“Wanna go on a field trip?”

Brynn was leaning in the doorway of Therese’s office, wearing the black field uniform that Riley called the ‘lesbian ninja’ outfit.

Therese blinked. “A what?”

“A field trip.” Brynn came in, took the seat that Riley had cleared for her use when she was along for divination work. “Literally, in this case. I’m taking a team out into the field, and I need a Diviner, and I thought of you.”

Therese absolutely did not want to leave the Tower, go out into the City, encounter any Banes, discover any more horrible corruption-bugs, or have to hike anywhere or carry a backpack. Just thinking about doing any of those things made her want to cry.

So she said, “Uh. Sure? When are you going?”

Brynn’s face broke into a grin. “This afternoon. I mean, really, as soon as you can get ready.”

Therese had things to do, reports to write, a planned meeting with Nora and Key and Allie, and had meant to drop by and check on Riley, who seemed awfully pleased with herself right now.

So she said, “Yeah, I can do that. As long as I don’t need to bring anything.”

Brynn bounced to her feet in excitement. “Just your own talented self and uh, not those shoes.” She pointed at Therese’s worn slippers, that she preferred for scuffing her way around the office when she didn’t feel like finding stockings to wear.

Therese did not want to put on boots. She didn’t want the cramped pinchy feeling of snugly tied boots, and she didn’t want the thick wool hiking socks, and she didn’t want to have to wear trousers that she’d tie down to the boots to protect her legs.

So she said, “Right. Boots. Got it.”

Brynn did a little dance. “Hell yes. Okay, we’re going to meet up in Ranger Assembly in um, 90 minutes?”

Therese looked around her office, and thought about how she’d also considered taking a nap later in the afternoon.

So she said, “I’ll see you there.”

And an hour and a half later, she was hoisting a light travel pack onto her shoulders and looking around at the intense, eager faces of the gathered Rangers, and at Brynn, whose face was nearly shining with enthusiasm.

That was probably also helped by the sheath of silvery metal that enclosed her left arm, which she wouldn’t explain to Therese except to confirm that it was a Weapon, and that she’d show it off if the opportunity arose. She was so excited by whatever it was.

Therese fell in beside her as they left through the long passage through the Peripheral Tower out into the City. “What are the Weapons, anyway? The Headmistress really didn’t want to talk about them, when I found out we had them.”

Brynn shrugged. “I don’t know much more than you do, probably. I guess there was a Magister, one of the Crafters. And right after the last kaiju-class Bane, she decided to make Tower defense her main research focus. So she’s spent a couple of centuries figuring out how to get the most power into a Worked object as possible, and nobody really understands any of the theory behind it, and she’s done that thing Magisters do when they get really focused on something?”

Therese nodded. Magisters sometimes had a problem where they forgot to interact with other people for so long that they stopped being a part of the real world. Once you replaced eating and sleeping with magical sustenance, you got weird. The official term for it was ‘going on Retreat’, and most of the Magisters who did it never came back, funneling all their communication through their fellow Magisters, or via cryptic notes and incomprehensible academic papers.

“Yeah, so we have a bunch of these things that are crazy dangerous, and they’re all basically irreplaceable and unique. I guess there’s a whole team in the Armory who just study them, trying to figure out what she did to Work them. And sometimes, what they even do, or how to turn them on.”

“Sometimes I feel like what we do is mostly just cleaning up after Magisters. Do you think people doing, like, theoretical physics have to deal with this kind of thing?”

Brynn laughed. “I mean, from where I’m at? Magic theory papers and college level physics read about the same.”

They emerged from the tunnel into the high-walled city canyon that led away from the Tower, moving at a pace just brisk enough to keep Therese from being able to quiz Brynn more on her new toy, or on what exactly they were going out to do. Presumably they’d be trying to open a portal, which meant Therese would be trying to form a connection with the Primary to pinpoint the location. She’d helped with two portal openings before, so she knew the basics, but she hoped she wouldn’t have to do anything complicated.

The things that fell under the purview of Divination always seemed a bit random to her. They clearly used the same skill set; it was what she called ‘diviner-brain’, and it was a whole way of thinking about magical problems that all felt related. For all these tasks, the same metaphorical muscles flexed, and Therese was just as competent at all of them.

Exploring the celestial realm. Finding and interpreting prophetic dreams. Gathering information magically. Communicating thoughts and emotions. Somehow, all of these were related, and so was the task of locating things in the Primary from within the City. She had a theory about what they all had in common, but spending time on fundamental magical research didn’t really interest her, when she could instead be wandering in celestial space. She realized this made her an absolutely terrible scientist, but Diviner Rajavi hadn’t complained about the often-abbreviated reports she submitted.

