Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Should I?” Euphrasia asked. She groaned. Ryuko groaned, her hands on her hips, her hips acheing after the day fighting on her feet deep in the concrete maze where trouble ran rampant and citizens still stumbling and reeling after the disruptions of the Merge tripped over each other. She adjusted the blue surgical mask now ill-fitted to her face after being bent and re-pinched and pulled this way and that over her face all week. She needed to sneeze. The bright shop lights were starting to give her a headache. Muddied boots, one untied, dirty jeans, a long leather coat that had never, to her knowledge, been washed: Ryuko had never felt more out of place. Euphrasia held the dress in front of her body and frowned at herself in the mirror. “I shouldn’t.”

“Then don’t,” Ryuko said plainly. The handles of several bags dug into her wrists and forearms.

“Do we have the money?” Euphrasia asked. She swayed back and forth and the dress moved with her. Ryuko wrinkled her nose. She wished that she could wear that sort of twirly thing.

“Of course. We put down a rogue fire dragon in the centre city, we can buy anything we want,” Ryuko replied.

“I think I’ll get it, then,” Euphrasia said. She put the dress neatly over her arm. Her own black robes and battle-tossed hair didn’t make her look any more in her element in the high-end shop than Ryuko. They dressed like a pair of shadows, the two of them together, earning them more than their fair share of double takes in the bright shop with its racks of fine clothing and ambient jazz that was too light a sound to be much of anything. 

“Then get it.”

“I will,” she said with a beaming smile. Ryuko nodded, if Euphrasia couldn’t see her smile behind the mask. “Thank you.”

“I just hold the money,” Ryuko said, although it was she who took out her wallet as Euphrasia handed the dress over the counter to the cashier. “It’s yours, too. You earned it. You’re getting good.”

Euphrasia bashfully tucked a loose strand of her long hair behind her ear. Ever-polite, she muttered her thanks to the cashier as she handed the dress back in a crisp paper bag printed with some logo Ryuko had a sneaking suspicion she was supposed to recognise.

“Have a nice day, sir,” the cashier said politely. Ryuko nodded, if she also gave an exasperated grunt, more on reflex than anything else. Euphrasia followed her as she quickly ducked her way out of the shop.

“Why don’t you ever say anything?” She asked. Ryuko shrugged.

“Who cares?” Ryuko asked. “I’ll never see her again. I’m one of dozens of people she sees every day. I don’t care.”

Euphrasia hummed. She hummed like she had something to say, but Ryuko wasn’t going to do the thing and humour her. She hummed all the way to the car. Ryuko put all their shopping in the boot and Euphrasia waited for her in the passenger seat. She watched her expectantly in the rear view mirror as she got in and put on her own seatbelt. It reminded Euphrasia to do the same.

“Oh, what the hell?” Ryuko sighed. “Just say it.”

“Say what?” Euphrasia innocently asked.

“What you’re thinking. You’re doing the thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The thing you do when you have something to say and want me to ask you what you’re thinking. What are you thinking?”

“Just that you should stand up for yourself more!” Euphrasia exclaimed. Ryuko rolled her eyes as she put the car in reverse.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not the prettiest of ladies.” Choppy, overgrown hair half-covering tired eyes, half a beard, and all the accoutrement of a bounty hunter had never particularly screamed at the world to treat her like a lady. She had grown more or less accustomed to it.

“I don’t think that matters,” Euphrasia said firmly. Easy enough for her to say. Ryuko snuck a glance at her in the rear view mirror now. Soft eyes and a soft face, it was hard not to think of her like a baby sister who had stumbled into her life. It was hard, sometimes, to think of her as the bounty hunter she was becoming, the deadly elemental master of the breath in their target’s lungs, Ryuko’s partner in the dirty business her father had left her. Ryuko wondered if she had made the right choice, taking her on this journey with her.

“To each her own.”

Euphrasia sighed and hugged her knees to her chest.

“Put your feet down.”

It was sometimes so obvious that she was raised somewhere far from here. She put her sandalled feet back on the ground as Ryuko merged into the ever-present traffic. To be honest, they were both more accustomed to taking to the air: Euphrasia in the Cloud Kingdom’s elegant gilded gondolas, Ryuko in airships that groaned and sputtered when they caught a bad gust. Life in the city would be a learning experience for them both. It was good, then, that jobs frequently took them far away. Euphrasia leaned her head against the window and watched the buildings roll slowly by.

Ryuko chuckled as they pulled into the car park. It never ceased to feel unusual when she went through the motions of a law-abiding citizen. Euphrasia looked like she felt the same: simply humouring foreign rules of some alien place. Neither of them belonged here, and they knew it. It was simply a place to crash between jobs— a nice place to crash between jobs— and it certainly beat dark roadside motels and not knowing where she’d be next month. Good bounties passed for a steady income, and after the Merge, landlords had stopped caring so much about who their tenants were, or where they got their money. Even so, the nicer parts of the city still reserved themselves for a classier clientele than the two bounty hunters trudging up the stairs. Even Euphrasia, who never seemed to tire, pushed herself languidly upwards. She yawned and apologised as Ryuko unlocked the flat.

“I need a shower,” Ryuko announced. She set their shopping— it was all Euphrasia’s shopping— on the floor next to the boots she unceremoniously kicked off her feet. Euphrasia sauntered over to the sofa, with that walk that seemed as if she summoned the winds to lift her, too, and she flopped down on her back with a contented huff.

“Can we order takeout?” Euphrasia called after her as she disappeared around the corner to the washroom. For the price, it was not a very large place.

“The world is your oyster, kid.” Ryuko closed the door behind herself as Euphrasia cheered, and she heard a sound like her getting tangled in her flowing robes as she scrambled off the sofa to the phone.

The jaded bounty hunter sighed. She brushed her hair back and caught a glimpse of her own dark eyes in the mirror as her hand snagged in tangled hair. Ryuko ducked quickly out of the washroom to gather a change of clothes. In the kitchen, Euphrasia happily rattled off menu items from one of the takeout menus they kept stuck to the fridge now, just for her. It sounded like Master Chen’s, again. Euphrasia cheerily thanked the person taking her order. Ryuko closed the washroom door again and lost track of their conversation as she turned on the shower.

She dumped her new clothes on the floor in one pile and shed her dirty clothes into the laundry basket. Ryuko set her coat carefully in its own pile to the side. She unlooped the surgical mask from her ears and left it unceremoniously on the counter. Two toothbrushes on the counter, two towels hanging in the washroom, half a dozen bottles of shampoos and soaps in the shower: the room itself refused to let her ignore the other girl’s presence. Ryuko sighed and studied her own face. It was almost a foreign look to her. What was she thinking, letting Euphrasia tag along with her? Destiny, or whatever she had called it, be damned, Euphrasia was old enough to know better. Even so, she seemed happy. The glass shower door began to gather steam and Ryuko took her eyes away from the face beneath her familiar eyes.

Hot water soothed her tired back and she closed her eyes. Dirt and sweat left her behind as she washed her hair. She looked over the line of hair products Euphrasia had picked for herself. On seeing the sorry state of Ryuko’s own choice of product, or lack thereof, Euphrasia had taken to offering her to use some over and over again. At last, it seemed Euphrasia had worn her down. She caved and let herself take her up on the offer.

It was strange.

She let the dirt and worry wash away until the water ran clear. After a job, the first chance she got to bathe always made her feel clean in its own kind of way. It was the kind of clean that made her seek dirtier and dirtier jobs. The water would wash it all away in its steady flow. Euphrasia had said that the wind made her feel the same way. Ryuko hummed a few notes at random. She wished she had a song for this sort of occasion.

Ryuko stood under the water until she felt innocent again, and then a little longer. She took it as her sign to take herself from this little pleasure when she heard the doorbell ring. Euphrasia got the door as Ryuko stepped out of the shower and dried her hair, then her body. She tied her damp hair back without much care and wrapped the towel around her waist. If she had treated herself once, she might as well go all the way. She opened the cabinet and found the shaving cream shoved all the way to the back by more important things. On a normal day, she would drag the razor over dry skin and call it a day. She wore a mask anyways, and that would cover up anywhere she fucked it up. She spread the shaving cream over her cheeks and chin and carefully shaved her face. The water ran warm out of the tap as she wet a washcloth to clean her face. She took some of Euphrasia’s lotion— she insisted that they should share this, too— and soothed her skin.

All of Euphrasia’s things smelled pleasantly of different things: lavender, roses, midnight— whatever that was supposed to smell like. Ryuko sniffed her hand as she felt along her cheeks. She smiled at herself in the mirror. Perhaps Euphrasia had been a little right. Perhaps it was not Ryuko who was the mentor here, after all.

Ryuko dressed herself in the clothes she had taken without much care: a dark blouse, high socks, a long skirt. She let her hair down and dried it as well as a towel could. Euphrasia had made her buy a hair dryer before the elemental master of wind realised she could do a better job by her own hand. Ryuko had used one before and didn’t care much for it. She put her coat over her arm and left her usual mask behind in the bathroom as she let the steamy air escape into the corridor.

Euphrasia was waiting for her, takeout boxes lined up neatly across the coffee table where they usually ate. Their kitchen table was all maps and pictures, of targets and bosses and potential work. Lately, it had turned into a place for Euphrasia to do her writing, whatever she got up to, at night before she went to sleep on the couch where she made a bed. They ate at the coffee table or on the balcony if the weather was fair, to watch television or the cars go by. The sort of things they found entertaining after the excitement of their day jobs never failed to amuse Ryuko in a wry sort of way. She sat on the other side of the soft sofa. During Ryuko’s shower, Euphrasia had put little plaits in her hair. Her nimble fingertips worked three small strands together by her waist.

“What did you order?”

“I have rice for both of us, and there’s beef dumplings and orange chicken, fried rice, and chow mein,” Euphrasia said, pointing at each box. She plaited the very tips of her hair until she couldn’t find purchase on the fine ends anymore. “And fortune cookies.”

She giggled as she took a fortune cookie and split it open.

“I like fortune cookies,” she said, “it’s cute. A little piece of paper in a cookie might tell you your future.”

“Of course, Writer of Destiny,” Ryuko said sarcastically, sideways, through a mouthful of rice and chicken. Euphrasia shrugged and read the paper happily before slipping it into the bag bound around her hips. She smiled. Ryuko caught her eyes studying her. She finished her bite and pursed her lips. “What is it, Euphrasia?”

“Nothing!” She exclaimed, though she had that same expectant expression in her eyes again. She took her half-cleared plate from the coffee table. “You look pretty.”

“I used your stuff,” Ryuko muttered.

“I can tell,” Euphrasia said triumphantly.

Ryuko looked around the bright flat.

“Euphrasia,” she began. The Writer, exiled from the hallowed halls, hummed. “If your Writers of Destiny… if destiny is controlled somewhere, by someone, what’s…” 

She hesitated. She searched for the words. She sighed and gestured flippantly towards herself.

“Why?”

And Euphrasia, who had a way with words, understood.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. She drew the black robes, the mark of an exile, about her body. “I don’t think it’s really destiny that we write. Well…”

Euphrasia played with the ends of her plait.

“It’s not like we write fortune cookies,” she joked drily. “We write… they’re like riddles. Destiny isn’t one thing, it’s like… a river. We write the riverbanks, and everything that happens happens within them. And something the river floods, and sometimes it’s dammed. I think.”

“So I don’t have a personal Writer I can go and strangle?” Ryuko joked. Euphrasia earnestly shook her head. She sighed resignedly. When she had finished her plate, Euphrasia collected an armful of her new clothes and hurried into the vacant washroom. Ryuko laid her head back against the cushions and watched the clouds pass by as they shrouded the sun. A cool breeze flowed into the room. Euphrasia insisted that they keep a window open, to feel the breeze. The breath of the Cloud Kingdom intermingled with the clouds so closely that the scent of the wind was in their blood. It was a wonder they hadn’t produced a Master of Wind before, and a shame, Ryuko thought, that they had banished their Master of Wind so quickly. Euphrasia always seemed so chipper, so cheerful, so happy and so polite that Ryuko wondered if she felt any sadness at all. She carried herself with such an air of destiny, Ryuko could barely believe she was still a child. Ryuko supposed that she wasn’t, really. A teenager. Ryuko had been on her own since she was a little younger than Euphrasia. Even so, it had taken a little while after that for her to become Ryuko. They were both like children, she supposed, in this world.

Euphrasia peeked her head out from around the corner.

“Yes?” Ryuko called.

“I’m not sure,” Euphrasia said shyly. She stepped into the living room and stood up straight. The Writer of Destiny had exchanged her black robes for a black shirt and a tasteful black skirt, long black leggings, and a pair of short heels, also black. She looked down at herself in the strange and foreign dress. “It feels odd not to wear my robes.”

“Other than dressing like you’re on your way to a funeral, you look fine,” Ryuko said. Euphrasia huffed.

“You dress in all black, too.”

“I dressed in all black first,” Ryuko pointed out. “You can wear other colours, you know.”

“I know,” Euphrasia admitted. She looked at her hands and her arms. “I am still… I am not a Writer of Destiny anymore, but that does not mean I am a regular person. I am an exile. I want to wear that, still.”

Ryuko let her have the silence.

“I am not sure what to do.”

“If you want to wear the robes, you should,” Ryuko said. She searched hard for the right words to hold the solemn air between them. For all the ways she carried herself like somebody who saw straight down the path of fate, Euphrasia was still, beneath it, a girl without much experience of the world. No. She had experienced the world all the same as Ryuko. They had gone together into the wastes, the Crossroads, the foetid swamps and bubbling seas that marked the edge of civilisation in the world. It was the bright days that were strange to the two women who had not gotten a chance to be girls. It was this sort of thing, cheap takeout and casual dresses that they were unaccustomed to. Ryuko, alone, would have avoided the city entirely, sticking to the shadows and shady rooms by the roadside, letting her hair and her jacket gather ashes and smoke. She and Euphrasia would get used to this thing together.

Ryuko hummed.

