email—ah, there.”

I’d communicated my big important decision, and the weight on my chest was replaced by a different sort of pressure, a nervousness of having a scheduled social ordeal, a feeling I mostly associated with doctor and bank visits, given how rarely I had really spoken to people prior to now. What awaited me on Saturday was far more consequential: I would walk into the jaws of one of Todai’s foundational opponents, as the star of the whole event, and that was nerve-wracking to even consider—but I’d be in the pleasant company of Amane and Ai, so it’d be alright, hopefully. Hopefully.

Also hopefully, I hoped we’d be able to confirm a negative on my stalker, conclusively prove it wasn’t a Hikanome flamebearer so I could rest easy on that side of things. Fingers crossed that that wouldn’t even be a problem by then; maybe Hina’s investigation in Kyoto would lead us right to who it was, and then at least we’d be planning around a known quantity.

Alice told me that preparations would begin tomorrow. She did her best to assuage my anxiety, assured me it’d be alright, nothing too difficult or unpleasant, echoing the same things Amane had said. There was a lot to do, but I’d come to my decision early enough in the week that it wouldn’t be overwhelming, supposedly.

But that was tomorrow. I had tonight to myself, since Hina wouldn’t be around, and I had unfinished business with my PC. After finishing dinner and wishing Alice a good night, I returned to my room. I spent hours into the night tinkering with GWalk, getting everything just how I liked it; signing into the chatroom to the celebration of my friends; redownloading my meager collection of games. And for the last few hours, as my digital environment became more and more familiar, I could almost forget that I was on the other side of the world. Eventually, at two in the morning, I went to bed, truly comfortable for perhaps the first time since arriving here.

And I dreamed once more.

---

Author’s Note:

It’s official: Ez is gettin’ in there! Belly of the beast! Well done, Amane. That discussion was pretty hard to write, but I’m pretty happy with the character legwork we got out of it. And Ebi’s situation gets that much more fucked up, yay.

Heads up: the next couple chapters will be slightly shorter (4000-6000 instead of 6000-8000). I will become less busy soon!

The usual:

– Thanks, beta readers (Cass, Zak, Maria, Zoo, Selenium, Penguin, Softies). Your feedback on this chapter really elevated it.

See you all next week!

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!

November 15, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Valentine’s Day. A day I’d basically never had any reason to care about, and especially not one I’d expected to become relevant in the strange circumstances in which I found myself. My relationship with Hina was far too fresh for the day to really feel significant. We’d just established we didn’t love each other—not yet, as she’d said, so this felt like jumping the gun a bit, yet here we were.

The puppy proffered the box excitedly at me. I gingerly, hesitantly drew the heart-shaped chocolate from its foam cozy.

“Am I supposed to eat it now?”

“Go for it!”

I bit off half. It tasted…like chocolate. I didn’t have much in the way of a frame of reference; my culinary palette was generally diverse, but this was an exception. When was the last time I’d even eaten chocolate? Before Dad had died? Bereft of comparisons, I did my best to evaluate it on its own terms: smooth and creamy, rich and sweet without overpowering the natural bitterness of the cacao—I startled myself when I crunched into something at the core. Hazelnut, maybe? It went down well with the last of my iced tea.

“Thanks.”

“Mhm! I get some for everybody every year. The girls, the Hikanome folks, Ogawa…every one of us in Japan!”

“Wait, what? As in, every flamebearer?”

“Yep!”

“Oh.” So it wasn’t a romantic thing; more obligatory? Or just an idiosyncrasy of hers. Nuance aside, the point was that I wasn’t special for receiving this. “Hold on, so this was Heliotrope’s, not mine? Does she…accept them, normally?”

“Nope.”

Figures. That sort of made me feel worse, knowing I was getting a gift that the original recipient wouldn’t have accepted anyway. She saw how my face fell.

“Is it bad?”

“What? No, it’s good.”

“You sure? Do you want more? I still have to give you yours, and I was gonna save that for tonight but if you don’t like the hazelnut then I can just give you yours instead now.”

“It’s—that’s not the problem.” I swallowed, feeling ungrateful. “Every flamebearer.”

“Oh.” Her face fell too. “Cutie, it’s not like that. It’s just something I do for fun, I didn’t think it’d make you feel bad—aha.” Her expression shifted, the hyena flickering across her features, fangs glinting behind her grin. She leaned closer to me, injecting a little purr into her voice. “Want me to yourself, hm? Need me to make you feel special?”

That pushed my buttons, hackles rising in fear, deviously taboo attraction like lightning in my stomach. I stammered.

“You’re not—there’s no obligation for you to—I don’t know if exclusivity is fair to request,” I eventually landed. “You’re…of course I want you, but I don’t deserve—”

She shut me up by grabbing the front of my shirt and tugging me close, staring me down with those all-too-blue eyes.

“You’re doing it again,” she growled, playful reprimand masking genuine challenge. “You can have me to yourself, if that’s what you want. But you’ll have to prove it. Tonight.”

While I was still paralyzed by the flutter in my belly, she plucked the remaining half of the chocolate from my fingers, popped it into her mouth, and vanished.

—

The unfortunate side effect of Hina’s theatrics was that I was left alone with the remains of lunch, so it fell to me to clean up. Maybe that was some strange, oblique lesson from her, but it was more likely that she’d just gotten too excited with the opportunity to push my buttons. Besides, she was indisputably busier than me, so it was with a lingering thrill rippling across my body and a flutter of nervous excitement for what tonight might entail that I set about washing the dishes.

It didn’t take long; Alice had cleaned up most of the detritus from the cooking by the time we’d sat down to eat, and neither of us had left any gnocchi survivors. Rinsing the dishes revealed yet more conveniences and amenities compared to my old apartment, like the much larger sink and the faucet head that could be drawn out to direct the stream of water. Opulent by my standards; they probably gave it no thought.

While wiping down the countertop, I realized—I was being uncharacteristically industrious. Back home, I’d sometimes let slightly-dirty-but-not-dirty-enough-to-be-gross dishes sit in the sink for a week or longer, but here I found it easy to power through doing all the dishes and was even going the extra mile to clean additional surfaces. How domestic; another thing I hadn’t expected to be part of my fantasized life as a flamebearer.

It was just because I felt guilty, I reasoned. I wanted to pull my weight, not feel like a burden, and it wasn’t like I had anything better to do with my spare time compared to the busyness of the others. It did occur to me that such a massive living space and access to funds might warrant specialized cleaning staff, but surely one of the Radiances would have mentioned that by now. Maybe it was biweekly or something, or maybe they just used magic. As I worked, I thought about ways to magically automate the cleaning I was doing, more as a mental exercise than any real plan I intended to implement. It was a fun little exercise, one I’d done before with chores at home, but now I had a whole new space to apply it to.

With the kitchen eventually reclaimed from our culinary adventures, I was once again left with a lot of time and little to do with it. I could finish exploring the penthouse, or I could be brave and face the tell-tale heart beating within my laptop, the lattice diagram of the weapon we’d made, but—I didn’t want to confront it, and I didn’t actually have to. Avoidance was a valid strategy. So I went back to my room, popped open my laptop, squeezed my eyes shut, and killed the horrid thing with Alt+F4, a fittingly ignoble murder. With the demon vanquished, I plugged in the USB stick that Ai had given me and resumed my study of the magical cores of Amethyst’s prosthetic limbs.

This time, I focused less on the lattices themselves. I still didn’t have enough confidence in the mechanical engineering aspect to make major changes to the structural glyphcraft without Ai’s supervision, so I took a look at the other documents on the thumb drive. What leapt out to me most among various reference standards and previous versions was a PDF file: the classified report precisely detailing the actual nature and extent of Amane’s injuries. It felt invasive to have that kind of thing available to read; I consulted our mutual medical staff.

[Direct Message] ezzen: Ai gave me Amethyst’s prosthetic files, including the physical assessment.

ezzen: Is it fair to assume that she consented to that? Anything else I should know?

The robot responded instantly, of course.

ebi-furai: yeah, we sat down and talked about it when you came in

ebi-furai: im the one who actually put that usb together, so everything on there is fair game

ezzen: k good, thanks

ebi-furai: as long as i have you: foot check

ezzen: Nothing to report.

ebi-furai: sick

Ironically, getting permission to look at the file somewhat killed my work ethic for doing more Amane stuff at the moment. There’d be more time later, and I kind of wanted to go through this stuff with Amane herself or Ai.

For now, I returned to the main chatroom, rapidly scrolling through the conversations that had happened while I was asleep, feeling a bit glum as I saw how much I was missing out on. There was a silver lining—a lot of the conversation was still about the Thunder Horse Inferno, and I was glad I didn’t have to deflect the conversation and play dumb about my own horrific role in those events. They didn’t have the full story, and I was growing more and more uncomfortable about the idea of keeping up the charade with these sorts of things.

The discomfort persisted as I continued my rounds, trawling the top posts on the forums and refreshing YouTube. There was the new Overload video, uploaded barely ten minutes ago, a 28-minute timeline of the events of the inferno, from that first flamefall detection on the Vaetna’s stream to the latest news an hour ago. I didn’t need to watch it; I already knew what had really happened. That drop in air temperature, the stumbling corpse.

As if summoned by cruel divinity, I received a DM just as I was about to keep scrolling.

