When I met Utsushikome of Fusai, I fell in love.

Or at the very least, that's what I thought had happened.

"I could help you dig," she said, after I failed to respond for a moment. She gestured off to the left. "My school has a tool shed just a little down the road. They leave it open for the gardening club, so I could probably get a shovel... Well, I think I could. If someone sees me, they might make a fuss."

I stared at her. "...no, that's okay..." I said, my voice so quiet I'm surprised it wasn't drowned out by the ocean waves.

The first thing I thought when the tears cleared enough from my eyes to see her properly for the first time was that she was beautiful. I was so struck by it, I almost gasped. I couldn't speak for a moment.

It's a pathetically superficial impression, I know, and even more embarrassing now considering... Everything. In my defense, because Itan was such a joke of a country, it was rare - much rarer than anywhere else I've lived - to see anyone outside of the wealthy districts who'd undergone even the cheapest distinction therapy. My class was filled with people with generic, mass-produced faces, and even the Isiyahlas, who I'd guess were probably comfortably middle class, could only afford post-natal treatment rather than pre-natal, let alone custom designed pre-natal.

Even if she wasn't doing anything to actively stand out, she looked completely unlike anyone else I'd ever seen. Her features were so gentle and balanced; her eyes so expressive. And to who I was at the time, everything about her oozed with wealth, and spoke to how she was special. The fancy, red-and-black kosode she wore, which I recognized as the uniform of the tiny private girl's school nearby. The warding artifice that hung from her wrist in the form of a bracelet. The custom-made glasses that adorned her nose. And all of it so pristine, so clean...

She was like an angel. A higher order of being. And she'd gone out of her way just to talk to me...

I didn't understand. Why was she bothering? What did she have to gain?

Stop staring, I quickly chided myself. You're acting like a freak.

"Are you sure?" she asked, frowning slightly. "It looks like your hands are hurt." She hesitated, laughing awkwardly. "Sorry, I hope I'm not butting into something I shouldn't."

"Uh, n-no! No, it's just." I gulped. "...I don't even know where I should be looking. Or if it's even here at all." I hung my head. "Some other kids from my class took my logic engine. They said they buried it somewhere out here. I've been trying to find it, but..." I cast my eyes around the area. Even if this wasn't a particularly large beach - hemmed in between a pier and cliff about 50 meters apart - it was still obviously well beyond the ability of any one person to effectively search unless they'd barely buried what they stole at all.

"Oh," she said, her face falling as it became apparent it was a problem she couldn't do anything to help with. "I'm sorry. That's awful."

"Y-Yeah..." I said, holding my arms together and shivering. Now that I'd stopped working, the cold of the evening winds and the seawater I was drenched in was hitting me sharply.

"Your uniform is from Enu Combined, right? From up in town." She furrowed her brow. "Did you tell a teacher?"

I shook my head firmly. "Whenever something like this happens out of school, everybody else just acts like I'm trying to get them in trouble or trying to get attention... And then I get in trouble instead." I sniffed, my eyes still teary. "The teachers all think I'm a liar."

This was a simplification of the truth. It was true that no one in my class would ever stick up for me and the teachers generally took what I said with a grain of salt, but it wasn't like that reputation wasn't in part a product of my actions. I was prone to exaggerating whenever I accused other students of wrongdoing, in part because it the was the only way to reliably get staff to pay any attention to your problems at a school like that (at least, without a parent to stick up for you), but also because I was desperate for my pain to be seen, for someone to realize how awful and unfair it was to pick on someone who was already overwhelmed by unfortunate circumstances. There was an element of spite to go with that self-pity, too-- I wanted the children I hated to be punished severely. I fantasized about them being expelled.

And, probably more importantly than all that, I was creepy. I stared, and didn't know how to talk to anyone. And I was suspicious of any sort of attempt to reach out to me that wasn't overtly gentle, fearing being taken advantage of, or even looking down on others as less exceptional people as a way to affirm my delusional belief in my own 'specialness'.

Also, I probably smelled bad.

