“Art transcends the artist’s intention. The viewer completes the work. What the artist meant is irrelevant. What the neighbor sees is everything.”— Tago Arts Council, Community Engagement Guidelines
The Central District was already turning gold by the time I got home.
The ache behind my ribs was, if anything, less than it had been at the Guild. But it had a steady weight to it, a small downward pull like a hand resting on my sternum from the inside, and it had outlasted three Jeup glasses, two flights of stairs, and a service-station ride home. It was, I was beginning to suspect, going to outlast the entire afternoon.
The lights came up automatically as I crossed the threshold.
Comma was on the couch.
She was wearing the oversized shirt she usually did, her hair in a loose ponytail that meant she’d put in approximately zero seconds of effort and then declared the matter resolved, and she had her bare feet propped on the coffee table that Mom would have made a comment about if Mom had been home.
A holo was running. The same trash she and Omar had been watching on Saturday, by the look of it, although the cast had rearranged itself somewhat and there was now a navigation console in the center of the bridge that I did not remember from previous episodes.
Comma did not look up.
“You’re home. Tea’s in the kitchen. Here, see, never say I don’t share.”
I dropped my jacket over the back of the armchair, walked to the kitchen, poured a cup, and brought it back. The holo continued. Two characters were arguing. One of them was the captain, who I remembered from Saturday. The other one was new. Their argument concerned, as far as I could tell, the moral implications of fuel rationing.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Episode seven. You missed a good one.” The smug satisfaction in her voice was barely contained, and when I glanced over, the smirk on her face matched it exactly. “The navigator turned out to be a traitor. Like I said.”
“You called that on Saturday.”
I took a sip of the tea as she confirmed it with a nod. The ache behind my ribs settled into the cushions and stopped pulling at anything in particular, and the holo continued, and the captain and the new character continued to disagree about fuel, and for the first time since approximately six in the morning, I was not actively constructing a list of things it needed to do.
It was nice.
It was so nice that I almost did not notice, twenty minutes later, that Comma had started looking at me sideways. “What.”
“Nothing.” She did not turn her head. “Just wondering when you were going to tell me why you weren’t at school today.”
“Same reason you weren’t.”
“It’s been a light day. No need to be there personally.” I made a noise of profound skepticism into my tea. “Really!”
She turned to look at me properly then, propping her cheek on one fist, and the assessing expression that surfaced was the same one she’d given the noodles on Saturday before declaring them disgusting. “But you should actually go.”
“I had a thing,” I said and decided not to share all my problems with my sister. For now.
“I don’t care that you had a thing.” Her tone shifted. “I care that Mom is going to ask why I wasn’t there, and if she pulls the attendance log, she’s going to see you weren’t there either, and then she’s going to ask both of us, and I really do not want her doing that.”
“Mom doesn’t pull the log.” I started to argue, and then stopped. The captain on the holo was now staring meaningfully at a viewport, having apparently won the fuel argument by some metric I had missed during this exchange. “Okay. I’ll fix it.”
I said nothing for a moment.
Dewi’s voice surfaced underneath the holo dialogue. Think about it seriously. The whiteboard. The patient way she had told me, without raising her voice once, that I was sitting in front of her asking questions that the boy in the worst-rated academy in Tago would have had answered for him by his third lecture.
If I finished out the Traninum year, the non-system electives, Creston offered a transfer pathway that skipped the first semester entirely on a placement test. Pass the test, walk into second year. All system electives from the first year, on a single test, to skip to the second year, was a lot to learn, but the second year was also where Omar would be.
Also, learning more math.
I groaned.
Comma’s head whipped around. “What. And don’t say nothing; that was not a nothing groan.”
“It was a thinking groan.”
She narrowed her eyes at me with the suspicion. “Thinking about what?”
“School.”
“Oh.” She turned this over for a moment, watching me with renewed interest. “You are actually going to fix it.”
I stared at the captain, who had stopped staring at the viewport and was now staring at the navigator, and the navigator was, per Comma’s earlier prediction, behaving in a manner consistent with treason. I sipped the tea. The captain frowned. The navigator looked away, and the viewport caught a passing star in a way the editor had clearly meant to feel ominous and had instead made feel slightly cross-eyed.
“The reason I wasn’t at school,” I said, “well, today, is that I had a medical checkup.”
Comma set her own cup down on the side table with the care of a surgeon laying out instruments. “Did they cure your ADHD?”
The tea I had just sipped went down the wrong way. “I don’t have ADHD,” I said when I could speak again.
She angled her head at me with the patient expression of a sister who had been waiting for this exact opportunity, and the smirk she produced was the one she saved for tactical victories. “Suuure, Dachshund.”
“For the last time, I am not a Dachshund!” I put palms on my temples. “We've talked about it.”
