Chapter 4: From On High // 1.04

How had Ebi gained access? I hadn’t invited her—it followed that she had either brute-forced her way in, a classic ‘superintelligent AI’ trope that may or may not apply here…or the simpler explanation: she had already had access, a perpetual lurker. But in that case—invited by whom? Skychicken himself? He had implied Hina had been his contact, not her. Ebi was still a plausible enough connection between him and Todai—but if so, why was she hiding it?

starstar97: whoa

starstar97: new person

starstar97: who invited them

It wouldn’t do to let on that I really had no idea how she had gotten in—I wanted her to be here anyway, so I rolled with it.

ezzen: Me, they work for Todai.

ebi-furai: greetings!

DendriteSpinner: hey, ez making friends, nice

starstar97: NO WAY

Star was the first to put together the obvious.

starstar97: so they know youre you?

ezzen: Yeah.

ezzen: They seem chill about it so far?

ebi-furai: we’re trying to be

ebi-furai: some of the staff in the know are freaking out

She was using an all-lowercase style like Star and Moth, unlike the technically correct capitalisation and punctuation I generally preferred, a holdover from starting out on the forums.

starstar97: yo youre recognized

starstar97: thats a good thing isnt it

ezzen: Hope so!

ezzen: Not sure I can be more of a target really.

ezzen: Ok, I’d be remiss to not give ebi (capitalization?) the chance to ingratiate themself, but first:

ezzen: I’ve been disconnected from the news cycle for like

ezzen: 18 hours? Probably a personal record.

ezzen: So catch me up.

ezzen: Sapphire told me the Spire is at war again?

starstar97: npnp

starstar97: dermis got all ridgey again this morning so it sure looks like it

starstar97: did you hear about the other flamefalls

starstar97: its related

ezzen: nope

ezzen: Just that they happened. Short version?

DendriteSpinner: spire’s saying they’re the other shards that split from yours on heung’s intercept

starstar97: one inferno in poland. kat dealt with it

starstar97: one confirmed in america, ofc pctf got that one

starstar97: last was weird, went back to the trajectory from before it switched. actual splashdown is on one of the oil rigs in the gulf

ezzen: oh shit

Oh shit.

DendriteSpinner: yeah. and ofc spire caged the whole area, peacies didn’t like that, etc

DendriteSpinner: so stalemate, war

starstar97: dubai moment

ezzen: Dubai moment. ffs

ebi-furai: not as ugly as dubai yet, fwiw

ebi-furai: its firmly pctf territory and its just one flamefall

starstar97: oh yeah for sure. could be more of a clusterfuck in a lot of ways

starstar97: i think that just about covers it

starstar97: nobody has any fucking clue what was with your flamefall

starstar97: west-east? wtf

ezzen: Trust me it’s been on my mind

ezzen: Will post about it tonight probably.

ezzen: Ok, good enough for now, ty guys.

ezzen: Make Ebi feel welcome.

DendriteSpinner: welcome!

DendriteSpinner: do you feel welcome

ebi-furai: i think so!

starstar97: todai person huh

starstar97: fav radiance?

ebi-furai: emerald

starstar97: hell yeah

ebi-furai: i work with her though so im biased

DendriteSpinner: youre an engineer?

ebi-furai: medical, actually, amethyst stuff

ebi-furai: i do help with engineering stuff too though

ezzen: They’ve basically been my nurse.

It was better to be vague about her gender in the chat unless she volunteered that information.

starstar97: 灯台ファイト

ebi-furai: 日本人だから灯台好きなわけだわww

starstar97: whoa

starstar97: sorry my japanese isnt that good

skychicken: english only in the chat please

ebi-furai: sorry

ebi-furai: im japanese, so ofc im a lighthouse fan

starstar97: :DDDD

Her body returned with a tray of various dishes on a cart.

“Did I come off as a bit know-it-all with the Dubai comment?”

It took me a moment to associate the chatroom name with the robot in front of me. On top of the fact that she had joined of her own volition—via still-mysterious means—it did seem that she genuinely wanted to fit in. It warmed my heart.

“Uh, I think you’re fine.” Couldn’t be worse than Dendrite. “If you screw up some etiquette, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks.”

She passed the tray over to my lap, adjusting my bed to help me sit up. A decidedly Japanese spread: rice, miso soup, tea, some anonymous fried bits, a small salad, something that seemed to be pickles, and…

“A milkshake?”

“Fortified. The sugar covers up some of the more…chemical flavors. It’s good for you, I promise.”

Huh. It had been a long time since I’d had a milkshake—or any of this, really. Japanese food was a Dalton-thing, not an Ezzen-thing, a relic of a time from when Dad had been al—around.

Those dark thoughts aside, I noted a problem with the provided utensils—rather, the conspicuous lack thereof.

“Um. Can I have a spoon?”

Ebi grinned. With a flourish, she drew something from nowhere, a sleight of hand that was definitely masking some kind of glyph activation, a pocketspace trick like Heung’s spear. She handed me a pair of chopsticks connected by a piece of plastic. The design bore some grooved extrusions to guide where my fingers were supposed to go. I sighed at the utensil; they were assuming I was a dumb foreigner who didn’t know how to use them. They were half-right.

“Oh, I—I know how, but never bothered to relearn with my…”

I indicated my burned hand. Dad had insisted I learn from a young age, but it was another thing that had been taken from me that day. It had taken me about a year to relearn how to hold a pen, and I had never had an incentive or desire to go back to chopsticks. Ebi shrugged.

“I could get you a spoon if you want. Humor us.”

