My robe hung loose slowly accumulating the drops of sweat that migrated down my body. The memory of Sphinx’s body against mine—soft fur, dense muscle, and an enthusiastic warmth—teased my expression into a smile as I savored the not-so distant memory.

When we’d finished, Sphinx returned to my spirit so she could continue recuperating. I’d worried about her expending herself for something so trivial, but she’d scoffed then said, “With you, nothing is trivial.” A sentiment that made all the sweat feel worth it—she made me feel worth it. Though as I poured water from the filtered decanter that sat cooling inside the fridge I couldn’t help but wonder where she’d learned to talk like this.

As I returned to the living room, glass rising to my lips, the door flung open as Amber and Melissa flew inside. The jolt from their sudden entrance instigated a minor paroxysm in myself. I jumped back, spilled water against my chest, and scrambled to form the hand-spell for Atomic Glory with as much haste as I could muster—the spell instinctual by that point, but pleasure was a dulling agent.

I shook the spell from my hand once I processed that it was only Amber and Melissa. Amber and Melissa. She’d come back just like Amber said she would. I placed the glass down on the coffee table. Took careful steps as if to go too fast would break the magic of this moment, and see her leave me again. I stopped just a few feet from her—she was in the range that I could embrace her…if she let me.

Despite the panic on her face only moments earlier, Amber had effortlessly returned to a sort of bemusement as she shut the door without a sound. Equally careful not to break the moment. Though my attention was entirely on Melissa as she’d discovered some new expression—scrunched up, face flush, brows knit, and teeth on the verge of slicing open her bottom lip. It was a new sort of anger I’d not seen from her. She even quivered from the power of it. Her eyes darted about as if to look anywhere but me; besides her initial top-to-bottom assessment of my person to discern what she should feel. I had to say something.

“Melissa, I…” blanked. How do you apologize for hijacking someone’s present, endangering their life, and stealing away from them the security of a life they were ready to live for nearly a decade? I suppose you just say you’re sorry for all of that. Though sorry, I now find, is too small a word to wrap its arms around the enormity and diversity of my wrongs. It was all I had though.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “At the hospital I was feeling…just feeling everything again. Then you all told me to give up a spell that was necessary, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I—.”

She raised her hand, calling for silence from me. I obeyed because I didn’t want to keep talking. There was just too much to acknowledge, and bring up and some of it I just wasn’t ready to talk about. My heart, wrenched open by Sphinx and Lupe, needed time to heal. Incorporate the bruises until it was denser. Stronger.

“No,” Melissa said, after a minute of furious thought, “I can’t do this with you. Not right now. Not like this.”

She traced my silhouette with her hand—ah, the entirety of me was too much—then skirted past to her room. I didn’t return to the present until I heard the door slam shut. My mind stuck on the way her head tilted away from me—the disgust that kept her from looking at me. It hurt, but I was due my portion of pain.

Amber guided me to the couch. Set her bags on the coffee table, and leaned back into the cushion as she expelled a heavy breath that teased my nose with the scent of Bloodlust. She expelled another one, unfurling her body for peak relaxation. Feet on the coffee table, arms stretched out across the back of the couch, and her eyes shut. I was the opposite as I’d curled myself inward—knees tight together and drawn up to my chest.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” Amber said.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked.

“I hadn’t left you in the best position back at the hospital,” she admitted, “and something tripped the bugs I’d planted so I presumed the worst. Even put on my ‘killer face.’”

A smile glinted through the dark of my mood. Then confusion took over as I swiveled to match Amber’s bright gaze.

“What do you mean you bugged the place?”

She shrugged, “That I planted surveillance devices. Not literal bugs, Temple.”

“I know not literal ones. I’ve read spy serials,” I said. “I mean, why? What kind?”

“Well, this room isn’t that secure to begin with seeing that the Lodge can casually break the Mother’s Prayer. I wanted to make sure no one’s inside that you haven’t approved of, so I installed Court- and Chain-trippers. Anyone not of our Courts at specifically our link trips the bugs which sends an alert to my sorc-deck. Doesn’t tell me exactly who was here though.”

