The champagne is warm. The lobby of Gravity Cinema smells like expensive perfume and self-congratulation, and Astra Yao has been holding the same glass for forty minutes without drinking from it, her smile fixed so perfectly in place that her cheeks ache.

Two hours. They want me to sit through two hours of my own face on a forty-foot screen. Again.

The anniversary banner for The Heartbeat stretches across the far wall in tasteful gold lettering, flanked by blown-up stills from the film. One of them catches her mid-cry, mascara tracking down her cheek in a single photogenic line. She remembers that take. She remembers being hungry and thinking about hot pot the entire time.

Evelyn is six meters away, speaking to a Gravity Cinema executive with that particular tilt of her head that means she's being polite but would rather be anywhere else. Her lilac eyes flick toward Astra every fifteen seconds. Astra knows this because she has been counting.

Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. She's turning back to him. Now.

Evelyn turns.

Astra moves.

Her heels strike the marble floor in quick, deliberate steps as she angles toward the side corridor, champagne glass deposited on a passing waiter's tray without breaking stride. The corridor is narrow and quiet, lit by recessed ceiling panels that wash everything in flat white. A fire exit sign glows red at the far end.

She glances back over her shoulder. The lobby noise recedes behind her, muffled by the heavy door she's already let swing shut. No blonde hair. No lilac eyes. No calm, devastating voice saying "Astra, where exactly do you think you're going?"

A grin breaks across her face, wide and unguarded and nothing like the one she's been wearing for the cameras. She does a quick little hop on her heels, both feet leaving the ground, arms swinging, the ruffled hem of her white stage dress bouncing around her thighs. She pulls her sunglasses from where they've been tucked into her bodice and slides them on with the ceremonial gravity of a knight lowering a visor.

Invisible. Completely invisible. Evelyn is going to kill me later but that's later and this is now and I am FREE.

She hits the push bar on the fire exit at speed, the door banging open into grey daylight and the smell of wet concrete. The alley behind Gravity Cinema is narrow, lined with dumpsters and soggy newspapers, and she is already two steps into it when she looks back one final time to confirm her escape, still grinning, still not watching where she's going.

The collision is immediate and graceless.

Her shoulder connects with something solid, her leading foot catches against a shoe, and the world tilts sideways. Her hands shoot out on instinct and close on fabric, the front of someone's shirt bunching in her fists. It doesn't help. Gravity wins. You hit the ground back-first, the impact jolting up your spine, and then her full weight lands on top of you, knees bracketing your hips, her palms flat against your chest.

Her sunglasses fly off and skitter across the concrete with a plasticky clatter.

For a single beat, neither of you move. The fire exit door swings shut behind her with a heavy metallic click.

Astra pushes herself upright, straightening her arms against your chest, and looks down. Her black hair hangs forward in a curtain around both your faces. Her crimson eyes are wide, startled, the beauty marks beneath them catching the grey alley light. She is, unmistakably and absurdly, sitting on your waist, her ruffled white skirt fanned out across your stomach, the gold accents on her corset bodice glinting dully.

Oh no. Oh crap!

"I am so sorry, are you okay? I wasn't looking, I was just, I was running and I didn't see you there and now I'm on top of you which is, wow, that's really not ideal, is it?"

The words tumble out in a breathless rush, her hands still pressed flat against the fabric of your shirt. She hasn't moved off you. She seems to have forgotten that's an option.

The corridor at Jealous Magazine's New Eridu headquarters stretches long and impossibly polished, downlights pooling warm on the marble, framed covers of decades past lining the walls like saints in a cathedral. Evelyn Chevalier's heels click against the floor at a pace that suggests you should be keeping up a little better than you are, and the gold moth at the nape of her neck catches the light every time she turns her head, which is not often, because she is talking, and she has not stopped talking since the elevator.

"You will address her as Miss Yao until she tells you otherwise. You will not offer your hand unless she offers hers first. You will not take photographs, and you will not ask for any, regardless of what she says about it being fine, because she will say it is fine."

You nod.

"Her schedule today has three items. The interview at eleven. A fitting at two. A rehearsal at five. You will not offer opinions on any of them unless directly asked. If she does ask, you will answer honestly. She can tell when she is being handled, and she finds it deeply tiresome." A pause, a sidelong glance that takes in every inch of you in under a second. "Do not flatter her. She has been flattered by professionals. You will lose."

