Alas, as I found out upon our return, it transpired that no magic had whisked away the mess we’d left.

Going into Ease, everything had to be just-so—perfectly in order and neatened, clean and accounted for. I didn’t have any objection to this in theory, but in practice it involved a great deal of tedious, finicky labor.

The sole saving grace of the situation was that I didn’t have to dust everything.

Well, that and the company.

“So what you’re telling me is that I can’t activate this.”

“Yup!”

“Which means only you get to do the awesome Vortex magic.”

“I guess so!”

“Smug stinker of a smirking minion.” I grinned at the bits of glass-dust that had only become visible once I’d fully disassembled the safety shield we’d been using. “You’re lucky you’re cute.”

“And what would happen if I wasn’t?”

There was a dangerous glint in Kelly’s voice, and I took the opportunity to turn so that I could waggle my eyebrows at her as she activated one of the workshop’s enchantments again. There was a sort of anti-sound as the magic took hold and did something physically nonsensical with the vibrations in the air, and then the dust and grit that had accumulated in the hood in the past fortnight fell to the floor.

As though being gusted around by the wind, it moved in little whorls and spirals towards a point about two-thirds of the way towards the ramp from the opposite corner. There was, in hindsight, an engraving on the floor there, in an open spot where there wasn’t any furniture, and that must have informed the layout of the lab. The dust gathered there, and a faint blue glow spread out along jagged geometrical lines, sparking into life and then fading before I could get a good look.

“What’s the deal with the blue? I’ve seen it before.” I thought back on it for a moment, then snorted. “I once vomited into a bucket that glowed that shade of blue. Self-cleaning, very convenient.”

“Just moving on, huh?”

I glanced over at her and took in her body language. One hand at her hip, the other behind her back, with her shoulders back and head level, but spine straight rather than arched—not genuinely upset or angry, if I remembered right, and also not flirtatious. “If you weren’t so cute,” I said dryly, “I wouldn’t be nearly this wrapped around your finger. And then I’d make you do all of the cleaning.”

“Oh would you now.”

Spine arched, feet out of horizontal line, shoulders down, head tilted to the side. Hand up to the waist. My mental recall was faster now, and for all that it wasn’t anywhere close to instantaneous for most things, I’d studied Jannea’s notes every day. “Sure.” A little bit upset, and more than a little bit flirtatious. “See, I’ve always hated cleaning. And look at me now! Doing it voluntarily.”

I’d disassembled the safety shield we’d had on the workbench, which was technically part of the fume hood assembly, and put them on a side table of sorts for the Dust Vortex—not technically its name, but fuck it—to clean. That was just one side of them, though; somewhat laboriously, I flipped each of them over, and with a pulse of magic, they were pristine again.

So were my hands, for that matter—and impressively, the oils on my hands were spared while the marks my fingers had left disappeared off of what were effectively transparent, armored plates.

“Well, I’m glad you’re doing it voluntarily.” A pair of gloves landed on my shoulder. “I’m your lab assistant, not your servant!”

I almost replied, reflexively, with you’d rock the uniform, though. Thankfully, my brain interposed itself in time, and besides, Shem probably didn’t even have the cultural token I’d be trading on. “Honestly,” I said instead, “lab assistants back there didn’t make much more than the cleaning staff, and sometimes less. They worked longer hours on more dangerous work. Either way, maybe… four crowns an hour?”

“That’s… not bad for apprentice work?”

Sliding the gloves on, I focused on the plates, carefully lifting one. “You only think that because of how much you don’t have to pay for.” Over to the angled bin it went, gently—if I dropped it, it’d be perfectly fine, but thirty pounds of some sort of super-hard ceramic would do horrible things to my feet, and I wasn’t in steel-toed boots.

Not that those were a panacea. I’d had a four-by-four drop onto my foot once from about half the height of the shield bin, and the foot had in fact come out just fine, along with the boot.

Shame about the bloody furrow halfway up my shin that it’d carved on the rebound, though.

The plate went in, and I walked over to get the next one. Kelly had been quiet, giving me time and space to focus on not being my usual clumsy self. “Four crowns an hour, more or less, for forty hours a week. But a meal’s a crown, and for all that I was lucky to get a place to live as cheap as I did, it was still… three cities?”

“Sophie, it’s crowns, balances, cities.”

“No, I know. Three hundred crowns.” The next plate—the second out of twenty—went much faster for my having a better sense of the weight. “And before you say anything, that’s for every two fortnights, not for every year. A world and a half? And about a quarter of that income goes to taxes, no deducting expenses.”

“A world and… Sophie, that’s absurd. You have to pay taxes on the earnings that put food on your table?”

Stolen novel; please report.

I put the third one down carefully in the bin, making sure it was stable and secure before turning. Kelly was boggling at me, and I shot her a thin, sad smile. “I did tell you, on our first day. My home was not the best of all possible worlds.”

One third of your waking hours. Spark’s words were unusually flat, lacking even the cognitive tags of earlier in the week. One point eight cities in earnings every two fortnights, after only those expenses. An extraordinary difference in outcomes—shift each brick by one part in ten in every course, and suffer to live under the structure’s shadow.

“Thank you, Spark, but also! You’re doing work for another’s benefit.” Kelly’s hands tightened around the lip of the desk she was standing at, word after word, until her knuckles went white. “And what about clothes, the tools of your trade, you’d never have time to improve yourself and grow! And even then, what happens when you take ill for a fortnight with a Frost’s fever?”

