CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Have you ever seen one of those ultra-slow-motion videos of a bullet passing through ballistic gel? The projectile leaves a series of overlapping voids expanding behind it, the nominally solid gel encouraged by the extreme forces to bubble like a liquid. Milliseconds later, the forces that formed those bubbles have dissipated through the gel, so the cavity no longer has anything to hold it open and begins to collapse back in on itself. But the bullet drags outside air in behind it, and as the bubble collapses, that air is crushed and compressed, pressurized so rapidly that it ignites into a little explosion, a flare of light and heat that momentarily grants a second life to each bubble, glowing like fireworks before finally being snuffed for good.

The same thing happened when Hina struck the white-ripple field surrounding Yoyogi Park. The blazing blue comet pierced the field, and light exploded across the sky, a sapphire aurora both spilling outward beyond the barrier and following her in like leaking ink. Even though her mantle was barely visible as more than a pinpoint, I could see it was flaking apart, shards of LM trailing off of her and decohering into more ripple like the tail of a comet.

For a moment, there was equilibrium, the insane force of her arrival balanced against the field’s self-correcting shape. Then, like the ballistic gel, the field buckled and fell inward where she struck it, closing behind her and isolating pockets of the blue, compressing them inward, squeezing and concentrating the bubbles of ripple until they were a trail of blinding pinpoints suspended behind Hina’s dive.

Watching this collapse over a fraction of a second, I remember thinking how strange it was that there was no physical shockwave, no wind. As if responding to me, the colored guide-braziers flickered, and then their flames were being sucked inward too, an incandescent rainbow caught aswirl in the implosion of the ripple compressing Hina’s constellation of the Frozen Flame. The compression reached a peak, and like that hyper-pressurized air, the pinpoints detonated, tearing open Miyoko’s field. It curdled and peeled back, whips of white and yellow sparks dancing and igniting at the seam before they were overtaken by the tide of sapphire light. For a brief and blinding moment, Hina outshone the sun and dyed the whole world blue.

The sound reached my ears moments later, and everybody, flamebearers included, flinched and ducked for cover at the deafening, roaring rumble that was felt as much as heard, rattling my entire body, terrifying in a primal sense like a peal of thunder or erupting volcano; something early man would have worshiped out of fear. I remember that feeling more clearly than any other part, how my legs trembled and I hunched on pure instinct, how everybody was screaming, including me.

That was all before the ripple reached us.

I cried out as the lattice of my prosthetic flickered, red ripple hijacking my nerves and sending lancing pain from foot to brain stem while my stabilizer unit in my jacket pocket tried and failed to compensate. I fell to one knee, then on my arse, gasping and gritting my teeth as the pain overwhelmed my other senses. The device in my pocket was turning hot—an acrid smell hit my nose, and I tried to squirm out of the jacket even while phantom cramps made it feel like my foot was about to fold itself in half. Somebody helped pull the jacket off of me, and I immediately curled up on the pillow I’d been sitting on, cowering under the collapsing sky and trying not to scream at the venom in my nerves.

Over long, agonizing seconds, the pain ebbed downward from its peak. Gasping, ragged breaths became shallower and more even—and colder, as nature reasserted itself. The temperature was plummeting; with the barrier between hot and cold air destroyed, the former drove upward, and the cold air surrounding the park rushed inward, frigid, howling wind kicking up grit and shearing at my sensitive skin through the gossamer protection of my shirt. Familiar aches invaded my fingers, and soon I found myself curled up not in a futile attempt to escape pain but as a way of preserving precious body heat as winter announced its return.

I gritted my teeth; my fragile meat-body wanted to stay where it was and huddle for warmth, but I couldn’t afford to. Even without looking, I knew that this was an apocalyptically dangerous situation for the hundreds of thousands of average humans in the park. There was commotion around me, voices and shuffling, and I could hear yelling and screaming and sirens in the distance. The real flamebearers, the Radiances and Hikanome’s damn cultists, were probably already mobile and trying to help people, not fetal and blubbering. I had to get up and join them—it was pathetic to have been knocked flat on my ass.

“C’mon,” I murmured to myself, somewhere between a whisper and subvocalization. “The Spire stands, so can you.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Up we go. One, two—”

I sat up and cracked my eyes open.

Everything was dyed yellow. In that second or two of the detonation, the wash of blue light had indoctrinated my eyes to its overwhelming hue, so the natural sunlight seemed all wrong—all the colors were out of balance. The sky, actually a thin blue, appeared to be sickly orange. The remnants of brightest blue ink in the sky looked paler by the moment, thinning and dissipating into the aether. Distantly, I was relieved; that was a good sign as far as inferno intensity was concerned—no self-sustaining engine of magical tides, nor a wound in the world. Tokyo’s sky would not gain a second scar like the one over its harbor.

But the park still looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. It was an absurd relief to my social anxiety that I was not the only one who’d been cowering on the ground, bowled over by the sheer scale of forces—the entire park had. The spindly trees had remained standing, but I could see the big tents laying half-collapsed, smaller ones uprooted and tossed around. The tall braziers of colored flame that were supposed to mark districts of the festival stood dead and askew.

As for my immediate surroundings, I was surrounded by commotion. A cluster of people stood and knelt on the other side of the table from me, where Miyoko had been sitting. I spotted her at the center of the press of people, lying propped up on a hastily constructed stack of the pillows we’d been sitting on. The high priestess must have been the one maintaining the field, and thus took the full backlash of Hina’s arrival. But she wasn’t my highest priority anyway. I turned, rubbing my hands together rapidly to stave off the chill. I’d only been in the false warmth for an hour, tops—was the natural temperature supposed to feel this cold?

“Amane?”

A distorted, warbling ring came from behind me by way of reply. The Amethyst Radiance had mantled, standing tall, a purple statue unscathed by the devastation surrounding her. Once I made eye contact with her—or close enough—she acknowledged me with a nod, then her spike-snout swung back toward the chaos in the festival’s main section. Todai’s people stood clustered around her legs, barely coming up to her waist, like children against her stature. Heliotrope sat unmantled on her shoulder, leaning against her head. She was on the phone with her left hand while she dabbed something off her face with a napkin scrounged from the table—blood, I realized, trickling from under her bangs. I winced.

“You alright?”

She lowered the phone momentarily to curse at me. That was probably fair; I didn’t have better words for the destruction my girlfriend had wrought. Had her first rescue of me also been so explosive, when she’d saved me from the Peacies and that buried car? Or did the apocalyptic suddenness of her arrival mean she thought I was in even more danger now? It certainly displayed a stunning disregard for collateral damage; even if nobody had died in that initial flashbang of contact, the ripple churning overhead would have already begun to seep into people’s flesh. I needed to help contain it, or evacuate civilians, or both. What about Kimura?

I started to get to my feet and start making myself useful, but didn’t get all the way up before my ankle wobbled beneath me and I remembered that my stabilizer had been rendered useless. I reached for my cast-off suit jacket—it was warm, which I tried to savor while gingerly feeling toward the pocket. The stabilizer unit itself was cooked, too hot to touch; the component meant to convert interfering ripple to harmless heat had been overfed by the extreme conditions and amplified by the white surrounding it. The cocktail of ripple had gone to town on the disc, partially crushing it into more of a V-shape. It was fucked. I carefully shook the useless puck of ruined magitech out of the pocket, and it crumbled when it hit the plastic tarp; {ASH} residue. Don’t breathe that stuff.