"Ah... Yeah, I know how that sorta thing can be," Utsushikome said, with a sad laugh. She did - she'd had her own little issues just that year with being teased by another girl about her hair, only for her teacher to dismiss it as a case of he-said-she-said - just not to remotely the same level. It was like Neferuaten had said when talking about Durvasa and the revolution; the lack of ability to communicate scope renders humans fundamentally unable to understand each other's problems. "Old people can be really useless sometimes, huh...?"

I nodded distantly, too ashamed of how pitiful I probably looked to formulate a good reply.

"Do you have a spare?" she asked, hesitant.

I blinked, my mind still feeling scattered. "Huh?"

"A spare logic engine, I mean," she added. "At home."

"Oh, uh, no," I said, shaking my head grimly. "Even the one I had was from school. And they took some other stuff, too..." I sniffed again, wiping my nose with my cuff. "Some toys from when I was a kid. I need to find them... But I can't find them. I... I dunno what to do..."

At this point, despite my best efforts to hold it in, the thought of the doll the bullies had stolen - Yuma, a comfort object for me since I was a child, who I used to pretend to read books with and helped me concentrate - piercing me painfully. The idea that I'd never see her again made me feel like I couldn't go on. I just wanted to curl into a ball and disappear.

"H-Hey, it's okay!" she said, taking a step closer to me, but then seeming at a loss when she realized it was probably a step too far to physically comfort a stranger. "I mean-- I'm really sorry that they did that to you... But it's just stuff, right? You can get it replaced!" She made a troubled face, knowing this was an imperfect consolation, but not fully knowing what to say.

"I... I dunno..." I said, my face contorting as I tried, forcefully, to calm down.

"Was there anything important on the logic engine?" she asked. "If it was just a portable one, right? It can't have been much."

Why do you care? I thought, feeling a spike of animosity. For a moment, it felt like she was looking down on me. Like she was trying to say 'your problems can't be that big, right?' As if she could possibly know.

But when I looked up, her face was full of genuine, earnest distress. Like she'd only asked the question because she was desperate to find something about the situation was was consoling.

"...it was just my homework for this week..." I said, my voice trembling. "Couple pages of stuff."

"Okay..." she said, thinking on her feet. "Um, well-- What's your name?"

I told her.

"I'm Shiko," she said. "Listen, uh. Do you live around here?"

"No," I said, with another shake of my head. "My house is on the other side of town, then out into the boonies. I usually take the tram after school and then walk the rest of the way, but..."

Suddenly, I was hit with a spike of anxiety. What would the Isiyahlas think if I turned up in a state like this? They'd paid for my uniform, and now it was probably ruined; torn up and stained with gods-know-what. And I was already so late that I probably wouldn't make it back in time for dinner.

Shiko seemed to pick up on this, her brow furrowing sympathetically. "Okay, well. Then for the time being, why don't you come back to my house? My grandma is coming to pick me up soon. You could call home from there; explain what's going on. That would work, right?"

I blinked.

"I mean... No one else is gonna go digging around here any time soon, you know?" She tried to smile. "So if your stuff is here, nobody else will find it. And it's getting pretty dark... Plus, to be honest, you look like you're kinda hurt. Your hand is all cut up and covered in sand." She gestured.

I was speechless. Why would someone like her make an offer like this to someone like me? We were total strangers. Was this some kind of trick?

"S-Sorry, I might be being weird..." she said, her smile growing nervous. "I feel like I'm in funny mood. This isn't really my business, so if I'm going too far, then--"

"No, it's just..." My mouth hung open, and I looked towards her. A strange feeling stirred in my chest. "Is that really okay?" I glanced over myself. "I mean, I'm..."

"Your clothes, right? It's okay," she said soothingly. "My grandma isn't stuffy about that sorta thing... You could get cleaned up while you're there, too. It'll be alright, I'm sure of it."

I stammered. Something sputtered strangely within my chest; a rising sense of heat that tingled wherever it went.

It wasn't something that happened instantly. The walls I'd built up were thick. In that moment, I didn't know what to feel.

But it wasn't long, either. Suddenly, the world felt like it was shifting around me. That all my life had been just a prologue to this very moment; a long sleep from which I was finally waking.

