Riley was limping again, and she was annoyed with herself, with her physical failure. She wanted to scream with frustration. You shattered your left hip and then some fucking goon shot you through the calf. Cut yourself a little slack, her inner voice said, and she slowed and then came to a stop.

“You done?” Himari was coming up behind her in the parkour course, having lapped her twice now. “You remembering to hydrate?”

Riley shook her head, pushing sweat-soaked bangs out of her face. ‘No haircuts’ seemed like a good idea when she was first imagining she’d be a girl eventually, but these days she was starting to miss the ease of a buzz cut. “No, I’m, it’s my leg. And my hip. My whole left side, really.” She took deep, gulping breaths, trying to slow her heart rate. “I think I’m never going to be very fast on my feet.”

Himari, grabbing a towel and a water bottle, tugged Riley to a bench. “Take a break. You want to try something different?”

She hesitated. It seemed stupid, when it wasn’t an idea she was having in the shower, under a stream of hot water, replaying the events of that day at the clinic, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

“I mean… it’s probably stupid, but…”

Himari poked her in the side, which made her twist away. “Hey!” She held out her hands, palms up, in front of her. “I think. I think I want to learn how to fight.”

“Oh hell yes.” Himari was on her feet immediately. “You have no idea how bad I want a sparring partner, and our polycule is a bunch of soft nerds.”

Himari had taken to calling the cadre the ‘polycule’, which she meant ironically, but which Riley, watching Suliat and Eve together and wishing she could find more time to spend with Su, was increasingly using in her own mind in total earnest. Between Su and me, and Su and Eve, we’re basically a triad, aren’t we? Or something like it?

She wasn’t clear what ‘Su and me’ meant, just yet; currently it seemed to mean kisses in the common room and held hands on the way to class. She treasured every moment of intimacy, but she also wanted to get Su alone and talk to her, find out what she wanted from this relationship, find out where it was going, maybe do some more kissing—

You’re distracting yourself, Riley.

She’d been swimming in the soup of Therese’s emotions for days, ever since she and Nora had finally talked and the awkward nervous tension had become an apparently bottomless pool of love. It was nice as a background hum but it was also very hard to keep separate from her own thoughts about Suliat.

“Yeah, uh, I have no idea what I’m doing, though?” Riley looked up at Himari, whose face was shining with eagerness. “Like, I’ve never used a weapon or done a martial art or even like, kid gymnastics. I think I could maybe do a somersault if I really tried?”

“Yeah, we’ll start with the basics. I mean, I’ve only had a few weeks of lessons, anyway, and it’s all kind of optional work until we’re second years, so it’s not rigorous or anything. Just drills and movement and footwork, really.”

Riley looked skeptically at her still-aching left leg. “Making my feet work is part of the problem.”

“Hah, that’s, that’s terrible, actually. That’s a bad joke, and you should feel bad about it.” Himari was only half paying attention, looking around for one of the instructors. “Let’s get some practice gear and get suited up and give this a shot.”

Riley’s usual exercise outfit was refined down to a sports bra and bike shorts, the shorts pulled tight at the crotch to allow her to push all the relevant bits back and out of the way. It wasn’t super-comfortable, but it allowed her to at least look down at her body and not feel immediate self-loathing and dysphoria. She needed to be able to see herself and say this is a girl’s body or her whole careful house of cards of gender identity would come toppling down for at least the rest of the day.

At least her chest was mostly cooperating, the soft curves of her breasts becoming more and more defined each time she performed a self-inspection. She was skinny to start with, and narrow-shouldered, and even the small roundings of her body were enough to suggest femininity already.

Settling into the protective gear required for the wooden practice swords was unexpected and unpleasant, the shapeless padding changing her almost-tolerable form into a kind of roly-poly exaggeration.

“Oh come on. It’s not that bad. Anyway, haven’t you ever seen any of those collections of art of real women in armor? Like, not boob plate, but functional armor?”

Riley patted her chest, anonymously padded to a bulky thickness. “I could go for some boob plate right about now. Really big ones, like huge tit-cones. Maybe I could weaponize them.”