I shrugged my jacket back on, grateful that at least the device’s failure had left me with a warm outer layer. Then I tried to kneel again, putting my bad foot under me to see if the prosthetic itself had also been fried. It seemed like the stabilizer had taken the brunt of it—so no walking for me, but at least the basic analgomantics in the prosthetic were working. I sat back down, trying to stay huddled up for warmth. There wasn’t much point in standing; it wasn’t like I’d be much use in the pursuit even if I was fully mobile—

A sound like tearing metal erupted next to me. Adrenaline surged. I flinched away, scrambling backward from—

“Cutie! Hi! Love the hair!”

Hina looked untouched by her meteoric arrival—but she wasn’t in her mantle. I suspected it had been sacrificed as ablative shielding.

“Hina? Christ, are you okay? What the fuck was that? A fucking inferno—”

She flowed forward, standing over me and bending over at the waist with feline flexibility, putting her hands on my shoulders and nuzzling the top of my head.

“Shh. Can’t stick around; I gotta get him. Listen—he’s not working alone.”

I automatically reached up and put my hands over hers. Most of me was still shaken and terrified by the forces she’d just unleashed, but her touch was soothing in a small way.

“Kimura? I don’t—he’s working with the stalker, right?”

“Yeah. Haven’t found her, but it was his Flame. But—there’s others. Here.”

“Hina, clarify, please. Other stalkers? Other flamebearers?”

By now, the others were taking notice of her presence. The Hikanome and Todai entourages had turned toward us. Yuuka was disembarking from Amane’s shoulder, and Hongo stepped to the front of the crowd surrounding Miyoko. Hina straightened and raised her voice, addressing us all, but didn’t abandon her protective position over me.

“Other Sugawara loyalists,” she growled.

A cacophony of confused, overlapping Japanese exploded from both groups. I could hear Amane’s wind-chime voice over the group, but she wasn’t the one who reestablished order. That was Hongo, speaking in a resonant voice amplified and tinged by magic. He barked something out that made everybody quiet down, then pointed at Hina.

“Fox. That’s a severe accusation.”

“Don’t trust my nose, Nacchan?”

“Miyoko did,” Yuuka cut in, typing one-handed on her phone. “Called him a traitor right before he vanished. You got a trail?”

Hina nodded, idly running her fingers through my long hair. She spoke in a rush. “He’s shifting and hopping all over, but still in the park for now, ‘cause crossing the seams after what I just did to Shiny’s bubble would be suicide. I’m gonna find him, you guys find the other: Takagiri Izumi. Ring a bell?”

Hongo’s eyes narrowed, and murmurs erupted from his people behind him. Yuuka pulled the blood-stained napkin away from her head and inspected it, not quite able to snarl through her wince.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Hina agreed. “So that’s why I’m in a bit of a rush.”

Yuuka shook her head slowly and deliberately, in spite of her injury, and gestured around. “Yeah, she’s a loose end, bad fuckin’ news. And we’ll get her this time. We will. But—look around, Hina. Innocents first. Clean up your fuckin’ mess.”

“C’mon, Yuuka, I thought you’d be totally—”

Hongo shook out his robe. “Ghost or not, the flock is terrified and in danger because of what you just did, fox. I would not call it very mahou shoujo to put civilians in the crossfire like this, and you’re interfering with our internal affairs in doing so.”

“Bite me, Nacchan. Didn’t you hear the name? She’s after cutie—and working with Kimura to make it happen. They were probably working together back then, too.” She looked down at me, determination shining in the blue of her eyes. “She’s the stalker, I think.”

Yuuka frowned. “The what?”

My blood ran cold. “You—”

A new voice interrupted, crackling through distorted cell signal from Yuuka’s phone. “Hina, I take it we can’t convince you to clean up your mess instead?”

A relieved smile broke across Hongo’s face. He gave Alice’s speakerphone voice a courtier’s bow, deep and flourished with hand gestures. Many of Hikanome’s people bowed as well.

“Lady Dragon, it is—”

“You, shut up,” came the curt reply. “Hina?”

“Sorry, babe. I gotta.”

“Figures,” Alice sighed, staticy. “Then I’m authorizing you to give them hell and keep them off the rest of us while we stabilize this situation. Don’t kill them, though; I’ve got a lot of questions.”

“You got it.”

“As for you, Hongo-san: Leave discipline to us.”

He bowed to the phone again. “I would not dream of it, Lady Dragon, my apologies. As I was saying, it’s a relief to hear your voice in this time of crisis. Will you be gracing us with your presence in person?”

“The inferno’s cut the park off from the rest of the city. I’m going to see if we can open up a stable passage for emergency services.”

My skin crawled for a different reason than what Hina had just told me. I whispered up at her. “We’re trapped?”

Hina shrugged. “So’re they.” She knelt to nuzzle my face. “I’ll get them both. Promise.”

Another staticy sigh came through the speakerphone. “—Human life comes first. Yuuka, Amane—help Hikanome tend to their people, stabilize this—this clusterfuck. Once we find an entry point, I’m going to need your help to punch through, but that’ll be a few hours.”

I tried to push aside the revelation of my stalker—Takagiri, apparently—and focused on what Alice was saying about our situation. The top priority of responsible flamebearers during inferno response and cleanup was to shield the humans, but “a few hours” would mean enough ripple exposure that we’d have dead or dying civilians by the time the evac route was open. Even with five active flamebearers, we’d be hard pressed to shield everybody completely; the park was huge, and therefore so was the inferno. That was far more important than a few people being after me personally, especially if Hina was dealing with them anyway.

“Hina can’t chase two people at once,” Yuuka pointed out. “She’ll have her hands full with Kimura if that shatter move is as slippery as I think it is. What about Takagiri? Bitch disappeared completely after last time, and my eye’s munted right now on top of that. I can’t fuckin’ track her.” She sounded angry.

“She’s not a flamebearer. If she is after Ezzen, we don’t need to know where she is as long as one of us is with him. And once we have a tunnel open, they’ll have to go through us. Hina, you started this, I need you to at least tell me where the rift’s weakest so we can anchor the—”

“Mou kiechatta,” Yuuka groaned.

My girlfriend had vanished when Alice had begun to give orders, leaving no trace but the ghost of a kiss on my forehead. Was catching my stalker more important to her than human lives?

“Fine. That can keep—is Ezzen there?”

“Yeah,” I called out.

“Give him the phone,” she instructed Yuuka. The Heliotrope Radiance reluctantly passed it over, turning off the speaker as she did. I raised the phone to my ear, huddling under my thin jacket.

“Ezzen,” Alice sighed. “What kind of mess have you gotten into?”

“Uh, ripple shockwave toasted my stabilizer, so I’m not exactly mobile.”

“That’s—fine, you’re staying right there anyway. But, er, that’s not really what I meant; Hina only gave me very piecemeal information, and she said you’d fill in the rest. So please explain to me: what the hell is ‘the stalker?’”

I swallowed.

“I—um—I don’t really know? It’s…a person I saw.” My voice was shaking.

“A person you saw,” Alice repeated, deadpan.

“Yeah.”

“And why’s this person got Hina disappearing for days on end, and when she finally does reappear, it’s to tell me one of Sugawara’s old ghosts is back and then immediately cause an inferno in the middle of the city?”

“Because—she thought it was Hikanome related. Guess—she was right?”

“Ezzen, you sound terrified. I’m not going to yell at you for her mess, I promise! Just walk me through it from the start. When did this happen?”

“Um. Sorry. When you took me to the paperwork place, once you left.”

“Wait, last week? Why didn’t you say—agh, Hina told you not to, didn’t she?”

I tried to affirm, admit that this was all because of a stupid omission that had gotten out of hand, but my voice didn’t work; I was too afraid. It came out as more of a choking rasp.

