Sunspot

Hina’s response to the news was the opposite of what I had expected.

Opal actually didn’t give us any kind of directive to come straight home. No point when these events were happening on the other side of the world, she said; there was simply nothing for us to do about it. Other than some tweeting, which Todai’s PR apparatus was already on top of, the simple fact of distance meant there wasn’t anything the other Radiances could do to impact the situation in time. So Opal had figured that we might as well just keep on with our shopping if we wanted. I’d expected Hina to go along with that.

But Hina overruled her. Despite all her earlier insistence that we had nothing to fear from my stalker and her commitment to giving me a day on the town, she’d changed her tune completely when hearing that Heliotrope was in danger and that a serious inferno was kicking off. The moment she’d processed the news, she’d strangled a canine whine of distress in her throat, snatched her credit card back from me, and shooed me back into the changing room to get back into my clothes. Before the curtain had blocked my view, I saw her charge over to the registers, practically steamrolling the poor cashier in a jumble of Japanese that did not sound at all like the customer-service-negotiation script Opal had been using at Tochou.

When I got out and delivered my new clothes to her at the register, I saw the cashier almost cowering away from Hina. I’m nearly certain she had tugged down her sunglasses and given them a faceful of sapphire over the rims, pulling rank to expedite the process. I frowned and insisted to myself that the strange pressure in my chest was sympathy for the guy rather than jealousy that Hina was directing that behavior at somebody else.

“Do you have to terrorize the guy? Are we in that much of a rush?”

“Sorry! Yeah, we are. We’re going home right now.”

“Uh.” I was fine with that in principle, having gotten the most critical of the errands done, but I had a terrible premonition about the method. “We’re not going to teleport, are we?”

“Nah, too close to be worth it. We’re flying.” She bit her lip at how I shrank. “Not good with heights?”

“Um—I managed, earlier, with Opal.” I’d really rather we just took a taxi back, but in the face of her mania, I couldn’t muster enough of an objection.

“It’s not far, you’ll be okay,” she assured. “We’re like…a mile from home? So it’ll be up, over, down. Really more of a big jump. Just, um, keep your eyes shut.”

—

As I felt our trajectory arc back downward with no signs of a controlled descent, I clutched Hina pathetically, screaming my lungs out. The winter air whipped the sound away, overwhelming it with the awful howl that signaled I was moving far faster than a human body was ever really intended to go. I was about to be turned into a wet red smear on impact—Hina would probably have been fine, but I was only mundane flesh and blood, not built to survive these extreme forces. Right when it seemed we could fall no faster, we just—

Stopped, the air turning still and silent. It was a thoroughly unnatural sensation, no sense of extreme g-forces decelerating us, no commensurate rush of air indicating a change in our velocity. One moment, we had all the thunderous and final kinetic energy of an artillery shell, the next, we didn’t.

It took me a moment to realize that I’d slipped out of Hina’s arms and was now lying on something rough and hard. It was sweet, blessed, glorious concrete, and I could have kissed it for the way it was securely anchored to the ground. I savored the feeling of the very bedrock of the world against my front, the sky back above me where it belonged and not below, gravity’s terror neutered with my potential energy reduced to a flat zero.

“Why—” I asked between heaving breaths, eyes still squeezed shut as I tried to fight down the residual urge to vomit, “—the fuck—did we not—just teleport?”

Hina knelt next to me and rubbed my back, which helped.

“This close to home? I told you, not worth it. We would have had to go up like a thousand feet above the rooftops to get clear anyway, or it’d splash the whole neighborhood!”

“Bullshit,” I moaned. “I saw you do it yesterday.”

“Hm? Oh, in the hallway? Nah, that was just translating up and out, not a real big-girl teleport. But—damn, sorry, I didn’t realize you were as bad with heights as Yuuka. Hey,” she prodded, “up, up. Let’s get you downstairs and outta the cold, I’ll have Ebi make you a nice cup of hot chocolate while you guys check in with Yuuka, okay?”

“…Downstairs?”

“Yeah. We’re still on the roof—oh, shit—”

Aggravated by the revelation that we were still sixty meters off the ground, the urge to vomit almost won, and I pushed myself to my knees to retch, trying in vain not to expel the chicken sandwich—

Something pricked my neck, and the nausea vanished. I flopped back down onto the concrete in relief before finally opening my eyes to look up at Ebi.

“Thanks. Fuck.”

“Mhm. Back early?”

“How’s Yuuka?” Hina cut in. “Amane’s probably freaked, right? I know we got here before the ripple hit, but you should be with her! Cutie here wasn’t going to throw up anyway.”

“Yes I was,” I coughed.

I lay slumped there for another few bleary half-retches while my body disseminated the memo that we were not in fact about to hurl. When I finally recovered myself enough to sit up, then stand with Ebi’s help, I was able to appreciate the spell circle that had arrested our lethal descent. The roof of Lighthouse Tower had essentially a whole magical landing pad atop it, with inertial dampeners and soundproofing glyphs to keep the entire neighborhood from filing noise complaints.

Once I was sure that I was in fact fine to stand, I separated from Ebi and cast a foul look at Hina. I would have preferred literally any other mode of transport to this, especially because—

“What the hell was the rush?”

“I’m just dropping you off!” She dumped our shopping bags onto the rooftop and began to pace back toward the middle of the spell circle. “Gonna go over and help Yuuka.”

“It’s—it’s on the other side of the world! It took you two hours—” I glanced at Ebi, who nodded in confirmation of the number, “—to get me here from Britain; there’s no way it won’t be over by the time you get there. What’s there to do?”

“Wasn’t my top speed.”

“No,” came Opal’s voice, “absolutely not.”

Hina rounded on the doorway to the stairwell, a twitchy, jerky motion of barely contained energy, and barked something in reply. Opal stepped out into the afternoon sun, tail lashing, hands on her hips.