[Direct Message] OverloadTSS: hi ez sorry about the delay

OverloadTSS: was finalizing the thunder horse video because holy shit

Play it cool, Ez.

ezzen: Just saw it go up!

ezzen: “Holy shit” is right

ezzen: surprised you were able to get it out on time. long by your standards

ezzen: Does that mean the Thursday video will be about me?

OverloadTSS: yeah probably

OverloadTSS: ill send over an actual questions list soon

OverloadTSS: figure thats better for you than an AMA like we did in 2020 or whenever it was

OverloadTSS: so dont feel obligated to answer anything, i wont include questions in the video that you dont answer

OverloadTSS: what happened to you was scary as shit plus i imagine youve got some kind of NDA going with lighthouse

Had an NDA been in the stack of paperwork I’d signed? I was already working under the assumption that much of what I’d learned about Todai in the past few days was classified—not least the monstrous act we’d committed yesterday—but I would need to ask Alice what exactly I was allowed to disclose about my research and general situation going forward. Which turned a friendly Q&A session—something I’d had fun with before—into work that required me to go ask somebody something before I could do it. For bonus stress, there were the potentially incredibly dire consequences of leaking the wrong information.

It all sucked, but I couldn’t risk talking about it.

ezzen: Thanks, OL.

ezzen: I’m doing okay, just a lot of paperwork and still healing ofc.

ezzen: I’ll figure out what I’m allowed to say once I’ve got those questions in front of me.

OverloadTSS: hell yeah

OverloadTSS: yeah you havent been on as much the last couple days obviously

OverloadTSS: so no rush, ill get those questions to you soon (tomorrow?) and you can answer them when youve got time

OverloadTSS: but for the short term, can you answer one question so i can do a three minute clickbait thing

ezzen: Sure!

Overload made his living on this kind of news, and I was usually happy to throw him a bone—but things were changing, and longer-reaching trepidation turned to faint but immediate panic as I read the question.

OverloadTSS: you’re on board with lighthouse? planning to stick around?

This may have made me begin to spiral a little bit.

I certainly wasn’t on board with the murder—their opportunistic, guerilla war with the PCTF—even if I agreed with their reasoning on paper. And what about Alice’s efforts to educate me in mahou shoujo, as though assuming I’d eventually become involved with the team as…a magical girl? To say nothing of Hina’s own promise, even kept at bay by our agreement as she currently was. I had yet to discover what exactly she meant that I wouldn’t be the first male Radiance.

So there was a lot I wasn’t on board with, yet they were the things I couldn’t actually share with my friends or the wider community of the forums. Even with the best of intentions, like keeping Amane’s history private, I’d already had to lie to them more than I ever had before. So far, it had mostly been omission—but if I stuck around, how much further would that go?

Which raised another question, one which kept being subsumed by more immediate worries: did I even have to stick around? Fleeing for the Gate still looked like a decent idea, especially with the additional mess Yuuka seemed intent on causing as long as I stuck around here. It was only a kilometer away, and the Spire was famously no-questions-asked…and it would reduce pressure on Todai by no longer having the PCTF set on coming for me. That was a terrifying prospect; for now, only in a surreal, dream-like way, but I was starting to wonder—how long did I have until that looming threat became tangible? Alice had said they’d do something in the next couple days—would that be a diplomatic overture or another entire abduction attempt? The rumors of what happened to noncompliant flamebearers in PCTF custody were horrifyingly true—the last few days had proven that beyond doubt—and I really didn’t want to find out how far either party was willing to escalate, if plausibly deniable artillery strikes from the other side of the planet were Todai’s baseline. I felt sick.

But Overload’s question needed some kind of answer.

ezzen: There’s a lot of research opportunities, for sure. I’m actually already collaborating with Emerald, and of course there’s still the matter of my foot.

ezzen: The chains that drive their mantles are fascinating, and while I’m fairly sure I can’t reveal any of the technical details, that alone is a strong incentive for me to work with them further.

OverloadTSS: cool cool

OverloadTSS: ok thanks

OverloadTSS: will draft up those questions, get back to me whenever

Having acquired his nugget of information, he bid me farewell. I was rattled and went to the one person I knew who bridged the high-stakes world of flamebearers and the familiar box on my computer full of my friends. He might not be awake, but—

[Direct Message] ezzen: Sky, how the fuck do I not feel like I’m lying constantly to you all? Todai was more involved in the inferno than anybody publicly knows and I’m literally sick to my fucking stomach at trying to maintain the charade and play dumb given what we did. I’m going out on a limb here and assuming that you either already know or can guess what I’m talking about. Overload’s next video is going to be about my situation but there’s so much I can’t say. How do I handle this?

—

Sky didn’t reply. Maybe asleep, maybe not, but either way, I was left to stew in those thoughts all afternoon, trying to distract myself with banter and less upsetting videos as the winter sun fell below the skyscrapers and cast its last few fingers of orange light through their gaps. In the middle of my descent down a YouTube rabbit hole about aerospace alloy manufacturing, Ebi notified me that my PC parts had arrived.

The receipt process was handled by others; I just watched it happen from the doorway to my room. A pair of Todai employees brought the various heavy boxes out of the 20th floor elevator, and Amane, in human form, intercepted them and signed for the delivery, sounding surprisingly bubbly as she chatted with the two. The moment they were gone, she mantled up with a snap, gathered up all the boxes into one giant pile in her massive arms, and carried them across the common space to me with no apparent effort. She set down the pile, pushed it through the doorway, dropped mantle with a warbling hiss so she herself could fit, then looked at me.

“May I come in?” She asked in slow, halting English. Ebi was there, but conspicuously remained off to the side.

“Um, yes.” I was grateful she’d asked. Hina never did, and Alice had something of a bad track record even if she obviously cared more, which had led to my room not feeling particularly private. I also wanted to thank her for handling the pick-up, but I wasn’t sure how much of that she’d get.

Amethyst nodded, re-mantled, and I got out of the way so she could haphazardly push the various boxes fully into my bedroom. Her mantle’s brute strength was a boon. I glanced at Ebi, who had stayed out in the common room.

“Um. Are you not coming in?”

“Nope. She wants this one-on-one. I’ll be out here if something happens.”

My anxiety spiked a little at that. I’d kind of assumed that Ebi would be providing interpretation, but without her—I imagined hours of sitting together awkwardly, unable to bring up any kind of idle conversation topic, let alone articulate the more specific questions I had about Yuuka.

For the moment, at least, we busied ourselves with the task of unboxing. Amethyst provided the various tools for the task, plucked from her pocketspace and proffered to me without a word: box cutter, screwdrivers, anti-static bracelets, and so on. She herself didn’t need any sort of blade to slice through tape and cardboard, though; a finger flowed into a razor blade and made short work of any packaging that wound up before it. Our cooperation was wordless and intuitive, breaking down boxes, piling up styrofoam, collecting disinterred computer components in front of the desk. I jumped as she pressed a sheet of bubble wrap between her gemstone hands, making the plastic cry out in a hail of pops. She giggled, and I mustered an awkward chuckle to go with it.

My awkwardness got worse as we cleared away the detritus and were left with just the parts. This was my first chance to actually take stock of what Ebi had purchased for me, and what I could see was almost embarrassingly high-end; no actual magitech, but the enormously beefy GPU next to what were definitely water cooling tubes had me on edge. I’d never built a liquid-cooled computer before, and my first time would be with such expensive components—a leak would be catastrophic! I had hoped that building my new PC would be a familiar activity that brought some stability back into my life, but now I was horribly stressed.

And I couldn’t communicate any of that to Amethyst. I drew my phone in what I hoped was a surreptitious way.

[Direct Message] ezzen: Please help me talk to her.

ebi-furai: just talk to her, dude

ezzen: HOW?

ebi-furai: her en comprehension is pretty good

ebi-furai: or just like use some translation apps, there are lots

Oh. I’d been hung up on the idea that we needed to have an out-loud, verbal conversation—but I was always more comfortable in text anyway, wasn’t I? I navigated to Google Translate, typed something in, and showed the mech-girl my phone, hoping the app hadn’t mangled it too much.

Ezzen: Could we talk like this?

The spike-faced girl didn’t lean in to look at the comparatively tiny phone screen. I was in the chair at the desk, and she was on the floor, but she was so tall that her head was still at the height of my shoulders, a decent height for me to show her the screen. She summoned her own phone, ensconced in its sticker-bombed case, and carefully but skillfully typed a response with her long, knife-like fingers. It was too small for her massive hands, but she evidently had practice. When she held it up to show me what she’d written, it was in an app I didn’t recognize.

Amane: Use DeepL instead. The translation quality is a bit better.

Amane: You can say it out loud, though. I live with four English speakers.

“Do they speak English even when I’m not around?”

I hesitantly used my voice as she asked, going slow and doing my best to enunciate.

Amane: Hina and Alice.

Doing it this way was actually slower than just typing it in, so I went back to my phone.

Ezzen: It’s more comfortable for me this way, if that’s okay with you?

“Okay!”

I jumped, not expecting the verbal response in her chiming, sing-song tones.

Ezzen: Have you built a PC before?

Amane: I’m a gamer `⎚⩊⎚´ -✧

She looked at me expectantly, as though that were all the explanation that was necessary.

Ezzen: Cool!

I immediately kicked myself for the meaninglessness of the response, and the fact that the exclamation point wasn’t reflected in my actual facial expression. She didn’t seem to mind.

Amane: It looks like you’re also a gamer, judging by what the shrimp got for you.

Amane: shrimp = Ebi chan

Adorable.

Ezzen: Actually, not very much. My hand makes it hard to use a mouse quickly.

