Chapter 3: From On High // 1.03

It didn’t take long for Ebi to show up and break me out of my reverie, staring at the blood drying on the bedsheets.

“I apologize for Sapphire’s behavior.”

I looked up at her, somehow unsurprised that she had simply reappeared. A trick like Heung’s spear, maybe—that wasn’t some kind of flamebearer intuition for whatever lattice animated her, it was an educated guess. There were only so many ways to shunt that much matter in or out of our three-dimensional reality, and many of them had visual tells that she lacked. I looked at the robot—didn’t quite make it to her eyes. I wound up directing my gaze at her neck.

“Apology accepted? If I’m not a prisoner. Am I?”

“Not in those words. This is one of the safest places in the world for you.”

“But you won’t let me leave.”

“Opal thinks it won’t come to that.”

Well, it sounded like I didn’t have much control over that at the moment, so no point in pursuing it. I had other curiosities, ones more rooted in my passion for magic than my new circumstances.

“What’s your deal?”

“You mean the state of my intelligence?”

“Sure.”

She wasn’t visibly doing anything as she stood there, but I got the sense she was reading my chart, or my file. It was a safe bet that she knew who I was, even though she had been out of the room when Hina had said it out loud.

“I am sapient, but not sentient.”

That was vaguely insulting to my intelligence. She came over and gestured toward my arm. I looked at her. Her fingers twitched in a ‘come here’ motion. After a long, long moment of incredulous glaring—I gave her my arm.

“Bullshit.”

She had the audacity to wink at me even as her voice remained level.

“Blood pressure and O2 are good, and your foot looks stable. Are there any parts of your body that hurt?”

“Foot aches a bit. Don’t dodge the question.” I felt like it should be hurting more; maybe it was just that I hadn’t moved it.

“I am animated by Emerald’s magic. I’m not at liberty to say more, like I said. Are you feeling well enough to see her now?”

I had guessed that much—Radiance Emerald was the team’s technical magic expert, the ‘guy in the chair’ of their classical five-man-band. All five were veteran flamebearers, and therefore specialists at magic in one way or another; her field bridged the gap between conventional engineering and weaving. She was the one Hina had said to go see.

“For my foot?”

“And more general greetings. You’ve gotten off on the wrong foot by meeting Sapphire first.”

The wrong foot. The robot’s digital expression didn’t give anything away, but she practically radiated smugness at the joke. I looked down at the mound under the blanket created by the stump and sighed.

“Sure. Can’t exactly walk like this, though.”

“I’ll take you down. The bed moves.”

That harkened back to my last extended time in a hospital, although I had been more ambulatory then, with a ruined hand rather than foot. Still, being carted through the halls in a bed sounded humiliating—especially if the average employee here also knew my other identity.

“No wheelchair?”

“Just stay where you are for now. The bed’s doing a whole lot.”

Right, the painkiller magic—analgomancy, if you wanted to be technical. I decided to trust her judgment that the bed was the right call for now, although getting some control over my own mobility was rapidly becoming a priority, with how threatened I had felt by Hina.

Not just threatened. She had been so close to me; I hadn’t been that close to another person my age in—ever? It prodded at a kind of buried loneliness, a part of youth I had missed out on, spending all those years cooped up alone in that room. The intimate contact her posture had suggested was totally alien to me—yet desirable, confusingly so, in spite of how terrifying she had been. I couldn’t get her out of my head, replaying those few moments over and over.

Ebi snorted. “Attractive, isn’t she?”

I jerked my arm out of her grip, positive she had read my vitals for that bit of insight. “Right freaky’s what she was. They’re not all like that, I hope?”

“In their own ways. If you mean whether any of the others will climb up on your bed—doubtful. Don’t look so disappointed.”

I glared at her, resenting how I was blushing from something more than embarrassment. Ebi showed me some mercy and didn’t pursue the topic.

“Let me take you to Emerald—to Ai. Sapphire will stop pestering you about it.”

She waved her hand, and my entire bed began to move. Not floating, I thought, but probably magically assisted suspension for the wheels. I wiggled my ankle experimentally.

“This is beyond regen, right?”

I hadn’t really made my peace with the loss so much as I had assumed that Lighthouse or the Spire could offer me a prosthetic at least as good as the original.

“It is. How much do you know about Amethyst’s prostheses?”

I thought. The Vaetna and glyph magic itself were my areas of real expertise; I had a decent amount of knowledge about magitech, but not much focus on specific flamebearers unless it hit on one of my passions. For example, I knew more about Amethyst’s transformation than her prosthetics.

“Only the basics. Left arm, left foot…something about her lungs?”

“Internals are a mess. But the relevant thing is that they’re self-animated, like her mantle or Vaetna carapace.”

That made me wince. I was starting to see the problem.

“So in addition to the physical therapy, I’d need—”

“Months of magical training. Maybe years. She’s still not fully comfortable with her leg—but then, she hardly ever uses it, and you’re starting from an expert level of theory from what I hear, so maybe you’ll go faster. Either way, since it’s just the foot, we’ll have you on crutches or in a wheelchair within the day, I think. We had you on eightfold healing.”

We arrived at an elevator without encountering any other staff. Ebi called it without hitting the button.

“Where is everybody?”