Amber drew her expression into a pointed tool that dangled the unspoken question above my head, Who was here?

There were a lot of ways I could answer that question. Recursive half-statements that’d tease a few facts, but never enough for the full picture. I could lie—however much good that would do seeing as even in my processing of an answer Amber was reading me, and I had no idea what statements my face was making. Though the complete truth, the unmitigated truth, felt like a cruelty that was ill-deserved.

I’d been Observed twice by a Sovereign. Back home it only took being Observed once by at least a Viscount to see people quietly erect walls between you and them. Your existence, an ontological hazard. Who knew if your interactions would cause the entity’s attention to expand beyond you. It only took one Observation for that simple breach from the place beyond reality for your future to warp even subtly. While it was the literal act of Observation that did it, there was still the fear that to tell someone, to share words of what happened, could undo the listener’s fate.

“Amber, how far in this are you going to go with me?” I asked.

“Temple—.”

“We’re even,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“What’s this about?” she asked, hesitant—Amber was rarely hesitant.

“I want to know you know,” I said. “Cause you’ve already saved my life plenty. More than enough for me saving you once.”

“Twice,” she said. “You saved me twice, Temple. Once down in the Underside, and the second time last night.”

She slid toward me with the hesitation that she might break our moment—eyes enrapturing the other—until she felt close enough, secure enough, to gently press her fingers to my shoulder. I shuddered softly at the touch.

“I thought we were past this,” Amber said, her voice low and gentle. Soothing. “I thought we were…”

Her eyes searched me for the next line to say, but I didn’t know the steps to this dance. Amber pulled back slowly as those burning rosy eyes of hers flared with a want and an urge to say the answer that lurked inside.

“Comrades,” Amber lied. “I mean, with everything we’ve been through already I stopped keeping count. Figured there’d be no point because I’d planned to see this through to the end.”

“With Nemesis?”

“All of ‘em. If you’d let me.”

It wasn’t the answer I’d expected. I slid my legs apart as I leaned close to Amber. A smile so wide and so innocent on my face at the generosity I’d never imagined I’d get. Then I saw her face. She looked so content at my joy. As if it was the only thing worth getting out of bed for. I retracted my smile, and tried to focus on her. Her motives and needs, and not let my own self-involvement blind me like it had for too long now.

“Why me though?” I asked. “You said me saving your life meant it was only fair you help take one, but that’s four more and we’re already even with these back and forth rescues. If you don’t even keep track anymore then your original math doesn’t work. So, why?”

Amber pulled herself back from me and slumped over causing her locs to fall into a rippling raspberry curtain across her face.

“Temple, don’t make me say it.”

“I won’t take you with me otherwise.”

Her head snapped up; eyes wide with worry—anything but that.

“I needed a cause,” she said.

“A cause to what?” I asked. “Vacation, kill people, or—”

“To live even if it was only for a day longer,” she said. “It couldn’t be for something petty or small. I needed it to be righteous. Maybe a smidge redemptive if I could swing it.”

She ran her fingers through her locs as she tilted her head back up toward memories and the ghosts within them.

“It’d been ages since I had a righteous cause. There were people I knew—people I’d killed—who said they had one or I was on one back during the Changeover. I don’t know if they were right. If anyone was right back then,” she said. “I did a lot in those years, Temple. I saved some people and killed others, regretted both, and sometimes wished I’d chosen to kill who I’d saved or saved who I’d killed. And all of those worries pile on until you just wish you could stop. Cause it all gets too hard, Temple. It gets too hard.”

“I think I understand,” I said, the admission of life’s difficulties matching the one I’d made to Sphinx. “But you were a kid then, Amber, it wasn’t your fault whatever happened.”

I placed my hand on her thigh. The only place I felt was appropriate as I craved the establishment of some physical tie to bind us down as her emotions swept free from within the depths of her spirit.