“Show me what else you got.” She cringed as she said it, but Euphrasia’s eyes brightened and she took the other bags to disappear behind the wall. The next time she appeared, she was wearing a loose top with sleeves that flowed around her arms and gathered at her wrist with a long skirt buckled at her waist with a decorative silver clasp. She smiled, much more at home in this attire than the previous. Ryuko encouraged her and she spun to make her skirt dance around her. Neither girl knew the proper words of course, but theirs sufficed. At last, she came out in the last dress they had looked at, and she danced across the bright floor, casting off shyness. She laughed and Ryuko couldn’t help but laugh as well. Euphrasia hugged her arms and sat down, looking and feeling so different just from this.

“It is strange, you not dressed like a monk,” Ryuko said.

“I still don’t know if I like it,” Euphrasia admitted.

“That’s alright, I think.”

Ryuko let her have the silence.

“I bought makeup, too,” she said at last.

“I know that,” mused Ryuko. “I was there.”

“I’ll need someone to practice on,” she said proddingly. Ryuko shook her head.

“You can practice on yourself.”

“But that’s not as fun,” Euphrasia sighed. She raised her hand to run pinched fingers along the edge of the hood of her robe, but she would find nothing there now.

“Do you monks wear makeup?”

“No,” Euphrasia said. “That’s why I need to practice.”

“I’m not going to win an argument against a Writer of Destiny, am I?”

The exile ignored her former title with a grin.

“Nope.”

At least Ryuko could say she hadn’t gone down without a fight. Euphrasia happily opened the new makeup. She stood over Ryuko with a brush balanced as naturally in her hand as a pen. 

“If you stab me in the eye, I will leave you behind in New Stiix the next time we’re out,” Ryuko warned. Euphrasia took it for the jest that it was.

“You wouldn’t,” she declared confidently. Her touch was soft as Ryuko flinched from the ticklish sensation on her eyelids. “You need the Elemental Master of Wind.”

“I don’t need an elemental master of anything,” Ryuko scoffed. “I had a good business going before I decided to let you travel with me.”

“Your business ended with you freezing your arse off and coming within an inch of death in the mountains under Shintaro,” Euphrasia quipped. Ryuko clicked her tongue.

“Who taught you those words?”

“You did.”

Ryuko tried to keep her face from flinching as Euphrasia gently lined her eyes with her usual care.

“You can open your eyes now, I think,” Euphrasia said. Ryuko squinted against the bright space at first. White tiles and white walls as the sun peeked out from behind a curtain of clouds made Ryuko realise why she spent her days away from here.

“Mirror,” she said as she stood from the sofa. Euphrasia trailed behind her as she walked to the washroom and flicked the light on. She locked eyes with herself and hesitated. Dark eyeshadow on her eyelids blended out to a sparkling silver edge, something simple to match either of their dark outfits. Euphrasia’s unpracticed hand still had a roughness to the experimental strokes necessary to apply pigment to something other than paper, but it didn’t look bad. Ryuko’s gaze drifted towards her nose and chin, but her eyes brought it back. She touched her cheek.

“I could have done better,” Euphrasia admitted.

“No,” Ryuko whispered. She nodded at the stranger in the mirror. “I… like this.”

She bit her lip. Her tossed hair made her look a little like the rough rebel women rockers she had seen all her childhood from afar, ladies who didn’t have anything to prove. Ladies like her, just a little more fortunate. The handsome woman staring at her gave her a sly smile. It felt…

Good.

Like putting on the dark leather coat that knew the shape of her shoulders well.

Like pulling her hair out of the collar of a blouse and feeling it fall just short of her shoulders on the sides.

Like the wind to her back on a warm summer’s day, taking her far away from Stiix.

Euphrasia smiled as she watched her friend smile, and she let her have the silence.

Chapter Text

“I bet I can.”
“I bet you can’t.”
“I bet I can.”
“I bet you can’t.”
“I bet I can.”
“I bet you can.”
“I bet I can’t.”
“Gotcha.”
Ryuko smugly spread her arms across the back of the sofa as Euphrasia balled her fists at her blunder.
“There’s not a chance you’ll win a race against me. Not in Ninjago. This is my homeland. I’ve been travelling it since I could walk, and you,” Ryuko said with a snap and a point, “admitted it yourself.”
“I did not,” Euphrasia retorted proudly.
“You did, too.”
“I did not.”
“You did not.”
“You’re not going to trick me like that again,” she said. Euphrasia crossed her arms, loose sleeves erupting into folds at her elbow. Dressed in a long skirt and simple flats, she looked a little more herself than she first had after she had decided to get a change of clothes. Her hair, still long and loose, was the only colour against her black attire. She had gotten more adept at darkening her eyes neatly. Her skin was also much more tan without the hood keeping the sun and her cheeks as strangers. She had freckles, too. Ryuko knew she was getting all tan around her mask but not over her nose and mouth. Luckily, the habit meant that she could choose who to let in on that little secret. Ryuko had also volunteered her face for Euphrasia to practice her makeup on, but she hadn’t let her show any improvement there. She liked it, the messy heavy hand. She often forgot, and startled herself in the mirror. For the first time, she thought, catching a glimpse of a face that wasn’t immediately her own was a pleasant turn and surprise.
“Just because you can fly doesn’t mean a damn thing. You’d get lost walking to the bus stop if it weren’t for following me,” Ryuko said. She punctuated the point with a pointed look. Euphrasia knew it was true.
“In the Cloud Kingdom, we don’t have roads,” Euphrasia said, annoyance dragging her words on. “We arrive where we need to when fate ordains it.”
Ryuko couldn’t contain a sputtering laugh.
“And,” Euphrasia continued, speaking all the same as if she were correcting a misbehaving brat, “we’ve been looking down at your people forever. I could draw a map of your entire world, to scale, within a hair’s width of precision.”
“Oh, yeah? Draw a map from here to the bus stop.”
“I am serious!”
“It’s hard to take you serious when I know you’ve turned yourself around seven times on a one-way road,” Ryuko chided. Euphrasia’s tanned cheeks flushed. “Face it. Forget a race around the world. You’d never make it out of the city. You’re the elemental master of wind, and I’m the master of reading a map.”
Euphrasia opened her mouth defiantly and closed her lips just as fast. She drew her clasped and pointed fingers to her mouth with a sly smile. Ryuko cocked her head.
“Oh, yeah? Order from a restaurant menu.”
“Oh, fuck yourself, miss words and books all high and mighty.”
“If we did race across the world, you’d starve the moment you ran out of food.”
“I can order myself food,” Ryuko protested, pride prodded at last. “Alright.”
She sat forward, chin on her hands on her elbows on her knees with her long skirt stretched between her spread legs. Euphrasia matched her scheming smile.
“You and me. Our own devices. First one to New Stiix, she’s the better bounty hunter. The loser is the winner’s maid for a whole month.”
“And she has to buy the winner dinner, and dress up proper to the restaurant.”
“And she’ll not argue with the winner’s choice of music for the month.”
“Deal,” Euphrasia declared. She confidently thrust her hand in front of her and firmly shook Ryuko’s hand. “The race begins tomorrow when the sun rises over the rooftops.”
“The finish line is the sign for New Stiix.”
“Deal,” Euphrasia said again, and if Ryuko had any reservations about driving the girl into a corner at the risk of a wounded pride, she drove those quickly from her mind as Euphrasia shook her hand with the usual quantity of enthusiasm, the kind that bubbled and spilled over the soft edges of her person.
That night, as Ryuko left Euphrasia to make her usual bed on the couch, she could barely get a ‘goodnight’ as the banished monk poured over a map of the sprawling outskirts of Ninjago City.

Euphrasia hugged herself happily as she waited patiently in line for the bus: she had made it all the way across the road with all its shrieking cars and rumbling trams, through the sharp turns of identical street corners and to the crowded shelter where she was not the strangest person in line to pass the doors. The sun overhead beat down on her and for a moment she knew why those who were banished from the clouds were given black to wear. She fanned herself with her hand. At last it was her turn to board, and she pulled herself up the steps the old-fashioned way, pulling with her hand instead of pushing with her power, like people do. The bus driver looked at her expectantly and she realised with a sinking gut that she didn’t have a coin for his box. A small flashing light waited for her to pay her fare. Euphrasia fumbled in her empty pockets. In her laser focus to know her way in the city whose rooftops choked the sky, she had entirely forgotten to bring any sort of money with her— she had never had any need for this sort of thing! Breath coming quickly, she stuttered an apology and turned around to the impatient line of people still pressing her forward. She grasped the strap of the bag that hung across one shoulder. It had her scroll and her pen and her ink and her maps and her food but no money, no tokens, no cards and nothing to give.
With a sigh and a push, somebody behind her dropped two coins into the box, and the bus driver beckoned her to hurry up and board. Euphrasia nodded deeply and hurried quickly down the aisle. When she finally got her feet beneath her, she turned around to see if she could catch a glimpse of who to thank, but the other passengers had all separated to take a seat as the doors hissed shut, and Euphrasia couldn’t remember which face had been above hers. She stumbled as the bus began to move and all but fell into an empty seat, scooting over to the window and arranging her bag on her lap as the bus pulled away.
Euphrasia watched the city roll past and wondered if she had been too hasty to try and prove that she didn’t need Ryuko’s help. Everything felt so possible around her, she could forget that she was a stranger here. She barely knew the sights— if she lost her sight out of the window, she would lose herself in the map she had hastily made for herself in her mind— and the smells of heat and asphalt together under the city sun when the sky struck the glittering spires just right were still overwhelming, noxious trails in the air like the entrails of an invisible beast. The cloud monk played with the hem of her sleeve. She had travelled the realms after her fall by the power of her pen and a prayer for good fortune. Even so, this was a new labyrinth of concrete and automatons beyond her own inspired imagination. Technology: it was what had always made Ninjago special, what had always rendered it something that warranted monasteries above to pull on the reins. Euphrasia ran her fingertips along the edge at the bottom of the window as the bus slowed into the next stop. It was a marvel that she had ever controlled a beast like this with the stroke of a pen.
She folded her hands on her lap again as a girl sat next to her to the sound of the doors closing again. The streets continued to roll by, narrower now, and crowded with pedestrians on foot.
“I like your outfit,” the girl said with a small voice. Euphrasia turned from the window to look at her. She was wearing dark clothes, too, but Euphrasia would wager that she had some choice in that. She, too, held a bag on her lap. Her eyes and her hair were bright.
“I like your hair,” said Euphrasia. The girl smiled and tucked a pink strand behind her ear.
“Are you from around here?” She asked timidly.
“No,” Euphrasia responded. The girl sighed and her shoulders slumped.
“I suppose you can’t help me find where I’m going, then.”
“Even if I was from the city, I don’t think I could help you much,” Euphrasia said apologetically. “I’m terrible with a map.”
The abstract lines and too-perfect shapes had never made sense to her.
“That’s alright, I guess,” said the girl. She adjusted the satchel on her lap before she remembered to hold out her hand. “My name is Sora, by the way.”
“My name is Euphrasia.” She shook Sora’s hand. “Where are you on your way to?”
“I’m moving to the Crossroads,” Sora said nervously. She shifted in her seat. “I don’t suppose you know where that would be?”
“I’ve been there before, but, ah, my sister usually takes me. She knows her way better than me,” Euphrasia said. Her eyebrows knit as she remembered the suffocating mazes, the dark alleys, the labyrinths at every level where the city climbed higher and higher on top of itself and spilled into itself.
“I’ve heard it’s dangerous,” Sora said, certainly reading Euphrasia’s face— without a hood to draw down over her expressions, she had no more guard left to put up. “I’ve heard there’s work there.”
“I guess there is,” Euphrasia said. Now it was her turn to shift in her seat as the bus slowed to another stop. The Crossroads was, after all, where she and Ryuko went to find their work, their dirty work. Her nose wrinkled reflexively as her memory filled her mouth with the ghost of cigarette smoke in the corners where the wind went to die.
“You look like you have something to say.”
“Have you ever… been there before?” Euphrasia considered that Sora might want that sort of work. She looked not far from her own age (though Euphrasia had quickly learned not to assume what she thought she knew of other peoples’ looks), and innocent to match, but Euphrasia remembered that she was a girl Sora’s age in the business of jobs given in coded words at the end of cautionary guns, and she held her tongue.
“I haven’t,” Sora replied. “I’m new in town. I just got here.”
“I, ah, I wouldn’t recommend the Crossroads. I’ve been living in Ninjago City. I’m sure there’s plenty of jobs you could have there,” suggested Euphrasia. Sora pensively darted her eyes to the floor of the bus. They lingered there a moment. Euphrasia checked to see if she had something on her shoe. She did not.
“Where are you going?” Sora asked at last.
“New Stiix,” Euphrasia said. “I, ah, wouldn’t recommend New Stiix either.”
Sora laughed nervously. Euphrasia turned her head back to gaze out the window. Now her stomach turned with a start as she quickly studied the unfamiliar buildings passing by and realised: she had no idea where she was.

