“Hit me!”

Hina was in a mood. A giant, gleeful grin of pointed teeth covered her face, and the blue of her eyes held a fervor, a mania.

“Uh.”

“Punch me!”

“Um, we were doing spear exercises earlier—”

“No. Shut up and hit me, cutie. With your fist! Make it fucking hurt,” she panted.

My reservations were obvious. Even though my intellect and instincts agreed that there was absolutely no way I could meaningfully injure her with a simple punch, common sense had me hesitant to throw a punch at a girl who was almost a full head shorter than me and weighed easily 20 kilos less—no matter how disturbingly enthusiastic she was.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

“Hina-san,” Ai chided. The Emerald Radiance was sitting on the sidelines, cross-legged on the dojo’s padded floor. “Maybe it would be better if you let me—”

“Ai, baby, don’t ruin this for me.”

As Ai repeated the pet name to herself incredulously, Hina eyed me with what I could only describe as need. The blue of her eyes was being rapidly swallowed from within by the black of hugely dilated pupils, and she was clenching and unclenching her hands.

“Um, Hina, you’re freaking me out just a little. Can you…?”

That got through to her. She took a deep breath that exploded outward as a plea.

“Cutie, please, I’m just—I really need this, and I promise it’ll be fun and this is real training because you gotta at least be able to throw a punch and also we’re never gonna be able to have the good kind of sex without at least starting here and I’m trying really really hard to not unload onto you first and—and Ai’s here to stop me if I lose control.”

Damn her puppy eyes, and damn my desire to find out what “the good kind of sex” meant.

“…Okay.” I balled a fist, and Hina’s eyes lit up. “Uh…where?”

“Anywhere’s good,” she purred, before shame flickered across her face. She blinked away the haze a bit. “Um. Boob?”

“Boob.”

“Yeah.”

The open vulnerability of her neediness emboldened me to ask. “Any particular…reason?”

“I like it when you touch them.”

“I’m right here,” Ai reminded us. “This is not becoming…sex. I shouldn’t need to say that. Real training, Hina-san.”

Hina bounced on the balls of her feet, only loosely interested in gravity. “Real training!”

“Hina and I talked about this,” I informed Ai. “Um—with boundaries and everything.” Though Hina’s own admission that she needed Ai’s presence as a failsafe was undermining the strength of those boundaries more than I liked. “So, um, with that in mind, Hina, what’s the…goal, here, exactly?”

“We make sure you know how to throw a real punch.”

“With you as the punching bag because you’re into that,” I finished.

“Yep! Win-win, yeah?”

“Okay, sure, yeah.” I drew back my fist and changed my stance slightly, feeling a little lame; I’d never done a hand-to-hand martial art. At least I knew to put my thumb over my fingers.

Hina presented her chest for the strike in a distinctly sexual display, despite the fact that the tank top she’d changed into was fairly tame and unprovocative. Ai groused something at her in Japanese, and she sighed, standing more normally instead.

“Killjoy. C’mon, cutie.”

I punched her. My scarred knuckles squished into the fabric, and then her breast, stopping as they cushioned against her ribs. In that moment of contact, feeling my fist strike the meat of her body, the absurdity of this situation caught up to me. A pretty girl was begging me to punch her in the boob as a thin-veiled excuse to get off. And evidently, I was such an easily-strung-along submissive that there had never really been any question I was going to do it. What a ridiculous situation.

The moment passed as I withdrew my hand. Hina looked at me blankly, unsatisfied.

“Harder, cutie. Like you mean it.”

I reddened. I had meant it, but apparently my form was too bad to get that across, or I was just too weak.

“Um—okay.”

“Again.”

I complied, opting for the other boob this time, feeling even more absurd. But it still wasn’t enough to even move the needle on whatever criteria Hina cared about. Pain, presumably. She frowned.

“I know you’re not that weak. Stop holding back.”

“I’m not!”

“He is baseline,” Ai pointed out from the sidelines. “No augmentations, no mutations. You know he can’t hit as hard as we can. And it’s very normal to unconsciously pull your punches when your first time practicing a punch is doing it on a person, Hina-san,” she chastised.