Ezzen: I spend most of my time on GWalk and YouTube.

Well, spent, since things had changed. But once this computer was put together, maybe there wouldn’t be much difference from how things used to be. That thought was comforting amid the tumult of the last few days, so I set the phone down and moved to get better access to the open case, then realized that it probably made more sense to start with the motherboard and hunted around for that. Amane seemed to read my thoughts and handed it to me. She was wearing a static bracelet on her crystalline wrist—I eyed it, and she made a twinkling noise, a chuckle, and typed into her phone.

Amane: The bracelet doesn’t do anything.

I appreciated the thought, at least. I located the RAM sticks—a full set of four, each as powerful as the entire memory of my old PC at 16GB apiece—and carefully clicked them into their slots on the motherboard. Then it was onto the CPU, which I carefully removed from the remainder of its protective packaging while trying not to gag at the price tag, then placed gently into its grid of receiving holes and locked it down with the little lever. Those were the easy parts.

Things got harder from here as we encountered one of my old enemies: little, tiny screws. Beyond the exceptionally poor luck of being one of the first people to ever lose a loved one to the Flame, I’d also gotten the twisted bonus that the mobility in my right hand—that is to say, my dominant hand—had never fully recovered. So I used screwdrivers and other such implements with my left hand, and it was slow going. The PC’s external case screws were easy enough, but one look at the little screws for mounting the motherboard inside, nestled deep into crevasses between protruding heat sinks and I/O pin grids, had me dreading the whole procedure. The last time I had done this had been a slow, frustrating process where I’d repeatedly lost the little things inside the hollow spaces of the PC case.

On the bright side, the screwdriver Amane provided me had a magnetized tip. Was that a problem for computer parts? Probably not; she wouldn’t have given it to me otherwise, right? Also, what about the water cooling unit for the CPU? Did that go on now? It’d create more obstacles to getting those tiny screws in place—

I felt myself getting a little overwhelmed and glanced nervously at the Amethyst Radiance—she was pointing her phone at me.

Amane: If you have problems with your hands, try to use glyphs.

I hadn’t even thought of that as an option.

“But…isn’t high ripple bad for you?”

Amane: There’s no problem in small amounts, not while it’s transformed.

“It?”

She made a crackling noise of annoyance as she shook her massive, spike-snouted head and typed something else into her undersized phone.

Amane: While I am in my transformation form.

“Ah.”

I stood, weaving my way around piles of discarded packaging to reach the bookcase, and grabbed a notebook that I knew had spare pages. One somewhat-undignified shimmy across my bed later, I also had a pencil from my backpack. I flipped to a blank page and began to draw.

Two minutes later, I showed Amane the chain. It was elementary, first-order, dealing entirely in simple physical operations; trivial, in the technical sense of the word, as it didn’t even need to double back on itself anywhere. She nodded in approval and made no comment, so I called forth my Flame, holding my arm well away from anything that might ignite. I whispered an apology to it that I was aggravating it and wondered briefly about how I could feed it something other than pain—a conversation I wasn’t sure I could have with Amane, even with the artificial bridge we’d constructed across the language barrier. So for now, I just poked and twisted and formed it into my poor excuse for thread, and then fed the Flame along the lattice.

As weaving went, this was straightforward, no particular tricks necessary to ensure correct tension or manipulate the Flame at micro scales. When I was done, I was left with what was basically an invisible manipulator arm hooked up to a sensor, preprogrammed to apply a twisting motion to particular target areas. I placed the motherboard in its position inside the case, ensuring the screw holes lined up, and then dumped the little bag of appropriate screws onto the paper atop the {IDENTIFY}-{DIRECT} portion of the chain. The screws never hit the paper, instead stopping in the air, and I watched with excitement as they all aligned to face downward and floated over to the case, descending into their appropriate holes and turning themselves into place. So mundane, no flickers of light or confusing violations of one’s intuitions for space and motion, yet so magical all the same. I used my phone’s flashlight to confirm that the screws had properly fastened themselves into place.

Amane tapped my knee to get my attention.

Amane: It never gets boring, does it?

“I hope it never does.”

—

Between YouTube tutorials on my laptop and our combined magical ingenuity, we made steady progress. A simple chain to thread the cables of the power supply to the other components; a video elucidating the difference between open- and closed-loop water cooling systems; zip ties to keep everything neat and tidy. And I slowly broke the ice, first by simply coordinating our procedure for the building process, then hesitantly drifting toward the larger-scale worries looming over me.

Ezzen: So you have time for this even though it’s a weekday? All the others seem to be busy.

Amane: The expectations are lower for me than for my teammates.

Stupid Ez. Of course that’d be something of a touchy subject for her. I fretted about how to salvage the conversation while I wrestled with the tiny pins and wires connecting the motherboard to the case’s external buttons. I still didn’t want to intrude on her medical privacy—maybe moot now that Ebi had sent me the definitive report, but I’d had my own share of being seen as a medical case first and a person second. I couldn’t imagine how much worse that was for her.

Ezzen: Is that because of your injuries themselves or the pain?

Amane: Depends on the weather.

Ezzen: “Weather” = local ripple?

She nodded and hummed, a digital-sounding, too-pure piezoelectric tone.

Amane: Good days and bad days. Does your hand or foot hurt more when there’s red?

Ezzen: I don’t know. Using my Flame does hurt. Do you use pain for your magic? Ai singled out Hina and Heliotrope as the ones who use pain for their Flames, so I assume you don’t?

Amane: I don’t use it. Because it’s not right.

More like Alice than Hina, then. I wondered why Heliotrope also used pain if she was generally pro-Amane and anti-Hina.

Ezzen: Not mahou shoujo?

Amane: That’s right. I understand why the others use it, because it’s important to be powerful, but I am not only my pain.

She rubbed her right arm with her left, a shockingly familiar motion. In her real body, that would be her prosthetic, as opposed to my burns, but the sentiment was the same—was “real body” an offensive way of putting it, given how she seemed to prioritize this form instead? I’d have to ask at some point.

Ezzen: Not made of glass, right.

Ezzen: I don’t like magic based on pain either.

Amane: But you had sex with Hina.

Oh no. Yesterday, she’d expressed some fairly harsh disapproval of Hina’s lighthearted approach to pain—like Yuuka, would she assume the worst of me by association? But she was shaking her head.

Amane: That was supposed to be a joke. Text is difficult.

I gave her a sympathetic nod. Tone over text was tricky enough without the strange filtering effects of a translation program. At least in this odd, hybrid form of communication, I had facial expressions to back me up—but she didn’t. What was with that spike-face?

Ezzen: (I just want to clarify that it wasn’t sex)

Amane: Understood!

Amane: I don’t want to judge, but Yuuka is troubled.

Ezzen: “Troubled” is understating it a bit, don’t you think?

I mustered an awkward smile to accompany that, hoping the light tone came through. She gave me a thumbs up with one of her massive, gemstone hands.

Ezzen: Ai told me to ask you what to do about it.

Amane: I’ll tell her to be nice. As nice as Yuuka can be.

Now that second part was definitely a joke, but one attached to genuine goodwill.

Amane: I’m not surprised she’s being a problem. It’s not your fault. We’ll make her tolerate you for now, but I hope you two can become friends.

Ezzen: Friends? She’s so mean.

With the ice breaking a bit, that felt safe to say.

Amane: She’s basically a good person. And so are you.

Was that true? What could one say to that?

“…Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I blinked at the accented English.

Amane: Please give me the GPU and water cooler.

I obliged, now doubly off-kilter at the topic change. Then, to my shock and concern, she dropped out of her mantle, the towering mass of flowing purple gemstone squeezing itself before dissolving into the air in a fraction of a second, leaving just Amane’s real body. And her prosthetics, of course—the static bracelet dangled from her artificial wrist, now too large. She still had the eyepatch I’d seen when we’d first met, and like then, it took a few seconds to flicker to life and sync up with her true eye, mirroring the vivid green. Not supernaturally intense the way Hina’s eyes were, but pretty nonetheless. Her black hair fell in a straight, glossy curtain over her shoulders and down her back.

Amane: Your situation is bad.

Her mechanical hand worked swiftly and precisely to free the GPU’s pre-installed fans from its back plate as she cradled the device in her lap. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing, but I was still nervous; she was splitting her attention between the task and talking to me, and I felt that the thousand-dollar graphics card deserved a bit more reverence and care.

Her flesh hand had visible tremors as it continued typing on her phone, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the practiced ease and confidence in the motions. It helped that whatever keyboard she was using only seemed to have a few keys with Japanese characters, not a full QWERTY layout, so each key was bigger.

Ezzen: Yeah.

I was hesitant to add more of my own opinions until I knew where she was going with this. She stopped working the screwdriver for a moment and looked at me seriously as she presented the next message.

Amane: I think you shouldn’t have to fight the PCTF.

That didn’t mesh with her teammates’ vitriol.

Ezzen: I thought you hated them?

Amane: No. My teammates hate them for me. I think the PCTF are evil, and killing them is part of the duty of real magical girls. But it is not revenge, and we should not have made you help us. It’s not your duty because you’re not part of the team. I’m sorry.

Ezzen: Sorry it happened, or sorry that I’m not part of the team?

Amane: The first. I don’t understand why the others want you to join and help with our war.

