> Guild trip

> 002 blackbird × (4+20)

  The door was already open when Jett arrived. A cacophonic wave of esters immediately assaulted him, practically waterboarding him in the sickly sweet stench of nail polish remover and perfume and dirty laundry. Everywhere he looked covered in a thin layer of glitter. He avoided making eye contact with the anime body pillow propped up in the corner and focused instead on the girl hunched over a computer screen. It took him less than a second to realise that she was only wearing a sleepshirt, and he opted to stare at the ceiling instead, only to be bombarded with the sight of some incredibly sketchy posters.

  “Christ, Lulu,” he muttered. “Is there really nowhere for a guy to look in here?”

  “Au contraire, there’s plenty of places to look.” The girl’s eyes turned away from her PC, and she twirled a wavy lock of blonde hair around her finger coyly. It wandered down her shoulder, over her collarbone, hooked around her shirt over her chest…

  Something akin to a reflex dragged Jett’s line of sight aside, tearing his gaze from her vagabond hand. “Seriously?”

  Lulu cackled, spinning in her desk chair. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just really funny,” she stuck her tongue out. “I mean come on, you’re powered by adrenaline? If I just tease it out a little, your ‘secret power’ will be released?”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “Too late. Your existence is officially horny forever,” she declared. “I refuse to believe there isn’t some ecchi manga about you somewhere.”

  “And I refuse to ever let you touch it,” he sighed. “I get that trying to keep secrets from you is useless, but could you at least pretend you don’t know about it? I’ll settle for you not trying to turn it on as a joke.”

  Lulu folded her arms smugly. “Speaking of things I’m not meant to know about, I got the dossier you asked for,” she said. “You’ve got the payment, right?"

  Jett brandished a padded envelope, and she leaned forward to grasp at air until he handed it over, and she tore it open like a child on Christmas morning as she squealed with glee.

  “Madokaaaaa!” she cried. “Home at last! You have no idea how expensive this is.”

  Jett restrained the muscles in his face. “I think I can make a guess.”

  She’d refused a direct payment at the time she’d taken his commission, and instead had just sent him the details of some anime movie and told him to go buy that. When he’d pressed her, she informed him that she’d be willing to take payment of around a hundred dollars directly, so he just gave up and submitted to being her errand boy on this one. He wasn’t really happy with having to traipse around the stores in search of it, but he supposed that it was enough of a pain in the ass. He could see why Lulu would expect extra if she had to do it herself.

  “This one is the best one and anyone who disagrees is wrong,” she declared authoritatively, as though he had asked. “Rebellion is overrated compared to Walpurgis.”

  “I’m glad you have strong opinions, even if it’s for a kids show,” he shrugged.

  She gave a particularly melodramatic mock gasp. “How dare you say that about my girls.”

  “No, it’s… fine to like kiddy stuff.”

  “Agh, I want to tell you how you’re wrong so bad, but I don’t want to spoil it for when I tie you down and make you watch it with me!” whined Lulu, kicking her legs wildly, and Jett’s eyes again narrowly managed to dodge seeing anything indecent.

  “Can I just get the dossier now?” he asked wearily.

  She sighed, and her head rolled back on the chair, swivelling it back toward her computer screen. “I suppose.”

  Reaching over, she grabbed a folder, handing it over.

  “Voila. The complete life and times of Blaze Thompson,” she declared proudly. “Well, almost complete. I missed a few years off the beginning, but it’s comprehensive from four and up. I’m pretty sure she would have told you this stuff if you just asked though.”

  “Maybe,” said Jett. Blaze probably wouldn't hide anything on purpose, but he hadn't ruled out the possibility that she might not have been able to discuss some of these things even if she wanted to.

  He slipped out a few pages, skimming over the documents as he flipped through the years. Parents divorced at age six… Yeesh. And at age ten...

  “Hey,” he frowned. “This whole page is blacked out.”

  “Ah, it happens,” Lulu shrugged. “Make something up if you wanna fill the gaps. I'm sure your imagination is great.”

  “The only thing I’m getting is that she was non-verbal from some kind of trauma between 2016 and 2018,” he narrowed his eyes.

