2.10 Patreon Release

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Mild content warnings for dysphoria and blood magic.

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Who hosts an outdoor event in February?

The Saturday of Hikanome’s festival had seen the rain finally wise up and realize it was unseasonable for this time of year in Tokyo, so it had retreated and left streaky greys across a clear, blue sky which you could tell was chilly just from its hue. The blue was more like a hazy purple from where I rested my head against the limo’s tinted window. Honestly, it was more like a fancy cab, not one of those long limousines Dad and I used to ride sometimes. I winced as we rounded a bend and the centrifugal—centripetal, whatever—force pushed my bad foot against the car door. It was still sensitive.

I caught the reflection of the car’s interior in the window. To my left, on the far side of the limo, the aide Alice had assigned me for the brief journey was dragging a pen up and down his clipboard. He counted the items, double-, triple-, quadruple-checking them. I didn’t know exactly what was written, but I knew they were the safety procedures to get me there in one piece and un-kidnapped, since I wasn’t arriving with the two attending Radiances. They had a more spectacular entrance planned, but had stipulated that if I was to attend, I wouldn’t be held to the same standard of showmanship. I wondered how the man—Clipboard, I was calling him, since I’d instantly forgotten his actual name—saw me. Was I a different kind of entity from the Radiances, in his mind? Then a lock of my new hair slipped off my shoulder and blocked my view of his nervous tic.

Right, my new hair. Hard-earned; harder-earned than it had needed to be.

—

The barber’s shears left me numb. Kamihata was beyond apologetic, but didn’t understand the problem, and had no recourse other than to lead me back to the waiting room couch next to Amane. I stared at my phone and the messages I had sent Sky. The act of sending the messages had helped, barely—the panicked frenzy had ebbed away, replaced by a new kind of stress. The last time I’d sent Sky a DM, it had been to confess my stress about maintaining opsec over Todai’s involvement in the Thunder Horse inferno, the people we’d killed. He hadn’t even responded to that one. Perhaps his silence was itself a message; between that and what I’d sent just now, I might have been putting too many of my problems on his plate.

I reminded myself that I wouldn’t have ended up here without him. He had been the one to put me here with the Radiances instead of at the Spire, so it was his responsibility to help me with the fallout of that life-changing decision he’d made. And more to the point, he knew something that could fix my hair—Ai had mentioned that he’d grown his own with magic. So I waited, and to my relief, he responded.

skychicken: jesus christ ez how bad is the haircut

I started to type a response, but he was faster.

skychicken: okay holy shit actually im putting that on hold for a moment

skychicken: you CANNOT message me about lighthouse’s classified operations

skychicken: thats a huge security risk for you and them and me

ezzen: sorry

ezzen: They already told me.

ezzen: Wait, so you can admit to being a flamebearer, but I can’t talk about VNT activities? Are these chats secure or not?

skychicken: assume theyre not

skychicken: that specific fact about me is something that any listener worth their salt would already know, it doesnt count

Fair enough. I deleted the old message and averted my eyes from the screen, chastised, until a new message popped up in my peripheral vision.

skychicken: okay anyway

skychicken: im assuming those panicky messages are about a bad haircut

I ran my hand through my hair again. The lightness was alien.

ezzen: It’s not even a bad haircut, tbh

ezzen: But it’s way shorter and it feels all wrong and Ai mentioned you knew how to use magic to grow more

ezzen: For context, I performed some glyphless biomodding on myself the other day which I assume is similar to whatever you did since they equated mine to yours via having Hina as a mentor.

skychicken: ez, what did i JUST SAY

ezzen: fuck

I deleted that message, too.

ezzen: Okay without any more details, can you help me or not?

skychicken: i cant, not from here. the radiances CAN, but first

skychicken: is it WORTH using magic for this

skychicken: because itll be blood magic. it will hurt, it will spit red all over, and youre virtually guaranteed other residuals

I hesitated. He was right about the technical details: I did not know how to do this with glyphs. Biomancy was best accomplished through as little biomancy as possible, as the adage went—the green section of the glyph lexicon was the least-developed of any color of ripple other than white and silver. Setting a fractured bone was the kind of problem you could treat as a matter of telekinetics, but accelerating the cellular machinery for hair growth? I lacked both the glyph toolbox and the biology knowledge for that, and I knew better than to just stick my head in a bioacceleration field like the ones on Todai’s medical beds. That was glorified suicide, and I wasn’t that desperate.

I was, however, desperate enough for blood magic. I didn’t understand why, but the gut-deep wrongness and exposed feeling was enough to drive me back to panic or tears if I focused on it. I was only distracting myself by thinking about how I could work the problem.

ezzen: I’ll do it.

I’m grateful Sky didn’t question my conviction. If he had, I might have lost my nerve.

skychicken: okay. ask alice

skychicken: you are REALLY going to want to use the spell circle in the basement

ezzen: Okay, thanks.

With a goal in mind, I became aware of the world around me again. Amane had scooted to my left side and was peering over my shoulder, reading our chat. She shoved her phone between mine and my face.