After an hour of walking, they left the close-walled confines of the Tower approach road, and up onto a looping elevated highway that curved off to the southwest, cutting between looming limestone-facade buildings, rickety iron fire escapes intersecting the roadway and then descending below it towards the tangle of alleyways and side-streets in the lower dark.

“We’ll follow this for the next ten kilometers,” Brynn said, “and then we’ll have to drop down to the ground level and cut through the surface streets for a while. There isn’t another good trunk right now, so it’s going to take some more effort. Still, climbing up and down stairs? You’re used to that, right?” Her lopsided grin was infuriating.

“Don’t act like… this is somehow… my fault,” she said, pausing to get enough air to talk. The diaphragm breathing was helpful, sure, but she was still soft and squishy and kind of rubbery, when it came down to it, and all this cardio was way more than her body was used to. Still, she knew how slow I was going to be when she asked me to come along, so she has nobody to blame but herself, Therese thought.

Which led her inevitably back to thinking about why Brynn had asked for her specifically, and why she’d agreed even though she really didn’t want to go out, and then the mental image of Brynn in the tight field uniform she was wearing when she arrived to ask for Therese’s help.

And then the distraction of that thought made her trip over a cracked road slab, and she sprawled out and Brynn had to help her up while the other Rangers waited, and after that she worked very hard to keep her mind firmly on the mechanical process of moving one foot in front of the other.

# # #

Himari was out of her room and headed for the suite door when Riley caught her. “Mari! Hey, are you busy? Because—”

“Kinda.” Himari hesitated, a step away from the door.

“Can I come with you?” Riley was on her feet, feeling really insistent all of a sudden. It wasn’t that Himari was actively avoiding her, but there was a degree of passive avoidance, of just making herself busy all the time, of not spending her time in the common room. Riley didn’t really have an agenda, precisely, but she had decided to make an active effort to keep Himari from drifting away.

Therese had said that it was typical for a cadre to drift apart, especially if anyone in the group started a relationship with anyone else. Riley had pointed out that her primary example of this was her and Nora, and Therese told her to shut up.

Still, Riley had an awful sinking feeling whenever she imagined Himari detaching from their cadre, going a different way, hanging out exclusively with her Ranger friends and the Ranger wanna-bes in the other Novice cadres. It felt like failure, and it felt a little like her fault, and she hated it, and had decided to stop it dead before it could get worse.

At this point I’ve come out as a girl, I’ve come out as a lesbian, and right at this moment I’m wearing a sports bra and nothing else, because my boobs ache. What kind of social stigma am I even worried about? So she’d become more socially aggressive. At least within their cadre.

“I’m going to see if they need help downstairs, so it’s not going to be, like. Fun. Just moving boxes around.”

“That’s fine. That sounds great.” Riley was already pulling on her shoes.

“Shirt.”

“No, these are shoes.”

“You need to put on a shirt,” Himari said carefully, as though to a slow child.

“Oh! Right.”

Himari shook her head. “You’re such a girl so much of the time, and then…” She gestured up and down at Riley. “You try to go out in public in a bra and knickers.”

Riley looked down, and then said indignantly, “I’m wearing pants!”

“Pants.” Himari snickered. “You’re wearing pants.”

It took Riley a moment. “You’re such a pain in the ass. Trousers. Okay? Better?” It was one of Himari’s favorite stupid wordplay jokes, to set up Riley to say ‘pants’ and then tease her over the UK English meaning of the word.

“You want to—” Himari nodded at Suliat’s door, where she and Eve had disappeared not long after afternoon classes.

“Nah,” Riley said. “They’re probably sleeping by now.” And also, the whole dynamic changes when you’re around them, and I want you to myself right now.

Which sounded predatory, or at the very least a little risqué, but Riley also knew that the moment the other two started kissing, Himari would lock up and speak in monosyllables for the rest of the day. And that would defeat Riley’s entire purpose.

“Well, let’s go. Come on, girl, get a damn shirt on.” Himari’s impatience was only partially performative.

Riley was still struggling into the short-sleeve button-up as they headed down the hall towards the Tower shaft. She could already hear the commotion; the Tower’s central area always had a low rumble of activity, the echoes created by the vast space bouncing sound strangely so that the combination of voices and incidental noise formed a chatter that never really entirely quieted down. But right now, there was actual noise, the sound of shouted directions, heavy things sliding, the crackle of Workings discharging into Tower grounding, and a kind of enthusiastic bustle that Riley hadn’t heard in the two months she’d been here so far.

“What the hell is going—”

“Supply’s moving things around using the main chamber Portals. Which means we get to haul stuff from storage to the atrium floor.”

“What’s the atrium?”