“But he knows I can take it!” Hina stepped into my reach, leaning close. “Cutie.”

“Hi?” Subconscious pattern recognition observed that most times she had gotten this close, we were usually about to—

She yanked me forward by the collar of my shirt. Ai shouted. Hina’s lips—

Did not find mine. She growled in my ear, sending goosebumps rippling down my back and arms.

“Stop fucking disappointing me and hurt me already.”

She let go and casually dropped back to where she had been standing in the blink of an eye. The motion was fluid and weightless in that way that suggested she was more, that way which evoked the Vaetna. That alone was enough to send a spike of white-hot, jealous anger straight through my chest—but combined with her words?

The cocktail of envious frustration ignited sparks of my Flame, a tearing sensation in my chest like I’d pulled a muscle I hadn’t known was there, jolted to life from a cold start. Raw magic followed the path of least resistance from my soul to where it had first touched me all those years ago, into the seams of my scars, illuminating ice-cold magmatic flows of ivory Flame. She wanted me to hurt her, to hit her as hard as a flamebearer should be able—and in that moment of frustration, the third time I swung at Hina was with more than just the meat and bone of my fist.

Things slowed down around us. Maybe that was the adrenaline, maybe white or pink ripple from my Flame manifesting my emotions, but in any case, for that fraction of a second, I was moving and thinking and feeling at her pace. Those blue eyes caught the white firelight as they narrowed in satisfaction. She responded not by attempting to dodge, but instead by leaning into the blow, and I struck her square in the chest.

This time, when fist compressed skin and fat, it didn’t stop. I felt something crunch, bone failing. The force passed through her entire body in a shockwave as she crumpled around the blow. Then the energy ran out of ways to dissipate, and she was thrown down and backward, skidding to a stop in a heap on the mat a few meters away.

I stood there, panting, fire streaming from my clenched fist. It hurt, as the Flame always did, those channels of white light like frozen metal pressed against my skin, quickly turning numb in a way sure to leave criss-crossed lines of frostnip on my hand. And inside my arm, pushing my musculature past its physical limits had already begun to presage its consequences, a tattered cold front of soreness and aches. But I felt incredible, high on the surge of power, the blink-and-you’d-miss-it apotheosis. I was beyond the sluggish limitations that had weighed me down all these years, whole at last, the emptiness sated for just a moment—

Hina gasped, coughing flecks of blood onto the mat, a visceral, mortal sound that dragged me back to reality. I had tried to hurt her—to kill, really, because like when Ai had dispatched the dummy a few hours ago, a regular human would not have survived what I had just done to Hina. And while I knew my girlfriend was far more than human, able to take it, her wet coughs and the blood oozing from the corner of her mouth filled me with icy fear and doused my Flame with ashy guilt.

“H—Hina?”

She gurgled, coughed, and rolled onto her back. Fuck. I felt a hand on my arm—Ai was at my side, inspecting what I’d just done to my hand. I pulled away, pointing at Hina lying supine.

“I’m fine. What are you doing? Help her.”

“You’re not fine. Arm, please. I need to make sure you didn’t break your hand or that the residuals aren’t about to turn your muscles to marble.”

“I’m—” I winced as she ran her thumb along the back of my hand, checking the bones. “Okay, maybe I’m not completely fine, but she’s less fine.” Why was I the one receiving medical attention when I’d been the one to throw the damn punch? “I can deal with this myself, as opposed to my girlfriend, who is coughing up blood.”

“You’re not built for those forces or ripple exposure. She is.”

As if on cue, Hina sat up, wiping her mouth with her hand. She tried to say something—it came out as a cough. She tried again.

“Hehehe—hrngh—hiehehehehe. That was so good.”

“Uh. Are you alright? Ai, please give her first aid, not me. That cough can’t be good, and I definitely felt some ribs break, and that landing looked…bad.”

Ai shook her head as Hina babbled.

