Sunspot

I had known intuitively, instinctually, that my stalker had not been Hina.

On paper, it was trivial to change the color of something with magic, using the same basic {REFRACT} lattice as those dry-erase markers in the penthouse’s meeting room. There had been nothing in the illusionary voyeur’s appearance that was outside the purview of an advanced magical disguise. This went double in the case of the Radiances; manipulating the appearance of their mantle’s LM would be even easier than trying to alter the color of her actual hair or eyes. Even some of the other mismatches like her voice and posture could have just been her putting on additional layers of deception to throw off any especially perceptive fans—from the way Opal had talked about it, such measures seemed somewhat reasonable, which was a little worrying in its own right.

And yet some part of me had understood that no magic could suppress that impossible blue, which Hina confirmed for me.

“Mm-mm. Nope! Hibiki runs too deep.” She checked for bystanders before slipping off the sunglasses to bat her eyes at me, but the tension hadn’t left her posture. “Used to be brown and now they’re blue forever. Cool, right?” She donned the dark lenses again, which still couldn’t entirely strangle the supernatural sapphire at close enough inspection. “What’s this have to do with—” she waved up and down my half-hunched figure, more outwardly tense than her even though I was far less lethal, “—this? You’re freaked; you saw something, right? Tell me!”

I stumbled through a recounting of what had happened—keeping my shaking voice low, also wary of passersby—and tried to articulate the confusion of identity without admitting the too-personal way I had known in my gut that it wasn’t her. As I talked, the initial flood of panic ebbed away, but it was replaced by new confusion—why had I known? Some kind of link between our Flames from last night’s contact? Could that even happen? My Flame said nothing—not that I was expecting it to, but I couldn’t help but hope that maybe just this once it’d let me in on what was going on.

Hina twirled a lock of her hair around her finger as she took in my description. When I finished, she took a deep breath—to stabilize her nerves? That was scary. She was still on alert; her eyes flickered across the intersection, down the road, up at the skyscrapers around us, as though searching for something. My heart rate began to crawl back up. Was something still here? How could I know for certain that they were actually gone? Some kind of large-scale scanning lattice, maybe, a filtering chain scaled up and tuned to the color of ripple—if only I had the equipment to know which type. My tattoo still itched in rhythm with the scarred fingers of my right hand curling and uncurling as I weighed my options. Before I could settle on a course of action, Hina seemed to complete her own inspection of our surroundings.

“Sounds like some kinda remote viewing gone wrong. Didn’t expect you to see her?”

“No. She was—surprised, I think.” I thought back to the expression on her face, the way she had backed away from me. “Might have been…afraid of me.”

I dismissed the faint giddiness in that realization. It was nothing more than leftover adrenaline, and it was distracting me from racking my brain for the sort of scrying that would match what I had seen. What kind of viewing would necessitate an invisible copy of the viewer? More to the point—why had I been able to see her at all, if I hadn’t been supposed to? Had my only tip-off been that burst of energy in my Flame, that would have been explainable as just picking up on the ripple, but seeing her with my eyes meant something about the method used; I just wasn’t sure what.

Hina was investigating the scene in her own way, pacing around the street corner.

“Don’t know what to tell you, cutie. I mean—definitely magic, kinda crunchy ripple. But I’m not smelling anything.”

“Crunchy?”

“Uh—red-white, I think. But that’s normal for illusions and observation and that sorta thing. C’mere.”

Before I could parse what she was doing, she had come close to me, within arm’s reach, blue eyes looking up at me. She stopped herself before completing the invasion of my personal space, an adorable pout-grimace taking over her face. “Um, right, permission. Can I touch you? For forensics.”

If it could give stronger evidence that we were in the clear? Absolutely. The nervous, residually tense grunt of consent had barely left my throat when she closed the gap between us fully and pulled me into a hug. Her arms snaked under my jacket, and she rested her face on my chest, taking a deep sniff of my collar.

“Uh—”

She made a purring noise. It was a rumbly, deep-chest vocalization, and I felt the most absurd desire to mirror it. I couldn’t, though; it wasn’t a sound that could come from a human throat. It made me feel like prey. After a few quiet moments of holding me—inspecting me in some odd glyphless manipulation of her Flame I couldn’t sense or understand—the vibration fell away, and her voice returned.

“Nope, didn’t leave anything on you, or at least not nothing I can smell. Just smells like you.”

I would have been relieved about that, but I was very distracted by the feeling of her breasts against my front and her breath on my collar. I did not need my wires crossed right now. She didn’t seem interested in separating from me either, shifting to make herself more comfortable. Her tone stayed conversational, which was somehow the most thrilling part of the whole thing, suggesting that this embrace was utterly unremarkable and never further away than a request.

“Didya tell Alice?”

“Uh.” My brain was lagging. “Um. Not—yet.”

“Don’t bother. We’ll tell her when we get back.”

That made me frown down at her, the sense of unseen danger overriding my libido.

“But—what if they’re still out there? What if that was the Peacies or, like, Hikanome or—”

“They’re gone, cutie. Trust me. No point in making Alice panic and yell at us to come back home, not after I worked so hard to get you out here. And she’ll feel awful that she left you alone! Just let it be.”

It was so very hard to argue with her like this.

“You’re…sure? I’m safe?”

“Mhm! Ninety-nine percent. I’ll keep an eye out, don’t worry, and if either of us see something, we’ll get outta there, no questions asked. I’m not gonna take you hunting or fighting today. But I did promise to take you shopping.”

Those terms sounded reasonable, at least when they tickled my neck and resonated through her chest into mine. Even accounting for my…contact-induced bias, it did ease my mind that she was trying to be considerate to my needs; I bore no desire to find out what “hunting” and “fighting” entailed.

