Sunspot

The Vaetna do it too.

I’d always known, intellectually, that the Spire’s direct and violent brand of foreign policy left people dead by design. To me, it had always been beautiful, elegant, when they took their vaet and sliced clean through all the murk and red tape to declare “this is where we stand.” Their causes were just, and when they brought the hammer down, it was with such overwhelming force and precise aim as to cow any reply. They did so in the name of minimizing further bloodshed, making it clear that retaliatory escalation would only invite one’s own destruction. They left superyachts with yawning holes that passed exactly through where the owner’s cabin had been and spared every crew member, walked straight into the offices of corrupt leaders to behead them—that sort of vigilante fantasy. The ultimate, bloody check on power, brilliantly focused and wetting their blades only with the blood of the guilty.

But sometimes evil was distributed and systematic. And so sometimes, the Vaetna also had to do exactly what I had done: they murdered operatives of the PCTF and its equivalents for the sake of flamebearer lives and dignity. I hadn’t understood what that meant until I saw the tiny body on Opal’s laptop screen. Over and over, the backs of my eyelids showed me his—or her—final moments, before their body had turned to sludge and joined with the fires below; the grisly, impersonal end of an entire human life that I had wrought.

It was bigger in my memory, those handful of pixels growing to indict me for my crime, consuming the whole screen. In the enlarged, unavoidable clarity of a nightmare, I saw all the different ways the ripple had killed them. It transmuted their flesh to rusted iron, or wove their skin through their bones, or just punched random, perfect holes through their body, before they inevitably collapsed and the microscopic structures that held them together dissolved and at last they became a red slurry.

“They deserved it,” I repeated once again. “They crossed the line in the sand. They knew what they were signing up for. Their lives were forfeit. They were abductors—fascists, even, let’s not kid ourselves. The world is a b—better place with them gone.”

My room declined to weigh in.

I’d fled here after a few more minutes of ineffectual justifications from Opal. I didn’t need her to defend her actions. Acting in the Spire’s stead after Brianna’s still-unexplained exit, even without their own personal motivations to protect the flamebearer, they were more than justified to do what they had—what I had helped them do. But they should have told me. It felt like they’d specifically avoided using the word “kill”—and so had I, but that had purely been my narrow-sightedness, my naivete. They’d done this before, at least once, when they’d saved Amethyst. Opal should have stopped me short and laid out in crystal clarity that I was proposing to murder those people, justified or not, because I had not understood.

I fumbled for my phone, seeking comfort in old, familiar videos of the Vaetna doing this and that, mundane fraternal rambunctiousness and glyph engineering vlogs—and felt a new, awful tightness in my chest as I watched Heung balance atop the flexing haft of his spear. The blood of hundreds, possibly thousands, ran from its onyx tip, and that was to say nothing of the magic he and his siblings wrought. No bunker too deep, no lab too well-warded; the Vaetna were unstoppable, and death was their obligation.

So why the hell had Brianna fled?

Her absence from the scene of my misdeed was cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. It had forced my hand; we’d functionally been acting in her stead. Did it really matter who brought down the ax, so long as it fell upon the guilty? And guilty they had been; even if they were technically Blackwater or some other private military, even if the PCTF disavowed them, their mission on that oil platform was one which deserved the grisly end I’d brought them. So said the Vaetna and, apparently, Todai—at least on an unofficial basis for the latter.

But none of my moralizing explained why we had to be the ones to do it at all. Vaetna simply did not leave infernos once they had deployed. To do so was a violation of their duty, a crack in their terminal reputation, and—to be frank—a matter of sunk cost. Caging an area like that represented significant magical investment, so they might as well follow through and resolve the situation in their favor. So it followed that Bri must have been needed elsewhere—but there was no elsewhere. There had been no other infernos happening anywhere in the world at the same time, nor had my handful of Spire-resident contacts mentioned anything domestic which might have demanded her attention. Yes, two—three?—days ago, she had been interrupted from spooling into the Spire by my flamefall, but if that had been sufficiently disruptive then—

ezzen: She wouldn’t have been out there at all.

skychicken: what gets me is the lack of statement

skychicken: per all parties

ezzen: Right?

ezzen: She didn’t even say anything of note to Heliotrope, I can confirm that firsthand.

ezzen: Er, secondhand, I guess, but I can’t imagine any version of events where Heliotrope wouldn’t have been telling the truth about that part.

DendriteSpinner: Unless she was wary of you

DendriteSpinner: Something something OPSEC

ezzen: She would have just gone into Japanese, then.

ezzen: Recall that I cannot speak a word of that language.

DendriteSpinner: Oh right lol

DendriteSpinner: And like thats all from your end right

ezzen: Afraid so.

No, it was not.

ks3glimmer: speaking of parties

ks3glimmer: who the heck was the theres a third

ks3glimmer: or even fourth

ks3glimmer: bleh typo

ks3glimmer: (if that big explosion and whoever pulled holton out were different groups)

In the hours since the incident had begun to wind down, survivors from Thunder Horse had confirmed the new flamebearer’s identity as one Noah Holton, a totally unremarkable member of the crew who had been on for three years. Putting a name to the person we had rescued made me feel better, helped validate what I had done—at least as long as the operatives I had murdered remained anonymous and unpersoned.

DendriteSpinner: makes the most sense for the explosion to have been the spire

ezzen: I’m assuming it was the same third party.

ezzen: That didn’t look very Spire to me. And we know it wasn’t Holton because it was too controlled compared to the rest of his fighting.

Maintaining my cover, such as it was, was mentally and emotionally taxing. Opal’s gentle scolding from this morning about information leakage—had it really only been this morning?—had now taken on a cast of critical, mortal importance. I didn’t need the girls to explain to me how serious it would be if what we had done got out to the public…though I think Opal had made the attempt nonetheless, in those few minutes I’d sat there in crushed, horrified silence before I’d fled. Not that I’d really absorbed the specifics.

ks3glimmer: what little we saw of it, but yeah

skychicken: if we wanna go really dark

skychicken: the peacies could have false flagged their own team to justify escalating with an exo team next

skychicken: explains why that explosion looked so much like an airburst KV-20. maybe fired from one of the destroyers?