“I knew you could—” she hacked some more blood into her palm, “—could do it! Gosh, fuck, that was so good,” she repeated giddily, rolling her shoulders with a bloody smile. “I love you.”

I exchanged a look with Ai, pulling my arm away. “She hit her head.”

“She’s just like this. Do you see why we try not to enable it?”

Hina rose and staggered toward us, a crazy-eyed zombie. “I love you too,” she giggled to Ai. “So sweet, so thoughtful, so pretty.”

I was weirdly grateful that Ai avoided eye contact with her pain-drunk teammate. Hina had expressed similar affection for Alice before, and I was starting to suspect it applied to all her teammates. I tried not to be jealous.

“Hina, are you…alright?”

“I’m great. And I have you to thank for it, cutie, you cutie.”

Her giddiness was going from offputting to concerning.

“I—no, I hurt you. I feel like shit about it,” I added for Ai’s benefit. “I don’t—”

“Cutie. Ezzen. Ezzie!” She rolled her tongue over the new pet name, and I blushed despite the circumstances. “I’m already mostly better. Give me another five minutes and it’ll be like it never happened.”

“Are—you’re sure? That’s a relief.”

Hina stared at me hungrily, pupils huge. “Yeah! It means you can hit me again!”

“Hina-san,” Ai interjected, warning in her voice.

“Ai-chan!”

“No more.”

“I can take more! You know I can!”

“It’s not about you. Stop being selfish for once and think.”

“His arm’s fine,” she protested. “And we’re under the red threshold for Amane because of the wards in here, so we can go as hard as we want.” She licked the blood off her palm. “So c’mon, fuck me up, show me more of what you can be. C’mon, cutie, don’t you want it?”

Ai answered before I could. “I don’t want to be here for this. It makes me feel dirty.”

“Then don’t! It’s kind of weird for you to stick around and not join in. Just let us have our fun and go work on your stuff.”

“Your ‘fun’ could get Ezzen hurt. He can’t stop you from going…fight-crazy, and you can’t stop yourself.”

“I totally can stop myself! Ezzie and I had a whole talk about this! He’s keeping me responsible!”

“Not a huge fan of ‘Ezzie’,” I interjected quietly. There was more at stake here, but that part was the only bit I really had the bandwidth for at the moment. I was still reeling from the emotional whiplash of my momentary ascension.

“Sorry. Point is, I’m not gonna hurt him, okay? Walk away and we’ll prove it!”

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Ai pointed at Hina’s chest, which the hyena was rubbing absentmindedly—whether to soothe or inflame, I couldn’t say. “What just happened is not ‘keeping you responsible’.”

That, along with Hina’s “don’t you want it,” made something click into place for me. I spoke up.

“Ai, I think we’re done.”

“Hey!” Hina pouted. “Don’t blueball me like that!”

“Hina, please. I need to talk to you. Alone.”

“Aw.” Suddenly, she looked nervous. “Did I fuck up?”

“No, I just…” I glanced at Ai, hoping she’d trust my judgment.

“Yes, you fucked up.”

“Ai!”

“There was no reason for you to do any of it like this. If you want to show him how to fight like you do, then show him how to fight, not how to enable your selfishness.”

Hina looked hurt. “I did! Look at his arm!”

“Unmanaged, anger-driven ripple catalysis is not a safe way to fight. You know that; it’s why you do it. But he is still recovering from an amputation! What if it had been transmutative instead of augmentative? He could have—” She caught herself, taking a deep breath. “Fine. I’ll leave, Ezzen. I have papers to grade anyway. Ebi will check on you later.”

As she stormed off, my rapidly regenerating girlfriend called after her.

“I’ll be good! Promise!”

—

I sat down on the dojo’s padded floor, catching my breath, taking inventory of the lancing pain on my skin and in my muscles. Hina did the same and stretched her shoulders, riding up her shirt to expose her belly—a normally tantalizing view, somewhat undercut by the crunch of bone healing in real time. That rather summarized the problem.

