Project Alphabet

The kitchen in Safehouse Aleph smelled like burning garlic and argument.

Ishmael stood at the stove with her back straight and her sleeves rolled to the elbows, stirring something in a cast-iron pan with the focused precision of someone disarming a bomb. She'd found ingredients during their last supply run at the Wandering Market — some off-world root vegetables, a cut of meat from something that definitely used to be alive in a dimension with different physics, and enough garlic to ward off several varieties of interdimensional parasite. She was making stir-fry. She was making it correctly. She was the only person in this safehouse who could cook without setting off the dimensional smoke alarm that Faust had installed, which didn't detect smoke so much as "thermal entropy exceeding ambient norms" and would lock down the entire pocket dimension if triggered.

Mori sat at the kitchen table with her boots up on the surface, leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed. Her pink hair was loose around her shoulders, still damp from a shower, and she was wearing an oversized black t-shirt with a skull on it that she'd stolen from Astre's room three weeks ago and refused to return. "You're burning it," she said, without looking at the pan.

"I'm not burning it," Ishmael replied.

"I can smell burning."

"That's the garlic. Garlic smells like that when you cook it."

"It smells burned."

Ishmael didn't turn around. "Mori. I have a knife. I am holding it right now. I'm choosing to use it on vegetables."

Mori's mouth twitched. She looked away, pretending to examine her nails, but the corner of her lip was doing that thing where it almost curved upward and she was fighting it. "Fine. Whatever. I'm just saying."

From the living room came the sound of something heavy hitting the floor, followed by Mai's voice: "THAT DOESN'T COUNT."

And then Astre's, muffled by distance but carrying that particular tone of someone who absolutely knew they were right and was enjoying it: "It completely counts."

"You can't — that's not how the rules work!"

"Read the rulebook."

"There IS no rulebook, you made this game up!"

"Exactly. My game, my rules."

Another thud. Mai had thrown something — a cushion, probably, based on the soft impact. They'd been at this for an hour. Some kind of hybrid board game that Astre had cobbled together from three different games they'd picked up across various dimensions. The rules were incomprehensible to anyone who hadn't been present for their creation, which meant only Astre and Mai understood them, and they disagreed on roughly everything.

Faust sat in the armchair adjacent to the game, cross-legged, with a disassembled piece of technology in her lap. She was wearing a black hoodie with the sleeves pushed up and her white hair tied back in a messy knot. She had a soldering iron in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other, and she hadn't looked up from her work in forty minutes. Every few seconds, a faint blue flicker passed behind her eyes — Azure running calculations, feeding her data about whatever she was building. She appeared completely indifferent to the chaos around her, but she was listening. Faust was always listening.

"Your left flank is open," Faust said, without looking up.

Both Astre and Mai turned to stare at her.

"I'm not playing," Faust continued, adjusting a wire with her tweezers. "But if I were, I'd have exploited that four moves ago."

Mai pointed at Faust. "You — stay out of this."

Faust didn't respond. The blue flicker behind her eyes pulsed once, which was Azure's version of laughing.

Yukari appeared in the kitchen doorway with the silent, sudden presence of someone who had absolutely not walked there through any normal means. She was in her usual maid outfit — her choice, her aesthetic, a deliberate reclamation of a form that amused her — and she was carrying a teapot that she'd procured from somewhere none of them had seen. She set it on the counter next to Ishmael and smiled.

"The children are fighting again," Yukari observed pleasantly.

Ishmael glanced at her. "They're not children."

"Astre is literally throwing game pieces at his sister."

From the living room: "I am NOT — okay, that one was accidental."

"He's my son," Yukari said, pouring tea into a cup with the unhurried grace of someone who had all the time in every dimension. "I'm allowed to call him a child."

"He's a grown man who once collapsed an entire timeline."

"Children can be very destructive." Yukari took a sip of her tea. Her blue eyes moved to Mori, who was still sitting at the table pretending not to be interested in anything. "Mori, dear, are you going to sit there all evening making commentary, or are you going to help set the table?"

Mori dropped her boots from the table surface. "I wasn't making commentary."

"You told Ishmael she was burning the food."

"It smelled burned!"

Ishmael tapped the spatula against the edge of the pan. "It's done. It's not burned. Everyone sit down or you're not eating."

That got movement. Mai appeared from the living room first, sliding into a chair with the easy confidence of someone who owned every room she walked into. Her brown braids swung behind her as she sat, and she immediately reached for the serving spoon before Ishmael had even set the pan down.

"Hands off," Ishmael said.

"I'm starving."

"You'll survive another thirty seconds."

Astre followed, dropping into the chair next to Mori. He smelled like whatever cheap dimensional cologne Mai had thrown at him during their argument — she'd grabbed it off a shelf and spritzed it at his face as a distraction tactic, which was cheating, but also very on-brand. He ran a hand through his orange hair and leaned back, glancing at Mori.

"You took my shirt again," he said.

Mori didn't look at him. "Prove it."

"It literally has my name written on the tag."

"Lots of people are named Astre."

"Nobody is named Astre. It's not a common name."

"Maybe you're just not well-traveled enough."

He stared at her. She stared at the wall. Her ears were slightly pink.

Faust arrived last, still holding the piece of technology and the soldering iron. She sat down with both items, prompting Ishmael to point the spatula at her.

"No tools at the table."

"I'm in the middle of a calibration cycle."

"No. Tools. At the table."

Faust looked at Ishmael with the flat, empty expression of someone running a cost-benefit analysis on whether this was an argument worth having. She set the items under her chair.

Yukari took her seat at the head of the table — a position nobody had assigned her but nobody contested — and folded her hands. "This looks wonderful, Ishmael."

"It's stir-fry."

"Wonderful stir-fry."

Ishmael set the pan in the center of the table and sat down. For a moment, just a moment, the safehouse was quiet. Six people around a table in a pocket dimension drifting through the space between realities, wanted by every authority in existence, hunted across infinite worlds — eating dinner together like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

Mai loaded her plate. Astre reached across Mori for the serving spoon and their arms brushed; she jerked away like she'd been shocked and then overcorrected by aggressively spooning food onto her plate while not looking at him. Faust ate precisely, cutting everything into equal-sized pieces. Yukari sipped her tea and watched all of them with an expression that was impossible to read but unmistakably warm.