“Stay.”

“I’m going.”

“You’re not. I just got off the phone with Uchida-san.”

“I don’t take orders from Ministers,” Hina spat.

Opal’s eyes narrowed to glinting slits of solar orange. The winter air had turned from ‘frosty’ to ‘brisk’ to ‘tepid’ as she advanced and was now progressing toward ‘balmy’, ribbons of steam coming off her tail behind her.

“Actually, you do. And even if you didn’t, your stunt with the Peacies the other day—” she jabbed a finger at me with such viciousness that I flinched despite knowing I wasn’t the target of her ire, “—has put us in phenomenally deep shit with the Ministry. Phenomenally. You of all people showing up to interfere with a PCTF operation now would fuck things even more royally. And—fuckin’ hell, Hina, you know this! I might have to explain this to him—” she pointed at me again, a softer gesture this time, “but not you! And he’s right, by the by—once you get there, there’d not even be anything for you to do other than butcher the grab team if they’re still around, which is the main reason you want to go, because we both know Yuuka can take care of herself.”

The hyena and the dragon stared each other down in the middle of the spell circle. Hina had remained studiously silent through Opal’s tirade, but her lips curled into a nasty smirk at that last part. Being a bystander to the war of wills was taxing, even paralytic; if I moved, I’d be instantly pounced on. Even Ebi’s irreverence had been steamrolled into silence by the overwhelming pressure, though she was faring much better in the heat than I was—my paralysis was broken as I was forced to squirm out of my jacket to compensate, feeling further exposed without the protective shell. Even in just the Sailor Moon t-shirt, I was still hot—little wonder when the heat around Opal had become extreme enough to make her image shimmer.

After what felt like minutes of tense, explosive silence—probably only fifteen or twenty seconds in hindsight—Hina turned away from her friend and clenched her fists.

“I can’t do nothing,” she growled. “If Yuuka’s not going to stop them either, that guy’s as good as dead.”

She took a step forward which fluidly dropped into a coiling crouch, preparing to leap skyward—then aborted out and turned slowly back toward us, looking past us at the stairwell with an expression on her face that I had no idea how to parse. I followed her gaze and saw Amane, out of her mantle, leaning on the doorframe.

“Iku na yo.”

No translation needed: Don’t go. Not a plea; the order had come out level, flat, and rock-hard. The fight instantly left Hina, the tension visibly draining from her body, and she trudged back over to Opal to wrap her in a big hug, the same kind she had given me earlier, leaning bodily onto her best friend and burying her face in the dragon’s collar. Opal relaxed too, returning the hug as the air temperature began to plummet from the crucible of her Flame’s runoff back down to the natural chill of the season. The two muttered to one another, reconciliatory words not meant for the rest of our ears. Ebi left my side to go to Amane, who was looking—remarkably good, at least compared to our previous limited interactions, but clearly faring the cold just as poorly as me. Ebi hurried us back down the stairs and into the warmth of the penthouse.

—

The Thunder Horse Inferno, as the incident in the Gulf of Mexico would later come to be called—named for the oil platform—had taken a while to reach the threshold of damage to earn the title. Even right from the start, the very fact that the flamefall had landed on an oil rig had everybody from local news to PCTF analysts to we in the chatroom all calling it an inferno. Perhaps that was a little bloodthirsty from all of us, but even though the anonymous flametouched seemed to have successfully taken to his new power, it seemed inevitable that the situation would turn hot.

All parties had done their due diligence in the opening hours of the standoff. An hour after the Vaetna’s isolating cage had gone up, a PCTF rapid response air squadron had shown up to test it. In a video taken from one of the Coast Guard vessels that had gathered a healthy distance from the barrier, I watched the arcing, crackling bolts of ripple munitions rend the air until they struck the shimmering barrier and shattered into multicolored streaks like iridescent fireworks. I privately held the opinion that magic-based armaments were a fair sight more beautiful than the explosives and firearms of yesteryear. Never as beautiful as the Vaetna, though, with their immense hammer blows of focused magic and supernaturally elegant bladework.

Case in point—Brianna, the Vaetna taking point for the operation, told the gunships to back off by simply throwing her dagger really, really fast. Hypersonically fast, in fact—and somehow twice at once, targeting both gunships. The twin shock cones of the vaet split the predawn sky far more decisively than the chaotic bursts of magic from before. They tore away the gunships’ kinetic dissipation wards in vivid green bursts of light that unfolded mere centimeters from their hulls, a display of absurd precision, a clear warning shot. From the video’s vantage point, the scene was practically a work of art, the contrails forming a V that ended in falling petals of viridian magic. Simply gorgeous, desktop-worthy, and I felt a jolt of envy in my belly at the simple, overwhelming purity of the bladework.

I mollified my stomach with a sip of the hot chocolate Hina had promised me. She’d also vented the worst of her jittery, frustrated energy by blasting some of the clothes we had bought with hot air, a quicker substitute for putting them through a cycle in the clothes drier, transforming them into a wonderfully cozy carapace of comfort. I’d donned the heavy, heat-soaked garments and curled up on the sofa in the common area of the penthouse’s upper level, cross-referencing my news sources on my phone as I waited for the other Radiances to settle in before we called Heliotrope.

After that warning shot, the Peacies had gotten the message and had retreated to a safer distance, and the stalemate had begun; they seemed content to wait it out. Over the next two days, they’d brought in heavier assets, most prominently a pair of US destroyers with much heavier guns, but they had made no attempt to punch through the cage and provoke the Spire more. Indeed, they weren’t the ones who broke the stalemate.

Rather, that storm of buzzing on my phone had been because Bri had suddenly fled the field. I had hopped around several news outlets, Twitter feeds, and finally resorted to confirming with the chatroom directly, unable to believe what I was reading, and they’d all said the same thing: the Vaetna had simply…left, given up on the stalemate. Which was simply not a thing they did.