My skin crawled. Did he know? If he knew about Amethyst’s gun through Hina, and knew Hina well enough to know how much they hated the Peacies…

DendriteSpinner: Sorta contrived

ezzen: conspiratorial

But then, that was just skychicken. Even if he did know, he sure didn’t seem interested in outing what I had done.

skychicken: per their statement (link) they sent a pretty light snatch squad first, the ones they usually label as rescue

skychicken: based on the guy’s history i dont think they were expecting him to resist

DendriteSpinner: If he hadn’t, it would make sense why Brianna fucked right off after talking to him

ks3glimmer: yeh

skychicken: yep

skychicken: would have just told her to screw off because he was going to willingly give himself over

skychicken: except thats very obviously not what happened

ks3glimmer: ez, im still sorta wrapipng my head around the fact that youre a flamebearer now, but

ks3glimmer: same cluster, any thoughts?

ks3glimmer: *wrapping

ezzen: What sort of thoughts?

ks3glimmer: cluster links arent unheard of

ezzen: I’m aware. But none to speak of.

ezzen: Super weird flamefall, you might recall.

ezzen: Like, we’re technically same cluster, but because Heung splintered it, I sort of doubt we’ve got any kind of resonances.

ezzen: Which I NEVER SAW ON CAMERA BEFORE AND IT WAS THE COOLEST SHIT.

ezzen: For all of, uh. Three seconds or something.

I disengaged from the conversation before I ran out of ways to deflect any further, making some excuse about paperwork. I found the stream VOD from the other day, watching and rewatching those last few moments of the stream before it had cut out, when the heavens had been sundered open by Heung’s thunder from on high—or Zeus’, or Thor’s, as some supposed. Some drew pagan, pantheonic comparisons to the Vaetna, a slightly more focused flavor of worship than the more generic kind which other groups directed toward the Flame. I did envy the Vaetna’s supernatural physicality, a bone-deep frustration, but that way lay the sort of worship for which Opal had so strongly derided Hikanome. I envied their magic, too, but…

“Look where that’s gotten me,” I instructed the empty room.

Only three days ago, I’d been unwilling to use magic to take that cabbie’s life to save my own, but now I’d killed what looked to be a dozen to save one person I didn’t know. How was I supposed to square that circle?

With routine, of course.

It had been four days since I’d been able to get any meaningful spear practice. Now was as good a time as any, and I needed the distraction; if I kept looking at my phone, I was liable to explode into a confetti cloud of rancid guilt and increasingly hollow-sounding justifications. So I grabbed the stabilizer cylinder, moved it from my nightstand to the foot of my bed—heh, foot—close to the middle of my room, summoned my spear, and began my routine.

Heung’s spear style was not something I could really imitate at all. A baseline human simply could not maneuver in four dimensions like a Vaetna could, and even three was beyond me, so my training with the spear was mostly an homage, too far from the real thing to even call aspirational. But moving my body was still a welcome distraction, familiar, especially after a day of being essentially bedridden and most of my physical activity since then having been out in the cold.

Forward lunge, sweeping slash, twisting, mindful of my balance. Footwork was everything. Turn, use the haft like a quarterstaff, strike the ribs, follow the momentum to kick them away to create more space. It was not a fast series of movements; I was under no illusions of being able to mimic Heung’s quicksilver pace. But I could mimic his economy of motion, at least more slowly. Each thrust or sweep was careful, deliberate, prioritizing form and balance, flowing from one stance to the next. Each move was carefully calibrated to not strike the walls of my old, cramped apartment. Here, I had more than enough space, but there would be time to experiment with that later. For now, I stuck with my routine, because that was all I had. Parry, riposte, make sure I’m always controlling the space in front of me. I wasn’t fast enough to simply disregard defense like Heung.

My plodding, heavy limbs had one upside: in my hands, these moves were benign and relatively harmless, at least compared to the magical weapons I had built. A few GWalk diagrams of modifications and I had taken lives instantaneously, anonymously, intercontinentally. This spear, at least such as it was, could never be anywhere near so lethal.

Could it? Ai said she used a spear, and I had to wonder how her skills and raw power in mantle compared to that of Heung. Of course he was more powerful than her, pound for pound, and each vaet was a singular weapon, those onyx blades far beyond any LM construct Ai could weave. Still, if her teammates were anything to go by, she was still a weapon of mass destruction in her own right, and—

I abruptly stopped with my routine, lowering the spear from my guard, chest heaving. This line of thought was just sending me back down the spiral, back toward that grim truth about magic’s terrible potency when applied to violence, back toward what Ai had said about how the Flame sought pain. And with what Hina had said about her metamorphosis—

A terrible suspicion took root in my heart. I sat on the bed and rested my spear on my lap, running my hands down the haft.

“I don’t want you to follow me there.”

It said nothing.

“I mean, it’s only because you’re beautiful, you know? I never wanted to use you to kill. But then you’d not be much of a weapon, would you? More of a toy, I suppose. Guess that’s what you’ve always been. Even with this, haven’t been much use to me.”

I ran my finger along the strange, fuzzy shimmer of ripple warping at the tip, gained from when I had stabbed myself in the eye to slay the fire in my soul. Which eye had that been? I couldn’t remember; that hadn’t even been real to begin with. And of course, I hadn’t actually killed my Flame, merely called it to heel.

“So don’t come with me wherever I’m going. Even if I have to k—to kill again…and really have to, I mean, not doing it on somebody else’s behalf, for something more important than the Vaetna’s oath or mahou shoujo or just wanting to do the right thing…I’ll do it with magic. Not with you. You deserve better than that. Stay a toy. Stay a hobby. Better for the both of us.”

Satisfied with the one-way agreement, I put the spear away, then flopped backward onto the bed next to the little stabilizer module. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Such heft; definitely a fourth dimension’s worth of extra mass in there. The cylindrical outer shell was unmarked other than a blue ripple hazard sigil. I toyed with the idea of cracking it open, trying to piece together how it was made just from looking at the guts. Not now, though. My right hand wandered downward to the center of my chest.