That’s what I told myself, at least.

—

Winter air always makes my hand ache a bit. It’s both the temperature and the dryness, I think; the former brings a sort of swelling in my joints not unlike a fever, and the latter makes my scar tissue stiff. It’s not that bad if I’m not using the hand for anything in particular, and the dryness is mostly mitigated with moisturizer, but it’s still obnoxious enough for winter to be my least-favorite season. From November to March, my right hand essentially lived in my pocket whenever I was outdoors, and that still didn’t entirely stave off the ache. After my encounter with the voyeur where I had brandished my scarred hand as a direct conduit for my Flame, it occurred to me that I could use a milder version of the same trick to fight off the cold. Hina shot it down, though.

“Nope. Too loud. Trust me, cutie, I’d love to help you play with your Light, but the last thing we need right now is for you to make more of a light show.”

“I don’t mean I’d actually ignite it. Just chilly, ‘s all.”

“I get it, you’re just stressed. You get all nervous and fiddly with your Light because it makes you feel bigger and scarier against…” she waved her hand vaguely, “All that. I used to do the same thing, y’know. But you don’t gotta be worried, and you don’t gotta aggravate it. I can pick up on anything that happens near us without making us a target. We can deal with the cold without magic, ‘kay?”

She brooked no further argument. Remarkably responsible by her standards, I felt, and her caution was palpable. Despite her insistence that we were okay to follow through with today’s errands, she was still on alert, eyes scanning the thickening crowds from behind her glasses as we moved toward Shinjuku Station. We didn’t stand out, at least, which helped me stave off the pervasive feeling of being watched; foreigners still seemed to outnumber locals in this part of town. Nobody looked twice at Hina or me, but she kept checking over her shoulder, and it was setting me ill at ease. It was easy to imagine a pair of hands reaching out from the crowd and yanking me away while her back was turned, an idea that made my tattoo itch—that response had been useless all day. When I had confronted the stalker, I hadn’t even drawn my spear.

In a weird way, Hina’s constant reassurances paired with her alertness just made me more paranoid. She stayed within arm’s reach and kept assuring me that there was nothing to worry about, claiming that if she saw something we’d have no problems cutting through the press of bodies to get out of here. The fact that nobody else in the crowd seemed to notice the alertness in her posture was electrifying. She was nearly invisible, but not in the way of an ambush predator on the savannah, no silent, stalking, coiled spring ready to explode into motion at the first sign of trouble. I was sure she could, but that wasn’t the mode of stealth here; it was like she was one with the flow of the crowd, casual and unremarkable, even peppy, hiding in plain sight by being a totally normal young woman.

In short, she had disguised herself by being the puppy—and I was grateful that it was this rather than the hyena. The horrible thrill she aroused inside me when she fully embraced her predatory aspect was novel and exciting and absolutely not what I needed right now. 

“You haven’t had lunch yet, right?”

“Um. No?”

“Awesome. Let’s get outta the cold for a bit and grab a bite.”

Thus commenced my introduction to a staple of life in Japan: the konbini.

The cold chased us through the sliding door a few steps before reluctantly slinking back beyond the threshold, leaving us in a pleasantly warm pocket of consumerism. The general din of traffic and the crowd were replaced by the shop’s synthetic jingle and the peppy white noise of an ad playing on a television mounted above the registers. I avoided eye contact with the worker at the register, unsure whether I was supposed to acknowledge their greeting. Hina didn’t, busy scanning the store for threats—or just a meal. It was hard to say.

The convenience store was a dense space, even constricting, the narrow rows of shelves not wide enough for two people to pass by one another. If Tochou had been a castle, with layered corridors and bureaucratic redoubts, this rather felt like some sort of dungeon, if a brightly lit one bursting at the seams with colorfully packaged products. The narrow spaces were far more comfortable to me than being exposed in the open street; the shelves at my back lent the space a snug security as Hina led me down the aisles. Coming out of the cold and into this confined, controllable space had a much better effect on my mood than her assurances, and it was a relief when she seemed to relax some of her constant watchfulness and began to treat the little shop as something of a tour. Maybe she was just trying to distract me, but it was welcome now.

First, she took me toward the rear, down an aisle that began with supplements and ended at baked goods. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most items had a label in English in addition to the Japanese, though some of the sweets were labeled more enigmatically than others—I was reasonably sure the glazed churro I was inspecting could have had a more descriptive title than simply “Milk.” There were also some more classically Japanese items I recognized from online: curry breads, yakisoba breads, and the humble melonpan, which Hina regretfully informed me did not in fact taste like melon. A shame.

She handed me a fairly innocuous looking bun—for a burger, perhaps? It wasn’t a complete sandwich compared to some of the other offerings, but she insisted it was “exactly what I was looking for!” with a seal-like clap of excitement before dragging me around the corner to the back wall and presenting me with a row of refrigerated drink cabinets.

“Well?”

“I can’t read any of this.”

“Sure you can.” She reached into one of the fridge cabinets and extracted a carton labeled Lemon Tea in big bold letters—Lipton brand, even, familiarly nostalgic. “See!”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She tilted her head—too damn cute for someone who bothered me in so many ways.

“Then what did you mean?”

“…Just unfamiliar, ‘s all.”

“And that’s why we’re doing this!”

She brandished the drink at me until I accepted it, shuffling the items around so that the cold drink would be in my left hand and not aggravate the ache in my right so soon after we’d escaped the chill. Now both of my hands were occupied with lunch components, and for a moment I mentally played out what I’d have to do if we were attacked. Drop the bun, throw the carton at our assailant, summon my spear—these narrow corridors were perfect for it, no easy way to get around the speartip head-on. If a second assailant came from behind, I was confident I could at least snapweave a {DEFLECT} barrier to control the space. 

