Author's note: Today we return to Yuki, but only for this chapter. Next time, we'll fight a boss! If you have any ideas how it can go, let me please know!
Yuki was nervous...
The AI cab whispered through Neo-District traffic on a thread of soft jazz Yuki had absolutely not requested.
She suspected it had read her vitals; the polite little dashboard glow had pulsed once when she’d buckled in, like a doctor tutting, and prescribed something soothing.
It wasn’t working.
Yuki stared at her reflection in the tinted window and tried not to recognize herself.
The bomber jacket was too short. The skirt was too short. The belt had, she counted, three chains, two charms, one small jingling thing she could not for the life of her identify, and altogether too much.
The flower clip in her hair tilted slightly off-axis every time she moved her head, and she’d already adjusted it forty-six times since the cab started moving.
She had been counting; she’d stopped at twenty-two and started a new count for the second leg of the trip.
She tugged the jacket’s oversized sleeve down over her wrist. It rolled right back up. The sleeves had a personality of their own, and that personality was cute and uncooperative.
“Okay,” she whispered to the window. “Okay, okay, okay. It’s just a club. Phèdre said club. Clubs are—clubs are—a documented urban phenomenon dating back to— actually, the etymology of the word—focus, Yuki.“
She pressed her fingertips to the cool glass.
Outside, the city flowed past in long ribbons of light. Holosigns flickered above shopfronts in three scripts at once, advertising things she didn’t recognize, and one was a brand of bubble tea she now desperately wanted instead of going to a club. The cab turned onto a wider boulevard, and the noise climbed even through the soundproofing, bass lines bleeding from somewhere ahead, the hum of crowds, a vendor cart’s loudspeaker barking something cheerful.
[Arrival in 30 seconds. Please ensure your belongings are with you.]
“Right. Yes. Belongings.” Yuki patted herself. Phone. ID. Lip gloss Phèdre had texted her to bring. No notebook, the message had specified, with a winking face. She had not brought a notebook. She had jotted a few facts about the neighborhood onto her phone, which was not a notebook and therefore did not count.
The cab pulled up to the curb. The door slid open.
The street hit her like a wave.
Light, sound, perfume, fried food, more light, music thudding from a doorway thirty meters down, somebody laughing too loud, somebody else calling a name into the crowd. Yuki stepped onto the sidewalk and immediately stepped back into the shelter of the still-open cab door, blinking.
“Oh,” she said, tiny. “There’s—there’s a lot.”
A car horn blared. Three girls in matching iridescent boots brushed past her, giggling, leaving a cloud of citrus perfume. A street drone hovered overhead, projecting an ad for something pink.
Yuki touched her hair clip.
Adjusted it. Let it go. Adjusted it again.
[Cab departing. Please clear the door zone.]
“Right. Sorry. Sorry—” She skittered out of the way. The cab whispered off, leaving her on the curb with her knees not quite agreeing with each other.
“Mon cœur.” The voice came from behind her, languid and amused, and Yuki turned so fast she nearly took out the flower clip with her own shoulder.
Phèdre was leaning against the low wall outside a bistro on the corner, one ankle crossed over the other in an unbothered way.
She wore a slip dress in a shade of red so deep it was almost nothing, like wine left out overnight, like the inside of something carefully sealed. The hem cut high on one side. The neckline cut low everywhere else. A long black coat hung off her shoulders; a single thin chain glinted at her throat. No jewels.
Phèdre smiled. “There you are,” she said, pushing off the wall and crossing to her in three steps. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d been kidnapped by a footnote.”
“I was—the cab—I’m on time.”
“You are exactly on time. C’est parfait.” Phèdre’s eyes flicked once down the outfit, then back up, and the smile sharpened into something approving. “Et regarde-toi. Look at you. I knew the jacket would suit you.” She reached out, lightly, and adjusted the flower clip half a centimeter and let her hand fall again.
Yuki’s face went hot. “I keep—I keep moving it wrong.”