“Ezzen? Oh, that’s it, wasn’t it? You were—”

“I was scared,” I blubbered. “And she didn’t want you to worry! We were going to go shopping and if we told you then you would have told us to come right home and that made her really upset and she promised I’d be safe. And then after, when we did go back because of all the Thunder Horse stuff, that took priority, and then it was all a mess and she told me not to worry and she’d look into it on her own! I—I knew that was a bad idea at the time, but she really thought you shouldn’t worry about it on top of all the other ways I’ve been causing problems for you and—sorry. Sorry.”

I was making a scene with my confession, but I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to shut out the people around me.

“That’s—okay, shh, it’s okay,” she soothed. I felt even worse that she needed to calm me down because of this, not the magical disaster I was standing at the epicenter of. “Tell me what actually happened.”

“I was—I was at a crosswalk and I saw a…a girl. At first, I thought it was Hina, but it wasn’t, and something about her seemed dangerous, and she was surprised I saw her, and then she vanished right before Hina arrived. Like—like a breaking illusion, like the {MANIFEST}-{TRANSMIT} thing we did when—for Amethyst’s mantle, that’s where I got the idea. It’s—”

“Breathe, Ezzen. I understand, thank you. Deep breaths.”

I did as I was told, trying to steady my nerves. It felt good to get it off my chest, but some guilt still remained.

“…Sorry. Hina’s a…bad influence.”

“Trying to win points back with me? I’m not upset, really. Not at you, at any rate. Just remember that opsec applies to external leakage, not internal. The team should tell each other stuff, yeah?”

“Yeah…Is she fired?”

“Hina? No. There’ll have to be…consequences, but if we can pin this to Kimura, it’ll all work out, I think. Know anything about that?”

“No. Should I?” I winced and was grateful Alice couldn’t see it. “Hina’s—got me pretty much entirely in the dark about this. Did it all herself.”

“So you don’t know why she accused one of Hikanome’s top flamebearers of working with the person he carried out a coup against?”

“No.” When she put it like that, I felt very much in over my head and out of my element. “I don’t know anything about the politics or history here. Um…Kimura disappeared in the same way as the stalker. And you said Katagiri’s—”

“Takagiri. Ta-ka.”

“—T—Takagiri’s not a flamebearer, which means it would make sense if he’s the one providing the magic, so…hold on.” A dark thought had sprang up in that brief moment of interruption, one I was afraid to voice. “Did…did Hina plan this? Did she not tell me or you so that I could be bait today? Because they’re trapped now, right? Is that something she’d do?”

“No,” Alice countered immediately. “I…resent that you feel the need for that much suspicion, especially of Hina. She loves you too much to play it like that. This was just…bad timing, I expect. For all the…mess that this is, I can tell you with certainty that she wouldn’t have put you in the crossfire if she could have avoided it.”

“And everyone else?” I was getting more upset. “There are thousands and thousands of people here! I’m not worth that much more than them.”

“…She’s…listen, Ezzen, she’s more selective about how she values human life than I’d like, but we don’t have time to debate the morality of it—just know that I’m not happy about it either.”

“Fine, okay. Can I help?”

“Yes, with information first. When it comes to Sugawara…we thought the book was closed on that. He’s supposed to be in a medically induced coma in a prison in Yokohama, and everybody loyal to him should also be in prison or dead. Takagiri just…vanished. If she’s back, and Kimura is back under his thumb…” She took a deep breath. “Was Kimura being…suspicious? Anything that could back up Hina’s hearsay?”

“They’re all suspicious,” I muttered quietly enough that Hongo wouldn’t be able to hear. “Their ‘welcoming ceremony’ was suspicious as hell—they isolated me into a reality bubble thing—but…I don’t know. He wasn’t setting off any more alarm bells than the others were.”

“Isolated you?” There was alarm in her voice.

“Um—pulled me into a pocket dimension, alone. They babbled about my Flame and offered to do a whole medium ritual with Dad’s ghost. I couldn’t really tell if it was grift or if they genuinely believe in their own magic.”

“Later, Ezzen. God knows we have enough to bolt down already—wait, his ghost?”

“I said no. It was just bullshit, right?”

“…Right, yes. You said your stabilizer was ruined?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not thinking of resolving that with more blood magic to help Hina chase down Kimura, I hope?”

“No!” Christ, was that my reputation? Jumping at every opportunity to use blood magic to get myself into more trouble? “I—do you think Hina needs the help?”

“I…hope not,” she hedged. I didn’t like the uncertainty; in my mind, Hina’s physical capabilities were superior to all but the Vaetna. Alice explained. “Kimura was never a fighter, but Takagiri is dangerous, an unknown quantity, especially if they link up. Just—trust Hina has it under control, and we’ll keep another Radiance right by your side until we have you out of there. I don’t want to hear later that you were limping around covered in gore, sticking your spear where it doesn’t belong. Got it?”

“I wasn’t going to! But…I want to help with inferno control if I can.”

“Do you have inferno response training I don’t know about?”

“I don’t mean medical or crowd control. But—the park’s cut off by tidal shove, right? I can find the thinnest seam for you to punch through.”

Alice said something away from the phone, then picked it back up. “We don’t have readings yet, the crews are still setting up. Without Hina’s nose or Yuuka’s eye, Ai’s saying it’ll take hours and a whole server bank to chew through the data.”

I thought about this. This wasn’t a problem the Vaetna had to deal with; a vaet could literally cut through the storm. But we lesser flamebearers had to make do.

“Put Ai on, please.”

There was a rough, crackling noise as the phone changed hands. “Moshi moshi. Alice woke me up. Did you do something to your hair?”

“Later.” I was surprised at the grin that spread across my face at her voice. Finally, we were collaborating on something that mattered—saving people, not murder. “How many detection nodes are they setting up around the perimeter?”

It was good to hear her voice, but I was suddenly feeling the hurry; statistically, every minute we spent not evacuating civilians was taking weeks off the lifespans of at least a few of them, and I could potentially speed up the process of setting up a safe evacuation route by hours. I lowered the phone briefly and waved toward the group of Todai people, gesturing that I needed a pencil and paper.

“Sixty? Sixty-two. We’re pooling with Hikanome and the kanrikyoku—the Bureau.”

I had my phone in my lap and had pulled up the map of the park I had downloaded. I was facing east, and we were on the west side of the park, which meant—I glanced up at the sky, where the blue stain still remained in traces. The natural sky was otherwise visible overhead, but as I looked further down toward the horizon, the ripple at the borders of the park was combining in tides strong enough to distort the passage of light, let alone matter. I turned the map; Hina had come in from the northeast, so the backsplash and collapse of her cavitation trail would be concentrated on the west side of the park. That was making some assumptions about how Miyoko had set up her field—and how it even worked—but as far as I could tell, she still wasn’t conscious to ask about it.

“Any of them full-spectrum, 4-way flow?”

“Yes, ours. That’s only twelve. We don’t have many; usually Hina and Yuuka can do most of this without technology.”

“Well—” I glanced over at Yuuka, who was on her feet and talking to Amane, but still holding gauze over her magical eye. “That’s fine, I only need…eight of those on the southwest side bordering the VIP area, and three at points that superscribe a triangle around the park. Uh—” Clipboard came with my materials and helped me clear a spot on the table, and I scribbled out a rough blob of the park’s shape. “Thanks. Uh, Ai, I’m sending a picture of the layout on my phone.”

“Hai. I can picture it, I think—ah, there’s your photo. Alice—sou, acchi—” There was off-mic discussion for a moment. “She’s going to fly out the far ones. What are you planning, Ezzen?”

I had moved on to scribbling glyph notation onto the paper—where had Clipboard managed to procure graph paper in a situation like this? I drew lines, scribbled tension and offset and other notes, connecting shapes together. I didn’t need GWalk to know this would work.

“Gimme a few minutes. It’ll make more sense when I send the diagram.”