“Oh, medical’s mostly just me when we don’t have anybody in. This is my crib.”

“Just you for the whole floor?”

“All of eighteen, yep.”

Perhaps I had underestimated her qualifications. She carted me into the elevator and sent us downward, destination: B1F. It was a big building by my standards for these things, twenty stories top to bottom, plus three basement levels. The organization was so young that the building was actually a hospital that had been bought for some obscene sum of money and converted—but that was about the extent of my knowledge, off-the-cuff. I couldn’t recall exactly where in the city we were, and my phone was getting no reception in the elevator.

“Where in Tokyo are we?”

“Akasaka. That’s—”

She projected a holographic map of the city. It took me a moment to orient myself. If the Imperial Palace was the center, we were just to the southwest. I noted that we were close to the Diet and some other major landmarks—including the local Gate. If I were to make a run for it—that was the destination.

The elevator dinged, and we exited into a small corridor, a little more industrial, with a concrete floor and lit by full-spectrum LEDs rather than the warmer light of the elevator and higher corridors. Ebi took me down the hall, and we arrived at a pair of double doors. They slid open, and I recognized the room from videos, one of Todai’s main assets that set them apart from other groups.

Emerald’s workshop was enormous, an ex-garage. Half-disassembled jetbikes lay surrounded by parts and toolkits, patients abandoned mid-surgery. Workstations featuring holographic displays shared space with entirely manual machine shop tools from the previous century. More modern 21st-century machines also abounded, and rarely just one of any. I didn’t have the technical knowledge to label most of what I was looking at, beyond the obvious things like the lathes or the enormous metal printers—the bottom line was that this shop was built for ideation more than mass production, and had the breadth of tooling to look the part.

However, I only had eyes for what dominated the far wall: a huge array of glyphs spanning two to four dimensions, intricately connected, all mounted and ready to be powered at a moment’s notice. They corresponded to various effects and operations to be done within a large cubic space, maybe three meters to a side, which hovered on that side of the room, clearly demarcated by a variety of holographic barriers and “CAUTION: THIS MACHINE IS CARNIVOROUS”-type signage; I knew those weren’t facetious. Above it hung a candelabra of tooling, the maw of some great beast of hardened steel and carbide, itself using magic to enable tool swaps and precision at speeds far higher than the mundane equivalent.

The array enabled otherwise prohibitively expensive or outright impossible fabrication conditions like zero-gravity, hard vacuum for cold welding, spatial affix work-holding, and the ability to symmetrically and radially mirror operations around an axis, among others. Most notably, it could operate in four dimensions, making it invaluable for the manufacture of third-order lattice substrate, an essential element of the chain of production that allowed developed and magic-available countries to bootstrap themselves further up the tech tree in this new era. I was in awe—none of the arrays like this anywhere in the world were open to the public, and I had sort of resigned myself to never getting the chance to see them in person. There were only four outside the Spire.

The shop was also shockingly quiet in spite of the maybe three dozen people scattered around, clustered around various parts and machines. Magical soundproofing was both energetically cheap and easy to install, a fact leveraged here in abundance where the Radiances could be depended on to keep them running. We passed the threshold and made our way toward where Emerald was sitting at a desk with four monitors. She had one of those funky split keyboards and was currently neck-deep in modeling…something. Third-order glyph substrate embedded in something else, maybe. She saw us coming in a convex mirror mounted on the desk and spun in her chair to face us. The entire thing was on what looked to be a motorized base.

“Ebi-tan! This is him?”

Unlike Hina, who sounded straight-up American, Ai Matsumoto had a noticeable—if minor—Japanese accent and a bright and clear voice. This clashed somewhat with an otherwise rather gruff look: jeans, closed-toed shoes, and the scar that ran down the right of her chin to her throat. Her hair was black and long, held back in a simple ponytail. Her arms were bare—and muscular. I figured that was just a hobby; if she ever needed serious physical strength, she could always just mantle.

She also looked—exhausted, frankly. The bags under her brown eyes made her seem like she was in her thirties rather than the twenty-something she actually was. Like Hina’s predator teeth, that was never something I had seen in promotional material for them. Unlike Hina, though, this felt like a sign of her mortality; she had clearly been missing nights of sleep on some project. It was the good kind of fatigue, a familiar kind born of great joy and perhaps obsession in something. Hina and Ebi had had a sort of weightlessness I associated with the Vaetna as well; Ai was much more grounded and human.

Ebi shot off a stiff-sounding greeting in Japanese and managed half a bow before nearly teleporting over to Ai to wrap her in a hug. The Radiance made an adorable squealing sound and nuzzled into the machine-woman’s carbon fiber chest for a moment before seeming to remember herself and refocusing on me.

“Hina-san says you bound something to yourself. She also said you did a bad job of it. Show me.”

My bed floated closer, and she hopped out of her chair, jogging over to meet me and inspect my arm. I noted the total lack of greeting—I assumed that meant she either didn’t know or didn’t care that I was Ezzen. Later, with more knowledge of Japanese honorifics, I would also come to understand the strangeness of the appellation she used for Hina. She prodded at the burned image of the spear, as well as kind of waving her fingers in the air around it, getting a feel for the lattice. It tickled, sort of.