Are you alright?

I looked at her, at those emerald eyes. One real, one fake. She had lost far more of her body than me—hair grew back, limbs didn’t. I didn’t have the right to be so upset when she’d suffered worse. I instinctively retracted my phone from her gaze.

“It’s—fine. Good enough for the event. Alice wanted me presentable, yeah?”

Amane gave me a look I didn’t know how to interpret and typed something else into her phone.

They shaved my head.

Oh. She ran her hand through the long, glossy strands of black hair.

“And you grew it back.”

It’s a challenge.

“Did—did you use magic?”

No. It took years.

Her face fell, and my hopes followed. If her million-dollar prosthetics and magic weren’t enough, what could Sky have had in mind? She brightened, squaring her shoulders, and called something out to Kamihata as her mechanical fingers danced along the screen.

But in your case, it might only take a few minutes.

—

That’s how it should have gone. Amane’s big plan for me had been to try hair extensions—the kind that fused to your hair with a little heat. I’d always known in theory that hair extensions existed, but like so many other cosmetic products, I’d never had a reason to interact with them. The problem was that even though Kamihata—or rather, Ms. Kamihata, since it was her last name, as I learned through hesitant, stop-and-go small talk—had a small collection of extensions, none matched both the wavy texture of my hair and the near-black brown. She had light browns and jet blacks, as well as a rich reddish brown that I was almost certain was specifically Hina’s and a strange, opalescent white that was definitely Alice’s, but nothing for me.

Amane and I were both frustrated by such a simple obstacle. My hair wasn’t outside the realm of types common in Japan; this actually made it worse, because at least if I was blond then it’d feel less absurd that Ms. Kamihata didn’t have a match. As it was, though, all she could do was shrug apologetically and offer me the next-closest match, which was the right curliness but in a jet-black like Amane’s, too dark for my head. It didn’t look right when she held up the swatch against hair. I would have gone for it anyway, just to alleviate the discomfort—but Amane waved her phone in my face. She had been waiting patiently for me to resolve my ridiculous issue before her own trim could begin.

Alice can help you.

“It’s fine, this works.”

She crossed her arms disapprovingly, flesh over carbon fiber.

“What? Nobody would know at a glance.”

She uncrossed her arms to type some more into the translation app.

Don’t cut corners.

She tapped her false-yet-indistinguishable eye for emphasis. I looked away, shamefaced. I was so used to just—bearing it, dealing with it, settling for “good enough.” That was why I was wearing a hoodie worth twenty quid and not eighty. Anything better made me feel guilty, even more of a burden, ever more indebted to their generosity.

You should go home and fix it with magic.

“No, it’s—it’s fine, I’ll deal.” When she looked at me blankly, I clarified, speaking louder and slower. “I’m okay. This is good enough.”

Amane replied to that with a tilt of her head and a deadpan glare. She understood me, alright, she just disagreed.

Talk to Alice.

“You mean a magical solution?” I lowered my voice, conscious of maintaining opsec—even though Ms. Kamihata was probably trustworthy if she had matching swatches of the Radiances’ hair, and she was the only other person in the room. Maybe it was policy to only have her in the shop when her special clients were in. “Like, sanguimancy? Regrow my hair with blood magic?”

Amane flicked my forehead with a carbon fiber finger. I flinched, out of surprise more than pain.

Alternatively, make a wig out of LM.

“Oh. That’s a thing? With magic?”

Amane full-on stared at me for a moment. I deserved it, really; even as the words left my mouth, I was already piecing together how such a thing could be accomplished. My habit of settling for less still tried to have the last word, though.

“But—I’m not sure this is worth interrupting her for. She was practically breathing fire when we left this morning.”

She’ll help, because she doesn’t want you to have ugly hair.

“And…what do I ask her? ‘Sorry, can you drop everything and help me throw away this perfectly fine haircut you told me to get?’”

Amane rolled her eyes.

I’ll text her. Go fix your hair, dude.

—

“Oh my God, yes, of course I’ll help.”

Alice and I stood where we had been standing three days ago, next to the spell circle with its halo of tentacle-arms in the basement, once again discussing body modification. This time, we were minus Ai; she was still working on the same aerospace project from before, and that work had taken her to JAXA headquarters elsewhere in the city. 

“Really? Nothing about how this is an irresponsible use of magic that will put Hikanome on my scent?” Or how I was wasting her time? She certainly seemed impatient, tapping away at the keyboard and monitor that controlled the assembly.

“Don’t be snippy at somebody trying to help you, Ezzen.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s hair. Hair is important,” she declared. “It defines how we look, you know, more than almost anything else.” I tried not to look at her tail when she said that. She ran a hand through her own hair, white and opalescent. “If I had known that Kamihata-san was going to do that to you…well, it’s nobody’s fault. If it’s anybody’s, it’s mine for not specifying to keep it long.”

“What do you mean?” It seemed unreasonable to blame herself, given that not even I had known how upsetting the short hairstyle would be for me. I began to run my hand through the short hair before jerking it away in discomfort. “Is it really that bad?”

