***

The following morning, I wake up full of nervous energy. It’s ridiculous that the prospect of a date with a girl I see every day makes me so excited, especially when I should be worrying about more important issues. But I can’t deny reality - I wasn’t this nervous since the day Major Orner booted me out of Intelligence.

To distract myself, I skim the news, but there’s no substantial progress about the Valanes investigations, and the minor skirmishes between the Faceless and the Syndicates seem to be tapering out.

When my teammates wake up, ridiculously late, I’m relieved.

Usually, their morning chatter prevents me from any productive study or work, but today, I can use some silly distractions. I’m even willing to overlook their insistence to call this shamefully late breakfast brunch.

Althea sits next to me, and every time I look at her, my anxiety flares – I never had a proper date! Should I prepare for that? Like… do my hair?

No, I’m not quite that frivolous. We have precious little free time lately, I should make something productive of it.

“Do we have plans for today?” I ask. “Maybe we could fit in some training.”

“Sorry, I’m going to sleep the whole afternoon,” Kaelich grumbles. “I can’t believe we have another week of double shifts. Why can’t Team Red and Orange join us?”

“Team Red’s techie managed to get a transfer, and still needs a replacement,” I say, “Team Yellow is without a Council mage, they filed for incompatibility.”

“You actually read base bulletins?” Kaelich says, surprised. “That’s how you know Ceri was in Intelligence. They don’t teach us this fancy reading thing, in basic training. Anyway, last night of freedom before we’re back to work. We could… oh, right, you girls have your date. Sori, wanna go ice-skating?”

“Sorry, boss, I’ll go to the House of the Officers tomorrow,” Sorivel says. “It’s been way too long since I Conversed.”

Kaelich snorts. “Sori, they’re gods, they’re everywhere, can’t you talk with them from your room so we can do something fun?”

“They’re not gods," Sorivel says, annoyance obvious in his voice. "They were people, once, and facets of our souls, now. And anyway, Conversing is something you do with your spiritual mentor. When you address the Officers, it’s praying, you might have heard of that. You should come with me, actually.”

Kaelich looks at him like he’s gone mad. “And sit in silence on a bench for half an hour, like the last time? Why should I do that?”

“There’s a new baby seal they rescued,” Sorivel answers. “It’s very cute.”

Kaelich eyes go wide in sudden interest “Oh! Done, then. I’m ready to suffer through your stupid rituals for the chance to pet a baby seal. I’ll start my nap now, so I won't fall asleep in the House.”

“Wait, Kaelich,” I say – I finally thought about a useful way to keep myself busy. “I need your help for something. It’s time I meet Aeniki. She likes you, right? Can you give me her private contact?”

Kaelich looks at me, all the sleepiness gone from xir face. Xe looks worried.

“Yeah, I’ll ask her, and I don’t think it would be a problem, but… uhm, maybe we should go together? I’ll introduce you in person." Xe says, “and don’t be too… you, ok?”

“And what would that mean?” I ask, too confused to even be annoyed by Kaelich remark.

“Aeniki is a really nice girl,” xe says, very slowly. “But she’s a bit… er… unusual, and you really really shouldn’t argue with her. And you tend to be a little too honest, when you disagree with someone.”

“Honesty is a good quality,” I retort. “Clear communication with people is the only viable approach in the long term.”

Sorivel raises his eyebrows. “Wow, you’re even less fun than me.”

“You two are definitely the Officers’ punishment for my sins,” Kaelich says, “but look, let’s do it like this. We go meet Aeniki together, and if I say manatee, you shut up, for real, ok?”

“I also meant to bring her a cake,” I say. “You said she appreciates them.”

“Yeah, a cake helps a lot with Aeniki,” Kaelich answers. “So, you bake? You never told us!”

“I’ll look up the recipe,” I say, “how hard can it be, making a cake?”