“Then I was a bad kid,” Amber chuckled. “All the same, I was slowing down and circling the drain when you found me.”

“You were one of the crew’s best hunters,” I said. “That hardly seems like slowing down.”

“I love those guys, but it was rote and it was easy. Though I suppose my sense of ‘easy’ and ‘rote’ are shot to the Underside and back,” she said. “Most of the New World feels rote compared to the churning mess that was the Changeover. You could be a villain one day and a hero the next. Endlessly reinvent yourself. Then suddenly it was over and everything you’d done became a weight that you couldn’t change yourself past any more.”

“No more heroic deeds to offset the ghosts?”

“Nothing offsets them once they’re let in,” she said. “But yeah, the hunters were rote and then I saw you. Small, sharp, and cold like a knife at wintertime. At first I just wanted to unthaw you. Help reintroduce you to the life your parents’ death had shook you from. Then we found the lindwurm, that weird throne, and then you summoned an entity from a Court I’d never seen. You were the first unique thing I’d found in ages. I couldn’t not be near you.”

“Even if being near me kills you?” I asked, soft and hoping for an answer that was so selfish.

She lowered her hands. Placed one over mine which still rested atop her thigh. Her hand squeezed mine in an impossible grip that dared the world to see us parted.

“I was already dead, Temple,” Amber said. “Why fear what I’ve already been through?”

“Then,” I said, “my Court’s Sovereign tripped the bugs. She Observed me again.”

“Again?” she asked. “This happened before?”

“When I summoned Sphinx. She was who I negotiated with when establishing the bond. The second time was when your bugs were tripped.”

“Amazing,” she said.

“Amazing?”.

“Obviously. Means I was right,” she said. “You’re so interesting even a god can’t keep her eye off you. Now you have to let me stay to see how this ends.”

“You’re crazy. Everyone knows that being Observed is like the worst thing that can happen to you. Even if you do something good it’s a guarantee you’re going to be in for the worst.”

“Temple, I’m only hearing reasons why you still need me, and why I want to come.” Amber winked, “Think you’ll let me come?”

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Fine, you can come,” I said. Then her pun hit me, “Really? I thought we were having a moment.”

“We were. You’re the one taking it there,” she said.

I rolled my eyes and took stock of the bag that was on the coffee table. When I pointed at it, Amber gave her approval and I peeked inside. There was a beautiful creamy fabric with buttons glossy as river stones that were bordered by sharp elegant pleats.

“The ball,” Amber said. “It’s some little post-test party the Lodge is throwing.”

Melissa’s door swung open as she leaned past the frame. A thin white cream already evenly lathered across her skin accentuating the pout of her lips.

“Ugh, at least explain it right,” Melissa said.

“Sorry princess, I figured you were waiting for the chance to chime in.”

“I wasn’t waiting,” she said. “Anyways, it’s a party that Lodge members probationary and current can attend to celebrate the passing of the first test. Also a way to send off everyone who didn’t pass so there’d be no, or at least less, hard feelings.”

“How hard could they be?” Amber asked. “Everyone who helped defend the Lodge, pass or fail, got a prelim exemption that can be redeemed once for any Lodge exam in the future. They can even trade or sell it.”

“Still, it’s a tradition, and people take it seriously. Every year after the party there’s photos projected all over the NewNet of everyone’s outfits. It’s a big deal.”

Amber chuckled, “And here I thought she disliked the Lodge.”

I smiled up toward Melissa. A furious—and slightly embarrassed—blush clouded across her cheeks. She folded her arms across her chest as if it’d be a bulwark from our teasing.

“Oh, I think she does,” I said, “but she’s a Knitcroft through and through. If pretty clothes are involved then so is she. Actually, I remember every summer she’d come running to my place, hop on one of the sorc-desktops, and show me on as big a screen as possible everyone’s outfits.”

“They’re not just pretty clothes,” Melissa argued. “Each year it’s people wearing some of the most creative fashion statements possible. They even have a red carpet event!”

