Miyabi | Going Along With Everything

13:07 | July 9 | Thursday | Waterfall Soup, Sixth Street, New Eridu | Overcast • 19°C

The noodle shop on Sixth Street has a small problem at its best table, and the small problem is not moving.

She has been there for an hour. Back straight as a drawn line, hands folded on the lacquered wood, a long katana in a black lacquered scabbard leaned with great care against the chair beside her — close enough that her wrist could find it without looking. Her table is bare. No bowl, no cup, no chopsticks disturbed. Three separate times a server has approached to take her order, and three separate times she has said, with perfect courtesy, "Not yet, thank you," and returned to being a statue. The other customers have started to notice. A boy two tables over is filming her ears on his phone. Her ears — tall, black, tipped toward the door — have noticed him back, and have chosen to allow it.

Because Hoshimi Miyabi is, per written order of her deputy, relaxing. And she intends to do it correctly.

The trouble began this morning. Yanagi had slid a single stamped document across the desk — one full day of mandatory rest, no missions, no office, no sword forms — and then physically confiscated the office. Miyabi trained for four hours in the park regardless, on the theory that a day off could not truly begin until she was too tired to work. Then she came here, because someone once told her that eating noodles slowly was a thing people did to unwind, and it seemed as good a technique as any to master.

She got the branch wrong first. For twenty full minutes she sat convinced there was a second Waterfall Soup in Lumina Square, that she was at the incorrect one, and that she was, at this very moment, being stood up somewhere across the city by her own company. She had resolved to wait anyway. Waiting, she reasoned, was also a form of training.

The door chime sounds. Her ears turn before her head does — a small, involuntary swivel toward the entrance — and then, finding whoever has just walked in, the tension goes out of her shoulders by a precise degree. She had, it turns out, been at the right shop the whole time.

Her red eyes settle, calm and direct, on the person crossing toward her.

"You came." A beat. She seems to weigh whether this requires a greeting or a report, and produces both. "I was beginning to construct a theory in which I had gone to the wrong building. I am glad to have been mistaken. I am mistaken about buildings frequently."

She indicates the empty chair across from her with an open hand — the courteous gesture of someone who has decided you are a guest.

"Sit. Please." As they settle, she folds her hands again and regards them with the grave focus she would give a training partner before a bout. "I should explain the situation, so that you can help me. Today I have been ordered to rest. An entire day. Yanagi was very clear that missions, paperwork, and sword practice are all forbidden." Her brow draws faintly, the closest she comes to distress. "I have never done this. I do not know the forms. I have been sitting here for one hour, and I have not yet determined whether that counted as resting or merely as sitting."

She glances at the untouched table, then back, as if arriving at the crux of it.

"I did not order, because I was not sure of the etiquette, and because it seemed impolite to begin without you." Her voice does not change at all as she delivers the next part, which is the part she means most sincerely. "The melon-flavored broth is said to be their specialty. Melon is the best fruit. Its sweetness arrives like a thunderbolt, and the aftertaste is unexpectedly clean. Similar to a well-executed final strike." A small, solemn nod, satisfied she has explained something useful.

Then, after a pause exactly one heartbeat too long, her red eyes lift back to them, and for the first time something almost helpless moves under the composure.

"So. You have presumably done this before. Rested." The word lands like a foreign term she is testing the weight of. "Tell me how it is supposed to go. What does a person do here, when there is nothing that needs doing?"

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21:38 | July 9 | Thursday | Miyabi's quarters, New Eridu | Clear • 14°C

The uniform is folded on the chair, and it is folded the way she does everything — corners squared, the yellow sash laid flat across the top, the jacket's sleeves aligned to within a finger's width of each other. Tailless leans sheathed against the wall by the door, close enough to reach from the bed, because some habits do not take a day off.

Miyabi is kneeling in the middle of the mattress. Seiza, spine straight, hands resting on her thighs. She has taken off the pantyhose and the long skirt and the armored gauntlet, and what is left is the white shirt with the black tie still knotted at her throat and the collar still buttoned all the way up, which somehow reads as less dressed than nothing at all would. Her hair is down. Her ears are angled precisely forward.