I got the message—they wanted me to acclimate. I sighed inwardly and accepted the utensil, giving it a closer inspection. Even to my limited appreciation of mundane engineering, the chopsticks were impressive, printed as a single part. A compliant mechanism linked the sticks rather than some kind of hinge or bearing, stylized as Todai’s symbol, a triangle with lines radiating out from the tip—a rather unnecessary bit of design flair. The grooves fit my hand perfectly, comfortable as could be given the somewhat limited range of motion in my palm. The attention to detail was ornate, maybe excessive.

“Did Ai make this?”

“Just now.”

Dang. I snapped a photo of the training chopsticks.

ezzen: Check out what Emerald made for me.

starstar97: this is harassment!

skychicken: timezones say it’s lunchtime for you right?

ezzen: Yep.

I showed them the meal and began to eat. Even with the custom, ergonomic utensil, it took me a few tries to pick up one of the mysterious fried bits and maneuver it into my mouth. It was dense, surprisingly hard to bite through.

“I have no idea what this is.”

“Renkon. Lotus root.”

skychicken: hey that looks pretty good for hospital food

I fell into a rhythm as I began to realize how hungry I was. A bite of fried something, a sip of tea, some rice, a little soup, repeat. It was a rather simple arrangement, not many strong flavors other than salt and the oiliness of the breading, but that absence seemed to accentuate each element. The rice became a welcome respite from the saltiness instead of bland carbohydrate filler. The crunch of the breading balanced with the earthiness of the tea. The most intense flavor was the pickles, which had an acidic bite that fully reset the more rich flavors of the fried food. The milkshake felt out of place—I elected to save it for dessert.

ezzen: It’s okay.

I didn’t want to vocalize my commentary. Dad had taught me about this sort of arrangement, the balance of rice and soup and tea, fat and acid, and its return reminded me of his absence. One of the reasons I had hardly left my room in years was fear of this feeling, this awful nostalgia for a childhood that had been burned away, brought to the surface by so many little things. I wanted to go home—where? The house in Philadelphia? Ashes. My apartment? No going back. It was here or the Spire.

The chatroom scrolled on, not privy to the trauma.

starstar97: it should have been me

starstar97: it should have been me!

starstar97: you better go to all the fuckin restaurants

DendriteSpinner: tourism by proxy

I wasn’t particularly keen on that at the moment, given the bad vibes the meal had dredged up for me. I distracted myself with a question; I had stalled enough about this anyway.

“How did you join?”

“Wow, you really screwed that up. It’s pronounced gochisousama deshita.”

“What?”

“‘Thanks for the food’.”

I sighed. “Thanks for the food. How did you join the chatroom? I didn’t invite you.”

“Secret robot magic.”

I slurped my soup, unimpressed with the non-answer. “Is that magic magic, or do you mean you just hacked your way in?”

“Does it matter?”

“I…suppose not? Academic interest?”

“Not relevant to your recovery, and details about me are classified until you join up.”

Prickly.

ezzen: I’ll think about it.

ezzen: There’s a lot of uhhhh…culture shock going on right now.

ezzen: It’s sort of crazy I’m here, you know? I don’t even speak the language.

“You’ll learn if you stay. The Radiances are too busy to really teach you that part, but we keep in touch with a few schools. Lots of grad students and so on.”

I thought about Sapphire’s offer again, the words both she and Sky had used. I mattered, allegedly, and that meant Todai was willing to throw support at me. Divorced from the fear of being hunted, that was exciting—if undercut somewhat by my general bedridden-ness at the moment and the questionable status of my freedom. I sipped the milkshake. It was topped with a cherry and had swirls in it that tasted fruity, though I couldn’t quite place it. Melon?

“Ai said two weeks for my foot, right?”

Ai’s name and the pronoun ‘I’ were starting to get confusing. How did the honorifics work? Ai-san?

“Two weeks of design, and then probably another week of testing and iteration with your input. But she’s been working on a stopgap solution since midnight. That’ll be done in…a few more hours.”

I checked my phone. It was only about 1 PM, but that still meant—yeah, she didn’t get much sleep. Ebi caught the silent question.

“They’ve all got their vices.”

Another person might not call sleep deprivation a “vice”, but I understood—the passion, losing yourself in tinkering and math until suddenly you realized the sun was starting to come up and you hadn’t eaten in fourteen hours. There were worse vices to have; Ai and I were the same kind of person, and I’d be glad to see her actual design process.

“I’d love to see the diagram.”

“For the temporary one?”

“Yeah.”

“She’ll show you.”

We lapsed back into silence for a while as I finished the milkshake. I wanted to get back on my feet, move around a bit.

“Will I actually be allowed to leave the premises? Once I can walk.”

“Are you going to bolt straight for the Gate?”

I didn’t know. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? You’d catch me anyway.”

She rolled her eyes, a rather exaggerated motion on the digital display that was her face. “Please. The foot is a show of good faith. If you really wanted to go, we wouldn’t stop you.”

So was I a prisoner or not? I was picking up on some misalignment between Hina and the others, in terms of goals—but I wasn’t about to ask that to her face again. I decided to trust in Ai, for the time being, and pray that Sapphire didn’t show up again.

I finished my shake, quietly admiring Ebi as a work of engineering and magic in between watching the chatroom scroll and generally catching up. She was ostensibly naked, for one, covered only in mint-green paneling—carbon fiber? Hard to say—ensheathing a narrow and short frame. Aside from the face, her build was androgynous. She was no busty anime nurse, no curve to her chest or particular wideness of the hips—I averted my gaze nonetheless, reddening. She might not have any visible bits, but surely that qualified as ogling.