Thank fuck. An incredible weight came off my chest—she didn’t want me to be an accomplice to further murder. And she didn’t want me to join up as a magical girl. Even aside from the others’ especially egregious expectations, it seemed like they all wanted things from me, be it my expertise or my Flame. Even Ai, for all her kindness, was very interested in what I could do for Amane—but Amane herself had no demands or quid pro quo for me at all, no interest in even subtle leverage; I was starting to see why she’d insisted that I be allowed to choose whether I was going to the Hikanome event, and I was grateful.

She did something strange with her prosthetic hand, a twist of her wrist and wiggle of her fingers that almost made the static bracelet fall off, and we both winced slightly as a pulse of pain blossomed in my foot. She laughed softly even though her voice was tight.

Amane: Bad weather, right?

She’d activated the {AFFIX} binding in her arm and locked the water cooler against the GPU’s back plate so she could keep them aligned as she put the screws in: one of the cutting-edge accessibility features of a LIPS-compliant prosthetic. I’d seen it in the lattice diagram, but it was quite another thing to witness in action. Magic was still magical. She continued typing with her other hand as she worked.

Amane: There are more reasons that the others want to have you here, and I’m annoyed that they’re not telling you. Alice especially.

“Alice? With what?”

Amane: Her tail. Her dragon transformation. Dragon化

“Dragon-ka,” she said out loud, answering my question before I had the chance to ask it. With the screws now in place, she set down the screwdriver and her phone to lean over the case and slot the modified GPU into place with a satisfying click. If her chronic pain was bothering her, she did a good job of hiding it. I waited until she was done to show her my phone.

Ezzen: Like, something to make her more comfortable? The tail does seem like it gets in the way.

Amane: Something to stop it.

Ezzen: It’s still going on?

Amane: Yes. It gets worse whenever she uses magic. Tail lengthens and eyes change. Maybe more if it continues.

Amane: She didn’t tell you because she pretends it isn’t happening, but it’s getting worse, and we don’t know how to stop it.

“Jesus.” That was dire enough—and interesting enough—that I immediately started speculating.

Ezzen: Any use of magic? How much ripple?

Amane: 20-silver-like or above. Yuuka knows when it will happen and stops her. But it’s only a delaying tactic.

We both grimaced—though that belied the full intensity of discomfort I was feeling from this revelation. Hadn’t Ai called Alice selfish? Was this why? I remembered what she’d said on the car ride to Tochou: I live with it. And I remembered the tightness in her voice. The familiar bottled-up frustration.

Amane: I don’t like that she’s keeping it a secret and pretending it’s not one of the reasons she’s trying to keep you here.

Ezzen: And she didn’t tell me because she’s worried about putting even more pressure on me?

Amane: Yes. It feels like putting even more pressure on you because your situation is so fucked up.

Ezzen: I’ll help. Thanks for telling me.

Amane: You don’t owe us.

Ezzen: I know! It’s not about debt, but a chance to do something good.

I understood Alice’s reasoning, because I was under a lot of pressure, but I agreed—I wished she’d opened with this when making her original pitch to me. At the time, she’d focused on the appeal of learning more about the Spire’s dermis via the Radiances’ mantles, and that had been enough to hook me, before I’d understood the nature of their war with the PCTF. Now I wasn’t so sure, since that same track of research would be open to me sans the looming conflict at the Spire—but this? I wanted to help her with this. It was exactly the sort of thing that called to me: directly improving somebody’s quality of life by solving unsolvable magical problems. Well, biomancy was famously difficult, as well as outside my typical wheelhouse, but that was now surmountable with actual Flame at my disposal.

Amane: Okay. Thank you.

I gave her a lame little thumbs-up.

Ezzen: I’m curious: what Japanese word translates to “fucked up?”

Amane: ヤバい I think. But I wrote it. Yuuka and Hina taught me lots of dirty words.

She grinned, a warm smile reminiscent of Ai’s, but with a little more impishness to it. It was broken by a wince, and she rubbed her arm again.

Amane: Rebound from red. I’m alright.

I thought that binding didn’t pass her threshold of ripple for pain; that was the impression I’d gotten from her file, at least. She shook it off quickly.

Ezzen: “Bad weather”?

“Yeah.” She checked the power supply’s cables, making sure all the components were hooked up, tracing across each thick bundle with a segmented finger. Her prosthetic arm was almost doll-like, with visible articulation at the joints and smooth paneling, a very different look from the flowing, glossy facets of her mantle, a seemingly intentional but distinct sort of artifice. I racked my brain to compare the arm to Ebi’s; I’d need to see them side-by-side to compare the details, but they were certainly both Ai’s handiwork. She caught me looking.

Amane: What do you think?

Ezzen: It’s incredible. Thank you for letting me work on it.

She nodded, and her eyes flicked over to my scarred forearm. Would I rather have lost my arm entirely, with a prosthetic of that quality in its place? Then again—I did have a prosthetic now, tucked under my crossed legs. I extracted my legs to half-bend it in front of me, looking at the block of false toes. She brought out her own leg from where it was tucked under her and pulled off the sock to compare. Of course, her leg was entirely replaced below the knee, where I’d only lost the front half of the foot itself, so hers was much fancier, but she seemed interested in mine.

Neither of us commented on it, though. In hindsight, I think we were both wary of bringing up the other’s traumatic experiences. We fell back into mostly silence and kept working in sync. While she put in the NVMe SSD, I got up and collected more packaging detritus from around us: broken-down cardboard boxes, plastic wrapping, and styrofoam padding were all sorted into piles at her direction. I didn’t know how recycling worked around here, but she was being fastidious about keeping everything separate, so I trusted her judgment.

The PC was coming together. The full setup was still far from complete, but all the essentials of the box itself were in, and as I hooked up the I/O pins for the power button itself, trepidation began to build. I didn’t know enough about water cooling to check Amane’s work, but she’d done this before, so I tried to trust her judgment and console myself by thinking it through. In the worst case scenario where a tube burst and irreversibly destroyed all the internals, what would really be lost? I’d be out three thousand dollars of parts, which was a mind-boggling amount of money for a PC by my standards—I had to repeatedly remind myself that Todai wouldn’t even blink at paying that out-of-pocket. And then it’d be another one-day delivery, or maybe two days, but either way, it wasn’t like I’d be stranded without a home base for another two weeks while waiting for a new power supply or something. It would be okay; I’d be okay. Only two more days at most of this room feeling alien and transitory rather than like home. Hopefully, only a few more minutes.

While Amane used her mechanical hand’s miraculous dexterity to hook up the final few hard-to-reach pins, I wrestled one of the displays out of its box and onto the desk. Todai had gotten me three, complete with swing-arm wall mounts if I so desired, but we only needed one for this, and for the moment I didn’t even bother with managing the cables as I plugged it into power and ran the HDMI cable to the computer’s graphics card. We left the case open and on its side, since the first boot was always a bit fraught, and there was no point in closing the whole thing up and putting it in position if we’d need to immediately take it apart again to troubleshoot. I didn’t even bother with the keyboard or mouse yet, either; I just wanted to see if the power button would get us to BIOS or UEFI or whatever initial startup interface would indicate we’d averted catastrophic failure.

I plugged in the power supply, hit the switch on the back, and got our first sign of life—a single white indicator light on the motherboard, shining out of the metal-and-silicon cave. A good start, but the real test lay with the power button. Amane gestured grandly at the box, wordlessly but clearly insisting I did the honors. I indulged her by reaching over and pressing the button—

And was rewarded by glorious light and motion. The external case fans spun to life, followed a moment later by the softer sound of the water cooling pumps. No leaks! I caught Amane’s fist-pump out of the corner of my eye, but my eyes were locked on the monitor as it sprang to life, displaying familiar startup symbols that transitioned into a simple menu for configuration. Good job, us. I flopped backward onto the bed, enjoying the feeling of success, even if the stakes were admittedly low. I was home. Even if I wasn’t staying here permanently, at least now I could operate from here as I used to.

We celebrated with a break, retreating from the hardwood onto the softness of my bed. Amane called Ebi to get us some snacks and drinks, which turned into some playful banter. When the robot arrived and handed off our refreshments—juice and nuts, rather health-conscious—she crouched down in front of the PC, her simpler cousin.

“Good work, little dude.”

She gave it an affectionate pat. Then she turned and subjected Amane to what I could tell was a familiar routine of questions like “how is your pain?” and some more direct inspections from which I averted my eyes. Satisfied with her charge’s health, she turned to leave, but was caught by the hand, prosthetic to android. Ebi hesitantly returned to sit at Amane’s other side from me. The two of them discussed something briefly, then Amane turned back to me, looking a little apologetic. Ebi spoke for her.

“Do you want to talk about going to the Hikanome rally?”

---

Author’s Note:

Amane! This chapter is pretty talky, but…Amane! Yay! I’m not biased.

This chapter was hard to write. Thanks to the beta readers (Cass, Softies, Zooloo, Maria, Zak, Selenium, Penguin) for helping me through it.

See you next week for Amane Conversation Part 2!

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!

November 8, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

I did my best to enter Ai’s giant machine shop surreptitiously and not attract undue attention, which had gone well until I realized that her mobile workstation was not in the same spot it had been last time I’d been in here. So, feeling the whole time that I obviously didn’t belong and dreading the idea that somebody would walk up and ask for ID, I awkwardly skirted around the edge of the garage-turned-laboratory, trying to spot the Emerald Radiance. I gave a wide berth to the scariest-looking machines, especially those mid-operation like the massive waterjet cutter bringing forth dozens of identical parts from a sheet of metal at least three meters to a side.