Guilt fought desire. I did want to feel that rush of power again, and part of me, perhaps a larger part than I dared admit, wanted to get swept up in Hina’s giddy high, let this mood of hers take us from fighting to fucking and maybe blur the line between those entirely. We had the room to ourselves now, after all. But at the same time, I just felt…gross. I opened with that.

“This feels like too much.”

“Cold feet, you mean.”

“What I mean is that this is…extreme. Insane. If I hit a human like that, they’d be dead.”

“I’m not human! And neither are you, cutie. I saw that look on your face when you hit me, y’know. It makes you so happy. Like it should!” She scooted closer to me. “Lap?”

“Um—not right now.”

“Aw. Why not?”

“Because—adrenaline. You,” I clarified, finding one of the things I wouldn’t have been able to say with Ai in the room. “You’re adrenaline, and I don’t know how to feel about it.”

“Violence, yep, love it.”

“Why?”

“It’s how I am!”

“What’s in it for you? What’s the—point? Fun? Kink? I don’t even really know what I’m trying to ask.”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t. You were—I mean, I know masochism is a thing, and you’ve been open enough about that. But I had been thinking, like, whips and chains at most…” I trailed off, realizing I was ostensibly open to that level of fucked-up-torture-fun. I’d have to unpack that later. For now, it was overshadowed by the uniquely extreme case that was my girlfriend. “Not—not injuries that would send somebody to the hospital. That was way too far.”

“Mm. Okay, so…yeah, I’m a masochist, no news there, but the pain itself isn’t really the big thing. Y’know how adrenaline junkies, like skydivers and stuff, don’t actually want to die?”

“Sure.” Wait, was she implying—“Holy shit, Hina, are you—”

“No! No, no, not what I meant. I loooove being alive, that’s exactly the thing. When a human jumps out of that plane, the thrill is in the fall. Those thirty or forty seconds of letting gravity win, that’s where the fun is at. The danger, the fear of a messy end, just enough to get the heart rate up and get that thrill of survival when they open the parachute and land nice and safe. And like, it’s a good high, it scratches that itch. For humans.” My stomach turned over at the imagery of skydiving. She looked at me with those blue eyes, tilting her head curiously. “Oh, right, acrophobia.”

I nodded, pale. “Yeah, heights, not a great topic for me.”

“Nah. Perfect topic! Imagine how much of a rush that feeling of survival is when it comes after you actually hit the ground. The power when you see earth rushing toward you and know you’ll win. Imagine not being afraid of heights anymore, not being afraid of anything anymore, because you know you’ll survive.” Her voice was dreamy. “I don’t need a parachute.”

Because I was me, there was only one place for my brain to go from that: the Vaetna didn’t need parachutes either. They had enough pride in that bit of trivia that it came up fairly often—hell, Heung had said it almost verbatim minutes before I had been flametouched. I hadn’t put the pieces together until right now, but—could that bone-deep envy I felt toward the Vaetna be related to my acrophobia? Or perhaps both were just symptoms of the same frustration at being so…human. Either way, when Hina framed it like that, about being more and being powerful rather than simply about being in pain, the appeal came into focus. I hated needing a parachute.

But the parallel between her and my idols broke down from there. I couldn’t imagine any of the Vaetna being so enthusiastic about pain, nor so willing to revel in their superiority. Sure, the Heron liked to joke, but the Vaetna were ultimately practical; they wouldn’t seek out excuses to push their limits like that. Hina, on the other hand, was gratuitous, entirely self-interested. Flaunting it like she did felt wrong on some moral level, and that was before factoring in my personal, gnawing envy.

She grinned as she watched the gears turn in my head. “Yeah, I knew you’d get it.”

“I…I do, I think. That’s what you promised me, right? Power. But—the high-minded ideas about invincibility and power? Sure. But the way you were acting, the…mania…that still puts me off.”

“Sorry. The rush makes me a little loopy, but only because it feels so good.” She rubbed her breast as though reminiscing.

“Um, good as in the high you were talking about, or are we back to the masochist ‘pain equals pleasure’ thing?”