Admittedly, it was slightly more complex than that: Bri had boarded the rig for all of five minutes, then a huge spike of ripple had rocked the entire volume of the cage—no visible explosions or other signs of combat, though. She’d emerged moments later, no newly minted flamebearer in tow, and made a beeline to speak to Heliotrope and had words before launching off back toward the Spire. We were about to find out what had been said straight from the Radiance herself. I had gotten a bit jittery at the exclusivity, itching to understand why the hell the Vaetna had simply left. Opal hurried over to sit next to me and set up her laptop, and soon there was a bloop as the call connected.

The fires blooming from the rig offscreen cast Heliotrope’s face in orange rim light, just about the only light source in the inky midnight darkness until she turned on a lamp that illuminated her more properly. She was sitting in a little pseudo-campsite she had deployed from her jetbike, a suspended LM platform big enough for her to lay out a chair. The whole setup was floating some indeterminate height above the water; I was grateful the camera’s limited view didn’t give me enough perspective to get heightsick. I’d had quite enough of that for one day. She squinted at us with her one visible eye, the other hidden by long bangs.

“You’re Ezzen? The scientist?”

“Um. Yes. Hi?” It wasn’t the right time to be doing introductions; I cut to the chase. There would be time to uncover why she had an Australian accent later. “What did Brianna say? Why’d she leave?”

“Hello! I’m—yeah, okay,” she glanced away from the camera, in the direction of the burning oil platform’s firelight. “She didn’t give a straight answer. Weird as hell. She just told me to not go aboard.”

“What, and just leave him for the Peacies?”

“He’s a ‘lost cause’.” She mimed air-quotes.

I frowned. That wasn’t how the Vaetna did things at all. Before we could continue the line of discussion, Hina squeezed into the frame I had been sharing with Opal in front of her laptop, smushing herself between us.

“Yuuka! Yuuuuuuka! Youuuu-kay? Alice said you were on board but it looks like you’re not and I guess that’s probably because Uchida told you to fuck off but he told me that too and since I’m not going and the Vaetna aren’t there then you have to!”

Heliotrope’s expression curdled a little. Beasts keep out, the sign on her door said; her dislike for her canine teammate was audible in the response she gave even though I couldn’t understand the Japanese. Hina, for her part, was still practically bouncing off the walls with worry, trying to keep herself contained by sort of wrapping herself around Opal with all four limbs and resting her chin on her shoulder as those big blue eyes looked at Heliotrope with naked concern.

“English, Yuuka! We’re trying to make cutie feel included.”

Heliotrope snorted derisively.

“You’ve nicknamed him already? How long until you break his hips? Drink his blood yet?”

“Uh, dunno yet, maybe a—”

“Yuuka!” Opal objected over Hina as my ears began to burn. “Mahou shoujo! He’s had a very trying few days, and I won’t have you making jokes at Hina’s expense when she’s worried sick about you. Are you going to come on back?”

“M-mm, wanna help.” She flipped the camera to point at the oil platform. “When the shield went down and Brianna-chan left, everything moved, and now I don’t see a path where I can get on the…nantte iu…platform. It’s really bright there. I start fighting the monsters, it always ends in—gan!” She brought her hand into the frame and mimed an explosion. “I guess that’s what Brianna-chan meant about not going aboard. Still weird. Did you tell Uchida to fuck off and die?”

“Alice won’t let me talk to him!” Hina pouted.

“Wonder why,” chirped Ebi from the peanut gallery behind us, out of frame.

“Shame. Anyway, unless the Ministry clears us and I see a window, I’m just waiting here. Gonna get into mantle and help the kaiho fight the fire whenever they’re ready. Amane, iru?”

“Iru yo! Kiotsukete!” she chimed in reply.

Amethyst waved a massive crystalline arm behind the tops of our heads in the little picture-in-picture of our side of the video call. She’d re-mantled, claimed the vast beanbag chair at the center of the sitting area, and was now sharing it with Ai, who’d woken up for just long enough to trudge up the stairs and flop next to her crystalline teammate as we’d been settling in for the call. Amethyst was probably the least cuddle-able person in the world—all hard planes and spiny bits—but Ai’s sleeping body was making an admirable attempt, bolstered by a few pillows that Ebi had retrieved acting as anti-spike insulation. If you ignored the fact that there was currently a major international incident and potential environmental disaster going on just out of frame, the Radiances could have passed for a group of roommates checking in on their friend’s camping trip. But the Vaetna’s involvement—or rather, uncharacteristic lack thereof—made it hard for me to entertain that illusion for long.

“Incredibly fuckin’ weird.” That was mostly for myself, muttered underneath the Radiances’ chatter. “She’s just leaving the poor guy to the wolves?”

“Oi. I’m working within my limits here, ya pom.”

“Hirai Yuuka!” Alice roared, a matriarchal full-name rebuke. “Be nice!”

“I—I meant Brianna,” I stammered. “I get you don’t have the obligation or license to interfere. But the Vaetna do, so…”

Hina and Opal shifted as one next to me, Hina’s limbs tightening around her teammate as the dragon’s tail thumped unhappily on the carpet. Where I was concerned with the irregularity in the Vaetna’s behavior, the Radiances had made it clear that they really just wanted the PCTF to lose. Yuuka gave voice to the sentiment.

“If the whole thing weren’t so—” she waved vaguely in the direction of the fires, “—like that, if I could get on there without it blowing up, I’d already be on there, fuck what the Ministry says.” She made a frustrated noise. “They can’t get away with it. We’ve killed snatchers before, and I’d do it again. It’s—”

Then the rim lighting from the burning rig flashed far brighter for a moment, and she flinched, head spinning. I caught the briefest glint of crimson from under those long bangs as her hair swished from the motion.

