Chapter 18: Trick Of The Light // 2.03

I did my best to enter Ai’s giant machine shop surreptitiously and not attract undue attention, which had gone well until I realized that her mobile workstation was not in the same spot it had been last time I’d been in here. So, feeling the whole time that I obviously didn’t belong and dreading the idea that somebody would walk up and ask for ID, I awkwardly skirted around the edge of the garage-turned-laboratory, trying to spot the Emerald Radiance. I gave a wide berth to the scariest-looking machines, especially those mid-operation like the massive waterjet cutter bringing forth dozens of identical parts from a sheet of metal at least three meters to a side.

I eventually found Ai in the most sensible place in the whole shop for her to be: set up with a group of students below the enormous magical manufacturing array on the workshop’s far wall. Sadly, they weren’t actually using the array; Ai wasn’t even touching the control panel and was instead indicating each glyph on the wall with a laser pointer, quizzing the students on identifying each one and what it did. I chuckled as one of them mistook {AFFIX} for {DIFFUSE}. Rookie mistake.

The multitude of wrong answers like that one were because today’s batch of students were younger than the ones I had met the other day. I’d gotten the sense that most of that group had been grad students, noticeably older than me, to say nothing of the grizzled full-fledged engineers and machinists; by contrast, these ones were around my age, in their third and fourth years of college. It was a similarly eclectic group of races and nationalities to last time, native Japanese intermingling with Americans and some who must have been from Taiwan or Hong Kong, since I doubted anybody from mainland China was here. Despite Todai’s professed abstinence from the intermittent conflict in the South China Sea, it still impacted the demographics here in Ai’s workshop.

Ai saw me coming, making eye contact with me in one of the convex mirrors as I approached the back of the cluster of students. A grin spread across her face as she flicked the laser pointer to an eye-hurting jumble of curved plastic that seemed to crawl under my gaze, a three-dimensional slice of one of the four-dimensional glyphs. My stomach lurched as she called out.

“You in the back: what’s this?”

“That,” I sighed, simultaneously put-upon and excited at being given a chance to strut my stuff, “would be the third, sixth, and seventh layers of {PROPAGATE}, sliced maybe twenty-five percent ana to give it a more orange propensity so it can link into things like {ASSIGN} more easily.”

“Correct!” Her voice rang like a polished bell. “Everyone, this is Todai’s newest employee. You might see him around from time to time. Colliot-san, would you like to introduce yourself?”

“Uh—not particularly. I was actually wondering if I could, um…” I trailed off lamely. Unfortunately for me, some of the students—most, probably—were denizens of the forums and were already putting the pieces together, whispers erupting within the group as eyes went round. No keeping this cat in the bag. “Fine. Yes, uh, hi, I’m Ezzen.”

I wasn’t prepared for how good that felt to say. Ai had gone out of her way to not refer to me as Dalton, so Ezzen was the only name any of these people would know me by. I loved that. What I loved less was the way eyes slid down to the burn scars on my hand and to the prosthetic replacement for my foot, known to them despite being hidden inside my shoe. I unconsciously slid the Flame-marked hand into my hoodie pocket to fidget with the stabilizer module, hunching my shoulders. My tattoo itched, which was absurd.

Ai, bless her, regained control of the group almost instantly, before they had a chance to start bombarding me with questions or mob me.

“I’m not canceling this lab just because he’s here! You’ll get the chance to meet him eventually. Ah—” She glanced at an indicator light on her desk that had just come on. “Good timing, the blanks are done. Every group gets one of each type; make sure they both came out to spec, then come up with one first-order chain for each that can do the next three steps we talked about. If the dimensions are off, add back material with the sedimenter and then refinish them on the mill. Go.”

The students’ gazes lingered on me as they shuffled off toward the waterjet cutter, but mercifully none of them dared defy their orders to talk to me, in too much of a hurry. Ai beckoned me over.

“Are you here for something?”

I appreciated how she was straight to the point, no inquiries after my foot or asking about my plans for the day. I scratched my neck nervously.

“Um, just was wondering if I could be helpful.”

“Ah. Is this about the gun?”

“Um. Is it alright for you to just—say that?”

“Yes.” For explanation, she pointed at a matching set of dark panels mounted to the edges of her workstation. A classic soundproofing weave splayed across them in neon green. “So, is that it? You want to feel like you’re doing good to make up for yesterday?”

“Um—sort of? I mean, yes, but…that’s not all of it. I had an…argument? With Heliotrope.”

Ai frowned sympathetically.

“That’s…I’m sorry. What did she say?”

I didn’t really want to talk about most of it—even recalling her demeanor was making my stomach lurch, let alone the actual, wildly hurtful things she had said to me.

“She insulted Hina, which—I know you’re not going to have much sympathy there, and—”

“Ezzen.” I flinched at her interjection. “I might not agree with Hina, and yes, I do think she’s a little monstrous, but of course I care if Yuuka is being a…bitch, to her.”