“The haircut? It’s fine, it just doesn’t…suit you. We agree on that, I think.”

“…Yeah.” I scratched the base of my skull, once again uncomfortable with the lightness and the way it was exposed to the air currents. As always, magic was my distraction. “So, how’s this work?”

“Same way everything else works: LM. Get in the circle, would you?”

I hesitantly stepped closer to the glowing circle of green glyphs on the floor, remembering how Ebi had been wary of putting any part of her chassis inside. I glanced back at her.

“Should I be expecting…?”

“Analgomancy’s off, just step in.”

I did so, gingerly, and was relieved to experience no sudden, horrible transition between my prosthetic foot’s pain-nullifiers and those of the circle. I had a thought.

“Hey, why isn’t this a problem for my tattoo? Or Ai’s? Shouldn’t it damage the weave?”

“You’re fine. In, all the way in. Feet on the markers, stand up straight…straighter…good. You mean why Ebi can’t come in?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re hunching again. Up straight, c’mon…okay, stay there, don’t move.” Satisfied with my posture, she typed into the keyboard, and I heard something above me whirring. “The circle has a bunch of third-order components, some of them up to a meter ana of realspace. That’s also where Ebi keeps a lot of her auxiliary parts. Your spear is stored kata, isn’t it?”

I thought about it for a moment, resisting the urge to prod at my tattoo while Alice did whatever she was doing. The circle was even more complex than I had thought, then, if it had as many four-dimensional components as she was implying.

“Um, yeah, at least the original {COMPOSE} tuning I used was, but I actually don’t know whether Ai changed it. Must not have, if she didn’t see the need to warn me.”

“Stands to reason. Okay…done.”

“Done with what?”

“The scan. And now we apply the template, confirm, confirm, check the box, confirm…it’s going to need a few minutes to bake.”

A pop-up covered the terminal’s screen with an empty loading bar, an interface I recognized as belonging to a sibling program to GWalk.

“You’re making a glyph template.”

“Yes, so you can weave an LM version of a nice, full head of hair onto one of these.” She opened a drawer and pulled out a strip of fabric. “Wig base. We used to make these for Amane.”

“When she was regrowing her hair after…”

“Yes. I assume she told you.”

“She did.” To fill the silence that followed, I gestured for the cap, and she tossed it across the circle to me. I held it up, trying to figure out the orientation. “Are…I don’t know how wigs work,” I admitted. “Will I have to shave what I’ve already got?”

The prospect made me faintly nauseous. Bald Ezzen was—no, just no. Thankfully, Alice shook her head.

“No. Even a non-magical wig can get away with having a lot of hair underneath, and these caps include more than enough space-folding for what you’ve got. So you can just put it right on.”

I released a sigh I hadn’t known I was holding.

“Thanks. I…sort of thought you’d be mad at me.”

“For wanting long hair? Never.”

“Well—like, I thought—” I blushed, embarrassed at how I had been catastrophizing this conversation—then I realized why I had assumed we’d be doing this with blood magic. “Wait. I talked to Sky—Jason—first, and he made it sound like I was going to have to grow it back with sanguimancy. He said he’d done it before.”

Alice’s tail stopped moving, and she turned to me fully, reaching for the swiveling office chair and sitting sideways on it.

“He did. But there was no reason to do that here, yeah?”

“I…suppose not? This works. But he…” I dug out my phone, rereading the messages. “Definitely seemed pretty set on the solution being blood magic, not an LM wig.”

Silence as the loading bar on the screen crept forward. Alice looked up at the nest of soft-robotic tentacles stowed above me, and I hastily stepped out from beneath them and out of the circle. I was sure those had a gentler touch than I was envisioning, but I still wasn’t comfortable standing beneath them longer than necessary. Alice sighed.

“He thinks like Hina,” she sighed. “Why build a perfect fake when you can bleed for the real thing and hurt like hell while doing so?”

“Oh. Okay, yeah, fair. And this is a perfect fake?”

She gestured at the interface, where the progress bar had reached the two-thirds mark. “You tell me, self-made glyph genius.”

“You tell me, self-made LM expert,” I shot back with a smile, but I was already stepping toward the keyboard to click past the progress bar and look at the glyph diagram the program had generated. It had a number of telltale connections that you generally only saw in software-optimized designs, things that made it harder for most people to read but performed better. “Ai’s programming?”

“Yep.”

The diagram itself confirmed that the hair was generated using exact structural copies of the scan she’d just made of my hair. There were a number of sliders for different variables like hair thickness and length; currently greyed-out and unalterable while the current operation was in progress. The program was trying to calculate a template for the glyphs that would be 3D printed so I could easily follow it to weave the lattice.

“So this is how the mantles are made? Scan your body, tell the program to make the chains for an LM duplicate, then add on top of it for whatever features you want?”

“Yep. So all the design is in the diagrams, then we just print a template substrate and weave from that. Obviously that basic stuff isn’t Ai’s custom work, it’s the same full-stack that even a stock install of GWalk could…hm. I guess you’ve never done glyphcraft for production, have you?”

