“Point of order, Ezza,” Yuuka declared, clapping her hands together and pointing at me with them. “If you want to come along, you have to be less abductable.”
“Abductable,” I repeated, thinking it over. “Harsh.”
“Well, if you insist: Peacies going for you in the first place, then I’ll count the kemono reverse kidnapping you, then I think you were fine until the barbie where they did their ‘only flamebearers allowed’ shit to you? Which—anyway, and then Izumi showed up to yoink you. And then again when she busted into the pocketroom, and then just before now? Huh, all of them since you actually got here are her. Maybe it’s more of a her problem than a you problem.”
“Old habits die hard?” I asked, before realizing that I’d rammed my foot all the way into my mouth—an action I could physically carry out, and which would have been only a fraction as embarrassing. I’d been moving into comfortable banter mode with Yuuka and sort of forgotten that Izumi was still right there.
“Dude,” Ebi sniped. “Gender neutral dude, but dude.”
“Sorry, holy shit, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” Izumi said. I wanted to crawl out of my skin even more than I already had.
Yuuka rubbed her forehead above her eyepatch. “On the one hand, I don’t think Sugawara has access to any more people like Izumi-chan—”
“He will never have another,” Izumi vowed.
Yuuka grinned darkly at her. “That’s what I like to hear. But with the Peacies in town, Ezza, you’re still so…stealable. You’ve got got too many times for me to let you out of the house without more precautions.”
On my end, I was ready to admit she was right; even out in public with Hina glued to me, I felt like we’d been half-assing my safety. “Thanks. I do feel quite…abductable, yeah, good word,” I admitted. Expressing vulnerability around Yuuka was risky, but it really felt like I was among people who understood this. “Not as powerful as I’d expected to be as a flamebearer. Like…hypothetically, if right now I was put back in that situation in the taxi, I don’t know how much better I’d really do. I’m not actually any more effective with my spear if I were to fight back, and I don’t think I’d be able to make any more of an escape. Maybe I’m a bit better at weaving and could get the car underground without losing my foot, but I’d still be trapped.”
“You’ve already lost me on the details,” she said with a shrug. “I never got the play-by-play of what happened with you before our dog showed up. But I get what you’re saying—that’s the way of it,” she sighed. “We’re still just as vulnerable as anybody else until we do something about that. Not even close to all-powerful. You build it up over time, y’see, with traps and defenses and wards. Situational awareness, too, no amount of magic will save you from being where you shouldn’t. But when you’re just a larva, you don’t have those things, so those first few days, and I guess in your case those first few weeks with how much we’ve coddled ya, those are the killer. Too easy to get grabbed.”
Coming from Hina, that might have come off as flirting. From Yuuka, it was unmistakably an expression of hypervigilance and paranoia, one that I found myself strongly agreeing with, both from experience and perennial dysphoria about being exposed. “So are you saying you’ll help me set up my mantle?”
I let quite a bit of hope creep into my voice there. Yuuka surely picked up on it, but waved me off. “No, that’ll take all afternoon, and I really want to get out there while the sun is still up. Ghosts, y’know? We’ll just set you up with the usual distress beacon. Fuckin’ nutter that we didn’t before the barbie.”
“Future-seeing magical girl and you’re afraid of the dark,” Ebi snarked unseen.
Yuuka bickered back in Japanese. I didn’t have to follow the words to understand she was getting at something realer than pure superstition: in places where ambient ripple was already high, it tended to go even higher at night, enough for things to start getting paranatural. After all, if you subscribed to the idea that the ripple field was loosely a measure of how much something “mattered,” as inarticulate as that idea was, then of course it would respond to primordial human fears. Millenia of folklore about monsters and hauntings in the inky darkness, formerly just explanations for humanity’s diurnal fear of predators in the dark, had been granted a grain of truth by the Flame’s arrival.
And Sugawara’s former prison-turned-compound was fertile ground indeed. The residue of his occupation; the hideous things his followers had done to those two Todai employees who had first been sent to check on him; the Radiances’ assault; all had surely left their marks. Even if Sugawara himself, the literal ghost, was gone from there, I absolutely didn’t want to hang around after dark, not as a squishy flesh-person. An armored combat drone, on the other hand…
“Distress beacon sounds good,” I replied, interrupting the playful banter between Yuuka and Ebi. “You got a rack of them somewhere?”