She led me back to where her grandma was picking her up, and as she'd said, she didn't mind. And we rode her carriage out of town, to a stretch of the coast I'd never been (because it was a gated community, though at the time I didn't wholly understand the concept). Where all the houses looked like drama sets, and the sand was soft and white.

And I cleaned myself up in their beautiful, pristine lavatory, while her and her grandma went hunting for a logic engine of the same type as the one I'd lost, in the hopes that would be enough to appease the school. They went to so much trouble for me, even though I'd done nothing to earn their hard work. And once they'd found one and I'd called home, they ordered in some dinner, and we ate it together while Utsushikome helped me re-do my homework.

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And then, we were done, offered to help again if I ever needed it. And I smiled, and thanked her.

She was so, so kind. Kinder than anyone had ever been to me. Kind like the freshest water after the most terrible journey.

Utsushikome of Fusai was my savior; even if it's melodramatic, there's no other word I can think to use for it. She was like a light breaching through the clouds, burning my eyes with her radiance. The whole chain of events was shocking; a subversion of everything I understood about reality, as if gravity itself has reversed, sending everything catapulting into the sky.

It's impossible to describe the sense of change. I could give you some abstract description about it felt like time had been frozen, only to suddenly begin to flow for the first time. Or I could go the pretentious route the reference Plato's Cave, and turning to see a wider world for the first time... But that doesn't capture it. Not really.

Because it's not something that can be captured in words. We humans like to imagine ourselves as creatures of agency, and our feelings as logical extensions of our desires. But love - if that was, indeed, what I experienced - isn't a feeling. No, that's not the right word for it at all.

It's a transformation. A metamorphosis of the self. Once it begins, you're no more in control of what happens to your mind then you are of what happens to your body during puberty.

I'll say it again. Before I met her, I don't think I every really saw myself at all. I knew my name and face, and knew the things I had to do every day to avoid being punished or deprived of my coping mechanisms, like a dog performing tricks for bowls of food. But I didn't have a self-image or an identity. I never even thought about the nature of my own misery-- It was just a fact of life, like storms or getting a cold.

But when she spoke to me, asked me about myself and how people treated me, asked about the things I liked an didn't like... Something changed in the deepest part of my soul, and my eyes turned inward for the first time. The scab over my heart fell away, and I was a human being! And on the way home, I cried and cried and cried. Because I was no longer a spider. I was a lonely and shy girl, frightened to numb oblivion, who wanted to be free and loved.

I wanted to go on adventures, to meet more kind people, make real friends! I wanted to see the world! Every day for as long as I could remember, I'd seen the rim of the Mimikos towering in the sky on my walks home from school, the jungles of Viraak, the deserts of Asharom, and the grasslands of Mekhi unfolding beyond the mist of the atmosphere like the a ghostly mountain. But I'd never even wondered what those places were like! They'd just felt like window dressing; no more real than what was on a page of one of my books.

Yet when I saw it that night, I realized I could walk there. That I could walk anywhere. That the world was full of open doors, futures just waiting to be chased.

And I longed. I longed to blossom into someone beautiful, strong and kind, someone who looked as radiant to others as she had to me. Someone who wouldn't even need the stories that I'd come to depend on, because they lived in a world that shined even more brightly; raw, wonderful, real.

I didn't want to die in this awful place. This miserable little dot of sand in the ocean, filled with people I hated.

...gods. How pitiful must this all sound...?

I don't even want to think about it.

When I returned to Isiyahla's house after that evening, things looked different there, too. All the artifacts of the life I'd lived up until that point - the ugly furniture, the crappy food they fed us every day, the other kids and their sneering, distant faces - seemed like they were coated in a grey haze. Like they were wraiths, something from a fake world overlapping with the real one I'd just begun to see for the first time.

But more than that, they carried with the an aura of misery and futility trying to drag me back into the fugue. To even be there felt opppressive, like it was draining away something deep inside of me, regressing the world itself to a mean. I remember my gut churning with anxiety at the thought that perhaps what had happened had just been some daydream, or a random act of kindness I was reading too much into, and would never be repeated again. That I was doomed to slip back into the numbing, cold mud.

That idea frightened me more than anything else I'd ever felt.

