Depending on how you counted, the Vaetna had saved the world at least three times. Most indisputably, they had ended the firestorms. This was widely seen as a good thing, unless you were part of an especially radical Flame cult. More indirectly, they’d banished the future-devouring specter of climate disaster; the introduction of the glyph lexicon and the principles of weaving had brought on a dramatic energy and materials revolution that had drastically reduced the appeal of fossil fuels in many applications, to say nothing of the direct cleanup efforts of the Vaetna. Lastly, it was speculated that the Dubai incident would probably have destroyed the world if they hadn’t intervened, though that was contested by the PCTF, who never wanted to give the Vaetna credit for anything.
Despite this remarkable track record, the Spire had no shortage of detractors. Internally, it all seemed too good to be true, and externally, the Vaetna’s willingness to stick their nose deep into other nations’ business scared the hell out of the rich and powerful. And since it was very difficult to materially threaten the Spire with either direct conflict or economic sanctions, the court of public opinion was the main arena where the Powers That Had Been attempted to keep the rogue nation in check, to the tune of trillions of dollars in propaganda. The Vaetna had known this would happen, and so from the very first weeks after the Raising, their modus operandi had revolved around one simple method:
Live streaming.
This was both bizarre and inevitable. Bizarre, because the Vaetna themselves were secretive to the point of suspicion, tight-lipped about their own nature and many of the workings of the Spire. Inevitable, because the Spire’s mission statement of being a shelter for the dispossessed was contingent on a degree of worldwide public accountability strong enough to persuade the average fence-sitter away from conspiratorial propaganda, and that demanded a level of earnest transparency about its workings that went beyond Twitter posts or even candid recorded videos. They did those too, of course, but the streams were a staple. They were a show of trust in the regular person’s ability to draw their own charitable conclusions from what they saw, unscripted and unedited. Some very fancy infomancy ensured that they were accessible from anywhere in the world as long as you had an internet connection, Great Firewall or no.
Most days, across the ten Vaetna, at least one would host some kind of livestream. Topics could be loosely divided into domestic and foreign affairs; all ten superhero-knight-angels displayed a preference for which they generally preferred to do live. The stream I’d been watching when I had been flametouched had been the former, maintenance and upgrades for the Spire’s physical infrastructure, carried out by Brianna and Heung. Bri was a relatively common sight for content like that, often basically vlogging the Spire’s daily affairs. She loved to babble about the logistics and technical challenges of feeding and homing the Spire’s burgeoning population, an altruist through and through. She was the one who I felt was most like myself and other magical engineers, purified down to realize the guarantees of the Na Vva Kiiycaseiir, which was essentially their bill of rights.
By contrast, it had been kind of an unusual stream for Heung, who was the poster boy for the Vaetna’s more bloody-minded and interventionist policies. Sure, Sani had been the one to step onto the lawn of the White House with his blade bared, but by volume, Heung was the one most likely to show up when a flamebearer despot started to get too big for their boots or local brushfire conflicts threatened to spiral into cataclysm. This sometimes meant swift and unilateral murder, which naturally meant his streams were a source of endless controversy.
This, too, was part of the Vaetna’s philosophy of transparency. They wanted people to see the full spectrum of what they were willing to do for the short goal of averting disaster and the long goal of reducing human misery. And I—as biased as they came, admittedly—believed in those causes. They were so noble as to justify themselves, and for the first few years of the Spire’s existence, I’d held that anybody who thought differently was propagandized beyond the point of debate. After all, everybody who’d ever wound up on the dark end of a vaet pretty obviously deserved it.
“They don’t do enough,” was Yuuka’s opinion, muttered resentfully from an adjacent beanbag. “And it’s not cause I’m so fuckin’ naive that I think The Problem Of Evil squarely applies to them, don’t give me that shit. You didn’t say anything yet.”
“I didn’t say—oh.”
