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Blade curses as soon as he gets through the door of the safehouse they were all piling into.
“Don’t be such a baby,” says Silver Wolf.
“This is hardly the most difficult thing we’ve been asked to do as part of Elio’s scripts,” says Kafka.
“I’m going to disassemble my armor and lock it to the ceiling,” says Sam, mech suit peeling away to reveal Firefly.
He is pretty sure he can touch the walls on both sides if he stretches enough. The safehouse is mostly taken up by a bed and their bags of gear, rations, and other supplies, and just enough space to get to the connected bathroom. But Elio had promised that if they did not leave this room for a week, they could walk away afterwards from the planet without fuss or complications to the plans they had already enacted there.
He plants his face firmly into the wall. “No shoes on the bed, Bladie.” He kicks off his boots. Maybe he can sleep for a week straight. Maybe Kafka has come across a sedative his body won’t immediately burn through. Maybe he can cease existing by sheer force of will.
The bed is comfortable at least, despite the appearance of something from a cheap motel. His back pops. A bullet that had been lodged between two of his vertebrae pops out. He tosses it at the ceiling to magnetically stick to Sam’s armor.
*
Most of the food they brought is ration bars and other shelf-stable foods, but they have groceries for the first night.
Firefly uses her elemental affinity to boil water without too much of a fire hazard. Silver Wolf complains hot pot is an inefficient way to eat that requires her to look up from her game far too much, and Blade dutifully fills her bowl for her with tofu, bok choy, mushrooms, quail eggs, and lotus root as they become sufficiently cooked. His lack of dexterity makes chopstick difficult, but he uses a spoon and she doesn’t care if he uses his fingers occasionally.
*
Silver Wolf likes arcades.
She has told Blade that his only job is to follow her around and carry the prizes she accumulates. This is because the one time she tried to get him to get her a prize from a claw machine, he took out his sword and cut the top half from the machine. She said this was completely missing the point, but it was a nice gesture.
She leaves plushie pillows that she wins from her games in his room at their homebase, telling him it’s less lame to hug one of them in his sleep than his sword. He doesn’t remember any particular one well, they all eventually get shredded in a nightmare or other fit, but a new one always appears.
It’s nice to destroy something and have it not matter. No blood on his hands to remind him he had once had morals. No wondering if the broken thing could be fixed. Just a new giant plushie.
“Did you waste space in our supplies that I had to carry on this?” he said to her as he unpacked the smiling shark.
“It’s not like it’s heavy.”
*
Kafka sleeps like there’s a camera on her and she could be called on to play a sultry role at any moment. Silver Wolf refuses to even pretend to keep to a circadian rhythm or the same schedule as the rest of them and plays her games off to the opposite side of the best from Blade until she passes out, and then sprawls out like a starfish while snoring. Firefly takes the foot of the bed and curls up in a ball but she migrates towards the rest of their warmth in her sleep.
*
He and Firefly play a farming sim in co-op mode. The controls are simple enough for even his shaking hands to slowly push one large button after another. His character methodically goes up and down the screen breaking rocks and uprooting tree stumps, and Firefly follows behind him, tilling the soil and planting seeds.
Maybe it’s a little nice to imagine he is capable of involvement in an act of creation, even if it’s digital crops. He also wants to try the in-game crafting menu, have a fit of mara, and throw the handheld console against the wall. He doesn’t do that.
Kafka braids and unbraids his hair eighteen times.
*
Kafka does yoga to keep her body spry despite the small space. Firefly copies her in eager interest, Blade for something to do, even though neither of their bodies really need such a thing.
Blade is not naturally flexible but he has a high pain tolerance. He can push his body until it stops or until it tears apart.
Kafka gives Blade a massage and it hurts more than many of the times he’s been stabbed. But he has better range of motion afterwards. He pushes his head back into the crack between bed and wall to avoid emotionally processing the mix of gratitude, resentment of his dependence on her, and terror that one day he would continue to exist and she would not.
*
There is a smear of blood on Kafka’s neck. Blade immediately zeroes in on it. “Why are you bleeding?” It isn’t her neck bleeding, but a smear like she had had blood on her hand and had touched her hair. Does she have an injury she had been keeping from them? Had she cut herself shaving? Now that he is paying attention, he smells blood from her.
“Calm down, Bladie. It’s my period.” She does not use her powers, but a straight answer from Kafka is something you noticed.
Firefly perks up. “Really? I’ve never had a period. I wasn’t engineered to.”
Silver Wolf waves her hand dismissively the absolute minimum she can to get the gesture across without removing it from her game. “You’re not missing out. You get blood, slime, and poop everywhere, you get cramps and bloated and dehydrated. I got an implant to get rid of them as soon as I could. There are much better ways to incubate a baby with modern technology.”
“I know, but it would be an interesting experience. People treat it as this universal experience of being a normal human girl.”
“I suppose that’s true. It’s either periods or awkward erections. Hey, Bladie, do you get awkward erections? Morning wood?”