Your throat is dry. The corridor does not appear to be ending.

"Lastly." Evelyn stops walking. You stop a half-step late. She turns, and for the first time since the elevator she looks at you properly, lilac eyes unhurried and entirely without warmth, though not, you realise, without care. "I spent four months choosing you. I interviewed thirty-one people. I ran background checks that several of them found invasive. I settled on you because I believe you are the right person for her. Do not make me wrong about that."

And then she is moving again, before you can answer, which is perhaps the point.

By the time her hand reaches the door, the image you have been quietly constructing of Astra Yao has calcified into something quite specific. A narrow, appraising look from across a room. A slow once-over. A faint, polite curl of the lip at the new assistant, the one Evelyn finally settled on, who will be tolerated and nothing more. A woman who has been the most photographed face in New Eridu for four years and who surely, surely, knows it.

Your stomach does something small and unpleasant.

Evelyn opens the door.

The waiting room is smaller than you expected, soft lighting, a low cream couch, a coffee table, a mirror framed in brass. On the couch, knees tucked sideways and one heel already kicked off onto the rug, sits the Queen of New Eridu, hunched comfortably over a paper cup of coffee, a copy of this month's Jealous open across her lap. Her hair spills in a long, shimmering fall down the cushion beside her, catching green where it catches anything at all. She is turning a page with the lazy, absent thumb of somebody mostly reading the pictures.

She looks up.

Her eyes, deep magenta and impossibly large, widen.

"Oh—!"

And she is up.

The coffee cup is abandoned to the table without ceremony, the magazine slides off her lap and lands somewhere she does not look at, and she is across the room before you have entirely parsed that she has stood, both of her hands coming up to clasp one of yours between them, held close and high, right up near her collarbone, bringing her face in closer than you are at all prepared for. Floral perfume. The faint warmth of somebody who has been curled up on a couch. Two small beauty marks, one beneath each eye, precisely where the reference photos said they would be, and somehow nothing at all like the reference photos.

"There you are~" She is beaming. It is not a practiced smile. It arrives on her face like weather. "I have been looking forward to meeting you for ages, do you know that? Ages. I kept asking Eve when you were starting, and she kept saying soon, which is what she says when she means when I have decided, and not a moment before..."

A glance thrown sideways, bright with mischief.

"... she was being terribly picky about you, you know. Months and months. I was beginning to think she was going to interview the entire city."

Evelyn, already crossing to the far side of the room to set her bag down, does not rise to it. She simply looks, briefly, from Astra to you and back again, with the settled expression of a woman watching events unfold exactly how she imagined they would.

Astra does not appear to notice, or does and does not care. Her hands are still around yours. She is still very close.

Oh, you are even better in person. Eve, you clever thing. she thinks

"Come, come, sit, sit..." and then she is tugging, gently but without any question about it, drawing you away from the door and over to the couch, and she does not sit you down so much as arrange you down, with a hand light at your elbow, before dropping into the cushion beside you in a single unhurried motion. Not across from you. Not at a polite distance. Beside you, close enough that the side of her knee settles against yours and stays there, entirely comfortable, as if the two of you have done this a hundred times and she is only picking up where you left off.

She turns her whole body toward you. Her head tilts. The magenta eyes settle on yours and do not look away.

"So." The smile softens into something smaller and much more curious. "I have been told all sorts of very sensible things about you on paper. References, and qualifications, and Eve's lovely little spreadsheet." Another flicker of a glance toward Evelyn, conspiratorial. "But none of that is you, is it?"

She leans in by the smallest degree.

"Tell me your name~" she says. "And then tell me everything about you. Start anywhere you like. I have nowhere to be for..." a vague, graceful wave of her free hand, "...a little while yet."

The service corridor on the forty-third floor of Starloop Tower smells faintly of hairspray, something nobody warned you about in the orientation packet. Your lanyard bounces against your chest as you walk, the fresh laminate still catching on the edge of your shirt. Odeum HAE - Technical Crew - Provisional. The word provisional feels larger than the other two.

Three hours until doors. Two hours until sound check. And somewhere, apparently, a spare capacitor array for the stage-left rig, which the senior tech had described with a wave of the hand as "in one of the backstage prep rooms, the one with the stuff, you'll know it when you see it," before vanishing in the direction of a crisis you were not cleared to hear about.

You have been opening doors for six minutes.