***

“This is a disaster,” Kaelich says, throwing xir hands up - this is possibly the angriest I’ve ever seen xem. “By the Exiled, how did you manage to burn and undercook it? And the texture! It’s squishy and crunchy!”

“I don’t understand, I closely followed the recipe,” I say. Admittedly, the muffins pictured on my tablet look quite different from the misshapen lumps in the tray.

“Stop baking!” Kaelich says, sounding honestly distraught. “You’re forbidden to bake ever again! Don’t even look at the kitchen from now on, ok?”

“Should I bring them to Aeniki anyway?” I ask. It’s four in the afternoon, and I have a date this evening. I can't possibly try another recipe.

Kaelich's face goes ashen. “No, Black Liar’s ass, absolutely not. I made a raspberry pie earlier, as a fallback. Let’s bring her that.”

“Mind if I come along?” Althea asks, peeking through the kitchen door. “I’ve barely seen Aeniki in the flesh. And I know a great way to shut up Ceri, in case of an emergency.”

Kaelich seems torn. “I’m not sure Aeniki likes mages. Look, I don’t want to be an asshole, but Aeniki… should be handled carefully, ok?”

“She’s ok with mages,” Althea says, a hint of annoyance in her voice, “she’s friendlier than most agents, on comms. We notice that kind of thing.”

“Look, just be careful,” Kaelich says. It's weird to see xem this nervous, even worse than when xe talks with Sareas. “Three months ago she had an argument with an agent. Doors stopped opening for him, his Stemlink started playing very loud ads in the middle of the night, he found himself subscribed to a pyramid sale scheme and… point is, don’t make Aeniki angry, ok?”

“You know I’m a literal mage, and I can tear people apart limb by limb with a thought, right?” Althea says.

“Yeah, you can, but you wouldn’t,” Kaelich says, “Aeniki can and will ruin your life over a minor argument.”

“I’ll be careful,” I promise. “Honestly, I’m getting more confident this is a good idea. If she’s so dangerous, it means she’s truly skilled. We can work with difficult people. Not so with incompetents.”

Althea grins. “Well, this base is half difficult people, half incompetents. Plus Jaeleri, who is both. I’m happy to stay in team difficult people.”

“About that,” Kaelich says, wincing again, “for some reason, Aeniki gets along with Jaeleri. Don’t insult him too much in her presence.”

“Jaeleri gets along with someone?” Althea asks, looking honestly surprised.

Kaelich shrugs. “I think they have bonded about their evil nature and contempt for humanity, honestly. Anyway, keep that in mind.”

Kaelich retrieves his pie from the common fridge – it looks perfect and delicious, and I have a new realization about how hard cooking is. Armed with xir gift, xe leads us through the dilapidated corridors of Rakavdon base.

“We’ll meet Aeniki in the Server Room,” Kaelich explains. “At least it’s warm in there.”

We go through a corridor I vaguely remember from my report to Quicksilver, and reach one more thick door, this one well cared for, with a keypad. Kaelich swipes his wrist, and it beeps, but doesn’t open.

“Kaelich,” a voice calls through the speaker after a minute of increasingly annoyed waiting, “I’m busy. Go pester someone else.”

“O-kay,” Kaelich says, cheerful. “I have a pie, though.”

A moment of pause.

“I know that means you want something from me.”

“True, but I still have a pie,” Kaelich answers, “raspberry pie.”

With a whirring of well-oiled mechanisms, the door swings inward. Blessed warmth hits us as we step in - it’s even a bit too warm, but right now I don’t mind.

Inside, the Server Room looks like a cave - a vast, dark room, with the black cylinders of the servers rising like ominous pillars, blue lights blinking on their surface. It reminds me of the precursor site below the University, and despite the heat, the memory makes me shiver.

A wall is completely covered in screens, showing footage from cameras around the base - I recognize with a jolt of discomfort there’s one from our bunk room. Others show unsteady feeds from some soldier’s helmet, others again several world news sites.