The energy in her voice wouldn’t be contained, and by the end of her words she’d risen in pitch at least three times bringing herself to an excited squeal.

“Definitely a Knitcroft,” Amber said.

I wanted to stay in the moment. Luxuriate in the idea that we were three girls excited for a ball, but a part of myself—that mirrored part that refused to be singular—felt worried.

“After last night, why throw a party?” I asked.

The question dropped the room’s temperature by at least ten degrees. In the stillness of doubt and skepticism there came a silence for rumination. As usual, Melissa and Amber found stances that were in complete opposition.

“Reassurance,” Melissa proposed. “These are legendary parties, and if suddenly for the first time one was canceled it’d be a cause for concern. Throw the party, tell everyone things are under control, and buy time to actually get them under control.”

Amber said, “A fair point, but you’re wrong, princess. The parties are legendary, and that’s why they’d be a perfect trap for anyone involved with what happened last night. As well as anyone dumb enough to decide that attacking the biggest gathering of Lodgemembers—all of whom are lethal killers—is a good idea.”

“Okay, but if it is for reassurance or a trap,” I said, “then it’d be dangerous either way. Why go?”

Melissa was silent, and her excitement fell a few more degrees. I realized it’d been a minor dream of hers to attend one of these parties. A dream that now contended with a potentially deadly reality. Amber threw an arm over me, pulled me close, and reignited Melissa’s dream.

“Temple, it’s hardly a trap if you know it’s not for you.” Amber added, “We’re also not dumb enough to try anything, are we?”

She volleyed the question to Melissa who nodded emphatically. “Hardly. Not at all. Totally not.”

“See, Temple, we’ll be fine.” Amber leaned in and whispered into my ear, “Besides, what better way to make up with princess here than at the ball she’s always wanted to go to?”

“Right. Okay, okay,” I said.

Melissa asked, “So we’re still going?”

“We’re going. Um, want to help me find something to wear?” I asked.

She glanced away from me. Too sheepish to just come out with it, but not tore up about what had to be said. A nervousness for my benefit.

She said, “I’m sorry, but I told Ina I’d help her pick an outfit. We were going to arrive together.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, that’s…”

She’d come back to me, but she wasn’t mine right now. In my mind I strung up Ina and cut off her other arm. It was enough of an emotional vent that I could force a smile.

“I’ll see you at the ball then,” I said.

“You will…see me.” Melissa said, “When you’re shopping try to keep the theme in mind.”

“There’s a theme?”

“There’s a theme,” she squee’d. “It’s, ‘New World, New Wave, No Rules.’ Kind of a celebration for the New World hitting twenty years.”

“Got it. World, wave, no rules.”

I slipped free from Amber’s arm, and hustled into my room. When the door shut I realized that it’d been open longer than expected. With my robe half-off, I glanced over my shoulder to find Amber leaning against the door. I turned away from her and back to my feelings.

“Give her time,” she said. “It’s only been a few hours since…”

“I know.”

“Alls below, pick the best outfit you can and make it something that reminds her that when you’re at your best, Ina’s nothing.”

A smirk teased my mood out of the spiral it’d nearly fallen in. Then I heard a clack. Then another and another. Four clacks in total. Their tone gentle but clear as Amber placed them on my desk. Then I heard her steps behind me. They were soft and light. Her breath was a warm brush against the nape of my neck.

“Trust me, Temple,” she said. “I’ll make sure you don’t lose her.”

“Cause she’s necessary for the mission? Another comrade?”

“Cause she makes you happy. And that’s enough for me.”

I held my breath as I waited for something—anything—to happen. Then I released and turned around wanting to see her, but I was alone in the room. Besides the four royal tokens she’d left that stood in a prim array for me to claim at my leisure. It was more than enough to get the kind of outfit I needed if I was to put Ina six feet deep…socially speaking.