Himari thwacked her in the back of the head with her now-gloved hand, making Riley go ‘Hey!’ for the second time. So much of her interaction with Himari was this kind of casual horseplay. Teasing, bluster, bravado, and mock violence. She felt oddly even more feminine around her, though. Like, this felt like they were tomboys together, girls being rough and butch and aggro. It should have made her feel awful, she thought, but instead it was affirming.

“Let’s go talk to Brynn about swords.” Himari dragged Riley by the hand to the gym office, where Brynn, currently on duty as supervisor and currently planning out the spring tournament, was holding court.

In the end, they weren’t given the wooden practice swords, but instead a pair of wooden poles of roughly the correct length. They were damned heavy, too, Riley thought.

“You don’t hit each other with these, you got it? These will hurt, and you could break bones. Yes, even with the padding, Novice.” This last was directed at Himari, who was thumping herself experimentally on the chest and abdomen with the pole. “Himari, you know the basic drill, so why don’t you walk Riley through that, in slow motion, and then we can talk about reps.”

The ‘basic drill’, as it turned out, was a series of tightly-controlled, practiced swings with the pole, each one begun from a specific position and stopped at a specific position. The latter requirement was exhausting, and she complained. “If I’m hitting someone, won’t they stop the swing with their, you know, meaty face?”

Himari was trying to maintain a machine-like precision, and mostly failing, but she had far more endurance than Riley did. “What if you miss?” She swung again, the tip of the pole stopping right at the end of a short arc. “What if you try to swing through and get it caught in the target’s armor? Or stuck on bone?” She swung again, panting. “What if you get halfway there and you need to change direction, or defend?”

Riley muttered darkly. “What if I cut off my own foot? What if aliens abduct my sword right out of my hands?” But she got back to work, slower and more wobbly than Himari, and much more quickly exhausted and trembling. They kept at it for what seemed like hours, but which turned out to be about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of ‘extend, strike, retract’. Twenty miserable minutes.

“How come when people are actually fighting, it seems fluid and quick, but all we’re practicing are these same two cuts from the same two angles, over and over?” Riley was sitting, drinking, mopping sweat off her face while Himari unlaced her padding for her. She tied the knots; she has nobody to blame but herself.

“This is the basics. You have to be able to do these moves reliably and without wearing out. Then you start chaining them together, and then you start making decisions about which one fits into the fight. And these basics, if we’re doing them right, work out the muscles we’ll need for whatever moves we’re trying.”

“What, just these two swings?”

Himari swore. “Fucking— knots! Uh, no, there’s a couple more, but I thought we’d start with the easy ones first, just to kind of warm you up to the idea. Overhead from the right, overhead from the left.” She mimed with a hand held out as a blade. “Then there’s the uppercut from the right and left,” and she mimed those. “And then horizontal from the right and left.”

“They all seem pretty similar.”

“They use different muscles, so you’ll get tired in different ways. You have to be strong enough to do any of them just as fast as any of the others, and move from any of them to any of the others. So you practice them all.”

Riley waved the pole in front of her, tentatively. “My arms feel like jelly.”

Himari laughed. “They’re gonna be so fucked up tomorrow when you wake up. Don’t plan on lifting anything heavy.” She finally got the knot loose. “There, let’s get this thing off you.”

Riley stood up and leaned over to let the thick padding slide off her body, leaving her sweat-slick torso exposed to the slightly cool air of the gym. Goosebumps rose all over her, and she wrapped a towel around her shoulders. My nipples hurt. Of all the stupid things to ache after exercising.

“Why did you decide to learn to fight, anyway?”

Riley looked down at her hands, and the wooden pole in them. “Because… I was fucking useless, and worse than useless, when that attack happened. I just ran and fell down and got shot.”

“Bitch, they had guns. Running is the right move.”

“I know. But I felt like, I’m in a magic school and surrounded by magical bad-asses who can take care of things with Working and swords and lesbian ninja stuff, and I’m basically just a skinny nobody.” She stretched her arms out. “All those years with testosterone and I never used it to get swole.”