“I know there’s only ten of them, I know they can’t be everywhere, I know they don’t know everything, and we sure do fuckin’ know now that they’re not all-powerful. They can bleed. But they still have to do more. And since they don’t, Amane is missing half her body. It should never happen again, and instead it’s happening right now. Imagine being able to kill them all in a night and choosing to be selective. Yes, my eye can see what you’ll say just fine, and no, I can’t spoil the entire stream.”
“…Cool.” To be honest, I’d never experienced a Vaetna stream in such direct social proximity to one of their detractors—the chatroom was essentially a Vaetna fanclub, and that was more or less my whole sample size—so I had no idea how to react. Or rather, I had plenty of fantasies about how I’d react, but those had all been constructed in anticipation of some abstract hater and felt trite against a real person, especially one who had gone through what Yuuka had. “I’m sure they’d do more if they could,” I hedged.
“Sure. Maybe it is a problem of can’t rather than won’t. But if the cunts do have more to give, I fuckin’ hope they start. They’re not invincible anymore, and that better make them afraid enough to pick up their slack.”
Yuuka glowered at my laptop screen and the chat scrolling across it. We’d set up in the penthouse’s upper common area, neutral ground where neither Yuuka nor I would feel like we were invading the other’s space, and fortified a small area of it with some of the pillows and blankets scattered around, enough to not feel overly exposed in the expansive room. That was something Yuuka and I both valued, it seemed. With the lights off and some blankets wrapped around us, the watchparty felt almost like a sleepover, albeit a weirdly intimate one with no supervision.
I was still in the doll. Yuuka had made it clear that was a non-negotiable condition of being alone in my presence, and I was more than happy to oblige. The only complication had been that the chassis was tethered to the nightmare-chair by the gossamer cables of thread connecting my heads. It was technically incorrect to say my soul was being transmitted through there, in fact they were much closer to puppet strings—a label I didn’t like for how it put “me” outside the body I was inhabiting—but either way, I didn’t want to find out firsthand how far the weave could survive being stretched. The obvious upgrade to the connection would be fully reworking it into the more complex, fourspace-abusing implementation of the actual mantles, but that was an irresponsible level of unauthorized modification—
So we’d done it anyway. I’d briefly hopped back into my “real” body to make the necessary changes under Yuuka’s guidance. It had been disheartening to see Yuuka suppress a flinch as I’d sat up, and equally bothersome to me that the weight on my chest had vanished, so we’d hurried through the process of modifying the doll to set up the red and pink connections used by proper mantles. Ai would yell at us later, but we knew what we were doing, informed by technical expertise and the fact that Yuuka’s eye was essentially the perfect diagnostic tool, able to predict failure before it happened. We still definitely halfassed it, crunched for time as we were, but it did work, just in time for the stream’s proper countdown to begin.
Now back in the doll and a full floor removed from my regular body—I was thinking of them as “the chassis” and “the meat” until I came up with something better—I noticed I’d taken to absentmindedly squishing my boobs while I lounged in my beanbag chair. That was probably not a good habit to form as somebody who would likely be on camera quite a lot very soon, but right now it had the happy side effect of immediately removing some of the pervasive tension and wariness from Yuuka’s body language. Boobs club was real, at least as far as her subconscious saw it. I could feel the duck tape beginning to loosen its grip, which filled me with melancholy and made Yuuka’s idea of me duplicating one of the girls’ mantles distinctly more appealing in a way I didn’t really know how to dissect. Further consideration of that was a problem for tomorrow-Ezzen, though, because the stream’s countdown had entered its final minute.
“Do you know they’re not invincible?” I couldn’t help but ask. “No snark. Like, I know you don’t know what we’re about to watch, but…further downstream? Anything?”
“I said it’s working a bit better. There’s no way you’re dumb enough to think that I’d be sitting here if I knew, right now, whether something is gonna seriously fuck up one of the Vaetna on the other side of the world at some random point in time.”
