Sunspot

The shower had a fold-out seat that allowed me to reach the burn on my foot without a perilous balancing act or sitting directly on the floor. Hot water cascaded off my back as I bent over, scrubbing gingerly around my burn. It was ugly: bloody reds and pinks dominated where new flesh was in the process of replacing old, while the edge was still covered in off-white blisters with hints of brown and purple, a decidedly medical palette. I was grateful I couldn’t feel it thanks to the patch, both in general and when I ran it directly under the shower head to scour off any bits of dead flesh that seemed ready to part ways after being softened by the stream.

The seat was a little incongruous with the accommodations I was still lacking, like how they didn’t even have spare clothes for me, but Ebi had explained that all the bathrooms had one, a holdover from the building’s past as a hospital. There were also several bars along the walls, which I had found indispensable in making it to the seat. My old bathroom wouldn’t have been big enough for them to be necessary, but here it was easily four steps to cross from the entrance of the unit bath—what Ebi had called the inner bathing chamber, containing equal halves shower and bath—to the controls for the water. Outside was the basin, suspiciously high-tech toilet, and towels in a pure white that was again reminiscent of a hotel, like the rest of my apartment.

Fiddling with the knobs for the shower had taken a few tries to get hot water coming out of the shower head. First it was cold water in the bath, then hot water in the bath, then a knob that seemingly did nothing, and then finally hot water from the shower. I’d then had to flick through the shower’s pressure settings to find one that was gentle enough for my injury; there were at least eight. At last, I’d been able to luxuriate for several minutes as I got the sweat and general ick off of my body. Normally, I’d rush through the process to save water, but that wasn’t a concern at all here, and I wasn’t in that much of a hurry to get dry and dressed. I was still processing what had just happened.

Opal’s display hadn’t turned into a fight—my stunned silence had given way to Hina clapping happily.

“She’s so cool, right?”

“Apologies. Just need to remind Hina that she’s not the only superhuman in the room.”

Hina rubbed her head into Opal’s hand even as it separated her from me.

“Aw, you know I know! You’re hotter than me, even.”

The dragon retreated from the affection, retracting her hand.

“Well, point made, I think. Ezzen, want some fruit?”

Both of the women seemed not to give the sudden burst of violence any more thought. From my decidedly mortal perspective, Opal had nearly given me a heart attack. My spear had found its way into my hand on pure instinct, but it was far too unwieldy with my legs folded under the table—only one of which was really functional anyway—and I had hastily unsummoned it as soon as it had emerged, blushing. Damn that reflex. I was not at all a fan of how the spear was becoming a fear-boner signaling those emotions. Even with a fully functional foot, my gut said it’d be useless against these two. Hina’s third lesson—“don’t escalate to violence when outgunned”—was ringing uncomfortably insightful. She’d be easier to brush off if she were wrong.

I sighed, feeling the water cascade down from my neck and shoulders, nice and hot. This apartment was far better insulated from the winter chill than my old one had been, so there wasn’t a real need to warm up my extremities, but it was still a pleasant objection against the tyranny of the seasons. I lathered shampoo into my mop of brown hair, some floral product borrowed from one of the girls’ stashes. The body wash and face wash were of similar quality; the three were a substantial upgrade from the all-in-one stuff I had been using before, with its cheap lemon scent and rather remarkable inability to properly clean my shaggy, thick hair. Well, it had gotten it clean well enough, but the texture was a far cry from the visible softness and glossiness of Hina’s. She and Opal had both noticed the somewhat dry and stringy texture while cleaning up from breakfast.

“Your hair’s a mess, cutie. Do you use any product?”

“Um—I mean, I wash it.”

“I can see that. No conditioner?”

“No?”

“Blah.”

She hurt my eyes by reaching into another non-space and feeling around for a moment, blue irises looking up and brow furrowed like she was trying to recall something. After a moment, she retracted a small bottle, still embalmed in shrink wrap.

“Behold! One of my spares.”

She handed it to me, her hand brushing mine ever-so-briefly. I knew that was intentional because of the wink. Opal called out from where she was loading dishes into the dishwasher; another luxury I hadn’t had until now.

“How’s he gonna carry that on his crutches? And get it out of the shrink wrap for him, at least.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Hina took the bottle back from me. Instead of puncturing the wrapper open with a fingernail or one of a hundred ways with magic, she brought it up to her mouth, found a place at its neck where the plastic spanned taut over a hollow space, and bit through it, tearing the wrapper off with her mouth. She never broke eye contact with me as she peeled it away from the bottle with her fangs and lips. Opal audibly sighed—impressive, given the distance and the water now running from the faucet as she rinsed something.

“Ezzen, give her explicit permission to put it in your room. This is a good exercise.”

I was put on the spot, more enraptured by the ministrations of Hina’s mouth than I’d like to admit.

“Please put that in—in my room.”

“Sure thing.”

Opal called after her as she hopped to her feet.

“Throw in some of your shampoo too!”