“Both. My wires are definitely more than a little crossed. And now that you know all that—don’t you want to do it more? Power up with your Flame and get me all pain-happy at the same time? The sex after is god-tier, I promise.”

It was tempting, put like that. Very, very tempting. I tried to reach for some sanity to stave off how appealing that sounded.

“It—that feels like going too far. I feel it crosses the boundaries we set.”

“Hey, you agreed to all of this. You wanted to do that to me. That’s how the Flame works, y’know. You got mad, wanted to hurt me, it helped you. Didn’t it feel so good?”

And that was the problem. It had—or at least, part of it had. “That’s a trap.”

“Hm? Cutie, I just mean we should do things that feel good. The Flame helps you with that, if you let it.”

“The power felt good,” I admitted. “Hurting you…no. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be cruel.”

“Who’re you hurting?”

“You. I just said.”

“No, you’re not!” She sat up, fixing me with glimmering sapphire. “I know it looks bad. I know it does. But it’s so fun for me. It feels incredible, I almost came.” For once, she showed something like shame, averting her eyes. “So, uh, yeah, you did a good job. You know by now you’re not putting me in actual danger, and you’re making me feel exactly how I want to feel. Where’s the cruelty there, cutie?”

“I don’t know! I mean, you’re smaller than me, and I know that doesn’t really matter because you’re you, but I still feel gross for doing it, and—it just doesn’t feel like something I should be doing.”

“But didn’t you feel like a Vaetna, for that moment?”

“…Unfair to play that card again, isn’t it?”

She ignored me. “And compared to that, right now you’re all…slow. Bound. Mortal. And, cutie—now that you’ve had a taste of what it’s like to not need a parachute, what it’s like to be like them, like me, you’re going to want to feel like that again, chase that high.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t—”

“I want you to have that.”

“Why?” The question slipped out almost automatically, the uncertainty at the core of everything that had happened to me in the last week. It echoed in every moment I spent with the Radiances, but Hina especially. I didn’t deserve this. “Why me?”

“Because you’re hurting like I was, how I used to be. And I can make it better, make you more, with the power of love and magic and punching. That’s mahou shoujo, right there in the dictionary next to a picture of Alice.”

“Still makes me sound like your charity case,” I grumbled.

“Cutie, shut the fuck up.”

She moved, fluid and weightless, closing the gap between us. On hands and knees, she leaned forward to me, and this time the kiss happened. Her mouth tasted metallic, and despite all my protests and misgivings, I welcomed it, leaning into the flavor, shuddering at the way her purrs rolled through my chest. By the time we separated, my brain had thoroughly short-circuited, and the affection in her sapphire eyes banished any notion of this being purely a matter of selfishness or duty for her.

“I said you were disappointing me. That wasn’t just to rile you up, it’s because it makes me sad when I see you reaching for the parachute instead of growing beyond it. Use your Flame, cutie, like this.”

She put her hand on my chest, tugged for my Flame—

I pulled away, holding her wrist with both hands.

“Stop. No, Hina. We promised Ai no more magic, no more pain, right?”

“There’s—c’mon! I’m still all worked up.”

“Okay, but—not like that.” I looked at her seriously. “We promised.”

“Sorry, cutie, it’s just—I—I love you,” she whimpered, hurt.

“Do you love me, or do you love what you want to make me into?”

She snarled, and my heart dropped into my stomach, prey instincts rearing their head.

“It’s both! I just want you to be happy! Weren’t you happy?”

My tattoo itched, and the ache in my hand grew—unlike previous times she’d inspired this animal terror in me, this time I’d just proven I could fight back. But that wasn’t how we had agreed to do this. I took a deep breath and stood my ground against those impulses, pulling my eyes away from the bared teeth, meeting her eyes.

“Fucking hell, Hina.” She wavered, and my voice softened. “Stop—yes, spending time with you does make me happy. Yes, I felt powerful, and that felt…good. I want more of that,” I admitted, realizing that my desire for that outweighed my misgivings. “But…you’re really pushing it on me.”

The snarl disintegrated into remorse, shoulders hunching. She swallowed, sapphire eyes swimming in welling tears, and pulled her hand out of my grip.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Space twisted, and she vanished.