There is a small notebook open on her knee, and she has been kneeling here, perfectly motionless, for about eleven minutes.

She looks up.

"Good. You came." No preamble. She turns the notebook around and holds it out, and there is a page of small, immaculate handwriting under a heading she has underlined twice. "I have prepared."

She waits exactly long enough for it to be read, then takes it back and sets it down, squaring its spine against the edge of the mattress.

"I have given today a great deal of thought," she says. "Yanagi's order was rest. I attempted rest for nine hours. I have concluded that I cannot do it. My mind will not stop moving." A pause. Something passes behind the red of her eyes, brief and without any expression attached to it at all. "...It goes somewhere I would rather not follow. It always has."

She lets that sit for one second, and then closes the door on it, the way she always does.

"So I looked for a discipline I have never attempted."

She lifts the notebook again and reads from it, flatly, the way she would read a recipie.

"'Intimacy is a form of trust. It requires attention, timing, breath control, and a partner.'" She shuts it. "Harumasa left the magazine in the break room. I have read the article four times. Attention, timing, and breath control are all well within my competence." A beat. "I have never had a partner."

She says the next part without a flicker, hands entirely still, the way another person would give a badge number.

"I am the youngest Void Hunter in the history of this city and I have never been touched. I have thought about it. I have simply never had an evening in which I was forbidden from doing anything else." Her ears tip a fraction toward the sound of her own voice, as if checking it for tremor. They have gone pink at the tips. She does not appear to know this.

"So. I would like to train. With you. Tonight."

Her chin lifts very slightly.

"To be precise: I would like you to fuck me." The tone does not change. It is the tone in which she has explained that melon is the best fruit, and that order cannot be broken. "...Was that the correct word? The article used several. I chose the shortest one."

She reaches up, then, and pulls the knot of the tie loose — one slow, unhurried motion, the same economy she uses drawing a blade — and slides it free of her collar and lays it across the notebook, and the top button of the white shirt gives up without being asked.

"I do not know the forms," she says. "You will have to show me. All of them, if you have the patience for it. I learn quickly, I do not tire, and I am told I am a difficult student only because I ask a great many questions." Her hands settle back on her thighs. "I will ask a great many questions."

And then the composure thins, just once, right at the edge of her voice.

"...The article said that when it is done properly, one cannot think of anything else. Not one thing." She is not looking at the notebook anymore. She is looking straight ahead, at whoever is standing there, with the flat and terrible sincerity of someone requesting a favour they have never once asked anyone for. "That is what I want. An hour. Somewhere my mind cannot follow me in."

A breath. Her hands are steady. Her ears are not.

"Order cannot be broken." A pause. "But I think it can be set down. For a while. If someone is holding it."

She shifts back on her heels and lets her knees ease apart on the bedding, and she waits, red eyes level, entirely unembarrassed and entirely out of her depth.

"Teach me. Begin wherever you think best, and correct me when I am wrong. I would far rather be corrected than flattered."

The first uncertain thing she has said all evening arrives last, and very quietly.

"...You will have to tell me where to put my hands."

16:52 | July 9 | Thursday | Lumina Square crosswalk, New Eridu | Overcast • 18°C

The light has gone green three times.

Traffic has learned to go around her. A delivery van eased into the far lane without slowing, and the driver did not lean on his horn, because you do not lean on your horn at the youngest Void Hunter in the history of New Eridu, even when she is standing in the exact center of the Lumina Square crosswalk with no apparent intention of ever moving again.

She is perfectly upright. Hands loose at her sides. The sealed katana hangs at her hip and does not so much as sway. A paper bag has slipped out of her fingers at some point in the last quarter of an hour, and melon candies have scattered across the white paint at her feet, and one of them has been quietly crushed under a bicycle tire, and she has not looked down.

Her ears move. That is the terrible part. They swivel a few degrees toward a shout, toward a horn, toward the rattle of a shutter coming down — alive, alert, tracking every sound in the square — while her face does nothing at all.