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Aeniki sits in the middle, crouched in a huge armchair. A spider in her web, I find myself thinking, and the image seems strangely fitting, for reasons I can’t pinpoint.

I’d seen Aeniki a couple of times, at official gatherings. She’s a tall, gangly woman in her mid-twenties, with milk-white skin without tattoos. Her most distinctive feature is a larger metal protrusion on the left of her face, covering one eye - an advanced Stemlink implant, the kind that costs hundreds of thousands of credits and only experts in some narrow technical fields use. Looking at the metal sinking into live skin makes me feel weirdly nauseous.

Something immediately tells me she’s in her natural habitat, here. She doesn’t exactly smile, but she looks at us, attentive and interested, and I have a flash of my family’s cats looking at birds who landed in the courtyard.

Why do I keep thinking about predators? She’s just a snarky woman who is good with computers, for the Lords’ sake.

I check her Stemlink presentation.

NAME: Aeniki

OCCUPATION: Solving your problems

AGE: don’t ask

QUALIFICATIONS: I hacked this idiotic thing

BIO: I can write fuck here, and you can’t, loser

Wait - she hacked her own datasphere profile? Profanity in bio is forbidden, and the age field shouldn’t even accept text! I’m surprised that she could do that, but even more that she did it openly. Datasphere identity is regulated, so she’s flaunting a crime, if a minor one. How can she possibly do that and still work with ThauCon?

“So,” she says, squaring me up, “this is the intelligence school flunkie. And the trigger-happy mage. Nice to meet you,”

“Nice to meet you,” I answer. “We never had much chance to interact in person.”

“Why would anyone interact in person,” she says, raising her arms in disbelief. “Except for pie-giving. Give me my bribe, Corporal.”

Her posture relaxes as Kaelich hands her the cake. There’s something… disturbing about the way she moves. For a moment, her arm looks…

She turns to me, quizzical, and I realize I’m being rude and silly. I let Kaelich’s stupid stories get to my head. Aeniki sits in a horrible posture which will give her back pains, and she lacks muscle, she should exercise more, but that’s all. Her arms are perfectly normal.

“I was curious to meet you,” Althea says. “I’m an actual, legit mage, and people speak of you as if you were the one with mysterious, fearful powers.”

Aeniky takes a slice of pie. “That’s because people are idiots,” she says. “I understand basic IT management. That’s the end of my mysterious abilities. But it’s easier to fear my spooky powers than ask me how ThauCon’s digital infrastructure works. Well, insofar as it works. It’s a fucking mess, the original programmers should be shot.”

She bites into the slice, making appreciative noises. Crumbles fall on the floor, and immediately, a cleaning robot comes scuttling from under a desk.

“Sorry to disturb you during the weekend,” I say – it turns out people don’t like talking about work on Capday. “But we’re busy with the double shift, and I wanted to discuss the unexpected Theta signal you detected at the University. Did you analyze it further?”

“A good pie and no small talk,” she says, nodding. “That’s a decent beginning. Anyway, of course I realized that signal. It’s the first clear hint I've found in years. Unfortunately, it’s faint and noisy. The detectors at the University aren’t very good, and only two arrays registered the signal, that’s not enough for a good read on position. The best I can say is that it originated inside the University, or just outside its walls.”

I furrow my brow. “Could it have come from the excavation, maybe?” .

Aeniki shakes her head. “No, it originated from the ground floor, or the first underground level at most. That, I can say for sure – there are separate detectors in the Precursor cave and in the relic vault, and neither picked up anything.”

“As for the signature, it’s someone known to the Agency, because there is a match, I just don’t have the authorization to see it. The theta fingerprint database is centrally controlled, and – unlike most ThauCon systems – it’s solid. That’s usually a good thing, but it means I can’t tell you who it was, without a clearance I don’t have.”

Could Quicksilver get her that clearance? But how can I make them authorize Aeniki’s query without telling her? Maybe Quicksilver could just check if there’s an undercover Council mage – would they tell me, though?