“You’re worried about something,” Himari said, and poked her in the shoulder. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. I keep thinking about how sure Therese is that the Tower needs me for something, and thinking about how dangerous shit has gotten for everyone lately. The attack at the clinic, but also the expedition, and the one before that, and the dream I got dragged into, and… it just feels like something bad is coming, and I’m totally unprepared. Magically, physically. Emotionally, I guess. If I can fight whatever it is with tits, maybe I’ll have enough by then.”

“Let’s just let Suliat fight it, if it’s gonna take tits.” Himari smirked, and Riley laughed.

They were silent a few moments, and then Himari said, “So you and her, you’re—”

“Yeah, I think so?”

“Huh.” Himari leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her legs open in what could, for some very loose interpretations of the term, be called ‘manspreading’. “And she and Eve are still, like—”

“Yeah. I think they sleep together most nights. I’m not sure; I don’t check up on them or anything.”

“That’s not weird?”

Riley shrugged, feeling awkward. “It’s kind of weird. I don’t know. I’m not sure I can really call anything in this place ‘normal’, but this… this feels normal, I guess? Or at least, I don’t feel jealous, or anything like that.” She slung the pole over her shoulder. “And Suliat is an amazing kisser, so there’s that benefit.”

Himari grinned. “I’ll have to take your word for it. Kissing always seems so fucking strange to me. ‘Let me press my food hole against your food hole.’”

“Jesus, Mari, that’s nasty. Now I don’t want to kiss her, either.”

They laughed, and then got up to put the poles away.

“You know,” Himari started, and faltered. Then, racking her pole and turning away to hide her embarrassment, she continued. “You know that if anything bad does happen, we’ve… we’ve got your back, right? You don’t have to do whatever it is alone.”

“Thanks.” She twisted at the waist, back and forth, and was rewarded with a series of pop sounds from her spine. “I just wish I knew what the ‘anything bad’ was, or… anything, really.”

“Your soulmate is a Diviner, bitch. Why don’t you just ask her?”

# # #

Headmistress Gaveny looked so small and frail, with her head in bandages and her arm in a sling. Her voice had a waver in it, a hint of an exhaustion that Therese had never heard there before, and she glanced over at Riley to see the same concern mirrored there.

“Adept Lasalle. I’m glad to see you well enough to return to the Tower. Adept Ramos assures me that your recovery is now manageable from our own Infirmary, and I much prefer to have all my charges here, where I am best able to protect them.”

She’s sitting there, blind and infirm, just out of a hospital bed herself, and she’s talking about protecting us. Therese was never sure if she should love or fear the Headmistress at times like this. Her assumption of complete control over a situation was, she suspected, mostly an act put on for her various Adepts and Novices, but it was a comfortable fiction to draw assurance from. Gaveny could handle anything.

“Ma’am.” Therese nodded, then felt stupid. She couldn’t see the gesture. “I’m happy to be back, though I wish we didn’t have quite so many stairs.”

“You weren’t assigned a construct?” Gaveny’s voice had a hint of sharp steel in it, as though the oversight would be investigated and perhaps prosecuted.

“Kitty said I should walk as much as possible, and specifically that I should take the stairs. I need to rebuild all the lost muscle.”

“Hm.” The Headmistress tilted her head to one side. “Very well, but I need your services as a Diviner, not a runner, and if your therapeutic stair climbing leaves you too exhausted, you are to request a construct immediately. Agreed?”

“Yes, Headmistress.”

“Very well. Novice Hawkins. Notwithstanding our previous conversation, once again I am indebted to your immediate and decisive action. If you keep this pace, I will be forced to resign my position at this Academy and grant it to you as my only way of paying off that debt.” Riley started to speak, but Gaveny held her hand up. “No; let us leave this with my boundless gratitude and move immediately onwards.”

Riley spoke, finally, and her voice was small. “Yes, Headmistress.”

She’s working on the sound of her voice, Therese thought. She’s practicing, trying to make it more feminine.

“Let us speak briefly about the attack. To forestall your questions: no, we do not know who the assailants were. They were mercenaries hired through various cut-outs and, we suspect, some form of magical screening.” She paused, and with her face partially covered by bandages, Therese couldn’t read her expression. Gathering her thoughts? Thinking of the right phrasing? Weighing whether to share anything at all?