Hina jogged toward the stairs with a thumbs-up. She could probably have just teleported herself or the conditioner, but the vigor with which she ascended suggested a certain enjoyment of the physical activity. The puppy needed her walkies.

Opal came back toward me, leaning against the kitchen island.

“Okay, while she’s gone—speak freely. I meant what I said. You’re comfortable around her? If not…”

I didn’t know if “comfortable” was accurate, per Opal’s specific threat, but I didn’t feel inherently endangered by her. Or maybe…I did, and I liked that? I was no closer to detangling the disturbing prospect than I had been when I had gone to sleep last night, but maybe spending more time with her would clarify things.

“I don’t know. But I think I can manage, today.”

“Sorry.” She shrugged. “She can be a lot. You’re alright with spending time with her today, then?”

“Yes.” I thought for a moment. It wasn’t like me to ask these things, but—“Are you?”

“I’m…no, I’m not sure I am. If you don’t mind me saying so: right now, you’re delicate. I certainly wasn’t alright for weeks after being flametouched, and I had my family and Hina and Ai for support while we figured out…everything. I feel obligated to extend that same level of support to you. And so does Hina, she’s just…”

“Hina.”

“Quite. Well, if you’re committed.” A wry smile crossed her face. “I get it. She’s pretty.”

I reddened. Hina smothered my retort with her return, vaulting clean over the balcony and landing with only the lightest tap on the hardwood. Opal smoothly changed the topic.

“Gosh, your hair really is a mess. You’ve got no idea how to take care of it, huh?”

“Er…not really. I do wash it every day.”

That was a lie—particularly bad self-care weeks could have me going days on end without bathing. Hina called me on it.

“No, you don’t. Twice a week at most, I think.” She saw me shrink a bit, caught in the fib, “—which is good! That’s actually how much you should be doing it, you’re just not using the right product for hair as thick as yours.”

I sat there, avoiding their eyes, face burning. Hina trotted over to me and knelt at my side.

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with learning how to take better care of yourself. You were a hikikomori before, right?”

“Hina.”

“What? It’s true. Hardly ever went out except for groceries.”

I knew that word. It was humiliating to admit, but the lack of judgment in those blue eyes was compelling.

“That obvious?”

“It’s fine. Y’know, Alice used to be the same? Went straight home after school, no social life, couldn’t stand up for herself—”

“Hina!”

Opal had barked that loudly enough to stop her teammate short. The hyena twisted, and the two looked at each other for a moment, communicating something I couldn’t understand. Hina turned back to me.

“Anyway. What I’m getting at is that you’ll feel better about yourself once you start taking care of this.” She ran her fingers through my hair, twirling a clump between her fingers. Then she leaned in all the way, burying her nose in it, and sniffed, earning a disapproving noise from Opal. She didn’t move, half-leaning onto me. I was distinctly aware of her breast against my shoulder.

Opal’s voice was droll. “Get off him so he can go clean up.”

“Aw, fine.” She detached herself from me and wandered back over to the kitchen. “You heard her, cutie.”

Which brought me here, sitting with a soaped-up cranium while the conditioner bottle loomed ominously on one of the shelves next to me. They had been a little oddly insistent about it, now that I thought about it. My gut said to resist…because they were telling me to take better care of myself? That didn’t map. I wasn’t such a shitty teenager as to wallow in my filth out of spite—just laziness and lack of clear incentive. Plus, I hadn’t been a teenager for almost a year. The point was, if I was going to be living with this gaggle of feminine celebrities, the least I could do was maintain basic hygiene—but no further. I refused to let Hina force me into new styles and flashy haircuts in pursuit of a makeover, and from there it would be a slippery slope into hour-long morning routines and closets full of clothes that needed dry-cleaning rather than machine washing. I didn’t want to spend that much effort on how I looked.

I stretched my legs, digging my heels against the white tiling. Breakfast sat heavy in my belly as I arched my back until my head bumped the shower wall. I sat there, shrouded in the steam, savoring the gentle spray of water from on high onto my stomach and legs. With my foot silenced, the one thing intruding on my relaxation was the marks Hina had left on my shoulder. It was a mild, inoffensive pain, only notable by contrast to the animal comforts in which I had immersed myself. I felt a dribble of shampoo work its way down my temple toward the outer corner of my eye and leaned forward to douse my head, scrubbing vigorously and shaking like a wet dog until the stream onto my lap ran clear.

Body, hair, face—with all parts of me clean and rinsed, I leaned back against the wall once more. The hiss of the water’s spray was a soothing blanket of white noise for my thoughts, the secure isolation of the room a chance to really decompress. I felt at the scars on the back of my right hand, remembering the months of physical therapy and the perpetual glances swiftly averted. Hina’s hand had healed to flawless, supple skin in minutes. If I changed as much as her—however that worked, something I hoped to discuss but was unsure I’d be able to bring up—would these scars disappear? Would my right side finally mirror my left again?