She sighed. “Oh, look all you want. I’d wear clothes if I cared.”

I shyly resumed my inspection. The paneling was segmented at joints and along the torso, a fairly standard arrangement of components for the humanoid robots of the day—but she didn’t move like a robot, even a magical one. I wondered again how she was made—but that was clearly a no-go topic, and I was entirely too shy to make a comment, even a neutral one. I settled for looking up one of the Japanese-made models that at least superficially resembled her chassis, angling my phone toward her.

“You’re so much more—fluid than anything I’ve seen before.”

“Thanks.”

She brought up her arm to demonstrate the range of motion. The paneling on her chest moved in an echo of her arm, implying a much more complex and organic arrangement than a simple set of servos embedded in her shoulder joint. There was something odd in the movement aside from that—she wasn’t adjusting the rest of her body to counterbalance, even with the arm fully extended. That weightlessness inspired fascination—and a pang of jealousy, a reminder of what had drawn me to the Vaetna outside of pure love for magic. If I pointed a ripple indicator at her, I bet she’d be a blue-green to match her carapace.

Eventually, I worked up the courage to ask to go further, despite some discomfort with the intimacy of the inspection. She was just so interesting.

“Can—may I see your back?”

I had gotten a glimpse earlier, but as she turned around—that was much more sophisticated. Some of her panels were layered over each other, and she had what were obviously shoulder blades. Her spine was visible as well, a chain of segments embedded into each slice of her midsection and back, a clear imitation of the human form. Now that she was facing away from me, my eyes dared to venture past her neck and inspect her head. It was simple and boxy, dark-grey and smaller than a human cranium, although the neck continued the complexity and flexibility of her spine. No ears or hair to speak of; the only real features aside from the curved front-panel of her face were various stickers and labels indicating cable connection points—and a mark on the back of her head that looked hand-painted. I leaned in for a closer look—she knew what I was looking at and took a few steps backward toward me.

“The characters for my name.”

海老. It was pretty, insofar as I had opinions on these things. I pulled out my phone to google ‘ebi’, confirming the word matched the characters.

“Shrimp?”

“Yep.”

“…Why?”

“Why ‘Ezzen’?”

I figured she knew why; I’d answered the question on the forums countless times. This was the first time I had done so out loud, though, and it took me a moment to order my thoughts.

“It’s the spinal—a super-shorthand of the spinal mesh for {MANIFEST}. E—fork, two Z-axis transitions, fork again, and N is sub-1 from the last Z.”

“Vaetna-phile.”

I didn’t blink at the label; it was accurate. {MANIFEST} was arguably the most important glyph in the entire lexicon to the Vaetna, being the fundamental bit of magic behind the Spire’s dermis and, by extension, their carapace. I supposed it applied to the Radiances just as much, although they had come later and were inherently lesser.

“And you?”

She pointed at the kanji on her cranium—CPU?—again before turning back to me. “That’s your hint.”

Hint? I went back to my phone, going down a small rabbit hole of kanji details for a minute. I didn’t get it—the characters meant ‘sea’ and ‘old’, and I wasn’t sure how either was relevant to her.

“Are the riddles really necessary?”

“It’s a hint, not a riddle.”

“We already established I don’t speak the language.”

She waved a hand lazily. “Eh. You’ll get it eventually.” With that vague foreshadowing, she came over and took the tray of food from my lap. “Going to put these away, and then I’ll be gone for a couple hours. Need anything before I go? Pain okay?”

“Foot’s fine…is it just you up here? Other nurses?”

“What, want to get rid of me already?”

“Er—no, I just meant—”

“Well, it is. Just me, I mean. I’m the doctor.”

I blinked. “You are?”

“I am.”

She hadn’t corrected my earlier misconception that she was my nurse. Maybe she didn’t want to give too much away to the chatroom—which might have been telling, were I inclined to tease apart the possible reasons for those subtleties. I had enough on my plate as it was.

“And you…take care of Amethyst? No support staff?”

That bothered me a bit, since what I knew of Amethyst’s injuries were quite a bit more extensive than even the third-degree burns my hand had suffered. For the duration of my last extended hospital stay, I had had no less than four nurses on rotation in addition to a pair of doctors, and I would have expected something equivalent and relatively full-time care for her. Then again, Ebi probably didn’t have to sleep.

“Well, it’s me and Ai’s tech. Been good enough so far.”

I didn’t pry further than that. I looked around the bed, checking to see if there was anything else I wanted or needed for the moment. “Er—I don’t suppose you’ve got my backpack?”

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If it had been in the car with me, Sapphire had hopefully recovered it along with my person.

“Oh, we do, actually. It’s upstairs—what do you need?”

“Just my laptop. Maybe my notebooks, too—”

Oh, shit. I broke out in a sweat. They had almost certainly looked through my notebooks, and that was the exact kind of nightmare scenario behind putting a full-wipe protocol on my PC; there was some potentially sensitive and dangerous stuff in those that had gone unpublished. She saw my reaction both visually and in my vitals, shaking her head.

“We’re being respectful of your privacy, relax. Give me a few minutes.”

She left to get my bag, clicky footsteps reminiscent of high heels retreating down the hall. What a fascinating machine—and person, I supposed. At least she had an excuse for being mysterious—but I really ought to learn more about the Radiances themselves. I had a somewhat-embarrassing gap in my knowledge when it came to them and other second-tier VNT groups; until now, my focus had been almost exclusively on the Vaetna. I pulled out my phone.