—

I snuck into Ai’s workshop half an hour later, clutching oranges in both hands. A spur-of-the-moment decision that she’d probably appreciate a snack had led me to pilfer them from their basket in the penthouse’s kitchen, and I’d awkwardly carried them all the way down the elevator and through the halls, attracting a few stares from passing employees. Fortunately, it seemed that the average person here was accustomed to far weirder flamebearer shenanigans, so nobody’s eyes lingered on me too long.

Ebi had given my arm a once-over shortly after I’d left the dojo. She’d confirmed that nothing was meaningfully damaged; her only instructions were to not exert it for the rest of the day, which was the plan anyway.

“We didn’t…aggravate Amane, did we?”

“No. Dojo’s warded. You peaked high enough that you would have, though. Mostly Sapphire.”

I averted my eyes shamefully, looking out my room’s window at the setting sun.

“Makes sense. Sorry.”

“No harm done. I mean, plenty of harm to you and her, but Sapphire knows what she’s doing. It’s why she only ever does that in the dojo.”

“Really? I’d have figured it’d be a great return on investment to also ward up her room, or Amane’s. Or just put buffers between every room in the penthouse. One-color wards are pretty cheap.”

Ebi shrugged.

“Bring it up with Ai; I’m sure she has a reason. Anyway, you’re all clear, and I need to get back to kicking Amethyst’s ass in Mario Kart.”

“What?”

“You think we spend our days with her just lying in bed and me standing over her attentively like some maid?”

“I—huh.” That actually had sort of been my image of it. “Okay, uh, have fun?”

“I will.” She turned and strode toward the door, but stopped at the threshold of my bedroom. “Sapphire was crying. Post-nut clarity?”

“Something like that,” I admitted, a little too guilty and tired of the drama to be bothered by her needling. “It’s fucked, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Ha,” she chuckled in autotune. “You should probably deal with that before Heliotrope gets back tonight. She’s at her worst when her insufferability gets validated. See ya.”

“Bye.”

I decided that if Heliotrope wanted to bully me for having a girlfriend who just loved me too much, then that was her problem, not mine. Maybe it was the newfound sense of empowerment, but I found myself caring slightly less if the Bloodstone Radiance wanted to be a shit. It could also have been emotional fatigue.

I was a little angry at Hina. I also felt bad for being angry at Hina, because if the way she’d exited that conversation was any indication, she was already kicking herself for forcing herself onto me like that. I felt bad for feeling bad for being angry, because she did deserve some anger. But empathy for her high, the desire to be more, the longing—and especially gratitude and joy that she wanted to share those things with me—they factored in too. But if we did continue, went further with this, would I be able to stay in control with her making every effort to coax me over the edge, her repeated promises to combine the euphoria with sex? To say nothing of how we’d obviously made Ai uncomfortable, or darker concerns about these parallels between Hina and the Vaetna—

It was all so complicated and tiresome, and I‘d just wanted to just not think about it for a little while. Thus, oranges. I didn’t even really intend to talk to Ai about it; working on glyphs was my usual escape, and I’d rather do that with her around than without, because Ai was smart and kind and often right about things. Plus, she’d said she’d be grading assignments, and I was sort of curious what that might entail. So I crossed the threshold into her domain—and was instantly derailed from my plans by the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

The massive construction matrix on the far wall was in full operation. It was a much more intense and involved setup than Ai’s simple, educational display from yesterday. Hazard stripes and glowing caution symbols floated all around the workspace, warning all that the vast candelabra of whirring machine tooling was not to be messed with or approached by unauthorized personnel. Since I was one of those, I kept a wide berth from both the signage and the actual machinists at the control station, content to just watch.

