"Norma tells me you'd given her some pointers," Edith mumbled. Tremulous quarter-closed eyes that tunneled into swelling bruises had focused on him, and he found the attention painful.

Threads of a kindness he'd done, not as a kindness but as compensation for the revelation of something secret and precious and upfront payment for a possible reciprocation in the uncertain future. Might he be lying if he said he wasn't influenced by a sensuous and easy nature?

Betelgeuse nodded but refrained from answering. He was trying to conserve the energy necessary to survive unto the end of their training. Grunts of exertion issuing from the strained and straining combatants already thigh-deep in lactic acidosis as the match climaxed in a tumble of bruised limbs and battered faces.

Somewhere between match forty and fifty Norma had manifested her first Etching. That victory was hers after an eternity of careful avoidance, a tiring and soporific display of attrition-based combat, and Betelgeuse didn't know if it was the well-placed liver shot or the exhaustion that did her opponent in.

She'd shown it to him right after, evidently pleased with the results, slurring her way through some facetious flattery and smiling wide enough to reveal her chipped teeth, and all the while Betelgeuse wondering why she didn't hide it behind those pursed lips tinctured with rose, her teeth, and if this were a concerted effort to achieve some sort of exploitative intimacy by way of appealing to his love of authenticity.

> Norma Myrmec's close observation of a counterparty manifests as a keen intuition regarding such counterparty's actions.

The line was set across the binding from the Increment, the words serifed and scrawled in a peculiar blend of calligraphy and print typography across pages that were rough and thick as rawhide. His absentminded inspection of the little details of her Incunabulum, there under the persistent glare of their white-lighted sun and under threat of suppression by the system's belligerent pawn, suddenly made him feel as though the things were very strange indeed, and he wondered why he'd persisted all these years in his ignorance of the immanent characteristics of these the most foundational things in their society.

Perhaps, he thought, so much familiarity with the idea of Incunabula had erased from his mind the need to understand the things in themselves—what were they made of, where had they come from, how did they come to capture the whole Democracy within their grasp?

"Maybe… um… maybe you could look at mine too?" Edith inquired over his scattering thoughts.

Sleep deprivation had such a way of pressuring the senses. Every movement felt sluggish; the mind turned in on itself and emotions became dulled. But the thing could not be mistaken for calmness. It was a condition of confusion and incomplete thought and danger because one's capacity for critical thinking was compromised and taken down fantastical and drunken roads.

Betelgeuse nodded.

With furtive steps she closed the distance between us and cracked open the ashen covers, revealing to my vision a page the color of pumice and calligraphy that was scratchy and unpolished. The absent mind wandered further and wondered if there were not some relationship between the material manifestation that was the Incunabulum and a person's inner world; then the Will appeared, an eroded thing, phosphorescent against a dark and dimming awareness, to steer the spirit back down familiar roads, familiar paths.

> Because Edith Pavlov's early years were eclipsed by a constant fear borne of incessant abuse, she is extremely sensitive to threats of violence regardless of form.

"Okay. Keep it. Quickly."

Fear.

She knows it well.

How it must have felt, how it must have been like.

Betelgeuse furrowed his brows.

Similar approach to Norma's. Try for detection. But it's going to be difficult to sharpen an intention in the right direction. Because of exhaustion.

The Instructor's trying to meet a KPI. Couldn't care less about the quality of the Etching we get, as long as we get it.

"... Am I out of luck?"

"Luck has nothing to do with it."

And he fell silent, thoughts meandering through beaches of white sand pierced with half-buried bones lapped bleached and eroded by the pacing tide. He'd have wanted to see the sea again, if he could, if he knew that he was bound for a sea-less world. If on the new world there could be experienced the beauty of a yellow sun and sunrise and sunset and a blanket of constellations to which one could tether dreams, then perhaps he would be content.

Edith's eyes, wide and bloodshot, were darting from side to side. Frizzed hair bunched up in an eccentric coiffure that reminded him of cotton balls and static electricity. She was gnashing her teeth, looking away but always returning her hyperactive eyes to him, wondering, he was sure, if he would not help her.

"'Sensitive' is the starting point."

