“You!” Pala said when I came out. The cloud dissolved, though the demi-giantess was already drenched from its downpour. I wondered what the water would do to her nice sweater, and how she could be comfortable with it plastered against her skin like that. “I will guard your body, but I am not doing anything with her body.”

“Um… what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Why are you staring at my bosoms?” she asked.

“I’m not!” I said. “I was… concerned about your sweater.”

“Oh,” Pala said. She glanced down. “Oh! I rained on it… do you see what you made me do now?”

When I saw her reaching down and grabbing the bottom of the shirt, I had a single brief, glorious vision flashing through my head of her peeling it off in one fluid motion to reveal first a flat, well-toned stomach and then… well, the vision didn’t last that long before reality informed me that she was awkwardly wrestling the sodden garment off, to reveal an only slightly damp white blouse underneath.

“My uncle warned me about people like her,” Pala continued. “Well… not people just like her. I do not think Uncle Hallbjorn has ever heard of people like her. But he has heard of other people who behave like people like her, and he warned me about them, and I think his warning would be a good one for people like her as well.”

“That’s about the fifth time she’s said that,” Steff said. “The first two times she repeated it, it got longer. After that she started paring it down a bit. She used to go on and say…”

“That is, it would be a good warning for people like me about people like her,” Pala continued. “I mean, a good warning to give to people like me…”

“What exactly did you do to her?” I asked Steff.

“…about people like her.”

“I didn’t do anything to her… I just made her a bet,” Steff said. “On the subject of spatial relationships. Specifically, what would or would not fit where.”

“You should know better than to suggest such a thing to a young woman,” Pala said. “And you should not engage in such things yourself, either. My Uncle Hallbjorn says that young women should not gamble.”

“Oh, we don’t have to wager money,” Steff said.

“I do not have any money, anyway… I lost it playing cards.”

“Would you like to earn some?” Steff asked her.

“I thought your uncle told you not to gamble,” I said.

“Yes!” Pala said. She stomped her foot. It was probably a good thing she was standing on the soft ground to the side of the path… if she damaged university property, we’d probably all share in the blame somehow. “Because I lost all my money playing cards. Uncle Hallbjorn probably should have told me before that, but I’m afraid he isn’t very clever.”

“Well… anyway… it looks like this may all be over soon,” I said. “There’s an a-mail going around that there’s going to be a press conference at five.”

“Think it’s worth ditching Hart’s class over?” Steff asked. “I mean, I know I’m not supposed to encourage you to skip classes, but this could be important…”

“I’d still rather not,” I said. “History’s one of my favorite classes, and I’m really not sure where I stand with Hart. If they thought it was important enough to send out an announcement, they’ll probably put the important parts in another one. Even if most students are done with their classes by five, they can’t expect everyone to get to a TV, and they probably don’t really want everyone to show up at the admin building in person.”

“You are going to history now?” Pala asked me, frowning down at confusion.

“No, my next class is logic,” I said. “It’s still not for a little bit, but I wasn’t really… the library’s kind of stifling right now, and I thought you two might want to know about the press conference.”

“Well, you should not be standing out in the open until then,” Pala said. “If you are done in the library then I will be taking you back to Harlowe.”

“I think I’d rather stay in the library, then,” I said. I wouldn’t be any more or less alone with my uncomfortable thoughts back at Harlowe, and as far as I knew, nobody was trying to spy on me in the library.

“Okie dokie,” Pala said. “As long as I know where you are.”

“I think I’ll go inside for a bit, too,” Steff said. “The company’s easier.”

“What exactly did you think was going to happen with her, anyway?” I asked her as we headed back in.

“Exactly? Well, I did have a pretty detailed scenario in my mind,” Steff said. “It started with a series of friendly wagers that escalated until she ended up being my personal pretty pretty pony for the rest of my life.”

“Did you really think that would work?” I asked.

“Hey, I haven’t given up on the idea of having your head hanging on my wall someday,” Steff said. “And if I can get Pala back to Kilrest, I could make that deal that much sweeter for you, because there would be no need to breed you if we had a giantblood in the stables. Quarter-demon/quarter-ogre would be wicked awesome, but giants get serious cred from ogres. The fact that I could throw a saddle over her would make me basically the most badass person ever to them. I mean, talk about your epic mounts.”

“Steff, the idea of having Viktor’s baby is so far from being the reason I don’t want to be your zombie sex slave,” I said.

“You wouldn’t be a slave,” Steff said. “Well, you would be, until you died and became a zombie, at which point your will… and soul, if I did it right… would be bound to me, which would make slavery kind of a moot point. But really, there are worse lives than that. At least you’d be with someone you love.”

“Steff… I don’t think some fantasies are meant to come true,” I said. “Or be shared.”

“You’re the one who asked,” she said.

“About Pala,” I said. “And I don’t think that one’s going to come true, either. I don’t think you have a chance of even… you know, getting anywhere… with her.” Phrases that had passed through my head and been rejected as beyond my ability to pull off included getting with and nailing. “Much less turning her into an ‘epic mount’.”

“Oh, come on, Mack,” Steff said. “Look at her… I can’t believe she’s ultimately going to be much harder to get into bed than you were.”

“I can,” I said. “First of all, she’s straight…”

“Oh, you know… I think I’ve heard this story before ,” Steff said.

“Okay, but I get the feeling that she’s from a very different background,” I said. “It sounds like her family is very protective of her.”

“I think ‘raised by a fundamentalist ex-paladin’ would probably fit into both of those columns,” Steff said. “And look how you turned out. Trust me, it’s the ones who start out really uptight who eventually run wild.”

“I didn’t ‘run wild’,” I said. “I… opened up to a few new possibilities, that’s all.”

“Opened wide,” Steff said.

“Is the library really the best place for this conversation?” I asked. We weren’t talking loudly, but what we were talking about and where we were talking about it seemed to count almost as much as actual volume, in my head.

“Again… you started it.”

“Okay, well, let’s just drop it, then,” I said.

“Alrighty,” Steff said. “What do I know? I’m just the assistant bodyguard… and a darn good one if I say so myself.”

“How so?”

“Well, you know the saying: set a thief to catch a thief,” Steff said. “And so if you’re trying to protect bodies…”

“I think the point is to protect the people before they become ‘bodies’,” I said.

“People are always bodies,” Steff said. “Corporeal people are, anyway. Though I don’t know… I could probably objectify ectoplasm if I tried. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard. Well, I mean, it’s ectoplasm, so it wouldn’t… ack! I think Pala might be contagious.”

“Better give her a wide berth in the future, then,” I said.

“I don’t think she’d fit in a narrow one. Why are you so anti-Pala, anyway? I thought you’d be drooling all over her,” Steff said. “Which you kind of did back there, but you did it while looking at her like she was some kind of insignificant little giant insect.”

“She’s so not my type,” I said.

“As if you wouldn’t let her spank you,” Steff said.

“As if she’d be into that,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush with heat at the thought… both sets.

“As if that’s even the point,” Steff said. “Besides, I have a feeling that would be easier to arrange than my fantasy… we’ll just tell her you’ve been naughty and ask her what she thinks should be done.”

“I don’t think she’d fall for that,” I said, trying to imagine how that would even work. She’d have to kneel beside me… unless she picked me up and laid me across her knees?

“No, but you’re trying to picture it, aren’t you?” Steff said. “I bet you haven’t had a good spanking in days. Amy’s probably slacked off because of the whole ‘campus in crisis’ thing.”

“She’s not exactly slacking off,” I said.

“No, but she’s not exactly giving you what you need, either,” Steff said. “Let’s face it, she’s not a natural disciplinarian. Okay, she’s good at the motions, but the mindset doesn’t come naturally to her. She’ll never give you consistent punishments, Mack… on the other hand, I can give you eternal torment. It doesn’t get much more consistent than that.”

“You’re not even trying to make it sound appealing,” I said.

She shrugged.

“Hey, it’s a rough gig, but it’ll either appeal to you or it won’t,” Steff said. “I’m betting that by the time I graduate you’ll have realized that it does.”

“Then you’re going to be waiting a long time to find out you’re wrong,” I said.

“Good thing I’m known for my patience, then,” she said. “At least I think I’m known for it… I don’t usually stick around long enough to find out for sure.”

In fact, she didn’t stay at the library for very long, whether because she had a class to get to or because she was bored, I wasn’t sure. Pala walked me to my logic class, waiting outside while I went in. She wasn’t the only bodyguard in the hall, either… after having used a mirror on Monday, Sooni had returned to class in person, a fact which made me feel a surprising amount of relief.

She was wearing a very conservative outfit by her standards: a blouse with a dark blue jacket and a matching pleated skirt that stopped just above the knee, with a slit up the back for her fox tail but overlapping folds that closed up below. Maliko was wearing a similar, but somewhat simpler, outfit in gray as she had been during the previous class.

Sooni’s outfit was topped off with a scarf and veil that covered her face. Despite her furry ears and mountain of braids, I wondered if it was actually her, or if her father had provided a stand-in to act as a decoy… this was the first time I could remember Sooni not coming over to say hi or deliver a random threat, or at least look at me when I came in.

What must her parents think of the situation on-campus if they’d go that far for his daughter’s protection? If they were that overprotective, I’d be surprised they let her go to school halfway around the world, particularly at a mid-continental one and not one of the eastern universities.

Still, even if it was a stand-in that meant that he wasn’t planning on yanking her out of the school entirely. She’d have to be back when the current crisis was resolved, which would probably be soon. This was a bit of a relief to me. Maliko I would rather do without, but Sooni’s company was…well, she had her good points.

She had points that were better than her worst points, anyway.

Some of those points seemed less appealing once I’d realized that sex with her was out of the question, after our “date”… she didn’t even really know what it was, or what it really signified. The idea of lesbianism horrified her, except when she believed it was required by the plot of the comic book or animation she thought she was the star of. There was just no way I could take advantage of someone like that. The ethical problems aside… and I wasn’t sure that I could articulate those behind “it feels skeevy”, or that I needed to… I didn’t think I was equipped to take the lead in something like that.

My fantasies about Sooni had all revolved around her domineering personality, her ability to walk all over people. Sooni in the inn room had been uncertain, vulnerable… it was kind of touching, but not really arousing.

The professor started class by stiffly reading an announcement that there was going to be a statement for the student body from school officials and representatives of the Imperial Bureau of Finding at a press conference at five that evening. So apparently there was somebody in the office who realized that many students didn’t check their university a-mail accounts regularly.

After class ended, I waited around to see if Sooni would try to say anything to me. She didn’t, but as she went past I got a slight glimpse of her face around her eyes… and saw fur. So I had been right… it wasn’t Sooni. Unlike her nekoyokai “friends”, Sooni had smooth and bare skin.

The imitation was flawed in other ways. While the decoy had a tail like Sooni’s, but it didn’t swish nearly as much when she walked. Her backside was very similar in shape but she didn’t have Sooni’s walk down. She was much too prim and proper… when Sooni wasn’t stomping around in anger, she was slinking around like the fox she resembled. This woman, whoever she was, just… walked. The visual resemblance was so good it had to be a complex illusion or full-body glamour, which left me wondering why her face had come out furry.

“Hey!” Maliko said, hitting my head from behind with her logic textbook. “Quit staring!”

“Quit hitting me,” I said.

“Sooni is not allowed to speak to you but she wanted me to tell you…”

“Where is she, really?” I asked.

“What? You are so weird and stupid,” Maliko said. “And… weirdly stupid and stupidly weird. Sooni told me to tell you that you need to hurry up.”

“Hurry where?”

“Hurry to find things out and tell them to her so that she can solve the murder,” Maliko said.

“How am I supposed to tell her things when she’s not allowed near me?”

“She says she can’t think of everything!” Maliko said, snarling with a fury that I guess was probably an accurate reproduction of what Sooni had said when Maliko voiced the same objection.

“Yeah, well, you can tell Sooni there’s no need,” I said. “I have a feeling the whole thing’s going to be solved soon enough anyway.”

“Yes, she thinks so, too,” Maliko said. “That’s why you have to hurry up, so Sooni can solve it before anybody else does.”

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” I said.

I had the thought run through my head that I could have just told Sooni what I knew and let her be the big hero of the hour, but of course there were numerous reasons that wouldn’t have worked. Aside from the simple fact that I hadn’t had any contact with Sooni, any explanation she came up with for how she had come to know the nature of mermaids would be as ridiculous and flimsy as her typical outfits, which meant that the actual story would come out rather quickly.

No, Lee had been a much better choice than Sooni to entrust with the truth. His solution had been surprising and a little bit self-serving, but it was the best bet for my anonymity and safety. I supposed I’d have to get in to wait until I could find out what was said at the press conference before I knew how well his plan was progressing, or if it had progressed at all.

I wondered if Hart would have to read an announcement about the press conference, and tried to imagine how he’d take the intrusion into his class time, especially since the only way it would make a difference was if some of his students opted to duck out on his lecture.

When I got to Early Republican History, I realized that I’d been wrong about the last but right about Hart having reason to resent interference in his class time. There was a flat box TV set up on a rolling cart at the front of the room. Unless he’d suddenly decided to take a more multimedia approach to teaching then it seemed like we’d be getting to see the press conference after all.

Tuesday: Pressing matters are resolved.

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

As soon as I registered that she was there, I looked towards Sooni’s desk, but it was not occupied. The seat wasn’t, anyway. There was a tall oval-shaped mirror in a brass frame sitting on it, the front angled towards the instructor’s desk and the board behind it.