“I told you, cutie, stop doing that. You’re making your Light jumpy, and it’s making you jumpy right back. Let it go.”

I jumped when I realized Hina had gotten closer to me and was looking down at my forearm. Even though it was covered by my coat, I could tell she was referring to the tattoo. Could she see me fidgeting with the lattice somehow?

“I wasn’t going to. Just, uh—trying to feel better, I guess.”

“I know! It’s nice that you’re prepared, but seriously, leave that all to me, okay? I don’t want you to stress.”

Having her this close to me was also a good distraction. I found myself observing that this look was really working for her, and also that she smelled great. Then embarrassment kicked in, and I involuntarily edged away from her a bit. That made her grin, step yet closer to me, and grab my wrist. A flash of blue over the rim of those glasses reminded me of what I was standing next to, and I shuddered—not entirely in a bad way. I wondered if she was about to press me against these refrigerators and kiss me right here in the middle of this store, telegraphed by the way she leaned toward me—

She pulled away with a teasing grin. The flash of teeth showed standard human incisors and canines, not the fangs which had brought out those tainted, confusing feelings of need the night before. I found reprieve from my pounding heart in wondering about the magic.

“How’d you hide them?”

“Hologram,” she replied.

Then she pulled me by the arm to another part of the store, down an aisle which seemed to be focused on drugstore items, toiletries, and so on. She plucked from the shelf a box of…something. I could not at all figure out what I was looking at from the labeling, other than that it was vaguely medical. She tossed it from hand to hand idly.

“No more cold hands for you!”

“Um?”

“You’ll see! Amane loves these things. Want anything more to eat? Chips? Uh, chips as in ‘crisps’, I guess,” she clarified, making air quotes and rolling her eyes behind the glasses.

That would have stung a younger Dalton more, but the years of living in America had somewhat dampened my most objectionably British mannerisms by the time I had become a teenager, and then my desire to remain anonymous online for the following seven years had caused me to further Americanize my word choices for ambiguity’s sake.

“Um. Chips is fine. And—I’m not that hungry?” It came out as almost a question, embarrassed to refuse the offer. “Opal gave me some cashews.”

Hina was already moving on, taking me to the crunchy snacks despite my protest. I begrudgingly browsed; it beat thinking about the idea that we were still being watched.

The selection was dominated by potato chips and various forms of rice cracker—no corn chips, no pretzels. Wait—almost no corn chips; my eyes alighted on a familiar triangular logo.

“They have Doritos here?”

“Yeah, but good luck finding anything but that taco seasoning kind. And no, that’s not the red flavor. Not being able to get them here drives me up the wall. And like—no Cheez-its or Goldfish either! They love savory and salty and crunchy stuff,” she waved at the seaweed-flavored potato chips and chili oil rice puffs for emphasis, “and you’d think cheese-based snacks would be perfect for that, but noooo. It’s not even like cheese is unheard of here! They put it in places where it doesn’t belong all the time! Cheese gyudon? Cheese sushi? Cheese ramen—okay, no, that’s actually pretty yummy, but like—it’s just—ugh!”

Her sudden polemic reached a peak of exasperation from which it had no choice but to peter out to a grumble as she browsed down the snacks. She cast an almost fuming glance at the bag of Doritos I was now suspending between the fingers of my right hand as I clumsily tried to juggle it with the bun without dropping both. Was the rant a way of letting off her own stress about the whole situation, or was I reading into it too much? Either way, her rhythm demanded I say something—about her thoroughly developed stance on cheese? About my own dawning horror at the lack of the familiar snacks upon which I had subsisted for the last seven years? Or—

“Do you not consider yourself Japanese? You keep using ‘they’.”

I realized belatedly that that was maybe a bit heavy and invasive of a topic, but she didn’t seem offended. The curiosity had come from talking with Alice earlier—I couldn’t help but wonder about Hina’s remarkably American accent and mannerisms.

“I mean…I’m full blood, not a halfie like Alice. But I grew up in the US.”

“Where?”

“Socal. Santa Monica.”

I didn’t have a sturdy enough grasp of American geography to know exactly where in California that was—and I wasn’t going to admit that.

“Oh, yeah, that’s—on the coast, isn’t it? So, er—born there?”

Her head swiveled to me, catching the attempt to cover my ignorance like a radar dish. “Cutie, almost every city in the state is on the coast. It’s a suburb of LA.”

Caught in my ignorance, there was nothing for me to do but blush. The pet name contributed to that, too—embarrassing in public, but so good to hear from her lips. It was so casual and never had a hint of sarcasm; I didn’t believe the label, but it felt far too nice for me to want to object. I diverted by inspecting the bun as I rearranged how I was holding everything into a more ergonomic configuration.

“Sorry, is this just bread?”

“There’s tartar sauce in it!”

“I meant, er, fillings.” Was this some strange Japanese culinary sensibility in which a ‘sandwich’ consisted only of bread and sauce? Surely not; some of the other sandwiches sharing a shelf with the bun had contained katsu or ham.

She broke into a big smile. “Thought you’d never ask. Allow me to present my favorite thing about this entire country!”

She dragged me back to the registers, or rather to a large glass case between the registers which I had somehow missed on the way in, having been preoccupied with the sensory assault. It was full of—

“Fried chicken!”

She sounded so incredibly smug that I couldn’t help but play into it, leaning in to admire the selection. I was delighted to feel warmth radiating off the glass. After savoring the sensation for a moment, I ventured to confirm where I thought she was going with this.

“A chicken sandwich?”

“Yep. Delish, way better than you’d get for the same price at McDonalds. Better than KFC too, IMO, but don’t tell Yuuka I said that.”

“They have KFC here?”