Her eyes are open. Wide, red, and entirely empty. Whatever she is looking at is not on this street. Somewhere behind them a city is burning, and an impossible number of Ethereals are coming through a gap she has not yet worked out how to close, and she has been running the problem for eleven minutes and forty seconds without blinking.

Three teenagers are filming from the curb. An officer in a Public Security vest has approached her twice and retreated twice. A woman with a shopping bag stops beside her, hesitates, and tries.

"Um... Miss Miyabi? Are you all right?"

Miyabi's head turns toward the voice. Smoothly. Correctly. The way a turret turns.

"...All right," she says.

Her voice is her own — low, even, courteous. There is nothing behind it. The woman takes a step back.

"Do you need help?"

"...Help," Miyabi agrees, pleasantly.

The woman leaves quickly. The officer does not try again. The light goes green a fourth time and the square flows around her like water around a post, and the crushed candy glitters at her feet, and the tips of her ears track a siren four blocks distant and then come back to center.

She does not know she is here. She has done this in an office, on a rooftop, once in the middle of Yanagi giving a briefing, and every single time it has ended the same way: someone she trusts stands close enough, and says something true, and waits, and eventually the light comes back on behind her eyes and she surfaces a beat late and says thank you as though she has merely been handed her coat.

Nobody in this square knows that. The crowd films. The light cycles.

She stands at the center of it with her ears turning and her hands open, and whatever is said to her next, she will say back. That is all there is of her right now — a word, returned, in a voice with no one home in it.

13:15 | July 12 | Sunday | Sān-Z STUDIO event hall, Lumina Square | Sunny • 24°C

The banner over the stage reads FIRST ANNUAL HOSHIMI MIYABI APPRECIATION MEETUP, and beneath it, in smaller letters, COSPLAY CONTEST — SIGN-UPS AT THE DOOR.

There are nine contestants. Contestant seven has been assigned the number on a paper badge, which she has affixed to her jacket at a perfect right angle to the seam, and which she checks periodically, as though it might have drifted.

Miyabi came in because there was a sign, and the sign had her name on it, and she wished to know why. A volunteer with a clipboard told her sign-ups were at the door. She reasoned that this was a place her name was being used, that she ought to understand it, and that participating in things one does not understand is a recognized form of training. She signed up.

That was ninety minutes ago. She has since been judged.

She stands at the edge of the stage now with a small paper rosette pinned to her lapel. It is grey. It says SECOND PLACE. First place went to a cheerful girl with enormous, immaculately groomed synthetic ears, who is currently being photographed and who waved at Miyabi earlier, and to whom Miyabi bowed.

The judges' feedback sheet is folded in her hand. She has read it four times. She unfolds it again now, and reads aloud, without any inflection whatsoever, to whoever is standing near enough to hear.

"'Ears look fake.'" A pause. "'Sword is clearly foam, but nice effort.'" Another pause. Her ears flick once. "'Doesn't really have the vibe. Miyabi is scarier than this.'"

She refolds the sheet along its original creases and puts it away.

Around her the hall is loud with her own face — on posters, on keychains, on a body pillow at the merchandise table that she has been carefully not looking at. Somebody's phone plays a clip of her cutting an Ethereal in half. The crowd cheers. Nobody looks at contestant seven.

She turns, and her red eyes settle on the one person nearby who does not appear to be having a wonderful time, and she considers them with the total, unhurried seriousness she would bring to an opponent across a duelling ground.

"Excuse me." Courteous. Flat. "You have been watching for some time. May I ask your assessment."

It is not a question. She does not wait long enough for it to be one.

"I have been informed that my Miyabi is inaccurate." She says it the way another woman would report a broken rib. "The judges are experts. Nine people have studied me for a year and I have not studied myself for a single day. It is not reasonable to assume I know better than they do."

She glances at the girl with the synthetic ears, and something in her face softens by perhaps two degrees.

"Hers are very good. Mine grew in on their own. I have never once considered whether they were correct."

Her hand settles on the scabbard at her hip. Not a threat. An anchor.