“As for you.”

I waited a moment, wondering if my Flame would respond. It didn’t.

“Did you make me do that? Did you want those people to die? For…I don’t know. For our cluster’s safety? Just for love of violence? If it’s that second one, just your nature, no judgment, really. I’m not mad, just…okay, maybe I’m a little mad, but in the ‘madman’ way, not the ‘fury’ way. So. Did you?”

“Nope.”

For a very confusing few seconds, I had the weirdest sense of deja vu. Of course my Flame would speak to me in Hina’s voice…though I wasn’t sure why that made so much sense. Then I practically jumped out of my skin when I realized that it was just the actual Hina leaning on the gateway into my bedroom.

“Fucking knock!”

“I did! But you were clearly in the middle of your…thing. So I’ll just ask from right here: can I come in?”

I blushed, my deeply weird moment invaded. Mad indeed, I must have looked.

“Does it matter if I say no?”

“I mean, you could kick me out and I’d leave. But I can answer your question! Your Light won’t.”

“It might. It’s spoken to me before.”

That stopped Hina short. She stood up properly—in that damnable physics-defying way, like a puppet pulled upright, not levering herself off the doorframe at all—and frowned.

“It doesn’t do that. Pretty sure.”

“Mine did. Twice.”

“Oooooookay. Well, now you’re definitely not getting rid of me. Spill!”

“…No? Get out of my room, please.”

“What, so you can keep talking to yourself? Or so you can keep wallowing?”

“Not wallowing. Just—trying to piece it together.”

“Not a lot to piece together here, cutie. You helped us kill some people who totally deserved it. You know why we didn’t stop you?”

“Oh, don’t tell me this is another fucking lesson.”

She laughed, a hyena-bark.

“Ha! Nah. Well…I guess lesson three applies. We did escalate to violence. But no, not what I meant. I bet you’ve already talked yourself around on it anyway, but just so we’re clear: we let you go through with it, didn’t tell you you were helping kill those guys, because we wanted them dead. Selfish, right?”

“What, nothing to be said about the greater good? Not going to appeal to my Spire morality?”

“That’s Alice’s job, and you know it. I’m the selfish one, so trust me when I say we did it because we wanted to.”

Silence hung between us, a deafening, cloying fog.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Nope! It’s supposed to be honest. Cards on the table here: we’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. Sure, because it’s usually the right thing to do, but also because they will never bleed enough. That’s what we are. Now do you want out?”

“I was never in! I signed up to help with research and learn your secrets and b—because Ai is nice! I don’t want to be party to,” I mimed firing a rifle and made a frustrated noise, “that! Let alone all the magical girl shite Opal seems insistent on teaching me like it’s some kind of foregone conclusion that I’ll become an actual member!”

Hina crossed her arms and looked at me. Still my turn, she was saying, and as the seconds wore on, I was forced to acknowledge the problem.

“…But all magical research leads this direction, huh? Here, or the Spire, or the Peacies. Is that what you want me to say?”

“Yep! This is what it means to be us, cutie. No matter where you go—you’re going to have to spill some blood. To carry the Light is to be a weapon. At least here you’re the one wielding it.”

What an insanely bloodthirsty take on the world. Was I so cornered? Were there no other options?

“You’re saying that, even without joining the team, I’ll be party to…this? To vigilante killings of PCTF soldiers and whatever else you get up to?”

“Yeah. At best you’d be…turning a blind eye, right?”

I sat there, fuming, unable to formulate a good retort against that. I’d already equated the morals of Todai and the Spire—but it hurt a lot more to hear coming from her. She sighed.

“But that’s not the whole equation with you in particular, nope. Since you’re not just ‘some flamebearer’, you’re Ezzen. Vaetna superfan. You want to be more, right? So you can’t keep your Flame at arm’s length, not unless you wanna make yourself miserable. Which maybe you do?”

She flayed me open with those words and the casual shrug that accompanied them. I should have been honest. Instead, I got defensive.

“Why do you care?”

“Because I was the same! You’re like looking in a mirror, cutie.”

She sat next to me on the bed, reaching out, holding her arm—well, at arm’s length, like she had said, watching the muscles in her forearm flex as she curled and uncurled her fist.

“I was so…slow. Everything was wrong. Blind, deaf—er, compared to now, not literally—always looking for something that would just make me feel alive.” She growled that word. “Street fights, that kind of thing. I was nine years old the first time I broke somebody’s arm. Total adrenaline junkie. They shipped me back to Japan at the start of middle school to put a stop to it, but I just got worse, became the violent Yankee delinquent. Meeting Alice helped…mahou shoujo helped, too. But—she had her own problems.”

“And…being flametouched made it go away. Made you…this.”

Was she any more in control than she had been back then? Or was she just infinitely more equipped to pick fights?

“Nope. Not at first, anyway. But when Alice and Ai-chan and I were figuring out what had happened to us, in those first few weeks, just messing around—they missed us and Yuuka when they were rounding up the flamefall victims because they thought it had only been Amane who got sparked—I figured out how to…talk to my Flame. Hurt it. Let it change me. And it’s…wait, we already talked about this last night.”

Indeed we had, and as those memories trickled back into my conscious memory, my eyes wandered to her lips. She’d promised me power. Kin to the Vaetna. The power to kill? She preempted that thought.

“The point is, you’re stuck with this life no matter what. Even if you left Todai entirely, tried to lay low, you’d still eventually have to kill people like that, in self-defense or because you feel like it’s your duty to be more than a bystander. And, uh, that doesn’t make you a monster, cutie. If you were a monster you’d wish you had been there to do it with your bare hands.”

My tattoo felt like it was about to jump off my skin. I squeaked out an objection.

“I don’t want to kill people. I don’t want to hurt my Flame or anybody else.”

“Yeah, this is what I was afraid of. I was worried you were getting cold feet from last night.”