Himari looked sidelong at her as they walked towards the stairs down. “You’re fucking with me, right?”

“No? I have no idea what an atrium is.”

“It’s the main Tower shaft thing. That’s the atrium. Is that like, not a thing in the US?”

“No, it probably is. It’s just not a thing I knew.” Riley considered. “It’s not as filthy sounding as ‘shaft’ though.”

Himari snickered.

On the atrium floor, dozens of Novices and Adepts were directing constructs around the ten different piles of packing crates, moving things from one pile to another. In the center of the floor, a mosaic pattern Riley had only seen up close the one time, when she’d first arrived in the Tower, was flickering with discharging celestial energies. Little arcs and ladders of white fire lifted up into magical prominences that made it a few inches off the floor before expending themselves from the effort, and dissipating.

The Tower was absorbing a lot of magic right now.

As they approached the bustle in the center, Himari steered them towards Captain Ianthe, who was surveying the chaos and occasionally conferring with a Supply Adept. She had a clipboard under one arm, and she pulled it out to consult some kind of list or chart, ticking things off with a stubby pencil and sending the Supply personnel off on various errands.

She looked up as they arrived. “Novice Sasaki. And it’s Novice Hawkins, in the flesh.” She nodded. “You’re recovered from, well, everything?”

Riley nodded. “I think I’m not cut out to be in an action movie.”

Ianthe laughed. “None of us are, really. Maybe Hyun-ji.” Her face became serious. “Which reminds me, I wanted to thank you personally for.” She paused. “All of that.”

Riley started to shake her head, but Ianthe ignored it. “You saved lives. I know that the Headmistress chewed your ass for it, and I’m not going to say she was wrong, but you saved Ranger lives. That counts for a lot.” She smiled. “Glad we didn’t leave you in the City to die, that first day.”

Himari gave Riley a sidelong look. “Was she a pain in the ass or something? Because I’d believe it.”

“She was a pain in the ass. But no, she was asking us to leave her behind.” Ianthe shrugged. “Too bad I had orders.”

Riley was indignant. “It wasn’t exactly like that. I was just asking a question.”

Ianthe grinned, and then pointed at Himari. “Sasaki. You were looking for me. What do you need? We’re kind of busy.”

“To help? We can carry boxes or, you know. Whatever.”

Ianthe looked them up and down. “We don’t need muscle; that’s what the constructs are for. But we do need more people sorting.” She pulled two sheets of paper off the back of the sheaf on her clipboard. “Here. This is a manifest for shipping out to the Primary. Those piles over there?” She pointed with her pencil stub. “Those are where we’re staging supplies. Check the list, and tag anything that’s not on it, because that’s stuff for one of the other Portal destinations.”

Riley took the paper, which was covered in dense, carefully handwritten text, which had then been copied by, presumably, some magical means. Or maybe they just popped over to Switzerland and used a photocopier. She had no idea. “Uh, tag how?”

Ianthe pointed again, this time to a bin of what looked like confetti. “Grab the green strips, stick them to any box with an inventory number that’s not on the list. After that, it’s not your problem. The constructs will get it moved out of the way.”

As they worked, sorting through the inventory labels on each of the storage crates, Riley settled into an easy rhythm of conversation with Himari. As long as they mostly talked about fun or inconsequential things, there was no hint of any discontent; anything that strayed towards the cadre or the constellation of associated topics drained the enthusiasm out of Himari’s voice, and would eventually stall the conversation out entirely. So Riley talked about light and meaningless things, or Himari’s preferred topic, the Rangers.

“I mean, my wish fulfillment was never witchy, you know? I just wasn’t into the idea of magic as an academic thing. I was always a Sailor Moon girlie. I wanted to…” She waved her hands around energetically.

“Kick asses, but magically.” Riley had seen very little Sailor Moon, but had an idea that there was a lot of jumping around and maybe some martial arts? Or was she thinking of Power Rangers?

“Yeah, pretty much. If I got to pick a character in a video game, I picked the girl with the sword. They always make the sword girls magical, I guess to keep men from feeling, you know. Inadequate.” She grinned. “You don’t have to explain why Wonder Woman is stronger than Superman if you say she’s magic.”

“Is she?” Riley had no idea about superheroes, either.

Himari snorted. “Yes. And I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.” She had that tone of voice that suggested she was mocking comic book nerds while simultaneously admitting she was one of the people she was mocking. It was a Himari special, hiding her sincerity in a veneer of irony, but not so much that the irony itself became cringe. “Anyway, what was your wish fulfillment dream?”

Riley looked up into the vault of the Tower overhead, impossibly far away. “To be a girl.”