“Fuck. They’re fighting for real, now. If you’re not going to yell at Uchida—”

“Mm. You know how it is. Hands are tied.”

That came from Alice, delivered with an apologetic wince, and Hina also whined behind us. Heliotrope sighed.

“Right, of course. Containment only, then. Ja ne.”

“We’ll leave you to it. Kiotsukete.”

The call cut out, and Hina released her grip on Alice to flop backward onto the floor.

“This sucks! I can’t go, Yuuka can’t spill some fuckin’ blood, and the Vaetna fucked all the way off? What gives? We’re all just gonna let the fucking Peacies walk in and take one of our cousins? The hell!” She tilted her head on the carpet to look at me. “Cutie, you’re the Vaetnaboo. Why the hell did she leave?”

“Not a clue.” I’d had my phone in my lap for the duration of the call, bouncing ideas back and forth with the chatroom, forecasting the situation’s outcome and comparing this incident to similar flamefalls as we aggregated the reports from various news sources. But the Spire had provided no explanation. I rubbed my face. “The last time the Vaetna just quit the field like that was Dubai, and that was like…easily a hundred times worse than this. And telling Heliotrope not to interfere either? They know something we don’t, but I haven’t a damn clue what.”

“Or she doesn’t want to aggravate the Peacies,” Ebi suggested.

“They’re already at war.”

Hina put in a frustrated growl, extracted herself the rest of the way from Opal, rose to her feet, and began to pace restlessly.

“It’s—fuck, Alice, we gotta do something. Uchida just doesn’t want us to straight up fight them, right? So let’s…I don’t know. I’m bad at subtle, that’s your job. Wuhwuhmisd?”

It took me a minute to parse the jumble of sounds as “WWMSD” and reverse engineer that to “what would mahou shoujo do?” Opal didn’t respond, tail thumping on the carpet as she stared at the concluded call screen on her laptop. While she thought, Hina poured a glass of hot tea from the pitcher next to the computer and paced over to Amethyst, mumbling something in Japanese at her as she shook Ai. The Emerald Radiance stirred with a grunt, opened her eyes blearily—visibly jumped at the sapphire orbs right in her face. She sat up as far as the giant beanbag would permit and blinked away the residue of sleep, accepting the tea and sipping from it gratefully. She looked like she’d slept well, but was still sort of booting up, unfocused until her eyes wandered over to me. She pointed at her right foot, and I gave her a thumbs up. Her prosthetic had been so good to me today.

Hina and Amethyst began to discuss their options, quite literally behind Opal’s back—and figuratively behind mine. Damn this language barrier. I glanced plaintively at Ebi, who nudged Ai, who called over to Opal, who at last mustered a halting response to Hina’s earlier question.

“Mahou shoujo ni sokushite…I don’t…know. We—it’s not our fight. If the Vaetna just left, it has to have been for a reason. That’s as good a sign as any not to interfere.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“Cutie?”

I blinked as all the Radiances looked at me. I had said that? It had just come out automatically. I tried to keep going with it.

“Um—you—you all hate the Peacies, yeah? I can put that on the table, right? Like, really, profoundly hate them.” Hina and Amethyst nodded; Opal and Ai didn’t deny it. “I don’t quite know how to feel about that yet. But if you feel you should do something—you ought to.” Ensheathed in my armor, I was finding my rhythm, the security to say what I otherwise wouldn’t. “You interfered for me. Saved me, gave me this prosthetic, let me intrude on your lives, for some reason.” My gaze fell on Hina, Ai and Opal in turn. “That’s what you did for Amethyst, isn’t it? I don’t have the full story, but…that’s what happened, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Opal breathed.

Hina growled, deep in her chest.

Ai said nothing, shifting her gaze from Amethyst to Ebi. The mecha and the android looked back at her, silently remembering some additional part of their history I hadn’t picked up on yet. I pushed on.

“Yeah, so—that bloke on that oil platform deserves a fighting chance, too. As much as she or I did. Todai is one of the most magically capable groups in the world, short of the Spire. We can’t do nothing.”

The wake of my rambling little speech left a profound and heavy silence, only cushioned by the last few words of Ebi interpreting what I had said for Amethyst. Alice’s expression had taken on a rather piscine aspect, staring unblinkingly as her mouth worked, open and closed. In accordance, my face was reddening; I hadn’t meant to quote Hina at the end there, nor include myself in the “we”. Hina broke the quiet.

“I knew picking you up was the right call, cutie. What’s the plan?”

“…I don’t know. Um.” I looked around the space we were sitting in. “I could use a whiteboard.”

—

Five minutes later, we’d pulled up the diagrams of all five Radiances’ mantles into a GWalk file on my laptop and projected the whole thing onto the big presentation screen in the meeting room.

“Y’know, this is a huge violation of our data security policies,” Ebi pointed out.

“Ebi, rest assured, I’m not about to put this out on the forums. You’ve probably already got a backdoor into this thing anyway. Marker.”

Ebi performed a mildly disturbing, exaggerated eye roll as she tossed me one of the markers. I caught it without looking and felt extremely cool—pushed that emotion to the side. There was magic to be done. I jabbed bullet points onto the whiteboard.

“So, we want to: one, help Heliotrope save that flamebearer; two, do that from the other side of the world; and three, without implicating Todai so that the Ministry of…?”

“Kokka kouan iinkai,” Alice supplied. “Public Safety, basically.”

“Ministry of Putting Magical Girls on Leashes,” Hina opined.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Alice shot back. She seemed very torn about this whole thing, but at least she still had it in her to banter.

“So that the Ministry,” I compromised, “can’t trace it back to us in a way that would get Todai in trouble. Yeah? Anything to add?”

Ai raised a hand. As we’d assembled our resources, she’d gradually woken up more, aided by a can of coffee she’d retrieved from the fridge, and was already fiddling with a diagram on her own laptop.