Ryuko was in no hurry to shove through the crowd thronging slowly up the steps out of the underground station. She turned her collar up as she emerged onto the shadowed streets just outside the dark walls where high-rises packed together formed dark walls around the slums piled high on top of each other, racing towards the sky as the inhabitants raced each other towards the bottom. Ryuko joined the stream of brave and unfortunate souls pouring through the narrow gap in the labyrinth walls. Her hair, just not long enough to be swept back from her face without care, started to fall in front of her eyes. It was better, then, that she had some dishevelled disguise. She knew how to be the right person to fit in in the stagnant city that buzzed with something else, but returning to these portable pockets of home always required a little falling into place, as it were. She ran her thumb over the old lighter in her pocket as she paid silent respects to the Crossroads.
A satchel slung across her back kept her focused on her goals as she took the slick, condensation-laden stairs onto the next level. The hum of repurposed lighting lashed together with layers of tape almost obscured footsteps below and above and above and above. The scent of food and smoke as damp wood burned called her attention this way and that, but her pace never faltered. She instinctively checked over her shoulder to make sure Euphrasia was keeping pace.
Then she remembered, and she stopped her step to sigh.
Then it was on again, and she only prayed that Euphrasia would not come and try to retrace their usual steps in this place.
It was the lower levels that lived like a city, just more city per block, an order of magnitude more. The levels just above housed those who had amassed just the right amount of power. Bullies, they were, leering thugs that moved like flies to carrion, wherever it was. Ryuko kept her grip on her bag and herself. She had been paid several times over to firmly suggest that they take their dealings elsewhere. The Crossroads was an honest business venture. Their breed could take themselves to New Stiix. Yet every time, it would seem, that they could be chased out, new criminals crawled out of the woodwork searching for a place where they could call themselves lord. Ryuko resisted the temptation. She had a goal in mind, and she was perfectly happy with her life.
Still, she thought to herself, it wouldn’t help to have a little more leverage.
She ignored her own call to make an excuse for violence. Business called. That was her father speaking. The business, not the violence. It was always about the business, in the end. She climbed to the next level by ladder that creaked and flaked beneath her hands.
In the upper levels lived the least fortunate. It was the longest way down, though some passed it quickly on their way out. Ryuko headed for the heart of the hub, breathing the whispers of fresh air that filtered down to here, almost halfway from the ground to the sky. It was odd, coming here without Euphrasia coughing to keep time with their step, without her incessant complaining or preaching about the Cloud Kingdom kissing the clouds. It would only be this race, Ryuko reminded herself, and then she would have made her point and won her bet. Still, she thought.
It was a little lonely.
Burly bodyguards blocked Ryuko’s way. The heart of the hub, just inside the courtyard-esque space where the Crossroads opened to the sky to breathe, looked almost like a human heart, hung in the air suspended from the ground by a web of cables and wires holding fast to the high-rises that were the inner walls of the trading hub. The guards blocked the bridge just beyond. They were unarmed, save for their arms, tattooed and muscular. One cybernetic, made of scrap metal and wrapped with cloth that promised not to soften any blows. The other woman’s tiny shorts left little of her cybernetic legs, gleaming and golden, to the imagination. Ryuko nodded to her.
“Afternoon, Key.”
“Are you here for the boss?” She asked.
“Yeah,” Ryuko responded. Key sighed.
“You know how she is about appointments.”
“Yeah.”
“I suppose I’m not stopping you, though,” said Key. She nodded to the other bodyguard, who crossed her arms firmly. They exchanged a conversation in looks before Key jerked her head towards the hub. “Go on.”
Ryuko slipped through, feeling strange and short between the women, before she stepped onto the swaying rope bridge and said a prayer.
She didn’t consider herself a religious person.
If there was an All-Creator, she certainly wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. Nature spirits, too, had always been too fickle. Now she had one, a scheming little wind sprite in her flat and her car and her life, and she gathered that whatever the winds were up to probably wouldn’t take into account her interests. Superstition was another thing that she had never gotten into. Little nervous habits only ever slowed her down. Still, as she faced the long way down to the bottom cut through with wires and creaking support beams, she muttered a prayer in her father’s voice to the good dragons, the wind and the water. A short one.
At last the door of the heart of the Crossroads was opened for her by another woman wearing the Crossroads crest carefully sewn by hand onto her chest and pressed by needle into the back of her hand. Ryuko knew her way through the little heart and let the lady stay on her watch duty as she strolled alone, uninvited, through the rooms. She helped herself to a seat in the little parlour and waited for the boss to see her. Ryuko could hear a conversation just up the steep stairs. Seconds later, a disgruntled Serpentine stormed down the steps, misjudging one and slipping down the rest with a shout and a swear. The boss chuckled as she saw him off with a wave and her door woman saw him the rest of the way out with a knife to his back. It wasn’t hard to miss Ryuko in a room, especially a room as restricted as this.
“You don’t have an appointment,” Nagako said disapprovingly. She crossed her golden cybernetic arms, clean and cared-for, the innovations on the flesh that had started it all: her army, her empire, this labyrinth and all its undercity.
“You have something I want,” Ryuko said. She hadn’t taken her hand off her bag from her flat to here, but she relinquished it on her lap.
“A secretary?” Nagako mused, but she would meet Ryuko anyways. She owed it to her, at least as a business courtesy, if not a personal curiosity. Her long twin-tail plaits swung behind her as she walked, bright yellow these days, run through with strands of fading blue. She sat across the little room from Ryuko.
“A ship,” Ryuko said. She drew the lighter from her pocket and flicked it open. “Smoke?”
“Not in here, you animal,” Nagako said with a wrinkled nose. Ryuko flicked the lighter away and slipped it back into her pocket. “I have lots of ships. I have boats, but I’m not a chauffeur. I’m a very busy woman.”
“An airship,” Ryuko said plainly. “One recently-acquired Rex.”
Her father’s ship was good for shit and scrap.
Nagako knew that. She cocked her head.
“I can get you a better ship,” she said, bewilderment playing across her face.
“I want that ship.”
Nagako’s eyes flicked between Ryuko’s masked face and her bag. She had piqued her interest, after all, and Nagako would be a poor businesswoman if she didn’t keep herself in the know of all her business partners and their assets.
“Let me take it off your hands,” Ryuko coaxed. She leaned back in the chair, legs crossed, arms spread.
“Let me see what you brought to trade.”
“I’m warning you, it might get messy,” Ryuko mused. Nagako’s lip curled with a slight smirk. She knew how to play this game. Ryuko teased the bag open slowly, the way she had watched those glamorous women with their curled hair and satin slips beckon bosses before. Nagako watched, enraptured, now, but Ryuko knew she saw more than she let on. The boss of the Crossroads could put on this face with her soft features and slender dark eyes like a princess out of some myth making some poor soul forget her cybernetic hands tipped with sharpened claws. Boss Nagako could stare, mouth agape, eyes fixed on the zipper slowly drawn across the top with pinched fingers, but she could see the lighter in Ryuko’s jacket pocket and the gun held closer to her hip, her pocket knife and a combat one, and that she had come alone.
“Fuck,” Nagako whispered. Ryuko reached in with her arm, up to her elbow, and cut the shit. She pulled the battered plush toy out of the bag. The stuffed rabbit’s ears flopped limply as Ryuko waved it as if to a child as Boss Nagako Fujioka’s jaw dropped and the corners of her mouth curled with delight. “Where did you find him?”
Ryuko tossed the toy to her. She caught it in her claws.
“The warehouse at the docks,” Ryuko said as she sat back again, at ease, while Nagako examined her old toy, “right after the Merge. Went looking for you. Didn’t find you, helped myself to the place. Looked like a mini Merge slammed the inside. Been meaning to get that back to you.”
“We’ve seen each other plenty of times since the Merge,” Nagako said disapprovingly. “If you’d made an appointment every time, I’d have a record.”
“Business gets messy.”
“And I run an orderly business, Miss Ryuko,” the boss responded. She sighed as she squeezed the dirty toy rabbit. “Talk to Charlie. She’ll get you your ship.”
“Pleasure doing business.”
“Make an appointment, next time.”

Euphrasia profusely thanked the man as Sora clutched the written directions to her chest. They hurried off the bus together and onto the sidewalk, their destination one and the same, for now. The bus pulled away as they were swept along into the crowd, pressing through like crossing an angry river as they searched for the opening into the underground tunnels where the trains would roar and take them away. Euphrasia took deep breaths of the last free air as the ground swallowed her and the crowds without a care. She could never settle being underground with her soul. Even the claustrophobic confines of the Crossroads were too heavy for her. Some quality in the air changed there and here. She had never been able to get Ryuko to understand, but she had her own reasons to avoid the underground, though she still wasn’t above the Crossroads.
Sora found her way to the kiosk and checked three times between the man’s instructions and the screen before searching through her pockets. Euphrasia worked up the courage to ask her to pay for her ticket, too. Sora counted unfamiliar coins in her cupped hands as the parallel line moved on beside them with a sense of business about it. She dropped half the coins into the machine. It chewed on them for a moment before spitting them back out with an error. Sora took them back and counted again carefully.
“They must not take these,” she muttered. Euphrasia swallowed the words she had worked so hard to get the courage for.
“I have an idea,” Euphrasia said. She took Sora by the hand and led her away, back into the crowd. Only a few guards kept watch over the whole station. Almost nothing had been able to keep up with the world after the Merge. Those lucky few who rode the tides and swell climbed up high in the world, like the boss of the Crossroads, while all the rest swarmed through the creaking tunnels. Euphrasia couldn’t believe that the whole world hadn’t collapsed in on itself yet.
“Where are we going?” Sora whispered.
“Follow my lead,” Euphrasia replied in the same hushed tone. “I know a trick.”
Thick air, as if mixed with lead, folded beneath her fingertips. She watched the yawning guard as they approached the turnstiles, and then with a surreptitious flick of her fingers, she called on the wind to knock his hat askew. As he fumbled for it, Euphrasia deftly lifted herself over the barrier and beckoned for Sora to do the same. She looked around, balling and unballing her fists as the guard righted his hat. Euphrasia beckoned her again with a bigger gesture, now, as she started to hold up the queue. Sora grasped the sides of the aisle with a shaking conviction, but she had waited for too long. Euphrasia’s hold on the winds slipped the longer she spent beneath the surface. Even simply on the surface of the world, she could still feel a calling upwards, towards the sky. She yearned to fly.
“Um, excuse me!” Euphrasia called. She waved to catch the guard’s attention. His eyes flicked towards her for a crucial moment and Sora lifted herself with some difficulty. “Ah, sorry, I lost my mum.”
Those sort of family terms were unfamiliar on her tongue. Could he tell?
“Go talk to them,” he said blankly, tilting his head towards the window into the room lit to blinding with artificial light where similarly-dressed guards went about duties that required less of this attention. Having stolen it successfully, Euphrasia thanked him and vanished back into the crowd, taking quick and worried steps just long enough for him to forget about her. Sora and her bright hair were easy to find in the crowd.
“Isn’t that…,” Sora muttered. Her clenched hand crumpled her pristine dark shirt at her stomach. “Isn’t that wrong?”
“We didn’t have any money,” Euphrasia reasoned. “I mean, you had money, but they didn’t want it. We’re through, now.”
“Right,” Sora said. She took a deep breath, though Euphrasia couldn’t tell how that was any comfort down here. The paper crinkled as it unfolded and Euphrasia smiled at the sound as Sora checked the instructions and the station map. A train roared by and neither girl flinched. “The platform should be just down those stairs.”
She pointed and Euphrasia followed the line of her arm. Now it was her turn for her stomach to lurch. She gave it a comforting hand as they joined the crowd rushing to spill over the next descent.

The airship groaned as Ryuko climbed slowly into the sky. She kept one hand on the wheel as she put the Crossroads to her back. An empty passenger seat kept her on edge. If she were flying with Euphrasia, she could count on the elemental master to soften their landing if the sputtering engine gave way mid-flight. There was only so much threatening a machine with a gun could do if it stalled. Ryuko said her little prayer again, whispering it to the unfeeling skeleton of the machine worth the same as a forgotten memory. Now she and Nagako would be even.
All of Rex’s navigational instruments beeped and flashed at her, built for the landscape of Ninjago alone before all of the realms had crashed together. The poor thing had no idea what it was seeing, and Ryuko had no way of explaining it to the ship. She would be on her own above the fractured landscapes still bearing long scars where the upthrust rock was still too jagged, wounds too fresh to settle on. Far below, ghost towns were bleached by the sun. They had all run to the Crossroads, all the little people lost in the Merge. Ryuko had only barely avoided the temptation. But her world remained big, it remained open, and it remained mostly within the remains of Ninjago. She wasn’t ready for walls just yet. Perhaps it was in her blood to flee that sort of place.
She pulled down her mask and placed a cigarette between her lips, flipping open her lighter and making it smoulder with ease. Drinking in the taste told her where she was and what she’d be. A vent overhead just behind her seat carried the smell away. She could feel the airship fighting against the invisible currents of the wind through her hands and feet. She had often wondered what it was like to command them. Euphrasia, for all her way with words, had always been cryptic. Ryuko reasoned that this was the closest she would get to holding the wind in her palm and knowing its origin, its destination, and its power.
This was as close as anyone else could get, reckon. Ryuko held the ship against the pull of the winds. This had worked well enough, she supposed, for dead old dad.
She put it all to her back.
Rex would be no good for running the people and cargo that Nagako had built her empire on. Ryuko had lost contact with the mechanics she knew of after the Merge, and she had finally run out of momentum after running on fumes for so long. Even after the race, she’d need an airship. The world was big. Bigger than she ever expected. Rex groaned as Ryuko insisted on the strain upon these old bones. She wasn’t keen to owe Nagako any favours. Perhaps Euphrasia would have a creative solution to let them both fly.
Everything in her life these days seemed to come back to her.
Alarm bells rang and Ryuko shut them out with all the rest, but the jagged ground came up to meet her.
“Shit. Stay with me,” she swore and she swore. Her fingers fumbled for the seatbelt. One hand on the wheel, she reached the other out to protect her passenger and her hand brushed the empty seat. “Wojira have mercy, amen, and all that.”
It wouldn’t be a dead dragon that would save her, and she knew it.