"I-I'm not being sensitive."

Betelgeuse clicked his tongue in annoyance. "No, the Increment. You're 'sensitive' to whatever. I doubt I have to tell you to focus on it, so the important part's going to be intentionality. Obvious to me your mind is running itself out; you need to slow it down, reduce the arc of scatter."

She blinked. "You mean sharpen the intentionality to a point. I know I need a specific intention, I just want some pointers on what I could be specific about," she mumbled.

Betelgeuse' attention absorbed by the rise and fall of the hammerfist as Aminata 'the Darkskin' tried to beat his opponent's brains out.

"... This sensitivity to violence, I suppose you'll suggest I focus on the opponent's strikes, try to make a telegraph out of what I'm sensitive to."

"That's one obvious way… but, thinking through your Increment, and especially the last phrase—what was it again?"

"Regardless of form… ah, I see," her eyes narrowed as her paranoid hyperactivity was subsumed under meaningful thought.

"Yes. The words that comprise the Increment are markers of intentionality. It's up to you to supply the meaning but always within the limits of the Ash Incunabulum. I seem to recall a paper studying how human beings have through millennia evolved sophisticated but subconscious means of interpreting physiognomies. That's something to think about here, say for example recognizing threats based on expression or body language. Your Etchings might go down similar to Norma's."

"I-I see. She didn't tell me about hers…" she trailed off, and Betelgeuse sensed the palpitations of nervous energy gradually start to recede from her body.

"In fact," she piped up again, "talking with you…"

Dried skin stretched taut over cheekbones and cartilage makes soup from essences of fat and flesh from whence the discomfort is gotten be none other than strictures of time immemorial run on to modern day by the mediums of superstructures which control and create hierarchy but also harbor within the seeds of self-destruction which considering must concede a cannibalistic streak thwarted only by sublimating will to an order-making overlord of eternal fidelity by which slavish impulses to sin might be given over to the prudential wisdom of one construct sentient or no but without flesh-fat that might cross the edge of mortal knowledge into noumena thus transubstantiating the desire to halt the ineluctable progress of entropy—

"… it makes me think 'violence' can be a key word also," Edith breathed, the shapes behind her pupils turning a violet shade silhouetting painful memories that had made her and broken her and gifted such desire that things had not come to be, "'violence' can be many things, right? There are forty-three muscles in the human face according to the Medical Authority and potentially more ways for it to shift than all the grains of sand on Earth. A whispered word, a pretense to love, deception. I think… I can work with it."

"I… if you take it that far… to my mind the further you take it, the harder it's going to be to crystallize a clear definition to serve as an appropriate marker of intentionality. You'll be seeing violence in things I wouldn't describe as such."

Her eyes looked brighter to Betelguese than it had heretofore been. Something approaching a smile had settled at the corners where bruises met parched lips.

"But I know. The words are markers of my intentionality, aren't they? I've been mistaken before, seen ghosts where there were none. But the violence I recognize is specific enough that I can be sure of it when I see it."

Betelgeuse opened his mouth, about to reply, then closed it. Perplexity gradually turned to understanding.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Interesting.

"I can see how that would work," Betelgeuse gaped, then nodded, impressed. Some of his exhaustion had dissipated under the exigencies of grappling with the problem Edith had posed.

After all, there was a kind of multifarious tension involved in the use and navigation of language.

On the one hand a society could technically define the meaning of a word however it wanted, but whatever this definition was, a dictionary could only ever provide half of the story, given the empirical fact that such artifacts of language were in constant flux.

On the other hand, groups of all kinds and sizes (and differing political power) might enlist language to specialized uses and meanings, over time creating an idiomatic use which promulgated according to the fortunes of such group. The new meaning might eventually become recognized as the 'correct' meaning, or it would disappear into obscurity, or the word itself might fall into disuse and then disappear into obscurity, amongst others.

