The Vaetna do it too.

I’d always known, intellectually, that the Spire’s direct and violent brand of foreign policy left people dead by design. To me, it had always been beautiful, elegant, when they took their vaet and sliced clean through all the murk and red tape to declare “this is where we stand.” Their causes were just, and when they brought the hammer down, it was with such overwhelming force and precise aim as to cow any reply. They did so in the name of minimizing further bloodshed, making it clear that retaliatory escalation would only invite one’s own destruction. They left superyachts with yawning holes that passed exactly through where the owner’s cabin had been and spared every crew member, walked straight into the offices of corrupt leaders to behead them—that sort of vigilante fantasy. The ultimate, bloody check on power, brilliantly focused and wetting their blades only with the blood of the guilty.

But sometimes evil was distributed and systematic. And so sometimes, the Vaetna also had to do exactly what I had done: they murdered operatives of the PCTF and its equivalents for the sake of flamebearer lives and dignity. I hadn’t understood what that meant until I saw the tiny body on Opal’s laptop screen. Over and over, the backs of my eyelids showed me his—or her—final moments, before their body had turned to sludge and joined with the fires below; the grisly, impersonal end of an entire human life that I had wrought.

It was bigger in my memory, those handful of pixels growing to indict me for my crime, consuming the whole screen. In the enlarged, unavoidable clarity of a nightmare, I saw all the different ways the ripple had killed them. It transmuted their flesh to rusted iron, or wove their skin through their bones, or just punched random, perfect holes through their body, before they inevitably collapsed and the microscopic structures that held them together dissolved and at last they became a red slurry.

“They deserved it,” I repeated once again. “They crossed the line in the sand. They knew what they were signing up for. Their lives were forfeit. They were abductors—fascists, even, let’s not kid ourselves. The world is a b—better place with them gone.”

My room declined to weigh in.

I’d fled here after a few more minutes of ineffectual justifications from Opal. I didn’t need her to defend her actions. Acting in the Spire’s stead after Brianna’s still-unexplained exit, even without their own personal motivations to protect the flamebearer, they were more than justified to do what they had—what I had helped them do. But they should have told me. It felt like they’d specifically avoided using the word “kill”—and so had I, but that had purely been my narrow-sightedness, my naivete. They’d done this before, at least once, when they’d saved Amethyst. Opal should have stopped me short and laid out in crystal clarity that I was proposing to murder those people, justified or not, because I had not understood.

I fumbled for my phone, seeking comfort in old, familiar videos of the Vaetna doing this and that, mundane fraternal rambunctiousness and glyph engineering vlogs—and felt a new, awful tightness in my chest as I watched Heung balance atop the flexing haft of his spear. The blood of hundreds, possibly thousands, ran from its onyx tip, and that was to say nothing of the magic he and his siblings wrought. No bunker too deep, no lab too well-warded; the Vaetna were unstoppable, and death was their obligation.

So why the hell had Brianna fled?

Her absence from the scene of my misdeed was cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. It had forced my hand; we’d functionally been acting in her stead. Did it really matter who brought down the ax, so long as it fell upon the guilty? And guilty they had been; even if they were technically Blackwater or some other private military, even if the PCTF disavowed them, their mission on that oil platform was one which deserved the grisly end I’d brought them. So said the Vaetna and, apparently, Todai—at least on an unofficial basis for the latter.

But none of my moralizing explained why we had to be the ones to do it at all. Vaetna simply did not leave infernos once they had deployed. To do so was a violation of their duty, a crack in their terminal reputation, and—to be frank—a matter of sunk cost. Caging an area like that represented significant magical investment, so they might as well follow through and resolve the situation in their favor. So it followed that Bri must have been needed elsewhere—but there was no elsewhere. There had been no other infernos happening anywhere in the world at the same time, nor had my handful of Spire-resident contacts mentioned anything domestic which might have demanded her attention. Yes, two—three?—days ago, she had been interrupted from spooling into the Spire by my flamefall, but if that had been sufficiently disruptive then—

ezzen: She wouldn’t have been out there at all.

skychicken: what gets me is the lack of statement

skychicken: per all parties

ezzen: Right?

ezzen: She didn’t even say anything of note to Heliotrope, I can confirm that firsthand.

ezzen: Er, secondhand, I guess, but I can’t imagine any version of events where Heliotrope wouldn’t have been telling the truth about that part.

DendriteSpinner: Unless she was wary of you

DendriteSpinner: Something something OPSEC

ezzen: She would have just gone into Japanese, then.

ezzen: Recall that I cannot speak a word of that language.

DendriteSpinner: Oh right lol

DendriteSpinner: And like thats all from your end right

ezzen: Afraid so.

No, it was not.

ks3glimmer: speaking of parties

ks3glimmer: who the heck was the theres a third

ks3glimmer: or even fourth

ks3glimmer: bleh typo

ks3glimmer: (if that big explosion and whoever pulled holton out were different groups)

In the hours since the incident had begun to wind down, survivors from Thunder Horse had confirmed the new flamebearer’s identity as one Noah Holton, a totally unremarkable member of the crew who had been on for three years. Putting a name to the person we had rescued made me feel better, helped validate what I had done—at least as long as the operatives I had murdered remained anonymous and unpersoned.

DendriteSpinner: makes the most sense for the explosion to have been the spire

ezzen: I’m assuming it was the same third party.

ezzen: That didn’t look very Spire to me. And we know it wasn’t Holton because it was too controlled compared to the rest of his fighting.

Maintaining my cover, such as it was, was mentally and emotionally taxing. Opal’s gentle scolding from this morning about information leakage—had it really only been this morning?—had now taken on a cast of critical, mortal importance. I didn’t need the girls to explain to me how serious it would be if what we had done got out to the public…though I think Opal had made the attempt nonetheless, in those few minutes I’d sat there in crushed, horrified silence before I’d fled. Not that I’d really absorbed the specifics.

ks3glimmer: what little we saw of it, but yeah

skychicken: if we wanna go really dark

skychicken: the peacies could have false flagged their own team to justify escalating with an exo team next

skychicken: explains why that explosion looked so much like an airburst KV-20. maybe fired from one of the destroyers?

My skin crawled. Did he know? If he knew about Amethyst’s gun through Hina, and knew Hina well enough to know how much they hated the Peacies…

DendriteSpinner: Sorta contrived

ezzen: conspiratorial

But then, that was just skychicken. Even if he did know, he sure didn’t seem interested in outing what I had done.

skychicken: per their statement (link) they sent a pretty light snatch squad first, the ones they usually label as rescue

skychicken: based on the guy’s history i dont think they were expecting him to resist

DendriteSpinner: If he hadn’t, it would make sense why Brianna fucked right off after talking to him

ks3glimmer: yeh

skychicken: yep

skychicken: would have just told her to screw off because he was going to willingly give himself over

skychicken: except thats very obviously not what happened

ks3glimmer: ez, im still sorta wrapipng my head around the fact that youre a flamebearer now, but

ks3glimmer: same cluster, any thoughts?

ks3glimmer: *wrapping

ezzen: What sort of thoughts?

ks3glimmer: cluster links arent unheard of

ezzen: I’m aware. But none to speak of.

ezzen: Super weird flamefall, you might recall.

ezzen: Like, we’re technically same cluster, but because Heung splintered it, I sort of doubt we’ve got any kind of resonances.

ezzen: Which I NEVER SAW ON CAMERA BEFORE AND IT WAS THE COOLEST SHIT.

ezzen: For all of, uh. Three seconds or something.

I disengaged from the conversation before I ran out of ways to deflect any further, making some excuse about paperwork. I found the stream VOD from the other day, watching and rewatching those last few moments of the stream before it had cut out, when the heavens had been sundered open by Heung’s thunder from on high—or Zeus’, or Thor’s, as some supposed. Some drew pagan, pantheonic comparisons to the Vaetna, a slightly more focused flavor of worship than the more generic kind which other groups directed toward the Flame. I did envy the Vaetna’s supernatural physicality, a bone-deep frustration, but that way lay the sort of worship for which Opal had so strongly derided Hikanome. I envied their magic, too, but…

“Look where that’s gotten me,” I instructed the empty room.

Only three days ago, I’d been unwilling to use magic to take that cabbie’s life to save my own, but now I’d killed what looked to be a dozen to save one person I didn’t know. How was I supposed to square that circle?

With routine, of course.

It had been four days since I’d been able to get any meaningful spear practice. Now was as good a time as any, and I needed the distraction; if I kept looking at my phone, I was liable to explode into a confetti cloud of rancid guilt and increasingly hollow-sounding justifications. So I grabbed the stabilizer cylinder, moved it from my nightstand to the foot of my bed—heh, foot—close to the middle of my room, summoned my spear, and began my routine.

Heung’s spear style was not something I could really imitate at all. A baseline human simply could not maneuver in four dimensions like a Vaetna could, and even three was beyond me, so my training with the spear was mostly an homage, too far from the real thing to even call aspirational. But moving my body was still a welcome distraction, familiar, especially after a day of being essentially bedridden and most of my physical activity since then having been out in the cold.

Forward lunge, sweeping slash, twisting, mindful of my balance. Footwork was everything. Turn, use the haft like a quarterstaff, strike the ribs, follow the momentum to kick them away to create more space. It was not a fast series of movements; I was under no illusions of being able to mimic Heung’s quicksilver pace. But I could mimic his economy of motion, at least more slowly. Each thrust or sweep was careful, deliberate, prioritizing form and balance, flowing from one stance to the next. Each move was carefully calibrated to not strike the walls of my old, cramped apartment. Here, I had more than enough space, but there would be time to experiment with that later. For now, I stuck with my routine, because that was all I had. Parry, riposte, make sure I’m always controlling the space in front of me. I wasn’t fast enough to simply disregard defense like Heung.

My plodding, heavy limbs had one upside: in my hands, these moves were benign and relatively harmless, at least compared to the magical weapons I had built. A few GWalk diagrams of modifications and I had taken lives instantaneously, anonymously, intercontinentally. This spear, at least such as it was, could never be anywhere near so lethal.

Could it? Ai said she used a spear, and I had to wonder how her skills and raw power in mantle compared to that of Heung. Of course he was more powerful than her, pound for pound, and each vaet was a singular weapon, those onyx blades far beyond any LM construct Ai could weave. Still, if her teammates were anything to go by, she was still a weapon of mass destruction in her own right, and—

I abruptly stopped with my routine, lowering the spear from my guard, chest heaving. This line of thought was just sending me back down the spiral, back toward that grim truth about magic’s terrible potency when applied to violence, back toward what Ai had said about how the Flame sought pain. And with what Hina had said about her metamorphosis—

A terrible suspicion took root in my heart. I sat on the bed and rested my spear on my lap, running my hands down the haft.

“I don’t want you to follow me there.”

It said nothing.

“I mean, it’s only because you’re beautiful, you know? I never wanted to use you to kill. But then you’d not be much of a weapon, would you? More of a toy, I suppose. Guess that’s what you’ve always been. Even with this, haven’t been much use to me.”

I ran my finger along the strange, fuzzy shimmer of ripple warping at the tip, gained from when I had stabbed myself in the eye to slay the fire in my soul. Which eye had that been? I couldn’t remember; that hadn’t even been real to begin with. And of course, I hadn’t actually killed my Flame, merely called it to heel.

“So don’t come with me wherever I’m going. Even if I have to k—to kill again…and really have to, I mean, not doing it on somebody else’s behalf, for something more important than the Vaetna’s oath or mahou shoujo or just wanting to do the right thing…I’ll do it with magic. Not with you. You deserve better than that. Stay a toy. Stay a hobby. Better for the both of us.”

Satisfied with the one-way agreement, I put the spear away, then flopped backward onto the bed next to the little stabilizer module. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Such heft; definitely a fourth dimension’s worth of extra mass in there. The cylindrical outer shell was unmarked other than a blue ripple hazard sigil. I toyed with the idea of cracking it open, trying to piece together how it was made just from looking at the guts. Not now, though. My right hand wandered downward to the center of my chest.

“As for you.”

I waited a moment, wondering if my Flame would respond. It didn’t.

“Did you make me do that? Did you want those people to die? For…I don’t know. For our cluster’s safety? Just for love of violence? If it’s that second one, just your nature, no judgment, really. I’m not mad, just…okay, maybe I’m a little mad, but in the ‘madman’ way, not the ‘fury’ way. So. Did you?”

“Nope.”

For a very confusing few seconds, I had the weirdest sense of deja vu. Of course my Flame would speak to me in Hina’s voice…though I wasn’t sure why that made so much sense. Then I practically jumped out of my skin when I realized that it was just the actual Hina leaning on the gateway into my bedroom.

“Fucking knock!”

“I did! But you were clearly in the middle of your…thing. So I’ll just ask from right here: can I come in?”

I blushed, my deeply weird moment invaded. Mad indeed, I must have looked.

“Does it matter if I say no?”

“I mean, you could kick me out and I’d leave. But I can answer your question! Your Light won’t.”

“It might. It’s spoken to me before.”

That stopped Hina short. She stood up properly—in that damnable physics-defying way, like a puppet pulled upright, not levering herself off the doorframe at all—and frowned.

“It doesn’t do that. Pretty sure.”

“Mine did. Twice.”

“Oooooookay. Well, now you’re definitely not getting rid of me. Spill!”

“…No? Get out of my room, please.”

“What, so you can keep talking to yourself? Or so you can keep wallowing?”

“Not wallowing. Just—trying to piece it together.”

“Not a lot to piece together here, cutie. You helped us kill some people who totally deserved it. You know why we didn’t stop you?”

“Oh, don’t tell me this is another fucking lesson.”

She laughed, a hyena-bark.

“Ha! Nah. Well…I guess lesson three applies. We did escalate to violence. But no, not what I meant. I bet you’ve already talked yourself around on it anyway, but just so we’re clear: we let you go through with it, didn’t tell you you were helping kill those guys, because we wanted them dead. Selfish, right?”

“What, nothing to be said about the greater good? Not going to appeal to my Spire morality?”

“That’s Alice’s job, and you know it. I’m the selfish one, so trust me when I say we did it because we wanted to.”

Silence hung between us, a deafening, cloying fog.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Nope! It’s supposed to be honest. Cards on the table here: we’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. Sure, because it’s usually the right thing to do, but also because they will never bleed enough. That’s what we are. Now do you want out?”

“I was never in! I signed up to help with research and learn your secrets and b—because Ai is nice! I don’t want to be party to,” I mimed firing a rifle and made a frustrated noise, “that! Let alone all the magical girl shite Opal seems insistent on teaching me like it’s some kind of foregone conclusion that I’ll become an actual member!”

Hina crossed her arms and looked at me. Still my turn, she was saying, and as the seconds wore on, I was forced to acknowledge the problem.

“…But all magical research leads this direction, huh? Here, or the Spire, or the Peacies. Is that what you want me to say?”

“Yep! This is what it means to be us, cutie. No matter where you go—you’re going to have to spill some blood. To carry the Light is to be a weapon. At least here you’re the one wielding it.”

What an insanely bloodthirsty take on the world. Was I so cornered? Were there no other options?

“You’re saying that, even without joining the team, I’ll be party to…this? To vigilante killings of PCTF soldiers and whatever else you get up to?”

“Yeah. At best you’d be…turning a blind eye, right?”

I sat there, fuming, unable to formulate a good retort against that. I’d already equated the morals of Todai and the Spire—but it hurt a lot more to hear coming from her. She sighed.

“But that’s not the whole equation with you in particular, nope. Since you’re not just ‘some flamebearer’, you’re Ezzen. Vaetna superfan. You want to be more, right? So you can’t keep your Flame at arm’s length, not unless you wanna make yourself miserable. Which maybe you do?”

She flayed me open with those words and the casual shrug that accompanied them. I should have been honest. Instead, I got defensive.

“Why do you care?”

“Because I was the same! You’re like looking in a mirror, cutie.”

She sat next to me on the bed, reaching out, holding her arm—well, at arm’s length, like she had said, watching the muscles in her forearm flex as she curled and uncurled her fist.

“I was so…slow. Everything was wrong. Blind, deaf—er, compared to now, not literally—always looking for something that would just make me feel alive.” She growled that word. “Street fights, that kind of thing. I was nine years old the first time I broke somebody’s arm. Total adrenaline junkie. They shipped me back to Japan at the start of middle school to put a stop to it, but I just got worse, became the violent Yankee delinquent. Meeting Alice helped…mahou shoujo helped, too. But—she had her own problems.”

“And…being flametouched made it go away. Made you…this.”

Was she any more in control than she had been back then? Or was she just infinitely more equipped to pick fights?

“Nope. Not at first, anyway. But when Alice and Ai-chan and I were figuring out what had happened to us, in those first few weeks, just messing around—they missed us and Yuuka when they were rounding up the flamefall victims because they thought it had only been Amane who got sparked—I figured out how to…talk to my Flame. Hurt it. Let it change me. And it’s…wait, we already talked about this last night.”

Indeed we had, and as those memories trickled back into my conscious memory, my eyes wandered to her lips. She’d promised me power. Kin to the Vaetna. The power to kill? She preempted that thought.

“The point is, you’re stuck with this life no matter what. Even if you left Todai entirely, tried to lay low, you’d still eventually have to kill people like that, in self-defense or because you feel like it’s your duty to be more than a bystander. And, uh, that doesn’t make you a monster, cutie. If you were a monster you’d wish you had been there to do it with your bare hands.”

My tattoo felt like it was about to jump off my skin. I squeaked out an objection.

“I don’t want to kill people. I don’t want to hurt my Flame or anybody else.”

“Yeah, this is what I was afraid of. I was worried you were getting cold feet from last night.”

“You—don’t try to convince me. Not like then. Please. It’s different now, hurting my Flame was just abstract, but you’re talking about power. Power for what, Hina? To kill? All of your mutations are to make you better at—at killing. I don’t want that.”

“But you do, cutie. The way you look at me isn’t just horniness, trust me. You’re so jealous you could scream. When I do this—”

—she had seized my tattoo again and I was in danger and utterly helpless—

“You love it. You crave it. You want to be able to do it, even if it’s not about killing. Righ—holyshit.”

I’d surprised both of us, right then. My other arm had lanced forward faster than I thought possible. The hem of her shirt gave off a horrible acrid smell as it smoldered, bunched in my scarred fingers. What was I doing? My grip slackened, and I pulled the hand away slowly, avoiding her eyes. She was panting, eyes wide, and I both loved and hated that.

“You made me do that.”

“Nope! I told you, you’re like me. Ohmygosh. This is what you should be. Let me help.”

“…Why?” What was I to her? A lab rat? A chew toy? Or—“This has all just been to get another weapon against the PCTF, hasn’t it? You want my knowledge and my Flame, not me.”

“Are you even listening to me, cutie? I mean…yeah, I’d love it if you kept helping us kill them, that’d be great. But I’m doing this for you, and for me. Mostly for me. I don’t want to be alone.”

What?

“You’re—you have the others! You’re like the closest-knit group of flamebearers outside the Spire!”

Well, that was mostly based on vibes. I didn’t pay enough attention to groups other than the Vaetna to say that for certain. Hina raised her hand and waggled her fingers faux-menacingly.

“But they’re not like me.”

“Opal has a dragon tail.”

“Alice. You went out of your way to use her name, earlier. Why the switch? You don’t blame her for what we did, do you?”

The pivot was as painful as it was unexpected. I hadn’t even realized I’d switched; I’d stopped thinking of her on a first-name basis and instead gone back to her role. So that I could distance myself from what I had helped her do.

“Um—fine, alright. Alice should have stopped me. So should you.”

But Hina never would have, would she? As if reading my thoughts, she shook her head.

“I told you, it had to happen that way. We’re selfish. I’m selfish. Selfish…uh, where was I…right, I’m alone. Don’t get me wrong, the girls are the best thing that’s ever happened to me, they’re my pack and probably the only reason I’m still a person and not an urban legend. And in that sense…yeah, I do kind of want them for their Flames, I don’t think I can feel like that about humans anymore.” There was a note of melancholy in that. She despondently rubbed the part of her shirt I had scorched. “I owe them a lot. But they don’t get it, wanting to be more, to follow the path to wherever it goes. You do, and we can do it together. So—let me help you, cutie. For you and for me.”

“By hurting me. By showing me how to hurt.”

“Yeah! Listen—you’ve got powers, use them to make you happy. And for good, if you want, if that makes you happy. But you gotta be happy, and I’m telling you—this will make you happy.”

“Suppose it does,” I hissed. “Suppose I become like you. Uninhibited and rambunctious and whatnot. You can barely tell right from wrong, can you?”

“I can!” She blinked innocently. “With help.”

“You’re an utter hedonist. Sadomasochist.”

“Yep. It’s fun. You’ll love it, promise.”

“Like you loved sexually assaulting me?”

She went very, very still.

“I’m…sorry. I didn’t…Alice had to explain that part to me. I knew I’d scared you, that was by design, but I hadn’t—hadn’t thought it through. Got carried away with the biting and I shouldn’t have and I’m sorry. I worked on your stabilizer all night to make up for it. Please don’t be mad at me. Please don’t run away. It’ll never happen again, I’ll always pay attention to your boundaries and back off when you want me to and ask permission and I should have apologized sooner and—”

It brought me some sick, twisted enjoyment to have made her suddenly so torn up and desperate.

“You’re not saying that because you hurt me and frightened me. You’re saying it because you don’t want me to leave.”

“Yeah! I mean—no, I am sorry, really, but—I’m selfish, okay? You could be the best thing that ever happened to me. And me to you, really, I know you want it. Just—I need another chance. Please?”

I wasn’t falling for the shining, blue, puppy eyes.

“You don’t even know me. Get out.”

She vanished with too much still unsaid.

—

“That…” Ai seemed to struggle with how to put it delicately, then gave up. “…sounds like a very Hina-san blind spot, yes. When she was helping with the stabilizer, she did mention she had a fight with Takehara-san, but I thought it was about the actual brawl from earlier.” She gestured toward the hall still under repair outside the prosthetic fitting room where we sat. “This explains why she was so focused last night. Atoning.”

I’d walked in on her going through a list of requests to give special lectures at different colleges. She had seemed thrilled to deal with me instead, waving me in and directing me to a big office chair. It was a nice, padded item, one of the many bits of furniture throughout the building designed for flesh-Amane to sit comfortably in for long periods of time during consults in here—when she wasn’t on the bed in the middle of that spell circle, below that halo of tentacles on the ceiling. Poor woman. Now that I had some measure of her enemies and the means by which she fought them, I rather felt she deserved such plush comforts.

Ai watched me turn over the stabilizer module in between my hands. It had fit quite comfortably in the pocket of my new, oversized hoodie, the armor that made me feel brave enough to talk about these things.

“But this was just—to get even with me. It’s still selfish.”

Ai frowned at me.

“…You would still be unable to walk today if she hadn’t worked so hard. And it’s good to work out your guilt in a way that helps the people around you, isn’t it?”

I was reminded of what Ebi had said about Ai. She does her best work when she feels guilty. Of course she’d take Hina’s side on that part.

“So I should forgive her?”

“I didn’t say that. She’s—I don’t want to make excuses for her. Why did you come to talk to me if you didn’t want to be convinced to forgive her?”

“Is that what you were going to do? Convince me?”

“…Yes. I think if you wanted to be angrier you’d have gone to Takehara-san.”

“Don’t want to talk to her,” I admitted. “The whole…gun thing. I know Hina and Amane hate the Peacies, but I thought you and Alice would be the level-headed ones, talk me out of it. But I guess it’s only you.”

“I helped with that too, but…point taken. Thank you. Um, so, Hina-san: you do want to forgive her?”

“Fuckin…” I made a noise that was intended to be a frustrated growl but came out more like clearing my throat. “I guess so. And that’s fucked up, isn’t it?”

“Depends. Why?”

“Because…”

Fuck, could I even admit it aloud? It felt like a betrayal of my own feelings of violation from last night, and of my own erstwhile commitment to Ai’s pacifism toward her Flame—but that felt hollow now, since she, too, had helped me commit murder. We were all complicit, and in light of that, however we approached our Flame felt like inconsequential quibbling compared to the edifice of real mortality now looming over me. And that was really the heart of it, wasn’t it?

“Because I do want what she’s offering. And if I forgive her, there’s nothing else stopping me from taking it. I’ve already crossed a much worse line.”

“Mm. Killing somebody who deserves it isn’t worse than hurting your Light, Ezzen. It’s innocent, they’re not.”

“…Innocent? All it cares about is pain! You told me that!”

“Because that’s its nature. And Hina-san’s, as well. Not their faults.”

I’d said the very same to my own Flame, just before Hina had interrupted. She was right.

“You’ve already chosen to forgive her. But you don’t have to follow her path. She said it would make you happy, right? There are other ways to be happy. Be happy you’re doing the right thing.”

“Like how you’re happy those people are dead? I don’t believe this,” I snarled. “I thought you were the good one! The one with some moral backbone!”

Ai stood unnaturally fast. My throat went dry from the ripple. I looked up at her, at the fury that had twisted her face.

“I am not happy they had to die. I’m happy when I help people, when you and Ishikawa-chan can stand on your own two feet. That’s what magic is for. But the people who capture us and torture us and tear out our souls just to hoard them? I wish we were as powerful and free to do what we wanted as the Vaetna are, because the right thing to do, what would make me happier than anything else, is to end them forever. Until then, we fight back. In what few ways we can. That is mahou shoujo. Takehara-san would agree.” She collapsed back into her chair as the fire suddenly ran out. “Just…we must not be like Hina-san. When mahou shoujo turn cruel—real ones, Pretty Cure, the Sailor Scouts, chosen by some natural force of good—they lose their powers, and every day I wish we were the same. But she’s who we have, so I forgive her for it anyway, because we need her power. I just—don’t want you to follow that path. Stay away from it.”

“You can’t possibly equivocate her with the PCTF.” Even for my moral standards, that was a bridge too far.

Ai looked at me sullenly. The exhaustion had returned to her eyes.

“If you think what she does is different, or that the difference matters, then go ahead. Change like her, become another weapon forged in cruelty. And I’ll forgive you too.”

Now I had seemingly ruined two Radiances’ days, sapped away their high of justice delivered—possibly Alice’s too, by proxy. Each was carrying the weight of the world, at least in their own eyes, and they’d clearly argued these very points to death and rebirth and death again, long before I had ever entered the picture. It was overkill to call them battle lines within the team, but there were sides, and my thrashing and flailing at being caught in the middle was doing nobody any good.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

She rubbed her face and managed a genuine, though dim, smile.

“It’s fine. You have had—a weekend.”

It had only been two days, hadn’t it? Three, maybe four if you counted my actual flamefall, but I’d actually only been awake for about an hour and a half between getting up that morning and passing out in that buried car. So with how I’d been out like a light for a while after that, it really only felt like two days. The second- and third-worst days of my life, arguably. I managed a dry chuckle, suddenly feeling as tired as Ai looked.

“I…really have, haven’t I?”

“Yes. Unfair, I think. That’s part of why I’m upset with her and Takehara-san; they’re rushing you. They have—well, no, I was going to say they have good reasons, but they don’t, they’re being selfish. It took us a lot longer.”

I leaned back in the chair, then half-turned to inspect some of its features. Nice adjustable armrests, really comfortable lumbar support. A proper chair for an internet creature like myself.