I blinked.

“Strong language for you, isn’t it?”

“She deserves it, sometimes,” she sighed. “What else?”

“She…said I didn’t deserve to be here.” I stared down at my shoes, ashamed even though I knew it mostly wasn’t true. “And compared me to Hina’s ex. Who’s a friend of mine, which I didn’t know,” I clarified.

“Ah. That…yes, I think I see the picture. I’m sorry, again, you didn’t deserve that at all. Of course you deserve to be here, and it would make me happy if you helped here.”

“Please. What’s there to do?”

“Well, what do you want to do?” She countered.

It was a good question. I raised my head to look around the workshop. This was far more hands-on than my comfort zone of GWalk diagrams, a step into the practicalities of the physical that I was used to eliding and leaving for the people who actually implemented things—like Ai. The exception, no more comfortable for me but at least something I felt driven to help with, was Amane’s prostheses—as well as probably my own, though I didn’t want to come off as selfish by mentioning my foot right now.

“I feel…I want to at least learn enough about the design and function of Amane’s prostheses to be helpful. Where would I start with that?”

She nodded, turning back to her keyboard and opening some new windows. I was unsurprised to find she was running Linux; Ubuntu, by the looks of it. I’d toyed with it in years past but never delved deeply enough into the technicals to find it easier than Windows. She eventually found a PDF and pulled it up on one of the vertical monitors.

“Are you familiar with LIPS-2?”

“The…Lattice-Integrated Prosthetics Standard, yeah? I read v1, but haven’t kept up with it.” That was mostly true; I had read the first version, but didn’t recall many of the specifics. It belonged to one of those tangential fields where I’d read the Wikipedia articles and skimmed the key documentation out of academic interest or to settle arguments on the forums, but my off-the-cuff knowledge was lacking. “You…helped write it, if I recall correctly?”

“Hai…” she confirmed, mostly to herself, as she jumped down the very, very long document. The scroll bar on the side of the window was barely a sliver. “Ah, here.”

I advanced a little to read the section header: Idiomatic Psychomotive Chain Bases: Designs Minimizing Free Red Ripple. As my eyes scanned between the dense blocks of text below it, I saw they were broken up by a few beautifully elegant lattice designs. I sight-read them, appreciating the thought given to optimizing everything down to second-order at most and creative workarounds and glyph choices to lower the free-band red ripple down to almost zero by the end of the chain—then breathed an incredulous chuckle. Recognition dawned and years-buried memories returned as I saw my name—Ezzen, not Dalton—below, cited for two of the designs. Both were modified slightly from what I remembered, but at a glance, I approved of the changes.

“Ha.”

“You’ve already been very, very helpful.” Ai explained, a smile in her voice. She pointed at the second one bearing my name. “For Ishikawa-chan—er, Amane—specifically, because so much of the damage was sanguimantic, this is the one we use, and the one that would be most helpful to optimize further, rather than the actual kinetic drivers or power integration or…you get the idea.” I did indeed, smiling as well. Ideas were already starting to germinate, ways to clean this up further. “Although you’re free to take a look at the whole design, of course,” she added.

So I got to work. There was a row of PCs along the wall, somewhat cordoned off from the main machine shop, and Ai helped me log in. They were running a slightly different version of GWalk, the enterprise distribution rather than the pro license, so I was missing a lot of my personal quality of life tweaks, but I knew all the shortcuts anyway. Ai handed me a USB with the lattice files for Amane’s arm and leg prostheses, telling me it was mine to keep so I could keep tweaking it on my own time; I saw it also contained the schematics for the physical design of her limbs. That was beyond the scope of right now’s work and my own expertise, though. I focused on the glyphwork.

Eventually, maybe twenty minutes in, a few of Ai’s students appeared and booted up other workstations. I became irrationally self-conscious; despite having full confidence in the actual contents of my work, it was another thing to see them stealing glances at my workflow out of the corner of my eye. The weight of observation imposed a bizarre pressure to get every little change right on the first try, rather than first checking whether an idea would actually go anywhere, and to avoid consulting the documentation I usually leaned on so heavily, for fear of looking like an amateur.

In fact, I did sort of feel like an amateur; many of the implementation details of this lattice were tuned for the unique case of Amane’s arm, with particular portions of the weave intended for different physical locations and mechanisms within the limb. This was not my area of expertise. GWalk actually had a whole suite of features for placing the weave in a schematic of physical parts, associating lattices with respective substrates, and so on, but my focus on theoretical problems and LM meant I’d almost always avoided it. Now I kept having to refer back to that window to double-check my work and was still unsure that I hadn’t broken anything. No error popups, at least, but that was only a matter of time, and encountering an error with a part of the design process I almost never partook in and therefore had no idea how to resolve, in front of an audience, was a nightmare scenario.