“Mm. Vaetna-style for sure. Weave is—very sloppy, but you’re new. Would you take it out?”

I was grateful again for the painkillers as I obliged, motivated by her visible interest in the magic rather than the fear from before. Ai walked along the side of the bed, eyeing the cut that had reopened on my arm, muttering something in Japanese to Ebi. Then she went to inspect the spear itself.

“Just a regular wooden—oh.” She had spotted what Hina had called ripple warping on the blade. “I haven’t looked at the report yet. You did this?”

“Um, yes. To, er—” I scrambled for one of the only bits of Japanese I knew. “Ah—hikari wo osaeru?”

To contain the light, when I had averted the inferno at first. This was a cultural difference—the East conceptualized the Frozen Flame as light rather than fire. That was the basis for Lighthouse’s theming. She nodded approvingly.

“You’re saying it wrong, but I get the meaning. Hikari wo osaeru, like that.”

I couldn’t really hear a difference, other than the fact that her voice was outright melodic in her native tongue. I recalled that she was a fairly popular singer in her free time—for a moment I had a wild, ridiculous fantasy of going to a karaoke bar together, before remembering I couldn’t sing and would die of embarrassment in a setting like that. She said something to Ebi, and my arm stopped bleeding, although the gash didn’t close, and the sting remained.

“Why do you have this?”

“Um…I like Heung. He saved me once.” It was embarrassing to say out loud.

“Mm. It’s nice. You made it yourself?”

“Er—yes. Can’t get them legally in the UK.”

She grinned. “I use one too. May I?”

Oh, right, she did—so why not. Maybe I’d learn something. I offered it, but as she pulled the spear from my grip—no. No, she couldn’t, I needed that—I was still in danger. I had to be able to hurt it or else there was no—

I reflexively tried to put it back in my arm, reaching for the lattice on pure panicked instinct. The spear tried to fold into my arm, to mesh with the cut, and tugged Ai back toward me with it. She whirled, confusion on her face. Then she seemed to understand what was happening and planted her feet. Something shifted, and for a moment she stood like a Vaetna, that impression that physics was optional. Suddenly, I was the one being tugged, yanked out of the bed by the magic—

I would have slammed into the concrete floor. As it was, Ebi mostly caught me, but only mostly—the impact still broke my grip on the spear, and I lay there, dazed. My first thought was that my jaw hurt. My second was that I hoped I hadn’t just bitten off my tongue. Noticing the commotion, some of the other people in the workshop began to hurry over. I felt arms lift me and deposit me back in the bed.

“No fractures…I just gave you an anticoncussive. You got very lucky regarding your tongue.”

“I know,” I groaned. My head throbbed even through the painkillers.

Ai appeared on my other side, seeming genuinely distressed. “Sorry, so sorry. Ebi-tan?”

They conversed in Japanese for a few moments, and the woman visibly relaxed. I heard her mutter something to herself that sounded an awful lot like “bakabakabaka.” She refocused on me.

“So, so sorry. I didn’t mean to—aaa, korosarecchau—I just wanted to try the spear.”

Ebi said something softly to her, and Ai shook her head, ponytail wagging.

“It is my fault. I realized what you were doing and wanted to see what would happen to your lattice if I put tension on it. I wasn’t thinking. Please forgive me.”

She looked dejected for a moment, then something in her shifted. She retrieved the spear and brought it to me, her motions once again those of mortals. I clutched it pathetically, humiliated by my own reaction but unable to bring myself to let go. As I breathed slowly and calmed down, I managed a chuckle as I reflected on it. Not the best first impression, but—

“It’s fine. I would have done the same thing.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. Then she bowed, shook her head again, and paced down toward my feet, inspecting my gauze-wrapped leg. How much it had already healed, if it had effectively been something like a week, thanks to the magic?

“We’re going to do something about this. I was going to anyway, but now…”

She turned and raised her voice. It took me a moment to understand she was yelling names—and still speaking in English. Her voice had taken on an authoritative edge; it fit her surprisingly well. The exhaustion seemed to drop from her face for the moment, overridden by willpower. A crowd gathered around us, a mix of students around my or her age, but some of the engineers and machinists had to be at least twice that—and they were all subordinate to her.

“—Two weeks. You’ll all get the same dimensions and scans. Basic design goals comply with LIPS-2 like what we made for Amethyst last year, bonus credit for anything beyond if you can justify it or if he likes it. Give me something I would be proud to wear.”

Not a single one complained about the sudden project. Some of them looked outright excited and were already pointing at me and muttering. Did they already know who I was? She hadn’t said it out loud, at least. More to the point—did I want to be her charity case? Part of me wanted to research a way to magic my way out of the disability entirely, some kind of LM construct for my foot. Ebi poked me, and I jumped—I had forgotten she was there.

“Take it. Ai does her best work when she feels guilty.”

I sighed internally—then externally. I had suffered enough in these past 24 hours. My stupid ego could swallow some kindness, especially if it lacked an ulterior motive like Sapphire’s had.

The engineers dispersed, hurrying off toward their desks. Ai turned back to me. Her voice had lost that entire hard facade, now timid.

“I’m sorry, again. Would you allow me to fix your binding?”