That left a silence that took Himari a few moments to close. “Right, yeah, that makes sense. Like, anyone specific, or—”

“I saw a few episodes of show called Ranma.”

“Oh yeah? I’ve seen the first couple of seasons but I guess maybe it wasn’t really my thing?” Himari considered. “I can see how it would have been yours, though.”

“That’s the funny thing. It wasn’t. I kind of hated it, and stopped watching it.” She tried to sort through her thoughts. “I hated that the character could turn into a pretty girl, and all he did was complain about it. He had everything I could want, and he spent all his time trying to fix it. It made me think… there was something wrong with me, I guess. Because I would never try to fix it. If it were my show, I’d have made it about how happy Ranma was as a girl, and how much she hated to change back.”

Himari was silent for a second. Then she poked Riley once, in the shoulder, unbalancing her.

“Hey!”

“And now you get to magically transform and you never have to change back.” She grinned. “You just needed the right kind of magical girl show.” She stepped back from the box pile. “That’s all of mine. You finished over there?”

“Almost.”

Himari took the opportunity to squat down on her heels, resting. “My favorite show was Bleach. It was a boy show, but there’s this character, Rukia. She has a beautiful magical white sword and she fights with ice magic that’s, I guess, kind of part of her sword-fighting skills, too? Anyway. That’s what I wanted. That’s who I wanted to be.”

“Huh. Yeah, I can see it. I mean, you’re basically describing what it was like when I saw Finley fight Banes. Well, except fire, not ice.”

Himari laughed. “The Rangers are basically the real life version of the characters in Bleach, now that I’m thinking about it. Except in Bleach they’re called ‘hollows’ instead of Banes. Also, it’s fucking weird to describe the Rangers going out into the City to fight Banes as ‘real life’.”

Riley grinned as she finished her last tagging. “This place is fucking weird. This whole situation is fucking weird.”

There was a hum from nearby, which rose in volume until it made conversation difficult. In the center of the mosaic, a pillar of orange fire rose up to loom over the assembled piles of boxes, Novices, and Adepts. Someone shouted “Portal! Clear!” and then the pillar split into two, creeping away from each other slowly, dragging between them a black featureless void.

The sight of an open Portal still gave Riley chills. She could remember that first one in the park so clearly, and knowing what she knew now, she could imagine all the horrifying ways stepping into that could have gone wrong.

Embedded in the mosaic floor were two golden brackets, each of them four meters from the center of the mosaic, opposite each other, creating a distance between them of eight meters. They were pulling all the little arcs of celestial fire that Riley had seen creeping around the mosaic into themselves, like they were magnets for magical power.

The fire-pillars that formed the sides of the Portal made their way slowly to those brackets, pulling the central void wider and wider, until finally the pillars reached the brackets and locked into them. The brackets came alight with an inner golden glow.

Both of the fire pillars, and the bars of fire forming the top and bottom of the Portal, froze as though the fire had been turned abruptly to gold, solidified in some magical transmutation of energy to matter. The flames, caught in mid-flicker, looked like thorns on twisting vines. The glow of the brackets spread up through those frozen golden flames, and the whole Portal became a kind of miniature sun, bathing the floor of the atrium in yellow-white light.

Everyone had stepped back from the rippling black surface, keeping the space just in front of it clear. Running into someone as you stepped through a Portal might not necessarily be fatal, but it was at least dangerous, and best practice was to keep a four meter clear area in front of the portal exit.

The first group of Logistics personnel stepped through, still smartly dressed in modern fashions, tailored suits and impeccable hairstyles. They were all armed, with some kind of small submachine gun slung on straps over their shoulders, held ready for action, but with the barrels pointed down at the floor. As they got their bearings, the weapons were released into a more casual carry, and the tension of the team’s emergence from the Primary dissipated.

“Problems?” Ianthe was approaching the leader of the group, who shook her head. They began to talk.

“So, why don’t Rangers use guns? I mean, obviously we can get them here.” Riley gestured.

“Wouldn’t work. I mean, first of all, because of the entropy thing. Keep a precision instrument like a modern gun here and it will blow up in your face after a week.” She nodded towards the Logistics team. “They won’t use them here, and they won’t stay here with them for more than a couple of hours. But also?” She made a shooting gesture. “You can’t shoot Banes. It doesn’t really do anything.”

“Why not?”

“No internal organs.” Himari saw the lack of comprehension on Riley’s face, and rolled her eyes. “Guns work by putting a hole through you, and the hole goes through your innards, which you like, need? To survive? So with a hole in you, you die.”

“And Banes?”