“Ah, nah, it’s a thing you weave. Put that practice to the test.”
“Freehand?” I sighed. “If it’s a thing you set up regularly, you’ve got to have substrates lying around.”
“Surprise exam,” Yuuka insisted. “But you can have a diagram, at least, Ebi will send one your way. While you do that—Izumi-chan, I have a question.” Her voice softened. “You did try to abduct Ezza at the festival. None of us hold that against you. How could we? But we need to know what the plan was. Sugawara wanted them, that much is clear. As a new body?”
“Yes,” Izumi replied with zero hesitation. It was hard to tell from only one word, but I thought I heard rage there. If it had been Alice, the cavernous room would have gone up a few degrees.
“Fucker.”
“Yes. I don’t know the details, how he would have done it. If I did, we would not need to go there now.”
“He didn’t even try when he came here,” I pointed out as I pored over the still-warm printout of the diagram that had dropped onto the counter in front of me. Only twelve glyphs, not too bad. “Plan was ruined at that point, I take it?”
“Yes. He would have needed much preparation.” She went quiet for long enough to make me uncomfortable. A resounding silence of memory emanated from her and hung over us all, negative space left by the barbs and tethers he had put into her. I didn’t want to look at her or interrupt, but the long quiet was unbearable—I raised my eyes and opened my speaking hole a moment after she continued. “I was the best he could do at the moment we killed him. You were there, but you were not subjugated and emptied for him.”
“Neither were you,” Yuuka soothed, then looked at me. “Wouldn’t have worked anyway, right? Because your Flame is so fuckin’ freaky. Burned the shit outta him.”
I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t quite realized that that was the original plan; the others had avoided bringing it up with me in the aftermath, it seemed. A strange, distant perspective took hold of me, one momentarily untethered from my ego as the Vaetna’s heir-apparent and my own aspirations as a VNT flamebearer. “Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered, if he’d had long enough.”
“Dark fuckin’ thought, coming from you.”
“Just—I don’t feel all that attached to my body, y’know? I could—I dunno. There’s a world where if I did wind up in his clutches, then I don’t fight back that hard, I think, and my Flame takes the cue and gives up. Because I’m just a larva,” I spat with more bitterness than I had expected to find in myself.
Yuuka grabbed my arm and hissed quietly, so that only I could hear. “Oi. Never talk like that in front of Izumi. Or Amane. There’s enough trauma about that fucker to go around, don’t go imagining more of your own.” She loosened her grip and leaned back. “Now shut up and get weaving.”
“Right.”
The beacon wasn’t complicated. In fact, it was designed to be as simple as possible, an antenna that sent exactly one unmistakable and unalterable signal toward Ebi, as accurately and loudly and resiliently as possible, through inferno or intentional disruption. Functionally, that meant it was nothing more than a triangulator, signal encoder, and packager, exclusively pink and orange attunements thanks to clever pigeonholing. We planned to put it into my foot prosthetic for this outing, which meant I got to showcase my bizarre, mutant flexibility to bring my foot up onto the table.
Ebi pointed out the obvious. “You really could just take it off.”
“Listen, if I’m stuck in this body, I might as well get to use the damn thing.”
“Ooh, spicy.”
That seemed to dispel the darkness I had invoked. As I summoned forth divine fire from my arm and began to twist it into thread, Yuuka sat Izumi down to confer about what we might expect to find at the compound. The back-and-forth of Japanese was mostly white noise for me, and I soon added to the soundscape with my own muttered babbling.
“Never seen a practical reason for {IDENTIFY} to double back on itself like that.” My fingers gingerly wove the glyph’s shape—I was trying to focus on my movements rather than the hovering arrangements my Flame was leaving behind, envisioning the baseball as I’d been taught to guide my hand’s default position between movements. “Only ever seen it in problem sets and showcasing funny minimum glyph tricks. But I guess it’s a good way to skim off the blue input here, yeah? Resilient in, say, a combat situation where there’s thermodynamic stuff happening all over that would completely mangle how it interprets the pink channel, without needing to actually plug that input with solid blue.”