“I could light up my torch,” I offered, then I caught the edge of desperation seeping into my own voice. I’d never been anxious about a Vaetna broadcast before. I resented that feeling. “Uh. Can’t do that in this body anyway, huh. Though—”
“Doesn’t work like that,” she snapped preemptively. “The shit your arm does when you light it up only works for me because it’s forward ripple, not silver, and I can interpret the destructive interference there. But you doing it in the future means I get it all now as more silver. It’s like staring into the sun, fuckin’ worthless.” Her head whipped around, glaring at me with the gemstone. She made a zipping motion over her mouth with her hand. “And don’t you even fucking whisper ‘ripple sunglasses’ at me, cunt; the day somebody figures out how to do even half of what my eye does with sunglasses will make the day a Vaetna dies look like a fuckin’ joke. Never speak that shit into possibility, let alone existence.”
“…But that won’t happen, right?”
She didn’t answer, looking back toward my laptop screen with a huff. That was what it was like to hold a conversation with Yuuka Hirai. No wonder she hoped the Vaetna became more afraid, and believed that that would make them more effective; her entire worldview, in a very literal sense, was filtered through anxiety and pre-emptive measures, unable to fully prove a negative for her worst fears.
Right now, as the final seconds trickled away, I was much in the same boat, because it felt like the trajectory of my life—and more broadly, the fate of the entire world—depended on the next few minutes: on how well Kat was doing, what she’d reveal about her absence, and what she did or did not imply about the threat my Flame creche posed. Part of me hoped that it in fact had nothing to do with my Flame, that the inferno she’d faced had just been exceptionally odd but ultimately harmless to her and her kin and that she’d only retired to the Spire these past weeks out of an abundance of caution, and the nightmare would be over.
The rest of me knew better. Even if she was about to say, point-blank, that she believed neither I nor Noah Holton nor Ana Baker posed any threat to the Spire, the PCTF obviously disagreed enough to pursue us. So viewed cynically, all this stream would change is whether or not I could flee to the Spire, as had been my original goal when I’d rushed out of my flat in Bristol for the last time, or whether they would turn me away for fear of bringing my poison to them. Was running off to Tokyo’s Gate even an option, realistically, if it meant leaving this body behind and abandoning the Radiances to their war?
I ran out of time for those thoughts as the countdown struck zero. The stream cut right to…a snowy field. Kat’s voice spoke from offscreen. She sounded normal, which for her meant high energy; the words came out rapidly but with careful enunciation on each syllable, like picking out every droplet in a waterfall. There was a lilt to her speech, the same accent all the Vaetna had; people tended to assign all sorts of country labels based on the linguistics, but I’d always preferred to think of it like the voice of a fairytale told casually, which my friends always informed me wasn’t very helpful. But that was how Kat sounded right now, thankfully. I was so focused on listening for signs of weakness or infirmity that I didn’t actually process her first few words as anything more than a series of sounds.
“—an apology. Sorry it’s been so long, everybody! And wow, from the numbers, this does look like everybody. So, er, hello, people of Earth! It’s really nice to be back, and I’m so so grateful for all the support.”
She walked into frame. I let out an immediate sigh of relief; she looked totally fine. Or rather, her armor did, which was essentially the same thing. She was slim, as Vaetna went, a human form covered in thousands of mostly-white interlocking plates with seams so tight they practically vanished. Beneath her shell, she would have been shaped like Amane, tall and slim. Too human, came an intrusive thought—I glanced down at my chest to ask my Flame what it meant, before realizing that that had just come from me. Everybody at Todai had dramatically altered ourselves in one way or another, and if you bought into Hina’s ideas that the Flame wanted change, then for the Vaetna to be so much more powerful and to have plumbed the depths of magic then they ought to have been reshaped, more alien than just people wrapped in ultra-advanced carapace.
I had to remind myself that they absolutely did transcend the human form when they used their respective rain steps.