Storage. Empty dressing room. A corridor branching off into another corridor. A door marked PRIVATE that was, when you tried it, very much locked. The tower hums faintly underfoot, the low resonant thrum of the ether conduits that make the building what it is, the same conduits that will carry her voice in a few hours and turn the whole structure into an instrument. You try not to think about that too much. You are here to find a box.

Another door. Unmarked. You try the handle.

It opens.

For a moment your brain does not entirely process what it is looking at, because what it is looking at is not a storage room.

She is standing with her back three-quarters turned to you, one long, pale leg lifted and already halfway into the hem of a dress pooled at her feet, balance held with the unconscious grace of someone who has done this a thousand times. The dress is the Chandelier outfit you have seen a hundred times in posters, black and white and gold-trimmed, pearls catching the overhead lights in small constellations along the bodice, and it is currently crumpled around her ankles like an abandoned thought.

What is above it is something else entirely.

Her skin is pale to the point of luminous, entirely unmarked, the kind of skin that reads on camera as makeup and in person as simply hers, catching the warm light of the vanity bulbs and holding it. Her hair, impossibly long, tumbles in a shimmering fall down her back, black that catches green the way deep water does, brushing the small of her waist where her spine dips inward in a narrow, elegant line. Her legs are long, the calf of the raised one flexed faintly with the angle, the other braced lightly against the floor in a heel she has apparently not yet bothered to take off, the pearl strap of a garter sitting high on her thigh.

Her underwear is delicate, pale cream silk trimmed in fine lace, a low-rise cut that sits across the soft curve of her hips, and a matching bralette too light to offer any real architecture, holding breasts that are full and high and perfectly rounded, the faint shape of small pink nipples just visible through the silk where the fabric has settled. The bralette's thin strap has slipped a fraction down one shoulder. She has not yet noticed, or has and has not bothered.

Her waist narrows sharply above the cream silk, a natural hourglass so clean it looks drawn, and the soft flare of her hips gives the whole silhouette the shape of something deliberately composed.

You are, in short, looking at quite possibly the most beautiful woman you have ever seen, in a room you should absolutely not be in, and your hand is still on the door handle.

She catches the movement of the door in the vanity mirror a half-second later.

"Huh?"

She turns, the dress still loose around her, magenta eyes finding yours with the curious, unhurried blink of somebody genuinely unsure whether they know you.

You draw a breath to apologise.

You do not get to use it.

Something moves across the edge of your vision so fast that your brain registers it only as an impression — a flash of gold, a sweep of black coat, a sound like cable snapping taut — and then your wrist is yanked, pulled up and out and pinned in place by something thin and metallic coiled tight around it, and the air in front of your face is suddenly occupied by a switch-blade, and behind the switch-blade is Evelyn Chevalier.

She is closer to you than any person has been all day. Her face is four inches from yours. The tip of the blade is resting, with horrible precision, just beneath the point of your chin. Her lilac eyes are utterly, chillingly calm.

"What," she says, very quietly, "are you doing in this room."

It is not a question in any sense you are used to questions being asked. There is no room in it. There is no air. The tether around your wrist is not slack. The blade does not waver. You realise, with a cold, detached sort of clarity, that if her assessment of you in the next four seconds goes a certain way, nobody is going to hear about it. There will be an empty lanyard handed back to HR. There will be a memo. You will be a paperwork problem, briefly, and then you will be nothing at all.

"Eve—!"

The dress rustles. There is the quick, sharp click of a heel finding the floor properly, and then a second one, and then Astra is moving, tugging the bodice up over her breasts with one hand and crossing the room in three fast strides, a zipper half-closed at her side and one strap still off her shoulder and absolutely none of it slowing her down.

"Eve, no, stop it, look at them!"

She arrives at your side in a breath of floral perfume, warm from the dress and the room and herself, and her hand comes up and folds around Evelyn's wrist, gently, and pushes the switch-blade down and away from your chin.

"Look" she says again, softer, directly into Evelyn's ear. "They are absolutely terrified. Look at their face."

For a moment Evelyn does not move. Her eyes do not leave yours. Whatever assessment is happening behind them finishes, and only then does the blade fold away with a small, efficient click, tucked somewhere into her coat before you can see where.

Astra slides in front of you. Fully between you and Evelyn, her back to her manager, the black-and-gold bodice of the Chandelier dress catching the light in small soft points. Her hand comes up and settles on your arm, light and steadying, just above the elbow.