“No? I suppose not. Ai—” I stumbled on the homophonic name. “Ms. Ai—” No, that wasn’t better. What was her last name? I was embarrassed I couldn’t remember. “Ai-san had me manually editing the lattices for Amethyst’s prostheses.”

Alice covered a snort, betrayed by a twitch of her tail. “Drop the honorific, I know who you mean.”

“Sorry,” I replied, resenting the blush creeping up my neck.

“We don’t usually edit manually like that. What I was getting to was that Ai has automated away a lot of that, at least for the specialized tasks of mantles and prostheses. As a bespoke glyph craftsperson, I assume you object?”

“To programmatic glyph generation?” I scoffed. “As if. I love seeing what insane hacks the computer tries to do. It’s good stuff. Clever, inspirational. Especially when I know somebody as smart as her is behind it. There’s a lot of templating, right? Some of the motive and projection chains are pretty similar across all your diagrams.”

She nodded, checking her phone, idly typing on it even as she sat with me. I felt bad for wasting her time, but I was also really enjoying this conversation. “Our versioning’s gone to crap, a little, if you look closely. Nobody’s got exactly the same thing. But yes, being able to design one flight unit or what-have-you and then put it on all the mantles is convenient.”

“More convenient than altering your actual bodies, I’d wager.”

I realized as the words left my mouth that this was bringing us back to a sensitive topic.

“I mean…” she shrugged. “Design flexibility is the main thing, don’t get me wrong. But yes, the rest of us felt that this was much more true to the mahou shoujo transformation sequence than…bloody apotheosis.” In her London accent, it was unclear whether “bloody” was intended as a swear or in a more literal sense; probably both. “That went double after we got Amane back.”

“Apotheosis.” I rolled the word around my mouth. People sometimes used it for the Vaetna; I wondered if Alice was intentionally likening Hina to them. The hyena clearly liked to do so herself, but I wasn’t sure if that was just to push my buttons specifically. I decided to cut off this line of conversation before I managed to blurt something that would betray my incriminating desire to experience more of what Hina had shown me. “We’re, um, talking about a lot of classified stuff.”

“We are. Don’t worry; this room is off-limits to everyone but us, you know.”

“Is it? I’ve just been…coming and going as I pleased,” I admitted.

“Well, Ebi manages security and surveillance. Don’t need a keycard or anything when she knows it’s us.”

“I…see.” I supposed that was sensible, since she never left the building. I’d been a little worried when Amane and I had set out without her.

The progress bar popped back up to declare its completion, blocking me off from exploring more of the diagram.

“Done.” I squinted at the dialog box, but it was all in Japanese. “Was that the optimization step?”

“No, that was the printing.”

“Already?”

“Right? Ai never shuts up about the new printers. Come see for yourself.”

—

The glyph substrate was more complex in form than merely an outline of the sequence of glyphs. It followed the same path I’d ultimately pull the thread through, but the cross-section was more like a channel, a groove inset into the plastic to guide my hand through the various maneuvers. It also featured many more twists and turns than the glyphs themselves did, curves and edges where you could pull the thread taut so proper tension could be applied at the appropriate points. The resulting shape was a self-intersecting, coiled mess of dark polymer maybe forty centimeters in overall length but many times that if you were to stretch it all out end-to-end.

Because the LM was to be affixed to the wig cap, there was also a curved fixture for that, where it was held taut and in place by some clever grabbers. Even those bits were all the same part; like with my chopsticks, it seemed Ai had a soft spot for compliant mechanisms in her designs. Between those features and the overall shape, the substrate would be a nightmare to machine out of metal; even the monstrous, cutting-edge assembly in the workshop with its space-defying mechanisms would struggle, at least printed at this scale.

Alice had to leave me for more pressing obligations as soon as we’d freed the substrate from its embryonic bath of polymer goop and she’d shown me how to fix the cap in place, which left me a little nervous to do the weaving by myself. Each little loop was only barely large enough for me to keep track of the glowing thread as I pulled it through the groove, back and forth and around and over—word after word of the spell, for those inclined to think of it as such, although the translation for a chain of glyphs never sounded remotely grammatical in any language.

It turned out I had nothing to fear—the substrate made it dead simple to weave the design, even for an embarrassingly sloppy novice like me. Not all LM lattices are activatable and deactivatable, and this one was of the always-on variety, so it began to stitch in and grow the hair even as I was weaving. It was sort of unsettling to watch the matter manifest out of nothing, especially something as fine as human hair. The satisfaction of performing real magic outweighed the ick factor, though, and I was sad to see the process come to an end.

I was left staring down a full head’s worth of luscious, dark, shiny hair—my hair—hanging off the end of the twisting substrate. It was like the demented funhouse mirror of a mop, or the rebellious goth spawn of a Cambrian cephalopod and a curly straw. I disabused myself of the similes by removing the wig from its holder and trying to figure out which way was forward—I got there eventually. I ran my fingers through the hair and took a deep breath. My tattoo itched slightly.

“Again, not a problem you can solve, buddy.”