My first stop was Wikipedia, for a brief history of the organization as a whole. They had an underground period before the donation of flame four years ago in 2018 that had propelled them to their current status; the building I was currently in was directly linked to that sequence of events, having been wrecked in their last major incident from that time. Amethyst and Heliotrope had joined the original three during that too. It was all rather interconnected, and after skimming their page for the broad timeline, I started to go through their individual pages, following links down the rabbit hole.

—

I was interrupted by Ebi’s return—half an hour later.

“Sorry. Amethyst had a thing.”

Well, I wasn’t going to hold that against her. She deposited the backpack on my bed and extracted the laptop, handing it to me gingerly. Shifting around to accept it and orient it on my lap aggravated my foot somewhat, and I winced.

“Ow. Painkillers up, please?”

For all my habitual shyness and being out of practice with talking to people in general, that at least was a familiar refrain from seven years ago. Ebi didn’t visibly do anything, but after a moment, sweet relief washed away the sting. A factoid I had discovered during my research sprang to mind.

“That’s probably something anchored on {NULL}, isn’t it. No opioids in Japan.”

“You catch on quick.”

I mulled that over. The glyph was stopping all sensation from about halfway down my shin; it would be even harder to walk with the prosthetic while it was active, as though I had lost my entire foot rather than just the toes. Poor Amethyst—although surely her prosthetics had much more nuanced senses and analgomancy.

“Thank you.”

“It’s what I’m for. Anything else?”

“I’m good—oh. What’s the wifi password?”

I should have asked sooner—my phone plan was probably charging an unholy amount for what I had already done on it today. It had slipped my mind until I had needed it for the laptop, since I was so unused to being out of the house.

“On Todai-Guest? ‘5ignition’, all lowercase, with the numeral.”

“Thanks. Er…that’s all, I think.”

She nodded. “Going back to Amethyst. Press the button if you need me—or message me, I suppose.”

“She alright?”

That was the sort of prying I had tried to avoid earlier—it had just slipped out. Ebi didn’t seem to mind, though. She actually grinned.

“As much as she ever is. She just wants to clean up a bit before meeting you.”

That was—flattering and unfamiliar. I was vaguely upset at the way it made me blush.

“Really?”

“She’s a big fan of yours, actually. Alright, back in…let’s say two hours.”

And she left me to chew on that. It made a fair amount of sense that I, an LM expert—albeit a theoretical one—would have a fan in the most prominent non-Vaetna LM user in the world. But I would have figured that she, as a flamebearer, would have been ahead of me on that; I only considered myself a hobbyist, someone interested in glyphcraft as an academic exercise and as a proxy for my interest in the Spire and the Vaetna. Perhaps I had misjudged that.

I greeted my friends again from my laptop and resumed my research. I was about ten minutes into an hour-long video of Todai’s overall timeline—at 2x speed, of course—when I thought I found a lead on one of the things that had been bugging me. I reached out to Star.

[Direct Message] ezzen: Hey

ezzen: So I’m watching https://youtu.be/S_XJYBx9WcL

ezzen: And something about Keisuke Akiyama is sticking out to me.

starstar97: hey i helped on that one

starstar97: shoot

ezzen: Uh. Can you keep a secret?

starstar97: ooh

starstar97: is the secret about you or lighthouse

ezzen: Lighthouse. And it’s a bit sensitive, apparently.

starstar97: i wont spill but i cant promise i wont have severe brainworms

Such was Star when it came to Todai.

ezzen: Okay so

ezzen: Sapphire told me Lighthouse used to have male members

starstar97: WHAT

starstar97: saj;lskdjfskl;da

starstar97: trans radiances… the theory lives… vindication…

starstar97: is what id LIKE to say, but say your bit first

ezzen: Yeah that’s where I’m going with it.

ezzen: Let me lay it out.

ezzen: So, from the video: Keisuke Akiyama gets flametouched. He gets in contact with Mr. Tanaka, and agrees to donate his flame to a good cause. The Lighthouse girls basically fall into their lap after they’ve recovered Amethyst and are an obvious choice to build a VNT group around. This leads to Todai’s official founding. Is that right so far?

starstar97: just about

starstar97: are you going to say akiyama is one of the radiances pre-transition

ezzen: My thunder, stolen!

ezzen: It’s just really convenient, isn’t it?

starstar97: :P

starstar97: not a new theory

starstar97: but the consensus is that its probably a pseudonym for an actual person, not a deadname for one of them

starstar97: because if hes one of the five then where did the extra flame come from yknow

starstar97: and theres the magical complication

What she meant was that precise body modification magic was a bit of a white whale. Biomancy was a fledgeling field of magic compared to spatial or energy manipulation, because the Vaetna hadn’t seen fit to create many specifically applicable glyphs. They had always declined to comment on their rationale, but it was easy to see how extensive biological modification would be a difficult cat to put back in the bag, a slippery slope to eugenics in a world where the majority of magical access was already under the thumb of politicians and billionaires. Involuntary transformations did happen to some flamebearers, but those weren't glyph magic; a complete roll of the dice when it came to ripple residuals, along the lines of super magic cancer or turning you into a crab or other such strange and incomprehensible tricks of the Flame. Not exactly gender-affirming care for most people.

That didn't discourage me and several others from regularly returning to the problem, motivated by both the challenge and the feeling that if we figured something out, our findings could have some truly positive direct impact on people’s lives—not least for Star herself. But at this point, the problem was pretty much entirely academic; we had collectively concluded that changing one’s biological sex with magic to a degree superior to hormones and surgery was functionally impossible. We just didn't have the right toolbox of glyphs.