The master of wind filled her lungs as the sunlight showered her face again, her limbs feeling a hundred times lighter now that the wind was beneath them, flowing freely, no longer subject only to the whims of metal serpents in their tunnels. Sora, too, sighed in relief as they left the chill of the earth.
“I’ll be happy if I never go there again,” Sora said with a shudder. “We don’t… have anything underground where I’m from.”
“And I’m from the Cloud Kingdom,” Euphrasia said with a smile. Sora wrinkled her nose.
“I’m being serious,” she said. “The ground isn’t good for underground structures.”
“Oh, I’m serious, too,” Euphrasia said. “I’m sorry. I’m actually from the Cloud Kingdom.”
“No way,” Sora said, with awe this time. “Do you all have magic?”
Euphrasia froze, a lump in her throat. She hadn’t kept a secret, but she knew from whispers that it was often better to keep some things close to her chest. Long-denied, her instincts begged her to listen just this once.
“Sort of,” Euphrasia said, and it wasn’t a lie, per se. She reached for her hood to draw it over her face, though she hadn’t worn one for some time. She missed her robes and the way they drew the wind in towards her body. She missed being able to hide her face. Sora’s gaze pierced her like a sharp-eyed hunter. She was curious. Euphrasia couldn’t blame her.
“I need to know more,” Sora said. It was innocent curiosity sparking glimmers in her eye.
“We’re, ah, almost to the Crossroads,” Euphrasia said, almost apologetically. She could see the way from here, where dark walls turned alleys to tunnels. Sora nodded nervously. Euphrasia led the way across the busy road, guided by the sight of the walls over the lower rooves of the small shops lining the street. The smells of food drifting, on the wind, from where stall owners tended their stoves lured Euphrasia’s attention with the tempting promises of tantalising tastes. Sora groaned and clutched her stomach.
“I’m starving.” Sora reached into her pocket before she hung her head. The scent of golden fried perfection teased her stomach like a gloating demon. “And I don’t have any real money.”
“They take all kinds of money in the Crossroads,” Euphrasia reassured her. “Maybe not here, though.”
Euphrasia reached for Sora’s hand as they reached her usual entrance into the shadowed streets, but the other girl had stopped. She couldn’t blame her. Euphrasia wished that she had had a moment for a breath the first time she was swallowed by the stone walls, too.
“I’m ready.” Sora ducked her head and slipped her hand into Euphrasia’s. The forever night of the underground above the surface swallowed them together.
In the shadows, like the first stars of the velvet night sky shyly showing their faces, the sights and smells slowly fell into their places. Euphrasia followed signs painted on the walls where they could be seen between pipes and wires running together like tangled blood vessels until the smell of frying fish guided her the rest of the way. A small collection of low tables and mismatched stools cluttered the space in front of the counter. Behind it, a home. The bartender waved as Euphrasia led Sora into the space filled to bursting with artificial light that tinged everything a surreal shade of green.
“You wouldn’t believe it, but the Crossroads has some of the best seafood,” Euphrasia said as the bartender brought them fried fishballs in a fragrant curry sauce in a paper bowl. This was Ryuko’s favourite place, mostly because she didn’t have to bother with a menu. They were on the outskirts of the Crossroads, after all. If one stall didn’t strike their fancy, they could move on to the next as long as it took to get a meal. The bartender held out their hand and Euphrasia encouraged Sora to hand them their money.
“Fish?” Sora whispered in disbelief. “In here?”
Euphrasia couldn’t blame her— the only water here was cold and fell in drips from leaking pipes. She shrugged.
“Things travel fast here. To here. Through here.” Euphrasia said.
“I still don’t believe they’d take… this money.”
The bartender came back with her change.
“The Crossroads is like all of the realms stacked on top of each other,” Euphrasia said. “They’ll find somebody else to take it.”
Sora watched the people pass by, twisting and turning like leaves swept away in the currents of the narrow alleyway. The scent of curry spices nipped at her nose, enticing her curiosity, at least.
“This, this place, it’s not what I expected,” Sora muttered. It took a little coaxing to get her to try the fish. Euphrasia knew it was more than just a suspicion of the food. She turned the strange coins over in her hand. Euphrasia’s instinct screamed at her to take Sora from this place, but she knew that her kinship with the wind was hers alone. This choice, she knew, was Sora’s, and her fingernails in her palms kept her from shouting. Sora rolled a small gold coin between her fingers. “Can they… exchange this?”
Euphrasia called the bartender over and Sora fished around in her bag for another handful of bills. The bartender’s eyes widened, but they took the money and said nothing. They consulted a book behind the bar before returning with a handful of money more familiar to Euphrasia, the common currency in the city.
“I think I’ll stay here for a while,” Sora said. She crumpled the unfamiliar paper money. “Not here-here, but… in Ninjago.”
“I’m glad!” Euphrasia smiled. “I can show you around! Well, we can explore together. I don’t have… the best sense of direction.”
“I can tell,” Sora joked, “no offence.”
“None taken.”
“I think… I wouldn’t mind a friend to be lost with.”

A red flare stained the desert night the colour of blood in a murky haze. The sky cooled quickly at night; the sands, not so much, but Ryuko knew better than to make a fire. This was risky enough. She coughed as she pried the panel off, mask off, Ryuko and the engine both breathing in the sweet air laden with ghosts but free of the scent of metal and all the usual haunting of the big cities.
“I can’t make heads or tails of you, girl,” Ryuko murmured. How this sort of thing worked was beyond her. Even in the underworld, it took a village, and all those villages together could scrape together a city like Stiix. Old Stiix. Old Stiix underwater which sank when the realms crashed into the sea of Ninjago, that Stiix. Home. When Ryuko closed her eyes, she could still go back there. She remembered a different kind of red light. Fuck, she needed to focus. Perhaps something here would spark her memory like a light. She stood and brushed the sand from her knees. A rush of wind lifted her well-fitted coat and made her shiver.
“It looks like I’ll owe the Boss a favour, then,” she muttered. She looked from the wreck to the flare in her hand as Rex chimed softly with a wailing dying song. Ryuko knew better than to light a flare in the desert at night. She knew better than to call for help at all. Jagged, unnatural sandstone peaks shot up all around her. The rest was sand, in every direction. Ryuko kicked the sand to the wind as she walked, covering her tracks as she trudged out towards the first stars of the evening. She wound back her arm and threw the flare as far as she could before she hurried back to the airship, where hopefully dark smoke was enough camouflage against a dark sky.
Ryuko climbed into the hollow body of the airship, askew on the ground, and pulled the side door closed like a hatch over her head to keep the weather off her head. She opened her jacket and kept a hand on her gun as she watched the flare burn itself out, sputtering half-buried in the sand. The wind made strange patterns on the horizon as it made the sand dance. Ryuko could imagine Euphrasia in their midst, the loose cloth of her long black robes waving like banners behind her, her own body making ripples in the sleeves like leaping from dark pools of water. The stars overhead opened their eyes, one by one, goading each other on with dares of hubris as they climbed into the sky, one after the other, twinkling mischievously like a hundred million scheming brats. Four-legged shadows slunk across the sand. The world silently bloomed beneath three new moons and the bright debris of an old one.
In the distance, a hushed roar. Ryuko wrapped her fingers around the handle of her gun. She listened for it again, the horn of a train, rumbling and roaring across the desert. They would run at all times of night, she knew, though they would be rare across the broken desert. A train meant something to move and somebody to move it, and Ryuko’s mind moved just as fast, as she reasoned that the only places from which a train could come and go out here were the Crossroads and New Stiix.
She leapt to her feet and struck her head against the curved windshield with a resounding crack. Ryuko shouted and swore and covered her head, sinking to her knees, skull pounding as if her brain ached to break free all of a sudden, dissatisfied with something or other from Ryuko’s rough living to her stranding them out in the cold desert night. She dropped the gun and rocked herself as she sucked through her teeth, the windshield perfectly intact as if she had been about as much trouble as a pesky little fly.
Outside, the train rumbled on into the distance. Even if Ryuko had been a good runner, she would never have caught it. Best she could do, she supposed, was to follow the tracks and keep to a path. It was better than flying vaguely in the direction and hoping to come across the sprawling city before she hit the sea, anyways. A wishful part of her had wished that Nagako’s people had at least managed to give the airship an updated map of the world, but it had flown, and that was better than Nagako supposed she should have expected.
When the pounding in her skull subsided enough to think, she stood back up, cautiously, now, with her hand above her head feeling for anything in her path. Her fingertips made first contact with the door and she found the handle. A rough shove pushed it open and she climbed out of the side-top of the ship. She sat in silence with the sounds of the night, listening for the sound of the train on the wind.
“Shit,” she muttered, met with silence.
Euphrasia might actually have a chance.

Sora and Euphraisa alighted the steps of the bus together as the sun rose over Ninjago City. Sleek skyscrapers of silver and glass soared all around them, consorting with the clouds, as open parks sprawled between them where the bright titans permitted nature to have a hold. Blossoming trees shed their petals like rain as the girls found the well-trodden path together.
“It’s so strange here,” Sora admitted. There was only so much of the city that Euphrasia could have prepared her for over a breakfast of bread and sweet jam at the hotel. She stepped off the path and reached for the rough bark of a flowering tree. Her fingers grazed it almost reverently. “It’s so much and then nothing like home.”
Euphrasia turned to the wind and smiled. She let it wash over her and she let it just be. Today, she wore her old black robes.
“I travelled through many different realms before I got here,” Euphrasia said. She let the wind take her by the hands and lift her arms. It had been so long in stifled rooms and train cars that she was ready to shout her frustrations to the faceless titans around.
“As did I,” Sora said. Her gaze traced the branching fractals slowly as even the mathematics of a new realm spoke a new language to her. “How did you know when to stop?”
“I met my sister,” Euphrasia said. Such a term was more familiar than others to the former monk. “And… I just had a feeling.”
“I’m not the best. At my own feelings,” Sora said. Euphrasia spun with the falling petals and faced her. She held her hand out and Sora accepted it, and they walked together through the park over the trail forged by many footsteps. “Was there a sign? Was there… I don’t know, some magic?”
“You don’t believe in magic,” observed Euphrasia. Sora dropped the guise with a scoff.
“I don’t,” she said bitterly, as she felt. “I believe in science. Not fate.”
Euphrasia nodded as the petals fell around them.
“You’re not going to argue?” Sora asked, curious again instead of spiteful.
“I don’t like to.”
“But you’re- you were a Writer of Destiny. You should know if there’s a fate or not. Don’t you want to defend it?”
“I don’t know,” Euphrasia said. She let Sora walk ahead of her and drop their hands between them.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Don’t you write destiny?”
“Well, it’s complicated,” replied the ex-Writer softly. She held out her hand for a blossom to settle gently into her palm. “A lot of things… shifted in the Merge. I don’t know.”
“So you can’t write me a prophecy and tell me where to go with my life?” Sora joked dryly.
“I can tell you what to do,” Euphrasia offered, “if you’d like. As much as anybody else can.”
“In that case, I’d like a prophecy,” Sora said. “You’re dressed the part.”
Euphrasia shyly drew up her hood, delighting in the familiar feel of the fabric beneath her fingertips. She looked around for sparks of inspiration for her nonsense prophecy. It wasn’t the sort of thing that she had ever done: no self-respecting Writer of Destiny would dare claim they knew fate, but she had certainly seen her share of muttering mystics claiming to see into the mysteries of the world. It was ridiculous. Euphrasia laughed with her hand over her mouth for a moment in the absurdity of it all. She looked again at the world through the soft haze of smile-squinted eyes.
“You’ll look for a while and then you’ll find a brother,” Euphrasia said. Two Serpentine children ran by on the soft grass and paid the girls no attention as they passed a ball between themselves. “You’ll trust him, but keep your secrets close.”
Euphrasia felt the sun warm on her face and listened intently for what it had to say.
“You’ll find your sign in a piece of mirror.”
Sora nodded, as if she looked down the path over Euphrasia’s shoulder and saw the whole universe stretched from dawn to dusk in a perfect line. The false mystic shrugged.
“It can be a real prophecy if you want it to be.”
“That makes me feel better,” Sora said, smiling, “somehow.”
Euphrasia took the hood from her head and let her face feel the wind. It called to her in breathy voices, pointing fingers down the path in the form of fallen petals caught in short-lived swirls. She followed them, and Sora followed her. Euphrasia put one foot in front of the other in skipping steps. The more steps she took, the more she grew confident in her path. Sora hurried behind her as the mystic showed her the way.
Whether it was fate that brought them there or a muttering stomach, they found their way into a bright café with marble floors and ate lunch overlooking the city streets below where women walked with bags on their arms. Sora found her face in her silverware. Euphrasia didn’t dare to interrupt her. It was a kind of meditation, she found. Ryuko did this sort of thing, too. Euphrasia smiled into her cup, tasting the last of her sweetened tea.
“A sign in a piece of mirror,” Sora murmured. Euphrasia laughed shyly.
“Don’t take it too seriously.”
“Too late,” Sora declared. She touched the curve of her own cheek. “No take-backs.”
Euphrasia drew her shoulders up and held the sides of her loose hood over her mouth.
“I don’t live too far from here,” she realised. She knew these streets, that type of woman. A waitress took their dishes lined with crumbs. “If you’d like, I’m sure my sister could help you until you find some work. Depending on what you do, maybe she can help.”
“Didn’t you say you had somewhere to be?” Sora asked. She didn’t part easily from the silver spoon, but she surrendered it eventually to the waitress. “With your sister?”
“Hm?” Euphrasia hummed. “Ah!”
She clapped her hands together as she remembered at last.
“The race!” She leapt from her seat, the chair sliding over the floor with an ugly sound. Euphrasia and Sora cringed in unison. The master of wind looked over the city, to the horizon, the call of the wind speaking to her in clearer voices now. Above the heads of the world, the clouds like long arrows pointed her towards New Stiix. Euphrasia took the time to settle her thoughts and taste her words before she spoke them.
“I’m sorry. I’ve taken up so much of your time,” Sora said with a wince and a grimace. She apologised again, but Euphrasia straightened her back and shrugged it away.
“If it were to keep me from winning, I wouldn’t have met you,” she said calmly, for she knew it to be true. “And if I lose, then that is what my fate is.”
Sora chuckled dryly.
“I need to learn to think like that.”
A train on elevated tracks encircled the city like a glass halo, or a great eye. Sora and Euphrasia tossed their journeys to fate together upon it. Stop by stop rolled by on the outskirts of the city. People on journeys of their own passed them by. Euphrasia let the sun and clouds speak to her, while Sora tossed dice at every stop. She muttered to herself with every roll.
“Here,” Euphrasia whispered to herself as the train rolled into a stop. Her heart settled, and she trusted it. Sora tossed her dice and read her fortune from the numbers. The pink-haired girl shook her head.
“Not yet,” she announced. She gathered her dice and returned them to her pocket. Sora held out her hand. “It was good to meet you.”
“You, too.” Euphrasia shook her hand. She waved as she stepped from the train onto the platform. “We’ll meet again!”
“If it’s fate, or whatever,” Sora said with a smile. Euphrasia waved the train off as the doors closed and it slid from the station, vanishing towards that gradual bend. She watched it until the winds subsided and resumed their natural state. They would meet again. She knew this much. The circumstances eluded her, but time had to keep some mysteries to herself.
When she left the station, she turned away from the busy street. They never stopped to rest or breathe, not in Ninjago. Euphrasia turned her face and her smile to the sun. She held out her arms and let the wind come to her. Eyes closed, she let it lift her, and she took running steps until she could leap from the ground, impossibly high. The desert was the distance, and the air passing beneath her hands and through her hair grew hot and dry. She peered towards the distant ground through squinted eyes as the air stung them dry. Far beneath her, golden sands blanketed shadows and rifts. She took running steps, the air beneath her lifting her and keeping her from falling, the way it always had when she trusted it. She dove like a nymph of the sea and a cry escaped her. Euphrasia soared with the wind and let it guide her where it would.

