Gilded Ashes

Raizen finally got up, stretching his back. He made his way back towards the trapdoor, though Kori’s endless boxes and stuff, all crammed in the attic.

After reaching the trapdoor and pushing it away, he frowned. The trapdoor itself was colder than it should have normally been, and slightly heavier.

After pushing for a couple of times, it finally opened, but when Raizen climbed the ladder and touched the roof, he immediately pulled his hand back.

With a slightly terrified look on his face, Raizen looked at his hand.

It was wet.

The first thing he noticed when actually climbing up was that everything was actually wet. The alloy surface had a thin sheen across it, dark patches where puddles had formed in the small dips and seams, and the smell - the nice the kind of smell rain leaves behind after long quiet hours of falling - sat thick in the morning air. The night had pulled the weather through the auroras and he hadn’t been awake for any of it.

...Speaking about the auroras, they were still there, hundreds - if not thousands – of colors weaving through clouds, casting a beautiful light on everything below it.

Raizen slowly turned his head from the sky toward the spot where he’d been sitting.

The slate was exactly where he remembered he’d left it.

It was lying flat against the roof, screen up, and even from three metres away he could see the water pooled on its surface, the lower half of the display completely soaked.

He crouched and picked it up, then tilted it to one side. A small line of water ran out from beneath the screen and dripped onto the wet alloy.

He tried to power it on, but the screen was dead. A really fainy whirr came from the inside, the tiny machine trying to power on, but the electrical signals not reaching the screen.

He sat with it for a moment.

The slate was old. The case along the edge was scuffed in three places where he’d dropped it over the past few months, and the small indicator at the corner - the one that used to glow soft blue when a message arrived - was cold. Kori had given it to him two weeks after the entrance exam. She had presented it without ceremony at the kitchen table, slid it across the wood toward him, said "here, you’ll need this for the Academy", and gone back to whatever she had been doing.

He turned it over carefully - the back panel was wet too. The serial number etched into the alloy was the original print from the factory, before they had started laser-stamping them. He hadn’t realised, until this moment, that he had never actually replaced it.

Then he stood up, sighed dramatically and tucked it under his arm, climbing back down the ladder into the attic.

✦ ✦ ✦

The kitchen was full when he came down.

Arashi was at the table, halfway through a big piece of cheese, his hair still doing abstract shapes – he hadn’t taken care of it ever since he woke up. Keahi was at the counter, refilling a glass of water. Kori was at the head of the table, her left hand still bandaged and resting flat on the table beside an untouched bowl of porridge.

She wasn’t eating.

She was looking somewhere past the edge of the table, the way people looked when they were thinking through something, not entirely present in real life.

Raizen set the slate on the counter quietly.

Arashi looked over.

"Oh, hey - wait. Is that - did your slate get rained on?"

"It got rained on."

"...Why was it on the roof!?"

"Because I was on the roof."

"Why didn’t you take it inside!?"

"I fell asleep, Arashi."

"You fell asleep with your slate on the roof."

"Yes."

"That thing isn’t waterproof?"

"No."

"Oh my days. Bro-"

"The new ones are waterproof. They started making them like that last year. This one’s older. Mine is from before that."

"Yeah, but -"

"It’s an old slate."

"You couldn’t have, like, checked? Before you left it in the rain?"

"Just shut up."

"I’m just saying. As a passive observation."

Keahi, from the counter: "It’s not that deep. It happens."

"I’m not - I’m gathering information for the household."

"Go back to yout cheese."

Arashi let it go reluctantly and went back to his big chunk of cheese he had been eating without anything else on top – just cheese. Raizen pulled out the chair across from Kori and sat down. Keahi set a bowl of the porridge Kori also had in front of him without asking. He nodded once at her.

Kori still hadn’t looked up.

He watched her for a moment, then decided to interrupt Arashi’s aggressive cheese-chewing sounds.

"Kori."

"Hm?"

"You okay?"

Her gaze didn’t shift back to the table, exactly. It just slowly stopped focusing past it. She blinked twice and looked at him properly for the first time since he had come down.

"I’m fine."

"You’re not eating."

"I’m not hungry."

"You’re never not hungry in the morning."

"It’s been a long night."

"...Are you sure you’re -"

"I’m sure, it’s nothing serious. Eat your porridge."

She said it the way she said most things - short, dry, the kind of dismissal that wasn’t a dismissal so much as a closing of a topic that hadn’t been opened all the way. Raizen looked at her for one more second, then dropped his eyes to his bowl. Arashi, across the table, was watching her sideways with the small careful attention of a kid who had also noticed and had also decided not to push.

Then... Footsteps on the stairs.

Hikari was finally coming down.

She was dressed in clothes Raizen had never seen her in before - a clean dark grey jacket over a tailored shirt, slim trousers, boots she had clearly polished, her hair tied back with a precision that took twice the time her usual loose tie did. The whole outfit was formal in an almost strange way, and the careful effort behind it was visible from across the room.

Arashi stopped chewing.

"Whoa. Crazy fit."

Hikari didn’t look at him. Insteasd, she crossed to the table and sat down beside Raizen.

Kori, who had returned to her staring in the distance, came back into the room again, and this time her eyes settled directly on Hikari.

"Going somewhere?"

"No."

"Mhm."

Kori watched her for a few more seconds. Hikari’s face did not change. Whatever the formal clothes were for, Hikari was not in the mood to explain them, and Kori - who had spent the night carrying the weight of something Raizen did not yet fully understand - did not press.

Kori’s mouth lifted very slightly at one corner.

"Great," she said. "Because I’m a tensy weensy bit hurt, and I actually need all of you today."

Arashi looked up from his bowl. "...With what, exactly."

"With the back garden."

"...The back garden."

"The back garden, Arashi. You’re not deaf yet."

"It’s been Two – no, three - years since we touched the back garden."

"And it has accumulated three years of weeds because of that. I decided we’re handling it today. Of course, if you don’t have anything better to do – which I profoundly doubt."

"Kori, your hand is bandaged."

"Which is exactly why I need all of you."

Arashi stared at her with the slow betrayed expression of a teenager who had been promised a normal morning and was now realising that the morning was going to involve very intense manual labour. Keahi, at the counter, made a small amused sound that, near the end, somehow turned into a groan. Hikari and Raizen did not react, because neither have actually seen the back garden yet.

Raizen looked at Kori.

She was smiling. It was a small smile, the kind she did when she was deflecting something with a project - but the smile was there. Whatever had been keeping her in the middle distance a few minutes ago had stepped back, for now, behind a task she could put her household to.

She picked up her spoon with her good hand.

"Well, Eat" she said. "When you finish, go put on your work clothes."

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