“Tall, twitchy, and runs in circles when over-stimulated.” She ticked the points off on her fingers without looking at me. “Hyper-fixated on small mechanical objects. Loses time in the workshop. Cannot sit through a meal without checking the holoband at least three times. Forgets to eat unless food is placed in front of him.”
“You are listing engineer traits.”
“And what,” she said, with a sweetness that I immediately did not trust, “do you think the difference is.”
I glared at her, because the honest answer was that I had not entirely thought about it, and the dishonest answer was going to require more energy than the couch was currently willing to grant me. “It’s confidential,” I said.
“Sure, Dachshund.”
I set the tea down on the side table, carefully, and considered whether the dignity of standing up to leave the room was worth the protest the ache behind my ribs was almost certainly going to lodge. “I am going to bed.”
“It’s seven in the evening.”
“I am going to bed at seven in the evening, Coconut, and I am going to enjoy it.”
Comma’s head whipped around as if I had pulled a fire alarm, her loose ponytail swinging. “You are not allowed to call me that.”
“You started it.”
“That was different, and you know it. Dachshund is funny because it actually describes you. Coconut is just—”
I glanced at her and gave a sweet smile. “Coconut is affectionate.”
“Coconut implies I am hard on the outside and soft on the inside, which is something brothers say when they want their sisters to feel small. It’s a thing, Dash. It’s a known thing.”
I made it to the bottom of the stairs before the laugh caught up with me. We laughed across the distance for a stretch, two siblings in a house their mother had filled with good tea, and then I climbed the rest of the stairs and went to my room.
The ache behind my ribs settled into the mattress and went quiet.
I lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Creston and Omar, and whether I had to learn math to attend Creston.
Probably, I decided. I would think about it tomorrow.
—
The morning light made it through the basement windows weak and filtered. The TABLO was welcoming as always though.
I sat down.
The ache behind my ribs had settled overnight into something more like the memory of an ache, a low steady awareness that lived just behind my sternum and reminded me, every time I shifted in the chair, that I had been told to rest. It was better than yesterday. Dewi’s two-day floor had more hours left to run, and the soreness, helpfully, had decided to enforce the schedule on its own.
The client book sat on the TABLO in front of me.
I stared at it.
It was, externally, the same book Naiche had handed me yesterday. Plain brown leather, iron caps at the corners, the small stylized G low in one corner of the cover. I had, at some point between the basement stairs and the chair, expected the book to look different in the morning. To have done something overnight. It had not. It looked exactly like a book.
I opened it.
The first page was blank. I turned a few more, and they were all blank, which made sense, because the book was mine, and I had not yet asked it for anything. The pages were a soft cream colour, smooth under the finger.
I rested both hands flat on the open page and tried to think about a contract.
Nothing happened.
The page remained blank. The book remained warm, and I sat there, hands on the page, waiting for something I had not specified to do something I had not specified.
Right.
I lifted my hands and considered the book again from a slightly different angle that I considered, for the first time, that the book was not a transcription device.
The parchment in Naiche’s office had not transcribed Naiche. The parchment had populated when Naiche had directed his intent at it. The contract had appeared because the contract had been asked for, with a thought, by a man who knew exactly what he wanted on the page.
The book, presumably, worked the same way. Which meant the book was, at this moment, doing exactly what it should be doing. I had not addressed it. It was not listening, just like Comma in the morning.
The thing was, addressing it required knowing what to say.
I leaned back in the chair and let my eyes drift over the workshop. The hoodie hung on its rack along the far wall, the new HexCore emitters seated cleanly in their housings, the threading reinforcement clean enough that I almost wanted to stand up and admire my work from a closer angle. The pants hung beside the hoodie, still single-mode, still waiting for a second emitter run that I had not yet had the courage to enter Eddy’s shop and pay for. The coilgun on its rack across the room looked, this morning, faintly accusatory.
I thought about the slugs.
The Muzzy-certified rounds were down to seven, by my count, after the Underrail testing and the Zerakai incursion. I should be at thirty, minimum. I should also probably be working on a thicker piercing variant for the Bhavsar op, because vertical farms had structural panels that the standard slug would—
My eyes flicked back to the page.
Still blank.
Good. The book was, mercifully, well-behaved. Whatever discipline the parchment required, it required the discipline of direction, not the discipline of content. My ambient noise was not getting through. I could think about ammunition and the book would continue to mind its business.
I would also, I reminded myself, not be enchanting any rounds today. Or tomorrow. Or the day after. Dewi had been very specific. I had thirty-two hours on the generous one, and the rounds were going to have to wait until my body had decided that it was finished doing repair work behind my ribs.
Which made the seven-round inventory not a problem I could solve today.
