“Post-procedure restrictions are not suggestions. The soul heals on its own schedule. Patients who ignore this learn why the restrictions exist. We prefer they learn from the documentation.”— Aurelia Medical Division, Recovery Guidelines
The light beneath her palm did not feel like light.
It felt like warmth, but a warmth that arrived without traveling. It simply was, in the place where her hand was, and then it was inside the place where her hand was, on the other side of my sternum, in the part of me that didn’t have coordinates.
A prickling started there.
The word she’d used was the right one. It was the same sensation as a foot waking up after I’d sat on it too long; the prickling spread out from the contact point. Dewi’s lips were moving. I couldn’t make out the words, but the prickling sharpened.
It was pressure, a tugging behind my sternum, as if a small hand had reached through my chest and was pulling, gently and persistently, on a knot that didn’t want to come loose. The knot resisted. The hand kept pulling. And somewhere in the middle of it, something gave, a small, internal give, like the first millimeter of a stuck drawer finally accepting that it was being opened.
Dewi exhaled.
The light beneath her palm flickered once, then steadied, then dimmed, and the warmth withdrew. She lifted her hand. “There,” she said.
I lay still for a moment. My chest felt fine. My breathing felt fine. The prickling had faded to a faint hum that lived behind my ribs, and beneath that hum there was a tiredness I hadn’t noticed arriving. My limbs were heavier than they had been before the cast. My eyelids wanted to be closed.
It was, as advertised, exactly the soreness of post-exercise.
“That’s it?”
“That’s the first one.” She crossed back to her chair and sat down. “You’ll feel that for a few days. Heavy in the chest, tired in places that rarely get tired. Sleep more than you think you need to. Eat well. Drink water.”
“I can do that.”
“You also can’t do anything strenuous. Not for the next two days, minimum. Ideally three. No combat. No heavy training. Do not lift things you don’t need to lift.”
“Define strenuous.”
“Anything your body would describe as strenuous. Anything where you’d notice your heart rate.”
I nodded.
“And especially,” she said, and her voice changed on the especially, the way a teacher’s voice changes when the next sentence is the one that will be on the test, “no magic. No spells. No rune work. No mana exercises. Not even meditation, if your meditation involves drawing on your reservoir. Pure breathing meditation is fine.”
“Why?”
“Because everything you do that touches the System touches your soul first. Combat strains it. Magic strains it more. The connection to the System is the most taxing thing you can ask of your soul on an ordinary day, and right now your soul is doing repair work in the background. Asking it to also run System functions while it heals is like asking someone with a broken leg to take the stairs because the elevator is occupied.”
“Why is the connection to the System the heavy lift? It’s just... it’s just a connection. A pipe.”
The smile she’d been suppressing during the options conversation finally surfaced for real, and it was a different smile from the one she’d given me earlier, more amused, with a small edge of oh, sweet child that she did not entirely manage to scrub out of it before I caught it.
“It is not a pipe.”
“Okay.”
“Are you attending an academy, Dash?” I shook my head. She didn’t say anything for a moment and the amusement faded. “You should be.”
“I—”
“I am not upset,” she said, holding up one hand. “You have very valid reasons, I am sure, and I have not earned the right to ask after them. But Dash. You are sitting in front of me asking me questions that are answered in the first semester of any reputable academy program. Basic questions. Questions that the boy at the desk next to you, in the worst-rated academy in Tago, would have already had answered for him by his third lecture.”
I didn’t argue with it, because I couldn’t.
“Your connection to the System is not a pipe,” she said. “It is the bandwidth across which the System enhances you. Every time you use a skill, every time you draw mana, every time an attribute point makes you faster or stronger, that effect travels across your connection, and the size of the effect is determined by the size of the connection. The connection is determined by your compatibility.”
“So compatibility is—what, the diameter of the pipe, then.”
“Closer. But still not quite. Pipes are linear. The connection is not.” I waited. “At twenty percent compatibility,” she said, “you have approximately half the effect of someone at eighty. And at ninety, you have several times the effect of someone at eighty. The curve is not flat. It bends upward, sharply, the higher you climb.”
She stopped and let out a small sigh. “The first man, who called himself a Guildmaster, to map it during the Tutorial gave the tiers their names, and the names stuck because the system takes them as something we want it to be called. No change was successful.”
She lifted a finger and counted them off.
“Below twenty, iron. No system. Twenty to forty, bronze, and forty to sixty, silver. Majority of humanity sits here. Sixty to eighty, gold and sixty is roughly where the System starts treating you as a serious operator. Eighty to ninety, diamond. And above ninety—”
“And above ninety?”
“Above ninety, the tiers are gone. Each percent is named on its own because each percent is large enough to deserve its own name. Ninety-one is meaningfully different from ninety-two. Ninety-five is meaningfully different from ninety-four. The curve, by that point, is no longer a curve. It is a wall going upward.”