Just trying to help, I imagined my spear’s reply.

Before I could procrastinate any longer, I pulled the wig over my head. As promised, my existing hair was magically folded in under the cap, effectively removed from this slice of reality, hidden around a corner that shouldn’t exist—a process which would have thoroughly killed me if applied to the grey matter on just the other side of my skull. The wig sealed over my scalp, and for a moment I had a very strange feeling of disorientation and panic at the thing stuck on my head, get it off get it OFF—

And then I was fine. Better than fine, even, as I felt the weight on my neck and shoulders down to where the hair draped halfway down my back; not quite as unbroken and smooth of a glossy sable curtain as Amane’s hair, nor as long, but better nonetheless. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

Ezzen Colliot: All good now.

Amane Ishikawa: ദ്ദി´ ˘ `)✧

—

Trouble arrived in paradise that evening.

Amane had gushed about my new hair on her return, her joy evident as she circled me and ran her hands through it even though I couldn’t understand a word. She showed me how to put it up in a ponytail and did the same with her own hair, which had only received a minor trim, then went off with Ebi for whatever medical procedures filled their time behind closed doors—I tried very hard to ignore the easy innuendo there. Amane’s condition was serious.

Jokes in poor taste aside, the rest of that afternoon was spent on final prep for tomorrow’s big day. Alice eventually freed herself from meetings and gave my new hair—as I was thinking of it, rather than as a wig—the go-ahead. Hina was still absent without leave, which had me a little upset but not particularly worried for her; I was much more upset that Yuuka had deigned to grace us with her presence for dinner. It was one particular remark that set everything in motion.

“Doesn’t match the stubble, mate.”

The air on Alice’s side of the table heated up so quickly I didn’t have time to process the comment. I just flinched and scooted backward.

“Yuuka, we need to talk. Right now.”

“I meant he should grow out the beard! Have you seen Keanu? Beards with long hair are really in, and I think Ezza’s bone structure could totally—”

She shut up as a shadow fell over the table. Amane had been munching quietly—now she was a silent purple monolith, with one enormous hand gently cradling Yuuka’s cranium. She rumbled something at Yuuka, who flinched, looked confused, glanced at me, then at Alice, then back at me, and finally looked even more confused.

“I was trying to help!”

There was a flurry of Japanese back-and-forth between the three until she fell silent sullenly. I began to grow uncomfortable as an expectant silence took over the table, until finally—

“Sorry, Ezzen,” she blurted. Amethyst’s hand retracted, and she turned back into a girl, looking satisfied.

“Um. Forgiven?” I wasn’t even sure what had just happened, only that I’d never seen Yuuka look that contrite before in the short time I’d known her. She batted her temple with the heel of her hand, as though trying to dislodge something in her head. Troubleshooting her eye? Alice, for her part, still looked only marginally short of ready to skin Yuuka alive. At least the heat had died down, saving my poor pad thai.

At last, what she’d actually said caught up to me, and I reflexively reached up to brush my stubble. At some level, I’d recognized the need for a shave before the event, one to match my haircut, but since that had been thoroughly derailed by the circus with the extensions and the wig, I hadn’t—I didn’t like its texture under my fingers. I jerked my hand away and refocused on Yuuka, genuinely curious.

“You think I could…rock a beard? As it were?”

She didn’t respond until she’d made some sort of meaningful eye contact with Alice.

“With another…two or three weeks of growth? Yeah, I think so. Not like that, though. Should probably shave it.”

“Your foresight telling you that?”

“I don’t know what it’s been telling me, lately,” she groused, tapping her temple again. “Been a little on the fritz all week. Feel—” she glanced at Alice again, who was finally sitting back down, “feel like I should tell ya that, since you’re stickin’ around.”

—

That bizarrely non-confrontational encounter left me feeling a bit more cautiously positive about Saturday—but much worse about my appearance. I excused myself from dinner quickly and almost ran up the stairs, fast as my foot would allow, to shave off my stubble with the razor Alice had lent me. Now that I was aware of it, it felt almost…sticky, like a coating over my face and throat, nearly as intrusive as the wig had been in the first moments after putting it on. I ran the razor across my face, scrubbed off, and touched the skin again. Not smooth. 

I tried again, finding a few spots I had missed the first time in the crevasses where my neck met the corners of my jaw. Rinsed off again—still not smooth. The mirror claimed it was a clean shave at a distance, but up close, I could still clearly see the microdots of each follicle for the thick hairs of my beard. Maybe it was the razor: a dull blade or just the wrong type for this. Either way, I’d already imposed so much on the girls for my hair-related woes today, I couldn’t bring myself to ask if they had any others that might do a better job.

Dissatisfied with the shave, I tried to lose myself in random videos about magic and the Spire, old favorites and new releases I’d missed in all my newfound excitement. Once I’d handed over my answers to Overload’s questions, he’d finalized the video shockingly quickly, though there was precious little information about my flamefall that was new to me anymore. I still wondered where Holton was, who’d bailed him out—but whenever my thoughts strayed too far, my fingers would find my chin, and the tight dissatisfaction in my chest would return.