Motive glyphs rotated a huge metal plate in midair before {AFFIXING} it in place for the next operation. The cutting head came in to remove a groove diagonally down the side, and I saw flecks of metal skim off several other places on the part simultaneously, identical features being mirrored off the main one by magic. As the tool head swapped to some kind of grinder wheel to clean up the grooves in a shower of sparks, the array of glyphs on the wall also reconfigured, different symbols illuminating and linking together in new ways. It took me a moment to piece together what this new configuration was for, and I got even more excited when it was confirmed by a fresh batch of even scarier warning messages appearing around the workspace, ribbons of English stitched with Japanese. Of course, I could only read the former.

DANGER: HARD VACUUM. DO NOT PUT ANYTHING YOU LOVE INSIDE THIS BOX.

A new part, barrel-shaped with a number of rods sticking out one end, seemed to emerge from nowhere, pulled up into our three dimensions from fourspace storage. The rods fit perfectly against the new grooves on the first part as they slid into place. A few glyphs on the wall changed, re-enabling certain laws of physics, and just like that, the two parts were fused together, no fasteners required—and not even held together by magic, either. Instead, they’d simply cold-welded together in the vacuum, no oxidizing layer on the surface to prevent it, a procedure that would be nearly impossible anywhere but the vacuum of space if not for this magical array’s ability to simply prohibit the presence of gas and tell the two parts to not merge until that {DIFFERENTIATE} had been removed from the chain.

Beautiful stuff. For a few more minutes, I just watched the process, marveling at the sophistication. I would have pulled out my phone to take a video to flaunt to the chatroom—fortunately, that leaker’s impulse was obstructed by oranges. Somebody tapped my shoulder.

“No new bruises. You stopped.”

“Hi, Ai. We did, yeah.” I blinked, then held up the fruit. “Orange?”

“This is a mikan.” She accepted it anyway. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I started to peel mine, but she stopped me.

“No food in the shop.”

“Oh.”

“Come to my office instead?”

“Uh.” I pointed at the awesome assembly of magical machine tooling. “I’m pretty good where I am.”

Ai grinned warmly. “I thought you’d like it. The undergrads don’t even get to use it.”

“What are they making?”

“This is…an artificial gravity module. Making it in one piece—or rather, cold-welding—means fewer fasteners and potential points of failure. Important in space.”

“So this is going on the ISS?”

“Different station, but yes. NASA contracted us for a few parts.”

“Not enough Peacie manufacturing capacity,” I guessed. “All their plants are busy making the new line of gunships and stuff, I hear.”

“Yes. I refuse to make weapons.”

Neither of us pointed out what we had done the other day, opting for silence instead. We watched the machine go for a few minutes. Ai frowned at me.

“That doesn’t hurt?”

“Hm?” I realized I had been tossing my mikan back and forth from hand to hand. “Not really? Ebi said not to do anything with it, but I feel fine.”

“You should still be in pain even without using the arm. Hm. Come with me.”

She led me across the hall to the prosthetic fitting room, away from the machine. But health was important, and if Ai had reason to believe something was amiss…

“Into the circle?”

“No, let me just—” she dug around in a cabinet until she found the tool she wanted, a medical-looking wand with a readout. “Internal red ripple gauge.”

She put the tip on the back of my hand, pressed a button, waited a moment, then frowned. She repeated the process at my wrist, then elbow, then shoulder.

“Your residuals are almost a quarter of what they should be after that.”

“How can you tell? That was all glyphless.”

“Experience. Sit there.” She directed me to a chair next to a machine that resembled an X-ray camera, but she didn’t offer me a lead vest or anything. “Arm on here, please.”

I complied. She worked a control panel, and then her eyebrows went up. Her lips tightened, not quite a frown.

“Wow. That explains it, then. Look at this.”

She turned on a hologram projector that projected a scan of my arm in the air between us. A few more keystrokes highlighted the muscles of my arm.

“It’s not free red ripple, it’s filtering into green.”

Goosebumps emerged on my skin, ridged and bumped like Spire dermis.

“Green? But that means—”

“Yes. Your trick with Hina has changed the musculature. You fed the Flame, and it’s…rewarding you, like with her.” She didn’t sound angry like she had with Hina, just disappointed, but it was still enough to completely take away the excitement I should have been feeling. “You’re mutating.”