It was sort of moot either way, since I now had the tattoo marking my left arm. In that sense, there was already sort of a symmetry, marked on both arms by the flame; I supposed it had been stronger for the brief period I had a burn scar there instead of the tattoo. The now-erased scar had represented a mistake, a self-inflicted way of proving to myself that I’d be able to brave the dangers of being a flamebearer. At some subconscious level, I had already understood the role of pain. I’d cauterized the box cutter’s bloody wake with magic, filled my flesh with my weapon of choice.

The deed had forced me to act faster than otherwise—perhaps without taking time for the spear and producing that ripple, I could have made it to the Gate, and none of it would have turned out like this. I’d have gone to the Spire and become…and that’s where my thoughts always got caught. Surely, as a magic hobbyist of some renown and now also a flamebearer, there must be somewhere in the Spire for me. Perhaps I would be offered living conditions better than my old apartment—but that was true here as well. 

So really, the biggest difference would be that I wouldn’t have Hina breathing down my neck. I insisted on thinking of that as an upgrade, denial made temporarily possible by the warmth of the water and steam supplanting that of her body and her Flame. More than anything, that aspect of all of this remained feeling unreal. Being whisked to the other side of the planet by a VNT group wasn’t quite unprecedented, but being courted…seduced? Hunted by one of them? It just wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to real people. She wasn’t actually attracted to me, just my flame. Hell, that might even have been why she agreed that it wasn’t a date. What was it, then? In no world could I call us friends, and it wasn’t technically like she was a coworker, not yet—what of the souvenirs she had left on my shoulder, stinging under the water? How did they fit in?

I was overthinking. I was getting too caught up in the labels. She was neither puppy nor hyena, and this was neither date nor not-date. I knew my feelings would blur once I killed the water and stepped out, that the distant throb of the bite marks would continue catalyzing the fear-laced desire, that the moment I stepped out of the bathroom I would once more be subject to political and magical forces far beyond my ken, that winter’s chill would again creep into my burned fingers. Hina had insinuated as much, earlier, when she had mentioned that the PCTF would be pushing their claim on me. When push came to shove, if I had to choose between only them or Todai—at that moment, I thought I’d choose Todai.

These apprehensions didn’t quite matter yet, though. I had paperwork first. I stretched again, bringing one knee up to my chest while extending the opposite leg, twisting my torso for a warm sensation of released tension along my back. I did it again on the other side, and while nothing made an audible pop, the musculature had definitely loosened, especially at the base of my spine and in my obliques. Along with the rest of the posterior chain, they were important for stability to put any real power behind a weapon as large as a spear. Besides, taking care of your back was important when you spent twelve hours a day sitting in front of a computer. I relaxed under the stream once more.

“Thank fuck for free hot water.”

It then occurred to me that it probably wasn’t actually free, not on the macro scale, since it presumably came out of Opal’s pocket.

“Thanks, Opal. Alice? Bluh. The dragon.”

My gratitude corrected, I turned off the shower head to save her money, listening to the hiss reduce to the rattling of a bucket of beads, then a drip, drip, drip. The unit bath was effectively sealed, so the steam lingered, a stark difference from the sudden influx of cold air to which I was accustomed. My hand found the nearest railing, and I hoisted myself up off the seat and onto my good foot, sort of shimmying my way over to the door. I opened the door and was greeted by the belated cooler air of the outside world as it mingled with the steam. I groped for the folded towel I had placed next to the basin outside, found it, yanked it in, and spent the next few minutes awkwardly figuring out how to dry myself satisfactorily with one hand stuck on support duty.

It was only after I had gotten my hair from ‘soaked’ to merely ‘damp’ that I remembered the conditioner. I winced, reddened—despite nobody being around to witness the mistake—and hobbled back over to the dripping shower head and the bottles arrayed across a few shelves, towel sort of slung over my back and shoulders like a fluffy cotton mane. The bottle was an unassuming dark pink—mauve, perhaps—and dewed by the steam, clearly part of a set with the shampoo. Where it diverged, though, was that instead of the head being a nozzle for some kind of cream or gel, it was for a spray. Reading the label, I reflected that I was lucky in two ways: one, the instructions were in English, and two, it was actually intended for damp hair, not for use right out of the shower. I thanked Hina for the former and dumb luck for the latter, then sprayed some of it experimentally into my hand and took a sniff.

Wow. Wow, that smelled good. I didn’t even have the floral vocabulary to describe the scent, only that it was woody, sort of spicy in a fruity way, and…was it racist to call it “exotic”? That was how the little blurb on the bottle described it, anyway. The aroma was primarily jasmine sambac, it said—I could get used to that smell for sure. I spritzed it onto the damp, dark, overgrown mop that was my hair, what seemed like a reasonable amount, then ran my fingers through it for lack of a comb or brush. As both my hands were occupied with my steadily-getting-less-tangled tresses, I leaned onto the shower wall. With that dubious support, and the tiles wet as they were under my single foot, in hindsight it was practically an inevitability that I’d—

“Shit!”