I tried to ignore that impulse to catastrophize and continue working as I usually did, but it became more and more difficult as the row of computers filled up. They gave me enough of a berth to leave the seats to my immediate left and right empty, but it was the barest buffer of protection; my physical shell, the bulky hoodie, provided little security when my direct stream of consciousness was playing out on the computer monitor. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable experience, exposed and vulnerable.

“Oh, that’s so smart!”

I jumped. I hadn’t realized somebody had invaded the bubble of personal space, watching from right over my shoulder. I twisted and saw one of the probably-not-Chinese students utterly enraptured by my monitor, a man with bleached-blond hair. He was older than me—wait, no he wasn’t; I was twenty.

“Thanks?” I muttered, uncomfortable with the proximity, turning back to the screen and wishing he’d leave. “You mean this part? The pair of {ASSIGNS}?”

“Yeah. Why are you looping them through each other like that?” He came around to my side to look more closely at the monitor. “How are you even getting GWalk to let you do that? It gives us an error.”

“Oh, it’s…” I copied the chunk and deleted the connections to demonstrate. “Control-D, drag the first connection, select the output of the second, C for chain mode, I for invert, click the input of the first one. If you just click and drag the two normally, it gives you two errors: one, because it doesn’t know where you want the mesh to take its output, and two, the tensions aren’t constrained to each other, so the ripple can’t resolve.”

“Ohhhhh. Oh, wait, then—” He called back to his friend, who hurried over. Before I knew it, three more students had joined the group, all pointing at the screen and talking excitedly in a mix of Chinese and English. A different one broke from the discussion to try to talk to me directly.

“So—you’re actually Ezzen? Seven years of being anonymous, and now you’re just…here at Lighthouse?”

“Well—being flametouched kind of changes things.”

“Lots of people thought you were already a flamebearer! I know you’ve said you’re not, but it’s crazy that you discovered all that—” he pointed at the screen again, “—without actually having any Flame yourself.”

“I didn’t…discover it. The Vaetna already know all this stuff, we’re just following them.” I floundered, compelled to downplay my own accomplishments and expertise. “Um, not to discredit Ai or the Consortium’s own accomplishments, labs all over—”

“Take some credit,” Ai sighed from my other side. I twisted to look at her.

“But it’s true! Yeah, I know a lot, but everything I’ve ‘figured out’ is stuff they already know. And you’re actually doing things with it!” I gestured around the cavernous room. “This is incredible!”

“So is that.” Ai countered, pointing at the glyphs on my screen. Then she put her hands on her hips, addressing the students who’d gathered near me. “Back to work. You’re not going to finish in the next forty minutes if you keep bothering Ezzen.”

They dispersed, grumbling but smiling. Ai dropped herself heavily into the seat next to mine, already looking tired again despite having seemed fine this morning.

“Already making progress.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know if this’ll actually work in the weave…uh, sorry for being a distraction, also.”

“You aren’t!” She glanced past me down the row of computers. “I think this will be really motivating for them. And it will work in the weave, I think; just make sure to run the substrate optimizer before porting it to the schematic.”

I‘d totally forgotten that step and needed a flustered moment to find the right button in the unfamiliar sub-panel. I also didn’t know how to verify that it had done its job and squished the glyph substrates down to minimal weavable size and found places for them within the structure of the arm.

“Uh.” I hesitated.

“It’s here, then here.” She guided me through the process of confirming everything was as it should be, heedless of the fact that a few of her students were definitely watching her treat me like one of them, oh God. I tried to control my breathing, retreating into my hoodie slightly like a magic-obsessed turtle.

“…Thanks. Um. I should really know how to do that.”

She seemed to become aware that eyes had been on us while she’d helped me, the supposed expert, use a basic function of the program I probably had more than ten thousand hours on.

“…Would you rather work somewhere else, Ezzen?”

“No, it’s more…the work itself.”

“Ah. Not used to integration.”

“Not at all,” I admitted. “Your students are probably better at that than I am.”

She frowned. “You deserve to be here. Is this about what Hirai-san said?”

“Who?” I was sort of losing track of the names.

“Er, Yuuka. Heliotrope.”

“Oh. I guess? It’s just—I already said, I just don’t feel like I’m actually…doing anything with it. I’m just messing around. Yesterday was easy—and I know how fucked up that sounds—because it was pure magic, LM to LM. I felt like I understood all of it…which wasn’t true; I didn’t understand what we were really doing, but the task? Everything could be done in GWalk. With this—” I pointed at the screen, then spread the gesture to indicate the entire workshop, “—there’s literally more moving parts, stuff I haven’t touched before. I feel like I need to run all of this past you to make anything actually come of it.”

“So you’re saying you’re used to working alone?”

“…I guess, yeah.”