“They don’t really have anything inside them they need. It’s just all bones and gears and springs and pistons and meat. They aren’t really alive, is the thing. They’re more like… these constructs, I guess.” She pointed at one of the shimmering heat-fields that hung nearby. “Magic that moves stuff around. The only way to kill one is to use up all the magic that’s animating it. Bullets would just ventilate it. You gotta chop it apart, break its limbs, force it to spend its energy to put itself back together again.”

“Grim.”

Himari laughed. “I mean, maybe, but it’s kind of like janitor work. They don’t feel pain and they aren’t alive, so it’s more like we’re cleaning up the leftover magic that’s loose and animating stuff.”

Riley heard the ‘we’ clearly. Himari already knew what she wanted, and how to get it.

I wish I did.

# # #

Therese opened her eyes at the touch on her shoulder, letting the divination drop.

“Anything?”

She shook her head. “No. I think we need to move further south.”

The problem with the math that Logistics and Survey had worked out to map a location in the City to the Primary is that it had a lot of potential for error, because all the variables used to link the locations drifted over time. Usually slowly, sometimes catastrophically, depending on the Tower’s mood and the weather. Even under the best conditions, the least possible drift, it wasn’t possible to get the location more exact than a few hundred meters, and typically it was closer to a kilometer of fuzziness.

That meant Therese had to find a relatively comfortable place to sit, drop into a divination trance, and start poking around, trying to find the Diviner on the Primary side of things, who would be doing the magical equivalent of waving a brightly-colored shirt over her head to draw attention. The problem, of course, was that it wasn’t free to enter and leave the trance state, and certainly wasn’t free to probe around the Primary looking for another Diviner. By the third attempt, Therese was fighting a headache, and by the seventh attempt she was drained and groggy.

The longer she took to find the connection, the more it would drift; if they had to stay out another night-shift, it was entirely possible that the location could shift outside their reasonable search area, and if that happened, there was almost no chance of Therese locating her counterpart.

The woman on the other end was Diviner Senai, who Therese had met a few times. Whether familiarity with the other diviner mattered for establishing the cross-world connection was a contested topic among the Divination department, and Therese tended to the belief that it was always easier to recognize a mind you’d seen before. Senai wasn’t someone she knew well; the woman had been ten years her senior, and lived and worked almost entirely on the Primary these days, returning to the Tower only for department meetings. This shouldn’t matter, but the whole discipline was so ambiguous and vibes-based that Therese worried she was somehow self-sabotaging.

“Let’s take a break. We’ve got a few hours before we need to start thinking about making camp here.” Brynn looked around at the open expanse of roof. The structure was some kind of department store, six stories up from the road and perhaps as many more up from the presumed ground level. Ventilation hoods littered the space, and a service stairwell poked up in a small boxy structure. The door was propped open and the Rangers had affixed some kind of warding device to it, so that anything creeping up the stairs would set off an alarm that Therese had been assured was very, very loud.

She stood and sighed, her legs protesting with cramps and twinges of pain. “I can probably do one more here, and then we’re going to need to cross over to the next building.” She pointed south, uncomfortably aware of the looming Spike on the horizon in that direction. Just 20 kilometers away, the Spike was oppressive, visible no matter where they were, and Therese imagined that someone atop it would be able to see them scurrying far below like ants.

It was unpleasant to look at, and it was certainly worsening her headaches, and divination felt strange and wrong here. It was like the meta-reality of the celestial realm was being filtered through an art house film director’s vision, complete with Dutch angles and red and yellow color filters and extreme depth-of-field effects. She hated the feeling of entering the trance here, hated the distorted, rotten, warped-glass funhouse mirror experience of it.

Brynn nodded, signaled to one of the Rangers. The woman jogged over from her post on the east edge of the roof. “Sofia, let’s get a Working together to bridge the alley to the south. I don’t want to go down to ground level again.” The Ranger nodded and went off to confer with the rest of her team. “Give it another shot and then we’ll plan to bridge and camp.”

Therese nodded, picked up her light pack, and headed to the south edge of the roof. It was only twenty meters away from the last attempt, but even that short of a distance in the City might be enough to get her within range of Diviner Senai. She settled into a comfortable position, and let her mind drift.

Her headache immediately flared up, like a shard of glass buried deep in her skull, working its way further in. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to relax, to release the tension in her neck and shoulders, to detach her awareness from her body.

The problem was, the celestial realm here was fractured, like she was seeing it through a prism, but the prism had a big snarl of cracks and flaws that was separating her view of the Tree into a dozen different shards, none of which fit together properly. She had to assume this was being generated by the Spike, somehow, though she couldn’t imagine the mechanism.

Could be worse. It could be the distortion.

That, at least, had faded from view as they’d continued south beyond it. Divination near that open sewer had led to her coming out of a trance with a lap full of vomit, and she wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. The Spike was giving her headaches, but headaches she could handle.