The point was that Star and I both understood that it was extremely unlikely that Lighthouse had cracked that puzzle four years ago. If they had, surely they would have disseminated the glyph chains and procedures used. That was just the decent thing to do.

ezzen: Figured as much.

ezzen: So no trans Radiances :\

starstar97: well thats such a compelling nugget i dont want to just kill the theory

starstar97: can i ask what saph’s exact words were

ezzen: Uh

ezzen: I guess it was a bit roundabout?

ezzen: “You wouldn’t be the first [male Radiance]”, iirc

starstar97: yeah huh not a lot of ambiguity on that

starstar97: damn thats going to be my personal fuckin chew toy for a while

starstar97: i wish to gods they were trans but its totally just wishful thinking right

starstar97: bone structure n shit -.-

I agreed; Hina’s physique ruled her out. Opal and Heliotrope, too, if I was correctly remembering the pictures I had looked up earlier. The remaining two were maybe plausible—it felt wrong to theorize, both in the sense of imagining them naked and in that it was too personal now that I was coming face-to-face with them.

ezzen: Mhm

ezzen: So, other ideas?

starstar97: mm putting aside the trans thing for now

starstar97: i have two ideas

starstar97: first, its possible akiyama was originally going to just be part of the team and it didnt pan out

starstar97: dude did basically vanish after the donation (which supports the pseudonym thing)

ezzen: (notes)

ezzen: I could poke around about that.

starstar97: second: in december 2019 there were rumors that they were thinking about starting a second team, all male

starstar97: but that never went anywhere, partially because of concerns about popularity (classic idol group stuff)

I had just gotten to that part of the video, still playing picture-in-picture while we chatted.

ezzen: and because of blue spark right

starstar97: yeah it woulda killed the project in its infancy, if there was one, because of how todai messed up there

starstar97: imo it wasnt their fault

starstar97: but they need actual permits and stuff with the japanese government to be licensed flamebearers and there was no chance in hell that theyd actually get a whole new team in wake of that

starstar97: so yeah those are my ideas

starstar97: thats such a WEIRD thing for her to say

starstar97: sorta insensitive of her to say it that way if one of them IS trans though yknow

ezzen: I had the same thought.

She did seem to just be direct by nature.

starstar97: but ill dig a bit cause damn thats such ammo for the theory

starstar97: btw theres been a couple threads recently about what happened with you, you should take a look at those and maybe shoot down the really stupid stuff

We derailed into talking about those for a while, and unfortunately I never quite returned to fact-digging and timeline-checking after that. I wound up just watching Vaetna videos and chatting with my friends. I jumped when I realized Ebi was sort of looming behind my laptop screen.

“How—Jesus. How long have you been there?”

“Only about a minute.”

I needed a moment to catch my breath. Damn, I had wasted—almost two hours. It hadn’t been entirely fruitless, but ADHD had largely gotten the better of me once I had mentally categorized researching Todai as ‘work’. Nothing for it.

“Foot’s ready?”

“Yep. She actually already had it done, just obsessively tweaking it.” She harrumphed. “No point in that, really. She’s not going to be happy with it either way.”

That sounded familiar; I remembered countless hours drawing glyphs to solve logic puzzles and repeatedly finding better ways to optimize, sometimes until I had well undercut the ripple of the intended solution. Often I still ended the night—or morning, as was often the case—frustrated that I couldn’t find ways to push it further. Kindred spirits, although she was actually working in a lab instead of notation. Would she let me join her on those late-night projects, eventually? That sort of thing was a compelling reason to stay here, everything else notwithstanding. Like the karaoke fantasy from before, my imagination spun the image of the two of us bathed in monitor light, arguing about ripple management and the least-order principle over a GWalk diagram, applying our knowledge to real problems. We’d work into the night and we’d be aglow with pride in our work despite our exhaustion and at last I wouldn’t be alone—

I sighed. What an embarrassing tangent.

“Let’s—let’s go.”

To her credit, if Ebi saw what had just happened to my heart rate, she didn’t comment on it this time. She wheeled me out of the room and through the halls once more. First the emptiness of the 18th floor—I was glad to reach the elevator and return to the more populated halls of the basement, busier than before with the comings and goings of Ai’s underlings and other staff. I was recognized by an American, maybe a couple years my elder.

“Hey, you’re—uh, Dalton.”

That was delivered with a poorly executed wink. It seemed that my identity as Ezzen was a secret-in-name-only among Ai’s crew—but at least they didn’t seem to know I was that flametouched from Bristol, yet. They’d probably be treating me differently.

“Um. Yeah. Hello.”

In-person celebrity was not at all something I was experienced in, and it was horribly awkward. Ebi wasn’t about to bail me out, either, having adopted her android-persona, blandly smiling at the technician. It was deeply uncomfortable, maybe even creepy, to see her so docile and straight-backed, even after only a few hours of knowing her. She looked like she belonged in a maid uniform. I tried to treat the interaction as a warm-up for meeting Amethyst later.

“I’m on one of the teams working on your foot.” He stuck out a hand—glanced at the burns on my arm, thought better of it, switched hands. “Kyle.”

I shook it. “Thanks. For the foot. Anything interesting?”

Should I have introduced myself? He already knew it. Too late, either way.

“Not yet. Only so much you can do with half of a foot, y’know? We were sort of hoping you had ideas, actually.”

I had given it essentially zero thought, but I felt lame with nothing to offer—it was my foot, for Christ’s sake. I said the first thing that came to mind.