  Regardless of how much of a relief it sounded like to him having Blaze not spitting acid for two entire years, the dossier was basically unreadable. More and more of the paper was smeared in redactions from 2016 through 2020. All of 2019 was nothing but black bars. It was like she had printed out a scan of a physical document, with everything even slightly enlightening already struck out.

  “This isn’t what I asked for, Lulu.”

  “Hey, there’s stuff even I can’t crack!” Lulu protested. “I’m not some B-movie hacker, I’m a standard-issue weebcore bimbo.”

  Eris’s voice sailed through the door. “You can’t keep calling yourself a bimbo, someone is going to get the wrong idea.”

  “Not my problem. I am titties and glitter, and I’m not cynical enough to become a girlboss, Becky.”

  Jett blinked. “Becky?”

  “Québécois.”

  “Ah,” he nodded. It was hard not to feel stupid being between the girls from France and from Quebec and not even being confident enough in his own French to switch over.

  She gave a catlike smirk, as though reading his mind. “Don’t pout about it. You have bigger fish to fry.”

  He shrugged. She wasn’t wrong. His partner was probably the biggest fish he’d encountered in his life. “By the way, Blaze asked me to pass on a thousand-word essay to you about how you need to come to class more often.”

  “I do come to class!” she cried. “Sometimes I just have better things to do!”

  “Come tomorrow then,” he said. “Otherwise she’ll just yell at me instead.”

  “I can’t, I’m binge-reading this eroge! It’s really good!”

  “Skipping class to play an adult game instead,” Jett nodded. “Got it. I’ll tell her that.”

  “Noooo!” she whined. “You are the worst person I know!”

  For a fall evening, it was getting irritatingly hot, and Jett regretted not getting some air flowing before he had set out. Dropping the dossier on his unmade bed, he unlatched the window and stopped the door open, and immediately had second thoughts – the dossier quickly found itself shoved under the floppy-cornered duvet, out of view. He’d read it when he had some privacy, he decided. His room was nowhere near as stuffy as the chemical cherries that had almost suffocated him at Lulu’s, but it was still no place to digest dense documentation in any quantity right now.

  ──…Was the aircon off?

  He poked his head out of the room──

  “Don’t suppose you’re finally taking care of the bugs in there?”

  ──and an unexpected voice caught his attention.

  Blaze was sat at the table in the kitchen down the hall, directly in line of sight now he’d stepped out. That wasn’t exactly a shock in itself. Rather, it was the fact she was so readily striking up at all. Even if they lived together, he’d somehow ended up outright avoiding her without even really thinking about it. In other words, the path of least resistance. He had taken her for doing much the same, but…

  No, maybe she had been.

  He shook it off and focused on her words.

  “Uh, I didn’t realize. I can go get some spray,” he said. “What is it, roaches?”

  Blaze’s dry, level stare didn't shift. “Cameras, idiot. They were around the entire apartment when she set them up.”

  And so he was skewered through the brain. “Figures.” He silently cursed Lulu. “Uh, how long have they…?”

  “Two months.”

  “Fuck, are you for real? I’ve been watching,” he paused, “documentaries in there.”

  “On what, acting?” she said. “Yours could use some work. Ask our truant for pointers. Anyway, I dealt with all the others on the first day. I only didn’t clear yours out because I don’t want to be in there, but trying to stay away from your doorway is becoming a pain in the ass, so move them already.”

  Jett clicked his tongue, but only responded with a nonchalant shrug. “You’re in a good mood today, huh?”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “If you have to ask, you’ll never know,” he said.

  “Because you won’t tell me?” she frowned.

  “Take the lawyer’s method,” he recommended. “Don’t ask questions you don’t know the answer to.”

  “Why don’t we talk more often?”

  “Got me there,” he sighed, openly defeated. “So, did you want something?”

  She nodded. “Did you have any ideas for where we’re going on Friday? I want to make sure I’m properly dressed for it.”

  Jett felt his lips purse slightly, the natural reflexive reaction to having a sour taste in one’s mouth. “I hadn’t planned anything complicated. I was gonna wing it, y’know?”

  Judging by the steely gaze on him, that was the wrong answer.

  “Best not to take it too serious, right?” he said.

  “No, you don’t understand. I’ve never done this before. I don’t know what’s appropriate.”

