Chapter 11: From On High // 1.11

starstar97: WHAT THE FUCK

starstar97: YALL

ezzen: lmao

ks3glimmer: ?

starstar97: e. how.

ezzen: I…

ezzen: Asked?

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

moth30: lighthouse?

starstar97: opal did a video for me aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

moth30: hell yeah

ebi-furai: nice of her

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

ezzen: uhhhhhhh

ezzen: Not much to report. Doing paperwork.

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

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

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

skychicken: new computer and so on

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

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

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

starstar97: jealous forever. FOREVER, e

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

starstar97: ebi has been SO uncooperative >:(

ebi-furai: no leaks!

ebi-furai: i like my job too much

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

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

starstar97: fine

ks3glimmer: im very lost in this conversation

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

ezzen: <3

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

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

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

ebi-furai: ww hii

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

That claim still smelled a bit fishy to me.

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

ezzen: ^

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

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

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

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

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

“How much space have you got in there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re done for today?”

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

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

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

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

“Not good with heights, yeah?”

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

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

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

“Okay.”

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

“…thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue was physical effects—forces, changes in temperature.

“It’s not snapweaving?”

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

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

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

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

I considered this.

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

“Yeah.” She sighed. “It is.”

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

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

“That’s…Skytree?”

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

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

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

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

“Not here. Deep breaths.”

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

“Too high,” I blubbered.

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

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

“I’m sorry.”

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

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

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

“I’m okay.”

“Look at the mountains instead.”

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

“How do you…oh. Amethyst.”

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

“…Doesn’t she have a jetbike?”

“She insisted on learning.”

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

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

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

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

“Fuji-san.”

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

“Isn’t san an honorific? Personification?”

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

“On a hike?”

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

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

“And for…us?”

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

“Three minutes, twenty-nine seconds.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How are your bites?”

“Er—bitten, I suppose?”

“I mean emotionally.”

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

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

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

“It’s not a date.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My metaphorical ears perked up.

“Go ahead?”

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

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

“Crepes?”

“Crepes.”

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

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

“Doesn’t sound all that subtle.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s the Pacific.”

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

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

“Ah. Well, there it is. Behold.”

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

“That’s the scar.”

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

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

“Smaller than I expected.”

“It’s bigger up close.”

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

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

“Sparse, isn’t it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can’t,” I apologized.

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But it won’t come up today?”

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

“I’ll manage,” I sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

“Astute observation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“…so it is roleplay.”

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

“…okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

Her eyes were wrong.

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

“…Hina?”

The woman blinked in surprise and stepped back from me.

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

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

“Who are you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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