As falls went, it wasn’t nearly as bad as yesterday, when Ai had pulled me out of the medical bed as we wrestled for my spear. There, I had gone down pretty much head-first. Here, I half-caught myself, one conditioner-slicked hand attempting to grab the bar on the wall and missing. I brought my right foot directly under me on instinct just in time for it to cushion my fall, squished between my butt and the tiled floor. Because of the numbing patch, I actually didn’t realize how much my bad foot had taken my weight. It was only as I extracted the leg out from under me that it occurred to me that I might have twisted the ankle, or broken something, or aggravated the water-softened and still-healing burn scar—on visual inspection, at least that last one didn’t seem likely. Regardless of the extent of the harm, the patch muted it, so I was mostly left with soreness in my butt and pride for what was maybe twenty seconds of silence, filled only by the final drip-drip-drip of the shower head, until I heard a knock at the outer bathroom door.

“Are you alright in there? Heard something.”

Mercifully, it was Opal, not Hina…or Ebi. It was a little concerning that my doctor—indeed my only medical staff, it seemed—inspired relief at her absence. Her bedside manner truly sucked.

“Er—yeah, just slipped.”

“Oh no.” For some reason, she took that as permission to enter the outer washroom, and I saw her blurry silhouette through the frosted glass of the bath chamber’s door. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

“I’m—fine, I think.”

I really didn’t want her to come in and see me in this especially vulnerable state. Even though the intimidation earlier hadn’t been directed at me, I had been caught in the crossfire, and the spikes of adrenaline both then and now were reminiscent of the previous night in a way that made me frustrated at my libido. I didn’t want to feel that way about Opal. Nor Hina, but that ship had already sailed, and I was determined to keep the others at port, if at all possible. Coming face to face with the pretty dragon-girl while I was nude would not help with that at all.

“Are you sure? Do you want Ebi to take a look?”

“No, really, it’s alright. I landed fine.”

I was embarrassed to mention how my bad foot had actually taken the brunt of the landing, but it seemed fine—not that I could tell if something was wrong internally, totally numb as it was. Maybe that was why Ebi had been weirdly resistant and unhelpful with me using the patch—but she could have just said so.

“Alright. I could get your crutches?”

“I—Alice, I’m fine.”

“Sorry, sorry, I’m just used to Amane being a bit…bullheaded when she gets hurt. Are you sure you don’t want Ebi to take a look?”

“Er—no, I don’t think so.”

“Okay. Sorry for intruding. Um—anything else you need?”

“No.” Just for her to leave me alone.

She retreated, spouting apologies for bursting in and echoing Amethyst-derived concerns about me being a fall risk. Did she not see the hypocrisy? She had made a whole deal out of Hina needing permission to enter my room, but she could enter and leave at will on a hunch that I might need help? I wasn’t made of glass—okay, Ez, stop that, my rational mind replied. I was just aggravated from the embarrassment of the tumble. If I had been hurt—and I could have been—

I took stock. Foot seemed undamaged as far as I could tell, arse ached a bit and had been re-wetted from contact with the shower floor, and my damn spear was in my hand. It had bravely sallied forth to defend me when my hand had missed the support bar. I glared at it. 

“How were you planning to help me with that, huh?”

It said nothing.

—

A few minutes later, I had put away my spear, gone from damp to mostly-dry, brushed my teeth, applied cream to my scar, and was now debating whether I actually needed to change from my comfortable dark-blue jeans into the shorts Opal had brought last night. I’d only changed into the shirt because my old one was ruined, but stayed in my jeans through the night. Actually, it was sort of weird that I had been wearing them when I had woken up in that room on the 18th floor. Shouldn’t they have at least cut the trouser leg off while inspecting for other injuries? I was glad they hadn’t undressed me, though. I didn’t need more compromising situations, given what had just happened minutes ago and last night.

According to the forecast, it was brisk enough outside that shorts would be unseasonable, and the trousers weren’t dirty, really…discounting a bloodstain on the right ankle it had picked up sometime during those brief, agonizing moments underground. Bloodstained clothing in a major government building seemed like a bad look, even accounting for my circumstances. Didn’t they have any bleach around here? Where did they even wash their clothes? Not that there would be time to fully wash the trousers anyway.

Wait, I was being an idiot. This was a problem magic could trivially solve; indeed, a similar problem had been presented to me yesterday, and the solution was still fresh in my mind. My hands itched for one of my notebooks to draw the glyph—but they now lived on the bookshelf on the far wall, and I didn’t feel like stumbling across the room. Instead, I scooched to the end of the bed and summoned my spear.

“Time for you to start earning your keep.”

The spear was longer than I was tall, so if I stretched, I could reach across the room and sort of drag a notebook from its shelf with the butt. It fell onto the floor with a thump. I reeled it in with an almost paddling motion as I coaxed the spiral-bound tome across the hardwood until it was close enough for me to lean down and retrieve it. I nodded to my spear before banishing it.

“Thank you for your service.”