“Most people wake up horny sometimes, whether they have equipment for getting an erection or not,” he snapped.
“Bladie, does this make you uncomfortable?”
“No. Why would I be squeamish about blood or bodily fluids? I had my question answered and I stopped caring.”
“Really this is all your fault,” offers Silver Wolf.
“How.”
“You failed to impregnate her.”
Blade refuses to dignify that with the sputter Silver Wolf was aiming for. Kafka has never solicited him for sex.
“That is technically true, the best kind of truth.” Kafka chuckles.
*
Kafka and Firefly like to read fashion magazines on their tablets. Any good IPC-produced product or one with similar technology lets them holographically try on different outfits, though they spend far too much time also previewing clothes on images of Blade and Silver Wolf, in his opinion.
They are also far too fond of trying to get Blade to take the quizzes found in the pages, as despite how little he wants to engage with or follow the white noise of their chatter, they can usually get him to grunt a yes or no after repeating a question enough times. Apparently he is a Hanu, gargoyle, snow bunting, hinedere, red, Stoneheart Obsidian, and peanut butter. He has no idea what any of that information means and would instantly forget it even without his baseline shattered memory.
*
He scrolls through the contacts on his phone. He has a fair number, but it’s not surprising given how many people use his phone.
He thinks about messaging people he once knew. He doesn’t want to talk to them. He rarely wants to talk to the people in this room.
“Is Blade doing better?” is a message from the Stellaron vessel to Kafka.
He scrolls further back in the conversation. “You say I have more free will than most people in terms of Elio’s predictions, but I’m easy to manipulate the mundane way. If you ask for my help, I will always come.”
Chump, he thinks, knowing perfectly well he is the Stellaron Hunters’ attack dog, that he too would do anything Kafka asked of him, even with no spirit whispers, even with no script.
He texts that one. “Of five, three must pay the price.” He doesn’t remember doing this before, but according to the log he does so regularly. Good.
*
They practice their script for the next mission.
“Oh no, my wife can never know about this blackmail material you have on me,” Firefly improvises to fill in for what a mark might say at this point. Firefly is not a good actor.
“Now, now,” Kafka purrs. “No one needs to know. If you change those numbers in my company’s next annual report, you’ll have something on me that will cause me a lot of trouble if it comes out. But if it doesn’t… we’ll both benefit.”
“Do you think when Dorneau’s stock market collapses, that will affect Axiom Game Studio?” speculated Silver Wolf, even though it was not her turn in the script. “I think they’re incorporated in that system, even though their development team is in Tokiwa? Their Sesame Cake Fighter 3 is supposed to come out in another two years and I don’t want it getting cancelled.”
“Elio did not mention it one way or another. Perhaps the fate of the universe does not revolve around it?”
“Maybe you could suggest to the Nameless to suggest to Aventurine from the IPC to buy the studio out a bankruptcy?” suggested Firefly.
“That would probably work but then the next game is going to be a gacha. I suppose that would worth it. Bladie, you’re turn next.”
“At 2156 local time, I enter the Regal Hotel. I do not kill anyone in the lobby. I take the elevator to floor 14. I do not kill anyone in the elevator. I go to room 1434. I kill everyone in room 1434.”
*
Blade dreams.
In it he is not Blade but he is not quite Yingxing either. He is an ascendant creature, an Aeon of Creation.
Yingxing was the greatest craftsman of a world, but here he is better even than that. Everything comes so easily, beyond experience and skill into an inerrant Knowing. The furnace reaches the temperature he needs and stays there without bellows because he feels in his skin how it should be. He needs no gloves to hold molten slag, and his hair is unbound behind him despite being in the forge, the white of it broken up by hundreds of orange-red phoenix feathers. He can feel the alignment of the metal, weaknesses in the ore, and restructure crystalline latices with a tap of his hammer at the exact right spot, with the exact right force.
Instead of the weapons he goes through the once-familiar routine of making, what comes from his forge are stars. He takes each finished piece and tosses it up and he can see whole galaxies spiralling above him.
He wakes with tears on his cheeks, so incandescently angry he can’t get a single sound out to scream.
There are leaves growing from his hands and forearms. He rips them away, breaking branches and bones sounding the same. Silver Wolf is staring at him and urgently shaking Kafka.
“Listen, Bladie, sleep without dreams.”
When he wakes again, the dream is just a dream, and one about someone else. The shark plushie has some new stab wounds and bloodstains, but it’s not ready for retirement yet.
*
The Stellaron Hunters cannot be his family. They cannot make him happy. He is terrified, he will not call it anything other than what it is.
That way lies images of Elio’s whiskers transforming into tendrils on a dragon face, cursing him. Kafka torturing him for century after century, each word cutting as deep as any sword strike from that woman, hurting him and reminding him how much he deserved it. Firefly dead in light and flame and glory. Silver Wolf stepping aside and watching it happen.
*
He learns it is time to go when Kafka changes from sweatpants into her usual clothes. It must have been a week. He has not tried to count time.