CONTENT WARNINGS

None

As Hina cleaned up breakfast, the other four Radiances left via the elevator. Heliotrope was first, actively seeking to escape Hina’s presence and the general atmosphere, never mind that said atmosphere was largely her fault. Off to school, I assumed, still a little unclear on whether that was classes or research—were they alright with her showing up in her somewhat-scant nightwear? Seeing that she was departing, Ai hastily got up and followed her over. They bickered in Japanese a bit, rapid-fire, as the doors closed. Once they were gone, Alice put her cheek in her palm, rubbing her hand up to her temple and forehead, a slow-motion facepalm.

“Well—yes, alright, I can give you some time to decide whether you want to go next week. But, um—it really would be best if we were able to RSVP with who’s going by…Thursday at the latest. Don’t mean to rush you! I swear! It’s just…we’re both big organizations, and between the logistics and the publicity, lead time is important and…”

I waved her off nervously.

“You don’t have to justify it, I get the picture, really.”

“Oh, thank heavens, good. We have to go get dressed, so…” she stood, twisting to rub the base of her tail. “We’ll probably miss each other until tonight. You’re unscheduled; make yourself comfortable. Sorry for things being such a rush for the first few days. And—” she glared at the elevator, “—sorry about Yuuka. She’s really not usually this bad!”

“No, really, it’s fine.” I sort of felt guilty for the stress she was under, now that the pressure from outside was starting to become palpable. “I’ll, uh, let you know. About the Hikanome thing.”

At least Yuuka’s rather extreme response to the situation between me and Hina seemed to have blunted Alice’s own worries and protectiveness of me. We hadn’t really had time to talk about it since the not-date, so I felt it was important to add:

“Hina really was on her best behavior yesterday…I think,” I whispered, hoping Hina’s vaguely advanced senses couldn’t hear me over the rush of water at the sink. “Don’t…we’re fine, we’ve figured it out. Don’t worry on my behalf, yeah?”

It felt weird that I was the one reassuring her, but she seemed to appreciate it, rubbing her face again and mustering a grin and nod. She helped Amane to her feet—or tried to, which the Amethyst Radiance refused somewhat playfully, rising on her own—and the two of them made for the stairs, followed by Ebi. Hina turned from her cleanup to give them a thumbs-up. The three went upstairs and disappeared from view, leaving just me and the puppy. She killed the water and came back over to me.

“I gotta get going too, cutie. Busy!”

“Sure. What do you…do, exactly?”

“Lotsa stuff. Today’s…damn, I don’t really remember. Voice acting for one of the collabs, I think. Uh—hey, Doctor, let’s knock ‘em dead! Stuff like that.”

“Cool. Uh—have a good day at work?”

“You too.” She leaned down to where I was sitting and nuzzled the top of my head, sniffing my hair. “I’ll see you at lunch, though.”

Trepidation seized me.

“Uh—where’s lunch?”

“I’ll find you!”

She leaned down further to plant a kiss on the bridge of my nose, and then suddenly she was gone, teleported off to who-knew-where, leaving only the smell of ozone as the air responded a little violently to her instantaneous departure. I was extremely grateful that was the only effect of her teleportation; no free ripple, and she seemingly could do it with enough finesse that there was no deafening clap from air rushing to fill the newly vacated spot.

Plus, now I had something specific to look forward to: lunch! That wasn’t the only thing; since it was the first real weekday since I’d come to Todai, I wanted to drop in and see what exactly each of them did all day. But that could wait, because having established that I was not, in fact, in any particular hurry to get things done or make decisions, and having been left to my own devices, I was of a mind to go right back to bed. It was still barely half past eight in the morning, and the comfort of my sheets sounded quite nice; Hina’s pile of blankets was well and good, don’t get me wrong, but an actual mattress and some time in my own space was in order.

Ebi intercepted me before I could escape, tapping my shoulder.

“Gah!” Hadn’t she just been upstairs? “Where the fuck did you come from?”

She grinned.

“Sapphire’s not the only one who can shimmy around fourspace. You slept with your foot on.”

“Um—yeah, sorry. Was about to go wash up,” I lied. I would get to it after my nap.

“Great. I know you’re probably intending to kinda laze around all day, but at least try to stay awake. Still gotta beat your jet lag.”

Damn, there went that plan. I wasn’t even going to try to get one over on Ebi’s diagnostic systems when it came to that stuff.

“Um, sure. Can I go now?”

“Only if you promise to also clean that burn on your chest.”

I reddened. Of course she knew.

“…Don’t get mad at Hina?”

“Wasn’t planning on it. You consented, I hope?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Then it’s none of my business. Looks like she’s able to restrain herself enough to not make it my problem, and that’s as far as I care. Last thing before I release you: your PC parts are arriving sometime this afternoon, and Amane’s wondering if she can sit in while you build. She’s kind of a nerd for that stuff.”

“Um—yeah, of course. I mean—yes, she’s welcome.”

“Great. Alright, off you go. Bathe! Ablute!”

As I turned away and made for the stairs, she added:

“Good job fending off Opal.”

I stopped.

“Uh, thanks? She gets like that a lot, I gather?”

“She’s just an overprotective worrywart.”

“…Meaning your own situation?”

She put on a digital facsimile of a shit-eating grin.

“You didn’t hear me say that.”

—

My second time around bathing in my new apartment’s bathroom went better than the first; it only took me two tries to get hot water coming out of the shower head. The first time, water had come out the bath basin’s faucet, and I’d considered soaking in the bath instead, but my foot was still too early in the healing process, and I was leery of letting it get too soft. That had happened once while my right hand had been healing, and it had left the fingers feeling like they were wearing a poorly fit glove for hours afterward.

The cauterized stump where the front half of my right foot had been magically amputated still stung, but now that I had a sense of the general procedure with the wall-mounted stool and handrails and the various soaps, the process was more familiar. I made quicker work of the actual scrubbing and rinsing than last time, but ultimately, I still took about the same amount of time, just spent a higher proportion luxuriating under the hot water.

The smooth-seared spot on my chest stung under the water as much as my foot did, less severe of a wound but more recent. I ran my hand along the skin, finding that it wasn’t perfectly level, owing to a pimple and the general irritation from being blasted by the magical equivalent of a branding iron, but it was indeed clear of hair and, improbably, hadn’t blistered up. What would it be like if my whole body were this smooth, at least when paired with other, more significant physical enhancements? There was appeal there—but I had decided that those sorts of more extreme changes were off-limits. I didn’t want to go too far with Hina, for my Flame’s sake.

“Sorry if she hurt you.”

My Flame still said nothing. Both Hina and I had heard it last night—it wasn’t clear how much she had used it for the procedure, if at all, but I felt guilty that she might have. I needed to understand exactly what was different about my Flame, the special properties it had from my status as twice-touched…but I doubted it would speak again without another similarly intense experience. Short of that, our best lead on that would be to find my stalker, ask her exactly what she had been doing, and reverse engineer it to test my Flame’s response. Hina had figured out a similar weave for the ingenious and abhorrent mechanism of murder we’d invented yesterday, but without understanding the exact kind of projected-yet-invisible LM weave I’d encountered, there were too many unknown and uncontrolled variables to draw any conclusions about my Flame.

Or you could keep cuddling with Hina and see what happens, my libido asserted.

“Shut up.”

Just saying.

I killed the water and occupied myself by toweling off, this time remembering to brush the conditioner through my damp hair. It was definitely already having a minor effect—wait, shit. I wasn’t supposed to be washing my hair every day. Oops.

At any rate, with a clean body and somewhat less-clean psyche, it felt good to exit the steamy atmosphere of the shower. This part of the procedure was still rather limp-y, having left my prosthetic and the stabilizer module on the bed, but after hobbling my way around the perimeter of the room and sort of slump-rolling myself onto the sheets, all was good. Adding the blanket on top was even better. I almost fell asleep there, butt-naked and against Ebi’s instructions, but my phone buzzed at me just as I was drifting off.

ebi-furai: stay up!

Bleh. She was right, but the bed’s siren song of warm, cozy naps was near-irresistible. I needed to escape or otherwise distract myself.

ezzen: and do whqt

ebi-furai: you can always do more research, right?

ebi-furai: still got your laptop

It was true enough, and I blearily sat up, groaning at the sting in my foot; no matter how high the thread count, the blanket was an irritant against the water-softened and still-healing skin whenever I moved. I groped for my laptop on the nightstand, shoving some stuff that had started to accumulate atop it onto the newly vacated space. I maneuvered the laptop—a fairly heavy model, as I had never really intended to travel with it—onto the unoccupied side of the bed and arranged my pillows such that I could sit up against the headboard with the laptop open on my lap, tugging at the blanket to minimize its contact with my foot while still comfortably covering the rest of my lower body, tenting and tensioning the fabric—much like weaving a glyph, I realized. Amused by the parallel, I opened the laptop, typed in my password—

And slammed the screen back down.

The evidence of my crime was still right there, the instrument of collaborative murder I’d designed, abstracted to about two dozen graphical boxes full of numbers in GWalk. I saw them die again, squeezed my eyes shut to stave off the memory of those little symbols realized, the death-dealing efficacy of my own creation, the logical end of my expertise, the great spherical cut-out, and the stumbling corpse. A spear punched through the heart of the blaze—

“No, no, no. No!”

I banished my automatically summoned spear, that hollow imitation of the onyx-tipped real thing, and slammed my palm down onto the blanket with a whump in shaky frustration. That disrupted the careful equilibrium I had established in the bedding and dragged the blanket against the top of my foot, making me suck in a breath. The most sickening part was that I could have sworn I felt my Flame flicker at the burst of guilt and pain. Kindling for power that could reach to the very limits of my ingenuity, reshape the world itself, reshape me—if only I chose to apply a spark.

Better to douse that kindling, cut off the potential at its source. One of the items I’d cleared off my laptop and onto the nightstand had been a box of those pain-blocker patches; Ebi must have left them for me. I reached for the box and extracted one of the adhesive patches, taking care to not let it stick to itself as I pulled off the backing, and brought my right knee up to my chest, feeling around my shin for the right spot to apply it…then reconsidered. I would have to wield my Flame to activate the patch at all, inflict pain to eliminate pain. Simply reattaching my prosthetic would block the sensation less completely, but at least that was just activating a lattice that was already in place, not freshly spinning and weaving—contorting and mutilating—the raw Flame in my soul. So I reached for the false front portion of my foot instead.