“Mhm. But not as good as this place. Wait, I just said that.”

The options were diverse. Aside from the traditionally breaded options, which themselves came in a few form factors and ran the gamut from plain salt to soy sauce to spicy, there were more esoteric choices that were skirting the line of ‘fried chicken’, and yet others that had outright crossed it: glazed chicken skewers which some ingrained culinary knowledge identified as yakitori, hash browns, some mysterious fried balls on a stick, and—

“That’s a corn dog.”

She nodded enthusiastically. I could feel some choice paralysis coming on.

“Uh.”

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of putting a corn dog between those buns, cutie.”

Did she have to say it like that? Was she even aware of how it sounded? Her gaze was perfectly level, not even a wry smile acknowledging the innuendo, bordering on a creepy stare. I forced myself to stop looking at her, returning my gaze to the selection of fried and grilled foods. I pointed at the most-stocked item, a crunchy looking cutlet that seemed about the right size for the bun.

“Um. One of those.”

“Ding ding ding!”

“Uh?”

“The esteemed and noble Famichiki is the intended partner for that bun now in your possession.” She had taken on a very bad British accent. “It is one of the greatest joys in life.”

“Wait, are you imitating—”

“Noooo.”

“She—she doesn’t talk like that, I don’t think.”

“Who knows her better, cutie, you or me?”

Though I maintained privately that it was a rather poor impression from Opal’s purported best friend, I had no choice but to fall silent and contemplate the banter. I was, despite everything, having a pretty good time at right this moment.

While I ruminated on that, Hina waved down the cashier and ordered the Famichiki. Her voice was notably higher in Japanese, a full octave up—still retaining some of the huskiness, but if I didn’t know it came from the same mouth I would have had trouble connecting the two. She prompted me to dump my items onto the counter in front of the register, at which point I realized she hadn’t gotten anything for herself. Wasn’t she hungry? Indeed, she hadn’t eaten earlier today either. She had claimed that she didn’t need to eat or sleep as much as a normal human—a curious contrast from her other Flame-enmeshed teammate’s ravenous appetite—but by now, I rather felt she should be eating something.

That mystery was promptly solved when the cashier brought two of the fried chicken cutlets, not just the one, wrapped in their own neat little paper pockets. Hina accepted them and paid with what felt like a remarkable amount of composure and politeness. But once everything got bagged up, she turned to me and began to practically vibrate with excitement.

—

The sandwich was good. Unreasonably good, even, given that, upon inspecting the receipt and some conversions on my phone, I calculated that the combined price of its components came out to barely over two quid. Add in the chips and drink for equivalence to a typical Tesco meal deal, and all told, it was about three and a half—a very good deal by my standards, even before the superior quality of the sandwich. The breading was crispy, the inside juicy, and the tartar sauce bound everything together well.

Fat carries flavor, came Dad’s voice. Mayonnaise doesn’t have much flavor of its own, but it’s a fantastic binder for transmitting mix-ins. Add some dill, chopped pickles, and relish, and you’ll have the perfect spread for nearly any sandwich.

Watching Hina eat was an excellent distraction, because it was so far outside the realm of what could be called civilized that it was quite impossible for me to consider culinary details like seasoning.

Her disguise did nothing to conceal her nature when it came to the hunk of meat clutched in her claws. Indeed, it was the most feral I’d ever seen her, and even if that didn’t make it obvious to the layperson that this was one of the Radiances, we’d still have gotten some very concerned looks had we been eating in public. She’d killed her hologram, tossed her sunglasses onto the table, and torn the cutlet clean in half, slicking her hands with the juice. She then proceeded to tear off chunks with those razor-teeth, snapping through the breaded crust with an audible crunch each time. My gut said that even if these pieces of chicken hadn’t been boneless, she would have eaten them the same way.

Eaten me the same way, whispered an unwelcome shiver.

Once every piece had disappeared down her gullet, she’d licked the juices off her hands in a positively rapacious, dog-like manner and made a deep, satisfied huff. Only then did she regain some of the trappings of civilization, leaning over to grab a paper towel and wiping down her hands more properly, taking a brush to her hair that had fallen a bit out of place during the animalistic feasting, and reenabling the holographic veneer of regular human teeth. Her meal had taken maybe a minute, start to finish. Then she settled back down, let her eyes slide half-shut, and seemed to find a happy medium between dozing and watching me eat at a more normal pace, in sleepy, satisfied puppy-mode.

Obviously, this was not taking place on the street. Hina had led me back out of the convenience store, around the corner, down an alley, waited until no passersby were looking, told me to close my eyes—and transported us into her personal pocketspace in a sickening, crunching crackle of her personal bubble of reality. My stomach had turned upside down as my Flame had practically crooned at the display of power. This was real magic, and I had been tempted to open my eyes during the translation to witness the exact way the Flame asserted its truth upon the standard three-dimensional space of the world—but I knew that would have killed my appetite entirely, interesting as it would have been, and I was hungry. I crunched down on a Dorito and was devastated to find this flavor not to my liking.