Something interesting happened as I worked. All told the effort took no more than fifteen minutes, hardly over one per glyph, a record time for me to have woven that many without a substrate. This was more than my few days of regular weaving practice could account for; that had brought some improvement in my muscle memory with the common components of glyphs, crossovers and pullthroughs and particular twists and turns, the physical shapes of the arcane, but there was more to it than that. Something had changed in my right hand. It felt like the only part of me that was really in tune with my intent, really felt like part of me. My Flame had traction on the half-chitinous plating growing from my burn scars in a way it hadn’t before. A lingering resonance of the shape I’d had in the dream, reflected in one of the only parts of my body that matched it in the real world.
It was uniquely rewarding to watch the chain suddenly vanish as I tied off the end, a sign that it was at least a plausibly functional lattice—and somewhat anxiety-inducing, since I was used to being able to pore over my diagrams for as long as I liked. Nothing for it. “Ready to test,” I called out.
“Given it a button in your brain?”
“Yeah. I’ve got this tentative control panel in my head—dunno if it’s good practice to pop this right next to the activatable stuff for the dolldronepuppetmantlewhatever but it’s what I’ve got—and there’s a button there. That’s a good visualization for it, yeah? Just an emergency button that I slam?” I felt like I was talking a lot.
Yuuka gave me a thumbs up. “Yeah, panic button.”
“Hit it,” Ebi called out. I did, imagining slamming my hand on the control panel, and I felt a strong jerk in my foot for a moment, then Ebi emitted a ding. “Yep, works. Next time you hit it I’m gonna assume it’s not a drill, got it?”
“Got it,” I replied, slightly giddy. “Wow, real magic. And stuff I’m taking with me instead of toys I have to leave in the doll.”
“Says the one who can rain step,” Izumi put in with a grin as she hopped to her feet with that mantle weightlessness. “If you are ready, so are we.”
I slid off my chair gingerly, making sure that my prosthetic still worked for its intended purpose. It did, mostly, with the tiniest hitch as I put my full weight onto the toes. I reached into my pocket and touched the tuna-can stabilizer, and found that it was warm. Not alarmingly so, but warmer than it had been previously. The lattice was starting to decohere, spitting blue ripple that pigeonholed into its mildest effect, simple radiant heat. I didn’t think much of it; this new unit Hina had given me post-barbecue had generally run hotter, because it was even more of a temporary solution than the first one, intended to last only until Ai had a more integrated prototype ready.
It was concerning in a distant, deal-with-it-later way. And it wasn’t like there was anything to do about it right now, since none of us could weave like Hina did on short notice. We’d burn too much daylight fixing it if I brought it up, I figured. It could wait until after.
Idiot.
I rode shotgun on Yuuka’s jetbike. Well, the seating was arranged fore and aft, like a motorcycle or jet fighter, but sitting behind her was still shotgun in my opinion. It was about a ten minute flight to the derelict hospital; we cruised well below the bike’s supersonic maximum speed for the sake of stealth. The bike was almost completely invisible to radar, the naked eye, and passive magical detection at these speeds.
“You know,” I pondered, “none of that really shed any light on why she’s called Ebi.”
“Means shrimp.”
Her voice carried easily thanks to the comprehensive magical soundproofing that surrounded us. I loved that we were able to carry a conversation despite the wind shear skimming off the bike’s angular nose, delighting in how high-tech and comfortable this ride was. If I didn’t look down I could almost forget just how high up we were as the mountains of Japan raced beneath us—no, I chided myself. I had just done some magic, just proved in some small way that I could grow beyond being a larva. I chose to be brave and look down at the landscape, emboldened by my dissociation trick from earlier and figuring I’d already vomited once today.
I was rewarded with quite a view of the Japanese countryside. Most of Japan is mountainous, but from my view they were more like really large forested hills, rather than the craggy Alps or Rockies I’d seen as a kid. There was more brown than green below us; the deciduous trees were still missing their leaves, and we were still a few weeks out from the start of cherry blossom season. Nonetheless, it was an impressive view of nature at scale and a welcome change of scenery from the penthouse. Mount Fuji was plainly visible, too, and I realized that it was my first time seeing it. A tourism milestone to be sure, cropping up in the middle of our mission to unravel the secrets of a ghost.
