As she came out onto the South Pavilion, Riley immediately recognized the single figure standing away from the loose crowd of Surveyors and Theoreticians that had occupied the place since the appearance of the Spike. Brynn.

The Ranger wasn’t looking south; she was just staring off into the distance, and didn’t seem to notice as Riley approached. She turned her head just slightly as Riley leaned forward on the railing to join her.

“Riley.” She nodded.

“Hey, Brynn.” They both stared off at the horizon in silence for a few moments.

“I uh, I wanted to thank—”

“Listen, I never got a chance to thank—”

They both stumbled to a halt, and then both laughed.

“Sorry I was um. Kind of a bitch.” Brynn looked down, her expression unreadable.

“I was gonna say the same thing. You were under a lot of stress and some fucking novice comes in shouting at you and—”

Brynn waved her hand dismissively. “Wasn’t either of our finest moments.”

They were silent again. The wind picking through the spaces between the buildings below them made atonal whistles, hissing and bizarre, a background score to the murmuring of the nearby Adepts.

“So what brings you out here? I mean, except the obvious.” Brynn nodded towards the Spike.

“I dunno. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Therese’s prophecy dreams, and it’s kind of oppressive.” She looked up at the steel-gray sky above, the sun’s light murky behind a screen of unbroken cloud. “Not like this is much better, but it’s a change at least.”

“Has she found anything useful?” Brynn’s voice was just slightly too controlled.

Right, she has a thing for Therese and they haven’t talked about it at all. And I’m not supposed to know that because I got it from an emergency empathy meld. I can barely regulate my own emotions and I’m supposed to navigate this shit.

Riley shook her head and, out loud, said “Not really. Lots of visions of the Tower and magic lightning.”

Brynn sighed and leaned against the railing, folding her arms to rest her weight on them. “I just wish we knew what that thing was. Anything about it. What it has to do with the dark place.”

Riley turned to her. “Wait, I thought it was where the anomaly came from.”

“We don’t know. It’s way further away than the anomaly, and there’s a whole lot of normal City between it and the anomaly’s dark area. Well, ‘normal’ for the City anyway. You know.”

Riley nodded. “Yeah. Weird shit but our weird shit.”

Brynn laughed. “That’s the City in a nutshell, I guess. Our weird shit. When you live here, it’s easy to forget just how fucking freaky all this is.”

“I’ve seen the difference between celestial stuff and the distortion there, so I get it. Some kinds of weird want to kill you.” She thought for a moment, then continued. “So um, if it’s eighty kilometers away, you could probably send people out there to check it out, right? That’s what, four or five days?”

Brynn nodded. “We could, but we’re not. Yet, anyway.” She pointed off to the south. “That’s far enough that we couldn’t bring a lot of gear with us, we’d have supply lines that stretched out across a bunch of barely-charted City, and we’d have to either skirt the remains of the anomaly or trust that it wouldn’t shit out a bunch more killer bugs.”

“You said ‘yet’.”

“Yeah. It’s dangerous to do that here, but it would be a lot less dangerous to do it in the Primary. We could set up a logistics base there, pack it full of supplies, get a whole armory and lab setup going.”

“How does that work? Actually,” Riley said, “even though I got here through a portal, I have no idea what portals even are.”

“I mean, I’m not in Theory so I can’t tell you how to make them or what Sigils work best or anything. Mostly I just know how to use them.” Brynn paused in thought. “Okay, you know how the portal we used to evac everyone from the battle, the one you pinpointed for us, you know how it was somewhere off in fucking, Texas or something?”

“New Mexico, but yeah.”

“The big portal, the Portal, the one we open in the center chamber of the Tower, its other end is in Switzerland. In the Alps. Underground. So like, when you go to the Primary, typically you go to the Logistics base in Switzerland, and then you get a flight out of Bern.” Brynn pointed south. “The portal we opened to the south led something like… eight? Nine? Thousand kilometers west. In the Primary.”