I eventually found Ai in the most sensible place in the whole shop for her to be: set up with a group of students below the enormous magical manufacturing array on the workshop’s far wall. Sadly, they weren’t actually using the array; Ai wasn’t even touching the control panel and was instead indicating each glyph on the wall with a laser pointer, quizzing the students on identifying each one and what it did. I chuckled as one of them mistook {AFFIX} for {DIFFUSE}. Rookie mistake.

The multitude of wrong answers like that one were because today’s batch of students were younger than the ones I had met the other day. I’d gotten the sense that most of that group had been grad students, noticeably older than me, to say nothing of the grizzled full-fledged engineers and machinists; by contrast, these ones were around my age, in their third and fourth years of college. It was a similarly eclectic group of races and nationalities to last time, native Japanese intermingling with Americans and some who must have been from Taiwan or Hong Kong, since I doubted anybody from mainland China was here. Despite Todai’s professed abstinence from the intermittent conflict in the South China Sea, it still impacted the demographics here in Ai’s workshop.

Ai saw me coming, making eye contact with me in one of the convex mirrors as I approached the back of the cluster of students. A grin spread across her face as she flicked the laser pointer to an eye-hurting jumble of curved plastic that seemed to crawl under my gaze, a three-dimensional slice of one of the four-dimensional glyphs. My stomach lurched as she called out.

“You in the back: what’s this?”

“That,” I sighed, simultaneously put-upon and excited at being given a chance to strut my stuff, “would be the third, sixth, and seventh layers of {PROPAGATE}, sliced maybe twenty-five percent ana to give it a more orange propensity so it can link into things like {ASSIGN} more easily.”

“Correct!” Her voice rang like a polished bell. “Everyone, this is Todai’s newest employee. You might see him around from time to time. Colliot-san, would you like to introduce yourself?”

“Uh—not particularly. I was actually wondering if I could, um…” I trailed off lamely. Unfortunately for me, some of the students—most, probably—were denizens of the forums and were already putting the pieces together, whispers erupting within the group as eyes went round. No keeping this cat in the bag. “Fine. Yes, uh, hi, I’m Ezzen.”

I wasn’t prepared for how good that felt to say. Ai had gone out of her way to not refer to me as Dalton, so Ezzen was the only name any of these people would know me by. I loved that. What I loved less was the way eyes slid down to the burn scars on my hand and to the prosthetic replacement for my foot, known to them despite being hidden inside my shoe. I unconsciously slid the Flame-marked hand into my hoodie pocket to fidget with the stabilizer module, hunching my shoulders. My tattoo itched, which was absurd.

Ai, bless her, regained control of the group almost instantly, before they had a chance to start bombarding me with questions or mob me.

“I’m not canceling this lab just because he’s here! You’ll get the chance to meet him eventually. Ah—” She glanced at an indicator light on her desk that had just come on. “Good timing, the blanks are done. Every group gets one of each type; make sure they both came out to spec, then come up with one first-order chain for each that can do the next three steps we talked about. If the dimensions are off, add back material with the sedimenter and then refinish them on the mill. Go.”

The students’ gazes lingered on me as they shuffled off toward the waterjet cutter, but mercifully none of them dared defy their orders to talk to me, in too much of a hurry. Ai beckoned me over.

“Are you here for something?”

I appreciated how she was straight to the point, no inquiries after my foot or asking about my plans for the day. I scratched my neck nervously.

“Um, just was wondering if I could be helpful.”

“Ah. Is this about the gun?”

“Um. Is it alright for you to just—say that?”

“Yes.” For explanation, she pointed at a matching set of dark panels mounted to the edges of her workstation. A classic soundproofing weave splayed across them in neon green. “So, is that it? You want to feel like you’re doing good to make up for yesterday?”

“Um—sort of? I mean, yes, but…that’s not all of it. I had an…argument? With Heliotrope.”

Ai frowned sympathetically.

“That’s…I’m sorry. What did she say?”

I didn’t really want to talk about most of it—even recalling her demeanor was making my stomach lurch, let alone the actual, wildly hurtful things she had said to me.

“She insulted Hina, which—I know you’re not going to have much sympathy there, and—”

“Ezzen.” I flinched at her interjection. “I might not agree with Hina, and yes, I do think she’s a little monstrous, but of course I care if Yuuka is being a…bitch, to her.”

I blinked.

“Strong language for you, isn’t it?”

“She deserves it, sometimes,” she sighed. “What else?”

“She…said I didn’t deserve to be here.” I stared down at my shoes, ashamed even though I knew it mostly wasn’t true. “And compared me to Hina’s ex. Who’s a friend of mine, which I didn’t know,” I clarified.

“Ah. That…yes, I think I see the picture. I’m sorry, again, you didn’t deserve that at all. Of course you deserve to be here, and it would make me happy if you helped here.”

“Please. What’s there to do?”

“Well, what do you want to do?” She countered.

It was a good question. I raised my head to look around the workshop. This was far more hands-on than my comfort zone of GWalk diagrams, a step into the practicalities of the physical that I was used to eliding and leaving for the people who actually implemented things—like Ai. The exception, no more comfortable for me but at least something I felt driven to help with, was Amane’s prostheses—as well as probably my own, though I didn’t want to come off as selfish by mentioning my foot right now.

“I feel…I want to at least learn enough about the design and function of Amane’s prostheses to be helpful. Where would I start with that?”

She nodded, turning back to her keyboard and opening some new windows. I was unsurprised to find she was running Linux; Ubuntu, by the looks of it. I’d toyed with it in years past but never delved deeply enough into the technicals to find it easier than Windows. She eventually found a PDF and pulled it up on one of the vertical monitors.

“Are you familiar with LIPS-2?”

“The…Lattice-Integrated Prosthetics Standard, yeah? I read v1, but haven’t kept up with it.” That was mostly true; I had read the first version, but didn’t recall many of the specifics. It belonged to one of those tangential fields where I’d read the Wikipedia articles and skimmed the key documentation out of academic interest or to settle arguments on the forums, but my off-the-cuff knowledge was lacking. “You…helped write it, if I recall correctly?”

“Hai…” she confirmed, mostly to herself, as she jumped down the very, very long document. The scroll bar on the side of the window was barely a sliver. “Ah, here.”

I advanced a little to read the section header: Idiomatic Psychomotive Chain Bases: Designs Minimizing Free Red Ripple. As my eyes scanned between the dense blocks of text below it, I saw they were broken up by a few beautifully elegant lattice designs. I sight-read them, appreciating the thought given to optimizing everything down to second-order at most and creative workarounds and glyph choices to lower the free-band red ripple down to almost zero by the end of the chain—then breathed an incredulous chuckle. Recognition dawned and years-buried memories returned as I saw my name—Ezzen, not Dalton—below, cited for two of the designs. Both were modified slightly from what I remembered, but at a glance, I approved of the changes.

“Ha.”

“You’ve already been very, very helpful.” Ai explained, a smile in her voice. She pointed at the second one bearing my name. “For Ishikawa-chan—er, Amane—specifically, because so much of the damage was sanguimantic, this is the one we use, and the one that would be most helpful to optimize further, rather than the actual kinetic drivers or power integration or…you get the idea.” I did indeed, smiling as well. Ideas were already starting to germinate, ways to clean this up further. “Although you’re free to take a look at the whole design, of course,” she added.

So I got to work. There was a row of PCs along the wall, somewhat cordoned off from the main machine shop, and Ai helped me log in. They were running a slightly different version of GWalk, the enterprise distribution rather than the pro license, so I was missing a lot of my personal quality of life tweaks, but I knew all the shortcuts anyway. Ai handed me a USB with the lattice files for Amane’s arm and leg prostheses, telling me it was mine to keep so I could keep tweaking it on my own time; I saw it also contained the schematics for the physical design of her limbs. That was beyond the scope of right now’s work and my own expertise, though. I focused on the glyphwork.

Eventually, maybe twenty minutes in, a few of Ai’s students appeared and booted up other workstations. I became irrationally self-conscious; despite having full confidence in the actual contents of my work, it was another thing to see them stealing glances at my workflow out of the corner of my eye. The weight of observation imposed a bizarre pressure to get every little change right on the first try, rather than first checking whether an idea would actually go anywhere, and to avoid consulting the documentation I usually leaned on so heavily, for fear of looking like an amateur.

In fact, I did sort of feel like an amateur; many of the implementation details of this lattice were tuned for the unique case of Amane’s arm, with particular portions of the weave intended for different physical locations and mechanisms within the limb. This was not my area of expertise. GWalk actually had a whole suite of features for placing the weave in a schematic of physical parts, associating lattices with respective substrates, and so on, but my focus on theoretical problems and LM meant I’d almost always avoided it. Now I kept having to refer back to that window to double-check my work and was still unsure that I hadn’t broken anything. No error popups, at least, but that was only a matter of time, and encountering an error with a part of the design process I almost never partook in and therefore had no idea how to resolve, in front of an audience, was a nightmare scenario.

I tried to ignore that impulse to catastrophize and continue working as I usually did, but it became more and more difficult as the row of computers filled up. They gave me enough of a berth to leave the seats to my immediate left and right empty, but it was the barest buffer of protection; my physical shell, the bulky hoodie, provided little security when my direct stream of consciousness was playing out on the computer monitor. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable experience, exposed and vulnerable.

“Oh, that’s so smart!”