I hesitated. There was a sort of sentimentality in it, my first ever real bit of lasting, woven magic. But Sapphire had been right, it was impractically sloppy now that I was out of immediate danger. And I understood that this was still her way of trying to get off on the right foot.

“Yes, please. Hina said a tattoo binding?”

“Yes. Ink or LM?”

LM stood for lattice-manifest, the general term for matter directly generated by magic. Lighthouse were experts in it, overshadowed by only the Spire—like everyone else with a magical specialization; along with my personal connection to Heung, that was why I had primarily focused on the Vaetna over the other prominent VNT groups. They were simply a cut above in everything, but especially magic. They had introduced weaving, come up with the core lexicon of glyphs, and still remained far ahead of the curve.

I did want to do LM, but unfortunately, some things were just beyond my abilities for now.

“I don’t think I can do LM, not straight onto my skin. The most complicated thing I’ve cast is {COMPOSE}.”

“Oh. Yes, that would…that makes sense. Ink, then. Ebi-tan?”

I was a bit surprised that the machine-woman was the tattoo artist of choice. Then I thought about it a moment and—of course she was. Ebi’s hand disappeared in the same way a piece of paper did when turned parallel to one’s view, the three-dimensional object rotated in the fourth dimension such that it disappeared completely. After a moment, the process reversed, revealing a tattoo gun. I guessed that much of her body was 4-brane to enable swaps like this; it made sense for a medical robot. How would she look to a Vaetna?

“Color?”

I hadn’t thought this far ahead; I had never gotten a tattoo. “Um. What are the options?”

“Anything you want. We have the full spectrum in opaques, metallics, and iridescents.”

This felt like an important decision, but one I had no frame of reference for. “What would you think would look good?”

Ebi grinned at that. “We can temp it.”

In response, Ai retrieved something from a drawer in her desk, extracting it from a plastic bag. It was a translucent gossamer sheet.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“Arm, please.”

I offered my arm, and she wrapped the membrane around. It vacuum-sealed to my skin. A little uncomfortable, but not really squeezing. It flickered, and after a moment, the burn scar representing my spear vanished. I jerked—then realized the lattice of my binding was still there.

“Just a visual trick, don’t worry.”

Ebi—maybe Ai?—manipulated the membrane to project a design onto my arm in the same shape as my scar. Ebi withdrew a touchscreen tablet from somewhere within the bed, fiddled with it for a moment, and handed it to me. It showed a number of sliders and settings. “Take your time.”

I experimented for a few minutes. My pale skin was a good canvas for simple black or blue ink, but that felt a little mundane. On the flip side, a bright color and a fancy type of ink that caught the light came off as overly gaudy. As was so often the case, the best answer lay somewhere in the middle. Ai commented when I came to an iridescent dark blue-green.

“I like that. Ebi-tan?”

“Looks alright. The magenta was good too.”

I couldn’t decide. Choice paralysis was often a struggle for me, and this was no different. Eventually, I gave up and asked if they had a coin. Ai produced a 500-yen, a fat, two-tone thing, gold on silver. I flipped—heads. Dark iridescence it was. The template dissolved, the burn scar reappearing.

“Are you going to have to fully unmake the lattice?”

“I can reweave it in-place. I’m not very good at Vaetna-style, but…”

We sat in awkward silence for a moment. Then my magic-knowledge kicked in, dissatisfactions from the first time. I muttered, oddly embarrassed about the specificity.

“Ventral rethread with a finer spool. Leave the spinal mesh, it’s good enough. I messed up layers 3 and 23 on the first axis, and my passthrough between axes was sloppy.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Oh. Your theory is far better than your execution…” She trailed off as she caught the backhanded compliment. “Of course it is. I’m sorry. Yes, I can do that.”

This whole affair had been rather awkward so far, and neither of us could meet the other’s eyes. She was looking down at my arm, and I was casting my gaze around the room to avoid looking at her. Ebi cleared her throat. Well, she didn’t have a throat, but it was a good imitation. Ai jerked and blinked a few times, eyes flicking to the robot before refocusing on me. Had…had she fallen asleep, for a moment? It didn’t show in her voice, at least.

“Would you gather your thread for me? I’ll spin it and weave it for you.”

“Um…sure. Are you just going to tattoo straight over the scar?”

“We’ll have to reopen the wound. Please bring it out?”

I did, feeling the sting for what would probably be the last time. Ebi’s hands blurred, and she grabbed my wrist. Before I even reacted, she had injected local anesthesia and was stitching the gash. I reflexively jerked away despite the lack of pain—her grip was iron. When the sutures were done, she sprayed it with some kind of foam, which dissolved the stitches and left a patch of blank flesh. The whole process had taken maybe a minute.

“Christ.”

Ebi replied with a wink, proud of her work. Then she set about affixing my arm to the bedframe; evidently, the tattoo required more precision than the suture job had.

Time for magic. I hesitated, staring at my arm, my magic-sense running along the lattice. I tried to reach for the Flame—jerked back before I made contact. Ai looked at me. “It has to be your thread.”

I knew that, but—a fear lay within me. That horrible animal perspective I had found in those moments of pain…I hated it. It was—frustrating, wrong. The voices—whatever they were—had agreed that it wasn’t how it should be; weaving was supposed to be better than the cruelty of pure blood magic. And yet I had been causing harm in just the same way, angry at my Flame. Were all of us? Even the Vaetna, those paragons I and so many others all but worshiped?