“Kind of want one of these for my room.”

“Hm?”

“Uh—the chair.”

“Talk to Ebi-tan. Actually—I could help you order some furniture now, if you want.”

“Um—really, it’s alright, I don’t want to be a bother. Sorry for coming in on you with my problems when you were in the middle of something.”

“It can wait. I hate writing emails.”

She smiled at me, and I realized that she’d probably rather be doing this than anything else, short of literally working on one of our prosthetics. I still felt I didn’t deserve that—which was silly. Actually—I raised the stabilizer, admiring its heft.

“Um, I appreciate the offer, really, but if you’re free…can you walk me through this?” I tapped the warning label with a finger. “I’d love to know how it works.”

—

Spending an hour talking about magic with Ai made me feel far, far better about everything. It gave me an opportunity to re-center, remember why I loved glyphcraft, and generally feel comfortable with a Radiance when every interaction with Hina and Alice right now was loaded with the weight of their hopes and expectations and I couldn’t really hold a conversation with Amane. And Ebi was Ebi, which spoke for itself, but she was actually much more tolerable than usual when she popped in briefly. She and Ai seemed to mellow each other’s most objectionable traits—not that Ai had all that many, but she certainly seemed happier and less strung out with her android daughter in the room.

Ebi brought us refreshments and checked on my foot. My cauterization was healing apace and hadn’t been overly aggravated by the walking, mostly thanks to the way the stabilizer redistributed and canceled the most adverse forces against the site of the injury. It was a wonderfully clever bit of weaving and an excellent demonstration of how the best way to resist further damage was through physical focus rather than via biomancy or analgomancy. Indeed, that part of the lattice was arguably more impressive in design than its primary function of assisting my gait, though the third-order weaving of the latter was flashier. I decided I ought to thank Hina for that—had I done so this morning? I couldn’t remember; it had been a bit of a whirlwind with her.

My ankle had more or less recovered from my fall this morning—to a greater extent than Ebi had expected.

“Fourteen percent faster.”

“Meaning…I’m mutating?”

“Not…necessarily? Yeah, like, obviously the first place I’d go is the Hina comparison, but it’s not like I did a real scan of it when you got injured; that number is just a best guess. And you had just come off of a day of epithelial acceleration and red boosting and all that jazz, so I’m just going to chalk it up to statistical error.”

“O…kay.”

I had a moment of terrified panic that Hina’s changes I had rejected might well be happening regardless—then got ahold of myself. If my body was changing without having to hurt my Flame, wasn’t that the best of both worlds? It would mean I didn’t have to be complicit in Hina’s cruelty while still becoming closer to the Vaetna. Then I got ahold of myself again, old self-reminders that I wasn’t actually special kicking in automatically before I at last remembered that I was in fact an unprecedented, highly unusual case after all. So I might as well rejoice, though I did so internally, maintaining a healthy dosage of tempered expectations. I probably wasn’t going to wake up with supercharged myelin in my limbs and a magical furnace for a heart. Probably. A guy could dream, though.

I suspect Ebi picked up on at least some of that whole rollercoaster of emotions, but she didn’t interrupt Ai’s pleasant rambling about the stabilizer’s internals to comment on it, and the rest of the checkup passed without incident. Our little hangout came to a close when Ai’s pedagogical responsibilities caught up with her and she had to take a call, shooing us out of the room. Ebi accompanied me back through the halls and up the elevator to the 19th floor; I was starting to get a feel for at least this travel route between the Radiances’ abode and her sub-level domain.

“What else is in this building, anyway?”

“Uh…everything? Marketing, finances, operations, R&D, HR…” She pointed at various buttons on the elevator’s panel as she listed the departments.

“Isn’t Todai…huge? Culturally, I mean. Seems like sort of a small building for such a big operation.”

“The girls like to run a bit of a skeleton crew, it’s true. I’m told one of their conditions for the whole gig was to keep it lightweight, do marketing and stuff around them so they could do the magical girl thing in peace. Only sorta worked. I help with that, too.”

“Beyond just being Amane’s doctor?”

“Mhm. I run the Twitter.”

“Of course you do.”

When we stepped back into the penthouse, we found Hina in the kitchen, washing dishes, surrounded by the signs of dinner-in-progress. Something was roasting. She didn’t acknowledge us, even though I’m sure she heard us over the fwoosh of the faucet; for the best, probably. Whatever conversation we were going to have, I didn’t want to have it yet. And Ebi didn’t seem inclined to force the issue, bless her Flame-woven soul. She went back on Amane duty, and I returned to my room.

—

I whiled away the rest of that afternoon just…decompressing. At some point, I started idly looking up how to buy computer parts in this city, and less than five seconds later, Ebi messaged me with a list of specs and said everything would be there tomorrow. I was mildly disturbed she was watching my online activity, but she was probably hooked into the network; fair was fair. I made a mental note to get a VPN at some point.

The Radiances didn’t all convene for dinner that night. Ai’s portion of the meal went down to her in the lab, Alice was out, and Heliotrope was still on her way home, somewhere over the Pacific, which just left me, Hina, and Amane for a tense and awkward meal, sat together around the table with Ebi standing dutifully just behind the Amethyst Radiance. Hina seemed—unhappy, regretful. She didn’t bring up any of the events of the last few days, nor attempted to make any jabs at Amane. She just sat there and ate her roast duck. It was a marginally less voracious and messy affair than the chicken cutlet of lunch, more subdued. But only marginally—

And I totally got why, because said roast duck was really, really good. Maybe it was just that I needed the calories for my foot, but I gorged myself on a whole leg in the span of a few minutes. I’d like to think I at least outdid her on table manners, but honestly the whirlwind of tender meat and crispy skin and savory juices with the sweet-and-sour sauce she had made left me unsure as to whether I wound up being any more civilized about it than her. Amane also ate with her hands, in smaller, more careful bites than either of us—I was a little surprised her mechanical arm was food-safe, with its visible seams. She made no attempt to engage us in conversation, either, maybe affected by the awkwardness between us, or maybe just too focused on making sure she could keep the food down.

I excused myself pretty much as soon as I was done eating, barely mustering the manners for a “thanks that was so good” before returning to my room and getting back on my laptop to shoot the shit with my friends in the chatroom, doing my best to hide the way I was avoiding discussion of the events on the oil rig. If Sky knew, he didn’t call me out on it. So for a few hours, I was able to maintain almost-normalcy, especially when the topic turned to less-fraught topics like the goings-on of my friends’ lives and general magical research, nothing that demanded subterfuge from me. I did have to evade slightly when teased about whether I’d “gotten all up in the Radiances’ magical guts yet”—Moth’s phrasing left it ambiguous whether they had meant the magic of their transformations or literal sexual innuendo—but even that was a public sort of dodge; just an apologetic, half-joking “That’s classified.”

But that did get me thinking about Hina again, particularly in the ways I’d largely been trying to avoid. Even aside from all the posthuman temptation she’d levied upon me, there was a simpler, more basal attraction toward her which I found damnable but undeniable. Of course, all the Radiances were hot, and I knew my attraction to Hina was just a stupid, hormonal, misfiring crush from years of in-person social isolation and starvation for physical affection—but I still wanted her, despite everything. Despite what she’d done to me and promised to do more of. Stupid.

It was that stupid, ulterior motive that found me knocking on the door to her room, like a scene from a bad college drama. She’s waiting for you, Ez, whispered a tearful, melodramatic voice. It was rather undercut by the clip-art of a sapphire hanging by a lone strip of tape; it acknowledged me with just the barest hint of a flutter from my movements, and after my crisp double-knock, silence reigned. No swell of music to accompany my decision to cross into her domain, to thrust myself into the belly of the beast. Yet a decision it very much was; I wouldn’t let her into my own space again, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to try to have this conversation in one of the common spaces.

“Unlocked,” Hina called from behind the door.

I’d expected stepping into the room of Radiance Sapphire to be disorienting; I’d braced myself for some kind of translation into a different kind of reality as I crossed the threshold. No such luck.

The first thing I actually noticed was the incense. A softly spicy aroma, cloves and cardamom—thanks Dad—which merely mentioned its presence in the air rather than yelling it. That gave me a good idea of how advanced her nose was, if anything more intensely aromatic was uncomfortable—or maybe she just preferred it like this. Either way, it was unexpected but not unwelcome.

Her apartment had the same basic layout as mine; her multipurpose room seemed to be mostly storage, shelves and boxes which observed my passing in stolid solemnity—okay, no, stop being dramatic. Besides, that was far from the most remarkable thing about the room. That title went to the very fancy gaming rig. Three monitors all in a row, suspended from struts and bars at head-height to wrap across one’s field of vision, and a tall, fixed chair reminiscent of a racecar—a real racecar, not one of those overpriced gaming chairs styled after them. The setup had no desk, though, nor keyboard or mouse, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at until I saw the smaller panels and array of buttons…and the flight stick. What? Why did she have a flight simulator in her room? She was one of a handful of people in the world who could fly under her own power—she didn’t even have to mantle up!

I shelved the urge to investigate it further and crossed to the threshold of her bedroom, just around the corner from the gateway. Once we were face to face, things would get…much more difficult, and I could already feel my heart rate rising as I tried to organize my jumble of thoughts. I clenched my fists, let them relax, and then turned the corner.

This part of Hina’s apartment played more to my expectations; her bedroom shared the “den” vibe of her pocketspace. She didn’t have a big bed like mine; instead, quilts and pillows were scattered across the center of the room atop a plush, deep carpet that captured my feet like royal-blue forest moss. It must have been hell to get stains out of. The room was lit by the dying daylight and a few of the same indirect lights on the walls that had been in her pocketspace—and candles. Not an absurd number, maybe a dozen, scattered in twos or threes across various cabinets and dressers and her desk. A fire hazard, to be sure, but she was a greater fire hazard than anything in the country save her best friend, and I found I rather liked the ambiance.

Hina herself was lying on her side, flopped like a dog, facing away from me. She was hugging something—a stuffed animal in the form of a seal, I learned, once she rolled over to face me.

“Hi, cutie,” she muffled into the seal’s head. “Please be good news.”

“Uh—I don’t know if it is. I talked to Ai. Fuck. Ai, not I,” I gestured at myself for clarity. “Ai-chan? No, that’s appropriation or something.”

Bad start, but it at least made her snicker.

“And she said to forgive me.”

“How’d—”

“‘Cause that’s how she is. Too much good in her heart, I swear. Gonna get her killed someday. Already cut her in half.”

That was…almost certainly referring to Ebi, somehow. I resolved that I mustn’t derail or we’d never get around to the conversation we needed to have.

“I…okay. Can…I’m going to sit.”

She waved vaguely toward a pillow in reply. I put myself down gently, still trying to be somewhat conscious of my foot despite Ebi’s clean bill of health. Once I’d made myself comfortable, I looked around her room, trying to find something to focus on and talk at. My left hand wandered to my right and rubbed the scars. Nervous habit, because I was nervous. My eyes eventually found a pair of candles, a pale wax one with a slightly shorter, dark-purple sibling, directly across the room from me, above Hina’s head in my field of view. Opal and Amethyst? Reading too much into that, probably, since Amane was taller than Alice in both forms, and Hina probably wasn’t the type to—

Enough faffing around. I had to say it.

How could I say it?

It was as direct and simple of an admission as they came, but so, so loaded with straightforward vulnerability and the feeling that I was doing something I’d come to regret. I took a deep breath, pushed some strength into my vocal chords—

“A—”

And stopped. It was hard. I clammed up for a moment. Which turned into ten seconds, which turned into twenty, and by then I was considering bolting. I backed off a bit from what I was going to originally say, and instead went with:

“What are we?”

Great line, Ez, real low-drama, definitely not a line straight out of a crap romance novel. Hina breathed slowly.

“Dunno. That wasn’t as bad as I was worrying, though. What did you really want to ask?”

Damn her directness, her incisive way of knowing me despite not knowing me. I forced myself to stop white-knuckling my other hand, instead putting my face in my hands and sighing. I just wasn’t going to be able to say it any other way. Just spit it out, Ez.

“I…still…want you but.”

She squeezed the plushie tighter.

“But? I don’t like buts, cutie.” She frowned. “Well, no, I like butts, probably, at least when they’re attached to people I like. I’m going to shut up now.”

Heedless of her babbling, I had started talking again around “attached.”

“I want you physically and carnally and I want you to touch me and I want to touch you and…and…I’m willing to forgive you about what you did to me because I want more of it even though I shouldn’t and I feel awful that you feel so bad about what you did because Ai said—Emerald, that is—said it was a blind spot for you and it hurts that you’re so alone when I’m alone too and I’m just realizing how stupid it is for me to be angry about that when, one, I want it, and two, I had an even worse blind spot about literal murder so…”

I ran out of breath. That was probably for the best; I hadn’t quite worked out what was supposed to come after the “so”. I panted a few times, confirmed with a glance that she was still waiting for me to continue, found another thread, and pursued that instead.

“I don’t know what to think about the mutation stuff you keep talking about. I feel like I’d be betraying Emerald and myself because hurting the Flame is horrible and feels so awful that even though I want to be more the price is too high. But if we don’t do that, can we still…just do the physical stuff without all that? Is that an option, where we’re just…I don’t know, a couple or f—friends with benefits or something without me having to tear myself up about the magic side too?”

“Um.” For once, Hina seemed really speechless. She slowly sat up. “Cutie, I’m really, really proud of you, you know that? Dunno how much you think that’s worth, but I am. That must have been hard.”

I tried to acknowledge that it was, that it had been so hard but I couldn’t not say it, but now my voice was shaking too badly. Why was I sobbing? This whole affair was stupid and melodramatic and it had to get off my chest. How else was I supposed to deal with it all? And it hurt that she was proud, that I did value her praise like that. It was all so dumb and complicated and none of this had mattered before two days ago. But now it all mattered to me, so much, too much.

Hina let me cry quietly for a minute or two, until the tears at least stopped flowing and I was just choked up and dreading whatever she’d say next. She’d exploit my vulnerability and pounce on me, use my admission of desire to take everything she wanted.

“You shouldn’t trust me,” she eventually muttered, blue downcast.

“I know. But I…” It took me a few sniffles. “I want to. I—I want to.”

“You know how hard it is for me to not try to abuse this? To exert my leverage? It’s really hard, cutie. I look at you and I want to grab you and drag your Light to the surface and slice your belly open to drink your blood until we’re the same and I’m not alone anymore,” she whimpered. “Yuuka wasn’t joking. I try really hard to stop myself and I messed up last night. I get why you don’t want to become like me. And that’s probably the right call.”

“So…”

“I’m trash at half-measures, Ez. I told you, you could be the best thing that ever happened to me, and that makes me want to push you and push you until it comes true, because that’s what I am.”

“Then…Hina.”

“Mm?”

“You can control yourself. Or I want to believe you can. Maybe that’s—maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part. But let’s…experimental verification.” I rubbed my crimson face, embarrassed at what a mess I’d made of articulating my thoughts. “Um—fuck me, this is so…damn it.”

I stood and approached her den, unbalanced by the roiling trepidation in my stomach. I stepped across the thickening layers of blanket until I was standing over her.

“This is stupid, is what it is. Let’s—just touch each other. That’s what I want, that’s what made me even come in here in the first place. I want to touch you. Fuck.” It felt so good to just say it, but clarification was desperately needed. “Not—not sex. Um—not that I don’t want that, you’re very attractive, but this is—to prove a point. Nothing with the Flame, just…cuddling. Show me I can trust you.”

I held my breath. She stared at me, and I did my damnedest to maintain eye contact, meet the brilliant sapphire on its own terms.

“I’m so much stronger than you. Always will be, if you’re not gonna change. You wouldn’t be able to stop me.”

She said it so bleakly. No joy, no revelry in her transcendental metamorphosis. It opened a pit in my stomach.

“No—no, it’s not about being strong. I do want to be strong. I do want to be more…never want to have to fall back on violence. Not with you, not—not with Todai as a whole, either.”

“Mm. You mean the murder.”

“I…yes, I do mean the murder. Stop me next time.”

She snorted.

“Not quite balanced, cutie. You keep me from—fuck, yeah, sexual assault.” She looked like a kicked puppy. “Fucked up of me, yeah. And I keep you from killing people. That’s it?”

“Well—we both have some blind spots. That’s—mutual accountability, of some kind. Foundation of relationships or something. We stop each other from being our worst selves.”

She nodded at that and stood, and now we were two horny idiots standing atop a hill of blankets in the middle of a room. She fixed her hair nervously, twirling auburn locks between her fingers.

“Okay! Um, yeah! I wanna try it. I really really wanna prove I can be…uh. Lay it out for me as clearly as you can. You just want to…cuddle.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed,” I chided, but the knot of nerves and confusion was loosening. We’d come out the other end.

“I’m trying really really hard to not make fun of you for making this so vanilla because that’s the whole point, but…”

“…At least you’re honest.” I sighed. I did like that about her. “Um. Just…hands above clothes. No biting—can’t believe I have to say that. Kissing…sure, yes please, as long as you don’t try to suffocate me again.”

Then I surprised us both by laughing, a goofy, undignified chortle. The situation had just gotten too ridiculous, once I laid it out like this, laid the exact limits on the table. Must it be so contrived? Was trust such a fragile thing? Well—yes, for now. We had to start somewhere. She giggled too, then.

“The pact is made.”

“Uh. You’re not a fairy, right?”

“I’m me!” She took a deep breath. “I’m…I thought I’d fucked this all up and scared you off.”

“Yeah, um—you did. And I’m still worrying this is a mistake. Prove me wrong.”

“Gladly. C’mere.”

—

True to her word, the next few hours were passionate and exploratory but relatively chaste, as far as the overall axis of sensuality went. She’d burrowed us into the mound of bedding and given me what I could only describe as an inspection. There had been poking and sniffing and eventually even licking once I’d given permission. Then, there’d been kissing and purring and roaming hands, including my first touches of a boob and a butt—though that part remained above the clothes as I’d stipulated. She was so warm. I got a close-up of her teeth and barely restrained myself from asking her to sink them into me. That would be for another time.

Evening slipped to night, until the candles burned low and were overcome by the city lights coming through the window. Her eyes were so reflective they all but glowed, even in the darkness, two moons looking at me contentedly, reduced to sapphire slivers under the hoods of her eyelids. My eyesight wasn’t nearly so good, but I didn’t need to see anything else.

We talked more, sometimes in little mutual whispers that accompanied each touch and sometimes in longer rambling monologues while we lay next to each other, the other just intent to listen. She joyfully explained all the ways her body was different, made my heart ache with how she described what it was like to be her, and gushed about how much she loved her teammates. She tempered the end with a stream of quiet apologies for how she’d approached me and how she’d probably torn me away from the path that would have led me to the Spire. I forgave her for the first; the second would need more time until it scabbed over, but I found myself willing to wait.

For my part, I admitted new desires and older feelings I’d never said aloud before, what I dreamt of becoming—embodied in the girl laying half-across me and purring into my chest. We wondered about my Flame, how it had spoken to me. It was, to her knowledge, unprecedented; her deeply enmeshed experiences didn’t include speech. She did mention with a city-lit, troubled frown that Hikanome’s doctrine did purport communication between the Flame and its bearers, divinity-to-prophet, but not nearly so clear as what I’d experienced.

And eventually, soothed by budding trust beginning to take root between us, comfortably ensconced in her burrow of blankets, and euphoric in the simple presence of another body against mine, I fell asleep. My insane, whirlwind weekend of abduction and magic and pain was over.

The world kept turning, though. Somewhere, Noah Holton was going through something similar to the gauntlet I had just run, and of course the Spire stood, as ever. Radiance Heliotrope was on her way back, jetbike screaming across the Pacific. Our first meeting in person would be less than ideal.

And the next morning, Sun’s Blessing, Hikanome, the largest Frozen Flame cult in Japan—

Demanded an introduction.

Author’s Note:

And, scene!

Thus concludes Arc 1: From On High. Really more like a book than an “arc”, cause really what does that word even mean, but that’s my naming convention and I’m sticking to it.

The story’s success across these past few months has just blown me away. From avid discussion in the Discord and beyond, to out-of-the-blue shoutouts (those are two separate links) that did silly and beautiful things to the story’s numbers, to being #1 on TopWebFiction for a little while; it’s been so surreal and incredible. Thank you all so much. It’s been incredibly rewarding for my first original story to do so well.

And, of course, thank you to the beta readers, without whom Sunspot would simply not be possible. Softies, Maria, Zak, Cassiopeia, I know I thank you incessantly, but here’s an extra one.

Also, I’m thinking about bringing on a few new beta readers, maybe. If you’re interested, reach out in the Discord!

---

Let’s talk about what happens from now.

Tomorrow, you’ll see another chapter go up: an end-of-arc postmortem, in which I’ll ramble about Sunspot’s DNA. It’ll be fun!

2.01 dropped on Royal Road and on Scribblehub on October 11th, 2024. Which is a Friday. We’re releasing on Fridays, once a week. Specifically, three Fridays in a row, then one off. That’s right: starting next arc, Sunspot will be on a 3-1 schedule where I take the first week of every month off (approximately. there may be some drift at first). This is for planning’s sake; I want the story to be as good as possible, and doing enough roadmapping and writing ahead to ensure that while maintaining an average of 1200 words a day without breaks isn’t feasible for now.

Next up: along with 2.01 releasing publicly, 2.02 will also release, but only on the…

Patreon! Super happy to announce that you can now throw money at me every month to help support Sunspot and for benefits. Depending on the tier, rewards (starting when arc 2 does) will include:

• Being one week ahead of public chapters (note: as stated above, this inter-arc hiatus will still be a full three weeks for both public and Patreon. Gotta build up my backlog, you know how it is)
• Bonus dubiously-canon side stories which are mostly an excuse for me to spitball fun ideas, depending on the tier.
• Patreon-only discussion rooms in the Discord for discussion of those first two things

Further details are on the page.

Long term, I’d like to write Sunspot full time, and the idea of being able to support myself financially through writing is really exciting. But I don’t want to put the cart before the horse on that, so we’ll see how this goes. There are other ways to monetize, but I don’t want to sign onto a Kindle Unlimited exclusivity contract; I always want Sunspot to be free to read. Maybe the side stories could eventually be bundled for itch.io or something, though. Comments and suggestions appreciated!

So, yeah. That’s arc 1, done and dusted. To recap, big postmortem author’s note thing tomorrow, and after that, Sunspot will resume with Arc 2: Trick Of The Light on Friday, October 11.

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!

September 21, 2024

Hina’s response to the news was the opposite of what I had expected.

Opal actually didn’t give us any kind of directive to come straight home. No point when these events were happening on the other side of the world, she said; there was simply nothing for us to do about it. Other than some tweeting, which Todai’s PR apparatus was already on top of, the simple fact of distance meant there wasn’t anything the other Radiances could do to impact the situation in time. So Opal had figured that we might as well just keep on with our shopping if we wanted. I’d expected Hina to go along with that.

But Hina overruled her. Despite all her earlier insistence that we had nothing to fear from my stalker and her commitment to giving me a day on the town, she’d changed her tune completely when hearing that Heliotrope was in danger and that a serious inferno was kicking off. The moment she’d processed the news, she’d strangled a canine whine of distress in her throat, snatched her credit card back from me, and shooed me back into the changing room to get back into my clothes. Before the curtain had blocked my view, I saw her charge over to the registers, practically steamrolling the poor cashier in a jumble of Japanese that did not sound at all like the customer-service-negotiation script Opal had been using at Tochou.

When I got out and delivered my new clothes to her at the register, I saw the cashier almost cowering away from Hina. I’m nearly certain she had tugged down her sunglasses and given them a faceful of sapphire over the rims, pulling rank to expedite the process. I frowned and insisted to myself that the strange pressure in my chest was sympathy for the guy rather than jealousy that Hina was directing that behavior at somebody else.

“Do you have to terrorize the guy? Are we in that much of a rush?”

“Sorry! Yeah, we are. We’re going home right now.”

“Uh.” I was fine with that in principle, having gotten the most critical of the errands done, but I had a terrible premonition about the method. “We’re not going to teleport, are we?”

“Nah, too close to be worth it. We’re flying.” She bit her lip at how I shrank. “Not good with heights?”

“Um—I managed, earlier, with Opal.” I’d really rather we just took a taxi back, but in the face of her mania, I couldn’t muster enough of an objection.

“It’s not far, you’ll be okay,” she assured. “We’re like…a mile from home? So it’ll be up, over, down. Really more of a big jump. Just, um, keep your eyes shut.”

—

As I felt our trajectory arc back downward with no signs of a controlled descent, I clutched Hina pathetically, screaming my lungs out. The winter air whipped the sound away, overwhelming it with the awful howl that signaled I was moving far faster than a human body was ever really intended to go. I was about to be turned into a wet red smear on impact—Hina would probably have been fine, but I was only mundane flesh and blood, not built to survive these extreme forces. Right when it seemed we could fall no faster, we just—

Stopped, the air turning still and silent. It was a thoroughly unnatural sensation, no sense of extreme g-forces decelerating us, no commensurate rush of air indicating a change in our velocity. One moment, we had all the thunderous and final kinetic energy of an artillery shell, the next, we didn’t.

It took me a moment to realize that I’d slipped out of Hina’s arms and was now lying on something rough and hard. It was sweet, blessed, glorious concrete, and I could have kissed it for the way it was securely anchored to the ground. I savored the feeling of the very bedrock of the world against my front, the sky back above me where it belonged and not below, gravity’s terror neutered with my potential energy reduced to a flat zero.

“Why—” I asked between heaving breaths, eyes still squeezed shut as I tried to fight down the residual urge to vomit, “—the fuck—did we not—just teleport?”

Hina knelt next to me and rubbed my back, which helped.

“This close to home? I told you, not worth it. We would have had to go up like a thousand feet above the rooftops to get clear anyway, or it’d splash the whole neighborhood!”

“Bullshit,” I moaned. “I saw you do it yesterday.”

“Hm? Oh, in the hallway? Nah, that was just translating up and out, not a real big-girl teleport. But—damn, sorry, I didn’t realize you were as bad with heights as Yuuka. Hey,” she prodded, “up, up. Let’s get you downstairs and outta the cold, I’ll have Ebi make you a nice cup of hot chocolate while you guys check in with Yuuka, okay?”

“…Downstairs?”

“Yeah. We’re still on the roof—oh, shit—”

Aggravated by the revelation that we were still sixty meters off the ground, the urge to vomit almost won, and I pushed myself to my knees to retch, trying in vain not to expel the chicken sandwich—

Something pricked my neck, and the nausea vanished. I flopped back down onto the concrete in relief before finally opening my eyes to look up at Ebi.

“Thanks. Fuck.”

“Mhm. Back early?”

“How’s Yuuka?” Hina cut in. “Amane’s probably freaked, right? I know we got here before the ripple hit, but you should be with her! Cutie here wasn’t going to throw up anyway.”

“Yes I was,” I coughed.

I lay slumped there for another few bleary half-retches while my body disseminated the memo that we were not in fact about to hurl. When I finally recovered myself enough to sit up, then stand with Ebi’s help, I was able to appreciate the spell circle that had arrested our lethal descent. The roof of Lighthouse Tower had essentially a whole magical landing pad atop it, with inertial dampeners and soundproofing glyphs to keep the entire neighborhood from filing noise complaints.