—

With my foot reattached, my laptop apparently a no-go—a problem for future Ezzen—and still needing a solution for the fact that staying in bed was a path to the forbidden, sleep-schedule-ruining nap, I figured I might as well familiarize myself with the rest of the penthouse. After shrugging on some more of my new, baggy, protective clothes, I went exploring and found a number of amenities that were a substantial step up from my old place.

For one, the Radiances had their own laundry machines, washer and dryer. As somebody used to coin laundry—one of the few times I regularly left the house—this was a luxury beyond imagination. The laundry room was sensibly up on the penthouse’s second floor with our rooms, and indeed, at first glance, I hadn’t realized it was different from the unused rooms on the far side of the C-arrangement until I had found the door ajar and heard the rumbling within. My old launderette’s machines had this awful, chugging clang quality to their operation; Todai’s were so much cozier, like mechanical rolling thunder, or the surf crashing against a shoreline as heard from a clifftop above. Not so loud as to be obnoxious, more like a big auditory blanket of noise. Like being inside Hina’s belly as she purred.

Wait. What the hell? Why, brain?

The load of laundry currently spinning in the washing machine was impossible to identify. The indistinct, multicolored mass of cloth could have belonged to any of the girls, and I resisted the urge to try to deduce the owner. Did they have a system to make sure people’s clothes didn’t get mixed up? Something to ask when it became relevant, I supposed. Also, I would need a hamper or basket or something; I didn’t even have a spare chair to act as my customary Laundry Chair. For now—there was a stack of big baskets in the corner. Would they get mad if I took one back to my room for the time being? Maybe that was what they all did? After spending too long paralyzed by the choice, I decided this was stupid and stole one of the baskets for my personal use, grateful nobody was home as I carried it back to my room.

The second level didn’t have much else of interest. I peeked briefly into one of the unoccupied rooms, mostly out of curiosity—vacant, of course, a blank slate for some future occupant. Teammates? Caretakers for Amane? Whatever the original purpose of these spare rooms, they didn’t hold anything at all right now, completely unfurnished; so with my curiosity satisfied, I descended the main stairs to the first level.

Without the Radiances around, the space felt much emptier, even liminal. The lights were off, adding to the palpable absence; with the sun now up, natural daylight flowed through the windows at the far end of the main sitting area, bathing the space, refracting prismatically at the edges of each floor-to-ceiling glass panel into a series of scintillating rainbows that splashed across the floor at regular intervals. The tranquility—I was being overly dramatic again. It was just sunlight. Stepping into one of the beams was nice and warm, though; I could at least appreciate that.

The kitchen was pristine, the only sign of breakfast’s labors a handful of metal bowls drying in the dish rack. For all of Hina’s personal, wanton voracity in the act of eating, she seemed to take her cooking responsibilities very seriously. Did she cook every meal? No, she couldn’t have; that first meal with Alice and Amane had been prepared while she was out, so there must have been a kitchen somewhere else in the building. An employee cafeteria, probably. And in hindsight, that curry had been really quite good, so I sort of wanted to drop by and browse the menu—if that was even how it worked. The idea of just walking in without any kind of social script was nearly petrifying, even when only imagined. Perhaps there was some kind of early sign-up, maybe weekly or monthly, and if I were to just walk in and expect to be served, I’d get laughed out and be unable to explain myself because of the language barrier and—

Mercifully, such stressful thoughts of crowds and social stratagems weren’t a concern in this massive, deserted apartment. Was ‘apartment’ even the correct term for such a large communal dwelling? Google said yes, at least. Continuing my exploration brought me over to the various sub-rooms below the—balcony? Google answered that for me as well; beneath the mezzanine lay the meeting room and dojo, which I’d seen before, but it turned out the hall continued down and around, following the C-pattern of our individual rooms above. The room past the dojo was a continuation of the fitness theme, full of benches and strange pulleyed contraptions and treadmills. This made sense; Ai was the only one of the five who I’d consider ‘buff’, but all save Amethyst were fit and toned, something that was probably very important to the more idol-y side of their image.

It occurred to me to wonder whether Hina’s supernatural physique required such…mortal workouts as the weight room implied. Would I, if it came to that? The Vaetna, at least, were known to also have a weight room, but it sort of undercut their superhumanity to imagine them doing mundane weight training in addition to all their combat-focused training. Myself, I had maintained a pretty decent baseline of fitness from daily spear practice alone—though I hoped I wasn’t going to be forced upon those treadmills. Cardio sucked.

Speaking of my spear, the dojo’s open, padded flooring was calling to me through the propped-open doorway. Yesterday’s return to my routine had made me realize that I now had vastly more space to practice even in my bedroom, and the dojo was easily four times that large and had a higher ceiling. This was the kind of space that I could see VNTs do serious sparring in; that thought prompted me to look around for some kind of control panel like I’d seen in the Vaetna’s videos of their equivalent training space, forcefields to alter gravity or set up holographic targets, but no dice. There were dummies herded into the far corner of the dojo, though: skeletal wooden ones studded with pegs, pillowy ones more reminiscent of punching bags, and even a few torsos that looked like those anatomically correct firearms testing dummies made of ballistic gel and fake bone I’d seen on YouTube. It was easy to picture Hina tearing through those last ones, reveling in how her claws splattered false, neon-green blood onto the nylon floor padding. Or maybe those were for actual firearms, if Amethyst’s upgunned KV-18 was anything to go by; Todai didn’t seem very concerned with nonlethality.

I pushed down those thoughts, stepping further into the dojo and calling forth my spear. Yesterday, I’d resolved that it was a toy, something for my own recreation, part of a different world from those grand weapons, and I ought to make good on that. My stabilizer module, too bulky and heavy to remain in my hoodie pocket, went on the floor. The hoodie itself joined it right after, as did my socks and phone, and I began my routine, the same as yesterday’s, the same as most days between the first and second times my life had been turned upside down. Stretching my limbs and warming up my muscles felt great with my now-clean skin, and I had so much space to experiment! First, though, I had to adjust to the new environment. The padding underfoot changed the kinematics of each step, and I stumbled a few times as years of muscle memory were ever-so-slightly disrupted, but the stabilizer module caught me each time, and by the time I was done with the basic forms, I’d adjusted to the difference.

Ai’s explanation yesterday had been fun; the stabilizer was quite an impressive bit of tech. My intuition was more or less correct: it was essentially a magical gyrostabilizer. Some of the glyphware that identified the most stable positioning of footfalls was a miniaturized and slightly hacky version of Amane’s own leg—which it turned out that Ai had older versions of in the shop, so she’d opened one up to show me how exactly the lattice substrates were both etched into and extruded out of the skeletal struts at the core of the mechanical limb. Seeing the diagrams—publicly available, a move on Ai and Amane’s part for which I had no end of respect—realized and cleverly integrated into the physical structure gave me a renewed appreciation for the precision and design considerations involved in—

“Kemono two.”

I tripped. My prosthetic was planted firm, taking the majority of my weight, so it had nowhere to adjust. It turned out the prosthetic did have limits to what I could recover from. I began to windmill my arms, realized I was holding a giant crutch, and stabilized myself with the butt of my spear against the padded flooring. I turned to face Heliotrope, red as a beet from the exertion combined with embarrassment. I had only mustered the courage to do this in one of the public spaces because I had thought nobody else was home.

“Um. Hi. Heliotrope. Radiance Heliotrope?” She was the only one of the five for whom I was still using her title rather than her name, so…“Yuuka?”

“Bloodstone.”

“Bloodstone. Sure. Uh—thought you were at school?”

I had started that sentence intending it to be a statement, but it ended as a question, unsure of what exactly she did, day-to-day.

“Not until two. It’s on the callie, y’know.”

Did—did Australians call calendars “callies?” I didn’t know, and didn’t dare call her bluff.

“Um, sorry.”

We stared at each other. Or, rather, she stared at me, and I made a commendable effort to not stare at her boobs, instead pretending to inspect the furnishings of the dojo. Seriously, that perky and she’s not even wearing a—the dojo didn’t get any direct natural light, padded on all sides but the glass interior wall. My eyes found the control panel I’d missed earlier, half-hidden in the corner behind the dummies. Oh, shit, Bloodstone was saying something.

“—and I don’t want Alice to get on my ass about it, and Amane pulled me aside earlier, so, uh, sorry.”

I zoned back in just in time to register the apology, but not quite what it was for. I’d taken up her workout slot, maybe?

“That’s, um, it’s no problem,” I muttered, still avoiding eye contact. “It’s, um, really no problem. Was there, er, a sign I should have put on the door?”

I turned to see if there was some kind of locking or notification mechanism near the door. I didn’t see anything, but caught a frown on her face as I turned back, sort of awkwardly shuffling my feet to face her more properly. That was the polite thing to do, I remembered.

“What, like a sock?”

“Oh, is that how it works? Sorry.”

I hastily turned again to start ambling back toward where I’d left my socks with my hoodie. That was a weird system, but I wanted to fit in.

“What are you doing?” She groaned. “Not now, I meant—last night, sock on the door because you’re being a monsterfu—because you’re sleeping with her. Christ.”

“O—oh.”

“Did—oh my God, you weren’t paying attention, were you? I wasn’t—” She wheezed a single, strangled, incredulous cackle. “I was trying to apologize for the monsterfucker thing, not—not for walking in on you, we walk in on each other all the time in here, nani kore, you’re—”

She doubled over, dissolving into laughter. I wanted to quit this entire week and curl up in my old bed back in Bristol and pretend none of this had happened, that I hadn’t just fucked up a basic social interaction—where she had been apologizing to me—so badly that she now looked like she was on the verge of asphyxiating from laughter. I just stood there, horrified at the new low I had set for myself, until she recovered in shuddering gasps.

“Wow. Wow. You’re really—God, and you didn’t even challenge me on the ‘callie’ thing. Oh. Heh. You really are like a second one of her, just as scatterbrained. Aren’t you supposed to be as smart as Ai? I mean, you’ve got to be; you put together that thing we used yesterday.”

“That’s not—”

“But I guess that’s your thing? Idiot savant? No wonder you’re already fucking that thing, you must not have listened to anything the others said about her! I mean, there’s no way they didn’t warn you! Alice and Ai for sure—were you just not listening?”

“Of course they warned me, and I chose—”

“Really? Seriously, really, you heard everything they said and still fuckin’ went for it?”

“Yes!”

“Jesus. I thought we were done bringing horny guys in here. And Alice wants me to apologize? You weren’t even listening!” She waved her hand in front of my face. “Are you now? Are you?”