“You keep being nervous. The clip is fine.”
“I am very nervous.”
“Évidemment.” Phèdre’s mouth quirked. “Come, then. We walk.”
She didn’t take Yuki’s arm. She simply turned and started walking, and Yuki had to skip half a step to catch up. Halfway down the block, Yuki found her voice. “Phèdre.”
“Mm.”
“Remind me. Just—just one more time. Why am I doing this?”
Phèdre didn’t slow. She didn’t even look over. She tilted her head toward Yuki and said, “Because you walked into a labyrinth, ma chérie, and I walked in with you. And we said one night, real club, real dancing, no notebook. You shook on it.” She smiled. “Metaphorically. You squeaked. I counted that as binding.”
“I didn’t—I didn’t squeak—”
“You squeaked twice.”
Yuki puffed out her cheeks indignantly. Phèdre glanced over at last and her smile turned warm in the dangerous way. “Adorable.”
“I am protesting.“
“I see that. Continue. It does nothing.” She returned her gaze forward. “We are almost there.”
Yuki deflated, cheeks subsiding. She trotted to keep pace.
The club’s he bass was first, a low deep pulse rolling along the sidewalk through the soles of her shoes. Then the light: a slow violet wash leaking up the wall of an alley.
Then the line.
The line was long. It curled out of the entrance, down the sidewalk, and around a corner, sequins and leather and sheer fabrics, all of them in various stages of pretending they weren’t cold.
Yuki stopped.
“Oh. Oh, that’s—that’s a lot of—”
Phèdre kept walking.
“Phèdre,” Yuki hissed, scampering after her. “Phèdre, the line—”
Phèdre kept walking.
“We can’t just—there’s—there’s a system—”
“There is a system.” Phèdre’s heels clicked steadily on. “I’m the system.”
She walked past every person in the line.
Yuki, mortified, kept her eyes resolutely on Phèdre’s back and tried very hard to be invisible, which was difficult in a glossy white-and-lavender bomber jacket with sleeves that kept catching the violet light.
At the front, two velvet ropes. Behind the ropes, a mountain in a black T-shirt with an earpiece and the expression of a man who had ended several arguments today.
He looked at Phèdre.
Something passed between them that Yuki couldn’t parse. Just a small, mutual recognition. The bouncer’s chin moved a quarter of an inch downward.
The rope unclipped.
Phèdre stepped through. Yuki, suddenly and acutely aware that the rope was probably not going to be held open for long, scurried in after her.
The doorway swallowed them in heat and bass and the smell of something pleasant and electric, and Yuki’s eyes hadn’t finished adjusting before her hand had decided, all on its own, to find a fistful of Phèdre’s coat sleeve. She didn’t grab. She just closed her fingers lightly on the fabric, the way a small child held a parent’s coat in a crowd.
Phèdre noticed instantly, but she didn’t comment, didn’t tease, didn’t even glance down. She just adjusted her stride, gentler, calibrated for the small frightened historian attached to her sleeve, and led them inside.
The inside was a different climate.
Bodies, stage lights and the warm fug of perfume layered over perfume; then the bass. Yuki blinked rapidly, trying to convince her eyes to find shapes in the violet-and-pink wash. Silhouettes resolved slowly: a long, curving bar to the right, a sunken dance floor straight ahead, alcoves with low couches tucked into the walls.
Phèdre cut a path toward the bar without looking back. She didn’t need to. Yuki was a small persistent gravitational pull at her sleeve.
The bartender, a tall person with cute cheekbones, saw Phèdre coming, and a glass was already in their hand before she’d reached the counter. “Mon trésor,” Phèdre said warmly. “Two of the usual. The slow one. She is a beginner.”
“I am not a—beginner at what—”
“At everything tonight, mon cœur.” Phèdre slid an elbow onto the bar. “Stand still. Breathe. The bass will not bite you.”
“It might.”