“You—don’t try to convince me. Not like then. Please. It’s different now, hurting my Flame was just abstract, but you’re talking about power. Power for what, Hina? To kill? All of your mutations are to make you better at—at killing. I don’t want that.”

“But you do, cutie. The way you look at me isn’t just horniness, trust me. You’re so jealous you could scream. When I do this—”

—she had seized my tattoo again and I was in danger and utterly helpless—

“You love it. You crave it. You want to be able to do it, even if it’s not about killing. Righ—holyshit.”

I’d surprised both of us, right then. My other arm had lanced forward faster than I thought possible. The hem of her shirt gave off a horrible acrid smell as it smoldered, bunched in my scarred fingers. What was I doing? My grip slackened, and I pulled the hand away slowly, avoiding her eyes. She was panting, eyes wide, and I both loved and hated that.

“You made me do that.”

“Nope! I told you, you’re like me. Ohmygosh. This is what you should be. Let me help.”

“…Why?” What was I to her? A lab rat? A chew toy? Or—“This has all just been to get another weapon against the PCTF, hasn’t it? You want my knowledge and my Flame, not me.”

“Are you even listening to me, cutie? I mean…yeah, I’d love it if you kept helping us kill them, that’d be great. But I’m doing this for you, and for me. Mostly for me. I don’t want to be alone.”

What?

“You’re—you have the others! You’re like the closest-knit group of flamebearers outside the Spire!”

Well, that was mostly based on vibes. I didn’t pay enough attention to groups other than the Vaetna to say that for certain. Hina raised her hand and waggled her fingers faux-menacingly.

“But they’re not like me.”

“Opal has a dragon tail.”

“Alice. You went out of your way to use her name, earlier. Why the switch? You don’t blame her for what we did, do you?”

The pivot was as painful as it was unexpected. I hadn’t even realized I’d switched; I’d stopped thinking of her on a first-name basis and instead gone back to her role. So that I could distance myself from what I had helped her do.

“Um—fine, alright. Alice should have stopped me. So should you.”

But Hina never would have, would she? As if reading my thoughts, she shook her head.

“I told you, it had to happen that way. We’re selfish. I’m selfish. Selfish…uh, where was I…right, I’m alone. Don’t get me wrong, the girls are the best thing that’s ever happened to me, they’re my pack and probably the only reason I’m still a person and not an urban legend. And in that sense…yeah, I do kind of want them for their Flames, I don’t think I can feel like that about humans anymore.” There was a note of melancholy in that. She despondently rubbed the part of her shirt I had scorched. “I owe them a lot. But they don’t get it, wanting to be more, to follow the path to wherever it goes. You do, and we can do it together. So—let me help you, cutie. For you and for me.”

“By hurting me. By showing me how to hurt.”

“Yeah! Listen—you’ve got powers, use them to make you happy. And for good, if you want, if that makes you happy. But you gotta be happy, and I’m telling you—this will make you happy.”

“Suppose it does,” I hissed. “Suppose I become like you. Uninhibited and rambunctious and whatnot. You can barely tell right from wrong, can you?”

“I can!” She blinked innocently. “With help.”

“You’re an utter hedonist. Sadomasochist.”

“Yep. It’s fun. You’ll love it, promise.”

“Like you loved sexually assaulting me?”

She went very, very still.

“I’m…sorry. I didn’t…Alice had to explain that part to me. I knew I’d scared you, that was by design, but I hadn’t—hadn’t thought it through. Got carried away with the biting and I shouldn’t have and I’m sorry. I worked on your stabilizer all night to make up for it. Please don’t be mad at me. Please don’t run away. It’ll never happen again, I’ll always pay attention to your boundaries and back off when you want me to and ask permission and I should have apologized sooner and—”

It brought me some sick, twisted enjoyment to have made her suddenly so torn up and desperate.

“You’re not saying that because you hurt me and frightened me. You’re saying it because you don’t want me to leave.”

“Yeah! I mean—no, I am sorry, really, but—I’m selfish, okay? You could be the best thing that ever happened to me. And me to you, really, I know you want it. Just—I need another chance. Please?”

I wasn’t falling for the shining, blue, puppy eyes.

“You don’t even know me. Get out.”

She vanished with too much still unsaid.

—

“That…” Ai seemed to struggle with how to put it delicately, then gave up. “…sounds like a very Hina-san blind spot, yes. When she was helping with the stabilizer, she did mention she had a fight with Takehara-san, but I thought it was about the actual brawl from earlier.” She gestured toward the hall still under repair outside the prosthetic fitting room where we sat. “This explains why she was so focused last night. Atoning.”

I’d walked in on her going through a list of requests to give special lectures at different colleges. She had seemed thrilled to deal with me instead, waving me in and directing me to a big office chair. It was a nice, padded item, one of the many bits of furniture throughout the building designed for flesh-Amane to sit comfortably in for long periods of time during consults in here—when she wasn’t on the bed in the middle of that spell circle, below that halo of tentacles on the ceiling. Poor woman. Now that I had some measure of her enemies and the means by which she fought them, I rather felt she deserved such plush comforts.

Ai watched me turn over the stabilizer module in between my hands. It had fit quite comfortably in the pocket of my new, oversized hoodie, the armor that made me feel brave enough to talk about these things.

“But this was just—to get even with me. It’s still selfish.”

Ai frowned at me.

“…You would still be unable to walk today if she hadn’t worked so hard. And it’s good to work out your guilt in a way that helps the people around you, isn’t it?”

I was reminded of what Ebi had said about Ai. She does her best work when she feels guilty. Of course she’d take Hina’s side on that part. 

“So I should forgive her?”

“I didn’t say that. She’s—I don’t want to make excuses for her. Why did you come to talk to me if you didn’t want to be convinced to forgive her?”

“Is that what you were going to do? Convince me?”

“…Yes. I think if you wanted to be angrier you’d have gone to Takehara-san.”

“Don’t want to talk to her,” I admitted. “The whole…gun thing. I know Hina and Amane hate the Peacies, but I thought you and Alice would be the level-headed ones, talk me out of it. But I guess it’s only you.”

