I felt pretty comfortable with my standard look, but I never contemplated my typical dark jeans and t-shirt combo and thought ”Damn, I look good today.” It wasn’t even really a look to me. It was just how I dressed… part of my image of myself, but not part of my self-image, if that makes any sense.

When I got all dressed up, I felt like someone had stuffed me into a costume… which really is a pretty good description of most occasions that have involved me being all dressed up, come to think about it. I’d hated being put into dresses for school pictures and holidays and things growing up. The grown-up equivalent of that which I sometimes engaged in with Amaranth or Steff was more fun, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel ridiculous the whole time.

But this night, I wasn’t all dressed up… just a little. I still looked and felt like myself, just without some of what Steff had once described as my “grubby charm”. There apparently was a middle ground between fifty-copper t-shirts and clothing that had more moving parts than I did. I probably wouldn’t throw out the Walled Market clothes any time soon, if only because I would go through my nicer things way too quickly if I wore them all the time… but it was nice to have some things that I’d feel bad about ruining.

I had the thought that I could try to wear my better clothes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I had my design class… it was full of the sorts of girls that made me feel terminally inadequate, and maybe I’d have an easier time impressing Professor Stone if I looked my best. It was kind of weird to find myself thinking along these lines… the idea of trying to impress someone with my looks seemed really shallow to me, and more than a little ridiculous. But the goal wouldn’t actually be to impress him with my appearance so much as to impress him in general, and a teacher who was focused on the aesthetic appeal of things would probably take me more seriously if I paid more attention to my own.

My thoughts about clothing were interrupted by a sudden pinching sensation in my forearm, which probably stemmed from the fact that I’d just been pinched by Cetea, a gorgon who’d had the bad luck of being in the room beneath mine last year.

“Sorry,” I said automatically, as I realized I’d stopped there right in front of the door. “Excuse me.”

“Oh, you weren’t in my way,” she said. She sounded embarrassed, though her face was really hard for me to read. The snakes that wreathed her head seemed confused, or maybe they always all looked like they were trying to go off in different directions. “I was heading for the stairs when I saw you staring at your reflection, and it kind of freaked me out. I was just making sure you were… okay.”

“Um, thanks?” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, and she scurried away towards the stairs.

I decided to wander over to the pent, even though it was still early for the dance and I didn’t expect a lot of people to be there. Actually, that was why I wanted to show up early. After spending the whole summer on campus and then moving into my dorm a week ahead of the crowd, I’d sort of generalized the principle that the key to feeling like I belonged somewhere was to be there first. There was something inherently attractive about the idea of slinking in late when it’s already dark and everybody’s already distracted doing their own things, but that just made me feel like everyone else was part of a crowd I was intruding upon.

Also, it seemed like a fair bet that Nicki would also show up early, since she said she knew one of the CJs.

I was a little worried about spotting her, because when I’d last seen her she’d had shimmering orange-colored hair. That was pretty much the extent of my mental impression of her, visually. I hadn’t noticed her in the previous class, and I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to pick her out of a crowd without it. As it happened, she’d kept it orange but I still almost looked right past her when I saw her hanging out by the crystal arrays because she was wearing it completely different. It looked like what she’d described to me, all flipped over one eye. It looked cool, albeit slightly impractical. I wondered if she could see out of the covered eye… with glamour, the hair could be a lot less of a solid opaque mass than it appeared.

She could see well enough to spot me right at the moment that I recognized her. She waved and came fast-walking toward me, in a way that made it look like she was trying hard not to run.

“You came!” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Alone?”

“Sort of,” I said. “We’re all like meeting here, but we sort of left it kind of loose.”

“Oh, I get you,” she said, in a way that suggested she thought that this was the height of coolness, though it goes without saying that it really wasn’t. “You got here pretty early.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t really have anything else to do. I like your hair… it looks like you pulled off the flip thing you were trying for.”

“Oh, yeah, I was actually trying that for the dance,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I’d get it right on the first try, though, and I knew there was a chance I’d run out of juice even if I was doing everything right, so I made it a multi-day thing. That’s the thing about glamour. It can take as much energy as anything else when you’re setting it up, but once you get it in place, it’s pretty easy to maintain. I mean, when I cast it on myself. I’d have to stay really close to someone else to keep their hair glammed up for three days. But it’s pretty much second nature, and it doesn’t drain me hardly at all.”

“You maintain it in your sleep?” I asked, seriously impressed. It was possible to keep a spell repeating in a way that it became second nature, and some people could supposedly literally do it in their sleep, but it was easier and more common to put spells into a magic item if they needed to be running twenty-four hours a day.

“Not all by myself,” she said. “They make these sleeping caps that soak up ambient mana… you just have to do a little ‘hook’ thing between the glamour and the cap and it takes care of it.”

“How much power do they actually hold?” I asked, a little surprised. A porous powerstone that was basically empty would have a little power trickling into it from the background magic, but it was hard to imagine keeping an enchantment running on that. Whatever the caps Nicki was talking about were made of, it would have to be really efficient at attracting and using energy.

“Not much,” she said. “But again, glamour is low maintenance magic. If I used the same cap a bunch of nights in a row I’d deplete it, but I have a couple extras… they were a required course material for one of my classes last year, and at the end of the semester I bought some off my classmates. Not to be all ‘all non-humans know each other’ or anything, but do you know Mariel? I got the idea from her. The company that sells them won’t buy them back, so we didn’t have to offer a ton and between the two of us we got half the class.”

“Yeah, I know Mariel,” I said. “It’s good to know she has some decent business sense. She was pretty into the idea of being a hair stylist, the last that I knew.”

“Yeah, she can be a little flighty, but she’s actually pretty canny when she’s not… um…”

“Hanging around with Puddy?” I said.

They’d attached themselves to each other at the start of the previous school year, and though my former roommate was not the sort of person to make a commitment to anyone else, they’d been together more often than not, to Mariel’s obvious detriment. When Puddy wasn’t violent, she was controlling, and when she wasn’t controlling… well, she was still kind of an asshole.

I’d seen a few small signs throughout the last school year that Puddy had matured a little and taken steps to get her drinking under control, but after a certain point I’d stopped paying attention to signs because I’d stopped paying attention to her. Well, at several points. Ignoring Puddy had been an ongoing project for some time.

“Yeah, that,” Nicki said. “I know Puddy’s your ex…”

“She’s my ex-roommate,” I said. “Becasue that’s all she ever was, really.”

“Okay,” Nicki said. “I didn’t want to start badmouthing her in front of you, but yeah, she’s… not… good.”

I smiled and kind of half-giggled a little. The fact that Nicki considered that badmouthing… it was really kind of cute. The way she’d sort of glommed onto me by reputation suggested that she listened to gossip, but I was having a hard time picturing her spreading it.

“On the subject of hair styles and flight,” Nicki said, with an air of changing the subject, “did you know that the hair is the heaviest part of a sylph’s body? The rest of them weighs like nothing.”

“Yeah, I’d noticed that,” I said. “When she got her hair cut short, she seemed to get airborne without really thinking about it.”

“I actually asked her about it, after she cut her hair,” Nicki said. “I mean, about why she’d had it long in the first place if she could fly with it short and not when it was long. And it was long when she got here, so I know it’s something she did for Puddy, though I also know that Puddy liked it long… but she seemed kind of surprised at the idea that it would be even, you know, a consideration. Like, ‘Oh, yeah, I can fly now,’ like it’s not a big deal?”

“I guess it’s probably not, for her,” I said.

“You’d know better than me.”

“Probably not,” I said. “It sounds like you got to know her a lot better in your shared classes than I did living in the same dorm…the floors in Harlowe are actually pretty small, especially with the way they’re split down the middle, so it’s actually a pretty good bet that anyone who’s housed as the same gender and from the same year will recognize each other and know of each other, but we don’t all hang out together.”

“’Housed as the same gender’,” she said. “That’s an interesting way to put it. I like it.”

“Well, the school says everyone’s male or female,” I said. “And their ideas about which one a given person is don’t necessarily reflect their identity. I know of at least two trans students on campus, and some of the people who get housed as boys in Harlowe don’t actually have a sex… I don’t know what everybody’s situation is, but I know Steff only stays on the boys’ side for convenience, both in the sense that it lets her be with her boyfriend and in the sense that it would be a hassle to fight it.”

“See, this is one of the things that’s cool about you,” she said. “You’re all up on stuff like that.”

“I’m actually not,” I said. “I mean, when I came here I thought I was all progressive, and I was compared to the woman who ‘d been raising me for the past nine years and the town she lived in, but… well, that wasn’t exactly a hard standard to beat, and I swallowed a lot of pretty regressive ideas during those nine years. I’ve had to un-learn a lot of things.”

“Your grandmother… okay, I gather that you don’t get along, but that’s got to be kind of awesome,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Having a grandmother who was a hero,” she said. “I mean, an adventure-having, world-saving, dragon-slaying hero.”

“She fought a dragon,” I said. “I don’t know if she ever slayed one, but the one she’s famous for dueling is still alive and scorching. And if she ever saved the world, I didn’t hear about it.”

“Well, I didn’t either, specifically, but I just figured… an epic-level paladin fighting in the Chaos Wars…”

“I don’t think ‘epic’ is the word,” I said. “I mean, she kept her career hidden from me, but I think I would have noticed if there were epics being written about her.”

“Okay, but technically, fighting a greater red dragon qualifies her,” Nicki said. “I mean, right? She did that.”

“Qualifies her according to who?”

“That’s one of the criteria the international delvers association uses,” Nicki said. “If you defeat an epic-level threat, you’re an epic-level adventurer. It makes sense to me.”

“Okay, but it was a duel,” I said. “There would have been rules and restrictions, which probably benefited her. It’s not the same as defeating a dragon in actual combat.”

“If she made a red dragon abide by the rules, then she’s got to be kind of epic. I mean, a paladin’s challenge is supposed to have some kind of real force behind it, but you can imagine the kind of willpower she’d need to go head-to-head with a dragon like that?”

I couldn’t, but I didn’t have to imagine what it felt like going head-to-head against a greater dragon without the willpower to do so.

“Can we talk about something else?” I said, trying not to sound testy. I didn’t want to drive Nicki away or make the rest of the conversation awkward when it had actually been going kind of well.

“Okay,” she said. “Sorry. Like I said, I knew you didn’t get along… I didn’t know it would be such a sore subject.”

“Well, it’s not so much that she’ a sore subject… though I don’t care for her that much. To you she’s an ‘epic’ paladin,” I said. “To me, she’s… she was just my grandmother, an old lady I saw a couple of times a year at most. Sometimes she was a little stern, which at the time seemed kind of scary or even mean, but… she was my grandmother. I knew what that was supposed to mean from books and TV shows, and the cookies and presents and things always seemed, you know, grandmotherly. Then my mom’s dead and suddenly my life is all her, all the time. She’s the one who told me I was a half-demon, and what that meant… and you can imagine what sort of things it meant according to ‘Brimstone’ Blaise.”

Nicki had tilted her head slightly, and she was looking at me out of her uncovered eye in a really quizzical way.

“Or maybe you can’t imagine it,” I said.

“It’s not… it’s just, I guess I had a picture of you in my head, from hearing about you and seeing you around campus,” she said.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said, and I meant it, though I was pretty sure it didn’t come out that way.

“It’s not exactly disappointing,” she said. “More like… enlightening. I’m not saying I don’t like what I see. Just that I’m seeing more than I expected. If that makes sense.”

“Well, you have seen me naked,” I said. “How much more could there be to see?”

“A lot, really,” she said. “You have some depths in you.”

She felt a presence like a light touch on her mind, which she thought of as a telepath’s knock… a polite way for the mentally gifted to let others know they were approaching. As always, it felt somewhat scattered, like she were hearing fragments of a single sound in the form of echoes. She understood this to be the effect of the minds of the snakes that wreathed her head. Any contact with her mind had to get past them as well.

She understood that it was considered polite among the elven telepaths, but her wreath-snakes didn’t understand about manners or subtle arts… they only knew that they’d heard felt something weird and didn’t know where it had come from, and they went wild looking for the source.

“I apologize, I did not mean to startle you,” Dee said out loud, coming around the set of large stones that concealed the exit shaft. She was wearing a long, shapeless woolen tunic that came to below her knees. It still left much more of her skin exposed compared to the full-body robes and cloaks that most of the subterranean elves wore. Cetea, in contrast, wore nothing over her glistening yellow-green scales except for a belt-like harness across her flat chest that held a series of pouches for convenient carrying of small items or animals.

“It’s not me you startled,” Cetea said, wincing as one of the snakes bit the side of her face in the sensitive area right around her tympanum. Gorgon manners said you didn’t react to your own bites, or mention anybody else’s. They were biting each other, too. She felt that more dully than her own bit, and at least it might knock a few of them out. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“It is not my sleep shift,” Dee said. “But they are re-consecrating the temple, and in my current state I cannot participate.”

“Don’t you outrank them?”

“I was little more than a novice before my… temporary reassignment of status.”

“I mean, socially,” Cetea said. “You told me you’re in line for your house’s seat. I doubt anyone else here could say the same.”

“Ah. I see what you mean,” Dee said. “It might be said that I am more important in the hierarchy of my house than any of the Ceilos delegates are in the hierarchies of theirs, but as we don’t belong to the same house or even hail from the same city that is not of consequence. Even within my house, my ‘rank’ has more to do with what is expected of me than any actual authority I wield.”

“I just think it molts that you’re being punished so harshly for something that you did at school,” Cetea said.

“The priestesses here have authority over me because I’ve been given over to their keeping,” Dee said. “It does not seem so harsh to me.”

“They took away all your robes and make you wear that scratchy thing,” Cetea said.

“You often do not wear any clothes,” Dee said.

“Yes, which makes uncomfortable ones seem all the worse,” Cetea said.

She could still feel the anger and confusion of her snakes, but it seemed to be abating. She cautiously raised one taloned hand up near her head, just out of reach. She was rewarded with a snapping lunge that jerked her head to the side.

“Girls are restless tonight,” she said. “Does cold bother you? A walk out in the air ought to quiet them down.”

“And it will not put you out as well?”

“Not as quickly as them,” Cetea said. “But I wouldn’t want to do it unescorted. The thing about torpor is it makes my brain slow, to the point that I’m not a great judge of whether I’m falling into it or not.”

“For my part, I had not expected to find much warmth on the surface, so I will not miss it,” Dee said.

Cetea got to her feet carefully, trying to avoid moving her head too quickly and further riling her snakes.

“I cannot imagine what it would be like to have several animal creatures conjoined to my skull.”

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to not,” Cetea said. “Or to have big fleshy sacs full of baby food attached to my chest.”

“They are not always full of milk.”

“Celia called it ‘cow venom’,” Cetea said. “It was funny, after she explained what a cow was.”

“Celia knows a great many humorous terms for the differences between mammals and reptiles,” Dee said.

“I don’t understand most of them,” Cetea admitted.

“Your live is not measurably impovershed by this.”

“Let’s walk up the trail,” Cetea said. “I’m going to be sleepy on the way back, so I’d rather it be downhill.”