“So what, it’s just random?”

Brynn shook her head. “No, but don’t ask me to explain it. There’s a map the Surveyors have been working on for about sixty years. It looks like a vector field. There’s transforms they do on Primary positions and relate them to City positions. And it’s not linear, and it varies over time, and a celestial storm can fuck up the positions of temporary portals so that they have to be resurveyed.”

“Seems like the easy way to do it is to go somewhere in the City and open a portal there and see where it goes?”

“Yeah, you’d think that. But you know where it mostly goes?” Brynn smiled. “Guess.”

It took Riley less than a second. “Right. The ocean.”

“Yup. And even if we wanted to like, charter a ship or something, there’s no way you can move anything in bulk through a portal that’s fixed relative to uh, gravity, I think, off the deck of a ship that’s moving relative to the ocean’s surface. You’d slice things into pieces even if you could get a calm enough ocean to try it.”

Riley considered the idea of the edge of a portal intersecting with an object. For an instant she flashed onto the moment where she’d stepped through the portal she’d made instinctively, that first time, and imagined what would have happened if she’d touched the orange fire outline.

“Anyway. This is why we have Surveyors and Logistics. They work out the math for how to position a portal, we open it, we anchor it with some Worked clamps that keep it stable, and then we can come and go through there as much as we need to.” She gestured down at the City. “It’s just that, you know, it could be eight thousand kilometers away in the Primary just to go down the street here, and it could be in the middle of the Pacific or in, like Antarctica, or whatever. So there’s a lot of trial and error. Gotta find a place close to a city, under a stable government, with decent infrastructure and friendly locals.”

Riley nodded, returning to silent contemplation of the horizon and the Spike.

“There’s a spot that’s the current best guess, but it’s still thirty kilometers from the Spike, and it’s in rural China, so it’s not great. More like a fallback plan if they can’t find anything else. Logistics hates dealing with the Chinese government almost as much as they hate dealing with the United States.”

Riley’s awareness of geopolitics was tenuous at best, so she just shrugged. “But you’re still looking.”

“They are,” Brynn said, pointing at the gathered Adepts, who had been joined by a pair of Magisters. “I’m not really a math person. I do operations and, you know. Hitting bad guys with spears.” She looked up and down at Riley. “Which reminds me, your form is getting better. Your endurance is still shit, but you at least look like you’ve held a weapon before.”

Riley grinned. “Himari’s on a mission. She wants a sparring partner who can keep up with her. I think she’s bitten off more than she can chew.” This wasn’t entirely true, and Riley had started taking a kind of animal pleasure in the flex and movement of her muscles. There was a joy in physicality that she hadn’t really known before.

Especially since me and Suliat—

She caught that image before it could make her blush. Nope. Nope, not thinking about that right now. Nope.

She knew that part of it was the effects of the hormone change. She felt good, almost all the time, a kind of low hum of euphoria that could make her shiver all over if she let it. Like being on the rising tide of an orgasm, but one that lingered for hours, days, just below the level of consciousness, an all-encompassing sense of well being. Moving felt good because existing felt good.

But beyond the physical, she also knew there was a deeper emotional root to the joy she took from exercise: she was no longer repulsed by the thought, or sight, of her own body. It wasn’t even that she’d changed all that much. She knew she hadn’t; her features were still masculine, her brows were still heavy and her jaw was too wide. Her shoulders were broad regardless of how skinny she might have let herself become, and her hips were nonexistent. And the ache of swelling breasts was more a future suggestion than anything visible.

But she could see the path. She could see the promise.

In a hundred different subtle ways, she let herself slip into feminine mannerisms and postures and body languages and vocal patterns. Things she’d fought her whole life to not do, things she’d fought to suppress, and in suppressing them, she’d mastered them. Elbows tucked in. Legs crossed at the thigh. Steps close in line rather than broadly spaced, swinging her hips. Practiced grace she’d always feared to attempt, finally allowed free.