“I helped with that too, but…point taken. Thank you. Um, so, Hina-san: you do want to forgive her?”

“Fuckin…” I made a noise that was intended to be a frustrated growl but came out more like clearing my throat. “I guess so. And that’s fucked up, isn’t it?”

“Depends. Why?”

“Because…”

Fuck, could I even admit it aloud? It felt like a betrayal of my own feelings of violation from last night, and of my own erstwhile commitment to Ai’s pacifism toward her Flame—but that felt hollow now, since she, too, had helped me commit murder. We were all complicit, and in light of that, however we approached our Flame felt like inconsequential quibbling compared to the edifice of real mortality now looming over me. And that was really the heart of it, wasn’t it?

“Because I do want what she’s offering. And if I forgive her, there’s nothing else stopping me from taking it. I’ve already crossed a much worse line.”

“Mm. Killing somebody who deserves it isn’t worse than hurting your Light, Ezzen. It’s innocent, they’re not.”

“…Innocent? All it cares about is pain! You told me that!” 

“Because that’s its nature. And Hina-san’s, as well. Not their faults.”

I’d said the very same to my own Flame, just before Hina had interrupted. She was right.

“You’ve already chosen to forgive her. But you don’t have to follow her path. She said it would make you happy, right? There are other ways to be happy. Be happy you’re doing the right thing.”

“Like how you’re happy those people are dead? I don’t believe this,” I snarled. “I thought you were the good one! The one with some moral backbone!”

Ai stood unnaturally fast. My throat went dry from the ripple. I looked up at her, at the fury that had twisted her face.

“I am not happy they had to die. I’m happy when I help people, when you and Ishikawa-chan can stand on your own two feet. That’s what magic is for. But the people who capture us and torture us and tear out our souls just to hoard them? I wish we were as powerful and free to do what we wanted as the Vaetna are, because the right thing to do, what would make me happier than anything else, is to end them forever. Until then, we fight back. In what few ways we can. That is mahou shoujo. Takehara-san would agree.” She collapsed back into her chair as the fire suddenly ran out. “Just…we must not be like Hina-san. When mahou shoujo turn cruel—real ones, Pretty Cure, the Sailor Scouts, chosen by some natural force of good—they lose their powers, and every day I wish we were the same. But she’s who we have, so I forgive her for it anyway, because we need her power. I just—don’t want you to follow that path. Stay away from it.”

“You can’t possibly equivocate her with the PCTF.” Even for my moral standards, that was a bridge too far.

Ai looked at me sullenly. The exhaustion had returned to her eyes.

“If you think what she does is different, or that the difference matters, then go ahead. Change like her, become another weapon forged in cruelty. And I’ll forgive you too.”

Now I had seemingly ruined two Radiances’ days, sapped away their high of justice delivered—possibly Alice’s too, by proxy. Each was carrying the weight of the world, at least in their own eyes, and they’d clearly argued these very points to death and rebirth and death again, long before I had ever entered the picture. It was overkill to call them battle lines within the team, but there were sides, and my thrashing and flailing at being caught in the middle was doing nobody any good.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

She rubbed her face and managed a genuine, though dim, smile.

“It’s fine. You have had—a weekend.”

It had only been two days, hadn’t it? Three, maybe four if you counted my actual flamefall, but I’d actually only been awake for about an hour and a half between getting up that morning and passing out in that buried car. So with how I’d been out like a light for a while after that, it really only felt like two days. The second- and third-worst days of my life, arguably. I managed a dry chuckle, suddenly feeling as tired as Ai looked.

“I…really have, haven’t I?”

“Yes. Unfair, I think. That’s part of why I’m upset with her and Takehara-san; they’re rushing you. They have—well, no, I was going to say they have good reasons, but they don’t, they’re being selfish. It took us a lot longer.”

I leaned back in the chair, then half-turned to inspect some of its features. Nice adjustable armrests, really comfortable lumbar support. A proper chair for an internet creature like myself.

“Kind of want one of these for my room.”

“Hm?”

“Uh—the chair.”

“Talk to Ebi-tan. Actually—I could help you order some furniture now, if you want.”

“Um—really, it’s alright, I don’t want to be a bother. Sorry for coming in on you with my problems when you were in the middle of something.”

“It can wait. I hate writing emails.”

She smiled at me, and I realized that she’d probably rather be doing this than anything else, short of literally working on one of our prosthetics. I still felt I didn’t deserve that—which was silly. Actually—I raised the stabilizer, admiring its heft.

“Um, I appreciate the offer, really, but if you’re free…can you walk me through this?” I tapped the warning label with a finger. “I’d love to know how it works.”

—

Spending an hour talking about magic with Ai made me feel far, far better about everything. It gave me an opportunity to re-center, remember why I loved glyphcraft, and generally feel comfortable with a Radiance when every interaction with Hina and Alice right now was loaded with the weight of their hopes and expectations and I couldn’t really hold a conversation with Amane. And Ebi was Ebi, which spoke for itself, but she was actually much more tolerable than usual when she popped in briefly. She and Ai seemed to mellow each other’s most objectionable traits—not that Ai had all that many, but she certainly seemed happier and less strung out with her android daughter in the room.

Ebi brought us refreshments and checked on my foot. My cauterization was healing apace and hadn’t been overly aggravated by the walking, mostly thanks to the way the stabilizer redistributed and canceled the most adverse forces against the site of the injury. It was a wonderfully clever bit of weaving and an excellent demonstration of how the best way to resist further damage was through physical focus rather than via biomancy or analgomancy. Indeed, that part of the lattice was arguably more impressive in design than its primary function of assisting my gait, though the third-order weaving of the latter was flashier. I decided I ought to thank Hina for that—had I done so this morning? I couldn’t remember; it had been a bit of a whirlwind with her.

My ankle had more or less recovered from my fall this morning—to a greater extent than Ebi had expected.

“Fourteen percent faster.”

“Meaning…I’m mutating?”

“Not…necessarily? Yeah, like, obviously the first place I’d go is the Hina comparison, but it’s not like I did a real scan of it when you got injured; that number is just a best guess. And you had just come off of a day of epithelial acceleration and red boosting and all that jazz, so I’m just going to chalk it up to statistical error.”