Once I was sure that I was in fact fine to stand, I separated from Ebi and cast a foul look at Hina. I would have preferred literally any other mode of transport to this, especially because—

“What the hell was the rush?”

“I’m just dropping you off!” She dumped our shopping bags onto the rooftop and began to pace back toward the middle of the spell circle. “Gonna go over and help Yuuka.”

“It’s—it’s on the other side of the world! It took you two hours—” I glanced at Ebi, who nodded in confirmation of the number, “—to get me here from Britain; there’s no way it won’t be over by the time you get there. What’s there to do?”

“Wasn’t my top speed.”

“No,” came Opal’s voice, “absolutely not.”

Hina rounded on the doorway to the stairwell, a twitchy, jerky motion of barely contained energy, and barked something in reply. Opal stepped out into the afternoon sun, tail lashing, hands on her hips.

“Stay.”

“I’m going.”

“You’re not. I just got off the phone with Uchida-san.”

“I don’t take orders from Ministers,” Hina spat.

Opal’s eyes narrowed to glinting slits of solar orange. The winter air had turned from ‘frosty’ to ‘brisk’ to ‘tepid’ as she advanced and was now progressing toward ‘balmy’, ribbons of steam coming off her tail behind her.

“Actually, you do. And even if you didn’t, your stunt with the Peacies the other day—” she jabbed a finger at me with such viciousness that I flinched despite knowing I wasn’t the target of her ire, “—has put us in phenomenally deep shit with the Ministry. Phenomenally. You of all people showing up to interfere with a PCTF operation now would fuck things even more royally. And—fuckin’ hell, Hina, you know this! I might have to explain this to him—” she pointed at me again, a softer gesture this time, “but not you! And he’s right, by the by—once you get there, there’d not even be anything for you to do other than butcher the grab team if they’re still around, which is the main reason you want to go, because we both know Yuuka can take care of herself.”

The hyena and the dragon stared each other down in the middle of the spell circle. Hina had remained studiously silent through Opal’s tirade, but her lips curled into a nasty smirk at that last part. Being a bystander to the war of wills was taxing, even paralytic; if I moved, I’d be instantly pounced on. Even Ebi’s irreverence had been steamrolled into silence by the overwhelming pressure, though she was faring much better in the heat than I was—my paralysis was broken as I was forced to squirm out of my jacket to compensate, feeling further exposed without the protective shell. Even in just the Sailor Moon t-shirt, I was still hot—little wonder when the heat around Opal had become extreme enough to make her image shimmer.

After what felt like minutes of tense, explosive silence—probably only fifteen or twenty seconds in hindsight—Hina turned away from her friend and clenched her fists.

“I can’t do nothing,” she growled. “If Yuuka’s not going to stop them either, that guy’s as good as dead.”

She took a step forward which fluidly dropped into a coiling crouch, preparing to leap skyward—then aborted out and turned slowly back toward us, looking past us at the stairwell with an expression on her face that I had no idea how to parse. I followed her gaze and saw Amane, out of her mantle, leaning on the doorframe.

“Iku na yo.”

No translation needed: Don’t go. Not a plea; the order had come out level, flat, and rock-hard. The fight instantly left Hina, the tension visibly draining from her body, and she trudged back over to Opal to wrap her in a big hug, the same kind she had given me earlier, leaning bodily onto her best friend and burying her face in the dragon’s collar. Opal relaxed too, returning the hug as the air temperature began to plummet from the crucible of her Flame’s runoff back down to the natural chill of the season. The two muttered to one another, reconciliatory words not meant for the rest of our ears. Ebi left my side to go to Amane, who was looking—remarkably good, at least compared to our previous limited interactions, but clearly faring the cold just as poorly as me. Ebi hurried us back down the stairs and into the warmth of the penthouse.

—

The Thunder Horse Inferno, as the incident in the Gulf of Mexico would later come to be called—named for the oil platform—had taken a while to reach the threshold of damage to earn the title. Even right from the start, the very fact that the flamefall had landed on an oil rig had everybody from local news to PCTF analysts to we in the chatroom all calling it an inferno. Perhaps that was a little bloodthirsty from all of us, but even though the anonymous flametouched seemed to have successfully taken to his new power, it seemed inevitable that the situation would turn hot.

All parties had done their due diligence in the opening hours of the standoff. An hour after the Vaetna’s isolating cage had gone up, a PCTF rapid response air squadron had shown up to test it. In a video taken from one of the Coast Guard vessels that had gathered a healthy distance from the barrier, I watched the arcing, crackling bolts of ripple munitions rend the air until they struck the shimmering barrier and shattered into multicolored streaks like iridescent fireworks. I privately held the opinion that magic-based armaments were a fair sight more beautiful than the explosives and firearms of yesteryear. Never as beautiful as the Vaetna, though, with their immense hammer blows of focused magic and supernaturally elegant bladework.

Case in point—Brianna, the Vaetna taking point for the operation, told the gunships to back off by simply throwing her dagger really, really fast. Hypersonically fast, in fact—and somehow twice at once, targeting both gunships. The twin shock cones of the vaet split the predawn sky far more decisively than the chaotic bursts of magic from before. They tore away the gunships’ kinetic dissipation wards in vivid green bursts of light that unfolded mere centimeters from their hulls, a display of absurd precision, a clear warning shot. From the video’s vantage point, the scene was practically a work of art, the contrails forming a V that ended in falling petals of viridian magic. Simply gorgeous, desktop-worthy, and I felt a jolt of envy in my belly at the simple, overwhelming purity of the bladework.

I mollified my stomach with a sip of the hot chocolate Hina had promised me. She’d also vented the worst of her jittery, frustrated energy by blasting some of the clothes we had bought with hot air, a quicker substitute for putting them through a cycle in the clothes drier, transforming them into a wonderfully cozy carapace of comfort. I’d donned the heavy, heat-soaked garments and curled up on the sofa in the common area of the penthouse’s upper level, cross-referencing my news sources on my phone as I waited for the other Radiances to settle in before we called Heliotrope.

After that warning shot, the Peacies had gotten the message and had retreated to a safer distance, and the stalemate had begun; they seemed content to wait it out. Over the next two days, they’d brought in heavier assets, most prominently a pair of US destroyers with much heavier guns, but they had made no attempt to punch through the cage and provoke the Spire more. Indeed, they weren’t the ones who broke the stalemate.

Rather, that storm of buzzing on my phone had been because Bri had suddenly fled the field. I had hopped around several news outlets, Twitter feeds, and finally resorted to confirming with the chatroom directly, unable to believe what I was reading, and they’d all said the same thing: the Vaetna had simply…left, given up on the stalemate. Which was simply not a thing they did.

Admittedly, it was slightly more complex than that: Bri had boarded the rig for all of five minutes, then a huge spike of ripple had rocked the entire volume of the cage—no visible explosions or other signs of combat, though. She’d emerged moments later, no newly minted flamebearer in tow, and made a beeline to speak to Heliotrope and had words before launching off back toward the Spire. We were about to find out what had been said straight from the Radiance herself. I had gotten a bit jittery at the exclusivity, itching to understand why the hell the Vaetna had simply left. Opal hurried over to sit next to me and set up her laptop, and soon there was a bloop as the call connected.

The fires blooming from the rig offscreen cast Heliotrope’s face in orange rim light, just about the only light source in the inky midnight darkness until she turned on a lamp that illuminated her more properly. She was sitting in a little pseudo-campsite she had deployed from her jetbike, a suspended LM platform big enough for her to lay out a chair. The whole setup was floating some indeterminate height above the water; I was grateful the camera’s limited view didn’t give me enough perspective to get heightsick. I’d had quite enough of that for one day. She squinted at us with her one visible eye, the other hidden by long bangs.

“You’re Ezzen? The scientist?”

“Um. Yes. Hi?” It wasn’t the right time to be doing introductions; I cut to the chase. There would be time to uncover why she had an Australian accent later. “What did Brianna say? Why’d she leave?”

“Hello! I’m—yeah, okay,” she glanced away from the camera, in the direction of the burning oil platform’s firelight. “She didn’t give a straight answer. Weird as hell. She just told me to not go aboard.”

“What, and just leave him for the Peacies?”

“He’s a ‘lost cause’.” She mimed air-quotes.

I frowned. That wasn’t how the Vaetna did things at all. Before we could continue the line of discussion, Hina squeezed into the frame I had been sharing with Opal in front of her laptop, smushing herself between us.

“Yuuka! Yuuuuuuka! Youuuu-kay? Alice said you were on board but it looks like you’re not and I guess that’s probably because Uchida told you to fuck off but he told me that too and since I’m not going and the Vaetna aren’t there then you have to!”

Heliotrope’s expression curdled a little. Beasts keep out, the sign on her door said; her dislike for her canine teammate was audible in the response she gave even though I couldn’t understand the Japanese. Hina, for her part, was still practically bouncing off the walls with worry, trying to keep herself contained by sort of wrapping herself around Opal with all four limbs and resting her chin on her shoulder as those big blue eyes looked at Heliotrope with naked concern.

“English, Yuuka! We’re trying to make cutie feel included.”

Heliotrope snorted derisively.

“You’ve nicknamed him already? How long until you break his hips? Drink his blood yet?”

“Uh, dunno yet, maybe a—”

“Yuuka!” Opal objected over Hina as my ears began to burn. “Mahou shoujo! He’s had a very trying few days, and I won’t have you making jokes at Hina’s expense when she’s worried sick about you. Are you going to come on back?”

“M-mm, wanna help.” She flipped the camera to point at the oil platform. “When the shield went down and Brianna-chan left, everything moved, and now I don’t see a path where I can get on the…nantte iu…platform. It’s really bright there. I start fighting the monsters, it always ends in—gan!” She brought her hand into the frame and mimed an explosion. “I guess that’s what Brianna-chan meant about not going aboard. Still weird. Did you tell Uchida to fuck off and die?”

“Alice won’t let me talk to him!” Hina pouted.

“Wonder why,” chirped Ebi from the peanut gallery behind us, out of frame.

“Shame. Anyway, unless the Ministry clears us and I see a window, I’m just waiting here. Gonna get into mantle and help the kaiho fight the fire whenever they’re ready. Amane, iru?”

“Iru yo! Kiotsukete!” she chimed in reply.

Amethyst waved a massive crystalline arm behind the tops of our heads in the little picture-in-picture of our side of the video call. She’d re-mantled, claimed the vast beanbag chair at the center of the sitting area, and was now sharing it with Ai, who’d woken up for just long enough to trudge up the stairs and flop next to her crystalline teammate as we’d been settling in for the call. Amethyst was probably the least cuddle-able person in the world—all hard planes and spiny bits—but Ai’s sleeping body was making an admirable attempt, bolstered by a few pillows that Ebi had retrieved acting as anti-spike insulation. If you ignored the fact that there was currently a major international incident and potential environmental disaster going on just out of frame, the Radiances could have passed for a group of roommates checking in on their friend’s camping trip. But the Vaetna’s involvement—or rather, uncharacteristic lack thereof—made it hard for me to entertain that illusion for long.

“Incredibly fuckin’ weird.” That was mostly for myself, muttered underneath the Radiances’ chatter. “She’s just leaving the poor guy to the wolves?”

“Oi. I’m working within my limits here, ya pom.”

“Hirai Yuuka!” Alice roared, a matriarchal full-name rebuke. “Be nice!”

“I—I meant Brianna,” I stammered. “I get you don’t have the obligation or license to interfere. But the Vaetna do, so…”

Hina and Opal shifted as one next to me, Hina’s limbs tightening around her teammate as the dragon’s tail thumped unhappily on the carpet. Where I was concerned with the irregularity in the Vaetna’s behavior, the Radiances had made it clear that they really just wanted the PCTF to lose. Yuuka gave voice to the sentiment.

“If the whole thing weren’t so—” she waved vaguely in the direction of the fires, “—like that, if I could get on there without it blowing up, I’d already be on there, fuck what the Ministry says.” She made a frustrated noise. “They can’t get away with it. We’ve killed snatchers before, and I’d do it again. It’s—”

Then the rim lighting from the burning rig flashed far brighter for a moment, and she flinched, head spinning. I caught the briefest glint of crimson from under those long bangs as her hair swished from the motion.

“Fuck. They’re fighting for real, now. If you’re not going to yell at Uchida—”

“Mm. You know how it is. Hands are tied.”

That came from Alice, delivered with an apologetic wince, and Hina also whined behind us. Heliotrope sighed.

“Right, of course. Containment only, then. Ja ne.”

“We’ll leave you to it. Kiotsukete.”

The call cut out, and Hina released her grip on Alice to flop backward onto the floor.

“This sucks! I can’t go, Yuuka can’t spill some fuckin’ blood, and the Vaetna fucked all the way off? What gives? We’re all just gonna let the fucking Peacies walk in and take one of our cousins? The hell!” She tilted her head on the carpet to look at me. “Cutie, you’re the Vaetnaboo. Why the hell did she leave?”

“Not a clue.” I’d had my phone in my lap for the duration of the call, bouncing ideas back and forth with the chatroom, forecasting the situation’s outcome and comparing this incident to similar flamefalls as we aggregated the reports from various news sources. But the Spire had provided no explanation. I rubbed my face. “The last time the Vaetna just quit the field like that was Dubai, and that was like…easily a hundred times worse than this. And telling Heliotrope not to interfere either? They know something we don’t, but I haven’t a damn clue what.”

“Or she doesn’t want to aggravate the Peacies,” Ebi suggested.

“They’re already at war.”

Hina put in a frustrated growl, extracted herself the rest of the way from Opal, rose to her feet, and began to pace restlessly.

“It’s—fuck, Alice, we gotta do something. Uchida just doesn’t want us to straight up fight them, right? So let’s…I don’t know. I’m bad at subtle, that’s your job. Wuhwuhmisd?”

It took me a minute to parse the jumble of sounds as “WWMSD” and reverse engineer that to “what would mahou shoujo do?” Opal didn’t respond, tail thumping on the carpet as she stared at the concluded call screen on her laptop. While she thought, Hina poured a glass of hot tea from the pitcher next to the computer and paced over to Amethyst, mumbling something in Japanese at her as she shook Ai. The Emerald Radiance stirred with a grunt, opened her eyes blearily—visibly jumped at the sapphire orbs right in her face. She sat up as far as the giant beanbag would permit and blinked away the residue of sleep, accepting the tea and sipping from it gratefully. She looked like she’d slept well, but was still sort of booting up, unfocused until her eyes wandered over to me. She pointed at her right foot, and I gave her a thumbs up. Her prosthetic had been so good to me today.

Hina and Amethyst began to discuss their options, quite literally behind Opal’s back—and figuratively behind mine. Damn this language barrier. I glanced plaintively at Ebi, who nudged Ai, who called over to Opal, who at last mustered a halting response to Hina’s earlier question.

“Mahou shoujo ni sokushite…I don’t…know. We—it’s not our fight. If the Vaetna just left, it has to have been for a reason. That’s as good a sign as any not to interfere.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“Cutie?”

I blinked as all the Radiances looked at me. I had said that? It had just come out automatically. I tried to keep going with it.

“Um—you—you all hate the Peacies, yeah? I can put that on the table, right? Like, really, profoundly hate them.” Hina and Amethyst nodded; Opal and Ai didn’t deny it. “I don’t quite know how to feel about that yet. But if you feel you should do something—you ought to.” Ensheathed in my armor, I was finding my rhythm, the security to say what I otherwise wouldn’t. “You interfered for me. Saved me, gave me this prosthetic, let me intrude on your lives, for some reason.” My gaze fell on Hina, Ai and Opal in turn. “That’s what you did for Amethyst, isn’t it? I don’t have the full story, but…that’s what happened, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Opal breathed.

Hina growled, deep in her chest.

Ai said nothing, shifting her gaze from Amethyst to Ebi. The mecha and the android looked back at her, silently remembering some additional part of their history I hadn’t picked up on yet. I pushed on.

“Yeah, so—that bloke on that oil platform deserves a fighting chance, too. As much as she or I did. Todai is one of the most magically capable groups in the world, short of the Spire. We can’t do nothing.”

The wake of my rambling little speech left a profound and heavy silence, only cushioned by the last few words of Ebi interpreting what I had said for Amethyst. Alice’s expression had taken on a rather piscine aspect, staring unblinkingly as her mouth worked, open and closed. In accordance, my face was reddening; I hadn’t meant to quote Hina at the end there, nor include myself in the “we”. Hina broke the quiet.

“I knew picking you up was the right call, cutie. What’s the plan?”

“…I don’t know. Um.” I looked around the space we were sitting in. “I could use a whiteboard.”

—

Five minutes later, we’d pulled up the diagrams of all five Radiances’ mantles into a GWalk file on my laptop and projected the whole thing onto the big presentation screen in the meeting room.

“Y’know, this is a huge violation of our data security policies,” Ebi pointed out.

“Ebi, rest assured, I’m not about to put this out on the forums. You’ve probably already got a backdoor into this thing anyway. Marker.”

Ebi performed a mildly disturbing, exaggerated eye roll as she tossed me one of the markers. I caught it without looking and felt extremely cool—pushed that emotion to the side. There was magic to be done. I jabbed bullet points onto the whiteboard.

“So, we want to: one, help Heliotrope save that flamebearer; two, do that from the other side of the world; and three, without implicating Todai so that the Ministry of…?”

“Kokka kouan iinkai,” Alice supplied. “Public Safety, basically.”

“Ministry of Putting Magical Girls on Leashes,” Hina opined.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Alice shot back. She seemed very torn about this whole thing, but at least she still had it in her to banter.

“So that the Ministry,” I compromised, “can’t trace it back to us in a way that would get Todai in trouble. Yeah? Anything to add?”

Ai raised a hand. As we’d assembled our resources, she’d gradually woken up more, aided by a can of coffee she’d retrieved from the fridge, and was already fiddling with a diagram on her own laptop.

“Sub-six red ripple, for Ishikawa-chan’s sake.”

“Oh. Last night’s…?”

“Yes. Too much red is bad for her.”

“Even local? Not just in her own weave?”

She nodded, and I obligingly added the constraint to the GWalk diagram. As of yet, it wasn’t anything resembling a functional lattice, just a toolbox of options. The mantles were joined by a collection of several hundred other prebuilt glyph chains that I’d accumulated over the years, various useful presets and common collocations to speed up ideation. And time was indeed of the essence here, with the rig ablaze and the flamebearer apparently now fighting for his freedom. The Ezzence, even. Moth hated that joke.

As I’d been setting up my workspace and considering those first three constraints, my thoughts had inevitably wandered back toward my encounter with the magical stalker. You’re not supposed to be able to see me, she’d said. And while I still didn’t understand why that was, it did suggest that the technique was stealthy enough for what we needed here. I dragged and dropped a scrying lattice onto the grid, a beautiful and intricate second-order weave abstracted to a few rectangles connected by colored lines, and consulted the predicted ripple readout. Red-white. Hina saw where I was going with it.

“Hey, yeah, that looks more or less like how it felt.”

For her part, Hina was pacing, and it was getting distracting—because it was impossible. She’d walk the length of the whiteboard on the opposite wall from the projector, but somehow, she never reached the other end or turned around. I resisted the urge to boggle—had she casually constructed a closed spatial loop just for the luxury of pacing without having to change direction? What would happen if I stuck my hand in her path? Not the time, Ez.

“Yeah, that’s the idea, seems as good a place to start as any,” I replied on autopilot, scrolling through the list of glyphs to see what could be done about the red. “If it was this sort of spine, then extending it all the way to…sixteen thousand kilometers, or however far, shouldn’t be a problem. Depends on what exactly we’re going to be doing with it, though.”

“Like how what felt? Last night’s pulse didn’t have white ripple like that, did it?”

Alice’s question, delivered from the chair across from mine, was exactly what we didn’t need right now. My scrolling slowed fractionally.

“Uh—”

“I was just messing around while we were out. Wanted to show him Shinjuku-eki from above, since you didn’t get to go up on the viewing deck.”

“What? Yes we did, I took him up—oh.” She sighed. “Ezzen, you didn’t have to lie about that. It’s alright to be afraid of heights. I told you Hina wouldn’t judge you for anything.”

“Oh, you did? Cutie. Cutie! She’s right, you don’t have to lie.”

I broke out in a sweat, embarrassed. The gentle rebuke of Opal’s sympathy was bad enough—Hina seemed to be twisting the knife for her own enjoyment. Still, I couldn’t exactly resent her for it; her deflection had averted a much worse lying-related debacle we didn’t have time for, so I thought a thank you very hard in her general direction and attempted to push down the various emotions and work the problem. I found the next glyph for the chain.

“Okay, we can deal with getting the range after, but the first requirement is the big one.”

I scrolled around the Radiances’ mantle diagrams, looking for inspiration and trying to piece together their capabilities. In some ways, this was incredibly invasive; even abstracted down to diagrams and notation, these lattices described their bodies in exhaustive detail. There was a lot of customization between each one; for example, Hina was the only one who had a functioning sense of smell. I stopped when I saw something weird in Amethyst’s mantle, turning to squint at its physical incarnation attached to the mecha-girl sitting next to Opal in an oversized chair. I hadn’t noticed it before, folded away into her arm.

“You’ve got the weave for a KV-18.”

Amethyst seemed to understand that just fine without translation, and Hina chuckled.

“She could sink those destroyers out there on her own.”

“Where’s…the barrel? Doesn’t it need…” I looked back at the diagram and saw the trick. “Oh. Tunnel. Clever.” Then what Hina had said caught up to me. “Wait, what? Zumwalt-class destroyers have wards rated to .14 Vn. That only goes to, like, .09.”

“Upgunned. It’s more like a mark 20,” Ai clarified for her teammate. “See the extra coil? We got it to around .16, then leakage interference stopped us from going higher.”

Alice sighed in response to my dumbfounded look.

“It’s not PACT-compliant, but—”

“—you don’t fight wars,” I finished. Maybe Todai being under Public Safety’s jurisdiction let them slip under the Paranatural Armaments Control Treaty on some technicality. More likely, they were functionally impossible to really hold accountable, short of the Vaetna showing up and asking politely that they knock off the weapons development.

It was tricky for a mecha made of flowing gemstones to look smug, but Amethyst pulled it off. And she was right to; this was a frankly absurd amount of firepower. Overkill. To fight what?

I shelved that line of thought and looked at Heliotrope’s mantle instead, wondering if our best option was to somehow boost the power. On paper, it looked like that wasn’t necessary; she wasn’t carrying the equivalent of shipboard ordnance, but she still had a variety of energy projection meshes that really looked like they’d be overkill to fight off a PCTF snatch team and make her exit. I was distracted from the offensive capabilities by an extremely strange sensory chunk none of the others had. I had no idea what to make of it—and it had been a long, long time since I’d felt this lost looking at a series of glyphs. No time for pretending I knew what it was.

“This section. What’s it for?”

“Precognition.”

I stuck a finger in my ear and rubbed around, wondering if maybe it was clogged with earwax and I hadn’t heard Alice right.

“Excuse me?”

“Mhm! Yuuka can see silver. You think my eyes are weird, she’s on a whole other level. Didn’t you hear her talking about seeing the rig go boom?”

“I—” I actually hadn’t been paying attention to that part at the time, preoccupied with wondering what the hell was going on with Brianna. “That’s not a thing.”

“Sure is. It’s not, like, a path to victory or anything, just blurbs.”

I sat back in my chair. This was entirely too much on top of the rest of this.

“Fuckin’—hell. Wait, if you can mimic that in the mantle, why not give it to all of you?”

“Doesn’t work like that.”

“Sacrifice,” Ebi intoned. “She’s got the whole cursed eye thing, very chuuni.”

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay,” I repeated. “Okay. That’s—shelving that.” I had many questions and not enough time to answer them right now. “We have to be able to do something with that. Um—she said her main problem was just that the rig would blow up before she could make an impact if she went aboard, yeah? Why the hell hadn’t Bri at least stabilized that part? Can we do that instead? Kill combustion in some radius around the platform?”

“We don’t have that kind of juice, cutie.”

“Well, why the hell else would she have gone out there in the first place? Heliotrope, I mean. What was her plan? Does she do firefighting?”

Alice put her face in her hands.

“No, she’s just—impulsive. She foresaw that something was going to happen to an oil platform, and her green thumb couldn’t stomach that, so she just went without really having a plan. We didn’t know it’d be a whole thing; she shouldn’t be there. But because the Peacies are involved, now she’s out for blood. At least she’s not dumb enough to just go charging in.” That last part was clearly a jab at her sapphire teammate.

“I could have handled it,” Hina shot back. She stopped her bizarre infinite pacing. “It’s feeling a little like either ‘save the rig’ or ‘save the flamebearer’, guys.”

She quit her pacing to lie on the floor, splayed out. It couldn’t have been comfortable on the hardwood, but she was weird like that. Ai nodded.

“PCTF Twitter just said they’ve gotten a lifeboat with the sickest crew members away from the platform. It’s not everybody, but…the rig itself might be beyond saving.”

I blinked at how utilitarian that analysis was.

“You’re saying we should just help Yuuka wing it? And risk an infernal oil spill?”

“Yes. Once the platform has nobody on it but the target and the PCTF…”

“Peacies are probably thinking of that too,” Hina pointed out from her new position, out of sight from where I was sitting. “This is too complicated. She should just go in and start cracking heads. Alice?”

Alice flinched; she very obviously didn’t want to be responsible for another international relations debacle. She indicated that third point on the whiteboard.

“We cannot be seen to interfere with them. Ai, if we were to just let the rig collapse or explode or what have you, how would we deal with the Peacies without also hitting the flamebearer?”

For reply, Ai turned her laptop toward Amethyst, who provided some glittering commentary which Ebi summarized as:

“I can make it look like an accident.”

“Uh.” I frowned. “Make…what look like an accident?”

Ai explained, indicating the gun’s lattice diagram up on the big screen.

“What if the part of the rig the Peacies were on just…exploded? So that it can’t be traced to us.”

“Can she do that?”

“Amethyst has incredible aim,” Alice put in, listening to her teammate’s ringing voice. “She can get them without also hitting him in the crossfire.”

“From the other side of the planet?” Even the Vaetna struggled with that.

“Hey!” Hina objected. “I can’t go, but now you want Amane to?”

“I didn’t say she’d go. Ezzen—oh, looks like you’ve already got ideas.”

Indeed, I did; I’d begun to hook things together in the GWalk grid as the seed of an idea had formed.

The LM projection lattice from earlier could plausibly connect to Amethyst’s gun in a few different ways, but power across distance was a real concern, even assuming we could maintain accuracy. Ripple leakage for LM was generally quartic with distance, which is why the Radiances couldn’t send their mantles far from their real bodies, and even the Vaetna struggled to apply blue-pink ripple further than a hundred kilometers without devastating side effects…

Unless they had an anchor.

—

“You want to what?”

“You’re the spotter, Amethyst is the sniper, Hina facilitates the distance. We’ve run the numbers; it can work.”

It wasn’t actually that simple. Amethyst’s mantle was here in the room with us, and shooting at the other side of the planet took some ingenuity. I’d taken inspiration from the scrying projection trick we thought my stalker had used, and Hina was confident she could riff on that to bridge the insane distance by using Heliotrope’s own mantle as an anchor and sensory input.

“That’s…” Heliotrope scratched her head. “Mad. You’re mad. Let’s do it.”