“Sub-six red ripple, for Ishikawa-chan’s sake.”

“Oh. Last night’s…?”

“Yes. Too much red is bad for her.”

“Even local? Not just in her own weave?”

She nodded, and I obligingly added the constraint to the GWalk diagram. As of yet, it wasn’t anything resembling a functional lattice, just a toolbox of options. The mantles were joined by a collection of several hundred other prebuilt glyph chains that I’d accumulated over the years, various useful presets and common collocations to speed up ideation. And time was indeed of the essence here, with the rig ablaze and the flamebearer apparently now fighting for his freedom. The Ezzence, even. Moth hated that joke.

As I’d been setting up my workspace and considering those first three constraints, my thoughts had inevitably wandered back toward my encounter with the magical stalker. You’re not supposed to be able to see me, she’d said. And while I still didn’t understand why that was, it did suggest that the technique was stealthy enough for what we needed here. I dragged and dropped a scrying lattice onto the grid, a beautiful and intricate second-order weave abstracted to a few rectangles connected by colored lines, and consulted the predicted ripple readout. Red-white. Hina saw where I was going with it.

“Hey, yeah, that looks more or less like how it felt.”

For her part, Hina was pacing, and it was getting distracting—because it was impossible. She’d walk the length of the whiteboard on the opposite wall from the projector, but somehow, she never reached the other end or turned around. I resisted the urge to boggle—had she casually constructed a closed spatial loop just for the luxury of pacing without having to change direction? What would happen if I stuck my hand in her path? Not the time, Ez.

“Yeah, that’s the idea, seems as good a place to start as any,” I replied on autopilot, scrolling through the list of glyphs to see what could be done about the red. “If it was this sort of spine, then extending it all the way to…sixteen thousand kilometers, or however far, shouldn’t be a problem. Depends on what exactly we’re going to be doing with it, though.”

“Like how what felt? Last night’s pulse didn’t have white ripple like that, did it?”

Alice’s question, delivered from the chair across from mine, was exactly what we didn’t need right now. My scrolling slowed fractionally. 

“Uh—”

“I was just messing around while we were out. Wanted to show him Shinjuku-eki from above, since you didn’t get to go up on the viewing deck.”

“What? Yes we did, I took him up—oh.” She sighed. “Ezzen, you didn’t have to lie about that. It’s alright to be afraid of heights. I told you Hina wouldn’t judge you for anything.”

“Oh, you did? Cutie. Cutie! She’s right, you don’t have to lie.”

I broke out in a sweat, embarrassed. The gentle rebuke of Opal’s sympathy was bad enough—Hina seemed to be twisting the knife for her own enjoyment. Still, I couldn’t exactly resent her for it; her deflection had averted a much worse lying-related debacle we didn’t have time for, so I thought a thank you very hard in her general direction and attempted to push down the various emotions and work the problem. I found the next glyph for the chain.

“Okay, we can deal with getting the range after, but the first requirement is the big one.”

I scrolled around the Radiances’ mantle diagrams, looking for inspiration and trying to piece together their capabilities. In some ways, this was incredibly invasive; even abstracted down to diagrams and notation, these lattices described their bodies in exhaustive detail. There was a lot of customization between each one; for example, Hina was the only one who had a functioning sense of smell. I stopped when I saw something weird in Amethyst’s mantle, turning to squint at its physical incarnation attached to the mecha-girl sitting next to Opal in an oversized chair. I hadn’t noticed it before, folded away into her arm.

“You’ve got the weave for a KV-18.”

Amethyst seemed to understand that just fine without translation, and Hina chuckled.

“She could sink those destroyers out there on her own.”

“Where’s…the barrel? Doesn’t it need…” I looked back at the diagram and saw the trick. “Oh. Tunnel. Clever.” Then what Hina had said caught up to me. “Wait, what? Zumwalt-class destroyers have wards rated to .14 Vn. That only goes to, like, .09.”

“Upgunned. It’s more like a mark 20,” Ai clarified for her teammate. “See the extra coil? We got it to around .16, then leakage interference stopped us from going higher.”

Alice sighed in response to my dumbfounded look.

“It’s not PACT-compliant, but—”

“—you don’t fight wars,” I finished. Maybe Todai being under Public Safety’s jurisdiction let them slip under the Paranatural Armaments Control Treaty on some technicality. More likely, they were functionally impossible to really hold accountable, short of the Vaetna showing up and asking politely that they knock off the weapons development.

It was tricky for a mecha made of flowing gemstones to look smug, but Amethyst pulled it off. And she was right to; this was a frankly absurd amount of firepower. Overkill. To fight what?

I shelved that line of thought and looked at Heliotrope’s mantle instead, wondering if our best option was to somehow boost the power. On paper, it looked like that wasn’t necessary; she wasn’t carrying the equivalent of shipboard ordnance, but she still had a variety of energy projection meshes that really looked like they’d be overkill to fight off a PCTF snatch team and make her exit. I was distracted from the offensive capabilities by an extremely strange sensory chunk none of the others had. I had no idea what to make of it—and it had been a long, long time since I’d felt this lost looking at a series of glyphs. No time for pretending I knew what it was.

“This section. What’s it for?”

“Precognition.”

I stuck a finger in my ear and rubbed around, wondering if maybe it was clogged with earwax and I hadn’t heard Alice right.

“Excuse me?”

“Mhm! Yuuka can see silver. You think my eyes are weird, she’s on a whole other level. Didn’t you hear her talking about seeing the rig go boom?”

“I—” I actually hadn’t been paying attention to that part at the time, preoccupied with wondering what the hell was going on with Brianna. “That’s not a thing.”

“Sure is. It’s not, like, a path to victory or anything, just blurbs.”