It got worse the later the night dragged on. Conscious of the fact that I’d have to be up early tomorrow—or at least early by my standards, out of bed by 8 AM—I tossed and turned in bed, still seeking refuge in distraction but unable to find it for long. I’d taken the wig off when I went to bed, nervous of some vague and ridiculous death by hair-strangulation in the night, but that just made the discomfort more gnawing, so I quickly re-donned the almost-real hair and occupied my hands by running my fingers through it instead. That helped, a bit, but still no sleep.

At half past two, I decided something had to be done.

—

Lighthouse Tower was different at night. The penthouse was still navigable, thanks to a mix of the city lights through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the main lights over the kitchen island, which remained on but dim. Familiar furniture was recast as alien, tenebrous shapes in my peripheral vision, a shadowy version of the space I’d just begun to call home. These failed to spook me as I crept my way down the stairs to the elevator. For all that the list of my various hangups and phobias was ever-expanding and had several recent additions, the dark didn’t make the cut. It would have been cozy, even tranquil—I was entirely too uncomfortable with the sensation on my chin and throat to relax. I hit the button and waited impatiently.

I knew from experience that there was an annoying chime to mark the elevator’s arrival at the upper, but not lower, of the penthouse’s two floors. The lower one had probably been disabled precisely for late-night comings-and-goings like mine. Why not the upper as well, I had no idea.

From there, it was a straight descent to B1F, where the lights remained on even at this late hour. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, given Ai’s propensity to pull late nights, but I hadn’t really thought it through until now. I felt out of place walking down these halls in my nightclothes—just a T-shirt and shorts, hardly an incriminating onesie, and there was nobody around to pass judgment anyway, but still. The narrow windows on the various closed doors to the workshop showed the vast ex-garage illuminated but motionless, the huge industrial machines powered down for the night. I didn’t want to linger; my actual destination was just across the hall.

The prosthetic fitting room with the spell circle was also closed for the night. Like the workshop, I could see its lights were still on through the sole window in the metal door. I bit my lip, debating whether it was even necessary to be here—but what I was planning to do would hurt, and hopefully sixty more meters of distance would limit how much red ripple would reach Amane. I felt safer hiding my crimes down here in this basement, assuming I could get in. Fretting that I was about to set off some sort of alarm, I tested the unassuming handle—nope. No blaring klaxons, which was good, but definitely locked up. I wondered how to bypass it with magic—

“Evening.”

I yelped and twisted away from the door, nearly overbalancing before my stabilizer kicked in and my prosthetic foot came down behind me. I held Ebi at spear-point. She was wearing…an actual polka-dotted nightgown, right out of a movie, nightcap and all. She yawned with her digital face and stretched sleepily, exaggerating the motions of her neck and shoulders to a degree that straddled the line between cartoonish and grotesque, then abandoned the act and crossed her arms.

“I said, evening.”

I sighed, banishing my spear and testing the handle once more for good measure. “Evening. Given you found me and haven’t raised an alarm, I assume you already have an inkling of what I’m up to at this hour. Accomplice or snitch?”

“Still deciding. Spell it out for me.”

I rubbed my jaw, wincing and impatient. It occurred to me that of everyone in the Radiances’ weird pseudo-family, Ebi might be the most sympathetic to this particular goal. She’d expressed her disdain for hair in all its forms before; it really came down to how much of a prick she felt like being. “Stubble. I want it gone.”

“Big oof. Totally get where you’re coming from. And you were gonna do blood magic about it?”

“Can we call it biomancy?”

“It’s meat.” She made a show of glancing through the small window. “Figure anybody’s in there?”

“Are you going to help me or not? I know you can unlock this door.”

“You were just debating semantics; can’t be in that much of a hurry. Y’know, we have sub-basements below this one, if you wanted to get further from the girls.”

“Do they have configurable analgomatic spell circles?” I’d take that option if there wasn’t some weird catch.

“No.”

There it was.

“Then I’m not interested. Let me in.”

She tutted. “That’s no way to talk to your doctor.”

“Let me in, please.”

“With feeling.”

“What’s the point of this, Ebi?”

“The point is that you do not fuck around with blood magic.” Something in the robot’s voice changed. Not the sonic, autotuned quality, something deeper, like the feeling in your sinuses before a storm. “Do you know exactly what you’re doing? Do you? Or are you playing with forces you don’t understand for vanity?”

“Vanity? I can’t sleep,” I shot back, trying and failing to keep my voice down. “Because of this. There’s something wrong with me, and I’m trying to fix it. Help me.”

“Quiet. You’re meat. You’re fragile. You’re not going to fix anything fucking about in the dark.” Her voice was icy. “Not when you’re so easy to break by accident.”

The door clicked. Ebi’s digital face twisted into a grin.

“Would be cool to see you try, though. Just one problem.”

My heart thudded. “Yeah?”

“Take a look. And really, be quiet. The soundproofing turns off when the door is open.”