She should have warned me of what she was doing, asked permission. Opal would have been beyond furious, I suspected. But even if she had asked, I wouldn’t have said no to this in the first place. Not to the magic, not to the relative safety of this secure space compared to the crowds, and ultimately not to the thrill of witnessing her indulge her carnal nature. In that minute of beasthood, my instincts had whispered to me two conflicting feelings: a marrow-deep terror that the moment she was done with her piece of chicken she’d do the same to me, and a primal desire to eat my own meal with the same ferocious abandon. Something about it called to me, the freedom, the sheer joy she had taken in every bite and brutal shredding of meat with her fingers. But I had insisted to myself that I was perfectly fine eating with a semblance of table manners, thank you very much. Furthermore, she was not in fact going to pounce upon me next—damnably desirable as that prospect was, conjuring images of more shredded clothes and bloody marks on my skin. In fact—don’t think about that, Ezzen. Don’t think about how in this space we were as hidden from Opal’s moderating presence as from any third-party interlopers, how Hina took such an obvious, primal happiness in devouring her kill, how freeing it would feel to follow her down the path of the carnivore—

Anyway. ‘Nest’ was the word that came to mind for Hina’s pocketspace; as Opal had mentioned, it was well-furnished, a combination living and storage space, and she’d clearly made herself at home. She had another of those low tables that Todai seemed to love so much, blankets and boxes, all the trappings of a cozy attic. It was a square room, four meters to a side, with warm beige walls that were certainly made of LM. The light came from a series of indirect, upward-facing lamps that ran the perimeter of the wall, shining onto the ceiling and bouncing it down onto us to cast everything in soft, warm tones. The air was that exact sort of room temperature where one could lose track of where their skin ended and the atmosphere began, tempting me to just curl up in one of the blankets and pass out with a full belly.

“Um. How does the air work in here?”

“You already know the answer to that, cutie.”

“Well—you mean it’s all magic? No external ventilation? Just…typical molecular recombinant filter?”

“Yep, same thing they use up on the ISS, ‘cause it’s like we’re in space, sorta. If I’m not making a door, this place is totally sealed off.”

“Huh. And we’re…W-up.” That was a pure guess, driven by the attic impression the room had given me; which direction we were offset from regular reality in the fourth dimension was impossible to tell without a frame of reference.

“Mhm. Easier to pull stuff up than push it down.”

“Gotcha,” I lied, so tempted to ask for clarification but unwilling to admit my ignorance. “Um—if this room can move around in threespace, do we have to walk on the streets at all? Couldn’t you just spit us out wherever we’re headed?”

“Mm. Nope. I mean, yeah, but you don’t want to be in here when I’m moving this thing.” She stretched on her bean bag, panther-like, to brush her fingers against the wall behind her. “Could intersect with something nasty.”

What was she referring to, exactly? Other VNTs’ pocketspaces? There was no Google Street View for the fourth dimension that had been overlaid onto the world when the Flame had crashed down; only VNT groups really knew what sort of stuff was hanging out just offset from reality, and they tended to keep real quiet about it. Sure, we knew that the Spire’s contents were heavily distributed through the fourth dimension for “bigger on the inside” practicalities, but supposedly everything else in here was smaller-scale and pretty much categorically secret. Ebi’s internals were a good example, squirreled away into these extra-dimensional hidey-holes.

“…nastier than whoever was stalking me?”

“Oh, that’s what this is about?” She sat up a bit. “We talked about this before, cutie, they’re gone. Gone gone, as in never really there, just some ripple. Nobody’s coming after us, I promise.”

“I—I know, I believe you,” I mollified her, “It’s just…I feel exposed, out there.”

She sighed.

“I promise you’re not. Nobody’s watching us, nobody’s following us. You’re safe with me. How can I make you feel more safe?”

Was she serious? Did she have no self-awareness whatsoever? She had been making me feel unsafe since I had woken up yesterday, and surely some of that had to be intentional—did she really not know how it came across? Opal’s words from last night, after seeing the bites Hina had left all over my shoulder, returned to me. Their little monster.

“…Can I be honest?”

“Always!”

“I…if we have to go through with this, I’d feel safer if…it were Opal here.”

I hadn’t known exactly where my thoughts had been heading until it came out of my mouth; I regretted it instantly as Hina’s face fell, her head flopping down to stare dejectedly at the sunglasses on the table. This wasn’t a conversation that should be happening in the middle of all this, certainly not without some planning and an escape route. The compounding stress of the whole situation had just gotten to me.

“Oh. I’m the problem?”

“…I wouldn’t put it like that,” I backtracked, trying to cram the hyena back into the bag. “Can…no, that wasn’t true. Opal can’t sense things like you can, can she?”

She perked up and shook her head in a motion that carried all the way down her neck and shoulders.

“Nope!”

“Then—it’s better that it’s you,” I compromised. “And I do trust you when it comes…to killing anything that gets in your way.” I winced a bit at saying that aloud, worried it’d set her off somehow, but she lit up. “So let’s just…get it over with, I guess.”

“I’m soooo good at that, yeah.” She reached for her sunglasses, having seemingly entirely bounced back. “I said it earlier, I promised you a not-date and some clothes. And I keep my promises! Let’s go!”

“What, already?”

“Uh, yeah? We’ve got places to be. And you’re done eating, unless that wrapper looks way more appetizing to you than it does to me.”

I looked down at the greasy paper baggie the chicken cutlet had come in, somehow relieved that she didn’t consider it on the menu. There was other detritus, too: the bun’s wrapper, the bag of Doritos, and my now-drained carton of lemon tea.

“Er—no, it doesn’t.” I checked the room; no rubbish bin. “What do I do with it?”

—

A few snapwoven {ASHES} later and we were back out in the cold, continuing up the promenade toward Shinjuku Station. I’d noted the hypocrisy of using magic to do away with our rubbish after Hina had told me that using a spell to warm up my hand wasn’t a good idea, though I’d framed it as a question. She’d patted my head and told me she’d show me how to cast more quietly later, which inspired a strange mix of indignance, excitement at the prospect of more magic, and a damnable please do that again which I did not voice. None of these feelings made my hand any less cold, though.