I sat back in my chair. This was entirely too much on top of the rest of this.

“Fuckin’—hell. Wait, if you can mimic that in the mantle, why not give it to all of you?”

“Doesn’t work like that.”

“Sacrifice,” Ebi intoned. “She’s got the whole cursed eye thing, very chuuni.”

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay,” I repeated. “Okay. That’s—shelving that.” I had many questions and not enough time to answer them right now. “We have to be able to do something with that. Um—she said her main problem was just that the rig would blow up before she could make an impact if she went aboard, yeah? Why the hell hadn’t Bri at least stabilized that part? Can we do that instead? Kill combustion in some radius around the platform?”

“We don’t have that kind of juice, cutie.”

“Well, why the hell else would she have gone out there in the first place? Heliotrope, I mean. What was her plan? Does she do firefighting?”

Alice put her face in her hands.

“No, she’s just—impulsive. She foresaw that something was going to happen to an oil platform, and her green thumb couldn’t stomach that, so she just went without really having a plan. We didn’t know it’d be a whole thing; she shouldn’t be there. But because the Peacies are involved, now she’s out for blood. At least she’s not dumb enough to just go charging in.” That last part was clearly a jab at her sapphire teammate.

“I could have handled it,” Hina shot back. She stopped her bizarre infinite pacing. “It’s feeling a little like either ‘save the rig’ or ‘save the flamebearer’, guys.”

She quit her pacing to lie on the floor, splayed out. It couldn’t have been comfortable on the hardwood, but she was weird like that. Ai nodded.

“PCTF Twitter just said they’ve gotten a lifeboat with the sickest crew members away from the platform. It’s not everybody, but…the rig itself might be beyond saving.”

I blinked at how utilitarian that analysis was.

“You’re saying we should just help Yuuka wing it? And risk an infernal oil spill?”

“Yes. Once the platform has nobody on it but the target and the PCTF…”

“Peacies are probably thinking of that too,” Hina pointed out from her new position, out of sight from where I was sitting. “This is too complicated. She should just go in and start cracking heads. Alice?”

Alice flinched; she very obviously didn’t want to be responsible for another international relations debacle. She indicated that third point on the whiteboard.

“We cannot be seen to interfere with them. Ai, if we were to just let the rig collapse or explode or what have you, how would we deal with the Peacies without also hitting the flamebearer?”

For reply, Ai turned her laptop toward Amethyst, who provided some glittering commentary which Ebi summarized as:

“I can make it look like an accident.”

“Uh.” I frowned. “Make…what look like an accident?”

Ai explained, indicating the gun’s lattice diagram up on the big screen.

“What if the part of the rig the Peacies were on just…exploded? So that it can’t be traced to us.”

“Can she do that?”

“Amethyst has incredible aim,” Alice put in, listening to her teammate’s ringing voice. “She can get them without also hitting him in the crossfire.”

“From the other side of the planet?” Even the Vaetna struggled with that.

“Hey!” Hina objected. “I can’t go, but now you want Amane to?”

“I didn’t say she’d go. Ezzen—oh, looks like you’ve already got ideas.”

Indeed, I did; I’d begun to hook things together in the GWalk grid as the seed of an idea had formed.

The LM projection lattice from earlier could plausibly connect to Amethyst’s gun in a few different ways, but power across distance was a real concern, even assuming we could maintain accuracy. Ripple leakage for LM was generally quartic with distance, which is why the Radiances couldn’t send their mantles far from their real bodies, and even the Vaetna struggled to apply blue-pink ripple further than a hundred kilometers without devastating side effects…

Unless they had an anchor.

—

“You want to what?”

“You’re the spotter, Amethyst is the sniper, Hina facilitates the distance. We’ve run the numbers; it can work.”

It wasn’t actually that simple. Amethyst’s mantle was here in the room with us, and shooting at the other side of the planet took some ingenuity. I’d taken inspiration from the scrying projection trick we thought my stalker had used, and Hina was confident she could riff on that to bridge the insane distance by using Heliotrope’s own mantle as an anchor and sensory input.

“That’s…” Heliotrope scratched her head. “Mad. You’re mad. Let’s do it.”

The situation on the platform had worsened. While we had been discussing our options and diagramming the exact procedure, another explosion had rocked the structure, and had actually lingered as a splintered ball of green light that had consumed much of the living quarters. In an awful way, it made our decision easier; it was now unlikely there was anybody left aboard other than our John Doe and the PCTF forces. Pretty much our only constraints were that we didn’t hit him or detonate the entire rig with a bad ripple interaction. Averting an oil spill was obviously a priority, too, but Heliotrope had made some progress with that while we’d been working, binding off the main pipeline.

Amane had dropped her mantle and was working with Ai to modify her gun for the job, the two of them spinning luminous thread between their fingers so quickly that I was completely unable to pick out which glyphs they were working on; I just trusted they were following the diagram we had worked out. Normally, the cannon projected a beam, but what we really wanted was a point-and-click explosion at a target to obfuscate that we were the ones behind it. That had actually been a surprisingly simple change once Ai and I had put our heads together, only needing to change the last glyph in the chain and adjust some of the tension in the amplifier.

The gun still required line of sight, which actually played to our favor; the idea was that by making it project from Yuuka’s line of sight rather than Amethyst’s, we could make full use of her foresight to find an exact spot to aim that would only disrupt or disable the Peacies without further collateral damage. That part of the weaving was Hina’s job, building a connection point between their mantles in a way that didn’t care about distance in threespace. That felt like the sketchiest part of the whole affair from a magical standpoint, evoking the horror stories of failed compression bridging creating fused abominations, and I would never have condoned this approach without hours or even days of thoroughly examining the task and wrapping my head around the glorious, dizzyingly complex construction of their mantles.

