The two of us stood in the hallway just outside our rooms, slack-jawed and staring at each other, for a moment that felt like it was stretching into infinity. A wild joy spun inside me, and I could tell she was feeling the same joy—the sense of being seen, the delight of another’s delight.

It poured into me like rainfall in the desert, promising roaring rivers and devastation made out of bad decisions before a return to parched, cracked ground.

Okay, I thought to myself, shaking my head with a grin and breaking the spell, maybe I shouldn’t become a writer or poet. I’ll stick with alchemy.

“Thousands, Sophie.” Kelly’s voice was a reverential whisper. “You clean up nice.”

“You don’t look so bad yourself.” My voice broke on me a little bit on the last word, roughened, giving the lie to the joke—and whether I’d have managed to keep a straight face a fortnight ago, I’d never know. “Black and red suits you amazingly.”

“Does it?” She looked down, then put her hands behind her back and arched, grinning at me. “I guess the colors do work nicely.”

“Really, I think the arch is a bit much.” I hugged her, grinning broadly as she hugged me back. “I feel like there’s some subtle language in our clothes that I’m not properly appreciating. You’re definitely not dressed like I am!”

“Well, no.” She shrugged, motioning with her head for me to precede her down the stairs. “I’m not dancing, not going into the deep grass, not taking anyone to bed. Or being taken to theirs! So what I’m wearing, I mean, it’s a little of all of them and not all the way any of them?”

“Pants that flow into ribbon a bit below the knee, and lacing on the sides that gives a slice of thigh from just above the knee to your hip,” I said, and then stopped talking to focus on the stairs—stairs, my nemesis anytime I was in heels, forever and always. “The ribbon becomes ties for your sandals, and the pants aren’t padded, and I bet they’re not fragile but they look it. So there’s stuff that’ll catch, and the sandals don’t look practical at all.”

“Can’t dance in them,” she affirmed. “They’ll hold up to a day of walking, but they don’t look it, like you said. And it’s the looking that’s important. And the corsetry’s just ‘cause I like it! And also for the reactions.”

I paused with my hand on the door. “Kelly, our conversation last night notwithstanding, I hope you don’t think I expect—”

“Sophie,” she cut me off, not unkindly, “I know we’ve made no promises. We had a whole conversation about how we shouldn’t, mustn't make any promises! So when I don’t dance with anyone, and come home alone to stare at Jannea’s art, at that city lit up like a flood of stars without any magic? You should know it’s because there’s nobody here I want to do those things with.”

There were a lot of things I could say to that. Questions around why immediately came to mind—was it because of her novelty kick, and if so, how had her relationship with Tomas even worked? “Got it,” I said instead, firmly squelching them. Not the time, I told myself, even if I do want to pry. Which I do, obviously.

“And that also means that when you go dancing with Ketka, I’ll be cheering you on!”

“Kelly,” I protested, barely managing not to cough or do a double-take. The warmth rising inside me felt quite nice, though, so I turned from the door to grin at her. “Yeah, well. I hope she asks.”

She took the win with only a moderate amount of smugness, a habit of hers I’d already grown to appreciate, and we swept off towards Levali’s and Keldren’s refectory.

Meals, Kelly had explained to me, were different on Ease, and the great open room of the dining hall reflected that. Everything was set out along long trestle tables, all of it food that didn’t need any day-of preparation other than pulling it out of refrigeration and maybe heating some of it up. Even that limited amount of prep was done by people who didn’t usually work there.

That meant delvers, apparently, and the Guard, because it was the farthest thing from what they typically did. Both refectories were open, with food in the main hall as usual for breakfast and lunch; dinner, though, would be out on the four squares, the big, rectangular grassy areas that the ring road routed around at each of the cardinal gates. Alas, it was all self-serve buffet, so no being waited on by Tseizal in the equivalent of a suit.

And Tseizal did look sharp in his suit, scrubbing down a table where a toddler had left a spectacular mess. Not to my tastes, obviously, and actually there were very few people in Kibosh who were less to my taste than he was—and few that were more to my taste than the woman I was bantering with as we walked into the building. But I could still recognize it—well-tailored clothes baring his arms and showing off his smooth skin and lack of scars, which was a nice humble bit of braggadocio from someone who fought monsters on the regular.

“So, new cheese,” I said to Kelly as we walked up to the serving tables. “Tell me about these new cheeses. I don’t want a repeat of the soft-blue incident.”

“But your face. Your face!”

I grabbed a plate and started loading it with fruit and twice-baked flatbread. “The cheeses, you inveterate voyeur of my every agony.”

“Rath,” she said, pointing to the one I was most suspicious of. “They’re a cousin of rakin—bigger, milk’s got something in it that means you can’t drink it, but the cheese is… well, people eat it.”

“That doesn’t sound like an endorsement.” I knew three of the cheeses, two sharp and one creamy; I liked one of the sharp ones better than the other. “And the others?”

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“That one’s a sopra cheese. They’re a kind of quadruped, pack animals, hooves instead of feet, grain-fed—in Sudh they use them to pull carts and stuff. You’ll like it, I think! And the third and fourth are… I don’t remember, but you won’t like them. Really really an acquired taste.”

I took a careful sniff of them and shuddered violently. “Oh fuck you aren’t kidding. That smells vile! That smells like socks that’ve been worn for three days!” I paused, shuddering again as about a dozen people around us burst into laughter. “No offense meant to anyone who likes it, other than to their sense of taste.”