* * *

After getting dressed I let myself wander the Lodge district in search of clothing stores. The tokens were muffled but clacked away in my pocket as I trudged up hills and scurried down them. They were gentler slopes than the city proper, but still demanded I keep a portion of myself present in my body. Adjusting speed and effort so I didn’t faceplant and tumble away somewhere. It helped me not fixate on how helpless I felt.

If Melissa had a comfort of knowing we’d be together then I had a sort of leisure from it. We weren’t married yet, but we knew our domains and let the other handle what needed to be handled. For me, Melissa handled the clothing. It’d only made sense considering her family, so when we were picking clothes for the weekend or trips, or it was time for me to get new clothes crafted she was always there to give notes. Make it perfect for me because she knew what I liked…and now Ina was getting that.

I stopped and chose the nearest store I could. Threw the door open, strode inside, and let the cooling shrine slowly quench the heat in my chest. I blinked and looked around the room taking in the location I chose. There were gowns here—so I hadn’t fucked up that badly—but they were of a darker palette comprised of the monochromatic nuances found in black. The silhouettes were diverse at least, and the fabric was good—you couldn’t be engaged to a Knitcroft for as long as me and not develop a thumb for it.

“Can I help you?” a small woman asked.

Her face was caked in a white makeup, and her eyes black sea urchins from the liner she’d painted them with. While her own outfit was a black velvet affair that was so long it melted into her shadow.

“I’m looking for a dress,” I said.

“I’d hope so. All we really sell here.”

“It’s for the ball tonight. I need something to…”

“To?”

I mumbled, “Try and win my girl back. I kind of fucked up recently.”

The store attendant nodded, we’ve all been there.

“Go to dressing room B, and I’ll bring you some options.”

I followed her instructions and waited in a circular dressing room. A semicircle of mirrors facing a dais so you could see yourself in nearly your entirety. When the dresses arrived, I dived into the options pulling each down from the rack built into the wall and throwing it on.

All of them were…fine. Really, they were fine dresses in a fine fabric, but they felt limp on me. Unalive and devoid of a spark of brilliance or Brilliance that Melissa had hammered into me over the years every time she’d shown me the outfits worn for that year’s ball. I’d need brilliance if I wanted to catch her eye and remind her that I wasn’t the person from this morning yelling and accusing. That even if she didn’t go with me to hunt down the rest of my parents’ killers, we’d at least be…something to each other.

As I stood there in a black gown with a mesh cutout for my stomach and chest covered in embroidered snakes—also in black—I spotted Secretary in the mirror. They moved in a way that made no noise as the dressing room curtain slid open just enough for them to slip inside. They stalked about the dais examining me. Horizon gray eyes lingering along my scant curves.

“I didn’t know being a voyeur was one of your duties,” I said, my own eyes snapping directly to their position.

Secretary stumbled—didn’t fall though—and scowled at me.

“Rude,” they said.

I turned to face them, and smiled from my position on high. Whatever the downside to my increased resistance to Sorcery, in that moment I was just happy to finally get one over on my favorite spy.

“I’m sure most would consider peeping to be ruder.”

“Then they’d be wrong,” they said. “Besides, as your handler you’re my highest responsibility.”

“At least to the exam’s end.”

“Hmm,” they said, “we’ll see. Until then my job entails cleaning up your messes like that bombed out ERO facility you left us.”

“We didn’t want the Lurkers and their allies taking anything from inside the place.”

Secretary grinned tight without a shine to their eyes.

“Your sense of strategy is astounding,” they said. “My other duty though, seems to be picking up after your leave-behinds.”

Secretary took a step on the dais, and withdrew my mask—red, snarling, its mouth open wide to rip open a throat…was its mouth always open? They took another step, and another as they ascended to the step just below mine. Guided the mask in front of my face, so I could see myself in the mirrors. It made me look like something monstrous and mad, but it was fiercer than the weakness the girl beneath it sometimes felt. My smile danced behind the mask’s fangs.

“Still a perfect fit, I’d say,” they said.

Then came the guilt. I pushed Secretary’s arm away. Stepped down from my position and let myself fall onto the cushioned couch that ran along the wall’s curve.