Eventually acrophobia did threaten to upset my stomach and I did have to stop looking down, which reminded me of where I was. It was remarkable that Yuuka was willing to chaperone me like this, given that my body was currently a disgusting mound of meat seated in arm’s reach directly behind her instead of an androgynous and synthetic puppet with breasts duct-taped on. That felt like a major show of trust, and I was grateful in a way that I didn’t know how to articulate. In fact, it seemed like she had come back to the tower in a real hurry—she was still wearing a stylish college student’s outfit as though she’d come straight from a lecture and the bike had been left running—meaning she was eager to join us in getting after whatever remained of Sugawara’s ritual.
She didn’t have foreknowledge of what we would see, not at a distance; the plan was to park the bike overhead and set up the hovering bivouac she’d used at Thunder Horse so we could take the time to inspect the future by my arm’s glow. Izumi was confident the survivors of Sugawara’s die-hard cult would have moved on, but caution never hurt. We hadn’t ruled out that his ghost could be at our destination. Spirits of the dead supposedly lingered where they died, after all, at least according to basically every culture’s folklore. Whether those rules held true for a transmuted entity of Flame was anybody’s guess, but worst case scenario, two mantles—two Radiances, if I was to be honest in how I was thinking about Izumi—constituted almost laughably big guns to bring to any engagement short of a naval battle. If Sugawara was waiting for us, the only misfortune that would occur would be that Amane would never get the chance to finish him herself.
The second Radiance was flying her own route separate from us, both to avoid arousing suspicion and because she had an errand of her own. She’d wanted to make a stop at the burned-out shrine where Hikanome had been founded, to check up on the traps she and Yuuka had left there the other week. Just to reassure herself, she’d admitted openly.
“I knew that,” I replied indignantly. “Is it just a joke about how she’s actually quite big? Jumbo shrimp?”
“Partially. You went out and saw her, those crazy tiny weaves.”
“Yeah. Ai did some blood magic, it seems,” I probed. “Is the name some Japanese pun on that?”
“Oh, I don’t want to spoil the joke,” Yuuka sighed. “It’s the only good one Ai’s ever made, and I want to give her that much.”
Fair was fair. I wanted to ask Ai directly about it all anyway. We rode in silence for another minute before Yuuka changed the topic.
“So, Izumi took you out to fourspace. Just grabbed you, from what Ebi told me. Couple weeks ago I was getting stabbed to stop her from yoinking ya out of the world, now we’re just letting her do it.”
“I thought you trusted her? Are we still suspicious she’s some kind of mole?”
“Oh, no, no, definitely not,” Yuuka said quickly. I couldn’t see her face from the backseat, but the way her twintails shifted suggested a playful roll of the eyes. “Just thinking about how the kemono is rubbing off on her. In all senses of the word. Listen, if either of them grab you when you don’t want, you slam that fuckin’ button, got it? Ebi will get me, and I’ll set them straight.”
“Ebi was the one who told her to grab me.”
“Gah. You alright?”
“Guess so? Is this…protective older sister energy I’m getting from you?” Yuuka fully twisted around in her seat to look at me incredulously, which made me go, “No hey what the fuck are you doing.”
“I can’t believe you just said that out loud.”
I started to sweat. It had just sort of come out. “I didn’t—”
She grinned impishly. “Sure, why not, as long as you’re not gonna be weird about it. Hina or Izumi give you trouble, Bloodstone-neechan will set ‘em straight.”
“They haven’t given me trouble! If anything it’s like…I don’t know, offgassing their worst impulses on each other so I don’t get turned into a chew toy by Hina. That’s good, isn’t it? As long as there’s no ripple collateral, which they’ve been good about as far as I know.”
“Just trying to look out for you. Boobs club might be a joke, but you’re an honorary one of the girls now.” She raised a finger to pre-empt my interruption with a small wince. “I know that’s not what you are. Just how my brain works, sue me. The choices are girl or enemy, so you’re girl.”
