Mi was in her morning css, listening to a droning lecture on the synthesis of preemptive metallurgical antidotes for cases of aerosol poisoning, when the coin in her pocket began to rapidly warm. Her heartbeat picked up, and she kept her face impassive while she put away her notes and slipped out the back of the amphitheater.

  This was it. The favor that Aralia had wrested out of her, come due. The shadow of a hawk hovering above her, ready to stoop.

  Part of her was braced, hoping against hope that she could sidestep the inevitable trap. It was possible—had to be possible. Mi had an accomplice that Aralia knew nothing about, after all. Together, Roxa and she might be able to anticipate and out-maneuver her sharp and striking talons.

  Another part of her, the part that felt deep in the quicksand, felt it brimming up to her bruised neck, wondered if it wasn’t wiser to accept the price of serving Aralia if it got Penelope off her back. She had gotten lucky so far, but somehow she’d still had the misfortune to catch the attention of not one, but two seasoned opponents with untouchable positions and seemingly endless resources. What were Mi’s chances, really? How long could she cling, before sinking under?

  But could Aralia even protect her from Penelope? And what would her price be? What in all the mythological hells did Aralia even want? What was her game?

  Mi groaned. This damn University was twisting her and molding her in exactly the ways she most feared. She could feel the Yavanese mental habit of use-thought seeping slowly into her way of thinking, turning her attention hard, suspicious, hierarchical. Sada had tried to prepare her for this, but she still felt irritable, resentful and slightly ashamed of herself for becoming so cynical, so jaded, so bitterly armored.

  The instrumentalism of this mentality was explicitly taboo in Opali, after all. A person could become the target of unrelenting gossip and rumor if they demonstrated it too strongly. Mi was gd her friends from home could not see her, could not witness what she was becoming. The thought made her burn with self-conscious shame. But what choice did she have, in this pce?

  Perhaps use-thought had been necessary to adopt in order to survive here, but it was almost a force unto itself, with its own drives and purposes. It was self-perpetuating, self-repeating, iterative, and worst of all, she could literally feel it sapping her life-force.

  Thank breath and bell for Roxa. Mi felt an unending tumble of gentle gratitude for Roxa’s steadfast, careful insistence on not extracting from or grasping at her in any way. Her friend’s warm green gaze was an invaluable anchor to a world that was not a chess board and a way of being together that was not adversarial, not maniputive, not ulterior.

  But though Mi detested on principle the way use-thought operated, even the way it felt inside of her, she was not foolish enough to throw away armor before a duel. Fire was fought with fire, after all. Aralia herself had insisted on that, with a frankness that Mi found curious.

  Was it possible that Aralia saw Mi as anything more than a piece to be moved across a board? She’d said something about mentorship, hadn’t she? A ughable word to use in the context, Mi thought bitterly. No, she promised herself, she would not let her guard down. Not with this one.

  The coin was almost too hot now, her fist tightly clenched around it. She slid it back in her pocket and knocked on Aralia’s office door. After a long moment, it clicked open and there were those keen, golden eyes, searching her.

  “Good,” said Aralia simply. She stood aside. “Come in. Sit if you wish.”

  Mi entered and remained standing. The coin in her pocket began to cool. She wondered how the thermic link functioned. She’d certainly never heard of alchemy that could heat an object across distance, let alone switch off the effect based on proximity.

  Aralia had dark circles under her eyes, Mi noticed. She even seemed somewhat distracted, as she rummaged in a cabinet and drew out a stack of files.

  “Here.” Aralia pnted the stack on the desk and gestured to it. “These are somewhat sensitive records, so I need you to exercise discretion and care with them. Take them with you, and search them for any and all mentions of these names.”

  She reached into a drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper, with a list written on it.

  “I need them back, in this condition exactly, in no more than a week.”

  “That’s it?” Mi stared at her. “That’s the favor you need from me?”

  Aralia snorted. She sank into her chair and stretched, arching like a cat. The motion tightened the fabric of her blouse across her breasts in a fascinating way.

  Mi quickly moved her gaze back up, found Aralia smirking at her, and strove to fight down a blush.

  The older girl across the desk from her, she reminded herself sternly, held the implicit power to revoke her screening exemption for Apomasaics and expose her to a gratingly intrusive administrative inquiry process—one that she very well might not be able to pass.

  “I’ll decide when your debt is fulfilled, Mi.” She inclined her head slightly. “If you can find any of those names, however, I will look very favorably upon your effort.”

  Aralia’s sharp gaze lost focus and drifted out over the rooftops, through the window. She suddenly looked older and more exhausted than Mi had ever seen her. Almost absently, she waved Mi towards the door.

  “Search those files and bring them back to me. Within a week, remember. I’ll have another stack ready for you by then.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Roxa leaned against a wall by the lecture hall door, reading a letter from her mother.