She was a step ahead. The non-magical solution she’d mentioned earlier lay within the indecipherable box she had bought at the convenience store, from which she extracted some small plastic packets. They were covered all over in fine print—rather like the ice pack I had been using, just smaller. I discovered with delight that they were in fact the opposite, radiating delicious warmth after a brief and vigorous shake which Hina delighted in. I wrapped one packet in each hand with chilly fingers, delved into my pockets, and within another minute of walking, the ache in my hand had dissipated. Hina looked so pleased with herself, and her smile—regular human teeth once more—only grew bigger after my mumbled thanks.

The streets of Tokyo were a jungle of signs; everything was indicated. Every shop had a sign, every tall building had a sign running up its length saying what was on each floor, and logos I didn’t recognize were plastered across the vast billboards perching atop every other building. Those shared the upper end of the view with the cranes; there was a lot of construction both up there and down at street level, where it was far more cordoned and demarcated than I was used to. Temporary plastic walls acted as sound baffles— complete with digital volume indicators, which were sort of fascinating—and were attended by workers in hi-vis directing foot traffic around affected areas. The signage even extended to the traffic; taxis took up a notable amount of the road, but they were totally blown out of the water by a truck that rounded the corner blaring pop music. As it passed, I realized the sides were billboards—made a face.

“Fuckin’ hell. That’s…”

“Incredibly obnoxious?”

“Well, yeah, but I’m talking about…”

The Radiances, rendered in an anime art style, smiled and posed at us from the side of the truck. Hina frowned at her organization’s motorized advertisement as it stopped right in front of us. For a moment I thought it had stopped specifically for her, that somehow we’d been made, but no—it was just traffic.

“Hate these things so much,” she grumbled over the music. “But I’m the only one who voted against it. That’s Ai you’re hearing, by the way.”

“Eurgh.”

The vocals would have been far more tolerable to the ear in any other context, but being blasted over the general din of the city was doing Ai’s voice no favors. Mercifully, we had only passed it by a dozen meters when traffic started moving again and the horrible truck continued further into the city, the song receding into the distance and turning to echoes bouncing off the skyscrapers.

“Nuisance, it is. Gotta be noise pollution.” I jerked a thumb in the direction of the construction site across the street, with its volume indicator. “How can this and that exist in the same city?”

Hina shrugged. “Sorry. I can bring it up with Alice next time.”

“That, uh, mahou shoujo?” The word came out just a bit more mocking than I had really intended.

“Ah, you got the lecture,” she giggled. “Not really. It’s idol shit. Or, uh, anime promo shit, in this case, it’s for the Precure collab.”

Fortunately, that was the most eventful thing that happened to us between then and reaching Shinjuku Station. I saw the first entrance long before the main building, a perfectly normal and even familiar metro stop staircase that descended into the city’s bowels. Then another, not thirty meters later, and another, and yet another. Sometimes they were standalone on the pavement, sometimes they were quietly nestled into the cityscape at the ground floor of random office buildings, but we must have passed a dozen across half a kilometer of walking.

“Is—are these all for the same station?”

“Yep. Shinjuku-eki’s real big. You didn’t see it from up above?”

“Um…we didn’t have time,” I lied.

“Aw. Well, it’s more impressive from down here anyway.”

When we finally got within eyeshot of the station proper, I had to admit that it was. Tochou had been tall, a duolith of stone facade—Shinjuku Station was more horizontal, but vast, in white panels and more logos. The density of foot traffic surrounding it was absurd, a sea of people flowing in and out and around, which put to shame even the press of bodies that had surrounded us until now.

“That’s…” Too big. This city was not for me; why did I have to be acrophobic and agoraphobic? I could feel myself clamming up a bit, squeezing the heat packs in my pockets as an outlet for the discomfort. “What are we here for?”

“Everything!”

—

Hina had led me into the station, first across broad indoor plazas lined with storefronts, then through wide, arterial halls plastered in advertising, and onto a series of escalators and down into the bowels. The upper levels gave the strong impression of a mall, and Hina confirmed that we could probably get all our shopping done without leaving the station, but we first had another errand deeper within. The crowds became a bit more orderly, the chaotic press laminating into distinct flows of traffic as the milling commerce gave way to the commuter hub the whole megastructure ostensibly was meant to be.

Eventually, we arrived at a row of automated kiosks, and she walked me through the process of getting myself a transit card. Unlike at Tochou, we didn’t need to interact with a clerk at all—just enter a name, feed the machine a ten-thousand yen bill, and collect the unremarkable green-and-silver plastic card it spat out. Hina presented the freshly-minted IC card to me with a flourish, then tilted her head at my wallet as I selected a spot for it.

“We gotta get those bills exchanged.”

“I’ve hardly used cash in years. These are just—my emergency money, from when…yeah.” I shook off the memories of the pursuit; it didn’t do me any good to be reminded of how she had rescued me. “Besides, didn’t you say it’s all basically Opal’s money anyway? Am I gonna get a credit card in Todai’s name or something?”

“I mean, yeah, you will, I think, but lots of places here still only take cash.” Hina gestured at the row of kiosks. “Half of these things can’t even recharge that card with anything but cash, and this is Shinjuku friggin’ Station! Gets worse the further out into the sticks you go. And—I don’t think that wallet can even fit yen bills. Hold on.” She dug into her own wallet and passed me a bill, confirming the hunch. It could sort of squeeze in there, but it definitely wasn’t intended.

Thus we returned to the commercial shallows to commence the shopping part of this outing in earnest, beginning with a new wallet. Hina found an appropriate shop in short order and ferreted out a little fake-leather item, with approximately the same layout as my current wallet and in roughly the same black. I wasn’t picky and was relieved that she didn’t push me to browse and compare my options. In and out, like we had agreed, no humiliation or choice paralysis. She paid for the wallet and handed me enough cash to fill it with that I flinched; even though I hadn’t quite internalized the exact exchange rate, I could tell that it was equivalent to several hundred pounds. I meekly accepted the stack of money, which only widened the grin on her face.

