Chapter 17: Trick Of The Light // 2.02

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.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

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.