“That’s—”
“It is mathematical. It is also the reason no one in living memory has been confirmed past ninety-five. Aurelia is the obvious exception, and she is the exception because she is Aurelia. Past her, the historical record gets thin and unreliable, and most of the names attached to the highest readings come from sources that I, professionally, do not cite.”
“So a stat point,” I said slowly, “is worth what at twenty, exactly?”
“Roughly half what it is at eighty. And a tenth, roughly, of what it is at ninety-five. The exact ratios are not the point. The point is that compatibility is not a threshold you cross once. It is a multiplier on everything you ever do with the System for the rest of your life.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh.”
“So my over eighty compatibility?”
“Means that every gram of effort you put into your System makes you a meaningfully different operator than someone at twenty doing the same work. And it is also why,” her voice softened, “the people who built your anchor went to the trouble. They were not removing you from a club. They were collapsing the multiplier that determined how much of yourself you could ever become and they used it for someone else. Someone else now has boosted access, thanks to you. Disgusting.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “And this,” I said, gesturing vaguely at my chest, “is the multiplier doing repair work.”
“Yes.”
“Which is why I can’t poke at it.”
“Yes.”
“Got it.”
“Promise me, Dash. No magic. No combat. No soul work like you damaged your soul before, until we are completely finished. All four sessions. I would rather lose the schedule than have you undo the cast by trying to be useful.”
“I promise.”
She held my gaze for one more second, evaluating the promise the way Dante used to evaluate them, and apparently it passed, because she nodded once and stood. “Think about the academy.”
“I will.”
“Think about it seriously.”
“I will think about it seriously.”
“Good.” She walked me to the door. I stepped through into the waiting room. The twins were on their feet before the door had finished closing.
“Already?!” Alice’s voice, again, but quieter this time, scaled down for a medical wing rather than a service-station platform. “How did it go? Are you okay? Do you need to sit down? Do you need water? We have water—”
“Alice,” Cecilia said. “Breathe.”
“I’m breathing. He’s the one who needs to breathe.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m tired. But I’m fine.”
The hugs happened. Alice’s first, a full one, cut short when she remembered with visible self-restraint that I had just been operated on and a rib-compression squeeze might not be ideal. She loosened it halfway through and turned it into a careful one-armed thing that she clearly hated. Cecilia’s followed, gentler from the start, no chin on the shoulder this time but a hand on my back that stayed there a second longer than usual. “You said you had tests.”
“We do,” Cecilia said. “We have a test in twenty-three minutes. We wanted to make sure you were all right before we went.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“We did,” Alice said. “Twenty-three minutes is plenty.”
“Twenty-one, now,” Cecilia said.
“Plenty.”
Cecilia gave her sister a look that I had seen many times in the limousine and was learning to interpret. “Alice is also using this as a reason to delay walking into the test.”
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“I am partially. But mostly I’m here for Dash.”
“You are sixty percent here for Dash and forty percent avoiding the test.”
“Seventy-thirty.”
“Sixty-forty.”
“Fine. Sixty-five-thirty-five. Final offer.”
I laughed. The laugh pulled at the new tiredness in my chest, but in a good way. “Walk me to the station,” I said. “Then go take your test.”
“Done,” Alice and Cecilia said at the same time.
They flanked me, one on each side, and steered me back across the campus avenues that were now lightly populated with students moving between classes in the same uniform I was wearing.
Nobody looked at me twice.
Alice talked the whole way, mostly to Cecilia, occasionally to me, narrating the various low-stakes outrages of the academy week. Cecilia interjected corrections at appropriate intervals. I walked between them and let the morning light and the borrowed uniform and the new soreness behind my ribs settle into something that felt, against all available evidence, like belonging.
At the service station, Alice hugged me again, carefully.
“Sleep,” she ordered. “Eat. Be lazy. You’re not allowed to be productive for two whole days. Dewi’s orders. Ceci, back me up.”
“Dewi’s orders,” Cecilia confirmed.
“You’ll see me on Monday next week,” I said. “Same time.”
“Same place,” Alice said. “Same uniform. Better breakfast.”
Cecilia squeezed my arm once. “Take care of yourself, Dash.”
“You too. Both of you. Pass the test.”
“Easy,” Alice said, in the tone of someone who had not yet opened a single textbook.
“Borderline,” Cecilia said, in the tone of someone who had memorized three.
—
The Guild door swung inward with its usual creak, and the tavern wrapped around me in the way it always did.
I crossed the floor.
Sera was behind the bar in her usual position, polishing a glass that had probably been polished six times already this morning, and Dr. Hoffman was on the stool he had occupied every time I had ever seen him, one elbow on the wood, the other hand around a tankard whose contents I had stopped speculating about. The fireplace crackled. Someone in a corner laughed. The Guild was doing the Guild thing.