“Of course I fucking am,” I snapped. “Just—overthinking!”

“Overthinking.”

“Yes! It’s just—”

“No, you’re not, because if you thought this through you would never end up balls-deep in the fuckin’ monster! Oh my God.” She laughed at me again. “Thinking it through means knowing what you’re fucking getting into, and you clearly don’t. Alice might not let me kick you out, but let me tell you, you’d better start thinking things through if you don’t want to—hold on. Are you going to join the fucking team?”

“No! I didn’t fucking ask to be here!”

“Huh?”

“Hina fucking abducted me and, no, I don’t want to join the team, but Opal keeps talking about it like it’s some kind of eventuality, and I keep trying to tell her and the others that I don’t want that but—”

“Wait, wait, waitwait—she abducted you and you’re still fucking her?”

“We’re not…fucking! It’s complicated!”

“Mate. I’ve heard that one before, you’re not the first—”

“Yes, yes, I know, her ex is the reason I’m here in the first place!”

That seemed to genuinely throw her off her rhythm. She tapped her right temple a few times, as though trying to knock something back into alignment, then struck it harder with the heel of her hand.

“The fuck? I should know that part.” She refocused on me. “This is Jason’s fault, and I didn’t pick up any of the ripple? Fuckin’…”

“Interference from being near the oil platform, if I had to guess. If your eye primarily works on silver, which is strongly correlated to flamefall and the Vaetna, then Heung splintering it on the intercept might have essentially blinded you—wait, Jason?”

I hadn’t known Sky’s actual name. Hina had let slip that it started with a J—one of the first things she’d ever said to me, in fact—but I’d promptly forgotten that tidbit in the hormonal mess that had ensued. What a mundane name. Distinctly masculine, though, which made sense. And the Argonauts were cool, I supposed. Oh, shit, Yuuka was talking again.

“—savant, yep. You’re really on the money with how this thing works, and that’s just from guesswork. So—wait, Hina really just carried you all the way here from fuckin’ England?”

“Yeah?”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

“So…” She seemed genuinely thrown by this bit of intel. “We good?”

“We good?”

“Yeah. I mean, you accepted my apology, so now Alice won’t hold that over me, and now that I get what’s going on with you I can say with confidence that I want nothing to do with you if it’s not related to magic, so. We’re good. Bye.”

She turned on her heel to leave.

“Huh? Wait, no,” I called toward her retreating backside. “Apology rescinded! You’ve done nothing but berate me since you walked in!”

“How would you know?” She didn’t turn as she replied. “You’re not even paying attention!”

Properly incensed now, I stepped after her.

“You’ve barely given me a chance to get a word in edgewise! You’re literally just being a jackass for no reason!”

—is what I didn’t say. Instead:

“Fine. If you’re only going to talk to me about magic, then here’s a question: Hina asked if—”

She had the audacity to raise a hand over her head and extend the middle finger back toward me. Her stride didn’t even slow.

“Not my problem!”

It was probably for the best that she interrupted me; trusting this catty bitch with the potentially sensitive case of my stalker seemed like it could backfire horribly, once I had another few seconds to cogitate on it. But I couldn’t resist trying to get the last word in as she passed the threshold back out into the hall.

“F—fuck off! I’m not just another ‘horny guy’, and Opal fucking knows it!”

That, of all things, finally made her pause and turn to look at me.

“What? We were done with this, guy. That’s like…two pages late.”

“I—I mean, I’m here because I can actually make a difference with my magic. That’s why they want me around. Even Hina doesn’t just think I’m a piece of meat…I think.” Probably. “It’s the first thing she said when she met me, anyway. Seriously, do you know who I am?”

“Oh my God. You’re playing the ‘do you know who I am’ card? You’re an internet nobody, some horny-ass hikikomori who had his flamefall three days ago and thinks that means he can bang every girl here. Well, guess what, jackass, Hina is only into you for your Flame, and the rest of us couldn’t give a shit about you.”

“Really? Amane was excited to meet me.”

At last, I got under her skin. She twitched, eyes narrowing, fists balling.

“Amane needs all the help she can get. Of course she’d be happy to have somebody around to help Ai. You have no fucking idea what she’s been through.”

I jabbed a finger at my bare prosthetic.

“Where do you think this came from? Running from the Peacies! Like her! Opal told me. Yes, they give a shit.”

“Only to help her.”

“Come off it,” I sighed. “I deserve to be here. I’m not just some fucking guy.”

“Why do—you know what, fuckin’ forget it. Have fun playing with your spear.”

And she turned and stomped away, all one hundred and fifty-five-odd centimeters of fifty-grit human sandpaper—posthuman, as the case may have been, but I wasn’t feeling charitable—angrily tramping along the glass wall separating the dojo from the hallway until she reached the end and vanished from sight. It took a little longer for her to also vanish from earshot, slipper-on-hardwood footsteps fading until they stopped. There was a ding—really more of a digital ping—heralding the elevator’s arrival, and then my verbal assailant was gone from the penthouse. Wait, she’d still hardly been wearing anything, surely she wasn’t going to go out in public with—

Oh fuck. I slammed the brakes on my imagination, wiping the image of her figure from my brain shamefully. I was being a horrible, objectifying ass; she was right. Guilt surged through me.

“Fucking…God, what am I doing?”

No answer from my spear. On top of being a political nightmare, and dead weight to the group, I was harboring horrible, fuckboy thoughts that would make them feel unsafe around me if ever voiced, never mind my relationship with Hina. I was being fucking gross about these girls who were already doing a lot to keep me around.

Part of me knew that I wasn’t being fair to myself. My shame was itself a sign that I wasn’t as nasty as Yuuka had made me out to be. But that didn’t actually alleviate the dark, viscous self-disgust coating my thoughts right now. I sat down and tried to take stock of the facts: none of the others had that perception of me, and Alice had outright told me not to worry about giving that impression. But that made it all the more frustrating how she’d hardly given me a chance to explain what my situation was. It was nothing but assumptions with her.

That made some sense, I supposed, given the nature of her eye. Other than the fact that it was apparently somewhat unreliable, I hadn’t gleaned much more about how it worked, but it was pretty easy to see how precognition—perhaps closer to general omniscience—could make someone a presumptive asshole to the extent that I had just had the bad luck to experience. Still, that wasn’t an excuse; how did the others put up with that? Even if she was more cordial with Amane and Ai, she was definitely a little frosty with Alice.

Belatedly, I realized that at some point during that I’d switched back to calling Alice ‘Opal’. Oops.

And what of Hina? She clearly still liked Heliotrope/Bloodstone/Yuuka as much as she did the rest of her teammates, which was to say a whole lot, despite the sheer abrasion of which I suspected I’d only caught the aftershocks. What a person. What a shitheel.

—

At any rate, I did indeed get back to playing with my actual spear, thank you very much.

“It’s okay,” I muttered to the length of wood, more quietly than I likely had to, now worried about more eavesdroppers. “She didn’t really mean that. She meant, uh, the other thing, not you.”

As I got back into the rhythm, I fumed, replaying the encounter in my mind, trying to pick apart how I could have approached it differently, cut back at her more strongly.

I’d missed the chance to throw several other points at her. For one, she’d been positively delighted with the instrument of murder I’d built for her yesterday, so clearly she cared about my magical capabilities, not just Amane, and not just for the purposes of prosthetic engineering. Which was ironic, in a sad way, because I would much rather be known for glyphcraft that made lives better and not…over. Yet I found myself fantasizing about throwing that particular note in her face and watching her fumble for a retort before retreating once she realized the flaw in her argument, leaving me victorious upon my throne of death. Would that be better than the lingering feeling that I’d come away from that interaction looking worse than at the beginning? Probably not. I certainly felt worse about myself, unable to entirely shake the muck of disgust, ego and self-image badly bruised. If that had been her goal, well done.

That I’d circled back on the “not a horny boy” thing felt even worse in hindsight, knowing there was some truth to it. Should have left it out entirely; not half the “gotcha” I had felt it was in the moment. I wanted to atone for that in some way, cleanse myself of the attraction to these girls and fixation on how attractive they were. I could try to think of those thoughts as unfaithful to Hina, but—what Heliotrope had said about the hyena being into my Flame rather than me stung, a lot. For all Hina called me “cutie” and made me feel amazing, and how I was trying my best to not be jealous of Sky, there was still a sharp edge of shallowness to it all. Maybe I was only imagining that, but it hurt nonetheless.

The worst part was that my simmering frustration was again aggravating my Flame. I attempted to solely vent the feelings with my spear routine and the rhetorical shadowboxing and tried very hard to ignore the way my right hand was steaming. Was this how Alice felt? Honestly, if two of her teammates were that and Hina, and she was hungry all the time, no wonder she seemed almost incandescent in every other interaction with them. At that thought, I aborted out of a far sweep to set down my spear and instead walked over to my pile of belongings to dig out my phone.

Ezzen Colliot: I just had a pretty awful interaction with Yuuka.

Ezzen Colliot: (Can I call her that? She told me to call her Bloodstone but it was. Bad.)

Alice Takehara: Meeting.

Ezzen Colliot: sorry

Oh, shit, oops. The calendar agreed; she was booked solid until 5 PM. Should have thought of that; I was being inconsiderate. The “callie”—which Google informed me was not an actual Australianism—also confirmed that Yuuka did indeed not have school until the afternoon, so that was on me.

The core of Yuuka’s accusations gnawed at me. I didn’t want to be dead weight. I felt the need to prove that I belonged here, that my knowledge was valuable, that I wasn’t just some gross boy here to ogle them. I was Ezzen, an expert, and I ought to use my Flame to help people, channel the Flame in my chest somewhere useful. If she thought I was only here to help Ai with Amane’s prosthetics, then fuck it, might as well lean into that. It was what I wanted to do with my magic anyway, far more than the instrument of murder of yesterday—which Yuuka had conveniently omitted that she’d been so happy with.

I folded away my spear, pocketed my phone, and shrugged the hoodie back over my head, still-new armor. Yuuka had caught me essentially naked by contrast; I already felt better once I was ensheathed in the heavy fabric, my carapace. Was this what it was like to pilot one of the Radiances’ mantles, this sense of security in my regalia?

My thoughts still aswirl with the caustic encounter, I went to make myself useful. Time to find out what the Emerald Radiance did on a regular Monday.