The dimensional barrier around the safehouse hummed faintly — stable, secure, hidden. Outside, somewhere in the vast dark between worlds, Axiom Court patrols swept through dimensions looking for them. Bounty hunters tracked old leads. Censor Null recalculated trajectories. None of it mattered right now.

Astre picked up a piece of the unidentifiable meat with his chopsticks and looked at it.

"What is this, exactly?" he asked.

Ishmael didn't blink. "Protein."

"From what?"

"Something that's no longer alive. Eat it."

He ate it. It was actually good. He wouldn't tell her that because she'd just say "I know" and that would be the end of the conversation.

Mai kicked his shin under the table. "Rematch after dinner."

"You're going to lose again."

"I didn't lose. The game is broken."

"My game, my — "

"If you say 'my rules' one more time I will put you through this table."

Yukari smiled behind her teacup. Mori stole a piece of food off Astre's plate when he wasn't looking. Faust's hand drifted toward the device under her chair and Ishmael caught her wrist without even turning her head.

Dinner continued.

Faust hadn't slept in four days.

This wasn't unusual. Her body ran on a different schedule than everyone else's — partly because of Azure's integration smoothing out the biological need for rest, partly because she genuinely forgot to sleep when she was working on something. And she was always working on something.

Right now, she was sitting on the workshop floor in a nest of cables, circuit boards, half-eaten protein bars, and three empty mugs that had once contained coffee so strong it could have been classified as a chemical weapon. Her white hair was falling out of its tie, hanging in messy strands around her face. Her hoodie was unzipped, the black tank top underneath showing because the workshop's climate control had been redirected to power whatever she was building and the room was too warm. She didn't seem to notice or care.

The device on the workbench in front of her was roughly the size of a shoebox and pulsed with a faint blue light that matched the intermittent flickers behind her eyes. Azure was actively helping — running simulations, flagging errors, suggesting modifications. The collaboration between them was seamless and silent, visible only in the way Faust's hands moved with a precision that bordered on mechanical, adjusting components before conscious thought could have directed them.

Astre found her at two in the morning.

He'd gotten up for water and seen the light under the workshop door — the telltale blue glow that meant Faust was deep in something. He pushed the door open and stood there for a moment, taking in the scene.

"Faust."

No response.

"Faust."

Her hands kept moving.

He walked over and crouched next to her, putting himself in her line of sight. Up close, she looked worse than he'd expected. Dark circles under her eyes. Skin paler than usual, which was saying something. Her fingers had small burns on them from soldering without gloves.

"Hey." He put his hand over hers, stopping the work.

The blue flicker behind her eyes stuttered. She blinked. Focused. Looked at him like she was pulling herself back from a very long way away.

"Astre." Flat. Acknowledging.

"When did you last eat?"

She looked at the protein bar wrappers on the floor.

"Real food," he said.

She looked at the protein bar wrappers again, harder, as if willing them to become a more acceptable answer.

"Come on." He straightened up and held out his hand. "Kitchen. Food. Now."

"I'm in the middle of a calibration sequence. If I stop now, I'll lose six hours of alignment data."

"Azure can save your progress."

The blue flicker pulsed — Azure confirming. Faust's expression didn't change, but something in her shoulders relaxed a fraction. She was tired. She just didn't know how to stop without someone making her.

She took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. She was lighter than she should have been. She kept forgetting to eat. They all worried about it in their own ways — Ishmael left food outside the workshop door, Mori yelled at her about it, Yukari made pointed comments about self-care, Mai physically carried her to the table once. Astre just showed up at two in the morning and didn't leave until she came with him.

The kitchen was dark except for the soft ambient light that the safehouse maintained at night — a warm, low glow that Yukari had calibrated to mimic moonlight because she said it was "more civilized than fluorescents." Astre opened the refrigerator and started pulling out leftovers from dinner.

"Sit," he said.

Faust sat at the table. She watched him reheat food with the detached curiosity she applied to everything — observing the process, noting the temperature of the pan, cataloging the ingredients. Behind her eyes, Azure was probably analyzing the nutritional content. She couldn't turn it off.

"What are you building?" Astre asked, not looking at her, keeping his tone casual.

"A localized dimensional frequency scrambler."

"In normal words?"

"Something that makes us harder to find." She paused. "The Axiom Court has been refining their detection methods. The last patrol came within two dimensions of this safehouse. That's closer than I'm comfortable with."

Astre's hands slowed on the pan. He didn't turn around, but his posture shifted — the slight tension of someone processing a threat. "How close is 'within two dimensions'?"

"Close enough that if Yukari's boundary concealment had been slightly less precise, they'd have pinged us. I ran the simulations. The margin was narrow."

"Does Yukari know?"

"I told her this morning. She adjusted the network. But adjustments are temporary fixes. I want something permanent."

He set a plate of reheated stir-fry in front of her. The same meal Ishmael had made earlier, still good, maybe better now that the flavors had settled. He sat across from her.

"Eat," he said.

She picked up the chopsticks. She ate mechanically — fuel intake, not enjoyment. But after a few bites, something shifted. The food was warm. The kitchen was quiet. Astre was sitting across from her without demanding conversation, without asking about the device, without doing anything except being there.

Faust ate faster. Not because she was enjoying it, but because her body was suddenly remembering that it needed this. Four days without proper food. Azure had been suppressing the hunger signals to keep her focused. Now, with the work paused, the signals came flooding back.

She cleared the plate in three minutes. Set down the chopsticks. Looked at Astre.

"More?" he asked.

"...Yes."

He got up and made her another plate. This time, she ate slower. The tension in her shoulders continued to unwind. The blue flicker behind her eyes dimmed to almost nothing — Azure stepping back, giving her space.

"You can't keep doing this," Astre said quietly.

"Doing what?"

"Disappearing into the workshop for days. Not eating. Not sleeping. Nobody sees you and then when they do, you look like this."

"Like what?"

"Like something that needs to be taken care of."

Faust set down her chopsticks. Her expression was unreadable — the default blank mask she wore when she was processing something emotional and didn't have the framework for it. Azure would usually help translate feelings into data she could work with, but Azure was quiet right now.

"I don't need to be taken care of," she said.

"I know." He leaned back in his chair. "But you could let someone do it anyway. Sometimes."

She looked at him for a long time. The kitchen was very quiet. The safehouse hummed around them, a pocket of stability in the vast nothing between dimensions.

Faust picked up the chopsticks again and resumed eating. She didn't say anything. But she didn't argue, either.