I made a mental note to stop talking to inanimate objects before one of the Radiances caught me doing it as I flicked through the notebook. This was one of my newer ones, only about half-full, sheathed in a black plastic cover with a sturdy cardstock backing. I preferred pencil and paper for my notes; so much of glyphcraft was visual, and this afforded me far more freedom of drawing and formatting than attempting to do the same thing on the computer. I had once bought a cheap drawing tablet, but I had hated how it felt. Besides, there was a certain security in knowing that these notebooks couldn’t just vanish in a catastrophic failure of my computer’s hard drive, since I didn’t keep backups—the same logic that had given rise to the full-wipe panic button.

{EXTRACT} was an easy glyph to draw, weave, and use, at least in the context of my jeans where the two things I was trying to separate were clearly different physical matter. In a more abstract case, I’d need more glyphs to clarify the exact semantics of what I was targeting. Here, it was just a matter of drawing some blazing thread—which this time felt a little like applying an ice-cold cheese grater to my lungs, for some reason—weaving the glyph into its characteristic V shape, tearing out the sheet of paper, placing it point-first over the stain, and kind of pulling the lattice over the end of the trouser leg, not unlike applying {COMPOSE}.

There wasn’t much to see. The effect was instantaneous; the lines of graphite had turned to black soot where the power of the Flame had seared the sheet of A5 notebook paper. I was left with clean jeans—for a given value of clean—and a little rust-red pile of dusty dried blood, no more than a teaspoon, sitting on one end of the now-burnt-out V. I wrinkled my nose at the acrid smell of the singed paper wafting up from where the glyph had been consumed. I crumpled up the paper around the blood, hunted around for a rubbish bin, found it on the opposite side of the bed from the nightstand, and tossed the waste. Like {ASH}, this was a consumptive, one-time-use glyph that ruined its substrate afterward.

I was in the process of shimmying into the trousers when there was a knock on my door.

“Who is it?”

“Alice. Felt a ripple. Was that you?”

It occurred to me belatedly that there might be some kind of procedure around using magic in the house, especially if I wasn’t particularly keeping track of the ripple. {EXTRACT} was blue-orange, not red, so I hadn’t figured it’d be a problem for Amane. Was that a bad assumption? I replied cautiously.

“Yeah, just getting the blood off my jeans.”

“Ah, thought it might have been you putting the prosthetic back on. Have you?”

I had been putting that off until after I got dressed, since I hadn’t been sure whether I’d need to take off the numbing patch, and I wanted to spend as little time in pain as possible.

“Was just about to.”

“Ah, good. I’ve got Ebi here. Mind if we come in?”

“Sure, one sec.”

I shimmied on my pants the rest of the way, carefully tugging up the denim around the end of my foot so as to not rub the still-softened flesh of the cauterization against the fabric. The fact that I couldn’t feel anything below my ankle played hell with my proprioception while I couldn’t see it; I kept having to feel around with my hand to make sure I knew where the half-foot was. I called for them to enter once I buttoned the trousers and got my shirt on.

Alice came in first, brightening as she saw me. “You look better.” Then she frowned. “Oh. You should shave. Let me go get a razor.”

“Um—I’m fine.”

But she had already left again, brushing past Ebi.

“There she goes. How’s the foot?”

“Painless, no thanks to you. How’s Amane?”

“Up and about. Hina’s making breakfast for her. I brought you a gift.”

She tossed something back and forth between her hands, a stout cylinder like a can of cat food. Bigger than that, though, maybe twice the diameter.

“That the stabilizer people keep talking about?”

“Yep. Prosthetic first, though. Pull up that pant leg for me.”

I complied as she retrieved the prosthetic from where I had put it on the floor, next to the nightstand. She knelt down to inspect the site.

“Healing looks good. You’ve been through all this before, so I’ll spare you the details. Did you put your cream on it?”

“No. Should I?”

“No, it’ll make it too soft.”

She handed me the prosthetic. I blinked, looking from it to her.

“What, that’s it? Just put it on and turn it on?”

“Yep.”

“What about the patch?”

“Won’t cross-interfere. You can keep it on until we link this up.” She hefted the stabilizer for emphasis.

“What’s in it?”

That’s when Alice returned, empty-handed. “Somehow we don’t have any spares around. You could use mine?”

Her voice went up in pitch at the end, turning the statement into a probing question. It felt gross to use someone else’s razor. Grosser than the itchy feeling of my now five-day-old stubble? Maybe not, but she didn’t need to know that, and I didn’t want to impose.

“I’m good…thanks.”

“You should,” Ebi cut in. “They might take an ID photo today, right?”

“I mean, they might, but that doesn’t mean he has to shave. Ezzen?”

If they were going to take a photo of me, that was totally different. I hated being in pictures to begin with, and the stubble was just ugly. But changing my mind in front of people was hard. I scratched my stubble, feeling the length. I’d feel better, clean-shaven, but something was stopping me from admitting it.

“Do you think I should? We’re sort of on the clock here, right?”

Opal hesitated. Ebi didn’t.

“Yeah, you’re all scruffy. Do you usually let it grow out this long?”