Brynn had been watching as Riley’s mind wandered, and she poked Riley in the shoulder to get her attention. “Hey, Tower calling Riley. You there?”

“Uh. Yeah, sorry, just thinking about um. Working out, actually.” She blinked, shaking her head to clear it.

“Well, good. What I was saying was, you should consider joining the Battle Club’s spring tournament.”

Which was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard, of course. “Battle Club. Tournament. Like, fighting tournament? The one all the Rangers dominate every year, the one you’re organizing?”

“Yeah!”

She didn’t seem like she was teasing, Riley decided.

“You’ve got a very different notion of how good I am at, you know. Anything. Like, walking.”

Brynn laughed. “You’ve got months and months to train, and it’s very low-stakes. It’s fun, and you can go in expecting to lose pretty early on, so you don’t have to worry about committing a bunch of time to it. And it gives you a goal to aim for.” She considered. “I mean, a goal other than being Himari’s punching bag.”

Riley grimaced. “Oof. Yeah, okay. Um, let me think about it.”

“That’s not ‘no’,” Brynn said, smiling.

“Let me think about it! I’m not. I’m not a very public person, you know. I don’t like being seen.”

Brynn patted her shoulder. “You’ll be fine. And after a few months of working out and eating healthy, you’ll also be hot.” She grinned wickedly.

“H-Hey!” Riley blushed.

“I’m teasing. Mostly. Anyway, think it over. You’d need to do the basic safety course, but we do another one of those every month, and it only takes a few weeks. Um, assuming you have time.”

Riley nodded. “If I tell Himari about this, she’ll give up all our practice sessions to make sure I do it, so I can probably find the time.” She grimaced. “Oh hell, if I tell Himari about it, my answer’s going to have to be ‘yes’, because she’ll never let me wiggle out of it.”

Brynn immediately looked away, stopped meeting Riley’s gaze. “Um.”

“You didn’t.”

“It was, um. It was actually kind of her idea?”

“Shit.” Riley sighed, but mostly for dramatic effect. The secret truth was that she loved being cared for in this way. She loved the idea that her friends were plotting on her behalf.

She loved the idea that she had friends.

# # #

Therese was deep in unfamiliar, maybe even hostile territory when Brynn found her: in the lower-level gym, a large and echoing space which was mostly taken up with a track and a lot of woven mats for practicing falls and tumbling. She’d stopped trying to run almost immediately after starting, and was mostly just focusing on keeping her legs moving, one foot after another.

She was in much worse physical shape than she’d thought.

Even just the mirrors in the shower could tell her that. Her legs weren’t emaciated, not anymore, but they were pale and flaccid in a way that suggested the absolute lack of muscle tone under the skin.

She’d filled out, slowly, but none of it was muscle, and so she was both heavier and also weaker than she’d been. Kitty had taken one look at her, and ordered her to the Ranger level to at least try to do some exercise. “Any physical activity, nene Tee. Just get moving. You spend too much time in your study dreaming.”

“It’s my job,” she’d insisted, but she also knew when to surrender, and so now she was in the gym, trying not to wobble or fall over in front of anyone and embarrass herself.

This was the state she was in when Brynn came bustling in with her workout bag, already changed into the form-fitted athletic clothing she spent an alarming amount of her time in. She spotted Therese immediately, her eyes widening. Great, she’s going to tease me for exercising. I should have come here in the middle of the night shift, when nobody would be around.

Brynn did get a broad smile, and dropping her bag at the door, cut across the middle of the mats to join Therese on the track, walking alongside her. “Heya, Therese. How’s your recovery going?”

Therese tried not to be distracted by Brynn’s obnoxiously easy loping stride. She kept up with Therese’s slow jog without even exerting herself, even as Therese’s breath came in increasingly desperate gasps. “Terrible,” she managed, but even that left her without enough air and she slowed to a walk again. “Can’t…” She gulped air for a moment. “Breathe,” she finished.

