Jolie is the first to notice that something’s changed.

My aunt is too professional to let her inner suspicions slip before they’re ready, so it’s not anything she says. It’s the fact that she doesn’t say anything at all. Leaning against the scuffed counter of our temporary safehouse’s kitchen with her back to a boiling pot, she watches, but she does not speak while I run her through everything that’s transpired since I arrived in the capital.

It’s day four since I was moved from the impromptu operating room to a suite of surprisingly luxurious staterooms deep within the Orange’s central towers. The reconstructive work in my back is finally beginning to show results, though I’m still immobile. Being stuck in a wheelchair is its own special kind of hell- double that for a ki fighter, and triple that for me. Movement is who I am. I’ve never been chained down like this before. Progress is small, incremental, and frustratingly slow. I only regained feeling in my toes yesterday.

Cal is with me for every step. We’ve been inseparable since I awoke on the operating table. Our closeness a thing of habit now, not a forced alliance. She could’ve left and started sleeping in the staterooms with Jolie nights ago, but she only left the medical ward once my surgeries finished and we were moved here together.

She’s always near at hand, like I’ll get ambushed again if I ever leave her sight. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Her protective presence was my anchor during the roughest nights of surgeries. When I reached out during the agony, her hand was always there to grip. Her yellow eyes become the first thing I expect when I wake. Her quirks and humor a constant companion. A blackbird perched ever on the windowsill of my mind.

So much of our time alone in that cold morgue of a room were just spent telling stories to each other. Cal told me about her childhood in the public system- all sorts of stories from the group homes, the day Jolie found her and Thane, the first time she went to school- and I told her in turn about what it was like growing up in the Section’s outskirts. The mountains, the forests, the fields, the seas. Now that we’ve swapped the medical ward for more human surroundings, more often than not, I notice that our conversations will end and our words drift off to leave us stranded in each others’ eyes till a joke or distant sound breaks the moment.

I know where this path leads. I’ve walked it once before with Thane. Yet as the days pass, I find myself toeing the first step every time I brush against Cal. My heart’s compass pulls as it will. As a ki fighter, I know better than to fight against that tug. Especially when Cal is the one who brought back my light after three years of dormancy.

The permanent, contented glow I now exude says everything.

We’re positioned around the scratched hi-top table in the stateroom’s kitchen. Just the three of us. I’m sunk comfortably in my wheelchair, blanket over my legs. Jolie alternates between watching me and laboring over a crock-pot concoction that smells better than anything else in the Vents. Smears of grease on her cheeks, Cal slouches on a bench beside me, taking a break from working on Jolie’s skeletal replacement for my prosthetic. A smooth, palm-sized lump of raw damascene that Dynasty operatives managed to recover from the site of the Mobiak’s ambush rests in front of her. I’d be paying more attention to the way she’s braiding and unbraiding my hair like she’s practicing gallows knots if I wasn’t entirely focused on Jolie's ice-cold gaze as she watches what’s happening in front of her.

My aunt has all the same reasons I once did to despise Cal to her very core. Our closeness isn’t something she’s commented on during the times she stopped by the operating room. She just accepted it as a piece on the board and worked it into the grim arithmetic of our current situation. Until now.

“Everything Tetsuka says paints a very compelling picture of your altruism, I will admit,” Jolie says, a full minute of thoughtful silence after I recap the fight against the Mobiak. She runs a rag along the ladle’s edge. “I’m inclined to trust her judgement given your track record for helping both of us, Cal. She has a sense of hearts that’s rarely wrong.” Flicks off the red sauce at the end of the ladle, letting it fall back into the pot like a blood splatter. “Rarely, being the operative term. I already made the mistake of trusting two Kyriakus on the word of others. One is now a criminal king who nearly murdered my brother on multiple occasions. The other fooled us all for the decade it took to finish what the first started.” Her indigo eyes are laden heavy with accusation. “Even Thane had good intentions at first. I’d have never helped mentor him if he didn’t. But evil is in his blood, just as it is yours, Cal.”

That heavy gaze falls on me next.

“No good man willingly sets foot on the path to evil, yet many have walked it to its end.” She quotes the old Champion Fang. “Good intentions are no longer enough to earn my trust. And you should know better, Tetsuka.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“If I can trust her after Thane, you can at least stand her presence,” I say from my wheelchair. “Cal’s earned our trust ten times over.”

“She’s a security risk. Her presence jeopardizes our safety as long as she stays.”