Betelgeuse half-remembered the story of the word 'nice', which he must have gleaned from the obscure tomes collecting dust in the basement of the E-Zeta library. Though possibly apocryphal, those books had taught how 'nice' had been a historically flexible word which had at various points pre-Old Empire took on new habits and sometimes habits of inverted color. Some of the most ancient definitions of 'nice', for example, referred (of a person or action) to 'foolish', 'silly', 'simple' or ignorant', or (of conduct and/or behavior), 'characterized by or encouraging wantonness or lasciviousness', or even 'faint-hearted', 'timorous', 'cowardly', 'unmanly'. Over time, 'nice' variously came to mean 'strange', 'rare', 'extraordinary', 'shy', 'coy', 'reserved', 'slender', 'thin' and/or 'insubstantial', not all of those meanings being in play at the same place or at the same time.

To his knowledge the meaning of 'nice' had only crystallized around the dawning of the age of the Old Empire, at the time meaning roughly 'agreeable', 'pleasant' and/or 'satisfactory', or sometimes 'attractive'.

Now, in the world that the Incunabula had created, every person could speak to themselves and make power with that alone, by virtue of the catalysts that were the Increments and Etchings born out of an individual's infinite recursion into herself. Her language had become a kind of asexually reproduced product which recognized as its parents only the individual and the individual's conception of her past participation in community.

"Betelgeuse," an unfamiliar voice called out to him, just as his internal monologue started to flag for lack of further energy. Edith jerked her head in its direction and, momentarily nonplussed, bowed her head and wilted into the background, clutching her hands to her front pouch.

Voke.

He was a meek little man and effeminate, this Voke, but handsome as a chrysanthemum is handsome.

Betelgeuse expelled air through his smarting nose in a bad substitute for a sigh. Some of his peers had too much energy.

"Voke Thatcher," he introduced himself, raising a hand that never found mooring.

When it became clear Betelgeuse wasn't going to take the handshake, he folding his wrist back into his armpit and continued in a soft mumble that was barely discernible from self-talk at first, but which gradually stabilized at an audible level "...re thinking of staging an escape. The way Michael and the others… the way they see it, this is all a load of bull. If we start then the others are going to follow no doubt about it…"

Betelguese, arms folded across his chest, left hand grasping a baton and right hand idling at his left tricep, raised his right palm. Voke's voice caught.

'Escape?' Betelguese mouthed, his right eyebrow arching.

"Yes," Voke whispered.

"Stupid," Betelguese concluded.

"... um… now wait here a minute. First of all, there's a hundred and fourteen of us and one of him."

"The lack of sleep's getting to you," Betelgeuse exasperated. "There's a hundred or more of him in other rooms, doing much the same, Voke. It's goddamn stupid is what it is."

Betelgeuse neglected to mention they had all flown here in LSVs, and he sure didn't see any LSV lying around waiting to be commandeered; he didn't care enough to raise the obvious, nor did he feel like hearing out the harebrained scheme they had cooked up to address this glaring hole.

"Look, Michael's thought the whole thing out…" Voke entreated, his expression becoming strained.

"You really got on good terms with him after the trouncing he gave you."

Sighing deeply, Voke stepped away, making for the other end of the arena.

----------------------------------------

They were in the canteen but his appetite had all but disappeared.

He sat and stared at his steaming pile of pasta, tailbone pulsing deeply with pain where it had impacted upon concrete.

Edith was with him again, poking incessantly at a clot of soup that seemed to share the same ethnicity as the curdles that had previously so absorbed her.

"Stop that," Betelgeuse muttered. Edith glanced at him and then twiddled with her thumbs. Softening his gaze, he added, "you can eat mine if you want. I've got no appetite."

Betelgeuse scanned the space, passing his eyes over the ovens, the row of mechanized arms, the queue of shuffling zomboid creatures, the gender-segregated washrooms (where a line of female cadets had spilled over onto the auburn tiles), the tables over which other dark-eyed cadets were brooding…

He did not see Shinzo nor any of batch designation 246-D.

The reverie of a quarter-hour passed with him drifting into and out of unconsciousness, when a tap on his shoulder jolted him to attention. It was a staff dressed in a doctor's coat and cyan facemask, looking down at him, calling his name, pronouncing it tortuously and incorrectly.

He stared at the stranger through bleary eyes.

The stranger narrowed his eyes impatiently and asked again and Betelgeuse answered. He was to follow this person quickly; whatever it was, it was urgent.