“Fine,” I huffed. “But does that mean you have to rant about my girlfriend and her girlfriend while I’m stuck alone with you a kilometer in the air? Is that the fabled ‘girl talk’?” Star would have a stroke, I thought.
She blinked. “Okay, true. We can talk about something else, though, fuck it, I’ve got plenty of big sister topics. How big are the tits you’re putting on your mantle?”
By the time we arrived I was extremely red in the face—and had begun to cotton on to the fact that Yuuka was doing it to distract herself from what we were walking into. Her anxiety made her precognition worse, so by getting a rise out of me she was actually making it more likely she’d be able to glean something useful now. Izumi wasn’t the only one who was nervous about what we might find. Against all odds, I might have been the least anxious of the three of us as we convened on the hovering bivouac platform, if only by virtue of me being the least deeply traumatized.
We set up shop almost directly above the abandoned hospital. The March sun was already starting to hang lower in the sky, the deepening shadows casting the winter-defoliated limbs of the trees as a vast bramble of thorns that seemed to reach up toward us, our quarry personified in the landscape itself as though he had left a permanent stain on the region. That was all in my head, of course, but not only mine, judging by how Izumi’s eyes darted around the grounds surrounding the building.
“Nothing at the shrine,” Izumi informed us, her mantle in its most tuned-for-killing mode next to me. “It makes me anxious. I would have preferred it if he had triggered the traps and gotten away, because at least I would know he had been there. I do not want to be here when the sun sets.”
“We’ll be gone long before it gets dark,” Yuuka assured us as she unfolded some lawn chairs. “You investigate spooky bullshit in daylight, everybody knows that.”
I nodded, though I had some questions. “Makes us easier to spot though, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re just sort of hovering up here. If the Peacies sent somebody out here to keep an eye on it…”
“Yeah. But we don’t think they did. And we’re pretty cloaked, nobody watching the building with pinkeyes is going to be looking up.”
“Always hated that name,” I groused, aware that she was intentionally prodding me and playing along. “It’s gross. Just call them infomantic sensors or something.”
“Yeah, yeah. Sit down and get your Flame out. Time to rend knowledge from the future with our wicked magicks.”
“Chuunibyou,” Izumi declared with a grin. “I admire that.”
I lit my arm and held it aloft to Yuuka, willing that justice would be served, that we would turn Sugawara’s escape from his end into some salve for his victim. My Flame liked that idea and burned brightly, spilling untamed out of the cracks between the plating. Even out here, in the sunlight, it cast strange, deep, unaccountable shadows in between the retina-stinging illumination, what I guessed were two-dimensional silhouettes of three-dimensional objects out in the fourth dimension, usually hidden from our limited perspective but briefly exposed by the paranatural light. Doing this was one of the rare times I felt properly magical, especially outside of the doll—and moreover, more rewardingly, it was one of the few times I felt like the Radiances needed me more than I needed them.
Yuuka pulled off her eyepatch. Black crystal shimmered with dark greens and then began to glow red. The eye was always active, but now Yuuka was pushing it as she stared into the Flame. Then she strode over to the edge of the bivouac platform to look down at the ruined building below. We were close enough that we could see where Hina had blasted open the wall to abscond with the Todai employee they’d been holding captive. She pointed at it.
“We should start down there. Going straight to the room where we killed him is fuzzy, and I don’t like fuzzy. Gimme a sec to keep trawling.”
While we waited, Izumi came up beside me and looked respectfully at my Flame. We shared a quiet moment while Yuuka muttered to herself in Japanese. Then the sixth Radiance shifted awkwardly. “I’m sorry for picking you up.”
I waved her off. My Flame was being powered by righteous indignation, but none of it was for her. “All good. Ebi was the one who asked you.”
“I still did not think. You’re too forgiving.”
“…Yeah, probably.” Only for pretty girls with trauma, I thought to myself. Maybe the PCTF would send their craziest special forces butch and I’d fold like a house of cards.
We lapsed back into silence. Just as my shoulder was beginning to tire from holding my arm up, Yuuka turned back to us, looking a little sick, and gave her report.
“Okay, no traps, no Sugawara, and either the place is abandoned or we’re about to get ambushed so hard they’ll name a holiday after us, because it looks like nobody came through after us, not the cultists, not cops, not Peacies. It’s bizarre how untouched everything is, and there’s gotta be a reason, but I can’t tell.”
