“Unsolicited advice from neighbors can be ignored. Unless it’s correct. Correct advice lodges in the skull and refuses to leave. This is the neighbor’s revenge for not being asked.”— Deleted post, residential community forum
“Mrs. Adelaide?” The name came out a little more carefully than I had intended. “What position is that, exactly?”
She tilted her head.
The smile did not waver. If anything, it softened. “I know these decisions, dear.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I know them.” She said it gently, and her gaze drifted past me, past the sculpture, settling on something in the middle distance of her own garden that I was fairly sure was not actually in the garden. “I made plenty like that. A long time ago. I made them well, I think, though it took me longer than it should have, and I was not given the guidance I am giving you now. I had to learn by watching, and what I watched, I did not always understand until much later. I am giving you the shortcut, Dash, because nobody gave it to me, and I have never quite forgiven the people who could have.”
“You —”
“I am not going to tell you the rest of that story. It is mine, and you are not owed it.” She returned her gaze to me. “What I will tell you is what I learned. The two silver-haired girls come together, dear. That is, as I said, a consideration. You will not be choosing between them in the way you would choose between two strangers. You will be choosing among an arrangement they have already made between themselves, and the arrangement is older than you and more settled than you realize, and the one of them who is the primary has almost certainly been the primary since they were small. You did not assemble that. You walked into it.”
I stared at her.
“You are not being asked to break it, dear. You will not be able to. What you are being asked to do is recognize it, and to choose accordingly, and to honor the order that already exists rather than trying to invent your own. The girls will be grateful. Believe me. The young man who walks in and decides, because he has decided he is the protagonist of the situation, that he will install his own order is the young man who is sent away politely after the third dinner, and never invited to the fourth.”
“Mrs. Adelaide —”
“And the redhead is separate.”
“What.”
“The redhead.” She made a small gesture, the dismissive, settling gesture of a woman organizing items on a tray. “She does not enter the same arrangement. She is her own arrangement, and she has her own grammar, and the choice with her is a different choice. You are not being asked to combine them, dear, no matter what your imagination is doing right now. That is a different conversation that I am not having with you today, and I would beg you not to have it with yourself either, because it is a conversation that very few young men have survived having with themselves, and the ones who survived did so with help that you do not currently have.”
Mrs. Adelaide’s smile widened, just slightly, and she patted my elbow the way one patted a horse one was fond of.
“You did not ask me how I know any of this.”
“I —”
“You did not, dear. And I will not tell you. I have my own opinions about the people who live here, which I will keep to myself.” She tilted her head. “I am very fond of you, Dash. I want you to understand that. The advice is not unkind. The advice is what an aunt would give you, if you had one who knew, and you don’t, so I am giving it instead. Take it for what it is.”
“But I don’t even think about combining—”
“Off you go, dear.”
“I really am not thinking—”
“Off you go.”
—
The shelves were going up, and that was about as much as I could honestly say for them.
Hammer in one hand, a length of salvaged pipe braced against the workbench, and the entire south wall of the workshop in a state of partial deconstruction that would have, at any other moment of my life, been the most stressful thing in my immediate environment.
Today, the shelves were a relief.
The shelves were a relief because they were the problem that responded to being hit with a hammer. I lined up the bracket against the upright and brought the hammer down.
The two silver-haired girls come together, dear.
The bracket bit into the upright at a slightly wrong angle. I corrected it on the second swing.
That is its own consideration.
I corrected it again on the third.
The thing was, I had spent the entire walk back from the recycling center telling myself that Mrs. Adelaide was an old woman applying very old grammar to a situation she did not actually understand, and that the correct response was to nod, smile, and forget. The walk had been twenty minutes. I had been telling myself this for approximately the first three of those minutes, and for the remaining seventeen I had been failing to forget.
The twins did come together.
It was, in fact, the first thing anyone noticed about them. Alice and Cecilia were Alice and Cecilia. They occupied a single sentence in everybody’s head, including mine.