“Alright! Clothes. Lots of fashion stores around here, but I don’t think we need to do anything fancier than Uniqlo for you, at least not today.”

I recognized the brand name.

“That’s—on the cheaper side, yeah?”

“Mhm. The way you were dressed when I picked you up—is that normal for you? Jeans and turtlenecks?”

“Uh, in the winter, yeah. Well—not jeans when I’m staying indoors. Sweats and such.”

“Mhm, we can definitely do that there.”

Actually getting to the store was a different matter; there was one in the station’s mall complex, but it was clear on the other side of the vast structure from where we had come up, so despite what Hina had said about getting everything done in the station, it was actually more convenient to go just outside and two blocks over. I didn’t love getting back on the open street, even though Hina quietly reassured me once again that she’d neither seen nor felt anything suspicious.

I was discovering that I just didn’t like crowds.

—

Uniqlo’s selection of unremarkable shirts and pants was to my liking. We’d gone up four floors via escalator to reach the unisex casualwear floor, and as we’d passed the women’s section on the third floor, I’d tensed up, half-expecting Hina to block me off from the next escalator and herd me toward those high-waisted skirts. But she didn’t even comment on it.

I was delighted to find that fashion in Tokyo tended toward baggier clothes that hid one’s figure. I’d long had a preference for looser clothes—for one, they were more comfortable to wear all day when sitting at my desk or laying on my bed, but also they formed a protective shell, a second skin that evoked Vaetna carapace in a way that tighter, form-fitting clothes didn’t. My basket had rapidly filled with wide-fit cargo pants in various earth tones—at first, I’d been hesitant to get more than one or two, citing that they were fairly expensive and could be worn multiple days in a row before needing a wash, until Hina had pulled out a very expensive-looking credit card and brandished it at me until I accepted it.

“Get what makes you happy. That’s why we’re here.”

Its opulence practically burned my fingers, noticeably denser in my hand than the plastic cards I was used to. I fumbled it into my wallet, where its matte-black and glimmering-blue embellishments stood out against the cheap grey of my debit card. It didn’t belong in my life, and I felt a pang of guilt at the undeserved generosity I was being showered with—until I saw the sweaters. Thick and baggy and wonderfully cozy-looking, they called me right over, guilt about price tags suppressed by the appeal of such a heavy and safe outer shell as I stuffed several into the basket. They were soon joined by some utterly unremarkable socks and underwear, which went un-commented-on despite how I had again braced myself for teasing. I was starting to let my guard down as my worst worries about this excursion continued to go unrealized; Hina seemed committed to both my safety and our agreement that she wouldn’t foist anything unwanted upon me. She did, however, attempt to expand my fashion horizons in more innocuous ways.

“Want more shirts like that one?”

“Like which?”

She pointed at my chest, and as I looked down I suddenly remembered that I’d had Sailor Moon peeking out from under my jacket all day. I reflexively turned away from her a bit to hide it from her—the embarrassment doubled when I remembered what she had said about this one being among her favorites.

“I’m…not really opposed, but it’s usually, um, Spire stuff.”

She insisted I at least take a gander at a table covered in graphic tees. I found nothing Vaetna-related—I’d been sort of hoping for something similar to my heron shirt, which I now regretted leaving behind in my apartment. It was probably in PCTF custody now; I had a ridiculous vision of the sixteen-quid polyester shirt laid out in a ripple-isolated analysis chamber, scientists and officials huddled around it, trying to extract the secrets of my strange and unprecedented flamefall from the fabric. The scene took on a bit of black comedy knowing that the rumors were true.

Anyway, the table before me was mostly anime merch and some other classic Japanica like Godzilla and Ultraman—and Todai. The Radiances’ portion of the table ranged from simple graphic designs of their logo to their individual symbols to stylized anime renditions of the girls themselves that recalled the truck from before. Hina had the audacity to unfold and hoist a white shirt depicting five pairs of anime eyes: fiery orange with slitted pupils, ultramarine, freckle-rimmed brown, vivid green, and a lone hazel, its twin covered by black hair. The irises glimmered with some kind of iridescent ink, like my tattoo. Each pair of eyes was put over their theme color—if I squinted, I could see the backdrops were made up of a pattern of little gemstone shapes, a different cut for each one. Hina read from the label.

“One hundred percent cotton!” She rubbed it with her fingers. “Amane insists on that for all the apparel and she’s totally right.”

It was a damn good design, all things considered, and sufficiently big and baggy that I could see myself wearing it to bed—but I wasn’t going to swap allegiances that easily, present circumstances notwithstanding. The Spire’s imagery was a comfort zone that I was loath to step out of. I opted to voice a less personal excuse, though.

“I’ll—couldn’t I just get one of those…straight from the source, instead of buying one here?”

She grinned.

“Nope! These are limited-time new years goods, already out of production. You’d have to get them secondhand in a few more weeks if you wanted one.”

Limited merch? Suddenly, I realized what to do. I drew my phone.

[Direct Message] ezzen: What size shirt do you wear?

starstar97: uh

starstar97: medium?

starstar97: what are you cooking

starstar97: actually, wait, don’t tell me, i want it to be a surprise

starstar97: …

starstar97: its totally japan limited todai merch holy shit holy shit

starstar97: either the big group splash or the new years one with the eyes

Hina had crept over to my side to peek down at the chat and gave a hum of approval at my best friend’s deduction.

ezzen: It’s the eyes. Interested?

starstar97: ofc im fuckin interested you baka please please get me one ill love you forever

starstar97: but thats like 40 bucks and shipping would be like another 30 so uhh i wont be able to pay you back until my next paycheck

ezzen: dw

ezzen: Sapphire is shaking me and telling me to tell you that it’s on the house.

ezzen: Happy birthday!

starstar97: its FEBRUARY

I shouldered Hina off of me, who was practically bouncing with delight.