Which made the seven-round inventory exactly the problem I wanted to chew on, because the only thing I wanted to do when I was forbidden from solving a problem was to solve the problem. I caught myself running through powder-charge variations on a piercing-rune slug that I could not actually produce.
I rubbed my eyes.
Suuure, Dachshund.
Comma’s voice arrived without warning. The catalogue of traits she had recited in front of the holo last night, the ticked-off list, the smug ponytail. I had defended myself against it last night, which was easier in a living room with the holo running, and I was defending myself against it now, which was harder.
I do not, I told myself, have ADHD. I had a system-sucking thing in my soul, a workshop full of half-finished projects, and a sister who weaponized armchair diagnosis for fun.
The system-sucking thing was the explanation.
Probably.
I shook my head, sat up straighter, and addressed the book.
I want to post a contract.
The page responded.
Ink, or whatever the book used in place of ink, the same self-arranging not-quite-ink the parchment had used, gathered at the top of the page and organized itself into a header.
[Contract: (untitled)][Type: (unspecified)][Description: (unspecified)][Risk parameters: (unspecified)][Deliverable: (unspecified)][Budget: (unspecified)][Time limit: (unspecified)][Channel: (unspecified)]
The book had heard me, accepted that I wanted a contract, and was now waiting, very patiently, for me to tell it what kind.
I addressed it again.
Reconnaissance contract. Bhavsar vertical farm in Tago. The primary site.
The header rewrote itself.
[Contract: Reconnaissance — Tago Bhavsar Vertical Farm (Primary Site)][Type: Reconnaissance][Description: (unspecified)][Risk parameters: (unspecified)][Deliverable: (unspecified)][Budget: (unspecified)][Time limit: (unspecified)][Channel: (unspecified)]
Better. The first two fields had taken my stupid thoughts. The rest of the form was still waiting on me; the book was not going to fill them in by inference.
I pulled the chair closer to the TABLO and started with the description.
The contractor is to observe the facility from outside the perimeter and produce a written report covering the following: perimeter geometry, identifiable access points including loading docks and worker entrances and rooftop access, visible security infrastructure including camera placements and patrol patterns, and any notable patterns of activity over a representative twenty-four-hour observation window.
The description field populated, flowing in clean script across the parchment-coloured page, and I read it back. It was, I thought, reasonable. It said what I wanted.
It also said, when I looked at it a second time, that the contractor was free to do whatever they wanted as long as they produced the report, which was, when I thought about it for a bit longer, not what I wanted at all.
I corrected.
Add: low-visibility reconnaissance only. I don’t want facility entry or interaction with personnel.
The description rewrote itself to accommodate the addition. I read it again. It now said what I wanted, and it also closed the door on the most predictable failure mode, which was a contractor with initiative deciding that “scout” meant “infiltrate” and earning the Bhavsar security a quiet briefing about me.
The deliverable field came next.
Written report with photographs.
It populated. I considered whether photographs was specific enough, decided it was, and moved on. Risk parameters had already been folded into the description, and the book accepted (see description) in that field without complaint. Budget I knew. Time limit I knew. The channel field I left at the book’s default, which appeared, when I asked for it, to be Guild standard encrypted single-use, the same hygiene Naiche had used on the Aurelia contract.
Budget: five hundred sols. Time limit: report delivered within five days of contract acceptance.
The fields populated.
The contract sat there in front of me, complete, the (unspecified) tags all gone, every line resolved into clean script.
I read it through once, then again. It said what I wanted it to say. The five-day window was tight enough to keep the contractor moving and loose enough to allow for a proper observation cycle. The budget was a number I had pulled from intuition and from Naiche’s earlier note that Bronze contracts capped at two thousand.
Naturally, I had no idea whether five hundred sols was the right number for a reconnaissance run on a vertical farm. It might be. It might be embarrassingly low.
I would, presumably, find out, and I pressed my palm to the line at the bottom.
A warmth flared.
It also, almost immediately, refused to settle.
I lifted my hand. The signature line was blank. The book had not taken it. I looked at the page. Every field was filled in. Every (unspecified) tag was gone. I had checked twice. The book had refused anyway.
I stared.
Then I read the contract through a third time, slowly, looking for the thing I had missed.
The contract specified a five-day delivery window, but it did not specify a start date. It said within five days of contract acceptance.
Also, there was no specification of how long the contract could sit on the board before it was deemed lapsed.
Also also, there was no specification of when I needed the report, in absolute terms, which was the actual constraint. I needed the report by Sunday evening. The Aurelia ball was on Saturday. The Bhavsar op was sometime the following week, or weeks.
I added the absolute window.
Final delivery deadline: Sunday, end of day.
The description rewrote itself to incorporate the new deadline. I pressed my palm to the signature line again. The warmth flared, and this time, settled.