The situation on the platform had worsened. While we had been discussing our options and diagramming the exact procedure, another explosion had rocked the structure, and had actually lingered as a splintered ball of green light that had consumed much of the living quarters. In an awful way, it made our decision easier; it was now unlikely there was anybody left aboard other than our John Doe and the PCTF forces. Pretty much our only constraints were that we didn’t hit him or detonate the entire rig with a bad ripple interaction. Averting an oil spill was obviously a priority, too, but Heliotrope had made some progress with that while we’d been working, binding off the main pipeline.

Amane had dropped her mantle and was working with Ai to modify her gun for the job, the two of them spinning luminous thread between their fingers so quickly that I was completely unable to pick out which glyphs they were working on; I just trusted they were following the diagram we had worked out. Normally, the cannon projected a beam, but what we really wanted was a point-and-click explosion at a target to obfuscate that we were the ones behind it. That had actually been a surprisingly simple change once Ai and I had put our heads together, only needing to change the last glyph in the chain and adjust some of the tension in the amplifier.

The gun still required line of sight, which actually played to our favor; the idea was that by making it project from Yuuka’s line of sight rather than Amethyst’s, we could make full use of her foresight to find an exact spot to aim that would only disrupt or disable the Peacies without further collateral damage. That part of the weaving was Hina’s job, building a connection point between their mantles in a way that didn’t care about distance in threespace. That felt like the sketchiest part of the whole affair from a magical standpoint, evoking the horror stories of failed compression bridging creating fused abominations, and I would never have condoned this approach without hours or even days of thoroughly examining the task and wrapping my head around the glorious, dizzyingly complex construction of their mantles.

But Alice and Ai’s expertise in the exact mechanics of their transformations had won me over; they’d supposedly done this before. As Alice had explained it, Heliotrope wasn’t directly connecting her Flame to Amethyst, not in any permanent sense; they weren’t being stitched together, more like creating a hitch knot that could transfer tension between the weaves without enmeshing their two souls. And Hina’s mastery of spatial manipulation—allegedly unmatched, at least outside of the Spire—made it possible across the insane distance. I was nursing a hunch that we were reinventing the principle behind the Spire’s Gates, just for a very different purpose.

Only four minutes after we’d committed to the plan, it seemed like the preparations were ready. I ran down the list I’d scrawled on the whiteboard. I was shaking a bit; we were about to perform real, high-grade magic.

“Ordnance modifications, check; spatial link, check; sensory link…check? Ai?”

“Check on our end. Yuuka, nuikonde iku OK.”

Heliotrope nodded and began to modify her own mantle to match the diagram we had sent over, spinning a crimson thread from her skein, not the pure white I was accustomed to from the Vaetna and myself. The vermillion light cast her silhouette against the midnight darkness as she connected to the gun. I muttered at Alice sitting next to me.

“You were right, she did get on board easy.”

“Of course. It’s plenty mahou shoujo. Team combo attack. Used to have to do it a lot more when we didn’t have as much Flame to work with.”

Even with the reassurance they’d done this before, I had a bit of a fright when Amane twitched and went limp, her eyes rolling back in her head. It lasted only a moment, and then she shook herself—a hiss and crackle filled the air as she re-mantled, massive and shimmering. Not hulking, exactly, too slender for that, but she still went from a girl of average height to a mecha made of gemstones. She looked down at her crystalline hands and checked the rest of her body.

“Tsunagatte…dekita you desu.”

With that confirmation, Heliotrope mantled as well, a flash of red light blinding her phone’s camera for a moment—from what I’d seen of her mantle’s diagram, it didn’t actually do that in person, only to digital cameras. When the video feed recovered, she was in full costume.

From her chest spilling over the corset binding her midriff, to the layered, lacy skirt that barely reached past her hips, and the thigh-high socks with ribbons on the hems, all of it came together to give her transformation the impression of a cosplayer’s outfit rather than the exceptionally high-grade magical combat frame it supposedly was. Her hair had gotten far longer and taken on a rich, dark-red tone that shone as a glossy curtain in the light of the burning oil rig. The word ‘fanservice’ wandered through my mind again, and I averted my eyes so that I wouldn’t get caught on details like the exposed sideboob or the choker. We had bigger priorities right now—but I couldn’t ignore the eye.

The bangs that had before covered her right eye were now bound back by a bow, revealing Heliotrope’s “cursed eye”. Black sclera surrounded a dark-green iris punched through the center with a crimson, square pupil. Where Hina and Alice’s eyes were cosmetic side effects of other changes, this was a bona fide magical organ, and my skin crawled as her gaze passed over me, unblinking, no eyelid for the multicolored gem. It felt like she could see my soul; that wasn’t quite how her foresight worked, from the brief explanation I’d been given, but it was still a mercy when the horrible eye passed over me to Amethyst. They launched into a rapid back-and-forth, Amethyst’s glimmering chimes against her teammate’s somewhat-tinny voice through the low-bitrate video call.

Amethyst unfolded her cannon, concentric rings flowing up and out of her right arm, deploying into a twisting series of collars for the energy that bulked out her arm significantly with spindly support structures and resonance spines to catch and twist the ripple into a secondary set of ephemeral glyphs. But for the moment, the weapon was inert, and she and Heliotrope were just running diagnostics. On Heliotrope’s end, there was no physical manifestation of the gun at all; it was essentially a pure psychomotive point-and-shoot. Satisfied with the connection, she turned the camera to point at the oil rig again.

“Whoa. Ha! Yeah, this is changing things.”

“Do you see a place to aim? One that’ll take out the PCTF team on the platform?”

“Yeah, a few. I can’t see what happens after, though. I can’t actually get involved, deshou?”

Alice winced.

“He’s on his own after that. This is all we can really do. If he’s evaded capture for the past…” she checked her watch, “fifteen minutes, he’s got a good enough grasp on his Light that hopefully getting him some breathing room on the platform will give him a chance to run for it, get toward the Spire.”

“If they take him,” Ai pointed out. I frowned.

“They will. I don’t know what Bri was doing, but—they always grant asylum. It probably has to do with the platform itself, not him.”

“Or maybe Zero-Day or somebody else will take that as their cue,” Alice reasoned. “Either way, this is the best we can hope for, so we’re doing it. Ezzen’s right, he deserves that much.”

Heliotrope blinked.

“Oh, it’s his idea?” She grinned. “Good work. Shikata nai nara…tsubushite yarimashou!”

On the laptop screen, she took aim. She was actually still lounging in her chair, but was looking intently at the blob of lights that was how the camera saw the oil rig. I glanced over at Ebi on reflex for translation.

“We’re ready?”

“That’s not quite what she said, but yeah.”

Hina chuckled.

Next to us, Amethyst spooled up her gun. Her thread was bright white, like mine, but left a violet afterimage in my vision as it ran around the circumference of her arm, tensioning off the spines and crossing the loops like a series of concentric dreamcatchers that formed a series of first-order glyphs. She looked around the room, hefting the loaded cannon, careful not to point it directly at any of us but unsure where exactly it should be pointed on the off chance something went wrong with the hitch. I glanced nervously at Ai, who gave me a reassuring smile.

“It’ll work.”

Amethyst settled on just pointing the gun straight upward; better it blew through the ceiling and harmlessly into the sky than hit one of the surrounding buildings. Her confirmation of readiness rang through the room, and I held my breath. I think Alice was just as nervous as I was, but Hina seemed at ease, even eager, confident in both her handiwork and that we were doing the right thing.

A pressure gathered in my sinuses as the magical artillery reached final readiness. That probably wasn’t a result of it interacting with my Flame, just the very fractional unavoidable portion of ripple leakage doing odd things to the air pressure in the room. Another brief, confirmatory back-and-forth between Amethyst and Heliotrope, and she pulled the trigger.

Ripple propagated backward through the weave of the cannon, up from the circles around Amethyst’s wrist through her forearm, making the entire assemblage shimmer and contort around the spines, a great raptor’s talons. Then it all flashed at once, and that was it on our end. After a moment, the blast of cold air hit me, virtually the only significant ripple leakage, setting my teeth chattering as I huddled further into my heavy clothes. I released the breath I’d been holding in a wispy puff and looked back at the video call as Amethyst lowered her gun and let the glyphs dissipate in my peripheral vision.

Somebody had taken a great chunk out of the oil platform’s superstructure with an ice cream scoop. Oh, no—we had done that. The left half of the superstructure was just gone, and flame billowed from the newly exposed corridors and rooms. The edge of the severed zone was melted as though superheated, molten metal sloughing downward onto the main deck. My phone exploded into a storm of buzzing in my pocket. Hina cheered, almost a howl.

“Take that!”

Off in the side of the frame, Heliotrope was nodding at her handiwork and fiddled with her phone camera to zoom in as far as it’d go so we could inspect our handiwork. A tiny figure, barely a few dark pixels almost drowned out against the flames, stumbled out from one of the gaping cavities that had been an interior space seconds prior. My stomach twisted as they fell to their knees, and then half-slid, half-melted down off the edge of the void we had blasted, vanishing from view into the molten heap accumulating below.

“Zen’in!” Heliotrope confirmed. “That was the last one. Our cousin is fine, too. Great plan, Ezzen.”

“No, no, no no nono—”

I’d just killed them all. I’d consigned that team of Peacie abductors, abhorrent as they were, to a visceral, awful death. Of course we had—we had fired the equivalent of naval ordnance directly at them. Of course we were going to kill them. My hand hurt, aggravated by the cold snap and the way I was gripping the table’s edge so hard it was starting to bruise. Dead. How many? A dozen? It didn’t matter. They were all dead now. All because I had wanted to do real magic to save one guy.

“I—I—I thought…” I stared glassy-eyed at Alice, mouth dry. “You let me do that.”

Her draconic eyes were fixed on the carnage onscreen as the fires continued to spread. Her tail wasn’t moving. Oily disgust and self-loathing bubbled through my soul. Anger at them, too—how could they have permitted this? Hina came around the table, hopping up to sit on it at my other side.

“Cutie, they’re monsters.”

I turned on her.

“I saw Bri use minimum force when she drove off the gunships. We did not have to—Why did you let me kill them?”

“Ezzen, look at me,” Alice murmured. My neck swiveled slowly, grinding like granite slabs as I faced Todai’s leader. “I told you. It’s not revenge. We’re destroying evil. They knew what they signed up for. Ezzen—Ez, no, look at me.” She reached forward and took my hand gently. “I’m—Hina is right. This is the right thing to do. They’re monsters. Their lives were forfeit the moment they stepped aboard that platform, whether their retribution came from the Spire or from us. And even though it wound up being us, the Vaetna would have done the same, because—”

“Alice,” Hina interrupted, “he’s not listening, give him space.”

Indeed I wasn’t. They were dead because of my selfishness, because I’d wanted the Radiances to do something. Would they have done it without me pushing them? Would those people be alive if not for me? If they were, if they had taken that flamebearer—would that be a worthy trade?

My gaze inevitably fell on the one who this was really all about. Amane sat so tired and small in her oversized chair, now out of mantle, ensheathed in the armor of her big hoodie even outside of her mech. A mirror to me in many ways. The Radiances had helped me kill those people because of her mechanical limbs and the access port in her belly and the lone viridian eye looking down at the table and the carbon fiber attached to the stump of my foot—nevermind that my injury had been self-inflicted. She nudged Ebi, muttering something. The android translated.

“It’ll take some time. Just—breathe. The world is a better place with them gone.”

I glanced over at the screen, at the burning, ruined oil platform. Heliotrope hadn’t ended the call, but she’d vacated her little hovering campsite to help contain the disaster she’d helped create, leaving her phone’s camera staring at the destruction. The PCTF gunships had come in, but were unable to safely land and disgorge more operatives.

In a different world, a better one where the Vaetna hadn’t left for some inscrutable reason, at least he’d be safe. But in reality? Things were still so dire for him. What would happen now? How would he make it off the platform and vanish enough to evade capture, without further help? He still had nowhere to go but the Spire, and they had seemingly abandoned him. If he got captured anyway, if this was all for naught—

A beam of light punched upward from the rig’s highest point, scintillating through greens and blues before turning to a vibrant magenta. Something shot along it in a crackle of rising lightning, and then it dissipated. It happened so quickly that my heart had only just stopped before it was already over.

“Hey, he got out!” Hina cheered. Alice slumped forward, putting her face in her arms on the table, and began to sob quietly. Hina rubbed her back. She winked at me, a huge, fanged grin on her face. “Tears of relief,” she clarified. It should have made me feel better, but I was going numb.

“He had help,” Ai reasoned. “But yes, I think he’s out.”

“From who?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Ebi cut in. “Point is that he made it out. We saved him.”

I looked at her, then at Amethyst, then at the other Radiances. Had those operatives deserved to die? This specific and exceptionally weird case aside, the Spire’s answer was generally—yes, and that was the moral standard I’d always trusted in the abstract, whenever cases of these sorts of conflicts made the news. And the Radiances had painful, personal reasons to have gone along with this. They’d had motive and opportunity—I’d just helped with the means.

“But you should have stopped me,” I whispered.

Author’s Note:

FYI: Heliotrope is both a gemstone (AKA bloodstone) and a flower. Yuuka is based on the former, in keeping with the team’s theme. Yes, she gets annoyed when people mix them up and wonder why she’s not purple.

Anyway. Murder, am I right? Very 魔法少女, so I hear. All the cool girls are doing it. Especially when they’re giant mecha girls with magic artillery and the people they’re murdering are MIC-backed kidnappers. If you’re not at least a little bit of an Amethyst fan after this chapter, I don’t know what to tell you.

Huge thanks as usual to Cassiopeia, Maria, Softies, and Zak. Beta reading really elevated this chapter.

One other thing: Boost on TopWebFiction! Back when this chapter first came out, we were #1 (above Worm!) and it’d be cool to see that again on rerelease here.

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September 15, 2024

I had known intuitively, instinctually, that my stalker had not been Hina.

On paper, it was trivial to change the color of something with magic, using the same basic {REFRACT} lattice as those dry-erase markers in the penthouse’s meeting room. There had been nothing in the illusionary voyeur’s appearance that was outside the purview of an advanced magical disguise. This went double in the case of the Radiances; manipulating the appearance of their mantle’s LM would be even easier than trying to alter the color of her actual hair or eyes. Even some of the other mismatches like her voice and posture could have just been her putting on additional layers of deception to throw off any especially perceptive fans—from the way Opal had talked about it, such measures seemed somewhat reasonable, which was a little worrying in its own right.

And yet some part of me had understood that no magic could suppress that impossible blue, which Hina confirmed for me.

“Mm-mm. Nope! Hibiki runs too deep.” She checked for bystanders before slipping off the sunglasses to bat her eyes at me, but the tension hadn’t left her posture. “Used to be brown and now they’re blue forever. Cool, right?” She donned the dark lenses again, which still couldn’t entirely strangle the supernatural sapphire at close enough inspection. “What’s this have to do with—” she waved up and down my half-hunched figure, more outwardly tense than her even though I was far less lethal, “—this? You’re freaked; you saw something, right? Tell me!”

I stumbled through a recounting of what had happened—keeping my shaking voice low, also wary of passersby—and tried to articulate the confusion of identity without admitting the too-personal way I had known in my gut that it wasn’t her. As I talked, the initial flood of panic ebbed away, but it was replaced by new confusion—why had I known? Some kind of link between our Flames from last night’s contact? Could that even happen? My Flame said nothing—not that I was expecting it to, but I couldn’t help but hope that maybe just this once it’d let me in on what was going on.

Hina twirled a lock of her hair around her finger as she took in my description. When I finished, she took a deep breath—to stabilize her nerves? That was scary. She was still on alert; her eyes flickered across the intersection, down the road, up at the skyscrapers around us, as though searching for something. My heart rate began to crawl back up. Was something still here? How could I know for certain that they were actually gone? Some kind of large-scale scanning lattice, maybe, a filtering chain scaled up and tuned to the color of ripple—if only I had the equipment to know which type. My tattoo still itched in rhythm with the scarred fingers of my right hand curling and uncurling as I weighed my options. Before I could settle on a course of action, Hina seemed to complete her own inspection of our surroundings.

“Sounds like some kinda remote viewing gone wrong. Didn’t expect you to see her?”

“No. She was—surprised, I think.” I thought back to the expression on her face, the way she had backed away from me. “Might have been…afraid of me.”

I dismissed the faint giddiness in that realization. It was nothing more than leftover adrenaline, and it was distracting me from racking my brain for the sort of scrying that would match what I had seen. What kind of viewing would necessitate an invisible copy of the viewer? More to the point—why had I been able to see her at all, if I hadn’t been supposed to? Had my only tip-off been that burst of energy in my Flame, that would have been explainable as just picking up on the ripple, but seeing her with my eyes meant something about the method used; I just wasn’t sure what.

Hina was investigating the scene in her own way, pacing around the street corner.

“Don’t know what to tell you, cutie. I mean—definitely magic, kinda crunchy ripple. But I’m not smelling anything.”

“Crunchy?”

“Uh—red-white, I think. But that’s normal for illusions and observation and that sorta thing. C’mere.”

Before I could parse what she was doing, she had come close to me, within arm’s reach, blue eyes looking up at me. She stopped herself before completing the invasion of my personal space, an adorable pout-grimace taking over her face. “Um, right, permission. Can I touch you? For forensics.”

If it could give stronger evidence that we were in the clear? Absolutely. The nervous, residually tense grunt of consent had barely left my throat when she closed the gap between us fully and pulled me into a hug. Her arms snaked under my jacket, and she rested her face on my chest, taking a deep sniff of my collar.

“Uh—”

She made a purring noise. It was a rumbly, deep-chest vocalization, and I felt the most absurd desire to mirror it. I couldn’t, though; it wasn’t a sound that could come from a human throat. It made me feel like prey. After a few quiet moments of holding me—inspecting me in some odd glyphless manipulation of her Flame I couldn’t sense or understand—the vibration fell away, and her voice returned.

“Nope, didn’t leave anything on you, or at least not nothing I can smell. Just smells like you.”

I would have been relieved about that, but I was very distracted by the feeling of her breasts against my front and her breath on my collar. I did not need my wires crossed right now. She didn’t seem interested in separating from me either, shifting to make herself more comfortable. Her tone stayed conversational, which was somehow the most thrilling part of the whole thing, suggesting that this embrace was utterly unremarkable and never further away than a request.

“Didya tell Alice?”

“Uh.” My brain was lagging. “Um. Not—yet.”

“Don’t bother. We’ll tell her when we get back.”

That made me frown down at her, the sense of unseen danger overriding my libido.

“But—what if they’re still out there? What if that was the Peacies or, like, Hikanome or—”

“They’re gone, cutie. Trust me. No point in making Alice panic and yell at us to come back home, not after I worked so hard to get you out here. And she’ll feel awful that she left you alone! Just let it be.”

It was so very hard to argue with her like this.

“You’re…sure? I’m safe?”

“Mhm! Ninety-nine percent. I’ll keep an eye out, don’t worry, and if either of us see something, we’ll get outta there, no questions asked. I’m not gonna take you hunting or fighting today. But I did promise to take you shopping.”

Those terms sounded reasonable, at least when they tickled my neck and resonated through her chest into mine. Even accounting for my…contact-induced bias, it did ease my mind that she was trying to be considerate to my needs; I bore no desire to find out what “hunting” and “fighting” entailed.

That’s what I told myself, at least.

—

Winter air always makes my hand ache a bit. It’s both the temperature and the dryness, I think; the former brings a sort of swelling in my joints not unlike a fever, and the latter makes my scar tissue stiff. It’s not that bad if I’m not using the hand for anything in particular, and the dryness is mostly mitigated with moisturizer, but it’s still obnoxious enough for winter to be my least-favorite season. From November to March, my right hand essentially lived in my pocket whenever I was outdoors, and that still didn’t entirely stave off the ache. After my encounter with the voyeur where I had brandished my scarred hand as a direct conduit for my Flame, it occurred to me that I could use a milder version of the same trick to fight off the cold. Hina shot it down, though.

“Nope. Too loud. Trust me, cutie, I’d love to help you play with your Light, but the last thing we need right now is for you to make more of a light show.”

“I don’t mean I’d actually ignite it. Just chilly, ‘s all.”

“I get it, you’re just stressed. You get all nervous and fiddly with your Light because it makes you feel bigger and scarier against…” she waved her hand vaguely, “All that. I used to do the same thing, y’know. But you don’t gotta be worried, and you don’t gotta aggravate it. I can pick up on anything that happens near us without making us a target. We can deal with the cold without magic, ‘kay?”

She brooked no further argument. Remarkably responsible by her standards, I felt, and her caution was palpable. Despite her insistence that we were okay to follow through with today’s errands, she was still on alert, eyes scanning the thickening crowds from behind her glasses as we moved toward Shinjuku Station. We didn’t stand out, at least, which helped me stave off the pervasive feeling of being watched; foreigners still seemed to outnumber locals in this part of town. Nobody looked twice at Hina or me, but she kept checking over her shoulder, and it was setting me ill at ease. It was easy to imagine a pair of hands reaching out from the crowd and yanking me away while her back was turned, an idea that made my tattoo itch—that response had been useless all day. When I had confronted the stalker, I hadn’t even drawn my spear.

In a weird way, Hina’s constant reassurances paired with her alertness just made me more paranoid. She stayed within arm’s reach and kept assuring me that there was nothing to worry about, claiming that if she saw something we’d have no problems cutting through the press of bodies to get out of here. The fact that nobody else in the crowd seemed to notice the alertness in her posture was electrifying. She was nearly invisible, but not in the way of an ambush predator on the savannah, no silent, stalking, coiled spring ready to explode into motion at the first sign of trouble. I was sure she could, but that wasn’t the mode of stealth here; it was like she was one with the flow of the crowd, casual and unremarkable, even peppy, hiding in plain sight by being a totally normal young woman.

In short, she had disguised herself by being the puppy—and I was grateful that it was this rather than the hyena. The horrible thrill she aroused inside me when she fully embraced her predatory aspect was novel and exciting and absolutely not what I needed right now.

“You haven’t had lunch yet, right?”

“Um. No?”

“Awesome. Let’s get outta the cold for a bit and grab a bite.”

Thus commenced my introduction to a staple of life in Japan: the konbini.

The cold chased us through the sliding door a few steps before reluctantly slinking back beyond the threshold, leaving us in a pleasantly warm pocket of consumerism. The general din of traffic and the crowd were replaced by the shop’s synthetic jingle and the peppy white noise of an ad playing on a television mounted above the registers. I avoided eye contact with the worker at the register, unsure whether I was supposed to acknowledge their greeting. Hina didn’t, busy scanning the store for threats—or just a meal. It was hard to say.

The convenience store was a dense space, even constricting, the narrow rows of shelves not wide enough for two people to pass by one another. If Tochou had been a castle, with layered corridors and bureaucratic redoubts, this rather felt like some sort of dungeon, if a brightly lit one bursting at the seams with colorfully packaged products. The narrow spaces were far more comfortable to me than being exposed in the open street; the shelves at my back lent the space a snug security as Hina led me down the aisles. Coming out of the cold and into this confined, controllable space had a much better effect on my mood than her assurances, and it was a relief when she seemed to relax some of her constant watchfulness and began to treat the little shop as something of a tour. Maybe she was just trying to distract me, but it was welcome now.

First, she took me toward the rear, down an aisle that began with supplements and ended at baked goods. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most items had a label in English in addition to the Japanese, though some of the sweets were labeled more enigmatically than others—I was reasonably sure the glazed churro I was inspecting could have had a more descriptive title than simply “Milk.” There were also some more classically Japanese items I recognized from online: curry breads, yakisoba breads, and the humble melonpan, which Hina regretfully informed me did not in fact taste like melon. A shame.

She handed me a fairly innocuous looking bun—for a burger, perhaps? It wasn’t a complete sandwich compared to some of the other offerings, but she insisted it was “exactly what I was looking for!” with a seal-like clap of excitement before dragging me around the corner to the back wall and presenting me with a row of refrigerated drink cabinets.

“Well?”

“I can’t read any of this.”

“Sure you can.” She reached into one of the fridge cabinets and extracted a carton labeled Lemon Tea in big bold letters—Lipton brand, even, familiarly nostalgic. “See!”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She tilted her head—too damn cute for someone who bothered me in so many ways.

“Then what did you mean?”

“…Just unfamiliar, ‘s all.”

“And that’s why we’re doing this!”

She brandished the drink at me until I accepted it, shuffling the items around so that the cold drink would be in my left hand and not aggravate the ache in my right so soon after we’d escaped the chill. Now both of my hands were occupied with lunch components, and for a moment I mentally played out what I’d have to do if we were attacked. Drop the bun, throw the carton at our assailant, summon my spear—these narrow corridors were perfect for it, no easy way to get around the speartip head-on. If a second assailant came from behind, I was confident I could at least snapweave a {DEFLECT} barrier to control the space.

“I told you, cutie, stop doing that. You’re making your Light jumpy, and it’s making you jumpy right back. Let it go.”

I jumped when I realized Hina had gotten closer to me and was looking down at my forearm. Even though it was covered by my coat, I could tell she was referring to the tattoo. Could she see me fidgeting with the lattice somehow?

“I wasn’t going to. Just, uh—trying to feel better, I guess.”

“I know! It’s nice that you’re prepared, but seriously, leave that all to me, okay? I don’t want you to stress.”

Having her this close to me was also a good distraction. I found myself observing that this look was really working for her, and also that she smelled great. Then embarrassment kicked in, and I involuntarily edged away from her a bit. That made her grin, step yet closer to me, and grab my wrist. A flash of blue over the rim of those glasses reminded me of what I was standing next to, and I shuddered—not entirely in a bad way. I wondered if she was about to press me against these refrigerators and kiss me right here in the middle of this store, telegraphed by the way she leaned toward me—

She pulled away with a teasing grin. The flash of teeth showed standard human incisors and canines, not the fangs which had brought out those tainted, confusing feelings of need the night before. I found reprieve from my pounding heart in wondering about the magic.

“How’d you hide them?”

“Hologram,” she replied.

Then she pulled me by the arm to another part of the store, down an aisle which seemed to be focused on drugstore items, toiletries, and so on. She plucked from the shelf a box of…something. I could not at all figure out what I was looking at from the labeling, other than that it was vaguely medical. She tossed it from hand to hand idly.

“No more cold hands for you!”

“Um?”

“You’ll see! Amane loves these things. Want anything more to eat? Chips? Uh, chips as in ‘crisps’, I guess,” she clarified, making air quotes and rolling her eyes behind the glasses.

That would have stung a younger Dalton more, but the years of living in America had somewhat dampened my most objectionably British mannerisms by the time I had become a teenager, and then my desire to remain anonymous online for the following seven years had caused me to further Americanize my word choices for ambiguity’s sake.

“Um. Chips is fine. And—I’m not that hungry?” It came out as almost a question, embarrassed to refuse the offer. “Opal gave me some cashews.”

Hina was already moving on, taking me to the crunchy snacks despite my protest. I begrudgingly browsed; it beat thinking about the idea that we were still being watched.

The selection was dominated by potato chips and various forms of rice cracker—no corn chips, no pretzels. Wait—almost no corn chips; my eyes alighted on a familiar triangular logo.

“They have Doritos here?”