They had arrived at Busaba Eathai together. They had bickered together, had argued about who would invite me to the ball, because that was how the twins worked, and that was how the twins had always worked.
I wanted to be their friend and never thought of them otherwise.
The hammer came down on the bracket, and the bracket seated itself with a clean, satisfying thunk, and I straightened up and rolled my shoulder, and the next thought arrived without invitation.
Alice was the one who reached out first.
Alice had introduced herself in the food court. Alice had pulled me into the limousine. Alice had been the one whose holocall lit up my band. Alice was the one whose hugs were the full-contact ones. Alice was the one who had said I’m inviting him at every opportunity, and Cecilia had been the one who had pushed back every time.
So who was the primary?
The hammer paused mid-arc, and I lowered it.
Mrs. Adelaide had said the answer would be obvious if I knew them well enough to see it, and that I had not assembled it.
Cecilia, then.
Cecilia, because Alice was the one who pushed forward, but Cecilia was the one who decided—
Argh.
I brought the hammer down on the bracket harder than the bracket required, and the bracket protested, so I corrected myself and brought it down again, gentler, and the bracket seated.
I did not want to be doing this.
I did not want Cecilia or Alice. I wanted to be at the ball without humiliating myself, I wanted the soul leech out of my chest, and I wanted, somewhere underneath all of it, a quiet I had not had in months. Twins were the first real friends I had made since the prep-school disaster.
I bent a piece of scrap to fit the angle of the next bracket. The scrap, which had not been involved in the moral conversation, bent.
Erika.
The thought arrived unprompted, and I let out a small, defeated noise and let it.
Erika was, by Mrs. Adelaide’s diagnosis, separate.
The honest answer, sitting in my workshop with a hammer in my hand, was that I did not know.
I had been crushing on Erika for years. I had been crushing on her quietly, I had read her Pulse comments. I had filed away every detail she had mentioned about her training and her preferences and her family, and I had built, over time, a very thorough and entirely private map of a person I had not, technically, ever asked out.
The map had not been updated in any meaningful way since prep school. Comma had called her my girlfriend. Erika had not corrected her. Erika had also not agreed.
She had deflected the question.
BANG.
The hammer came down on a bracket that was no longer in need of being struck, and the workbench rattled, and I set the hammer down on the bench with more care than I had treated the bracket, because the bracket had not asked for that, and the bench had not asked for it either.
I exhaled.
This was not, I told myself, a thing I needed to solve today. The ball was Saturday. The Bhavsar op was the week after. The shelves needed building, and the seven slugs in the workbench drawer needed to become thirty, and the twelve emitters in my left jacket pocket needed to become twenty-four, and the holster I had not yet designed needed to be designed, and the sword drills Cecilia had set me needed to be run, and the questions Mrs. Adelaide had planted in my head were not, by any reasonable definition, urgent.
Granny had told me to think about it.
She had not told me to solve it.
Right now, I had shelves.
I picked the hammer back up.
The shelves got built.
—
It took three more hours and at the end of them the south wall of the workshop carried a configuration of pipe and panel that was, while not beautiful, structurally honest. Five tiers. Adjustable height on each. Mounting points along the underside of each tier for tool hooks. The whole rack ran the full length of the wall, and when I tested it by pushing my full weight against the top tier, it did not move.
Better. Less chaos.
I started loading.
The exotic alloys went on the bottom tier, because they were the heaviest and the least frequently accessed. The combat fibers went on the second tier, away from the power components. The fourth tier was for fasteners and miscellaneous hardware, organized by gauge in the small bins I had picked up from Eddy. The top tier was empty, because I had not yet decided what the top tier deserved.
When I stepped back, the workshop looked like a place where work was being done rather than a place where work was being attempted in the gaps between piles of unsorted material.
I stood there for a minute, hammer hanging loose in my hand, and let the satisfaction settle. Then I walked over to the wall rack where the suitcase had been sitting, popped the latches, and lifted out the revolver.