I very gently tested the handle once more, slowly pushing the door inward. I looked through the crack and saw Ai, head down on the desk, surrounded by paper. Spent energy drinks were neatly stacked on the corner of the desk. Somebody—Ebi—had put a blanket over her.

I dropped my voice to a whisper, and gently closed the door, looking back at Ebi. “Ah.”

“Yeah. Be glad you didn’t come down sixteen minutes sooner.”

“What do I do?” My determination was starting to curdle into anxiety. “I can’t do this with her right there.”

“Maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it at all. I don’t want to wake her up either, for what it’s worth. This is the first real sleep she’s gotten in…” the robot mimed checking a wristwatch, “sixty-one hours. She hides it well, but I’m not letting anything wake her up until she’s gotten a nice, full nine hours.”

“We have to be out the door in…” I thought for a moment, not equipped with the same precision timekeeping. “Eight!”

“Sucks for Hikanome. She’ll still make the reception dinner, I think. But yeah, if you want to use the circle, we’re going to have to be real quiet. So I guess it bears asking: does it have to be blood magic?”

“Well…” To deal with the stubble, probably not. But Sky had planted an idea in my head, given me a stone that I was aiming at a second bird. “Yes. It does. And it’s not for vanity.”

“I know. Was just making sure you knew that.” She put a hand on the doorknob. “Ready?”

“I guess. Couldn’t you just, er, dose her? Give her something to make sure she gets her full night’s sleep even with us crashing around?”

“If I had something like that on-hand, I’d just have jabbed you in the neck before you noticed me.”

I shuddered. “…Right. In that case…”

—

The preparation was easy enough. Scrawl the most basic soundproofing glyph chain on a piece of paper, wince as I wove it shoddily, place the resulting lattice near Ai’s head. It was a poor solution even before my own sloppy implementation, but it was the least we could do, and it meant I didn’t have to literally be on my tiptoes. Still, just to be safe, Ebi and I were conversing by instant message even though we were standing right next to each other—me in the circle, her a safe way outside at the control panel. I’d had the good sense to take the heavy stabilizer module out of my pocket and place it outside the circle—I didn’t want to bring it in and ruin it or the circle or both.

ebi-furai: okay, how do you want it?

I waved in her general direction.

ezzen: Whatever the regular analgomantic configuration is, I guess?

ebi-furai: sure thing

She held up three fingers, more slender and angular than a human’s.

ebi-furai: counting you in for changeover

ebi-furai: 3

ebi-furai: 2

Wait. I had forgotten about that part.

ebi-furai: 1

“Fuck!” I covered my mouth to strangle the yelp as the low-power painkiller effect vanished from my prosthetic foot and I felt the full force of my still-healing amputation and burn. The pain had been steadily going down, but cutting off the analgesic effect cold turkey was still a shock to the system. Ebi glared at my outburst.

ebi-furai: cmon, man

Still, the moment was brief as could be, and then the circle’s full analgomancy kicked in, the relevant glyphs around the perimeter luminescing green.

ezzen: Uh.

ezzen: It occurs to me that this is Ai’s weave, isn’t it?

ezzen: This won’t wake her up or something?

ebi-furai: no backlash because shes actually good at her job

Alright, damn. I rolled my eyes at her petulantly as I sat slowly in the middle of the circle, glad to have confirmation that the painkiller magic was doing its job. It didn’t do much for the discomfort of sitting on the floor, though. I supposed that normally there would be some kind of seat or bed, like how Ebi had rolled my whole medical bed in the first time I’d been in here; as it was, only hard floor for me. I wasn’t actually sure what the floor material was, but it was tough and smooth. At this closer-to-the-ground inspection, there was a faint but definite slope to the floor, leading to—

A drain in the corner, outside the circle. For blood, one had to assume, although it looked like it was kept clean and sanitary. I hoped what I was about to do wouldn’t literally live up to the name, but I appreciated the thought given to ease of cleanup just in case. I’d probably ruined the backseat of that cab.

ebi-furai: oh. theres some fine print you might be interested in

ebi-furai: the red-dampening mode we have on right now is really fragile to green

I glanced down at the illuminated glyphs on the floor, eyes tracing around the circle, and I realized the problem. The painkilling effect basically took the red ripple produced in the circle and dissipated it as heat—but if fed green ripple, the mutagenic frequency I expected my Flame would radiate alongside the red, things could get chaotic. It was hard to say without GWalk in front of me, but it could easily spit out enough kinetic blue to shake the whole building; was that what had happened my first night here? Worse, it could burn out the lattice, and then anything could happen. I could turn to glass.

ezzen: Shit.

ezzen: Is there a mode that doesn’t do that?

I already knew the answer as I looked around the circle. There were only so many configurations of the glyphs available, and it was hard for most of what was available to tolerate both red and green. Ripple color didn’t exactly follow color theory, but by lucky coincidence, those two colors often paired off.

ebi-furai: theres a low power high stability mode for, as amethyst puts it, bad weather

ebi-furai: gonna be another changeover. want something to bite down on?

ezzen: Fucking hell.

ezzen: Yeah, I guess.