—

The chain of glyphs I drew was a bespoke data processing algorithm specifically adapted for the position and type of inputs the ripple sensors would give it. Generally, doing that kind of processing via glyphcraft wasn’t faster or easier than with a mundane computer, but this specific situation, simulating and guessing the behavior of ripple in a bounded space, was an exception.

I was banking on the fact that the field’s border nearest us, closest to Miyoko, would have formed one epicenter of the distortion effect; the other was obviously the stain in the sky, which marked the cluster of implosion points where Hina had first contacted the field. By using the ripple readings around those areas and the overall gradient of ripple tides picked up by the larger triangle of sensors that enclosed the whole park, it was possible to perform some clever reductions and triangulate the point where the effect separating inside from outside was weakest.

I lacked the skill to actually implement the glyph diagram with Flame—but that was the same as it had always been. Theory was my strong suit, not execution, and there was no reason for me to try to force it to work with blood magic. I had Ai implement the lattice instead, and once she understood what she was looking at, she found ways to streamline the process further, get even more computing power out of a relatively short chain of pink-oriented glyphs.

Eight minutes after I sent the diagram, we had the location of the best point of access around the perimeter of the park. It was closer to the south side than I’d have guessed, near where the map said there was a group of large theater tents. Amane and Hongo were occupied corralling and pacifying the bulk of the crowd in the northern section of the park, snuffing the worst areas of ripple, and coordinating what limited first aid we had; that left me and Yuuka to link with Alice from our side of the barrier.

It was determined that I was probably safest with Yuuka, even with her eye crippled. Alice didn’t want me around Hikanome’s people, in case there were more Sugawara loyalists, and I very much shared the feeling; plus, once we did get the tunnel open, I could get out immediately, and then we could completely deny Kimura and Takagiri access to me with them still inside the inferno. Clipboard helped me limp to one of the cars, and we set off toward the chosen site, with a scout car screening the off-road route before us.

“Today was supposed to be fun,” Yuuka groused from the seat in front of me. Clipboard and I were where we’d been on the way in, which put me diagonally behind Yuuka, unable to see most of her face past her bangs. Periodically, though, a trickle of blood would appear below the curtain of black hair, and she’d hurriedly wipe it away. “Stupid fuckin’ animal, had to turn it into a fight.”

We’d actually seen Hina again, very briefly. She’d blinked into existence in front of the car, ragdolled off the road, struck a tree so hard its trunk swayed with a crack, then vanished again as she rose to her feet. Evidently, she was fighting one of the two somewhere in the fourth-dimensional spaces outside reality—maybe even explicitly trying to cover me. I tried not to think about the possibility of an ambush as I looked out the window, toward the devastation caused by her explosive entrance.

The car wound its way around destroyed tents and signs of abandoned festivities. Some had been conventionally crushed by the hurricane-force winds caused by the pressure differential, but others were damaged in more esoteric ways, melted or overgrown or fractured as though reflected in a smashed mirror—signs of how lingering ripple had fragmented and distorted reality in those places. Some of them would return to normality as the larger inferno died down, but others would need to be stitched back together with magic to repair the local fabric of reality. For now, all that could be done was avoid them.

There were people, too. The tide of civilians—I tried not to think of them as the ‘survivors’, too morbid—flowed toward the park’s center and away from the most violently affected edges. Hongo and Amane’s efforts to herd them toward the safest regions of the park seemed to be mostly successful, but maybe every one in three were visibly sick or injured. Burns abounded, and a number of them seemed partially blinded by the immense flash of Hina’s impact, led by their fellows toward safety. Many of them were shivering, too sparsely dressed for the cold, and were using picnic blankets and stage costumes as makeshift outerwear to make up the difference.

While I’d been working on the glyphs, Hongo had reassured me that the human suffering on display wasn’t as bad as it looked; one of Hikanome’s premier miracles was curing ripple sickness, so most of “the flock” would make a full recovery from the magical effects. But even if I were to disregard my doubts about the veracity of said miracles, people’s symptoms would only increase in severity the longer they were trapped in here, so time was of the essence. The sooner we could get a tunnel established, the sooner we could evacuate the area of effect and get people proper medical care. That took precedent over my own desire to be away from the renewed threat of my stalker.

I’d have felt better if Yuuka’s eye was working. But the more I thought about it, wasn’t it weird that she’d been caught off guard even before Hina had caused the inferno? Shouldn’t she of all people have been prepared, have seen the whole incident coming through silver ghosts of the insane quantities of red and blue Hina would create? Curiosity nipped at me. The extent to which she had been caught off guard felt like it contradicted her foresight.

Prodding at her ego about it seemed like a bad idea, though.

“Is your eye okay?” I hazarded.

“Will be.”

“Will it…heal normally?”

“Normally? Sure, and pretty quick. But in the middle of an inferno zone? Might heal fine in here and then be munted when we get out.”

“Because of the white ripple,” I explained to nobody. “How does…looking through it work?”

She twisted in her seat to glare at me with her normal eye. “What’s with the questions?”

“Uh. I’ve been seeing a lot of magic I don’t understand lately. Like, I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the cult’s people claim to be able to do. So I’m trying to have an open mind, because understanding is better than not understanding.” I fumbled, unable to leave the statement there. “And if I can understand your eye better, I might be able to fix it now.”

“Ah, yeah, glyph genius, gonna solve all our problems for us. Because we’re not smart enough to do it ourselves.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It is.”

“Is this about me being a guy, again? I’m not—I don’t mean to ‘mansplain’ your own tech to you, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”

Yuuka frowned. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No! I’m very confused right now!”

“Ugh. No, that’s not what I was insinuating. I’ve been told I don’t have to worry about that with you, anyway.”

Amane or Ai must have vouched for my character; I should thank them later. “Then what’s your problem with me? I mean—other than everything with Hina. I want to learn so I can help you; why’s that a bad thing?”

“She is the problem.”

“Alright, fine, fuck off, I guess,” I riposted, not quite able to disagree. “Just trying not to be dead weight.”

“Don’t start with the self-deprecating shit. ‘S not what I meant, and you’re not dead weight. At least you want to help, better than…” she gestured out the window, at the destroyed tents and refugees. “Her. That.”

“…Yeah. Not a very proportional response, is it? I mean, she’s here to protect me, and even I think this is overkill.”

“All this for your fuckin’…what did you call it? Stalker?”

“Takagiri, apparently. It was a…thing.” It was sort of a relief to at least have a name to the face, and an approximate location—even if I now knew that it was more than a one-off encounter. “But it doesn’t warrant this.”

“Wow, we agree on something.” She looked out the window, dabbing blood off her face again. “Yeah. She’s too focused on keeping them off of you when she coulda just…told us ‘n trusted us to do it. If it’s a problem for the whole team, we should handle it as a team.”

“Did she…I don’t know, expect you to see it coming?”

She must have seen something before or during the impact; the persistent blood on her cheek suggested she’d been affected intensely enough to overload the magitech organ, which made sense given the amplifying effect of the white ripple that surrounded us.

“Maybe. Don’t know if she was thinking that far ahead.”

“Alice said something similar.”

“Yeah. And—” she grunted with pained frustration, grabbing another piece of gauze. “Fuck. Like I said yesterday, eye was already on the fritz all week, but this is so big that I shouldn’t have been able to miss it. This is my fuckup too.”

—

We made it to the edge of the park a few minutes later. The inferno’s border wasn’t a solid wall separating us from the outside world; it was more like looking down into a body of water, gradually becoming denser and murkier the deeper you looked. There were flickers of motion within, a chaotic churn of magic that would corrupt and destroy any matter that dared enter it. Even going near it was a bad idea for unaugmented humans, so Clipboard and our driver were hanging back a healthy distance; Yuuka and I were afforded some protection by our Flames, which I could feel as a tingling across my body. Or maybe that was just the cold—either way, it was frightening to consider that the storm in front of us was the mildest point on the whole perimeter, according to the math.