“Er, no, I…I guess. I don’t like to, it just sort of happens.”

Ebi made an exaggerated face in her digital visor. “Ugh. Organics. The idea of having thousands of little hairs all over my surface…yuck.”

I completely knew what she meant. I wasn’t super hairy, but I did have a fair bit on my arms, legs, and chest. It was gross, and it got everywhere. I’d have preferred to have no hair at all, save maybe on my head. It was actually one of the more ridiculous things that attracted me to the Vaetna: the smooth and flat surfaces of carapace, their second skin, called to me. But for me, there was no point in shaving it all when it’d grow back in a few weeks at most.

I wasn’t quite willing to expose all of this to them, not the parts involving the Vaetna. Something about that was buried too deep. But Ebi did embolden me to admit part of it.

“It’s…yeah, it’s pretty gross, huh. Wish I could just get rid of it all.”

Opal blinked. “You could. There’s, like, a thousand laser hair removal clinics in Tokyo. Yuuka went to one for her legs.”

“Oh.” But that was a girl thing, wasn’t it? Was that fine? I wasn’t sure…but I could at least assert control of my face, for now, if I was going to be spending more time around people. And it wasn’t that gross to use somebody else’s razor, not with a clean head. “Cool. I’ll think about it. Um…yeah, I’ll shave, Alice, thanks.”

Why did that feel so good to say? Was it because I was into her? I certainly hoped not; I wanted her firmly out of the part of my head that Hina lived in.

Opal nodded. “I’ll get it.”

Ebi watched her go. She turned back to me and waggled her virtual eyebrows in a way that I was sure no human could actually do.

“Cute.”

“I’m not into her.”

“Did I say that? I didn’t say that. Just nice to see you becoming friends with them.”

I blushed, but didn’t dignify that with a response. I was already wasting enough of everybody’s time; no need to spend more on banter. I picked up my prosthetic, giving it a cursory inspection, before placing it against my burn, grateful for the fact that it was still totally numb down there.

“How long do these patches last?”

“Until the adhesive wears off. Three days? Why?”

“Just curious.”

My fingers worked at the edge of the little grippy sleeve going around the perimeter of the prosthetic, where it met with my foot, making sure it wasn’t folded over onto itself anywhere. Once it seemed aligned, I tugged on the lattice embedded in my prosthetic without fanfare, activating the {AFFIX}. I didn’t actually feel it bind to my foot, because the whole area was still numbed by the patch. 

“Alright, it’s on.” I tapped the patch, feeling nothing. “Now how do I take this off? Should I deactivate the lattice first?”

“Oh, let me. The trick is to peel it off slowly so you don’t get punched in the face by the pain, but Amane says it’s hard to do that herself.” 

That made sense. Nobody in their right mind would want to gradually ramp up the pain they were feeling. She gripped the corner of the patch.

“I’m going to pull it off over the course of six seconds, and the effect will get weaker as I go, so the pain will get stronger. I’ll count it out. Once I start, I’m not going to stop, okay?”

I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for it. She poked my knee.

“Relax, the analgesoid in the prosthetic is already active, it won’t be that bad. There won’t be a moment of changeover like with the circle.”

“If you say so.” I took a deep breath anyway; I didn’t entirely trust her. “Ready.”

“Alright. Here…we…go.”

I had been braced for her to pull it all off in one tug, despite what she had said, just like every time I had ever removed a band-aid. But true to her word, she began to peel the patch off my leg slowly.

“Six.”

The generalized numbness vanished first. I could feel the bed’s blanket against my heel, and proprioception for the area came back online, confirming where my leg was relative to the rest of my body.

“Five.”

Then the pain began. First, the throb at the site of the actual cauterization, which began as a dull ache. Beyond that, the skin around my ankle was suddenly aware of the airflow in the room, and while it didn’t hurt, I did gasp. As promised, Ebi didn’t stop.

“Four.”

I became aware of the pain of the patch itself being pulled off my skin, and the pain at my burn increased, becoming sharper, spikier, like a papercut scaled up by a factor of a hundred. I reached for my foot; my instincts insisted that blood should still be oozing out from there, even though I knew rationally that it wouldn’t. I felt Ebi’s free hand gently push mine away before I regained control.

“Three.”

It grew more intense still, and I ground my teeth. I whispered a soft “fuck.”

“Two.”

My ankle hurt, too. Why did my ankle hurt? It wasn’t supposed to. Had I actually damaged it when I had fallen on it?

“One.”

I felt the patch fully come away from my skin. Now the pain was at full clarity.

“Ow. Ow. Fucking ow.” I sucked in a breath through my teeth. “Are you sure the prosthetic’s online?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit. Ow.” It hadn’t hurt that much last night. “Please tell me the stabilizer is going to help more with this.”

“It should. Want me to link it up?”

I snarled at her.

“Are you fucking with me? Do it already.”

“Alright, yeesh.” She proffered the cylinder. “Take it and tug.”