---

Author’s Note:

Thank you so, so much to pirateaba of The Wandering Inn for the shoutout. It’s pushed Sunspot onto the Rising Stars list here on RR, #22 at time of writing, and that’s absolutely incredible to me. You might remember from the arc 1 author’s note that TWI is one of the big inspirations for Sunspot, and on top of that paba is one of the biggest fish in the ocean when it comes to shoutouts, so I’m incredibly grateful. And hello to all the new readers!

As for the happenings of the chapter. Isn’t Yuuka just so mean? A real jerk, and yeah, this chapter is supposed to make you feel kind of bad. As with 1.06, please bear with me. Also, apologies to any Australians if her lingo sounds inauthentic; I’m still getting a feel for it.

EDIT: I FORGOT TO THANK THE BETAS. Softies, Cass, Penguin, Selenium, Zak, Maria, Zooloo: Sorry! Thank you!

Thanks for the love. See you all next week!

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October 18, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

“The flock would be blessed…newest Lightbearer…a great day for all Japan…warmest welcome at the gathering on Saturday. Gonna be casual, no fireworks…not asking much, by their standards. Full support…commitment to safety and security…The big hook is that they want Ez there.”

Ebi delivered a translated summary of Hikanome’s 6 AM message from her customary spot over Amane’s shoulder. We’d gathered around the largest table in the lower-level common space on the 19th floor of Lighthouse Tower.

“Leeeeeverage,” Hina simplified from the stove. As part of her continuing efforts to educate me in Japanese cuisine, Radiance Sapphire had decided this morning’s breakfast was to be omurice; she was currently managing the omelette half of that equation in three pans simultaneously. “They won’t lean on the Ministry to help us with the Peacies if he doesn’t show, ‘s what they’re saying.”

Ai raised a hand to indicate she wanted to speak while she hastily swallowed a bite of ketchup-smeared rice and egg. She looked like she had slept well, for once, although there was a slightly sleepy slur to the Emerald Radiance’s voice as she gave her assessment.

“It’s casual. They’re not going to, um, senrei shite—”

“Initiate,” Ebi supplied.

“—initiate you into the cult, if you’re worried about that. It’s just a big festival.”

Ebi crossed her arms, looking down at her mother.

“Why are you supporting this? You don’t like Hikanome, and you don’t like events.”

“I’m not.”

Alice looked hungry and a little impatient, though she did a commendable job of keeping her voice steady and reasonable.

“Amane is going anyway, he won’t be alone.” She turned to Amane for confirmation. “Ne? Iku?”

“O uchi ga tazunete kuru wa,” the Amethyst Radiance confirmed in her regular voice, slightly tightened as always by chronic pain. She was doing pretty well this morning, supposedly, but it was hard for me to gauge that beyond the fact that she seemed mobile and active.

“Her family are Hikanome members of pretty high standing,” Alice explained, turning back to me.

“Can’t blame them,” I muttered. “My grandparents found God.”

After Dad had died, was the unfinished part of that sentence. It was exceedingly common for direct relatives of flametouched—both inferno and successfully integrated bearer—to treat the whole affair with some level of spirituality or religion. Bring enough people like that together, and you got the new-age cults surrounding flamebearers. My grandmother had coped with the loss of her son with the belief that he had been taken by the Rapture, not slain horribly by forces beyond our understanding. It was why I had left to live on my own.

I wasn’t going to pick at that emotional scab out loud, nor had I opened up to Hina about it last night; our passionate whispers and admissions through clenched teeth had been decidedly future-facing, not reflections on our pasts.

“All of us have some family connected to them, but Amane’s are by far the closest, so she’ll be going as a social call regardless. They were—” she clicked and tapped a bunch on her laptop, “—yeah, they were happy with just two of us showing up last time. Yuuka? You don’t have classes that day, do you?”

She looked to Radiance Heliotrope—or Bloodstone—who put down her phone to count something on her fingers. Her right eye was shrouded by long bangs, the rest of her black hair up in twintails. I shuddered as I remembered the jade-and-ruby eye that lay behind. With the spoon in her other hand, she picked at her omurice, eating around the shockingly detailed, anime-style illustration of her that Hina had drawn on the omelette in ketchup. Somehow, the sapphire puppygirl had recreated every strap and gratuitous curve of her teammate’s mantled outfit. And there was indeed a lot of curve; in her much more casual nightwear of a tank top, the way she was leaning over gave me an uncomfortably clear line of sight down her cleavage. Were those real?

I didn’t want to incur a death-glare from that horrible eye, so I jerked my gaze back over to Hina as she brought over my own omurice. Heliotrope sighed, replying to her teammate in an Australian accent I was still quite surprised to hear come from the mouth of such a Japanese-looking girl.

“Hm. Me, Amane, a big barbie in the park, chaperoning our new monsterfucker to make life hard for the Peacies? Sure.”

—

Monsterfucker. She’d applied the label after an unexpected meeting in the early hours of the morning. We’d surprised each other—I’d been woken up by the thud-shhhhmmm of her jetbike landing on the roof and realized I was really thirsty, so after a few minutes of deciding whether I wanted to leave our cozy, warm nest, I’d disentangled myself from Hina and snuck out of her room to get my water bottle. I’d had the unfortunate luck of doing so just as Heliotrope was trudging down the hall, travel bag slung over her shoulder.

“Um—mornin’,” I’d blearily greeted her. In classic Ezzen fashion, it didn’t occur to me to inquire politely about her travels until the moment had already passed.

She’d just gaped at me.

“Aw, nah,” she’d groaned. “You’re sleeping with her?!”

“Er—no, we didn’t have…” Even in my half-awake state, I’d managed to muster some embarrassment. “We’re not dating.”

“Not dating. Even though she calls you ‘cutie’—yeah, I remember! You showed up three fuckin’ days ago, if my maths is right, and you’re already fucking?” She pushed past me toward the door of Hina’s room hanging ajar. “Kemono! You cunts are about to make a whole bunch more red, and if that keeps me up even a second longer—”

Hina appeared next to her and grabbed her wrist, yanking it off the doorknob.

“Go to bed, Yuu-chan. No, cutie and I didn’t have sex, but we are sleeping together, because sleeping together is awesome. Yell at us once you’ve gotten a few hours of sleep yourself, okay? You need it.”

“Oh, fuck off, you…ugh.”

Heliotrope had been so dead on her feet that this did indeed seem to smother the embers of her wrath, and she pushed Hina’s arm away with a grumble before finishing her voyage down the hall. She did expend the effort to cast us a death-glare before entering her room, though. Hina didn’t dignify that with a response and instead sidled up to me and led me back into her room, through the dark—back to bed, insofar as that word could describe her den. By now, the candles had all died, so only the even, soft, yellow glow of the city lights through the floor-to-ceiling windows illuminated the room. The contrast, yellow on blue, made her eyes somehow even more impossibly, gorgeously vivid.

“Sorry ‘bout her.”

“Tell me that’ll be the worst response any of them have.”

Yesterday’s discussion with Ai, and the implicit judgment of monstrousness she had levied upon Hina, came back to me. She’d equated her personality to the PCTF’s organized abductions—and in the same breath, also forgiven her and said it wasn’t her fault, so I wasn’t actually quite sure where the Emerald Radiance stood on her teammate.

“Mm. Should be! Don’t worry about it for now.”

Hina flopped back down onto her pile of bedding, unconcerned. I remained standing, looking over to her washroom.

“I’m not great at not worrying.”

“Practice makes perfect. Seriously, don’t let her get under your skin.”

How was I supposed to do that? For now, by changing the subject.

“Er—was going to get my water bottle. Thirsty.”

“Need your fluids, yep. Gotta lubricate.”

“You do know how that sounds?”

She hopped back to her feet. Now that she had been roused, it seemed that she was firing up with the same late-night energy of a cat or dog with a case of the zoomies.

“Cutie, we made out for like two hours. Yeah, I know how it sounds, I’m not that oblivious.”

She stalked past me silently, too-blue irises shining in the gold lights of the city. They glimmered as she stopped and turned to me, brushing a hand down my forearm to loosely take my fingers in hers.

“Is—I’m not being oblivious, right?”

I returned the gesture, holding her hand gently. Her skin was soft, and her relaxation hid her alluring, monstrous strength. Here in our little pocket of the night, she and I weren’t predator and prey. We were the same kind of creature, albeit in different stages of our metamorphosis. Ebi had called us mates, as a joke—I pushed down that direction of thoughts. I held onto the agreement we’d made.

“You’re not. You’re doing really well, Hina.”

“‘Kay. Thanks.” She squeezed my fingers, then averted her eyes. “Can I bite you?”

Yes.

“…Where?”

“Um—chest? Near your heart. I won’t break skin, I just kinda wanna…gnaw? Is that the word? Gnaaaaaw. Gnaaaw. Hehe,” she giggled giddily.

“Yeah, it is, that’s the word, you got it,” I rambled, heart rate rising, the turmoil of excitement beginning to bloom in my belly. “Yeah, I’d—I’d like that. But, um…” My hands, already pulling up the hem of my new, generic shirt, stopped at my belly button. “I’m…fuzzy.”

“I don’t mind!” She leaned in slightly, peering at me, examining me in sapphire. “But you do. Uh—hm. I could just zap the one spot. Not gonna do your whole front, that’d take like an hour or two, and you should shave first, but I can totally clear a couple square inches. How’s that sound?”

That was meandering awfully close to the element of our arrangement I had most strictly forbidden. Did it count? Possibly. In a literal sense, she was proposing to change me with pain, and that was a line I wasn’t willing to cross—not if it were my own Flame being hurt. But was I really crossing that line? She would be the one doing the magic, and the necessary pain was part of what she was. It was her sin, not mine. Not entirely faultless, perhaps, but buoyed by more conventional desire for further contact and skinship, in the face of that 3 AM temptation, aglow in the city lights, rationalizing was easy. I wanted to be smooth and sleek; one of the muttered, breathless admissions I’d whispered at her earlier in the night, before sleep had taken us.

“Yeah, um, I’d—yeah.”

She giggled again.

“Aww. You’re fuckin’ cute, cutie. Well—” she hummed. “That’s obvious, I guess.”

Then she closed the gap between us entirely, angling her head up and tugging me down by our joined hands into a soft kiss. I felt the rumble of her purr resonate up through her body and against my lips. I found myself again trying to imitate her, a kind of growl rising in my throat like I was trying to clear it. A rough, mucosal sound, not at all the soothingly feline rumble of her own anatomy. But she still enjoyed it, jerking slightly before wrapping her other hand around the back of my neck to pull me deeper, rising to her tiptoes and deepening the kiss, her own purring intensifying. When she came away from me, a huge, dopey smile was plastered across her face, fangs tinted a soft cream color by the yellow light.