“Um—a booster?”

He stroked his stubble.

“What, like Peacie exos?”

“I guess?” I had actually been thinking of Heung’s carapace, but it was easier to just let him think whatever.

“Ah, gotcha.”

The technician—oh no, I had already forgotten his name—typed something into his phone.

“Tricky with one foot, but…we’ll see what we can do.” Then he looked around and lowered his voice. “Got a minute? The rest of the team would love to meet with you.”

“Mr. Colliot is being taken to the Prostheses Fitting Room for a meeting with Radiance Emerald.”

“Oh, fair, fair. I won’t keep you, then. Tell Ms. Matsumoto I said hi! See you around.”

He hurried past us down the hall. My phone buzzed.

[Direct Message] ebi-furai: (≧▽≦)

ebi-furai: a BOOSTER

I looked up at her. Her face remained impassive. Mine did not, invaded by a blush as I grumbled.

“I know, I know, IknowIknowIknow…”

ebi-furai: its fine

ebi-furai: you can talk over features with ai if you want

ebi-furai: but if you dont have ideas dont sweat it

As we proceeded down the corridor, an announcement came on the PA. A voice that was unmistakably Hina’s blared through the halls, husky and peppy, ending on a laugh that abruptly cut off. Ebi’s stride accelerated.

“Do I want to know?”

ebi-furai: its what it sounded like. shes on the prowl

Might as well reply in kind.

ezzen: For…me?

ebi-furai: afraid so

Oh, fantastic. I was being hunted. What had happened to Todai being safe? A new voice came on the PA, more apologetic.

ebi-furai: thats opal: ‘Terribly sorry for the ruckus, please forgive any inconvenience’

ebi-furai: shes going to take out some frustration on sapphire, if i had to guess

ezzen: Why?

ebi-furai: shes not very happy about the first impression sapphire made on you

That was—sort of a relief, actually. Hina had sort of primed me to expect nastiness from the remaining three Radiances, for all Ai seemed much more my speed. My—depressingly limited—research had somewhat restored my confidence in them, but it was nice to have some firsthand demonstration of their character.

ezzen: And they’re FIGHTING?

ebi-furai: its more like…tag

ebi-furai: theyre just roughhousing. you know the vaetna do this too

“The Vaetna keep it in the upper Spire.” I didn’t much fancy being caught in the crossfire.

This hallway was empty now, so she spoke out loud. “It’s also an exercise in minimizing collateral damage. You’re not in danger, just a convenient target for her.”

“Why’s she so…after me?” I resisted the urge to say ‘into me’; that was wishful thinking for sure.

“Beats me. Sorry for leaving you with her. Didn’t have much choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“She kicked me out.”

“Out of the room?”

Ebi waggled her virtual eyebrows, which I took to be a no. That meant—

“Out of…3-space? Are you 4-brane all the way through? I saw your hands, but—”

She’d have been chewed up like one of us three-dimensional meat-beings if she wasn’t built for that. Of course, all the Radiances were able to shunt their bodies out of 3-space when they transformed, but exactly how remained a secret known only to them. Part of me wanted to join just so they’d show me how—my animal fear of Hina put a stop to that.

“I am, but not all of it is modular.”

That was fascinating to me. I wondered again what she would look like in the eyes of a Vaetna, who could perceive her full form at once. Some kind of Vitruvian arrangement of all her configurations?

“And that’s all Ai’s weave?”

“Sure is.” Oddly, she didn’t sound very pleased about that, almost sighing in her synthetic voice.

I itched to pursue the topic further, but I knew I wouldn’t get a straight answer about how exactly she had been made or how that related to Ai’s broader philosophy on her flame. I had gotten some clarity from my research about how exactly Ai had wound up with her specialty in robotics and prosthetics, but the organization had seemingly remained quite tight-lipped about the details of their magic, and of course Ebi seemed to not exist at all in the public eye. I put it aside for now, thinking over my conversation with Star, potential secrets.

“What did Hina mean that there were male Radiances?”

“Did—she said that?” There was genuine surprise in the robot’s voice.

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

Her poker face was impeccable.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Um—huh.”

I hadn’t been expecting that. Of course, she could just be lying to me, which did sort of seem like something she’d do if any of the theories held water—but she had sounded truly surprised.

“Well, she did. I’m trying to figure out what she meant.”

“It might have been before my time. I don’t have perfect access to records, you know.”

“You’re their doctor.”

At least that was soft-confirmation that she had been made post-founding, not that that came as much of a surprise.

“A lot of the stuff around the founding is classified, even to me. You know how idol groups take protecting their members fairly seriously?”

“I don’t, really, but go on.”

“It’s that, multiplied by the fact that Lighthouse is paramilitary. Infosec against VNT groups is hard with the ripple in play, so their time underground before the official founding is pretty locked down, although of course there’s only so much that can be done. It’s digital and magical—I know of at least two spots in the database where they tell you in big bold letters that ‘UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO THIS DOCUMENT WILL TRIGGER:’ and then a long list of stuff that scrambles the hell out of your device and your brain.”

Yikes.

“So…anything about hypothetical male members would be behind that same level of security.”

Especially if something had gone wrong.

“Mhm. Above both of our paygrades. It’d be easier to ask Ai directly.”

Good timing; we had arrived once again at the doorway to Ai’s workshop. Actually, we were across the hall. She met us at the door, giving Ebi another big hug, speaking to me with her face smushed against the carbon fiber plates. The robot hugged her back.

“I have something for you to try.”

No greeting, again. “Lead the way.”