We did have a few other human spectators: A crowd of Hikanome’s most die-hard believers, intent on seeing some of their divine lightbearers deliver them unto salvation. Many of them were praying. They at least had enough sense to not get in our way, but I wasn’t sure what they were so excited to see; Yuuka and I didn’t cut particularly heroic figures as we sat before the roiling storm of magic. That’s right, sat; I’d found a piece of shattered tent strut to use as a makeshift crutch, but when Yuuka’s complaints of a headache had turned into something akin to a migraine, she’d taken a seat on the grass rather than stand. I’d opted to join her. And we were both struggling with the elements; we’d thrown on extra layers to fight the chill, but huddled under them awkwardly. The ground was cold under me as we confirmed our position relative to Alice.

“Ten meters in front of us. You see her?”

“No. Should I?”

Another side effect of the ripple was severe radio interference, so we didn’t actually have contact with Alice. Supposedly, she was just on the other side of the storm.

“Nah, but I can hardly open my eyes to see for myself,” Yuuka admitted. “Hurts like a motherfucker. Let’s just get this done.”

“I’m, uh, following your lead here. Never done this before,” I reminded her, unreasonably ashamed of that fact. “Are we punching an actual tunnel, or just nullifying an area of the storm, or what?”

“Both. We’re locking down, Alice is punching through. You know how {ASH} residue is ripple-inert?”

“Ripple-invisible,” I clarified. “Not exactly going to block anything, is it?”

“The point is that we can make LM that does the same thing, a big block of it that the storm won’t fuck with, right through to the other side. Then Alice can punch a stabilizer lattice using that as a substrate. It’s just a fancy ward, but she has to do it from her side, because of, uh, relative reality baseline bullshit or something—you’re the math cunt, not me.”

“Yeah, I get it. Substrate is relative to our ripple-distorted space, lattice is relative to her baseline, bridges any desync. It’s really just LM?”

She shrugged. “We can’t just stab a spear right through it.”

“I—wasn’t thinking of doing it like Heung,” I lied. “Anyway, I can’t do {MANIFEST}.”

“That’s fine, just gimme your thread, I’ll stitch it in.”

It was kind of a relief to summon my Flame; as uncomfortable as the blazing-white fire was, I welcomed the heat in my numb fingers. There was no need to hurt it, either; I had more than enough pain to offer it right now—and it seemed eager to spring forth. I was distantly relieved that it only erupted from my hand’s scars, as usual; I’d been a little worried that all my raw, altered skin might serve as an ignition point and I’d go up in a self-inflicted magical fireball. The clump of pale, living magic coalesced into a spool of thread around my forearm and hand; that part had become familiar, though the quality of the thread still left a lot to be desired.

“Sorry about how rough it is—what the fuck?”

Yuuka’s Flame wasn’t white like mine, and it didn’t come from her hand. Her bangs were being pushed out of her face by wind that wasn’t there, exposing her damaged eye. It poured thick droplets of grey Flame tinged with dark red, oozing out from the gemstone eyeball like blood in zero-gravity. She snapped her hand outward, and the Flame-blobs followed, swirling around her arm and coating it like a grey gauntlet. She grinned at me wildly, eye bleeding magic, then beckoned for my thread. I held my forearm toward her, and she plucked the tip of my thread in her gauntlet and tugged.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. She closed her fist, then opened it slowly, and now a lattice of thread was spun between her fingers. She drew her hand back slowly, glyphs spinning themselves into existence in her hand’s wake, my thread woven through hers in a way that felt uncomfortably intimate. Then she clenched her fist again, and lattice…manifested.

It was a simple geometry, just a box the shape and size of an eighteen-wheeler’s trailer, lying on the grass and stretching from right in front of us into the storm until it faded from view. The light caught it wrong—it was a neutral grey, but it looked unshaded, and if I couldn’t see its silhouette, I wouldn’t have known where the front met the sides.

A cheer erupted from the cultists behind us, even though it was just a featureless block. For them, it must have been a miracle—I was just glad we’d done our part.

“That’s it?”

“For us, yeah.” Yuuka’s bangs had fallen back over the cursed eye, but did nothing to hide the self-satisfied look on her face. “Alice should be doing her part any second now.”

“And then we can start evac?”

“Yeah.”

Compared to the size of the park, this box would be one hell of a bottleneck, but that also worked to our advantage; Sugawara’s people wouldn’t be able to slip out undetected. Yuuka flicked her wrist, banishing her Flame and relinquishing mine, which hissed back toward me and returned to its spool, sending pinpricks through the bones of my arm. I let my Flame go and shook out my hand, wincing.

We waited. First a few seconds, then half a minute, then a full minute. She frowned.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Is that code for we’re about to be attacked, or more magical in nature?”

“Second.” She got to her feet, brushing the dirt off her butt. “I don’t—aw, fuck.”

“What?”

She sat back down, swearing. “Hina’s fucked it up worse than I thought.”

“Meaning?”

“This was a giant field of white ripple. So the storm’s bad, but more importantly…”

“…It’s amplified—more desync between inside and outside than there normally should be,” I finished, and she nodded. “So it won’t work?”

“It will, ‘cause Alice is strong, but she’ll—wait, do you know about that?”

“Uh. About what?”

“What happens when she uses too much magic.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. “Oh no. It’s going to push her…” I blanked on the word. “Dragon transformation?”

Yuuka nodded, lips pursed. “Dragon-ka.”

“We should stop her. There’s—there’s got to be another way.”

“Nope, not unless you want to wait for the storm to die off. Ai isn’t strong enough, and Hikanome’s other couple of flamebearers outside don’t—”

The featureless block of LM imploded with an awful whistling sound. The front end facing us crinkled inward like paper caught in a vacuum cleaner. We both flinched at the noise, covering our ears as the interior of the rectangular prism was devoured from within until it vanished, leaving only the edges of the box—and a stable tunnel to the outside world. There were familiar colors at the far end of the tunnel, the red-and-blue flashes of emergency lights silhouetting an unmistakable figure, one whose tail hung between her legs. I couldn’t make out how the magic had changed her body at this distance.

The people watching behind us cheered even louder. I was glad I didn’t know what they were saying, singing our praises or praying or just celebrating—but cultish worship aside, it was sort of a dream come true. I’d saved people with magic. It felt good. I turned to face them—

“I see her,” Yuuka said, urgency in her voice.

“What? Who? Alice?”

“Takagiri. My eye’s, uh, unclogging a bit now,” she explained. “She’s in the crowd, or will be soon. Was probably waiting for the tunnel to open so she could slip out after you.”

My tattoo itched as I scanned the crowd, looking for the face I remembered. No luck. “Fuck. So what do we do?”

“You? Stay out of my way.” There was something odd in her tone—I looked over and saw that the grin was crawling back over her face as she stared into the crowd. “I can see her. The rest doesn’t matter.”

Author’s Note:

Disaster! Escalation! Confrontation! What a mess Hina’s made. And at last Ez has to confront the silly lie she dragged him into. Shoulda just told Alice in the first place, smh.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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January 24, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

I cannot talk about Dad’s death without discussing infernos, and it is difficult to discuss infernos, especially those of the firestorms, without first explaining free ripple, or ambient ripple. That’s the stuff that brings uncontrolled magical effects, be it from natural sources or as the runoff of flamebearer magic. Though the exact effects are myriad, on the whole, there is an obvious analogy to radiation.