Sixth plate, and a deep breath. I didn’t entirely get what Spark had meant; probably something about the way that small changes can add up. Move your bricks over just a little every time you lay another set down, and you wouldn’t want to live under the leaning disaster that resulted, after all. And maybe each change from Shem to San Francisco would be small, in isolation. But if you stack them up…

“You go into work anyway,” I said after a moment, “because the alternative is falling into debt with interest that compounds, and actually I really don’t want to talk about this.” The seventh one, I put down with shaky hands. “I know I brought it up, but is it okay if we—”

Kelly’s hug interrupted me, her arms cutting me off by wrapping around me from behind. She didn’t say anything for a while, and I just stood there, hands on the supports that held the bins and the shelving.

The shakes faded quickly. After all, it wasn’t like I was particularly traumatized by the economics of the work I’d been doing. If I hadn’t had to fight tooth and nail to actually get to use my contractual paid time off, to be paid the amount I was owed, and to do my work in a safe and ethical manner, I might have enjoyed my job.

Unlike the traumas of my childhood and early adulthood, this was just… the act of explaining it, really. The struggle to reach out to someone who didn’t understand, and who wasn’t going to be able to because she came from somewhere so very different. And I wanted her to understand, because it had defined a decade of my life, and I tried to take that and acknowledge it, and then let it pass through me and onwards.

I was, as always with any litany or meditative exercise, only imperfectly successful.

“So, what’s with the blue glow?”

Kelly sighed, and for a moment it felt like she was going to pry some more. “It’s usually a self-cleaning enchantment,” she said instead. “The blue glow is actually from the mana-draw; it’s pulling everything it can out of the stuff it’s affecting, and using it to feed whatever.”

“Huh.” I glanced over at the pile of dust, grit, and miscellaneous detritus sitting in a neat heap. “That’s neat! I should have wondered whether there’d be trace enchantments in the safety glass. Same way the neutralizer works, then.”

“Yeah.” Kelly glanced over at me, and I raised an eyebrow at her and her uncharacteristically quiet tone. That got a smile out of her, along with an emphatic nod. “Yeah! It is neat. And! Speaking of the neutralizer!”

“That’s definitely your job.”

“It’s mud!”

“It’s chemical byproducts and the spec says that it takes up to forty-eight hours to fully neutralize solids. And anything that can’t be dropped—”

“—is my job, but forty-eight hours is for the worst of it, not for anything we’re working with, everyone knows that.”

“Then why,” I responded with a thin smile, “doesn’t the book say that?” I gave her a beat, and then shrugged. “By the book. Not up for discussion. Which means?”

“Stickler,” she mock-swore under her breath, then grinned back at me. “We finish cleaning everything. The dust, dirt, oils, and whatever else that doesn’t get handled by the cleaning glyph goes into the solid chute of the neutralizer, and then I run the purge of the interior unit to pump everything into the outside unit.”

“And I’ll deal with the papers in the meantime. And the books, and yes,” I preempted her, “I know how to use the index to make sure I rack them in the right order.”

Assistance can be rendered at need, for none present are alone. Let disorder be burned away, and divine order spread transcendent.

I didn’t dignify Spark with a response beyond my snickers, impossible as they were to suppress, and we set to it with renewed gusto and a continued determination to keep giving each other friendly shit on utterly trivial matters.

I complained about the way Kelly’s reference books were structured and ordered, declaiming minute points of disagreement as though they were vast inadequacies of civil policy. Spark complained, having started to get some memory leakage from me, about not having a better computational substrate and how inefficient our pathfinding algorithms were. And Kelly made as if to fume about my methods of organization for my handwritten notes, and also about their origin.

“It’s a notebook of endless pages! How is that even a thing, Sophie?”

“It’s not endless at all.” I glowered thoughtfully at the stack of notes I’d made about the bacterial contaminant from the morning before putting them in the ever-growing Ideas Soup section. “It’s limited by the fact that a page can only be torn out once it’s been written in, and it has to be physically torn out by me.”

“It doesn’t have a limit!”

“It’s time-bounded. Look, you’re overthinking it.” I smirked at her, watching her lips quirk upwards against her will as she glanced over at me. “Hephaestus gave me a fifty-page notebook as a replacement for something I had beforehand. That’s all it is.”

A fifty-page notebook, and it stayed that way. Miraculously, no matter if you tore a page out or not. Because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a fifty-page notebook anymore, would it?

“Thousands abounding, Sophie, you have the absolute weirdest attitude towards the Gods.”

“Works, though,” I said quietly, my smile vanishing. “Gods all over the place, happy to do business. Might even be that they’re happy to talk, too. There’s only one that’s silent.”

“Are you…”

I looked over at Kelly, once her voice trailed off. “Am I sure about the silence, as opposed to nonexistence? Of course not.”

“No?”

“How could I know? How could I possibly be sure?” There weren’t any more papers to file away, so I started pacing, unable to stay still. “The God of my mother and father, and their mothers and fathers before them—may their gaze be elsewhere, and not upon the rot in the apple that falls from the tree—is supposed to be an absent demiurge, not having touched the world for thousands and thousands of years.”

“Ours is too, you know,” she said, and my eyes snapped over to her. “Absent, that is. The oldest Gods we have attestations of, they talked about how the oldest ones they knew had no idea how the universe began.”

“Huh.” I let that thought percolate as I looked over our workshop. There wasn’t a speck of dust visible, or a single thing that wasn’t put away; everything was done, even as I itched with the urge to make my hands busy and keep myself occupied. “Huh.”

“Maybe at lunch,” Kelly said with a soft smile, “Cleric Veil will be around, and you can ask them.”

And then she started walking up the ramp, and there wasn’t anything to do but follow after her, ruminating.