“Well, you’re not alone. You never were! You’ve shared so much of your work on the internet; of course we’ve used it. Not…not all of my colleagues respect you as much as they should, but they certainly all know your name. So do my students, for a reason.” She smiled at me, reaching out to gently touch my forearm. “Your focus is pure theory, not application, and that’s fine, because we’ve already been applying it here. Now you can actually work with us.” She took a breath, but before I could formulate a rebuttal, another complaint that I was out of my depth, she went on, passion rising. “Teamwork means letting other people do the parts you’re not good at. Yesterday, you were able to do almost all of it yourself, which…” her expression darkened. “Which is how we got away with not telling you until it was too late. I’m sorry for that. But for almost everything outside of our mantles, bungyou—division of labor—is important, even necessary, because nobody can do what we do alone. You can help us do so much! And you know that, I know you do. I’m really, truly excited to be working with you, and so is everybody in this room.”

For a moment, I was terrified that meant she was about to order her class to line up and encourage me, but she just rubbed my arm and looked at me. Unlike Hina, her silence carried no expectation of response. Tears were starting to well in my eyes at Ai’s pure, unguarded outpouring of belief. I didn’t want to cry here, under the eyes of her students, people who looked up to me—I swallowed in a vain attempt to keep my throat from getting tight. Seeing my response, Ai tensed up.

“Oh. Oh, ah, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s—fine,” I pushed out, wiping my eyes before any tears could fall. Her honesty and kindness helped me admit why this was so hard. “No, I mean, thank you. Heliotrope sort of got under my skin. Thank you,” I repeated. Yuuka had brought my insecurities to the surface, asserted that I didn’t belong; a belief she had so boldly thrown in my face that it had further undermined my already shaky self-confidence. But Ai’s conviction that I could have a place here—that I already had a place here, long before I’d ever actually arrived, was just as potent as her teammate’s venom, perhaps more so. “Um…how long have you…known about me?”

“Me? Since before we had this building. I think we’ve actually emailed each other, back when I was in school, and so did my professor at the time. He’s the one who told me about—do…do you need a tissue?”

“…Yes.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

Ai jogged back to her desk and brought the entire box back to me. I dried my tears before they could spill onto my cheeks, thanked her, and spent the remainder of her class time continuing to tinker with and refine the weave of Amane’s arm.

Meanwhile, her students got back to work, under too much pressure from their assignment to keep bothering me. They ferried their parts around the workshop, refining those parts toward gradually more familiar shapes. Each time a group of students returned to one of the PCs, the sheets of metal had been further altered: intricately folded, slots milled out, more folding, small sections of metal ground away to thin out the shape, onward and onward until various second-order glyph substrates began to make themselves apparent in the aluminum. Even when different teams had the same glyph, there were a number of differences in the shape of the substrate, from overall proportions to the particular paths the metal took as it contorted around itself in mimicry of the Flame. Of course, there were idiomatic, semi-standard base layouts for substrates, but Ai had imposed additional restrictions on each team that meant the students had to improvise.

Even with that, the production process seemed an awful lot of effort. When I voiced this to Ai, she explained that this was entirely doable with CNC machining instead of the relatively manual processes to which she was subjecting her students, but that wasn’t the point. The goal of the exercise was to understand the common pitfalls in substrate design, like how one team had ground a branch point too thin; when Ai tried to weave along it, it snapped. That team still wound up passing, though.

Ai returned to sit with me again once she’d dismissed the students for the morning.

“What do you want to know about Yuuka?”

“I…wasn’t going to ask?”

“But you do want to know.”

“Yeah. How can you tell?”

“Because you like understanding things, and Yuuka is not easy to understand at a glance. I’m sorry she was so…her.” It sounded like she was talking about Hina, put like that.

“Alright, sure: Why’s she like that?”

“The eye, for one.”

“Precognitive self-assurance, yeah, figured as much. How’s it work?” I hadn’t even known it was possible until yesterday, so I wasn’t afraid to admit my ignorance.

“I…don’t know,” she admitted. “Silver ripple, of course, but I can’t even guess at the capture mechanism or how it translates to something she can parse. She’s…touchy about it, as well. If we could find out…”

Widespread precognition, even of a relatively limited sort based on whatever the local silver ripple happened to show, would be a game-changer; that went without saying. It was also the sort of cat that would be nearly impossible to put back in the bag. Ai understood that implicitly, I hoped—but then again, she was also the woman who had apparently invented a truly sentient AI in Ebi, so perhaps given the chance, she’d leap before looking. So might I, if it came to that, which troubled me. I switched back to the main topic.

“How do I get along with her?”

“Ah, well…your start was bad, being…with Hina. You are, ah, dating with her?”

There was a little bit of judgment in her voice. I hurried to correct her misconception.