“Magical?” Riley didn’t have Therese’s long years of practice in waiting out Gaveny’s silences, and immediately seized on the obvious question.

“Magical.” Gaveny sighed. “While I would like to make the claim that everyone in the Primary able to use magic is either a graduate of this Academy, or known to us and closely monitored, the truth is more complicated. We do not find all the girls with magical talent, as much as we try to do so. Some evade us, through our oversight or their own guile. And some of those learn enough to operate as rudimentary Adepts in the Primary. To the degree that they continue to evade us, we can guess at their overall level of skill. Some of them are quite skilled indeed.”

“So, rogue Adepts in the Primary? Why would they attack you?” Riley’s expression was troubled, her brow creased.

Gaveny held up a hand. “It is a theory, and only a theory. I cannot guess at motives just yet. Nor can I speculate on the actual identity of the attackers. Our Logistics department has largely relied on secrecy and obscurity for defense; what the mundane threats found in the Primary don’t know, they cannot target. This kind of direct action has not been a part of their threat model before.” She allowed a slight smile. “It is, of course, a part of that model now.”

The Headmistress leaned forward onto her desk, her hands clasped in front of her, and she turned her bandaged face towards Riley. “Regarding the motivation for the attack, I want to propose an alternate scenario to you, Novice Hawkins, and be assured I am not doing so to alarm you, but rather to give you and Adept Lasalle more information for your investigations.”

Investigations? What’s she talking about? Therese sat up straighter.

“I propose that I was not the target of the attack at all.” She shot one finger out, pointing unerringly at Riley despite her blindness. “You were.”

Riley sat back, stunned. “I— What?”

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone target a random Novice? Therese thought.

“Consider: I had occupied that office for many hours before our meeting, with no attack. I had also moved outside the clinic several times, speaking in the parking lot with Logistics agents. I was a very easy target for a motivated attacker with access to military weapons. You, on the other hand, came through a Portal and were entirely inside the structure, not exposed to any windows, until you and I met in that office.”

“That doesn’t mean— Maybe they just weren’t ready yet?” Riley was clearly incredulous at the whole idea, but Therese was beginning to feel a creeping, cold fear.

“Consider also: you left me in a room, with an obvious trail of blood from the office in which we met to the door of the room. I was unconscious, helpless, and vulnerable.” She made a cutting gesture with one hand, as Riley started to apologize. “No, you did the correct thing. Even if I had been their target, you could not have managed the attackers and an unconscious woman at the same time. Running to get help was the correct move.”

Riley subsided, and Gaveny continued. “They could have easily found me. In fact, had they wanted me, they would have found me, as they knew where we’d been and where to look. But instead, what did they do?” She pointed at Riley again. “They pursued you. All of them. Their whole strike team pursued you, overextending themselves into a bad tactical position in the stairwell to do so. They were willing to take extraordinary risks… to kill you.”

Riley had turned pale white, her face a mask of shock. Therese could feel the shuddering fear radiating from the link. “W-why would— What did I do—”

“That, Novice Hawkins, is why I have asked you both to this meeting.” She turned towards Therese. “I want the two of you to find out. That is the investigation I mentioned earlier. You are a Diviner, Adept Lasalle, and you have a particular insight where Novice Hawkins is concerned. She will make herself available to you should you need her assistance, and assuming that assistance does not come at the expense of her own classwork and training.” Gaveny nodded slightly towards Riley. “Training you as a competent Adept is the best protection this Academy can offer, I think.”

Therese frowned. “What are we looking for? All the Divination targeted at Riley ends up tangled in the same prophetic dream.” Which had not resolved itself after her disastrous expedition, and continued to churn away in the celestial realm near the Pleiades; that, more than anything, told her that she’d failed, and the problem was still festering.

“Then begin there. Find out why. You will have reasonable access to the resources of the Tower to facilitate this task. And I assume that whether I require it or not, you’ll be consulting with Adept Nyström.” She looked pointedly at Therese, who blushed deeply. Called out. Not that anyone can keep anything hidden from her.