They did all have places where their armor diverged from a centimeter-thick shrinkwrapping of a human body. The easiest to spot was the coloration that broke up the white: Kat’s right arm was adorned with a spatter of dark gray micro-panels that rose from fingertip to elbow like a column of bubbles, leading to a slim torso with vivid red markings that ran down her flanks like racing stripes. Also, the helm: Kat’s was more faceted than some of her counterparts, with a little bit of a snout and in-cut ridges that suggested cheekbones and swooped back along the sides of her head to give the distinct impression that this was a being who was meant to go forward.
More subtly, her carapace was much more finely segmented than most of the others. She had over eight thousand distinct sections in the panoply, most so small they couldn’t even be picked out from the whole on camera. They were smoothly aligned, never overlapping; flexibility came from each individual plate of dermis distending and warping, which sometimes provoked derisive comparisons to the spandex superheroes of yesteryear rather than the solid and clearly-segmented plates of historical knight armor or the oversized, engineered shapes of a combat exosuit. The armor did a good job of blunting the impression of nudity where it was most critical, at least; the modest mounds of her breasts were joined into one aerodynamic shape and there was some reinforcement around the back of her waist and thighs that gave her a more streamlined appearance from the rear. Not that this had stopped many brave artists.
I was Vaetna Envier Number One Global, so I’d always looked at them and thought it didn’t look like nudity at all. I’d always imagined that it would be comfortable to be fully encased, wrapped and secure with minimal extraneity; I only opted for bulky hoodies because anything tighter rubbed uncomfortably, which wouldn’t be an issue with a perfectly morphing second skin. The doll had proven me right on that front, at least before we’d added the boobs. I used one of them as a stress ball while Kat kept talking, gesticulating like the experienced presenter they all were.
“Let me cut to the chase: I’m good, my armor is good, The Spire Stands. I hope looking at me is all the proof you need. But I do need to talk about exactly what happened, why I was out of commission for so long, and what’s going to happen going forward. To get the headline out of the way: Yes, I was hurt. No, it didn’t stick.”
An unfortunate consequence of us doing this on my laptop was that I only had the one screen, which meant that the chatroom was relegated to my phone, and I was slower there, so I wound up being the last to give my reaction.
skychicken: uh oh
starstar97: not sticking is good
starstar97: three weeks for it to not stick
starstar97: thats less good
moth30: :O
moth30: wha
DendriteSpinner: i dont like how this sounds at all
ezzen: fuck
Yuuka grunted next to me. “Punchline’s coming.”
I looked at her, alarmed. “Is that a prophecy?”
“Yeah.” The seriousness of her tone terrified me. “Things are about to change.”
“Too vague!”
“That’s all I got! Keep watching!”
On the screen, Kat had turned to face the snowy field behind her. “If you haven’t guessed already, we’re in Poland; this is where I put down that inferno a few weeks ago. Notice anything odd? Maybe not, but remember: I didn’t clean this up.”
I saw it immediately.
ezzen: where’s the holes
A flamebearer gone inferno was the strongest point source of ripple on earth. They spewed it across the whole spectrum, and while red and blue could be horrific, the orange and pink were the true danger, rapidly shredding any notion of distance and direction, shuffling matter and producing labyrinthine sub-dimensions that got fractally dense as you tried to approach the source.
Kat was a specialist in solving this problem by virtue of her rain step. Unlike Heung’s dives or my own limited teleportation, she disintegrated into shards that could blast through all those diseased, warped spaces at once like a sandstorm. And when she reformed, she dragged most of those little pieces back into sensible reality with her, enough to allow her lance to plow a straight path through to the source. And with a little more cleanup, she could get more of the pieces back together, enough to establish a zone of safe passage much like the tunnel we’d punched through the perimeter of the barbecue. She left any further repair to the local magitech-equipped authorities—if there were any. There were abandoned sites all over the world where it was a bad idea to stray from the road.
The problem was that here, she had retreated immediately. We still didn’t know why, but the important part was that she had, and therefore had done none of her usual cleanup beyond what it had taken to put down the poor soul. Reality behind her was supposed to still be a mess. Instead, the snow lay smooth and uninterrupted over the landscape.