“Yeah, but good luck finding anything but that taco seasoning kind. And no, that’s not the red flavor. Not being able to get them here drives me up the wall. And like—no Cheez-its or Goldfish either! They love savory and salty and crunchy stuff,” she waved at the seaweed-flavored potato chips and chili oil rice puffs for emphasis, “and you’d think cheese-based snacks would be perfect for that, but noooo. It’s not even like cheese is unheard of here! They put it in places where it doesn’t belong all the time! Cheese gyudon? Cheese sushi? Cheese ramen—okay, no, that’s actually pretty yummy, but like—it’s just—ugh!”

Her sudden polemic reached a peak of exasperation from which it had no choice but to peter out to a grumble as she browsed down the snacks. She cast an almost fuming glance at the bag of Doritos I was now suspending between the fingers of my right hand as I clumsily tried to juggle it with the bun without dropping both. Was the rant a way of letting off her own stress about the whole situation, or was I reading into it too much? Either way, her rhythm demanded I say something—about her thoroughly developed stance on cheese? About my own dawning horror at the lack of the familiar snacks upon which I had subsisted for the last seven years? Or—

“Do you not consider yourself Japanese? You keep using ‘they’.”

I realized belatedly that that was maybe a bit heavy and invasive of a topic, but she didn’t seem offended. The curiosity had come from talking with Alice earlier—I couldn’t help but wonder about Hina’s remarkably American accent and mannerisms.

“I mean…I’m full blood, not a halfie like Alice. But I grew up in the US.”

“Where?”

“Socal. Santa Monica.”

I didn’t have a sturdy enough grasp of American geography to know exactly where in California that was—and I wasn’t going to admit that.

“Oh, yeah, that’s—on the coast, isn’t it? So, er—born there?”

Her head swiveled to me, catching the attempt to cover my ignorance like a radar dish. “Cutie, almost every city in the state is on the coast. It’s a suburb of LA.”

Caught in my ignorance, there was nothing for me to do but blush. The pet name contributed to that, too—embarrassing in public, but so good to hear from her lips. It was so casual and never had a hint of sarcasm; I didn’t believe the label, but it felt far too nice for me to want to object. I diverted by inspecting the bun as I rearranged how I was holding everything into a more ergonomic configuration.

“Sorry, is this just bread?”

“There’s tartar sauce in it!”

“I meant, er, fillings.” Was this some strange Japanese culinary sensibility in which a ‘sandwich’ consisted only of bread and sauce? Surely not; some of the other sandwiches sharing a shelf with the bun had contained katsu or ham.

She broke into a big smile. “Thought you’d never ask. Allow me to present my favorite thing about this entire country!”

She dragged me back to the registers, or rather to a large glass case between the registers which I had somehow missed on the way in, having been preoccupied with the sensory assault. It was full of—

“Fried chicken!”

She sounded so incredibly smug that I couldn’t help but play into it, leaning in to admire the selection. I was delighted to feel warmth radiating off the glass. After savoring the sensation for a moment, I ventured to confirm where I thought she was going with this.

“A chicken sandwich?”

“Yep. Delish, way better than you’d get for the same price at McDonalds. Better than KFC too, IMO, but don’t tell Yuuka I said that.”

“They have KFC here?”

“Mhm. But not as good as this place. Wait, I just said that.”

The options were diverse. Aside from the traditionally breaded options, which themselves came in a few form factors and ran the gamut from plain salt to soy sauce to spicy, there were more esoteric choices that were skirting the line of ‘fried chicken’, and yet others that had outright crossed it: glazed chicken skewers which some ingrained culinary knowledge identified as yakitori, hash browns, some mysterious fried balls on a stick, and—

“That’s a corn dog.”

She nodded enthusiastically. I could feel some choice paralysis coming on.

“Uh.”

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of putting a corn dog between those buns, cutie.”

Did she have to say it like that? Was she even aware of how it sounded? Her gaze was perfectly level, not even a wry smile acknowledging the innuendo, bordering on a creepy stare. I forced myself to stop looking at her, returning my gaze to the selection of fried and grilled foods. I pointed at the most-stocked item, a crunchy looking cutlet that seemed about the right size for the bun.

“Um. One of those.”

“Ding ding ding!”

“Uh?”

“The esteemed and noble Famichiki is the intended partner for that bun now in your possession.” She had taken on a very bad British accent. “It is one of the greatest joys in life.”

“Wait, are you imitating—”

“Noooo.”

“She—she doesn’t talk like that, I don’t think.”

“Who knows her better, cutie, you or me?”

Though I maintained privately that it was a rather poor impression from Opal’s purported best friend, I had no choice but to fall silent and contemplate the banter. I was, despite everything, having a pretty good time at right this moment.

While I ruminated on that, Hina waved down the cashier and ordered the Famichiki. Her voice was notably higher in Japanese, a full octave up—still retaining some of the huskiness, but if I didn’t know it came from the same mouth I would have had trouble connecting the two. She prompted me to dump my items onto the counter in front of the register, at which point I realized she hadn’t gotten anything for herself. Wasn’t she hungry? Indeed, she hadn’t eaten earlier today either. She had claimed that she didn’t need to eat or sleep as much as a normal human—a curious contrast from her other Flame-enmeshed teammate’s ravenous appetite—but by now, I rather felt she should be eating something.

That mystery was promptly solved when the cashier brought two of the fried chicken cutlets, not just the one, wrapped in their own neat little paper pockets. Hina accepted them and paid with what felt like a remarkable amount of composure and politeness. But once everything got bagged up, she turned to me and began to practically vibrate with excitement.

—

The sandwich was good. Unreasonably good, even, given that, upon inspecting the receipt and some conversions on my phone, I calculated that the combined price of its components came out to barely over two quid. Add in the chips and drink for equivalence to a typical Tesco meal deal, and all told, it was about three and a half—a very good deal by my standards, even before the superior quality of the sandwich. The breading was crispy, the inside juicy, and the tartar sauce bound everything together well.

Fat carries flavor, came Dad’s voice. Mayonnaise doesn’t have much flavor of its own, but it’s a fantastic binder for transmitting mix-ins. Add some dill, chopped pickles, and relish, and you’ll have the perfect spread for nearly any sandwich.

Watching Hina eat was an excellent distraction, because it was so far outside the realm of what could be called civilized that it was quite impossible for me to consider culinary details like seasoning.

Her disguise did nothing to conceal her nature when it came to the hunk of meat clutched in her claws. Indeed, it was the most feral I’d ever seen her, and even if that didn’t make it obvious to the layperson that this was one of the Radiances, we’d still have gotten some very concerned looks had we been eating in public. She’d killed her hologram, tossed her sunglasses onto the table, and torn the cutlet clean in half, slicking her hands with the juice. She then proceeded to tear off chunks with those razor-teeth, snapping through the breaded crust with an audible crunch each time. My gut said that even if these pieces of chicken hadn’t been boneless, she would have eaten them the same way.

Eaten me the same way, whispered an unwelcome shiver.

Once every piece had disappeared down her gullet, she’d licked the juices off her hands in a positively rapacious, dog-like manner and made a deep, satisfied huff. Only then did she regain some of the trappings of civilization, leaning over to grab a paper towel and wiping down her hands more properly, taking a brush to her hair that had fallen a bit out of place during the animalistic feasting, and reenabling the holographic veneer of regular human teeth. Her meal had taken maybe a minute, start to finish. Then she settled back down, let her eyes slide half-shut, and seemed to find a happy medium between dozing and watching me eat at a more normal pace, in sleepy, satisfied puppy-mode.

Obviously, this was not taking place on the street. Hina had led me back out of the convenience store, around the corner, down an alley, waited until no passersby were looking, told me to close my eyes—and transported us into her personal pocketspace in a sickening, crunching crackle of her personal bubble of reality. My stomach had turned upside down as my Flame had practically crooned at the display of power. This was real magic, and I had been tempted to open my eyes during the translation to witness the exact way the Flame asserted its truth upon the standard three-dimensional space of the world—but I knew that would have killed my appetite entirely, interesting as it would have been, and I was hungry. I crunched down on a Dorito and was devastated to find this flavor not to my liking.

She should have warned me of what she was doing, asked permission. Opal would have been beyond furious, I suspected. But even if she had asked, I wouldn’t have said no to this in the first place. Not to the magic, not to the relative safety of this secure space compared to the crowds, and ultimately not to the thrill of witnessing her indulge her carnal nature. In that minute of beasthood, my instincts had whispered to me two conflicting feelings: a marrow-deep terror that the moment she was done with her piece of chicken she’d do the same to me, and a primal desire to eat my own meal with the same ferocious abandon. Something about it called to me, the freedom, the sheer joy she had taken in every bite and brutal shredding of meat with her fingers. But I had insisted to myself that I was perfectly fine eating with a semblance of table manners, thank you very much. Furthermore, she was not in fact going to pounce upon me next—damnably desirable as that prospect was, conjuring images of more shredded clothes and bloody marks on my skin. In fact—don’t think about that, Ezzen. Don’t think about how in this space we were as hidden from Opal’s moderating presence as from any third-party interlopers, how Hina took such an obvious, primal happiness in devouring her kill, how freeing it would feel to follow her down the path of the carnivore—

Anyway. ‘Nest’ was the word that came to mind for Hina’s pocketspace; as Opal had mentioned, it was well-furnished, a combination living and storage space, and she’d clearly made herself at home. She had another of those low tables that Todai seemed to love so much, blankets and boxes, all the trappings of a cozy attic. It was a square room, four meters to a side, with warm beige walls that were certainly made of LM. The light came from a series of indirect, upward-facing lamps that ran the perimeter of the wall, shining onto the ceiling and bouncing it down onto us to cast everything in soft, warm tones. The air was that exact sort of room temperature where one could lose track of where their skin ended and the atmosphere began, tempting me to just curl up in one of the blankets and pass out with a full belly.

“Um. How does the air work in here?”

“You already know the answer to that, cutie.”

“Well—you mean it’s all magic? No external ventilation? Just…typical molecular recombinant filter?”

“Yep, same thing they use up on the ISS, ‘cause it’s like we’re in space, sorta. If I’m not making a door, this place is totally sealed off.”

“Huh. And we’re…W-up.” That was a pure guess, driven by the attic impression the room had given me; which direction we were offset from regular reality in the fourth dimension was impossible to tell without a frame of reference.

“Mhm. Easier to pull stuff up than push it down.”

“Gotcha,” I lied, so tempted to ask for clarification but unwilling to admit my ignorance. “Um—if this room can move around in threespace, do we have to walk on the streets at all? Couldn’t you just spit us out wherever we’re headed?”

“Mm. Nope. I mean, yeah, but you don’t want to be in here when I’m moving this thing.” She stretched on her bean bag, panther-like, to brush her fingers against the wall behind her. “Could intersect with something nasty.”

What was she referring to, exactly? Other VNTs’ pocketspaces? There was no Google Street View for the fourth dimension that had been overlaid onto the world when the Flame had crashed down; only VNT groups really knew what sort of stuff was hanging out just offset from reality, and they tended to keep real quiet about it. Sure, we knew that the Spire’s contents were heavily distributed through the fourth dimension for “bigger on the inside” practicalities, but supposedly everything else in here was smaller-scale and pretty much categorically secret. Ebi’s internals were a good example, squirreled away into these extra-dimensional hidey-holes.

“…nastier than whoever was stalking me?”

“Oh, that’s what this is about?” She sat up a bit. “We talked about this before, cutie, they’re gone. Gone gone, as in never really there, just some ripple. Nobody’s coming after us, I promise.”

“I—I know, I believe you,” I mollified her, “It’s just…I feel exposed, out there.”

She sighed.

“I promise you’re not. Nobody’s watching us, nobody’s following us. You’re safe with me. How can I make you feel more safe?”

Was she serious? Did she have no self-awareness whatsoever? She had been making me feel unsafe since I had woken up yesterday, and surely some of that had to be intentional—did she really not know how it came across? Opal’s words from last night, after seeing the bites Hina had left all over my shoulder, returned to me. Their little monster.

“…Can I be honest?”

“Always!”

“I…if we have to go through with this, I’d feel safer if…it were Opal here.”

I hadn’t known exactly where my thoughts had been heading until it came out of my mouth; I regretted it instantly as Hina’s face fell, her head flopping down to stare dejectedly at the sunglasses on the table. This wasn’t a conversation that should be happening in the middle of all this, certainly not without some planning and an escape route. The compounding stress of the whole situation had just gotten to me.

“Oh. I’m the problem?”

“…I wouldn’t put it like that,” I backtracked, trying to cram the hyena back into the bag. “Can…no, that wasn’t true. Opal can’t sense things like you can, can she?”

She perked up and shook her head in a motion that carried all the way down her neck and shoulders.

“Nope!”

“Then—it’s better that it’s you,” I compromised. “And I do trust you when it comes…to killing anything that gets in your way.” I winced a bit at saying that aloud, worried it’d set her off somehow, but she lit up. “So let’s just…get it over with, I guess.”

“I’m soooo good at that, yeah.” She reached for her sunglasses, having seemingly entirely bounced back. “I said it earlier, I promised you a not-date and some clothes. And I keep my promises! Let’s go!”

“What, already?”

“Uh, yeah? We’ve got places to be. And you’re done eating, unless that wrapper looks way more appetizing to you than it does to me.”

I looked down at the greasy paper baggie the chicken cutlet had come in, somehow relieved that she didn’t consider it on the menu. There was other detritus, too: the bun’s wrapper, the bag of Doritos, and my now-drained carton of lemon tea.

“Er—no, it doesn’t.” I checked the room; no rubbish bin. “What do I do with it?”

—

A few snapwoven {ASHES} later and we were back out in the cold, continuing up the promenade toward Shinjuku Station. I’d noted the hypocrisy of using magic to do away with our rubbish after Hina had told me that using a spell to warm up my hand wasn’t a good idea, though I’d framed it as a question. She’d patted my head and told me she’d show me how to cast more quietly later, which inspired a strange mix of indignance, excitement at the prospect of more magic, and a damnable please do that again which I did not voice. None of these feelings made my hand any less cold, though.

She was a step ahead. The non-magical solution she’d mentioned earlier lay within the indecipherable box she had bought at the convenience store, from which she extracted some small plastic packets. They were covered all over in fine print—rather like the ice pack I had been using, just smaller. I discovered with delight that they were in fact the opposite, radiating delicious warmth after a brief and vigorous shake which Hina delighted in. I wrapped one packet in each hand with chilly fingers, delved into my pockets, and within another minute of walking, the ache in my hand had dissipated. Hina looked so pleased with herself, and her smile—regular human teeth once more—only grew bigger after my mumbled thanks.

The streets of Tokyo were a jungle of signs; everything was indicated. Every shop had a sign, every tall building had a sign running up its length saying what was on each floor, and logos I didn’t recognize were plastered across the vast billboards perching atop every other building. Those shared the upper end of the view with the cranes; there was a lot of construction both up there and down at street level, where it was far more cordoned and demarcated than I was used to. Temporary plastic walls acted as sound baffles— complete with digital volume indicators, which were sort of fascinating—and were attended by workers in hi-vis directing foot traffic around affected areas. The signage even extended to the traffic; taxis took up a notable amount of the road, but they were totally blown out of the water by a truck that rounded the corner blaring pop music. As it passed, I realized the sides were billboards—made a face.

“Fuckin’ hell. That’s…”

“Incredibly obnoxious?”

“Well, yeah, but I’m talking about…”

The Radiances, rendered in an anime art style, smiled and posed at us from the side of the truck. Hina frowned at her organization’s motorized advertisement as it stopped right in front of us. For a moment I thought it had stopped specifically for her, that somehow we’d been made, but no—it was just traffic.

“Hate these things so much,” she grumbled over the music. “But I’m the only one who voted against it. That’s Ai you’re hearing, by the way.”

“Eurgh.”

The vocals would have been far more tolerable to the ear in any other context, but being blasted over the general din of the city was doing Ai’s voice no favors. Mercifully, we had only passed it by a dozen meters when traffic started moving again and the horrible truck continued further into the city, the song receding into the distance and turning to echoes bouncing off the skyscrapers.

“Nuisance, it is. Gotta be noise pollution.” I jerked a thumb in the direction of the construction site across the street, with its volume indicator. “How can this and that exist in the same city?”

Hina shrugged. “Sorry. I can bring it up with Alice next time.”

“That, uh, mahou shoujo?” The word came out just a bit more mocking than I had really intended.

“Ah, you got the lecture,” she giggled. “Not really. It’s idol shit. Or, uh, anime promo shit, in this case, it’s for the Precure collab.”

Fortunately, that was the most eventful thing that happened to us between then and reaching Shinjuku Station. I saw the first entrance long before the main building, a perfectly normal and even familiar metro stop staircase that descended into the city’s bowels. Then another, not thirty meters later, and another, and yet another. Sometimes they were standalone on the pavement, sometimes they were quietly nestled into the cityscape at the ground floor of random office buildings, but we must have passed a dozen across half a kilometer of walking.

“Is—are these all for the same station?”

“Yep. Shinjuku-eki’s real big. You didn’t see it from up above?”

“Um…we didn’t have time,” I lied.

“Aw. Well, it’s more impressive from down here anyway.”

When we finally got within eyeshot of the station proper, I had to admit that it was. Tochou had been tall, a duolith of stone facade—Shinjuku Station was more horizontal, but vast, in white panels and more logos. The density of foot traffic surrounding it was absurd, a sea of people flowing in and out and around, which put to shame even the press of bodies that had surrounded us until now.

“That’s…” Too big. This city was not for me; why did I have to be acrophobic and agoraphobic? I could feel myself clamming up a bit, squeezing the heat packs in my pockets as an outlet for the discomfort. “What are we here for?”

“Everything!”

—

Hina had led me into the station, first across broad indoor plazas lined with storefronts, then through wide, arterial halls plastered in advertising, and onto a series of escalators and down into the bowels. The upper levels gave the strong impression of a mall, and Hina confirmed that we could probably get all our shopping done without leaving the station, but we first had another errand deeper within. The crowds became a bit more orderly, the chaotic press laminating into distinct flows of traffic as the milling commerce gave way to the commuter hub the whole megastructure ostensibly was meant to be.

Eventually, we arrived at a row of automated kiosks, and she walked me through the process of getting myself a transit card. Unlike at Tochou, we didn’t need to interact with a clerk at all—just enter a name, feed the machine a ten-thousand yen bill, and collect the unremarkable green-and-silver plastic card it spat out. Hina presented the freshly-minted IC card to me with a flourish, then tilted her head at my wallet as I selected a spot for it.

“We gotta get those bills exchanged.”

“I’ve hardly used cash in years. These are just—my emergency money, from when…yeah.” I shook off the memories of the pursuit; it didn’t do me any good to be reminded of how she had rescued me. “Besides, didn’t you say it’s all basically Opal’s money anyway? Am I gonna get a credit card in Todai’s name or something?”

“I mean, yeah, you will, I think, but lots of places here still only take cash.” Hina gestured at the row of kiosks. “Half of these things can’t even recharge that card with anything but cash, and this is Shinjuku friggin’ Station! Gets worse the further out into the sticks you go. And—I don’t think that wallet can even fit yen bills. Hold on.” She dug into her own wallet and passed me a bill, confirming the hunch. It could sort of squeeze in there, but it definitely wasn’t intended.

Thus we returned to the commercial shallows to commence the shopping part of this outing in earnest, beginning with a new wallet. Hina found an appropriate shop in short order and ferreted out a little fake-leather item, with approximately the same layout as my current wallet and in roughly the same black. I wasn’t picky and was relieved that she didn’t push me to browse and compare my options. In and out, like we had agreed, no humiliation or choice paralysis. She paid for the wallet and handed me enough cash to fill it with that I flinched; even though I hadn’t quite internalized the exact exchange rate, I could tell that it was equivalent to several hundred pounds. I meekly accepted the stack of money, which only widened the grin on her face.

“Alright! Clothes. Lots of fashion stores around here, but I don’t think we need to do anything fancier than Uniqlo for you, at least not today.”

I recognized the brand name.

“That’s—on the cheaper side, yeah?”

“Mhm. The way you were dressed when I picked you up—is that normal for you? Jeans and turtlenecks?”

“Uh, in the winter, yeah. Well—not jeans when I’m staying indoors. Sweats and such.”

“Mhm, we can definitely do that there.”

Actually getting to the store was a different matter; there was one in the station’s mall complex, but it was clear on the other side of the vast structure from where we had come up, so despite what Hina had said about getting everything done in the station, it was actually more convenient to go just outside and two blocks over. I didn’t love getting back on the open street, even though Hina quietly reassured me once again that she’d neither seen nor felt anything suspicious.

I was discovering that I just didn’t like crowds.

—

Uniqlo’s selection of unremarkable shirts and pants was to my liking. We’d gone up four floors via escalator to reach the unisex casualwear floor, and as we’d passed the women’s section on the third floor, I’d tensed up, half-expecting Hina to block me off from the next escalator and herd me toward those high-waisted skirts. But she didn’t even comment on it.

I was delighted to find that fashion in Tokyo tended toward baggier clothes that hid one’s figure. I’d long had a preference for looser clothes—for one, they were more comfortable to wear all day when sitting at my desk or laying on my bed, but also they formed a protective shell, a second skin that evoked Vaetna carapace in a way that tighter, form-fitting clothes didn’t. My basket had rapidly filled with wide-fit cargo pants in various earth tones—at first, I’d been hesitant to get more than one or two, citing that they were fairly expensive and could be worn multiple days in a row before needing a wash, until Hina had pulled out a very expensive-looking credit card and brandished it at me until I accepted it.

“Get what makes you happy. That’s why we’re here.”

Its opulence practically burned my fingers, noticeably denser in my hand than the plastic cards I was used to. I fumbled it into my wallet, where its matte-black and glimmering-blue embellishments stood out against the cheap grey of my debit card. It didn’t belong in my life, and I felt a pang of guilt at the undeserved generosity I was being showered with—until I saw the sweaters. Thick and baggy and wonderfully cozy-looking, they called me right over, guilt about price tags suppressed by the appeal of such a heavy and safe outer shell as I stuffed several into the basket. They were soon joined by some utterly unremarkable socks and underwear, which went un-commented-on despite how I had again braced myself for teasing. I was starting to let my guard down as my worst worries about this excursion continued to go unrealized; Hina seemed committed to both my safety and our agreement that she wouldn’t foist anything unwanted upon me. She did, however, attempt to expand my fashion horizons in more innocuous ways.

“Want more shirts like that one?”

“Like which?”

She pointed at my chest, and as I looked down I suddenly remembered that I’d had Sailor Moon peeking out from under my jacket all day. I reflexively turned away from her a bit to hide it from her—the embarrassment doubled when I remembered what she had said about this one being among her favorites.

“I’m…not really opposed, but it’s usually, um, Spire stuff.”

She insisted I at least take a gander at a table covered in graphic tees. I found nothing Vaetna-related—I’d been sort of hoping for something similar to my heron shirt, which I now regretted leaving behind in my apartment. It was probably in PCTF custody now; I had a ridiculous vision of the sixteen-quid polyester shirt laid out in a ripple-isolated analysis chamber, scientists and officials huddled around it, trying to extract the secrets of my strange and unprecedented flamefall from the fabric. The scene took on a bit of black comedy knowing that the rumors were true.

Anyway, the table before me was mostly anime merch and some other classic Japanica like Godzilla and Ultraman—and Todai. The Radiances’ portion of the table ranged from simple graphic designs of their logo to their individual symbols to stylized anime renditions of the girls themselves that recalled the truck from before. Hina had the audacity to unfold and hoist a white shirt depicting five pairs of anime eyes: fiery orange with slitted pupils, ultramarine, freckle-rimmed brown, vivid green, and a lone hazel, its twin covered by black hair. The irises glimmered with some kind of iridescent ink, like my tattoo. Each pair of eyes was put over their theme color—if I squinted, I could see the backdrops were made up of a pattern of little gemstone shapes, a different cut for each one. Hina read from the label.

“One hundred percent cotton!” She rubbed it with her fingers. “Amane insists on that for all the apparel and she’s totally right.”

It was a damn good design, all things considered, and sufficiently big and baggy that I could see myself wearing it to bed—but I wasn’t going to swap allegiances that easily, present circumstances notwithstanding. The Spire’s imagery was a comfort zone that I was loath to step out of. I opted to voice a less personal excuse, though.

“I’ll—couldn’t I just get one of those…straight from the source, instead of buying one here?”

She grinned.

“Nope! These are limited-time new years goods, already out of production. You’d have to get them secondhand in a few more weeks if you wanted one.”

Limited merch? Suddenly, I realized what to do. I drew my phone.

[Direct Message] ezzen: What size shirt do you wear?

starstar97: uh

starstar97: medium?

starstar97: what are you cooking

starstar97: actually, wait, don’t tell me, i want it to be a surprise

starstar97: …

starstar97: its totally japan limited todai merch holy shit holy shit

starstar97: either the big group splash or the new years one with the eyes

Hina had crept over to my side to peek down at the chat and gave a hum of approval at my best friend’s deduction.

ezzen: It’s the eyes. Interested?

starstar97: ofc im fuckin interested you baka please please get me one ill love you forever

starstar97: but thats like 40 bucks and shipping would be like another 30 so uhh i wont be able to pay you back until my next paycheck

ezzen: dw

ezzen: Sapphire is shaking me and telling me to tell you that it’s on the house.

ezzen: Happy birthday!

starstar97: its FEBRUARY

I shouldered Hina off of me, who was practically bouncing with delight.

“Awwwww! That’s so sweet, cutie.”

“It’s—I’m just paying it forward. You’re spending…way too much money on me, and I’m not even a fan. She is.”

“Awwwwwww,” she repeated, coming back in and hugging me from the side. Even though her hands remained firmly above my clothes, the way she glommed herself onto me felt like too much PDA for the middle of a store. It called for a more private setting—I absently glanced over at the dressing rooms, my subconscious dredging up that wild fantasy that had helped drag me down last night—I squirmed out of her embrace before I could suggest something incredibly untoward. She followed my gaze and affirmed that it wasn’t happening.

“Not today, cutie. That clause about love hotels applies in spirit here too.”

“O-oh.” That hadn’t been a joke? “Wait—‘not today’?”

“Yeah, not today.”

That was leaving rather a lot unsaid, and she seemed totally disinterested in expounding further, putting the onus on me to ask if I wanted to explore exactly what she was implying—which I was not at all willing to do in public, even if I had been able to get any words out at all. Steam practically shot out of my ears as I turned what was probably a yet-undiscovered shade of red. She just blinked at me before slinking over toward the outerwear.

“Want a coat like mine? They’re really comfy.”

Rather than respond to her, I just edged toward the dressing rooms, if only to get out of her immediate presence and stop the cycle of thoughts. She gave me a thumbs-up and went back to inspecting a long jacket, and I practically fled to the dressing rooms, only stopping to have a confusing and further-embarrassing exchange with an attendant who directed me to the second stall and motioned for me to take off my shoes before I entered.

I closed the door, turned the latch, dumped the basket of clothes on the floor, and leaned against the wall, almost hyperventilating and feeling quite stupid about it. How the hell was she able to just blow past that? Was I making some kind of awful false assumption about what she had meant? What’s more, at some level, there was also kind of revulsion at my own want; this had all begun with her kidnapping me, and last night she had sexually assaulted me. I’d outright admitted I didn’t feel safe around her not an hour ago. These intrusive, horny thoughts about her felt so, so wrong.