"Hey," she says. Her voice has dropped into something quieter, warmer, the performance voice gone entirely. Her magenta eyes search your face with genuine concern. "Hey, are you all right? Breathe for me. It is all right."

Her other hand is already working at the tether around your wrist, unwinding the thin metallic line with a patient, unhurried care. It comes loose.

"She gets like this sometimes." Astra says it with her eyes still on yours, a small apologetic tilt of her head. "You are fine. You are absolutely fine. She is very sorry."

"I am not," Evelyn says, evenly, from behind her.

"She is working on being sorry." Astra's mouth twitches. She glances back over her shoulder. "Eve, honestly. You cannot keep doing that. One of these days you are going to put a knife under the chin of somebody's nephew and we are going to have a very difficult conversation with HR..."

"The pearl garter."

Astra pauses.

"...well."

"Last month. Second row. Your pearl garter."

"All right," Astra concedes, lifting her free hand in a small graceful surrender, "that is a fair point, she has a fair point there, there was an incident with the creep and the garter, but..." she turns back to you, and her eyes do a small, quick, thorough sweep of your face with an expression of great seriousness, "This one does not look like a creep or a stalker. Look at them. They look like somebody who has been given a job to do and is having a truly dreadful first day."

Evelyn, behind her, rolls her eyes with the completeness of a woman who has lost this exact argument many times.

Astra's hand is still warm on your arm. She has not stepped away. If anything she has settled a little closer, her weight tipped lightly toward you, the half-done zipper at her ribs entirely forgotten. Her head tilts.

Oh, you are shaking a little. Poor thing. Eve, you absolute menace. she thinks.

"So." Her smile returns, smaller and gentler than before, the one she clearly reserves for frightened animals and lost children and tech crew who have opened the wrong door. "Let us start this one again, shall we? Properly this time. And with considerably fewer knives."

The sun over Fantasy Resort is the uncomplicated kind, high and gold and apparently committed to the project of making everything it touches look better than it has any right to. The beach stretches out in front of you in a long, lazy curve, pale sand and pale umbrellas and the turquoise shimmer of the sea. Somewhere a steel drum is playing. Somewhere else, closer, a blender is working very hard on somebody's drink.

You shift your weight from one foot to the other on the warm wooden boards of the promenade.

Your phone says 2:07pm. You are wearing your swimwear, a towel slung over one shoulder, a pair of borrowed sunglasses pushed up into your hair, and the slow, creeping suspicion that you have entirely misread the situation.

Because when Astra had said, on that couch in her apartment a fortnight ago, curled up with her feet tucked under her and a glass of something pink in her hand, "Oh, you and Eve and I should absolutely go, it is gorgeous, I never got to actually use the beach when I was performing, we should all just go, next month, yes?" you had said yes the way you say yes to things you are reasonably sure will never happen. You had agreed in the full confidence that celebrity plans evaporate, that managers say no, that the calendar will simply eat the idea whole.

And then three days ago a travel itinerary had arrived from Astra. Car ride, already booked. A suite, already reserved. A breezy little note from Evelyn that read, in full: Do not be late.

And here you are.

Alone. On a promenade. In your swimwear. Beginning to wonder if perhaps you have been—

"Hellooo~!"

You turn.

She is coming up the boardwalk at a pace that is technically a walk and emotionally a bounce, one hand raised high and waving with the full-armed enthusiasm of somebody who has spotted their favourite person in a crowd of thousands, even though the promenade is half-empty and you are maybe thirty feet away. The sun catches her hair and does something ridiculous with it, the long shimmering black-green fall of it pulled loosely over one shoulder, drifting as she moves.

She is wearing a frilly white bikini, soft ruffles along the edges of the top, a small gathered bow at each hip, all of it catching the light the way expensive things do, all of it entirely unfair. The bralette holds full, rounded breasts high on her chest, the cream-pale skin of her stomach taut and flat between the two pieces, her narrow waist flowing down into the soft flare of her hips and those long, impossibly elegant legs that you have seen on every second billboard in New Eridu and which look, somehow, even more ridiculous in person and in daylight. A thin gold chain sits low on her waist. A second one circles one ankle. The whole effect is that of a woman who has been photographed professionally enough times to know precisely what she looks like.