So just a few days later, after I had some homework built up, I took Shiko up on her offer. Even as a 12 year old, I knew this would probably come across as a little pathetic. Seizing on an open-ended offer not even a week after it had been made felt about as desperate as you could get. I knew she was probably busy, and that I could be sabotaging one of the few good chances at making a friend I'd ever had. I half expected her ghost me on the spot.

Yet, to my surprise, that wasn't what happened. Instead, she didn't even seem that bothered, and even seemed worried about how I'd been. We made a date for a few hours towards the end of the week. And then, after that was over, another.

Things were stiff at first. After all, one person doing a favor for another isn't a friendship. But-- Well, you know what happened next already. She brought up a book she'd been reading, and it turned out we had some similar tastes. So after we finished, we started talking about stuff we'd been reading or watching. And after the next couple of times, we barely talked about schoolwork at all. I got to know her grandmother, too, and started helping the two of them with the cooking.

And slowly, my outer self began to change, too.

"Kiddo, pass me the paprika, would you?" Shiko's grandmother - Tahazili, though I didn't know her name at the time - asked, as she dumped a pile of peppers, onions, and slices of peacock thigh from a bowl into a pan.

"Uh, where is it?" I asked, standing over a pot of rice on the stove.

"It's up on that little cabinet to your right," she told me, pointing. "I should have grabbed it when I was getting the chili powder, but I guess I'm a fuckup."

"You shouldn't swear around kids, grandma," Shiko told her sarcastically.

"Whoops, my bad," she intoned without much sincerity. "Hey, up the gas flow, would you? Need to get another hob lit here."

"Just a second," Shiko said, reaching over to the pipe connecting the stove to the wall.

Because it wasn't possible to generate a stable electric current in the Remaining World, infrastructure for buildings - outside of places with regular access to the Power and the runework to facilitate it, like Apsu - had to be developed very differently than during the Imperial Era. Heating and light was facilitated with gas, while everything else was accomplished through city-wide high-pressure hydraulics, which had grown incredibly sophisticated as a vehicle for delivering potential energy. Some places also had a third system of pipes to transport nutrient fluid for powering appliances with biological engines, but that was pretty niche outside of Viraak, with their Biomancy-embracing culture.

Shiko turned the knob, and her grandmother twisted another dial on the stove. Blue gas fire shot out of it with a satisfying 'pooft' sound.

"Mm-mmm," Tahazili said. "Now we're talking."

"I don't get why you always turn off at the wall between meals," Shiko said. "It's not necessary."

"Eh, I don't wanna waste money," the woman dismissed her, waving her hand. "And you can never be too careful when it comes to leaks."

"There's no such thing as money, and that's not how it works," she told her matter-of-factly. "They told us in class. It doesn't go into the stove unless something is turned on."

"Well, they might tell you that, but I remember when half this chome went up in flames 'cause somebody down on 4th block didn't bother and tried to light a cigarette," she told her granddaughter. "And as for money, come on. You know what I mean."

Shiko sighed. "Whatever you say, grandma."

"So, how's school been going lately, kiddo?" Shiko's grandmother asked, turning to face me.

"Oh... It's been going okay," I said, trying not to sound too half-hearted. Be careful. Don't sound like you're making no progress. Don't sound like a lost cause. "I-I came 4th in my Ysaran test today."

She whistled. "That's really good, for a place with big classes like yours!"

"Yeah, nice work," Shiko complimented me, a small smile on her face. "I knew you could do it."

My face flushed, my own lips turning upwards. "Thanks..."

"It's about getting a good feedback loop going," she told me. "Push yourself to get a study routine going, do well, get praised, let that carry you forward to the next round of studies... You've got to think of your brain as being basically in a constant civil war with itself, you know?" She tapped her head. "You have to trick it to get it to do what you want."

"Yeah, I know..." I said, stirring the rice with the wooden spoon in my hand as I thought about how mature she was compared to me, even though I was technically a little older. "I'll keep trying."

"Should you really be playing the part of the mentor, here, Shiko?" her grandmother asked, with a skeptical smirk. "You got failed on that history assignment the other day, didn't you?"

She quickly furrowed her brow into a huffy expression, looking much more her age. "That was just because mister Ujibito wanted to punish me for a stupid reason that didn't even have anything to do with my essay."