“O…kay.”

I had a moment of terrified panic that Hina’s changes I had rejected might well be happening regardless—then got ahold of myself. If my body was changing without having to hurt my Flame, wasn’t that the best of both worlds? It would mean I didn’t have to be complicit in Hina’s cruelty while still becoming closer to the Vaetna. Then I got ahold of myself again, old self-reminders that I wasn’t actually special kicking in automatically before I at last remembered that I was in fact an unprecedented, highly unusual case after all. So I might as well rejoice, though I did so internally, maintaining a healthy dosage of tempered expectations. I probably wasn’t going to wake up with supercharged myelin in my limbs and a magical furnace for a heart. Probably. A guy could dream, though.

I suspect Ebi picked up on at least some of that whole rollercoaster of emotions, but she didn’t interrupt Ai’s pleasant rambling about the stabilizer’s internals to comment on it, and the rest of the checkup passed without incident. Our little hangout came to a close when Ai’s pedagogical responsibilities caught up with her and she had to take a call, shooing us out of the room. Ebi accompanied me back through the halls and up the elevator to the 19th floor; I was starting to get a feel for at least this travel route between the Radiances’ abode and her sub-level domain.

“What else is in this building, anyway?”

“Uh…everything? Marketing, finances, operations, R&D, HR…” She pointed at various buttons on the elevator’s panel as she listed the departments.

“Isn’t Todai…huge? Culturally, I mean. Seems like sort of a small building for such a big operation.”

“The girls like to run a bit of a skeleton crew, it’s true. I’m told one of their conditions for the whole gig was to keep it lightweight, do marketing and stuff around them so they could do the magical girl thing in peace. Only sorta worked. I help with that, too.”

“Beyond just being Amane’s doctor?”

“Mhm. I run the Twitter.”

“Of course you do.”

When we stepped back into the penthouse, we found Hina in the kitchen, washing dishes, surrounded by the signs of dinner-in-progress. Something was roasting. She didn’t acknowledge us, even though I’m sure she heard us over the fwoosh of the faucet; for the best, probably. Whatever conversation we were going to have, I didn’t want to have it yet. And Ebi didn’t seem inclined to force the issue, bless her Flame-woven soul. She went back on Amane duty, and I returned to my room.

—

I whiled away the rest of that afternoon just…decompressing. At some point, I started idly looking up how to buy computer parts in this city, and less than five seconds later, Ebi messaged me with a list of specs and said everything would be there tomorrow. I was mildly disturbed she was watching my online activity, but she was probably hooked into the network; fair was fair. I made a mental note to get a VPN at some point.

The Radiances didn’t all convene for dinner that night. Ai’s portion of the meal went down to her in the lab, Alice was out, and Heliotrope was still on her way home, somewhere over the Pacific, which just left me, Hina, and Amane for a tense and awkward meal, sat together around the table with Ebi standing dutifully just behind the Amethyst Radiance. Hina seemed—unhappy, regretful. She didn’t bring up any of the events of the last few days, nor attempted to make any jabs at Amane. She just sat there and ate her roast duck. It was a marginally less voracious and messy affair than the chicken cutlet of lunch, more subdued. But only marginally—

And I totally got why, because said roast duck was really, really good. Maybe it was just that I needed the calories for my foot, but I gorged myself on a whole leg in the span of a few minutes. I’d like to think I at least outdid her on table manners, but honestly the whirlwind of tender meat and crispy skin and savory juices with the sweet-and-sour sauce she had made left me unsure as to whether I wound up being any more civilized about it than her. Amane also ate with her hands, in smaller, more careful bites than either of us—I was a little surprised her mechanical arm was food-safe, with its visible seams. She made no attempt to engage us in conversation, either, maybe affected by the awkwardness between us, or maybe just too focused on making sure she could keep the food down.

I excused myself pretty much as soon as I was done eating, barely mustering the manners for a “thanks that was so good” before returning to my room and getting back on my laptop to shoot the shit with my friends in the chatroom, doing my best to hide the way I was avoiding discussion of the events on the oil rig. If Sky knew, he didn’t call me out on it. So for a few hours, I was able to maintain almost-normalcy, especially when the topic turned to less-fraught topics like the goings-on of my friends’ lives and general magical research, nothing that demanded subterfuge from me. I did have to evade slightly when teased about whether I’d “gotten all up in the Radiances’ magical guts yet”—Moth’s phrasing left it ambiguous whether they had meant the magic of their transformations or literal sexual innuendo—but even that was a public sort of dodge; just an apologetic, half-joking “That’s classified.”

But that did get me thinking about Hina again, particularly in the ways I’d largely been trying to avoid. Even aside from all the posthuman temptation she’d levied upon me, there was a simpler, more basal attraction toward her which I found damnable but undeniable. Of course, all the Radiances were hot, and I knew my attraction to Hina was just a stupid, hormonal, misfiring crush from years of in-person social isolation and starvation for physical affection—but I still wanted her, despite everything. Despite what she’d done to me and promised to do more of. Stupid.

It was that stupid, ulterior motive that found me knocking on the door to her room, like a scene from a bad college drama. She’s waiting for you, Ez, whispered a tearful, melodramatic voice. It was rather undercut by the clip-art of a sapphire hanging by a lone strip of tape; it acknowledged me with just the barest hint of a flutter from my movements, and after my crisp double-knock, silence reigned. No swell of music to accompany my decision to cross into her domain, to thrust myself into the belly of the beast. Yet a decision it very much was; I wouldn’t let her into my own space again, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to try to have this conversation in one of the common spaces.

“Unlocked,” Hina called from behind the door.

I’d expected stepping into the room of Radiance Sapphire to be disorienting; I’d braced myself for some kind of translation into a different kind of reality as I crossed the threshold. No such luck.

The first thing I actually noticed was the incense. A softly spicy aroma, cloves and cardamom—thanks Dad—which merely mentioned its presence in the air rather than yelling it. That gave me a good idea of how advanced her nose was, if anything more intensely aromatic was uncomfortable—or maybe she just preferred it like this. Either way, it was unexpected but not unwelcome.