“Wait a moment,” Althea says, frowning, and I see Kaelich go rigid. “You said this signal was the first clear hint – first hint of what?”

Thad did sound weird, but I thought it was some Fallish idiom I’m not familiar with – or a lost-in-translation from Vorokan. But Aeniki smiles at the question, something feverish in her expression.

“A hint that the secret factions are moving,” she says, “that their game comes to Rakavdon.”

I’ve seen that look – and heard similar words – all too often in Intelligence School. It’s a situation I hate: someone says something interesting, but unusual, and you don’t know whether they’re insightful experts or conspiracy theory nuts. And if you ask for explanations, you’ll have to listen to them either way.

But I must be starved for speculation since I left Intelligence, because I want to know more. And in the worst case, if I let her rant about alien cabals controlling us from the shadows, she’ll be more willing to help us.

“What game do you mean?” I ask. “And how does it relate with the strange signal?”

“I don’t know, yet,” she says, excited - a strange contrast with the bored demeanor she keeps on comms. “The obvious explanation for our signal is that the Council sent an undercover agent to keep an eye on the university. But that would mean they, too, think something is going to happen here. And they’re not going through the regular channels.”

“Are you sure the Council has undercover agents?” Althea asks, skeptical. “Really, you’ve no idea how cautious the Councillors are. Most of them would be happier if none of us ever left the Glass Tower.”

“The Alliance itself needs magical support for some special operations,” Aeniki says. “I know for a fact that Bureau K employs Council mages in their undercover work. So, the Council at the very least has some members trained for covert ops. And yeah, the Councillors are cautious, and bureaucratic. They have to be - there are so many hardliner politicians, and ThauCon agents as well, who’ll be all too eager to shut down the Council or go back to more stringent rules. But believe me, the Glass Tower plays its own games, too.”

Kaelich has kept silent, standing politely a step behind us, letting us do the talking that requires actual thinking. But xe said not to contradict Aeniki, so I glance xir way while preparing to do just that. Xe shakes xir head, but doesn’t say the stupid safe word, so I suppose I’m free to go. I turn to Aeneki.

“So, you believe Rakavdon is a target for terrorist mages?” I ask her. “That seems like a stretch. Our districts barely sees any magical activity.”

I actually think there is something strange going on in our city, and Quicksilver pretty much confirmed it. But I need to know if Aeniki has actual arguments, or if she’s seen the Black Liar’s face in a spot of mold and made up a magical conspiracy.

“And why is that?” She asks, looking straight at me. Her mechanical eye has a glassy iris, the same gray as her biological eye. But the artificial eyeball is black, and a pinprick of white light shines in the middle of the pupil. Lady of Pains, that’s disturbing.

“Think it through,” Aeniki goes on, “the point is exactly that nothing happens here - the Syndicates don’t try to set up shop, the Faceless Army doesn’t snatch young mages, the Hidden Schools don’t steal relics, and demons don’t fall from the sky. Geographical latitude explains the lack of demonfalls, but what about the rest? Why is Rakavdon so peaceful? Because one thing is for sure, it’s not ThauCon’s merit.”

Althea, at my side, frowns, but now I’m convinced that Aeniki isn’t jumping at shadows. This is the same question that gnawed at me since I came here, and couldn’t get anyone else to take it seriously. I itch to tell Aeniki about Quicksilver’s answer – Abyss, I can’t do that, but I should consider telling her something, in the future.

“So, what do you think?” I ask.

“I think the factions must have some kind of agreement,” she says, talking fast. “Since the Zelenian Revolt, the magical factions have become less active - but they’re not defeated. The Syndicates are stronger, especially since they formed the Cartel, and none of the Hidden Schools has been attacked in thirty years.