“That is sensible,” Dee said, and they started out up the mountain trail. Cetea walked slowly, holding her head erect.

“Do you often come out here at night?” Dee asked her.

“My summer… tutor, I guess… wants me to spend at least three hours up top. I had some issues last year with re-adjusting to the underground too quickly and then having to learn to cope up here. It’s not always at night, but it was raining during the day. It’s nice to not have to deal with the sun, but it’s not like I can take all my classes at night.”

“That is indeed a shame,” Dee said.

“Yeah,” Cetea said. “I heard someone talking about night school one time and got excited for a moment… but it turns out there is some kind of social gap between the kind of schools that offer everything as a night course and a university, and they don’t have the whole student accommodation thing… it seems like such a lost opportunity. Half the humans I met seem to stay up all night, anyway.”

“I am not certain if I would prefer night school to day,” Dee said. “If the sun makes it uncomfortable to be abroad during the day, it also makes it difficult to sleep during it. And physical discomfort aside, the sun does not bother me half as much as the stars at night do.”

“Why’s that?”

“They are so very… numerous,” Dee said. “Like a thousand glittering eyes in the dark, or slivers of light glinting off of teeth or blades. And they are so far away.”

“Isn’t that reassuring?”

“No,” Dee said. “You might think it would be, but… when the sun is in the sky, I feel like I can see the vault of the world. The ceiling is there. I know it, and I feel secure. At night, in the darkness… it’s like there is nothing to see. Like the sky goes on forever.”

“It doesn’t, though,” Cetea said. “The sky is… the sky. It’s up there. Solid as a ceiling of rock, or more so.”

“I know that,” Dee said. “One of my dormmates was more than slightly inclined to pontificate on facts such as that, when the topic arose. She told me that at night when I look up and see black, I am seeing the sky… I lacked the nuance of language to articulate how untrue that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I see darkness,” she said. “When darkness falls on the bottom of a pit, I see the bottom by that darkness. Where the vault of a chamber is lost in darkness to light-seeking eyes, mine see it by that darkness. When I look up into the sky at night, I do not see darkness. I do not see the sky. I see nothing… nothing dotted with stars.”

Cetea shivered, an action that made her wreath of snakes rattle against each other and hiss in complaint.

“My former neighbor told me that the sun used to be a portal,” Dee said. “In the days when the gods would walk the physical realms freely and at will. In those days, the light of the sun was divine and would burn infernal creatures upon whom it fell. It was despised by creatures of chaos, though it held no power over them.”

“I’ve heard that,” Cetea said. “Or part of it, anyway. As part of Khersian myth. Humans say he became human in order to walk the world without restriction, and to become a ‘new sun’ for his people. I didn’t know how much of the portal stuff was real, and how much was just backstory for their myth.”

“I do not know either,” Dee said. “The celestial reaches are not a significant area of study among my people, and my informer on the subject would not be well-suited for investigating the truth of the matter. But it unnerves me to contemplate the matter, because if the sun is or has been a gateway to other realms, might not the stars be as well?”

“That’s crazy,” Cetea said. “Where would they all lead?”

“That is what I find unnerving.”

“I think the night just got colder,” Cetea said. “So why did you come up here tonight? I know about the re-consecrating, but the whole elven wing isn’t one big temple, is it?”

“No,” Dee said. “But… since I have a rare shift at liberty, I thought I would seek out your company.”

“Me? Why?”

“We… share experiences,” Dee said. “A frame of reference. And you are accustomed to speaking in Pax.”

“Most of the residents of Ceilos speak Pax.”

“But not habitually among themselves,” Dee said. “The elves who have been here longer can speak the gorgon tongue, and vice-versa. Going into the other races’ quarters in search of company feels like an awkward intrusion as it is.”

“Why do you need to leave the elven quarter for company?”

“I have never made friends easily, among my own people,” Dee said. “The station I occupy is not exactly the most crowded one.”

“And it’s not allowed for you to socialize with people outside it?”

“It isn’t simple to,” Dee said. “When I first arrived here, I spent my time in the halfkind den… they exist apart from the ordinary social order, so there are fewer strictures in dealing with them. Now, I am forbidden from having any contact with them. I do not think I would miss social contact, if not for the fact that… I…”

“Miss social contact,” Cetea said. “I understand, I suppose. You didn’t really have friends until you came up here, did you?”

“Not in the fullest sense of that word,” Dee said. “Of course, my language yields more precise degrees. Humans would say we have more than two dozen words for ‘friend’, but they all differ significantly from each other.There is duri, which is a state of invitation and openness. It usually leads to kezi, which is a mutual agreement to act in good faith.”

“Sounds more like a treaty than friendship.”

“It is a foundation for deeper understanding,” Dee said. “People have faults and it is easy to disappoint someone. Especially when you live in close quarters with one another. If two people agree to act in and assume good faith with each other, it can ease the way.”

“So why not assume good faith of everyone?”

“People have faults and it is easy to disappoint someone.”

“When you say that, do you mean that you can’t assume good faith of everyone because they have faults and will betray it, or you can’t assume good faith of everyone because you have faults and will be suspicious?”

“Everyone has faults,” Dee said. “So both interpretations are reasonable.”

“That makes sense, I suppose. On another subject, the summer is young,” Cetea said. “You could probably pick up some of the local languages before we go back to school.”

“I have actually been in the central library, doing that.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I’ve been studying primers on your language,” she said. She closed her mouth and made a series of hisses.

“Um… I’m not sure what you were trying to say there,” Cetea said. “It was something like ‘arm of the relative is not my…’ well, then it just gets rude. And half of it was just sort of making noise.”

“Evidently I require more study,” Dee said. “It is hard to understand the context of what I read when the illustrations are invisible to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I lack the necessary organs to apprehend heat patterns,” Dee said. “I can make out the writing because the ink is dark as well as heat reflective. The pictures, though, simply appear as an indiscriminate black mass… I can make out shades within the blackness, but they do not seem to correspond well to the image I’m meant to see.”

“Oh,” Cetea said. “I didn’t realize… I know you see things differently, but I didn’t know that would matter. I can see a light-drawing, when there’s light.”

“As can I,” Dee said. “It is curious to me how so many races that see by other media than light can see light as well.”

“Well, it’s useful,” Cetea said. “Most of the foundational myths I’ve heard have all or most of the races being made from a common plan. Which god made what race first is up for debate, but if everyone started from the same eye, it was probably a light-seeing one.”

“It could also be that the first race had an eye with capabilities that other gods could not duplicate,” Dee said. “Or did not feel their creations deserved.”

“I wouldn’t attach too much value to the first race, if there was a single first one,” Cetea said. “Anyway, why are you trying to learn from a book? I’d think, given the legendary sensitivity of the pointy elven hears, you’d pick up the subtle nuances faster just listening.”

“Ear,” Dee said. “The ear is the organ, and hearing is what it does.”

“Oh, really? That’s… confusing,” Cetea said.

“I do not imagine whoever devised it intended any malice.”

“I learned Pax as a child, but my primer didn’t cover things like ‘ears’… I never even really thought about what the little crests around mammals’ tympanal organs were called, and then when I thought I heard people calling them ‘hears’, I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of clever, in an obvious way.’”

“In any event, I would most likely learn faster through immersion, but there is a strong taboo against eavesdropping, and… well, again I do not care to intrude.”

“Not without any… kuri?”

“Duri,” Dee said. “My culture involves clear boundaries and declarations. Not because we are naturally open. In fact, I find that we tend to be more guarded and perhaps a bit more given to intrigue than many other peoples. Because of that, we deal with each other most easily when we are most explicit about intentions. When I find myself in situations where everything is theoretically open but one must feel one’s way forward, it is… disorienting.”

“And a little scary?”

“Not ‘scary’ in the…”

“…fullest sense of the word,” Cetea finished. “I know. Well, consider this an invitation if you want it, Delia Daella. We can be friends if you want someone to hang out with, and I can help you with my language.”

“I appreciate that,” Dee said. “I could teach you my language in turn.”

“Thank you. I could always use another word for friend.”

It was a weird kind of normalcy, granted, given that instead of waking up underneath Amaranth in a tiny little bed, I woke up underneath her in the middle of a great big one. The new furnishings really did have the effect of making it seem like I was waking up in an entirely new place, not the room I’d spent the last week in.

I didn’t mind that little mental reset one bit. The summer housing dorm I’d stayed in for the preceding three months had never felt anything like a home. The room in Gilcrease had felt like that: just somewhere I was staying. Somewhere with a place for me to sleep and room for me to store my stuff. Amaranth’s arrival might have been enough to turn it from “some place” into “home”, but turning it into a cozy and comfortable home with little resemblance to the crowded and strictly utilitarian place it had been was even better.

It also gave me the sense that it was more her room than mine, which I also didn’t mind… it had been years since anywhere had really felt like it was mine. While I’d made a lot of strides in dealing with it, feeling out of place was still one of my bigger sources of anxiety. How could I feel out of place in Amaranth’s room? It was where she kept her belongings. She even had a place for me.

When we unpacked her books, it occurred to me that she had a practical reason for delegating the shelving to me… it wasn’t just a matter of giving me a task for the sake of doing so. She seemed almost inherently incapable of picking up a book and just putting it on the shelf. Each one that she took out of the trunk, she ended up at least flipping through, if not sitting down to read. I like books, and I can’t pretend that none of them caught my eye, but a lot of them were things like old natural history or philosophy textbooks from the 160s or 170s… fifty, sixty years out of date and looking like they’d felt every day of it. Amaranth cooed over each and every one of them like they were children, which meant I got a dozen or two books up on the shelves for every one she took out.

“You have your class with Coach Callahan this semester, don’t you, baby?” she asked me, while paging idly through a large book about wildflowers. “The additional one you promised you’d take when she gave you a pass/fail grade last year?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. My replies were more likely to come out “yes, ma’am” than anything more conversational when I was actively working on not sounding snappish. She knew this already. We’d gone over my whole schedule before. “It’s my last class of the day, every day.”

“A five credit-hour class,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m taking 17 hours this semester, but don’t worry… I’m still ahead of where I need to be, credit wise, and I’m not going to slack off just because I got extra classes in over the summer.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about you slacking off in that regard,” Amaranth said. “I’m just thinking about what a bad grade in a five hour class would do to you. What grade do you think you would have earned in your last melee class, if you hadn’t been given a pass?”

“Probably a C,” I said. “That’s what Callahan thought I would end up with when she made the offer.”

“Coach Callahan,” Amaranth said. “I want you to start practicing proper respect for her.”

“I don’t think that’s going to affect my grade,” I said, then added, “ma’am.”

“No, but it will affect your attitude, which might affect your performance, which would affect your grade,” Amaranth said. “Say it.”

“Coach Callahan,” I said. “Coach Callahan told me she thought I could end up with a C.”

“If you get a C this time, it will be a third of your grade,” Amaranth said.

“Not quite a third,” I said. “Ma’am.”

“More than a quarter of it,” she said, and I couldn’t argue with that. “So we’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen. Therefore, one of your tasks will be to get an A from her.”

“Yes, ma’… wait, you mean to get my collar, I have to get an A from Ca… Coach Callahan?”

“Whose collar?”

I lowered my eyes.

“Your collar,” I said.

“Do you not think you can get an A?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Honestly, her grading system is kind of… well… arbitrary.”

“Do you think it’s unfair?”

“I couldn’t say,” I said. “She says she assigns the grade she thinks students deserve. Anyway, even if I do get an A, that means it’ll be winter break at the earliest that I get to wear your collar.”

“I didn’t say they would be short tasks,” she said. “You’ve been mine for almost a year. If you don’t think you can wait one semester to make it ‘official’…”

“I can wait!” I said. “But… what if I don’t get the A?”

“Let’s just focus on getting the A, shall we?” she said with a broad smile, and that was all the discussion she would allow on the subject.

I sort of understood why she wouldn’t discuss alternatives. If she told me that failure would mean she’d give me some other task, that would be the same thing as saying that if I didn’t mind waiting longer I didn’t have to try to ace Coach Callahan’s class. But it felt very much like she was telling me I had to do something impossible and I wouldn’t get to wear her collar after the inevitable failure.

Still, even when she was proposing that I should scramble up the dome of the sky and peel the moon off of it for her to use as an umbrella, I loved being in her presence again. Amaranth was warmth incarnate, and I basked in her. It was like the sun had put on flesh and was now sitting on a battered sofa that looked like it was missing at least three inches of height in the form of legs.

Other than getting Amaranth’s things in order, it was an utterly routine day. We ate all of our meals in the cafeteria, we went and hung out in the library in the afternoon. It was what had become a typical Sunday in my life.

Steff and Ian went to the library with us, but they didn’t stay very long. None of us had any homework or studying to do, obviously, and the others wanted to go check out the newer additions to the campus facilities. Amaranth seemed content to just enjoy being with me in a familiar place for the moment, and of course none of the additions were new to me anymore.

I took an odd kind of comfort in the knowledge that by staying over the summer I had spent more time living on campus than about half of the undergraduate student body, assuming an even distribution of students over the four years. In our little group, Steff had been at MU longer than I had but she’d missed out on the changes over the summer.

“It’s kind of a shame we won’t be here when the library gets remodeled,” Amaranth said, in between flitting between books. “It’s part of the five year plan, but there are no funds allocated for it yet, which means it probably won’t be done in the next two years.”

“I’m kind of glad,” I said. “I like the library the way it is.”

The multistory school library was one of the biggest and the nicest library I’d ever been in. The municipal library in downtown Enwich was bigger and more impressive looking on the outside, but its inside was kind of dingy and institutional-looking. The MU library was very modern in its design. Its floor plan was very open and well-lit, with skylights on the top floor and a lot of glass in the front that illuminated all three stories. I couldn’t imagine a building on campus in less need of renovation.

“Well, I look at it this way,” Amaranth said. “If they expand it, it’ll have room for more books. Anyway, it’s hard to say what will happen in the next four years… Bethany Davies is laying out all these big changes, but she’s not staying to see them through.”

“You seem really up on this stuff,” I said.

“I got the Gazetteer, the alumni newsletter, and the Enwich Times in Paradise Valley so I could keep up on it,” Amaranth said. “Last year none of us really came here with our eyes all the way open… I didn’t want to make that mistake again. Anyway, it’s obvious Chancellor Davies is concerned about the legacy she’s leaving now that she’s retiring. I just hope she’s thinking about more than buildings and landscaping projects.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, it’s not like we’re not giving her plenty of opportunity to get her name attached to something positive.”

My case against the school for the little matter of one of their employees warding me inside a room with a divine seal and another one accidentally dumping me into the ancient magical labyrinth used for delving exercises was still pending, though a settlement offer was on the table that would let them off the hook without much financial hardship or metaphorical egg on their collective and equally metaphorical faces.

They’d have to admit wrongdoing, of course, but since what we were really looking for was improvements in the handling of racial matters there was plenty of room for a moderately skilled P.R. department to spin the whole thing into something good for the school.

“I keep wanting to ask if Lee knows you’re back,” Amaranth said. Lee Jenkins, of course, was my lawyer, who was handling my arbitration case against the school and who had helped me out in some of the bigger trouble spots of my freshman year. “But of course you didn’t leave.”