In nature, both can be found in relatively trace quantities, and indeed, there is strong evidence of a link between the two: like how Earth’s magnetosphere shields us from the majority of the sun’s constant barrage of radiation, ambient free ripple also flows from the earth’s geomagnetic North Pole. This is believed to be why flamefall generally travel from north to south—though it’s not known why all colors of ripple seem to obey this law instead of just blue, the color typically associated with such physical phenomena. This northward gradient of ambient ripple had also been speculated to be the reason—or at least a reason—for the Spire’s location in the North Atlantic.

The resemblance to radiation continues into the effects on the human animal. The body can cope with the quantities found in nature in the short term, and even adapt in the long term; just as the skin will produce melanin in response to UV, prolonged exposure to ripple causes the bone marrow to produce ripple-reactive agents, microscopic-scale natural glyphs that convert ambient ripple to green and thereby cause the mild mutations that are common at the higher latitudes and other regions that happen to be hotspots of free ripple. This marvelous phenomenon of biology was one of a precious few glimpses at the natural principles underlying glyphcraft that had yet been observed, back when I was meeting with Hikanome in that mirage of Yoyogi Park.

As with radiation, when we step from the natural world to the works of man, things get far nastier. High intensities of free ripple or radiation will rapidly degrade tissue; past a certain threshold, both will kill you in minutes, if not seconds. Near an inferno—the flamefall or magical disaster kind, not the politicized VNT kind—reality begins to break down. If you’re lucky, you die quickly from having your pieces rearranged and split as space and matter lose cohesion. If you’re not, you die slowly and painfully from a mix of spatial, mutagenic, and matter-altering effects while the qualia and basic information of your existence get shredded and put back together in a ransom-note collage of suffering that may extend far beyond where reason would normally dictate you are entitled to the sweet release of death.

In this, the chaos of ripple, magic run amok, far outstrips even the wildest comic book notions of radiation. It is a worse way to die than anything that existed before the Frozen Flame arrived.

It’s what happens to a flametouched who goes infernal. It’s what happened to Dad.

—

“No.”

“Ezzen,” Hongo began, spreading his hands reasonably, “this is not an attempt to make you relive your trauma. We both want to better understand what happened on the first day of the firestorms.”

“What’s in it for you? Your interest isn’t scientific,” I spat. “What are you even hoping to find? He was killed by a force of nature, and he suffered. I suffered.” I raised my burned hand, blinking away the tears threatening to well in my eyes. I couldn’t show weakness in front of these jackals. “If you have as much respect for me as this whole reception implies, then how could you even suggest putting me through that again? And if you can bring back some fragment of the dead—” I gestured at the too-empty facsimile of the park that surrounded us. The branches overhead might have been covered with leaves now, but that didn’t mask the feeling of being caught in a net “—which I can’t possibly verify is anything more than a parlor trick when you’ve got me isolated like this—then you’d be putting him through that too. It’s sick.”

My anxiety had boiled over into defiant frustration. In a way, this was worse than outright hostility or a physical attack; it was an insult to Dad’s memory. My interest in magic had begun in an attempt to understand, scientifically speaking, what had happened to Dad. I wasn’t going to let these charlatans convince me that his death had been for some “higher purpose.”

I searched their faces for any sign of contrition. Kimura avoided eye contact, looking down, lips pressed together in a thin line. Hongo seemed frustrated, almost imperious—good. Miyoko met my eyes, face level. Her voice was still soft, but not gentle.

“We know why the dragon sent you. We know what she wants from us. This is what we ask in exchange: a chance to learn truths about the Light from you.”

Hongo picked up after her before I could rebut. “Suppose we’re right, little Heron. If the Flame you carry now is connected to both that day and to the Spire—think about what that would mean. Think about the leverage that could give you in going there, in escaping the PCTF. The Vaetna are avoiding you and the others who carry your blessing, when they should have been the ones to save you. Don’t you want to know why?”

“Escaping the PCTF,” I repeated. “You sold Amane to them.”

That at last got a rise out of Miyoko. Those creepy eyes with the space behind them began to glow, flickering pink. I was glad to have gotten under her skin with that—now we were talking about something other than the worst day of my life. Hongo also bristled, but Kimura raised his hand to stay them both. 

“We did not hand over one of our own to those butchers. Sugawara did, and that is why we helped Toudai destroy him.”

His voice was angry in a distant way, disinterring memories of a dark time. Served him right. “They said you helped him,” I countered.

“Coercion. He was going to hurt somebody I loved.”

“And that stopped you? Some gods you are.”

Something flashed in his eyes, but he didn’t rise to the bait. “It was too dangerous to oust him. Too costly. The only reason we survived was because we only faced his supporters, not the military men he paid. That was Takehara-san’s job.”

“Mahou shoujo don’t fight wars,” I quoted, but I couldn’t put any acrid bite into it; I knew it was hollow. My stomach dropped as I remembered how the girls had gone along with my plan, aided and abetted the idea of an artillery strike while carefully dodging the facts of what we had been going to do to the human beings aboard Thunder Horse. The person I’d watched melt—I had inflicted on him the same degree of horrible death that the wild Flame had done to my dad, because I had thought it was the right thing to do. And so had the team of magical girls I now called roommates. “O—okay, yeah, I hear it. That’s bullshit,” I admitted, sobering, guilt tempering my anger. “But I still trust them more than you.”

“Hm.” Hongo was examining me in a way that made my tattoo itch. “So you’ve seen something of what they do.”

“They want us to face the PCTF directly,” Kimura continued, “and Takehara-san knows that will be far more costly. That is why she’s offering you. It is a fair trade.”

“She didn’t know you were going to pull this stunt.”

“You really believe that?” said Hongo, smirking. “Arranging for you to meet us separately from Miss Ishikawa and Miss Hirai? The dragon knew we would know your history, the things that make you unusual and exceptional. She knew we would do this, and trusted us enough to allow it to happen. So you can keep thinking we’re monsters and wonder why she would allow it, or you could trust her and us, but you cannot mistrust us without also mistrusting her judgment.”

I swallowed, remembering how Alice had been so pushy about me attending, how I’d been kept relatively in the dark about what to expect from this meeting. “My—my answer is no.”

Hongo’s smirk shifted into a more genuine smile and an approving nod. “Backbone is important for our kind.”

“As you wish,” Miyoko affirmed, impassive once more. She rose to her feet, robes draping around her, though they still fell below her shoulders and chest. I found that I was already pretty numb to the nudity. “We will not ask again, not today. We only ask you to spare it some thought as you enjoy the festival. We will not give Toudai our full support without understanding the circumstances that brought you here, from the beginning. It could inform much about what is to come.”

Hongo stood as well. “They say the Peacies are going to make their first moves soon. I don’t suppose Miss Hirai gave you a timeline?”

I bit my lip. I’d overheard the three-week number Yuuka had given, and it had been four days since then. I wasn’t supposed to leak information—but they obviously already knew about Yuuka’s foresight, and it was mutually beneficial for me and Todai if Hikanome knew how long we had, right?

“…two weeks, give or take.”

“Then we’ll ask again on the first of March.” Ten days from now. He checked his watch. “The ladies are about to wrap up their entrance. Thank you for your time, little Heron. Miyoko-san?”

Miyoko nodded. The space around us began to glow. I smelled woodsmoke as the bubble of private reality began to fizzle away and the true space of Yoyogi Park began to bleed in. Kimura stood as well.

“We are not the cult you think we are, Ezzen. This festival is a celebration of light and warmth, not a show of power. You are welcome to walk the grounds and see the way we live. But first, come eat with us. There are many things we would like to discuss with you, things that are not so dark.”

—

It was a palpable relief to see Amane. Yuuka too, begrudgingly, but it was especially reassuring to see Radiance Amethyst’s towering form raise a crystalline arm to wave at me as she approached the true VIP section.