Ryuko trudged along the parallel lines of train tracks and electrical posts. The sand made her boots heavy and the ground thick. A night on her feet made the way sway ever more dangerously in front of heavy eyelids. She stopped and got a grip on herself and her weapon. Ryuko could afford to lose her way a little among open tracks. Here, the path wound between jagged peaks that cast the hazy shadows of the moon across her path. Her gut warned her: a prime spot for an ambush. Usually, it was her on the other side of things. She peered carefully at the cracks and the peaks. The bounty hunter knew to look for dim lights in the dark, shoddy equipment, gleams of scope sights in the dark. She also knew that there were those who favoured the old-school stuff so they lay invisible in the dark, those who were better than careless mistakes. They were likely not here tonight, so Ryuko followed the tracks into the shadows. They would not have let her get so far stumbling across the open desert. There were, too, the ones for whom antiquated technologies of a time long-past were all that their emptied pockets could purchase. Ryuko knew that it was most likely that they were absent, too. They were too desperate to bid and deal in time. Yes, she was alone here tonight. The wind howled a lonely song. It sounded wounded, heavy, laden with grief, and Ryuko shivered as it blew from the north, channeled through canyons of no natural maker. She grit her teeth, alone in the night, alone as the desert cooled.
The hunter stopped to rest a moment with her back against a wall. A narrow pass walled her in. She stared at the stars as they slowly twinkled, unfeeling, uncaring in the sky. They glimmered like a wealth of diamonds far beyond a wealth imaginable. They glimmered like gems in bright storefronts where the rich went to shop for gifts. Ryuko remembered gaudy faux stones given between dirty hands made pretty with paint and polish. Her stomach and her heart ached every time Euphraisa led her by those beautiful stones. She didn’t need a man to give her diamonds and gifts. In truth, she had never wanted those sort of things. But when she caught her translucent reflection’s eye reflected in the pristine window of the store’s front window, she couldn’t help but wonder what it might be like to be on either side of a bent knee.
It was a hopeless dream.
Ryuko knew that Euphrasia still dreamt it. She sighed to hear herself against the night and dragged a hand across her brow. Before she allowed her mind to drift, it was time to take herself back to her feet. If she sat and allowed herself to wallow in her misery here, she’d never get up. So she tore her eyes from the sky and walked while she wondered what sort of things Euphrasia would do with her win. She would gloat about it, for sure. Then there was the clause that had worried her. Euphraisa would pick the restaurant— a pricey one, no doubt. Ryuko knew the way Euphrasia had wanted to move up in life the moment she learned the order of things in the city. She had had her eyes on glimmering penthouses and champagne-scented nights since Ryuko had pointed roughly upwards as they walked through the alleys below.
It wasn’t the cost that worried her, though.
Ryuko wasn’t necessarily the most adherent of women to the religion of the feminine, hell, she wasn’t the most adherent to the religion of the orders governing the masses. She patted her beaten leather coat to feel for the shape of the gun hidden inside, and she knew that she wouldn’t pass for an hour as a natural-born high-brow lady of class. Euphrasia, though, was a little chameleon. If she could so seamlessly shift from being a monk to a beaten-down bounty hunter to almost a normal girl shopping and skipping down the sidewalk, then she’d fit right in in an evening dress and a dainty gold necklace, purse in hand, polite conversation on painted lips. Those places, after all, had dress codes. They wouldn’t tolerate Ryuko’s long shirts with the torn-up hems, and they wouldn’t appreciate them on, bluntly, a man. She had never worn a suit before in her life— never had an occasion to, under her father’s wing— but she supposed, for Euphrasia, she could swallow the bile the concept sent to her stomach.
It wasn’t just that, though.
Ryuko knew she was enough of a woman. She had known it since she had put the barrel of a gun to a head and insisted the bloke on the other end address her right. It was enough for her that those in her world knew it and knew it properly.
It had been enough for her.
The world, after all, was bigger than she ever could have imagined.
Her feet ached from dragging them through the sand along the never-ending tracks, but if she stopped to rest, all of her thoughts would catch up to her. She could barely handle these ones. So on she went, one foot in front of the other.
Euphrasia dreamed big and she wanted to take Ryuko with her. It was sweet, sickeningly sweet, and Ryuko couldn’t find it in her heart to reject her. She knew that Euphraisa wanted the best for her. The younger girl had shared with her a dream. They mingled in a tower of sapphires and diamonds, dancing among conversations with the world’s most brilliant and beautiful, and they were brilliant and beautiful, too, ten years from now, both grown into the women they had made themselves. Euphrasia, restlessly pacing the spacious flat, had painted herself as she had been in that dream. The sleeves of her long dress floated in the wind. Her plaited hair was arranged at the base of her neck, thick and bound in delicate golden bands. She held an equally delicate glass in her hands, which were clean of the dirt that never left Ryuko’s fingernails, and her nails were neat and long and painted. The figure of Euphrasia on the page smiled in silent response to somebody up to the imagination off the page. The figure of Ryuko was beside her. She had held her paper image for a long time. She smiled up at herself, hair long and plaited, too, in a sleeveless dress that hugged the curves of full breasts and hips, bracelets around her wrists, high heels with delicate clasps on her feet. Euphrasia had always denied that she could be any sort of prophetess, but both girls knew that was a lie.
At the very least, it wasn’t the whole truth.
It wasn’t a prophecy, not in the way that Ryuko knew the world liked to think, and the reason that Euphrasia so vehemently denied her power. She knew that she couldn’t kick her feet back and let the world pass her by just because she knew the future from a dream. It was the sort of thing that should give her grit. It was the sort of thing that should make her take her feet down and get to work. Because it would be work. It felt almost unattainable, unreachable for Ryuko. It had been this way for a very long time. And so she had told herself that she knew she would never look quite like anybody else, and it would be fine, until she believed it.
Now Euphrasia had given her a different dream.
And Ryuko realised with a wry grimace that, if she had had any hope of the sort as a boy, she would very much like to dream it with her.
And Euphrasia knew it too.
She knew, too, that it was not too late.
Something inside Ryuko knew it, too. It yearned to break free from Ryuko’s hardened mind, and Euphrasia pulled persistently on it. Euphrasia would never stand for seeing Ryuko shifting uncomfortably in her seat, as herself or under a different name. Yet she dreamed of moving up in the world, Ryuko by her side.
Ryuko dragged her hand again across her brow as her stomach growled. She could not silence it, but she could ignore the pangs. She would live. That was what mattered.
The world rumbled again and it wasn’t her imagination, this time. A light like the sunrise quickly came and Ryuko pressed her back against the canyon wall. She watched as the train approached and she moved with no time to waste. Mustered strength from the reserves of her soul let her run until she found her hold, and she leapt, and she held on with all she could as she got her footing on the train that would not stop for her. Cars of cargo would not notice her stealing away, and she slipped inside as the train continued on its way, none the wiser.
She sat against boxes stacked high and lashed together and filled her lungs with heaving breaths as the train moved on through the night, towards New Stiix.

Sora tossed the six-sided dice into her lap as the train rolled to a stop. Caught between her legs, they both landed on their corners. She held one up carefully, to inspect the number. Was it farther to one side, or the other? She tilted her head as people rushed to board and push themselves from the train. Her heart raced as she made her decision. The doors began to close.
“Wait!” She cried. She leapt to her feet, and one of her dice was flung from her lap across the floor. Sora fell to her knees and felt with her hands as people rushed to move their feet away. A man held his arm out to stop the door, and it hissed back open. One friendly hand placed the die back in Sora’s reaching hand. “Thank you. Thank you! Sorry. So sorry.”
She kept her head down as she ran onto the platform. The dice were sharp in her clenched hand as she watched the train pull away. It was strange, to trust her life to chance. She opened her hand and read the numbers, just meaningless symbols on a six-sided shape. Yet she had allowed them to decide where she would make her life. The Writer had suggested it, and she had chosen to believe it.
Now Sora would have someone to blame when everything went wrong.
It was more than that, though.
She stood still in that random spot on the ground while the world bustled by her. Sora closed her eyes and listened to the noise, the chaotic and senseless commotion. This would never be possible in her home. The people she knew were orderly and knew their places. They took their turns and would never shout so senselessly.
The world was bigger than she could have ever imagined.
Sora slowly released her breath and followed the stream of people towards the street. She repeated Euphrasia’s prophecy to herself.
“I’ll wander a while,” she muttered, “and then I’ll find a brother.”
She wandered the road until the sky stained itself scarlet. Even after days among them, she still could not believe that she was not the strangest one on these streets. Back home, nobody was a stranger because the black walls never let a foreigner in or a native out. Here, everybody seemed a foreigner. Serpents walked on two legs, and there were those who seemed more fish than man, and those just uncannily not human. They mingled and they did business together. Money changed hands and there were smiles. Sora stopped at the corner of the street and tossed her dice. They took her to the right.
Just like on the platform, she felt her heart begin to race as she stopped beneath a window. It was just like every other one on this street. The curtains were open and a flickering light came from within to battle back the darkness. Iron bars kept would-be burglars out. A sweet scent, like berries baking, wafted lazily towards the street. Sora sighed a prayer and tossed her dice.
They came face-up on lucky numbers. Sora laughed and snatched them up. She pressed them into her pocket and patted it to ensure that they stayed. Though she had nothing to check her appearance in, she smoothed her hair and wiped her tired eyes with her hands. She found the door and raised her hand. She knocked three times.
“Just a moment!” Called a voice from inside. Sora closed her eyes so that the empty streets would not tempt her from the doorstep. A dark-eyed boy opened the door. “Can I help you?”
“Y-yes,” Sora stuttered. She had not thought about what she would say. It wouldn’t do to say that fate had brought her here. She had trusted fate to guide her tongue, but now she was lost for words. Sora swallowed nervously. The sweet scent of something slightly burnt overwhelmed her. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast this morning with the ex-monk. “I-I’m lost, and I need some help. Something to eat. I can do chores, or, if you have anything that needs fixing, I used to be an engineer.”
“Oh, come in!” Said the boy. Sora stepped inside the home. It ended in decorated walls on every side, a simple stove in the corner, a table set for one, and a mattress on the floor far from it. “I was just making dessert. I’m making dinner, too, but that might be a wait. Sorry about that. Make yourself at home!”
Sora dropped her things by the leg of the table.
“I, uh, I live alone, here,” said the boy apologetically as he returned to the cluttered kitchen where he had been cutting vegetables. “I don’t have another chair.”
“That’s alright,” Sora said. She knelt on the floor, where another chair might have gone. “I, um. Thank you.”
“I hope you like vegetable fried rice,” said the boy, “and berry pie for dessert.”
“It smells delicious,” said Sora. Her stomach growled and she cringed. The boy could probably hear it across the small room.
“Is that what made you knock on my door?” He joked. Sora laughed and shyly tucked her hair behind her ear as the boy rushed to address a small rice cooker as it beeped.
“Something like that,” she said.
“My name is Arin, by the way,” said the dark-eyed boy. He gave her a glance over his shoulder. “You?”
“I’m Sora,” she responded. He smiled.
“It’s nice to meet you.”
You will find a brother.
“You, too.”

Euphrasia leaned against the wooden poles holding the humming sign high above the docks, where it welcomed the bustling merchants and seafarers to New Stiix. Dark waves lapped at the city built on stilts to make a little harbour out of unwanted coastline. She did her best to keep the satisfied smile from creeping across her face as she soaked in her victory with the sunlight. She had gotten here yesterday, actually. It was easy enough to find food and a room for the night: this place was more temporary residents than permanent ones: traders, merchants, seasonal workers. They followed the money and stayed for the night. Euphrasia didn’t fit in at all with the crowd, but a soft hand as light as a feather and a handful of sleeping drunks had put enough cash in her pockets that nobody asked her any questions. She had done a little sightseeing by day. It was only this morning that the wind had called her to the sign of her victory, and now she waited patiently to claim it.
She planned to wait like Ryuko might, if it had been her who won. Euphrasia crossed her arms toughly and leaned on the signpost precariously over the water. She knew she could catch herself if she slipped. She even wore her heavy coat with the collar pulled up, as Ryuko sometimes did. Euphrasia rehearsed her victory lines in her head. She knew exactly what she would say: after all, she had had plenty of time to rehearse.
“Ryuko!” She exclaimed, and she couldn’t hold in the excitement that swelled when she saw her sister. Euphrasia wove between the carts and trailers and people on foot as she ran to greet her friend.
“Shit,” Ryuko muttered. She stumbled as Euphrasia threw herself into her arms to embrace her.
“I won,” Euphrasia said, unable to stop the grin sliding across her face.
“You won,” Ryuko admitted. She yawned, jerking her head and rubbing her tired eyes slowly.
“I what?” Euphrasia asked innocently with her hand up to her ear. Ryuko sighed.
“You won,” she repeated firmly. “You are the better bounty hunter.”
They stepped together from the busy road. Euphrasia hummed and nodded and kept her hand to her ear.
“You will do?”
“Your chores for a month,” Ryuko muttered darkly with a light heart.
“And?”
“Dinner is on me,” she said. She braced for her anxieties. It was the strangest of feelings. “Pick a place.”
“I want to go to the Crossroads for fishballs,” Euphrasia declared. Ryuko’s brow furrowed with a start.
“Really? You don’t want to go somewhere… nicer?”
Euphrasia shook her head resolutely.
“I want to go to the Crossroads.”
Ryuko laughed incredulously.
“If that is what you want.”
“You still have to dress up, though,” Euphrasia said giddily. They had the same image in their minds. “I get to pick our outfits.”
Ryuko put her hands up in defeat. Euphrasia reached for that hand to pull her along, back towards the world.
“Give me a second,” Ryuko said. She stole her hand back. Taller than Euphrasia by no small margin, it wasn’t hard. She sat down hard on the well-pounded ground and damn near felt her knees sigh in relief. “I need to lay down for a minute.”