“Yeah, we’ve been in touch,” I said. “He’s inviting us to the wedding reception, by the way. It’s in the first weekend in Polyantha, so if you want to go you’ll probably want to make arrangements to stay past the end of the year next semester.”

“I would have thought it would have happened already,” Amaranth said. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised they’re opting for a longer engagement, with his career and all.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “His wedding’s been pushed back by his in-laws-to-be again… something about an insufficient bridal gift. They want time to put together a better offering.”

“I can’t imagine he cares about that,” Amaranth said.

“I’ve got the idea that it would be insulting for him to tell them that,” I said.

Lee didn’t talk about himself very much, but when he did he was really talking about his fiancee, K’thindi. She had a half-orc mother who’d raised her orcish, and they were a close-knit family. The stereotypical view of orcs wouldn’t lead one to imagine they could approve of someone with a white collar job, but most cultures tend to view someone who makes a good living in high regard. If anything, orcs had a higher regard for lawyers… trial lawyers, especially… than humans typically did.

Orcs didn’t practice trial by combat. They viewed trials as combat. Two people standing up in front of an audience of their peers and a respected authority, making contrary claims and trying to show the other up as a liar or trip them up on a point of traditional protocol? That was the kind of thing orcs could understand. It was more or less how they’d settled disputes of honor for ages, during times when a lot of humans were still dueling.

“Anyway… in my mind, it felt like during the summer you went somewhere else,” Amaranth said. “I know I was writing to you here, but it was like you left MU and went to some other school and then came back. I’m sure that doesn’t make any sense…”

“It kind of does,” I said. “The campus feels different during the summer. It’s the same buildings, a lot of the same people, and the same place… but somehow it adds up to something different. I can’t explain it.”

“I think you just did,” she said. “As much as I can, anyway… it seems like we both understand what we’re talking about, and that’s what matters.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, smiling so wide that my cheeks blushed out of apparent belief that I couldn’t possibly be so happy without having something to feel self-conscious about.

It was nice in some ways to be put in my place, to fall into the familiar rhythm of yes, ma’am/no, ma’am with my Owner in her room… but it was also nice in other ways to just have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend in one of our favorite places to go together.

The next day we went back to the union for breakfast… myself, Amaranth, Ian, Steff, and Two. Despite how familiar the buffet-style cafeteria was, this felt a good deal less routine, because it was the first day of class. I’d been through this three times before but each time it was different. I was less than an hour away from starting a new class with a new instructor.

“Lot of new faces,” Amaranth said as we sat down at a pair of tables in the middle of the room.

“Yeah,” Ian agreed.

“Thirty-three that I can see from here,” Two said. “No, thirty-two. I’ve seen the girl with the green earrings before.”

I took their word for it… Two’s, particularly. I wasn’t really good at faces, and I’d never been much of a people-watcher. I tended to keep my head down. When I did look around the room… which I did reflexively since the others were talking about it… my eyes gravitated towards the faces I recognized. They were mostly non-human.

There was Belinda, the half-ogre, who was sitting with some of her human teammates from the Skirmish team. She saw me looking and waved. I returned it, a little awkwardly. We weren’t exactly friends, but she’d been friendly enough towards me after the beginning of the previous year.

Celia was sitting with a couple of lizardfolk… one who I thought was Hissy, our floormate from last year… and the gorgon who’d been in the room beneath me in Harlowe.

Twyla, a quiet girl who looked completely human except for a pair of pointy little horns jutting out of her forehead, was sitting by herself at a two-person table, her head down low over a notebook. I didn’t know much about Twyla. She’d hung out with the Leighton twins, who seemed to have managed to make it from junior high to higher education without maturing at all… but that was probably more due to bad luck in the roommate lottery than any personal preference.

“I wonder how many people are coming over for meals as opposed to the Archimedes?” Ian said.

“We call it the Arch,” I told him.

“That’s how you can spot the cool kids here at the Mag Univ,” Steff said. “They’re up on the newest campus slang, or ‘camp slan’, as they call it.”

“I’ll bet a lot of the new freshmen in Harlowe are going there instead of here,” Amaranth said. “It’s so much closer to those dorms. I mean, I don’t think I see any obviously non-human students I don’t recognize here.”

“They must be going there,” Steff said. “The school quietly dropped their Food For Freaks program… no more catered meals to keep us from upsetting the normals.”

“Huh,” I said. “Kind of works out nicely for them that the new student center with the whole racial harmony message is so much more convenient to Harlowe.”

“Yeah,” Ian said. “A human who’s got a big problem sharing eating space with other races wouldn’t go to the dining hall that’s all in-your-face with the tolerance. So they come here by default, while most of the people they’d object to go to the new place.”

“Well, to be fair,” Amaranth said, “the new dining facility is designed to cater to more diverse dietary needs. Considering how many people had problems finding adequate nutrition in the cafeteria options before, putting it close to Harlowe seems like a goodwill gesture, really. It’s not a perfect solution, of course, but you have to remember the whole campus is getting overhauled. Presumably when the student union gets its own re-do, this place will offer similar options.”

“I’m not saying it’s all bad,” Ian said. “I mean, I don’t think there was some conspiracy by the school to trick Harlowe people into going one place and not the other. But… well…”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “There’s good and there’s bad in what they’re doing.”

“I agree,” Amaranth said. “I just don’t want the good to be overlooked.”

“I’ll tell you one good thing about dining at the ‘Argh’,” Steff said. “They do take-away boxes. You swipe your card like normal, but instead of all-you-can-eat, it’s all-you-can-cram. Not that I don’t enjoy a little mealtime social fun, but I’m looking forward to that for those nights I just want to be alone, or alone with Viktor… popping out and bringing back something resembling real food is going to be a lot better than trying to make a meal out of the stuff they carry at the little hallway store in the Nexus.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I wonder if this place is going to start doing that? The Arch would be a bit out of our way for food, but that would be nice.”

“Oh, Little Ms. Here All Summer didn’t know about the take-away boxes?” Steff said. “I guess the chosen one hasn’t penetrated all of Magisterius University’s secrets, after all.”

“Who’s the chosen what now?” Ian said.

“It’s really not worth asking,” I said. “And no, I didn’t realize they let you do takeout. If I had…”

I was cut off by a whooshing sound, a flash of light, and then the clattering of a chair and several screams. We all turned and looked. Twyla had jumped up from her table, several things on which seemed to be burning… it looked like the whole tabletop had burst into flames but most of it was already dying out.

Two very calmly pointed a finger at the table and the rest of the flames went out with a puff. A wave of her hand dispersed the acrid smoke. A couple of people who’d been in the verge of running towards the burning table stopped mid-stride. Other people who’d been running for the exits kind of stumbled to a stop as awareness that the emergency… such as it had been… was over caught up to them.

“Gesundheit!” Steff yelled to mixed chuckles as Twyla grabbed her bag and made a very hasty exit.

“A spell must have run away from her,” Amaranth said. “That’s why you’re not supposed to mess around with fire magic outside of labs. I wonder if someone should go after her and make sure she’s alright?”

“She wasn’t burned,” Steff said. “That look on her face was embarrassment. I don’t think there’s anything you could say or do that would make her less embarrassed, Amy. If you want to be kind to her, I’d say the best thing to do would be to never mention it. That girl’s got a serious case of Really-I’m-Normalitis.”

“I suppose not saying anything is safer than saying the wrong thing,” Amaranth said. “But it feels like there should be some right thing I could say, that would let her know it was okay.”

The cafeteria manager was surveying the damage and shaking his head by this point. He wheeled a trashcan over and began disposing of the damaged tray and silverware and table accessories, and the burnt paper goods.

“Anyway,” Amaranth said, “getting back to the previous subject… if you had known about the takeout boxes, baby, you would have turned into a hermit the day they opened their doors. That’s something I am not going to permit you to do now.”

“Okay, yes, I probably would have taken food back to my room a lot of time,” I said. “But when I was here by myself, it’s not like I was sitting and talking with people at meals anyway.”

“No, but you were getting out for them and sitting somewhere where there were other people around,” Amaranth said. “That’s something. If it’s not a step forward, at least it’s not a step back. Now that we know we can do takeout, we’ll use it sometimes, but only when we’re going to be being sociable back in one of the dorms or for a picnic or something, or when there is an ironclad academic reason you need to be eating alone somewhere.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“In fairness to Mackenzie,” Ian said, “we’re acting like the new dining hall is the first time there’s been an alternative to eating in the cafeteria. But she could have got food from one of the burger stands and taken it back to her dorm, and she didn’t do that. So it’s not like the Arch thing would have given her a new and exciting opportunity to withdraw from the world if only she had known about it.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said, her cheeks coloring slightly. “I completely forgot about that. I’m sorry, baby.”

“I actually forgot about it, too,” I said. “We went to the food court so rarely that it didn’t even cross my mind as an option. Otherwise, I probably would have been eating chicken sandwiches and burgers by myself in my room all summer, and that probably wouldn’t have been a good thing.”

“Thank you for saying so. In any event,” Amaranth said, “how about we go check out the Arch for dinner tonight? I’m kind of curious to see it.”

We all agreed, and after that the conversation turned to more academic subjects.

As apprehensive as I was about all the unknowns involved in starting my first class of the year, I was really looking forward to it. ENC 217: Spellbinding For Enchantment was going to be a major step along the way to my major. Thus far in my education as an enchanter, I’d learned how to manipulate the inherent properties of an object. I could make a sword sharper, a coat warmer, or a door stronger… for a little while. I’d learned how to prolong the effects of such enhancements, though I couldn’t yet make them permanent. I could even make a person faster or stronger or more perceptive, though that didn’t last nearly as long.

I’d also picked up as a necessary skill in all of my lab classes the basic art of spellbinding, of taking magical techniques that worked for me and shaping them into a formula that could be repeated at need. It was very much an art, and there were a lot of trade-offs involved in taking powerful and useful magic and reducing it to something that could be more or less relied upon.

But that was what my major, Applied Enchantment, really consisted of. Humanity and other races of the world had been using cooling magic for millennia. When you took that magic and stuck it inside a box in such a way that it was always there, you had a refrigerator, and something like a refrigerator could change the world.

ENC 217 would focus on how to craft spells with an eye towards attaching them to objects. I still wouldn’t close out the semester any closer to being able to make a permanent magical item, but my spells would be a lot tighter and I’d be able to store them as charges in an object. I was really looking forward to that, especially considering how often during the winter months I’d had to repeat the insulation spells I put on my coat.

In fact, that was why I’d decided to take it during the fall semester. By the time the sunny, summer-ish weather left us I’d be able to deal with the cold in proper wizardly fashion.

Ian was a bit less sanguine about his first day of class.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said quietly to himself near the end of breakfast. “I am so not ready for this.”

“Relax, sweetie,” Amaranth said. “It’s the first day. I’m fairly certain you don’t have to be ready for it.”

“What’s there to be ready for?” Steff asked. “I’m sure your syllabus-receiving skills are still in top form even after a summer without so much as an agenda.”

“Okay, maybe you all don’t have to do anything for a grade today, but I have to play an audition in front of my professor and the music department head,” Ian said.

“Isn’t that the sort of thing they should have you do before they let you into the class?” I asked. “If they’re going to be picky about it, I mean.”

“They did,” he said. “This is… I got a notice over the summer that I’ve been ‘selected’ to give an additional audition.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Amaranth said. “I mean, I can’t imagine how it would be bad.”

“It’s bad in that I already made it through the process once without blowing it and now I have to do it again,” Ian said.

“It sounds to me like you’re under consideration for some honor or advanced class,” Amaranth said. “So the worst thing that would happen is you’d be in the class you signed up for and nothing would be different, right?”

“Except my professor, who had thought I was worthy of consideration, would now know he was wrong,” Ian said. “Seems like that would be worse than never having caught his attention in the first place.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel, you could just tell him that you’re comfortable where you are and decline,” Amaranth said.

“And give up without trying?” Ian said. He sounded borderline offended by the suggestion. “You’re kidding.”

That seemed to make up his mind, like he’d decided to go in and give it his best shot out of sheer stubbornness. Amaranth had always been the sort of person who would encourage people to excel, but she’d become a little more nuanced in her approach.

“What do you have today, Two?” Amaranth asked.

“My friend Hazel and I are taking Small Business Management together,” Two said. “And then I have a pastry class, and then I have The Art of Presentation.”

“Does this small business thing have anything to do with your friend Hazel’s three or four plans for making money?” I asked. I was long past my initial suspicion of Hazel taking advantage of the easily-disadvantaged Two, but that didn’t mean I was thrilled at the thought of her rearranging her curriculum around Hazel’s pipe dreams.

“No,” Two said. “My friend Hazel says it’s planning for the future.”

“I think it’s a very good idea,” Amaranth said. “I mean, college only lasts a few years… if you don’t want to live at Hearts of Clay for the rest of your life, you do need to be planning ahead.”

“My friend Hazel says she is pretty sure she can get the money to open an inn,” Two said. There wasn’t a hint of doubt in her voice, but I knew from experience that this didn’t mean she believed Hazel’s claims. She had no problem blithely repeating the things the burrow gnome said, because she was confident at least that Hazel had said them.

I knew there were a lot of things that could change between sophomore year and graduation. Two and Hazel could have a falling out, as hard as that was to imagine. They could drift apart, especially given Hazel’s growing friendship with Shiel and the fact that they weren’t even in the same building anymore when they had used to be just a few doors away from each other. I knew, too, that they didn’t have anything like a firm plan for post-college life, but I envied that they had as much figured out as they did.

In theory it was easy to make money with an enchantment degree, but I didn’t have anything firmer than that theory. I knew I wanted to stay with Amaranth, but I had no idea how that would work. Making a living as an enchanter would probably require me to live in a city, and she was bound to a plot of land in a farming commune. Her divine nature wasn’t much of a hindrance to me at school, but back home she acted as something like a priestess. Then there was the fact that her home was the field of amaranth that was her “other body”… how could we live together there?

“What happened to your excited smile, baby?” Amaranth asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“Just thinking about the future,” I said.

“I thought that’s what you were excited about.”

“I mean the long-term future,” I said.

“Isn’t there a lot to be excited about there, too?”

“There’s a lot to be uncertain of.”

“That’s another way of saying there are a lot of possibilities,” Amaranth said. “I can’t think of anything more exciting than that.”

“Ah, you all are so cute,” Steff said. “It’s just a bunch of sophomore jitters, which are like first-year jitters but a year more advanced.”

“And I suppose you have junior jitters,” I said.

“No such thing,” Steff said. “Or at least there won’t be until next year, when I’m a senior and you’re all juniors, with your junior jitters. Oh, it will be freaking adorable. I can’t wait.”

Friday: Mackenzie’s first class.

“The investigators have set up shop here, on the first floor,” he said, frowning. “I wasn’t really expecting that.”

“Does that mean we should go somewhere else?” I asked hopefully.

“No, I don’t think so… they’ve asked students to stay in their own residence halls as much as possible,” Lee said. “Let’s head on in and get the lay of the land.”