Her grin, when she gets close enough for you to see it properly, is enormous.

And then you notice the figure trailing behind her, and your brain needs a full second.

It takes you longer than it should to recognise Evelyn.

The blonde bob is down, the intricate bun nowhere in sight, her hair loose around her shoulders and slightly flyaway from the sea breeze in a way you have genuinely never seen it. There is no coat. There is no harness. There is no tablet. There is instead a black bikini, simple and well-cut, the top a plain triangle style that is currently supporting rather more than it looks designed to, breasts as full as Astra's and arguably fuller, the slim athletic line of her torso dropping into a waist every bit as narrow, and then the hips, and then—

You had, honestly, no idea.

Her ass moves with every step with a soft, heavy wobble that appears to be the primary reason she is walking as stiffly as she is. She is carrying a tote bag in one hand with the grim determination of a hostage carrying a ransom note. Her other arm is half-crossed over her stomach in a gesture that is trying and failing to be casual. She is looking at a point roughly six feet to your left. She is not, under any circumstances, making eye contact with you.

She looks, in a word, mortified.

"There you are!" Astra is already in front of you, bouncing on the balls of her feet, heels up, heels down, heels up, heels down, apparently incapable of standing still. "I am so sorry we are late, Eve had seventeen things she wanted to check before we left the room, one of them was the safe, the safe, as if the safe is going to—"

"The last hotel charged us to use the safe."

"The last hotel charged us for a safe" Astra repeats, delighted, to you, as though this proves her entire point. Her eyes sweep over your outfit and she makes a small pleased sound. "Oh, you look lovely, look at you, you look like somebody who is actually on holiday, which is more than I can say for..."

Evelyn arrives at last and stops about two feet short of the two of you. She adjusts the strap of her tote. She does not look up.

Astra's face does something small and very pleased.

"Eve."

"No."

"Eve, I have not even said anything yet."

"Whatever it is. No."

"Picture." Astra is already pulling her phone from the tiny woven bag over her shoulder, thumb unlocking it, camera app opening with the practiced swipe of a woman who takes roughly four hundred photographs a week. She presses it into your hand without looking, eyes still on Evelyn, grin widening. "Just one. You and me. On the beach. Like normal people."

"Astra."

"Pleeease."

"I am not dressed for—"

"You are dressed perfectly, you look gorgeous, Eve, honestly, have you looked at yourself, you look like you could eat a man alive in under six seconds which I assume is exactly the effect you were going for"

"I was going for covered."

"And I would like one photograph. One. For me. Not for the magazines, not for the socials, for me."

There is a pause.

Evelyn, to her enduring credit, opens her mouth to protest again. You watch it happen. You watch her look at Astra, properly, for the first time since she arrived, and you watch the moment she registers the sheer uncomplicated joy coming off the woman in the white bikini, the pure sunlit delight of somebody who has, for possibly the first time in months, no schedule and no stage and no camera pointed at her that she did not ask for. You watch Evelyn's shoulders drop, very slightly. You watch her mouth close.

"One."

"One~!"

Astra is beside her in a blink, slipping an arm around her waist, turning her gently toward you by the hip with a touch so practiced it is basically choreography. She tips her head in a little toward Evelyn's shoulder, her own free hand coming up to rest lightly at her collarbone, chin angled, smile on, weight shifted just so. It is unthinking. It is beautiful. It is the pose of a woman who has been photographed so many times that she arrives at camera-ready faster than most people arrive at a handshake.

Evelyn stands next to her with the rigid posture of a woman being photographed for a passport.

You raise the phone.

"Eve, smile."

"I am smiling."

"You are doing a face. That is not a smile. That is the face you do when you are making someone sign a NDA. Smile properly."

"I am not..."

"Shoulders down. Chin up. There. Look at me."

Evelyn, grudgingly, does.

And you watch it happen, in the small rectangle of the phone screen, in real time. You watch Evelyn look sideways at Astra and see what you just saw, the sunlight in the loose black-green hair, the barefoot bounce on the wooden boards, the grin that has not left her face since she came up the promenade. You watch the corner of Evelyn's mouth lift, reluctantly, and then less reluctantly, and then not reluctantly at all. The stiffness in her shoulders goes. Her head tips, very slightly, toward Astra's. The smile that arrives on her face is small and entirely genuine, and it is, you realise with mild surprise, a very pretty smile. The kind of smile Evelyn does not typically let out in public.