I had to give it voice, explain what I was feeling, and she felt like the right person—better than Sapphire, at least. I almost whispered.

“They made it look so easy.”

Her eyes searched my face. Did she get it? I went on hesitantly. This felt profane. “It hurts. Both ways.”

Her voice was as quiet as mine. “You’re like Hina-san.”

“I’m—what?”

“She hurts her Flame.”

I resented the comparison, having seen the hyena.

“It—I guess? But I don’t want to. I was desperate. I—don’t know any other way.” That horrible thought struck me again. “There…there is another way, right?”

That seemed to physically hit Ai. She struggled with something. Her lips squirmed, and she gave the impression that she was digging up bad memories. That was half an answer in itself; maybe I had misjudged why she was losing sleep. Eventually, she spoke.

“There is.”

“How?”

“Sacrifice,” Ebi broke in, now configuring the tattoo gun.

I looked at the machine-woman, some dark comprehension growing. “Sanguimancy?”

Ebi glanced at the Radiance for a long moment, then shook her head. Ai muttered darkly, almost angrily. Some of the exhaustion on her face came into her voice. “We’re not all Yuuka-chan, or Hina-san. There’s other choices.”

“What…are they?”

The question was difficult to force out. It implied a huge gap in my knowledge of magic, an aspect outside of the glyphcraft I knew so well—but just as essential.

“I’ll show you. Draw the thread, please.”

I was quiet for a long, long moment, dreading it. Then I took a deep breath—and pulled it from myself. My burn scars ignited as they had last time, and I winced, less at the discomfort I was feeling and more at the pain I now understood I was inflicting on the shard embedded in my soul. I hadn’t even realized how violent the act of pulling it out of me was. It was a stabbing, scratching sensation, flowing out from my chest and into my arm. I kept going, silently apologizing, resolving to find a better way now that I knew one existed. It said nothing this time.

This was still just raw flame, not thread. I clenched my fist and told it to tauten and extend. Each individual tongue of flame began to wrap around my arm, thinning out, merging together until it was a shaggy tangle of magic, chaotic but workable. It might have even been called fluffy, if it weren’t so sharp and almost thrashing. The blazing light danced in Ai’s eyes as she watched the form change.

“Good enough. Now watch carefully, please.”

Her hands began to gather the mass and spin it into fine thread that, before now, I had only ever seen through a camera. Her skein wasn’t so much bundled around her forearm as it was…already woven, a sort of glove, or maybe a gauntlet—an artful preparatory step that I had no idea how to even begin. I flashed back to yesterday’s stream, how Bri had prepared her own thread, and then to that moment in the car, my arm wreathed with flame. There was a connection there, but I had hardly even thought to examine that part of the process, nor had any of my resources covered it. My perspective had been so limited, so focused on the glyphs themselves. She brought her hand to my arm and tugged. I made a sound, a coughing gasp. It felt like she had pulled on my collarbones hard enough to bend them, a sharp ache of protesting bone. That pain passed quickly, and the sensation afterward wasn’t nearly as scorching as last time, more of a suffusing warmth.

Ai locked eyes with Ebi for a moment. Then they both began at once, the tattoo gun injecting glimmering ink into my skin as she unthreaded the old weave. As she did, she brought the new one into its place. With literal thread, this procedure was either difficult or impossible—but this was all sort of a metaphor for a magical and somewhat abstract process to begin with.

The process was patient and methodical, instead of the frenzied, bare seconds I had taken to throw together my own version. That time, the fraying twine had been actively burning me as it came apart in my hands, so speed had been of the essence. This time, with proper thread, there was no need to rush, and there was time to appreciate the moment and take in the details. I noticed her nails were painted—had Hina’s been? I couldn’t remember. Each nail was a different color—I realized it corresponded to her team. Pearly white, azure, verdant green, violet, dark green with red flecks. Cute.

There was also a small tattoo running along her right index finger and down the back of her hand, regularly demarcated. A ruler—a bit redundant and imprecise for a machinist who had access to real metrology equipment of mechanical, electronic, and magical varieties. Maybe it was symbolic—then I saw the lattice it bound. Rather, I didn’t quite see the lattice, but I knew it was there. That was some kind of measuring tool, maybe a caliper, bound to her body for easy access like she was binding my spear to mine. Her eyes followed mine.

“Bindings are easier for me than snapweaving.”

The rest of the world and the throbbing in my head fell away as I watched them work, Ai’s hands twisting and tugging and refining as she pulled. She was clearly in the zone herself, both the timid apologeticism and tough leadership forgotten. I wondered how long it would take me to be able to work the thread as she could. Was this how she had made Ebi, sitting next to a vacant chassis, losing hours weaving life into being that stretched into weeks, maybe months, until one day some last thread of the lattice was pulled into place and flame had crystallized into consciousness? To what extent were they linked? Ebi herself was precise as one would expect, imitating the shape of my old scar with the ink—it didn’t hurt, thanks to the anesthetic.