We clambered out of the coach and headed down the slightly uneven concrete steps to the front patio. Lee entered the basement lounge ahead of us, holding open the door.

The room was fuller than I’d seen it any other time since the first weekend and its hall-wide meeting. It wasn’t just students, either. Some of the larger groups were sitting with humans, who I figured were their resident advisers, judging by their ages. The dean of non-human students, who probably hadn’t been back in Harlowe since the first weekend, was talking quietly to a couple of guys who were probably either somebody’s lawyers or plain clothes investigators.

The gorgon girl who lived in the room directly beneath me was standing with a couple of figures in all-encompassing black cloaks similar to the ones that Dee wore, and another person who looked like a humanoid mushroom standing about three and a half feet tall.

“It looks like there was an all-night Veil party,” Lee said.

It took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about… he was looking at Sooni, who was dressed in her latest Science Princess outfit. Maliko and Suzi were huddled around her. Sooni was bawling her eyes out, Maliko looked scared. Suzi looked oddly serene, as if she possibly didn’t understand what was happening.

Arrayed around them were men who looked like body guards… easterners, three who looked human and two who were canine yokai.

Interestingly, Kai was standing just outside the ring of bodyguards, looking sort of adorably stern in her baby clothes. She had a weapon belt strapped around her padded diaper, with a pair of long and short curved swords and wicked-pronged throwing blades.

“No, that’s actually just… Sunday morning,” I said.

“Ah, well… looks like Gregory’s not at the Crystal Palace any more but he hasn’t turned up here yet, either,” Lee said quietly, his eyes going back down to his tablet. “He might be at the admin building. Most of the agents and officers on premises are blanks to me… I don’t want any contact between them and you if he’s not in earshot of an uproar.”

“Is this one guy really going to make that much difference?” Ian asked. “I mean, if someone decides to play a little game of blackguard, paladin, with us don’t you think we can count on at least one honest cop hearing? Dorms aren’t known for efficient soundproofing.”

“Mike Gregory’s one of the ‘good guys’, no doubt about that,” Lee said. “But that’s not why I want him. I told you, I spent part of the morning studying him.”

“Um, no offense,” Ian said, “but I really hope you’re not staking everything on some hunch you gleaned from reading news clippings. I admit I don’t know much about these things except what I’ve seen on TV… but that sounds like something I’ve seen on TV.”

I nodded my own agreement. I trusted Lee… but I wasn’t sure what he could have learned in an hour or two that would make him seem so certain.

“Let’s just say that my firm’s information on Mr. Gregory is better than news clippings,” Lee said.

“What, do you have a psych profile or something?” Ian asked.

“I really can’t say anything about the specific nature of the information,” Lee said.

“Holy shit,” Ian said.

“Please do us all a favor and don’t go jumping to conclusions, or spreading them around,” Lee said. “Now, I’d rather not leave you completely alone but I’m kind of on my own here for the time being. Will the three of you be okay sitting tight here while I go up and have a chat with the people on-site here?”

Ian and Amaranth both looked at me. I knew they weren’t deferring to me. It looked more like they were sizing me up somehow… maybe wondering how well I’d handle myself if someone confronted us, or if I’d say or do something rash.

While that kind of concern had some basis ordinarily, I resented the idea that I couldn’t be counted on to control myself when it counted.

“Yeah, we’ll be fine,” I said, trying to force myself to be nonchalant. “Go on, have fun.” Okay, maybe I could stand being a little more chalant than that. “I mean, do what you have to.”

“Right,” Lee said. “If anyone official… imperial, provincial, school, or other… wants to talk to you, tell them your attorney is upstairs and will be with them shortly. Don’t listen to anyone who says you don’t need me. I’ll make this as quick as I can.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be polite but firm,” Amaranth said.

“Okay, but if someone presses you to the point that balancing those two things becomes tricky, make sure you remember which of them is optional,” Lee said. “I’ll be back.”

He left us alone. We all looked at each other, but nobody said anything. Amaranth stirred as if she were about to speak and break the silence, but then she seemed to think better of it. It was like she shrank back inside herself.

The atmosphere inside the main lounge was somber. That didn’t seem too odd, considering that Leda was dead, but it was surprising that so many people would seem so deeply affected by her death. Sooni was the only one who was weeping so openly, but there were more tears throughout the room.

Harlowe was a place of insular cliques, in my experience… and indeed, the room was full of islands of people with no more than half a dozen students in each and many smaller than that. Leda had been standoffish… at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, she’d been more than a bit of a snob.

Then I became aware of an undercurrent to the scene: fear. I could feel it, I could smell it… and once I knew it was there I could see it on the faces of everyone in the room.

One of their own… our own… had died, been killed. Imperial suspicion was on someone from our building. Who wouldn’t be afraid? The fierce and feral-seeming had to worry about being accused and brought to trial for a crime they might not have done… or worse, accused and not brought to trial. The more conventionally vulnerable had to worry about becoming victims themselves.

I was probably creating a dichotomy that didn’t exist, I realized. I myself was proof that someone could look innocuous by human standards and still be both physically powerful and dangerous. The gnomish students would probably garner little suspicion, but everyone else would be fair game for the investigators.

Lee had kept my mind on my plight, my defense, to the extent that I hadn’t had much thought for the question of who might have done it. Now I found my mind turning to that subject.

The fact that Leda had been human-like and killed in water suggested one very strong possibility to me… or rather, one or two of them. If she bore bite marks and was torn apart to the point that resurrection didn’t seem to be in the cards for her royal personage, as it seemed was the case, then that made it even more likely.

Suspicion wasn’t proof… although it might turn out to be just as good for the imperials if it gave them a satisfactory resolution. Lee seemed like a good guy, and he definitely had my back… but that was the thing. He had my back. I was sure he’d want me to share my information about the mermaids if he thought it would help me out.

I couldn’t even say that he’d be wrong to do so. I hadn’t killed anyone. Feejee and Iona, by their own admission, had. Would it be such a terrible injustice if… say, Iona… were to take the blame for this one?

Of course it would, I realized. Someone had killed Leda. Trying to punish Iona for unrelated deaths without knowing for sure she was responsible for this one would only mean someone else might get away with murder.

And, of course, I’d had no interest in seeing Iona punished before doing so coincided with a chance to shield my own ass.

But maybe I was overthinking it… the investigators weren’t going to take the unsupported word of a demonblood murder suspect as damning evidence. They’d at least check Iona out because I had a lawyer who would use it against them if they ignored a tip that could clear me, and they’d either find proof of her involvement or…

…or the’d discover that under her smooth, red-tinged skin, she was hiding something a lot scarier looking than any demon and forget about finding evidence of anything else.

Also, I was thinking of this in terms of blaming Iona, but there was no way I could shield Feejee. While Feejee was hardly innocent… she seemed to be, in some ways, an innocent. She knew nothing but her people’s own peculiar system of morality. There was no connection in her mind between the idea of humans as people she could talk to and befriend and humans she could eat… or there was no conflict between the two.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, either way. I had the feeling that if she ate me, she might miss me afterwards, but I didn’t expect any remorse.

If Leda hadn’t died in water, I would be pretty sure Feejee hadn’t been involved. That she had been killed in the fountain muddied the… metaphorical water. It might even have made it more likely to be her than Iona… I could see Feejee not giving a second thought to the victim’s identity or standing as long as she was in water.

On the other hand, I could also see Iona just not caring. Feejee could overwhelm me with fear when she shifted into her less human-looking states. Iona was just plain scary, no matter what face she wore.

“Holy shit!” Ian said.

“What?” I said, looking around.

Hovering over the underworld contingent was what could only be the observer Lee had described as “some sort of eyeless fish-beast”… it was at least five feet across, generally flat and maybe three feet tall at the center, with wavy fringed fins protruding a foot and a half farther on each side. The front of it seemed to be all mouth, except for a small knob over the center of it from which a pair of whisker-like undulating antennae protruded. Its coloration was… hard to describe.

Dark and glistening, but just when I thought I was getting a handle on exactly what dark and glistening color it was, my mind slipped off it.

“Did I miss that thing somehow, or did it just show up?” Ian asked just as the thing faded back out of sight. “Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s… interesting.”

“It probably exists simultaneously on multiple planes,” Amaranth said. “Physical, ethereal…”

“The ether doesn’t extend that deep below the surface,” I said. “Probably some place stranger than that… somewhere that’s farther removed from anywhere up here. That could be why it seems to have trouble manifesting.”

It shimmered back into view, slowly turning in the air as it did. I had a distinct sense of unease as I realized that it was “looking” towards us, its long, whippy appendages streaming out through the air. Something rolled over me… a feeling like being pounded by a cold, strangely dry surf, and then the thing reoriented itself back the way it had been.

“Oh, so that’s how you say ‘mind your own business’ in extraplanar fishese,” Ian said. “I’ve been wondering.”

“Actually, it was just saying hi,” Amaranth said. “Introducing itself.”

“What’s it doing now?” Ian asked.

The fish turned its attention towards the door at the back corner of the room, where the stairwell to the boys’ side was. A moment later, the door swung open so hard and fast that I thought perhaps its attention had caused it to move, but then Dee came flying through it in a dark-dark green robe… as far as I could tell, her feet were on the ground, but there was really no other word for it but flying. She used the unearthly smooth elven stride, but she crossed the room over to the group of her compatriots far too quickly to call it “gliding”.

Her appearance took them by surprise. I could imagine the substance of what Dee was saying had something to do with her obligations to Steff, though I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, or even hear what the cloaked elves said to her in response. They were either sticking to telepathy or modulating their voices to a degree Dee wasn’t bothering to do. They seemed deeply concerned with her state of dress, though… one of them actually stripped off her cloak, revealing herself to have spiky black hair, and tried to throw it over Dee’s body. Dee batted it aside mentally, her voice getting slightly louder.

“Do you think we should go help her?” Amaranth asked.

“It looks like she’s doing okay to me,” Ian said.

“We probably shouldn’t be getting involved with anything right now,” I said. “Remember what Lee said?”

“I think we could support our friend without getting entangled with officialdom,” Amaranth said.

“Right, except we’d be supporting her to ambassadors or lawyers or oathspeakers or whoever those are,” I said.

“Looks like it doesn’t matter anyway,” Ian said, as Dee threw up her arms and then turned and zipped back towards the door.

The woman who’d taken off her cloak made a lunge for her, but the other one grabbed her arm and held her back. As soon as Dee was out of sight, the uncloaked one shook her head sadly, then let out an audible “oh!” and disappeared. The discarded cloak seemed to pick itself up and then settled itself into an elf-sized shape.

“Apparently they’re privacy advocates?” Ian said.

There was a loud scoffing sound from behind us. I turned to see Trina had just come in. All three of her eyes looked bleary and red.

“I can’t believe you’re joking at a time like this,” she said. “Or actually, I can. Come on, Gladys,” she said half over her shoulder, apparently not even realizing that her friend had fallen behind her at some point and wasn‘t even in sight. “Let’s go find Mariel.”

“…she sure told me?” Ian said as Trina headed for the stairs.

“Everybody deals with tragedy differently,” Amaranth said.

I thought that maybe Trina’s way of dealing with it differently was by dealing with it exactly the same way she dealt with everything else, but I didn’t say that. I looked around the room, looking for something else to say, something else to talk about… and I was again struck by the amount of fear there seemed to be. Some people even had the look on their face that I recognized as being a certain kind of “guilty”… the look that says you know you’re going to be punished and you at least halfway feel you deserve it, irrespective of anything you’ve actually done. It looks the same as being guilty to a lot of people… particularly people who think that the innocent don’t have any reason to fear punishment.

“I think the really sad thing is that no one’s really dealing with what happened yet,” I said. “I don’t know who’d be mourning Leda, but right now everybody’s worried about what happens next… everybody’s waiting for the hammer to fall.”

“We’re sort of lucky, in a way,” Amaranth said, nodding. “Or we will be, if Lee’s right and he can get them to move on from you fairly quickly. You know you’re under suspicion, and you can look forward to a quick resolution.”

“I can hope for one,” I said. “It’s not a guarantee. I think I’d rather not be under suspicion in the first place.”

“Well, yes, but you can’t choose that, any more than you were able to choose your birth,” Amaranth said. “And even the people who don’t share your circumstances are under a cloud… they just don’t know exactly how bad it is yet.”

“Amaranth… I know you’re trying to look on the bright side, but it sounds to me like you’re talking about ’having a big enough problem to notice it’ like it’s a good thing,” I said. “And yeah, Lee’s got confidence and I’ve got confidence in him, but he‘s always been pretty upfront about the fact that there are no guarantees. There are a lot of things that could go wrong… there’s no way of knowing for sure that I’ll be cleared of suspicion, much less that it‘ll happen quickly.”

“Um, your coat’s buzzing,” Ian said.

“Oh!” I said, and I pulled my mirror out of my coat pocket and flipped it open. “It’s Lee,” I said for the others’ benefit as I accepted the reflection. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mackenzie?” he said. “Yes, I think things either got a whole lot simpler or more complicated. They have a demon expert here insisting there was no infernal handiwork in the killing.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Amaranth said, leaning over my shoulder. “Wouldn’t that make things simpler for Mack?”

“For a demonblood who’s under suspicion?” Lee said. “Very likely yes. For Mackenzie Blaise? That depends.”

“Depends on what?” I asked.

“On your relationship to a Martha Blaise.”

Next time: Do you really need a teaser?

Discuss this story on the Livejournal feed.

“Hi, Cetea… thanks for agreeing to talk with me,” Lucinda said, getting to her feet and holding out her hand.

“No problem,” Cetea said, clasping her palm to Lucinda’s but curling her four sharp-taloned fingers up loosely around the top of Lucinda’s hand instead of gripping firmly. Lucinda observed the awkwardness and made a mental note to check out the hands of future interviewees before trying to shake them.

“Go ahead and have a seat, unless you want to get some food,” Lucinda said. “I’m just getting stuff organized.”

“I’m fine. Do you do shorthand?” Cetea asked, watching the student reporter line up her pens and flip through her notepad.

“Kind of,” Lucinda replied. “I’ve got my own system.”

“Ah,” Cetea said, reaching up to stroke and soothe the snakes. “My cousin’s a steno.”

“Nice,” Lucinda said.

“Can I ask a question?” Cetea said. “I mean, I know you’re interviewing me, but I’m curious about something.”

“Sure,” Lucinda said. “Feel free. An interview’s not a monologue.”

“What’s this for, exactly?”

“Well, I’m a reporter with the Gazetteer…”

“I know, but… I didn’t just win any awards and I’ve kept my noses out of the little scandals,” Cetea said. “So what’s the story?”

“That’s what I want to find out,” Lucinda said. She gave her friendliest smile. “What is your story, Cetea? Who are you? Where do you come from? That kind of thing.”

“Why me, though?” Cetea said.

“Well, I’m going to be honest… I’m gathering material for something I’m not sure I can talk my editor into running. But somebody said something that got me thinking about why I got into journalism in the first place.”

“What was that?”

“Something about it being my job to tell people’s stories,” Lucinda said. “And you know, if the union burned down tomorrow or one of the deans got caught stealing money or something, we’d print it… but on a day to day basis, that’s what we do. But it’s mostly human stories.”