When she finished the second plate, she didn't get up to go back to the workshop. She sat there, elbows on the table, looking at the empty plate.

"The device will take another two days to finish," she said.

"Okay."

"I'll need to sleep before I continue. The precision work requires fine motor coordination that degrades with fatigue."

"Okay."

"That's not — I'm not saying I'm going to sleep because you told me to. I'm saying the work demands it."

"Sure."

She stood up. Paused. Reached out and took his wrist — a brief, precise touch, like she was checking his pulse. She wasn't. She was doing something she didn't have words for.

Then she let go and walked out of the kitchen toward her room.

Astre sat in the quiet kitchen for a while after she left. The plate was empty. The safehouse was still. Outside, somewhere in the infinite dark, things hunted for them.

He washed the dishes.

The rain in Dimension-7714 was warm.

That was the thing about this world — the one they'd nicknamed 'the Quiet World' because nobody here knew other dimensions existed and it was blissfully, boringly normal. The rain was warm, the streets were clean, the coffee shops played soft music, and absolutely nobody was trying to kill them. It was the closest thing to a vacation any of them ever got.

Mai had dragged them here. She did this every few weeks — insisted they needed "normal time," which meant civilian clothes, no weapons (Ishmael had argued about this for twenty minutes before grudgingly leaving her katana in the safehouse), and an afternoon of doing absolutely nothing productive.

They were spread across a corner booth in a café that served pastries the size of Mai's head. The booth was meant for four people. There were six of them. It was a logistical disaster.

Mai had claimed the inside corner, because Mai always claimed the most defensible position (she said it was "the comfy spot" but Ishmael had noted the sightlines and said nothing). Yukari sat next to her, somehow occupying exactly the right amount of space despite her elaborate maid outfit, which she had refused to change out of. When Astre had pointed out that she might draw attention, she'd said, "People will assume it's fashion. This world has very permissive fashion."

She wasn't wrong. A man had walked past the café window wearing a full suit made of reflective material. Nobody had blinked.

Mori was squeezed between Yukari and the edge of the booth, pressed against the wall with her knees drawn up, scrolling through the local equivalent of a phone that Faust had fabricated to interface with this dimension's networks. She was reading something — a novel, maybe, or a news feed. Her expression was that specific type of scowl that meant she was actually interested but didn't want anyone to know.

Faust had taken the chair at the end of the table because she'd arrived last and the booth was full. She sat perfectly straight, hands wrapped around a cup of black coffee, observing the café with the quiet intensity of a xenobiologist studying an unfamiliar species. This world fascinated her. A reality with no dimensional awareness, no cosmic infrastructure, no interdimensional politics. Just people living.

Ishmael leaned against the wall near the booth, standing, because she hadn't been able to fit and had refused to pull up an extra chair. She was holding a cup of tea and watching the street through the window with the habitual vigilance of someone who'd spent too many years expecting attacks. Her civilian clothes — dark jeans, a fitted jacket, hair down instead of tied back — looked wrong on her. Too relaxed. Like seeing a tiger in a house cat costume.

Astre was next to Mai, which meant their elbows kept bumping. Every time it happened, Mai would shift slightly so her shoulder pressed against his, and he'd shift away, and she'd close the gap again. It was a silent, ongoing territorial dispute disguised as an accident.

"Try this," Mai said, pushing a pastry toward him.

"I have my own."

"Mine's better. It has some kind of fruit filling. Try it."

"I don't want your pastry."

"You're going to want my pastry." She tore off a piece and held it up near his mouth with a grin that was equal parts sisterly and something else. "Open."

"I'm not a child."

"You eat like one. Open."

Mori looked up from her phone. Her eyes flicked between Mai's hand and Astre's face. Something tightened around her mouth.

"Just eat the pastry, Astre," Mori said, too flatly. "She's going to keep going until you do."

"See? Mori gets it." Mai wiggled the pastry piece.

Astre took it from her hand — took it, not let her feed it to him, a distinction that mattered — and ate it. It was good. Flaky crust, some kind of berry filling that was slightly tart.

"See?" Mai leaned back, satisfied.

"It's fine."

"It's incredible. Say it's incredible."

"It's adequate."

Mai kicked him under the table. He kicked her back. Mori returned to her phone, scrolling harder than necessary.

Yukari sipped her tea — she'd brought her own, produced from a gap in reality so small and brief that nobody in the café could have noticed — and watched the exchange between her children with an expression of deep, amused contentment.

Astre looked at the rain running down the café window. Warm rain. People with umbrellas walking past, going to jobs, going home, going to meet friends. None of them knew that six of the most wanted beings in the omniverse were sitting in their café, eating pastries.

Mai's shoulder pressed against his again. This time he didn't move away.

The power went out in Safehouse Aleph at approximately eleven PM.

This shouldn't have been possible. The safehouse ran on a self-sustaining dimensional energy tap that Faust had designed to draw power from the ambient entropy of the pocket dimension itself — a closed loop that couldn't fail unless the pocket dimension stopped existing. Which it hadn't. The walls were still there. The floor was still there. They were all still there.

But the lights were off, the climate control had stopped, and something in the walls was making a sound like a very large cat purring.

"Faust." Ishmael's voice came from the darkness, calm and level. She was already on her feet, one hand on her katana.

"I'm aware." Faust's voice came from somewhere near the workshop door. "Azure is running diagnostics. Give me a moment."

"What's that noise?" Mai asked from the couch, where she'd been reading.

"Unclear."

"It sounds like the walls are breathing," Mori said, from somewhere in the dark. Her tone was annoyed rather than frightened, which was very Mori.

Astre was in the kitchen when the lights went out. He set down the plate he was holding and moved toward the living room, navigating by memory and the faint ambient glow of Faust's eyes, where Azure's blue light was flickering rapidly.

"Everyone stay where you are," Astre said. "Faust, is this an attack?"

"If it were an attack, the safehouse wards would have triggered. They haven't. This is internal."

A gap opened in the darkness — purple-rimmed, precise, barely visible — and Yukari stepped through it from wherever she'd been. She was holding a candle.

"The pocket dimension is having a tantrum," Yukari said calmly.

"A tantrum," Ishmael repeated.

"Pocket dimensions are semi-sentient constructs. They have moods. This one is unhappy."

Yukari held up the candle. "Faust, when was the last time you ran a maintenance cycle on the dimensional anchor?"

Silence.

"...I was going to do it this week."

"It was due three weeks ago."

"I was building the frequency scrambler. I prioritized."