I did. It was so much easier to find the leading point on the lattice when I was in this much pain, as my Flame reared up and responded, alert, closer to the surface of my senses. The cylinder twisted in my hands as though rotated by some invisible axle, and—

Aha. As the pain cleared, I thought I understood the principle. The device in my hands was like a gyroscope, in a way; it naturally wanted to stand up. And somehow, the lattice in the stabilizer was linked to the lattice in my foot and transmitted that abstract ‘stand up’ concept to the prosthetic. It didn’t grant sensation to the false toes, nor control of them, but there was a kind of intuitive balancing force being applied. The pain in my cauterized stump had been shoved down back to the throb back when Ebi had said “five”—bearable enough to stand. I looked up at Ebi.

“Help me up.”

She offered me a hand, and I stood on my own two feet. No crutches, no hobbling, an acceptable amount of—pain. I sat back down hurriedly.

“Fuck.”

“Analgesoid not taking?”

“No, the burn’s fine, it’s—I might have twisted my ankle when I…”

“When you fell in the shower, yup. No need to be shy about it.”

“I thought you’d make fun of me.”

“For being a dork, not for needing medical attention. I thought you knew better than to be coy with your doctor.” She turned. “Opal, get in here, I know you’re waiting out there for an appropriate moment. This is it.”

Alice reappeared, looking a little shamefaced at having been called out on her eavesdropping. She had a safety razor and some shaving cream, but put them both on the bed, looking at me with concern.

“Ezzen? I thought you said your foot was fine. Er—‘fine’ by the standards of your injury, pardon me.”

I rubbed my ankle, experimentally angling it this way and that to see what made it hurt, wincing when I found that any significant tilt was sending spikes of pain up my leg. It actually hurt more than the burn did. “Apology accepted. I thought it was fine!”

Ebi looked at it. “Hm, I’m not seeing much swelling. Opal, will your schedule shatter into a thousand pieces if we lose fifteen minutes icing this?”

The last thing I wanted was to be a burden. “No, it’s fine, I can walk.” To demonstrate, I stood, though I couldn’t keep the grimace off my face. Ebi was shaking her head, and Alice had a dubious look on her face, but neither stopped me from rising. “I mean, yeah, it hurts. But…how long’ll it be in the car? We are driving, right?”

“Half an hour, call it.”

I sat back down, continuing to experiment with my ankle. “Then I’ll ice it on the way. It’ll be mostly sitting once we’re there, right? Unless Japan is loads different from the UK.”

“You really don’t need to push it. We’re not in a hurry.”

“Let him make a mistake,” Ebi declared as she produced a gel-filled ice pack from her hidden higher-dimensional pharmacy. “That’s how people learn!” She wrapped it in my discarded bath towel and handed it to me. “Or so I hear.”

I examined the utterly mundane ice pack she had handed me, then directed a questioning glance up at her.

“We do have anti-inflammatory patches, but they’re not great. Can’t beat regular ice for something like this,” she explained.

I created a list of magitech to improve upon and inserted that at the top, for later, as I tied the ice pack around my ankle. Good enough for keeping it iced while I shaved—I felt like I might as well get that far in what I had planned to do today, even if this were to wind up derailing the rest. Besides, I really only needed one foot for support while shaving; another slip like earlier was unlikely with the sink’s soft bath mat underfoot. Ebi said something to Alice in Japanese, who frowned.

“Rude.”

“But accurate.”

Alice didn’t dignify it with a response, turning to me. “See you downstairs?”

I nodded.

—

Walking, even with the stabilizer, was painful. I was loath to put weight on my foot, and as I descended the stairs with a clean-shaven face, I took pains to do so one-by-one, never putting all my weight on my right leg. It was slow going, and would have been humiliating if not for Hina’s enthusiastic waving. Instead, it was just embarrassing.

“He walks! Everything okay with your leg, cutie? Stabilizer treating you okay?”

“Yeah,” I called back, “It’s not my burn, it’s my ankle.”

Hina winced. “Oof, yeah. Heard you fall earlier. Don’t go around getting yourself hurt without me, ‘kay?” There was a possessive edge to the delivery that undercut her otherwise cheerful and teasing tone and made me shiver.

She had claimed the beanbag we had shared, lounging all splayed out with her arms and legs hanging over the edge. The rest of Todai, sans Heliotrope, was scattered around the sitting area. Amane was sitting with Alice at the low table where we had eaten breakfast earlier, eating pancakes—blueberry or plain, I couldn’t tell—and a milkshake, probably the same fortified variety I’d had yesterday. Alice was at her side, on her laptop, with Ebi remaining standing opposite her. Ai remained insensate on the sofa where I had seen her last.

Hina looked over at her teammate’s sleeping form. “Man, she worked so hard on it, and she’s too busy being asleep to see it in action.”

“You helped too, didn’t you?”

“I sure did. I actually did most of the weaving.”

“Then, uh, thanks. How does it work, exactly?”

“Oh, y’know, it’s a gyroscope plus some other stuff. Links to your foot. Magic, am I right?”