  He sighed. “Then we’ll just go straight after class before you have a chance to change. Don’t worry about it so much.”

  He offhandedly wondered if this was also a consequence of those two years of mutism. It was probably best not to ask, but it probably had a knock-on effect given how awkward she was about this… but for both their sakes, he decided to shove that thought to one side, at least until he had properly read the dossier.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  ‘Take it slow’ was good advice, applicable to a lot of things. Of course, if he said that out loud, there were a few too many people who would hear it as ‘go steady’ — doubly so given the circumstances.

  Why is that even crossing my mind?

  He shook it off, and charted a path to the fridge. “I’m gonna cook something before I go looking for those bugs, I guess,” he muttered. “You, uh… want anything? I can’t work out portion sizes on pain of death, but…”

  She paused, not even turning to look at him as he passed. “I eat a lot.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, and opened the slightly off-white door.

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

  “When is sundown?”

  Of course that was the first question she asked.

  “Who cares?” sighed Jett, tugging at his shirt collar in a vain attempt to lure some of the heat out. Wheels spun smoothly on the highway bridge, the gentle hum of the engine shaking his bones as they were broiled through his blood. Today was sweltering, far more than any September day had any right to be. Frankly, it would have been welcome for the sun to retire from the sky sooner rather than later. The stuffy interior of the tin can of a bus wasn't helping matters at all, bottling the sun's furnace-like gaze as though it was planning to sell it to the highest bidder.

  “Me,” Blaze insisted. “I want to get back before that time. If it gets dark, it’ll be a nuisance since we’re prohibited from violence against outsiders. It’s also important to keep a good reputation for the school.”

  He wanted to chew her out for her blind idealism on the spot, but mustering up the energy to deal with her response seemed like a pain, so he just sighed again.

  “The idea wasn’t to take a roll call,” he told the single passenger in the bus besides himself.

  “I know. It’s a cliché,” she said. “But if I don’t assert myself properly, that isn’t conversation.”

  How academic of her. It was an objectivism worthy of praise, and one that could only have come out of a deeply hyperactive self-consciousness.

  “…Yeah, I know you know,” he replied. “Since I kinda get what you were saying about two years of math class the other day now.”

  She leaned back just as the bus began to slow. “Is that so,” she murmured. “I’m glad you took some initiative for once.”

  Blaze’s entire affect was as vague as ever even through the pleasantry, like a rosebush from the perspective of someone searching for their glasses. Had he upset her? How would he know if he had? This was all pointless if she ended up shutting him out, but at the same time, he wasn’t going to get anything out of this if he played it safe.

  “You seemed fine with personal information being up for grabs and all, so…” he shrugged.

  “I am. Frankly, I’m just pleased to see you finally motivated about something,” she said. “Doubly so when it’s about a classmate.”

  For someone so acutely puntable, she had some nerve acting like his mother. Then again, he would probably break his shins on her steel-hard aura.

  “Can I take that as permission to pry?” he asked.

  She shrugged, not making eye contact. “Sure.”

  “You mentioned a cemetery when I first asked. Whose grave were you gonna visit?”

  The bus halted. Blaze got up, turned, and walked toward the door.

  Guess not, Jett mentally conceded, following suit. Maybe that had been a slightly too personal question after all. It wasn't too surprising, all things considered. It’d been a gamble, so bankruptcy had been on the table from the start. As he stepped off the bus and into the tangling crowds of the afternoon streets, he started to consider where he was going to recover that goodwill. The noise was as always, and the sun wasn’t getting any friendlier. Perhaps going to do something indoors would be best for now.

  “My brother,” Blaze said.

  “What?” blinked Jett.

  “The grave is my brother’s. We were at ground zero of Goliath,” she explained. “I almost died myself.”

  He gave a slight nod of understanding. Given the year and where she was at the time, he’d had a hunch that the incident had affected her somehow, but…

  “Watching your own brother die must’ve been a lot for a kid,” he muttered.

  “I didn’t. That’s what bothers me the most,” she replied. “I was knocked unconscious just before he was killed.”

  Her face was like marble, her body language expressive as Michelangelo’s David, but her voice delivered the bitter, bileish taste it had left in her mouth straight to him. The self-loathing, indignation, failure, anger──

  “That explains a lot.”