I slid onto the stool next to Hoffman.
“Thanks for coming, Dash,” Sera said, setting the glass down.
“You said this morning we had something to talk about.”
She nodded. “How was the checkup?”
“Solved.” I leaned an elbow on the bar. “Or it will be. Four weeks, four sessions. Whole thing comes off.”
Hoffman’s tankard came up off the wood as if it had been waiting. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, and did, the foam catching in his beard somewhere between the third and fourth braid.
Sera smiled. “Good,” she said, and let the word settle before moving to business. “Your handler is here. Situation room four, if you go into the main room with a board, it’s first on the left. Goes by Naiche.”
“Thanks, Sera.” I started to push off the stool.
“Hold on.”
She had already turned to the back shelf, and her hand came back with a tall bottle I did not recognize, narrow-necked, with a label that wore the corporate-beige discipline of a Jeup product so dutifully that even the bottle seemed embarrassed to participate in it. She set a long glass on the bar, dropped two cubes of ice in, and started pouring before I had reassembled my thoughts.
The liquid came out a deep, troubling red.
“What is… that?”
“Jeup Premium Pour Series: Monthly Specialty Number Eleven.” She read the label. “Pepper-Citrus Variant. Non-alcoholic.”
“That’s... a name.”
“It is, in fact, the name.” She finished pouring, and the surface of the liquid had a faint oily sheen of capsaicin floating where the ice had pushed it up. “I was placing the monthly order. I saw that they had a specialty pour, and I thought of you.”
I stared at the glass.
“Why?”
“Because you drink the Premium Soda, Dash, which means you are the only person in this Guild whose palate has been calibrated by Jeup.” She pushed the glass across the bar. The ice made a small, accusatory clink. “So I bought one. On me.”
“Sera—”
“On me.”
Hoffman was watching this exchange, and his tankard was already half-raised in case a second toast was warranted.
I picked up the glass.
The smell hit before the rim reached my mouth. Citrus, yes, the bright acidic snap of something orange, but underneath it the slow heat of a chili that had been steeped in liquid for longer than chili really should be, and somewhere even further down a base note that might have been ginger and might have been Jeup’s chemists imitating ginger from a manual.
I took a sip.
The cold landed first. The citrus second. The heat arrived third, on a delay, like a courier who had taken the wrong corridor and was now sprinting to make up time, and it bloomed across the back of my tongue and settled in a slow burn at the soft palate that was somehow not unpleasant.
“Huh.”
“Good?”
“It’s... yeah, good.” I took a second sip to confirm, and the heat was already easier the second time, the way Jeup products always were once you had agreed to forgive them. “Actually, it’s pretty good. The citrus saves it.”
“I thought you’d say that.”
“You’re a menace, Sera.”
She inclined her head, accepting the title. I lifted the glass at Hoffman in a half-toast, took it with me, and turned toward the situation room.
—
The situation room four was plain.
Stone walls, the same warm stone as the rest of the Guild but stripped of decoration, no tapestries or sconces or banners, just a simple wooden table at the center with two chairs and a single iron lantern hanging from a chain above it. The lantern threw a circle of light onto the table and left the corners of the room in a soft gloom.
A man was seated at the far side of the table.
His robes were layers of deep green silk over a cream undershirt, the silk embroidered with silver thread in patterns that looped along the cuffs and the collar, robes that belonged on a king’s vizier in some Earth 1.0 fantasy serial. A heavy gold chain rested across his collarbones, and the rings on his fingers caught the lantern light when he moved his hands.
His face was thin, his hair going silver at the temples. Mid-fifties, maybe. “Dash.” His voice matched the face. “Please. Sit.”
“Naiche?”
“That’s the handler, yes.”
I closed the door behind me and crossed to the chair opposite his. The Jeup glass clinked against the wood as I set it down, and Naiche’s eyes flicked to it once, registered the contents, and moved on without comment, which I appreciated.
There were two books on his side of the table.
Both were leather-bound, both wore the warm patina of frequent handling. Naiche rested one hand on the cover of the upper book.
“I’ve been briefed on your upcoming engagements,” he said. “Your uncle’s office reached out through approved channels. I’ve been retained to construct two Guild quests on your behalf, and I will be your handle on both for as long as that arrangement suits us.” A small, professional pause. “The second of the two will, on acceptance, also generate a System quest. We’ll get to that one in due course.”
“My uncle mentioned the petition.”
“Then you know the broad strokes. We’ll cover the specifics when we open that contract. For now…” His hand moved from the upper book to the lower, sliding it forward until it sat between us in the lantern light. “We need to discuss the Aurelia job.”
“Right.”
He opened the book.
The pages turned of their own quiet accord, settling on a sheet that carried the faint ghost of text that hadn’t fully resolved yet.
When the writing settled, he turned the book toward me.