“Mm. Well. If it does, I will scold it.”
Yuki opened her mouth to argue with that on biological grounds, remembered she was holding a stranger’s coat sleeve in a nightclub, and closed it again.
The bartender slid two short glasses across the counter, one pale gold, with a single curl of citrus peel doing a small, dignified swim. Phèdre lifted hers, considered the light through it, and clinked the rim gently against Yuki’s.
“À toi, ma savante. Sip. Do not gulp. This one bites back if you rush it.”
Yuki sipped.
It tasted like citrus and a warm spice she couldn’t place, and underneath all of it a small, bright heat that went straight to the corners of her mouth. She made an involuntary face. Phèdre watched her with patient delight. Yuki sipped again, more cautiously, and made a better face.
Phèdre’s smile widened. “There. You see. The world is full of small revelations.”
“It’s—actually it’s quite—there’s something in the bottom note that’s almost—”
“Drink, ma chérie. Lecture later.”
Yuki drank.
Phèdre’s gaze flicked over her shoulder at someone two stools down, a woman in a silver suit, cheekbones lit cool by the bar’s underglow. A small acknowledgment passed between them. Phèdre tilted her head towards Yuki. “One moment. Don’t move.”
“I—”
“One. Moment.” She touched the back of Yuki’s hand with two fingertips, and then she unfolded herself off the bar and crossed three steps to lean down to the woman, murmuring something in low French that was clearly not meant for Yuki’s ears.
Yuki turned back to her glass.
The bass shifted into a new track. The floor erupted into a fresh round of cheering. Someone behind her laughed too loud. Yuki was concentrating very hard on the curl of citrus peel in her glass, which was now slowly rotating, when a shoulder bumped into hers.
“Oh—sorry—”
“No worries, sweetheart.”
The voice was male, too close. Yuki turned her head. He was leaning his elbow on the bar beside hers, taller than her by a head, vaguely pretty, glass in one hand, eyes already doing a slow inventory of her jacket.
“That’s a hell of an outfit,” he said. “You here alone?”
“Oh—no—I’m—my friend is—” She gestured vaguely. Phèdre was four meters away, half-turned, in conversation. Not visible from this angle.
“I see.” He smiled. “Lemme buy you the next one.”
“Oh, no, that’s—that’s very—actually, the etymology of the word treat in this context comes from—I mean—no thank you, that’s—”
“C’mon.” His hand landed on her elbow. “Just one drink.”
The hand didn’t leave when she shifted. “I really, I’m okay, I’m with someone, I—”
The hand stayed.
“— I should—”
“Excuse-moi.”
The voice came from just behind Yuki’s shoulder. The man looked up.
Phèdre was there, and she was smiling, the smile that had once made three guards reconsider their life choices in a Grandmaster’s vault. Her hand settled lightly on the back of Yuki’s neck, at the choker.
“You have,” Phèdre said sweetly, in English, “approximately two seconds to remove your hand from my partner, chéri. Two is generous. I would not waste them.”
The man’s hand left Yuki’s elbow as if it had been burned. “Hey, I didn’t—I didn’t know she was—”
“Évidemment.” Phèdre’s smile sharpened. “Now you do. Allez. Va-t’en.“
He went.
Phèdre did not watch him go. Her eyes were already on Yuki, scanning her in a single quick pass —elbow, face, hands—checking for damage as a healer. They were not in Rimelion though. “Ma chérie.”
“I’m okay—I’m fine—I just—”
“Ah.” Phèdre’s hand stayed light on the back of her neck. “Move with me. Just here.”
She steered her, and somehow Yuki was no longer at the open edge of the bar but tucked in toward the wall, with Phèdre’s hip between her and the room. It happened so quickly and without comment that Yuki didn’t realize what had been done until it was done.
Phèdre lifted her glass again as if nothing had happened. “Drink, mon cœur.”
“Phèdre—”
“Drink. Then we discuss.”