I jumped. I hadn’t realized somebody had invaded the bubble of personal space, watching from right over my shoulder. I twisted and saw one of the probably-not-Chinese students utterly enraptured by my monitor, a man with bleached-blond hair. He was older than me—wait, no he wasn’t; I was twenty.

“Thanks?” I muttered, uncomfortable with the proximity, turning back to the screen and wishing he’d leave. “You mean this part? The pair of {ASSIGNS}?”

“Yeah. Why are you looping them through each other like that?” He came around to my side to look more closely at the monitor. “How are you even getting GWalk to let you do that? It gives us an error.”

“Oh, it’s…” I copied the chunk and deleted the connections to demonstrate. “Control-D, drag the first connection, select the output of the second, C for chain mode, I for invert, click the input of the first one. If you just click and drag the two normally, it gives you two errors: one, because it doesn’t know where you want the mesh to take its output, and two, the tensions aren’t constrained to each other, so the ripple can’t resolve.”

“Ohhhhh. Oh, wait, then—” He called back to his friend, who hurried over. Before I knew it, three more students had joined the group, all pointing at the screen and talking excitedly in a mix of Chinese and English. A different one broke from the discussion to try to talk to me directly.

“So—you’re actually Ezzen? Seven years of being anonymous, and now you’re just…here at Lighthouse?”

“Well—being flametouched kind of changes things.”

“Lots of people thought you were already a flamebearer! I know you’ve said you’re not, but it’s crazy that you discovered all that—” he pointed at the screen again, “—without actually having any Flame yourself.”

“I didn’t…discover it. The Vaetna already know all this stuff, we’re just following them.” I floundered, compelled to downplay my own accomplishments and expertise. “Um, not to discredit Ai or the Consortium’s own accomplishments, labs all over—”

“Take some credit,” Ai sighed from my other side. I twisted to look at her.

“But it’s true! Yeah, I know a lot, but everything I’ve ‘figured out’ is stuff they already know. And you’re actually doing things with it!” I gestured around the cavernous room. “This is incredible!”

“So is that.” Ai countered, pointing at the glyphs on my screen. Then she put her hands on her hips, addressing the students who’d gathered near me. “Back to work. You’re not going to finish in the next forty minutes if you keep bothering Ezzen.”

They dispersed, grumbling but smiling. Ai dropped herself heavily into the seat next to mine, already looking tired again despite having seemed fine this morning.

“Already making progress.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know if this’ll actually work in the weave…uh, sorry for being a distraction, also.”

“You aren’t!” She glanced past me down the row of computers. “I think this will be really motivating for them. And it will work in the weave, I think; just make sure to run the substrate optimizer before porting it to the schematic.”

I‘d totally forgotten that step and needed a flustered moment to find the right button in the unfamiliar sub-panel. I also didn’t know how to verify that it had done its job and squished the glyph substrates down to minimal weavable size and found places for them within the structure of the arm.

“Uh.” I hesitated.

“It’s here, then here.” She guided me through the process of confirming everything was as it should be, heedless of the fact that a few of her students were definitely watching her treat me like one of them, oh God. I tried to control my breathing, retreating into my hoodie slightly like a magic-obsessed turtle.

“…Thanks. Um. I should really know how to do that.”

She seemed to become aware that eyes had been on us while she’d helped me, the supposed expert, use a basic function of the program I probably had more than ten thousand hours on.

“…Would you rather work somewhere else, Ezzen?”

“No, it’s more…the work itself.”

“Ah. Not used to integration.”

“Not at all,” I admitted. “Your students are probably better at that than I am.”

She frowned. “You deserve to be here. Is this about what Hirai-san said?”

“Who?” I was sort of losing track of the names.

“Er, Yuuka. Heliotrope.”

“Oh. I guess? It’s just—I already said, I just don’t feel like I’m actually…doing anything with it. I’m just messing around. Yesterday was easy—and I know how fucked up that sounds—because it was pure magic, LM to LM. I felt like I understood all of it…which wasn’t true; I didn’t understand what we were really doing, but the task? Everything could be done in GWalk. With this—” I pointed at the screen, then spread the gesture to indicate the entire workshop, “—there’s literally more moving parts, stuff I haven’t touched before. I feel like I need to run all of this past you to make anything actually come of it.”

“So you’re saying you’re used to working alone?”

“…I guess, yeah.”

“Well, you’re not alone. You never were! You’ve shared so much of your work on the internet; of course we’ve used it. Not…not all of my colleagues respect you as much as they should, but they certainly all know your name. So do my students, for a reason.” She smiled at me, reaching out to gently touch my forearm. “Your focus is pure theory, not application, and that’s fine, because we’ve already been applying it here. Now you can actually work with us.” She took a breath, but before I could formulate a rebuttal, another complaint that I was out of my depth, she went on, passion rising. “Teamwork means letting other people do the parts you’re not good at. Yesterday, you were able to do almost all of it yourself, which…” her expression darkened. “Which is how we got away with not telling you until it was too late. I’m sorry for that. But for almost everything outside of our mantles, bungyou—division of labor—is important, even necessary, because nobody can do what we do alone. You can help us do so much! And you know that, I know you do. I’m really, truly excited to be working with you, and so is everybody in this room.”

For a moment, I was terrified that meant she was about to order her class to line up and encourage me, but she just rubbed my arm and looked at me. Unlike Hina, her silence carried no expectation of response. Tears were starting to well in my eyes at Ai’s pure, unguarded outpouring of belief. I didn’t want to cry here, under the eyes of her students, people who looked up to me—I swallowed in a vain attempt to keep my throat from getting tight. Seeing my response, Ai tensed up.

“Oh. Oh, ah, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s—fine,” I pushed out, wiping my eyes before any tears could fall. Her honesty and kindness helped me admit why this was so hard. “No, I mean, thank you. Heliotrope sort of got under my skin. Thank you,” I repeated. Yuuka had brought my insecurities to the surface, asserted that I didn’t belong; a belief she had so boldly thrown in my face that it had further undermined my already shaky self-confidence. But Ai’s conviction that I could have a place here—that I already had a place here, long before I’d ever actually arrived, was just as potent as her teammate’s venom, perhaps more so. “Um…how long have you…known about me?”

“Me? Since before we had this building. I think we’ve actually emailed each other, back when I was in school, and so did my professor at the time. He’s the one who told me about—do…do you need a tissue?”

“…Yes.”

Ai jogged back to her desk and brought the entire box back to me. I dried my tears before they could spill onto my cheeks, thanked her, and spent the remainder of her class time continuing to tinker with and refine the weave of Amane’s arm.

Meanwhile, her students got back to work, under too much pressure from their assignment to keep bothering me. They ferried their parts around the workshop, refining those parts toward gradually more familiar shapes. Each time a group of students returned to one of the PCs, the sheets of metal had been further altered: intricately folded, slots milled out, more folding, small sections of metal ground away to thin out the shape, onward and onward until various second-order glyph substrates began to make themselves apparent in the aluminum. Even when different teams had the same glyph, there were a number of differences in the shape of the substrate, from overall proportions to the particular paths the metal took as it contorted around itself in mimicry of the Flame. Of course, there were idiomatic, semi-standard base layouts for substrates, but Ai had imposed additional restrictions on each team that meant the students had to improvise.

Even with that, the production process seemed an awful lot of effort. When I voiced this to Ai, she explained that this was entirely doable with CNC machining instead of the relatively manual processes to which she was subjecting her students, but that wasn’t the point. The goal of the exercise was to understand the common pitfalls in substrate design, like how one team had ground a branch point too thin; when Ai tried to weave along it, it snapped. That team still wound up passing, though.

Ai returned to sit with me again once she’d dismissed the students for the morning.

“What do you want to know about Yuuka?”

“I…wasn’t going to ask?”

“But you do want to know.”

“Yeah. How can you tell?”

“Because you like understanding things, and Yuuka is not easy to understand at a glance. I’m sorry she was so…her.” It sounded like she was talking about Hina, put like that.

“Alright, sure: Why’s she like that?”

“The eye, for one.”

“Precognitive self-assurance, yeah, figured as much. How’s it work?” I hadn’t even known it was possible until yesterday, so I wasn’t afraid to admit my ignorance.

“I…don’t know,” she admitted. “Silver ripple, of course, but I can’t even guess at the capture mechanism or how it translates to something she can parse. She’s…touchy about it, as well. If we could find out…”

Widespread precognition, even of a relatively limited sort based on whatever the local silver ripple happened to show, would be a game-changer; that went without saying. It was also the sort of cat that would be nearly impossible to put back in the bag. Ai understood that implicitly, I hoped—but then again, she was also the woman who had apparently invented a truly sentient AI in Ebi, so perhaps given the chance, she’d leap before looking. So might I, if it came to that, which troubled me. I switched back to the main topic.

“How do I get along with her?”

“Ah, well…your start was bad, being…with Hina. You are, ah, dating with her?”

There was a little bit of judgment in her voice. I hurried to correct her misconception.

“I’m…not sure, but I’m not doing her type of magic. No…mutation or transformation.” The seared patch of skin under my shirt and hoodie still stung faintly, a guiltily euphoric reminder to myself that we’d already taken steps in that direction—but cosmetic stuff didn’t really count. I ought to clarify that to Hina…if I could even convince myself of the loophole’s validity. “I made it really clear that I didn’t want to hurt my Flame or anybody else, so…”

Ai let out a breath she’d been holding, shoulders relaxing.