It was warmer than it should have been, because the foam interior of a Sentinel Corp commemorative case was apparently temperature-stabilized to the room, and the room was warm. The matte steel caught the workshop light. The amber glyphs along the barrel pulsed in their slow, regular rhythm.
I carried it to the TABLO and set it down.
Eddy was right.
I did not want to admit that Eddy was right, but I had been turning the revolver over in my head since Saturday afternoon.
I had no idea whether Scavantis scanned non-shard items. I had no idea what the price was if they did. Scavantis scanned items recovered from shards, in a process that was bundled into the dive payout, and the bundle had been the entirety of my exposure to corporate item analysis. Asking the front desk at SMB11 whether they would scan a Sentinel Corp commemorative was the question that was likely to either get me a polite we don’t do that here or a reasonable price quote, but it was equally likely to get me flagged on three internal systems for asking weird questions about a piece of corporate-grade hardware that I should not, under any reasonable interpretation, possess.
Eddy had a system card. Eddy had a price. The price was three-fifty.
I was going to pay the three-fifty.
I groaned audibly and pinched the bridge of my nose.
It was less than I had spent on a single one of the HexCore emitters Eddy was about to laugh me out of his shop for. I was, technically, no longer poor. The version of me that had been poor for two years, the one running the silent accounting plugin in the back of my head, did not believe this.
I told it to be quiet, and I made a note on my holoband to call Eddy later. Like not today or tomorrow, but soon. He’ll laugh, right? Ugh…
While I was at it, I made a second note for the bullets.
I set the holoband down and went back to looking at the revolver, because something I could do was design a holster.
The pants did not have one.
The pants had storage for three magazines, two utility pouches, a thigh-mounted sheath for a small knife, and a generic mounting rail along the right hip that would accept any standard holster module I cared to fabricate.
I pulled up the Orbital.
The holographic projector resolved, and I started sketching.
The form was straightforward. Right-hip carry. Open-top retention with a thumb-break strap, because closed retention was slower and the speed mattered more than the security at this caliber. The shell needed to be molded to the revolver’s specific frame geometry to grip without play, and the mounting plate needed to interface cleanly with the existing pant rail. The throat of the holster needed to allow a clean draw from a seated position as well as standing, because the only thing worse than being shot in a parking garage was being shot in a parking garage while fumbling for a sidearm.
I worked.
I sketched the basic form. I rotated. I adjusted. I added the cant, fifteen degrees forward, which according to a random forum I read, was the angle that produced the cleanest draw arc for a hip holster on a standing operator. Hopefully sooner than later I could ask in Tinkerer’s DB.
Then I tightened the retention shell against the revolver’s contours until the holographic gun nestled into the holographic shell with a fit that would, I estimated, hold the revolver firmly enough to survive a sprint while still releasing on a thumb-break draw.
The shell needed reinforcement at the trigger guard.
The mounting plate needed to spread the load across the rail rather than concentrating it, because I was eventually going to be drawing this thing under stress and the plate’s job was to not move when I did. I widened the plate.
Then I dyed the holster the same yellow as the hoodie. I added the Sentinel Corp emblem to the outer face of the shell, which Orbital asked me if I had paid the corporate license for.
I said yes, and it just accepted that.
Huh.
I committed the design and queued it for fabrication.
The ACCIW began its work, and forty minutes later, I had a holster in my hand.
I sat at the workbench and did the finishing. The mounting plate needed the rail interface cleaned up; the ACCIW had left a small flash of polymer along one edge that would catch on the pant rail if I left it. The thumb-break strap needed its retention spring tensioned by hand, because the ACCIW could fabricate the strap but it could not tension it correctly. The yellow finish needed a second pass to bring it up to the same depth as the hoodie, which meant a careful manual application of the same dye I had used on the hoodie, applied with a small brush and dried under the workshop’s heat lamp.
I worked slowly. The soul ache was better than yesterday, lower and quieter, but it was still there, and slow was the speed Dewi had specifically requested.
When I was done, the holster was the same yellow as the hoodie.