“Hm. Hold on a sec, wait. Stop, I want to watch you breathe.”

Therese obediently stopped, and while she stood there dripping sweat, Brynn reached out to place her right palm right against Therese’s chest.

Um.

She blushed, but Brynn didn’t notice. She moved her hand down to Therese’s upper abdomen, just below her breasts, and held it there, too.

Uh.

Then she nodded, and looked up. “I thought so. You’re— Oh, hey, Tee, are you okay? You should sit down for a minute.” Brynn’s expression showed only concern, and Therese realized she must have taken the bright red flush of her cheeks as some kind of overheating.

Which is fine. That’s a fine thing for her to believe. Overheated. From running. Absolutely.

Obediently, she followed Brynn to a bench against the wall, and collapsed there, accepting a bottle of water. “You thought so?”

“Huh?” Brynn didn’t seem entirely present, like she was distracted by some other thought. “Oh! Oh, right, you’re breathing with your chest.”

“Um, isn’t that where your lungs are?”

Brynn shook her head, and replaced the water bottle with a new, full one. “Sure, but it’s more about what muscles you use to breathe. The best muscle for you to use is your diaphragm, and you’re barely using it at all.”

“Okay. So how do I—”

Before she could react, Brynn was sitting next to her on the bench, with her hand out. “Lean back.”

Therese hesitated a moment, and Brynn repeated. “Lean back, so I can show you.”

As Therese leaned back, Brynn touched her abdomen again, below her breasts.

Um.

“Okay, now when you breathe, I want you to imagine the air is going here. Down to your belly. Let it push your belly out.”

Therese felt both ridiculous and profoundly alarmed by this whole operation. She knew this looked silly; keeping her tummy sucked in to make herself appear smaller was reflexive for her now, after years of letting herself believe she was oversized in some way. And on top of that, Brynn’s casual touch, just the basic physicality of an athlete touching another athlete, unconsidered and unburdened with anything like desire, was making it very difficult to focus on her breathing.

“So what is this supposed to accomplish?”

“Well, for starters, you should be able to keep moving for longer than thirty seconds at a time, and maybe eventually you’ll even be able to hold up one end of a conversation while running.” Brynn’s smile was gentle, not teasing, despite the barb in her words. “Chest breathing is okay if you’re just sitting around but it’s no way to keep your muscles oxygenated.”

Therese nodded, and pulled a towel down off the nearby rack, wrapping it around her face and scrubbing. “Ugh, I’m so gross right now.”

“You look a lot healthier, though. Sweat agrees with you.”

Therese fought off another blush, and tried to change the subject. “So what are you doing down here? I thought you were on Operations duty right now.” Operations meant sitting around, planning, looking at maps, doing paperwork. Desk work. Boring work that Therese knew Brynn hated.

“Yeah, I was, but the rosters just got shuffled around, and everybody’s getting put on active duty shifts.” Brynn sounded both excited and worried. “One of the patrols got hit, and so we’re doubling their size for safety. Two squads instead of one, across the board. Nobody’s getting any rest for a while, and we’re pulling some people back from Logistics, too.”

Therese’s breath escaped in a slow hiss. “What do you mean, ‘hit’?”

“Bugs. Corruption shit.” Brynn was stretching, now, warming up before her own workout, and Therese tried not to let her eyes linger on the girl’s lean, muscular body. Even just thinking about not looking at her made her want to squirm on the bench.

“What happened?”

“It was Annette’s patrol, and they were out to the southeast, looking for an alternate trunk to push through to nearer the Spike. Which is basically what we’re all doing these days. Anyway, I guess they walked into an ambush. The things were waiting for them.”