“So this is an affirmative action interview,” Cetea said.

“I wouldn’t have put it that way, but kind of. I just want to get more voices in the public forum. Does that bother you?” Lucinda said.

“Meh. It’s not the worst motive,” Cetea said. “Let’s go for it.”

“Okay, I’m going to be asking you about yourself, and also about your culture, because I don’t think most of our readers are very familiar with gorgons,” Lucinda said. She put a crystal down on the table. “I’m going to be taking notes so I can organize my thoughts, but I’m also going to be making an echo of this for later, just so I can make sure I’ve got everything accurately if I quote you. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” Cetea said, holding out one hand to examine the long fingernails. Her skin was covered in scales that were a very reflective yellow-green… her nails in particular were long and yellow and very shiny, like brass.

“Is that their natural color?” Lucinda asked her, pointing at the claws.

“Is that an interview question?”

“It’s a place to start,” the reporter said.

“Mostly,” Cetea said. “They tend to collect grime, so I clean and polish them regularly… the first time I ran out of nail polish last year and asked my roommate if she had any, it was kind of a learning experience.”

“Your roommate was…?”

“Her name was Willa. She was a golem. She dropped out about a month into the semester. Married someone she met on that crystal ball thing. One of those bigger-type goblins… I don’t remember his name, I only met him once. I thought they were both kind of stupid about it, but I kind of had the impression she only came here to meet someone. She was very single-minded about it.”

“How about you? Why’d you come here?”

“Not to bag a man,” Cetea said. “Or a woman. I wanted an education.”

“What are you studying?”

“Enchantment theory, and music.”

“Music?” Lucinda asked.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t seem… I mean… you know, never mind,” Lucinda said.

“What were you going to say?”

“Something stupid,” Lucinda said. “I don’t know what a bardic student is supposed to look like.”

“Human,” Cetea said.

“Uh… yeah. Sorry,” Lucinda blushed. “Stupid.”

“Eh, you’re trying,” Cetea said. “My uncle… great-uncle… used to crawl around caves with this guy, Lazarus, who taught music here forever ago…”

“Professor Lazar?” Lucinda asked. “The guy they named the music building after?”

“Yeah,” Cetea said. “Him. We called him Lazarus. I have one of his harps. Not here… I had to buy the one I use for classes. It’s waiting for me when I graduate.”

“Oh, wow,” Lucinda said. “Cool for you. So… you came here to study music?”

“I actually came here so I could learn other things along with the music,” Cetea said. “We do have something like a conservatory back home. It’s kind of famous… even elves send their children to learn.”

“Where’s home, for you?”

“Down,” Cetea said.

“In the underworld?”

“Yeah. We weren’t an underground race, originally,” Cetea said. “But the surface got crowded, and we got crowded out. There are some colonies still up top, but they’re very isolated… underground, it’s a bit of a struggle, but we’re not so cut off. We trade with kobolds and dwarves…”

“With both of them?”

“We’re neutral. If they want to trade with each other, they go through us.”

“And elves come down to study music at your school?”

“They come up,” Cetea said.

“Oh… you mean dark elves,” Lucinda said, realizing. “Sorry. I got hung up there for a second.”

“Yeah,” Cetea said. “Seeing pale white elves was kind of a shock when I came here. Not that I saw a lot of elven skin around the colony, but… well… that was an adjustment, too. When I was a hatchling, I thought elves were ghosts… that you could take the cloak off and there wouldn’t be anything there. I learned better, but it’s still weird seeing them with bare heads.”

“What else was an adjustment for you, coming to a human… predominantly human university?”

“Well, everything,” Cetea said. “There were girls who’d never seen a toilet before coming here. I mean, I hadn’t, but I read a lot…though really, that kind of thing doesn’t make it into a lot of your stories. Anyway, though, it’s not just the human stuff. I spent most of my time in Harlowe the first year, and there are so many different cultures on the floor, it’s hard not to tread on anybody. I think I did okay, if only because I’m personally used to dealing with different cultures, but I’m not sure who’s being served by having a separate dorm.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not like we’re any less strange to each other than we are to humans, and learning how to get along with goblins and gargoyles is nifty but it doesn’t help much in a ‘predominantly human’ university,” Cetea said. “It would be more useful if we were learning how to deal with humans, and vice-versa.”

“But you came back to Harlowe for your second year,” Lucinda said.

Cetea shrugged.

“If it wasn’t here, and we all had to mix, I think things would be better,” she said. “But it is, and I’m not going to be the one who slips outside her place.”

“Has anyone in particular made you feel that way?” Lucinda asked.

Cetea raised a shiny hand up to her mouth and covered it. The snakes’ mouths all opened and they hissed, not quite in unison. It was creepy to Lucinda, how much it sounded like laughter.

“I’m sorry,” Cetea said. “That question… ‘anyone in particular’. I got that a lot, when I tried to talk to my advisor about how I felt last year. It’s not anyone in particular. It’s everything in general. The lizardfolk get treated as beasts, because that’s what humans do with ‘humanoids’ that look like animals that aren’t monkeys.”

“What race looks like monkeys?” Lucinda asked.

“Oh… um… no one. I was being hypothetical there,” Cetea said. “Anyway, they’re beasts but I’m a monster… and when you’re a monster, everybody’s afraid of you, until the moment they think you’re weak and they decide to be brave.”

“So, there were moments when you were afraid of what a human student might do to you?”

“There were moments when I was afraid of what a hundred human students might do after what I did to one who tried to do something to me,” Cetea said. “Which is sad, because really, I’ve got the perfect non-fatal self-defense device right up here.” She pointed to her reflective eyes. “But because I have it and they don’t, people are afraid of it.”

“In fairness, don’t you see how having poison snakes for hair might be legitimately intimidating?” Lucinda asked.

“First of all, I don’t have snakes for hair,” she said. “I’m reptilian. Did you ever see a reptile with hair?”

“I saw a bearded dragon once,” Lucinda said.

“Funny,” Cetea said. “But I mean, the snakes aren’t there instead of anything. I’m not ‘supposed’ to have hair to begin with. That’s a mammal thing. Isn’t that where the word ‘mammal’ comes from?” She mimed like she was fluffing up a big poofy hairdo. “Because you have mammaries?”

“Um… that’s not what mammaries are,” Lucinda said.

“Really? What are they?”

“Breasts.”

“Every animal has a breast, though,” Cetea said.

“Breasts,” Lucinda said. “As in, boobies.” At Cetea’s blank stare, she cupped hers briefly. “These.”

“Oh, really? I thought those were just the cuppy things you wore,” Cetea said.

“Um, no,” Lucinda said. “Those are for support, since they don’t have a lot of, you know, structure. Didn’t you ever notice, with your roommate…?”

“Willa moved out and I never got another one last year,” Cetea said. “I have a roommate this year, but I don’t see much of her. I just thought… well, the goblin girls don’t wear them, and they don’t have anything there.”

“Well, goblins don’t have mammaries,” Lucinda said.

“Aren’t they mammals? They have hair.”

“I don’t know what they are,” Lucinda admitted. “I thought they were reptiles, because they don’t have… you know.”

“Huh,” Cetea said. “Anyway…”

“Poisonous snakes,” Lucinda said.

“Yeah, well, the way I see it… if I have a dozen mouths full of poison fangs, or a flaming catapult in my pocket, or whatever, that should make it more reassuring to people that I’ve got a way of disabling an attacker without hurting them.”

“Speaking as somebody who honestly does find you a little intimidating, I can say that it’s hard to think about somebody turning to stone as being painless or non-fatal,” Lucinda said.

“Human magic can cure a lot worse than that these days, though,” Cetea said. “And anyway, it wears off in about a week on its own. That’s something else that was an adjustment, though… training myself not to open my eyes when I’m startled.”

“Your eyes are closed?” Lucinda asked.

“Veiled,” Cetea said. “Lidded. It’s not the same thing that you have. I can see out, but you can’t see in. We walk around like that most of the time, but if something threatens us… poof.”

“So what color are your eyes under there?”

“Dunno,” Cetea said. “Nobody’s ever got a good look at them.”

“Not even your family?”

“We’re not immune to each others’ gazes,” Cetea said. “They’d be able to throw it off in a few hours, though.”

“What about you, in a mirror?”

Cetea shuddered and all her snakes reared. Lucinda jumped back in her chair.

“Sorry,” Cetea said. “Mirrors… that’s another adjustment. Great big mirrors in the bathrooms. We have horror stories about mirrors… like a bride who gets stuck in front of one for a hundred years, until the dust on it’s thick enough that she can’t see her eyes in it any more.”

“If that really happened, couldn’t she just close her eyes or look away as soon as she, uh, thawed?”

“It would be too late… how long does seeing something take you?” Cetea said. “That’s why in the bad old days, the other races had stories about how horrible we looked. None of them got a good look at our faces because as soon as they saw it, poof.”

“If you don’t mind me saying, I think gorgons are kind of pretty,” Lucinda said. “With your shiny scales, and everything.”

“Thank you,” Cetea said. “If you don’t mind me asking, what races do you think are ugly?”

“Uh… um…”

“Rhetorical question,” Cetea said. “There really aren’t any races I’ve found that really match my aesthetic ideals, but that’s because a good crown is one of the first things we look for.”

“Crown… of snakes?” Lucinda asked, and Cetea nodded. “So… male gorgons have them, too?”

“Yeah,” Cetea said. “I’ve heard all the stories, that males don’t have snakes, or that they’re the ugly ones, or that we don’t have males… I honestly don’t know where they came from. Our men look exactly like our women, just like every other race… well, I guess the mammary thing is different, if that’s not just clothes.”

“I actually think more races have differences between men and women,” Lucinda said. “Which might be where the confusion came from.”

“Really?” Cetea said. “Well, I guess there are a lot of mammal races… but, goblins and kobolds are the same.”

“Except in the, you know, privates,” Lucinda said.

“The what?”

“The, uh, genitalia,” Lucinda clarified. “Men have different ones than women.”

“But they still look the same, don’t they?”

“I haven’t actually looked at any goblins,” Lucinda said. “But I think they’re normal.”

“What’s ‘normal’?”

“I mean, like ours,” Lucinda said. “Mammalian, I mean.”

“No offense, but I’m not sure I want to know what that means,” Cetea said, shaking her head. The snakes’ heads moved in the opposite direction. “That would be weird to me. Different… stuff… for men and women. I can’t wrap my head around it.”

“So, you’ve been going here more than a year now and you never realized that?”

“I didn’t spend a lot of time peeking in the boys’ bathroom,” Cetea said.

“Not to be indelicate, but did you never notice that men look different in tight jeans than women do?”

“I didn’t spend a lot of time staring at mammal crotches,” Cetea said. “But when I did notice it, I just figured they were aroused a lot of the time. I had no idea a lump like that was normal.”

“Well, see, we’re learning things about each others’ races,” Lucinda said. “Um, if I can ask a question about your crown?”

“Wreath,” Cetea said. “Men have crowns, women have wreaths.”

“But they’re exactly the same?”

“Crowns are male, wreaths are female.”

“Noted,” Lucinda said. “I’m not sure how to word this, but… can you see with them? I mean, it looked like they saw me first and then you did.”

“No, I only have two eyes that are mine,” Lucinda said. “But they ‘tell’ me things, and they respond to my thoughts.”

“So you don’t control them?”

“No,” Cetea said. “They knew I was looking for you, and they looked for you… but some days they get sulky, or they want attention. The worst is when they started fighting each other. I don’t know if they don’t realize that their blood is mine and they’re just making all of us sick when they bite each other, or if they don’t care.”

“They’re not intelligent, then?”

“They’re snakes.”

“So, if somebody tried to touch them…”

“They’d probably get bit,” Cetea said. “They bite me sometimes.”

“How long would they be, if they stretched all the way out?”

“About two feet long… but they really can’t just stretch out like that without something to support them. They’re halfway coiled most of the time.”

“Do you… uh… do you feed them?”

“They don’t need to eat separate from me, but if I don’t want my hands getting bit on the way to my mouth, I do,” she said. “They hunt rodents and lizards while I sleep. At home, I mean, they did.”

“Did they catch many from your bed?”

“Oh, we don’t sleep in beds,” Cetea said. “We all bed down in the kitchen, around the stove.”

“Do you wash them?”

“When I can,” she said. “They hate showers, so I don’t bother. I can’t really scrub them, or oil them up like I do the rest of my scales… that’s why they’re so dull compared to me.”

“Is it weird having a dozen living creatures sticking out of your skull?”

“Is it weird not having any?” Cetea asked. “I can understand how hard it can be to understand what it’s like, but I can’t really imagine what it’s like not to.”

“This might be getting into morbid territory, and please tell me if I’m touching on something taboo, but… if they’re alive, can they die? And what would happen?”

“Oh, they can be killed… older people often have lost a few to accidents or fights,” Cetea said. “They won’t die of natural causes because they’re not going to get any sicker from anything than I am, and they can heal from just about anything as long as I’m alive.”

“Could… forgive me, but my imagination… could they stay alive if you were dead?”

“Maybe for a while,” she said. “But I don’t think so. We share blood.”

“Sorry… I don’t mean to focus on your hair, er, your wreath,” Lucinda said. “Just tell me if anything I ask is bothering you.”

“It’s not bothering me,” Cetea said, smiling wryly. “But for reference, I think the closest equivalent would be you giving an interview all about your, uh, breasts.”

“Oh, well, let’s go to another subject,” Lucinda said. “Your uncle… your great-uncle… knew Professor Lazar?”

“They traveled together, a little. Cetus… my great-uncle… showed him the way around our neck of the underworld.”

“Is he the one who taught your people music?”

“Cetus?”

“Lazar.”

“Why would we need to be taught?” Cetea asked, and some of her snakes looked angry. “We already had the conservatory at that point… he was actually there to learn from us.”

“Oh! Sorry,” Lucinda said. “I didn’t mean to imply… I don’t think of reptilians as being musical. That’s probably stupid.”

“I don’t know any race that doesn’t have music,” Cetea said. “There was an ogre in one of my performance classes last year. He was pretty good, when he remembered to show up. Every race is musical. It’s the universal language.”

“By that token, what did Professor Lazar have to learn from you?”

“Our songs, I’d imagine,” Cetea said. “And the ones in our library. We had songs from all the races we traded with… dwarves, elves, kobolds…”

“Kobolds?”

“You’re doing it again,” Cetea said. “It was a cultural exchange. He had songs from all over the surface.”

“So, really, you were teaching each other, your ancestors and him,” Lucinda said.

“If this story comes out and it’s about how the brave Professor Lazar descended into darkness and taught the gorgons how to sing, I’m going to throw up,” Cetea said. “In front of you. And when I throw up, it’s a chain reaction.”

“I’m just thinking about the best angle to involve the average human reader in the story,” Lucinda said. “A cultural exchange is good.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Cetea said. “Anyway, he made four or five harps while he was down with us, and he left one with my great-uncle when he left.”

“As a sign of friendship?”

“As payment for a vase he broke,” Cetea said.

“Ah,” Lucinda said. “So, are your whole family musicians?”

