Gilded Ashes

The door clicked shut.

Below them, the house went quiet. No footsteps on the stairs, no movement in the living room, no Kori-shaped noise of any kind beyond the brief sound of the front door’s mechanism re-engaging. She had walked inside and stopped wherever the first chair was. Raizen knew the layout of the home well enough to map her movements through the silence - the foyer, two steps, the couch...

He slowly stood up. The motion was reflexive. He was halfway to the trapdoor before he had fully thought it through, the slate forgotten on the rooftop - and the woman behind them spoke without turning her head.

"Sit."

The word was quiet, friendly. The kind of one-syllable instruction that landed gently because the voice carrying it had no particular need to sound intimidating at all. Raizen stopped mid-step, and turned his head.

Slushie was still lying on her side, propped on her elbow, watching him with her usual calm attention. The mask hid the smile but not the eyes. The eyes were doing the work.

"She’s fine," she said. "She walked herself home. Anyone who walks themselves home from this kind of eventful evening doesn’t need a babysitter the second they get through the door. Let her sit a minute - she’ll appreciate it more than you running down those stairs and asking her where it hurts."

Raizen didn’t move. He didn’t know how to respond to a woman who had just told him to leave Kori alone while bleeding through three layers of bandage on the same rooftop Kori had launched off into the night.

If she came back that roughed up, someone as strong as Kori – whatever she had faced needed to be radically powerful. The instinct to ignore her and continue toward the trapdoor was strong. The competing instinct to not turn his back on a stranger who had appeared on his roof during a city-wide manhunt was stronger.

He stayed where he was.

"I didn’t know," Slushie said. "That Kori had..."

She gestured vaguely at the four of them with the hand that wasn’t propping up her head. The gesture took in Arashi, Keahi, Hikari, and Raizen in a single small wave that did not really commit to a noun.

"...kids."

The reaction was immediate and overlapping.

"We’re not her kids -" Arashi made a face Raizen would remember years from now.

"She’s not, like, a parent -" Keahi.

"She’s our teacher - " Hikari said at the same time the other two were talking.

"We just live here," Arashi finished. "Like, all of us. She has a house. We don’t have houses. Somehow it all worked out."

The four of them talked over each other for about ten seconds, an entire small negotiation happening among them about how to describe a relationship that had never required precise terminology because no one outside the house had ever bothered to ask. Slushie watched the exchange with both eyebrows lifted by a fraction. The smile beneath the mask was visible only in the way her eyes had narrowed in amusement.

"Got it," she said. "Wards. Roommates. Family. Some combination of all three."

"Something like that," Arashi said.

"Mm-hm," Keahi added.

Slushie glanced once at the trapdoor, then back at Raizen.

"Tell her something for me."

Raizen waited.

"When she’ll get better - and she will, once she’s had a minute - tell her I’ll be waiting for her at the Maw, if she wants to see me."

"The Maw." Raizen’s jaw dropped.

"She’ll know where."

"What if she doesn’t come?"

"She will."

"How do you know?"

The eyes crinkled. The mask shifted slightly with whatever expression she was making beneath it.

"Because she’s Kori," Slushie said. "And I’m an interesting thing in her life. She’ll come."

She straightened from her elbow-propped position, but the motion did not look like the motion of someone who had been cut a few times in the last hour. She tilted her head once at the four of them - a small farewell - and her boots found the rooftop in a low crouch.

"Anyway," she said. "Time to go. I’m running late."

Arashi opened his mouth. "Wait -"

Slushie casually walked the four metres to the northern edge of the roof at the pace of a woman crossing a kitchen, sat on the edge, swung her legs over, and lowered herself down the side of the building until only her fingers were visible holding onto the lip. She hung there for a moment. Then, with the same easy fluidity, her hands released, and she dropped out of sight.

There was no sound.

Arashi blinked.

"Did she just -"

"She did."

"Like, off the side?"

"Yes."

"You do realize that we have rose bushes right around there, don’t you?"

"She’ll be fine."

"How do you know?"

"She said she was Kori’s friend," Keahi mumbled. "Kori’s friends are... Usually fine."

Arashi looked at her. He opened his mouth to argue. He closed it. He scratched the back of his head with both hands at once, the gesture of a teenager who had been confronted with too many anomalies in too short a span of time and had decided to think about the entire experience as "Kori’s problem."