“You’re not a very good kisser yet.”

“Uh. Sorry, I—”

“Which is fine ‘cause it means we can do so much practice!” She was bouncing a bit; her switch was flipped, somewhere between predatory mania and puppy excitement and surreal, unbelievable attraction. She took a deep breath, eyes lingering on my lips. “Okay, I really want to give you your zappies and nibbles, but I need to work off this energy first or…”

Or she wouldn’t trust herself. The tacit acknowledgment of her limitations, of her desire to prove she could control herself around me, made my chest all fuzzy. A cute grimace flickered across her face.

“Gonna do my rounds. Can get you a glass while I check on something. Cold or lukewarm?”

“Cold, please. Your…rounds?”

“My rounds!”

And she trotted out the door before I could reply, off to guarantee the security of her territory. Was that just the penthouse, or was she about to scour all twenty-three floors of Lighthouse Tower? While she was gone, to settle the pounding of my heart, I groped around for my phone where it had lay discarded.

Skychicken had finally replied to my apology.

—

My omurice stared up at me. The ketchup embellishments took the form of hearts and flames. Hina was making no attempt to hide her proclivities. Alice poured me a glass of juice from the pitcher and passed it to me—some mix involving oranges, from the look of it. It was hard to gauge the exact color under the warm lights of the common area; they bathed everything in cozy tones that warded away the winter’s chill outside. A sip confirmed that it was orange and mango—maybe some grapefruit in there too.

“Ebi, will he be well enough to go next week?”

Ebi didn’t respond to Alice, instead gently prodding Ai with a leg, who looked up at her, and they seemed to silently bicker for a moment. Ai rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand, then looked back to Alice.

“Don’t rush him.”

“I’m not!” Alice harrumphed. “I’m just cognizant of timetables.”

Ai turned that gaze to me.

“Ezzen: do you want to go to the rally?”

“Not sounding like I’ve got much choice, does it?”

She frowned. Alice winced, but covered it quickly.

“Of course you have a choice.”

I looked over her shoulder and wondered how much it cost to heat the enormous open floor plan of the penthouse. Maybe nothing at all; it seemed like a task for which the Frozen Flame’s natural heat emanations were well-suited, so perhaps it was just their own magic. Wait, she’d asked me a question. Choice?

“Do I? I’m, er, not as savvy as you all about the politics of the whole situation, so…I guess it depends on how much they’d shield us from the Peacies, if I’m following.”

Alice and Ai both sighed. Hina probably did as well, but it was buried under the sizzle of the pans and clanging of metalware and brief fwooshes of the kitchen faucet as she labored for our sakes in the kitchen. Ai spoke over Alice.

“Ignore that for a moment. Do you want to go?”

I took a moment to give it real thought. A big crowd of a religious persuasion I found a little unsavory? Potentially being outright put on display as a pawn between major VNT entities? Being outside in the cold all day?

“Not really.”

“Then don’t. Your comfort is our biggest priority right now.”

Alice accompanied that with a reassuring smile. It broke when Heliotrope elbowed her.

“He’d be more comfortable without the Peacies breathing down our necks. And Hikanome is our ticket for that.”

“Yuuka, no, it is his choice,” Alice maintained.

Heliotrope turned to me, leaning forward, elbows on the table.

“Way better to be in bed with Hikanome than the Peacies, long term.”

She examined my face, and I felt that horrifying, creeping sense again, the idea she was looking through me, under my clothes and meat and directly at my Flame. I attempted a protest.

“I’m not used to crowds.”

“What’s wrong? Nothing there will be scarier than that thing.” She pointed past me to Hina in the kitchen. “If you can get in bed with her, nothing there will spook you.”

I suppressed a sigh. For one, I didn’t appreciate the extent to which Heliotrope seemed willing to openly deride Hina—and neither did Alice, who was glaring at her goth teammate.

“He’s had a really hard few days, Yuuka. Come off it.”

“Amane’s had worse, and you don’t see her complaining.”

That sent the two of them bickering, slipping between English and Japanese. I felt like I couldn’t reveal exactly how little I wanted to do with public spaces full of people without explaining the situation I’d had with my stalker, and I knew that would lead to more yelling. I glanced over at Hina, my accomplice in the charade-by-omission, but she was studiously avoiding eye contact for the duplicity’s sake. I would have appreciated the support here, but left out to dry, I just waited for the two to settle down. Amane, seemingly now more clued in on the topic of conversation, prodded her draconic girlfriend with her prosthetic arm to shut her up, then glanced up at Ebi. She and the aqua-blue robot discussed something in rapid-fire and highly emotive Japanese—one of Ebi’s replies made Heliotrope fall silent as well and go back to eating, shamefaced.

“Amane thinks it’s rather unfair of Alice to be pushing you to meet with Hikanome’s head honchos while also citing your hardships,” Ebi explained. “Also, Heliotrope, you’re being a jerk. That one’s from both me and her.”

“Sorry, Ebi,” the Bloodstone Radiance muttered, finally relenting in her aggression.

A few moments of silence fell over the table. I found myself the one to break it.

“Er…thanks.”

Amane nodded in reply, rubbing Alice’s shoulder. The dragon looked grumpy, then caught herself.

“Um—apologies, myself. I’m getting impatient because I’m…hungry…”

The way she trailed off in embarrassment and sipped from her glass of juice with both hands was endearing, even familiar, and thus easy to forgive. Somehow, I found myself in the conversational pilot seat, and now that Amane had entered the picture, I felt her role in all this could use some clarification.

“Your family are members? Of Hikanome?”

I was a little worried we’d run into a language barrier problem, but she seemed to get it fine, and directed her reply up at Ebi, who spoke in her stead again. You couldn’t ask for a better real-time interpreter; she took on an approximation of Amane’s voice as it would sound in a Japanese accent around the strength of Ai’s and free of the tightness of chronic pain.

“Parents and brother. It was a big upward move for our family.”

“So…they’re good people?”

Amane frowned.

“Of course.” She conferred with the others for a moment, a snappy back-and-forth that circled the table and returned to her. “Wait, do you mean my family, or Hikanome as a whole?”

“Er—Hikanome. I didn’t mean to insult your family,” I added hastily.

The table fell silent again. This was why I wasn’t to be trusted with control of the conversation. Alice’s tail thumped.

“They are now,” she ventured.

“Ah. Suga…hara? Did he…do this to you?”

Ebi eyed me as she interpreted that for Amane. Alice opened her mouth, then paused, glancing over at Amane. Ai grimaced, but didn’t volunteer. The black-haired girl nodded, less hesitant about this than her teammates. They seemed nervous to weigh in on this topic in her stead, so she took point, still speaking through Ebi.

“Sugawara, and yes, indirectly. Sounds like you could use a history lesson.”

—

[Direct Message] skychicken: hey ez sorry it took me a couple days to get around to this

skychicken: apology accepted, i get why you were upset, its been a really fucked up few days

skychicken: you holding up okay?

Laying in Radiance Sapphire’s blanket-bed, trying to quell the jittery nerves that anticipated what we’d do when she returned, it was easier to distract myself from what I had done yesterday. The murder still weighed heavily on me, of course, and if I let my thoughts wander too long they’d inevitably return to that grisly sight of the final moments of a person’s life abstracted down to those few pixels, but the guilt was easier to dispel with Hina’s agreement that she’d stop me next time. She was strong enough and direct enough to cut through it all.

ezzen: I’m alright, all things considered. Long day yesterday, did paperwork with Opal, and Sapphire took me shopping.

skychicken: oh youre up, thought youd get to that when you woke up

skychicken: isnt it like 3am for you

skychicken: late even for you

ezzen: Still adjusting to the time difference.

Technically true.

skychicken: ah yeah that tracks

skychicken: shopping huh

skychicken: interrupted by the rig stuff?

ezzen: Sapphire freaked out and took me back, but nothing really came of it.

Aside from the people we’d killed together.

skychicken: hina been alright to you?

“Hina?” First name? It made sense he knew her personally; he’d called her to bail me out in the first place, after all, but I wasn’t sure of their relationship beyond that.

ezzen: She’s been pretty good. Nicer than first impressions.

ezzen: Not gonna tell me how you know her?

skychicken: answering that would require revealing some personal stuff

skychicken: …which i’d say you’ve earned with everything, and i feel bad for keeping you in the dark

skychicken: to start with, yes, i know what shes like, teeth and all

ezzen: So you knew what you were getting me into.

skychicken: ill bite

skychicken: what exactly have i gotten you into?

Could I admit this to him? I’d previously decided I trusted his confidentiality; plus, he was one of the handful of people other than Star to whom I’d admitted my Vaetna dysphoria.

ezzen: We’re…dating? Maybe? Not sure about labels yet.

ezzen: But we’ve been physical.

Wow, did that feel weird to say. Good, but weird.

skychicken: damn okay, happy for you

skychicken: confession:

skychicken: i knew you’d be into each other

skychicken: or suspected as much, at any rate

skychicken: (now would be an okay time to rescind your apology, i get it)

ezzen: Did you SET US UP?

No other way to ask. Had I wound up here instead of the Spire solely because Sky had thought it would be funny for me to get with Hina?

skychicken: lucky bonus?

skychicken: ez i say this with love but

skychicken: you’re a bottom. everyone knows you’re a bottom

skychicken: yeah, i figured you’d be compatible with hina, eventually. once stuff settled down a bit

skychicken: got boundaries, all that? healthy relationship stuff? i can yell at her if shes being a shit

ezzen: yeah

That was pretty telling.

ezzen: Thanks, I guess? Still working it out

ezzen: But don’t dodge the question.

ezzen: Did you set us up?

skychicken: no, not in that sense, she really was just the best string i could pull in that moment

skychicken: i contacted her pretty much the moment you told us what had happened to you

The reiteration that this hadn’t all been planned out, that there really just had been some serendipity to all this, made me feel better.

ezzen: Okay, I buy that. How DO you know each other?

skychicken: ah fuck here we go

skychicken: do i have your confidentiality?

ezzen: of course

skychicken: you promise? this is serious and it’ll change the way you see me

skychicken: absolutely sure you want to know?

ezzen: You’re only making me more curious, sky

It took him a minute to respond, the little icon blipping to indicate that he was typing. I rolled over onto my other side and waited, noting distantly that this pillow carried a hint of the same floral scent as Hina’s hair, barely detectable under the incense. I shut my eyes and took a secret sniff—she could never know that I did that, or I’d never hear the end of it. I reopened my eyes to see Sky’s message.

skychicken: i’m a flamebearer

“Oh.”