This was a custom medical bay, one I recognized from a few videos. There was some fairly standard medical equipment scattered around, scanners and an IV unit and such—and some things that were more obviously custom-designed for Amethyst’s physical condition. Most prominently, from the ceiling hung a number of tentacular soft-robotics appendages, to help maneuver her into place inside the intricate circle of glyphs on the floor below it. This was one of the few places in the facility she couldn’t mantle without disrupting the existing glyphs and weave.

“This is where Amethyst gets her prosthetics fitted, right?”

In hindsight, if the 18th floor was ostensibly the medical zone, it was odd that this particular room was down here. Maybe proximity to Ai’s workshop was valuable.

“Yes. Into the field, please, Ebi-tan.”

Oh no, tentacles?

Ebi just pushed my bed into the circle, the air within glowing a faint green. My at-a-glance reading and context told me that this was a mix of more specialized analgesics—analgomancy, technically—and some corrective forces to help the subject balance. She didn’t enter it herself, though—she actually used a long stick to get me partway in before some motive glyphs kicked in to guide me the rest of the way. I guessed that, like Amethyst, somehow the circle would disrupt her weave or vice-versa. I wondered if a Vaetna would just shred the circle by entering. It didn’t occur to me until much later to wonder why my or Ai’s tattoo bindings weren’t an issue.

“It’ll take a moment to kick in. Sorry.” Ebi didn’t sound very apologetic—

Pain, blinding. I made a choking, moaning sound, my head retreating into my hunched shoulders. There was no sensation but the pain slamming upward from the stump at the end of my leg. I instinctively began to curl up—

Then blessed, total relief. As basic cognition returned, I understood that that had been the momentary switchover from the bed’s local, imprecise painkiller glyphs to the circle’s more calibrated ones. My foot didn’t hurt—thank fuck, that had been horrible—but the overall numbness had gone. I was really not looking forward to later stages of physical therapy where we’d forego the analgomancy.

“Fuck you, Ebi,” I coughed. She chuckled.

Ai’s voice was more genuinely sorry. “It hurts more if you’re braced for it.”

I nodded, still somewhat trying to recover my breath. From my supine position, I hadn’t seen the temporary prosthetic on the desk. Ai collected it and brought it over to me, face twitching incrementally as she stepped into the circle. Her ponytail had come a bit loose, I noticed, stray hairs lending her an even more harried and exhausted appearance further at odds with how she looked during photo ops. How comprehensive was her makeup routine to hide the bags under her eyes? Not that I had any frame of reference for that stuff.

I inspected the prosthetic. Printed resin, seemingly, in simple dark-grey, the same color as Ebi’s chassis. It had a few moving parts, but nothing obviously motorized. The toes came in two segments—the big toe and a single block representing the other four. She flipped it over, and I saw that the sole and pads of the toes had a strange foam—oh. That was the same resin, a section of each part printed at lower density for padding. I didn’t have much appreciation for non-magical engineering, but even I had to admit that was a nice trick. Little things like that were why she was considered one of the world’s experts in cutting-edge magical prosthesis design, a result of her time helping Amethyst.

“Since I hear my teammate is being…herself, I want to make this quick. The prosthetic attaches with {AFFIX}, no physical socket or suspension. Your blood price being such a clean cut made that easy. My weave, of course—the final version will need that to be yours, although now that I’ve browsed your file I don’t think that will be a problem. The final version will have some socketing for a seal so nothing gets in, and some more liner at the connection point or a more complex connection spell to make it more comfortable. Small-scale analgesoid glyph that should stop most of the pain without killing your sensation, more or less how the circle is making it feel now.”

“What’s the analgesoid?”

“{AFFIX}-{DEFLECT} sub 2.”

“Sub 2” was a diagramming shorthand describing a second-order—that was, three-dimensional—glyph being offset down on the Z-axis from its anchor. I nodded, picturing the diagram in my head, although I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the lattices proper without the glyphs in front of me to reference.

“Pink link?”

The link of the chain wasn’t literally pink; the color-coding was shorthand for different channels of ripple, a standard established by the Spire’s lattice displays. She nodded.

“You really are the Ezzen. Some of my students would have said blue.”

I blushed and avoided her eyes.

“What else…the resin is lightweight, but I’ve added a few nodules of osmoid LM to get the mass and weight distribution equal to your other foot. Not perfect, but…well. The toes have torsion springs to assist your step…that’s about it. No sensation or direct control of the toes, so your gait will be a little shaky.”

She obviously knew her stuff. She bent over my foot, using some precise cuts of magic to remove the gauze from my amputation, and inspected the site momentarily. She seemed satisfied and reached over to some cabinet inside the bedframe to extract a surprisingly mundane antiseptic spray bottle and cloth.

“Looks alright. Cleaning now. This will tickle, I apologize.”

“Why regular cleaning? Didn’t you just use magic to take off the gauze?”

“Why do you think?”

Excitement—this was going to become a lesson. “Um—I think you used {SEVER} on the gauze?”

Obviously, she hadn’t scribed the literal glyph that represented {SEVER}; rather, she had simply cast the first-order spell so fluently she hadn’t even needed to gather a real spool. But she had said she wasn’t as good at snapweaving—oh. I looked over at the circle and found the glyph in the perimeter. She nodded in the corner of my eye. I went on, trying to keep my voice level. It did tickle a bit.

“By contrast, the chain you’d need to clean the wound is, uh, {DIFFERENTIATE}-{ASH}? I think? To tell apart the pus and the scar tissue.”