I felt an odd mix of emotions. I was relieved that Sooni was apparently not being pulled out of classes and annoyed that I cared. If she had been there, she would certainly have skipped or swished her way down the aisle to my desk to annoy me with her latest petty complaint, bizarre accusation, or harebrained scheme in the minutes before class began.

So much about Sooni irritated me on so many levels, but I felt like if I didn’t have her around to irritate me, I’d miss her.

I wondered when the last time was that someone other than her paid companions told her that they appreciated having her around… and other than her mother, of course, who was all the way on the other side of the world. Maybe she would just take it in stride, accept it as part of her due as the most important person anywhere she happened to be… or maybe it would mean something to her. Maybe being told that she mattered by someone else would help fill the void that obviously existed inside her.

Or maybe she’d hit me with her shoe. Actually, she would probably do that even if the gesture did touch her.

But it wasn’t as though I had anything to fear from a shoeing. If anybody was equipped to be a friend to Sooni, it was me.

Maliko said something to her handler, in Yokano. I’d never heard her speaking her native tongue alone, only as part of a general babble of voices… it was interesting to notice that the slow, almost sleepy-sounding inflections she had in Pax were still present. I’d assumed it was due to her unfamiliarity with the language. Maliko had always sounded a bit like she was whining, or yowling when she was pissed. The look on her face was deferential, though, and the man she was talking to seemed polite, if cold, in his reply. She nodded at him and carefully stood up.

From the moment she got to her feet, I was pretty sure where she was heading, and I was not wrong. She walked slowly up to me, her furry face utterly unreadable.

“Hello,” she said, very quietly.

“Hi,” I replied in a similarly hushed tone.

“I told him that I needed to ask you about our coursework,” she said. “I am being covered.”

“Um, do you mean ‘covert’, or do you mean you’re covering yourself?” I asked. “Because both would kind of work here, where ‘covered’…”

“If they both work then why do you need to pick at my language now, you… stupid?” she asked, the last word coming out in a hiss as she struggled to control her rising volume. The man in the suit glanced back at us.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s up, Maliko?”

“Sooni’s father wants to bring her home,” she said. “He is worried about her safety.”

“This school’s never been highly ranked for safety,” I said.

“He thought it would.. toughen her up?” she said. “Grow her up?”

I nodded.

“But now that the bird princess was murdered, he thinks maybe it is too dangerous,” Maliko said. “For people like Sooni.”

“How’s Sooni taking this?” I asked.

“She is not worried,” Maliko said. “She thinks she can solve it.”

“Solve… what, the murder? Or her own situation?” I asked.

“Yes,” Maliko said, nodding, and I realized that it made perfect Sooni-sense.

Sooni was the star of the show… a background cast member had died and it was significant only because it affected her. Being the star of the show, she was also the only one who could bring the murderer to justice, which she assumed would make the problem of her father not thinking the school was safe enough go away. Clearly, she hadn’t learned her lesson about such wrap-it-up-by-the-end-of-the-episode solutions when winning the student election didn’t make her father think she was responsible enough to keep receiving boatloads of money to spend as she saw fit.

Either that or she was desperate. Or this was the only way she could grapple with the fact that one of her floormates, even one she’d barely known, was dead.

Why did I keep feeling sympathetic for her? It could be said that I knew what it was like to be lonely… but I’d been lonely and poor, and I hadn’t benefited from trafficked “friends” like she had.

“We don’t have long to speak,” Maliko said. “Please pay attention to me.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Were you doing a voiceover?”

“What?”

“When Sooni stops talking like that, she gets mad if we interrupt her because she says she’s doing a voiceover,” Maliko said.

Sooni narrated things in her head? That was easily the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.

“Maliko, that’s easily the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. “Anyway, why are you telling me all this?”

“Sooni told me to,” Maliko said. “Because she’s trapped in town, she cannot do the investigating herself, so she says you have to be her eyes and ears.”

“Sooni wants me to solve Leda’s murder for her?”

“No, she wants you to be her eyes and ears so she can solve the murder,” Maliko said. “But… really… what you said is also true.”

“Maliko… you know there’s no way I can do that, right?” I asked. “I’m just another first year student, I don’t have any special abilities or expertise… at least not ones that are useful for conducting a murder investigation, especially when there is already a well-funded and highly trained imperial agency on the scene.”

“I know,” Maliko said, nodding. “You’re useless. But Sooni told me to tell you, so I did.”

“Okay,” I said. “Would you tell Sooni something for me?”

“Not if it’s anything gross,” she said.

“Would it be gross if I said I hope she doesn’t have to leave?”

“Yes,” she said. “Kind of. But I will tell her.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Do you want to stay here, Maliko?” I asked.

“Things are better here,” she said. “We are more… the same… here. It’s more like when we were young, before Sooni knew that she was better than us.”

If anybody else had said that, I would have told them that nobody was better than them… I was pretty sure that lots of people were better than Maliko, just not in the way that she meant it. I felt a stab of guilt at holding my tongue… the fact that I didn’t like Maliko, or even her actual nastiness as a person, didn’t change the underlying truth of what I was thinking.

“People aren’t ‘better’ than each other,” I said. “Just because she’s valued more by your society doesn’t refect on your actual values as people.”

Maliko gave me the most withering look I’d ever seen, on her face or anyone else’s, and turned and walked back to her desk. At first I took the look to mean something along the lines of shows how much you know, but then I started to wonder if I hadn’t insulted her somehow. I couldn’t figure out how, I’d been being nice… okay, maybe it might have sounded a little condescending, to have someone who didn’t know anything about your culture trying to correct you when you were talking about what life was like for you within it… I mean, whether or not Maliko and Sooni’s lives were intrinsically different values or not, Maliko still had to live with the day to day reality that someone like her could be bought and sold by someone like Sooni.

My words were true, but they were also kind of trite and probably nothing that she hadn’t heard or thought about herself before. Even it was somehow a revelation to her, it didn’t do anything to help her.

So maybe her scorn was somewhat justified.

The flashes of sympathy I was feeling, first for Sooni and then Maliko, were kind of weird. I didn’t think of myself as an unsympathetic person… despite my demonic blood and my own previous insistences that it made me evil, I felt like I was basically good, on some level. But I’d also had the good sense to hate people back when they hated me. I would have rather just rolled my eyes at Maliko’s unwarranted rudeness and then move on.

Though, to be perfectly honest, “moving on” was often kind of a work in progress… I’d always had a tendency to dwell on the people who irritated me. Sooni had even infiltrated my dreams on more than one occasion.

Amaranth would probably be pleased if I told her about this… I supposed it was a kind of personal growth. Well, I’d had enough epiphanies, personal revelations, and life-changing events since coming to MU that I supposed it was inevitable… or was that thinking like Sooni, expecting events to follow narrative form rather than just unfolding in a logical fashion?

Maybe it was a little of both. Either way, I decided then and there that if I ever caught myself narrating events in my head like I was living some kind of story that I would head straight over to the mental healing annex and get myself checked out. That level of self-involvement and sheer disconnection from reality couldn’t be any kind of healthy.

The instructor was already a little late when Maliko went to sit down at her desk, and a good five or ten minutes went by before he showed up. There was very little fidgeting and no jokes about how long we had to wait before class was automatically canceled. I supposed the presence of the seriously official-looking guy standing next to Maliko might have had something to do with that. Also, this was unlikely to be anybody’s first class of the day… probably everybody had encountered some irregularity in their earlier ones, much as Goldman had let us leave early.

“I hope you’ll forgive my tardiness,” the professor said when he arrived. “We all are of course cooperating fully with the imperial investigation, but I’ve found myself getting something of the runaround regarding who wishes to speak to me and where. There seemed to be some confusion regarding my identity. Now, under the circumstances some concessions have been made to our students from overseas… please do your best to disregard the additions to the classroom. Today we’re going to begin a relatively in-depth study of wishes, as the construction of such will be a major part of your midterm. Now, the question is often asked of any lesson, ‘When will we use this in real life?’ And there is probably no skill you are less likely to use in real life than wishcraft. However, knowledge of the theory and practice involved in wishing is useful as it combines several of the foundational elements of this class. If you can wish well, you can do almost anything.”

He led by example as he got into his lecture, saying nothing more about the mirror or the man and not looking at the man when he addressed the class, though he did make occasional eye contact with the mirror. Participation was so rare in this class that I was surprised they’d bothered with a mirror… an echo would probably have sufficed.

“First, definitions: a true wish is, as I alluded to, a very rare thing,” he said. “What a wish actually is is a subject for another class. A lesser wish, more properly called a boon, is simply a promise from a powerful being to do whatever you ask of it that’s within its power. Most stories involving ‘wishes’ are more in line with that: a djinni, a demon, a faerie spirit, or other being of power offers someone ‘whatever you may wish’ and then uses its not-inconsiderable powers to make that wish a reality. This is the other way around from a true wish, in which reality is altered to resemble the wish. For purposes of our class, we’ll be dealing with both phenomena, as some of the basic principles remain the same, including the first, most basic principle, which might as well be called ‘The Grand Rule of Everything’, when it comes to magic: be careful what you wish for.”

Either this was a favorite topic of his or being harrassed by the imperials seemed to agree with our teacher… he was being far more animated and engaged than he’d ever been before.

“When you’re dealing with a being of power that is offering you a boon,” he said, “there are three basic possibilities: it will do exactly what you ask of it, regardless of whether or that’s in your best interest… it will do something that can be construed as what you have asked of it, but in a way that’s deliberately inimical to you… or it will try to understand your intention and deliver it even if it’s not literally what you asked for. The fourth possibility is that it will do none of the above, in which case the offer is a lie, but for purposes of this class we’ll assume that is not the case.

“A true wish is ‘interpreted’ by something that is beyond the pale of the wisher or the being who is acting as a conduit for it, thus it will tend to resemble the first possibility… however, in any case, the second scenario, in which the worst possible interpretation is used, should always be considered. This is the essence of wishcraft: finding words that mean exactly what you want, and cannot mean anything that you do not want. In a perfectly constructed wish, the worst possible interpretation will be exactly what you wanted and nothing else.

“Of course, when dealing with a being of great power, it is possible that its interpretation of your words will differ from your own, and there is no court of appeals. Well, that’s not strictly true. The djinn have their courts, and so do the sidhe, but a mortal being is unlikely to get a satisfactory resolution from them. With demons? It’s best not to bother in the first place. Contrary to popular belief, demons are not bound to their words… that some of them gain a perverse enjoyment from sticking close enough to their word that can claim to be perfectly honest helps spread the myth of ‘honorable’ demons, but in case studies of demonic bargains it’s more often found that their actions did not fulfill a reasonable person’s interpretation of the deals they made.”

I could hardly blame the professor for finding this topic interesting… it was interesting. It made me realize that Goldman had never passed out our extra credit wish papers, either… of course, that was understandable under the circumstances. I just hoped that the assignment hadn’t been permanently sidetracked. Not only would extra credit in an already easy class help, but it sounded like fun.

“Let’s start by examining a very frequently-wished wish: I wish I had a million gold pieces,” the professor said, writing this on the board as he did. “For most beings we think of as ‘wish-granters’, this is well within their power to achieve… it may even amount to giving the asker what amounts to ‘pocket change’ out of its personal trove. There are three major weaknesses in it, however.

“One, the word ‘pieces’ is ambiguous. The asker may be thinking of standard Imperial weight gold coins, but he says pieces, now getting a million pieces of gold of any size or shape would be a windfall. A million grains of gold dust would still be valuable. But if one means coins, then one should say coins, and should specify the size thereof. Wording matters. There is a giant gold coin on display in the Museum of the Imperium in Palantine City that resulted from a man asking a djinni for ‘two tons of gold, minted as coins’. He ended up with two one ton coins, one of which he melted and sold as precious metal, the other he kept and charged admission to view until some enterprising tax collector thought to fine him for minting coins out of size. This is and always has been a serious charge, but he was able to be absolved of it and gain quite a bit of favor by making a gift of the giant coin to Magisterion IV. The man in this story got what he actually wanted, more or less, which was to be comfortably wealthy for the rest of his life, but it shows well the danger of imprecise language.

“The second weakness is that it gives no thought to the placement of the gold. If one wishes for a million gold pieces while conversing with a djinni in the middle of a fiery desert, transportation may become a factor. More sinisterly, any sizable quantity of gold is going to weigh quite a bit. A being could claim it was honoring the wish most directly by placing the gold on the asker’s person, to disastrous effect. So, not only is it best to be precise in what one is asking for, it’s also best to specify where and how one wishes to receive it. I wish for a million solid gold coins of standard Imperial size to be placed in a clear spot in the basement of my home, for instance, would be a better way of wording it.

“The third weakness is also logistical. As I mentioned previously, most ‘wishes’ that people are offered are not true reality-altering wishes. This gold must come from somewhere. If a djinni or faerie creature empties an Imperial reserve on behalf of an unwitting human, the authorities will be far more interested in confronting the human than the primeval power involved in the crime. Current law effectively regards such beings as little more than tools when they are acting out a boon.”

The professor clearly had a different approach to dealing with the shock and trauma of Veil Night than Goldman did, plunging ahead with the class exactly as planned, or as nearly as was possible. I thought that both approaches had their merits. Goldman’s had maybe been more appropriate for a morning class. Tragedy was tragedy, but school and life both marched on.

At a certain point, you had to get back to business as usual, even if it seemed impossible.

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My scream of unadulterated horror at the appearance of the scarecrow backlit by a lightning flash cut through the ambient noise and the general atmosphere of fear.

