Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

Kori sat down on the couch and didn't move for a while.

The Med Wing jacket was still on her shoulders, the cuffs stained at the wrists. Her left palm throbbed under its bandage in a slow, steady rhythm that matched her pulse. The cut from catching Lay's blade had needed five stitches and a layer of synthetic skin to seal properly. She didn't accept when Osamu offered to heal her with Eon – he was exhausted enough, and it took her a bit until she got back on her feet again, with dizziness and other side effects the Eon healing usually had. She figured she'd heal faster with normal bandages, but even with the bandages holding everything in place, she could feel the wound complaining whenever she flexed her fingers. The shoulder, the hip, the shin - all of them were managed. The hand was the one she'd have to baby for a few days.

She looked at it.

She looked at it for a long time.

What in the world was that?

The question arrived in her head without a particular form. It wasn't a thought she could finish into a sentence or a question towards herself. It was just… Confusion.

That. What Lay was. What the fight had been. What the woman with no signature, abnormally small breasts – if she had any at all, a brass canteen of hibiscus slushie, and the manners of a regular at a wine bar had actually been doing on a Neoshima rooftop on the third-day phenomenon.

She rolled her shoulders. The bandages held, and she didn't feel any form of pain this time.

Kori let out a long breath. The pieces drifted up on their own: The backhand. The mantis-climb up the side of the tall building. The harness clicks she had not been able to localise the first three times she heard them. The cloak vacuum-tight against a body that should not have looked the way it did. The slap she'd never quite recovered from. The slushie. The handless hug, with her own knife angled across the back of her neck and Lay's lips warm against her ear. The casual way Lay had stepped off the roof at the end like she'd remembered an errand. The hand gestures she'd made - three fingers down, then a knuckle facing her, then the middle three fingers all extended up - that had meant something Kori didn't speak.

The petals.

Kori made a small irritated sound.

If Alteea had left the damn things open, the fight would not have come close to a draw. Kori had been operating with the phenomenon's amplification for the first half of the engagement, and the moment the dome closed, every amplification channel she had access to had snapped back to baseline output.

Alteea panicked. Alteea always panicked when she didn't have direct eyes on a problem, and the petals were the worst version of her panicking - the city's biggest, slowest, most expensive way of saying "I don't know what's going on, so nobody else gets to either". Kori had been telling her about this for a decade. Alteea always nodded thoughtfully and did the exact same thing the next time it actually mattered.

It would have been funny, in a different mood.

She let her head fall back against the couch.

The thing underneath the irritation was colder, and she had been letting it sit for a few minutes now because she didn't quite want to look at it directly.

The woman had no Eon signature.

None. Not a faint one, not a flickering one, not the residue trace that even a fully-suppressed channel left behind in the air around the body. Kori's whole career had been built on reading those signatures. Her Chasmis, her knives, her instincts - every tool she had assumed the opposite person would be visible in the way every other living thing was visible. Lay had broken that assumption inside the first ten seconds of contact, and Kori had spent the rest of the fight calibrating against a broken instrument that wasn't measuring what it needed to measure.

She didn't have a category for what Lay was.

That was the part that bothered her. Not the loss - they hadn't lost. Not the wounds – they would heal in a bit. Not even the cocky dismissal of her name, which had stung in the moment and now seemed almost charming in retrospect. The bothering part was clear and specific: she had met a body that operated at her own combat tier and produced no readable Eon. Her training had not prepared her for that, her tools could not adjust to it, and her understanding of the world did not currently contain a slot it could fit into.

Tomorrow she would talk to Alteea. Tomorrow she would talk to Osamu. Tomorrow she would visit the Med Wing and have someone look at her hand again properly, then she would start the long, careful work of adjusting everything for whatever the woman had been.

Tonight she just wanted to sit on the couch.

The trapdoor at the top of the stairs opened. She heard Arashi's voice before she heard his footsteps.

"- but she dropped off the side of the building, Keahi, the side, not down the stairs, and you're telling me that's normal -"

Keahi shushed him.

"What."

"She just got home. Look at her."