—

Once Amane broached the topic, she seemed comfortable to hand the actual explanation back to Alice, instead digging into her own omurice.

“Sugawara founded Hikanome, along with three other flamebearers. I won’t mince words: until three years ago, they were a doomsday cult. Lots of blood magic, and they made a significant portion of their money and connections doing…human trafficking, supplying flamebearer flesh across Asia. And beyond.”

The pieces were coming together. I looked at Amane again with dread. She met my gaze and poked Alice with a sort of “get on with it” attitude.

“That’s to say…they were how Amane ended up with the PCTF.”

Of course.

“Because her family are part of the—” Me and my stupid mouth, already forgetting that not half a minute ago Amane had hinted it wasn’t their fault. “Sorry.”

“They didn’t know,” Heliotrope asserted gravely. “We checked.”

Ai sipped her coffee. When I’d been coming down the stairs, I’d seen her spike it with Red Bull. Did that work? She fixed an accusatory glare at Heliotrope, some of the tiredness returning to her face.

“Alice and I checked. You and Hina…”

“They were monsters.”

Hina echoed the sentiment as she came back over.

“Yep, so we’re cool now. If it makes you feel better, most of them killed each other. Big ‘splodey inferno.”

“Which gave you plausible deniability,” I inferred. I hated going down this line of reasoning, but I couldn’t allow myself to miss the mortal element in their work again.

“Mhm.”

She passed a double portion to Alice, who accepted it almost desperately and immediately dug in, eating as fast as she could without looking completely deranged. Heliotrope was wearing a smug not-quite-grin, which had me a little puzzled. If she and Hina largely agreed on the principle of violence, why did the former seem to dislike the latter so much? Aside from the obvious, at any rate.

Amane pushed past the dark topic, through Ebi again.

“I’m not proud of that part. It had to be done, but…anyway, the parts of Hikanome that remain are good people, I swear. I don’t agree with their—” she coughed. All three of her teammates plus Ebi were all immediately on her, and she waved them away hurriedly as she rubbed her chest. She poked Ebi’s thigh, who resumed interpreting, the slightly exasperated expression on her digital face not betrayed in the tone of ‘her’ voice. “—their beliefs, but they’ve been really good to me and my parents.”

“I believe you,” I said hastily, feeling like I’d bungled this interaction somewhat. Did her parents know the full story? It seemed tactless to ask.

Alice broke in awkwardly, clearly wanting to hurry this along. She said something apologetic to Amane, who sighed and returned to eating in her slow, careful way. Alice turned back to me.

“Uh—anyway, the timeline: Blue Spark Incident, Hikanome sort of imploded and had a schism, Sugawara went to prison.” She listed the events on her fingers. “Now they’re under a new name, new doctrine. Same flamebearers other than him, though.”

“New name? That’d be Sun’s Blessing?”

Ebi sighed, speaking for herself now.

“No, it’s a bit of a clusterfuck. They used to be Hikari no Megumi; now they’re Hi kara no Megumi.” She tossed up a hologram to show the names spelled out, which only sort of helped me get it. I could see the different kanji, at least. “Still Hikanome, but switching from ‘light’ to ‘sun’ helped fix their branding, pushed it away from Sugawara’s focus on the Flame.”

“Huh.”

“They’re chill now!” Hina declared, trotting away toward the kitchen again.

Alice nodded in her direction.

“‘Chill’ enough that we’d feel safe sending you next week along with Amane and at least one of the rest of us, at any rate. That’s my main point,” Alice summarized. “Again, your call, Ai is right, but…the PCTF are coming. I’m expecting some official diplomatic proceedings to start sometime in the next forty-eight hours, and if we’re going to shelter under Hikanome’s wing, I’d rather have them on the same page as us sooner than later.”

I raised my hand once more.

“Um, didn’t they work with the PCTF?” I still wasn’t quite clear on that. Would they really take our side?

Alice was stopped from answering by a poke in the side from Amane’s robot hand. She explained via Ebi.

“It was through a series of intermediaries. I changed hands between…at least two different groups other than Hikanome, and the ones I actually ended up with are technically private military, not the PCTF proper. Um—were private military, I should say.” She spared a meaningful glance in Hina’s direction. “Internally, all those elements got either purged or followed Sugawara in the schism, and what exactly happened isn’t quite public knowledge. But they did successfully reform, and these days they’re a much more conventional…well, still distinctly culty, but no more doomsaying, no more blood magic, and no more human trafficking.”

Maybe this was an editorial choice by Ebi, but her tone regarding her own situation was remarkably lighter than the gravity with which her teammates always discussed the matter. She was serious, to be sure, but it was matter-of-fact—in much the same way I spoke about Dad, actually.

“We checked,” Heliotrope repeated.

“So, yes, they’d help shield us from Peacie interest if we appease them by having you show up on Saturday,” Alice summarized.

It was in everybody’s best interest for me to go. It protected Todai from being under cross-pressures from Hikanome and the Peacies. How bad could it be, really?

“Um, would I have responsibilities if I went? How much publicity would there be? It’d…make my face public, wouldn’t it?”

“All good questions,” Alice conceded. “It…depends on what exactly they want. They probably do want you to go public, and actually I’d guess that they want you as unassociated with us as possible. If they can sell you in the public eye as a sort of floating flamebearer, rather than explicitly a Todai member, it gives them more influence over your image.” She caught herself, conscious of how chessmaster-y she was coming off, waving her hands hurriedly. “I know you don’t like that, so…we can push back on that part. Just meeting with the leaders, maybe.”

“Nope. Veto,” declared Hina, returning to pass a double portion to Alice. “Sugawara might be put away, but I don’t want cutie to meet Miyoko without me there.”

“Worried she’ll steal your boytoy?”

Heliotrope’s snark was ineffectual. Hina just looked at her blankly.

“No, I wanna see if she’s down for a threesome.”

—

ezzen: WHAT

skychicken: flametouched 2017

skychicken: can’t give too many details, if you dig you can probably trace me

skychicken: the important thing is that i met hina when todai were on the trail for amethyst

Which would have been earlier in Hina’s metamorphosis, noted some part of my brain.

ezzen: Wait, so, the forum???

skychicken: magic discussion needed a neutral nexus for online discussion outside of the pctf’s grip on data in the us/eu

skychicken: you already know that part, ofc, but now you know how im able to maintain that neutrality

skychicken: im positioned to resist intimidation, and its way more of a difference than i could make doing vnt work

“Hey, cutie. Coast’s clear.”

“Um, hey.”

Hina passed me the promised glass of cool water, and I sipped from it gratefully. Crisp and refreshing, it helped me stabilize after the revelation Sky had just laid upon me. The water caught the low light of the room, casting wavy patterns onto the wall behind it when I put it down on the small table that functioned as the nightstand.

“Your heart’s up.”

“What are you, Ebi?”

“Sorry.” She shrank. “Too invasive? Still calibrating.”

“Um…no. I don’t mind. It’s—” I held up my phone. “Our ‘mutual friend’ was explaining how you know each other. I didn’t know he was a flamebearer.”

Hina purred, silently lowering herself to lay next to me, sapphire eyes glinting.

“He is. You jealous?”

“What about?”

Her eyebrows went up as she seemed to put something together, a playful smirk on her lips. I rather wanted to kiss her.

“Oh. He hasn’t talked about it yet?”

“…no? I’m assuming…something about your transformation?”

That was a bit of an overshare on my own part, to be honest, veering a little too close to my own deep, dark desires when it came to her mutations. But Hina literally waved the topic away, swatting her hand in the small space between our faces.

“Ask him later. Right now, you’re mine.” She paused, catching herself before the growled purr could be realized in physical contact. “Uh. Unless you want to back out. Which I’m giving you the opportunity to do. Now. If you want.”

How on Earth could I have said no to her? Desire was electrifying me, flooding every muscle in my body, the desire to run and stalk and pounce and fly under the open sky, the desire for her to embrace me and ply me with her strange magicks and stranger affections. I inhaled a jittery breath, lingering incense filling my throat, a smell I’d always associate with her.

“All yours.” I was rather proud of my delivery, the flirtatious honesty—but of course, I couldn’t just leave the moment there. “Is—you get what I mean by that? In the limited context of our agreement and what we want and the boundaries we’ve previously—”

Thankfully, she shut me up in exactly the way I’d been hoping. Her lips only lingered on mine a few moments before drifting down to my chin and then to the right side of my jaw, where I felt those sharp, sharp teeth graze my skin. Her breath tickled my cheek, distracting me from the way her hands were coming up. Of course, once her fingertips grazed my waist and began to raise my shirt, that became all I could think about, each caressing tug of fabric causing a new wave of anticipation to crest in my belly. She stopped once the body of the shirt was scrunched up to my chest.

“Take it off before I shred it.”

I did just that, in a hurry. I was going to just discard the garment, but Hina practically snatched it from me to take a deep, huffing sniff. She freed a hand from clutching it to wave me down into the ‘bed’.

“Get comfy,” she muffled through the bunched fabric. “Need a minute.”

She took her minute as I lay down, taking her time to satisfy whatever primal instincts demanded that she engage in this ritual of scent. I dared to ask.

“What do you smell?”

“You, ashes, blood.”

“All that from…a few hours of me wearing it?” Somebody had deposited my shopping bags in my room while I had been down in the lab with Ai, and I’d changed into one of my new, baggy shirts to help distance myself from the events of the day. Ashes and blood? Really? “It’s, um, taken my scent?”

“Sure has.”

I shuddered, and those blue eyes glowing at me in the darkness narrowed in satisfaction. Without ceremony, she reached over her head and pulled off her shirt in one motion. Suddenly, I was met with an eyeful of modest but authentic magical girl boob in the dim light. I got a precious few seconds of watching her abs and shoulders flex and ripple with enhanced, lithe musculature as she dumped the top and reached over her head again. Then the wonderful sight was covered by my shirt, hanging huge and loose from her small frame like a dark curtain, totally obscuring all the curves and sculpted angles of her figure except for a minor outward curve on her chest. Maybe it was the fact that it was my shirt, or maybe it was how the hem hung so low that her shorts vanished and I could only see bare thighs, or maybe it was her messed-up hair, but the new look was almost as titillating as the exposure had been.

“Okay, ready.”