“Did anyone…”

“Die? No. Katya’s leg got fucked up, and she’ll be off patrols for a few days while the Infirmary works on it. She was too young to be out on patrols, but like I said, we’re stretched pretty thin.” Katya had graduated less than a year ago, and was only technically an Adept at all. “The bugs came right through a wall, using their spit to dissolve it, I guess. Like acid. I don’t really know; Annette wasn’t very clear on the specifics. Anyway they burst through the wall and leaped on the patrol.”

“Fuck. How did they survive? Those things are—”

“Fast, nasty, terrifying. Yeah, we know. But your whole expedition? Got us a bunch more Weapons released from the Armory, so every patrol has one now. Thanks for that, by the way. I don’t know what fucking rainy day they were saving those things for, but they’re making the difference for us now.”

After finishing her last round of stretching, Brynn dropped to her haunches in front of Therese. “So Annette had something kinda like what Finley was using last time, a projector for a big arc of celestial fire that just kind of erases the bugs. I guess they were really gross this time. Don’t worry, I didn’t get any details, so I’m not going to share any.”

At the thought of the corruption creatures and their relative levels of ‘gross’, Therese had felt her stomach churn. Just thinking about the thing that had attacked her was enough to start her hyperventilating if she wasn’t prepared for it.

“They wiped out a whole nest of the things, a few dozen of them, and came back because of Kat’s leg. But they weren’t at the anomaly.”

“So it’s spreading.”

“Yeah.” Brynn looked away, concern plain on her face. “So we’re all going out now, double strength, and we’re spacing our patrols out to cover more ground.”

Wait, they’re spreading. Spreading where? “Where was the attack?”

Brynn gnawed at her lower lip. Finally, she said, “I’m not supposed to talk about this, but if anyone needs to know, it’s probably you. They were only about twenty-five kilometers out, southeast.”

“That means the things are coming closer. Like, to the Tower.”

Brynn nodded. “It feels like a probing attack. Like they’re testing to see where our defensive lines are.”

“Like they’re getting ready for the real thing,” Therese said.

“Yeah, that’s what worries me.” She stood, bounced on her toes. “Gotta get to work, if I’m doing patrols later this week.” She paused, and then made eye contact with Therese again. “I mean it, by the way. You look a lot better. Take care of yourself.” Then, in a lower voice, “I like seeing you healthy.”

And with that, she jogged off down the track, leaving Therese speechless.

# # #

“Hey, um. Riley! Hey!”

It took several attempts for Eve to get Riley’s attention, and when she finally came up out of the reverie she’d been in, she wondered how long and how loudly Eve had to yell to pierce her obsessive, circling thoughts.

Nobody was staring, at least. Or not openly. The common area platform on the Theory level was mostly unoccupied, though one of the second-year cadres were doing something complicated with a large sheet of brown paper and black grease pens. She assumed that would make sense someday, and like so many of the mysterious things the second and third years got up to in public spaces, she filed it away for the future.

She turned back to face the Theory passage, and Eve caught up. “Hey. Sorry. I guessed you were still thinking about class.”

Riley nodded. She’d been grilling Nora about how the Tower exercised its power, and Nora was feeling cooperative lately, it seemed, so she was giving answers or, where she didn’t have them, her best guesses.

So now Riley knew how much the Academy didn’t know about how the Tower worked, mostly. Nora tried to use an analogy to a current generating a magnetic field, but Riley had already recently established how basically she had no idea how electricity really worked, and so it didn’t really clarify anything. Nora tried again with ripples in a pond, and this was better, except that she kept insisting that this wasn’t a good analogy, which kind of defeated the purpose.

What Riley was trying to steer the conversation towards, though, was what the Spike was doing. What effects was it having? What could they expect from it? And like all the Adepts who weren’t Therese, once Nora realized Riley was trying to ask about the Spike, Nora shut down the conversation and got back on topic, and the topic was math, and Riley was frustrated.

