“The senior atelier waitlist remains closed to new applications.”— Syntavelli, Atelier Services Notice
The river slid past in a long ribbon as I let out a long sigh, as I tried to just forget about what happened with Natalya.
Was this someone I wanted to cooperate with? I was thinking about it internally so intensively I almost missed my station.
Vermilion Promenade.
As I stood up, the hoodie made a small protesting noise under the coat. I rebalanced the holster against my hip, adjusted the coat to settle over it, and stepped onto the platform. Vermilion Promenade Station was ten meters wide; the ceiling vaulted in a dark glass that let in light filtered through some kind of treated panel.
So this is the rich area.
I followed the signage to street level. There were no street vendors, and—what really got me—no advertisements. But there was a man in a black uniform standing nearby who singled me out and was watching me as I stepped onto the sidewalk and consulted my holoband.
The Syntavelli flagship was four blocks down.
By the second block, I had passed three storefronts that didn’t pretend that poor people should linger here.
My goal was a single building, set back from the street behind a shallow forecourt of brushed dark stone, the entrance flanked by two vertical light installations that pulsed in a deep wine-red. The Syntavelli logo was carved into the stone above the door, but lacked any kind of neon lighting.
The lobby exhaled at me.
Cool air, scented with something that was probably a custom blend with a name and a license fee.
Hopefully Comma never showed up here, because a few months back she came home with a Proar Biomed custom scent and insisted we get more. The cost was in the hundreds per small bottle.
No stray thoughts! I don’t have ADHD!
The light inside was warmer than the light outside, set low in the architecture, throwing the room into a series of soft golden zones that left the corners in shadow. A counter ran along the back wall. One person stood behind it, a young man in a Syntavelli uniform that fit him perfectly.
And between me and the counter, scattered across the lobby in irregular clusters, were the chairs.
The chairs in the Syntavelli lobby were not NullSit.
The nearest one had brass legs, and a single curved sheet of dark resin that swept up from the seat into something that wanted to be called a backrest. Beside it, a low chair in merlot leather suspended on three angled struts, with no support beneath the front edge of the seat at all.
I crossed to the counter.
The young man looked up, saw me, and the polite-neutral expression on his face did not, to his credit, change. “Good morning. Do you have an appointment?”
“Dash. With Sarisol.”
He checked his terminal. “She’ll be ready in approximately twenty minutes. Please take a seat. I’ll let you know when she’s ready.”
“Thank you.” I turned, surveyed the field of hostile chairs, and chose the one in merlot leather on the angled struts.
The chair held me. My spine was pushed out at an angle, and my butt slid down, requiring constant adjustment. Why these idiot designers never sat in them was beyond me. I would take NullSit ten times over this nightmare.
I pulled my holoband up.
There was time and a small unresolved knot from the morning had been sitting in the back of my head since I had stepped off the train at Mahlangu. I needed someone to talk to who would not require an explanation of who Natalya was, and that narrowed the list to one.
[Me: Sera. Got a minute, when you can?]
The message went green and sat. Sera ran a tavern that lived in a pocket dimension; behind a bar she did not seem to ever leave; her response time on a non-emergency was probably bad.
About five minutes in, the band buzzed.
[Sera: Hold on. Naiche left me a note. Said to open it if you reached out.]
I stared at the message. The chair, briefly, ceased to be the worst thing in the room.
[Sera: His note says, in full: “You picked her.”]
[Sera: So. Is this about Natalya?]
[Me: Yes.]
[Me: She hijacked my earpiece on the train this morning. Made me get off two stations early. Detonated my old earpiece in my coat pocket while I was wearing the coat. Then sent me into a stranger’s apartment in a yellow mask so she could yell at the man on the couch through the wall speakers about something he did to her in a video game.]
[Me: I am not exaggerating any part of this.]
[Sera: I would not have assumed you were.]
[Sera: Look. Natalya is a lot of things. Boring is not one of them. Everyone who meets her has an opinion about her, and most of those opinions have been bad. The ones that haven’t been bad have generally come from people who have worked with her on something that mattered.]
[Me: She destroyed my earpiece.]
[Sera: She also gave you a better one. Right? Is it better?]