“I’m…not sure, but I’m not doing her type of magic. No…mutation or transformation.” The seared patch of skin under my shirt and hoodie still stung faintly, a guiltily euphoric reminder to myself that we’d already taken steps in that direction—but cosmetic stuff didn’t really count. I ought to clarify that to Hina…if I could even convince myself of the loophole’s validity. “I made it really clear that I didn’t want to hurt my Flame or anybody else, so…”

Ai let out a breath she’d been holding, shoulders relaxing.

“Good. Good. That’s a relief, truly. I was worried, because…you two do have chemistry, and…”

“Christ, could everybody see it but me?” I immediately slapped my hand over my mouth. “Didn’t mean to say that.”

Ai burst out laughing, then covered her own mouth just as quickly. She needed a few moments for the giggle fit to subside.

“You’re not the first. She told me she’d tell you about her last boyfriend?”

“Skychicken. Jason. Flamebearer, friend of mine.” That part didn’t seem to surprise Ai. “Apparently, their relationship is why Yuuka doesn’t like her?”

“In simple terms, yes. Hina got…worse, more Hina-like, over the course of that relationship, and Yuuka blames him for that. And she doesn’t like men all that much, especially…she probably thinks you’re just here for Hina.” I didn’t quite flinch, but Ai still caught how I shifted and recoiled slightly. “Ah. I’m sorry, I know that’s not how it is at all, but…she’s had some bad experiences, and she jumps to conclusions. Alice thought she’d be alright with you being here, staying here, but maybe she miscalculated, or she just didn’t expect you to click with Hina in this particular way and make Yuuka mad.”

“I…she yelled at me for not thinking things through. But she’s the one who just immediately assumes the worst like that!” I almost growled. It was beyond frustrating and unfair, and Ai nodded in sympathy. I wondered if I could ask her to clear things up with the abrasive goth girl for me, to explain that I wasn’t at all like the caricature she’d assigned me, since trying to have that conversation myself would kill me and I doubted she’d even listen. But I also didn’t want to put Ai through that, not somebody who’d already been so kind to me and who frankly had better things to do. “What can I…do? To fix things with her? I don’t want this—mess. It’s ridiculous,” I groused. “A revolving door of drama. I just figured things out with Hina!”

That bordered on being too much outward complaining, and I cut myself off before I could run my mouth about how this was on top of the lingering worries about the PCTF and Hikanome. But it still felt good to say, and Ai nodded harder, then sat back and thought for a minute.

“I understand, it’s…yes, she can be exhausting,” she admitted. “And stubborn. She won’t listen to me or Alice for this, I think, and certainly not Hina. But Amane, she can help you with this.”

“Amane?”

“Yuuka has a soft spot for her, of course, after everything.”

“Um. I’m still not entirely clear on the timeline for that,” I admitted, glancing around the workshop, reflexively checking if the coast was clear despite knowing our conversation was magically secure. It was mostly deserted now that the students had gone; a few other engineers were working on their own projects at faraway machines, but nobody was close to being within earshot. “Amane was abducted, and the rest of you…rescued her. Alice said something about how you and her and Hina were a separate group first, though?”

It was a bit of a tangle, trying to piece together offhand comments and insinuations and tone from the past few days in between far more immediately important conversations. Not my strong suit. Ai bit her lip, and I hesitated, but then she jumped in her seat, clenching her right fist.

“Everything alright?”

“Yes.” Her tone said otherwise. “Your girlfriend is here. She can explain that to you.”

I jumped as well when I felt arms slither over my shoulders.

“Hey, cutie. I’m stealing you for lunch,” a husky voice muttered in my ear. “Hi, Ai! I’m stealing cutie for lunch!”

—

Ai was very, very unhappy with Hina traipsing through the fourth dimension in her workshop, and I got a front-row seat to a short but blistering lecture in Japanese. Hina did a remarkable job of staying still and enduring her teammate’s annoyance, chin resting atop my head. She didn’t seem particularly chastised, occasionally interjecting enthusiastic “Mhm!”s and unrepentant “Sorry!”s until Ai’s anger inevitably sputtered out and was replaced by an older-sister sense of exasperated disappointment. At that point, the Emerald Radiance switched back to English for my benefit, reminding Hina that “we’ve talked about this” and then attempting to cajole her out of the workshop. Stubborn mutt she was, Hina dug her heels in and insisted that she wasn’t leaving without me, so I bid a hasty farewell and thanks to Ai, taking the USB drive with me.

Hina took my hand and led me back through the hall toward the elevators, still full of energy.

“What’s for lunch?”

“Eggplant and pesto gnocchi!”

Yum. Apparently she wasn’t an obligate carnivore after all.

“…Homemade?”

“Not yet! How’s Ai?”

“Not yet?” But Hina didn’t answer the question as we entered the elevator, hitting me with that level, it’s-your-turn stare. “You just saw her.”

“Yeah, but she probably wasn’t yelling at you like she was with me. Unless she was?”