Hell, the only reason Therese didn’t shut down her questions was that she couldn’t, she wasn’t able to lie, and if Riley asked yes-or-no questions, Therese basically had no choice but to answer. This irritated her, though, so Riley used this back door as sparingly as possible. Making Therese irritated with her, something that had been thankfully infrequent during their stressful and exhausting divination sessions, was unpleasant; knowing exactly how much someone wanted you to shut the fuck up and go away was hard on the ego, even if it wasn’t coming from a place of genuine anger.

“Nora doesn’t want to talk about the Spike. Nobody wants to talk about the Spike.”

“Yeah,” Eve said. “Truth is, I don’t want to talk about it either. But it’s hard not to think about it.” She pointed to one of the clusters of tall wing-backed armchairs. “Sit with me?”

Riley had been meaning to go hide in the Archives and try to figure out what celestial storms really were, and even opened her mouth to say ‘no thanks’, but caught the look on Eve’s face. She wanted to talk about something.

“Um, okay.” Riley sat, curling her legs under her. The first time Himari had seen her do this, she’d told Riley that she sat like a bisexual, and even though that didn’t make any sense to her, now Riley couldn’t help but think of it as ‘bi seating’.

This is ominous. She’s going to be angry with me because of Suli, isn’t she? Riley should have talked to Eve first. She worried about that at the time, but Suli had seemed so sure. And now Eve was upset, and it was going to fuck up their cadre even worse than Himari’s unhappiness had. Fuck. I’m still making a mess of everything and everyone around me. Can’t transition away from being a problem, I guess.

Eve pulled one of the other chairs close enough that between Riley’s right-hand wing and Eve’s left-hand wing, the backs of the chairs formed an almost complete wall against the world behind them. It was oddly private, for a public space, and comfortable. Even the constant hum of activity that cascaded through the tower’s central shaft seemed muted by the soft upholstery that enclosed them, a murmur rather than an echo.

“So like. It’s okay whatever you say. Just want to be clear about that first, right? Um.” Eve paused, fidgeting, and whatever she wanted to say was making her as nervous as Riley was. “What— Um. Did I do something wrong?”

Riley blinked in surprise. “What?”

“It’s okay if I did! I mean, it’s not okay, I shouldn’t have, whatever it was, but— oh, I’m fucking this all up, aren’t I?” She visibly struggled to find the right word, opening and closing her mouth through two different false starts, before finally continuing. “I mean, I’ve upset you somehow, that’s obvious, I guess? I don’t know what I did but I wanted to see if, I don’t know, if maybe I could explain—”

Riley waved her hand, trying to interrupt. “No, no, Eve, it’s not—”

“Or if not, if you just want me to go away, I mean, I get it, you and Suli need some alone time—”

“Eve!” Riley finally managed to break into the stream of consciousness that Eve was panic-dumping into the space between them. “Eve, hold on.”

Eve sputtered to a halt, her lips still half-formed around whatever word Riley had interrupted.

“Why do you think you did something wrong?” But of course, Riley knew, and inner-Riley was more than happy to make it clear: Because you’ve been avoiding her like she’s contagious, you idiot.

“You, um. You don’t talk to me anymore?” Eve’s eyes were tightly fixed on her hands, which she was twining into each other, finger over finger, and then untangling to re-twine in a different configuration. Riley could see the white ridges that gave away how tight she was gripping herself as she fidgeted. “When I try to see you, you leave the suite or the dining hall or wherever. When Suli and I are in the common room, you go into your room. When I try to talk to you after class, you’re in a hurry.”

Her voice was trembling, ever so slightly.

You’ve been a complete asshole to her, is what’s going on. Riley hadn’t meant to, but all she had to do was consider it from an outside perspective. From Eve’s perspective.

Christ, I’m so terrible at this. All of this. This friend shit.

“I’m, um. Okay so first of all, no? You didn’t do anything, Eve.”