“So, what are they doing? I pick up hints here and there. Edited reports about magical activity - from police, media orgs, even ThauCon. Upticks in secure communications. Anomalies like that signal spike. I don’t know what is happening, but mages, powerful ones, have been moving a lot across the Alliance, in the last years, and they take pains to keep a low profile. Consider the recent train station emergency. The mages were from the White Rose Society. Why are they suddenly trying to get a presence in Rakavdon? And by the Fallen Home, how could a bunch of mundane gangsters ambush three powerful mages, and even kill one?

“I think something big is happening here. The factions put some serious effort into laying low, after Zelenia. But now they’re… less cautious. Something made them worried, or greedy, or surprised. And in Valanes, someone finally got sick of playing by the rules.”

She mostly sounds like a conspiracy nut. Her sources are hints here and there.

But there’s no denying that her interpretation of the recent events matches, in some points, Quicksilver’s words. Something made them worried, or greedy, or surprised.

Quicksilver says that the Syndicates want something, and it must be kept away from them, at any cost.

A storm is building in the Else, Za Ruik said.

The truth is simple. I have three very different, independent sources all claiming some major move from the Magical Factions is happening, or will soon happen, in Rakavdon. There’s no way they’re all deluded, and - even more importantly - they can’t reasonably be coordinating to deceive me.

“That sounds like a lot of extrapolation from a signal spike and a single Syndicate incursion,” Althea says.

“I know it sounds paranoid,” Aeniki says, but she doesn’t look at Althea - she’s still staring right at me. “I could show you some evidence, but you’d have to trust I didn’t fabricate it, so there would be no point.”

Maybe a good intelligence officer would try to pretend disinterest, making her work hard to convince me.

But I know I’m a terrible liar. And Quicksilver… well, they might be playing me for a fool, but they say intelligence work is about partnership and trust, not just sources and manipulation.

“I believe you are on to something,” I say. “Not sure about the big picture, but there’s some serious anomaly in the magical activity in Rakavdon. Something is happening under our nose, and we should find out about it before something like the disaster in Valanes happens.”

Aeniki raises her eyebrows, surprised.

“Well,” she says, “that was easier than I thought.” Se cocks her head, looking at me. “You had similar suspicions already, didn’t you?”

I nod, but say nothing. This is entering dangerous territory. On one hand, I’m dying to discuss the situation with someone beside Quicksilver. On the other, I can’t tell her about Quicksilver, yet.

And I don’t think I’ll tell Quicksilver too much about Aeniki either, now that I think of it. While it would be nice to all be part of one happy conspiracy, they’re two sources I can check against each other. That would make my relationship with Quicksilver far less unbalanced.

Lord of Seas, I enjoy the cloak-and-dagger shit way too much for my own good, I can barely stop myself from cackling madly.

“You said you have some evidence.” I say, “And honestly, anyone with a brain can tell something strange was going on with the Syndicate mages ambushed at the train station. Have you considered making a report to regional HQ?”

I don’t even suggest telling our superiors. The Captain is useless at best, a traitor at worst, and I think Aeniki knows that as well as I do.

She carefully cuts another slice of cake, and takes a small bite. “I tried that, when I spotted a bunch of doctored travel visas.”, she says, thankfully after she’s done chewing. “No one took me seriously, either in provincial command or regional HQ. I could try again with the new information about the theta spike at the university, but at best, I’d be wasting my time. At worst… consider this. Someone had to whitelist that mage’s signature. So, someone high in ThauCon knows something is happening - and decided not to tell us. Would we be safe, talking openly about it?”

Message, Kaelich: Does all that stuff really make sense? Like, I know I told you to be nice, but if she’s going on a paranoid rant, maybe you shouldn’t encourage her.

Message, to Kaelich: I’m not lying. She raises interesting points, at the very least. I’ll look at her evidence in detail, but I’d definitely listen to her.

A red notice flashes on my Stemlink, and I flinch.

SYSTEM ALERT - YES, I’M PARANOID, BUT YOU SHOULD REMEMBER I’M A L W A Y S W A T C H I N G

[CONTINUES]