I had gotten that far on my own, thank you very much. Opal called over to us, shutting her laptop. “Don’t bother trying to get that kind of stuff out of Hina. Ai will—sorry, Emerald, that still gets us too sometimes—will send it to you when she’s up. None of that’s classified, but feel free to call it your first bit of Todai insider info that you have the okay to post on the forums.”

I smiled despite myself, and that just made me more embarrassed. Amane waved hello at me, and I waved back. She muttered something to Opal.

“Yes, it’s pretty much time to go. Last call, Ezzen—do you feel ready to enter the bureaucratic labyrinth and lock horns with its fearsome minotaur?”

I hadn’t taken Opal for a jokester, and it wasn’t at all clear to me from her tone or expression whether it was serious.

“Um. No? I signed up for paperwork and shopping, I think.” I looked down at my foot. “I don’t think I’m really qualified to be fighting any minotaurs until this is healed, anyway.”

Silence reigned for a moment. Then Hina dissolved into giggles. They spread to Opal next. Even Ebi indulged a good-natured chuckle. Amane was grinning, but it was the polite smile of incomprehension, befuddled by her friends’ infection of mirth. A victim of the language barrier; how exclusive, if inadvertently. I wished I spoke enough Japanese to at least follow along so they could speak that instead and she wouldn’t feel left out. I saw Opal whisper an explanation to her as I approached, still a bit unsteady on my feet. Ebi began to narrate in a female but otherwise spot-on impression of David Attenborough.

“And thus the Ezzen, freshly-groomed, takes on the role of the jester. Experts speculate that this is some sort of courtship display. Indeed, it seems this theory may hold some water, as a female flamebearer decides to draw close, inspecting her prospective mate’s—”

Hina snapped her fingers a few times, and the robot shut up, but the damage was done. “Mate” sure was an evocative word, one I tried and failed to file away in my mind as she circled me. I felt as though I was being sized up.

“You do look better after a shave, cutie. Missed a spot, though.” Hina ran a finger along my neck. I twitched at the contact. For a moment the pressure turned to searing pain accompanied by a high-pitched whine, and I jerked again, harder. I coughed at the acrid smell of burnt hair. She removed her finger from my neck, holding it up. “Laser hair removal, in-house!”

I stared at her, attraction and betrayal fighting for supremacy. “I said to warn me.”

“Oh. Oops. Sorry…”

She deflated, sounding so genuinely crushed that I instantly felt bad. I opened my mouth to apologize myself and clarify, but was drowned out by an avalanche of Japanese. Amane’s tirade—and I was sure that was what it was, language barrier notwithstanding—lasted a solid thirty seconds. Hina’s dejection started to metamorphose into anger near the end, and after a few seconds of tense silence that hung like a noose, she snapped back at her teammate. Then Alice cut in, and suddenly all three of them were yelling. I took a few sidling steps over toward Ebi.

“Help?”

“Oh, it’s nothing big. You know how Alice called me rude earlier?”

“Yeah? What did you say?”

“That you were being stubborn like Amane. This is what I meant.”

“I don’t follow. What happened?”

Opal heard me and switched to English. “Hina, that’s not fair.”

“Of course it is! This is what I am, every bit as much as Amane’s…shinkeisonshou is her. It’s none of her business how I choose to have my fun. Or yours!”

“It absolutely is, because you’re this close to bringing the PCTF to our fucking doorstep and—” Alice forcibly cut herself off and took a deep breath, looking at me. “Sorry, Ezzen. We should be…I don’t know. Including you in this? It’s complicated.”

“Did I do something?”

“Other than get flametouched, no.” Hina groused, genuine annoyance in her voice for the first time since I had met her.

Ebi sighed. “It’s not so much about you as it’s about pain.” She pointed at Hina and Amane. “With those two, it always is.”

They showed no signs of stopping. Amane’s body language was surprisingly animated for somebody who had been bedridden just earlier this morning, if my understanding was correct. Hina practically barked back at her. Whatever they were exactly talking about, it clearly wasn’t the first time, and I felt very…talked around. There were things not being said, and what was being said wasn’t in languages I understood. Opal stood, taking her laptop with her. She did interrupt Amane briefly to give her a kneeling, delicate half-hug, and gave Hina a single pat on the head as she passed by. Hina didn’t turn to look at us, but she did throw up a peace sign and waggle it around even as she spoke to Amane in terms that sounded less than cordial. Ai, for her part, remained fast asleep. I was a little envious. Opal gestured toward the elevator.

“Let’s go.”

“We’re just…leaving?”

“Can’t be helped. I’ll try to explain on the way, but…there’s some other things we need to discuss, too, and there’s never enough time. Just know that it’s not really your fault. It’s always been like this between them, you’ve just…catalyzed things by your presence. It’s Hina being Hina, I’m sure you already get what I mean by that.”

As she led me to the elevator, it seemed to me like “Hina being Hina” was a fair summation of many of Todai’s problems. Perhaps even most of them.

I was soon to learn she barely made the top five.