Gaveny looked towards Riley. “Novice Hawkins, I have no specific tasks for your cadre in this investigation, but do not feel as though you must conceal anything from them. I imagine that will become increasingly difficult, regardless.”

Now it was Riley’s turn to blush, and Therese could feel her embarrassment through the link.

“Do keep in mind the rule regarding your cadre’s presence when you engage in magic, however. Adept Lasalle’s presence does not free you from that requirement. If you join her in another ill-advised divinatory journey, you will still need someone else present.” She sniffed. “Having one of the more, shall we say, stable members of your cadre present might have avoided the challenges you faced the last time you went off together into dreamland.”

Therese knew that was more directed at her than at Riley. She shouldn’t have taken her along, and she knew it, and she’d been keenly aware of Gaveny’s forbearance in not mentioning it before now.

The Headmistress continued. “The Logistics department will continue to pursue the attackers and neutralize them in the Primary. What I need from the two of you is the why.”

# # #

Riley set the pile of books and notes down on a low table, itself already cluttered with various crystals, glassware, incense burners, small cloth bags, polished rocks, metal pipes, and brass chains of a variety of lengths. “What is all this stuff, anyway?”

Therese had made a desultory attempt to clean a place for Riley to sit, but then collapsed onto her meditation cushions, exhausted. So now Riley was moving things off a chair that hadn’t known the touch of human ass in years, at least.

“Um, mostly it’s junk.” Therese looked sheepish. “I collect interesting-looking things from the City. Or, well, the Rangers collect it and if they think I’ll like it, they bring it to me. Brynn, sometimes Hyun-ji. I guess they’ve figured out what kinds of things I like.”

Riley smiled, not looking up from her tidying. “That’s cute.”

“Sometimes I wonder if they’re teasing me. But I also really like the random magical-looking junk, so I don’t mind, if they are.”

“They’re not.”

Therese narrowed her eyes a fraction. “How would you know?”

Riley grinned broadly at her. “Intuition.” She paused and then started to say “Women’s—”

“Riley Hawkins, I will get up off this cushion and shake you.”

Riley held up her hands defensively. “Sorry, sorry!” She looked around. “None of this is like, necessary for Divination, though, is it?”

“Oh, no. I mean, you can use anything as a focal point for meditation, and if the thing you use is somehow relevant to what you’re looking for, it might be helpful?” That was actually a bit of an open question in the department. Was a focal object causing the Divination to be directed, or was the Diviner causing that by their own preconceptions about the object? Therese had an idea for how to test the hypothesis, but it hadn’t ever seemed worth the effort.

“But this is mostly just, uh, a collection?”

Therese nodded. “I keep meaning to sort through it but, you know. I’ve been busy.”

Riley looked around the divining chamber, which was littered with other tables of varying heights and density of clutter. “You also don’t have anywhere to put anything. Why don’t you get some shelves in here?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. I guess I’ve just gotten used to the mess.”

Riley shook her head. “You ever get an ADHD diagnosis, before you came here?”

Therese put on a look of mock offense. “Me? ADHD? What would possibly make you think that?”

Riley looked around. “You know, this room was the first thing I saw about the Tower? In that original vision of you, when you reached me… after the car accident, I mean.”

Riley didn’t want to talk about the accident, Therese knew; the reluctance leaked through the empathetic connection. She decided on a light tone. “So my mess was your first impression. Great. And here I thought I could keep this disaster a private shame.”

Riley did one of her little half-smiles. “At least it meant you weren’t intimidating.”

“Hey!”

Riley finally had enough room to sit, and leaned forward attentively. She was here to observe and, Therese hoped, to give her a meditative focus without being distracting. Or any more distracting than usual; having her constant emotional presence lurking in her mind was always a little bit challenging during meditation. And other times, she thought, and then clamped down on her emotions before the embarrassment could—

“Too late,” Riley said. “Congratulations on sorting that out, by the way.”

Therese blushed and looked down at her lap, but a smile had crept onto her face. “We’re both idiots, Nora and me. We’ve had years of just… wishing. We had to almost die before either of us even brought it up.”