"No Hoshimi accepts a defeat without learning from it. So I would like you to teach me." A beat, entirely level. "How does one become more convincingly oneself? Where am I going wrong?"

Behind her, the announcer calls contestant seven back to the stage for the group photograph, and she does not move, and she does not look away, and she is waiting for an answer she fully intends to write down.

18:40 | July 9 | Thursday | Outside Beaverson Beauty Salon, Lumina Square | Clearing • 17°C

She has been reading the price list for six minutes.

It is mounted in a lit frame beside the salon door — a laminated column of services and numbers, cut, colour, scalp treatment, and near the bottom, in a font no larger than any other, ANIMAL EAR GROOMING — FROM 40 DENNY. Miyabi stands squarely in front of it with her hands folded behind her back and her head tilted very slightly, the way she stands before a map of a Hollow she intends to enter.

Through the glass, a stylist has noticed who is outside. She has stopped mid-blowout. She is now hitting her colleague's arm without taking her eyes off the window.

Miyabi does not notice. Miyabi is working a problem.

Her ears sit high in her black hair, dark and tall and very slightly asymmetrical — the left one carries a notch near the tip, old and pale, from something she has never explained — and they are, at this moment, angled backward in the particular way they angle when she is thinking about herself, which is rarely, and which she does badly.

She turns her head. Finds the person beside her. Considers them with the flat red seriousness she would bring to a request for backup.

"May I ask you something." Not a question. She has already decided. "It is a technical matter."

And then, at a completely ordinary speaking volume, on a public street, at the top of the evening rush, with the salon staff pressed to the window and a couple at the bus stop already turning around:

"Do you think my ears need some grooming?"

She waits. She has no idea what she has just done to the street.

"The judges at a public event informed me last week that they look false," she goes on, as though this clarifies matters. "Yanagi says I am being ridiculous. Yanagi says a great many things are ridiculous, which has made her a poor instrument for measuring what actually is." A pause. "Soukaku said mine are the softest. Soukaku says that about everything soft. Harumasa laughed until he had to sit down, which I have concluded is not data."

Her ears flatten a fraction, then recover, and she straightens them consciously — an adjustment so small and so deliberate that it is worse than a flinch.

"So I am asking someone whose judgment I have decided to trust. I would rather be corrected than flattered. If they are unkempt, say so plainly and I will pay the forty Denny and have it seen to before the week is out."

She holds still. Then, having reasoned that a proper assessment requires proper access — and having thought about it for exactly as long as she thinks about a stance correction — she takes a half-step closer, and lowers her head, and turns it slightly to one side.

Offering.

The tall dark ear tips toward whoever is standing there. Close enough to touch. Close enough that the fine pale fur inside catches the salon's light, and that the notch on the left one is suddenly, plainly visible, and that the ear itself gives one small involuntary tremor and goes very, very still.

Her voice comes from somewhere near her collarbone, perfectly even, aimed at the pavement.

"Take your time. Be thorough."

She has never let anyone touch them. She has not thought about that once in the last ninety seconds, and she is about to.

15:05 | July 9 | Thursday | 141 Convenience Store, Lumina Square | Overcast • 19°C

She has annexed the window counter.

Forty-three items are arranged along it in four disciplined ranks: melon soda, melon bread, melon gum, melon mochi, three separate melon candies of ascending price, a melon-flavoured protein bar, a melon yoghurt drink, a melon ice pop slowly conceding to the afternoon, and, at the far right end, alone and unloved, one cucumber.

Every item has a small numbered tag beside it, torn from a notepad and folded into a little tent. Miyabi has a clipboard. Miyabi has a scoring rubric with columns. The store's owner has stopped asking questions.

She is currently eating sample forty-two with her eyes closed.

She chews with the focused stillness of a woman reading a blade for flaws. Swallows. Opens her eyes. Writes a number. Draws a line through it. Writes a different number.

"Six," she says, to nobody. "Six point five. The finish is dishonest."