Chapter Text

Euphrasia carefully cut a square, not much larger on any of its sides than her hand, from her scroll. She rolled the rest of it up with some reverence, its length dwindling every day. Its magic still hummed in her hand as she put it back in her pack, and she knew that it would be gone when she had used the last of it, and not before. Still, what was cut was cut. She smoothed the paper on the kitchen table.

Ryuko had gone to smoke on the balcony with the door closed behind her. Even after following in her step for so long, Euphrasia had never quite gotten used to the taste. Ryuko seemed to always understand, and so she went outside and closed the door behind her, and both of them had some time alone.

Euphrasia put two of the corners together, diagonally, and carefully made a sharp crease along the line, using the edge of her thumbnail to make a precise fold. She felt the new sharp corners of the triangle shape with the pad of her forefinger, admiring the clean points before she put them together and made another sharp fold. The balcony door opened and closed behind her with the sound of the glass door sliding against its rails and striking the frame on either side. Euphrasia placed the paper flat on the table and gently opened the last fold, like the pages of an empty book, before she took the crease down the middle and pressed it into the new bottom corner. Her thumbnail pressed down the old creases and made the new ones sharp in this diamond shape. She turned the page over and did the same to the other side. Despite her careful folding, the paper opened a little in her hand, like a sigh. She pointed the opening ends towards herself and made two more folds, one on each side of the centre line, taking the closer sides of the top face of the shape and pressing them together, perfectly down the middle. These creases would need to be undone, but she didn’t need to make them any less carefully. She did the same, as before, to the other side, aligning these folds with her previous ones, before she undid these ones and then the first. Rain began to pitter-patter against the window. Euphrasia took the lowest edge and carefully folded it upwards. This step always felt like magic, yet there was none at work. The paper made new creases along old folds as Euphrasia’s fingertips teased the sides of the shape outwards, making them hollow as she pulled the lower corner towards the highest point and then beyond it until the paper wouldn’t fold any farther. Then, she let it go a little, her ambition too great, and she made sure that the guideless fold wouldn’t crumple before she pressed it flat, and then she pressed the new long edges flat, and she made sure that all the new corners along the bottom sat neatly against each other. She smiled, then did the same again on the other side.

Four more folds were difficult as the paper grew thick pressed over itself. Euphrasia leaned over the table, her head drifting closer and closer to the pages as she lost herself in careful focus while her head’s shadow across the table grew. Now she took each edge, all four of them, with the needle-like folded paper still oriented the same as it was when it could still release itself. She took these edges and folded them all one more time towards their respective centres. The paper was heavy now, and almost too thick to fold. Now she let herself sigh and sit back in the chair. Outside, the rain had grown to a roar. Distant thunder rumbled, then closer lightning flashed. Euphrasia pinched the thick centre of the folded paper together as she defied the crease. The inside was outside, then inside again as she reaffirmed her work and pinched it together. She did the same to the other.

Thunder crashed overhead and the walls trembled, as if attempting to recoil into the stubborn earth. Euphrasia flinched and dropped her work with the sudden surprise. The wind outside slammed raindrops like bullets into the windows of Ryuko’s flat. A distant, muffled scream came from a neighbour above. Euphrasia took her work back in one hand, but turned around in her seat to watch the rain. Dark clouds stained the afternoon like the night. Ryuko silently watched it pour, hands on her hips. Bright lightning and crashing thunder struck together and the lights flickered once, then died. Their neighbour shrieked again and Euphrasia blinked quickly as her eyes betrayed her in the dark.

“Shit,” Ryuko muttered, and Euphrasia could barely hear her over the sound of the angry rain. She knew that she had nothing to fear from the weather, but she had never been fully at ease during an angry storm. Ryuko loudly patted down her pockets. “Nuts.”

“Shitnuts,” repeated Euphrasia matter-of-factly. Ryuko hopped around a little, and by now Euphrasia’s eyes had adjusted just enough to make out the shape of Ryuko struggling to kick off her boots. A shiny white marble floor was a recipe for disaster for either of them, Ryuko more than Euphrasia. The latter had learned to wear slippers fairly quickly, but the former often forgot she no longer had to fear the splinters and soaked wood that oozed disease like cold sponges underfoot of Stiix. At least, not at home.

“Shut up,” Ryuko called. Her running footsteps were quickly cut off by a loud thud. Euphrasia leapt to her feet, all four legs of her chair sliding roughly against the floor as a flash of lightning illuminated Ryuko sprawled on the ground, having tripped over the corner of the coffee table in the dark. The other woman pointed roughly back at Euphrasia as she untangled herself from the piece of furniture that made no attempt to do the same. “Not. A. Word.”

Ryuko disappeared stumbling down the darkened corridor towards her bedroom. Being on her feet already, Euphrasia moved with her hands in front of her towards the window. Rain swept by howling wind pummelled the side of the building. Across the street, the lights were out as well. Euphrasia looked down the road for a lamp and to the sky for the stars, but all was shadows and the lighter hue of ash. She touched the window and left small fingerprints. The world was cold beneath her hands. She could calm the wind and make it still, at least, she could suggest the storm to direct its fury somewhere else, and make it a calm day again for here, at least, but she knew it was best to let it rage.

Across the street, little stars showed their faces. Faint torchlight appeared in windows, some revealing frantic sweeps of light and others muffled behind drawn drapes. The gentler light of candles came on in their own time. Ryuko emerged from the bedroom bearing a beat-up lantern. It let Euphrasia see her furrowed brow as she tinkered with a dial and a switch.

“I remember this thing being brighter,” Ryuko muttered, but she set it down carefully on the coffee table she had knocked askew.

“As long as it lights up,” Euphrasia said. Ryuko pushed the coffee table back into its old position with her knee before falling heavily onto the sofa. They let the world inside be still and silent for a minute while the rain kept time. At last, Euphrasia returned to the table. The light of Ryuko’s lantern didn’t reach her there, but she felt by her hands until she was at its edge. She brought the chair back beneath herself as she sat and found her folded paper on the tabletop. There was just enough light to make out the white page against the dark table’s top. She turned it over in her hands and closed her eyes just to know its lines and corners by touch alone. Her fingertips were careful not to tease open the pockets or make an erroneous crease on the delicate edge of the paper itself. The harder edges made their more stubborn wills known to her. They were much more firm in her hand, born from deliberate strokes meant to last until the crane had taken shape. Euphrasia blinked, though the world was almost all the same as the backs of her eyelids. She righted the paper in her hands again.

Light steps on the silent floor heralded the creep of light into Euphrasia’s world. Ryuko brought her lantern with her as she brought their other chair around. It was a mismatched dining room set, as Ryuko hadn’t furnished her flat with the expectation of hosting a long-term guest. The table had come with two chairs, and upon learning this fact, Euphrasia sidetracked Ryuko’s retelling of the story to tell her that fate had put a sign in her face that even she should have been able to read. Ryuko had swatted that aside, as she always did. Now, she set the lantern on the table and let it cast its strange shadows that buzzed with an electric hum.

“Thank you,” Euphrasia said.

“Hm.” Ryuko folded her arms on the table and laid her head down. She watched Euphrasia’s nimble fingers with an uninspired curiosity as she got back to her paused project.

It was a matter of personal taste as she adjusted the angle of the last fold she had made before her interruption. The paper was looking more and more like a crane. She chose the right side of it to make one last fold, the first one without a twin, to give her crane a head. At last, she gently pulled the wings out, and its back expanded as if it took a first breath. She smiled and posed the little bird in her palm. Then, she took it by the tail and set it on the table in front of her. Ryuko’s eyes stayed on her as she went to the kitchen sink for water to make her ink. The Writers of Destiny insisted upon holy water to make their writing the most pure, blessed from once to thrice by elder scholars of the mysteries of the world, to be mixed with sacred ash in precise quantities dictated by knowledge written by the stars in the language of the eternal.

Perhaps we took ourselves too seriously, Euphrasia thought to herself, as she lifted the kitchen faucet and let the water pour over the well-used block. Nevertheless, she found herself whispering the customary prayers as she swirled the black stone with her brush until a sliver would flow off the top as a liquid. She sat again to work, a strange and new luxury which she would now not part with easily. The crane returned to her hand, held by the tail-tip again. Then, it was her brush in her writing hand, and by lantern light she carefully wrote blessings upon its little wings. She dried the ink quickly with her breath until the blessings worked their magic and instilled breath in the paper breast. The paper crane’s wings rustled experimentally, then flapped with greater force. Euphrasia lifted it towards the high ceiling and tossed it from her hands as it flew by its own animation. They watched the little bird flutter in a circle around the open rooms. Euphrasia held out her hand and the little bird settled back into her palm.

“So,” Ryuko began, “can you make anything?”

“Only cranes like this,” Euphrasia said. Ryuko’s eyes followed the crane as she set the bird gently on the table. “I had a sister who taught me how.”

“Senbazuru,” Ryuko muttered. She looked up. “Is that anything to you?”

Euphrasia shook her head.

“Story goes,” she said, “if you make a thousand paper cranes, you get to make a wish, or something like that. I wondered if that meant anything, you monks being the ones who, well, if anybody, could grant wishes.”

Euphrasia shook her head again.

“I’m afraid it’s just a nice story.”

“A nice coincidence.”

Euphrasia folded her arms and laid her head down, too. Ryuko sat up, as if only one of them were allowed to do so at a time. She fished in her pocket for a crumpled receipt. Euphrasia watched as she smoothed it out against the table with the heel of her hand. She eyeballed and tore off a section that wasn’t quite square. Her folding was quick and uneven, though she moved with the eerie swiftness of a long-lost habit. She folded it into a triangle, and then a triangle again, then she turned it over in her hand a few times before she remembered the correct motion. The folded paper grew smaller and smaller in her hand. Her eyes narrowed as she creased and increased the paper, the angles at the corners confusing themselves for one another. 

At last, Ryuko chuckled triumphantly and held out the paper crane posed on her palm. She cupped her hands and tossed it gently into the air. It soared a brief moment before the unbalanced weight pulled it down, no magic to fill its fragile breast. Euphrasia reached her arm across the table and sent under its wings a gentle wind, enough to keep it aloft, bobbing in the wind like petals on a river’s meander. She opened her hands like blooming blossoms as the wind subsided and the crane settled into her ready palms.

The rain outside had settled into a steady percussive rhythm. A clock with two batteries in its back faithfully kept time for the shadows of their dark living room. Though a little light crept through the clouds, Euphrasia had already been betrayed to believe that night had fallen already. She yawned and stretched both hands far over her head.

“I’m going to lay down,” she declared.

“You’ll ruin your sleep,” Ryuko warned, though she, too, began to close her eyes.

“Just for a moment,” said Euphrasia as she slipped away from the table without a sound. “Wake me up for dinner if I fall asleep.”

She stepped softly across the floor, stopping to study the expanse of grey stretching on beyond the balcony. Euphrasia took her folded blanket and spread it over herself as she lay down on the couch which was her bed for every night that she got to spend in Ryuko’s home. She tilted her face slightly downwards, towards the sliding glass door, to watch the rain. The ticking of the clock grew louder and louder in the silent room. Euphrasia closed her eyes and let the sleep slide from her weary shoulders.

Ryuko listened to the old lantern’s hum as she twirled her crane around by the tail, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, making the paper more and more strangely smooth the more she played with it. She rocked it from side to side beneath her hand. When she closed her eyes, a memory came to her. She fought the urge to rest them until she couldn’t anymore.

Then she was a little boy again.

The little boy sat by the edge of the alley, muffled playful laughter coming from inside, red light spilling through the brothel entrance and staining everything in its hue from his hands to the folded paper held between them to the dark clouds above. Waves lapped greedily at the underside of the city on stilts. A shadow fell over him as a lady in a slim dress, clung tightly to the curves of her body, stepped down to the street. Her curled hair bounced as she took a step, dancing on her bare shoulders and caressing her cheeks. Ryuzo blinked, starstruck, because she must have been a spirit from the heavens. She knelt down next to him, and at last he remembered to dart his eyes and shy away. He had been reminded time and time again not to talk to strangers. His father was inside, and he might be a while. The Madame was a difficult businesswoman, or had to be, that way that father always left with a sour look between his eyes. This city was dangerous and it was well worth the cost to have the protection of someone who had powerful friends. Ronin charged a fair price for friendship, that was what Ryuzo knew.

He occupied himself fiddling with the paper in his fingers. Though he turned it this way and that, he still couldn’t figure out what magic to work on it to make it into a worthy shape for a shrine. It was stuck in the shape of just a smaller square, softening under failed attempts.

The lady held out a hand tipped with nails painted bright yellow to match her dress. 

“Can I help you?” She asked. Ryuzo nodded, put in a trance by her striking eyes. She was gorgeous. He blinked, hoping to remember her face so that she might visit him again in a dream. “Are you trying to make a crane?”

He nodded again, his mouth mindlessly agape.

“This part is always tricky,” she said. She folded the paper against her bent knee. The lady folded the edges in, and then unfolded them, as Ryuzo had a dozen times before. Then, she took the bottom-most corner and pulled it upwards into new space, opening a new shape and a new world of possibilities. “But once you learn it, you never forget.”

She handed him the paper so that he could open it and fold the other side. The lady took it back and they traded off, fold by fold, learning by the touch of their hands. She let him tease it apart with gentle coaxing as the well-worn paper broke and tore. A voice from inside the house called for her and she quickly stood, nimble even in her high heels. She waved to him quickly as he waved slowly after her shadow.

He held the crane gently as he stumbled to his feet and ran towards the gap in the pier where the roads made way for dark water. Still stained by red light, he knelt and lowered his hands to the high tide waves and whispered his wish to the wind. He held on to the slick edge of the wooden roads as the cold water swept the crane away. When it vanished from the gap, he leaned over as far as he could to watch it until a wave swallowed it, wings and all, and it vanished from sight.