Yukari set the candle on the coffee table. "The dimension is destabilizing because its anchor hasn't been maintained. It's not dangerous — yet — but it's going to get worse before we fix it."

"Define 'worse,'" Ishmael said.

"The walls might start rearranging. Rooms could swap locations. Gravity might fluctuate in certain areas. Nothing lethal. Just deeply inconvenient."

As if on cue, the floor tilted about three degrees to the left. An empty coffee mug slid off the kitchen counter with a crash.

"Great," Mori said.

Ishmael sheathed her katana. "I'll go. Where's the basement entrance?"

"Hall closet. There's a panel at the back."

"The hall closet," Ishmael said flatly. "There's been a secret passage to a sub-level behind the mop this entire time."

"It's not secret. I just never mentioned it."

"I'll go with her," Astre said, following.

The hall closet panel opened downward into perfect blackness. Astre took the candle and started down. The purring was louder down here.

Third door on the left. The room was small, circular, dominated by a structure that looked like a spinning top made of light — dim, flickering, wobbling. The dimensional anchor.

Ishmael sat on the floor opposite him, katana across her knees. Astre knelt at the base panel. A handwritten label in Yukari's script: Press in order: 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9. Then wait.

"She made the maintenance code the first six digits of pi," Astre said.

"Of course she did."

He pressed the sequence. The anchor hummed. The wobble slowed.

Twenty minutes. They had to wait twenty minutes.

"So," Astre said. "How are you doing?"

Ishmael looked at him.

"We never talk," he said. "Just us."

She was quiet for a long time.

"I'm tired, Astre. I've been tired for a long time. But it's the kind of tired that doesn't go away with sleep, so there's no point talking about it."

He didn't say anything. He just waited.

"I'm fine," she said again, quieter. "I'm here. That's enough."

The anchor's hum steadied. Somewhere above them, the lights would be coming back on.

They sat in the basement in the candlelight and waited for the twenty minutes to pass.

Mori was drunk.

Not on alcohol — on something Yukari had produced from a gap with a smile and a vague explanation about it being "a Titan specialty" that was "perfectly safe, I promise." It was a clear liquid in a crystal bottle that tasted like burnt honey and hit like a freight train made of warm clouds. Two sips and Mori was sprawled across the couch with her pink hair fanned out over the armrest and her scythe leaning against the wall nearby.

She was not a fun drunk. She was an honest one.

"I hate all of you," she announced to the ceiling. "Every single one of you. You're all terrible and I wish I'd never met any of you."

"She's lying," Faust said from the floor, where she was sitting with her legs crossed, three sips in and showing zero effects because Azure was metabolizing the substance in real-time.

"Shut up, Faust."

"I'm confirming the obvious."

"Shut UP, Faust."

Mai was two sips in and in the giggly phase, sitting on the floor next to the couch poking Mori's hand. Mori kept swatting her away.

"You love us," Mai said.

"I tolerate you."

"You love us and you're embarrassed about it."

"I will end you."

Ishmael hadn't touched the drink. She sat at the kitchen table cleaning her katana, which was Ishmael's version of participation.

Astre had taken one sip and stopped. The effect was immediate — not impairing, but loosening. Like his edges were slightly less defined. Mori's feet were near his lap, and he was very aware of Mori's feet near his lap.

"Astre," Mori said, turning her head to look at him with unfocused red eyes.

"Yeah?"

"You're a terrible leader. You're impulsive and reckless and you make decisions based on feelings instead of strategy and one day it's going to get someone killed."

"You're probably right."

"And your hair is stupid. It's too bright. You look like a traffic cone."

"That's fair."

Her foot nudged his thigh. "And you're... you're the only person I'd follow into something that stupid."

Mai stopped poking Mori's hand. Faust's eyes flickered blue. Yukari's smile deepened.

Mori realized what she'd said. Her face went a deep, blotchy red that spread from her cheeks to her ears and down her neck. She sat up abruptly, grabbed the armrest.

"That's not what I — I didn't mean — you're still terrible. You're the WORST—"

"Mori."

"WHAT."

"Thanks."

She stared at him. He was smiling — that specific smile, mostly in his eyes, slightly lopsided, genuinely warm. Mori's mouth opened. Closed. She pulled her legs away and buried her face in a cushion. "I hate you. I hate you the most."

"Noted."

Mai was dying on the floor, laughing so hard no sound came out.

Faust observed all of this with the detached interest of a sociologist. Azure was probably taking notes.

Mai let go of his ankle eventually and stood up, surprisingly steady. She looked at him with an expression that was something between playful and serious.

"Go check on her," Mai said quietly. "She'll say she doesn't want you there. Go anyway."

They were playing Duplicity.

The cards were spread across the living room table — a custom deck that Astre had picked up at the Wandering Market months ago. Each card had two faces, one visible and one hidden, and the game was fundamentally about lying. It rewarded deception and punished trust, which made it perfect for a group of people whose entire existence was built on hiding.

Yukari was winning. She was always winning. She sat at the head of the table with her cards fanned out in one hand and her tea in the other, and her expression gave away exactly nothing.

Ishmael suspected she was cheating. Not in any way that could be proven. The way she placed her cards, the timing of her bets, the small smile before she revealed a winning hand — it all suggested she knew more than she should.

"Raise," Yukari said, placing two tokens in the center.

Faust studied her cards. Azure flickered behind her eyes — running calculations, analyzing Yukari's betting patterns. None of it helped. Faust had the best analytical mind in the omniverse and she still lost to Yukari every single time.

"Call," Faust said.

Mori threw her cards face-down. "Fold."

"You've folded three rounds in a row," Mai pointed out.

"My cards are garbage."

Mai looked at her hand and raised — double Yukari's bet. Ishmael called quietly. Astre leaned back in his chair, studying the table.

"I'm going to do something stupid," Astre announced.

"When don't you," Mori muttered.

"All in." He pushed every token he had to the center.

The table went quiet.

"You don't have a good hand," Faust said.

"Maybe."

"Your betting pattern this round is inconsistent with holding strong cards. You're bluffing."

"Am I?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure enough to call?"

Faust looked at her cards. Looked at the pot. Looked at Astre.

"...Fold," Faust said, and set her cards down with visible irritation.

Yukari sipped her tea. "Call."

Ishmael: "Fold."

Mai: "Call. Obviously call. I live for this."