  “Huh?” She made an irritated sound, as though to ask if he was picking a fight.

  “That’s why you joined the Harbor School, right?” he said. “You don’t want to be powerless like that again.”

  She frowned at the concrete beneath her feet. “I won’t be. And I won’t be underestimated either.”

  Not a promise, but a declaration of fact.

  “…I guess not,” he shrugged. “All of us have already gotten stronger since then. Probably thanks to the beatings from the class president.”

  The president shot him a glare. “I’m not doing any of this for your benefit. I just don’t want you all to drag me down when the time comes.”

  “You seem pretty sure it’s coming,” he pointed out.

  Blaze stared, silent, at the sidewalk for a second or so. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “And―”

  “No more ands,” she interrupted. “Weren’t you trying to stop me from thinking about this in the first place? Don’t get carried away, you idiot stalker.”

  “You said it was fine!”

  “I said I’m fine with it. That doesn’t turn it into something you should make a habit of,” she corrected. “If you’re using me as a moral endpoint, you’re wrong.”

  “What… the hell are you even talking about?”

  Arcades, Jett found, tended to be populated by two kinds of people these days: children younger than 12 and adults older than 35. The adults tended to be here for a wide variety of reasons from nostalgia to just wanting to play pool, but plenty of them were only here to keep an eye on their kids.

  It was hard for Jett to be around kids. It wasn’t as though he particularly hated the loud, boisterous, infuriating, sticky little brats. He kind of liked them. He was just aware that he was a gloomy person. He had taken off the rose-tinted blinders already, but it wasn’t fair to rub off on them. The further they could stay from him, and the closer to the adults who had already learned how to muffle this carcass of a world, the better.

  Blaze, apparently, had the exact opposite opinion.

  “Not like that,” she explained carefully, adjusting the little girl’s knees. “You want your foot on the brake at all times. Never take it off. You don’t know when you’re going to need to slow down.”

  “I don’t want to slow down, I want to go fast!” the girl protested. “I’ll lose!”

  “There’s more to it than just going fast. Turning means slowing down. If you slow down a bit, you won’t slow down a lot.”

  “Then I won’t slow down.”

  “Yes you will. You’ll crash into a wall and die horribly in a mess of fire and sheared metal. You’ll be in the worst pain and fear you’ve ever experienced,” Blaze said gently, “and then the engine will explode and kill you instantly.”

  “…Oh,” the girl blinked.

  “And then you’ll lose so badly that you’ll never win at anything ever again,” she finished. “You’ll not just be a loser, you’ll be a super loser who died by not using her brakes.”

  “Blaze, you know you can’t die in most racing games, right?” droned Jett.

  “I think you should be able to,” she replied.

  “The players would just kill each other,” he sighed.

  “The strong will survive. If you die, that just means you’re weak.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t make excuses just because you’re bad at games, Jett,” Blaze said.

  “Is he bad at games?” the girl asked. “My big brother is pretty good at games.”

  “He’s not my big brother,” Blaze said. “We’re the same age.”

  She had jumped pretty hard at denying that, Jett noted. It wasn’t a complete shock, obviously, to see her getting defensive. There were more than a few reasons to draw her mind back off the topic again.

  “I am pretty good at games though,” he said. “She’s just never played me.”

  “If you were, then you wouldn’t complain about my opinion,” she shot back immediately. “You’re just mad because you’re bad. Get good.”

  “Those memes were not designed for your accent,” he frowned. “I didn’t even know you played video games.”

  “I told you not to underestimate me. I’ve played some shooters,” she replied. “But I’m best at solitaire.”

  He felt his face twitch against his will. “Solitaire isn’t a real video game, Blaze.”

  “Then I’ll play you at a shooter.”

  “Instead of solitaire?”

  “Shut it,” she said.

  Her finger thrust at a machine across the room, split in half with a red section and a blue section. Each had a pistol attached. Jett immediately knew how this was going to go.

  “Hey, come on,” he protested. “That’s not fair.”

  “It’s only unfair as a game of chance,” Blaze declared.

  Jett sighed. He had plenty of quarters left anyway.

  “What the hell, why are there so many now?!”

  “We don’t have the luxury of complaining! Hurry up!”