“Kid, we’re leaving,” Ronin called. He was a dark silhouette with one red eye. Ryuzo scrambled to his feet to follow him as the eye disappeared and the shadow started to shrink. The crane and the wish sank to the bottom of the sea.

Now Ryuko twirled the crane between her fingertips and listened to the rain. The chair began to scrape against the ground, though she quickly caught herself and slipped slowly the rest of the way. Euphrasia lay almost still in sleep as Ryuko gently opened the sliding door. Rain falling slantwise to the sky fell into the flat as Ryuko stole onto the balcony. Still in her socks, the cold rain pooling beneath her seeped up like sneaking tendrils towards her leg. She set the crane on the corner of the railing. She crossed her arms upon the railing next to it and leaned over to lay her head upon them. The rain seized the crane like the waves below Stiix, the way that fleets of hundreds over the years had been sent to their fate with a wish in their breasts in lieu of breath. Ryuko watched the crane and the wish wither in the weather as cold rain soaked her face and hair. 

Chapter Text

Ryuko pardoned herself to the restroom as Euphrasia’s new friends made themselves at home in her flat. 

“Do you mind if I smoke in here?” Arin called politely. Ryuko frowned into the mirror, even if they couldn’t see it.

“Aren’t you a little young for that?” She muttered. She could hear the kids giggling to each other as if something were amusing, so she called over her shoulder: “ask Euphrasia.”

She had done her best to break the worst of her habit at the behest of Euphrasia’s preference.

“Ok, ok, bring it in,” Euphrasia whispered, and Ryuko wondered with concern what had caused the sudden change in heart. She rushed to the door to the sound of giggling and heavy steps.

Ryuko placed her hands on her hips. Euphrasia watched, leaned over with her hands on her knees, looking out of place in black robes as Arin knelt in front of a tall electric smoker. Sora handed him cuts of meat from a small cooler.

“What’s all this, then?”

“I am smoking,” Arin declared proudly, “some ribs.”

“I’m sure you’re proud of that,” Ryuko said.

“You’re not even a little impressed?” Euphrasia asked.

“I was more concerned,” she replied pointedly. Euphrasia pointed Sora to put her cooler in the kitchen as Arin admired the rack of ribs before closing the door. “Smoking is bad for you.”

“And yet…” Euphrasia said.

“I am an adult,” Ryuko retorted. She took it upon herself to open the balcony door to introduce some fresh air. “How old are you?”

“Old enough to smoke a rack of ribs,” declared Arin. Ryuko pinched the bridge of her nose.

“Where the hell did you get a smoker?”

“I made it,” Sora said, “for his birthday.”

“I got mine in Shintaro,” Euphrasia said smugly as she made herself comfortable on the sofa. She turned herself upside down on the sofa and put her feet up as her hair brushed the floor.

“I didn’t know you cooked!” Arin’s face brightened. Ryuko flipped her the bird as she realised, unamused, her unimpressive play on words.

“Oh, I don’t. Not really,” Euphrasia said. She had to quickly explain herself as Sora sat politely, her hands on her lap, next to the upside-down Euphrasia.

“Did you assemble it outside my door?” Ryuko asked Sora pointedly. “Or did you take that on the train?”

“We took it on the train,” Euphrasia said happily, as if she lived in some envious world where there would be nothing amiss about the sight of three giggling teenagers hauling a smoker and a cooler of meat onto public transportation. Ryuko supposed that the monk just as well might. She raised an eyebrow.

“Just to make that joke?”

“Not just,” Euphrasia protested. She placed her hands on the floor and gracefully flipped herself with a burst of wind, in that lighter-than-air way she did. “It was… a big factor.”

Ryuko looked around her flat at their strange assortment of characters. She couldn’t help the grimace that crept across her face.

“You really want to stay here and smoke ribs? Wouldn’t you rather spend time at, I don’t know, an arcade?”

The three looked at each other and shook their heads. Ryuko patted her pockets for lighter and cigarettes.

“If you’ll excuse me.” She pardoned herself onto the balcony.

“Oh, can I have a cigarette?” Arin asked. He leapt to his feet with too much excitement. Ryuko placed the cigarette between her teeth and defended her little flame from the breeze.

“No.”

“Why not? You were ready to accept that I smoked,” he said smugly.

“You look eight years old, kid, I’m not giving you a cigarette,” Ryuko said. She leaned against the railing as the taste filled her mouth. “And there’s laws, I think.”

Euphrasia’s brow furrowed incredulously.

“Since when did you care about the law?”

“Since it told me to do what I already wanted to do. Since when did you stop immediately protesting smoking?”

Euphrasia turned to Arin.

“It is bad for you.”

“So why do you smoke cigarettes? I could take them off your hands and do you a favour,” argued Arin. He arranged himself cross-legged on the ground. Ryuko could smell the rack of ribs from where she stood. The combination of smells made an interesting taste on her tongue that she did not see herself growing any fonder of.

“It was a gift from my father,” Ryuko said plainly. “You can’t throw out gifts. It’s rude.”

She ran the pad of her thumb along the corner of her lighter as she took another drag. Euphrasia directed the output of the smoker through the door. The tunnel of wind brought it narrowly past Ryuko’s nose. Euphrasia’s use of her powers was precice, but not enough so to keep the fragrance contained. Ryuko wondered if it was some sort of tactic. Either way, she gave up on her cigarette.

She gave Arin a glass of apple juice and Sora a glass of water to drink, as it seemed that Euphrasia had forgotten her manners. Perhaps it had been that she had never had them. From what she had told her of the lifestyles of the Cloud Kingdom, the monks seemed a solitary lot. 

“I knew a man who smoked a pipe,” Ryuko mused. She sat at one side of her sofa, even though she was alone on it. “He looked just like the kind of man I’d expect to smoke a pipe.”

“Oh? Like what?” Sora asked. Euphrasia had stripped Ryuko’s bed of blanket and pillows as Arin and Sora looted all the spare cushions from the lounge to arrange into some sort of strange nest on the cold tiled floor.

“He was a big, heavy man, built like a brick wall stuffed into a suit. Bowler hat. One giant prosthetic arm that looked like he had ripped it off a heavy excavator,” recalled Ryuko. She mimed the way he would sit. “He would loom in the back of a room puffing on this pipe.”

“What happened to him?” Arin asked with a glimmer in his eye. Ryuko hummed as she couldn’t recall if she had ever encountered a trustworthy rumour of his whereabouts.

“Last I heard, he had been arrested, but that was before the Merge,” she said. “I knew him, I called him Boss Fujioka. People who knew of him called him the Mechanic, for the arm, I think.”

“I know that guy!” Arin shot up on his hands. Ryuko looked him from head to hands sceptically.

“Really?”

“Well, I heard of him. He was one of the guys the ninja fought. He got stopped by the ninja and Samurai X right before the Merge, when they broke down his Vengestone shipping empire,” Arin said.

Euphrasia looked up at Ryuko. She shrugged.

“I had his trading card,” Arin bragged. Ryuko laughed incredulously at the idea.

“What?”

“Ninja trading cards,” Arin said, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world to him. Perhaps it was. “The limited Villain card run? They’re some of the most valuable cards in the game, except for the Golden Ninja Lloyd and any of the Garmadon cards. Did you know the company tried to buy back all of the old released Garmadon cards after he destroyed the city because his card was too controversial? It didn’t work because collectors realised that this would make them rare and even more valuable in the future and started buying them as fast as they could. I had a Sensei Garmadon card right before it happened, but I traded it away. ”

Ryuko shifted in her seat. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cringe at the idea of the Mechanic’s face on a kids’ trading card. Arin checked the watch he wore on his wrist.

“I think it’s time to start cooking,” he declared. Sora clapped her hands together and rose from their nest to pick her way across the minefield of half-finished board games and discarded hands of playing cards that had appeared as if by magic. Euphrasia threw an apologetic look over her shoulder as she stood.

“I said we could,” she said through the teeth of a half-grimace, half grin. Ryuko waved her hand.

“I’m not doing your dishes.”

Ryuko’s stomach growled the moment the onions hit the pan. Arin tossed them together with garlic in the sizzling pan with the pose of a celebrity chef. Sora scoured the kitchen for the right cutting implement as Euphrasia washed greens at the sink with her sleeves tied back. Ryuko sighed and cursed to herself as she decided to get up and do the hard thing.

She rehearsed her words in a whisper as she entrusted her kitchen to Euphrasia and her friends for a moment so that she could rush down the corridor. Ryuko hesitated with her hand raised to knock on her neighbour’s door. She hadn’t expected her guests to stay so long, nor for those kids to cook a whole meal. Still, she raised her hand and struck the door three times before quickly smoothing out her hair. Her fingers caught in the tangles and she cursed as the door opened.

“Hello, ah, I live next door. This is a strange request, but I have some surprise company over and you wouldn’t happen to have two dining room chairs that I could borrow for an hour or so?” She clapped her hands together and cringed.

She had no qualms about knocking on the door to her own flat as many times as it took for Euphrasia to come running to fling it open. Ryuko pushed the door open with her foot as Euphrasia ran away just as fast as she had come. She lifted one chair across the threshold and then the other. Ryuko sniffed the air suspiciously, but she knew that the smell of her flat was often deceiving. She turned quickly and whipped her whole body around even quicker as the corner of her eye caught a sight that was brighter than usual. Arin stood statue-still, holding a pan nearly engulfed in flames that licked their way higher and higher. Sora bounced on her tiptoes at the sink as she filled the kettle with water. Euphrasia’s hands burned with a bright white glow as her wind routed the heat directly out the door and, critically, beneath the smoke detector.

“Oil! Oil!” Arin shouted once he caught her eye, as if that sufficed to explain how he had come to hold a pan of fire that threatened to lick the ceiling. Small fires that had caught across the counter hissed as Sora tossed the kettleful of water across them without much more success than she would have gotten pouring. Euphrasia swore as she tried to bat the reaching flames down with one hand.

“Oxygen, Euphrasia,” Ryuko shouted, “suffocate the pan and the fire will go out!”

She set down the chair and grabbed a pillow from the floor to fan the air away from the smoke detector as Euphrasia redirected her attention. The elemental master rushed from beneath the alarm and stole the fire’s hot breath. Sora clasped her hands together in front of her mouth as the fire slowly dwindled. She only began to breathe when the contents of the pan were no more than char and embers. 

Arin’s shoulders slumped and he waddled the pan shamefully back to the stove. He hung his head.

“I’m sorry.” His voice cracked. Sora’s eyes widened. She reached one hand towards her shoulder, but she hesitated. “I messed up dinner.”

“It’s alright,” Sora said. She cracked a hesitant smile. “Hey, remember all the times I almost burnt down our place?”

They lived alone?

“Yeah, but this is somebody else’s place,” Arin whispered. “I’m sorry, Miss Ryuko.”

“The fire is out,” Ryuko observed unhelpfully with a shrug. “You handled it well enough, kid.”

Arin shook his head and put his face in his hands. Sora squeezed her eyes shut and gently touched his shoulder. Euphrasia’s eyes darted around the room. Ryuko sighed. It wasn’t just a burnt dinner, was it?

Ryuko quickly put her sofa back together from the floor and waved Sora to bring her friend over to sit. She led him carefully around the minefield they had made out of the floor. They sat together. She slowly touched his shoulder. He collapsed into her arms.

In the kitchen, Euphrasia slowly clenched and relaxed her fists.

“I don’t know what I should do,” she whispered.

“Clean, Euphrasia,” Ryuko said. She tried to act less than fazed. She knew the type of tears. If she acted as if it were just a ruined dinner and a mess on her countertops, it would be better for them all. She tossed Euphrasia a towel to mop up the mess as she filled the sink with soapy water. They cleaned the mess wordlessly, Euphrasia in a daze.

“Excuse me, do you have tissues?” Sora called.

“Tissues, Euphrasia.”

“Right,” she said. She wiped her wet hands on her robes. Euphrasia didn’t return to Ryuko’s side. Good. She hadn’t expected it.

She didn’t mind doing the rest of the cleaning up.

“Right,” Ryuko muttered. Arin held himself on the sofa. Sora held him, and Euphrasia laid her head on her folded arms at his side. Discarded tissues on the table in front of him and one in his hand had taken up the most of his tears. Ryuko looked at the ceiling as she spoke. “We can get takeout, or something? Do you have a favourite restaurant?”

“We’re from sort of far away,” Arin muttered. A sniffle interrupted his words. “I don’t know this area that well.”

“Can we go to Chen’s?” Euphrasia asked. “It’s, like, noodles-go-round.”

“Oh! Master Chen’s Noodle House,” Arin said. The glimmer returned to his eye and Ryuko let herself sigh in relief. “I didn’t know you had those… in this area.”

“Noodles?” Ryuko raised an eyebrow in Sora’s direction.

“Sounds good to me.”

“Great. Get your shoes on.”

Sora helped Arin to his feet as Ryuko slipped her car keys into her pocket. It was Euphrasia’s responsibility to quickly lace up her sandals and get her friends’ cooler and the salvageable food that Ryuko had packed up for them. Ryuko herself could get that damn smoker down to her car. They descended the stairs with their arms full.

They settled into a booth against the less than soothing hum of the noodle house’s sparse late evening clientele. Arin had spent the car ride explaining the convoluted tale of the real Master Chen, or at least, the most authentic Master Chen that could be made into marketable trading cards. Ryuko had listened with half her attention, and now she knew less than she had about the noodle house founder at the beginning of the car ride. The noodles were good, she knew, and Euphrasia had taken a real liking to the place. She explained every dish as it passed them by on the conveyor belt.

When the dishes piled high and the kids all leaned against the soft back of the booth, Ryuko called a waiter over to take the total of their dishes. Sora broke free from her food-stunned stupor to look at the mountain of dishes and begin to count with her fingers. Ryuko waved her down silently as she paid their bill.

“Thank you for dinner,” Sora said sheepishly. She shivered as the cold night air greeted them as they left the restaurant.

“Oh! Thanks for dinner,” Arin added as she reminded him to give his thanks.

“Yeah, yeah.” Ryuko waved it off.

They were just kids.