When I lifted my hand, the contract had a new line at the bottom, in a slightly different script:
[Submitted to Guild review.][Estimated review time: six hours.][Expedited review available: 5 GP.][Result will be reflected on this page.]
I stared at the GP line.
Yesterday’s blush, I noted with some dignity, had not entirely finished fading before the universe had arranged for me to encounter the same humiliation again. The GP wall was real. It was sitting on top of every part of my life that touched the Guild, and my GP balance was, as Hoffman had so gently reminded me, zero.
Six hours, then.
I closed the book, set my hand on top of it for a moment as if to confirm to myself that I had actually done the thing, and then leaned back in the chair.
I looked around.
The crates I had been ignoring for two weeks were stacked unevenly along the near wall. The shelving I had built for the workshop, the half I had built, ran along the south wall in a configuration that had seemed efficient, but now it looked frankly inadequate. The exotic alloys had migrated to a corner where they did not belong. The combat fibers had ended up next to the power components, which was a fire hazard.
The impact foam, somehow, was in three places.
Dewi was adamant. I could not enchant or run mana through myself. I could, however, build shelves.
Building shelves was not soul work… right? Building shelves was carpentry. I had built half a set of shelves already. I had a plan. What I did not have, and had not had for two weeks, was the metal stock for the frame parts, because I had used the last of the salvaged stock on the reinforcement.
Which meant a recycling center run.
Which meant the cart.
Which meant, almost certainly, the entire neighborhood gossip network learning before lunchtime that Dash Kallum was working on something new.
—
I made it to the gate.
That was as far as I made it.
“Dash! Oh, Dash, what perfect timing!”
Granny Adelaide was on her front walk before I had registered her presence at the front door, moving across the lawn as if she had been watching for me through her window and had perfectly calibrated her exit. She was wearing one of the more elaborate of her gardening sundresses.
“Hello, Mrs. Adelaide.”
“Come, come.” She took my elbow without asking, the grip friendly and entirely non-negotiable, and steered me back toward her gate. “I have something to show you. Just a moment of your time, dear, just a moment.”
I let myself be steered, and the cart squeaked along behind me on its protesting wheels, and I considered, briefly, that I had not yet made it to the recycling center and was now being abducted in the wrong direction.
“Mrs. Adelaide, I have to—”
“It will be quick. Quick.”
She steered me past the corner where my last sculpture stood, currently being haunted by two of her cats, who appeared to have accepted it as part of the local geography.
I was already drafting the apology.
Whatever the new commission was, I did not have time. Aurelia was Saturday. Bhavsar was the week after. The hoodie still needed its second emitter run, and the workshop still needed its shelves, and there were only seven slugs in the workbench drawer.
I was rehearsing the no when she stopped. “There,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”
We were standing in front of a sculpture.
It was one of mine.
It took me a moment to place it, because I had welded so many of these by now that the individual ones had begun to blur into a single composite memory of regret. Oh, the one I had welded in roughly an afternoon two months ago, after she had asked specifically for “something with people in it, dear, you do such interesting things with abstraction but the human form is the foundation of art,” and I had panicked and welded three figures out of salvaged copper pipe and steel rod and put them in the most basic configuration I could think of.
A central figure, standing.
Two figures, one on either side, leaning into the central one.
Arms welded into approximate hugs.
The two side figures had long hair, suggested by twisted copper wire, because that had been the fastest way to gender them without committing to actual features. The central figure had no hair, because I had run out of copper wire and decided that bald was a creative choice.
Granny was looking at it as if it had been carved by Goddess herself. “It’s beautiful, Dash. It speaks to me.”
“Thank you.”
“It speaks to me now especially.” There was a particular weight on the now that I did not entirely like. She turned to face me, still holding my elbow. “Dash, dear.”
“Mrs. Adelaide.”
“I want you to listen to me for a moment. In my day,” she said, “young men of a certain age were not always given clear guidance on these matters. The world has developed, of course. Many things are different now. But some things, dear, are not as different as people pretend they are.”
I stared at her.
She nodded once at the sculpture, as if it were saying something I should have been able to hear. The central figure stared back at me with the welded blankness of a face I had not bothered to give features. “You must be careful, Dash.”
“About what?”
“About which one is the primary.”
“Huh?” I did not expect that. “The primary.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Of—” I gestured helplessly at the sculpture. “Of what? Primary sculpture?”
“Of the relationships, Dash.” She said it gently. “The two are very different girls. I can see that even in the sculpture, the way you’ve rendered them, the one on the left has such energy, such fire, while the one on the right is so much more composed. They are wonderful girls, both of them. Wonderful. But there can only be one primary, and a young man in your position must be very very very thoughtful about which one he chooses, because the choice, once made, is not a choice that reverses cleanly.”
The blood, I noted distantly, was leaving my face.