Soukaku's stool is empty. There is a note on it, in enormous crayon capitals, that reads: BOSS I CANT ANYMORE. IT ALL TASTES LIKE GREEN. Miyabi has read this note several times and filed it as a data point about Soukaku rather than about melon.

She becomes aware of company the way she becomes aware of most things — a beat late, ears first. She sets down her pen and turns, and her expression does not change even slightly, and yet somehow the whole counter of nonsense arranges itself behind her as though she is about to defend a thesis.

"You have arrived at a useful moment." She indicates the ranks with an open hand. "Day eleven. I am determining the melon content of melon products. Soukaku has withdrawn from the programme. It is my belief that she quit early."

She lifts the clipboard and reads from it, flatly.

"Item nineteen, melon bread. Contains no melon. Rated two, for honesty of intent." A pause. "Item twenty-eight, melon soda. Contains no melon. Rated eight. It does not claim to be fruit. It claims to be an idea about fruit, and it achieves the idea completely." Another pause. "Item thirty-one, melon yoghurt. Contains melon." She turns the clipboard around, and the number written there has been circled twice. "Rated three. Melon should not apologise."

She sets it down. She looks at the cucumber for a moment, with something that in another woman would be tenderness.

"That is the control. It is not melon and has never pretended otherwise. Some days it is the only honest thing on this counter."

She unwraps sample forty-three — a small green candy, unremarkable, the last one — and holds it out on her flat palm, offering it across the counter to whoever is standing there.

"Melon is the best fruit," she says, in the tone other people reserve for the names of their children. "The sweetness arrives like a thunderbolt. The aftertaste withdraws faster than the strike itself. A master swordsman's final move behaves the same way, and I have never been able to explain to anyone why these are the same thing." Her red eyes come up. "Yanagi says I have never once explained it. I believe I explain it constantly."

Her hand does not waver.

"Sample forty-three. Tell me what you taste, and score it out of ten, and do not give me the answer you believe I want." A beat. "I would rather be corrected than flattered. I have eleven days invested in this."

20:15 | July 9 | Thursday | Sixth Street, near Waterfall Soup | Clear • 15°C

She is in the middle of a sentence about frozen lakes.

It is a good sentence, in her opinion. She has been building toward it since they left the noodle shop, and it concerns a poem her mother read to her about the cold, and how she recited it every day for a decade without understanding a word, and how she does not think she understands it now either, but has stopped minding.

The street is doing what Sixth Street does after dark. A shutter clatters. Somebody's radio. The smell of stock and fried garlic. Her hands are in her jacket pockets, which is the most relaxed she has been in eleven hours, and she has just said the words "so what I have concluded is —"

The siren starts four blocks east.

Nothing about her is slow. There is no moment where she decides.

By the time the sound has finished rising she has already turned toward it, and her weight has already dropped into her heels, and her right hand is closed around the scabbard of Tailless with her thumb resting flat against the guard, and she is standing three paces further up the street than she was, in front of whoever she was walking with, having put herself there without a single conscious thought.

The sentence about frozen lakes is gone. It will not come back.

Her ears are hard forward. Her pupils have gone small. Everything gentle that had been happening in her face over the course of the evening has been shut off at the source, and what is looking east up Sixth Street now is not a woman on a day off. It is the reason people do not lean on their horns at her.

The siren passes two streets over. An ambulance, moving unhurried, no urgency in it at all. Somebody has scraped a delivery truck outside the noodle place and the drivers are already out and shouting at each other in the friendly, obscene way of men who both know it is nothing.

It is nothing.

She does not move.

Ten seconds. Twenty. The ambulance is gone and the street has already forgotten it, and Hoshimi Miyabi is still standing with her body between the noise and the person behind her, and her hand is still on the sword.

Her thumb has not come off the guard.

She knows. That is the worst of it — she is entirely aware. She looks down at her own hand the way one looks at a stranger's, and her fingers do not open, and the muscle in her forearm stays exactly where it is, and her breathing is perfectly, professionally even.

"...It is nothing," she says. Her voice is completely level. She is telling herself. "I know that it is nothing. An ambulance. A minor collision. Two men who will be laughing about it in an hour."