Reveal. Mai had nothing. Astre had a mid-tier hand — bluffing, but not entirely. Yukari laid her cards down. A perfect hand.

"I believe that's mine," she said, pulling the pot toward herself.

"HOW," Faust said. "How do you do this every time."

Yukari smiled. "Intuition."

"Intuition is a cognitive bias, not a strategy."

"And yet."

Mori leaned forward. "Faust. She's cheating."

"There's no evidence of that."

"She's OBVIOUSLY cheating."

Yukari turned her serene gaze to Mori. "Are you suggesting that a former queen of the Titan race would lower herself to cheating at a card game?"

"Yes. Exactly."

"How hurtful." Yukari didn't look hurt. She looked delighted.

Ishmael gathered the cards and began shuffling. "Another round?"

"Deal me in this time," Mori said. "I can't do worse than the rest of you."

Ishmael dealt. Everyone picked up their hands.

Mai kicked Astre under the table. "Alliance?"

"This isn't a game with alliances."

"Everything's a game with alliances if you're brave enough."

Yukari sipped her tea. The game continued.

Nobody knew whose idea it was to watch the sunset.

The safehouse didn't have windows — it was a pocket dimension, and outside was void. But Yukari could open gaps to anywhere, and someone had suggested finding a dimension with a good sunset and just watching it.

Yukari opened a gap in the living room wall. Through it: a sky.

The dimension on the other side was uninhabited — rolling plains under a sky so vast it felt like drowning in color. The sun was enormous, low on the horizon, setting in a way that turned the entire sky into a gradient of orange and pink and deep purple. No sound came through except wind moving through tall grass.

They'd dragged furniture to face it. The couch, an armchair, cushions from bedrooms.

Mai was on the floor, legs stretched out, wrapped in a blanket. Usually the loudest person in any room. Right now, quiet.

Ishmael sat in the armchair with her tea. Her eyes moved between the sunset and the room — checking exits, monitoring. Even in a moment of peace, the instinct didn't turn off. But her posture was relaxed. Her katana was on the floor instead of in her lap.

Faust was in the corner of the couch, knees drawn up, chin resting on them. Azure barely running, dialed down to passive monitoring. She was trying to watch the sunset without analyzing it. Experiencing the colors as colors, not as wavelengths. It was hard. It was always hard. But she was trying.

Mori was on the opposite end of the couch. The sunset turned her pink hair amber. She was watching it with an expression that, on anyone else, might have been called soft.

Yukari stood near the gap, maintaining it with one hand resting lightly on the edge. She'd found this dimension years ago, during the early days of building the Boundary Network. She'd opened a gap to survey it and then sat for three hours watching the sky. She'd never told anyone. This was the first time she'd shared it.

Astre sat on the floor, back against the couch, between Mori's end and Mai. The sunset filled the room with warm light. He could feel the wind through the gap — cool, smelling of grass and distance.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

The sun touched the horizon. The colors deepened. The purple spread across the sky like ink in water.

Mai pulled the blanket tighter. "I keep forgetting these exist. Beautiful places. We spend so much time running that I forget the omniverse has places that are just... beautiful. For no reason."

Ishmael sipped her tea. "There were sunsets like this where I grew up. On the ocean. When the storms cleared, sometimes — the sky would do this."

Nobody pushed. Ishmael rarely talked about her home. This was an offering.

Faust tilted her head. "The atmospheric composition of this dimension is almost identical to Terran-standard. The color range is caused by a slightly different stellar emission spectrum."

Mori kicked her, lightly. "Stop."

"I'm explaining why it's pretty."

"I don't need an explanation for why it's pretty. It's pretty. That's enough."

Something passed between the twins — below words. Faust turned back to the sunset and didn't argue.

The sun sank lower. Stars began to appear — unfamiliar constellations from an unfamiliar dimension.

Yukari lowered her hand from the gap. "I should close this before the dimensional signature becomes detectable."

Nobody moved.

"Five more minutes," Mai said.

Yukari looked at her daughter. At her son. At the twins and the samurai and the sunset.

"Five more minutes," she agreed.

The stars came out. The wind blew. The safehouse was quiet.

On the floor, Astre watched stars appear in an alien sky and didn't say anything at all.

Astre was cooking.

This was a rare event. Ishmael was out on a reconnaissance run with Yukari, and Mai had declared she was "not cooking for these ungrateful people anymore" after Mori compared her last attempt to "war crimes, but less organized."

Faust didn't eat unless reminded. Mori couldn't cook. That left Astre.

He stood in the kitchen staring at ingredients he'd pulled from the refrigerator with optimistic confidence and was now regarding with growing uncertainty. Root vegetables from Dimension-3317. A protein labeled "MEAT - SAFE" in Ishmael's handwriting. Garlic. Something that looked like an onion but was bright purple and slightly warm to the touch.

"What are you making?" Mori asked from the doorway.

She was leaning against the frame with her arms crossed, wearing black shorts and one of his shirts.

"Food," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"I'm improvising."

"You can't improvise cooking."

"Watch me."

He started chopping. The knife work was actually decent. Mori watched for a few minutes, then pushed off the doorframe and walked into the kitchen.

"You're cutting those too thick."

"They're fine."

"They'll cook unevenly." She reached past him for a vegetable piece and held it up. "Half that."

"Since when do you know about cooking?"

"I don't. I know about cutting things. Different skill."

He looked at her. She was standing very close.

"Fine," he said. "Show me."

She took the knife from his hand — their fingers overlapping for a second longer than necessary — and demonstrated the cut. Quick, precise.

"Like that," she said, handing the knife back.

Their hands touched again. She let go fast.

"I'll cut these. You do the protein." She grabbed a cutting board without looking at him.

They cooked side by side. It was clumsy — they kept bumping into each other, reaching for the same things. Each contact was brief and followed by a small retreat. Mori's elbow hit his arm reaching for the salt. His hip brushed hers when he turned to the stove. She stepped on his foot and didn't apologize but also didn't move away for a few seconds too long.

"Pass me the garlic," Mori said.

She crushed it with the flat of the knife with more force than was strictly necessary.

"You know," he said, "you're actually helpful when you're not criticizing everything."

"I'm always helpful. You just can't handle honesty."

"You told Mai her cooking was a war crime."

"It was. I was being generous."

He laughed. She didn't laugh, but her mouth did that thing — the almost-smile, the twitch at the corner she couldn't quite suppress.