[Infiltration: Aurelia Academy — Bishop’s Quarterly Ball]Estimated Difficulty: DOperative role: physical courierTotal operational window: ninety minutes from primary touchDescription: Clients require operative to attend the Bishop’s Quarterly Ball as their invited guest and assist a contracted netrunner in the deletion of records, along with all associated cache reconstruction logs. Technical work performed remotely by netrunner.
Target archive is housed in the Administrative Building, east wing, third floor, on a cluster air-gapped from the academy’s main network. Side entrance to the east wing will be unlocked remotely by netrunner from the property edge. Biometric door lock on the server room bypassed by netrunner; bypass signaled to operative on closed sub-band. Patrol rotation through corridor: fifteen minutes. Effective working window: approximately eleven.
Cache architecture is housed separately, in the basement of the west wing, across three reconstruction nodes. Cache must be fully scrubbed within ninety minutes of primary file modification, or the cache repaints the records from synchronized fragments and flags the edit. Operative proceeds to all three nodes in sequence, under netrunner direction.
Operative returns to ball; varied reentry recommended.
Channel: closed encrypted sub-band, single-use, live from property line to property line. No record retained on operative’s holoband. Guild channel hygiene applies.
Specialist (netrunner): to be selected by operative from vetted slate. Operative payment scales accordingly.
Date of operation: (This week.)Payment to operative: ¢5,000/¢7,000Time Limit: Operation window closes at conclusion of ball.
The parchment was warm under my fingers, and the lantern above us threw a steady light over the writing. The new tiredness behind my ribs gave a small protesting tug, then settled.
Naiche let me read.
On the second pass, my eye caught on the slash in the payment field, and then on the line several rows above it — Specialist (netrunner): to be selected by operative from vetted slate. Operative payment scales accordingly. The slash, I now saw, was not a placeholder and not a typo. It was a question, written into the contract itself, waiting on me to answer it.
I took a sip of the Jeup. The pepper was friendlier on its third visit.
“Who’s the netrunner?”
Naiche folded his hands.
“To be decided.”
“By whom?”
“By you.”
I blinked.
“For a Guild operation of this size,” he said, “the operative—that is, you—has the right of selection from candidates I have vetted. I provide the slate. You choose. The budget rebalances around the choice. Hence the slash.”
He tapped the page once, and the parchment turned a single sheet of its own quiet accord and laid itself open on a new entry. He didn’t look down at it. He had clearly memorized the slate before I had walked in.
“The first is Natalya Novikova. She is the expert pick for this work. Her record is, by any reasonable metric, overqualified for what we are asking. Aurelia, not only academic infrastructure, is in her résumé three times over—twice on the offensive side, once on the consulting side. There is a credible rumor, which she does not confirm and which the Guild does not press her on, that she wrote one of the validation patches the cache architecture you and she will be defeating still uses to confirm node sync. This contract, by her usual standards, is beneath her.”
I waited. “But.”
“But she is, in the Guild’s polite framing, eccentric. Less polite framings have been used by her last three handlers, two of whom are no longer her handlers. The word that lives in her file is brash. She has been formally barred, in writing, from three of the higher-tier corporate fixer networks, for incidents involving, in chronological order, an unprovoked insult delivered to a Najjar director’s spouse, an unprovoked insult delivered to a Henderson editor, and an event at a Palistra venue that I have not been authorized to describe.”
“Three different kinds of insult.”
“At minimum. The result is that the larger networks have stopped sending her their better work, and she has had to dig into the Guild’s standing offerings to fill her schedule. She saw this contract on the board. She expressed interest. Aggressively.”
I let out a slow breath that very much wanted to be a laugh. “And the other candidate.”
“Pedro Gutierrez. Low-tier. Reliable. Has run Guild jobs before, with no failures on file, and nothing on file at the technical complexity of what we are facing. He is, in my professional assessment, capable of completing this contract. Probably.”
“Probably.”
“I will not lie to you, Dash. Probably is the honest word. He has not personally faced reconstruction nodes.”
“And his rate is lower.”
“His rate is lower, by approximately two thousand sols against Natalya’s. Under Guild structure, the savings on the netrunner flow through to the operative. Five thousand if the netrunner is Natalya. Seven thousand if the netrunner is Pedro. Total contract value is identical either way. Only the distribution shifts.”
I looked back down at the sheet.
The slash sat there in the payment line. The Guild was asking me, in writing, on a piece of self-writing parchment, whether I would rather have an extra two thousand sols in my pocket and a competent man on the other end of the channel, or an excellent woman who insulted strangers professionally and a lighter wallet.
Two thousand sols was not nothing. Two thousand sols was, in fact, a meaningful number. It was also exactly the kind of number that looked very large from outside an air-gapped server room, and very small from inside one, when probably started to mean something specific.
“Huh,” I said.
Who should Dash pick? :)