The new earpiece felt warmer than the old one, and the handshake with the band had been instant, and beyond those two I had been a little distracted by the man on the couch losing control of his expressions one feature at a time.
[Me: I think so?]
[Sera: Wait till tonight. Then tell me if you still feel hard done by.]
[Sera: And she does this or a similar thing to everyone the first week. She thinks of it as introduction. You are not the first, you will not be the last, and no, that does not make it less rude. I am aware.]
[Me: Thanks, Sera.]
[Sera: One more thing. If you mean it about giving her a chance, do not lead the next conversation with what she did this morning. She knows.]
[Me: Got it.]
[Sera: Good. Naiche’s note also said to tell you he had a small bet running with himself on which day you would call.]
I let the band dim and rested it on my knee.
After a while, the side door opened.
A woman stepped through. She was perhaps a few years older than me, and she was dressed in a sleeveless cream sheath in a fabric that caught the light differently when she moved. Also, her heels did not click on the polished floor, which I noted as weird.
She paused inside the door, scanned the lobby, and her eyes settled on me. I rose, mostly because the chair released me, and partly because it was probably polite.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was melodic and warm. “I’m sorry to bother you. Are you here to see Sarisol?”
I blinked at her. “Yes.”
A bright smile surfaced on her face. “Oh, wonderful. I thought you might be. There’s nobody else here this early.” She extended a hand. “Josephine Fance. My father owns Harborline Interiors.”
I took the hand; her grip was gentle. “Dash. Nice to meet you.” She looked at me expectantly, and I said nothing else. Was I supposed to say I was the heir to Kallum? Or perhaps that was not what Kallum was supposed to say? My old instructor, Eldon, would teach me and then politely say I was stupid when I would forget.
“Dash,” she repeated, and gave my name a small, gracious nod. “I’m so glad to be here,” she said, and then she said it again, “so glad. You have no idea. I’ve been on the list for fourteen months. I checked twice last week to make sure they hadn’t lost me. They hadn’t.” She laughed. “And then her assistant called personally. Personally. Last Tuesday. To confirm the appointment. I cried. I am not embarrassed. I cried.”
“Fourteen months,” I said, because I felt I should say something. “Is that a lot?”
“Fourteen.” She held up a hand. “Which, for context, is nothing. There are women on her list who have been on it since they were debutantes.”
I nodded as if I had been raised in those circles, which I had been, but had spent most of the last six years pretending I had not.
“Have you met her?” Josephine asked. “Sarisol. Have you, before?”
“No.”
“Oh. Oh, you are in for a time.” She pressed a hand to her sternum. “She is, Dash, the most extraordinary person you will meet in a building. She does not work the way other designers do. She looks at you, and then she sits with you for I think it’s twenty minutes, and she asks questions that have nothing to do with what you came in for, and at the end of those twenty minutes she stands up and goes to her workroom and you don’t see her again for ten minutes, and what you receive is something that you cannot, afterward, imagine yourself in anything else.”
“That’s—” I wanted to say a lot of words you just said, but she cut me off.
“I know.” She nodded vigorously. “I know. It sounds ridiculous. I would have told you it sounded ridiculous two years ago, before I started seeing what came out of the workroom.” Another small laugh. “But you’ll see. You’ll see when she meets you. The first thing she does, the very first thing, is stop talking. She just looks. And whatever she sees, she sees. And then she begins.”
“Is it—” I tried, and tried again. “Is the result usually what people expected when they came in?”
“No,” Josephine answered without hesitation. “Almost never. That is also the point. People come in with an idea of what they want. Sarisol gives them what they should want.”
The side door opened again.
A second assistant, a young woman this time, stepped halfway through, scanned the lobby, and her eyes settled on me.
“Mister Dash? Sarisol is ready for you.”
I followed the assistant through the side door.
The transition from the lobby’s warm gold to whatever was on the other side involved a short corridor in a clinical white, lit from above by a recessed strip that ran the length of the ceiling. The corridor ended in two doors. The assistant opened the left one and gestured me through.
The room beyond had white walls, a white floor, and a single long bench of pale wood along the left wall. A coat rack stood beside the bench in brushed metal. Two further doors, both closed.
“Your coat, please.” The assistant held out a hand.
I had been hoping she would not say that.