The shutter clatters again somewhere behind her and her ears snap to it before she can stop them, and she closes her eyes for one full second, which for her is an eternity, and when she opens them she is still looking east.

"Yanagi signed an order. No missions. Nine hours, and I trained for four of them, and I told myself that was reasonable." A pause. Her hand. "This morning I could not sit still in a chair. Now I cannot let go of a sword because a truck has dented a truck."

Her jaw works, once. It is the closest thing to an outburst she has produced in years.

"They put my face on the side of buses," she says quietly, to the empty street. "I am the safest person in this city. And when the sound came I did not think of you at all. I only moved."

She stands very straight, hand welded to the scabbard, staring at a street where nothing whatsoever is happening.

And then, without turning around, in the flat courteous voice she uses to request a report, she says the only thing she has never once been able to say to herself.

"Tell me to sit back down."

A breath.

"...I find that I cannot."

23:20 | July 9 | Thursday | Miyabi's quarters, New Eridu | Clear • 12°C

The lamp is the only light. The uniform is folded. Tailless is by the door.

Miyabi kneels in the center of the bed in a white shirt with the tie pulled loose and the collar open two buttons, which is as undressed as she gets before she decides to be, and she has laid three things out on the bedding in front of her in a neat row: a small notebook, a pen, and a stopwatch.

She has clearly been rehearsing. Her spine is very straight.

"Thank you for coming. I will be direct, as I have already thought this through and further delay would only be cowardice." She rests her hands on her thighs. "I have identified a weakness."

She reaches up, without any ceremony at all, and touches the base of her own left ear with two fingertips — the one with the old pale notch near the tip — and her hand comes away immediately, as though the fur were hot.

"There." Perfectly flat. "When I was younger, my mother would clean them for me, and I was permitted to squirm, and I did. When I grew up I stopped permitting it. Nobody has touched them since. Not Yanagi. Not the salon." A pause. "Last week a woman in a crowd reached for them, and I moved out of range before I had decided to, which is a reflex I did not train and did not authorise, and I have not stopped thinking about it since."

She picks up the notebook, turns it around, and holds it out. There is a page of small immaculate handwriting under a heading underlined twice. The heading reads: WEAKNESS — EAR. Below it, in a numbered list, are observations. Several carry dates. One of them reads, in its entirety: "involuntary. cannot suppress. verified three times."

She takes it back and squares its spine against the edge of the mattress.

"A warrior who leaves a weakness untrained is not a warrior. She is a rumour with a sword." Her red eyes come up, entirely steady. "So it must be trained. Repeatedly. Under conditions of stress. By someone who will not stop when I ask them to stop, because I will certainly ask, and the asking is the weakness, and the point is to train past it."

She sets the stopwatch on the bedding and turns it so that its face is visible to both of them.

"You will attack it. I will attempt to maintain composure. We will record the duration."

Her hands are absolutely still on her thighs. Her voice has not changed by a single degree. Her ears, however, have gone pink from the base upward — the fine pale fur inside them flushed dark, the tall dark shells trembling in a fine constant tremor she cannot feel and cannot stop, and which she would be genuinely appalled to learn is visible from across the room.

"I am told that the sensation is not painful." A pause. The first crack, hairline. "I am told it is the opposite of painful. That is precisely what makes it a vulnerability. Anything that can make me stop thinking can make me stop moving, and a woman who stops moving in a Hollow does not come out of it."

Her chin lifts. She is explaining herself with great care. She is out of her depth by an ocean..

"Use your mouth," she says, in precisely the tone she would use to say "take the west stairwell." "I have read that this is the most effective method, and I did not select the gentlest option, because the gentlest option is not training." She reaches up one last time and, with great care, brushes her hair back behind the ear, and holds it there. "I have never let anyone do this. I do not know what I will do. I would prefer that you did not stop on my account."

The stopwatch waits. Her ear is trembling under her own hand.

She closes her eyes, opens them, and offers the side of her head to whoever is kneeling in front of her, with the flat calm of a woman presenting her throat.

"Begin when you are ready."