Ai was almost as close to me as Hina had been, but the energy was different. Where my encounter with Hina had been alien and unfamiliar, heart-poundingly intense, this procedure was a familiar setting. I had plenty of experience with this kind of contact from equally attractive surgeons and nurses in the months it had taken to recover function in my other arm, and had long since gotten over embarrassment in that context, by necessity. That’s not to say I didn’t find Ai attractive, but it was the kind of idle aesthetic appreciation I could compartmentalize as that of a caretaker, almost motherly; somebody I wanted to be friends with. And we had a connection in the form of our shared nature as flamebearers. Unfortunately—

“I can’t see what you’re doing differently. Um—something in how you’re pulling it?”

Was it something in the motion of her hand? The way she had prepared the spool? She was certainly more skilled than me—but it felt like she was looking for a deeper answer than that.

“Close. Do you know why it came from your hand?”

This was taking on the air of a lesson.

“Because—those are my burns from last time?”

That stopped her short, and she frowned at me.

“Last time?”

Ebi said something to her in Japanese, and her eyes widened. “You’re second contact. So it can happen. That—I’m sorry. Let’s start over. Why does hurting it work?”

“Because…it’s alive.”

That was fairly well-understood about the Flame. It wasn’t a being per se, but it was alive in some way, and living creatures tended to avoid pain—but she shook her head. “That’s the misconception. Why does blood magic work?”

“Sacrifice. Because—” my stomach dropped. “The magic seeks pain. So when we hurt it—”

It was so horribly obvious, framed like that. The conversation until now had felt profane; this was outright blasphemous, unholy. She nodded in a small way, looking down at the spool on her arm. “Pain is…food. Motivation. It loves to feel, and pain is strong—its own, or the bearer’s. It doesn’t actually care which, as far as I can tell.”

Blood magic wasn’t my area of expertise, but I understood the principle well enough. It had taken more of my foot than I had intended because the Flame—or some other force related to it—had decided that what I was asking the magic to do required more pain for equilibrium to be maintained.

“But—so there’s another option? You said you didn’t use sanguimancy.”

“The Flame likes pain because it’s—powerful. Red ripple is…yoku tsukaeru. Very usable.”

That it was. Pain was overwhelming, all-consuming. Nothing else mattered; it eclipsed all, and so in terms of ripple—how much something ‘matters’, magically speaking—it was powerful. Ai twisted one of her hands around her thumb, working a loop into the thread. She teased it until the tension was right, then went on.

“It doesn’t only like pain. What it really wants is ripple, and there’s more colors than red, and other kinds of red ripple anyway. We’re mahou shoujo, so we feed ours with good emotions. Trust, hope. Kindness. The desire to do good.”

I didn’t need translation to know she had said ‘magical girls’. I was seeing the downside, cynical as it was. “Weaker than pain.”

I had been saved once—twice now, actually, so I was a pretty decent case study there. The first time, my gratitude had been utterly drowned in the pain of my charred hand. The second time, the pain had prevented me from being able to experience gratitude in the moment, because I had literally passed out. She sighed.

“That’s the trade-off.”

Ebi cut in, looking bored with the conversation. “They’re supposed to only use good emotions.”

“Meaning?”

“Sometimes they make compromises to do what they have to. That’s what I meant by sacrifice.”

The robot let that hang. It wasn’t delivered with any acid, but Ai still seemed stung by the remark. I looked between the two, and while I was sure there was drama and history there, my thoughts were going further afield, grander in scale, to the basis of my obsession.

“But the Vaetna are so powerful. They can’t be—”

“I don’t know. It’s either pain, or whatever they do—doesn’t follow the rules. I’d like to think it’s the second one.”

Nightmarish. If they were performing blood magic, they sure didn’t show it—which meant they were instead hurting their flame, which was inconceivable, too horrible, a violation of what the Spire stood for, what I believed in. So I had to agree with Ai—but they had all but made the rules for how I understood magic, between glyphs and modern understanding of ripple. So if they were operating on different rules…she saw my turmoil.

“You’re second contact. You might also be breaking the rules. So—let’s go back to why it came from your hand. These are…inferno scars?”

“The very first day of the firestorms.”

“That would—your memories of that pain are probably a…lens, a focus. You already associate them with the Flame, so it’s drawn to manifest there. That’s just a guess, but…the Vaetna might be like that too, in some way.”

Elation rose in me. It was just a blind guess, because of how little we knew of them, but—“Are you saying I’m more powerful?”

It felt too good to be true. After all these years, I was actually special? Destined for more, somehow twice-flametouched or otherwise able to transcend the system Ai had laid out?

“Impossible to say, yet. We’ll benchmark you when you’re more recovered. But after that…maybe you should go to the Spire to learn from them, not stay at Toudai.”

“I want to. I always have. But the way Hina put it—I’m a prisoner.”

She sighed. “The others don’t think so. I think this is all going to become a mess. You’re safe here, but…Hina-san and Takehara-san want to recruit you. For different reasons, I think.”

She saw the naked worry on my face. “But…don’t they both…”

“Yes. They do. Hina-san is selfish, like I said. So is Takehara-san—Opal—in her own way. But they’re good people. They’re still mahou shoujo. Takehara-san more than any of us. You can trust her.”