Eve was silent but Riley could hear her breath hitching in tiny sobs. Her voice was still even, somehow. “I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I misunderstood—”

“No!” That came out louder and more abruptly than she’d intended, and Riley pulled back on her emotions. “No. I mean, it wasn’t you who did something wrong, it was me. And I’m sorry.”

Eve’s eyes flickered up to Riley’s face, and Riley could see the tears massing there.

“I’ve… never been in a relationship with anyone before,” Riley finally managed, the words strangled by the difficulty she had in making the admission. “And I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m just kind of following Suli’s lead. And I’m scared that I’m… hurting you.”

She drew in a breath, so she could say the rest in a rush before Eve could interrupt. “After what you saw when we were together, in the empathy link, when I came out to you, I thought I’d made you uncomfortable, because it was kind of forced on you and you didn’t consent or anything, and I felt like I would be taking advantage of that if I said that I liked you or that I wanted, I wanted to be closer to you, or anything like that, and I didn’t know how to even try to talk about it.” She ran out of air, finally, and then continued with a smaller breath. “I thought it was creepy. Like, you didn’t ask for it. I’d be like a stalker, if I tried to get you to like me after that.”

Then, having run out of things to confess, she fell silent, and the two of them sat together for a moment.

Finally, Eve reached one hand out to Riley’s shoulder, gently laid it there, and then grabbed her, tightly, and shook her.

“You. Are such. An idiot.”

Each pause was punctuated by another shake, and Eve had gotten up to stand in front of Riley to take her by both shoulders now, so she could shake her more effectively.

“I’ve been going around thinking you hated me and the whole time you thought I was, what, judging you? For letting me inside your emotional walls?” She shook Riley again. “You made yourself vulnerable and I fell in love with you and you’ve been avoiding me because you thought you were creepy?” Another shake.

Riley had to admit, when you laid it out like that, it sounded pretty—

Then her mind caught up with her ears. “You fell in what?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Eve pulled Riley forward and into the kiss.

After an endless time, she pulled back. “You. You’re coming with me, and we’re going to my room, and we’re going to sit, and we’re going to talk, and then I’m going to kiss you.”

Riley, stunned into obedience, nodded and let herself be led away towards the stairs. She was so distracted that she didn’t even see the cadre of second years giving the two of them broad grins and thumbs-up gestures, and knowing looks at each other.

# # #

Eve’s room was the refuge of someone who had discovered that the people who controlled access to pillows and blankets would never say ‘no’ if you asked for more of both. The bed was a fortress of pillows, and they’d spilled out onto the floor, which itself was covered by a thick, soft rug, such that wherever you walked or touched or stood or laid, there was softness underneath you.

There was also a distinctly Suli-sized bra hooked over one of Eve’s bedposts, which Riley had tactfully not pointed out, though her eyes kept drifting back to it whenever she was able to stop looking at Eve.

Which wasn’t often, because Eve completely naked was difficult to look away from, even asleep. She curled around herself in her sleep, her knees tucked up and a soft pillow caught between them. Her skin was so pale that her veins were clearly visible in blue traceries across her body, except on her shoulders and upper back, where dense freckles clustered like ginger reminders of the sun.

She smelled like a field of flowers.

Riley curled against her, wrapped around her, and every time she moved, Eve made a little satisfied hum of pleasure, something between a moan and a whimper. If she hadn’t been worried about waking Eve up, Riley could just shift her weight around to hear that sound all evening long. She wanted to. She wanted to listen to all the sounds Eve made, for as long as Eve would let her.

Then she caught herself, because ‘would let her’ was exactly what Eve had been lecturing her about, for the hour before they’d finally given up any pretense and started pulling each others’ clothes off. Eve wasn’t ‘letting her’. She’d been very clear. She was asking for, she was participating in, she was demanding, she was enjoying.

Intimacy, she kept telling Riley, was something for two people, not one. It wasn’t a fortress to be assaulted, it was a dance to be shared.