I recovered a bit when the figure jumped away from me in obvious surprise, if not fear, letting out a distinctively womanish shriek. Recovered mentally, anyway… my heart was still pounding in my ears and my limbs were shaking like jelly in an earthquake. I’d landed on my ass, my cape tangled up beneath me and pulling on my neck.

The afterimage from the lightning burst cleared away from my eyes, and I found myself looking up at Barley, in her most immodestly modest outfit yet: coveralls over a long-sleeved shirt, with straw sticking out around the openings and a floppy straw hat.

Seen clearly, she looked more goofy than anything… it had only been the timing of the thunderburst and the resulting silhouette that had kicked off my fear reflex.

Not that I was positively ecstatic to see Barley… I’d take her over the shadow scarecrow from the cursed farm any day of the week, but I wouldn’t have sought out either of their company. The relief I felt was relative. My reaction to her was pretty visceral in its own right.

“Oh my goddess, I didn’t mean to startle you!” she said. “I hope that was just you being startled, I mean… because I also kind of hoped that we could get past, well, you know, everything…”

“Everything” was a funny of saying “attempted rape”, I thought, but my tongue was pretty much still pressed against the roof of my mouth by my heart and my stomach.

“What… what are you doing here, Barley?” Amaranth asked, her voice croaking a little.

“It’s a school party,” Barley said. “That means it’s for everybody, not just you and your special friends.”

“There’s room for everybody, but I thought you were supposed to stay away from us,” Amaranth said. “Mother Khaele told me…”

“Mother Khaele told you that I’m not your concern,” Barley said. She reached out a hand to me. “Here, Mackenzie let me help you up.”

“Don’t touch her!” Amaranth shrieked, getting between us… but not fast enough for me to miss the look of pain on Barley’s face.

“I think she can speak for herself,” Barley said. “Unless you’ve beaten that out of her.”

I found my voice then… anger will do that. Calm, rational thought isn’t so great for pushing back even the silliest and most baseless mortal terror. Anger, though, cuts through it like an enchanted knife through warm butter.

“I can,” I said. “And I don’t want you touching me.”

I reached a hand up to Amaranth and she helped me up.

“Well, you shouldn’t need her to say it,” Barley said.

“I agree,” I said. “It should go without saying. Barley, you tried to rape me.”

“But Puddy…”

“I don’t want Puddy touching me, either,” I said. “I might be… adventurous… a little, sometimes… but I’m not public property, and I don’t like people who treat me like I am.”

Barley’s eyes rolled over to Amaranth in a way that made me glad that nymphs weren’t related to basilisks.

“No?” she said. “But you love her.”

“Amaranth has her values,” I said. “They’re not always the same as mine. We… we compromise sometimes. But she’s never tried to rape me.”

“Listen, can we not use that word? I’m willing to talk about what I did, but…”

“Great… good for you. But I’m not willing to talk about it,” I said. “Not with you.”

“Could you just hear me out for one minute?”

“Were you possessed?” I asked. “Had you been messing around with strange pitchforks? Were you under the influence of strange alchemical vapors?”

“Oh, yeah. See, that’s the thing. I actually drank some of Puddy’s wine to get my courage up…”

“Up for what?” I asked. “Look me in the eye and tell me that you hadn’t already made up your mind about what you were going to do before you took the first swig.”

She steeled herself up, swallowed, and then she did look me in the eyes.

I didn’t know if it was something that was against their nature, or if going for a dozen and a half years of mature existence with nothing worth lying about just didn’t cultivate the habit of deception. I knew the truth as soon as her eyes met mine, all big and bright and brittle as Two’s… but not nearly as innocent.

There was a calculation in there. Not a particularly complicated one… one that was straightforward and direct as two plus two equals four. I’d just told her what she had to say for me to give her a chance, and she was about to say it.

“Honestly, Mackenzie, I don’t remem…”

“Stop,” I said. Her eyelids ratcheted down and her blue eyes flashed with anger. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see her face any more. “Stop, Barley… you’re lying to me.”

“That’s because you won’t listen,” she said. Her straw-stuffed pants crinkled as she stomped her foot.

“Barley… if you really are trying to change, I’m glad,” I said. “For so many reasons. But it’s not my job to forgive you. I don’t owe you that. Your mother was right… the best thing we can do is stay away from each other.”

“I will,” she said. “I was going to, except for this one night when she’s not looking… I just thought I’d be big and apologize, but if you don’t even… if you won’t… if… I wonder if it’s the demon blood that makes you so petty, or if it’s her.”

“Barley… just go,” I said. I kept my eyes closed as I heard her crinkling away, then let out a very relieved breath.

“That was… that was really pretty good, baby,” Amaranth said.

“Thanks,” I said. I turned to Ian as we started to wander away from the scene of the… scene. “Were you planning on jumping in at any point?”

“Not even a little bit,” he said.

“I guess there’s a reason you didn’t go as a knight in shining armor.”

“Maybe because you didn’t need one?” he said. “I don’t know what I could have added except another loud voice, and I don’t think that’s the same thing as helping.”

“Is doing nothing really better?” I asked.

“Excuse me,” Pala said. She held up a furry bikini bottom that looked a lot like mine, except for the broken strap and the not even barely covering up my girly parts. “Is this yours?”

Ian’s gaze flicked down. I was suddenly intensely aware of the feel of my cape on my barer-than-before butt. While my face turned into another glowing pumpkin, Amaranth reached out and took the broken garment from the demi-giantess.

“Thank you so much, Pala,” she said. “Hold your cape closed, baby… I’ll just go grab Two. Unless you just wanted to slow dance real close against Ian for a while?”

“Uh, yeah, no,” I said, pulling the cape around myself. “Hurry back.”

“It was just a thought,” Amaranth said. “Making the best of what could be a fortuitous accident. I’ll go get this fixed, though,” she said, and she hurried off towards Two’s group, which had gone straight for the refreshments.

“I don’t get a vote on the slow dancing thing?” Ian asked. “You impressed Amaranth with how you handled that whole deal… it could be like a whole streak.”

“That’s pretty much what I’m worried about. Anyway, you can dance if you want to,” I said. “It’ll be like a compromise. She likes those, too.”

“Miss Mackenzie!” another voice said, the speaker coming up behind me. “Miss Mackenzie!”

This time, I knew exactly who it was, even though the voice was a little muffled and echoey… Sooni was one of the few people apart from teachers who ever used a title when she addressed me, and her yippy little voice was fairly distinctive even when she wasn’t quite screaming at the top of her lungs.

“What, Sooni?” I asked, turning to face her. “What is… ack!”

I had an excuse for being startled that time… even if her voice might have suggested a mask, the last time I’d seen her, her head had been uncovered, and in any event, the last thing I would have expected was to see her entire head covered with a “realistic” (as far as that went) foam representation of an animated character.

“You’re bunching up the cape! It doesn’t look right!” she said, slapping at my hands where I was clutching it. I yelped and let go. The big foam head rocked back a bit. “Actually, I think maybe it did look better the other way.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, closing it.

“Science Princess!” Pala yelled, running over… well, stepping over. We weren’t that far away from her, comparatively. “You are the Pretty Neko Science Princess!”

“Yes!” Sooni said. She looked up at Pala and her badly abused elven gown. “I like your swimming costume!”

“Thank you!” Pala said. “It is in my room at the inn. Why do you not have Science Princess’s science boots?”

“Oh, these are my mother’s shoes,” Sooni said. “She gave them to me when I was very young. I liked them because they made me look tall.”

“Oh,” Pala said. “Maybe I should get some?”

“You look pretty tall already.”

“They must be working already,” Pala said. “I need to stand next to you some more.”

“You… you aren’t a lesbian, are you?” Sooni asked.

“That is a type of sex pervert?”

“Yes!” Sooni said, nodding her head so enthusiastically I thought it was going to fall off.

“No!” Pala said.

I mouthed “Let’s get out of here,” to a very bemused Ian, and we began to shuffle away from the new best friends, in the direction of Two and Amaranth.

“If that head doesn’t win for scariest costume, I’m demanding a recount,” Ian said.

“Don’t speak too soon,” I said. spotting something that would give Sooni’s head a run for its money: two people who could only have been Suzi and Maliko wearing similar outfits complete with heads, and… most frightening… pushing a stroller with Kai, who was wearing a giant Baby Kai-Kai head with giant oval eyes taking up almost all of the face that wasn’t covered by the giant pacifier. “Don’t stare at her,” I said. “She’s probably already plotting to kill me in my sleep.”

“She could probably sneak out of that and nobody would ever know,” Ian said.

The nekos were parked at one end of a long table covered with Veil treats. Amaranth and Two’s group were at the other end, fortunately, next to a big placard welcoming students to Anna Paradox Tower and Residence Hall for the Veil Ball.

“Hey, baby,” Amaranth said as we approached. She held up the repaired garment. “Two put it right for you.”

“Thanks, Two,” I said. “Sorry for making you work during the dance.”

“It’s okay, I forgive you,” Two said. “Anyway, it isn’t your fault that you were made clumsy.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Hey, listen,” Hazel said. “I don’t know the whole thing that’s been going on between you and that stuffed shirt, but if she gets up in your business again, I’ll be happy to show her how we do things on the river.”

“Oh, Hazel, don’t,” Honey said, looking as mortified as she ought to have looked in her mock-goblin costume. “Not in your…”

“Not another word from you on that, or I’ll give you a refresher course,” Hazel said. “I’m as fit as the day I was I popped Andy one for putting his hands where oughtn’t've, and a woman who can whoop a dwarf could take on just about anyone in this room, up to and including the very tall elf.”

“You didn’t ‘whoop’ him, Hazel, you took him by surprise,” Honey said. “Which he had every right to be, considering that you apparently weren’t so modest as to…”

“Not another word, Honey,” Hazel said.

“Where… um… so, where is Andy tonight?” I asked Hazel.

“He’s… we’re taking a little bit of a breather, actually,” Hazel said.

“I can’t believe that even a dwarf would cut and run when…”

“Owain! Will you please shut it? I will belt you one, Heather Callaway!”

“Let’s go find the ladies’ room, baby,” Amaranth said, grabbing my cape-wrapped elbow and pulling me away.

“Yeah, I think I’ll just join you,” Ian said.

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Also, the smug sneer faltered a little bit when she saw my face… I wondered what kind of response she’d been expecting. Mild confusion apparently wasn’t it.

Sooni put her stuff down neatly on her desk and then came swishing back to talk to me, as she so often did… she looked so very pleased with herself that I felt a resurgence of dread. Maybe Maliko’s seeming disappointment had been premature.

“Hello, Sooni,” I said,

“Hello, Miss Mackenzie,” she said, beaming. “You know… the Veil Ball is tonight.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“I understand it is a masquerade,” she said.

“Yeah…”

“I was wondering if you had a costume prepared for it.”

Oh, here we go, I thought. It was obvious that she’d decided that I had to go to the party with her and she’s come up with some ridiculous, borderline festishy outfit she expects me to wear.

“Actually… um… I’m going with Ian, and he’s working on a costume for me,” I said, bracing myself for the temper tantrum.

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “I put the finishing touches on mine this morning and thought I would see if you needed any help with alterations or anything for yours. Are you going as Annie?”

“Uh… actually, I thought about doing a Mecknights costume, but I wasn’t sure how to do it,” I said.

“Oh. Well, you should have asked me,” she said, but she sounded hardly even reproachful. “I would have been happy to help you.”

“Uh huh,” I said, still not at all sure where she was going with this… was she going to ask me a favor?

“I guess I’ll see you at the dance!” she said as the professor came into the room. She turned and hurried back to her desk, where the whipping of her fox tail and forth caused the girl behind her to scoot way back.

“Settle down,” the professor said in response to the legs of the chair squeaking against the tiles. “Now, will everybody who looked up the extra credit questions please pass them forward and we’ll be moving on.”

Extra credit questions? What extra credit questions? Maliko threw a glance over her shoulder at me as she handed a paper forward, and I dimly remembered having been in a momentary panic after the last class, when I’d realized I’d missed a good deal of the lecture. Maliko had tried to taunt me by telling me I’d missed hearing about a huge, grade-critical assignment… well, I’d showed her by forgetting all about it.

Two wrongs might not make a right, but under certain circumstances two absentmindednesses could.

On the other hand, though, I had missed out on some extra credit. Even if Maliko hadn’t manage to drive me into a blind panic for the past two days, I’d still managed to screw myself a bit. I paid close attention throughout the remainder of the period, even though it wasn’t particularly interesting material… we were just dealing with conditional statements, and the inverses, converses, and contrapositives thereof. It was important to have a firm grasp on those things when dealing with certain kinds of magic… and more particularly certain kinds of beings… but it didn’t have a lot of direct application for an enchanter.

Unless I was going to put a lot of limiting effects on my work, I probably wouldn’t use it that much, and the essence of applied enchantment was making things that were useful, not bound up by a lot of arbitrary conditions. The bottom line was that there just wasn’t much of a market for televisions that only worked if a thrice-married virgin laid a golden egg in a month with seven Sundays, or whatever. In olden times, being able to sort your way through those kinds of riddles had been an important skill for enchanters, because almost nobody had the kind of power and understanding you needed to make a truly permanent enchantment, so they’d done the best they could.

When class ended, I reminded myself that Ian had told me to look at the name of the history building. I knew of at least one current professor who was a Smith, in the delving program, but it was such a common name there was no reason to think he was any relation to the one who the building was named for. But if he wasn’t, why had Ian thought I’d find the name significant?