It took five minutes to talk myself down and then another five to actually try on the clothes I had picked; getting out of the shirt Hina liked so much helped me re-center. The cramped space of the stall helped me feel more secure, nice and closed away from the world; didn’t have to check over my shoulder for magical stalkers in here. The sense of comfort increased further as I donned the baggy armor of sweaters and heavy pants. The mirror agreed that it was working; the heavy, ambiguous silhouette of the sweaters and pants combined felt like me, a far cry from my worst worries for the kinds of clothes implied by Hina’s casual dismissal of my gender when we had first met or the aesthetics dictated by mahou shoujo. It wasn’t an extreme makeover, just a moderate shift to a slightly more upscale version of what I was used to wearing, since budget was no longer as much of a concern.

I jumped when I heard a tap on the door and Hina’s voice.

“Cutie? Ez? You okay?”

“I’m—fine, I’m fine. The clothes are working.”

“Can I see?”

I resisted the urge to take a deep breath; she’d definitely hear it. I opened the door of my cozy little haven and saw her standing there, looking a bit nervous, eyes cast down at the shoes I had discarded at the threshold of the stall. She was holding one of the coats she had been looking at earlier, a long, heavy thing in a soft cream tone. Was that technically a trench coat or a great coat or an overcoat?

“Sorry if I spooked you by saying that.”

“It’s—fine?” I hadn’t expected her to apologize. Nestled in my new armor, I felt the confidence to at least obliquely confront the topic. “We, um—ah, fuck, we need to talk about it when we’re done here, I think? It’s—it’s all just been an extremely weird few days, you know? And I don’t know if I’m ready for—if I want—well.”

Fortunately, she seemed to get what I was trying to convey without me having to spell it out.

“Mhm. Let me know if I’m coming on too strong, okay? Like I said, I’m…”

“Not great at knowing when to stop, yeah. I will.” Then I allowed myself to take the deep breath I had aborted earlier and changed the topic, proud of how I had handled that. “…How do I look?”

“Good! Yeah, it’s working.” She gave me a once-over, then prodded at my discarded shoes idly with her foot. “We can do better than these, but that doesn’t have to be a today thing, ‘specially before your foot’s all better. How’s it feel?”

“Um, doesn’t hurt much, ankle’s still—”

“The outfit, not the foot,” she giggled.

“Oh. I like it?” I tried to figure out how to expound on that without referencing how it felt like carapace. “It’s comfortable…yeah, it’s comfortable.” I indicated the coat. “That for me?”

“Yeah! I think it’d work for you. Contrasts with the darks on the rest of the outfit, bulks out the silhouette some more, collar plays nicely with your hair. Try it?”

I had just reached out to accept it from her when Hina’s phone rang. I took the coat, and she dug in her pocket, sighing.

“It’s Alice. We might be about to get yelled at.”

“Why? Oh, wait—you think she found my stalker?”

“Probably.” She looked at the incoming call with something between trepidation and annoyance before picking up. “Damn it. Moshi moshi?”

My phone buzzed behind me where I had left it on the little bench in the stall. Then again. Then a third time, and a fourth, and it continued as I snatched it up. The first three had been pings in the chatroom, then a Twitter notification, then two news bulletins, and they just kept coming, all talking about the same thing. I realized Alice’s call wasn’t about the illusionary Flamebearer I had encountered—she was telling Hina about the same thing I was seeing cascade across my sources of magical world news.

That oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico where another part of my flamefall cluster had landed, the one locked down by the Spire in a standoff with the PCTF, had just gone inferno.

And Radiance Heliotrope was aboard.

Author’s Note:

Ahem. Anyway.

Thank you as usual to the beta readers: Softies, Maria, Zak, and Cassiopeia. As always, this chapter would not be half as good without their feedback; heck, this chapter wouldn’t have even been out on time if not for their regular prodding to get me onto the keyboard.

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!

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September 7, 2024

starstar97: WHAT THE FUCK

starstar97: YALL

ezzen: lmao

ks3glimmer: ?

starstar97: e. how.

ezzen: I…

ezzen: Asked?

starstar97: im doing a stupid little dance on my bed rn

moth30: lighthouse?

starstar97: opal did a video for me aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

moth30: hell yeah

ebi-furai: nice of her

ebi-furai: wanna fill them in on how things have been going for you, ez?

ezzen: uhhhhhhh

ezzen: Not much to report. Doing paperwork.

Why was she prompting me? Just being social, or was this a roundabout and subtle form of bullying?

ezzen: Really weird to spend so long off my PC.

skychicken: oh, yeah, i assume you’ve got to basically move into a new place?

skychicken: new computer and so on

No acknowledgment of my apology or question from last night. That stung. Was this bridge burned?

ezzen: Yep, wound up living with the Radiances, doing some shopping today.

ezzen: Which is just unreal when I actually say it.

starstar97: jealous forever. FOREVER, e

starstar97: currently too high on this video to make demands but later im going to want the hot gossip

starstar97: ebi has been SO uncooperative >:(

ebi-furai: no leaks!

ebi-furai: i like my job too much

ezzen: Yeah, no leaks. I’m already a burden sorta since they’re covering everything about my foot, don’t want to cause further problems.

ezzen: My post earlier ruffled some feathers for their publicity.

starstar97: fine

ks3glimmer: im very lost in this conversation

starstar97: btw tysm ily this is the best day of my life

ezzen: <3

ks3glimmer: i go afk for three days and i come back to ezzen living

ks3glimmer: with LIGHTHOUSE? correct me if im wrong. bizarro world if im not

ks3glimmer: also hey new person who im inferring from context is a lighthouse employee

ebi-furai: ww hii

skychicken: our first Todai employee in this chat, i think

That claim still smelled a bit fishy to me.

ebi-furai: check the forum, still top post i think

ezzen: ^

We’d been collectively fielding questions about the news of my new situation from latecomers all morning, both in the chatroom and on the forum. It was what occupied most of my otherwise-empty past two hours of following Opal around Tochou like a lonely duckling. We’d gotten a respectable portion of the immigration paperwork done; most importantly, Opal had successfully submitted some critical documents on Todai’s end regarding sponsoring my visa, and we’d managed to dodge any difficulties regarding the fact that my method of entering the country had been via counter-abduction by Hina. She had allegedly teleported me in eighty-kilometer hops all the way across the world—some seven thousand meters up—which had caused significant distress to air traffic control in every jurisdiction between Heathrow and Haneda. Opal had assured me that Todai had already paid the according fines—apparently those made up the vast majority of the final bill for my rescue and recovery, compared to the actual medical costs or the fees associated with immigration. The number was large enough that she refused to reveal it to me, citing that it’d make me feel unreasonably guilty even though it was entirely Hina’s fault. She was probably right.

We’d relocated once during our bouncing between different lines and kiosks, claimed a new unofficial home base of lightly padded seats and tables that were slightly too small for our bureaucratic labors. At least this new location was by a window, and the view was decent up here on the twenty-fifth floor—did Japan have a thing for floor-to-ceiling windows? Surprisingly, the concrete terrain of lower rooftops was peppered with what looked to be gardens despite the fact that most of those buildings were minor local government offices sheltering in Tochou’s shadow. It did a lot to liven up the euclidean blocks of concrete, like the park had on the drive over.

I’d taken this all in across the span of a few seconds. Then I’d had to stop looking; too high off the ground. Opal had spotted that—without comment, mercifully—and opted to instead describe the scene to me, which had metamorphosed into some rambling tangent about how the city’s juxtaposition of urban construction and green space was a particularly Japanese sensibility. It had gone over my head, only half-paying attention with my focus split between the chatroom and the documents, but it seemed to keep her occupied while her eyes scanned through the endless sheafs of red tape. Indeed, her spirits had remained quite high through the whole thing, energy unflagging—though that might have also had something to do with the steady supply of nuts being transferred from pocketspace to her stomach.

By square footage, Tochou was over eight times the size of Lighthouse Tower, and while our adventures had been constrained to a select few floors, there’d still been a surprising amount of walking, agitating my ankle. Fortunately, the ice pack had done its job, muting the joint’s fussing, until it had finally reached thermal equilibrium with the stuffy, ink- and paper-laden air. It was maybe a degree warmer in here than I would have liked, and I’d absentmindedly been tapping my fingers against the window to compensate, leaching the excess heat into the chilly glass. That also helped remind me that there was a barrier between me and the long drop.

I silently thanked the spent pack of mysterious blue gel—not nearly as blue as Hina’s eyes, a slightly disquieting thought—and handed it back to Opal, who deposited it into her personal pocketspace. I distracted myself the only way I knew how.

“How much space have you got in there?”

“Four cubic meters. Two by two by one. Handy, isn’t it?”

“Extremely.” I was a little jealous. “It’s just {VOLUME}, isn’t it? The space itself?”

“Pretty much. Hina’s is fancier than mine; she uses it for everything. Hates carrying stuff.”

“She can portal too, right? Saw her do it last night.”

The mention of her teammate’s objectionable behavior set Opal’s expression just the tiniest bit stormy before she shook it off.

“Yep. Space is her specialty, you could say. Easier when you’re halfway to having a lattice for a brain.”

Opal had done a formidable job of filing away the documents not intended for return to whichever helpful clerk had presented them to us, banishing them into an accordion folder with different labeled sections—immigration, health insurance, Bureau. Opal had made an attempt to teach me the Japanese term for each of those and scribbled them onto the back of each of the little label tabs as though they were flashcards. In turn, the folder was relegated to her pocketspace to join the spent ice pack and her dwindling supply of nuts and whatever else she had in there.

Then she stood, stretching, tail raised and midriff on display. The word ‘fanservice’ wandered through my brain, which I tried very hard to ignore. I almost succeeded. She rolled her shoulders and encouraged me to do the same, eyeing how I distributed my weight as I rose. She cracked all her knuckles—loud in the hush of the byzantine labyrinth, though no louder than her own voice had been while rambling about some shrine in Akasaka—and then surprised me by continuing the crackling up her arms and then down her spine, even getting some loud pops from her tail as she flexed it.

“Nnghm. My back is killing me—these chairs are really not great for my spine. Feel up to going up to the skydeck, stretch our legs?”

“We’re done for today?”

“Just about. It’s—” She checked her watch, an ultra-thin hologram display more like a bracelet in form. At least four hundred quid, I guessed. “Quarter to noon, and if we do another ticket-wait-forms cycle, I won’t have enough buffer time to drop you off and eat something before my meeting. Skydeck will probably only be…twenty minutes at most, I think.”

The rhythm of Opal’s day seemed to be heavily influenced by the supernaturally high demands of her stomach; meals were the immovable keystones around which she assembled the rest of her itinerary.

“Um…sure, we can go up. How high is it?”

I tried to keep the question nonchalant, but it came out a bit too breathless, and she caught on, glancing out the window I’d been studiously avoiding once I’d had all I could take of the view.

“Not good with heights, yeah?”

“Um…not great, but I can manage,” I assured her. “It’s not as bad once I go high enough, so…”

She nodded. “You should be alright, I think. It’s nowhere near as tall as Skytree, but it’s still…two hundred meters, I think? Something like that.”

I considered this. I didn’t want to refuse the offer, so I swallowed my nerves.

“Okay.”

Her voice softened. “If you think you can’t, just let me know, alright?”

“…thanks.”

She really was entirely too kind. That feeling only intensified under her watchful gaze as I shuffled my feet experimentally, confirming that my leg was up to some more walking. Satisfied with that, she led me over to the elevators she had indicated. When one arrived, both of the people who stepped out—employees, probably—directed a round-eyed, starstruck stare at her. She gave them a warm smile, seeming not at all awkward under the attention, before leading me inward. The doors slid shut.

“I’m a little surprised that a Spire-lover like you would be scared of heights. You’ve never been, right?”

“No, but I think it’d be like a plane. Once I go high enough, I stop thinking of it in terms of distance from the ground.”

“Makes sense. You’ll get over it, I think. It’s a lot less scary once you realize how much control you’ve got in the air. Er—that’s how it is for our mantles, anyway. I wouldn’t recommend jumping off any buildings, yourself.”

Was there a silent “not yet” appended to that? I didn’t want to tempt that possibility, as much as I was coming to trust Opal to not push me in that direction.

“That’s…{IMPEL}? Can we talk about this now?”

“We can, since it’s just us. When we’re mantled, it’s…well, not just {IMPEL}, there’s a lot of tricks. Blue ripple, though, yeah.”

Blue was physical effects—forces, changes in temperature.

“It’s not snapweaving?”

“It’s bindings. Jet fighter cockpit sort of vibes, remember? The mantles sort of come…preloaded with the glyphs, woven into the manifest, so they’re acting as LM substrate for extra bindings. You know how all you have to do with your binding is tug on the weave? Same deal, but even more natural. If you’ve ever played an instrument, or a video game with a lot of hand-eye coordination, it’s like that.”

I had largely stayed away from video games that demanded that sort of dexterity, owing to my right hand, but I wasn’t about to derail into that when we were finally talking about my favorite thing.

“So what you can do is limited by what you’ve included in the mantle.”

“Sort of. We still can snapweave for other stuff, but that’s not the same either. When your body itself is spun out of lattice, it’s…I don’t know how to put it. You’re much more aware of the ripple directly. Psychomotive elements go both ways, you understand. Though we’re still ‘on instruments’ for a lot of maneuvers, so to speak.”

I considered this.

“Even if it’s not totally fluid, that still sounds…” Then I wound up being a little more vulnerable than I had intended. “Freeing.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “It is.”

The elevator dinged, and we were at the deck. There were few internal lights on, but the huge windows encircling the space let in the skylight, the hazy blue casting everything in its hue. Like the penthouse, the elevator was at the building’s center—or rather, this tower’s center. Tochou had two peaks that rose above the more conventional office building design of the first thirty-ish floors, and both had a skydeck; we were on the northern one. Opal led me forward to the window which circumnavigated the entire deck, continuing to keep an eye on my leg; not that I was limping, but the concern was welcome nonetheless. I made it to the window and needed a moment for my eyes to adjust from the relative shade to the light of the open sky. Then I saw Tokyo’s true scale for the first time.

The city just…kept going, in every direction, a sprawl of grey and brown mottling that extended into the hazy distance, blending into the foot of distant blue mountains which in turn melded with the midday sky. Skyscrapers broke the cobbled surface, jutting out in protrusions that were sometimes conventional rectangles and sometimes more esoteric and bulbous. Most were smaller than Tochou, but a few were of the level or even taller, kin to the behemoths that shared Todai’s neighborhood. We were facing the wrong way anyway, but I would have been completely unable to pick Lighthouse Tower out from the undergrowth. There was an especially tall, needle-like building ahead of us, a mile or two away.

“That’s…Skytree?”

“Yep. Fourth-tallest manmade structure in the world, these days.”

A little placard set in front of the part of the window which faced Skytree helpfully listed the competition. The tallest structure in the world was obviously the Spire, by an entire order of magnitude, 8,070 meters…but it didn’t count for this metric, as it wasn’t manmade. Thus, the actual crown went to an 800-meter super-skyscraper that had been erected as an exercise in magic-assisted architecture in Shanghai, closely followed by its sibling in Guangzhou. Then came the tallest non-magical one from the previous era, Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, right above Skytree on the list. Previously, those two had been behind the Burj Khalifa, but that had been annihilated with the rest of Dubai.

I made the mistake of looking past the little informational rectangle, down toward the ground far below the observation deck’s windows. Too high—I squeezed my eyes shut. That was a second mistake, because now my body was convinced I was standing on the edge of a cliff, with nothing between me and the ground. My heart pounded, my mouth dry and sticky. My panicking mind groped for some security. I found it in my binding—

Opal’s hand gripped my wrist, fingers pressed over the tattoo. The lattice wouldn’t budge—she wasn’t just holding my arm in place, she was also using her Flame to hold the thread taut, preventing me from tugging the leading edge to call the weapon from the binding, just as Hina had. I didn’t at all appreciate that echo, and the panic deepened further for a moment, recalling the primal terror she had evoked in me—

“Not here. Deep breaths.”

My brain was screaming danger. I was going to fall, down and down, and become a wet smear on the pavement. Like—

“Too high,” I blubbered.

“Let go of the lattice, it’s okay. Deep breaths, Ezzen. Kuu…fah. Like that.”

I forced myself to take a shuddering breath. This was humiliating—and became more so when I heard Opal say something in Japanese to a passerby or maybe the staff. I squeezed my eyes tighter. I squeaked out an apology, hating the scene I was making.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Do you need to go back down?”

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to lose to my body’s stupid response to a bad memory. Stupid fucking useless spear, what would it have even done for me? No, don’t think about that, just breathe in, breathe out. A lattice diagram began to take form in my mind. It would start with {AFFIX}, and blue link into {IMPEL} to resist the force of gravity, or a {DEFLECT} sheet to create sufficient drag. Alternatively, I could {TRANSPOSE} the momentum itself into some other color of ripple, though some napkin math on kinetic energy ruled that out as a matter of externalities that most VNT groups would deem unacceptable, regardless of which color I were to choose. There was one neat line there where you linked on orange into a {COMPOSE} to just directly store the energy into a binding for later release, but you’d need a proper receptacle ahead of time, which—

Picturing the glyphs that would arrest my fall helped me calm down. My heartbeat settled, and I released my mental hold on the lattice in my arm.

“I’m okay.”

“Look at the mountains instead.”

I opened my eyes, looking out at the blue peaks bordering the horizon instead of straight down. Opal didn’t release my wrist until I took a few more slow breaths. Then my gaze tracked to her.

“How do you…oh. Amethyst.”

“Yuuka, not Amane,” she corrected, her voice gentle.

“…Doesn’t she have a jetbike?”

“She insisted on learning.”

There was a quiet smile in her voice that stabilized me. I unclenched my fists, forced myself to un-hunch my stance. I wasn’t going to let the memories rule me.

“Okay. Sorry, again. Can we keep going?”

“Yes. If you need to go down—just ask. I won’t let it become a scene.”

Thank you, Opal. I wished I could have said that aloud, but the whole ordeal had made me a bit fragile as it was. She took me around the perimeter, going toward the west side, and pointed.

“Fuji-san.”

The snow-capped peak was visible over the row of smaller mountains in the far distance. This direction also had fewer skyscrapers, making the buildings seem like pebbles on a beach by comparison. There was majesty in the mountain, even at this distance—I pictured the Spire next to it, over twice as tall but far more narrow, less vast for all its height. Nature had a way of eclipsing even the work of the divine. On the other hand, the endless urban sprawl below me, the fruit of centuries of labor from us mortals, had less than a fifth of the Spire’s population. Wait, no, not centuries; at some point in Opal’s architectural rambling she had mentioned that not much of the old city had survived the firebombings during the Second World War.

“Isn’t san an honorific? Personification?”

“No, just a homophone. It’s a good friend of ours, though, so maybe. We’ll take you, eventually.”

“On a hike?”

That sounded sort of nice; the slopes seemed gentle enough that they probably wouldn’t trigger my acrophobia. It’d have to be after my foot healed completely, though. Opal chuckled.

“Well, it’s a bit more than a hike—it’s a pretty serious ascent. For humans.”

“And for…us?”

It still made me giddy to refer to myself that way and mean it. No longer fantasy. She pointed at the distant peak.

“Three minutes, twenty-nine seconds.”

“Flying straight up? Or is it more like running?”

“Oh, no, not the ascent. From here to the summit. That’s the average between us.”

Another placard helpfully informed me that that was a roughly 80-kilometer journey—she let me use my phone’s calculator for a minute. The speed wound up being a little over Mach one.

“I assume that sort of statistic is under…NDA?”

Aside from our discussion of Todai’s less-than-cordial relationship with the PCTF, Opal had been a little cagey about exactly what was and wasn’t considered ‘safely public’ knowledge regarding the Radiances. She’d assured me that we’d talk it through once the paperwork caught up to us.

“Well, that specific number is public, or I wouldn’t have said it, but that’s a good assumption.”

I took a photo of the vista for Star’s benefit—hopefully she still had an appetite for souvenirs from me after Opal’s video—and mentally filed away the factoid. We continued around the perimeter, and she finally broached the topic I had hoped she’d continue to avoid.

“How are your bites?”

“Er—bitten, I suppose?”

“I mean emotionally.”

“Must we?” It felt a little forceful of her to be bringing this up after the emotional ordeal not three minutes ago.

“Mm. We don’t have to, just felt I should get it on the table. I understand you two agreed it’s not a date, but…”

Was she asking if I was into Hina? Because the answer to that was a resigned and faintly horrified yes, you have no idea how much, but there was no way I was going to admit that—especially not in public, even with the respectful wide-ish berth that other tourists were giving us. So I stuck with my story.

“It’s not a date.”

“Okay, fine, sorry, didn’t mean to be a bother.” She fell silent for a moment, and then almost burst out, unable to stop herself from continuing the line of questioning. “Then—what do you think of her? I mean—she’s my biggest worry about all this, you know? I just fret she’ll scare you off. I want this to work.”

What did I think of Hina, exactly? I still felt last night’s resolve that she was entirely, unapologetically herself, more than anything else—but that understanding had come about through too much intimacy for me to feel comfortable sharing it. Besides, that was a tautologically unhelpful framing of her character, and I had to admit some curiosity about what Opal would think of my previous theory instead.

“She’s like…a puppy, sometimes. But sometimes she’s a hyena?”

Fuck, that sounded stupid, said aloud. I was powerless to stop the blush from invading my face. She stifled a snicker, which made me feel even worse, and flayed me open with a giggle-laced conspiratorial whisper.

“A hyena! Hina the Hyena. Like a certain Heron, isn’t it?”

Oh no. Oh fuck. Was that why I had categorized her like that? If I had been somewhat embarrassed before, this was now all-out humiliation, as she dragged my subconscious predilection toward Heung into the harsh light of day. She continued poking holes in the metaphor, a teasing grin on her face.

“Hyenas aren’t really scary, are…they…?” She trailed off as she processed my reaction. Her voice softened. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to make fun of you. Sorry.”

I tried to defend the idea, even though it had already taken on far too much water and I really had no reason to be invested in it anymore. “It’s just—how she smiles. The teeth.”

“Yes, I see it, it’s really not a bad comparison at all. That was so rude of me, I don’t…no excuse here, that was just out of turn. Um…can I make it up to you with some insider intel?”

My metaphorical ears perked up.

“Go ahead?”

“She likes crepes. There’s a place on Takeshita-dori called, uh…Sweet Box. She’s probably going to hint for you to take her there when you pass by. At least, I’m assuming that’s the part of town she’s going to take you to.”

That caught me off guard—I had pegged her tastes as more carnivorous, not quite so sweet and girly.

“Crepes?”

“Crepes.”

“And she wouldn’t just…drag me there directly?”

“She’s capable of subtlety, you know. To use the dog metaphor…she’ll beg a bit. Look at it, then look back to you, that sort of thing.”

“Doesn’t sound all that subtle.”

“I didn’t say she was good at it, just capable of it. It’s cute, though, I promise.”

“Okay, um. Thanks. Um—apology accepted?”

Awkward, but functional, and my appreciation was genuine. Opal and Hina had both intimated that they were each other’s best friends, or something close to it, and being let in on that felt good.

We fell silent as we continued around the perimeter. The view directly to the south was partially blocked by the south tower with its twin observation deck, some twenty-odd meters away from us. The main thing of note in that direction was that the mountains tapered off as they met the bay. It occurred to me—

“That’s the Pacific.”

“It…is? Of course.” She nodded hesitantly, before snapping her fingers in understanding. I’d have only seen the Atlantic while living in Britain, and Philadelphia had been inland. “Oh, first time?”

“Um…probably not first first, I think my dad took me to California once or twice when I was little, but I don’t remember it.”

“Ah. Well, there it is. Behold.”

I did as told, casting my gaze out at the horizon; there wasn’t actually all that much to behold from this vantage point. It was just a lot of water. In the sky, however—

“That’s the scar.”

“Yep. Right mess. Not our proudest moment.”

The sky above the city—specifically above the port, to the southeast—had a section that was discolored and jagged. It was an ugly yellowish grey against the otherwise-blue sky. It almost looked like the ripple warping on my spear; I supposed that made sense. There were other landmarks further inland in this direction, like what looked to be the Imperial Palace, but the scar was a rather new addition to the skyline.

“Smaller than I expected.”

“It’s bigger up close.”

There was a placard for this, as well. I already knew the gist, but I gave the English portion a read anyway.

Visible above Tokyo Harbor is the Blue Spark Scar, a magical effect created on 27 July, 2018, after the Blue Spark Incident, where Lighthouse defeated a monster summoned by a necromancer.

“Sparse, isn’t it.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t even mention the fireworks.” She squinted at the placard. “The Japanese does.”

Wait. “July 2018. So that’s—three and a half years ago. You mentioned that, um, Sugahara…”

“Sugawara. Yes, it’s connected. Our first mission as an official team that wasn’t just inferno control. Topic for later, you understand.”

First time they had fought Hikanome—a name suspiciously absent from the placard. This wasn’t something we should continue discussing in public. We followed the circle to the final cardinal direction of our circumnavigation, facing east. She pointed downward.

“You don’t have to look, but that’s Shinjuku. One of the biggest city centers in…well, the whole world, really. Even the station is practically a city in its own right.”

I braved it—but when my gaze fell closer than a certain distance, I suddenly became aware again of how high off the ground we were and had to abandon the effort. What I had seen of it looked—frankly, pretty much exactly like the rest of the city. Maybe with a slightly higher density of skyscrapers, but if there was something specific she had wanted me to see, it either wasn’t visible from up here or I hadn’t looked carefully enough.

“Can’t,” I apologized.

“It’s okay. Honestly—yeah, not much to see of it from up here, is there? You’ll get it once you’re down there.” She winced. “Oof, I can’t imagine my first real exposure to the crowds being with Hina of all people. Uh—well, you’re committed, and I promised I wouldn’t keep questioning that. So…good luck?”

—

We left Tochou the same way we came in, through the front, first descending those two hundred meters down to ground level—two different elevator rides—and then through the labyrinth of lines and halls on the ground level. The skydeck had been full of tourists, but we’d been almost entirely left alone; there were more interesting things to look at than Opal. But down here in the maw of the bureaucratic beast, her shining hair and massive tail were by far the most attention-grabbing things to see, turning the heads of visitors and paper-pushers alike. The eyes that fell on me by association were becoming more and more unwelcome; she was long since inoculated to it, though.

“Okay, so—Hina’s going to meet you somewhere else, and in the interest of her privacy, I’m not actually going to hand you off to her directly.”

“I’m already, er, seen with you already, though.”

“Yeah, but she’s a bit…paranoid about it. She’s already, uh…” She lowered her voice, rolling her eyes, “Undercover.”

“Is that…a lack of faith in her disguise, or just that it’s not—” Too many eyes on me to dare use the Japanese without risk of embarrassment. “—magical girl?”

“The latter. Scamp can disappear completely when she wants. Besides, word about how you look won’t spread fast enough to catch up to you today, at least, not once the two of you disappear into the crowds.”

“Oh.” That somehow made it worse; it hadn’t quite occurred to me that celebrity-spotters on social media might make note of my appearance and spread it around. But if they were anything like Star—indeed, some of them might be people Star knew—my face was already destined to be cataloged into the weekly rumor mill surrounding the Radiances, just by being seen here with Opal today. “I’m going to be hunted down by paparazzi?”