Eventually, Riley interrupted her. “I have to know. Why are you so shy right up until you decide you like me, and then you bully me like the bossiest girl boss ever?”

Eve grinned. “Because once I knew you weren’t going to reject me…”

Riley scoffed. “Me reject you,” she started to say, and Eve poked her.

“Hush. We’ve agreed we’re both useless lesbians, okay?”

And Riley thrilled to the sound of a beautiful queer girl who was currently stroking her hair and nibbling her ear, calling her ‘lesbian’.

“Once I knew, once I figured out how bad you had it for me—” She poked Riley again, which seemed to be her preferred method of torment, and made Riley squeak every time. “Then I could make you pay for putting me through all that. And when you’re a queer woman, you get very good at processing emotions in relationships.” She let out an exaggerated sigh. “Processing and relationship drama is like, what lesbians do.”

After the mock-lecture ended, and the kissing began in earnest, and the clothes came off, and their hands wandered each other’s bodies, and their mouths followed, and they lay together in sweat and darkness and the floral smell of Eve’s hair, Riley whispered, “I love you, Eve.”

And they had dimmed the lights in the room, so Riley couldn’t see her face, but she could hear the smirk in Eve’s voice. “I know you do, idiot.”

An endless soft quiet time later, Eve curled against Riley, little spoon to Riley’s big spoon, and her voice was barely more than a whisper. “I love you, Riley Hawkins.”

The light, dimmed for a few hours only, began to leak back into the room through the false window. A green and blue light, the light of a clear day over rolling grassy hills; it slowly grew, lifting Riley back into reality and the present, lifting her into awareness of the pale beautiful girl curled against her, and the wonder she had at the girl’s presence there.

This had actually happened.

The proof was warm, and soft, rising and falling with every long, slow breath. Riley was so close to Eve’s face, and she wondered how she’d never realized that Eve’s eyelashes were also red. Her eyebrows, her pubic hair, she was soft and red all over.

So Riley looked at Eve, and then she looked around the room, and the shelves of books, and stuffed plushies, and hanging little framed postcards, and tiny figurines of crystal, and scattered dice, and blown-glass dipping pens. And then she looked at Eve again, whose presence made the rest of the room make sense, who was clearly its focal point, the jewel in the room’s setting.

There was a painting of a dragon on one wall, a bright illustration, something from a child’s book of fairy tales. It was flanked by pictures of unicorns in the same style. Together the three images were perfectly, precisely Eve.

Riley gently pressed her lips to Eve’s back, which made her murmur another little moan, and Riley’s chest filled with the kind of joy that seemed like it could be terminal.

Eventually, they’d have to get up. Eventually, they’d have to emerge, and Riley would be teased by Suliat, and then they’d all kiss and it would be horrible and amazing and glorious, but right now? Laying here in this haze of emotion and flowers? Riley was content. Riley was where she wanted to be. Riley let herself sink back into stunned half-sleep, sure that the dreams and reality were mixing themselves up, becoming confused, tangling like she was tangled in Eve—

And she drifted away again.

persenche

That's all for Devotion, which hopefully has earned its name with heartwarming scenes of love, mutual admiration, and affection. Next time, we'll begin Disaster (Part 1). Which doesn't necessarily mean anything! It could be a completely benign disaster! It could be a metaphorical disaster!

It's not, of course. But it could be!

I'm so happy to be able to share all this with you. I've fallen behind on finishing the novel, so while I'm still more than a month ahead of you, I'll probably have to really push to finish before the posts catch up. But I've just finished another chapter tonight, so I'm confident I'll be able to push.

If you want to encourage me, of course, you could leave a comment! Tell me your theories, argue with other readers, be enthusiastic! It really does provide me almost all of my motivation when I sit down to work. And if you'd like to see this story succeed, share it with your friends! I love the idea of more people getting to meet my disaster lesbians, and see their unfolding magical catastrophes.

See you on Sunday!