The gear was still laid out on the blanket where I’d left it, the coilgun, the sword, the revolver, the hoodie, and I’d gotten as far as deciding to actually pack it when the other thought caught up with me.
I was going to be on the Moon.
The twins lived on the Moon. Or their family did, their whole Lunaris everything did, and I was about to drop out of the sky onto their doorstep for two days without a word, which felt like the thing you told people, so before I could talk myself into it being weird, I pulled Ceci’s contact and threw the call at the holo-tv so I’d have both hands free for the bag.
Her room came up on the wall. She was cross-legged on the end of her bed, and the octopus was next to her, propped upright against the headboard with its eight arms flopped out either side and its stupid little tie squared, and Ceci had clearly been the one to square it.
“Dash.” She was smiling before I said anything. “I’m glad you called.”
I picked the hoodie up off the blanket and started folding it. “Did you see Alice sent the picture? Of you and the—” I tipped my head at the octopus behind her. “That one.”
Ceci looked at me. She kept looking at me, no expression moving on her at all, and then she reached over and adjusted the octopus’s tie a millimeter it did not need. “She sent it to the group chat.”
“Right,” I told the hoodie, feeling like an idiot. “Yeah, of course you know.”
“I like it,” she said, as if that settled the question. “So. Was that why you called? To tell me my sister has bad framing?”
“No.” I put the hoodie in the bag and made myself keep moving, because it was easier to say into a duffel than into her face. “There’s a shuttle. Cheap one, weekend fare. I’m going up Saturday, back Sunday night. My cousin booked me a tutor at the Kallum library. I want to learn another enchanting technique while I’ve got my soul rested.”
“That’s a great opportunity.” She said it without hesitation, and her hand came to rest on the octopus’s head. “You know Alice focused herself over the fire. Big, flashy spells, the higher the temperature the better, right? I put all of mine into powering me. It’s slower to look at and it doesn’t throw sparks, but it’s powerful. Do that, like us. Pick the thing that’s actually yours and feed it.”
“That’s the plan.” I checked the coilgun’s magazines, four of them, translucent, the enchanted slugs sitting in their runes. “Anyway, I figured I should tell you two since you’re—”
“I know why you called.” She tilted her head, and the smile came back, smaller and more amused. “And no. We can’t come with you.”
I set the magazine down. “Am I that transparent?”
She grinned and nodded, no words wasted on it. “We’d have said yes,” she went on, “except we’re stuck. There’s a dinner on Saturday. We have to sit through a dinner with Barry.”
I ran the name and came up with nothing. “Who’s Barry?”
Ceci let out a breath through her nose, long-suffering, and pulled the octopus a few inches closer along the blanket. “Alice won’t use his real name, so now it’s stuck in my head too. Bartholomew.” She weighted it as if it cost her something. “Bartholomew Jeup the Third. He’s the man we’re both betrothed to.” She smoothed one of the octopus’s arms flat. “Don’t call him Barry, though. He insists on Bartholomew.”
“Oh,” I said.
Something turned over low in my stomach, and I did not have a name for it either, which put me in good company with Alice.
I stood there with a coilgun magazine in one hand and looked at the wall where Ceci was, and I thought about the beach like an hour and a half ago, the copper light and Alice standing up out of the water with her hair on her cheek, and the thing that had gone through my chest and left. And now this one, the same shape, over Ceci.
Both of them.
They looked identical, and they were not remotely the same person, and I was apparently falling for whichever one was in front of me, which couldn’t be how it worked. And there was still Erika somewhere underneath all of it, unanswered.
“—so you’d have to be on the Moon a different weekend,” Ceci was saying, and I caught the back half of it. “But you should meet Dad. Next time you’re up. He’d love to see you, he actually likes the ones who work, and you won’t shut up about work.” She had the octopus fully in her lap now. “Promise me you’ll come by Lunaris some other time.”
“Yeah. For sure.” I picked the sword up off the blanket and turned it over, checking the sheath, and I wasn’t really in the room for it.
“Dash.”
Her tone had changed. I looked up. “Yeah?”
She was watching me the way she’d watched me across the assay table. “Did you exercise?” she said. “We talked about it at Kraftwerkhaus. I made Alice text you about the membership.”
I put the sword down and became very interested in the zipper of the bag. “I’ve been busy.”
Ceci held the octopus and looked at me and did not fill the silence for me, and I ran out of zipper. Then she sighed, the low one, the one she used on Alice, and settled the plushie against her chest.