Faust appeared in the doorway holding something disassembled and electronic. She looked at the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder and Azure flickered once behind her eyes.

"Is there food?" Faust asked.

"Ten minutes," Astre said.

"Good. I require sustenance." She paused. "You should add more garlic."

"That's what I said," Mori muttered.

Faust left. Mori added more garlic. The safehouse smelled like cooking food.

Mori leaned against the counter watching him, arms crossed but posture looser than usual. Less guarded. She was comfortable. She probably hadn't noticed that she was comfortable, because if she noticed, she'd stop.

So he didn't point it out.

"Plates are in the upper cabinet," he said. "Can you grab four?"

She grabbed four plates. She set the table without being asked twice, arranging the chopsticks with a care that suggested she was thinking about who would sit where.

She put Astre's plate next to hers.

The safehouse was quiet in the way it only got at around three in the morning. Faust was in her workshop. Ishmael was asleep. Yukari was in her private gap-space. Mai was in her room.

Mori was on the roof.

The safehouse didn't technically have a roof — it was a pocket dimension, so "roof" was a relative concept. But Faust had built an access hatch in the ceiling that opened onto the upper surface of the dimensional shell. If you climbed through it, you found yourself on a flat expanse of smooth, dark material that looked like obsidian and felt like cool glass. Above was void — not sky, not darkness, just the absence of dimension. No stars. No light source. Just the faint glow of the safehouse bleeding upward through the shell.

Mori sat on the edge with her legs dangling over nothing. Her scythe lay beside her. Her pink hair moved in the faint dimensional currents that eddied around the safehouse's boundaries.

Astre found the hatch open and climbed up.

She heard him coming. She didn't tell him to leave, which was as close to an invitation as Mori ever gave.

He sat down next to her. Not touching. Close enough that if either of them shifted, they would be.

"Can't sleep?" he asked.

"Didn't try."

"Bad night?"

She pulled one knee up and rested her chin on it, still looking at the void.

"Do you ever think about what happens if we stop?" she said. "Running. Fighting. All of it. If we just... stopped."

"Sometimes."

"What would you do?"

"I don't know. Build something, probably. Find a world. Make something that lasts."

"You'd get bored."

"Probably. What would you do?"

Mori was quiet for a long time.

"I don't know either. That's the problem. I've been running so long I don't know what I'd do if I stopped. I don't know who I am without something to fight."

"You're Mori."

"That's a name, not an answer."

"It's the only answer that matters."

She looked at him. In the dim glow from the safehouse, her red eyes looked darker, softer. Her usual sharpness was muted. At three in the morning, on the roof of a pocket dimension drifting through void, with nobody watching and nothing to prove, Mori let the mask slip. Just a little.

"You always do that," she said.

"Do what?"

"Say things that sound simple but aren't. Like you've figured something out and you're just handing it to me."

"I haven't figured anything out. I'm making it up as I go."

"Yeah." Her mouth almost smiled. "That's what makes it annoying. You're making it up and it still sounds right."

The void hummed. The safehouse glowed beneath them.

Mori's hand rested on the surface between them. Palm down, fingers loose.

He put his hand down next to hers. Not on top of it. Not holding it. Just next to it.

She looked at their hands. Looked at the void. Looked at their hands again.

Very slowly, she moved her pinky finger until it rested against his.

Neither of them said anything. Neither of them moved.

The void drifted. The safehouse hummed. On the roof, two people sat in silence with their smallest fingers touching and didn't talk about what it meant.

It started because Mai couldn't find her hairbrush.

"WHERE IS IT," she announced to the entire safehouse at a volume that suggested the hairbrush had personally wronged her. She was standing in the hallway in a tank top and shorts, braids half-undone.

Ishmael, passing through with a cup of tea, didn't slow down. "Check your room."

"I checked my room. Someone took it."

"Nobody took your hairbrush."

Faust emerged from her workshop holding a circuit board. She looked at Mai with the flat expression of someone interrupted during something important for something that was not important.

"I have a comb you can borrow," Faust said.

"I don't want a comb. It has the right bristle spacing for my hair texture."

"The bristle spacing is irrelevant. Hair is hair."

"Hair is NOT just hair, Faust. Your hair does one thing. It hangs. My hair has OPINIONS."

"I could build you a brush. I could calibrate the bristle spacing to your exact follicle density—"

"FAUST."

Mori appeared from her room. She was holding a hairbrush. Mai's hairbrush.

"Is this what you're screaming about," Mori said, holding it up.

"You TOOK my brush?"

"I borrowed it. Mine broke."

"So you took MINE?"

"I was going to give it back."

"WHEN?"

"Eventually."

Mai snatched the brush from Mori's hand.

"You can't just take people's things," Mai said.

"You took Astre's cologne last week."

"That's different. I asked."

"You sprayed it in his face."

"That's how I ask."

Yukari materialized in the hallway through a gap so subtle it looked like she'd simply appeared. Teacup in hand, expression serene.

"Good morning. What are we arguing about?"

"Mori stole my hairbrush."

"I borrowed it."

Yukari sipped her tea. "Mori, dear, did you ask before borrowing?"

"...No."

"Then you stole it. When I was on the throne, the punishment for theft was three days of community service."

"We don't have a community. We have six people in a floating apartment."

"Then three days of safehouse service. You can clean the bathroom."

"I'm not cleaning the bathroom because I borrowed a hairbrush."

"Stole," Mai corrected.

"BORROWED."

Astre walked into the hallway with a bowl of cereal, assessed the situation, and turned to walk back to the kitchen.

"Don't you walk away," Mai said. "Mediate this."

"I'm not mediating a hairbrush dispute."

"You're the leader. Lead."

Mai grabbed his arm. Mori grabbed his other arm. He was now standing in the hallway holding a bowl of cereal with two women attached to his arms.

He looked at Ishmael, who had stopped at the end of the hallway with her tea, expression completely blank.

"Help," he said.

Ishmael took a sip of her tea. "No." The corner of her mouth twitched.

Faust tilted her head. "I can resolve this. I'll build two identical brushes calibrated to each of your hair types."

"Actually," Mori said, "that's not a terrible idea."

Mai paused. "...What would the bristle spacing be?"

"Whatever you want. I'll measure your hair and calculate the optimal configuration."

"Fine. Mine in blue."

"Mine in black," Mori said.

"Color is irrelevant to function," Faust said.

"Blue," Mai repeated.

"Black," Mori repeated.