I started to get irritated with him, that he hadn’t just told me what he was getting at… but not so irritated that I forgot to look. Almost that irritated, but not quite. I stopped at the last moment before walking underneath the arch and looked up. In the moment before the person behind me slammed into my back and pushed me forward, I read the name: Ian H. Smith Hall.

Oh.

“Learn how to walk,” the girl who’d shoved into me said, blowing past me as I started forward again.

Either Ian just thought it was really super neat that a building had the same first name as he did, or there was a story there.

I kind of wondered if Hart was going to say something about Steff’s continued absence, but he didn’t… he just jumped right into the lesson.

“Last time we were talking about the goblin situation, in the wetlands north of Ravenport,” he said. “The first direct contact between the Empire and goblinoids, and it seemed to be going great: the locals went nuts over relatively cheap trinkets and common foodstuffs that they’d never seen before, and the envoys of the Unnamable One were making all kinds of impressive diplomatic breakthroughs. Of course, the whole thing was predicated on the kind of misconceptions that we outlined on Wednesday…”

“What kind of misconceptions?” Ms. La Belle asked. I heard Ms. Carter swearing not quite under her breath.

“The ones we went over last class,” Hart said.

“But what do you mean, ‘the kind of misconceptions’?”

“Misunderstandings about how goblin society is arranged, confusion about the level of political organization, a tendency to draw inferences from the very unrelated orcish society…”

“No, I remember all that… but what kind of misconceptions were they?” Ms. La Belle asked.

“Chocolate,” Hart said. “The breaking point came when, in order to secure the driest route for the emperor’s new highway, they ‘purchased’ the land being occupied by several disparate family groups from an unrelated goblin village they had established good relations with. Some people say that goblins had no concept of property before humans came. That’s probably not quite true, but they certainly didn’t have this kind of commerce, where land changes hands based on the movement of metal coins and papers. What happened from the point of view of the empire’s allies is their friends offered to evict some of their enemies from the region and pay them for it, and that seemed like a good deal. Those whose land had been ‘sold’ had no say in the deal, and probably weren’t even aware of it until the legionnaires showed up to evict them… and that was the end of any peace between humans and goblins in the region of Ravenport. Two more legions had to be sent south to defend the colony, with its valuable diamond mines… a small but significant weakening of the imperial forces in the north.”

“Wait, that doesn’t make any sense,” La Belle said. “Chocolate misconceptions?”

“Now, in the northern colonies, the settlers on what was then the western frontier had already had their own clashes with goblins, and in some cases they had even learned how to get along peacefully,” Hart said. “The dwarves of the Westering Lands had also been dealing with goblins… they weren’t fond of each other, but at the very least the dwarves were a potential source of information for relatively new arrivals. The Empire’s experience with dwarves back in the motherlands was that they were politically neutral unless threatened… the conventional wisdom was that the only way to get a military alliance with them was to hope your enemies got stupid and attacked them first. So, the official position was to avoid, avoid, avoid. If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed a possible option that the empire had overlooked, a bit of leverage they had that they could have used to gain favorable relations with the dwarves. Can anybody guess what that is?”

A few people raised their hands, including myself and Ms. Carter. Hart called on me.

“Diamonds,” I said. “Ravenport’s not near any dwarven kingdoms, so they probably didn’t even know about the deposits.”

“That is correct,” Hart said. “And the mines of Ravenport are some of the richest diamond mines in the Westering Lands. The dwarves in the north and the west mine iron and precious metals extensively, but they’ve always had to trade for most of their precious stones. Before humans established a transoceanic trade, this meant using treacherous trade routes through the northern ice reaches or with underground kingdoms, with frequent interference from kobolds. Selling diamonds to the dwarves… or even selling a share in the mines outright… would have been a very canny move for the empire. Would anybody care to speculate about why the Unnamable Emperor wouldn’t have explored that option?”

“He didn’t like dwarves?” La Belle said, without waiting to be called on.

“Astonishingly enough, that’s almost correct… the emperor might not have had any particular antipathy towards dwarves, but he was accustomed to signing trade agreements that were more like treaties, where smaller groups agreed to become his subjects, de facto or otherwise, in exchange for his beneficence. He did not like to deal with other races who could deal with him from a position of strength, who would not cede their own rights in exchange for the comfort and security of the Pax, who could not be assimilated into the empire. He would not deal with dwarven kings as kings, and he knew better than to expect them to deal with him as anything else. What else? Ms. Carter?”

“He was keeping with his policy of exporting all the wealth from the colonies,” she said. “Or importing it, from his point of view. But he wasn’t viewing the situation in the Westering Lands as being an actual economy so much as one big extended workhouse where citizens of the empire could toil for his benefit.”

“Ouch. Are you writing a pamphlet, Ms. Carter? I almost hate to tell you we already won that war,” Hart said. “But, yes, essentially. The output of the Ravenport mines was already accounted for in the emperor’s plans… whether he even considered the option of dealing with the dwarves and rejected it, or it never even crossed his mind, we don’t know.”

“Then why are we talking about it?” La Belle asked.

“Because, Ms. La Belle, to understand why things ended up the way they did, it can be instructive to look at how they might have gone instead,” Hart said. “There has been some interesting supposition about how differently things might have turned out if he had made that decision… the colonists had been trading with the dwarves on a limited basis from the beginning, but they wouldn’t have been able to match his offer. It’s doubtful that Magisterion could have won as many dwarves to his cause if the emperor was careful to spread the wealth around equally. The legions wouldn’t have been as hard-pressed in dealing with the goblins. The dwarves might have viewed any uprising that interfered with the diamond trade as a hostile action against themselves. It’s hard to imagine the revolution going the way it did, under those circumstances.”

The brief exploration of alternate history interested me on the usual geeky level, but the whole thing actually piqued my interest in another way… it was, as Hart had said, hard to imagine the old empire losing control of the colonies if they hadn’t so badly misjudged the situation with the races that were native to the area. The Unnamable Emperor probably could have mistreated his own people all he’d wanted if he’d sounded out the dwarves a little better, or sent people who displayed a little more intellectual curiosity about the funny green people in the south… really, there was no benefit to not doing a little homework when it came to those sorts of things.

Was it just laziness? Or xenophobia?

Goblins could certainly come off as creepy to mammalian races… though it was probably mutual… and dwarven secrecy had to be off-putting to someone who was trying to make up their own mind about how far to trust them. But were those things any kind of real excuse for someone who was trying to oversee an ocean-straddling empire made of many cultures and multiple races? Did “creepiness” really explain a bunch of career politicians and tacticians botching things so badly?

Or maybe the underlying lesson wasn’t one about racial tolerance at all… maybe it had just been the same arrogance that had made the emperor think the human colonists would just roll over for him, too.

Or maybe it was both… maybe it took that kind of arrogance to look at a continent populated with diverse peoples and think you could treat it as a blank slate, with only the people you’d placed there yourself counting for anything.

“Ms. Mackenzie, I’m losing you again, aren’t I?” Hart said. “Or have you been overcome with some kind of brilliant revelation?”

“I… I was just thinking about what you said,” I said.

“About the rum excise?”

“Um… before that,” I said. “About the dwarves and the goblins.”

“I’m all ears,” he said.

“I… um… there’s no benefit in ignoring another race that’s living somewhere you have interests,” I said.

“Yes, that was kind of the point.”

“Well, no, you were talking about all the benefits the emperor could have gained from dealing with the dwarves,” I said. “What I’m saying is that not only did he ignore those, but he did it for nothing… there was no rational benefit to ignoring them, there was no rational benefit to not taking the time to figure out the goblins, especially when the imperial legions started out on good terms with them. Their road north wasn’t going to be finished any time soon no matter what they did, so they had every opportunity to learn about the goblin culture, to sit down and ask the goblins about their culture, but they didn’t. It’s senseless… stupid and senseless.”

“Everybody write that down,” Hart said. “Humans did something stupid and senseless.”

“How man S-es are in ‘senseless’?” La Belle asked.

“Just the one, but it gets reused,” Hart said. “In all seriousness, though, you’re right, Ms. Mackenzie: it was downright boneheaded. It was one in a series of boneheaded moves that the empire made at its peak. This might seem counterintuitive, but there’s a reason the peak of any civilization is the peak, and it’s not because of the build up that comes before it… it’s the sharp decline that happens afterwards. Of course, no world power got to be where it is by being stupid… but once it gets there, it’s big enough and powerful enough that it can survive a few mistakes. This almost always results in making more mistakes. Why not? The first few weren’t so terrible. The damage from them may not even show up as damage immediately, but they start to stack up, and sooner or later the effects are going to be felt… the emperor might have been able to quash the rebellion with the help of the dwarves and with cooperation from the goblins, but the rebellion was a historical inevitability long before that point, because of his earlier missteps in dealing with the provincials… missteps that were still ongoing even as the open revolt spread. Which brings us back to the rum excise, which was an attempt to levy funds to suppress the northern rebellion by further taxes on the island holdings…”

I tried not to get too lost in the chain of thought as the class went on, but it was hard for me not to see the mistakes of the Unnamable Emperor being repeated in modern society, at both personal and institutional levels. The IRM in general and Magisterius University in particular both prided themselves on being racially inclusive, but in both cases the actual level of inclusiveness was very dependent on the other races’ willingness to assimilate in certain ways and to stay in their places in others. We were all thrown into the same holding area, even though we didn’t necessarily have any more in common than the old world orcs had with goblins.

It was stupid and senseless… and it wasn’t a huge stretch to imagine it ending as badly for the university as the policies of the emperor had ended for the old empire.

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I was treated again to fragmentary nightmares: running across the penthouse pool towards a rapidly fading Steff while dark shapes bit and slashed at my legs and pulled me down, Caron trussing me up to an X-shaped frame and hammering great big spikes through my parts of me, Mercy chasing me on a motorcycle.

My sex dreams had been strange and frightening to me before I’d been able to accept what many of them actually were… I would have hoped that being more at peace with my desires would allow me to enjoy them, but it seemed like I just plain didn’t remember them as often, if I was still having them… and in their absence I was getting these fun little scenarios.

None of my nightmares were complete stories. They weren’t even complete scenes… just snatches, vignettes. That made them worse. They could start at any time, repeat at any time, and they never ended. There was no conclusion until I finally woke up… or in this case, until Two woke me up with some less-than-gentle shaking.

It was a good thing sleep wasn’t ready to release me completely when she did, because it startled the fuck out of me to have a tiny, feminine hand grabbing my shoulder roughly at the same time when Mercy caught up to me and grabbed hold. I could barely manage a hoarse scream, much less a physical reaction.

“I’m sorry, Mack,” Two said. “I did not mean to frighten you, but you were shaking the bed. Also, it’s almost time to meditate with Dee.”

“Huh?” I said. “Oh… Dee.” I sat up slowly and yawned. “I haven’t really been keeping that up, have I?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Two didn’t even seem to hear it. Her eyes were locked on my bare chest. My first thought was that she was going to chastise me for not wearing anything to bed, despite Amaranth’s insistence that it was none of her business.

“You need to go to the healing center!” she said, her eyes huge as moons and luminescent in the darkness.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re hurt!” she said. She pointed at my nipple piercing. “You have metal stuck through you. You need to get healed.”

“Two, those are piercings,” I said. “Like earrings.”

“No they aren’t,” she said. “Earrings go in the ears and are pretty.”

“These are kind of pretty,” I said, trying to look down at my heart lock.

“No they aren’t!” Two said. “They’re stuck in your nipples. That isn’t pretty at all.”

“Well, thank you for your opinion, Two,” I said. “But these were a present from Amaranth, and they’re supposed to be like that.”

“Oh, okay,” Two said. “Are you going to come meditate today?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “Has Dee asked about me, other mornings?”

“No,” Two said. “I asked her if she thought we should wake you up and she said you would wake up or you wouldn’t.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess that makes sense.”

“It does make sense,” Two agreed, nodding sagely. “You would have to.”

“I’d have to what?”

“Wake up or not,” Two said. “I don’t think you could not do that.”

“I suppose you’re right about that,” I said.

“Yes.”

It was just past five thirty in the morning… Two’s interruption of my troubled sleep meant we had time to shower beforehand, which I chose to do because I’d woken up all sweaty.

When we got to the bathroom I kind of wished I’d decided to forego it… the place was a disaster area. One of the sinks had been plugged up and left on, resulting in a swamp centered around the drain in the middle of the floor. There were sodden wads of toilet paper stuck to the walls and rolls draped over the stalls and the curtain rods of the bathtub. The mirrors had been smeared with soap and lipstick and what looked like blood but didn’t smell like the kind that came from a vein. The artists responsible had written “FEEJEE PLUS MACK 4 EVER” in soap across all the mirrors. There was water all over the floor around the far right stall that couldn’t have been from the sinks, and the place smelled like… well, like a toilet.

Not a place with toilets in it, but an actual toilet.

Two looked like someone had punched her in the gut, there was so much wrongness all around. I didn’t want to keep walking, even in my flip-flops… there was too much moisture on the floor between us and the shower and I didn’t trust that all of it was water.

“Feejee is going to be in big trouble,” Two said, looking at the mirrors.

“Feejee didn’t write that,” I said.

“You did?”

“No,” I said. “I’d bet platinum to peanuts it was the Leightons, but see if Kiersta lifts a finger to punish them. You might as well go back to the room.”

“I want to take a shower,” Two said, looking across the bathroom at the open curtain. I could tell from the conflicted look on her face that she didn’t want to keep walking any more than I did.