“Usually, snow is an excellent way to spot discontinuities, all those little errors I don’t have the time to stay and clean up,” Kat explained. “There should be mounds or patches, something that gives away there’s some displacement or lensing. Eddies in the orange should be making at least some kind of mess. But this looks all natural, if you account for all the places where I tore up the dirt underneath during the fighting. Accounting for that, it’s a dead flat, smooth continuum. Isn’t that odd? And those distortions were there when I left; even if you don’t believe me on that, the PCTF came through after I left and wrote up a whole report. It’s not supposed to be public—link’s pinned in the chat, though.”
The tilt of her helm did an excellent job of suggesting an impish grin. Some gender-obsessed part of my hindbrain took a note as the rest of me skimmed the document as fast as I humanly—doll-ly, chassis-ly—could. I raced through possibilities, trying to map this against all the other oddities we’d observed about my Flame. “Yuuka, doesn’t this—”
“Your torch, yeah. Clarity, equilibrium, perfect destructive interference, taking the noise out of the gradient.” she rattled off in increasing order of technical correctness. “But it’s not quite the same thing. You cancel out silver, not normal colors like orange. You’re making normal colors to do that.” She sat up in her beanbag chair. “Huh.”
“What?”
Yuuka gestured helplessly at the screen, flummoxed.
Kat continued. “Obviously, this isn’t normal. Flamefall infernos don’t do that. And that’s because this thing wasn’t natural. We thought it was an attack on the Spire, and that’s half right. And I knew the moment I got to the center of the inferno that this wasn’t just any chunk of the Frozen Flame. But it took me three weeks to actually understand what was going on.” She looked at the camera, at a billion people, and I knew she was looking directly at me. “It was sent from the future. And it can hurt us.”
My blood ran cold. Yuuka had frozen.
Then Kat relaxed. “Well. It could hurt us. Can’t anymore, it was an easy fix.”
I felt like I was going to burst into tears in relief. Of course, I didn’t have tear ducts or eyes, so the sensation was purely imaginary, but it was still an incredible release of stress. Yes, the Peacies were still going to come after me, but the Vaetna would be okay, so big picture, everything else would also be okay.
Yuuka’s expression said otherwise. She looked like she was about to puke.
“What’s wrong? Is…is she lying? That it can’t hurt them?”
“No. Maybe. That’s—it came from the future, Ezza. Take that at face value. You’ve got Vaetna shit going on. Put those two facts together.”
“…Oh. It came from them in the future? Why? Why would their own Flame hurt them?”
“Maybe because they’re gonna turn fucking evil?”
“That’s insane,” I asserted. “And, what, they’re trying to stop their past selves? Through me?”
“I don’t know!” Yuuka banged her palm against her knee in frustration. “Or somebody else is, or maybe it wasn’t meant to be for you at all. The others with your Flame, they don’t know shit about magic. There’s just—something isn’t right. What’s the pattern? Why aren’t these fucks doing anything? They know the Peacies won’t buy that this is the end of it until they actually get to test out whatever superweapon they’re making and it really doesn’t work on them. ”t
“Is any of that rhetorical?”
“I wish,” she groaned, leaning back in her beanbag as Kat began to move on from the topic of her absence. The Vaetna apparently had little more to say on the matter; the Spire was going to monitor flamefalls more carefully for the time being, but otherwise the stream seemed prepared to leave the topic of time travel behind in favor of more usual State of the Spire proceedings. Yuuka fumed. “They should be blasting whatever lab to fucking rubble, just to be safe. They should be blasting us to rubble, just to be safe.”
I flinched. She was spiraling. “What were you saying about not speaking it into existence?”
“Seems I was fucking wrong about that! The future is real and it can come back to fuck us all over at any moment. As if the present wasn’t already enough of a bitch.”
That was an upsetting thought. “I…okay, yeah, that’s not good. But, like, time travel paradox still holds, doesn’t it? If messing with the past were a thing outside of this one instance then it would have already happened an infinite number of times.”