When Miyoko’s illusion or pocket dimension or whatever it had been had fully dissipated, the priests’ handmaids and staff had quickly moved in to upgrade our seating arrangement. Bamboo mats had been laid over the tarp and more sitting pillows had been procured, and a long, low table made of beautiful, wine-dark red wood had been placed in the center. Despite the grander displays of wealth, I definitely preferred this to being three on one on their turf. The bare branches and pale winter sky also helped dispel that feeling of being in somebody else’s territory—proof that whatever the cult might claim, reality would ultimately win out. And now it was three on three.

Amane and Yuuka dropped their mantles as they made their way to the table. The glimmering mecha was replaced by the straight-backed, raven-haired girl with piercing green eyes, wearing a polite smile and a purple sundress; Yuuka’s impractically layered outfit of dark belts and laces was replaced by a slightly more reasonable corset, blouse, and skirt, long bangs shrouding her eye. The five flamebearers exchanged a long series of greetings in Japanese, including stiff bowing from all parties. The conversation sounded friendly enough, or at least polite, though there was a moment where Kimura and Yuuka glared at each other in a way that suggested a lot of history.

Waitstaff appeared around us as the introductions concluded and people took their seats. We flamebearers sat three on three at the head of the table; myself, Amane, and Yuuka facing Kimura, Miyoko and Hongo. To our left, down the remaining twelve seats of the table, was an assortment of both groups’ staff, as well as people who looked like representatives of other organizations involved in the event. Todai’s people and the third parties were fully dressed; Hikanome’s people were not. I was distantly relieved that Yuuka didn’t subscribe to their nudism; Like Miyoko, Amane was slender enough that I could have mostly filtered the exposed breasts from my peripheral vision, but Yuuka would have been intolerably distracting.

“Hey, Ezzen.”

“Hi.”

Amane had her phone out, already typing into her translation app.

How did it go?

“Well enough,” I muttered. “They made me an offer. Not to join, but they have conditions for helping us with the…stuff.” I didn’t particularly want to discuss the details of it in front of them, and the three had said they wouldn’t bring it up again today. “I didn’t realize they’d isolate me. Felt a little ambushed.”

Amane winced.

I was hoping they wouldn’t. You’re alright?

“I’m good.” I was actually pretty proud of how I’d handled myself; no big secrets given away, as far as I could tell.

“Yeah, you’re good,” Yuuka verified. “We told ya they wouldn’t hurt ya, no matter how bad you fucked it up.”

“We would never,” Hongo cut in. “And so far, he’s exceeded expectations when it comes to propriety.”

“Nah, really?”

Hongo winced theatrically. “He must have set a truly awful first impression with you if your prediction was so far off the mark.”

To my surprise, Yuuka laughed. “I mean, he’s fucking Hina, ‘course my expectations were low.”

Amane elbowed her teammate, hard, with her mechanical arm. It didn’t make contact; Yuuka’s hand had already been moving to catch the blow, and Miyoko exhaled a rather unladylike snort at the roughhousing. “He does look somewhat like her, no?”

“Mhm,” Yuuka replied, twisting to flag down a waiter.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. I certainly didn’t look like Hina—wrong sex, wrong race, wrong height, wrong hair. They must have meant in a more magical sense; was there a connection between Yuuka’s eye and Miyoko’s? Perhaps Miyoko’s too-deep irises were pink- or white-ripple equivalents of Yuuka’s, though they were obviously structurally different. Yuuka’s looked almost prosthetic, like an intrusion or growth, whereas Miyoko’s seemed more supernatural.

“You’ve paid in blood quite a few times for someone blessed only eight days ago,” Hongo pointed out, and I frowned.

“That’s not…”

But it was definitely true at this point. Between my spear, my foot, when I’d struck Hina, and of course last night’s impulsive, full-body epilation, I really did seem to be developing a troubling propensity for blood magic. “My abilities to design complex lattices are much stronger than my practical ability to weave them, for now,” I hedged. “And done carefully, sanguimancy is still safer than fully unbound magic.”

Hongo gestured at me as though presenting me to Yuuka. “See? He can make decent excuses! Though I do take some issue with the idea that glyphcraft is the only way to safely utilize magic, and I contest that you’ve been particularly careful. Removing all the hair from your body the night before an event like this is bold. Some would call it reckless, or pain-seeking.”

I was annoyed and a little alarmed that he’d identified exactly what I’d done, but stood my ground. “It was worth it.”

“Your hair really is beautiful,” Kimura said quietly, sipping from a tall glass of beer. A waiter offered me a slightly different glass which I accepted hesitantly. “I’ve never seen something like it.”

I gave the drink an investigatory sniff and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was ginger ale rather than beer. Amane nudged me. I looked back at her. “What?”

She mouthed something. I frowned, not sure what she meant. Yuuka groaned. “Ezzen, say thank you for the compliment.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I reddened, shrinking into myself, feeling too exposed and unable to hide from Yuuka’s counter-gesture indicating my fuck-up to Hongo. This thin shirt provided no protection, no armor; a hoodie might have been sweltering to wear in the magically adjusted temperate weather, but it would have given some security, helped hide that I didn’t know what to do with my hunched shoulders. The weight of my hair draped over my back helped a little, sort of emulating the feeling of a hood hanging behind my neck, and I tried to focus on that; at least my back was covered.

Should I say something more in response? He’d already complimented my hair earlier; I wasn’t sure why he was bringing it up again. Normally, I’d talk about the interesting magical implications of my possibly cyborg nature, but Hikanome had expressed enough distaste with that topic that I wasn’t sure if it would make me look more like a fool. Better to just say nothing at all?

Amane rescued me by raising her glass and calling down the table. The toast was in Japanese, so I don’t know exactly what was said, but whatever it was, it was cheerful and confident, delivered in her bright, strong voice. Something she said got a laugh from the table, then everybody raised their mugs, and the first plates of food began to hit the table.

“Thanks,” I whispered to Amane as a plate of chicken skewers was placed before me, charcoal-smoky and glazed in soy sauce.

“No problem.”

—

The food was exceptional. The theme was flame-cooking, and sure, that meant skewers and steaks, hot dogs and burgers—but it also meant brick oven pizzas and flatbreads, raclette and octopus all sharing the table. There was an entire row of grills, griddles, and ovens set up parallel to the table, which constantly brought new delicacies and interesting twists on more familiar foods. I crunched down on a piece of duxelles that had been broiled to a crispy, chip-like consistency on extremely hot cast iron and washed it down with ginger ale. The drink was arguably the highlight; it had an intense, spiced edge to it without tasting of alcohol, and it was nice and cool to refresh my palate after eating food that had come off of open flame moments prior.

We didn’t make much conversation for the first few minutes, mostly consumed in the universally human act of savoring really good food. Normal human or flamebearer, we all could take some enjoyment from it. To my right, I was happy to see that Amane was enthusiastically digging in; it would have been a shame if her stomach condition had prevented her from partaking.

Conversation began to resume around the third course. I twirled a fork in my small bowl of assassin’s spaghetti while Amane and Hongo discussed something in Japanese. Foreign policy, if I had to guess; my Japanese was still awful, but I was definitely picking up “America” here and there. Yuuka cut in in English—for my benefit? That didn’t seem like her.

“They keep making offers to Ai. They can’t buy her out, but they’re trying. Nervous about the new patterns we saw last month in Taiwan, feel like they’re losing the arms race with China. ‘s stupid, she’d never help make exos.”

Hongo nodded. “It’s the principle of it. If they offer and she refuses, they have it on paper where she stands. They’re not going to make an offensive in the South China Sea, though, not with the situation with the Spire.”