But Alice and Ai’s expertise in the exact mechanics of their transformations had won me over; they’d supposedly done this before. As Alice had explained it, Heliotrope wasn’t directly connecting her Flame to Amethyst, not in any permanent sense; they weren’t being stitched together, more like creating a hitch knot that could transfer tension between the weaves without enmeshing their two souls. And Hina’s mastery of spatial manipulation—allegedly unmatched, at least outside of the Spire—made it possible across the insane distance. I was nursing a hunch that we were reinventing the principle behind the Spire’s Gates, just for a very different purpose.

Only four minutes after we’d committed to the plan, it seemed like the preparations were ready. I ran down the list I’d scrawled on the whiteboard. I was shaking a bit; we were about to perform real, high-grade magic.

“Ordnance modifications, check; spatial link, check; sensory link…check? Ai?”

“Check on our end. Yuuka, nuikonde iku OK.”

Heliotrope nodded and began to modify her own mantle to match the diagram we had sent over, spinning a crimson thread from her skein, not the pure white I was accustomed to from the Vaetna and myself. The vermillion light cast her silhouette against the midnight darkness as she connected to the gun. I muttered at Alice sitting next to me.

“You were right, she did get on board easy.”

“Of course. It’s plenty mahou shoujo. Team combo attack. Used to have to do it a lot more when we didn’t have as much Flame to work with.”

Even with the reassurance they’d done this before, I had a bit of a fright when Amane twitched and went limp, her eyes rolling back in her head. It lasted only a moment, and then she shook herself—a hiss and crackle filled the air as she re-mantled, massive and shimmering. Not hulking, exactly, too slender for that, but she still went from a girl of average height to a mecha made of gemstones. She looked down at her crystalline hands and checked the rest of her body.

“Tsunagatte…dekita you desu.”

With that confirmation, Heliotrope mantled as well, a flash of red light blinding her phone’s camera for a moment—from what I’d seen of her mantle’s diagram, it didn’t actually do that in person, only to digital cameras. When the video feed recovered, she was in full costume.

From her chest spilling over the corset binding her midriff, to the layered, lacy skirt that barely reached past her hips, and the thigh-high socks with ribbons on the hems, all of it came together to give her transformation the impression of a cosplayer’s outfit rather than the exceptionally high-grade magical combat frame it supposedly was. Her hair had gotten far longer and taken on a rich, dark-red tone that shone as a glossy curtain in the light of the burning oil rig. The word ‘fanservice’ wandered through my mind again, and I averted my eyes so that I wouldn’t get caught on details like the exposed sideboob or the choker. We had bigger priorities right now—but I couldn’t ignore the eye.

The bangs that had before covered her right eye were now bound back by a bow, revealing Heliotrope’s “cursed eye”. Black sclera surrounded a dark-green iris punched through the center with a crimson, square pupil. Where Hina and Alice’s eyes were cosmetic side effects of other changes, this was a bona fide magical organ, and my skin crawled as her gaze passed over me, unblinking, no eyelid for the multicolored gem. It felt like she could see my soul; that wasn’t quite how her foresight worked, from the brief explanation I’d been given, but it was still a mercy when the horrible eye passed over me to Amethyst. They launched into a rapid back-and-forth, Amethyst’s glimmering chimes against her teammate’s somewhat-tinny voice through the low-bitrate video call.

Amethyst unfolded her cannon, concentric rings flowing up and out of her right arm, deploying into a twisting series of collars for the energy that bulked out her arm significantly with spindly support structures and resonance spines to catch and twist the ripple into a secondary set of ephemeral glyphs. But for the moment, the weapon was inert, and she and Heliotrope were just running diagnostics. On Heliotrope’s end, there was no physical manifestation of the gun at all; it was essentially a pure psychomotive point-and-shoot. Satisfied with the connection, she turned the camera to point at the oil rig again.

“Whoa. Ha! Yeah, this is changing things.”

“Do you see a place to aim? One that’ll take out the PCTF team on the platform?”

“Yeah, a few. I can’t see what happens after, though. I can’t actually get involved, deshou?”

Alice winced.

“He’s on his own after that. This is all we can really do. If he’s evaded capture for the past…” she checked her watch, “fifteen minutes, he’s got a good enough grasp on his Light that hopefully getting him some breathing room on the platform will give him a chance to run for it, get toward the Spire.”

“If they take him,” Ai pointed out. I frowned.

“They will. I don’t know what Bri was doing, but—they always grant asylum. It probably has to do with the platform itself, not him.”

“Or maybe Zero-Day or somebody else will take that as their cue,” Alice reasoned. “Either way, this is the best we can hope for, so we’re doing it. Ezzen’s right, he deserves that much.”

Heliotrope blinked.

“Oh, it’s his idea?” She grinned. “Good work. Shikata nai nara…tsubushite yarimashou!”

On the laptop screen, she took aim. She was actually still lounging in her chair, but was looking intently at the blob of lights that was how the camera saw the oil rig. I glanced over at Ebi on reflex for translation.

“We’re ready?”

“That’s not quite what she said, but yeah.”

Hina chuckled.

Next to us, Amethyst spooled up her gun. Her thread was bright white, like mine, but left a violet afterimage in my vision as it ran around the circumference of her arm, tensioning off the spines and crossing the loops like a series of concentric dreamcatchers that formed a series of first-order glyphs. She looked around the room, hefting the loaded cannon, careful not to point it directly at any of us but unsure where exactly it should be pointed on the off chance something went wrong with the hitch. I glanced nervously at Ai, who gave me a reassuring smile.

“It’ll work.”

Amethyst settled on just pointing the gun straight upward; better it blew through the ceiling and harmlessly into the sky than hit one of the surrounding buildings. Her confirmation of readiness rang through the room, and I held my breath. I think Alice was just as nervous as I was, but Hina seemed at ease, even eager, confident in both her handiwork and that we were doing the right thing.