“If they were, I’d probably never get the harp,” Cetea said. “My father is… I guess it would translate as ‘chef’, but there’s less cooking. We cook some things with heat, but our cuisine is more about presentation than anything else. Our mouths don’t chew well, so we keep portions small to avoid having to stretch out our jaws to swallow, and every meal includes a plate of amuse-gueules.”

“What’s that?”

“Distractions for them,” Cetea said. She pointed up at her wreath. “We have to make sure what they’re eating looks as good as or better than what we’re eating, or there are going to be bites. We’re each a little resistant to our own snakes’ venom, and those of close family, but it still doesn’t feel great.”

“Does anybody ever… muzzle or restrain them?”

“No, and I can’t imagine anybody doing that,” Cetea said.

“So, your father prepares food,” Lucinda said. “Is that a professional thing? I mean, does he do that for the family or…”

“I guess you’d call it professional,” Cetea said. “We’re communalists, it’s what he does for the colony. There’s usually a waiting list for his tables.”

“And your mother?”

“She teaches. Literature and storytelling.”

“Any siblings?”

“I have a sister, but she’s too young to have a path. I have a brother a few years younger than me,” Cetea said. “Nobody expects much from him, because he has feralia.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a condition where the snakes aren’t properly… connected? They act wildly all the time, they bite each other and the baby and anybody else that gets near. They have to be defanged, which… well, it’s pretty horrific for a child, but it beats the alternatives.”

“I’m sorry,” Lucinda said. “If you don’t want to talk about…”

“It’s okay,” Cetea said. “They still manage to cause a lot of trouble, even without fangs. He doesn’t get any feeling from them, so he never knows if they hurt themselves, and because they don’t send him signals he has a hard time getting around. He’s got to keep looking around and behind himself, stay away from walls, and stay out of narrow corridors.”

“I can see where some of that would be a problem, but nor… uh, I mean, other races can get around okay without a crown or wreath of snakes looking out for them,” Lucinda said.

“Well, maybe things are different for you,” Cetea said. “I probably couldn’t explain it properly to somebody who doesn’t understand what it’s like to have functional snakes.”

“To turn back to your experience here,” Lucinda said, “would you mind giving me some examples of what you were talking about, the problem of being viewed as a ‘monster’ among humans?”

“Well, if you want me to pull out the story about how I got lynched or the time I was chased out of town, I can’t help you,” Cetea said. “But you said earlier that I intimidated you.”

“Yeah, but… I’m here, sitting down and talking to you,” Lucinda said, sounding hurt.

“Sure, because you decided to do an interview with the ‘unknown voices’,” Cetea said. “Chances are you’re talking to me because I intimidate you. You didn’t pick a little goblin or a fluffy faun or something safe and ‘sexy’ like a mermaid, you went straight to the gorgon girl so you could make a point.”

“That’s not fair,” Lucinda said.

“I’m sorry, is this story about you?” Cetea said. “You asked a question. Let me finish answering. You’re intimidated by me. I understand that’s not anything personal, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are… and you’re not alone. People on the surface are intimidated by me, in general. I know this. Imagine how that affects me when I have a chance to decide whether to approach someone or not. Imagine how it affects others when they have a choice to approach me or not. Is it impossible for me to make friends with humans because I’m a gorgon? No, it’s not. Can I point to any one friend I lost when they suddenly realized I was a gorgon? No, I can’t. But knowing how you feel when you look at me, can you honestly say it’s hard to imagine that I have a harder time making friends than you do?”

“I suppose it really isn’t,” Lucinda said. “But… honestly, it feels kind of racist saying that.”

“Right,” Cetea said. “One human I met last year made a big deal about how she’s skinblind, as she put it. ‘I don’t see humans or gorgons or elves, I just see people.’ That’s a wonderful disorder for a human to have, but I can’t not be aware that I’m a gorgon surrounded by humans, and I’d rather have other people think about what that means than pretend it doesn’t matter.”

“Okay,” Lucinda said, scribbling on her notepad. “Um… I think that’s enough to work up a basic piece. I’ll probably quote you directly on that last, if you don’t mind, it was really good. Can I a-mail you if I have any follow-up questions?”

“Sure,” Cetea said. “I’d ask when this is going to go out, but you told me you don’t think it will.”

“Oh, I’m going to do something with it,” Lucinda said. “If it’s not in the Gazetteer, I’ll put it somewhere. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there, though. Thank you so much, Cetea,” she said, standing up. She started to hold out her hand, then raised it gave a little wave, which Cetea returned.

“You’re welcome,” Cetea said. “And just so you know we cover our eyes.”

“What?”

“When we’re greeting someone respectfully,” she said, lifting her hand and very slowly and putting it across her eyes, careful not to disturb the writhing snakes.

“Oh,” Lucinda said. “Do I do that back?”

“After I uncover mine,” Cetea said, doing so. One of the snake heads lunged for her hand and she pulled it out of the way. “That’s about the minimum polite time. You leave them covered longer when you’re greeting an important person, but they return the same.”

“Would it be an insult if they didn’t?”

“It would make them look foolish and petty, more than anything else.”

“This is good,” Lucinda said. “I know what my first question is going to be in my next interview.”

Discuss this story.

Two wakes up in the glass case, which means that she hadn’t woken up at all.

The case, like everything else in the full but tidy basement workshop, bears a label. Its label says “Golem Case”. The block letters were applied to the glass almost directly across from her eyes, and so she can see the backs of them without moving or looking around and so she knows without moving or looking around that she was in the proper place, that she was in her place and so she knows that much at least is right in the world.

This means she’s dreaming.

She hears the bolts on the door at the top of the stairs sliding open, one after another. She tenses up. She hears the door open and she sucks in her lips a bit.

This time I won’t do it, she thinks as she hears feet tread on the stairs. I won’t say it. I don’t have to. I don’t have to say anything I don’t want to ^{I WANT TO DO WHAT I’M TOLD} but I’m a free being ^{but if I were a free being I wouldn’t be back here} but if I’m back here and not a free being then Miss Ruth never told me to say it and so I don’t have to.

Then she hears the bolts on the door at the bottom of the stairs and that door opens, and the man steps inside.

“Good morning!” Two says, and he freezes. The perfect dream of her perfect life begins to crack and fray around the edges. She doesn’t know what he says in response to this. She doesn’t know what happens next.

She had never said “good morning!” to the man.

Sometimes when this happens she wakes up and she cries because she ruined the dream and she can’t get it back. Other times she keeps dreaming. The workshop falls to pieces and is blown away, leaving her on a vast, flat, featureless plain (labeled “A Vast Flat Featureless Plain”) in an infinitely expanding empty space (labeled “An Infinitely Expanding Empty Space”), alone except for some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing sitting on a post, both labeled appropriately.

The ridiculous owl turtle thing has occupied the vast featureless plain ever since the day that Two, wanting something to replace the workshop dream that had been her refuge until Miss Ruth’s increasingly specific admonitions to be more personable had finally destroyed it, had asked her friend Hazel what sort of things people dreamed about. Her friend Hazel had told her that a lot of her dreams had impossible things that were not quite one thing and not quite another. The next time Two had fallen asleep, after she wrecked the workshop dream, there it was: not quite an owl and not a quite a turtle.

It perched upright on the top of the post on bird-like talons, but it had a reptilian underbelly and a turtle shell. The things that stuck out of the holes at its shoulders might have been flippers and might have been wings. Its head was turtlish, but with owl-like tufts over big yellow eyes and a beak that almost might have belonged to a snapping turtle as much as a bird.

“Oh,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “Back again?”

“Yes,” Two says sullenly. “I am back again.”

“Did you try what I said?”

“No,” Two says. “I did not.”

“Well, there’s no use glaring at me like that if you aren’t going to take my advice.”

“Your advice isn’t any good,” Two says. “I cannot make something up about my own… my maker. Making things up about people is called lying and gossip, and it’s wrong.”

“It’s only gossip if you tell other people and it’s only lying if you act like it’s true,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing said.

“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think I know those things,” Two says. “So I don’t know how you could possibly know them.”

“I am a ridiculous owl turtle thing,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing responds, “and I am clearly impossible.”

“I am going to ignore you,” Two says. She looks around the vast, flat, featureless plain. “I think I am going to sweep.”

“Going to sweep? But you’re alweady sweeping,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “This is all a dweam.”

“That isn’t very funny,” Two says.

“It’s your nascent sense of humor, honey. I just work here.”

“I need a broom,” Two says, looking around the infinitely expanding space, but of course, there is no such thing as a broom there.

“And who told you to sweep?”

Two freezes, looking guilty. Her face in the dream takes on the spasmodic tic that it does when she’s stuck in a chain of thoughts. In her bed, under the blankets, her whole body kicks and twitches.

“I… I… I… this is my space and I am supposed to keep my space clean and tidy,” she says with a measure of triumph as she works the justification out.

“Looks pretty neat and tidy to me,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“Miss Ruth says that practice makes perfect.”

“I don’t think she was talking about sweeping perfectly clean surfaces.”

“She did not specify,” Two says. She says again, “I need a broom.”

“Have you tried the other side of my post?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “It seems to me that you can see everything there is here from where you’re standing, except for the other side of my post. So if you can’t see a broom, that’s the only place it could be.”

“Oh, okay,” Two says, and she walks around the ridiculous owl turtle thing. There is no broom leaning up against the post. “No,” she says. “There is no broom here.”

“Well, of course,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. It’s facing her again. “That’s this side of the post. You want the other side.”

“But I went to the other side,” Two protests.

“I beg to differ,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “You did not go to the other side. You came to this side. The other side is always the one at which you are not.”

“That poor chicken must be very tired, then,” Two says. “And dizzy.”

“Now who isn’t very funny?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing asks as Two reached around to the other side of the post and feels her hand closing around a wooden handle. She pulls out the improbably-placed broom. It’s labeled “Improbably-Placed Broom”.

“You,” Two says, and she begins to sweep the perfectly flat, perfectly clean surface of the vast, flat, featureless plain. “You aren’t funny. Still. Now be quiet. I have sweeping to do.”

“How will you know when you’re done?”

“When I’ve swept the whole place.”

“But it’s endless.”

“Yes,” Two says, and she smiles.

“You aren’t very good at dreaming, you know,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“I don’t care,” Two said as she starts to sweep.

“Your name isn’t even Two,” it says. “You just made that up.”

“I think I hate you, ridiculous owl turtle thing,” Two says.

“You aren’t supposed to hate anybody.”

“You aren’t anybody,” Two says. “So that’s okay.”

Steff doesn’t have the self-awareness to know that she’s dreaming, but when she wakes up it will seem like it should have been obvious to her… so obvious that in the moment she awakens, she’ll manage to convince herself that she knew it was a dream and was just going with it.

There is no room in the fortress at Kilrest as big and expansive as the throne room in her dreams. While the ogres tower over her, they don’t build their structures any bigger than they need to. They lack the architectural cunning to build a great big hall with a high vaulted ceiling like the one Steff always imagined before she saw the real place, the one she still pictures more than half the time when she imagines her life after graduation.

Steff sits on her throne in the hall, and it is her throne. Viktor doesn’t factor into this dream. She has dreams about Viktor and she has dreams about Kilrest, but ever since they went there she hasn’t had any dreams about Viktor and Kilrest. Her sleeping mind cannot make them fit together. Her brooding lover does not fit with her idealized fantasy life of wicked decadence.

The hall is full of her subjects… ogres and reanimated skeletons and zombies… and her victims, which this time around consist entirely of people she went to school with. The ones who attacked her, the ones who teased her, the ones who snubbed her, the ones who happened to be present for the worst years of Steff Johnson’s life are being torn apart, being impaled on spits, being tortured to death in a dozen ways, but none of them are dying because Steff’s dark magic is too awesome to allow them that escape.

They’re starting to twist off Cindy Mears’s head now. What had Cindy done? Steff couldn’t remember anything in particular. But she was hot and effortlessly popular and Steff had popped so many boners over her while trying to figure out if she was a gay boy or a straight girl or what and that hadn’t made things easier for her.

Not that Cindy had been alone on that score. An adolescent male body is on a hair trigger to begin with. Adding in fifty percent elven blood… for a while it had seemed like everything turned Steff on, and this at a point in her life when she regularly found herself thinking of violent and/or morbid things…

It really was no wonder that certain associations had stuck in her head, though Steff has never had the self-awareness necessary to think about how she might have come to associate violence and death with sex. Even asking the question could seem to imply that there was something wrong with doing so, and Steff had spent too many years and too many tears convincing herself that she was fine to do that.

Life in her dream of Kilrest was so good. She didn’t feel like rocking the boat with a lot of moody self-examination.

“Why, yes, I do see your point,” Mother Khaele tells Amaranth in an utterly realistic and wholly plausible scenario in which the nymph has just pointed out the fundamental flaw in existing cosmological models which results in the perceived division between the so-called higher and lower races, the people and the animals. “You’ve worked it out quite nicely. In fact, I have to admit that I left that mistake there on purpose to see which of my children would be the first one to spot it, so that I would know who would be worthy of sharing my…”

At this point, Mack’s leg twitches in her sleep and she kicks Amaranth in the ankle, jarring her awake. She blinks her myopic eyes several times in the perfect darkness of the blanket tent before she realizes where she is and that her Mother’s praise had simply been a dream. She sighs, and tries to go back to sleep.

Moeli’s working the desk when She comes in, cool as ever. She doesn’t look at anyone when she comes into the room. She keeps her head down, thinking her important thoughts, but She‘s not afraid to say anything to anybody. Really.

She‘ll just blurt out things that would make a bugbear blush without even thinking about it. Just like that.

Eventually She sidles up to the counter, the way She does, like whatever She has got to do isn’t even that important.

“Hey,” She says, with that quiet, husky voice that drives him wild. “I, uh, found your notebook.”

“Oh?” Moeli asks. His hearts skip a couple of beats as She puts it down in front of him. He’d wanted to show his notebook to her, but he’d always chickened out. It was a million to one chance that She would be into something so weird.

“I hope you don’t mind I looked through it… well, I had to figure out whose it was. I thought the drawings of motorcycles were kind of cool. Did you do them?”

“Yeah,” Moeli said. “I did.”

“I like motorcycles,” She says. “I think they’re awesome.”

“I do, too,” Moeli says.

“In fact,” She says, leaning in close. “I’ve got one outside. A real one.”

“No shit?” Moeli says.

“Yeah,” She says. “Half-demons have motorcycles. But I can’t seem to figure out how to make it go. You seem like you know a lot about them, though. Do you think maybe we could try to take a ride… together?”

“Well, I’m kind of working now,” Moeli says. “And I can’t just walk away. Also, you said you weren’t into me.”

“I’m a bitch and I was lying to you for no reason,” She says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Of course,” he says. “You know what? My shift’s over.”

Two has been sweeping for what seems like hours, and the ridiculous owl turtle thing is a distant memory behind her, as she’s sweeping in the way she’s been taught: one straight line until she comes to the wall or carpet, and then move over.