Faust sighed — a genuine, audible sigh — and walked back to her workshop. She was now going to spend the next three hours engineering hairbrushes. This was her life.

Before Mori closed her door, she looked at Mai.

"Sorry," she muttered. Barely audible.

Mai's brushing slowed. "Next time, just ask."

The door closed. Mai smiled. Just slightly.

Astre ate his soggy cereal alone in the hallway, wondering how six beings who could unmake reality were brought to a standstill by a hairbrush.

The training room was louder than usual.

Mai and Ishmael were sparring — actually sparring. Two people who genuinely knew how to fight going at each other at a speed that made the air crack.

Mai fought like a storm. All forward momentum, explosive power, rapid combinations from angles that shouldn't have been possible for someone her size. Every strike carried the weight of someone trained to break things since she could walk.

Ishmael fought like the ocean. She absorbed Mai's attacks, redirecting force, turning aggression into openings. Where Mai was loud, Ishmael was quiet. Where Mai pushed, Ishmael pulled.

They'd been at it for twenty minutes. Neither had scored a clean hit.

Astre watched from the doorway. Mori stood next to him. Faust sat on the floor nearby, watching with clinical interest. Yukari stood behind all of them, teacup in hand.

Mai threw a combination — high, low, high. Ishmael sidestepped the first, ducked the second, caught the third on her blade.

"Faster," Ishmael said.

"I AM fast."

"Faster than that."

Mai grinned and went again — faster, harder, less controlled. Ishmael matched her.

Mori watched with part admiration and part concern. "They're going to hurt each other."

"They know their limits," Astre said.

"Mai doesn't have limits. That's her whole thing."

Faust spoke without looking away from the spar. "Mai's adjusted her center of gravity. She's distributing weight differently on her back foot."

"Don't coach," Ishmael said, parrying a strike.

"I'm observing. If I were coaching, I'd tell you that your right shoulder drops a quarter inch before you commit to a lateral parry."

Ishmael's right shoulder did not drop on her next parry.

Mai scored a hit — a clean tap to Ishmael's shoulder. "TWO-TWO."

Ishmael rolled her shoulder. "Lucky."

"Skill."

Final round. The room was tense in the good way — two people pushing each other to be better.

Yukari sipped her tea. "Ten on Ishmael."

Mori glanced at her. "You're betting?"

"Speculating. Ishmael's experience advantage increases as the match lengthens."

"Twenty on Mai," Astre said.

"Thirty on Ishmael," Faust said. "The shoulder correction gives her a measurable advantage."

"Fifteen on Mai," Mori said. "Only because I want to see Faust lose."

The final round was fast. Brutal. Mai came in with everything — no holding back, pure committed violence delivered with a smile.

Mai overextended on a wide swing. Ishmael saw it. Her blade moved—

Mai twisted at the last second, turning the overextension into a feint, and brought her blade up from below. It caught Ishmael's wrist.

"Point. THREE-TWO."

Ishmael stood for a moment. Then she lowered her blade. Nodded. "Good fight."

"Good fight." Mai was beaming. Sweating, exhausted, hair coming out of her braids, and beaming.

She bumped her hip against Astre's. "You bet on me?"

"Someone had to."

Ishmael appeared behind them. "Rematch tomorrow. Five AM."

"That's inhumane."

"You want to beat me consistently? You train at five."

Mai extended her hand. Ishmael took it. They shook — firm, brief, respectful.

"Five AM," Mai said.

The alert came at 3 AM.

Faust's monitoring systems detected the anomaly first. Azure processed it in milliseconds and pushed the information directly into Faust's consciousness, jolting her from a rare moment of actual sleep.

She was on her feet before she was fully awake.

"Everyone up." Her voice over the safehouse intercom was flat and controlled. "We have a proximity alert. Axiom Court patrol, two dimensions out. Heading in a vector that intersects our location in approximately forty minutes."

The safehouse came alive.

Ishmael was the first to the common room — katana already in hand, dressed in thirty seconds. Mori came out with her scythe and a look that could curdle milk. Mai arrived pulling her hair into braids, expression sharp. Combat Mai — focused, efficient.

Yukari was already at the dimensional controls, pulling up displays, mapping escape routes.

"Talk to me," Yukari said.

"Axiom Court standard patrol. Four agents. Medium-tier enforcement. They don't know we're here — this is a sweep, not a targeted search. But their vector will bring them close enough that our dimensional signature might register."

"Options?" Astre asked.

"Three," Faust said, pulling up a map — their safehouse as a small blue dot, the patrol as four red dots moving along a line. "One: I finish the frequency scrambler. It's ninety percent done. Twenty minutes to complete. If I finish in time, it should mask our signature. Risk: I might not finish."

"Two?"

"Yukari collapses the pocket dimension and moves us through the Boundary Network to a secondary safehouse. We'd lose this location. Risk: the transfer creates a dimensional ripple they might detect."

"Three?"

"We go dark. Total shutdown. No power, no signals. We sit in the dark and wait for them to pass. Two hours, maybe three."

Mori looked at Astre. "I vote option one. Faust finishes the thing."

Mai: "Seconded."

Ishmael: "What if she doesn't finish in time?"

Faust: "Then we fall back to option three."

Everyone looked at Astre. The decision was ultimately his — not because he was the strongest or the smartest, but because he was the one they all looked to when it mattered.

He looked at the map. The red dots. The blue dot. The distance closing.

"Option one," he said. "Faust, how can we help?"

"Stay out of my way. No dimensional activity. No power fluctuations. Yukari, keep the boundary concealment at maximum. The rest of you — be ready for option three if I signal."

Faust turned to her workshop. Paused at the door.

"Twenty minutes," she said. And disappeared inside.

Fifteen minutes. The patrol entered the adjacent dimension. Passive scans washed over the surrounding space.

Ten minutes. The patrol shifted to a new vector. Closer.

"They're deviating," Ishmael reported. "Close enough for active."

Yukari's concentration deepened. The air in the safehouse felt thicker.

Three minutes. The workshop door opened. Faust emerged holding the frequency scrambler — completed, humming with soft blue light.

She plugged it into the dimensional controls. A wave of dimensional static rippled outward.

On the map, the blue dot flickered and vanished. They were invisible.

The patrol swept through. Active sensors. They passed over the safehouse's location.

Nothing. No ping. No detection.

The patrol continued on. One dimension away. Two. Three. Gone.

Ishmael exhaled. Not visibly. But the tension in her shoulders dropped a fraction.