A pressure gathered in my sinuses as the magical artillery reached final readiness. That probably wasn’t a result of it interacting with my Flame, just the very fractional unavoidable portion of ripple leakage doing odd things to the air pressure in the room. Another brief, confirmatory back-and-forth between Amethyst and Heliotrope, and she pulled the trigger.

Ripple propagated backward through the weave of the cannon, up from the circles around Amethyst’s wrist through her forearm, making the entire assemblage shimmer and contort around the spines, a great raptor’s talons. Then it all flashed at once, and that was it on our end. After a moment, the blast of cold air hit me, virtually the only significant ripple leakage, setting my teeth chattering as I huddled further into my heavy clothes. I released the breath I’d been holding in a wispy puff and looked back at the video call as Amethyst lowered her gun and let the glyphs dissipate in my peripheral vision.

Somebody had taken a great chunk out of the oil platform’s superstructure with an ice cream scoop. Oh, no—we had done that. The left half of the superstructure was just gone, and flame billowed from the newly exposed corridors and rooms. The edge of the severed zone was melted as though superheated, molten metal sloughing downward onto the main deck. My phone exploded into a storm of buzzing in my pocket. Hina cheered, almost a howl.

“Take that!”

Off in the side of the frame, Heliotrope was nodding at her handiwork and fiddled with her phone camera to zoom in as far as it’d go so we could inspect our handiwork. A tiny figure, barely a few dark pixels almost drowned out against the flames, stumbled out from one of the gaping cavities that had been an interior space seconds prior. My stomach twisted as they fell to their knees, and then half-slid, half-melted down off the edge of the void we had blasted, vanishing from view into the molten heap accumulating below.

“Zen’in!” Heliotrope confirmed. “That was the last one. Our cousin is fine, too. Great plan, Ezzen.”

“No, no, no no nono—”

I’d just killed them all. I’d consigned that team of Peacie abductors, abhorrent as they were, to a visceral, awful death. Of course we had—we had fired the equivalent of naval ordnance directly at them. Of course we were going to kill them. My hand hurt, aggravated by the cold snap and the way I was gripping the table’s edge so hard it was starting to bruise. Dead. How many? A dozen? It didn’t matter. They were all dead now. All because I had wanted to do real magic to save one guy.

“I—I—I thought…” I stared glassy-eyed at Alice, mouth dry. “You let me do that.”

Her draconic eyes were fixed on the carnage onscreen as the fires continued to spread. Her tail wasn’t moving. Oily disgust and self-loathing bubbled through my soul. Anger at them, too—how could they have permitted this? Hina came around the table, hopping up to sit on it at my other side.

“Cutie, they’re monsters.”

I turned on her.

“I saw Bri use minimum force when she drove off the gunships. We did not have to—Why did you let me kill them?”

“Ezzen, look at me,” Alice murmured. My neck swiveled slowly, grinding like granite slabs as I faced Todai’s leader. “I told you. It’s not revenge. We’re destroying evil. They knew what they signed up for. Ezzen—Ez, no, look at me.” She reached forward and took my hand gently. “I’m—Hina is right. This is the right thing to do. They’re monsters. Their lives were forfeit the moment they stepped aboard that platform, whether their retribution came from the Spire or from us. And even though it wound up being us, the Vaetna would have done the same, because—”

“Alice,” Hina interrupted, “He’s not listening, give him space.”

Indeed I wasn’t. They were dead because of my selfishness, because I’d wanted the Radiances to do something. Would they have done it without me pushing them? Would those people be alive if not for me? If they were, if they had taken that flamebearer—would that be a worthy trade? 

My gaze inevitably fell on the one who this was really all about. Amane sat so tired and small in her oversized chair, now out of mantle, ensheathed in the armor of her big hoodie even outside of her mech. A mirror to me in many ways. The Radiances had helped me kill those people because of her mechanical limbs and the access port in her belly and the lone viridian eye looking down at the table and the carbon fiber attached to the stump of my foot—nevermind that my injury had been self-inflicted. She nudged Ebi, muttering something. The android translated.

“It’ll take some time. Just—breathe. The world is a better place with them gone.”

I glanced over at the screen, at the burning, ruined oil platform. Heliotrope hadn’t ended the call, but she’d vacated her little hovering campsite to help contain the disaster she’d helped create, leaving her phone’s camera staring at the destruction. The PCTF gunships had come in, but were unable to safely land and disgorge more operatives.

In a different world, a better one where the Vaetna hadn’t left for some inscrutable reason, at least he’d be safe. But in reality? Things were still so dire for him. What would happen now? How would he make it off the platform and vanish enough to evade capture, without further help? He still had nowhere to go but the Spire, and they had seemingly abandoned him. If he got captured anyway, if this was all for naught—

A beam of light punched upward from the rig’s highest point, scintillating through greens and blues before turning to a vibrant magenta. Something shot along it in a crackle of rising lightning, and then it dissipated. It happened so quickly that my heart had only just stopped before it was already over.

“Hey, he got out!” Hina cheered. Alice slumped forward, putting her face in her arms on the table, and began to sob quietly. Hina rubbed her back. She winked at me, a huge, fanged grin on her face. “Tears of relief,” she clarified. It should have made me feel better, but I was going numb.

“He had help,” Ai reasoned. “But yes, I think he’s out.”

“From who?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Ebi cut in. “Point is that he made it out. We saved him.”

I looked at her, then at Amethyst, then at the other Radiances. Had those operatives deserved to die? This specific and exceptionally weird case aside, the Spire’s answer was generally—yes, and that was the moral standard I’d always trusted in the abstract, whenever cases of these sorts of conflicts made the news. And the Radiances had painful, personal reasons to have gone along with this. They’d had motive and opportunity—I’d just helped with the means.

“But you should have stopped me,” I whispered.