  The timer was ticking down at a merciless rate. Enemies appeared one after the other with no regard for their own numbers.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” grumbled Jett. “Your side is basically empty.”

  “Hand it over then!” retorted Blaze.

  Before he had a moment to acknowledge what she had said, he instantly found himself disarmed. Toting two plastic pistols, she tore a cone of carnage through the digital battlefield, hopping on and off the red and blue pedals to separately duck into cover on each side of the screen. Even as both players, she was still doing better than he had been. Well, not that that was news to him. He’d known from the start that she was bound to make him look like an amateur, if not a child.

  “That was kinda mean.”

  Speaking of children, that little girl from the racing game was here, issuing a complaint toward his partner’s bad manners. Had she been watching them?

  “Weren’t you driving?” asked Jett.

  The girl shook her head. “I crashed, so I died. I wanted your friend to teach me some more. I was waiting for you to finish.”

  He smiled. “If only she was as polite as you. She has a talent for making us mere mortals feel like she doesn’t need us,” he sighed. “Which I suppose is basically true.”

  “I think it’s an interesting way to win a competition,” the girl commented. That sentence more or less cemented her image for him as an overachiever from whatever same alien planet Blaze came from.

  Judging by how intently focused his partner was on the screen after she had shoved him aside, Jett was pretty sure she had forgotten all about their contest. That said, it had been a battle to see who was better at the game to begin with, so he supposed that there was no real point in continuing after it was abundantly clear he’d lost to her long before he’d inserted a single coin.

  The thought abruptly made him take notice of something. “Where are your parents?”

  “I’m here with my friends, but they didn’t stick around to race me,” replied the girl. “They’re playing other games now. I think it’s just because they don’t like losing.”

  “You’re pretty good at it then?”

  “Better than they are,” she shrugged. “But I still crash a lot.”

  “Yeah,” Jett nodded, his gaze shifting back to Blaze as she continued her warpath through the shooter’s excuse for opposition. “They do say it’s lonely at the top.”

  The machine blared out a tinny song of victory.

  Sundown was approaching, but for the moment, the sky remained perfectly blue. Blaze was quite insistent that they made their way back before dark, and Jett should have had no reason to complain. He was doing his best to not grumble, but it was difficult.

  “Where’s the bus?”

  “It’s probably just late,” Blaze replied.

  “How? It’s a private road.”

  “There are reasons to be late besides traffic.”

  Blaze took a seat at the shelter, and Jett shrugged as he joined her. Neither spoke. Jett let the traffic and bustle go by. Manhattan never let up. Even now, he couldn’t imagine that much had changed since 2016 when it came to what the world was like a few blocks down from Wall Street, regardless of whether an entire borough to its east had been wiped off the map. He had never been to Long Island, but apparently there were little more than a few highways connecting it to Brooklyn now, running through the relatively intact northern border of Queens.

  He’d heard about work going into repairing the damage done, but over the past eight years, almost nothing had been accomplished. He’d heard some spiel at some point about the land being ruined to the point of faithful restoration being impossible, but he didn’t care enough to remember the details. Perhaps it was different in other parts of the city, considering Queens had been where most of the population had lived, but Jett had lived in a post-Goliath New York long enough to not be able to think of it any other way. From New Orleans to New York, he supposed he had always lived in the aftermath of disasters.

  He had to wonder if Blaze had ever returned to that ground zero.

  “Hey─”

  “Shut up,” she shot back, raising a hand. Her eyes were narrow.

  “What?”

  “I said shut up!”

  One second. Two seconds. A rattling sound came on the wind. He didn’t have to wrack his brains to figure out what he was hearing. He’d heard it enough.

  “Gunfire…?”

  Here, now? He hadn’t heard of the school doing live fire training outdoors, least of all where the mainland could hear it. And if it wasn’t an exercise…

  Blaze pulled herself to her feet. “We’re going.”

  He nodded immediately. “Got it.”

  The highway wasn’t built for pedestrian access, but he guessed that it would probably take less than a minute to cross it if they sprinted.

  “Don’t fall behind,” said Blaze.

  She took off with a velocity that left him in the dust. Despite her short legs, she was still much faster than him.

  Another blast of gunfire echoed through the air.

  Jett felt a wave of adrenaline take him, and gradually he began to catch up.