Her apartment had the same basic layout as mine; her multipurpose room seemed to be mostly storage, shelves and boxes which observed my passing in stolid solemnity—okay, no, stop being dramatic. Besides, that was far from the most remarkable thing about the room. That title went to the very fancy gaming rig. Three monitors all in a row, suspended from struts and bars at head-height to wrap across one’s field of vision, and a tall, fixed chair reminiscent of a racecar—a real racecar, not one of those overpriced gaming chairs styled after them. The setup had no desk, though, nor keyboard or mouse, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at until I saw the smaller panels and array of buttons…and the flight stick. What? Why did she have a flight simulator in her room? She was one of a handful of people in the world who could fly under her own power—she didn’t even have to mantle up!

I shelved the urge to investigate it further and crossed to the threshold of her bedroom, just around the corner from the gateway. Once we were face to face, things would get…much more difficult, and I could already feel my heart rate rising as I tried to organize my jumble of thoughts. I clenched my fists, let them relax, and then turned the corner.

This part of Hina’s apartment played more to my expectations; her bedroom shared the “den” vibe of her pocketspace. She didn’t have a big bed like mine; instead, quilts and pillows were scattered across the center of the room atop a plush, deep carpet that captured my feet like royal-blue forest moss. It must have been hell to get stains out of. The room was lit by the dying daylight and a few of the same indirect lights on the walls that had been in her pocketspace—and candles. Not an absurd number, maybe a dozen, scattered in twos or threes across various cabinets and dressers and her desk. A fire hazard, to be sure, but she was a greater fire hazard than anything in the country save her best friend, and I found I rather liked the ambiance.

Hina herself was lying on her side, flopped like a dog, facing away from me. She was hugging something—a stuffed animal in the form of a seal, I learned, once she rolled over to face me.

“Hi, cutie,” she muffled into the seal’s head. “Please be good news.”

“Uh—I don’t know if it is. I talked to Ai. Fuck. Ai, not I,” I gestured at myself for clarity. “Ai-chan? No, that’s appropriation or something.”

Bad start, but it at least made her snicker.

“And she said to forgive me.”

“How’d—”

“‘Cause that’s how she is. Too much good in her heart, I swear. Gonna get her killed someday. Already cut her in half.”

That was…almost certainly referring to Ebi, somehow. I resolved that I mustn’t derail or we’d never get around to the conversation we needed to have.

“I…okay. Can…I’m going to sit.”

She waved vaguely toward a pillow in reply. I put myself down gently, still trying to be somewhat conscious of my foot despite Ebi’s clean bill of health. Once I’d made myself comfortable, I looked around her room, trying to find something to focus on and talk at. My left hand wandered to my right and rubbed the scars. Nervous habit, because I was nervous. My eyes eventually found a pair of candles, a pale wax one with a slightly shorter, dark-purple sibling, directly across the room from me, above Hina’s head in my field of view. Opal and Amethyst? Reading too much into that, probably, since Amane was taller than Alice in both forms, and Hina probably wasn’t the type to—

Enough faffing around. I had to say it.

How could I say it?

It was as direct and simple of an admission as they came, but so, so loaded with straightforward vulnerability and the feeling that I was doing something I’d come to regret. I took a deep breath, pushed some strength into my vocal chords—

“A—”

And stopped. It was hard. I clammed up for a moment. Which turned into ten seconds, which turned into twenty, and by then I was considering bolting. I backed off a bit from what I was going to originally say, and instead went with:

“What are we?”

Great line, Ez, real low-drama, definitely not a line straight out of a crap romance novel. Hina breathed slowly.

“Dunno. That wasn’t as bad as I was worrying, though. What did you really want to ask?”

Damn her directness, her incisive way of knowing me despite not knowing me. I forced myself to stop white-knuckling my other hand, instead putting my face in my hands and sighing. I just wasn’t going to be able to say it any other way. Just spit it out, Ez.

“I…still…want you but.”

She squeezed the plushie tighter.

“But? I don’t like buts, cutie.” She frowned. “Well, no, I like butts, probably, at least when they’re attached to people I like. I’m going to shut up now.”

Heedless of her babbling, I had started talking again around “attached.”

“I want you physically and carnally and I want you to touch me and I want to touch you and…and…I’m willing to forgive you about what you did to me because I want more of it even though I shouldn’t and I feel awful that you feel so bad about what you did because Ai said—Emerald, that is—said it was a blind spot for you and it hurts that you’re so alone when I’m alone too and I’m just realizing how stupid it is for me to be angry about that when, one, I want it, and two, I had an even worse blind spot about literal murder so…”

I ran out of breath. That was probably for the best; I hadn’t quite worked out what was supposed to come after the “so”. I panted a few times, confirmed with a glance that she was still waiting for me to continue, found another thread, and pursued that instead.

“I don’t know what to think about the mutation stuff you keep talking about. I feel like I’d be betraying Emerald and myself because hurting the Flame is horrible and feels so awful that even though I want to be more the price is too high. But if we don’t do that, can we still…just do the physical stuff without all that? Is that an option, where we’re just…I don’t know, a couple or f—friends with benefits or something without me having to tear myself up about the magic side too?”

“Um.” For once, Hina seemed really speechless. She slowly sat up. “Cutie, I’m really, really proud of you, you know that? Dunno how much you think that’s worth, but I am. That must have been hard.”

I tried to acknowledge that it was, that it had been so hard but I couldn’t not say it, but now my voice was shaking too badly. Why was I sobbing? This whole affair was stupid and melodramatic and it had to get off my chest. How else was I supposed to deal with it all? And it hurt that she was proud, that I did value her praise like that. It was all so dumb and complicated and none of this had mattered before two days ago. But now it all mattered to me, so much, too much.

Hina let me cry quietly for a minute or two, until the tears at least stopped flowing and I was just choked up and dreading whatever she’d say next. She’d exploit my vulnerability and pounce on me, use my admission of desire to take everything she wanted.

