Gilded Ashes

The four of them froze.

Arashi twisted his head over his shoulder in a slow, uncertain motion that suggested his brain had not quite committed to believing his eyes. Keahi’s hand stopped mid-air, a piece of chili-coated something halfway to her mouth. Hikari’s grip tightened on her staff - not visibly, but the small adjustment of weight in her hand – Raizen saw it, sitting beside her and feeling the shift in her posture against his shoulder.

Raizen himself did not move.

The woman behind them was lying on the rooftop with a casualness that did not match anything else about her appearance. Her cloak was torn. Her bandages were fresh. A black mask covered the lower half of her face. The dark hair falling brushing against her shoulder was damp at the ends, looking more like sweat rather than rain, and her boots - both visible from this angle - bore the deep scuff marks of recent climbing. None of it suggested a person who had wandered up here looking for somewhere quiet to sit.

"Who da’ frick" Arashi said, "are you!?"

The woman tilted her head a few degrees. The motion was lazy, almost feline. Her eyes - visible above the mask, dark and amused - moved across the four of them in a slow, unhurried look, and then settled back on Arashi patiently.

She extended her right hand toward Raizen first, palm down. Then she paused, looked at the hand, made a small dissatisfied sound, and wiped it against the side of her cloak. The cloak was bloodier than the rest of her clothes. She wiped it again, looked at her palm and decided it was clean enough.

She extended the hand again.

"I’m Kori’s..."

She paused. Her eyes flicked sideways for half a second, the corner of her mouth lifted beneath the mask.

"...friend."

Arashi blinked.

"Kori has friends?"

"That’s a rude question."

"Sorry, he is just kidding" Keahi interrupted, throwing a death stare towards Arashi.

"It’s fine. People ask. Kori doesn’t really do friends, no. But she makes exceptions sometimes." The woman’s eyes crinkled at the corners. "I’m one of them."

Arashi looked at her hand for a moment. Then, with a really doubting look on his face, he leaned over and shook it.

"Arashi."

"Charmed."

"You look roughed up."

"I am, a tiny bit."

"Need anything? Water, food, painkillers? She’s got chili if you’re into that kind of pain." He pointed at Keahi. "I can run downstairs and grab a med kit. I’ll tell Kori when she comes back that someone swung by -" He snapped his fingers, the gesture of a person reaching for a name he had not yet been given. "- sorry, what was the name again?"

The woman’s gaze tracked the snap. She watched Arashi’s fingers for a moment with an expression Raizen could not quite read - something like amusement.

"Slushie."

Arashi’s hand remained in the air.

"...Slushie."

"Tell her Slushie swung by. She’ll know what it means. And there’s no need to bother with anything - the wounds are already treated. Bandages, antiseptic, the whole thing. I figured she’d be back by now, but I’m guessing she got held up or something."

"Yeah, no, she -" Arashi looked around the rooftop, then up at the sealed dome, then down at the streets below as though Kori might appear from any of those directions in the next ten seconds and resolve the situation for him. "She left, like, an hour ago, maybe more. Right before the petals closed - something about tracking down someone."

"Yeah," ’Slushie’ said. "I heard about that."

"Did you?"

"Mm-hm."

Arashi paused for a moment. His brain was visibly working - the small flicker of his eyes, the slight tilt of his head, the brief moment when his mouth opened to ask a follow-up question and then closed again because the question was too complicated to ask. He landed, after a few seconds, on the simplest possible version of it.

"How’d you know to come here?"

"Kori said this was the nicest roof in the eastern district."

"...She did?"

"She did."

"But this is the southern part of the district"

"Of course she gave me the address as well. I might have forgotten" Lay covered up the lie quickly.

It was an answer. Slushie’s voice carried the calm, easy conversation – she was the kind who said many things, most of which were true, and who therefore got a small grace period when the things she said happened to be lies.

Raizen watched her work. It was, he realised, the same technique he himself used. The shape of it was almost identical - the casual posture, the warm voice, the careful selection of which true detail to anchor the lie to. Kori said this was the nicest roof in the eastern district. The sentence had a Kori-shaped specificity to it that any of them, being around her for enough time, would recognise as something she might plausibly have said. The detail was the hook. The lie hung from it. By the time Arashi had finished parsing the sentence, the falsehood had already settled into the conversational background where it would not be re-examined.

Raizen had used this exact trick on Eiden, a few nights ago, in a guest house in Ukai.

Beside him, Hikari had gone very still.

She wasn’t looking at Slushie. She was looking at the rooftop’s near edge - the asphalt, the buildings, the surface details of the angled roof they were sitting on. Her staff was across her lap, hand was resting on its centre. The luminite gem at its head was, Raizen noticed, glowing very faintly.

Hikari had read something Arashi hadn’t.

"Right," Arashi was saying. "Right, that’s - okay. Yeah, makes sense. Kori knows everyone, honestly. People show up here all the time. Last year there was this guy from the western continent who came by with a falcon. Like, an actual falcon. He stayed for two days, ate everything in the kitchen, left a note that said ’thanks for the bird food,’ and Kori didn’t tell us anything about it. So..." He shrugged. "Welcome, I guess...?"

"Thank you."

"Are you sure you don’t need -"

"I’m sure."

Raizen spoke for the first time since the woman had appeared.

"What did you say your name was again?"

"Slushie."

"That’s an odd name."

"It’s a long story." Slushie’s eyes crinkled. "But we don’t really get to choose our names, do we?"

Hikari nudged Raizen after he didn’t give any answer.

The contact was light. The end of her staff, tapped against his ankle. He looked at her. She was still gazing at the rooftop’s near edge, her expression unchanged from the careful, neutral attentiveness she had been wearing all evening, but her eyes flicked sideways - toward the street below, holding the look just long enough for him to understand that she wanted him to follow it.

He followed it.

The street was wide and mostly empty – same cold lamplight, same vehicle sounds in the distance. The Wardens had drawn back to the central districts, and the local patrol cars had finished their sweeps a half an hour ago. The only motion on the pavement below was a figure walking - alone, slowly, with the long, careful gait of someone who was managing pain by controlling every step.

It was limping.

The figure crossed beneath a streetlamp, and the light caught the side of her face for a moment as she passed. Shiny white hair, partially covered by the hood of a jacket – from the Academy’s Med Wing, as far as Raizen could see she had probably been given somewhere on her way back. A few bandages were slightly visible at her shoulder, some looser ones hanging at her hip. A few more bandages along her shin, with dark spots near the centre. The same Med Wing bandages - the white, slightly woven, antiseptic-soaked field bandages that Raizen had worn after the avalanche, the same ones he had to wear for weeks after he risked his life in the most stupid way possible.

Kori. She was slowly limping home alone.

The woman lying on the rooftop was watching him with both eyes visible above her mask. She had not moved. Her hand was no longer extended. Her smile had not changed. But the look in her eyes had - the lazy amusement of the introduction was gone, and what was there now was a sharper attention.

The mask shifted slightly with her deep breath.

Below them, Kori reached the door of the house.

She paused on the porch. She looked up.

Her one visible eye found Raizen’s at the rooftop’s edge – but the angle wasn’t right for her to also see the woman who named herself Slushie, laying next to them on the roof.

She did not speak.

She did not gesture.

She just looked at him, for the longest second of the night so far, and without saying anything, she opened the door and went inside.

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