“What if I wanted to leave it?”

“Then I’d tell you that these masks are expensive. Each one made for only one person. They’re useless otherwise and reclaiming the material cost from them after they’d been keyed to a wearer already is inefficient at the best of times.”

They discorporated the mask in a flutter of luminescent balls that quickly dissipated.

“You couldn’t just send it back to me that way?” I asked.

They hummed. “Yes, but I wanted to make a point.”

“A point, okay. A sternly worded note could make a point. Is there a reason I need the mask right now?”

“Not that I’ve been notified of.”

“So, you came all the way to me for a point that could’ve been a letter? Sure you didn’t just want to come see your ‘favorite brute’?”

“You’re my only one.”

“So I’m one of a kind, then.”

Secretary scoffed at my assertion. Scoffed again as their fingers steepled against their chest in mock bewilderment. Then assembled their face into a stony demeanor making for the exit. I launched myself from the chair to cross the room so I could catch their wrist—I didn’t want to be alone right then.

“While you’re my highest duty,” they said, “you are not my only one. The paperwork I’ve had to fill out just to properly report on the facility you bombed. Then, I had to track down a spatial compressionist to see about recovering any of the racks or labs that may have gotten caught in some interstitial dimension or other after the formations collapsed. You made so much work for me!”

Their voice had taken a tone that was so serrated and mad it’d caused the attendant from earlier to peek in.

“Can I—?”

She was cut off by the slightest flex of Secretary’s field-spell which stole the memory of why she’d entered the dressing room in the first place. Which caused her to leave once again.

“She didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Hmph, maybe she just annoyed me. I mean, her taste is atrocious if she thinks any of this trash would cut it for the ball tonight.”

Secretary was waiting for something from me. They were so petty.

“I’m sorry for making so much work for you. Really, I didn’t know that you’d get in such trouble because of me.”

I was sincere in that apology. I didn’t know we were tied like this, and it all felt like another case of what Lupe was getting at. There were so many people around me, helping me even if only to help themselves, and I wasn’t considering any of it.

From Secretary’s face, they were taken back by my words. Their eyes searched me for some trick, some unseen meaning, but I’d said what needed to be said. Even as we moved on they held back a full acceptance as if to do so would lead to a unique pain. Which, for a spy, I suppose it often did.

“Fine, it’s not like you needed to know the full scope of my tasks. The secretaries in the point tabulation department were impressed by your team’s willingness to destroy everything,” they said. “Too many people get stationed at these research facilities and can’t bring themselves to tear it all down to keep it from falling to improper hands.”

“So, I did the right thing?” I asked.

“So naive, little brute,” they said. “The Lodge only wants you to do the best thing. Speaking of, the best thing for me is to go back to what needs to get completed for tonight if I’m going to make the ball, and flirting with you is not going to make that happen.”

“You’re going to the ball?”

“I perish to name a summoner who wouldn’t,” they said. “For secretaries, many of us are still working on the night of the party, but the higher ranking ones—proper handlers—they get to actually attend. Rather than carry around drinks with an ear open for gossip.”

“Is this the first time you’d be attending?” I asked, knowing I’d stepped beyond the shape of our usual conversations. We didn’t talk about their past, and the break from this decorum caused them to pause as they weighed the truth on a value only they could discern.

“It is,” they said.

“Could you help me then?” I asked. “You’re always looking perfect, all of you secretaries do, and without Melissa I don’t know what I’m doing. Not really.”

“Find someone who can make you something custom, and fit it to you. Wear the clothes, don't let them wear you, and all that. Happy?”

I wobbled my hand, and then held my palms up in request for assistance.

“Know where I can go to get a custom outfit, last minute?” I asked.

Secretary thought for a moment. An idea sparked, their gray eyes caught a knowing glint, and lifted their mood to something beyond a minor exasperation at my helplessness. It was something gleefully ambitious.

“Get changed,” they said. “We’re going to visit someone special.”