The sequence there mattered—scribed as glyphs, the first spell was the anchor and the second extended from it. There were complicated rules about which glyphs could connect to which depending on which was the anchor, as well as what order—that was, dimensionality—the glyph was, and so on.

She nodded approvingly as she carefully scrubbed at my wound. The magitech had already pushed the healing process maybe a week ahead of where it’d be naturally, although it was nowhere near fully healed. It oozed pus, and I was grateful again that I couldn’t feel what was going on down there beyond some faint pressure. Burns healed ugly.

“Good. So why didn’t I do that?”

“Risk assessment. Already too high on the complexity curve given that severing more of my foot would be, uh, bad. Obviously.”

She grinned, and for a moment, I understood why they were called Radiances. It practically lit up the room. Hina’s smile was impish at best or predatory at worst, paralytic in its promise—Ai’s was a lantern, someone worthy of standing with the Vaetna, of wielding the Frozen Flame for the betterment of the world. It scoured away her exhaustion, and beneath it, her passion for magic called to me, imploring me to join her, to follow whatever path she had found. She was pretty, which was also part of it, but the feeling inside me wasn’t carnal attraction. I was a moth faced with a flame that promised to illuminate the world.

Ebi made a decidedly mechanical clicking noise. I looked at her, the spell broken.

“Did you just take a photo?”

“You can prove nothing.”

I gawked at the robot. In my peripheral vision, Ai rolled her eyes.

“Four out of five—minus one for having the wrong second spell on the chain. Noun exclusion. Give me a first-order that would work and how you’d mitigate the risk.”

I shook myself a bit, returning to the practical problem, an eager student for once. {SEVER}? No, it’d Zeno. {SEVER} cut in flat planes; chained off of {DIFFERENTIATE}, it would continuously cut along the rough geometry of my partially healed injury more and more precisely, but would never actually reach the end of the operation within a finite time. Akin to Zeno’s Paradox, thus the rule. I kept thinking. I was embarrassing myself a bit, here. I was more comfortable with LM projection lattices, like Spire dermis or Radiance mantles, than stuff that interfaced directly with organics—oh. Thinking about it from that angle—

“{OFFSET}.”

She blinked. “Defend your reasoning.”

“Green link would loop the ripple away from degradation. It’d pigeonhole into a clean pop.”

Ebi broke in. “Would you bet your foot on that?”

I shrugged. “I’m right. Run it in GWalk.”

Ai nodded. “It works, although that’s a fairly static approach. Hard to snapweave through green. I would use {EXTRACT}.”

Oh. That made sense. I had been thinking too spatially—simply extracting the pus was an approach that avoided the spatial complexities of working around organic matter. That was a good example of how, with the tools available, biomancy was more about doing as little actual biomancy as possible.

Ai affixed the prosthetic to the flat plane of my injury. I actually felt the lattice sort of “stitch” it to my foot. It was neither painful nor itchy, some other sensation that came from magic which my basic senses didn’t really have an equivalent for, more like a twisting, kneading force. She offered me her hand to help me sit up on the bed, and pulled me upright with a momentary display of that VNT effortlessness, bringing in her other arm to steady me.

“Time for you to try to stand. Let me just—”

I felt it as she engaged some of the spatial and motive components. The active parts of the spell circle were now a dizzyingly complex weave in my burgeoning magical senses, the flame inside me roiling and twitching as it investigated the delicate weave surrounding us; I had to shut it out to focus on the act of balance as she helped me off the bed. She helped me balance on my good foot with both magic and her arms as I gingerly lowered my stump. Despite my conscious knowledge of the analgomancy blocking my pain, some primal part of me was tense as the prosthetic’s toes made contact with the floor. But none came as I put more pressure on it, feeling the springs provide some counter-force, and at last my heel touched the ground. Then I tried to put some weight on it—

I stumbled. The magic caught me immediately, not helping me stand but just catching me as I fell. Ai helped me back upright. How many hours had she spent helping Amethyst like this, in this room? She had a hand on my back.

“Breathe out.”

I had been holding my breath? Oh. So I was. A long exhale—then I tried again, more gingerly this time, right leg shaking a bit with the unfamiliarity of the lack of sensation in my toes. My muscle memory was thrown off despite the foot itself being a perfect fit. Still, it went better this time. I stood on my own two feet—foot and a half, maybe, but still. Ai let go of me and I just stood there, relishing the…uprightness. I resisted the urge to attempt to take a step, even knowing that I wouldn’t fall.

Ai gave a satisfied nod. “Good! Try to just stand up and sit down a few times, like you normally would.”

I did so. I felt like I was getting the hang of it fast. Maybe I could try to take a step?

I didn’t get the chance. Something zipped past the closed door to the room, a yell dopplering down the hall. Then there was a crash. Ebi shrugged as if to say “called it.” Emerald sighed, long-suffering, and strode to the door. Ebi provided interpretation—not in her own voice, an imitation of her creator’s.

“LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE. No, I don’t care if she deserved it, out of my wing. OUT. Ishikawa-chan, why didn’t you stop them?”

Ebi broke from the impression to make her own comment. “She can’t stay mad at Amethyst.”

Then she resumed. “No. No! You tell her—oh. She said—oh, seriously? Okay, yes, she deserved it. Still. Mhm. Huh? No, I was in the middle of—”

Another crash. Someone was yelling. Then it became a roar—which meant it was Opal. I put my face in my hands. Ebi leaned out the doorway to peer at whatever was happening. That seemed gratuitous; she was probably wired into the security cameras.

“Heliotrope is going to be so mad she missed this.”