“Uh, no, she wasn’t. I was working on Amethyst’s arm. Or trying to, at least; I was really just messing with the weave.”

“Cool! Was it fun?”

“Yeah.”

Silence fell. I felt so awkward—but I’d already missed my window to ask how her own day was going. That was the correct, boyfriendly thing to do, right? It wasn’t that I didn’t have questions: was her voiceover work in English or Japanese? Was she done with her workday? Did she have any advice regarding making Heliotrope less of a bitch?

But I didn’t say anything, nor did she prompt me further with those sapphire eyes, content to just hold my hand and swing our arms back and forth a bit. At least she was in puppy-mode; my imagination lewdly suggested that the hyena might slam the emergency stop and press me against the wall, a scenario which would turn this mild social embarrassment into boiling-hot—

I politely told that part of my psyche to fuck off. I was still coming to terms with how much I wanted Hina to, in her own terms, “fuck me up,” and the awful things Heliotrope had insinuated about me were doing that process no favors.

We once again arrived at the nineteenth floor. The lights had been turned on in the kitchen, warm light pushing back the cool blue coming through the windows, and I smelled something roasting, probably the eggplant.

Stepping out of the elevator, I was surprised to find Alice laying on one of the sofas, face-down to accommodate her tail stretched out behind her, the tip just barely dangling over the armrest. As she pushed herself upright to greet us, I saw that she was wearing actual business attire—unlike at Tochou yesterday. Odd, or maybe normal; I didn’t have a good frame of reference, really.

It wasn’t much, just a button-down blouse with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a long, loose skirt worn high on the waist. She glared at my hand connected to Hina’s—quickly covered the expression with a smile. I altered the script I was building in my head; her presence automatically struck down any chance of conversation about my strange, budding relationship with Hina, but hopefully helped the odds that I could learn something that would make existing around Heliotrope less intolerable.

“Hey. Lunch soon, please? I have to be back with Suzuki in half an hour.”

“Yep! Fifteen minutes, sit tight.”

“Fifteen minutes?” Pretty quick. “Frozen gnocchi?”

“Oh, nah, I made the dough this morning, so it’s just roll and cut. Do you wanna do that or make the pesto?”

“Oh, uh…” I hadn’t realized that I would be helping. When I was young, we’d made pastas of all kinds, really, so the activity of rolling and shaping dough was scattered all across my memories of Dad, but the pesto…I didn’t want to touch that memory. “The gnocchi.”

“Gotcha!”

She put me to work, directing me to the enormous, metal-topped kitchen island, evocative of a restaurant prep table, oddly comforting and nostalgic. I was provided with the dough, flour, and an old friend: my knife, Dad’s gift.

“Still haven’t sharpened it,” she apologized, “but should be fine for dividing dough.”

Gnocchi are exceptionally easy to make by hand, Dad instructed. Most pasta shapes require you to roll a flat and thin sheet, which is hard without a machine, but gnocchi dough is robust enough that you can just roll it into a snake and cut it into little cylinders to make your pastas.

I floured up my hands, sliced the big ball of dough into more manageable portions, and went through the steps. Make a snake, chop it up—I stopped and hunted around the kitchen for a moment. Hina noticed from her own station to my right, where she was grinding the pesto by hand in a large mortar and pestle.

“Cutie? What are you looking for?”

“A fork.”

“Why?”

“To shape the dough?”

I was surprised she didn’t seem to know what I meant, but she obligingly directed me to the silverware drawer. She watched curiously as I demonstrated the technique.

Then—and there are specialized boards for this, but you can also just use a fork—you press the piece of pasta down along the tines of the fork with your finger, like this.

Hina squealed with delight as I transformed the gnocchi from a lump of potato dough to a pleasing little rolled shape with ridges all around the edge.

“More surface area; catches more sauce.” I explained from memory.

“Ooh! That’s so cute! Alice, kocchi mite!”

Todai’s leader, who’d seamlessly slipped into a support role doing dishes, also approved of the shape, nodding appreciatively.

“Oh, that’s how it’s done! I’ve had it like that at restaurants before, but I thought it needed a machine or something.”

“Same!” Hina stopped grinding the pesto—no, bad brain, stop that—to prod the pasta with a finger. “Can I try?”

“Hina, no, you’ll bend the tines and make a mess and I’m hungry,” Alice whined. Then she caught herself and her eyes slid over to me as she bit her lip nervously, caught with her guard down. What little dignity she had left was erased by a rumble, and I dodged meeting those slitted pupils to glance at her belly. She stammered. “Um.”

The three of us stood there in silence for a moment. Hina looked between the two of us with her big, blue eyes, then barked a laugh.

“Understood, Captain!”