“Uh.”

My heart had more or less stopped at this point. It shuddered back into motion as she came over and knelt at my side. I hoped the darkness hid how red the display had caused me to turn, mind stuck replaying those few moments of her exposed figure and tantalizingly soft flesh—but I suspected she could see me just fine, which was only amplifying my embarrassment. She was purring again—not the chainsaw, motorboat growl of before, just a quiet rumbly hum that nonetheless filled my ears in the quiet of the night. Her fingers traced up from my belly to my chest, leaving searing hot trails of sensitivity.

“Is—how are you doing that? What’s the chain?”

“Hm? Cutie, I’m not using any magic.”

I discovered it was possible to turn even redder. She rested her palm on the left side of my chest, just below the nipple, running her fingers through the chest hair I hated so much.

“Here’s good. Ready?”

“You’re just—zap? Like before?” Had it really only been yesterday morning?

“Mhm! Quick and easy.”

“Alright. Um—count me in?”

“I’m not Ebi.”

My skin screamed. Every pore was torn open, a hundred concentrated bee stings, a splash of molten metal igniting white-hot agony. All other sensations vanished, and the pain covered me, because ‘me’ was only that spot on my chest, consumed by pain. Something whispered.

Raze.

And then it was over. The searing pain fell away, replaced by an acute but far more tolerable sting. As my other senses returned, I realized Hina was giggling. I raised my head slightly to look at her, doubled over above me, hair grazing my belly from her hung head.

“What?”

“I heard it! That was so cool! Did you hear it?”

“Y—yeah. ‘Raze.’ Um—fuckin’ ow—” I sat up a bit, grateful it was too dark to see what exactly had happened to the cleared skin. At least it didn’t smell burned or acrid, which boded well. “Did—does that mean you used my Flame?”

“Dunno! But it worked!”

She turned, eyes glinting sapphire, and pounced.

—

Despite those midnight antics, Hina’s proposal of a threesome nonetheless sent all my thoughts to a grinding halt. She saw my reaction and grinned.

“Kidding!”

“About which part,” mused Heliotrope. “Sounds like you.”

“I mean…she’s pretty hot. And so is Ez! She’s turned me down before, but maybe with a cutie like him in the mix—”

“Quit it, you two. We’re not done with the education,” Alice groused.

She turned around her laptop screen. She’d crammed three Wikipedia articles next to one another to show three faces. I was not good with faces, and was already envisioning a version of events where I came face-to-face with one of these three and mixed up the names, a diplomatic fumble that would demolish the goodwill between Todai and Hikanome and set the bloodhounds of the PCTF upon us. My fingers twitched to draw my phone.

“Uh, should I be taking notes?”

“We’ll keep it simple, don’t worry.”

She pointed at the first, a balding man with a narrow face and thin eyebrows. His mouth was pursed as though trying to decide how to address a tough line of questioning. Obviously, this was not the one Hina had meant. Despite Amane’s surprisingly light tone earlier, her expression had turned a bit stony upon seeing the countenance.

“This is Kimura. He founded Hikanome alongside Sugawara.” That explained Amane’s reaction, which Alice acknowledged by turning the laptop slightly. “Not particularly vile, but went along with most of what Sugawara was doing without much resistance.”

“Coward,” Heliotrope summarized. “Shoulda been tossed with him.”

“But he wasn’t,” Alice continued. “He’s still the administrative head,” she clarified for my benefit.

“Creeps me out,” the twin-tailed girl countered. “He knew what was going on.”

“The court found otherwise. Assume goodness, Yuuka-chan,” Ai chided.

Something in how she said that, and the fact that Heliotrope then demurred to her older teammate, signaled a hierarchy between the two. They were the two still involved in academia—as mentor and student, even, though not in the same discipline as far as I understood—so perhaps there was something there. Where did that put Ebi, exactly?

Alice took advantage of the awkward moment of silence to shovel some more ketchup-loaded egg and rice into her mouth, then cleared her throat, obviously not wanting to linger on this.

“Um, anyway, Kimura is the least dangerous of the three. Next is Hongo.”

She made to indicate the next picture, but I meekly raised my hand first. She paused, pursed her lips, and gestured to me.

“Dangerous? You said the cult’s rebranded, cut out the bad parts.”

“We’re all dangerous.”

By way of that brief explanation—equal parts revelatory and meaningless—she indicated the middle picture, a man not much older than us. His hair was cut to a fade on the sides and gelled up on top. He had wide cheekbones and an easy smile. I spared a glance at Ai, a silent request for further explanation, and she subtly swept her hand on the table. Later. Alice was talking.

“Hongo is their ambassador when interfacing with other VNT groups. Not a fighter,” she clarified, forestalling my next question. “Any of us could kick his butt, but that’s not his job; it’s all soft power. Also, he’s the brother of the blood mage responsible for the Blue Spark Incident. Ai and Ebi saved her life, so of the three, Hongo is the warmest toward us on a personal basis.”

“She’s alive?”

I didn’t really know the details of the incident, but my impression was that she’d died from her own blood magic in the opening stages, and the bulk of the damage of the incident itself had been from fighting what she’d inadvertently summoned.

“Barely. Permanently hospitalized—not our doing, just the sanguimancy. Anyway, he never liked Sugawara to start with and was pretty instrumental in separating their reputation from his clique when the schism happened. Smoothed things over with us, that sort of thing. Between all that, if we want to push back on their leverage over us, he’s the easiest to work with.”

Hina leaned all the way forward to rest her chin on the table. As I was growing accustomed, she hadn’t made any food for herself.

“You should mention the thing.”

Alice made a disgusted sound.

“Ugh. Fine. This probably won’t be relevant to you, but he keeps proposing to me.”

I blinked.

“Like, marriage?”

“Like, marriage.”

“Why?”

“He likes the tail,” Heliotrope provided.

“He likes the tail,” Alice confirmed.

“He likes the tail!” Hina giggled.

I found that I sort of understood the appeal. The extra limb was meticulously cared-for, despite Alice’s stated unhappiness with it, and it really did make the Opal Radiance cut a unique figure. Some lizard-brain part of my psychology could appreciate its bulk as an appealing element in its own right. On the other hand—

“So he wants you for your body.”

I recoiled immediately after saying that, worried it was too blunt, or would inspire a fresh wave of discomfort with my presence, but Ebi confirmed the idea with a digital snort.

“Bingo. But that’s sorta flamebearer romance, I hear.”

Amane put in a giggly comment of her own that made Ebi and Ai snicker, although the latter covered her mouth. This was the most animated I’d seen the Amethyst Radiance outside of her mantle, and she brought an infectiously bubbly energy to the table, even through the language barrier. I found myself grinning along with the others. So was Heliotrope, and it was enough to undercut some, but not all, of the bile in her comment:

“Surrounded by monsterfuckers, I swear.”

—

Hina was very physical in her gnawing affections. She kissed and licked the patch of cleared skin, purrs intensifying every time I squirmed against the stinging sensation or twitched at the hot pulses of her breath rolling across my chest. When she finally grazed the area with her teeth, it was only after climbing over me and rubbing her hands up and down my shoulders. My shirt stretched taut over her figure, each of her curves vivid against my torso. She was straddling one of my thighs, but mercifully not grinding on me; I thought I’d explode if she did that, and not in the sexual way.

After a few minutes of gluttonously indulging herself with different angles of chomping at the underside of my pec, she raised her head and directed those sapphire eyes at me.

“We’re not telling Alice.”

“Uh?”

“About the person you saw.”

“I thought we already agreed on this.”

“Just checking!”

“Why are you bringing it up now? Go back to—” I waved my hand around my chest. “Me. I like that.”

“Heh. Selfish! I like you too, cutie.”

I flinched just a tiny bit at being called selfish, one of those words that Ai seemed to reserve as a strong pejorative for Hina. But right now, I was happy to share the label with her, and we basked in the moment of affectionate honesty—then I shook it off.

“Um, seriously, why bring it up?”

“Her plate’s full. I do want to check it out, figure out who it was, but we’re gonna do that on our own time. I’ll show you how to hunt.”

“O…kay.” That sounded pretty nice, right at this moment, as we indulged our instincts together. Her reasoning seemed a little flimsy, but I could let it slide; she knew Alice better than me. “What does that entail, exactly?”

“Well…it’s easier if Yuuka would help us. By a lot.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“Not…the biggest fan of you, is she?”

“Nope.”

“Why’s that?”

“Lots of reasons,” she chuckled. “But when it comes to you specifically? Ask our mutual friend.”

“Huh?”

She retrieved my phone for me. It had lain abandoned for the last few minutes as Hina had done her thing—even the act of receiving her affections took all of my attention, no room for distractions. What was she getting at?

The screen almost blinded me, even at the lowest brightness and with the chatroom set to dark mode. I had become so accustomed to the hazy darkness that the faceful of light forced me to squint my eyes to narrow slits, holding the eye-burning rectangle away from my face.

ezzen: Hina’s making some insinuations about you. Something about why Heliotrope doesn’t like her.

skychicken: heh

skychicken: ok, here’s the other shoe

skychicken: a lot of hina’s biggest mutations happened while we were dating

Hina had squirmed up my side to peer at the screen with me. I turned my head to look at her incredulously.

“He’s your ex?”

“Mhm.” She gave me a big, toothy grin. “Don’t be jealous, cutie.”

The worst part was that I was. Rationally, I knew that was stupid, and yet I couldn’t help but feel some possessiveness for my partner of one night. The feeling was doubly stupid given that I hadn’t felt it when I’d seen her show how close she was with her teammates—so was it just because Sky was a guy? Was I that shallow and sexist? Also, since Sky was one of my better friends, I knew exactly how inaccurate it was to expect he’d at all try to twist the knife of this revelation. But I still needed a minute to master the sense of betrayal and jealousy.

“Hey, you’re spiraling, I can see you spiraling, quit it.”

“Sorry, I’m—I don’t know what it is. I’m feeling dumb.”

“For being jealous?”

“Uh. I guess? We don’t…I shouldn’t be jealous, because that’s just…not what we’re doing here.”

“You mean we’re not a couple?”

“Yeah. This is like—exchange. Transactional. I’ve only known you for a couple days.”

“Mm.” She shifted against me. “We want each other.”

“That’s not…love.”

“Doesn’t have to be!”

“So you…want me for my body, and you’re fine leaving it there? Was it like that with Sky?”

“I didn’t say I was fine with leaving it there, cutie. It’s just a start point.”