“Well, the professionals know better than to mob us, but by next week there’s at least some chance of fans recognizing you, yeah. If that’s a problem…well, Hina will talk you through it.”

I didn’t relish the idea of being high-profile enough to garner attention from passersby in public even without a Radiance at my side—that was some small part of why I had rejected the idea of joining as a Radiance in the first place, secondary to the more obvious objections. Even the idea of my face eventually becoming joined publicly to my identity as Ezzen sat deeply wrong with me. I valued the near-perfect anonymity I had cultivated online; I’d managed to achieve a strange limbo between being popular and respected while remaining mostly private, and now that was being threatened.

“But it won’t come up today?”

“Shouldn’t. Rumor mill doesn’t work that fast. Er—sorry. I should have explained it more back when I made you the offer.”

“I’ll manage,” I sighed.

She winced a bit, which in turn made me feel bad for making her feel bad that I felt bad. We were great at this. She shook it off and led me the rest of the way out the building, and then around the corner to where we had street-parked—how humble. When we reached the car, I turned and looked again at Tochou’s facade, now just far enough away that I wouldn’t lose my balance trying to look up at it.

Somebody with a proper appreciation for architecture would have probably gotten more out of it, but Tochou cut an impressive figure nonetheless. It gave the impression of two huge columns stitched together in the middle until about halfway up, beyond which the two towers continued to rise individually, holding higher-level offices and the twin skydecks. The stone facade was a fortress of bureaucracy, with the two turrets standing sentinel above the keep, the entrance set in as though to shield it from assault. It felt as though it should have a drawbridge or portcullis or something, rather than the array of perfectly normal glass doors. Too, craning my neck up at the dual peaks adorned with satellite dishes, I almost expected to see them crowned with vast anti-aircraft guns watching the sky, perhaps trained on the scar. That mental image, of artillery atop great stone monoliths, came from a childhood trip to see the concrete flak towers in Vienna—a historical site that had fared WW2 far better than this city supposedly had. Those enormous slabs of concrete had long since been denuded of their armaments, which had been disappointing to ten-year-old Dalton at the time. Now, my imagination filled in the absence with the Spire’s own defensive emplacements and dropped the whole amalgam of concrete and cutting-edge cannonry onto the top of each of Tochou’s spires.

But no such weapons were necessary; the scar was inert, stitched shut and scabbed over. Anything that threatened this city would have to go through the Radiances, anyway.

Opal looked up with me. “View’s fine from down here?”

“Little dizzying…not scary, though, no. Sky’s big.”

“Astute observation.”

“…Thanks. I guess it is sort of scary, in a more abstract way. Feels like if you stare long enough you might fall up into it, y’know?”

She gave me a funny look. “Can’t say I do.”

I retreated into my jacket a bit at that, casting my gaze back down to Earth, the blush warring with the chilly air attacking my skin. My arms, the left of which had been absentmindedly squeezing the right to help fight off the winter’s ache, separated and delved into my pockets. Seeing my reaction, she cursed.

“Ah, bollocks. I feel every third thing I say makes you uncomfortable in some way. Sorry.”

I wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault, because it really wasn’t, but I was shutting down a bit. My ears were replaying the stupid thing I had said over and over, my mind unable to buffer anything past the moment of embarrassment. Instead, it harkened back to the humiliating scene I had made earlier up on the skydeck, and the idea that more people would be looking at me from now on, my undersocialized, probably-autistic constant awkwardness on global display, to say nothing of how I was going to make a fool of myself with Hina, it was all this awful paralytic pressure—

“Oh, Ezzen. It’s not—it doesn’t have to be scary. You know I didn’t get good at talking to people overnight, right?”

I still didn’t respond verbally, trapped in the cycle of overstimulation and bad thoughts, but I managed the tiniest nod to indicate I was listening. She circled from my side to stand in front of me on the pavement. She probably cut an impressive figure with Tochou at her back, the kind you’d see on a postcard or the cover of a magazine, but all I saw from my downcast gaze and hunched shoulders were her trainers. They looked expensive, a splatter of soft pinks and baby blues and citrine yellows over pure white; the same hues that refracted across her scales, so maybe the shoes were custom.

“Remember what Hina said this morning? How I used to be a hikikomori? A shut-in?”

I actually hadn’t. I managed a noncommittal noise of acknowledgment.

“Well, it’s true. I was…I wanted the publicity, to be seen as a mahou shoujo, but I was terrified. Could barely form a complete sentence in front of people, and that was in my school uniform, not my transformation. If I ever went anywhere, it was because Hina dragged me there, or because I didn’t want Ai to spend time alone. Took me a long time to, er, ‘get it together’. You’ve—really splashed right into the deep end with all this and…what I said earlier about the Peacies probably made it sound like you’re on a timer to do the same. But you’re not, okay?”

She stepped a bit closer to me, but I still couldn’t raise my eyes to her.

“You’re not. You don’t—it’s really, really hard at first. But it’s just practice, and we don’t bite.” She made a dissatisfied noise. “Well, I suppose Hina does. The point is, if you don’t want to be in the public eye with the rest of us beyond your name, we can make that happen. And I promise, a year from now, it’ll be so much easier to just…exist. To not be embarrassed to be you. It just takes practice. Want to know what helped for me?”

“What?”

“I…gosh, it sounds a bit dumb when I say it out loud. I took an improv acting class. It’s one of the best decisions I ever made—okay, well, Hina threatened me at knifepoint to do it, but it’s still true. And at some point, the embarrassment just…became normal, yeah? It didn’t go away, I just got better at ignoring it to keep playing the role, learned to think on my feet even when my metaphorical arse was out. And when I started being Radiance Opal, and not Alice…I was still playing a role, until it became real. More than figuring out our costumes or anything else, more than anything aside from getting flametouched, pretending is what let me really become mahou shoujo. Again, not saying you have to follow in those exact footsteps, just…”

“…so it is roleplay.”

She guffawed at that. “Yes, it is, in this sense. It’s performative. But no more performative than any other public interaction. It’s all tatemae. Um, I’m getting off track—that’ll have to be a whole lecture on its own, eventually, but the point is: just try. I won’t tell you to not be embarrassed. Just try to…keep up the act, pretend you’re somebody who’s confident. You’ll mess up, and that’s fine, because while Hina’s real queer, she’s basically the perfect person to practice that sort of thing with because she’ll never make fun of you for making an effort. Okay? Can you do that?”

“…okay.”

“Attaboy.” She patted my shoulder gently—my left, so as not to put more weight on my bad leg, which I appreciated—then dug the stabilizer out of her bag and handed it to me. “This is yours. Feeling up to walking a hundred meters on your own?”

“Um. Think so?” I accepted it from her, rolling the bulky shape around in my hands before pocketing it in my jacket. It unbalanced me slightly, but that was a small price to pay for being able to walk at all. Then I processed the rest of what she was saying; I hadn’t quite realized we were to part ways right here on the pavement. She was just going to set me loose in an unfamiliar city and hope that I linked up with the right person, who was supposedly in disguise? I didn’t even have Hina’s number, which seemed like a bit of an oversight. This seemed like a bad plan, and while I didn’t say it aloud, my frown spoke for itself.

“Don’t worry,” she assured me, pointing over my shoulder. “Just follow the road. She’ll find you before too long. She’s already around here somewhere, actually, so it’s not like you’ll really be alone. She just doesn’t want to be seen with me.” She made a dissatisfied hmpf noise, obviously directed at her absent teammate rather than me. “Anyway, uh…right, the folder. I’ll show you where we keep files and stuff once you get home, yeah?”

“Okay? Sounds good. Um. Get home safe?”

I had unconsciously referred to Lighthouse Tower as “home”, prompted by her doing the same—and was not at all prepared to unpack that right now. She smiled at it, at least. Unreasonably, distractingly pretty.

“Will do. Have fun with Hina. Remember, she ever makes you uncomfortable or pushes you too far and you need a bail-out—call me. I’m never too busy to wrangle her, promise. See you tonight!”

With that, she got in her car. We waved at each other as she pulled out and onto the road, and then she was gone, leaving me alone in the shadow of the split skyscraper. Well, not alone, according to her claim that Hina was around here somewhere—though she had been a bit vague about exactly how close. Nothing for it. I began to walk in the direction she had indicated.

—

Following the road as instructed led me through underpasses, past glass-enclosed plazas, and into a gradually more tourist-dense area. I didn’t look out of place on these streets; unassumingly dressed, black-haired white guys were among the most common types of tourist, and I was relieved to find that my prior stressing about being recognized was unfounded for now.

The road eventually terminated at a T-intersection, surrounded on all sides by what my maps app said were hotels—Hiltons, Hyatts, and the like. I stood at the corner of the intersection, now unsure of how to proceed. I supposed I should at least cross the road; there was an interesting-looking statue in one of those small green spaces Opal seemed to like so much. It was really just a small brick plaza with a row of trees and some shrubs, and the greenery wasn’t exactly living up to its name in the middle of winter, but the open space was at least a reprieve from the relative claustrophobia of the tall buildings around me. The crosswalk signal turned green, and I was about to cross—

A spark of icy fire ignited in my chest. The cold winter air was suddenly cloying around me, far too hot and humid by contrast to the frigid magic blooming inside me. I stumbled—not into the street, thankfully, more of a stagger to the side to lean against the traffic signal’s post. An attack? An ambush by the PCTF or Hikanome, taking advantage of Opal’s laxity, her assurance that nobody would try this so soon?

As I tried to regain myself past the coughing fit and fight down the explosion of sweaty discomfort, I pressed my forearm to my side, denying my tattoo and the spear it held. If I was under attack, I could summon it in an instant; better to wait for the right moment and not give away that it was an option. Somebody approached me from the side, then, and I felt the tattoo itch. I waited, waited—then turned, raised my scarred arm to shield myself from the stranger. It was on the verge of igniting, wisps of steam rising from it in the cold air.

Then logic caught up to me. This spark of flame? A stranger on the streets? It was Hina, duh. I sheepishly lowered my arm to indulge her ambush, the jitter in my chest from reignited panic transforming into a primal excitement at her predatory approach—which turned to a lump of leaden dread in my stomach when it wasn’t her.

Her eyes were wrong.

The rest of her look was explicable enough for a magic-enhanced disguise: black hair, black lipstick, a baggy black jacket like mine over a short skirt, big boots with some metal embellishments. Overall, goth, but fairly subdued, and all within the parameters of what was possible, still a twenty-something Japanese woman of approximately the right height and build. But her eyes weren’t blue. They were a mild brown, and that simply made no sense—no contact lens could refract away that impossible blue. Could magic? Yes, trivially—but my gut was sure, absolutely certain, that it wasn’t her, against the assurances of logic. I still attempted to trust the latter, trying to talk myself down from the spike of adrenaline and the almost painful itch in my arm.

“…Hina?”

The woman blinked in surprise and stepped back from me.

“You’re not supposed to be able to see me.”

She didn’t sound like Hina. Stronger Japanese accent, higher-pitched voice. I prepared to draw my spear.

“Who are you?”

She didn’t answer me, taking another step away, eyes narrowing. She didn’t move like Hina, none of the supernatural balance, neither a stalking prowl nor explosive motion. Then she splintered, like a hyper-realistic rendering in stained glass struck by a shockwave, and shattered into a thousand fragments. They burned away in wisps of smoke, and she was gone, leaving me to take deep, slow breaths of the chilly air and slowly release my mental hold on my spear binding as my core temperature returned to normal, human levels.

An illusion—a messenger? A voyeur, really, or perhaps a stalker, if I wasn’t supposed to have been able to see her. And how had I done that? My Flame’s reaction was surely a factor, but I hadn’t woven anything; whatever reaction that had been was pure intuition, like how Hina had directly stoked my flame last night. I shuddered at both the memory and the terror still in my veins, the adrenaline making my fingers shake as I fumbled for my phone to tell Opal what I had just seen, tell her to turn around and come pick me up—

“Hey, cutie. What happened? Ripple’s all fucky.”

The husky voice was unmistakable. So was the bouncy step that concealed the coiled energy of an apex predator on alert, one who knew that something had intruded upon her territory. She was in a comfortable-looking sweater and baggy pants, a silvery grey trenchcoat hanging over her shoulders. Fashionable as ever.

Those things didn’t confirm to me that it was her, though, not beyond doubt; I still nearly jumped out of my skin, half-brandishing my forearm with its renewed hiss of steam, the itch returning to my tattoo. I didn’t lower my guard until she lowered her dark sunglasses, peering at me over the rims.

I’d never been so relieved to see those sapphire eyes.

Author’s Note:

If you’re ever in Tokyo, I highly, highly recommend visiting one of the observation decks, either at Tochou, Roppongi Hills, Shibuya Sky, or especially Skytree. It’s incredible, especially if you don’t have hangups about altitude like Ez does; hopefully the prose conveys the sheer absurd scale. It really does just sort of fade into the horizon.

Thanks to the beta readers: Softies, Maria, Cassiopeia, and Zak.

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August 31, 2024

The Main Todai building was officially called Lighthouse Tower. The actual name in Japanese was a direct transliteration of the English and had inspired my first impromptu Japanese lesson on the walk over, through an underground tunnel on the first-level basement linking it to the adjacent parking structure.

“Raitohausu tawa. Laitohausu tawar. Raithaos tawa?”

‘R’ was a terrible letter, at least the Japanese one. It just wasn’t a sound my mouth was used to making at all.

“You’re getting there! You can get away with a really light ‘D’ sound instead for the ‘R’. Make the last ‘A’ longer, too.”

“Daitohausu tawaa?”

“Too hard on the ‘D’.” She immediately facepalmed at her own innuendo. “I’m so glad Hina didn’t hear that.”

When her hand came away, she looked the same—no makeup? Her skin really was just that smooth. The realization prompted a jolt of envy I didn’t quite understand, and I brushed my face with my fingers unconsciously. I discovered a few more missed spots around my jaw that had gone unshaven. The spot Hina had zapped stung a bit, and I was grateful that it wasn’t visibly inflamed as I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror.

Opal’s car was in a reserved spot right next to the tunnel. It wasn’t visibly the main ride of a major VNT organization leader. It was a nice car, some low-rider sporty import in a sleek white that matched her hair and tail, but I had been primed for…actually, I wasn’t sure what I had been primed for. One of those anime girl illustration wraps, but of her team? That didn’t sound like her; she didn’t even have a bumper sticker in that vein. The interior was more custom than the exterior, though: the driver’s seat was modified to accommodate her tail, the lumbar section of the back removed to allow the thick limb to spill out into the backseat and coil like…toothpaste? Surely there was a more flattering comparison, but that was what came to mind.

Alice was dressed slightly heavier than yesterday, opting to also add a pale-yellow crop top over the sports bra underneath the same white jacket. That was presumably for propriety’s sake rather than anything to do with the cold, but even with the addition, I would have been horribly embarrassed to wear such an exposing ensemble to a government office. Being in proximity to it was an exercise in fighting down secondhand embarrassment even as I rebuked myself for the way my eyes were drawn to the subtle bounce of her chest. I had to build up my tolerance to this sort of thing soon. Surely, the way my eyes wandered of their own accord was making these girls uncomfortable, despite assurances to the contrary.

She was already snacking on some sort of pastry: circular with a hole in the middle, like a donut, but with square edges instead of round. She took a few massive chomps, chewed hastily, swallowed with some effort, took a long draw from an iced tea she’d managed to sneak out the door while fleeing Hina and Amane’s argument, and then changed the topic as we pulled out of the parking space.

“You’re taking the amputation rather well.”

Was I? I supposed I was.

“It’s—thank you?” Silence reigned for a few beats as we went up a ramp to the parking structure’s ground level. “It doesn’t seem like all that big a deal, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t sunk in?”

If the quality of the rush-job prosthetic they had already given me was anything to go by, the one still in the works would be basically perfect once I finished healing. I didn’t feel like an amputee, at any rate. Opal nodded, waving at somebody getting out of their car who was presumably starting their workday. Support staff, perhaps, a totally unremarkable 40-something man in a suit. Slicked back hair, briefcase—the very image of a Japanese salaryman, even to my limited cultural context. His car was much less flashy than Opal’s, some mini Mitsubishi that they probably only sold domestically. He responded to Opal’s gesture with a small bow as we passed by.

“That’s Suzuki-san, no relation to Hina. He’s on the marketing team. You’d like him, I think…anyway, amputation. It’ll feel more real with time. This might sound a bit uncouth, but you got pretty lucky. If you had lost more of the foot, like up to the ankle, your recovery timeline would look much worse. The fact that you can already stand even without the stabilizer is a boon. Don’t just grit your teeth through it if it hurts, though, yeah?”

I assumed that came from experience with Amethyst’s condition. Even in my limited experience thus far, it was clear that she was a mess. Actually, it occurred to me that I’d hardly seen her stand in her human form, let alone walk. She didn’t seem to carry a cane or any other sort of mobility aid, but my gut said she ought to. My memories went back to the glimpse I had caught yesterday of the port in her midriff, and the way her argument with Hina had been on the verge of a shouting match. Both of them had pointed at me at least twice even in that short period.

“…Honestly, I feel like I’m imposing. Did that argument start because of me?”

“Ah, no, no. You’re entirely blameless for that. It’s more like…well, you know Hina. And Amane is the opposite, avoidant. Always in mantle because it lets her not be in pain for a while.”

“Mm.” As always, mention of their brand of magic took my attention. It seemed alright to ask these things now. “So your transformations can’t feel pain? No red links anywhere?”

“Well, it depends. Pain is a useful signal, but…alright, actually, we should start at the beginning, since I was hoping to have this talk on the way over anyway. How much do you know about magical girls?”

“Not much.”

“…Meaning?”

“I…uh. I have a friend who’s a fan of yours, but that’s it. Never seen an anime about them or anything.”

We arrived at a little electronic toll booth that marked the entrance of the parking structure.

“That’s alright. We’ll get you up to speed on the classics in the next few weeks.” She rolled down the window and waved a card at it. “But let me fill you in on the basics now, if that’s alright?”

The booth beeped and raised the barrier arm to allow us onto the streets of Tokyo. I had seen the immediately local skyline from my room’s window up on the 20th floor, but the effect was different on the ground. Down here, it was easy to forget just how tall the buildings were; Lighthouse Tower’s 20-story glass-and-steel facade was the same as its 80-story neighbors. With it as the model in my head and my view of higher floors obstructed by the car’s roof, it felt like we were surrounded by mid-size buildings rather than the truly tremendous skyscrapers they were. My frame of reference was a bit skewed anyway, though, since the Spire completely dwarfed anything in this city.

Since I couldn’t much see the skyline from down here, what really caught my attention was the people. The weather forecast had said it was actually a fair bit warmer here than in England today, high of 9 Celsius—yet everybody was bundled up. Scarves and hats abounded, topping off long overcoats and other heavy winter wear, a stark contrast to Alice’s athleisure. Her exposed skin wasn’t entirely without company among the pedestrians, though. She gestured with her reduced pastry at a trio of girls in bona fide sailor uniforms, bare-legged under their skirts. The girls pointed back at us; the glass was tinted, so they probably couldn’t see us, but it stood to reason that Opal’s personal ride was pretty iconic in its own right.

“That’s how old we were when we started. Most mahou shoujo deals with girls in high school or younger, chosen by some higher power for their youthful purity—the untainted love in their heart, that sort of thing—to do battle against evil monsters.”

I nodded, already seeing some of the real-world parallels, though our kind—still wasn’t used to thinking of myself as the in-group—were far more randomly selected. No distinguishable pattern for us. “Flametouched.”

“Mhm.” She took another bite of the pastry I would later learn is called a baumkuchen. “Aesthetically speaking, I’m sure you’ve already seen enough Sailor Moon stuff to get the picture by osmosis, online as you’ve been. No offense.”

“None taken. So it’s all, er, ribbons, hearts, gems?”

“Frills. Bows.”

She hung a left, and we pulled onto what seemed to be a more significant traffic artery. The streets reminded me of NYC in terms of how things were separated into blocks rather than the jumble of many European cities, but the big difference was that the Japanese loved signage to a degree that I had never quite seen before. Street signs were fairly universal, of course, but every storefront had a big sign, and everywhere I looked, there were flyers and bulletins. Opal continued.

“And wands, and sometimes actual weapons, yes. And all that comes with the transformation; otherwise, they’re just regular girls. The five of us, not getting those as part of our signing bonus, so to speak, had to make our own transformations. The Japanese for that is henshin, by the way; that’s the word you’ll see people use when talking about our mantles.”

“Henshin.” I rolled the word around in my mouth. I’d probably seen Star use it before. “Got it. So technically speaking, a mantle is…a PMLMC? My friend says it’s more mech-like than an actual transformation, but that’s all speculation.”

She took another sip of iced tea. “Correct. Yes, your friend is right; they’re psychomotive. It’s a neat little fourspace swap that gets our actual body out of harm’s way, and we plug our consciousness into the LM construct to fight without worry of harm. You can see how that’s not really on the original theme.”

“But visually it’s just an outfit swap?”

“Visually, yeah, the basic LMC is a duplicate of our bodies, and we add modifications on top of that for the outfits, which at least gets us looking like proper mahou shoujo, other than Amane. But unlike the source material, it’s an entirely separate body, so we had to implement everything ourselves. You saw some of the structural and motive elements yesterday—the parts derived from Spire dermis—but the sensory and control stuff is where most of the work goes. Every sense is custom-implemented.”

“And the fewer the better, since those would be red links.”

“Yes!” She sounded pleased I was keeping up. “So the real trick is getting enough psychomotive integration that controlling it is as fluid and intuitive as our own bodies, without the red links relaying pain down the lattice back to us. It’s finicky, and not the first solution we went with—ask Ai to show you her back binding sometime.”

“I—I’m not sure I could manage that. It sounds fascinating, though.”

She chuckled, slitted pupils looking at me out of the corner of her eyes. “You really don’t have to be so nervous around us. If you’re making us uncomfortable, believe me, we’ll let you know. We wouldn’t have asked you to stay with us if we were worried about that sort of thing. Where was I—yeah, so we’re not really working on actual mahou shoujo rules, you understand?”

I wished I could be less nervous and briefly considered confiding more in her about it—but reflexively retreated from examining that notion, instead accepting the dangled bit of conversational escape. “I think so. So…you’d say the mecha comparison is accurate?”

I didn’t know much about that genre either, but Opal nodded.

“We’ve done a lot of work to try to make it more hooked-in and less like flying a jet fighter, but…yeah, I hate to admit it: we’re magical girl-shaped mecha, functionally speaking. Mind if I ask who your friend is? One of the YouTubers? That’s the sort of circles you move in, to my understanding.”

“Um, not quite. But she does a lot of the research for some of the videos about you—about Lighthouse as a whole, I mean. Um…Starstar97?” I cringed at how the username sounded in this offline setting, but Opal nodded in recognition.

“Heard the name, I think. Tell her I said hi. Actually—” We had just come to a stop at another fairly large intersection, so she turned to me and threw up a peace sign, flashing a practiced smile. Radiant indeed. “A pic would make her day, I hope? I could do a short video, too; this light usually takes about a minute.”

“Um, wow—really?” Should she even be doing something like this while we were on the road? Didn’t that sort of thing give a bad impression? But it wasn’t like I was going to question her judgment on this; she certainly would know better than I. I fumbled my phone out of my pocket; I had been trying to adhere to ‘polite conversation behaviors’ by not looking at it and instead keeping my eyes on the city around us. “Ready?”

“Yep.”

I hit record and tried to keep the camera steady. Radiance Opal launched into a peppy, authentic-sounding greeting.

“Hey, Starstar97! I’m with Ezzen, and he mentioned you’re a fan, so I just wanted to say thanks for your support and the work you do! Houseki hikare!” She nodded to me after a moment. “There you go. Hope she likes that! And send that to me, too, if you would? I won’t put the whole thing up publicly, but this year we’re going to do a montage video like ‘Every Time the Radiances Said Houseki Hikare in 2022’.”

That wasn’t particularly my speed—I always ignored similar videos of the Vaetna saying the Spire’s catchphrase when they showed up in my recommended page—but it was definitely the kind of thing Star enjoyed. And Opal was right, this was going to make her day, or maybe her whole week. I was pleased to find my cell connection acceptable to send the video even while on the road. I attached a small message of my own, too.

ezzen: Treat for you. Opal’s so nice; she’s not actually quite this peppy, but she’s so damn…kind.

ezzen: Which she’s currently explaining to me is very mahou shoujo, so I guess that tracks.

ezzen: Hope I’m spelling that right.

We pulled onto an elevated motorway.

“Um, can she share it around?”

“Yeah, of course, if she wants. We just have a policy of not sharing it on our end because, well…some of our fans can get jealous.” Her grip audibly tightened on the steering wheel, a squeal of leather. I relayed the permission, though not the comment.

The cityscape was changing around us. The high-rises had given way to shorter, squatter apartment buildings—though still only short by comparison, most of them being at least eight stories tall. Soon after, the buildings were entirely replaced by trees on both sides. Opal gestured to the left with the final chunk of baumkuchen.

“This green stretch is Motoakasaka, which has a bunch of temples and one of the old Imperial estates. Can’t get a very good view of it from up here, though.”

Sure enough, a column of apartment buildings soon obstructed what little view we had. Now that we were away from the pedestrians and storefronts, the cityscape was mostly defined by grey concrete juxtaposed with clusters of foliage denuded of most of their green by the winter. Come spring, when these little islands of nature were back to their full green, I could see how it’d be pretty. As it was, though, the city had a certain brutalist ugliness to it, at least from this vantage point.

“I don’t love that we’re not ‘proper’ mahou shoujo in our transformations, but there are upsides. We can’t lose our powers by losing our purity, for one. And real magic is a lot more flexible than the power systems you see in most anime.”

I didn’t want to offend her, but I needed clarification on the basis for this whole thing.

“Uh…so, it’s roleplay?”

“I mean…in the sense that we’re not literally selected by a higher power on the basis of purity, no.” She sighed. “But that’s not in our control, and we’re the real thing in every other sense. Are the Vaetna roleplaying superheroes?”

“They’re really more like knights,” I protested.

“Point. Why does it matter that our moral code comes from anime? I’m trying to make a difference with the hand I’ve been dealt, to follow in the footsteps of the heroes I grew up admiring. Am I wrong in saying you look up to the Vaetna in the same way?”

She wasn’t, but it felt like a false dichotomy. In my eyes, she was comparing a fictional morality system from kids’ cartoons to a group of people who engaged in very real geopolitics.

“The Vaetna are real, though.”

“What we believe in isn’t all that different from the Spire. We just—can’t trample over nations like they can. And wouldn’t even if we could. That doesn’t make it roleplay. Doesn’t make it fake.”

She was getting defensive. I flinched. “Alright, sorry. So…” I searched for another topic. “If the aesthetic matters so much, why’s Amethyst a big crystal mech? And, er, your tail, is that inspired by anything?”

“Amane likes the intimidation factor of being huge, and copying her body for the LM is…complicated, in a way that it isn’t for the rest of us. Residuals. As for this…” She swished her tail in the backseat. “Memorable, isn’t it?”

“Er, yeah, I suppose. Are dragons, ah, mahou shoujo?”