We lapsed back into silence until they were done. I couldn’t bring up the fact that my Flame had spoken to me, or the implications thereof. I would, in time, but I was still reeling from it all. I was ashamed of how little I knew of what had come up in this conversation; for all my understanding of glyphcraft, of ripple, this aspect had hardly ever come up. The various VNT groups out there in the world seemed to play it close to their chest, which made me feel a little better for not knowing, but I felt I had been so blind.

In my flame-sense, I could feel the new portions of the lattice, crisp and taut, and where my old work remained, deemed good enough and perhaps kept in as a matter of sentimentality. Visually, the anchor had changed as well. The burn scar had been replaced by a shimmering tattoo, like a foil card. It was darker than my pale skin around it, making it stand out far more, brilliant as it caught the light. The word 'ripple’ rose to mind—I supposed that was appropriate. It stung, but it was mundane pain, and it faded as soon as Ebi applied some kind of cream. I imagined how much better my burns could have healed if that kind of medical technology was available seven years ago—then again, my foot was apparently beyond repair, and by all accounts it was basically the same kind of burn.

Despite not doing any of the work, I was exhausted, and both of them could see it. She still insisted I give it a try. I focused, pressed on the lattice—no pain, no gash, just the spear in my hand. I could feel the improved weave. I retracted the spear, the motion feeling more natural than ever. Was this how it felt for Heung?

I called and put it away a few more times. It was so much more responsive and elegant, and I was almost giddy with the lack of pain—it occurred to me that I should thank her. I looked up at Ai sheepishly, trying to hold the eye contact.

“Thank you.”

That was for the binding, and my foot, and the insight. I felt I didn’t deserve any of it.

“It’s good?”

“It is.”

She lit up. It was almost a transformation. She hadn’t literally mantled—but she looked so much better than before as she inspected her work. Despite the darkness of the conversation, she seemed lighter, healthier in some abstract way. In some way, she was being nourished by the act of helping me—is that what she had meant by using positive emotions to power her magic? Behind her eyes was a passion and a joy in magic that affirmed the sense of kinship I had felt with her.

She saw me off with thanks of her own, more apologies for the near-chin-floor incident, and a promise.

“If you want to stay—I still don’t think you should, but if you do—I’ll try to teach you how we do it. It doesn’t have to hurt.”

What did you say to that? I mumbled another thank-you, starting to be a little overwhelmed by the slightly unfamiliar social rituals.

“Um. Okay. Thanks. And thanks for the—foot, too? When that happens.”

She smiled. “No problem.”

Evidently satisfied with the end of the interaction, Ebi provided escape for me, carting me away. The journey back to my room was still mildly humiliating on principle, but we once again encountered nobody as we reached the elevator ride back to Ebi’s domain on the 18th floor. Besides, I was focused entirely inward, thinking about what had passed between us and the thing attached to my soul.

I knew for a fact Ai wasn’t a pacifist and was having trouble reconciling the experience I just had with the violence I knew Lighthouse traded in. That dissonance now loomed even larger in my mind when it came to the Vaetna. It had never bothered me before; they were just so much more, and very open about the way their violence intersected with their humanitarianism…but now I wasn’t so sure. If the greatest power lay in pain, and they were the undisputed most powerful magic-users in the world…I didn’t like the implications of that. At least it was gated behind several ‘if’s. If they even operated on the same rules the rest of us flamebearers did, if the sheer scale of their humanitarianism didn’t factor into their magic somehow…and so on.

With Lighthouse, on the other hand, I was certain that this leveraging of pain was part of how they operated, from Ai’s own mouth. It felt a little like their sunny public image was a mask—or at least, more aspirational than genuine, chasing the image of magical girls while trafficking in cruelty, not that I had much basis for knowing what the ‘true nature of magical girls’ should instead be. The impression was amplified by the physical features I kept noticing, absent in promotional material. But Ai seemed alright, on my wavelength. By the time the elevator came to a stop, I had recovered enough social energy to ask.

“About, uh, positive emotions, and what you said about compromises. Are they…real?”

“They’re trying.”

A rather enigmatic answer—but enough so that it felt honest, so perhaps it was the best she could have given. I was still uncertain, rattled by the encounter with Sapphire, mentally contrasting her with Ai again, danger against safety. I returned to those moments with the hyena once more, and a pattern dawned on me. She had told me three times in the space of five minutes that I should let Ai work on my binding. Had that been her way of showing she cared, knowing that this was what Ai needed? What I needed, even? Had she been expecting me to broach that topic, see the other perspective? I quietly readjusted my evaluation of the Sapphire Radiance. Perhaps I ought to trust Ai’s confidence in her character, such as it was.

I was tired, thoughts aswirl with doubts and uncertainties, but I always had energy for my friends. The chatroom was generally a zone where I could recharge and recover my social battery. I was also chattier here, among my longtime friends.

ezzen: Guess who just met Emerald. Sapphire, too.

starstar97: FUCK OFF

starstar97: im literally this close to buying tickets to tokyo

starstar97: i know where you live.

That threw me, just a bit. Did I live here now? Ebi chuckled, reading over my shoulder. I reflexively hid my phone for a moment before remembering that they evidently already knew about my online identity.

ezzen: Huh. I guess you do.

ezzen: Come visit!

starstar97: how dare you call my bluff

starstar97: no moneys oTL

starstar97: what are they like

“How much am I allowed to say?”