“Good. Good. That’s a relief, truly. I was worried, because…you two do have chemistry, and…”

“Christ, could everybody see it but me?” I immediately slapped my hand over my mouth. “Didn’t mean to say that.”

Ai burst out laughing, then covered her own mouth just as quickly. She needed a few moments for the giggle fit to subside.

“You’re not the first. She told me she’d tell you about her last boyfriend?”

“Skychicken. Jason. Flamebearer, friend of mine.” That part didn’t seem to surprise Ai. “Apparently, their relationship is why Yuuka doesn’t like her?”

“In simple terms, yes. Hina got…worse, more Hina-like, over the course of that relationship, and Yuuka blames him for that. And she doesn’t like men all that much, especially…she probably thinks you’re just here for Hina.” I didn’t quite flinch, but Ai still caught how I shifted and recoiled slightly. “Ah. I’m sorry, I know that’s not how it is at all, but…she’s had some bad experiences, and she jumps to conclusions. Alice thought she’d be alright with you being here, staying here, but maybe she miscalculated, or she just didn’t expect you to click with Hina in this particular way and make Yuuka mad.”

“I…she yelled at me for not thinking things through. But she’s the one who just immediately assumes the worst like that!” I almost growled. It was beyond frustrating and unfair, and Ai nodded in sympathy. I wondered if I could ask her to clear things up with the abrasive goth girl for me, to explain that I wasn’t at all like the caricature she’d assigned me, since trying to have that conversation myself would kill me and I doubted she’d even listen. But I also didn’t want to put Ai through that, not somebody who’d already been so kind to me and who frankly had better things to do. “What can I…do? To fix things with her? I don’t want this—mess. It’s ridiculous,” I groused. “A revolving door of drama. I just figured things out with Hina!”

That bordered on being too much outward complaining, and I cut myself off before I could run my mouth about how this was on top of the lingering worries about the PCTF and Hikanome. But it still felt good to say, and Ai nodded harder, then sat back and thought for a minute.

“I understand, it’s…yes, she can be exhausting,” she admitted. “And stubborn. She won’t listen to me or Alice for this, I think, and certainly not Hina. But Amane, she can help you with this.”

“Amane?”

“Yuuka has a soft spot for her, of course, after everything.”

“Um. I’m still not entirely clear on the timeline for that,” I admitted, glancing around the workshop, reflexively checking if the coast was clear despite knowing our conversation was magically secure. It was mostly deserted now that the students had gone; a few other engineers were working on their own projects at faraway machines, but nobody was close to being within earshot. “Amane was abducted, and the rest of you…rescued her. Alice said something about how you and her and Hina were a separate group first, though?”

It was a bit of a tangle, trying to piece together offhand comments and insinuations and tone from the past few days in between far more immediately important conversations. Not my strong suit. Ai bit her lip, and I hesitated, but then she jumped in her seat, clenching her right fist.

“Everything alright?”

“Yes.” Her tone said otherwise. “Your girlfriend is here. She can explain that to you.”

I jumped as well when I felt arms slither over my shoulders.

“Hey, cutie. I’m stealing you for lunch,” a husky voice muttered in my ear. “Hi, Ai! I’m stealing cutie for lunch!”

—

Ai was very, very unhappy with Hina traipsing through the fourth dimension in her workshop, and I got a front-row seat to a short but blistering lecture in Japanese. Hina did a remarkable job of staying still and enduring her teammate’s annoyance, chin resting atop my head. She didn’t seem particularly chastised, occasionally interjecting enthusiastic “Mhm!”s and unrepentant “Sorry!”s until Ai’s anger inevitably sputtered out and was replaced by an older-sister sense of exasperated disappointment. At that point, the Emerald Radiance switched back to English for my benefit, reminding Hina that “we’ve talked about this” and then attempting to cajole her out of the workshop. Stubborn mutt she was, Hina dug her heels in and insisted that she wasn’t leaving without me, so I bid a hasty farewell and thanks to Ai, taking the USB drive with me.

Hina took my hand and led me back through the hall toward the elevators, still full of energy.

“What’s for lunch?”

“Eggplant and pesto gnocchi!”

Yum. Apparently she wasn’t an obligate carnivore after all.

“…Homemade?”

“Not yet! How’s Ai?”

“Not yet?” But Hina didn’t answer the question as we entered the elevator, hitting me with that level, it’s-your-turn stare. “You just saw her.”

“Yeah, but she probably wasn’t yelling at you like she was with me. Unless she was?”

“Uh, no, she wasn’t. I was working on Amethyst’s arm. Or trying to, at least; I was really just messing with the weave.”

“Cool! Was it fun?”

“Yeah.”

Silence fell. I felt so awkward—but I’d already missed my window to ask how her own day was going. That was the correct, boyfriendly thing to do, right? It wasn’t that I didn’t have questions: was her voiceover work in English or Japanese? Was she done with her workday? Did she have any advice regarding making Heliotrope less of a bitch?

But I didn’t say anything, nor did she prompt me further with those sapphire eyes, content to just hold my hand and swing our arms back and forth a bit. At least she was in puppy-mode; my imagination lewdly suggested that the hyena might slam the emergency stop and press me against the wall, a scenario which would turn this mild social embarrassment into boiling-hot—

I politely told that part of my psyche to fuck off. I was still coming to terms with how much I wanted Hina to, in her own terms, “fuck me up,” and the awful things Heliotrope had insinuated about me were doing that process no favors.

We once again arrived at the nineteenth floor. The lights had been turned on in the kitchen, warm light pushing back the cool blue coming through the windows, and I smelled something roasting, probably the eggplant.

Stepping out of the elevator, I was surprised to find Alice laying on one of the sofas, face-down to accommodate her tail stretched out behind her, the tip just barely dangling over the armrest. As she pushed herself upright to greet us, I saw that she was wearing actual business attire—unlike at Tochou yesterday. Odd, or maybe normal; I didn’t have a good frame of reference, really.

It wasn’t much, just a button-down blouse with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a long, loose skirt worn high on the waist. She glared at my hand connected to Hina’s—quickly covered the expression with a smile. I altered the script I was building in my head; her presence automatically struck down any chance of conversation about my strange, budding relationship with Hina, but hopefully helped the odds that I could learn something that would make existing around Heliotrope less intolerable.

“Hey. Lunch soon, please? I have to be back with Suzuki in half an hour.”

“Yep! Fifteen minutes, sit tight.”

“Fifteen minutes?” Pretty quick. “Frozen gnocchi?”

“Oh, nah, I made the dough this morning, so it’s just roll and cut. Do you wanna do that or make the pesto?”

“Oh, uh…” I hadn’t realized that I would be helping. When I was young, we’d made pastas of all kinds, really, so the activity of rolling and shaping dough was scattered all across my memories of Dad, but the pesto…I didn’t want to touch that memory. “The gnocchi.”

“Gotcha!”

She put me to work, directing me to the enormous, metal-topped kitchen island, evocative of a restaurant prep table, oddly comforting and nostalgic. I was provided with the dough, flour, and an old friend: my knife, Dad’s gift.

“Still haven’t sharpened it,” she apologized, “but should be fine for dividing dough.”

Gnocchi are exceptionally easy to make by hand, Dad instructed. Most pasta shapes require you to roll a flat and thin sheet, which is hard without a machine, but gnocchi dough is robust enough that you can just roll it into a snake and cut it into little cylinders to make your pastas.

I floured up my hands, sliced the big ball of dough into more manageable portions, and went through the steps. Make a snake, chop it up—I stopped and hunted around the kitchen for a moment. Hina noticed from her own station to my right, where she was grinding the pesto by hand in a large mortar and pestle.

“Cutie? What are you looking for?”

“A fork.”

“Why?”

“To shape the dough?”

I was surprised she didn’t seem to know what I meant, but she obligingly directed me to the silverware drawer. She watched curiously as I demonstrated the technique.

Then—and there are specialized boards for this, but you can also just use a fork—you press the piece of pasta down along the tines of the fork with your finger, like this.

Hina squealed with delight as I transformed the gnocchi from a lump of potato dough to a pleasing little rolled shape with ridges all around the edge.

“More surface area; catches more sauce.” I explained from memory.

“Ooh! That’s so cute! Alice, kocchi mite!”

Todai’s leader, who’d seamlessly slipped into a support role doing dishes, also approved of the shape, nodding appreciatively.

“Oh, that’s how it’s done! I’ve had it like that at restaurants before, but I thought it needed a machine or something.”

“Same!” Hina stopped grinding the pesto—no, bad brain, stop that—to prod the pasta with a finger. “Can I try?”

“Hina, no, you’ll bend the tines and make a mess and I’m hungry,” Alice whined. Then she caught herself and her eyes slid over to me as she bit her lip nervously, caught with her guard down. What little dignity she had left was erased by a rumble, and I dodged meeting those slitted pupils to glance at her belly. She stammered. “Um.”

The three of us stood there in silence for a moment. Hina looked between the two of us with her big, blue eyes, then barked a laugh.

“Understood, Captain!”

She picked the pestle back up and resumed grinding the green paste. Alice kept trying to produce sounds, perhaps intended to be apologies for her impatience or indignance at the possible sarcasm, but another undignified grumble from her belly made her give up and turn back to the sink in embarrassed defeat. I picked up my knife and resumed making dough snakes, but that wasn’t enough to dispel the lingering awkwardness. I reached for a random question based on what was in front of me.

“Where did you learn to cook?”

“Me? Teacher from school who thought I needed a hobby to stop getting into fights. Hey, Alice, you remember Asagi-sensei, right?”