She picked the pestle back up and resumed grinding the green paste. Alice kept trying to produce sounds, perhaps intended to be apologies for her impatience or indignance at the possible sarcasm, but another undignified grumble from her belly made her give up and turn back to the sink in embarrassed defeat. I picked up my knife and resumed making dough snakes, but that wasn’t enough to dispel the lingering awkwardness. I reached for a random question based on what was in front of me.

“Where did you learn to cook?”

“Me? Teacher from school who thought I needed a hobby to stop getting into fights. Hey, Alice, you remember Asagi-sensei, right?”

“…Yes? Third year home ec in middle school. It didn’t work, as I recall.”

“Nope! But food’s fun. You’re pretty good with that knife, cutie, where’d you learn?”

“I’m just chopping gnocchi, hardly a chiffonade or julienne.”

“Oooooh. Okay, now I really gotta know.”

I hesitated for a moment. I’d talked about this with Alice briefly, but somehow it hadn’t come up with Hina.

“My dad.”

“Oh, right, the dead one.”

“Hina!”

“Oops. Um. Sorry, cutie.”

I put down the knife for a moment to take a deep, slow breath. She didn’t mean anything by it, I knew that, but I still needed a moment to suppress the sudden spike of anger and grief at her casual prodding of the event that had destroyed my life. Shame, too, which took longer to boil off than the others.

“It’s—fine,” I gritted out.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“Hina!” Alice accompanied that with a thump of her tail against the kitchen’s tiles. The puppy flinched.

“Sorry.”

“No, um—talking is good, maybe,” I interjected, fighting down the reflexive annoyance. If I was going to live alongside them, telling them this much had to happen eventually, and it was easier with them, fellow flamebearers. If I trusted the chatroom, I could trust them. “Dad was a chef, the kind who traveled a lot. Took me with him.”

“Ooh, you’re rich?”

“Hina…”

“Uh. He didn’t actually save that much, and…things went wrong with the inheritance. Most of the money went to my grandparents, and from there to one of the cults, so I didn’t really see much of it.”

“Oh, shit. That’s—super fucked up.” The sapphire eyes were full of pity. I winced.

“I was fourteen, still in and out of the hospital, didn’t know how any of that worked, and they…stole it, basically.” More shame. “I got some aid from the Peacies later, around the end of the Firestorms, and managed to hold on to enough of that to, um, support my lifestyle.” I clarified hastily. “Uh, they weren’t the PCTF yet.”

“Don’t worry, we get it, no hard feelings. We know a thing or two about making ends meet.” Alice chuckled dryly. “Billionaire money, remember?”

“Ah. Right.”

Dirty money all around. Hina frowned as she passed me a small bowl.

“Wait, so the Peacies or one of their precursors knew about you as a flamefall survivor, knew where you lived, probably knew you were Ezzen, and never, like, tried to hire you? You’re a fuckin’ catch, cutie.”

“I’m…because I didn’t matter, probably, not compared to the pros.” I regretted that immediately, imagining Ai’s gentle rebuke if I’d said that to her. Alice filled in for her.

“Don’t talk about yourself like that. Remember how your work helped Amane? You’ve already made a difference.”

I tried to get myself to believe that while I gathered a snake’s worth of shaped gnocchi and brought it to the pot of boiling water on the stovetop.

“Okay, no, I can admit I would have been…an asset, so…no, I don’t really know. I guess I sort of assumed it was Sky’s doing. Um—Jason?”

“Probably. Sounds like him,” Hina confirmed as she dug through a cabinet for appropriate serving bowls. Alice stiffened at the name, and I realized we’d managed to stumble close to one of the things I was meaning to ask about. I seized the chance.

“Um, on that note, Heliotrope compared me to him earlier.”

Not at all a smooth transition, but I figured it was the only chance I was going to get.

“Ah, fuck, that’s right, your message,” Alice groaned, turning to me as she dried her hands. “I suppose it’s too much to ask that she was nice about it?”

“…No. Er, yes, too much to ask. She was mean.” Alice’s face fell further; now I felt bad for piling this on top of what was probably already a very stressful time. “My bad for bringing it up. I’m fine, really.”

“Last time you said you were fine, Hina had just sexually assaulted you,” Alice pointed out, voice flat. Hina whimpered, and Alice shifted; she wasn’t made of stone. “Sorry, Hina. Uh—I guess before I find out what dreadful things Yuuka said, we should first…she told me you two slept together last night. That, plus…‘monsterfucker’, plus that comparison—it compels me to ask: what exactly is going on between you two? Are you…a couple?”

“We’re trying things out!”

I glanced at Hina, relieved that she seemed to already have an answer ready.

“Yeah. It’s—we’re being responsible. Boundaries and all.”

“And you’re not our mom!” Hina crossed her arms defiantly.

Alice spread her hands in an ‘I give up’ motion.

“Couldn’t stop you if I wanted. Use protection, mind the teeth, et cetera. Just wanted to stay up to date on what was happening under our roof.” The stiff lashing of her tail betrayed her true feelings, but she didn’t press the issue, instead looking at me as though facing the gallows. “So, lay it on me: what did Yuuka say?”