“You shouldn’t trust me,” she eventually muttered, blue downcast.

“I know. But I…” It took me a few sniffles. “I want to. I—I want to.”

“You know how hard it is for me to not try to abuse this? To exert my leverage? It’s really hard, cutie. I look at you and I want to grab you and drag your Light to the surface and slice your belly open to drink your blood until we’re the same and I’m not alone anymore,” she whimpered. “Yuuka wasn’t joking. I try really hard to stop myself and I messed up last night. I get why you don’t want to become like me. And that’s probably the right call.”

“So…”

“I’m trash at half-measures, Ez. I told you, you could be the best thing that ever happened to me, and that makes me want to push you and push you until it comes true, because that’s what I am.”

“Then…Hina.”

“Mm?”

“You can control yourself. Or I want to believe you can. Maybe that’s—maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part. But let’s…experimental verification.” I rubbed my crimson face, embarrassed at what a mess I’d made of articulating my thoughts. “Um—fuck me, this is so…damn it.”

I stood and approached her den, unbalanced by the roiling trepidation in my stomach. I stepped across the thickening layers of blanket until I was standing over her.

“This is stupid, is what it is. Let’s—just touch each other. That’s what I want, that’s what made me even come in here in the first place. I want to touch you. Fuck.” It felt so good to just say it, but clarification was desperately needed. “Not—not sex. Um—not that I don’t want that, you’re very attractive, but this is—to prove a point. Nothing with the Flame, just…cuddling. Show me I can trust you.”

I held my breath. She stared at me, and I did my damnedest to maintain eye contact, meet the brilliant sapphire on its own terms.

“I’m so much stronger than you. Always will be, if you’re not gonna change. You wouldn’t be able to stop me.”

She said it so bleakly. No joy, no revelry in her transcendental metamorphosis. It opened a pit in my stomach.

“No—no, it’s not about being strong. I do want to be strong. I do want to be more…never want to have to fall back on violence. Not with you, not—not with Todai as a whole, either.”

“Mm. You mean the murder.”

“I…yes, I do mean the murder. Stop me next time.”

She snorted.

“Not quite balanced, cutie. You keep me from—fuck, yeah, sexual assault.” She looked like a kicked puppy. “Fucked up of me, yeah. And I keep you from killing people. That’s it?”

“Well—we both have some blind spots. That’s—mutual accountability, of some kind. Foundation of relationships or something. We stop each other from being our worst selves.”

She nodded at that and stood, and now we were two horny idiots standing atop a hill of blankets in the middle of a room. She fixed her hair nervously, twirling auburn locks between her fingers.

“Okay! Um, yeah! I wanna try it. I really really wanna prove I can be…uh. Lay it out for me as clearly as you can. You just want to…cuddle.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed,” I chided, but the knot of nerves and confusion was loosening. We’d come out the other end.

“I’m trying really really hard to not make fun of you for making this so vanilla because that’s the whole point, but…”

“…At least you’re honest.” I sighed. I did like that about her. “Um. Just…hands above clothes. No biting—can’t believe I have to say that. Kissing…sure, yes please, as long as you don’t try to suffocate me again.”

Then I surprised us both by laughing, a goofy, undignified chortle. The situation had just gotten too ridiculous, once I laid it out like this, laid the exact limits on the table. Must it be so contrived? Was trust such a fragile thing? Well—yes, for now. We had to start somewhere. She giggled too, then.

“The pact is made.”

“Uh. You’re not a fairy, right?”

“I’m me!” She took a deep breath. “I’m…I thought I’d fucked this all up and scared you off.”

“Yeah, um—you did. And I’m still worrying this is a mistake. Prove me wrong.”

“Gladly. C’mere.”

—

True to her word, the next few hours were passionate and exploratory but relatively chaste, as far as the overall axis of sensuality went. She’d burrowed us into the mound of bedding and given me what I could only describe as an inspection. There had been poking and sniffing and eventually even licking once I’d given permission. Then, there’d been kissing and purring and roaming hands, including my first touches of a boob and a butt—though that part remained above the clothes as I’d stipulated. She was so warm. I got a close-up of her teeth and barely restrained myself from asking her to sink them into me. That would be for another time.

Evening slipped to night, until the candles burned low and were overcome by the city lights coming through the window. Her eyes were so reflective they all but glowed, even in the darkness, two moons looking at me contentedly, reduced to sapphire slivers under the hoods of her eyelids. My eyesight wasn’t nearly so good, but I didn’t need to see anything else.

We talked more, sometimes in little mutual whispers that accompanied each touch and sometimes in longer rambling monologues while we lay next to each other, the other just intent to listen. She joyfully explained all the ways her body was different, made my heart ache with how she described what it was like to be her, and gushed about how much she loved her teammates. She tempered the end with a stream of quiet apologies for how she’d approached me and how she’d probably torn me away from the path that would have led me to the Spire. I forgave her for the first; the second would need more time until it scabbed over, but I found myself willing to wait.

For my part, I admitted new desires and older feelings I’d never said aloud before, what I dreamt of becoming—embodied in the girl laying half-across me and purring into my chest. We wondered about my Flame, how it had spoken to me. It was, to her knowledge, unprecedented; her deeply enmeshed experiences didn’t include speech. She did mention with a city-lit, troubled frown that Hikanome’s doctrine did purport communication between the Flame and its bearers, divinity-to-prophet, but not nearly so clear as what I’d experienced.

And eventually, soothed by budding trust beginning to take root between us, comfortably ensconced in her burrow of blankets, and euphoric in the simple presence of another body against mine, I fell asleep. My insane, whirlwind weekend of abduction and magic and pain was over.

The world kept turning, though. Somewhere, Noah Holton was going through something similar to the gauntlet I had just run, and of course the Spire stood, as ever. Radiance Heliotrope was on her way back, jetbike screaming across the Pacific. Our first meeting in person would be less than ideal.

And the next morning, Sun's Blessing, Hikanome, the largest Frozen Flame cult in Japan—

Demanded an introduction.