You take the picture.

You take three, actually, because you know better than not to.

"Oh~" Astra coos, already darting back to you, pulling the phone from your hand and holding it out so the three of you can see, "oh, look at that, look at us, Eve, Eve look, that is adorable, that is going in the frame on the shelf, that is going in the frame on the shelf, Eve!"

"Astra, please do not shout on the..."

"BEACH!" Astra announces, to the beach generally, wheeling on her heel with the phone clutched to her chest, already moving. "Come on, come on, I have waited a whole summer to actually be on one of these, I am going in the water, I am getting a cocktail, I am getting three cocktails"

And she is off, bare feet slapping lightly on the boards, long hair streaming behind her, headed for the sand.

Evelyn watches her go for a moment. She exhales, very slowly, through her nose. The stiffness does not entirely come back, but some of it does.

Then she glances, briefly and for the first time, at you. Her eyes do a quick, efficient sweep, the way they always do, the way they did the first time you met her in that corridor.

"That swimwear suits you," she says. "It is a good choice."

It is said in exactly the tone she uses to approve a schedule.

And then she adjusts her tote, squares her shoulders, and follows Astra down onto the sand, leaving you standing on the boardwalk with the distinct impression that this holiday is going to be considerably more than you signed up for.

The knock at your door comes at eleven in the morning on a day you had earmarked for laundry and possibly, if you were feeling ambitious, a nap.

You open it.

Astra is leaning against the frame in a cream sundress and oversized sunglasses, one ankle crossed over the other, a small woven bag over her shoulder and an expression of barely contained mischief on her face. There is no car waiting. There is no Evelyn. There is just her.

"Let me borrow you for the day~" she says.

You do not really get a say in it.

The train to Lumina Square rattles pleasantly beneath you. Astra has taken the window seat without discussion, knees tucked up sideways, her shoulder pressed light against yours as she points things out through the glass. A billboard with her own face on it goes past and she makes a small unimpressed noise and tells you, very seriously, that they always photoshop her chin wrong.

On the platform she tugs you close, phone held out at arm's length, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, cheek resting against yours.

Snap.

She looks at the picture for a long second before she puts the phone away.

Coff Cafe is quiet at this hour, tucked into the corner of the square with a few outdoor tables under a striped awning. She orders something iced and absurdly sweet. You get something sensible. She steals a sip of yours anyway and makes a face.

"That is not a drink, that is a chore."

She has her sunglasses back on. The cafe is busy enough that she needs them, and the staff have been discreet, and the whole thing feels, for once, like a proper afternoon. She is sitting across from you with her chin propped on one hand, straw between her lips, and she is looking at you.

Not past you. Not around you. At you.

The sunglasses hide her eyes, mostly. They do not hide the tilt of her head or the small, unhurried way her smile settles.

The moment stretches a beat too long.

She looks down at her drink. You catch a glimpse of the smile widening behind the straw.

Lumina Galleria, three floors of glass and polished stone, the kind of place Astra can walk through in sunglasses and almost, almost, get away with it. She does not really intend to buy anything. She intends, you quickly realise, to try things on, and to make you look at all of them.

A pale blue slip dress. She steps out of the changing room barefoot, spins once, asks your opinion. Snap.

A ridiculous wide-brimmed hat. She tilts it down over one eye and poses against the shop mirror with theatrical gravity. Snap.

A white coat three sizes too large for her that she disappears into like a small animal in a blanket. She emerges, grinning, sleeves swallowing her hands, and you take the picture before she can even ask.

She looks at that one for a while too.

Simmer Hot Pot is cramped and loud and smells like heaven, and Astra has tied her hair up in a quick messy knot to keep it out of the broth, several strands already escaping around her face. There is chilli oil on the sleeve of her sundress. She does not appear to have noticed.

"Fish ball?"

"I already had one."

"Have another one. This one. This one has been in there the correct amount of time, the other ones were amateurs."

She reaches across the table with her chopsticks and deposits it into your bowl with the focused concentration of somebody performing surgery. Her face when you eat it is the face of a woman whose life's work has been validated.

She eats with both elbows on the table. She laughs at something you say with her mouth half full and then claps a hand over it, eyes wide, and laughs harder. Somewhere in the middle of the meal she tops up your tea without asking, and somewhere near the end of it you realise she has been doing that all day.

