You reflect.
It’s what you do.
Noise you don’t want to hear, fists thrown, bullets fired—all of it bounces back and strikes your attacker with the slightest bit of your attention, or even less.
He might have been someone important, might have been loved by a mother, a father, embraced by family before he became the human body wrapped around the power of catastrophe and destruction. ____ didn’t feel anything about that, or about the seal between self and the world, or about the seal between that vessel and the world, where people moved in the distant light beyond this blue grey glass.
He’s cold. Space closes around his body without the warming blanket of riftspace caressing his hull. He moves a human hand and stares at it, wondering at the warmth of his own body heat and how it doesn’t remove the chill he feels.
Ekos has no pilot right now. He remembers how the temporary sync felt that got them to this solar system, remembers the warmth of human laughter and chatter in the corners of his mind.
They’re gone now. He’s too large a ship to be so empty.
Ekos lowers his hand and settles in for his long vigil.
Gin proves herself strong. She’s quick, agile, and more driven by the need for vengeance and to no longer be helpless than by gratitude for Dazai’s choice to take them in.
It was the Port Mafia that killed their companions, and the Port Mafia that punished the killers and rewarded Gin and her brother. The Port Mafia values strength, values proficiency with knives and body and all goes well—until she hits puberty and her voice doesn’t change.
“Nobody listens to me,” she vents, frustrated, to Ryuunosuke as she washes blood from his shoulders where Dazai’s training has harmed him.
“Words mean nothing,” he says in a low rasp. “Actions are everything.”
Gin pauses, considers that, stops her brother from escaping, and finishes dressing his wounds.
She’s getting to be pretty and that’s a problem. She ties up her hair and forces it to be just the right amount of wild, the right amount of out her way. She covers her delicate features with a mask and stares keen-eyed into the mirror. She closes her mouth and makes her points with the tip of a knife instead.
They listen to her. She rises in the ranks. She takes command.
They count coup: confirmed kills, unverified kills—which covers the halo of supposed inhabitants or workers within a given area when they destroy en masse—and sometimes when the weight gets too heavy, they count things they aren’t required to.
“Five confirmed lives saved. Seventeen unverified.”
“Ten confirmed saved.”
They pass the tea back and forth, alcohol warm on throats too young to be drinking it, and it almost washes away the taste of blood in the backs of their mouths.
Because they don’t care about those numbers. They care about mission success rates, intelligence gathered, acceptable cost.
“Mission success.”
“Mori’s asked me to look after you.” The woman folded her hands into her sleeves as she looked Chuuya over, assessing. “I’m Ozaki Kouyou,” she introduced herself.
Chuuya remembered Mori’s comments that someone was responsible for teaching and caring for new Port Mafia recruits, and it was only a relief he clearly didn’t consider that devil Dazai his recruiter. He stood up a little straighter for Kouyou. “Thank you, Ane-san.”
She paused, a hint of surprise on her face, but waved it aside for the moment and handed him a small box. “For you.”
He opened it curiously, then slowly slipped off the band marking him a member of the Sheep. He reached up and fastened the choker around his neck.
Kouyou smiled. “It suits you.”
He felt small and very alone in the quiet woods around him. He wasn’t very big yet anyway, newly born from his power only a few years before, and while he grew, it was at the rate of all the gods—whatever that power sustained.
So even when he’d been walking alongside his older sister, her mouth curling in a bright smile, warm fingers curled around his hand, he’d been a child at her waist and unnamed yet. But there it hadn’t mattered that he was small and she was not because he knew that she wouldn’t let anything happen to him.
The woods rustled gently, creaking branches, wind-blown leaves and underbrush. His sister was the god of finding. If he just waited, she would find him.
He crawled under the brush around one of the trees with low-hanging branches and let it cover him while he waited.
There were moments when all anyone could think about was the blood on their hands, their fallen team members—something not quite family but beyond mere friends—and their own willingness to go bloody themselves again.
Lirian was queen of ice and snow, her lands robed in white mists and frost. Winter was cold in Lirian’s heart, fitting for her rank. She condemned who must be condemned to save who must be saved and never let it pain her. Such was the lot of she who would rule over the icy lands.
But as she swept in from another long day in councils, divying up what supplies there were, knowing she was deciding who would live and who would die, she let out a sigh as the heat of the roaring fireplace at the far end of the great hall began to thaw the chill off her skin and warm her furs to a tolerable temperature. There was a small child sitting near the fire, a fierce scowl on her dark face, black crow feathers growing from her black hair.
“Seiran,” said Lirian.
The child looked up, scowl vanishing into an expression more neutral than blank. The child stood and curtsied.
“Never mind that.” Lirian waved off the gesture and moved closer to the fire. Her gaze stayed on Seiran and something in her heart felt warm. “You had a pleasant day?”
Seiran shrugged indelicately. The child had only a feral grace, but she was beautiful to Lirian anyway. “You didn’t,” she said, more brazenly than anyone else might.