“Spooky,” I commented, not sure what else to say. It was incredibly convenient that she could just copy her notes from the future like that. “But not dangerous?”
“Yeah. So that’s thing number one to figure out.”
“Avoidance field?” I asked. It was possible, through a mix of spatial and infomantic techniques, to make it so that a place couldn’t be found or entered by accident. “Granted, seems like all those groups would have had reason to come here intentionally, so maybe not. And who would have had the resources to set it up anyway? Forget I said anything,” I sighed.
Yuuka waved me off. “Silversight isn’t giving me colors, but just looking down there with mantle eyes—Izumi, see any pink? I don’t.”
“No.”
“Okay, so something else. Fuckin’ cults. Nobody should be allowed to use blood magic but us.” She crossed her arms authoritatively. “We’re gonna take it slow until we figure out what that’s about, why nobody’s at least come in and cleaned up the bodies—good thing you’ve got a mask, Ezza, it’s never good when something smells so bad I can see it. And there’s red everywhere, or at least I think it’s red, so I’m pretty fuzzy on the rest of it. Not new red, though, probably some fucked up ritual shit judging by what they were doing in there. Then we can go through the halls the same way we did last time we were here, fewest surprises that way because the path is pretty bright. When we get to Sugawara’s room…” she winced. “Eye’s giving me ‘Izumi will get the insight she wants.’ Which is vague to the point of making me paranoid.” She took a breath. “So. Either of you want to bail, knowing all that?”
I blinked, looking to Izumi. If she still wanted in, so did I. She shook her head. “No. Delaying would not improve our chances of finding anything, will it? So we do this now.”
“Nah. Glad you agree. I’ll put down the bike on the roof and we’ll get in. If either of you feel anything weird as we get close, you tell me, clear?”
“Clear,” we both replied.
Izumi floated upward, we stowed the platform and got back on the jetbike, and the three of us descended to the compound, descending past the sky-grasping brambles of the treeline and into the clutches of a man who’d thought himself a god-in-waiting.
Touching down was fine. Making our way to where the ceiling had collapsed was fine, and Yuuka and Izumi confirmed it was fine to head in, that there really were no traps. It all went swimmingly and without incident. Until we hit the net.
Yuuka had mentioned something about it when last the Radiances had been here, the strong impression she’d had that there was something that would tangle Hina up if she moved through fourspace. It hadn’t come to anything then; ruthless and overwhelming firepower had made far too quick work of the cult’s loyalists for us to find out what it did. In the weeks since, it must have fallen into disrepair and shifted out of place, slipping from wherever it had been mounted in the fourth dimension and managing to cross back over into our reality in places where the boundary was thin enough. Now we saw it for what it was: strips of skin, knotted and glued together into a lattice the size of a hospital. Nothing so elegant as a proper series of glyphs; this was unrefined suffering, red ripple given the crudest structure and form. I shuddered to think who all that skin had come from.
Whatever nightmare project it had been for originally, it had now settled across the entire building. Across every corpse, too, and the Radiances had left their fair share.
A lattice, a form, red ripple, and the dead. The same recipe as for the grim miracle that was Ebi, for all its simplicity and haphazard chance—the recipe for a soul.
More urgently, the recipe for a building that wanted to eat us.
Author’s Note:
Meat! Meat! Meat!
Thanks again for the follower milestone. I’ve had some people ask me if the reduced update rate signifies that my passion for the story is fading, but rest assured I am still just as excited to write Sunspot as you guys are to read it, and I intend to stick around for when we hit 10k and beyond. If you want that milestone to come sooner, the best thing you can do for the story’s metrics is take the time to write a review! Alternatively, tell your friends about it! Or join the discord (link below!) Even if you don’t do anything, I still appreciate that you’re here reading!
Thanks to the beta readers as always. This chapter took a while to come together and I actually had to pretty heavily rewrite it, but I think it’s absolutely cleared my standards of quality for the story. I really doubt next chapter will go up this Sunday; I’m gonna say it’ll be next Sunday, and if I can get it done before then, it’ll be up early on Patreon.
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!