“Look. I’m not your wife, and I wouldn’t nag you even if I were.” Her chin came up. “But your baseline matters more than the points do. You saw the numbers. Two whole attribute points bought you ten percent, and that ten percent was over your body, not magically got better by the System. Attributes are a multiplier, Dash. You can’t multiply nothing. And it’s cheapest to build now, at a low level, while the floor’s still soft. Every point you wait, it costs more in effort.”
I nodded and felt the heat come up my neck. “Okay. Yeah. You’re right. I’ll go.”
“When?”
I gulped and thought about it out loud. “Next Thursday? I’ve got the Moon over the weekend, and then Monday Dewi’s going to be poking around in my soul, so—”
Ceci shook her head slowly, and I watched her arrive at a decision I already didn’t like. “Right. I see I have to do this the Alice way.” She sat up straighter. “Go now.”
I blinked at her. “Huh?”
“Go out right now and get a membership at the nearest gym. I’ll send you a regimen and a set of sword drills to run while you’re up there.” She said it as if it were already settled, and I just hadn’t caught up. “Tonight.”
“Like—now now?” The half-packed bag was open on the bed between me and the door, and there was a six a.m. alarm sitting on the other side of it. “But tomorrow I’ve got the—”
“You’re doing it for yourself, Dash. Not for me.” She pulled the octopus in tight against her chest and looked at me over the top of it, both huge plush eyes and both of hers. “Of course, you can say no,” she said. “But it would make me sad.”
My heart stopped. “Ceci. What are you doing?”
She broke. The composure went all at once, and she laughed, bright and helpless, folding forward over the octopus. “It works on Alice,” she managed. “Every time. You have no idea how often that thing works on Alice.” She got herself back to level, mostly. “Come on. You need to start. It’s only ever hard before you start; once you go once, the next one’s easy.”
“Fine,” I said and was trying to resuscitate my heart. “Fine. I’ll find a gym.”
“Good.” She set the octopus back against the headboard and squared its tie again, which was apparently going to be a thing now. “Oh, before you go. The headmistress talks about the Aurelia bust, and she’s excited about it. Dewi will probably say something on Monday, so act surprised.”
My heart stopped again. Yeah. This thing. “I’ll be shocked,” I managed.
“Be shocked.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Land safely on the Moon. Call your mother when you’re down; she’ll want to know.”
I rolled my eyes. “Everyone keeps telling me to call my mother.”
“Because you won’t,” Ceci said, and cut the call.
The wall went back to being a wall. The octopus went with it. I sat there on the end of the bed with a half-packed duffel and one sword still loose on the blanket, and the salt still in my hair from a beach.
“Huh,” I said to the empty room. “I guess I need to find the closest gym.”
—
The map put a gym about a kilometer away, a fifteen-minute walk if I took it slow, which I was going to, because I’d just come off a beach and I wasn’t sure how Ceci convinced me to go.
Probably those eyes.
I did not own gym clothes. I owned tactical gear, an Aurelia school uniform that resized itself, and the wreckage of whatever I’d grown out of, and after a minute of digging, I came up with a pair of shorts that still fit and a shirt that mostly did. I left the coilgun and the revolver on the bed. The sword came with me, because the sword always came with me, and because Ceci had promised drills.
Comma was still on the couch, band up, shell presumably somewhere in her shirt pocket.
“You’re going out again,” she said to the band.
“Gym.”
Her eyes came down over the top of the band, tracked the shorts, the shirt, the sword, and went back up. “In those.”
“Yep.”
“Okay,” she said, in the tone of a person remembering something for Mom, and I slipped out before she could develop it into a theory.
The Central district at night was the opposite of Barani in every way that counted. No sand, no ground-rings strung down a strip, no man working through a sandwich the length of his arm. Just estates standing far enough apart to prove they could afford the gaps. We couldn’t, but we could pretend.
I almost walked past the gym.
There was no sign, or there was, but it was set flush into the dark stone beside the door with a font so small and so unlit that I almost missed it even if I was looking for it:
THE CENTRAL GYM.
It didn’t proudly announce who sponsored it, or which amazing corporation ran it, or it had a logo, nor glass onto the street to show off the people inside sweating expensively. The whole facade of it was closed, quiet, a frontage that could’ve passed for a private residence, or a very discreet bank.
Then the door finally recognised a person was standing in front of it and opened without a sound, and the noise of the district cut off behind me like it had been switched off, and I understood the flex.
They’d bought the silence.
In a city where you could hear four neighbors and a transit line, someone had spent a fortune to make a room where you heard nothing you weren’t meant to.
The air was cool and still, and smelled faintly of stone and something green. The light was low and warm and came from nowhere I could point at. Dark wood, dark stone, plants standing in troughs, a long counter, and past it a hush I could feel in my teeth.