“You should be okay using the next one down,” I said. I figured I’d skip it… I was more likely to encounter hostility for simply being out of perceived bounds than she was. “Don’t take any orders from anybody while you’re doing it, if anybody asks what you’re doing there tell them that ours is out of order, and if anybody gives you a serious problem just leave and come back up here.”

“Okay,” she said. “You aren’t coming, too?”

“No, I’m going to have a little talk with Kiersta,” I said. “Probably best if you’re not around, that way she can’t hold a grudge against you.”

“Okay,” she said.

We left the wreckage of the bathroom, Two turning left and heading downstairs while I turned right. I waited until I couldn’t hear Two’s footsteps and then knocked, firmly enough that I figured it would rouse even a drunken resident advisor.

There was no immediate response, so I knocked again. This time I heard blankets moving and the bed shifting, and then a crash of breaking glass followed by a groan.

“Kiersta?” I said through the door.

“Fuck off…” she moaned.

“You need to come out here,” I said.

“I’m sleeping.”

“You’re the R.A.,” I said.

“What the hell do you want from me?”

“I want you to come look and look at what your drinking buddies did to the bathroom!” I said.

I heard her coming closer and thought she was going to open the door. Instead she stopped at the other side of it and said, slightly more clearly and awake-sounding, “That’s your problem now.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not my problem. Cleaning the bathroom is one thing, but that’s just nasty.”

“It’s a bathroom,” Kiersta said.

“It’s vandalism,” I said. “And it’s disgusting.”

“You should have thought of that before you had sex in the shower.”

“I don’t even want to guess what they did in the shower,” I said. “And don’t forget, you’ve got to use it, too.”

“Do you think I would actually go in there? I shower in the fitness center.”

“Do something about it, or… I’m going to report you for drinking.”

“Good!” she yelled. The door ripped open inward and she was screaming in my face. “Do that! And when you find someone who gives a shit what anybody does in this hellhole, let me know!”

She stepped back and slammed the door so hard it bounced back from the frame instead of latching, then did that again before finally closing it forcefully but with her hand on the knob and locking it. Other doors were opening down the hall… Mariel, Maliko and Suzi, the twins, and both of the gnomes.

“Oh, of course,” Maliko said, looking at me before turning and going back into her room while Suzi stood there blinking sleepily. Sooni’s door opened and Maliko jumped and turned right back around, but it was Kai.

“Will everybody be the fuck quiet?” Kai shrieked. “Some of us have an examination this morning!”

Suzi’s head lolled to the side and she looked at Kai for a second before lashing out with one paw-like hand and swiping at her face. It was so random it seemed instinctive. Kai just stepped back out of the way and glared at her. She looked around the hall and spotted me, her lantern eyes locking with mine. Kai had no subtle arts that I knew of, but she might as well have been a telepath for how loud and clear I got the message: this is your fault and if it affects my grades, I will kill you for it.

“What in Owain’s name is going on?” Hazel asked.

“Hazel Willikins, bite your tongue!” Honey said, pinching her elbow and then making a tossing gesture over her shoulder.

“Er, I meant Owain,” Hazel said. I must have misheard her the first time, because I was sure she’d said that.

“Of course you did,” Honey harrumphed.

The Leightons, of course, could barely contain themselves through all this.

“You think this is funny?” I asked, stomping over towards them. Sara got a gleam of panic in her eye while Tara looked defiant. “Other people have to use that bathroom!”

“Oh, yeah, I guess you’ll have to find somewhere else to take Feejee out,” Tara said. “Hopefully your next date spot will be almost as classy.”

“People are going to have to start getting ready for class soon,” I said.

“Oh, wow, better get cleanin’, then,” Tara said. “And, in case you haven’t seen the shower yet… brace yourself before you go in there.”

“I didn’t do that!” Sara said. “That was all…”

“Oh, shut your mouth,” Tara said. “We didn’t do anything… we just got up early and saw it.”

“Wait a tick,” Hazel said, which I guessed was like shire slang for “a second” or something. “What did you two do to the lav?”

“The lav?” Sara repeated, and they both snickered.

“They wrecked the place,” I said. “Water, toilet paper… other stuff. It’s disgusting. You wouldn’t want to go in there with your bare feet.”

“Oi!” Hazel said, turning scarlet and smoothing down the front of her floor-length robe. “You don’t have to tell the whole world about that!”

“I thought you said ‘everyone does it’,” Honey said, rolling her eyes.

“Not the point!” Hazel said.

“We don’t know what she’s talking about,” Sara said. “We didn’t do anything. It was like that when we got there.”

“Yeah, all I know is that I’d hate to be the one who has to clean it up,” Tara said.

“Well, you’re going to be, because I’m not doing it,” I said.

“Kiersta said…” Sara said.

“Fuck Kiersta,” I said. “What’s she going to do? One shout to my lawyer and she’d lose her job,” I said, not having any clue if this was true or not but pretty sure Kiersta could hear every word. “I’m not cleaning up your mess, and if you don’t clean it up, nobody’s going to be able to use the showers.”

“That’s not our fault,” Sara said. “You’re supposed to clean it up. Kiersta…”

“Shut up about Kiersta,” I said.

“Hold on,” Hazel said, shuffling over. “I have a headache, I’m queasy, I ache all over, and I’m not a big fan of being woken up early in general. I have to get up at the crack of eleven today and the first thing I’m going to want is a shower. Is it going to be fit to use then, or isn’t it?”

“Don’t talk to us, bunny,” Tara said. She pointed her thumb at me. “Talk to the help.”

“I’m talking to you,” Hazel said. “Call me bunny again and I’ll kick both your arse.”

“‘Arse’,” Sara repeated, and they both giggled.

“What is wrong with you? Were you born in a barn?”

“Were you born in a dollhouse?” Sara asked.

“I was born on a boat,” Hazel said.

“Hazel!” Honey said, more urgently than she had objected to Hazel’s evidently profane pronouncement earlier.

“I don’t care who knows,” Hazel said to her. “I’m proud of it.”

“Honestly, I wish you could hear how you sound,” Honey said.

“I am!” Hazel said. “I’m proud of where I come from.”

“Why in the world would you be proud of your mother’s smelly, rancid cunt?” Tara asked.

Hazel turned a shade of purple-red normally reserved for eldritch abominations.

“Hazel… think about your condition…” Honey pleaded, sounding terrified.

I took a step back. As I did, I remembered Steff’s description of Hazel “going orcshit” over the term “motherfucker”… but that was only after I’d started backing away. I didn’t have to know anything about Hazel or her past behavior to see where this was going. I’d step in if things went too poorly for Hazel… the twins seemed pretty athletic and she was no fighter, though I thought the way Sara seemed to be trying to turn and scramble away while Tara tried to stand their ground might take away some of her disadvantage

“Hazel, they didn’t mean it!” Honey shrieked.

“Oh, I fucking meant it,” Tara said. “What are you going to do, bunny? Dig me to death?”

With an angry howl, Hazel charged forward, barreling into their legs and knocking them down. Tara’s arm punched her in the face while Sara’s flailed around, but she might as well have been punching an ogre or a dwarf’s skull for all that it slowed Hazel’s fury. She pulled herself up until she was straddling the twins’ torso and started punching at Tara’s head with alternating fists.

“Kiersta! Kiersta!” Sara shrieked as Hazel pretty much beat Tara’s face in.

More doors had opened. Everybody who lived on the floor was out in the hall except for the skirmishers, Celia, Leda, Amaranth, and Dee… and Kiersta, naturally. I was trying to figure out how to get Hazel off of Tara without hurting her, especially given her “condition” as Amaranth had diagnosed it. Tara was trying to push her off with her one arm; Sara was useless, sobbing with her eyes squeezed shut.

Before I could decide what, if anything, to do, a powerful force wrapped itself around me and yanked me backwards off my feet. I flew down the hall away from the melee, passing the swishing robes of Dee as she flew forward.

“Hazel Willikins!” she called as I landed on my butt halfway down the hall. “Be at peace!”

That worked about as well as you might have expected it to. Dee waved her arms in the air and became too bright to look at. When my vision cleared, Hazel was floating up off of the twins, a placid expression on her face. Dee guided her mentally back towards Honey while she herself crouched by the fallen form of the Leightons and grew bright once more as she gave them healing energy they didn’t deserve.

“Hazel, I wish you’d think about your daughter!” Honey said.

“I am not having any daughters!” Hazel said, snapping out of the divinely-bestowed serenity at once, but fortunately not reverting back to her state of unreasoning rage.

Sara suddenly started shrieking and kicking spasmodically. Dee stepped back at once. Tara groaned and touched her head.

“I apologize for any unexpected familiarity,” Dee said to them.

“Get away from us, you cowl headed freak!” Sara said.

“Somebody provide a concise summary of events, please,” Dee said, looking around the hall. Her eyes settled on me. “Mackenzie?”

“They trashed the bathroom,” I said coming forward. “Because Kiersta said I have to clean it.”

“Why under earth should that task fall to you?” Dee asked. “Never mind. I think I can surmise.” She looked around. “And then one of the twins said a word against Two’s friend Hazel’s departed mother, I suppose?”

“Hey, that’s right!” Hazel said.

“Let it go,” Honey said, grabbing Hazel’s sleeve.

“I believe you owe Miss Hazel an apology,” Dee said to the Leightons. “And then she will apologize to you.”

“Like hell,” Tara said, as they got to their feet. She groaned and clutched at her head with her hand.

“That goes for double for me,” Hazel said.

“I can’t force you to apologize,” Dee said. “But I’ll ask again once I’ve finished healing you, as duty…”
“You’re not touching us!” Sara said.

“Please,” Dee said. “I would not be offering if it were not dire. The most superficial portion of your wounds healed first. I do not believe the underlying damage is…”

“Go fuck yourself, drow bitch,” Tara said. “I’m not letting you do any more black-ass demon witchcraft on me.”

The twins turned to go back into their room.

“Go to the healing center, then,” Dee said. They both flipped her off. “Don’t let her fall asleep!” Dee called after them as they closed the door. “Willful… willful idiots!” Dee shouted at their door, then let off a stream of what certainly sounded like swear words. She turned around to face Hazel, her eyes narrow and her nostrils wide. “And you! Your kinswoman has the right of it! Does avenging the memory of your mother take precedence over the safety of your daughter?”

“I… don’t… have… a… bloody… daughter!” Hazel yelled. “I can’t have a daughter, I won’t have a daughter, I don’t have a…”

There was a pop and a flash of light and Hazel was asleep on her feet. Dee’s mental powers caught her mid-slump, tilted her gently back, and then floated her past a very stunned looking Honey into their room, where I have little doubt she continued floating until she reached her bed.

“Please try to keep her calm when she wakes,” Dee said to Honey, who snorted. “And, out of curiosity, how do you know she’s having a daughter?”

“Oh… um… how do you?” Honey asked.

“I was merely repeating what I heard from you,” Dee said. “But it’s the default assumption… or it is, among my people.”

“Oh… the same,” Honey said. “For mine, I mean.”

“I did not realize gnomish culture was so gynocentric,” Dee said.

“Oh, well, if a woman’s expecting we say it’s a daughter and if a man is, we say it’s a son,” Honey said.

“Indeed,” Dee said.

“I should get back to bed,” Honey said, hurrying into her room and shutting the door, then locking it.

Other people, apparently deciding the show was over and realizing just how fucking early it was, were also drifting back towards their beds. Mariel was still standing in front of Puddy’s room, staring at the bathroom door and then whipping her head around in a dizzying pattern down the rest of the hall before staring at the bathroom.

“Don’t be so fucking dainty!” Puddy grumbled sleepily from the depths of her room.

I sighed.

“We’ve got to do something about the bathroom. Or I guess I do,” I said. “They only did it because of me.”

“That doesn’t make it your responsibility,” Dee said. “Is it simply untidy, or have they… befouled… it?”

“I think it’s beyond befouled,” I said.

“I will see to it then,” Dee said.

“Dee, you don’t have to,” I said.

“Somebody must… I have never cleaned anything beyond the chapel floor, but I believe I can remove the mess without having contact with it,” Dee said. “No one else, perhaps save for Two, could do that, and she does enough cleaning after others as it is. Do you intend to join me this morning?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Please go downstairs and reserve us a chamber. I will join you shortly.”

“Thanks,” I said. I hesitated, torn. “Uh… are you sure you don’t want any help?”

“I need not touch your mind to see that you are hoping I will say no,” Dee said. “Your offer is appreciated, but your efforts would not combine effectively with mine. Thank you, but no.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I turned and I headed past Mariel for the stairs. Dee followed behind me. I glanced back from just inside the stairwell and saw that she was turning to face Kiersta’s door.

Part of me wanted to know what she was going to do or say, but most of me didn’t want to be anywhere near the kind of ass-chewing I thought Dee just might be able to administer.

Discuss this story.

Sooni was absent from logic… it was mutual, I’m sure, but a little worrying.

Maliko was there, looking even more irritable than usual, which probably meant that she’d been told to go while Sooni skipped. If something was actually wrong, I’m sure Maliko would have shown some concern… or else not bothered to show up herself.

It was a little worrying, though, as I said. Sooni had already sloughed off her student senate responsibilities… what would happen if she stopped going to classes, too, in order to pursue her pipe dream of the moment? If she blew her shot at a foreign education, she’d be screwing Kai over, too.

I wasn’t sure why I was worried about that, though… Kai acted like any sign of sympathy from me was bitter poison.