I unbuttoned the charcoal coat slowly, and she hung the coat on the rack. “Through here, please.”
I went through.
—
The atelier was the same white as the corridor, but bigger and emptier. Two chairs sat in the center of the floor, facing each other across a meter and a half. A low table stood beside one chair, having nothing on it. The walls were empty, and the lighting threw no shadow that I could find.
The chair, blessedly, was a chair. It supported me at the angles a chair was supposed to support a person. It neither tilted nor sloped nor required me to brace.
I was reaching for my holoband when the door at the far end opened.
—
The woman who came in was perhaps in her forties, with a tan complexion and brown hair that fell loose past her shoulders. She wore something that was either a dress or a long jacket or both at once, in a deep teal fabric. The cut suggested she had designed it herself, because no one else would have made a piece that hung that specifically.
She closed the door behind her and turned to me with a warm, professional smile. “Hello! I was told by Alice dear, that you need—”
Her eyes landed on me for the first time.
She stopped.
She blinked.
The smile went somewhere else. “Oh.” Quietly. Then, half a beat later, “Oh.” She came closer. She stopped about a meter away and tilted her head.
“Hm.”
She walked a slow half-circle, ending up on my left.
“Oh!”
A second half-circle, completing the orbit, ending behind me.
“Hm?”
I sat still.
“Eh?”
She came back into my field of vision from the right, and she had the focus. Her gaze flicked across the hoodie, the seam at the shoulder, the asymmetric pocket placement, the point at the hip where the hoodie’s hem met the holster.
“Hm!”
That bad? Was I being thrown out? I tried to remember what posture a person was supposed to hold while being judged by a woman who designed clothes for governments.
She finally sat down in the chair across from me, and her gaze settled on my face for the first time.
“This is a tactical hoodie,” I said, and my voice came out tiny.
She laughed.
It was a delighted laugh, a surprised laugh. “Of course! Tactical hoodie!” She emphasized the word tactical as if it were a flavor she was tasting. “May I ask—who designed it?”
I gulped. “Me?”
She gaped. “Wait.” She rose halfway from the chair, settled, rose again, and this time stayed up. “Wait, wait, wait.” She came two steps closer and stopped. “Are—are you—”
I had no idea where this sentence was going.
“Are you the author of Master Adelaide’s Dancing Twin Moons Under Corporate Sun?”
I blinked.
I sorted backward through the catalog of recent welding crimes. There had been so many. The greenhouse-pipe disaster. The three-figure hugging composition. The one that looked like a chair that had eaten another chair. The one with the—
Oh.
The discs.
I had found two flat silver discs in the recycling center, pulled out of a holoprojector by someone who had not respected its original function, and I had found, in the same trip, a round casing that had once been part of an old stabilizer.
I had welded the discs to the frame I was already building, but I had not welded them well, because I had been tired and the angles were awkward and the discs were thin. They had ended up loose on their mount. They moved when the wind hit the sculpture.
“I might be?” I said cautiously. “The discs—the discs aren’t welded properly to the pipe, so they move, but—”
I trailed off because Sarisol sat back down and the grin that surfaced on her face was actually scary. “Oh,” she said, quietly. “Oh, you truly are the mysterious author.”
I tried to figure out what to do with my hands.
“I’m your biggest fan.”
“You what—”
“Your ideas are otherworldly.” She said the word with weight. “What a natural talent! No wonder. No wonder you designed the tactical hoodie.” She giggled briefly at the word tactical. “It all makes sense now.”
The whiplash was worse than Adelaide’s, and I had thought Adelaide’s was the ceiling. Adelaide was my sweet, bewildered neighbor. Sarisol was… whatever Sarisol was. Josephine had cried in the lobby about being on her waitlist for fourteen months.
Sarisol leaned forward, and her eyes flicked back to the Twin Moons in her memory. “Tell me,” she said. “The angles.”
“The—”
“On the Twin Moons. The discs. One faces slightly left, the other slightly down. The asymmetry. Why?“
“They’re not welded well.”