“…Yes? Third year home ec in middle school. It didn’t work, as I recall.”

“Nope! But food’s fun. You’re pretty good with that knife, cutie, where’d you learn?”

“I’m just chopping gnocchi, hardly a chiffonade or julienne.”

“Oooooh. Okay, now I really gotta know.”

I hesitated for a moment. I’d talked about this with Alice briefly, but somehow it hadn’t come up with Hina.

“My dad.”

“Oh, right, the dead one.”

“Hina!”

“Oops. Um. Sorry, cutie.”

I put down the knife for a moment to take a deep, slow breath. She didn’t mean anything by it, I knew that, but I still needed a moment to suppress the sudden spike of anger and grief at her casual prodding of the event that had destroyed my life. Shame, too, which took longer to boil off than the others.

“It’s—fine,” I gritted out.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“Hina!” Alice accompanied that with a thump of her tail against the kitchen’s tiles. The puppy flinched.

“Sorry.”

“No, um—talking is good, maybe,” I interjected, fighting down the reflexive annoyance. If I was going to live alongside them, telling them this much had to happen eventually, and it was easier with them, fellow flamebearers. If I trusted the chatroom, I could trust them. “Dad was a chef, the kind who traveled a lot. Took me with him.”

“Ooh, you’re rich?”

“Hina…”

“Uh. He didn’t actually save that much, and…things went wrong with the inheritance. Most of the money went to my grandparents, and from there to one of the cults, so I didn’t really see much of it.”

“Oh, shit. That’s—super fucked up.” The sapphire eyes were full of pity. I winced.

“I was fourteen, still in and out of the hospital, didn’t know how any of that worked, and they…stole it, basically.” More shame. “I got some aid from the Peacies later, around the end of the Firestorms, and managed to hold on to enough of that to, um, support my lifestyle.” I clarified hastily. “Uh, they weren’t the PCTF yet.”

“Don’t worry, we get it, no hard feelings. We know a thing or two about making ends meet.” Alice chuckled dryly. “Billionaire money, remember?”

“Ah. Right.”

Dirty money all around. Hina frowned as she passed me a small bowl.

“Wait, so the Peacies or one of their precursors knew about you as a flamefall survivor, knew where you lived, probably knew you were Ezzen, and never, like, tried to hire you? You’re a fuckin’ catch, cutie.”

“I’m…because I didn’t matter, probably, not compared to the pros.” I regretted that immediately, imagining Ai’s gentle rebuke if I’d said that to her. Alice filled in for her.

“Don’t talk about yourself like that. Remember how your work helped Amane? You’ve already made a difference.”

I tried to get myself to believe that while I gathered a snake’s worth of shaped gnocchi and brought it to the pot of boiling water on the stovetop.

“Okay, no, I can admit I would have been…an asset, so…no, I don’t really know. I guess I sort of assumed it was Sky’s doing. Um—Jason?”

“Probably. Sounds like him,” Hina confirmed as she dug through a cabinet for appropriate serving bowls. Alice stiffened at the name, and I realized we’d managed to stumble close to one of the things I was meaning to ask about. I seized the chance.

“Um, on that note, Heliotrope compared me to him earlier.”

Not at all a smooth transition, but I figured it was the only chance I was going to get.

“Ah, fuck, that’s right, your message,” Alice groaned, turning to me as she dried her hands. “I suppose it’s too much to ask that she was nice about it?”

“…No. Er, yes, too much to ask. She was mean.” Alice’s face fell further; now I felt bad for piling this on top of what was probably already a very stressful time. “My bad for bringing it up. I’m fine, really.”

“Last time you said you were fine, Hina had just sexually assaulted you,” Alice pointed out, voice flat. Hina whimpered, and Alice shifted; she wasn’t made of stone. “Sorry, Hina. Uh—I guess before I find out what dreadful things Yuuka said, we should first…she told me you two slept together last night. That, plus…‘monsterfucker’, plus that comparison—it compels me to ask: what exactly is going on between you two? Are you…a couple?”

“We’re trying things out!”

I glanced at Hina, relieved that she seemed to already have an answer ready.

“Yeah. It’s—we’re being responsible. Boundaries and all.”

“And you’re not our mom!” Hina crossed her arms defiantly.

Alice spread her hands in an ‘I give up’ motion.

“Couldn’t stop you if I wanted. Use protection, mind the teeth, et cetera. Just wanted to stay up to date on what was happening under our roof.” The stiff lashing of her tail betrayed her true feelings, but she didn’t press the issue, instead looking at me as though facing the gallows. “So, lay it on me: what did Yuuka say?”

—

“She’s grounded,” the dragon growled.

Alice’s expression had soured, then curdled into a snarl, as I repeated the nasty things Yuuka had said to me. It hadn’t stopped her from slurping down bite after bite of ridged gnocchi coated in creamy, green sauce as she listened; her hunger at least bound her to the table and prevented her from stomping to the elevator and hunting down Yuuka herself, but the atmosphere was still a bit fraught. We were both exasperated; this felt a bit too much like a repeat of the song-and-dance I’d had with Hina, although this time didn’t seem bound for euphoric intimacy, which suited me fine.

Hina, for her part, was emitting a faint but bone-chilling growl that had my heart pounding. It was nice to feel protected by something as wildly dangerous as her—but I was also genuinely concerned she’d attempt to tear Yuuka limb from limb.

“Um, Hina?”

“Mm?” The way her voice sounded with the growl was worryingly attractive, arguably hotter than when she was purring. More investigation would be needed—later.

“You’re not going to, uh…kill her, are you?”

“Never! Just rough her up.”

“Hina, can it wait until after I talk to her?” Alice shoveled another bite into her mouth; I was learning it was possible to eat pasta angrily. “As in, after you do your job. Which you have to get back to in twenty-six minutes.”

“It’d only take ten!”

“Uh, you’re not actually calling her off?”

“No. What she said was really hurtful to her too. Hina, please, you’d just make things worse, you know that.”

“What? No, you guys, I love her to bits, she’s done that for years, I’m good! She just doesn’t get to corner Ez and be a bitch like that. Not if I’m not there.”

“So you’ll wait?”

“Depends. Cutie?”

I wasn’t entirely opposed to Hina dispensing some physical retribution, assuming it would be the same degree of roughhousing I’d seen the other day. Hadn’t Ebi said Yuuka wouldn’t have wanted to miss that? So maybe the violence was fine, but—

“It…won’t help. I don’t think she respects…us. You or me.” I winced as Alice’s aura of heat, until now suppressed for the sake of her bowl of pasta, momentarily flared in frustrated acknowledgement, and the creamy pesto dried up, desiccated to a powder on the gnocchi’s surface. She frowned at the bowl and got up to add a bit of water back in. “I just—I talked with Ai, and that helped brush off some of what Heliotrope said, but other parts…”

“Which parts?” The growl vanished from Hina’s voice. If she had dog ears, they would have perked up.

“The, um…last night, you said this was just a starting point. Is it? Or is…” I raised my scarred hand, hoping she’d understand what I meant. “Is it just this you care about?”

I couldn’t bring myself to ask directly, both for the embarrassment of asking and fear of the answer.

“What? Cutie, of course it’s a start point, there’s more to you than that. I don’t call you that for nothing. You’re cute! And hot.”

“…Really?”

“Do I lie? Alice, do I lie? Is that a thing I do?”

“I’m not engaging with this part.” The dragon sat back down with her rescued pasta and kept eating.

“Fine. Cutie, yes, really. Your Flame is hot—heh—your body’s hot, and you’re going to be so cool once you just…come out of your shell, get comfy around us, learn to use your Flame. And Yuuka’s making that hard, which is…” She growled. “She’s just being shitty because of some old stuff with Jason; that’s not really anything to do with you. Don’t let her get under your skin. That’s my job. I wanna open you up and bring out the best version of you I can, and that’s not just because of your Flame, okay?”

“Um.” I shivered. “Open me up?”

Alice slapped the table softly in concert with her tail thumping the floor, reminding us she was there.

“Alright, too much flirting in front of me. I’m glad you two are at least, er, talking, but keep it in the bedroom. I have to get to my next meeting. I’ll try to give Yuuka a talking-to tonight.”

She left her empty dishes where they were, hurrying toward the elevator, tail swaying behind her. As she left earshot, Hina looked at me mischievously.

“So you don’t want me to fight her?”

“I mean…if you must, it’s not like I can stop you.”

“You’ll be able to, eventually. I won’t beat her up, though, because I’d rather spend my energy convincing you I’m actually into you. How’s that sound, hm?” She leaned toward me, blinking those big blue eyes too innocently for the innuendo, then sighed. “No time now, though, not for any real fun. I, too, have meetings. Ugh. But we do have time for—” She reached into pocketspace, which made me have to squeeze my eyes shut and rub them. When I reopened them, she had a small red box, palm-sized and squat. “This was for her, but I decree that she’s lost the privilege this year for being mean. So you can have it!”

“Um. I’m not following.”

“What day is it, cutie?”

“Monday?”

She facepalmed, giggled, and then removed the box’s lid to reveal a single chocolate shaped like a heart.

“February 14th! Happy Valentine’s Day!”

---

Author’s Note:

Healing! Being valued! Cooking! Valentines? We are slicing some lives.

Thank you to Softies, Cass, Penguin, Selenium, Zak, Maria, and Zooloo, my stupendous beta readers.

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!

October 27, 2024