“Oh, everyone important already knows what Sapphire is like. Go nuts.”

“It won’t reach the tabloids?”

“Won’t it?” There was a smile in her voice.

ezzen: Sapphire scares me. She’s like Sahan levels of intense, but she moves like Hueng.

DendriteSpinner: Saph? Scary? Shes the cuddly one right

starstar97: you barely keep up with this stuff dendrite

starstar97: yeah shes the cuddly one

starstar97: but also famously the crazy one

ezzen: ty for confirming lol

ezzen: Emerald…

ezzen: Gets it? Hard to explain but

ezzen: She reminds me of Mayari maybe?

ezzen: She gave me a tattoo.

I looked at Ebi, the one who had actually wielded the tattoo gun. A robot of decidedly mysterious origins, supposedly Ai’s creation—indubitably a person, but outside of what science had understood to be possible. How had she come about? Actually, that was too…clinical, too focused on what she was rather than who she was. I ought to have some empathy, repay that which she and Ai had shown me. So—what was her life even like?

“Do you ever get out?”

She shrugged. “Legally, I don’t exist.”

I looked down at the chatroom on my phone, the social lifeline I had had for six and a half years of otherwise near-total isolation. I would have gone insane without it, probably. I raised my gaze to the empty halls and rooms of the 18th floor. Her situation, this barren domain devoid of companionship, was oddly nostalgic in a way that was more than a little painful. I felt obligated to offer it to her in turn, showing her the screen.

“Do you want to—join?”

She seemed genuinely confused by the question. “What, your chatroom?”

“Yeah. You’re sort of secret, right? You’ve got ‘forbidden secret project’ written all over you, and I’ve never seen you in any videos or anything.”

I gestured around the liminal space of the hallway for emphasis. She crossed her arms, mint-green chassis illuminated from above by the bluer light of her digital face frowning at me.

“You think I don’t have friends. This is pity. You’re pitying me.”

I blushed, having been mostly-correctly called out—empathy, not pity, though the difference could be pretty immaterial—but soldiered on. “Well…do you?”

“I have the Radiances.”

“And all the other staff? They’d figure out what’s up with you if you talked with them too much.”

“I am not permitted to address this line of questioning. Please consult with Radiance Emerald for further inquiries. Have a nice day.”

Her customer-service smile was sunny—no, solar, blinding. I was rather unmoved.

“Nice impression.”

“Thanks. No, I suppose I don’t really get out much. I mean, I’ve poked around on the forums, just like everybody else who works for Todai. But no.”

“So what do you do in your free time?”

That was an unusual question for someone like me to ask—but I was trying to figure out if she was an internet-creature like myself. That digital face made a smug smile.

“Online classes at the other Todai. Want to know how many degrees I have?”

“Humor me.”

“Working on my sixth.”

As someone who had effectively vanished from formal education after year nine and coasted through the remainder of secondary school with barely passing grades and minimum attendance—I couldn’t imagine that. I was a rather hard worker when it came to my own study of magic, but school simply hadn’t worked for me. I did some mental math in my head. Even with the most generous estimate of her age—

“Multiple, simultaneously?”

“Yep. Fake names, all that. So I keep busy enough.”

Too busy for friends, is what it sounded like to me. Maybe that was a little hypocritical, but even I had more social connections, if only online. She seemed content with what she had. That was disappointing, in a weird way, and we fell silent as we returned to the room I had woken up in. Attempt failed.

She deposited me, gave my IV and vitals a once over, and walked—almost a glide—back toward the door.

“Going to get you lunch and do my rounds. See that spray bottle?”

“Yeah. Disinfectant?”

My wound was probably due for a cleaning, if it was healing anything like my arm’s burns had. Ebi shook her head.

“Water. Spritz Hina if she shows up while I’m gone.”

“That works?”

“Well enough.”

She turned to leave the room, and I wanted to call out, to make one last push for connection with someone who I could almost consider a friend in this new place—but the words didn’t make it to my lips. I just lay there as she left, ashamed at the failed invitation. I had never been good at making friends, and it seemed I wasn’t about to start now, for all I felt I had forged some small connection with Ai earlier.

Alone, in that desolate room on that desolate floor. Maybe Ebi could bear it, but for me, it called forth the loneliness unearthed by my encounter with Sapphire. I had thought I had made peace with my lifestyle—but one crumb of interaction, a handful of face-to-face conversations with pretty girls and mysterious robots, and suddenly I hated being alone again. If Hina had shown up then, I might have just let her do what she wanted, if only for someone to talk to and feel close against my body, damn the spray bottle or the danger. But she didn’t, which was equal parts relieving and disappointing. What complicated emotions she inspired in me.

Thanks to her and Ai and Ebi, maybe things would be different from now on, however long I stayed here. But for now, at this moment? More of the same, just me and an empty room. I sighed. Well, even if ‘Dalton’ was perennially secluded—today’s events excepted—‘Ezzen’ never was. I sighed, reaching for my social lifeline once again. It really was a shame Ebi didn’t want to join. I rather felt she’d belong.

So imagine my surprise when the first thing I saw upon opening the chatroom was:

ebi-furai: o/