She laughed, like I had told a joke. “Of course they aren’t welded well.” She tapped a finger against her own knee. “They cannot be. If they were welded well, they would face the same direction, and then there would be no dance, would there. They would be twins in name only. The looseness is the dance. The misalignment is the moon. Yes. Yes, of course. And the corporate sun above—the round stabilizer casing, that was a stabilizer casing, no?—the indifferent geometry of corporate stability presiding over twin natural bodies that cannot quite agree on which way to look. Oh, it’s exquisite. Master Adelaide undersold it in her note. She said only that it was your average work.”
“Eh,” I wanted to run away, but I promised Alice to get clothes.
“And now this.” Sarisol’s gaze returned to the hoodie. “Tactical.”
She had not stopped enjoying the word. “The yellow,” she said.
“It—” I stopped. I had picked the yellow because I had liked it. This was the entire artistic process. Cecilia had laughed at me about it when I explained that. “I worked under constraints, you know?” I said carefully. “The hoodie has projectors. I had to improvise to make it look—passable.”
She nodded slowly. The nod said she had heard me. The nod also said she had no intention of believing me.
“Yellow,” she said, “in tactical apparel, is oppositional. Tactical color theory is dominated by absorption—black, graphite, the muted greens of corporate paramilitary. Yellow is the color of being seen. To choose yellow for a tactical garment is to refuse the entire premise of the genre. You are saying—what? You are saying that concealment is for cowards. You are saying the body in motion under threat deserves to be witnessed. You are saying—”
“I just liked the color.”
“—that the artist refuses to disappear into the violence of his environment.”
“It looked nice,” I tried.
She heard me. She went on anyway. “And the pockets. Look at the placement.” She gestured to my left. “Asymmetric. The right side, almost austere. The left side, cluttered—pocket, pocket, a small loop here, a clip there. The composition is unbalanced. Why?”
The composition was unbalanced because it had to carry twelve emitters and a small spool of mana wire, and the loop and the clip were for tools I had decided I would build later and had not yet built. I did not say any of this. I had a feeling that if I said any of this, Sarisol would interpret each item as another layer of meaning, and we would be here all day.
“I had to put things somewhere,” I said. “It is what it is.”
She sighed, the small, happy sigh of a critic. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you did.”
She looked at the seam where the hood met the body of the hoodie. “And here.”
“That’s a stress point. I reinforced the stitching.”
“The stitching is exposed.”
“It’s exposed because the seam takes load. If the stitching is hidden, you can’t inspect it.”
She put a hand to her chest. “Inspectability as aesthetic.” She said it like a phrase she was filing away for later. “Brutalist garment honesty. The seam shows its work. The work admits that it is work. The garment refuses to flatter the wearer with the illusion of seamlessness.” She closed her eyes briefly and opened them. “You are—you are not from any school I know. Are you self-taught?”
“I —”
“You are. I can tell. The choices a school would have trained out of you are exactly the choices that make this sing. The asymmetry of the pockets answers the asymmetry of the Twin Moons. The yellow answers the corporate sun. The exposed seam answers the loose weld on the discs. You are not making one piece at a time; you are building a vocabulary. I see it now. I see it across the work. Master Adelaide kept your name private, and I understand why. I understand entirely, but I will tell you, and I want you to hear me—there are people in this city who would commission you. Who would attempt to commodify what you do. They would hollow it. They would put it on the wall of an investment lobby, and they would stop seeing it within a month. You are right to refuse them. You are right to remain—what is the word? An outsider. Yes. The outsider artist. The form requires it.”
“I —” I tried, and gave up trying. “Mrs. Adelaide kept my name private.”
Sarisol shifted into a solemn nod. “I will keep your name private. Just as Master Adelaide did. You have my word. Within these walls, what you tell me does not leave. The atelier is not a place of leaks. We have professional discretion. I would not jeopardize a working relationship with an artist of your caliber by letting your identity become a topic of gossip.” She said the word as if it tasted bad. “I will not be among those who try to commission you. I will only ask, one day, when you are ready, that you allow me to sit in your studio. Nothing more.”
“Thank you,” I said weakly.
“Now,” she stood. The professional posture returned. “Let me think. You came for an event piece. Alice was very specific. Aurelia ball, premium tier, your liability index appropriate.” She waved a hand at the liability index the way one waved at a bug. “I have an idea. Not a usual idea. I will need ten minutes. Will you trust me?”
“Yes,” I said, because I had no negotiating leverage. I would not negotiate with a woman who had just diagnosed my hoodie as a manifesto.