She doesn’t expect to find a wall or carpet any time soon. She doesn’t expect to find anything, as there has never been anything in the vast, flat, featureless plain except the post with the ridiculous owl turtle thing on it. But there had also never been a broom behind the post (that she knew of, anyway), and unfortunately for her, Two understands that one runs across unexpected things in dreams.

However, there are an infinite number of things she does not expect to run across, so it won’t necessarily have to be a wall or carpet or something else that would force her to turn around and start heading back towards the ridiculous owl turtle thing.

In fact, the first unexpected thing she runs across is her teddy bear, Hand Wash. In her dream, he’s as tall as she is, though he still just sits there with his firmly stuffed legs jutting out in front of him to support him and his upper body leaning slightly forward to keep him balanced on those legs.

“Hello, Two,” he says.

“Hello, Hand Wash,” she says. “I can’t stop to talk. I’m busy sweeping and I have to keep going until I’m done.”

“Sweeping? I thought you were dreaming.”

“I can do both,” Two says.

“I can’t do anything,” Hand Wash says.

“I know,” she says.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he adds.

“Yes.”

“I’m not even supposed to be talking,” he says. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “I forgive you.”

And onward she sweeps.

Ariadne knows the dream before it starts, because it’s the same one she’s been having for weeks now. That thing is in her class. It wears a mousey, unassuming little face, but the elven professor knows the fire and death and hate that lie behind that mask. She can’t say anything about it, though. She can’t do anything.

Nobody else sees. Nobody else knows.

Every time she turns her back, even if it’s only for a second, another of her students is gone. The thing is clearly responsible. Why can’t anybody else see this?

And now there’s more of it. More of them. It’s brought in its friends.

How much longer can this go on?

How long before the school’s overrun?

Something must be done.

Something must be done.

Amaranth, having just found out that she had aced all of her classes (as expected!), was getting ready to go home for winter break, but she was planning on taking the fast route home and traveling there in style. Steff had helped get her “dressed”, so to speak… arranging her on the platter with roasted potatoes and other vegetables, brushing her body down with garlic oil, and even stuffing an apple in her mouth for aesthetic purposes. Steff had wanted to use garlic butter, but Amaranth had felt that using an animal product would be more likely to bring Mother Khaele’s disapproval.

Now Steff is wheeling the trolley with the covered platter on it to the elegant dining room where her Mack waits along with Viktor and their new best friends, Iona and Feejee. This was such a brilliant idea, she thinks to herself, enjoying the smell of the garlic and the pepper and the fire roasted onions, and when she surprises all of her sisters by arriving home early and explains how she got there, they’ll all be so excited to try this… the ultimate carnal experience, the ultimate sharing of self… and the new phenomenon of responsible, consensual cannibalism utilizing renewable resources will put places like Tender Mercy’s out of business, she just knows it.

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it, too?

And then the trolley stops and she knows that the moment of revelation is upon her and Mack is going to be so surprised and everybody’s going to think she looks sexy and delicious and she’s going to taste so good…

…and then Mack rolls over in her sleep, pulling on the blankets and Amaranth isn’t on the platter at all.

“Oh, phooey,” she says, and then she tries to go back to sleep.

Some dreams are simpler than others.

In Trina’s dream, everybody had four eyes, except for her, and this made them all freaks. Sara Leighton dreams that the teleport accident which in reality had joined her with her sister had actually sent her twin to another plane of existence. Tara’s version has it so that it merged them fully and they’d become one person. On occasion, they’ve each dreamed it the other way and broke out in a cold sweat in their sleep.

Feejee dreams of blood in the water.

Iona dreams of blood.

Kai, who often thinks of nothing but murder all day, dreams a surprisingly peaceful dream about her grandfather’s calligraphy pens. Suzi dreams of invisible cheeseburgers. Maliko dreams about her Sooni.

Scylla dreams that she’d made it to the damned rabbit before the snake-eyed bitch did. The snake-eyed bitch dreams of cutting off her pink skin and finding scales underneath. Gladys dreams of being up on stage, hundreds—no thousands—of people’s eyes upon her. Cetea dreams that she can use a damned mirror without it breaking.

Honey dreams absolutely nothing, as six crushed flower petals in a tall glass of vodka have rendered her oblivious even to oblivion.

“Hey, hey Two!”

“What is it, ridiculous owl turtle thing?” Two asks as the clearly impossible thing flaps its flipper wings in ungainly flight alongside her, oblivious to her attempts to sweep away from it.

“How come you never dream about your friends?” it asks her.

“I do,” she says. “Sometimes. But not when I dream about the workshop, because they weren’t in the workshop.”

“You never dream about them here, either.”

“They were never here,” Two says. “And anyway this is still the workshop dream. It’s just broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“You could stop saying good morning,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “I tried that.”

“You could stop freaking the hell out when it happens,” it says. “That’s what breaks the dream, you know.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I have a different dream now. I’m sweeping.”

“But have you considered the ramifications of that?”

“No,” she says.

“Do you think there really was a broom on the other side of my post?”

“Yes,” she says.

“It was there because you dreamed it up,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “You could dream up anything you wanted.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I’m sweeping.”

Dee is a child in the marketplace. One of her hands is being held by Dehsah, and the other by her mother.

No, that’s wrong. My mother never took me to the marketplace.

Dee is a child in the marketplace. Her mother, pretty Dehsah…

No.

Dee is in the marketplace, with her lover, Dehsah.

Dehsah hasn’t been out of the house since we became lovers.

Dee passes a fitful night, her subconscious unable to provide any dreams of succor which her conscious mind does not reject out of hand.

Amaranth looks beautiful in her wedding dress, and so does Mack. They are having an outdoor ceremony, of course, and even a hilltop shrine was out of the question under the circumstances, so they’re holding it in a beautiful elven forest bower. Everybody from Paradise Valley is there, and so are all the students she’d worked with during her years of study (in which she’d attained multiple degrees and many honors), and nymphs and satyrs and fauns of all stripes.

Mack had agreed to have a Mechan officiate, to get around her little disability, but when they get to the end of the aisle Amaranth sees that it’s not the scientist there at all, but Mother Khaele herself. Amaranth looks in alarm at Mack, but Mack is standing unharmed in the presence of the divine.

“Rest easy, my daughter,” Mother Khaele says. “For your love has redeemed this demon-tainted soul completely, and now I will happily join the two of you as one, after which you will be taken to your honeymoon in a carriage pulled by specially trained horses, who will join you for…”

“Sooni!” Mack blurts out, and Amaranth looks at her in confusion as the wedding dissolves and she finds herself in bed once more, where Mack blurts out Sooni’s name a few more times.

“Suzune-Darling, there is something you must know,” her mother tells Sooni, who sits anxiously by her feet, hanging on every word. Her mother is so wise and so beautiful, just like herself. “We have kept this from you for years, for your own protection, but now you must be told.”

“What, Mother?” Sooni asks. “What is it?”

“I only hope you can forgive my dishonesty towards you,” her mother says.

“I’m sure if you were not truthful towards me, it was for a very good reason,” Sooni says, bowing her head.

“You are such a good daughter, Suzune-Darling,” her mother says. She gets to her feet. “Perhaps it would be easier to show you than tell you.”

She turns around in a circle, and when she does her features have changed. It’s the same kind, wise eyes that are looking down at Sooni, but they’re yellow instead of black. The same calm smile, but with a shorter snout.

Her mother is a nekoyokai.

“Mother… you’re…?”

“Yes,” her mother says, nodding. “And not just that, but I am Queen of the Nekos. Which means that you, my humble daughter Suzune-Darling, you are the Neko Princess. You look like you do because you are half kitsu, but now that you know the truth you will be able to change between the two at will. You must keep your identity as Neko Princess secret, though, or else you will be in terrible danger.”

“That’s why Father always became angry when I acted like a neko!” Sooni exclaims.

“Yes. He was simply worried about you,” her mother says. “And you must know that Kai…”

“Kai is my true sister!” Sooni says. “I’ve known it all along!”

“Yes! Your heart knows the truth, Suzune-Darling, my Neko Princess!”

A door slams downstairs, pulling Sooni away from her mother. She sits upright in bed, shaking her head in confusion. What had she just been dreaming? It had been about her mother, she’s sure about that… but the details are all slipping away. Her mother and nekos.

Oh, well. It couldn’t have been a True Dream if I can’t remember it.

She reaches down and gets her mother’s shoes, the shoes she wears everywhere, even inside the house, off the floor and holds them to her chest as she lays back down, hoping her mother comes back to her soon. She had left a map of the Imperium with Prax circled on it at the family shrine, along with a brochure for the campus with her room number on it, but she wasn’t sure if her mother could come this far, or that she’d have the time.

She had a lot of work to do, her mother did. She was a very important person.

“My friend Hazel used to keep a dream diary,” Two says.

“Oh, so you’re talking to me now?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“I’m talking,” Two says. “I don’t think it matters if I’m talking to you or not, since you are not real. Her mother made her keep a dream diary from when she was eleven until she turned twenty-two. She made my friend Hazel write her dreams down every morning, and then she read it. She wanted to make sure that my friend Hazel didn’t get the curse.”

“No, she wanted to find out if your friend Hazel already had it,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing replies. “That’s a different thing. And it isn’t a curse.”

“I know,” Two says. “I told my friend Hazel that, and she said ‘Well, it isn’t a blessing.’ And then she told me not to talk about it.”

“But you are.”

“I’m dreaming,” Two says. “I’m not really talking.”

“So why can’t you stop yourself from saying ‘good morning’ to the man?”

It’s the war again.

The bridge.

Theona’s down by the bridge, trying to finish her spell of unmaking before the orcs overwhelm her. Jill can see that she’s just going to make it… get the spell off, that is. She doesn’t have time to finish it and escape.

The rest of Hydra Company… all four of the other survivors… have their hands full. Nora’s gone dead to the world again, seemingly conscious of nothing but the bow in her hands. Ironically she’s doing the most to help Theona, sending arrow after arrow at the thundering horde as it bears down on her.

She makes every shot she takes, and every shot is a fatal one, but she might as well be standing on a beach trying to shoot down the waves as they head towards the shore.

Mur-Si is… who the fuck knew where Mur-Si was? The most Jill could see was where she had just been, as ogres collapse with the legs cut out from under them and orcs die in fountains of spurting blood. Jill had been told… some hundred years before… that she had been bred to be the greatest warrior the world had ever seen… but the bastard elven hybrid is a strong argument that the Founders had wasted their efforts.

Jill and Fayborn are fighting back to back, Fay’s gleaming sword and Jill’s giant axe cleaving a circle around them. Jill keeps getting glimpses of the kid in the wizard robes down by the bridge, kneeling helpless and alone as she focuses on her spell.

“What’s the plan for extraction?” Jill asks.

“Soon as we see the bridge go down, we bug out,” Fay says. “Simple enough for you, Flattop?”

“What about The?”

“She bugs out, too.”

“She’s never going to make it back up to us,” Jill says.

“She might,” Fay says. “Didn’t think we’d make it this far at all.”

“We’ve got to get down to her,” Jill says.

“Can’t,” Fay says. “If she fails, we’ve got to be ready to try Plan B.”

“She’s our wizard,” Jill says. “What are we supposed to do to the bridge without her, have Mur-Si stab it to death?”

“Need to know basis.”

“You sent her down there to die,” Jill says.

“We were all sent here to die,” Fay says. “Some of us are better at it than others.”

Jill headbutts the orc in front of her and then charges through the gap left as it goes down, trampling goblins, shouldering past orcs, and dodging around ogres. Fay yells out behind her, something about sticking together, but let the bitch yell. She stands a better chance on her own than the neophyte mage who had, completely unwittingly, become the linchpin of the entire mission.

And as she thunders down the side of the ravine towards the bridge, Jill remembers that this has all already happened and that it’s just a dream, and she realizes she’s not going to make it in time.

The bridge starts to crumble and Theona stands and turns to run up towards her. The bridge is collapsing as a pair of ogres catch hold of her.

They don’t even have weapons out. Why would they? She doesn’t. If she’d been fighting them, they might have been forced to kill her, but instead they’ve got her in their hands…

“Opening the first charity brothel together was the best idea ever, Amaranth,” Mack says.

“Oh, it just seemed like the natural thing to do, after you and Two overcame your inhibitions and embraced the nymphly codes as a way of life,” Amaranth replies. “But this is just the start. Once we start teaching our classes, we’ll get more women of all races to subscribe to my new revolutionary philosophy and soon the entire world will be at peace because everybody will be too busy loving one another to hate anybody. Of course, some credit belongs to Mother Khaele.”

“No, she told me it’s all because of you,” Mack says. “And that you shouldn’t need to feel humble about it, but that’s just like you to think of her.”

“But, Mack, you couldn’t have spoken to… oh, poop. This is a dream again, isn’t it?” Amaranth says as she wakes up.

“Huh? What?” Mack murmurs sleepily beside her in the darkness.

“Nothing, baby,” Amaranth mutters, frowning. “Nothing.”

Leda is dancing across the smooth, glassy surface of the lake. It’s winter, her favorite time, but though a dusting of snow coats trees and the ground on the shore around the lake, the water remains unfrozen. Even in human form, though, it bears her weight. She leaps and she glides about in the moonlight, and then she heads for the thicket of reeds in the center of the lake, where on this side there is a small island, barely more than a bump of rock jutting up above the surface of the water.

That small island of reeds is the gateway to the other side, where her mother’s castle and where her true kingdom is. On both sides, the kingdom of Mariinsky Lake is not more than the lake itself, but on the Other Side, that lake is much bigger.

Even though she loves the castle and she loves the true lake far more than she loves the dreary, cramped one she’d just been dancing upon, she feels cold dread seeping down her spine as she passes through the reeds and finds herself on the large island with her home in front of her. It’s daylight on this side, but the sun doesn’t seem to warm her up much.

She knows what’s coming next.

Leda is a true princess: grace defined, possessing endless reserves of natural charm and refinement. But somehow—witches, probably—she screwed up and got herself exiled for four years to a moonforsaken frontier outpost in an empire of human barbarians. It was unthinkable, it was impossible… but it had happened, and it was going to happen again.

What would it be this time? Would she upset a tureen of soup? Lean against a priceless tapestry? Would she tread on an ambassador snail’s tail? Accidentally insult a visiting frog prince?

Knowing that her doom was coming but not knowing what shape it would take was terrible torture, but no matter how much she fights against it, her body still insists on passing over the drawbridge, under the portcullis, and through the gatehouse. She exchanges polite pleasantry with the guards in their bright red uniforms.

Her mother and her stepfather are waiting for her in the throne room, and in between her and them is a gauntlet of respected courtiers, servants bustling around with important loads, and guests of high social rank. But no matter what Leda did, no matter how careful she was, something would go wrong because when she reached the throne room, her stepfather would smile that sneering smile at her and say those nine most hated words:

“Your mother and I have been discussing your education.”

And so the dream went.

“Do you want to know what I think?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing asks.

“No,” Two says. “I really think I do not.”

“I think you say ‘good morning’ because you want to.”

“I want to do what I’m told,” Two says.

“Among other things,” it says. “But I think you want him to acknowledge you.”

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “You are mistaken.”