“I did not,” Lirian agreed. She reached out a hand to stroke her fingers through soft feathers and hair.
Seiran sighed quietly.
They stood in the silence together as their iciness thawed.
Anyone who was going to be Chuuya’s partner was going to be competent at knives.
Dazai winced and blew on his newly bleeding fingers. Chuuya held out his hand. Dazai stepped forward to hand back the knife.
“You meant to do that,” he accused in an undertone.
“You asked for the knife,” Chuuya answered incredulously.
“Yes, hand it to me, not throw it!”
Dazai glared at Chuuya. Chuuya glared at Dazai. They were teenagers, but when they were together, they might as well have been little kids.
Chuuya suddenly grinned, sharply. “I’ll teach you.”
“I am competent.”
“You are bleeding.”
Ide’a had never been a disappointment to his parents. He had a knack for business, was capable with the technology, software, and processes that kept his extended family firmly in control of the Flux’s mining economy, and knew how to manage business ‘partners’ with the appropriate balance of conciliation and hostility.
He’d never disappointed them until he took mandatory affinity testing and scored too valuable a potential pilot to avoid being drafted.
But when he arrived at his tiny bunk with his two permissible duffel bags, on equal footing with every other candidate, he exhaled his cage and inhaled relief.
The first time Cor saw sand, he ran across the beach with giggles and bare feet, not even noticing the stinging heat and grit. Zana watched with a smile and settled down to build castles.
He came back over, curiously, after her towers began to rise from the sand, looked with wide eyes, never touching. She was raising him at essentially a spaceport. He knew to keep his fingers away from delicate things.
But he was her little brother. She took his small hands and showed him how to shape and pat and firm the walls.
“Our castle,” she said.
You will be my blade.
The words echo in his mind sometimes, a soft-voiced memory, the imprint of a small hand against his hull.
Mihzat doesn’t remember it, but Veset does. Veset, blade, and he looks through log files that predate his integration, digs through memories that are his for all they aren’t.
That quiet voice, You will be my blade.
Is that what you want to call it, my queen? More familiar. Kasuru, the designer of the spaceship, who’d been at Mihzat’s integration when he became Veset.
Queen. Yes.
“I’m not going to talk like a fucking girl!” Chuuya practically growled at his annoying partner.
“Bet you will!” Dazai singsonged back. “If I win this game, you talk like a little rich girl and ask nicely for what we need.”
“And if I win,” Chuuya countered, “I grind your into the pavement and then you torture it out of them.”
“But Chuuya! I’d need my face for that.”
“Fine, you torture it out of them, then I grind your face into the pavement.”
The two eyed each other.
“Deal.” Dazai grinned.
Chuuya checked his game console for foul play.
Nanere first picked up the knives when she was a little girl. She rammed one into the knee of her mother’s love. When he howled and swung, she slashed his arm.
When he was finally gone, still cursing her, she gently washed her mother’s face and applied salve to her bruises, then fixed her mother’s makeup for her.
“He was our next meal,” her mother slurred.
Nanere thought of the shipyards and dangerous work available for tiny bodies that could fit into the small spaces between mechanical parts. She hardened her face and stiffened her shoulders. “I’m our next meal.”
His entire childhood had been a long line of broken things, things that guy had burned, things he’d torn apart and unraveled and left as gifts to his only child. Saruhiko had never had anything he cared about that had ever lasted whole.
Misaki was different. Misaki was his friend, and he’d left when that guy had come. He’d left and hadn’t been just another broken thing.
Saruhiko didn’t know why he thought it would last. He’d wanted to destroy the world with Yata, remake it, and somehow along the way, they’d taken fire to each other and broken everything.
Saruhiko isn’t afraid of shadows when he walks through the city on missions he despises, climbing Jungle ranks like it comes easy. (It does come easy. He had a thorough training in malice and sadistic behavior before he ever encountered the clans.)
He has nothing to fear from the members of the Green Clan or the King he knows he will come to meet. He’d been afraid of the Red King once, all flame and power, but he’s not afraid of shadows, not anymore.
That guy had occupied the shadows, malicious, sadistic. He’s dead, and now it’s Saruhiko owning them.
Zuko was the first boy to dump her in a lake. He was trying to be helpful, and she knew that. He was trying to put out the flaming apple on her head, and she knew that too. But for a firebender, he sure picked the most embarrassing, awkward, inefficient way to do it.
Joenna Janine Browning stood in front of a viewscreen staring at her five-year-old son. He was bound at the wrists humanely—small consolations—his whole body hunched over as he cried and railed in words that meant less than the intensity of the pain behind them.
“He’ll be a legend, Janenna.” The father’s voice practically glowed.
He had done this to their son. He had delivered him to the Projects without warning or consultation.
Janenna had heard of the Projects, decided not to volunteer herself as a potential supersoldier, never dreamed they were taking children.
She turned to her husband, soon to be ex. “One day, I will kill you for this.”