“Good.” She smiled. “Wait outside. Paola will get you something to drink.”
—
I was returned to the small white reception, where Paola stood up from behind the bench and offered me water, sparkling water, tea, or “anything else.” I asked for water and she brought it from somewhere I did not see her go.
I drank the water and checked my holoband.
[AliceOnFire_real: DASH!! Sarisol got back to me. She says you are ‘extraordinary.’ WHAT DID YOU DO. WHAT HAPPENED. TELL ME.]
I stared at it for a second, then thumbed a reply.
[Me: I think she likes my hoodie.]
[AliceOnFire_real: YOUR HOODIE???]
[Me: Yes.]
[AliceOnFire_real: ……]
[Me: Alice are you there.]
[AliceOnFire_real: Cecilia just took my band. She says she is going to handle this. I am sorry, Dash. I tried.]
I closed the message.
Below it, unread, timestamped ten seconds earlier:
[CeciTheSamurai: Whatever Sarisol gives you, accept it. We will handle the rest. Do not negotiate.]
I closed that one too.
The water was good.
—
She came back nine minutes later.
She was carrying a garment bag, opaque, deep teal, the same color as the dress she was wearing. She set it on a small frame that Paola produced from somewhere, and she unzipped the bag with delicacy.
It was, technically, a coverall.
Long sleeves, full body, a single front zip that ran from collar to crotch, a high neck that finished just below the line of a shirt collar. The silhouette of something a mechanic, maybe Erika, would wear into a shop on a chilly morning.
The cut was severe.
The shoulders sat on the form in a slightly square line, neither narrow nor extravagant. The waist took itself in without nipping. There were pockets: two on the chest, two on the hips, and a small interior pocket on the left chest panel whose presence I noticed only because Sarisol gestured to it.
The collar was high enough that, with a thin neck-piece, Sarisol pulled one from the same garment bag, a soft band in a slightly lighter black, and a small pin at the throat.
“It is a mono,” she said. “Monosuit. Workwear silhouette, ceremonial fabric. The neck piece converts the read.” She demonstrated the collar adjustment in the air. “Without the band, you are an artist who has wandered into the ball from his studio, indifferent to the dress code, dressed in his work clothes because he is too occupied to change. With the band, you are a guest in formal attire, refusing the codes of corporate display.” She smiled.
I stared at it.
“The fabric is woven with a Syntavelli interior thread that handles wrinkle, stain, and scent. It will keep its line, and it will accept a folded sidearm without printing.” Her gaze flicked to my hip, briefly, and away. “I saw, of course. Your right side will not embarrass you. The cut is calculated for clearance. The interior pocket on the left is sized for documents, a holoband, or a reasonable number of small components. The fabric is rated for corporate event security. You will not be flagged on entry. You will not be flagged on exit.”
I had absolutely no idea what to say.
“Do not thank me yet. Try it on first. Paola will assist you. If anything is wrong, we will fix it now. I do not let work leave this atelier with corrections pending.”
I tried it on. The fabric, against my skin through the thin shirt I had on under the hoodie, was warmer than I expected. The shoulders sat. The waist sat. The trouser broke. The collar, with the band, lifted my throat into a clean line.
The right hip cleared. I tested the draw motion, and the fabric did not catch. I tested it again, and it still did not catch.
I looked, against the mirror’s evidence, like someone I was not.
Sarisol stood behind me and considered the reflection over my shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. It is correct.”
She did not ask me what I thought.
—
I changed back into the hoodie and the coat. Paola packed the mono into the same teal garment bag, with a smaller bag for the neckpiece and the pin and a folded card that was, I assumed, the care instructions or the bill.
Sarisol walked me to the door of the atelier.
“Thank you,” I said. It came out more sincere than I had meant it to. “Truly.”
She inclined her head. “It was an honor. I hope, one day, you will let me sit in your studio. I will not press.”
“I—”
“Go to your ball, Dash.” Her smile was warm.
—
Outside, the day had warmed.
I walked to the station with the garment bag over my shoulder and the coat buttoned over the hoodie and the holster, and I tried to figure out what had just happened to me, and I gave up about two blocks in.
The Schwarzstahl train back was half-empty.
The river slid past.