Yuki drank. The bright heat at the corners of her mouth did something to her chest this time, or maybe that was something else. She stared at Phèdre’s collarbone because looking at her face was, suddenly, slightly too much.
“Thank you,” she said in a small voice.
“Mm.” Phèdre swirled her glass. “Nothing to thank me for. Men like that one do not survive contact with me. It is a small public service.” She glanced sideways. “You did very well.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You did not apologize to him for his hand on your arm, ma savante. That is something. That is, in fact, a great deal. We will work on the rest.”
“What rest—”
“Later.” Phèdre set her glass down with a soft click. “First—the cure for being shaken, ma chérie, is to move. Come.”
“Oh—no, no, no, I can’t—I really cannot—I have documented evidence that I cannot dance, there are witnesses—”
Phèdre just smiled.
“At my friend’s wedding, I knocked over an entire—”
“Yuki,” Phèdre had extended her hand. It was just an offered hand, palm up, half lit by a violet wash from the dance floor. Her face was patient and amused, which somehow made it harder to refuse than if she had actually pulled.
Yuki put her hand into it.
She regretted it three seconds later, when Phèdre had walked her down the two shallow steps onto the sunken floor and the bass was now directly in her sternum. The crowd opened around them in a small, respectful curve. Yuki’s hair clip moved entirely on its own.
She adjusted it. Adjusted it again. Adjusted it a third time.
“Ma chérie. The clip is fine.”
“The clip is very much not fine; the clip is—”
“Look at me.”
Yuki looked.
Phèdre had not let go of her hand. She was standing close, closer than was strictly necessary. “You are going to be terrible at this,” she said gently.
“I know—”
“That is correct. You are going to be terrible. And then you are going to stop counting. And then you are going to be less terrible. This is the lesson. This is all of it.”
“I’m not counting.”
“You are counting. I can see it in your eyebrows.”
“That’s not—eyebrows can’t—”
“They can on you.” Phèdre’s free hand found her hip. “Here. I lead. You follow. You are very good at following, ma chérie. Like a labyrinth.”
“That was different—”
“It was the same.”
It was not quite dancing, the first thirty seconds. Not on Yuki’s part. On Yuki’s part it was a careful negotiation between her feet and her brain, which had drawn up several conflicting itineraries and refused to ratify any of them. She tripped over her own ankle. Apologized. Stepped on Phèdre’s foot. Apologized. Hit a stranger with her elbow and apologized so profusely the stranger laughed and waved her off.
Phèdre, through all of it, simply held her hand and her hip and waited. “Stop counting, ma chérie.”
“I’m—”
“The music is doing the math for you. You only have to be in it.”
“I don’t know what that means—”
“You do.”
And the maddening thing, the thing Yuki would think about later, in the cab, in the morning, in three days while she was supposed to be reading a folklore compendium, was that she did know what it meant.
She didn’t have a word for it, which was alarming for a historian.
She felt it in her chest, where the bass was sitting, and in her hand, which Phèdre was still holding, and at her hip, where Phèdre’s palm rested, and she, slowly, stopped counting.
Her shoulders dropped half an inch. Her feet just moved.
She wasn’t good. She wasn’t even decent. But she was in it, suddenly, small and slightly out of breath, looking up into Phèdre’s face, and Phèdre’s smile. “Voilà,” Phèdre said softly. “There she is.”
Yuki couldn’t answer. Her chest was feeling something sophisticated she only read about.
Two songs later, or maybe three, the track slowed. Phèdre, without comment, drew Yuki in by the hand she was still holding until Yuki’s forehead was nearly at her collarbone, and she settled her hand at the small of Yuki’s back, and they swayed.
Yuki, whose face was hot, whose feet hurt, whose flower clip was somehow still in place, leaned her cheek against the soft fabric of Phèdre’s coat lapel.
She thought, and she knew she was thinking it, and she knew she would never, ever say it out loud:
I kind of, sort of, actually… like this.