"I'm looking at her. I've been looking at her, I know she got home, that's why I'm talking, that's the point -"

Keahi nudged Arashi so hard he hit the wall next to the stairs.

They reached the bottom of the stairs. Arashi's volume dropped by about a third when he saw the bandages, which for Arashi was as close to silence as he got.

"...Hey. You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You look like you just escaped from hell."

"Thank you."

He came over and sat on the floor in front of the couch with the casual disrespect he had been demonstrating since he was nine. Keahi took the chair across from her. Both of them watched her for a moment, waiting.

"How was the night?" Kori asked.

Arashi threw a guilty look towards Keahi and wasn't able to hide a smile. "Eventful, let's say"

Then he launched.

Kori let him. She let the whole thing wash over her - the rooftop, the closed dome, the wait, the conversation, the woman who had appeared behind them on the roof. She let Arashi describe the bandages, the cloak, the brass canteen, the casual posture, the lazy speech, the way the woman had dropped off the side of the building when she finally decided to leave. She let Keahi correct him in small quiet places: no, she wiped her hand twice before she shook it. No, the mask covered the lower half, not just the mouth. No, she said "Kori said this was the nicest roof," not "Kori told me about this place." Both of them giving her a witness statement they didn't know they were giving her.

When they finished, Kori didn't move for a moment.

"What did she tell you her name was."

Arashi glanced at Keahi.

"Slushie," he said.

Kori closed her eyes.

It took a few seconds for the entire shape of it to assemble in her head. The slushie was the snack Kori had made for Lay personally - out of the woman's own canteen, with the woman's own tea, on a rooftop where the two of them had stopped a fight to negotiate the existence of a frozen drink. The name was a private joke between them. The kind of joke that doesn't survive being explained, because the whole point of the joke is that only the two people inside it know what it means. Lay had used it as her alias with the kids because she had wanted Kori to know - the second she heard it - that Lay had been here. In this house. On this roof. With Arashi, Keahi, Hikari, and Raizen at conversational distance.

She had come straight from the fight to deliver the message.

Kori opened her eyes.

"Anything else."

"Oh, yeah. She said if you wanted to find her, she'd be at the Maw."

Kori didn't show much - a slight tightening at the corner of her mouth, the small adjustment of her good hand on the couch cushion - but Arashi caught it anyway, because Arashi had grown up in this house and had spent thirteen years learning to read the things Kori didn't show.

"What does that mean?"

"It means she's... An even more interesting individual than I thought"

"Okay, but what is it."

"A place."

"Helpful."

"It's not a place you need to know about yet."

He let it go, the way he had learned to let things go when Kori used that voice. Keahi watched her for a moment longer, with careful attention. Then she stood up.

"You want anything?"

"Tea. But not hibiscus."

"...Why not hibiscus."

"Just not."

"Okay."

Keahi went to the kitchen. Arashi stayed on the floor, looking at her with the wide-open patient expression he wore when he was about to ask something he wasn't sure he was allowed to ask. Thankfully, he didn't ask it - he just watched her.

Kori watched the staircase.

The trapdoor was still slightly open at the top. Hikari and Raizen were still up there, probably. The cohort she had raised - her two strays, plus the ones that Takeshi had handed her - had spent ten minutes alone on a rooftop with the most dangerous person Kori had met in years, and the only reason they were all still breathing was that the dangerous person had decided to spare them.

That was not protection.

That was… Something else – either Luck, either a well-made strategy.

Kori sat with that for a moment, staring absently at the floor.

She was not going to leave them alone again.

Kori got up slowly. Her bandages tightened, left hand throbbing. She walked across the living room, past Arashi, and stopped at the bottom of the staircase. She looked up at the open trapdoor. The aurora colours had reached the inside of the attic now, painting soft bands of rose and blue across the angled ceiling. Hikari and Raizen were not visible from this angle. She could hear nothing from up there.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs in the warm spill of auroral light, the bandaged Phalanx with the worst hand she had been dealt in months, and she watched the trapdoor in silence.

The Maw could wait.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!