Yuuka responded to that by jabbing a finger at her crystalline eye. “Two instances. Strike three and history is over, it’ll all be one giant tangled clusterfuck of stopping shit before it can get started. They have to know it too.”
“I’m saying that’s not how it works! If the stakes were that high I would already be dead,” I reasoned. “Unless I’m needed alive for something and there’s a whole time traveler war happening just out of sight at all times, in which case everything we know about the world might as well be dumped out the window. The only sane thing to do here is assume that this is it. One person made it work one time, outside of your eye.”
Yuuka took a long, anxious, slightly mistrustful look at me. She held it for several seconds, her eye flickering as though trying to divine the truth in my words by peering through all of what was to come. Then she hung her head. “Fuck.”
“Is that a crisis ‘fuck’ or a defeated ‘fuck’?”
“It’s an ‘I wish you’d never showed up’ fuck.”
“So not in a foresight way.”
“Not in a foresight way,” she agreed.
I scoffed. “What happened to boobs club?”
“I joined this conversation at a strange time,” came a new voice. I turned and saw Izumi standing at the top of the stairs. She waved. “I just got back from a party. Twitter is saying time travel is real?”
“Yeah, and it’s how this fucker got its Flame.”
“And that’s all it seems to have done!” I added.
“…I see. And the boobs?” She looked at me. “Did you touch her boobs?”
“No! What is it with you and touching boobs?” I groused.
“It’s fun. Yuuka-chan, how does this change what the PCTF will do?”
Yuuka looked at Izumi dumbly. “Eto. Uh. I…haven’t checked.”
I would have pinched the bridge of my nose if I had one; in this body it felt more correct to cross my arms under my boobs. “Okay, Izumi, great point. Before we keep catastrophizing about history imploding or the Vaetna turning evil, I’m gonna go back into my body, we’ll get up on the roof, I’ll light up my arm, and Yuuka will verify how this changes anything within twelve kilometers and like a week of where we’re standing right now.”
Izumi put a hand on her hip. “If you go back to your body you will immediately fall asleep.”
“Oh. Shit.”
Yuuka frowned. “Oh, yeah, you’re way overspent, go the fuck to—” she flinched, hard, then scrambled to her feet, her eye flaring bright. “Oh fuck. Oh, fuck fuck fuck fuck no no no—”
The alarm in her voice had me also jumping to my feet, itching for my spear. “What?” I asked.
“I—I have no idea what I’m looking at,” she admitted. That was even more concerning, given her personality. “Physically. Ice? A beach, maybe? Nothing from around here. But if you don’t go there right now, the Vaetna show up and kill us all tomorrow.”
I glanced at the stairs up to the launchpad. “Shit. No idea where?”
“Stop,” Izumi commanded. “Think. Yuuka was about to suggest that you go to sleep. It’s not a real place.”
“Oh, fuck,” Yuuka gasped. “Yeah. If you have their Flame, then you’re part of their creche, and sometimes—but it’s been weeks, you’d know—fucking time travel,” she fumed. “Or maybe they just don’t fuckin’ sleep. Fuckin’ bugs.”
I cottoned on at last. “You’re having a vision of one of my dreams?”
“Only because this one is magical! I had them with Amane, sometimes, it’s how I helped find her, and the others, because we’re all from the same stuff. Haven’t had one in a while, but—point is, Ezza, get out of the doll, go to sleep, now. I think you have a conference call with the Vaetna.”
Author’s Note:
What a reveal! Time travel is very scary to write about. I wonder if the Vaetna are willing to give more details directly to Ezzen? And I wonder which of them will show up! Perhaps we will get even more description. Perhaps in the dream they are more…buglike. We’ll see!
Thanks as always to the beta readers! Their feedback always goes a long way. I also want to give special thanks to the Discord for an extremely positive response to last chapter, as well as some truly excellent fanworks discussion lately. Both have really helped my motivation this past week.
Tune in next week for our first behind-closed-doors encounter with Ezzen’s favorite people (?) ever!
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