“Girl, please,” said someone I didn’t recognize—gahl, she pronounced it, so probably a herder, though the close-cropped curls of really dark black hair weren’t typical for the herders I’d seen. “I’ve tasted what you drink. Ain’t nobody taking you seriously on flavor.”

“Hey now,” I groused, “that’s only almost entirely fair. Even if you all think I’m a comedian for liking the combination of sweetness and fire in Hitz’s distillates, there’s a whole percent or two of the village that agrees with me.” I grinned at her, finishing off my breakfast tray with a bowl of thick soup and a large chunk of bread that was baked yesterday and was still absolutely delicious, even if most people were treating it as tainted.

The woman nodded at me and walked on, snickering, and I did a sort of linguistic double-take just a moment too late for it to be polite to waylay her. With the melodic intonation on her words, I was fairly confident she was from the Remnant League, which made her the first person from the Remnant League I’d had the chance to talk to.

It also almost certainly made her a delver, one of… well, she didn’t necessarily have to be on Kasménos’s team. Not that I had a grudge against them, even if their whole we aren’t going to use your potions because they’re a crutch and we’re here to push ourselves to the limit thing was almost entirely ridiculous, but I hadn’t met any of them—and they almost certainly had a wildly different view on culture and history.

Eh, I thought to myself, shrugging and sitting down to eat alone, Kelly having wandered off to chat up another table. She gave me a nod, nudging Zak and Khulu, who both gave me a wave—the latter waving with Kanja-who-chomps, his bird of the stuffed, multicolored kind. Life is good, and life is slow. There’ll be time to talk.

I caught the eye of one of the other delvers I didn’t recognize, someone who was headed to the buffet table with a resupply of soup, and gave him a calculated incline-and-tilt of the head with a two-finger touch to my right shoulder. It was a simple thank you in pure body language, and one of the things that Jannea had actually helped me practice, for moments exactly like this—no, I didn’t need more food or need his attention, I just wanted to say thanks in the most socially appropriate way.

I’d gotten a lot of use out of that one. And for all my initial distaste of the idea, it felt… nice. I did, in fact, appreciate that people were getting food onto tables and doing dishes, and it wasn’t an act of dishonesty to thank them for it. It was just something I hadn’t done, not anywhere I’d lived, a recognition I hadn’t been granting people—or when I had done it, it was just the performance of it, nothing genuine.

Shemmai, or at least the people who lived in Shemmai villages, lived in a sort of ever-circulating pool of gratitudes ranging from the trivial to the sublime, a flow that didn’t bother to differentiate much between the two poles. The thanks you gave for a repair job on your house—the paperwork for which I had a feeling I was going to get quite acquainted with—was the same that you gave for someone bringing more plates out, because it wasn’t about how hard it was or how important it was.

The important thing was being there for each other and chipping in. The hard part was remembering to do so, and wholeheartedly being part of that social model. Well, and managing it without getting the expression of it in everyone’s way, but that’s why it was mostly body language instead of verbal.

One may yet dwell beyond the realm of no comparison, and do deeds such that recognition might not be averted, nor avoided. Spark’s mental voice was developing an edge of actual inflection, not just meta-tagging, but this was pointedly dry as dust. Thus may some depart the norms, and be so great as to by their nature demand gratitude for that which they do, and do for others without purpose—and such gratitude permits no return.

Spark, I thought at it primly, even Tammy actively tries to play it down, and everyone around her does the same to avoid making a big deal out of her. So even though everything she does literally reshapes the world around her and she’s a hairsbreadth from being a Goddess walking the land, she acts like she’s just… normal, like nothing she does is more important or more interesting than cleaning a table.

I got a moment’s pause from that, and then a sense of huffiness. No less so does the great Lady Akesios, to less avail.

My eyes widened at that, and I could imagine my mental brakes squealing as I instantly went to shut Spark down on the subject. Hey now. None of that. I put as much force into the thought as I could, making absolutely clear how serious I was. Not only is it super rude to disrespect Rafa’s desire to not be titled as she’s entitled to be, you need to be more careful about the epithets. There are people here who can pull that out of a conversation even if it’s between the two of us, and even if there aren’t, I bet Mera’s mom can. Good habits, you know what I mean?

There was a sense of mulishness from Spark, but also a sense of… steadiness, it almost felt like. I had the feeling it was reassured by knowing that I was willing and able to express boundaries and give it firm direction when I felt like that was necessary—a disquieting thought for someone who had emphatically never wanted that kind of responsibility.

Blessings and their costs, I thought to myself and Spark wryly. Listen, I know you’re still working on what you are and what you’re becoming. But you’re never going to be at your best when you speak or act from an intention to needle or deride.

It quieted down at that, settling into a more contemplative mood. Spark knew I was right, I was confident in that—using a Grecian epithet for Rafa wasn’t just out of line, it was a clear tell to those in the know. Knowing the construction of those epithets, much less knowing specific ones that were bestowed on Olympians who had shards involved in Shem’s bloody past?

Well, some revelations were best limited to people I decided to tell, rather than people who skimmed it off of my mind for whatever reason.

I pushed the musing away, looking down and realizing that I’d finished my breakfast while being lost in thought. It wasn’t the best of habits, and it wasn’t the most auspicious start to a day when I was supposed to be dwelling in the moment and appreciating the beauty of being alive.

That’s alright, I said to myself with a grin, catching Kelly’s eye and watching an answering grin spread across her face. The day is slow, and the day will be good.