He threw a quick and questioning glance at Edith, and then he was trailing behind billowing coat flaps, the man's broad shoulders leading Betelgeuse down the line and past whirring machinery; then it was into the kitchens, where jabbering human cooks grappled with cadaverous machinery and checked this gauge or that portion size, this manifest or that specification.

Beyond the kitchens were rows of storage rooms, musty like the ancient armories back at E-Zeta, the gray concrete flooring unlacquered and splotched and grease-darkened by generations past.

They passed personnel dressed in the purple-gray uniform of the military, whose boots clacked smartly along the breezy halls and up the stairwell, unto white-painted double doors hung with a silvered name plate.

Conference Room 12.

Cracking the door open halfway, he ushered Betegeuse in, but did not follow.

Seeing the man's furtiveness, the swirl of confusion that had entangled Betelgeuse over the duration of the short excursion gave way to anticipation and curiosity. He slipped in sideways through the portal, into the warm glow and onto the garish paisley carpeting, when someone familiar caught the corner of his eye.

"… Betelguese… is that you? Gods… what happened?"

It was the furthest thing from what he had expected. Chrysilla lurched from the chair, coming close to him and then hugging him gently, her side pouch patting his thigh softly as it danced on nylon straps.

"I am astonished."

"Oh, shut up. You smell terrible," she sniffled.

"I feel terrible."

"You jest," she breathed, and then squeezed hard enough to hurt his bruised ribs. He forced himself not to flinch.

"What happened to you?" Chrysilla asked, raising her face to look at the piece of discolored gauze clinging to his face, concern evident in her expression. "And what happened here?"

"Broke my nose. They make us fight 'cause they're trying to force Etchings," Betelgeuse monotoned. "Why am I here?"

"I… I asked the Docent if I could return to E-Zeta to see you. He told me you were still in the facility because…"

"Because I'm an Ash grade?"

"B.T. … who the hell cares? I badgered the old man until he let me meet you. See if I don't complain to the Docent—"

"It's not going to work. They're sending us to the Frontier, some place called Desert. P-D-S 70. Quickly, what day is it? What time?"

"Wednesday, eleven in the night. What the heck do you mean? They're not going to let you go home?"

A rap on the door and a muffled voice. Two minutes, no more.

"Look, listen to me, listen to me" Betelguese stressed, grasping her upper arms with his hands, her eyelids fluttering above sapphire pupils. "There's a standing Requisition Order that we're to be sent to Desert—no way you or I can do anything about it. Tell Mom and Dad I'm fine, if you see them. Tell them I'm an Ash—they deserve to know. But see here it's very likely tomorrow's the embarkation…"

"What!? We've got to get you out—"

"Stop wasting time. Gold or not, it's a Requisition Order we're talking about. Chrysilla," he entreated, "can you do something for me?"

"Anything," she breathed.

"I need information on the Chimerae. Anything you're able to find. As much as the messenger loads will handle—get it over to P-D-S 70, Desert; remember, P-D-S 70, Desert. I can't recall the designation, but it's Desert, the planet's name. I've a batch designation, 2-4-7-B. I don't know how convenient it will be to access the messenger relay, but I will try, so this means you'll have to use a cipher. I don't want them thinking I'm trying to bypass the Firewall or circumvent the goddamn propaganda."

"Like when we were kids?"

"Yes, like when we were kids. As for the key… we'll use yours."

"Nighti—"

"Yes, yes, no need to say."

Another spiccato rap of knucklebone upon plastic.

"Okay, okay—" Betelgeuse managed, glancing at the door and releasing his grip on Chrysilla.

"Wait! B.T., I wanted to show it to you," Chrysilla clutched at his smelly sleeve, her left hand producing the Golden Incunabulum from her side pouch. The first page lay open, and on it, he saw:

> Because the truest wish of Chrysilla Nightingale's consciousness is to hold things close together, hers is the power to influence gravity as she sees fit.

"Fits you," Betelgeuse smiled.

"When will I see you again?" she asked, eyes shining.

The words rolled off his tongue, subconscious artifact of something someone had said to him recently.

"It's Heisenberg uncertainty."