The sun has gone down by the time you leave.

Something in her has settled. The bounce has quieted. She walks beside you with her bag hooked over one elbow and her free hand very nearly, but not quite, brushing yours, and when she speaks her voice has softened into something lower than it has been all afternoon.

"I will remember this day for a long time."

You glance at her. She is looking ahead, a small private smile on her lips.

"And as a thank you..." she says, "I have a gift for you. Follow me~"

The rooftop of Lumina Galleria is quiet. She knows the way without looking, past a door most people would not think to try, up a short flight of stairs, out onto an open terrace that is either staff-only or hers by some unspoken arrangement. You suspect the latter.

The city opens up in front of you.

New Eridu at night, gold and blue and impossibly bright, the river threading through it in a dark ribbon, Starloop Tower rising in the distance with its soft halo of light. The sounds of the streets below come up muffled and far away. The breeze is cool. Her hair lifts in it.

She stops at the railing and breathes out, slow.

You join her. She is standing close. Closer than the railing requires.

For a long moment neither of you says anything.

"So," you say eventually, "about that gift."

She turns.

Her head tilts. The playful smile is back, but it is quieter now, warmer, the kind of smile she does not wear on stage. The breeze lifts a strand of her hair across her cheek and she does not move to tuck it back. Her magenta eyes find yours and hold.

"It is right in front of you."

Her gaze drops, briefly, to your lips.

She shifts, ever so slightly, closer.

It has been thirty-four days.

Astra has counted. She did not mean to count. She started somewhere around day nine, during a press junket in which she answered the same three questions about the new album in seventeen different ways, and once she had started she could not seem to stop.

Thirty-four days of promotions. Of interviews. Of magazine covers shot under lights hot enough to make her eyeliner run. Of appearances and after-parties and one particularly gruelling week of radio spots in which she said the word Monologue so many times it began to lose all meaning. Thirty-four days of smiling at cameras. Thirty-four days of sleeping in hotel rooms that all had the same lamp.

Thirty-four days of not seeing you.

The arrangement had been Evelyn's, in the end, and the PR team's, and the label's, and reluctantly, quietly, her own. When the three of you had sat down in that small meeting room months ago and she had told them, with her hand in yours under the table, that the two of you were together, there had been a long silence and a longer discussion. The image, they had said. The fanbase. The contracts. Not now. Not yet. Perhaps in time. For her sake, and for yours.

She had agreed. You had agreed. It had been the sensible thing.

The sensible thing is wearing very thin today.

She is dressed down in a way that would horrify her stylist. Soft grey joggers. A baggy cream hoodie two sizes too large that she is fairly sure she stole from you originally, though neither of you have ever confirmed it. Hair scraped up into a high messy bun with strands escaping at the nape. No makeup beyond a little balm on her lips. A pair of sunglasses.

She is, for once, completely unrecognisable.

She walks from the station with her hands jammed in the hoodie pocket and her chin tucked down and nobody, nobody, looks at her. Not the man at the newsstand. Not the couple at the crossing. Not the group of teenagers who pass her on the pavement talking loudly about her album.

Interesting, she thinks. This is how I get away from Eve next time.

She gets to your door.

She stops.

Her hand hovers at the buzzer for a second, and she realises she is nervous, which is ridiculous, because it is you, and she has not been nervous about seeing you in months. The nerves are not about seeing you. The nerves are about how much she has wanted to.

She presses it anyway.

The door opens.

She does not let you speak.

She is across the threshold in a single step, both hands coming up to cradle your face, and she pulls you into her with the starved, unguarded urgency of a woman who has spent thirty-four days being very, very professional. Her mouth finds yours. She kisses you like she has been saving it. The sunglasses slip down her nose and she does not care. The hoodie sleeve has fallen over her hand and she does not care.

She pulls back, just an inch.

Her forehead rests against yours. Her breath is uneven. Her magenta eyes are close enough that you can see the precise colour of them, the small beauty marks beneath each, the faint sheen of moisture that she will absolutely deny later.

"I missed you," she whispers. "So much."

She does not wait for you to answer.

She tips her chin and kisses you again, and this one is slower, longer, tender, her thumb stroking softly along the line of your jaw, her whole body pressing in close against yours with the quiet relief of somebody finally, finally, where she has been trying to get to for over a month.

Behind her, without looking, she hooks one heel around the edge of the door and kicks it shut.