Assuming she could get a few hours of sleep, anyway.

She began to feel, somewhat blindly, across the texture of the celestial realm. It had a kind of correspondence with the Primary, and Therese could feel pinpoints of magic on its surface like reading Braille across the dome of the entire cosmos.

Nothing. No Senai. She could feel a kind of tension further south, but it wasn’t close enough to be certain. She sighed. They’d have to try again after resting and crossing the gap between the buildings. She suspected they were just another 50 or so meters away from the right place; the tension she could barely touch at the furthest extent of her mental reach felt familiar and comfortable, a likely sign of a Diviner. Or so she thought. Maybe it was just unconscious bias. Maybe it was some kind of as-yet-unmapped sense that only Diviners could use. Maybe it was her imagination.

There were prickles on the surface of the celestial sphere, though, and those were much closer. Something like the catching and grabbing of tiny hooks, little needles, thorns on a bramble trying to grab hold of her awareness.

What the fuck is—

Then she knew, and retreated from her trance as quickly as she could without losing consciousness from the shifting of her magical focus.

“Banes,” she shouted, and that instant of warning saved Sofia’s life, as the pack of goblin-class Banes came swarming up over the south end of the building, over and onto the roof, where the Ranger had been planning the Working to bridge the gap.

Sofia acted on pure instinct at Therese’s shout, pushing herself backwards from the edge, activating her pike and getting the blade between herself and the roof’s edge. She landed hard on her ass, but brought the pike up in time to catch the first of the goblins as it rushed her. It speared itself through the torso, and with a wrench, Sofia tugged her weapon sideways and through the thing’s body, splitting it nearly in half.

The goblins were whirring clockworks, visible gears grinding through slots in their carapaces. A set of chains like a bicycle’s came spinning out of the broken creature, reducing its four frontal claws to limp and useless weight. The second goblin was right behind its damaged sibling, hurtling over it and throwing itself at Sofia, who was still working her weapon back around to face the enemy.

Brynn pointed with her silver-chrome arm, and a lance of white fire speared out of it, crossing the five meters of space between her and the attacking Bane. It looked, Therese thought, like a sparkler. All along the length of the lance, shooting sparks leaped off and burned themselves out before they could do more than bounce off the ground once. It was like a cascade of burning bits of metal, generated out of the Weapon and whatever strange Working it was infused with.

Brynn swept the lance of fire sideways, and it tore across three more of the Banes, reducing them to shuddering ruin, claws and legs desperately trying to reconfigure themselves into something, anything, that could keep attacking.

The rest of the Ranger team had their pikes out and fully extended, and they pushed forward from the eastern flank of the pack of goblins, following behind Brynn’s sweeping, scything bar of burning light. As more of the crab-things flung themselves up and over the roof edge, the front rank of Rangers speared them and pushed them backwards.

Therese had her own pike in hand, but she was keenly aware of how little she knew about using it. Still, she gripped it tightly, her eyes darting around from one Bane to the next, her breath coming in shallow, panicky gasps.

Brynn’s lance went dark, leaving an afterimage on Therese’s retinas that she desperately tried to blink away. She’d lost count, but it looked like more than a dozen of the creatures had been dismembered already, and Brynn and Sofia were fighting side-by-side, sweeping their weapons in short arcs in front of them to maintain distance, outnumbered, trying to hold off the Banes to give the rest of the team time to fight over to them. Whatever the Weapon was, it seemed it couldn’t be used continuously for very long.

Brynn had taken off her helmet during the downtime, and her purple hair was loose now, falling across the side of her face, flaring out when she whirled. Therese could see the muscles of her thighs tense and pull like corded ropes with every turn and twist of her body. Her face was a mask of exultant joy as she dashed forward, then leaped back just in time to avoid the scythe-claws of the goblins.

She was beautiful.

Therese could feel her heart thrashing in her chest, and she desperately tried to catch her breath, watching Brynn spin and turn, whirling the pike around herself, retracting it and then extending it again, lashing in and out. She was a whirl of motion and death. She was dance and dancer all at once. Therese couldn’t pull her eyes away.

The goblin that finally reached Brynn had circled around the pair, and at the last moment in its lunge it changed its target from Sofia to Brynn, and one of its claws lashed out and raked across Brynn’s shoulder and down her back, parting her black Ranger gear and her skin beneath it. Her left arm went limp as the muscles of her upper back parted, and she snarled in pain. Sofia turned to engage the creature, but not in time; it danced back away from the pair, and crouched to leap on the now-defenseless Brynn.

But its backwards scuttle put it just a few meters away from Therese. Oblivious to her presence.