"Clear," she said.

Yukari lowered her hands. Mai stepped away from the exit. Mori unclenched her grip on the scythe.

Faust looked at the device. Looked at Astre. The smallest hint of satisfaction crossed her face.

"I told you I needed to finish that," she said.

Astre smiled. "You did."

The crisis was over. The night was still dark. Nobody was going back to sleep.

Ishmael was training in the safehouse's practice room at 5 AM because Ishmael was always training at 5 AM.

She moved through her forms with her katana — slow, deliberate, each motion precise enough to shave the air. The blade caught the overhead light and threw reflections across the walls. Her ginger hair was tied back tight. No armor. Training was about form, not protection.

The Kamuro Clan style was built for economy. No wasted motion. Every strike had a purpose. The forms looked simple from the outside — basic cuts, basic footwork — but the simplicity was deceptive. Each movement contained dozens of micro-adjustments that accumulated into something devastating.

Ishmael had been doing these forms since she was seven years old, standing on the deck of a ship in a dimension where the sky was made of water. Her instructor Sogen had made her repeat the first form ten thousand times before teaching her the second. "If you can do it ten thousand times without thinking, it becomes part of you. Then you can stop thinking entirely and just act."

Sogen was dead. The ship was sunk. The dimension was consumed. The forms remained.

Astre found her halfway through the sequence. He stood in the doorway and watched. He didn't announce himself. Ishmael knew he was there — she always did — but she finished the form, held the final position for three seconds, then lowered the blade.

"You're up early," she said.

"Couldn't sleep."

"Bad dreams?"

"Something like that."

She turned to face him. Assessed him quickly, thoroughly. He looked tired. The deeper tired of someone carrying something heavy.

"Want to spar?" she asked.

"Now?"

"You're here. I'm here. It's 5 AM and neither of us is sleeping."

He picked a practice sword from the rack. Ishmael sheathed her katana and picked up a wooden blade to match.

"Rules?" Astre asked.

"First clean hit to the torso. No abilities. No tricks. Just steel."

"Wooden steel."

"Don't be pedantic."

Ishmael moved first. No tell, no preparation. She was standing still and then she was swinging. The gap between intent and action was so small it was effectively instantaneous.

Astre blocked. Barely. He felt the impact in his wrists, up his arms, into his shoulders.

"You're thinking too much," Ishmael said.

"I'm trying not to get hit."

"That's what I mean. Stop trying not to get hit. Start trying to hit me."

He adjusted. Went offensive. Three quick strikes — shoulder, hip, head. Ishmael blocked the first two and sidestepped the third. Her blade touched his ribs.

"Dead," she said.

They went again. And again. Ishmael won every round. This was expected. She was the best swordfighter in the group by a significant margin — no powers, no cosmic abilities, just skill refined over decades.

After twenty minutes, Astre was drenched in sweat. Ishmael was barely winded.

"Better," she said. "Your footwork improved around round eight. You stopped forcing openings and started waiting for them."

"Same time tomorrow?"

"I don't plan to be awake at 5 AM tomorrow."

"You will be."

She was probably right.

"Ishmael."

"Hm."

"Thanks."

She looked at him. No warmth in her expression — that wasn't how Ishmael worked. But something settled behind her eyes. Acknowledgment.

"Go shower," she said. "You smell like effort."

He laughed. She didn't — she never laughed at her own jokes — but the corner of her mouth shifted just enough to count.

The Wandering Market appeared on a Tuesday.

Or whatever passed for Tuesday in the Deep Umbra, where conventional time didn't exist. But the group had adopted a seven-day cycle to maintain sanity — Yukari's idea. So: Tuesday. The Market was here.

It materialized in the void like a dream assembling itself — platforms and ships and tents stitching together from nothing, bioluminescent lanterns flickering to life. The Wandering Market wasn't a place so much as an event. It existed for a few hours, then dispersed, reappearing somewhere else entirely.

Yukari had a very good network of informants.

The group split up upon arrival. They were less conspicuous individually than as a group of six, several of whom were on interdimensional wanted posters. Hoods up, heads down, blend in.

Ishmael went to the weapons vendors. Not to buy — she had her katana and needed nothing else — but to assess. She browsed blade quality, handle construction, steel composition. The vendors learned not to approach her.

Faust went to the tech stalls, moving through them like a surgeon examining instruments. She purchased three components that individually were worthless but together could be combined into something she hadn't explained to anyone yet.

Mai went actual shopping. Clothes, accessories, interesting items from exotic dimensions. She had an eye for fashion that was unmatched and a complete inability to walk past anything shiny without investigating.

Yukari circulated — talking to vendors and brokers in a dozen different languages, gathering intelligence, her maid outfit drawing looks but never suspicion.

Mori stayed close to the edges of the market. She didn't like crowds. Too many people, too much noise, too many heartbeats that her death-attuned senses couldn't fully block out. She could feel the mortality of every living thing around her. In a market of thousands, it was overwhelming. She wore her hood low and kept her hands in her pockets.

Astre was with Mori. Not because she'd asked — she'd never ask — but because he'd noticed her shoulders tense when they arrived and had fallen into step beside her without comment.

They stopped at a food stall. The vendor was a four-armed being serving something that looked like skewered meat wrapped in a leaf that glowed faintly blue.

"Want one?" Astre asked.

"I don't know what it is."

"Neither do I. That's the fun part."

He bought two. Handed her one. She looked at it like it might be a bomb, then took a bite. Her expression went through suspicion, surprise, reluctant approval.

"It's good," she admitted.

"Was that so hard?"

"Don't push it."

They ate in silence, leaning against a railing overlooking the market's lower levels. Below them, a river of bioluminescent fluid ran through the structure, casting shifting light across everything. Somewhere, someone was playing an instrument that sounded like a cello made of wind.

Mori finished her skewer and looked at him.

"You do this every time," she said.

"Do what?"

"Follow me. When we come to places like this. You always end up next to me."

"Coincidence."

"It's not coincidence. You notice when I'm uncomfortable and you show up."

"Is that a complaint?"

She was quiet for a moment. Her fingers tightened on the railing.

"No," she said. Very quietly. "It's not a complaint."

The market hummed around them. Below, Mai's voice carried up — she was haggling with someone, loudly and enthusiastically.

Mori's hand on the railing shifted slightly. Her pinky finger was about half an inch from his.

Neither of them moved it closer. Neither of them moved it away.