She scratched her temple as we changed lanes.

“Well…animal traits aren’t unheard of, but usually it’s part of the whole team’s theming, and I’m sure you’ve noticed that that’s not our theme. That’s because I didn’t choose it. It’s a metamorph residual, like Hina, though hers are more subtle. It started for me when we got our flame donation. I’ve come to appreciate how distinctive it is, though. Being Todai’s Dragon has a nice ring to it.”

There was something a little halting in how she said it.

“So it’s flesh, not LM.”

“Yep, marvel of nature and all that. It’s really quite marketable—we’ve got plushes of the tail, my eyes stand out as much as Hina’s or Amane’s in the posters…I’ve lucked into being a real-life anime girl, even if the exact subtype doesn’t entirely fit with my genre, and that’s worth it when we trade so much on—”

“Do you like it?”

“—our reputation and appearance.”

I don’t know why I blurted it out and interrupted her, but it was just something in her tone. It sounded like she was rationalizing. Her eyes flicked to me briefly before refocusing on the road.

“I live with it.”

That hurt, and I wasn’t quite sure why. She continued after a moment.

“It’s…inconvenient, for sure. You see how much I eat, and stuff like this seat—lots of accommodations like that. I miss wearing pants sometimes. I’m more of a skirts girl anyway, though.”

I abstained from pointing out that she wasn’t wearing a skirt now; I had intentionally avoided examining the exact way her leggings were modified to make room for the extra limb when we had been walking together. She was practically begging the question, but I was too shy to ask about her fashion choices…and there was another kind of discomfort, the way she signaled unhappiness about her body, that made my fingers return to my face, feeling the spots of stubble I had missed again.

“Sorry for interrupting.”

“It’s fine.” She seemed as eager as me to go to another topic. “Does the, er, commercialized side of what we do bother you?”

“Not…really? The Vaetna’ve got plenty of merch.” Then I thought about it some more, reminded of something Star had said before regarding how their PR worked. “Well…can I say something that might be offensive?”

“Sure. Trust me, I’ve gone under much more severe cross-examination of our way of doing things.”

“Alright, then…it just seems especially performative. Like with the video earlier.” I put my hands up hastily. “Not like roleplay! It’s just…if you’re playing up the act for publicity, then that’s sort of acknowledging that it’s at least partially an act, not totally genuine.”

“Not wrong. But we live it, and believe in it. It’s…there’s a lot of reasons we do it. It’s important to be seen. It’s kind of a concession to the original concept, since mahou shoujo do tend toward a sort of secret identity paradigm, but…well, think about it this way. Since our status as magical girls is not granted by some higher power, we need to work harder than Usagi or Hibiki to maintain it, to make it more real. So, yes, it’s performative, but only because we believe it matters. Is that a problem?”

“Er—as long as you’re not going to try to get me in one of those costumes.”

She laughed. “Perish the thought! Whatever Hina says, I know you didn’t sign up to become one of us. No pressure to participate with any of the marketing stuff beyond what concerns your research.”

That was something of a relief.

“How much does that factor into the, er, day-to-day? Promotions and all that?”

“Depends. In terms of what you’d call VNT activities, we’re more on the reactive side, so it depends on if there are monsters for us to fight at the time.”

“Um…’monsters’ as in infernos?”

“That’s another spot where theory sort of bows to praxis. Case in point—see these trees on our left? That’s Meiji Jingu, the biggest shrine in Japan. It’s attached to Yoyogi Park. Next week, Hikanome—er, Sun’s Blessing—is holding a demonstration here, and we’re supposed to keep an eye on them.”

“They’re a cult, right? Like Zero-Day.” I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this.

“Yep. Biggest in Japan. In a way, their leaders are a pretty good adaptation of the ‘proper’ mahou shoujo villains. People with the same powers as us, but misusing them. Hardly an objective black-and-white structure, but in a world where so-called ‘incarnations of darkness’ and such don’t exist…” She punctuated the label with air-quotes. “And yes, infernos, but those aren’t evil. They’re just…”

“People. Like us.”

“Just the bad ending, yeah. That’s a little mahou shoujo, too.”

It was one of the great injustices of this era that some people couldn’t handle the awesome power that fell from the sky, overwhelmed by these fragments of what the various cults called the only provable divinity. It broke my heart that nobody had found a way to reverse the process or permanently contain them; they all met the same fate as Dad. Even the Vaetna still just went for mercy kills, seven years on. Opal went on somberly.

“It’s one of those things I dream about solving, a way to stop the inferno and save the victim. Nobody deserves that.” Her resolution hung in the air, an intense pressure directed at nothing in particular.

“Yeah. Me too.”

As I’d originally explained to her yesterday, part of what had gotten me into magic was the drive to understand what had happened to Dad. I’d eventually been forced to accept that it wasn’t the type of magical problem I’d be able to solve in glyphs, not if the Vaetna couldn’t with their mastery of magic and near-boundless power. But maybe…with Flame of my own, with the Radiances’ help? It was egotistical to think I could do what the Spire couldn’t, but the spark of hubris reignited in me. I resolved to take another look at my old papers on the topic tonight.

Her follow-up question was no reprieve from the dark atmosphere. “Do you think there’s such a thing as evil, Ezzen? As monsters?”

“I…well…The Spire Stands, you know?” I sheepishly tried to articulate how that connected. “The strong ought to—have an obligation to—protect the weak, but…power corrupts. Not always, but often enough. I don’t know much about Sun’s Blessing specifically, but Flamebearer cults and the like…they’re ugly. I think there’s evil there.”

“Agreed. Most of the believers are fine. Just people, again, and I can’t fault people for needing to believe in things. But the VNTs at the center of it? I’d call Sugawara emblematic of the monsters, at least as far as flamebearers are concerned.”

“He’s…the founder of Hikanome? ‘The Savior’?”

“Don’t call him that.”

I noted some hypocrisy there—her team got the larger-than-life, fiction-inspired titles, but didn’t extend the same privilege to their enemies. I didn’t interrupt her to call it out, though, because from what I knew—she was right. He deserved to be left in the dustbin of history after what he had done. She continued.

“The UK’s got a big cult too, right?”

I had figured from the accent that she had grown up in London, so I was a bit surprised she didn’t know. “Well, Zero-Day is technically based in America…but yeah, they’ve got some influence. Really, though, everything in the UK regarding magic is subordinate to the PCTF.”

“How big?”

“Er, I’d have to check.” A quick google gave the answer. “Eight hundred thousand?”

“Hikanome has seven million in Japan and three million more abroad. Next week they’ll fill the entire park.”

I went quiet, looking out the window as I watched the park pass us by. It had dominated the left side view for the past few minutes.

“And you’re supposed to stop that from turning into a riot?”

“They’re pretty peaceful these days, with Sugawara in prison, at least the sect that’ll be there next week. It’s more about appeasement, showing our faces. They love us, worship us. Off the record, the feeling isn’t entirely mutual.”

“The fans you mentioned before?”

“Yeah. But like I said—they’re not the problem, not the monsters. What do you think of the PCTF?”

It was a leading question, and I understood where it was headed.

“I…I mean, I had overall good experiences with them with this,” I gestured to the scars on my arm, “But it’s kind of an open secret that they’re less than ethical. And the rumors…” I didn’t know how to segue gracefully into what she wanted me to ask. It was a horrible thing to acknowledge, even when the same fate had nearly befallen me two days ago. Her confirmation made my tattoo itch as my skin crawled.

“All true. Every single one. She’s living proof. Every time she has to cancel an event because she’s bedridden, every time she tries to hide the fact that she can barely keep food down—it’s on their heads.” Her voice could have cut diamond. “This doesn’t leave this car or the penthouse, you understand?”

“I—yes, I understand. So…they really did…?”

This didn’t feel like a topic for the sunlight, for this cold February day on the way to do some terribly boring paperwork and go on a not-date in the city after. This pretty girl and her sports car ought not to exist in the same world as black sites and drugs and torture. But I knew in my gut that Opal was telling the truth.

“They did. Her and dozens more.” She took a deep breath. “I think you being here will bring us back into conflict with them, basically inevitably. Hina knew that would happen. She wants the fight—we have unfinished business. The reason I really wanted to get the ball rolling on your paperwork today was to give your presence here some legitimacy before the bloodhounds show up.”

“They won’t actually try to abduct me again, would they?” My blood was up just thinking of the possibility. Surely, the Spire would step in if it came to that; it would be a huge, front-page-news violation of the standing agreements between all the various VNT groups.

“They might. Listen—” I heard her tail moving in the backseat. “As far as I’m concerned, if there are monsters in this world, it’s them. At least the cults believe in something, and it’s hard to begrudge them that when we just discussed where my own beliefs come from. But the PCTF just wants power for its own sake. ‘Peacekeepers’. Ha. If they had their way, we’d all be turned into fucking batteries for their superweapons.” She laughed mirthlessly, looking straight out onto the road. I suddenly realized how hot the air in the car had gotten and squirmed a bit in my seat. “No. They are not touching you. I refuse. Not in our city.” Then she suppressed the incandescent fury, her voice softening, the atmosphere in the car cooling back down to tolerable levels.

“Revenge isn’t mahou shoujo. But destroying evil is.”

—

There had been a time in my life where I interacted with a government office on a nearly daily basis. My dad had died on the first day of the firestorms, and it had taken a few months for nations to get a grip on reparations for the casualties and the bereaved. Consequently, I was in the US government’s first batch of the Inferno Recovery Program, one of the predecessors of what would become the PCTF. The program included what little testing for residuals had been available at the time—before ‘ripple’ was even in the vocabulary for magic—as well as a three-week period of observation ‘just in case’.

I was a special case for two reasons: one, because I was directly related to the unfortunate flametouched—“Paranatural Event Origin,” as the endless documents had put it back then, already denuded of personhood—and two, because I wasn’t a US citizen, and they needed to figure out what to do with me. Ultimately, they’d shipped me right back to Bristol, where I spent two years with my grandparents, in and out of hospitals for regular checkups while both the UK and American governments figured out what more should be done with me, if anything.

Nothing really came of it; rather anticlimactic, in a way. I had no residuals, no evidence of being somehow secondhand flametouched or anything of that sort. If I had shown any signs, I would have likely been subjected to a further battery of testing and been more closely watched by the PCTF during my rise to prominence online. Instead, the last time I had met with an official on that basis was on the five-year anniversary, and that had been for a general check-in and well-wishes, nothing exciting. I had still clung to the idea that my dad’s death and the burns on my hand meant something, that it had marked me as special in the eyes of the Frozen Flame, but that had never really had much basis in reality—

Until two days ago. Now, the fact that my flames manifested from those scars was a surefire sign that I hadn’t gone entirely untouched by that first encounter. I didn’t buy into the idea that the Flame was necessarily a blessing, but the events of the past two days had made me certain I was special in some way, if only by circumstance rather than any actions of my own. Hina and Ai had reinforced that idea; even the least charitable interpretation of the former’s predations toward me implied that she saw something there, and the latter had outright said that I might not be playing by the same rules as other Flamebearers.

Tochou inflicted a critical strike upon these notions of ‘specialness’ by the simple weight of paperwork. I had sort of expected the de-facto leader of Todai paving the way would at least grease the wheels of bureaucracy—it was not to be. We were treated more or less exactly like every other person. We’d go to a kiosk, take a numbered ticket, wait a bit, then go to a clerk. Opal would talk with them for a moment, we’d get some documents, she’d talk me through what it said, I’d sign, and we’d be directed to a different kiosk, slowly accumulating extra paperwork and receipts for fees which she assured me weren’t coming out of my pocket. In all, we’d done this cycle four times so far.

I’d had a bit of a scare when I realized I hadn’t thought to bring my passport, but it turned out that Opal had retrieved it from my backpack yesterday. She’d taken my travel documents so I couldn’t escape—but that was nagging paranoia, easier to brush off than ever; it was just her being prepared. That worry still lingered regarding how I was essentially bound to her as long as she was holding onto my foot’s stabilizer, but given the state of my ankle, I wasn’t going anywhere fast anyway. In all, my foot had been wonderfully cooperative as we navigated to different areas of the bureaucratic labyrinth, at least compared to the near-uselessness from before the stabilizer had been introduced, even if my ankle still throbbed distantly. I continued to ice it while we were sat down, which was helping.

Opal handed the passport back to me as we returned to the small sitting area we had essentially claimed as a home base between interacting with clerks. She sat to my right, sideways on her chair to accommodate her tail, rifling through the documents we’d accumulated.

“What would have happened without it?”

“Well, you still have an actual ID, but they’d have had to check with the UK embassy, probably, and that would be a snag for the PCTF to get involved.”

“So as long as everything stays on Japan’s side, they can’t touch me?”

“Well…I didn’t say that. I had our legal people look into it when Hina brought you in, and while the UK doesn’t have grounds to extradite you as a fugitive or anything—they would if Japan was a NATO member, but they’re not—you should still probably stay far away from the embassy for the time being.”

“Until…?”

“I…don’t know, yet. This’ll blow over eventually.”

Some decisions were made; for one, my address of residence was to be Lighthouse Tower, same as the Radiances. In addition to continuing the pronunciation lesson from earlier, I also received my crash-course in the rest of the country’s addressing system: backward compared to the US or UK, starting at the largest scale and working down from prefecture to city to neighborhood to street address. We also had to contend with my name.

“Dalton is what’s on your ID. Is that alright?”

I had just been getting used to being called Ezzen. “It’s—fine. It’s what I’m used to, anyway.”

She seemed to pick up on the frustration of identity, putting a hand gently over mine, which I half-flinched away from before suppressing the urge. “We’ll still call you Ezzen if you’d like; Dalton doesn’t have to be your name anywhere but the paperwork. I just don’t want to get in trouble because the names on your documents mismatch. It’s a huge pain. Is there a reason you prefer the online name?”

“Um.” I really didn’t want to admit to her that it had been because Hina had pushed me, so I fell back on the explanation I had used with Ebi. “Well, you know the etymology, right?”

“{MANIFEST}. So it’s your…identity with magic, and it signals your preference for the Spire.” She saw how I shifted uncomfortably; she was right on the money. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, take it from me. Coming up with names was one of the first things we did when forming Todai.”

That made me feel better; the majority of Flamebearers with any kind of public presence took on some sort of epithet or title, and even simpler, less-aggrandizing name changes were also common enough. The Vaetna were actually the exception—or, since nobody could trace their identities from before the age of magic, they might have had the most complete identity overhauls of any of us.

“Um—how did you end up with ‘Radiances’ anyway?”

She grinned. “The gemstone thing was what I’d always imagined as a kid when I pictured myself as a magical girl, and Radiances were always the title. Just felt right, you know? I didn’t know which—for a long time, I sort of figured I’d be Diamond, but I wound up going with ‘Opal’ when my dreams actually came true. Still doesn’t feel real sometimes.”

Diamond would have fit her too, but I could see how it might come off as a bit arrogant compared to her teammates. I lowered my voice, feeling a little like this peek behind the curtain wasn’t supposed to be happening in public.

“So they’re…arbitrary? The choices of gemstones?”

She didn’t seem to share the concern, shrugging easily. This must have come up in interviews before for her to be so nonchalant about it.

“Mostly. For me and Hina, we already looked the parts, my hair, her eyes. Ai chose Emerald because…I think just because green is her favorite color, but I don’t quite remember. I’m at least sure that there’s no grand reason behind that one. Amane picked Amethyst because it sounds something like her name, even though I’ve always thought her eyes should have made her Jade or something else green—besides, Emerald was already taken by then. And Yuuka is…Bloodstone.” She chuckled. “Having a member with a more goth aesthetic is also pretty mahou shoujo, so I’m glad she fills that role so easily.”

I hadn’t yet met the fifth member, so I was only working off of Star’s rants and my abortive Wikipedia skim from yesterday to picture her, plus Ebi’s comment that she was some sort of life sciences grad student. Biology or ecology or something in that vein, but I didn’t quite see how that connected to a title like ‘Bloodstone’. It was a mystery for another time, though, because this whole topic had cut me a bit more deeply than I had been prepared for. I had always fantasized that, as a Vaetna, I’d go by Ezzen, not Dalton, and Opal’s own admission of the same habits created a weird feeling of intimacy I didn’t quite want to confront. I looked over the paperwork arrayed before us again, pointing at the first empty box I saw.

“What goes here?”

“Your furigana. That’s, uh…how your name is spelled in Japanese, since the sounds are different.”

She pulled out some random receipt she assured me we wouldn’t need, and wrote:

コリオー・エッゼン

“That’s your name in Japanese, I think. Korioo Ezzen. Uh, if we’re going with what’s on your ID, then…” She wrote another name: ダルトン. “Daruton. ‘Colliot’ is French, right?”

“Great-grandfather, yeah.”

“Well, sorry to say, Japanese is terrible with French words. Still, Ezzen can be your name basically everywhere but your ID, and if you ask people to call you ‘Ezzen’, they will. ‘Ezzen-san’ sounds…mostly Japanese, I think, not that you have to pass for a native anyway.” She scribbled some kanji. “You can get away with writing it in kanji a few different ways—but I’m getting off track. You can just stick with katakana. Like how I write Arisu for my name.” She scribbled it: アリス.

“Not a Japanese name, is it?”

“Well, I think the accent gives me away no matter what.”

“I, um, didn’t want to ask. You’re a Londoner?”

“Nope, grew up here.” She waved it off good-naturedly. “I’m what they call a halfie. Dad’s Japanese, Mom is a second-generation Brit. And Tokyo has a British school. It’s a whole thing, there are American ones too. So I’m a Japanese citizen, but lived in this little pocket of fake-London in the middle of Tokyo until high school. Spent a lot of summers out in the countryside with Dad’s family, though, so I do consider myself Japanese in terms of culture or heritage or however you’d call it.”

Wow. That was a step beyond the years I spent living in America. “You’ve never been to Britain?”

“I have, but never lived there. The plan was for me to go to Oxford—but that was before the firestorms, and once we were flametouched…no way. I wasn’t going to leave Hina and Ai behind.” She shook herself. “You lived in the US for a while, though, right? What was that like?”

“Fine? Normal? I don’t remember much from before it, and after…”

Little more needed to be said on that front. The arrival of magic had rather thoroughly screwed up practically everybody’s plans for the future in the short term, even disregarding the grander geopolitical impact. Doubly so if you were like me and had lost people, or were flametouched like the Radiances. I thought of what else to say. The memories seemed a little less painful knowing that her life had been just as derailed as mine in those first few weeks, so I searched for something to share.

“Well, there are things I miss about it. My dad was a chef, a really big one, so he’d take me to NYC and we’d eat at the fanciest restaurants for free since he was friends with everybody who ran those places. That was nice.”

Opal lit up at that, although she was still actively rifling through papers and filling in boxes the whole time, conscious of the timetable we were on. “That sounds—great. Tokyo is so good for food tourism, you have no idea. And they put out the red carpet for us—although between you and me, I prefer the chains and really grubby dives over the fine dining. You ever had Japanese pasta?”

“No.” I mean, of course not.

“Right, right. We’re doing Saizeriya next time I take you out, then. I’d ask Hina to take you today, but I’m sure she’s got her own ideas for a good time on the town.” She looked up from the document she was working on. “Not too late to back out of that if you’re getting cold feet, by the by.”

“…Cold foot. Just the one.”

My delivery was so deadpan it sounded almost glum, and her brow furrowed with concern—before she saw my lips twisted in a suppressed giggle. The stupid joke made her laugh quietly, covering her mouth, which made me unable to hold my own dumb guffaw. More importantly, this distracted us from the offered escape from today’s plans, without delving into my complicated and conflicting feelings about Hina.

“It’s great that you can joke about it already, really. How’s it feeling?”

“Ankle still hurts a bit, but the ice definitely helped. Stabilizer’s working a treat, it’s…so good to be able to walk properly again.” I hadn’t actually expressed that feeling out loud yet, and it felt nice to confide. Then I pointed at an object that had caught my attention earlier, a little stamp she was putting down at the bottom of the document. “What’s that?”

“Hanko. Personal seal, substitutes for a signature. Perks of having family history here.” She held up the document. “I know you can’t read it, but that says Takehara.”

I nodded. My earlier prediction that today would greatly exceed my capacity for cultural osmosis was proving true—case in point, just then the number for our ticket was called, and we stood to approach the next desk. As with the last four, the person attending us seemed a bit star-struck by Opal. She did most of the talking; by now, I was picking up that there was a lot of the same boilerplate dialogue every time, things that I could reasonably guess were long-winded “thank you”s and “would it be possible to…” phrases. I wondered how much of the language I’d pick up in a month’s time.

Opal seemed pleased with the progress we were making as we came away from the desk and returned to our impromptu home base. Mercifully, they generally didn’t seem too willing to enter our bubble of privacy; Opal’s star power seemed to keep them at bay rather than invite them to try to get a selfie or make small talk with the celebrity. It wasn’t that she was intimidating, at least not to me, more that she was a visibly important person in the middle of doing visibly important things, and I appreciated that people were giving us space. She noticed me not-so-subtly looking around us.

“Enjoy it while it lasts. People will be way more willing to come up and bother us when we’re on the street, tourists especially.” She indicated her tail and the way she sat sideways in her chair to accommodate it. “Fair warning, I don’t exactly try to hide.”

“Right, visibility. I got the impression Hina does? She said we’d be undercover.”

“Hina…is weird. She doesn’t believe in visibility off the clock.”

“But aren’t secret identities…magical girl?”

I felt sort of embarrassed to use the Japanese phrase in public as a foreigner, both on principle—it felt a little appropriative—and because I wasn’t particularly confident in my pronunciation. When Opal said it, mahou shoujo was beautiful, and I could practically feel the belief and determination behind it. Coming out of my mouth, it felt I was doing a disservice to both the language and the concept. But on the other hand, using the English phrase was nearly as awkward, grammatically incoherent.

“They are, but again, it’s one of those practicalities. Being seen is important, even when it’s—” she gestured around. “Just standing in line to get immigration paperwork done. We’re just people, you know?” She dropped her voice much lower and leaned in—this part wasn’t for listeners-in. “Hikanome thinks we’re above humanity, above the law. Even Hina thinks that way, to an extent. But it’s important to stay grounded. The Flame doesn’t make you any more…more, do you follow?”

That was the first thing she said that really sat wrong with me. I leaned away from her. I agreed with the basic premise—great power, great responsibility—but this was a common talking point from people who meant to suggest that the Vaetna subscribed to the same philosophy of transhuman superiority. But the Vaetna didn’t use their power to lord over the denizens of the Spire—indeed, their whole raison d’etre was to remind the powerful that they could and would be held accountable. The Spire’s ten knights were far more than regular humans, more than even VNTs, and that wasn’t inherently a bad thing. This was a familiar line of debate from the forums, and a familiar rebuttal was on my lips—something like “I think you can acknowledge and take advantage of a disparity of power without putting yourself on a pedestal”—but some danger-sensing part of my mind prodded me to consider why she had lowered her voice, why she didn’t want passersby to overhear this part in particular, even with the mild security of this conversation taking place in English. It wasn’t about the Vaetna; that was my own biases. I matched her whispered tone, thinking back to what she had said in the car.

“Sun’s Blessing wouldn’t be happy to hear you say that, I take it?”

She shook her head. “Not at all.” Then she looked around warily for anybody approaching. Satisfied the coast was clear, she reached into a not-space and retrieved something small, hurriedly popping it into her mouth and chewing. And chewing. I didn’t quite look at her—eye contact wasn’t exactly a strong point for me—but I could still see her face growing redder in my peripheral vision. I had to ask.

“…Nuts?”

“I get peckish!”

“I’m not judging.”

She chewed some more. “…Want one?”

“What kind?”

“Um—cashews, almonds, walnuts, peanuts. Salted.”

“Cashew, please. Why are we still whispering?”

“Um. We’re not really supposed to eat here.” She offered me a nut, dropping it surreptitiously into my cupped hand. Her tone returned to the politely-quiet, conversational level from before. “Anyway. I think you’re seeing what I’m getting at? We have to lead by example, show that anybody can do good.”

Because they didn’t even have the clout to say in public they weren’t naturally superior to the people around them. I maintained the whisper, now unsure of what could be safely said in public.

“Does Sun’s Blessing have that kind of power?”

Opal looked around again, judging the safety of this conversation, before opting to pull out her phone along with another nut.

Alice Takehara: The short explanation is that the National Public Safety Commission, who more or less hold our leash, are heavily tied to Hikanome. We keep Hikanome happy, they don’t pressure the Commission to restrict or sanction us.

Alice Takehara: The appeasement isn’t just about maintaining our fanbase. It’s politics.

I was oddly pleased that she shared my habit of proper grammar over text, even on our phones.

Dalton Colliot: Which is why Hina is policing a protest?

I frowned after sending the message, and went into my phone’s settings, changing my display name.

Ezzen Colliot: There we go.

Alice Takehara: ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ – ˵ ) ✧

“How did you do that?”

“I have a whole menu of them. You’ve never seen kaomoji before?”

I had, but I had figured they fell more in the vein of ASCII art than an easily accessible menu.

“Show me how to get those?”

“Sure, later.”

Alice Takehara: But yeah, that sort of thing is the price we pay for having mostly free reign to do our thing.

Alice Takehara: It’s this or be essentially forced to participate in the whole South China Sea…thing. Dick-measuring contest, if you’ll excuse my language.

Alice Takehara: Mahou shoujo do not fight wars.

Ezzen Colliot: lol

Ezzen Colliot: (at dick-measuring contest, not the thing about war)

She acknowledged the clarification with a nod.

Ezzen Colliot: Seems adverse.

Alice Takehara: Try ‘corrupt’.

She knew the score. It was easy to see how situations like these could be construed as Todai being pressured into appearing to support Sun’s Blessing. This was already a tangle of politics that I had little patience for. Hina’s first lesson loomed as a kind of omen, now, and I was starting to understand why she had felt the need to impress it on me almost as soon as I had confirmed I was sticking around. Todai lived and died on leverage. I had always admired the way the Spire was able to cut the Gordian knot when it came to this sort of thing—but then, they had both the means and ideological sanction to go to war over it. Opal and her team had neither.

Ezzen Colliot: Also, ‘free rein’.

“What? No, it’s ‘reign’, with a ‘G’, like being in control.”

“Nope, look it up.”

“…Oh, darn.”

Alice Takehara: But there’s a weird upside to it all.

Alice Takehara: If we do wind up in open conflict with the PCTF, we can go public about what happened to Amane and all the other flamebearers like her.

Alice Takehara: And my hope is that Hikanome would lose their shit.

And there it was. Todai’s greatest leverage, a play of brutal realpolitik that took full advantage of their position in the public eye and could turn one of their biggest external pressures into a staunch ally against their most hated enemy. Not something to be done lightly; if they couldn’t make the accusation stick, it was easy to see how that could demolish Todai’s reputation, and even in the best case scenario, it was so adversarial as to almost be a declaration of war. And what of Amane’s own place in this, as the centerpiece, someone of whom Opal was clearly so protective? All that to say—

From what I now understood of the concept, such a move would not be mahou shoujo in the slightest.

Author’s Note:

Now we’re really crunching into some of the politics. Magical girls are serious business!

Thanks to the beta readers: Softies, Cassiopeia, Zak, and Maria.

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August 24, 2024