“I think you know you couldn’t go back to being a piece of lab equipment now that you’ve been a person, and you want to know if he could relate to you as a person.”

“No,” Two repeats decisively.

“I think part of you would like to have a conversation with him.”

“You are mistaken.”

“I think you want to know what he thinks about you… if he thinks about you. Does he miss you like you miss him? Would he take you back as you are now? Would he hire you as a free person? Would he like you?”

“No!” Two yells. She turns and clobbers him with the broom. “I hate you, some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing!” she yells as she hits him again and again. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

“Amaranth, you’re so smart!” the professor proclaims. “In all my years of teaching, I’ve never met a student who understood the material so quickly and so completely. That a nymph should be the one to…”

Under the covers, Mack begins to masturbate furiously. Amaranth, awoken once again, sighs, reaches over, and guides her lover’s hand to a slightly better spot. Mack moans in her sleep.

“At least somebody’s having pleasant dreams tonight,” Amaranth says.

After messing around the ethernet function a little, I decided to try for Ian before I got too absorbed, but he wasn’t answering. I reluctantly closed the mirror on my way up the stairs after the third time I caught my foot on a step… the last thing I wanted was to break it the first day I had it. There was no telling how long I’d get to keep it, or if the next replacement would be half as cool.

I opened it back up as soon as I got to what I thought was my floor, and then found myself trying to force my key into the lock of what turned out to be room 317 while gazing at a Mecknights tapestry I hadn’t checked for a while. The door opened from inside and I stumbled forward, bouncing off the flat chest of a scaly, snake-haired girl I didn’t recognize.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Uh…” I said, then realized what I’d done. “Wrong floor, sorry.”

Dozens of little yellow eyes rolled and she shut the door in my face.

“Who was that?” somebody said inside the closed room.

“That spazz from upstairs.”

“Oh my kosh, I have to tell Trina right now.”

Cheeks burning, I managed to keep the mirror closed on my way back to the stairwell and up to the actual fifth floor. I was back at the tapestry again by the time I was at my door, though I tore my eyes from it to check the number before I tried to jam my key into the lock. That probably would have gone a little bit better if I’d kept my eyes on what I was doing. I was still fighting with it when I heard Steff calling “Hey!” from the end of the hall.

I turned to see her coming out of Oru and Shiel’s room.

“Hey, yourself,” I said.

“Is that a new mirror?” Steff asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Pendragon was having problems with theirs, and… I guess I lucked out.”

“Awesome,” she said. “So… how was the big date?”

“Surreal,” I said. “I think we made a kind of progress, though.”

Steff grinned from ear to ear.

“Oh, you nailed her, didn’t you, you little slut?” she said.

I shook my head.

“She nailed you?” Steff asked. “I’ll be the first to admit I’m not clear on all the options when it’s all scabbards and no swords.”

I glanced at Sooni’s closed door, and then gestured towards my room.

“Let’s get out of the hall and I’ll tell you about it,” I said. We headed into my room, where I did my best to explain what had happened, and how I had felt. I didn’t think I did a very good job of it.

“I guess I can kind of see that,” Steff said after I told her why I’d turned Sooni down.

“You’re the one who told me that rape is the absence of choice,” I said. “Sooni wasn’t being coerced, but she was doing what she thought she had to do. If it wouldn’t have been rape, it would have been… rape-ish?”

“Too close for comfort, anyway,” Steff said. She shook her head. “It would have been so incredible, though. You love everybody you have sex with, and that’s nice… but you need a healthy dose of hate to get really hot.”

“I don’t know about that… I think I do just fine with love. Anyway, I’m having a hard time hating Sooni right now,” I said. “That’ll probably change the next time I see her abusing her nekos… though, honestly, I’m having a hard time feeling sympathy for them, which is awful of me… no amount of Kai being bitchy excuses what Sooni puts her through.”

“You’re way too forgiving,” Steff sad. “When I don’t like somebody, I start imagining them enslaved and tortured in worse ways than bad cosplay.”

“Well, let’s just leave it at things are a lot more complicated in her life than I thought,” I said. “We aren’t having sex, and we aren’t enemies. I don’t know if we’re friends yet. She didn’t seem to want me to leave, though. Even after we spent the day together, she kept asking me to hang out more… she wanted me to go to the arena or the pool.”

“The pool?” Steff said, her eyes lighting up. “Mmm… you know, the deep end is like thirteen feet deep?”

“I’ll pass on that forever,” I said. “Five feet was deep enough for me.”

“Sorry,” Steff said, putting her hands on my hips and pulling me towards her. Her skirt was tenting out in front of her. “I just can’t get the image of you thrashing helplessly around out of my head… I’d love to get you alone in there sometime and just throw you in.”

“Steff, that would seriously scare the fuck out of me,” I said. I’d panicked when my feet had momentarily lost contact with the bottom in the penthouse pool… the idea of thirteen feet of water, more than twice my own height…

“I know,” Steff whispered, sliding around behind me, her dick poking into the back of my jeans. “I could tie a weight to your feet, or just wait for you to get tired… watch you sink to the bottom, and then slowly stop moving…”

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. Even if drowning wouldn’t technically kill me, I didn’t really want to deal with Steff’s death fetish. “What were you doing in Oru’s room, anyway, watching the news?”

“What? No, it’s all that earthquake-tsunami and updates from overseas now,” Steff said. “Even the local people are hardly mentioning campus stuff any more, and what’s there is just rehashing. We’re playing stone soldiers… me and Hazel versus Shiel.”

“What, two against one?”

“Yeah, we had to combine our forces to make a decent army,” Steff said. “Hazel’s using her own forces that she had the dwarves churn out for her, and I’m using some humans I bought off Shiel and converted to undead.”

“Very necromantic,” I said.

Steff giggled.

“It’s all in the details,” she said. “Make the armor a little ragged, replace the eyes with gaping sockets, make some exposed bone… they’re a little crude, but I guess that kind of fits, right?”

“I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing,” I said. “So, where’s everybody else?”

“Well, Dee… went off somewhere. I think she’s praying or something. Two’s working, of course,” Steff said. “So is Amy. I gave her a pretty good going-over this morning, but she says she feels like she’s falling behind… if you ask me, she’s trying to score points with Mom, or prove that you’re not a distraction, or something.”

“Really?” I said. “It seemed to me… well, it kind of seemed like she was giving up.”

Steff shook her head.

“Don’t you believe it,” Steff said. “If I believed it, I’d be fucking some sense into her right now… she’s just trying to prepare herself for the worst, which is kind of pointless since if that happened, nothing would prepare her for it.”

“You don’t think it’s going to happen, then?” I asked. “You don’t think Mother Khaele is going to forbid her from being with me?”

“Hon, I think she’s going to realize she’s spent too much of her divine attention on such a small problem already,” Steff said.

“And she’s not going to take the next logical step of ending the relationship before it took any more of her time?” I asked. An image… or rather, a series of images… popped into my head. They differed in particulars: a lightning bolt splitting the air and striking me, the earth swallowing me up, a radiant column of light obliterating me… basic wrath-of-the-gods stuff. “Or flexing the tiniest little bit of her divine might and ending me?”

“Mack, she isn’t going to just up and kill one of her nymphs’ girlfriends,” Steff said.

“Are you sure about that?” I asked. Now that I’d thought about it, the idea was darkly irresistible. “You saw her talking to that reporter at the festival, right? People are dying every second and she shrugs it off. A little elemental upheaval and one hundred thousand people are dead. Do you think she batted an eye at that? She just added that to the tally and then went on to the next disaster.”

“That’s a little different than righteously smiting down somebody for dating your daughter,” Steff said. “I just can’t imagine… well, I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I just can’t imagine a greater divinity being so petty.”

I started to retort, but I bit back the urge. Steff had once called Khersis an “asshole” over my inability to pray to him following my demon awakening. There was nothing petty about Lord Khersis’s enmity towards demonkind, though, and I wasn’t going to throw Steff’s blasphemy back in her face to score a point in an argument.

That would be petty.

“Why the sudden burst of piety?” I asked instead. That seemed a little more fair, and less confrontational.

“Don’t know,” Steff said. “I mean, I don’t think I’d call it piety, but… well… did you see the shit on the news? I used to think the ogre badlands were a whole world away. We actually went and found where Yokan was on a map to try to figure out if it got hit or not… you know, out of curiosity. Looking at how far it was from there to East Reaches, and from the East Reaches to the coast… it’s a big fucking world, Mack, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I don’t think I knew before today, but I know now.”

“Right,” she said. “Exactly. And I got to thinking, and the way I figure it, right at the moment Mother Khaele was putting in her little appearance at that festival, on the other side of the world, that whole thing was just getting started.”

“It might have been close,” I said. “But I don’t know if you could say it was right at the same…”

“No?” Steff said. “Do you remember how she left all of a sudden? Like something big was happening?”

“Now that you mention it… I kind of do,” I said. “But why would she stop to talk to a national TV audience and not give some kind of warning, if she knew that was coming?”

“How would that have helped?” Steff asked. “‘Oh, by the way, if you happen to have a mirror link to anybody on the other side of the world, tell them to head for high ground.’”

“But in the time she took to vent about Amaranth, or whatever you want to call it, she could have appeared before the easterners,” I said. “Or just done something about the wave in the first place!”

“Look who’s blaspheming now,” Steff said, grinning.

“I’m serious, Steff,” I said. “If she’s going to be involved with mortal affairs, why bother messing around with… affairs… when she could have saved those people?”

“Hon, as an Arkhanite, this is the sort of thing I think about all the time,” she said. “It’s usually in terms of ‘if the gods exist’ and ‘if the gods have power’, but I’m pretty well willing to admit Mother Khaele’s existence at this point, and no matter how you frame the question there aren’t any good answers. But you’re a great big geek… there’s a reason that earthquakes happen, isn’t there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The thinking is that fire and air that builds up in the crust of the world has to escape and be released to their own layers. If it doesn’t happen in good time, the explosion when it does happen is worse.”

“Right,” Steff said. “So if there hadn’t been an earthquake at that time, in that place, it might have blown a hole in the bottom of the ocean or something later.”

“I’m not saying Mother Khaele should have stopped it from happening,” I said. “But she could have done something for the people.”

“She was doing her job,” Steff said. “The people had their own gods who could have been looking out for them. But say an assembled force of divine beings had teamed up and got everybody to evacuate the coasts.”

“Yeah, say they did,” I said. “Where’s the downside?”

“Maybe there isn’t one,” Steff said. “But if they’re doing that, what about all the people who died from fires or plagues or war or basic stupidity at the same time?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the gods should just a more pro-active stance on that stuff anyway.”

“Okay, but… where does it stop?”

“Maybe it stops when everybody’s safe!” I said, suddenly very angry about the whole thing. Until Mother Khaele had entered the conversation, I’d been thinking of the tsunami as something that had happened without warning… but she had known. “When whole villages aren’t being wiped out in the blink of an eye, when nobody has to grow up without a mother, when people aren’t buying and selling each other… when you can’t hop on a crystal ball and order up a side of somebody just because you have money to burn.”

“That wasn’t you, Mack,” Steff said quietly. “If you believe me about anything, believe me about that… I’ve seen you hungry and that wasn’t you. I may have let my excitement at the idea… well, it was too late to fix, anyway… but you had nothing to do with that.”

“But it shouldn’t have even been an option,” I said. “Why do we have laws that let people be treated as commodities?”

“Mack, hon… that’s life,” she said. “There are poor people everywhere. There are people who can buy and sell other people’s lives in every society. Some are just more honest about it than others. If the gods came down from on high… if Lord Khersis walked the world again and he said ‘You guys cut out this slavery shit right the fuck now!’ and he made it stick somehow, people would still be people. There might not be any establishments like Tender Mercy’s, but it would still be a dog-eat-dog world.”

“Maybe some people are going to be evil assholes no matter what we do, but there are still degrees,” I said. “Making things difficult for them, making it illegal, making it socially unacceptable… I mean, I know the past wasn’t some golden age or anything, but if you look at history… it used to be that people who owned slaves were expected to show some responsibility for them. There was a social contract you had to follow.”

“That was a sham, though,” Steff said. “Slaves didn’t have any more rights back then than they do now, and it’s like Shiel says about kobold women… if the masters let their slaves have some freedom or dignity, the fact that it was up to them in the first place just kind of underscores the whole thing.”

“Okay, but… if somebody butchered a slave like an animal for meat, there would have been one hell of a stigma,” I said. “A lot of times, saying something ‘just isn’t done’ is more powerful than a law. But these days nobody cares. You can order everything on the ethernet, everybody is expected to mind their own business, and the only contracts that matter are the legal ones.”

“But what are you going to do?” Steff asked. “It’s never going to change… there’s too much money in slavery.”

“Way back when, slavery was legal because it was an effective way of getting labor for farming and building,” I said. “These days, there’s enchantments and automata for taking care of that kind of thing. Slaves are a total luxury, and the only people making money are the slavers.”

“Right… and they’re catering directly to the wealthiest and most powerful people in the imperium,” Steff said. “You see the problem?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t even know why we’re talking about this,” I said. “We were talking about Amaranth, and then the wave…”

“We’re in college,” Steff said. “Pointless bull sessions go with the territory, especially when big world-shaking events are in the news. Oh! But I was saying it would be petty. Could you really see somebody who’s concerned with things like earthquakes and hurricanes stopping to wipe out one relatively harmless half-demon? I mean, Khersis himself doesn’t go around doing the direct smiting any more. Why is she going to step outside her sphere to get rid of you?”

“She took the time to talk about it,” I said. “On TV…”

“That’s why I’m not ready to give up,” Steff said. “That can only be a good thing… it means she’s thinking about it and not just reacting, which makes it less likely that she’s going to just throw up her hands and give it up as a bad job.”

“But it doesn’t mean she won’t,” I said.

“Eh… smite happens,” Steff said, shrugging. “Anyway, I should probably get back… I mean, I’d love to give you a consolation prize since you missed out on the foxy love…”

“It wouldn’t be a consolation prize,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But I’m kind of committed… we’re a couple hours in already and if I quit they’ll just be wasted.”

“I think it’d be a bigger waste of time finishing the game,” I said.

“Yeah, you’d probably rather play with your little Mecknight dolls,” Steff said.

“Actually, I’ve got another toy to play with,” I said. I held up the black compact.

“Good deal,” Steff said. “I’ll come around after we finish losing to Shiel… Hazel’s talking a big game, but she’s just hammering us. I think we need to work on our tactics… or I need to stop playing with Hazel. Anyway, I’m learning. I’d ask you to come watch, but I know you’re not interested…”

“And I’m banished,” I said.

“Well, yeah,” Steff said, shifting uncomfortably. “I hope you don’t mind me hanging with Shiel…”

“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s got her reasons for supporting Oru, I guess, and I don’t even blame Oru that much.”

“Too forgiving,” Steff said, shaking her head. “Oru’s a cunt and you know it. Anyway, I’ll be by later… oh, and Feejee was looking for you earlier.”

“She was?”

“Yeah,” Steff said. “She said she has some new sauce she wants you to try. I swear, everybody’s turning into a cook with the pseudowench in residence.”