I was disappointed that Sooni wasn’t there for other reasons. I was having a hard time picturing exactly how her tail would go when we were riding our motorcycle… would it flap out behind us, or would she have to tuck it underneath her or wrap it around her waist? I could picture her tail and how it moved when she walked, but I wasn’t quite sure how that translated when she was in a different position. I thought if I could watch her sitting down, it might give me a better idea.

But if she wasn’t going to bother to show up, I wasn’t going to bother wasting time thinking about her. I had my own problems. Naturally, I was worried about Steff… I’d looked around for Amaranth a bit after lunch, but she’d either been off to her own classes or over on the boys’ side taking care of her. The situation with Feejee was also very much on my mind. Even though I still had a full day to go before it, I was also “looking forward” to my next class with Callahan. I felt about that class the way I’d often found myself thinking about high school as a whole… not only was it a horrible ordeal when I was there, but when it was over I couldn’t even feel relief because I knew I’d just have to go back again.

Considering how much I loved learning and enjoyed other classes, it seemed to me that there was something terribly wrong when I found myself dreading a lesson like that. I wasn’t any kind of an elitist, but I wondered what would happen if they started giving special weight to teacher evaluations and complaints made by students who performed well academically. We were the ones who would know what sorts of things constituted a good teacher or a bad one, as opposed to one who just taught an unpopular subject or expected students to actually put forth some effort at learning.

A good teacher was somebody who knew how to inspire students. If Callahan inspired me to do something, it wasn’t to learn how to fight… take a hot bath, maybe, or curl up with a book, or crawl back into bed for a late afternoon nap. There were so many things I could have done with that hour and a half every other school day that would have been more pleasant and more productive than getting beat up for the amusement of a sadistic bully.

Also, the way Steff got all dopey over her was just disturbing. She wasn’t even attractive. Her skin was kind of tan-ish, but it was a dull tan, not a deep bronze like Sooni had. And she fought in skirts, which had to be a stupid thing to do and didn’t really give her any aesthetic benefit, since her legs were so short and chunky, not long and slender and with the perfect blend of softness and tone. There was something that was just plain off about her face, too. It was subtle… I’d never really been able to put my finger on it. Steff said it was a result of her mixed heritage. Her face was approximately like a human’s, but not quite.

Of course, it wasn’t the inhumanness that bothered me… Sooni’s face was slightly vulpine and I found it perfectly lovely.

Then it hit me all of a sudden that I was being a little stupid.

No, more than that… I was being a total hypocrite.

I felt horrible, just horrible.

Here I’d let myself be set up in some small way as some kind of anti-racist figure on campus, and I was thinking that a woman with orc blood was ugly. If Steff was to believed, I couldn’t judge Callahan on the human standards of beauty, anyway. I was being horribly racist and humanocentric.

Also, Amaranth would probably tell me I shouldn’t be judging people’s looks in the first place… and she was right. I was in the middle of class. The professor was outlining the principles we’d be following for the next block of assignments. I had better things to think about than a crazy bitch with no business teaching.

I wondered what her actual qualifications were. I could kind of accept that a combat teacher wouldn’t need to be some kind of academic giant and I could see why maybe they’d have to relax the teaching standards to get the best fighters, but was she really the best?

She could trip me up pretty easily, but as Steff had said of Gloria, that didn’t prove anything. She went around all “durrr, in real battle you get killeded dead, durrr,” but she looked to be all of like twenty-four or twenty-five… when exactly had she gone off and seen all these real battles that supposedly made her such a badass?

She was probably just an urban barbarian who’d seen one too many war movies. I imagined that if she were dropped into a real war zone, full of combatants who weren’t students and who had real weapons and battle magic, she’d probably piss herself with terror… and then die.

There was something kind of pathetic about the way she took such pleasure in fighting with college kids… it was probably the only way she could live out the sad little fantasies that kept her going. When you look out on a field that’s got a hundred people on it and know you could take any of them, it’s probably easier to feel like you’re some kind of ultimate warrior than if you have to go out into the real world and actually put your life on the line.

I pitied her, really.

Even better than seeing her dropped into a war zone, though, would be if I really had a motorcycle. I could just imagine roaring up, breaking through the enemy lines. Sooni could help scatter them with her green bolt spell, and I could even throw around some fire… I mean, I wouldn’t, in real life… but if there really was a war, that would be okay.

We’d get up to her right as she was being overwhelmed, and send the bad guys packing… and she’d look up in confusion, blinking at me through her tears, and I’d say something like, “Buck up, ‘Crybaby’… this isn’t the classroom.” Or maybe “school’s out”, since she’s probably never seen the inside of a classroom.

It would be best if Steff was there, too, because she could be holding guys off with her knives… and also because then she’d see how worthless ‘Jilly’ actually is.

Actually, this was starting to sound pretty cool, like for a show or comic book or something. It would be a team… I’d be like the main character, with the cool motorcycle and the fire powers, and Steff would be like the snarky antihero and the hand-to-hand expert, and Sooni with her magic would be the long distance support and the ditzy comic relief, and… after a motivational speech made her get over her big fat tears… Callahan would be the dumb, strong warrior-type.

The fact that she’d still panic when in real danger sometimes would also work for comic relief. She could have lines like, “A true warrior never runs from peril.” Then when she saw the villain’s minions, she’d start running away, and another character would go, “I thought you said a warrior never runs from peril.” and she’d be like, “There could be some peril over here!”

Really, the idea worked on a lot of different levels.

For it to really work as an ensemble, though, we’d need Amaranth for healing and to kind of balance everybody else out. She wouldn’t have to fight.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was almost as much potential in this idea as there was in my fan fiction. I mean, I wouldn’t write it so it was about me, exactly… but it would be a character who was sort of like me, and one sort of like Steff, and so on. There would have to be adjustments to make for a better story and stuff like that. The real life people would just be starting points.

On the subject of starting points, I’d have to do a lot of work to carry it beyond the basic idea. Would the stories take place in the real world but with a little science, or would the “motorcycle” be a magical facsimile, like the one in my wish assignment? I could just set it in a world where science holds sway over magic, but one of the things that had always bothered me about Mecknights was that the motorcycles were so rare when scientifically anybody should have been able to make them.

I wanted a reason for my motorcycle… I mean, the character who was sort of like me’s motorcycle—to be special.

So, some kind of real world analogue, then… and maybe it would be best not to explain where the motorcycle came from right away. It could be a secret… or a mystery, even to the characters.

But I’d still need an overall storyline. The idea had come from envisioning a battlefield, so probably a war of some kind would be involved… that would make it easy to come up with conflict and enemies to fight and stuff. The question was, should it be based on a real historical war, or set in a near future scenario with a new war breaking out?

There were definitely possibilities there.

I had to smile. To think that Callahan was stuck lording over a bunch of kids who would graduate and then go out and get better jobs than her while she stays behind with nothing but her dreams of glory and her delusions of being some great warrior while I was coming up with an idea that could very easily end up being my ticket to greater things.

She was only a little bit older than me, but the most she could look forward to was the possibility that if she stuck around long enough she might be allowed to coach the skirmish team instead of being stuck in the pit. I, on the other hand, had prospects… more than that, I had plans. There was my fan fic, which could easily become the springboard to a greater career as a writer. There was also my idea for making custom toys. That could be huge. Hell, there was even Sooni’s idea of making a clothing site together. That could definitely go somewhere.

And if I could turn this latest idea into a comic or animation or something, it could become the next Mecknights… or even bigger than that.

Of course, my euphoria was somewhat diminished by the knowledge that in a little over twenty-four hours she’d probably be hammering me into the ground… but I just had to put up with that for one semester and then I’d have my WP credit and I could get on with the serious business of being a student, and another three and half years after that I’d have my bachelor’s and be on my way. At that point even if none of my many possible projects had taken off, I could just stick it out for another few years to become a master enchanter and really bring in piles of money.

I had all that going for me. What did Callahan have? She was one step above the troglodytes I’d went to high school with, who were probably stuck quarrying stone and bagging groceries… jobs they might one day lose to an unintelligent automaton.

They’d all thought that they were so great, but I would bet anything bet that real life had been a rude awakening for them. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would feel like to go from thinking you’re better than everybody to realizing that the world doesn’t give a shit and you have to work for success like everybody else.

If I were petty, then when I was a master enchanter… or a successful animation creator… or a rich and famous writer… I’d go back home just once so I could see what everybody else had amounted to, or rather failed to amount to, and lord it over them a bit. But I wasn’t petty… and also it was probably a little dangerous for me to go around provoking people like that.

That was the fly in the ointment. No matter how successful I became, I would still be a half-demon.

But if I managed to succeed in life anyway in spite of that, that would really be saying something… I’d really have something to rub in everybody’s faces.

I was still mulling over the various creative choices for my concept… with an occasional thought about what kind of fame and fortune it could possibly bring… when the bell rang. I gathered up my things and headed for the door, wondering if I could enlist Steff to do some concept art or something. Actually, I thought that if I could get her to “doodle” a comic it would be a pretty damn good beginning, but I’d have to ease her into the idea.

I felt a soft whack on my side as Maliko passed me. Her tail had twitched, whipping into me.

“Excuse you,” I said.

She didn’t respond. She was looking down at a closed notebook in her hand, smiling.

“I’m so glad Sooni thought to ask me to take notes for her,” she said, purring. “It would be terrible for her if she didn’t have those instructions written down.”

“Instructions?” I repeated. An icy lump started to grow in my stomach.

“The instructions the teacher wrote out,” Maliko said. “For the project.”

“Project?”

“That he spent the whole class going over,” Maliko said. “He said it was very important. Half of our grade.”

Shit. How in the world had I missed that?

I raced back to the classroom, but the professor had already erased the board and was marking up some problems for another class. He looked back at me at the sound of the door opening.

“Did you forget something, Ms…. er, I’m sorry, I’m terrible with names,” he said.

“Um… I guess not,” I said. “Um… if I had a question about the assignment…?”

“If you can make it quick, I’ll do my best to answer,” he said. “But if it’s anything more complex, perhaps you should come visit me outside of class.”

Nothing complex, but… what is the assignment?

“Um… you know, never mind,” I said.

“Right, well, my office hours are listed,” he said, and turned back to the chalkboard.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

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.

In a large house on a cliff overlooking the northwestern coastal waters of Yokan, a man with fur and features like those of a fox stood watching the wind beat the torrential rain against his window. He could not even see the fury of the ocean below, so dark was the sky and so thick was the water against the glass.

“This storm was supposed to land a week ago,” the kitsu businessman said to a younger fox-figure who stood a respectful distance away from both him and the spectacle of the storm. “I postponed my departure in order to avoid the typhoon, when I could have been safely away had I left as scheduled.”

“You would have been away, Hoshinotama-senpai, but your wife and unborn child would have been left alone to face the brunt of the storm’s power.”

“While I am honored to be known for my leadership abilities, Kiyoshi-kun, the walls do not gain strength in my presence,” Hoshinotama said. “My lovely wife would have been just as safe in any event. What concerns me is the distressful inaccuracy. For what purpose do I pay the diviners, if their information is no more reliable than that of a fisherman watching the sunset?”

The younger fox considered before answering.

“The missionaries say that of what men propose, the gods dispose,” he said.

“Missionaries,” Hoshinotama said. He snorted. “They may bear the egg and the arms, but beneath their robes they are traders and schemers, all.”

“Certainly you are right,” Kiyoshi said. “But it is true that the precepts of heaven must overcome the premonitions of mortal creatures. Can you not see a higher purpose in your presence here, when your wife struggles to bring your child into the world?”

“I was inclined to believe she was mistaken about the signs,” Hoshinotama said. “It is weeks too early, and the omens were all auspicious. But now the skies themselves have opened up to show me the folly of trusting in omens, and I have decided that it is good. My son is impatient to be born, and he will do so in his family home, in the sight of his ancestors.”

“It will be a son, then?” Kiyoshi asked.

The older fox let out a bitter bark and turned away from the window, taking his eyes off the raging storm for the first time in over an hour.

“The same fraudulent stargazers who prophesized an earlier landfall and an uneventful birth think it will be a daughter,” he said. “I can think of no more definitive proof that a male child is on the way… can you?”

“I would not disagree with you, Senpai.”

“You must not be worried, my friend,” Hoshinotama said. He smiled thinly. “My son will of course take my place in time, but not at the expense of your own future. My star is rising. There will always be a place for you in my business. I would not forget my promise to your father, and neither could I ignore your potential.”

“Your praise quite embarrasses me,” Kiyoshi said.

“Forgive me such unmanly emotion,” Hoshinotama said. “The impending arrival of my first son… it threatens to overwhelm me.”

“My forgiveness is not necessary, but it is yours for the asking,” Kiyoshi said. “But if I may have your forgiveness in turn, then I must ask… are you not concerned? The labor has gone on for most of the day… weather or no weather, it may be time to send for the healers.”

“I have already sent for them,” Hoshinotama said flatly. “They say they will come when they can. But… I am not overly worried. There is a reason it’s called ‘labor’, after all. The struggle… it will be good for my son, I think.”

“Then there is nothing else that you can do,” Kiyoshi said.

“Except to wait,” Hoshinotama said.

“Except to wait,” Kiyoshi agreed.

The storm and the labor had both been ongoing when Kiyoshi finally retired for the night. He awoke to an eerie calm outside the house, and to the realization that his host was standing at the end of his bed.

“Senpai?”

“My wife is dead,” Hoshinotama said.

“Your son?”

The fox shook his head.

“My most sincere condolences on both of your losses,” Kiyoshi said.