“Awwwww! That’s so sweet, cutie.”

“It’s—I’m just paying it forward. You’re spending…way too much money on me, and I’m not even a fan. She is.”

“Awwwwwww,” she repeated, coming back in and hugging me from the side. Even though her hands remained firmly above my clothes, the way she glommed herself onto me felt like too much PDA for the middle of a store. It called for a more private setting—I absently glanced over at the dressing rooms, my subconscious dredging up that wild fantasy that had helped drag me down last night—I squirmed out of her embrace before I could suggest something incredibly untoward. She followed my gaze and affirmed that it wasn’t happening.

“Not today, cutie. That clause about love hotels applies in spirit here too.”

“O-oh.” That hadn’t been a joke? “Wait—‘not today’?”

“Yeah, not today.”

That was leaving rather a lot unsaid, and she seemed totally disinterested in expounding further, putting the onus on me to ask if I wanted to explore exactly what she was implying—which I was not at all willing to do in public, even if I had been able to get any words out at all. Steam practically shot out of my ears as I turned what was probably a yet-undiscovered shade of red. She just blinked at me before slinking over toward the outerwear.

“Want a coat like mine? They’re really comfy.”

Rather than respond to her, I just edged toward the dressing rooms, if only to get out of her immediate presence and stop the cycle of thoughts. She gave me a thumbs-up and went back to inspecting a long jacket, and I practically fled to the dressing rooms, only stopping to have a confusing and further-embarrassing exchange with an attendant who directed me to the second stall and motioned for me to take off my shoes before I entered.

I closed the door, turned the latch, dumped the basket of clothes on the floor, and leaned against the wall, almost hyperventilating and feeling quite stupid about it. How the hell was she able to just blow past that? Was I making some kind of awful false assumption about what she had meant? What’s more, at some level, there was also kind of revulsion at my own want; this had all begun with her kidnapping me, and last night she had sexually assaulted me. I’d outright admitted I didn’t feel safe around her not an hour ago. These intrusive, horny thoughts about her felt so, so wrong. 

It took five minutes to talk myself down and then another five to actually try on the clothes I had picked; getting out of the shirt Hina liked so much helped me re-center. The cramped space of the stall helped me feel more secure, nice and closed away from the world; didn’t have to check over my shoulder for magical stalkers in here. The sense of comfort increased further as I donned the baggy armor of sweaters and heavy pants. The mirror agreed that it was working; the heavy, ambiguous silhouette of the sweaters and pants combined felt like me, a far cry from my worst worries for the kinds of clothes implied by Hina’s casual dismissal of my gender when we had first met or the aesthetics dictated by mahou shoujo. It wasn’t an extreme makeover, just a moderate shift to a slightly more upscale version of what I was used to wearing, since budget was no longer as much of a concern.

I jumped when I heard a tap on the door and Hina’s voice.

“Cutie? Ez? You okay?”

“I’m—fine, I’m fine. The clothes are working.”

“Can I see?”

I resisted the urge to take a deep breath; she’d definitely hear it. I opened the door of my cozy little haven and saw her standing there, looking a bit nervous, eyes cast down at the shoes I had discarded at the threshold of the stall. She was holding one of the coats she had been looking at earlier, a long, heavy thing in a soft cream tone. Was that technically a trench coat or a great coat or an overcoat?

“Sorry if I spooked you by saying that.”

“It’s—fine?” I hadn’t expected her to apologize. Nestled in my new armor, I felt the confidence to at least obliquely confront the topic. “We, um—ah, fuck, we need to talk about it when we’re done here, I think? It’s—it’s all just been an extremely weird few days, you know? And I don’t know if I’m ready for—if I want—well.”

Fortunately, she seemed to get what I was trying to convey without me having to spell it out.

“Mhm. Let me know if I’m coming on too strong, okay? Like I said, I’m…”

“Not great at knowing when to stop, yeah. I will.” Then I allowed myself to take the deep breath I had aborted earlier and changed the topic, proud of how I had handled that. “…How do I look?”

“Good! Yeah, it’s working.” She gave me a once-over, then prodded at my discarded shoes idly with her foot. “We can do better than these, but that doesn’t have to be a today thing, ‘specially before your foot’s all better. How’s it feel?”

“Um, doesn’t hurt much, ankle’s still—”

“The outfit, not the foot,” she giggled.

“Oh. I like it?” I tried to figure out how to expound on that without referencing how it felt like carapace. “It’s comfortable…yeah, it’s comfortable.” I indicated the coat. “That for me?”

“Yeah! I think it’d work for you. Contrasts with the darks on the rest of the outfit, bulks out the silhouette some more, collar plays nicely with your hair. Try it?”

I had just reached out to accept it from her when Hina’s phone rang. I took the coat, and she dug in her pocket, sighing.

“It’s Alice. We might be about to get yelled at.”

“Why? Oh, wait—you think she found my stalker?”

“Probably.” She looked at the incoming call with something between trepidation and annoyance before picking up. “Damn it. Moshi moshi?”

My phone buzzed behind me where I had left it on the little bench in the stall. Then again. Then a third time, and a fourth, and it continued as I snatched it up. The first three had been pings in the chatroom, then a Twitter notification, then two news bulletins, and they just kept coming, all talking about the same thing. I realized Alice’s call wasn’t about the illusionary Flamebearer I had encountered—she was telling Hina about the same thing I was seeing cascade across my sources of magical world news.

That oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico where another part of my flamefall cluster had landed, the one locked down by the Spire in a standoff with the PCTF, had just gone inferno.

And Radiance Heliotrope was aboard.