“Yeah, you’re idiots. But at least now you’re idiots who are kissing each other.”

Therese squirmed. It was weird to talk about something like this with a person who knew exactly how you felt at all times. She parried with, “And you? All I’ve been getting is ambient longing and love and worry. Who’s that about?”

Riley looked away. “Suliat.”

“That makes sense. She’s had a look about her, like she’s hunting, ever since the first day she met you.”

“But she’s also kind of… I don’t know, she’s with Eve, and I’m not sure what any of it means.”

Therese nodded. Birds and the bees, magical girl style. “You’re worried about Eve?”

“Not exactly. Not like, jealousy? More like, any time I could get with Su, I kind of want her to spend with Eve. Su makes her happy, and I like seeing them happy together. But it means I don’t really know, I guess, what we are? Su and me. We just haven’t talked about it.”

Therese sighed. “I am the wrong person to give advice on this, as I think I’ve established. But Riley, you should just talk to her.” She frowned. “I don’t know why you’re afraid of that. But I know you are.”

“Fuck.” Riley looked away, down at the floor. “Yeah. Of course you know.”

“Hey, you don’t have to talk about it, if you’re not comfortable—”

“No. No, it’s fine, it’s stupid. I’m stupid.”

Therese could feel her wrestling with the desire to hide and the desire to speak, so just waited her out.

Finally, Riley said, “They’re… lesbians.”

Ah. There it is.

“And, I mean…” She trailed off, gesturing vaguely at herself.

“You think they don’t see you as a girl.”

Riley nodded. “There’s a lot of space between saying I’m a girl and like, looking like one? I see myself in the mirror, I know what I look like.”

“Didn’t you and Suliat kiss already, though? Or did I misread that emotional burst?” Therese was pretty sure, in fact, that they’d kissed a lot, more than once, and at length. It was occasionally annoying when she was trying to concentrate.

“We, yeah, we did. But what if—” She cut herself off. “Never mind, that’s stupid. Anyway, I feel, like whether I want to or not? Like I’m a big ugly man invading their space, and their relationship, and they resent me for it. Or, well.”

“Eve does.”

“Yeah.”

“You have any evidence of this? Has she said—”

Riley snorted. “Eve? You could be standing on her foot and she wouldn’t say anything.”

“But still, this is all just speculation?”

“Yeah.” Riley nodded. “It is. It’s stupid. It’s stupid speculation. But I hate the thought that she would ever come to dislike me for… stealing Su from her.”

“Suliat doesn’t seem like the kind of person who gets ‘stolen’, Riley.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. Anyway. You asked. That’s where the ‘worry’ part of it comes from. Sorry.”

Therese laughed. “We’re both such messes, and we’re dumping all our messiness on each other all the time. Taking turns apologizing.”

Riley did that lopsided grin again. “If you’d told me six months ago that I’d have to spend the rest of my life giving someone unfiltered access to my emotions, I’d have stayed in the hospital.”

“Do you regret it, though?”

“No. I… I think I like who I’m becoming. You?”

Therese smiled down at her hands in her lap. “I don’t regret it either. I like you, Riley Hawkins.” She felt the pleased surprise from Riley’s link. “But!”

“Time to work?”

Therese put on a pompous voice, an echo of Gaveny in full lecture mode. “Novice Hawkins, if you would be so good as to put out those flame globes?”

“Very well, Adept Lasalle,” she said, just as pompously. “Are we prepared?”

“Yeah, but you have to stay quiet, or you’ll distract me. More. You’ll distract me more.”

“Got it.”

Therese closed her eyes, pushed the link to Riley away and out of her consciousness, and let her mind drift—

into the Tree.

persenche

Sorry this is late going up! It turns out that enough really loud music and dancing can disrupt even my most carefully-planned schedule. Here we are, though, with Riley and Therese working together on divination after the latest revelations. What will they find? Entirely positive and upbeat visions of the future, I'm sure!

As always your support keeps me writing and your comments make me smile. Share my story widely, and give me your theories and speculation in the comments!