  All their correspondences were obviously intercepted and surveilled, so Sasha Monir had written, as usual, in an encryption that could only be cracked if the reader had a special algorithmic key, a hashing function.

  Which, Roxa did.

  On the surface, the letter was a jumble of inane propositions, observations and cims. It had taken the st hour for Roxa to transcribe the dense message hidden inside. Now she stared hard at the page, chewing her bottom lip. Her mother hadn’t lost her penchant for driving straight and hard, right at the point.

  I ask that you put aside your impetuousness, as I am putting aside my feelings as your mother, so that we can both focus clearly on the mutuality of our duties as sworn bdes of the Duchy at this pivotal and dangerous time.

  Roxa snorted, and shook her head. She already felt needled.

  Drago is a screaming kettle, on the brink of boiling over, and every week the pressure grows. Yet another failed harvest and tax season has resulted in mass evictions across the Imperiat and brought more and more peasants streaming into the city, enraged and desperate for bread. Every night they riot and surge through the streets, raiding and looting before the loyalist militias muster to chase them back. The slums are full, and new encampments proliferate as fast as the Ministry troops expunge the old ones.

  The Ministries have started doling out rations from the granaries only to those the districts they deem loyal, and there is rabid colboration, with neighbors policing neighbors, all fanatically driven by the terror of starvation and beatings.

  The Moot is not yet upon them, and the nobles and senators are already signing away their plenary powers and offering them to the loyalists on a silver ptter. They all fear the rabble more than they fear the combined power of the Ministries and the Hierophancy. Their only care is for the profitability of their joint-stock concerns and if they must choose between unrestrained fascism and war on one hand and peasant revolt and insurrection on the other, they will all side with authority, and entrench against its dispersal.

  The Ministries and the Navy Admirals know it, and have ceased to obey Parliamentary summons and policy. Their only loyalty is to the Hierophant, whose rallies grow daily. The presses all churn to produce lurid stories of ‘Ursilian agitators’ and ‘foreign degenerates’ plotting to sap the nation’s vital will and turn back the clock on Science, Hygienic Progress and the Evolution of Man. Bme for ‘the foreign rot’ has become so fashionable to bandy about that I can hardly go anywhere in public without the air growing thick with tension.

  Meanwhile the loyalists are locked in their own power struggle. The Ministries of Inquisition and Social Hygiene are in what I believe is a tenuous alliance with each other, under the Arcane Hierophancy. None dare challenge their authority openly, for fear of being beled traitor and targeted for cleansing. They effectively rule the entire Imperiat in everything but name and I fear war and invasion, come spring.

  Their first strike may nd upon our Duchy. We are small, and close. I’ve warned the Duchess to strengthen our defensive redoubts in the mountain passes, and advised her that my best use here is to stay in pce and attempt to destabilize the loyalist alliance. You, however, must prepare to depart sooner—certainly before the Imperial Moot, unless I have gravely miscalcuted and things move much faster than I anticipate.

  Roxa’s stomach dropped.

  I will not risk seeing you inquisitioned if you stay, diplomatic immunity or no. I would see you safely back at our familial keep when the storm breaks here, but duty compels me to assign you to the Star Tower, at Dropwater Pass. You will join Countess Vara’s staff of officers there. I have already sent your marching orders ahead.

  If you have recruited more assets at Harmine, as you were assigned to, you must now prepare them to operate in your absence. Respond with a report on your progress within a fortnight.

  Roxa gritted her teeth, and crumpled the page in her fist. She pulsed a wave of sorcery into it, and felt it dissolve and trickle onto the floor as fine, ashy dust.

  Well. Her mother would certainly not be pleased with her report. Roxa hadn’t recruited so much as a dusty stable sweep in her time here.

  On the contrary, she’d tried her best to forget her mother and her directives entirely, and just discover who she was, away from all her oaths and duties. She’d tried to give herself a chance to be something other than a finely honed weapon, a tool with a sole purpose. And if getting to just be a student at a school for magic counted as that, she’d fallen head over heels for it.

  Or perhaps Roxa had just fallen head over heels for a certain pair of liquid dark, serious eyes? She felt a lopsided smile blossom on her face.

  Either way, she’d been so focused on getting to just exist, without the constant pressure of being shaped to fit her mother’s mold, that she’d underestimated the rger threat, growing all around her.

  Invasion. Not the insidious creep of economic exploitation and cultural colonization, but war. If her mother was right.

  And though it was always unbearable for Roxa when Sasha Monir turned out to be right, wasn’t the Imperial war machine aimed at their home more important than either of them? No matter what complicated feelings Roxa had towards her mother, the Countess was clearly pying a game that put her life at grave risk.