—

“She’s grounded,” the dragon growled.

Alice’s expression had soured, then curdled into a snarl, as I repeated the nasty things Yuuka had said to me. It hadn’t stopped her from slurping down bite after bite of ridged gnocchi coated in creamy, green sauce as she listened; her hunger at least bound her to the table and prevented her from stomping to the elevator and hunting down Yuuka herself, but the atmosphere was still a bit fraught. We were both exasperated; this felt a bit too much like a repeat of the song-and-dance I’d had with Hina, although this time didn’t seem bound for euphoric intimacy, which suited me fine.

Hina, for her part, was emitting a faint but bone-chilling growl that had my heart pounding. It was nice to feel protected by something as wildly dangerous as her—but I was also genuinely concerned she’d attempt to tear Yuuka limb from limb.

“Um, Hina?”

“Mm?” The way her voice sounded with the growl was worryingly attractive, arguably hotter than when she was purring. More investigation would be needed—later.

“You’re not going to, uh…kill her, are you?”

“Never! Just rough her up.”

“Hina, can it wait until after I talk to her?” Alice shoveled another bite into her mouth; I was learning it was possible to eat pasta angrily. “As in, after you do your job. Which you have to get back to in twenty-six minutes.”

“It’d only take ten!”

“Uh, you’re not actually calling her off?”

“No. What she said was really hurtful to her too. Hina, please, you’d just make things worse, you know that.”

“What? No, you guys, I love her to bits, she’s done that for years, I’m good! She just doesn’t get to corner Ez and be a bitch like that. Not if I’m not there.”

“So you’ll wait?”

“Depends. Cutie?”

I wasn’t entirely opposed to Hina dispensing some physical retribution, assuming it would be the same degree of roughhousing I’d seen the other day. Hadn’t Ebi said Yuuka wouldn’t have wanted to miss that? So maybe the violence was fine, but—

“It…won’t help. I don’t think she respects…us. You or me.” I winced as Alice’s aura of heat, until now suppressed for the sake of her bowl of pasta, momentarily flared in frustrated acknowledgement, and the creamy pesto dried up, desiccated to a powder on the gnocchi’s surface. She frowned at the bowl and got up to add a bit of water back in. “I just—I talked with Ai, and that helped brush off some of what Heliotrope said, but other parts…”

“Which parts?” The growl vanished from Hina’s voice. If she had dog ears, they would have perked up.

“The, um…last night, you said this was just a starting point. Is it? Or is…” I raised my scarred hand, hoping she’d understand what I meant. “Is it just this you care about?”

I couldn’t bring myself to ask directly, both for the embarrassment of asking and fear of the answer.

“What? Cutie, of course it’s a start point, there’s more to you than that. I don’t call you that for nothing. You’re cute! And hot.”

“…Really?”

“Do I lie? Alice, do I lie? Is that a thing I do?”

“I’m not engaging with this part.” The dragon sat back down with her rescued pasta and kept eating.

“Fine. Cutie, yes, really. Your Flame is hot—heh—your body’s hot, and you’re going to be so cool once you just…come out of your shell, get comfy around us, learn to use your Flame. And Yuuka’s making that hard, which is…” She growled. “She’s just being shitty because of some old stuff with Jason; that’s not really anything to do with you. Don’t let her get under your skin. That’s my job. I wanna open you up and bring out the best version of you I can, and that’s not just because of your Flame, okay?”

“Um.” I shivered. “Open me up?”

Alice slapped the table softly in concert with her tail thumping the floor, reminding us she was there.

“Alright, too much flirting in front of me. I’m glad you two are at least, er, talking, but keep it in the bedroom. I have to get to my next meeting. I’ll try to give Yuuka a talking-to tonight.”

She left her empty dishes where they were, hurrying toward the elevator, tail swaying behind her. As she left earshot, Hina looked at me mischievously.

“So you don’t want me to fight her?”

“I mean…if you must, it’s not like I can stop you.”

“You’ll be able to, eventually. I won’t beat her up, though, because I’d rather spend my energy convincing you I’m actually into you. How’s that sound, hm?” She leaned toward me, blinking those big blue eyes too innocently for the innuendo, then sighed. “No time now, though, not for any real fun. I, too, have meetings. Ugh. But we do have time for—” She reached into pocketspace, which made me have to squeeze my eyes shut and rub them. When I reopened them, she had a small red box, palm-sized and squat. “This was for her, but I decree that she’s lost the privilege this year for being mean. So you can have it!”

“Um. I’m not following.”

“What day is it, cutie?”

“Monday?”

She facepalmed, giggled, and then removed the box’s lid to reveal a single chocolate shaped like a heart.

“February 14th! Happy Valentine’s Day!”