"Yeah, you know what, fair. Honestly. I’m not gonna make this my thing." He turned to Raizen. "She said the Maw. The Maw means something to you?"

"Mmm, no..."

"Anyway. Let’s go check on Kori. I’m starving and I want to know what happened. Keahi?"

"I’m coming."

The two of them started lazily moving toward the trapdoor. Kori took the half step since she was closer, and Arashi started crawling on the roof like he was some kind of disabled caterpillar

Raizen pushed himself off the tiles and took a step after them, his weight already shifting, his mouth already opening to volunteer the third spot in going to see Kori - but Arashi’s hand came up over his shoulder without turning around.

"Nope."

"What."

Arashi paused at the trapdoor. He turned. His grin was, by his standards, restrained - only one eyebrow raised, only half his mouth committed to the smirk - and his eyes flicked, with the most aggressive subtlety Raizen had ever seen him produce, from Raizen to Hikari and back. The look was held for exactly one second. The implication was held considerably longer.

"You stay up here. We’ve got it."

"Arashi."

"You’ve been gone for two weeks, dude."

"Arashi."

"Two weeks."

Raizen rolled his eyes. The colour rising in his cheeks was not significant, he told himself, and Arashi did not need to be encouraged by any further reaction.

He sat back down against the parapet.

Keahi disappeared down the ladder first, the bowl tucked under one arm. Arashi followed, lifting one hand in a small wave that managed to communicate "good luck, don’t mess it up" without saying any of those things. The trapdoor lowered behind him with a soft mechanical click, and the rooftop went quiet.

Hikari and Raizen sat side by side.

She didn’t say anything.

He didn’t either.

The wind across the roof was cold and steady. The chili smell from Keahi’s bowl had dissipated already. The cloud-glow above had been hidden behind the closed petals for the better part of an hour now, the warm lights of the third-day phenomenon reduced to a memory of itself. Somewhere across the city, a siren cycled once and shut off. Somewhere closer, a dog barked, and was answered by a different dog two streets over.

Raizen looked at Hikari.

She was looking at the closed petals.

"The luminite on your staff," he said. "It was glowing while she was here."

"Mm."

"You noticed something."

"I noticed everything."

Raizen didn’t answer. He let her continue.

"She was lying, Raizen. About all of it. The smile could have been real, but the rest was a costume." Hikari’s voice was quiet, just like Raizen had remembered it – and despire the alarming message, it was soothing to hear. "I don’t know who she was. I don’t know if she actually is Kori’s friend or not. I know Kori didn’t tell anyone the nicest rooftop was this one." She gestured wildly in the air, as if Kori telling someone about a little chilling spot – her roof – would be something like a crime for her. "I know she came up here from the back of the building, somehow, and I know she heard Arashi say Obi’s name and decided to stay."

"...You know many things, don’t you?" Raizen teased, trying to break through Hikari’s careful shell.

"I told you. I noticed everything."

Raizen let out a long, slow breath.

He should not have been surprised. Hikari was the strongest of them now, per Arashi’s own enthusiastic accounting earlier in the day, and the strength had not arrived without a sharpening of the rest of her. The careful attentiveness she had been demonstrating all evening - the small glances, the quiet positioning, the staff held with reflexive readiness - had been processing far more information than her silence had let on.

He realised, sitting beside her in the cold, that he had missed her.

Not the way he had been missing things since Ukai - the lizard, the bench, the people. The simpler, smaller way of being near a specific person and feeling warmer just because of their presence.

A faint light caught his peripheral vision.

He looked up.

The petals were opening.

The slow articulation began at the seams - the alloy plates separating along the central join, small gaps appearing in the dome’s geometry, the activation lights along the edges pulsing from their dim sleep-state back into the brighter blue of active mechanism. The opening was gradual. Layer by layer, segment by segment, not like when it closed – all at once.

Through the widening gaps, the clouds’s glow returned.

It was different now. The third-day phenomenon had moved further along its cycle while the petals had been closed - the pale lights Raizen had seen earlier had deepened into something richer, the clouds above showing soft striations of gold and pale rose and an occasional shimmer of green that he had no name for. The sky was finishing what it had been about to begin when the city had panicked and closed itself off.

Suddenly, something brushed his arm. Something soft and smooth.

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