She didn’t think about what she was doing, certain that if she stopped to think, she’d be paralyzed with fear. She stepped forward, casually, like she was walking across a room or down a hall, and thrust her pike forward, triggering it out to its full extension. It leaped from her hand into the back of the Bane, severing its chains and shattering its primary gear, which snapped and tore itself apart, rotational forces carrying its broken pieces out through the thing’s carapace and ripping it nearly in half.

The force of the impact dislodged the pike from Therese’s hands, and flung it off to the side, well out of her reach. She staggered, trying to catch herself before she fell, her right arm numb from the wrenched weapon.

The nearest Banes turned to face this new threat, and stalked towards her.

Brynn howled in fury, trying to pull their attention back to herself, and the sheath on her torn left arm flared into life again, sending the bar of white fire out to carve out a path through the goblins closest to Therese. There was steam rising from the device now, as Brynn let it fall silent once again, and her damaged arm now dragged on the ground, the Weapon seeming an insupportable weight. The smell of burning flesh filled the air, sickly-sweet and charred and horrible.

Then the other Rangers reached the pinned trio, and the last of the Banes was hacked into shattered chitin and clockwork.

In the sudden awful silence, Brynn staggered across the space between her and Therese, and dropping her pike, reached out and grabbed her by the upper arm. Brynn’s grip was iron and inexorable, and she pulled Therese in close. “You idiot,” she said, gasping, and Therese could see the terror and tear-tracks on Brynn’s face, as her eyes flicked up and down Therese, hunting for injury, frantic. “You fucking idiot,” she said, and pulled Therese to her, her arm gripping her around the shoulders; Therese could feel her shaking, shuddering, through the contact. Brynn was crying in panic and relief. “You could have died,” she sobbed into Therese’s hair, as she sunk to her knees, and Therese tried to support her weight. The two of them were borne to the ground by her suddenly inert mass.

And then Brynn was unconscious, and Sofia was shouting for a medic.

# # #

Riley and Himari continued sorting the crates while the Logistics team moved back and forth through the Portal, hauling laden manual pallet jacks behind them. According to the manifest they were working from, the crates mostly contained the infrastructure for magic: Worked objects of various purposes, from healing to divination to mobility.

And Worked weaponry. Crate after crate of pikes and bucklers and knives and armor plates. Riley couldn’t imagine the sheer quantity of weaponry, and finally asked Ianthe about it.

“The Armory’s been working flat out since the Spike appeared,” she explained. “Most of this stuff can be managed by junior Adepts, sometimes even talented third years.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“Better safe than sorry?” Ianthe had been looking over a document one of the Logistics people had handed her, and shook her head as though taking Riley in for the first time. “Sorry, distracted. We’re outfitting at least one forward observation post in the City, and its Primary-side counterpart. There’s a team out right now that’s working on finding a good spot for the linking, and by the time they have the local portal up and running, we need to be ready to get supplies through it to the forward post.”

“But the weapons?”

“We have no idea what’s out there, basically.” She shrugged. “Therese — Adept Lasalle — saw some fairly nasty stuff in her divinations. Though I suppose you’ve also seen them.”

Riley shuddered. “Yeah.”

“There you go. We don’t know what to expect. We don’t know if we’ll be fighting Banes or whatever it was that hit the Ranger team at the anomaly. We don’t know what the Spike is, or what to expect from it. So we’re preparing for, well. War, basically.”

Himari had joined them, and asked, “Is that something we’ve done before? War, I mean.”

Ianthe looked pained. “Not… Not at this scale, let’s say.” She frowned. “It would take too long to get into. Let’s just say that our big happy Tower family hasn’t always been a big happy family.”

Riley thought about the idea of splinter groups, about the attack on the hospital.

While she was lost in thought, she was seized from behind, grappled and unable to react. She froze, tensed, prepared to start thrashing and flailing, and then a voice said in her ear, “Gotcha!”

She turned to see Marta, Adept Marta Koval of Logistics, with a wide shit-eating grin on her face.

“Jesus fuck,” Riley gasped, as Ianthe grinned and Himari gaped. “Are you trying to kill me after all that work to save me?” Her heart was still racing.

“Sorry, sorry. I couldn’t resist, when I saw your back was to the Portal. You should be mad at the Captain for not warning you, though. Never seen someone go along with a prank with such a straight face.”

Riley glared at Ianthe and Marta in turn.

Marta, meanwhile, had noticed Himari. “Heya. Novice, right? In Riley’s cadre? Marta. I’m from Logistics.” She extended a hand.

Himari, temporarily overwhelmed, took it and let her hand be vigorously pumped up and down. “Himari. Novice. Uh, yeah. I’m with her.” She pointed at Riley.