“And if she leaves?” I shake my head. “Cal fought Thane for me. She broke you out of the Imperial Complex. If she shows her face in the overcity…”

“I’d be perfectly fine,” Cal smirks, working at a small braid near my jaw. She unwinds it and starts over. “It’s cute that you’re worried about me, though.”

Jolie stirs something in the pot before turning back. “If it’s facts that you need, allow me to renumerate. Cal may have helped you against Thane once. She’s also an assassin with blood on her hands. A social chameleon trained by the most dangerous murderers, courtesans, politicians, and saboteurs her brother could find. She is a Kyriaku. A direct clone of your father’s greatest enemy, just as dangerous as Thane. And just like Thane, she maintains connections with every one of Gami’s Shadows and servants. Those are people who will be looking for her. Wondering why she’s missing. What she’s doing. Who she’s with. People who she likely is still maintaining communication with now.”

Cal admits it with a shrug.

“She betrayed her genetic twin for you on a whim. What’s stopping her from betraying us now?” Jolie’s tone chills further. “What if she’s still working with them, and Thane or Valance or Gami let her free me? Her entire existence beside you is a risk. She could even be playing both sides just to gain your trust and use you as a fulcrum to undercut her brother. You trusted her blindly-”

“I trusted her because my heart told me to, and Dad told me to always listen to those feelings,” I say, voice quiet as a wave of weakness washes over me.

Jolie’s lips, frozen mid-sentence, slowly close. She breathes out carefully through her nose. Treading gently past the mention of my father. Water overboils behind her. “Be that as it may…”

“Auntie. You’re right. By the reasons, we shouldn’t trust her.” Struck by more nausea, I slump back in my chair. “But reason didn’t get me this far. Cal did. She’s had every chance to leave me. Hell, I attacked her, twice. I beat the shit out of her. But she stuck with me through everything.” Grimacing, I reach over and grab Cal’s shadow-bitten left arm. Black poison still worms through the veins. “This was for me.” I touch the still-healing flap of skin that Thane carved from her arm. “This was for me.” My hand falls back to my lap. “Cal is everything you said, yes. But she’s also more than that.”

Jolie picks up a half-cooled cup of caf, takes a quiet sip. Evaluating again the yin and yang that she sees before her. The blooming intimacy. The honesty in my voice. The protectiveness with which Cal guards me even now. In it, I’m sure Jolie sees a piece of herself. I’d like to think my words are what make her relent, but I know my aunt better than that. She is a mother hawk, a watchful lioness burned by the world one too many times. So far are the lengths she will go to to protect her flock that even my insistence won’t budge her. But seeing that same sentiment mirrored in Cal- that, I think, is what pushes her over the edge.

Her paper cup comes to a firm rest on the counter. She turns and adjusts a knob on the stove. “And what do you have to say, Calliope? You’ve been quiet.”

Cal looks me in the eyes while she talks. “Tay said it well enough. You can listen to her. Or you can not. Either way, you should get cozy with seeing me around. I’m not letting her leave my sight again.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what I want to do.”

The sentence seems to strike Jolie, though not in a way I fully grasp. “Then you have no intention of returning to Thane?” she asks.

“Oh, I have every intention of returning to Thane. We’re not done yet. Not until I’ve kept my promise.” Reaching up, Cal slides out the screwdriver holding her ponytail and returns to fiddling with the half-finished prosthetic. Voice a comfortable, easy low against my ears. “But I also have every intention of getting Tay back on her feet in fighting shape first. And I have every intention of getting both of you out of the capital. Having a ki fighter as powerful as her at full strength is the kind of firepower that makes escape possible.”

“In that, we are in agreement.”

Sheathing her distrust for now, Jolie scoops up her empty cup and heads past me towards the caf brewer, ruffling my hair on the way by. “If Tetsuka wants you, I won’t say otherwise. But you have one strike. Don’t waste it.” She comes back with a fresh cup and sighs into a seat at the table. “I suppose if I’m already working with a Venter like Nabuna, keeping you around may actually be an improvement. I could use another pair of eyes on this.” She taps a nail against the prosthetic.

Cal smiles to herself at the backhanded compliment. Probably the best she’ll ever get from Jolie.

“Nabuna’s still around? What’s he doing for you?” I ask, shifting a little so I can lean more comfortably against her.

“Not for me. For you,” Jolie corrects. A projection screen blinks to life above the table. My ghost bank account, once filled with piles of winnings from my undercity fights, recently dented by the loss of a not insignificant number of credits. All to the name of a no-good greaser.

Cal groans when she understands. “…You gotta be kidding me.”