The older woman raised an eyebrow as she finally poured the mix into the man. It immediately began sizzling satisfyingly, the sweet and spicy aroma filing my nostrils. "Didn't you start defending the imperial occupation during the critique phase?"

"I was just playing devil's advocate for a minute," Shiko protested. "I wasn't being serious."

Her grandmother laughed. "Gods, when you're older, you'll realize how much gall it took to pull a stunt like that here, of all places." Her grandmother chuckled to herself, sprinkling in the paprika. "Well, take this as a valuable lesson. When you play devil's advocate, don't be surprised if you get deported to hell, eh?" She looked to me. "How's the rice coming along, kiddo?"

"Um, good," I said. "I think. I'm still not used to, uh, cooking..."

"Relax, you're doing fine," she told me, smiling. She leaned over, sniffing. "Seems good to me!"

Though still tinged with anxiety - fear of revealing myself, of rejection, of it all being some joke at my expense after all - these little moments of what I knew were probably just ordinary family life alongside Shiko felt miraculous to the point of almost being wrong at first. Like I wasn't supposed to be there. Like I was trespassing.

But slowly, like bricks stacking up one by one in my heart, it began to feel less exceptional and more just... Normal. An ordinary part of life.

And, with surprising speed, I became more ordinary, too. My speaking improved. I did better and better at school, soon rising towards the top of my class. I even started getting along better with the other children at the foster home, though I wouldn't say I ever actually managed to become friends.

In the end, the hardest part of life is convincing yourself you have even a little strong ground beneath your feet. Once you've done that, the rest is easy. All you have to do is stand up and start walking.

Of course, so long as that ground holds.

I never told Shiko my feelings about her. Not because I knew she wouldn't return them, though I did know that, with my deformed body based on a common, unmodified seed, and the fact she didn't even seem interested in girls...

But because I didn't want to do anything to sabotage our friendship. To ruin it. To shatter this blessing that I didn't understand and, deep in my spirit, was sure someone like me didn't deserve.

So I was content to simply bask in her radiance. Like a flower forever reaching towards... Well, you know.

But what was Shiko thinking, during all of this? Why did she go so far out of her way to reach out to a random girl she just met and try to help her, when for all she knew I could have just taken advantage of her? Or even have just turned out to be a boring or depressing drag, taking her time while giving nothing in return? I wondered that many times, in those years.

Having obtained the truth, there are two answers.

The first was that, during our first meeting, Shiko saw something in me that reminded her a little of herself. I never realized this until after everything was over, but she, too, was very lonely. All the friendships she'd made in Itan up until that point were superficial. No one in her tiny school had much in common with her, and she'd had to suppress a lot of her stranger habits to fit in. Her urge to hyperfocus on minutia. Her discomfort with her own body. Her fear of change, but also of being left behind, of returning from Itan one day to find that all her old friends had built amazing lives without her, while she was left a failed adult.

Those who are suffering can sense something in one another, no matter how far they are apart in other ways. Perhaps it's the same way animals can sense your fear. That aura of fragility, of a space that needs to be filled.

And of course, we shared our obsessive love of stories.

But the second reason is the more important one, which is that the question itself was based on a false premise. To me, who had led such an empty life, my meetings with Shiko were everything. I was like a baby bird dependent on food chewed up by its mother; without her, I couldn't even be myself. And even when I started to feel stronger, I still knew that if she were gone, it would be like the sun coming up and lifting an enchantment in a fairy tale. I'd crumble to dust.

But for Shiko, I was just someone she met with once or twice a week. She had whole social spheres I barely even knew about - with her old friends from Oreskios who she still made an effort to keep in contact with, with local girls who's parents were friends of her mother, and with people she'd met over the logic sea who she shared interests with even more closely than me. I wasn't no one to her, but even at the peak of us knowing one another, she probably only considered me a decently close friend.

Of course, if I think back on what happened from her perspective... Even that limited friendship was a terrible, terrible miscalculation. The worst mistake that I... That she would ever make.

And for all the happiness it brought me, it would have been better for everyone if she'd left me there on that beach with my Sisyphean task, to be swept away by the waves.