“Um—okay, fine, sure.” I wanted her to want me, so I went along with that. I was afraid of confronting anything that might make her recoil and back off. “Any, um, other context I should know about? Does Heliotrope really just not like me because of Sky?”

“She just…thinks I’m gross.” Hina sounded sad. “I was worried you’d wind up thinking that too.”

ezzen: So the breakup was…bad?

skychicken: actually the breakup was fine, but her team kinda soured on the whole relationship by the end

“And you still came on as strong as you did?” I immediately walked that back. “Uh…I didn’t mean it that harshly. Blind spots, yeah?”

“Only because—because I thought you’d like it! And I was right, you do, and that makes me so so happy! But—yeah, I fucked up, I know. I don’t wanna talk about this. I wanna just enjoy each other.”

And I wanted that too, desperately, so I let that line of conversation die where it lay. Irresponsible, but—it was still the first night of our relationship, whatever exactly that meant. I didn’t want to keep rushing through things, going headlong into more emotions I was afraid to name. This was surreal enough as it was, the idea that a supernatural smokeshow like her would be so attracted to me. It still almost felt like a bad prank.

“What, um—why me?”

“I toldya when we met.”

I picked up my phone again, tilting it away so she wouldn’t be able to see it, typing slowly with my good hand.

ezzen: How much did you tell her about me?

skychicken: like, private stuff between us?

ezzen: Yeah. The Vaetna stuff.

ezzen: and what do you MEAN im a BOTTOM

I didn’t actually send that last one; I typed it out and deleted it. That ship had already sailed, signified by the stinging ache on my chest.

skychicken: i filled her in on some of that after she picked you up

skychicken: todai are rather experts on the transhumanism thing, you may have noticed

“Cutie, I can still read it in your eyes.”

“Then stop looking!”

ezzen: That’s PRIVATE, Sky.

ezzen: You picked up that sort of boundary-crossing from her?

skychicken: this is your chance to become more

skychicken: after all the years you’ve spent being mopey and dysphoric about the vaetna, don’t tell me you’re about to back out of that because you’re offended at me pulling the string that was available to try and help you with that

skychicken: yes, i did this for you AND for her. but thats not the same as setting you up romantically

ezzen: If you’ve had these contacts for so long, and the personal connections to her, why not try to help me with it years ago?

ezzen: Instead of holding out on me.

skychicken: you weren’t a flamebearer

skychicken: if there was a way to get those kinds of changes without having a flame of your own, trust me, i would have tried to help you

skychicken: but there’s only so much i can do for my friends who aren’t like us, even you

skychicken: and only so much i can tell you

skychicken: i KNOW you understand that much, if only because you said alice has hit you over the head with it at least once

I made an effort to smother my anger. I did understand the importance of being picky about who you revealed what to, now more than ever.

ezzen: Fine, thanks, fair enough

ezzen: And uh

ezzen: Thanks for trusting me now, I guess.

ezzen: I do appreciate what you’ve done for me, between it all.

ezzen: Still friends?

skychicken: cousins, now

Uh. The Radiances had referred to Holton, that flamebearer on the rig, with the same term, but…

ezzen: ew ew nooooooo

ezzen: That makes my thing with Hina sound incestuous!

skychicken: oops

As long as I had him on the line—I had an idea.

“Uh, Hina? Could Sky help us with my, er, stalker?”

“Like, figuring out who it was?”

“Yeah.”

“Prolly not. Could ask, though.”

ezzen: Uh, can I seek some flamebearer-specific advice

skychicken: shoot

ezzen: I got sorta ambushed by somebody we think was a flamebearer

ezzen: Kinda goth-looking, Japanese (?) girl around Hina’s age

ezzen: I thought it was her at first, just disguised (did she do that with you too?) but the eyes were wrong

ezzen: Ring any bells?

skychicken: at first blush?

skychicken: sounds like yuuka to me

I frowned, angling the phone back toward Hina. I hadn’t seen a resemblance, but then—I also hadn’t actively been comparing the two. Would she do that?

“Thoughts?”

“Uh…I don’t think her eye works like that. I think. And Yuuka’s goth, but you saw for yourself, not like what you described. How big were her boobs?”

“Really?”

“I mean, you’ve seen those things. I don’t know why she’d make hers smaller. ‘Specially if she thought she wouldn’t be seen anyway. She’s proud of them, y’know.”

I would be too, if I were a girl. I elected not to speak that thought out loud.

“Okay, but—she didn’t sound Australian.”

“Ah, yeah, then there goes that theory. Then who the heck?” Hina wondered.

“Why are you looking at me? I’ve been here three days, not exactly a local expert.”

“You’re just easy to look at.”

—

Alice’s reaction to Heliotrope using the word “monsterfucker” again set her off. Her tail thrashed as she put her hands on the table.

“I don’t like that word.”

“Ah, here she goes,” Heliotrope grumbled. “Gonna lecture me on my manners?”

“If you insist on insinuating that I’m a monster, then yes.”

“Come off it, Acchan, you know I didn’t mean it like that.” She glanced at Amane. “You’re not a monster, and Amane’s not…you’re still a person! Obviously!”

“Yes, I’m fully aware you really meant to insult Hina. And Ezzen by association. Why try to alienate him like that?”

“Yuuka-chan,” Ai warned, but it was too late.

“—I’m just calling it like I see it! You agree with me too, Ai, don’t act like you don’t. Alice, if you’re not willing to let Hikanome at him so they’ll help get the Peacies off our backs, what is the plan? Because as much as I’d fucking love to give them what they deserve, if they want him as bad as that other guy, we will lose. Ma—ke—ru. And believe me when I say that, because I know. We don’t fight wars, deshou?”

Could she see that far forward? That wasn’t the impression I’d gotten, but the certainty in her voice was worrying. Hina leaned over the table herself, apparently not put off by the simmering dislike in the air.

“It’s none of your business who I sleep with, Yuuka.”

“It is, if you’re bringing a boy into our apartment while I’m not even there to weigh in.”

That stung, hitting on the exact fears I’d had when Alice had first pitched this arrangement. I shrank, and that’s what got Alice really mad. The air temperature began to rise, a tell-tale sign of Alice’s mood souring.

“Yuuka. He’s staying. He’s got nowhere else to go! And—I’ve made it very clear to Hina what’ll happen if she causes more problems. But I didn’t think I’d have to worry about you being hostile.”

“Really? You couldn’t see how this would have pissed me off? A second one of those things, but this one’s a boy? Acchan, that’s on you.”

The dehumanizing label for Hina and myself—as well as my rising indignance at how much of a deal she was making of my gender—finally got me mad enough to interject.

“Hey!”

At the same time, and much more effectively, Amane broke in and admonished them in Japanese, leaning over the table. Heliotrope and Alice both flinched. The heat dissipated. Ai sighed, muttering what sounded like gratitude to Amane before raising her voice back to speaking levels.

“We have the PCTF showing up in maybe the next few days, and we’re fighting with each other?”

“Yes, Amane’s right, we should be working the problem,” Alice muttered, before raising her voice again in the authoritative voice she’d used when she first met me. “Yuuka, that’s enough. Bicker with Hina all you like, but be nice to Ezzen. Are we clear?”

The goth rolled her eyes petulantly.

“Yes, Mistress.”

Ebi snickered.

“You don’t pull that off as well as me.”

That defused the tension the rest of the way. I sat back, mollified, as Alice pointed at the third face on her laptop screen.

“Back to it: this is Miyoko. The light-blessed child. Well, not a child; she’s our age, but it’s all in the title: High Priestess.” There was some annoyance in her voice. “Magically powerful, but no expertise in glyphcraft or physical mutations, so she’s a little anomalous.”

“You mean she doesn’t use her Flame?”

“Oh, she uses it, alright. But absolutely no regard for ripple.”

“She uses faith,” Ai explained. “From her…ugh. Shinja? Believers?”

“Followers,” Hina provided.

“Oh, that makes sense. Yes, from her followers. For miracles.”

“Miracles. How’s that different from…?”

“From our magic? It isn’t,” she confirmed. “It’s ridiculous, and annoying, because it makes them treat us like saints.”

“Mahou shoujo do have a bit of a divinely ordained bent,” Alice admitted, “but it’s not like that. If anything, we usually wind up killing gods, not serving them. But I won’t get into all the philosophizing here—point is, that’s the three. Hikanome has two more flamebearers, but they’re auxiliary, not part of the leadership in the same way.”

“Um, thanks. For explaining.”

Hina nudged me slightly, flicking her sapphires from me to the face on the screen and back. Was that my stalker? Can’t tell, I tried to transmit to her through the eye contact. Our encounter had been too brief. She certainly wasn’t dressed the same way in the photo, all robes, but—it was plausible, maybe. That would really only raise more questions, though. To confirm one way or the other, I’d need to meet her face to face…or enlist Heliotrope, as Hina had said. The former almost sounded preferable.

Alice looked at me hopefully.

“So…now that you have a better idea of what you’d be walking into, would you go next week? For goodwill?”

“I…” The PCTF were indeed looming. “I don’t…”

Hina nudged me again. What did that mean? Seeing that I wasn’t picking up whatever the subtle message was supposed to be, she spoke up.

“Don’t be pushy, Alice. You said it yourself, he’s had a crazy few days.”

Alice suppressed a sigh.

“I know, I know, but with Hikanome actively reaching out to us, it feels like it’d be a waste to squander that chance.”

“I…okay, I have an answer,” I decided. “Being that I…don’t have an answer. I need a few days. You can swing that, right? I don’t actually have to decide right now, do I?”

“Yeah, fine by me,” Hina agreed. Ai nodded as well.

“I suppose you don’t,” Alice seemed a bit antsy, tail swishing twitchily on the carpet. “But like I said, we are on a bit of a timer, and earlier is better, so—”

“Ii kagen ni shite yo,” Amane cut in, holding up a hand to stop Ebi from interpreting for her. She surprised me by switching to English, a bit halting but determined to make sure I got the message as well. “Don’t push. Let him choose.”

---

Author’s Note:

And we’re back! Drama within the team from mounting external pressure, a pair of reveals about Sky, and Ez having all kinds of Feelings. That’s Sunspot! I’m super excited for this arc, and I hope you are too.

We’ve picked up three new beta readers (two from the Discord and one from my secret stash of writing geniuses), so now I get to thank Cassiopeia, Softies, Maria, Zak, Penguin, Selenium, and Zooloo.

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That’s all from me, really. See you next Friday!

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October 11, 2024