A woman sat behind the counter with her band up, both thumbs going, popping something, a grid of little bubbles that burst in soft colors and refilled from the bottom. She got another row before she clocked me, and then the band went face-down on the counter and she came up with a smile that had clearly been through training.
“Good evening. How can I help?”
“Hi.” I stopped a polite distance from the counter. “Can I apply for membership?”
“Of course.” She reached for the holo-screen folded into the counter’s surface, and it bloomed up under her hand, and she’d gotten as far as a first field when I made myself ask the thing I’d been turning over the whole walk.
“Before that, is there anything, if I’m... a VIP?”
She straightened. Her hands came off the screen. “Homeowner’s VIP, you mean,” she said, and it was not quite a question. “May I verify your identity?” She turned a reader on the counter to face me, a flat black pad with a single amber ring.
I put my band to it.
It thought about it. It thought about it long enough that I ran through the reasons it might not work, the corrupted registry, the Sentinel mess, the whole conspiracy that had once had me in a cell for the crime of being a Kallum, and then, underneath all that, a smaller and stupider thought surfaced: the art.
Every hideous sculpture I’d built for Mrs. Adelaide, every one she’d hailed to her friends as a masterpiece of corporate commentary, keeping the old woman and her whole circle warm on the Kallum household when the HA’s VIP votes came around.
The reader beeped. The ring turned green.
“Confirmed. Welcome.” The smile changed into something a little more careful. “As a VIP, you’re free to visit any time, and the basic floor is yours at no charge. Anything higher-tier, the system-user machines, the calibrated rigs, runs a fee per machine, depending on the rig. Supplements at the bar are at cost. A personal trainer is at a cost. And, I almost forgot, the spa amenities are complimentary, all of them.”
I blinked.
That was a lot of words that all meant free, and I did not have the room in my head right then to hold all of them.
I knew Comma vanished for whole afternoons and came home smelling of chlorine, so the pool I’d sort of accounted for. There was a restaurant we sometimes ate at. There was, apparently, a spa, which my family had access to, and which I had not known about until this exact second. At some point I was going to have to sit down and find out what being a VIP actually meant, because it kept turning out to mean more than the last time I’d checked.
Later. I set it next to everything else.
There was one thing I wanted settled first. I thought back to Kraftwerkhaus, and the assay, and the seven hundred credits I’d paid specifically so my body’s numbers wouldn’t get shipped off to the Palistra-Scavantis Attribute Network to be sold back to me as an advertisement.
“What’s your data policy?” I asked. “Where does my information go?”
Instead of answering, she slid a single sheet of warm printer paper across the counter and turned it to face me. One page. I learned my lesson with Scavantis and read it twice.
I’d braced to sign my numbers away if I wanted free gym, the Kraftwerkhaus trade all over again. This was the reverse. The gym was signing a non-disclosure to me, my presence, my usage, my numbers, all of it sealed, and in the event of any breach the gym held itself liable for damages, a minimum of ten million.
Ten million. The floor. The number they’d pay me if a receptionist so much as mentioned I’d been here.
I used to live in a world where that sentence was normal, where the whole corpo machinery of the wealthy bent quietly around the assumption that you must never be inconvenienced or observed, and I’d forgotten.
I… just forgot how smooth it was, and how little it had to do with me, and how it didn’t quite fit anymore. I’d worn shorts that didn’t fit to get here. Now I was worth ten million in liability just for standing at a counter.
I didn’t love it. I signed it anyway, as if I were doing it in a dream, my thumb on the line before I’d finished being surprised.
“Would you like a personal trainer for your session?” she asked, taking the sheet back.
I nodded, because that was the entire reason Ceci had ejected me from my own bedroom.
She checked the screen. “Hector’s free right now. Fifty sols for a three-quarter-hour session—that’s the at-cost rate for you.” She looked up. “Shall I put you with him?”
“Yeah. Please.”
“Wonderful. If you’ll give me a moment to bring him up.” She was already tapping. “Feel free to wait at the bar.”
The bar ran along one wall, dark and lit like a good lounge, and I went and sat at the end of it with the sword across my knees, nothing to do but watch people.
Nobody here was sweating. Nobody here was performing. Two men in soft clothes leaned into a slow conversation over something glowing. A woman laughed at something and put her hand flat on the counter. Somewhere behind me a weight settled onto a rack with a sound the room swallowed almost before it happened.
They were just talking. Just being here, in the quiet they’d paid for, enjoying their evening, and none of them looked like they’d ever run around a mine until something tried to eat them.
I waited for Hector.