Which was somehow strangely satisfying to Riley. Himari was with her.

“She’s a fucking badass, so you’re in good company. She dragged herself to safety with her leg basically blown off by gunfire.”

Riley had told the story to the rest of the cadre, but her language had been a lot more moderate and restrained. Himari hadn’t heard the injury described as ‘blown off’, or Riley’s escape described as ‘dragged to safety’. She looked at Riley with a new, appraising look on her face.

“Oh yeah, I know. We’re training together these days.” Himari grinned, trying to recover some of her balance around the extremely intense Logistics Adept. “I try not to kick her ass too hard.”

Marta grinned, and hit Riley in the shoulder.

“What is it with butch girls and hitting me, anyway?”

“Who you calling ‘butch’?” Marta said in mock outrage, striking an excessively feminine pose in her tailored black suit and tousled pixie cut. Then she collapsed back into a casual slouch. “Hey, listen, want a quick tour of the Mountain? Both of you. I’m going to be going back and forth a couple of times today, so I can take you through both ways, and you can see what the place looks like.”

Riley looked over at the Captain for confirmation, and Ianthe waved her hand dismissively. “Go for it, as long as Adept Koval stays with you. This chaos is under control now, in part thanks to you, and I’ve got some Supply Adepts to chase down for now, anyway.” She gave Marta a skeptical look. “Though the Mountain is basically just a bunch of office space with no windows, so I’m not sure how exciting the tour is going to be.”

Marta laughed. “We’ll go up to the Lookout. It’s nice up there, and we can have hot chocolate and breathe Earth air instead of this dusty City crap.”

She led them back to the Portal, where a queue had formed, and they waited their turn behind several pallet jacks heaped with crates of some kind of ocular crystals. Marta kept up an uninterrupted monologue, describing the facility and talking about its history, which apparently stretched back to the early Middle Ages, when it had been a secure underground school for practitioners of early heretical esoterica, women hiding from Church persecution, and then later, women hiding from the witchcraft panic. “They never really caught any of us,” she explained, “but there was only so much we could do to save the poor fuckers they thought were us. We probably saved one in five. Which isn’t nothing, right? But so many died.”

And then they stepped through the Portal, and everything was black and Riley felt the sense of being two places at once, of being torn, and she reflected that this was really only the first time she’d been fully aware when moving through a portal, since all four times prior to this she’d been some form of incapacitated; sedated for the trip back from the hospital, tucked away in the shelter in her mind while a demon took control for the trip to the hospital, and operating in some kind of trance instinct when she’d come to the City the first time. And—

Why had she counted four trips through portals?

Then they arrived in the central Portal chamber of the Mountain, and Riley forgot about it, because this place was impressive. Not ‘magical-world’ impressive like the main shaft of the Tower, but impressive like an underground government bunker in a modern thriller movie way. Floodlights pinned the center of the platform, a hundred meters across, and ramps led down to the chamber floor, where forklifts rumbled back and forth, hauling pallets of crates to various piles staged around the place in a broad semicircle.

The air was clean, and fresh, and cold; Riley hadn’t realized how stale and old the air in the Tower felt. She took a deep breath, and then Marta was dragging both her and Himari out of the way to make room for the next pallet-jack being dragged though behind them.

“So this is the Mountain,” Marta said, gesturing up at the hundred-meter-high ceiling, tangled with lighting and infrastructure, and then around at the room. A windowed control room overlooked the space from fifteen meters up, and women with headsets prowled around the floor with tablets, taking notes, using them to scan the writing on the crate labels.

“It’s uh, it’s very modern.” Riley was otherwise at a loss for words.

“It’s like Evangelion,” Himari muttered, her eyes wide in excitement.

Marta laughed. “The Tower can be pretty stuffy, yeah. Anyway, let’s head over to the lifts. I want to stop off at the cafeteria and get something warm to drink before we go up to the Lookout.” She looked them both over. “And coats. You’ll freeze to death in those outfits.”

“We were expecting to be hauling boxes and getting sweaty,” Himari protested.

“And then you realized we have constructs for that shit. Well… there’s a lot of hauling happening on this end, if you’d like to get your hands dirty,” Marta offered. “Assuming you’re forklift certified.”

Himari glared in mock irritation, and Riley laughed.

persenche

We're moving towards the end of the story, now, though there's still a lot of ground left to cover, but I'm excited to hear your thoughts about some of the revelations that are just around the corner. And in the short term, there's a whole lot of Himari coming up, and I love her so much and I'm so looking forward to exploring her with you all.

As always, thank you so much for reading, for sharing this with your friends, for commenting, and for just being along for the ride with my little disaster polycule. <3 you all!