The Sentinel emblem on the outer face was matte silver, the same brushed finish as the original revolver grip, and it caught the workshop light from across the room.
I stood up, walked to the rack where the pants hung, lifted them off the rack, and clipped the holster to the right-hip rail. The interface seated cleanly. I tested the retention. The shell held the revolver firmly. The thumb-break released on a clean motion. The draw, when I tested it, came up smooth and on-line, the revolver clearing the throat without catching.
I stepped into the pants.
I pulled on the hoodie.
I holstered the revolver.
There was no mirror in the workshop. The only reflective surface in the room was a sheet of polished aluminum, and the aluminum was, as a mirror, terrible.
It rendered me in low resolution, slightly stretched, with a faint warp along the seam where the sheet had been cut. The colors were approximate. The geometry was approximate. The yellow of the hoodie blurred into the yellow of the holster, and the silver of the Sentinel emblem caught a piece of the workshop light and threw it back at me from the right hip.
I looked, despite the aluminum’s best efforts, dangerous.
I grinned at my reflection.
—
The rest of the afternoon went to the sword.
I cleared the workshop’s central floor of the small piles I had not yet found permanent shelving for, and ran Cecilia’s drill sequence from the start. Stance work first. Then footwork. Then the basic cuts.
The soul ache flickered when I pushed the wrist work, the small protesting tug behind my ribs that meant I was approaching the line Dewi had drawn. I stopped when it did. I stretched. I let the ache settle. Then I started again, slower, and got most of the way through the fourth sequence before the ache flickered a second time, and I stopped a second time, and I called the practice for the day.
The ache settled into the mattress. The note on the holoband, with its growing list of expensive things to call Eddy about, sat on the nightstand and judged me silently.
I was asleep before I had finished planning the order in which I was going to humiliate myself in his shop.
—
The Schwarzstahl train pulled out of Central District Station at 09:47, which was the time it had been advertised to leave, and which was, per Schwarzstahl’s never-officially-approved internal slogan, not a coincidence.
I had a window seat in the second car, on the side of the train that would, fifteen minutes from now, give me a view of the river and the New Clearwater District as we crossed into the corporate corridor. The hoodie was zipped to halfway, the holster was riding the right hip of the pants, the revolver was in the holster, and the entire arrangement was hidden under a long charcoal coat I had pulled out of the back of the closet that morning because the coat was the closest thing I owned to “appropriate for a Syntavelli appointment.”
Well, it was not appropriate. I knew this. Alice knew this.
The car was almost empty. Two suit-types in the back row, each reading something on their bands. A woman near the front with a small child asleep against her shoulder.
Outside the window, the city moved.
The soreness behind my ribs was quieter today. Day three of three. Dewi’s restrictions still applied, but the soreness itself had downshifted from a steady weight to a low, occasional pulse that mostly reminded me, when I shifted my shoulder against the seat, that the rest of me was running below its rated capacity.
Alice would not be at the appointment.
She had been very clear about this in a sequence of nine messages last night, each of which had contained roughly twelve words and four exclamation marks. School. Tests. Things, Dash. But Sarisol would be there, and Sarisol was the best, preem-tier, capital-T-the-best, and Sarisol had been told everything, and I was going to be fine, Dash, fine, don’t worry, just show up and let her do her thing.
Thought about what Mrs. Adelaide said flared in my mind, so I instead focused on the outside. The river came up on the left.
The train crossed the bridge in the easy, soundless glide that Schwarzstahl crossings always did, and the morning light slid down the supports and across the water and through the window in long pale bars that fell across my coat and across the seat next to me and across the band on my left wrist.
The band chimed, and the contact card was blank.
I sat with the blank card for a moment longer. Six days, Naiche had said. I will coordinate. Natalya is fast on contact and slow on confirmation. The first half of that sentence was, apparently, doing some heavy lifting it had not advertised at the time.
I accepted, and the voice that arrived was a woman’s.
“Ahoj, Dashi. Nice to meet you and all that. You will be calling me Miss Natalya.”