“Situation?” Yuuka bit down on a slice of mayo pizza, one of the few things on the table I wasn’t willing to try. “It’s the same shit as ever. Vaetna make a clusterfuck in some other country, don’t clean it up properly, the big boys reach for their guns, and then when they’ve fully pivoted to face the Spire, they get stabbed in the back by one of the others.”

Finally, a conversation I actually felt qualified to participate in. I took another swig of ginger ale, then spoke up. “I think that’s uncharitable. Er, to the Vaetna’s interventions.”

“Oh, do ya? Really. ‘Course you would gobble their knobs.”

“They do clean up their messes.”

“Only when the big guys actually get scared and don’t try to escalate, and that’s happening less and less. So more escalation, more messes.”

Here we go. I braced; I’d heard this line of argument before, and it always ended back at Dubai.

“Sometimes—”

“—you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Shut the fuck up.”

That earned her another elbow from Amane. Miyoko spoke up, leaning forward as she twirled a chicken skewer in her fingers.

“Ezzen, you believe the Spire’s humanitarian efforts outweigh the consequences of their interventions?”

“Yes.” The response was automatic.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a net good. Toppling petty warlords, clearing droughts, pre-empting superhurricanes and taking point on infernos—those directly save lives! And that’s not even counting the Spire itself; there’s a reason their quality of life is the highest in the world, and it has everything to do with their medicine and hydroponics.”

“Quality of life,” Hongo repeated approvingly. “For the average person. That’s what communities should do.”

“Says the cult leader,” I noted dryly.

“I’m agreeing with you! We believe the same things the Spire does. Magic should be used to create a better world for everyone living in it, not hoarded for one’s own interests.”

I blinked. “Clarify? You think the Vaetna should rule the world?”

“You think they should not?”

I sighed. “That’s—it’s complicated. In a world where the average person knew what was good for them, yeah. In practice…I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m uncomfortable with anybody ruling the world, Vaetna or not. And when it comes to them specifically, so many people don’t trust the Vaetna. For faulty reasons, you know?”

Hongo smiled. “Please go on.”

“Well…alright,” I said, mentally gearing up. “Do you know the story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas?” I got some nods, but Kimura shook his head. “It’s—almost fifty years old now, so pre-firestorms, pre-Raising, pre-magic. It’s about a utopia that runs on the torture of a single child, basically, and whether that trade-off is worth it. I think we can all see the parallels to the real world these days, yeah?” More nods. “My problem with it is that…well, people assume that any utopia, any place where people are happy, has to have a catch, a dark side. It’s why people accuse the Vaetna of blood magic or ruling the Spire with an iron fist, all that bosh. They refuse to believe that people with that much power can create a society that’s unambiguously good, no catch. And I just think that’s—such a backwards, 20th-century way of looking at the world.”

“I would say the same argument applies to Hikanome.”

I snarled; how could they say that when Amane was sitting literally right here? “What? No, you demonstrably based your success on child slavery—”

“And we destroyed that side of us,” Kimura interrupted. “No more, never again. Now we heal the sick and shelter the homeless without keeping bodies in the basement.”

“And more than that,” Hongo picked up once he swallowed a bite of his overloaded hot dog, “we put our thumb on the scales of policy to end those problems at the source. We fund housing and lobby to keep rent down rather than merely sweeping homeless people out of sight.” He gestured at Yuuka. “Miss Hirai is here today because we are lending our blessings to environmental groups to help reduce pollution. Make no mistake—we could rule Japan if we wanted to, but that is not what we were given these blessings to do. How are we different from the Vaetna, Little Heron?”

“I’m not interested in arguing what you do for your tax write-offs.”

“Fuckin’ oath, ‘Little Heron’, do you not see your hypocrisy here?” Yuuka sneered. “It’s the same shit. And the Vaetna didn’t help me find Amane. Get off your high fuckin’ horse.”

I deflated, looking guiltily at the cyborg girl between us. She was clearly having trouble keeping up with the conversation, but when her name came up, she seemed to understand what it meant. She sighed something at Yuuka, who shook her head angrily. 

“It seems to me,” Miyoko said, looking between the three of us, “That you see something divine in the Vaetna, Ezzen. You may not worship them, but you recognize their higher calling.”

“Well—they’re not omnipotent,” I begrudgingly admitted, shamefaced. I had no rebuttal for Yuuka.

“But you wish they were. That is faith.”

“Everyone believes in something,” Kimura added. “You think we are not deserving of the same trust you extend to them, because you believe that they are ordained to do good and we are not.”

I felt I had to push back on that—then my skin crawled. The hair on my neck would have stood on end if I still had any. Instinct had me look straight up, guided by some perception of my Flame. I realized all five other Flamebearers had done the same. Yuuka swore.

“What?” I couldn’t pin down exactly what I was sensing.

Amane pointed, and I saw it. An ultramarine dot was moving across the pale-blue sky, vivid and aglow, brighter each moment. My heart leapt. My phone buzzed, and I scrambled to get it out.

Hina: I FIGURED IT OUT

Ezzen: figured what out?

Hina: the stalker. she’s with hikanome i can smell her somewhere down there with you

My blood ran cold, eyes darting around before they locked on Miyoko. Amane and Yuuka both put fingers to their ears, then a change passed over them. They both tensed, looking at the Hikanome flamebearers with the same suspicion I had, but with warriors’ poise rather than my prey-animal panic.

Ezzen: What do we do? We’re literally sitting across from the leaders right now.

Hina: sit tight cutie

Hina: the girls have your back

“Ezzen,” Yuuka said slowly, injecting casual friendliness into her voice. “Wanna walk around the park? There’s plenty of stuff to do.”

“Y—yeah, that sounds good.”

Ezzen: and you?

Hina: what do you think

Hina: im going hunting

Ezzen: Uh. Maybe this should wait until after?

The blue dot in the sky was getting bigger.

Ezzen: Hina?

“Ah,” breathed Hongo. “I don’t suppose any of you can stop her?”

“Stop her from what?”

“She’s gonna break open the whole white ripple bubble,” Yuuka explained, alarm in her voice. “What the fuck is this—ittatata—fuck!” She clutched the side of her head, sucking in a breath through clenched teeth, then whipped around to stare at—Kimura, who had risen to his feet, looking up at the approaching sapphire fireball. She growled. “What the fuck?”

The middle-aged businessman met Yuuka’s eye, then looked at me. Was he—but he couldn’t be, right? I frantically went back to my phone.

Ezzen: DONT

Ezzen: youll amke an inferno. its not worth it, im not in danger

Ezzen: just come down normally and we can talk

Hina: yuuka will get it

Hina: stay safe, love you

The others at the table, the humans, had taken notice, and gasping turned to yelling as it became clear Hina wasn’t going to stop. Hongo and Miyoko were asking Kimura frantic-sounding questions, but he just shook his head. He looked at me one last time, then shattered into glass, splintered fragments that burned away into smoke. Like before.

Certainty took root in my stomach. He’d been the one providing the magic for my stalker, whomever she’d been. That was why Hina was here—but her response was still wildly disproportionate. Why did she seem ready to go to war? I turned to Amane and Yuuka, who were both staring at where Kimura had been. Rage was written on their faces. What was I missing?

“What the fuck is going on?”

Yuuka barked something at Miyoko. The high priestess scowled at the place where Kimura had been, pristine and delicate features twisting with fury.

“Traitor.”

Then the sky split open as Radiance Sapphire cracked Hikanome’s eggshell of false summer.

---

Author’s Note:

Ezzen’s biases are starting to show, but more importantly: Hina’s back! Did you miss her? I missed her. I wonder what she learned!

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January 17, 2025

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.

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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:

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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!

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November 15, 2024