“I know nothing of the raising of girls,” Hoshinotama said. “One of the household nekos recently had a kitten. She can see to the child until it has reached a respectable age.”

“At least you will always have a part of your wife.”

“Not the part that I need.”

Despite his initial apathy, the businessman found that he had a certain fondness for little Suzune, the disappointing girl who had cost him his wife. At first he had only checked on her progress in a cursory fashion, out of a sense of obligation, but now he made a point to set aside a day as often as he could—often as frequently as every two or three weeks, when business didn’t keep him away—to visit with her, and to quiz her nurse on her education and her behavior.

She was an overly imaginative child, and a willful one… but truthfully, his expectations for her had never been that high, so it was difficult for her to disappoint him.

“And have her manners improved at all?” he asked the nekoyokai servant woman who had nursed and then raised her.

She lowered her head even further and explained, in halting and fearful tones, that there was only so much she could do when she was not permitted to discipline the child.

“You will have to make do,” Hoshinotama said.

At that moment, his daughter skipped into view. She was hand-in-hand with the neko’s daughter, her constant companion, Mariko… or “Leeko”, as she rendered it. She had problems forming some of her sounds.

“Sooooooni,” Mariko said, purring her butchered version of the young vixen’s name. “You can’t.”

“And what can my daughter not do, little one?” Hoshinotama asked.

“Father!” little Suzune said, excited as always to see him. “Father, father!”

“Hello, my little darling,” he said. “I hope you do not let your companion dictate your behavior.”

“No, I didn’t!” Suzune said proudly. “She said I can’t but I said I can and I will!”

Hoshinotama chuckled indulgently. His daughter’s willfulness wasn’t all bad. If only she had been a boy…

“That is good to hear,” he said. “But, what is it you will do?”

“Grow up to be a neko like her!” Suzune declared. Not registering the look of horrified shock on her father’s face, she added, “They’re so pretty!”

The servant was dismissed immediately… immediately following the most severe thrashing she could receive without causing a scandal. Hoshinotama watched her hobbling down towards the compound gate with her daughter slung over her shoulder. His daughter was at his side, restrained by two of his staff. The child was bawling, screaming “Leeko! Leeko!” over and over again. The nekoyokai kitten was answering in a similar fashion.

The kitsuyokai father signaled to one of his men. In later years, he would never be sure if he’d done this for his daughter’s peace of mind, or for his own, but it was such a small thing that it hardly mattered.

“Send someone to the neko village to buy the child,” he said.

“If the mother will not sell?”

“Bring her to an understanding.”

“Father, Maliko says there is a neko in the village who has my name,” Suzune said. She’d learned to form her Rs properly long ago, but she still retained the childish mispronunciation of her bond companion’s name. “Suzune the neko.”

“And what, my daughter, would you like me to do about this?”

“Maliko says you can have nekos killed.”

“Maliko should not speak about kitsu affairs.”

“I don’t want there to be a neko with my name,” Suzune said. “It isn’t fair.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“I don’t want her to be there any more,” Suzune said. “Either kill her or make her leave.”

“Suzune-chan, if we treat the nekos badly for no reason, it will fall back upon us,” Hoshinotama said. “Do you understand?”

“No!” Suzune said. She stomped her foot. The noise was appalling… she’d recently taken to wearing a pair of ugly wooden sandals, and none of the servants could convince her to take them off indoors. “It isn’t for no reason! She shouldn’t get to be Suzune the neko! If you won’t get rid of her, then change her name!”

“Darling daughter, we can’t go changing the names of people who don’t belong to us. It simply isn’t how things are done.”

“Then buy her! I don’t care!” Suzune said.

“I will not buy you another neko simply to change her name.”

“Are you saying that I can’t have her?”

Hoshinotama sighed.

“But you do not even want her,” he said. “You only want…”

“I do, I do, I do!” Suzune shrieked. The words turned into a loud, sustained wail. To Hoshinotama’s chagrin, the furry little child had inherited the power of her mother’s voice, if not the facility with which to use it.

He summoned a servant to go to the village.

“Ikayup! Ikayup!” the small striped cat girl shouted, running up to the bench where the pale spotted one sat reading.

“What is it?” Ikayup asked resignedly, not looking up from her book.

“I saw a girl who looked like you!”

“That’s nice,” Ikayup said. “I’d like to finish reading my book, please.”

“What is it?”

“A method of presenting pages of written material bound within a cover.”

Her sister didn’t understand exactly what Ikayup had said, but she understood that she was hearing a put-on and not a proper answer.

“Tell me, or I’m telling mother,” she said.

“It’s a Chung romance.”

“You can’t read Chung.”

“I can’t yet,” Ikayup said. “But I almost can.”

“Why do you want to read another language anyway? You read too much anyway.”

“I read because I want to,” she said. “Because I don’t want to spend my life as a servant.”

“Oh. Guess where I saw her.”

“Who?” Ikayup asked.

“The girl who looks like you.”

“No.”

“Just guess!”

“I don’t want to,” Ikayup said.

“Do you want me to tell you, then?”

“Not really.”

“Inside a television!” her sister exclaimed.

That got Ikayup’s atttention. She let the book close around one clawed finger and looked at her sister disgustedly.

“Where did you see a television, tiny liar?”

“Mother took me with her when she went to clean the big houses,” the younger neko said. “I got to watch the television while she dusted, and there was a girl who looked just like you, with a weird splotch on her eye and everything.”

“They aren’t splotches, they’re spots,” Ikayup said. “And some people think they’re lucky.”

“Mother says next year you can go cleaning with her,” the younger cat said. “I’m jealous. You’ll get to watch TV all the time.”

“I’d rather just read…” Ikayup started to say, only to be interrupted by a shrill, screeching scream from a passing carriage.

“Stop the coach! STOP THE COACH!”

Ikayup scowled in irritation. It was easily the most horribly piercing, grating voice she’d ever heard, even including that of her sister. She was happy to see that the coach did stop, if only because that stopped the screaming. If she went her whole life without ever hearing another spoiled, rich kitsu bitch throwing a tantrum like that, she’d consider her life well-spent.

She opened her book back up and buried her face in it once more, thus missing the coach’s door opening, and the figure who stepped out of it…

It seemed so long ago. I’d learned more than I cared to about her in the weeks since then, but that first impression had been powerful. Sure, she was a stupid silly, little girl who’d never grown up, but she’d put me in my place without even trying.

Today, she looked even taller somehow, if that was possible.

She was decked out in black, with a dress whose top looked like it was two scarves crossed over each other and slung under her breasts, lifting them up and leaving a good portion of her chest exposed. Her mountainous hair was done up in almost conservative fashion, with tight, thin braids piled into a beehive that was secured with black ribbon. It was still ridiculous, but it didn’t do as much to pull focus from her chest as some of the more outrageous hairstyles she’d worn.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked when I realized I hadn’t heard her.

“I did not say anything,” she said. “I was waiting for you to wish me good luck.”

“What for?” I asked.

“Today is my first senate meeting,” Sooni said. “There will be a planning meeting with all the other senators from our hall and we are picking a leader to represent our delegation.”

“Don’t you think they’ll probably pick one of the second floor senators?” I asked.

“Why would they do that?” Sooni asked me.

“Because they’re seniors,” I said. She stared at me uncomprehendingly. “Because everybody else probably already knows them,” I elaborated. “Because they’ve got experience, you know… or maybe because they’ve earned it?”

“Well, what in the world does that have to do with anything?” Sooni asked, scowling.

I thought about how best to explain the concept of actual personal merit to somebody who’d evidently been insulated from it her whole life, then finally gave up and simply said, “Good luck, Sooni.”

“Thank you!” she said, and tottered back to her desk. I realized she’d traded her big wooden sandals for even taller black heels. The bottom of the dress clung to her legs instead of flaring out in a skirt like most of the things she wore. It did have a slit up the back for her tail, and the hemline was still ludicrously high.

“Good luck, Sooni,” Maliko said as Sooni took her seat. “I just know that you are going to be chosen.”

“What do you know about it?” Sooni said.

Maliko glared over her shoulder at me right until the beginning of class, and kept shooting looks back at me whenever the teacher’s back was turned. It was like high school. Or elementary school.

Well, the curved magical sword Maliko wore on her back made it a little different… but I’d survived scarier fights in my weeks at the university. I wasn’t afraid of an overgrown pussycat with a sycophantic crush who was too stupid to understand that I had absolutely no interest in spending an entire night worshiping Sooni with my tongue, or something unspeakably gross like that.

Immediately after lunch, it had seemed like a vast gulf of time stretched out between me and my appointment with Viktor. Now that I only had two classes to go, I wondered why I’d been so desperate to fill that void. How was I supposed to focus on spell layering and contingent linking with a brooding half-ogre hanging over my head? I’d been all stoic and noble when Steff had spoken of taking my place, but now I was starting to think about what that actually meant.

Though I’d still take the punishment without hesitation if it meant a chance to be with her, my mind was starting to try to imagine how bad it could get. I thought about real pain: me hurting my foot on the protection circle, Tyler signing me into submission in a panic, Iona latching onto my crotch with her teeth, Gloria jamming a phantasmal sword blade through my heart…

Was that it? Would Viktor have a mockbox? He could kill me over and over again, cut me to pieces… the ones we used in weapons class only did momentary wounds and pain, but the more complex models used for skirmish matches could convey the appearance and sensation of dismemberment.

If he had the necessary contacts to get his hands on one of those, I could be in for a very long night. As far as I knew, he was going to honor my blacklist, but “no phantom dismemberments” wasn’t on it.

Or would he simply use brute strength? With his muscles and my invulnerability, it was hard to imagine how a mockery could inflict more pain than he might with his bare hands and feet.

He could always decide to go for something more… intricate, though. Ogres as a culture considered torture to be the highest art form. Viktor personally eschewed it in favor of more uplifting forms of personal expression, but he couldn’t have grown to adulthood without learning a few tricks.

If he was willing to inflict actual injury, there were any number of things he could do with blessed items or magic weapons. Of course, there were some circumstances in which holy water or symbols would spontaneously “unholy” rather than allowing themselves to be used for unseemly ends, but I wasn’t sure that tormenting a half-demon would count regardless of the motivations or subtexts involved.

Holy water…

I shuddered, my hands gripping the sides of the desk as if for support. A spasm in my spine almost tore the top of the desk off.

It was unbearable, not knowing what was coming. Part of me hoped that I’d show up and he’d tell me that this had been my torture, but the rest of me knew that was ridiculous.

This was only part of the torture.

It didn’t seem like I was learning anything during that logic class, except that Maliko’s death glares seemed to grow more and more impotent the longer I spent trying to guess at Viktor’s plans for me.

Steff said she’d been “practicing.” Did they have specialized implements tucked away somewhere in that lair-like dorm room? Did the time out box have other functions I hadn’t managed to discover during my time in it?

There was a thought. Would Viktor enlist Steff into the punishment in order to try to teach her a lesson? That seemed unlikely. She’d wanted to “play” with me for a long time, and she knew how to get me excited effortlessly. If he was serious about making me suffer, he wouldn’t risk letting her turn it into a game.

The class dragged on forever, and then it was over far too quickly. I wanted to dawdle on the way to the history building, though I knew that the speed at which I arrived would have no effect whatsoever on the orderly progression of time for the rest of the afternoon.

When I got there, Steff grabbed me in the hallway… literally. Her hand shot out of the alcove in front of a darkened classroom and I had a moment of flashback to Belinda’s ambush before I realized who it was that had snagged me. She dragged me through the open door, shutting it soundlessly behind her.

“Fuck, Steff, I don’t know if I’m safe from heart attacks,” I said, shaking uselessly with nervous energy. I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears. “As if I’m not keyed up badly enough, worrying about what’s to come…”

“Yeah, that’s, um, what I wanted to tell you,” she said. Her eyes were darting around the dark room, as if she expected to see somebody sneaking up on us. “You can actually quit worrying. Viktor… well, he sort of called it off.”

“What?” I asked.

“Viktor called it off,” she said.

I didn’t take in the words. My mind wanted to assign some terribly horrific meaning to them, and wasn’t finding one.

“Say that again?”

“He said forget about it,” Steff said. “You don’t have to come over or anything.”

Relief flooded through my… well, actually it felt like it drained out from below my stomach and flooded my pants. Fortunately my nature meant that this was a strictly metaphorical flooding, but that’s what it felt like.

“Are you serious?” I asked, wondering if the afternoon of waiting actually had been the torture after all… or maybe if the whole thing had been a test. Steff offering to take my place could have been part of it… and when I said I’d go through with it…

“Yes,” Steff said quickly, nodding. A bell went off in my head. “You can just go find Amaranth, or go to the library or something. Have fun.”

I looked at her. She didn’t look relieved or happy. She looked desperate… more desperate and even hungrier than ever. She needed to be believed.

I don’t know a lot about the mechanics of lying effectively, but if you’re telling somebody what they most want to hear in the world, then looking like you need them to believe it is probably a bad idea.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“No, really, he said you’re free,” she said. “He doesn’t care. Honest!”

“Steff, you’re lying,” I said. “You’re trying to take the punishment. He said it had to be my choice, remember?”

“Aren’t you listening?” she asked, her voice cracking. “There is no punishment. It’s over.” She hiccupped. “It’s… it’s…” The dam broke, and she fell against me, sobbing. I remembered to put my arms around her after a second or two. She just broke down so quickly that it caught me off guard.

“Steff, we’re going to be okay,” I said. “I promise.”

“You can’t promise that,” she sobbed. “You don’t know.”