Ebi pulled off her nightcap and tossed it to me. I twisted it, shoved it in my mouth, and bit down. She held up three fingers again, and I nodded in reply.

ebi-furai: 3

ebi-furai: 2

ebi-furai: 1

The circle switched modes. Some glyphs flickered off while others flickered on, and—I groaned into the gag—a loud clunk noise.

“Mh?”

Ebi and I both went very still as Ai shifted in her sleep. Compared to the other mode, I did not appreciate at all how little pain this was killing. It would still protect Amane sleeping up above, but this was now going to hurt. A lot.

ebi-furai: thats all i can do from here i think

ebi-furai: youre up

ebi-furai: no, wait, hold on

She pulled something out of her pocketspace and tossed it to me. I caught it hastily, frowning at how it could have gone clattering across the floor, then figured out how to unfold it.

ezzen: Makeup mirror?

ebi-furai: so you can see what youre doing

ebi-furai: NOW thats all i can do

She accompanied that by replacing her face with a big thumbs-up emoji. I took a deep breath around the gag. Now or never—and with the limited painkilling effect, I was starting to think never sounded pretty nice. There were ways this could go very wrong magically, not to mention waking Ai up and getting caught—ruining her sleep in the process—and even in the best-case scenario, I was going to have a pretty bad time.

But the discomfort on my throat was somehow worse than that; a sufficiently sharp razor or even an epilator wasn’t enough. I wanted to attack the problem at the source, make more of myself, like Hina had said. Sky had seemed confident suggesting this, although I wasn’t sure if it was what he had in mind. And I figured that, at least in this small way, I would become a little more like the Vaetna—smooth—my own tiny apotheosis through magic. Not hurting anybody else.

I met Ebi’s eyes one last time, then focused on the little mirror, on the rough patches on my face. I reached for my Flame, and it was there, waiting. I told it I wanted the hair gone, picturing it, trying to will it into happening through sheer want rather than glyphs. Specifically the hair from my philtrum downward, I told it, not my eyelashes or brows or the tiny hairs in my ears and nose. Those were important, but my beard was just a nuisance.

I connected that to the idea of wanting the long hair that had been taken from me. I wanted the LM wig to become real, for that hair to become my own, for there to be no need for the wig. I deserved to be whole, as I saw it.

Maybe it was vanity, just a little.

My Flame understood, in its primitive, emotional way. It surged through me, icy and ablaze, up from my chest and through my throat like acid reflux from hell, seeping out through my veins into every pore, every follicle. It rushed and destroyed and combined and—it kept going, down and down and out and through and all around me, everywhere philtrum-down, arms and chest and legs and I was burning and burning and screaming into the gag all the while—

Blood oozed from my arms, legs, chest, belly, back, neck—all flowing down the gentle slope into the drain. Every follicle had been torn open, the very machinery of my cells removed. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was trying to escape my chest, each thud bringing another wave of oozing pain across my body. I was practically a fountain of blood—

Then fire, once more. Searing micro–cauterizations prickled across my body to seal every rupture in my flesh—not literal cauterization, as I’d find later, but we were past the limits of what my fragile nerves were designed to experience. Rather, new flesh grew where old had been removed, tiny polyps to plug the gaps. Some small pity so I wouldn’t have to do it myself once more.

As the Flame ebbed away, its work done, I slumped sideways. Everything fell into darkness—well, almost everything. Between the pain a tiny spark of annoyance bubbled up from somewhere inside me, at what I saw between the splatters of blood on the little hand mirror.

Had it made me blond?

—

My reflection in the limo’s tinted window said not quite blond. My new hair was more of an ochre; ginger but in the sense of the vegetable. The Flame’s hilarious punchline after it had upcharged me by taking all my body hair. In between Alice’s fretting over the ramifications of this decision, Amane had asked whether the new hair was LM incorporated from the wig, which had possibly merged with or replaced my scalp. It certainly hurt like it did, but we hadn’t had the time to check. It was still doing better than most of my body.

Every inch of my skin from the neck down hurt, red and irritated and so terribly dry. It wasn’t completely smooth; each torn-out follicle had left a tiny goosebump where the Flame had sealed the hole, so miniscule it was invisible even at close inspection and only faintly detectable by touch. It stung everywhere my clothes touched my skin, especially around the waistband of my pants, and that was after Ebi had loaded me up on a truly frightening amount of painkillers. Part of Clipboard’s job was to make sure I took more in a few hours. 

I’d put the clothes on nonetheless and gotten in the limo, a smile on my face despite knowing the cold and dry February air would make the pain worse. Everything hurt, I had a full head of truly odd-colored and likely magical hair, and my skin was not perfectly smooth as I had willed it to be, but it was worth it. The gnawing incorrectness on my skin had been rinsed off by blood and scoured away by flame. The long hair on my back and shoulders felt right, even if I had some serious questions about the Flame’s choices in color coordination. I’d insisted to the girls that I hadn’t picked that part. Maybe I’d dye it back.

Did any of this make me more ready to face Hikanome?

Absolutely not.

Still worth it, though.

---

This one was a lot of fun to write.

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