  Was Roxa going to obey her mother, then? She chewed her lip. No matter how nauseating she found this political spycraft, the thought of abandoning her mountain home on the eve of invasion felt worse. And if the Imperiat jackboots came marching into the vales and vilges of the Duchy like columns of ants, building their garrisons and their prisons and their schools? Her temper fred hot and bright.

  But if her mother was wrong, and the Duchy was passed over in favor of easier targets, would Roxa find herself guarding a cold battlement in the mountains while the cities and isnds of the Whistling Sea were sacked? While her best friend’s home burned? Roxa felt abruptly heartsick. She knew she would never be able to forgive herself.

  As much as it turned her stomach to think of abandoning her home, she could not bear the thought of abandoning Mi, either. How would they find each other again, in a world on fire?

  A bell began to toll, and Roxa heard scraping and ctter from inside the lecture hall as css ended. She turned towards the door, then saw Mi approaching from down the corridor.

  “Hmm. Why am I not surprised?” Roxa said, raising her eyebrows.

  Mi rolled her eyes. “I know, I know. I wasn’t being careful enough. I was summoned, though.” She frowned at the little pile of ash by Roxa’s boot. “What’s that?”

  Roxa turned and they began walking together. Behind them, students began spilling out into the corridor.

  “More bad news from Drago,” said Roxa grimly. “Let’s talk somewhere else.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Mi shuddered. “These are all juvenile prison records.” She had a sudden urge to drop the page she was reading and wipe her hands.

  All Opali children grew up hearing tales of vast colonial bor camps built by the sves of an ancient empire, and the uncontainable insurrection that had raged around the whole rim of the whole Whistling Sea, until all its walls were burned and broken.

  The griots taught that Opali and the other Common Cities formed along the river mouths and safe harbors where the camps and prisons and forts once stood, as havens that welcomed all those who wished to keep svers and overseers and turnkeys from entering into the world again.

  Mi shook herself a little. She was sitting on the floor of their room, files spread and scattered around her. Roxa lounged on the couch like a tiger, her limbs draped in every direction, flipping through a stack of pages.

  The redhead grunted.“Well, these ones are residential school records from Imperial colonies. So, essentially prisons.”

  “Hm, strange. They’re not just lists of names, either. They’re cross-referenced with merit exam scores? And here are the final pcement decisions from the exam proctors.”

  “I didn’t know prisoners could sit the merit exam.” Roxa frowned. “How far back do these records go?”

  Mi moved some papers around. “They vary, but here’s one from almost eight years ago.”

  “Most of these are about that old, too.”

  Mi looked up. “She’s searching for someone?”

  Roxa nodded slowly. She was scanning the list of names. “A lot of these names are Jyllish, I think? But most of them seem like assimited versions of Jyllish originals. Also, lots of repetitions with slight variations.”

  “I wonder…” Mi’s eyes went far away for a moment.

  Roxa was still flipping through her stack, shaking her head. “Nothing. Damn, this writing is small.” She squinted and yawned. “I can’t believe she’s just using you to search for the needle in this haystack. Why not give the job to some clerk? Or an office full of clerks? She runs the biggest, richest, most advanced research department in the world.”

  Roxa realized her friend wasn’t listening. She paused for a moment to take in Mi’s firmed mouth, the tiny crease between her eyebrows as she stared seriously out the window.

  Mi blinked and looked down at her p. Then she gnced up, right into Roxa’s dreamy fox smile. She blushed. “hey.”

  Roxa reached out and tucked a twist of dark hair behind Mi’s ear. “hey.”

  Mi’s lips curved shyly, and she rested her cheek into Roxa’s lingering hand.

  Roxa grinned and stroked softly. “Cutie.”

  Mi’s eyes fluttered and she sighed, tension draining out of her body.

  Roxa reached around the back of her friend’s neck and began to squeeze and massage the muscles that ran up either side of the spine. Mi groaned and slumped even more, melting like putty into Roxa’s strong grip.

  Roxa grinned in delight. “Do you, perhaps, need a distraction, Mi?”

  “Um,” gasped Mi. Her head lolled. “I—ah, yess.”

  “Goood girl. Would you like me to put you through your paces?” Roxa murmured throatily. “Want me to make you sweat?”

  “Yes,” Mi breathed.

  Roxa tightened her fingers around Mi’s neck, eliciting a moan, and pulled her closer. “Would you like me to tell you what to do? Shove you around? Train you up sooo well?”

  Mi peeked up at her friend from under her shes. “Wait, are you—?”

  With a mischievous wink at Mi, Roxa released her and vaulted off the couch in one liquid motion. She grabbed an overstuffed pad from under her bed and held it up, grinning.

  Mi scrunched her face up and pouted at her friend. “That was sooo mean.”

  Roxa was gleefully immune. She rapped the pad and poked her tongue out. “Come on, bitch. Time to work on your jab-cross-jab.”

  ChaoticArmcandy