“I don’t,” I agreed. “But… if he says you can’t see me, we’ll work on it. I can talk to him. Amaranth can talk to him. There’s a lot of school year left. We’ll work it out.”

“It’s pointless,” Steff said.

“It’s not,” I said. “I’m not giving up on you. Why are you giving up on me?”

“I’m not,” Steff said. “But it’s over… let me do this one last thing for you. Let me do one thing right.”

“You do plenty right,” I said. That had to be right. She made me smile and she made me excited. She was my friend. Could I think of any specific examples, though? “You made me and Amaranth talk after our big fight, and that was after I said all your friends…”

“Yeah, I remember what you said,” Steff said. Nothing cut through tears like a bit of ire. She wiped her eyes and gave her hair a toss. “You… you’re really going to do this, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I said I would. I don’t want to…”

“Let me, then!”

“I don’t want to, but I said I would,” I said. “And like I said, I’m not giving up.”

“I really don’t deserve you,” Steff said.

“Nobody does,” I said. “But they keep inflicting me on themselves, anyway.”

She tried not to laugh at this, and ended up snorting hard instead. She grabbed her nose.

“Ow,” she said. “That was painful.”

“We should get to class,” I said. I saw the idea on her face before she’d even opened her mouth. “I’m not skipping, so don’t ask. When Viktor gives the okay for us to date, I think Amaranth and you need to sit down and talk about my blacklist and what it means.”

“I know what it means,” she said defensively. “I was the one who told you about it.”

“My classes are important because I care about my future,” I said. “That’s the same reason I have to go through with this thing. I want that future to include you.”

“Okay, let’s go, then,” Steff said. “Before you get any cheesier.” She gave a weak laugh, but there were still tears in her eyes and she was still shaking with the occasional sob.

She didn’t get any more composed after we sat down in the classroom, and by the time Professor Hart came in, she had her face in her hands and she looked like she was shivering uncontrollably, she was shaking so much.

The professor took one look at her, and then looked down at the papers on his desk. “Miss Steff, you are excused,” he said. The abruptness of the remark was stunning, like a physical blow. He didn’t even look up at her as he said… he just sat there, shuffling his papers. “Get the notes from somebody. Thank you.”

I expected Steff to protest this dismissal, but she simply nodded and put her book and sketchpad back in her bag. I tried to say something to urge her on, some word of support, but nothing came. She got to her feet and headed towards the back of the room while Professor Hart calmly arranged his notes.

“Hey!” I said, finding my voice as Steff shuffled out into the hall.

The professor ignored me.

“Hey!” I repeated, getting to my feet. “I’m talking to you.” I could feel hot anger rising up within me. Couldn’t Hart tell that Steff was suffering? How could he be such a heartless jerk to her when she was crying?

He looked up at me. I’d started to step around the desk, but his eyes fixed me to the spot.

“That’s ‘Hey, I am talking to you, Professor’, if you please,” he said.

“She’s on a potion for her emotions,” I said.

“I am aware of Miss Steff’s status,” Hart said. “And now, so is the entire class. Thank you so very much for that, and now please either join her or retake your seat.” I stared at him in disbelief, but he was apparently serious… and done talking to me. “To continue where we left off Friday, the most contentious issue facing the revolutionary government was the power of taxation and with whom it should reside. There were two competing… don’t forget to get the notes,” he said as I headed for the door. “Two competing factions, one led by…”

I didn’t have to go far to catch up to Steff. She’d simply kept walking straight ahead as she came out of the classroom and leaned against the opposite door, which appeared to lead to a class in session. I gently pulled her off of it and turned her around, holding her until her sobbing slowed.

“Come on,” I said. “I don’t want to put this off any longer.”

“Wake up, stupid!” she said. “You slept through your show.”

“Oh,” I said. I could have happily slept through the day, though preferably in my bed rather than on the floor of the downstairs lounge.

“Maybe soon you won’t even like Mecknights any more,” Sooni said.

“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t care,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’m going to bed.”

“Okay, goodbye,” Sooni said, waving for me to get out of the way of the television. She seemed to have already lost interest in my presence.

Maliko and Suzi both looked ready to crash as well, after having spent half the night guarding the TV for Sooni, but Sooni was flicking through channels, looking for something else to watch.

My brief nap seemed to have done me more harm than good, sharpening my exhaustion rather than doing anything to abate it. It wasn’t fun climbing up to the fifth floor, but I made it. I wanted to find Amaranth and tell her to forget about the bookstore, but she was already in the hallway, back in front of Dee’s door. Puddy was there, too, in a t-shirt and boxer shorts.

“I’m not trying to disturb anybody,” Amaranth was saying to her. “I just want to make sure…”

“You’ve been knocking on that door all night, and yesterday, too,” Puddy replied. “You ever think she just might not be home?”

“I’m almost sure that she is,” Amaranth said. “But thank you for your concern.”

“Well, did you even try the knob?” Puddy said, reaching for it.

“It’s locked,” Amaranth said, but Puddy had turned the knob with ease and pushed the door open a crack. “I thought it was locked,” Amaranth amended, looking perplexed. “It was last night. She must have woke up at some point during the night, then, and unlocked it.” She bit at the corner of her lip and twirled some strands of hair around her finger nervously. “That’s good, isn’t it? She must be pretty much okay then, right?”

“Whatever,” Puddy said.

“Oh, hey, baby,” Amaranth said, spotting me.

“Hi,” I said.

“What do you think? I’d say that since it’s an emergency, it probably won’t hurt if we go in and have a look,” she said. “I mean, if we end up getting emergency services, it might help if we can tell them what’s wrong, right? And Dee wouldn’t mind us checking on her…”

Amaranth seemed to be floundering a bit, so I put my hand on the door and gingerly swung it open.

“Hey, don’t thank me or anything,” Puddy said, heading towards her room. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Thank you, Puddy,” Amaranth said as I stepped into the dark room. “Baby, can you see anything in there?”

“Sorry, Dee,” I murmured, turning on the light. Amaranth was still hanging back outside the door peering in.

Dee was lying on her bed in the same nightgown she’d been wearing on Friday. The bed was covered with nothing but a single sheet. She didn’t even have a pillow. Her pose was strangely familiar to me, being very similar to what I thought of as Two’s sleeping princess pose. She was deathly still.

Deathly.

“She looks so peaceful,” Amaranth said, having overcome her trepidation enough to enter the room, though she kept one hand on the door. Her other hand flew up to her mouth when she realized what she’d said.

“I think she’s… I mean, she’s okay,” I said. Saying I thought she was alive would be like saying she might be dead. “Look at her chest. I think she’s breathing. Dee?” I said, quietly… almost reverently. I felt like I was intruding. Well, I was. I realized pretty quickly that there wasn’t any point to the intrusion if I wasn’t going to be a bit more forceful, though. I leaned over by her head. “Dee, can you hear me? Hello?”

There was no response. Given how long Amaranth had spent knocking loudly on the door, off and on and without results, I didn’t really expect there to be one. Amaranth let go of the door and strode over to the bedside.

“Well, she isn’t cursed,” she reported, holding out her hands as if she were feeling the air over Dee’s body. “Could you tell if there were any sleep spells on her?”

I reached out and probed the bed and then Dee herself, but couldn’t detect anything.

“Nothing,” I said. There were specks or flakes or something on the sheet, especially around her shoulders and head. The rest of the room was so clean that they seemed really out of place. “What’s that stuff, all around her head?”

“I think… I think it’s skin,” Amaranth said. “Look at her shoulders. She’s peeling.” Now that Amaranth pointed it out, I could see what she was talking about. The skin wasn’t discolored or red, but there were cracked, ragged edges where it looked like it had dried out and fallen away. “Sun burn? Stand back, baby… I’m going to try some things.”

I stepped away and averted my eyes while Amaranth channeled divine energy. I thought I heard Dee stirring, but when the bright light dissipated she was in the same position as before.

“That should have worked,” Amaranth said, frowning. “The spell of awakening. I mean, it did work. I felt it. Then she just sort of… kicked back asleep.”

Something came together in my memory.

“Wait, I’ve seen this,” I said. “You… when I… um, Friday night. Dee couldn’t heal you fully, so she did something to your mind to keep you in a restful sleep. Do you think she could have done something like that to herself?”

“She was so tired,” Amaranth said, a look of dawning horror on her face. “So tired at the meeting… and even more so after that. You don’t think… I mean, she wouldn’t, would she? She’d have to have some way of waking herself up.”

“Maybe she wasn’t thinking,” I said. “Maybe she didn’t mean to put herself so far under… or maybe she didn’t mean to do it at all.”

“Do you think maybe a physical shock would do it?” Amaranth asked. “Maybe if we had a pin…”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You were… well, you were in a lot of pain, and it still worked.”

“I think we might need a subtle artist,” Amaranth said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Just stay with her, okay, baby?” she said, and then she was gone.

I stayed by Dee, feeling utterly inadequate. She’d done without my presence all weekend long. It hardly seemed like I would accomplish anything just by being there. Amaranth came back in a few minutes, with a sleepy-looking Trina in tow. It was kind of interesting—and more than a little freaky—to notice that while her two humanish eyes were more than half-closed, her middle eye was wide-awake and sort of angry looking.

She woke right up when she saw me, though.

“What’s that doing here?” she demanded, forgetting to be even fake polite. “What’s going on?”

“We think Dee’s done something to her mind to try to sleep better,” Amaranth said. “But she’s been sleeping for most of the weekend, and we don’t know if she can wake up on her own.”

“But what’s…” Trina asked, still staring fixedly at me with her regular eyes while the third one flicked over to Dee.

“Will you never mind that!” Amaranth said. “Dee needs your help!”

“I don’t really know if a drow mind is the same as a regular mind,” Trina said.

“Hey, don’t call her…” I started to say, but Amaranth reached up with a finger to shush me without looking. Peripheral vision wasn’t really her strong point, though, so it was a bit more like smacking me in the face with one finger.

“Hush, baby,” she said. “I just thought you might be able to help, Trina. If you really can’t do this, just say so and you can go back to bed. We can bring in a professional.”

“Well, of course I can help,” Trina said, affronted. “I do have a natural talent, obviously, or I wouldn’t be in the subtle arts program. You’re just talking about a recursive deep sleep suggestion, after all, not something terribly complicated.”

She reached out her hand towards Dee. I watched the sleeping elf for a response, but a small gasp from Trina shifted my attention to the triclops. Her eyelids were flickering up and down, and behind them were the veiny whites of eyes rolled all the way back.

“Almost… almost,” Trina muttered.

Dee came awake all at once, the way you always see people waking up on TV shows and never in real life: head flying up like there’s a spring underneath it and a big gasping cry like a drowning person coming up from air.

Trina screamed and ran from the room, colliding with the side of the open door on her way. I barely paid her any attention, though. Dee was awake, but it didn’t seem like everything had gone as planned. She was babbling in what was probably her native language… it sounded elvish but not the sort I was vaguely familiar with. She kept repeating a word or two that sounded like “Day Sa”.

“Dee, it’s us!” Amaranth said, kneeling down by her. “Amaranth and Mack. Honey, it’s okay, you’re awake now.” Dee looked at her like she didn’t recognize her, or couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “Do you think she was having a bad dream?” Amaranth asked me. “She looked so calm…”

“I think the idea was her body would be calm and at rest no matter what,” I said.

Seeing Dee like this was very affecting. She didn’t always hide her face around the dorm, and she had lowered her hood the times she’d eaten with us, but she’d always been so guarded, so reserved that her face might as well have been a mask carved from a single piece of obsidian. To see that proud and perfect face lined with grief and possibly fear was shocking.

“Dee, honey, what’s wrong?” Amaranth asked. Dee’s eyes finally focused on Amaranth, and she seemed to come to an awareness of herself, her angular face settling itself into something more familiar, more recognizably Dee.

“What… what has happened?” she asked. “Why are you in my room?”

“You were asleep,” Amaranth said. “All weekend. We couldn’t wake you.”

“All weekend?” Dee repeated. “What day is today?”

“Sunday,” Amaranth said. “The fourth.”

“The last thing I remember… the last real thing… I was treating you for your wounds,” Dee said. “Then I went back to bed. I was so very tired, and I thought… I thought…” She trailed off. Amaranth and I exchanged a glance, and Amaranth looked like she was going to say something, but then Dee spoke again. “I thought to myself, how easy it would be… I could wake myself up at any time.” She shivered. “But I couldn’t. Something went wrong, inside my head. I couldn’t.”

She looked so vulnerable in that moment, so… I hated to say it… human.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she sounded embarrassed. I wondered if she’d picked up on my thought. “I would not for anything have wished for you to see me like this.”

“We’re your friends, Dee,” Amaranth said. “There’s more to that than just calling you a nickname. We’ll always be here to help you, and you never have to be afraid of what we’ll think, even if we see you at your worst.”

“I am not afraid. It is simply unseemly,” Dee said. “Only my family and my lovers see me in a state of emotional release… and even then, I hope to always comport myself with more dignity in front of them.”

“Well, we’re just glad you’re okay,” Amaranth said. She sounded like she would have liked to keep arguing the point, but recognized the futility of it. Dee was who she was.

“I really am not, though,” Dee said. “I’ve committed a terrible error.”

“Well… no harm done, right?” Amaranth said. “I mean, you’re awake now.”

“I am not referring to that,” Dee said. “I mean in leaving the underworld and coming here in the first place… I was a fool to have done so. I can only hope that if I return home immediately, it will not be too late.”