When they piled back into the car, Euphrasia elected to join her friends in the backseat. Ryuko quickly noticed a lack of the usual chatter. She hadn’t learned anything new about an old villain yet on this ride. When the light ahead turned red, she took the liberty of checking her mirror in case she had left them behind. Sora leaned against Arin with her eyes closed, who slept slumped against her shoulder. Euphrasia curled against Sora’s other shoulder. Her hair obscured her eyes. Ryuko smiled to herself and to the dark as the light burned green.

The address they had given her took her down narrowing alleys. She hesitantly stopped on the dark street before waking Sora. When she stirred, she woke both her friends. Euphrasia simply turned to lay against the car door. Arin looked around with some confusion, but recognised his own door and fumbled for the car door handle. Sora had the keys to let them in, and Ryuko went behind them to bring in their things. Arin stumbled over to one of two mattresses and flopped down, face-first, without pausing to kick off his dirty trainers. Sora yawned and shielded her eyes against the light of a mini-fridge as she looked for a place for their food. Ryuko looked around the sad place.

They did live alone.

“You’re both welcome at my place, ah, whenever,” she said. “And if you need anything, I- I assume you can call Euphrasia, or something.”

She didn’t want to overstay her welcome. It was a long drive home with a different kind of silence.

Euphrasia still hadn’t awoken on her own by the time Ryuko made it back to the car park beneath her flat. She didn’t stir as Ryuko carried her back up the stairs. The sofa where she usually made her bed was still a mess. Her whole place smelled oddly of a different kind of smoke than the one seeped into her bones. She set Euphrasia in her own bed, though without a blanket, it was still the best place in the one-bedroom flat to rest for now.

Ryuko sighed as she surveyed the mess that would keep her up for a little while yet. She tried not to think too much about anything at all as she got on her hands and knees to put the kids’ games back into their boxes. 

Chapter Text

“Seven thousand nine hundred and eighty two bottles of beer on the wall, seven thousand nine hundred and eighty two bottles of beer!”

Arin carefully kept their merry backseat band in time with a careful rhythm, but not even the most skilled conductor in all the merged realms could keep them from falling apart into three discordant and jumbled melodies:

“You take one down, pass it around, seven thousand nine hundred eighty one bottles of beer on the wall!” 

“You take one down, you pass it around, seven thousand nine hundred and eighty one bottles of beer on the wall!” 

“Take one down, pass it around, seven thousand nine hundred eighty one bottles of beer on the wall!”

Euphrasia giggled as they composed themselves and began anew with Arin keeping time:

“Seven thousand nine hundred and eighty one bottles of beer on the wall, seven thousand nine hundred and eighty one bottle of beer!”

Ryuko slammed her foot on the brakes hard enough to throw all four occupants against their seatbelts. She glared at her passengers in the rear view mirror as other cars swerved by them.

“I will turn this car around,” she vowed. “Shut up.”

Arin, Sora, and Euphrasia gave each other a mischievous grin. Arin slowly raised two fingers like a conductor addressing an orchestra. Euphrasia stifled herself with a hand as Ryuko moved back into the steady stream of cars on the highway pointed away from the city. The scheming kids continued their song with excited whispers:

“You take one down, pass it around, seven thousand nine hundred and eighty bottles of beer on the wall!”

Ryuko had lost her patience several times over by the time their whisper-singing had crescendoed into a full-chested announcement of their seven thousand nine hundred and twenty-five bottles of beer on the wall.

“Rest stop,” she announced over the sound as they passed by the sign. “Does anybody need to stop? Piss? Get a drink?”

“When is the next stop after this?” Sora asked.

“Whenever you need to go,” Ryuko said. “Plenty of bushes.”

“Let’s stop here,” Arin said, wisely.

Ryuko stopped in the car park and the kids piled out of the car. Arin and Sora walk-ran towards the toilets as Euphrasia lifted and perched herself on the roof of the car like a hawk.

“You have an airship. Why couldn’t we fly?”

“It doesn’t have a back seat,” Ryuko said plainly. She took her time getting herself to her feet. “And your friends wanted to come.”

“Fine.”

Euphrasia lifted herself again into the air and set her feet down on the ground with impossible weightlessness.

“Are you sure you should use your powers like this?” Ryuko asked. She tilted her head roughly towards the other families moving to and from the little collection of toilets, tourist shops, and restaurants, though even if they noticed Euphrasia’s stunt out of the corner of their eyes, they paid her little attention.

“I saw a man yesterday who was all frog,” Euphraisa scoffed. “I don’t think anything is weird since the Merge.”

Fair enough.

By the time they made it back onto the road, the kids had quieted into a peaceful silence kept at bay by classic rock as they watched the fractured landscape roll past. The sprawling city turned to abandoned farmland fraught with the strange new plants that had taken hold after the Merge had scattered their seeds to tangle and choke out their new homes. Ryuko turned off the radio when the Ninjago City station turned to static.

Arin struck up the song again:

“Seven thousand-“

The girls shushed him in unison more loudly than he had sung. 

By the time they arrived at their destination, the sun had already begun setting behind the trees. Arin, Sora, and Euphrasia all but fell out of the car and kissed the sweet, solid ground after their afternoon of bumping over dirt roads to get as far into the tangled forest as they could before thick shrubs blocked their path. Once Sora had stretched her legs, she stood impatiently over Arin.

“We have to pitch the tent,” she said. Arin groaned, but didn’t peel himself from the ground just yet.

“Five more minutes. I need the grass to stop jumping first.”

“We can pitch the tent ourselves,” Euphrasia said as she carried the bag from the car to Sora. “How hard could it be?”

“You two pitch the tent. Arin, unload the car. I’m going for a walk,” Ryuko called.

“Where are you going?” Euphrasia asked.

“Piss and get firewood. Not at the same time.”

“Have a nice piss!”

“Euphrasia, I will drive this car back to the city and leave you here to eat bugs the rest of your life,” said Ryuko without looking back or a second thought. 

“She doesn’t mean it,” Euphrasia said happily as Ryuko disappeared into the shadows.

“Let’s see this tent.” Sora rubbed her hands together with a grin at the prospect of a puzzle. Euphrasia emptied the components onto the ground with intermittent clatters. They assembled the poles without much difficulty, but then came time to untangle the cover. A little bit of wind made the task a breeze.

“Arin, can you get the mallet?” Sora asked. He had unhelpfully arranged himself on his back to happily stargaze through the thick trees.

“There’s so many stars out here. I never realised,” he murmured.

“I’ll get it,” Euphrasia muttered. She wiped her hands on her skirt as she began unloading all of their camping supplies from Ryuko’s car. Arin hummed himself a tune as Euphrasia did his job. She took out their air mattresses and sleeping bags, pillows, and clothes. Sora came and helped her take out two camp chairs, their food, and their water. Arin, at last, came over and found the mallet from the toolkit that Euphrasia had already taken out while the girls worked together to lift down the heavy locked trunk of Ryuko’s job supplies. Because of course she wouldn’t have agreed to take them camping for no reason at all.

Arin, Sora, and Euphrasia worked together quickly to hammer the stakes into the soft ground and bring their things into the tent. Torches tossed around gave them light, but also strange shadows. Sora shivered as a chill blew through the mesh entrance of their little tent. She opened her bag to search for a coat.

“Did you hear that?” Arin whispered. He stilled the swaying torch with one hand.

“Not funny, Arin,” Sora muttered. 

“I’m serious,” Arin said. His voice trembled with a new panic. “Something is rustling. It sounds big. Are there bears out here?”

“Are there what?” Sora asked. She looked up at her friend with both her arms still in her bag up to her elbows as she felt around for anything to ward against the cold.

“I think I hear it, too,” Euphrasia whispered. Her shadow moved slowly as she reached to take a torch into her hand. “That doesn’t sound like Ryuko.”

“Cut it out, both of you,” Sora said firmly, but she was cut off by a crunch too loud to have been made by a human foot. Arin flinched hard enough to set the hanging light swinging and tossing shadows this way and that. Euphrasia put her hand on Arin’s side as she searched the darkness outside for Ryuko’s trunk.

“It’s coming closer,” Arin muttered. Sora grabbed the mallet. “I’m going to turn off the light.”

“Don’t,” Sora hissed. She grabbed his arm and pulled it away from the light. “It’s already seen us. We might as well be able to see.”

“If you say so.” Arin clenched his fist. Euphrasia swallowed and braced herself as the wind whistled past. Arin shivered. “Was that you?”

“That wasn’t me.”

Another crack like snapping trees sounded from outside. Arin swallowed.

“We should get outside. Right now we’re three delicious humans in one pod,” Sora said. She nodded to Euphrasia. “Slowly.”

The three of them slowly made their way outside under the green-tinged sky, back to back to back to cover each other’s blind spots. Arin pulled his hood over his head like a ninja as Sora held onto the mallet. They made their way together to the trunk and covered Euphrasia as she knelt in the dirt to open the lock. She pushed it open and took Ryuko’s pistol from the top. The bounty hunters always kept it loaded. Euphrasia had insisted that she had her powers, but Ryuko had been adamant that she keep a backup plan at her hip. She still had her powers, but for some reason, it gave her a little comfort to have something substantial between her hands.

“Alright. Whatever it is, Sora, you go low, Euphrasia, you go wide, and I’ll go high,” Arin said.

They waited for it to emerge from the forest. The trembling earth moved to one side, then the other, coming closer even more slowly than it moved.

Then, silence.

None of their three even dared to breathe.

The monster they had made lumbered into the distance.

“It’s gone,” Sora sighed in relief. She lowered the mallet and loosened her death grip. The wind seemed to turn warm again.

“That’s not good,” Arin said. All the tension of their three had made its way into his shoulders. “There’s always a bigger fish.”

“Can I have the gun?” Sora asked.

“Can you shoot it?” Euphrasia asked. Sora nodded quickly, and there was no time to question where or why she had learned. They swapped weapons between cold hands as they waited for some new horror to emerge from the silent night.

“There!” Arin pointed at the light emerging from the forest. All three of them turned as their blood rushed past logic to survival.

“Wait!” Euphrasia said. She put her hand on Sora’s shoulder as Ryuko picked her way from the trees with a torch balanced precariously between two fingers and her arms piled high with dry branches. “Ryuko!”

Euphrasia dropped the mallet and ran to the edge of the clearing as Arin sighed and let tension drain limply from his body. She threw herself into Ryuko’s arms as their firewood clattered to the ground. Sora and Arin sank into the group embrace as Ryuko looked around.

“You three looked ready to kill someone,” she said incredulously.

“We heard a monster in the woods,” Arin exclaimed. “It had to be bigger than a bear. It was hunting us.”

“We thought we were going to have to kill it,” Sora added. “I’ve never been more glad to see someone.”

“Did you see it?” Arin asked.

“I didn’t see anything,” Ryuko said plainly. She tried to lift her arms, though the kids kept her pinned to her place. “Can I move, now?”

Arin collected the fallen wood as Ryuko collected her weapon with a stern warning for Sora.

“There shouldn’t be monsters out here,” Ryuko said as she piled the smallest branches onto each other in the dirt. Oddly, the things she said never sounded that reassuring. “Maybe foxes.”

“We all heard it,” Arin insisted. “It sounded heavy, like a dragon. It came towards us and just ran away.”

“Are you sure it couldn’t have been the wind?” Ryuko lit a flame beneath the quick-burning twigs.

“It wasn’t the wind.” Euphrasia was quick, almost as if to defend herself, as she handed Ryuko more sticks to feed the flame.

“These woods might be haunted,” Arin suggested with a whisper. The flickering flames were no comfort as they struggled to hold on to life with belches of thick smoke.

“Shut up,” Sora retorted quickly. As if the shadows weren’t deep enough. “Let’s not tell any ghost stories.”

“I know ghost stories,” Arin muttered. “Stories about ghosts. The ninja won, in the end. They’re not scary stories.”

“Ghosts aren’t real,” scoffed Sora. “There’s no such thing. There’s always a scientific explanation for those things.”

“What’s the scientific explanation for that thing, then?” Arin gestured in the direction of the sound and the trembling earth.

“Some kind of animal,” Sora said, though the shake of her voice suggested that even she had no idea. “We’re not its natural prey. It got close enough to smell us, and decided that we weren’t worth it. See? Safe.”

“And how come Ryuko said she didn’t see anything?” Arin continued. Ryuko kept her head down to the fire and the curling smoke.

“Maybe we were all just hearing things,” suggested Euphrasia. Arin shivered. “That’s less comforting, actually.”

“Maybe it’s a really bad practical joke,” suggested Sora, though they all knew that that hypothesis was hopeful at best.

Ryuko zipped the kids into their tent with a warning not to go wandering into the woods. She checked their earnest eyes for promises before disappearing into the back of her car, though she neglected to check for fingers crossed behind their backs. They could handle themselves to make good decisions, and she trusted them, even though she shouldn’t have. 

She waited patiently as the minutes ticked by and the spectral green glow rose slowly like floodwater from the soft ground. Ryuko only opened the door once the light in the tent had gone out and the woods were still and silent. Deepstone charms placed around their camping site would protect the kids, so Ryuko would believe, either that, or she would have her revenge on the old lady who had made the mistake of scamming her. A Deepstone amulet tucked into her coat would keep the worst of the cold from her person, or so she would believe, as she stepped into the woods awash with the spectral roaming.

It was bright enough to see under the moon with the glowing smoke wafting between the trees. Incorporeal forms, some human, most not, passed between and through the undergrowth. Of course, the Merge had disturbed the dead. Whispers in the Crossroads said that the Merge had disturbed death itself. Ryuko had no intention to test any sort of paranormal rumour with her own life. She had hardly believed in ghosts herself, though it was hard to do anything but that as she pressed through the woods. It was just her good luck that this shit let her push a higher price tag. Was it the ghosts that nobody else would put themselves face-to-face with, or was it this heat? Ryuko tugged the shirt from her chest as it began to cling uncomfortably to her arms. The leather trench coat didn’t help, but the thought of leaving it behind didn’t cross her mind.

Once the growth began to grow thicker, Ryuko began to cut. A machete left a crude trail for her to follow back to their camp. The ghosts passing by on invisible trails took more form as she passed deeper into their nightly abode. Some of them began to follow her with hollow eyes as the greenery turned transparent beneath her fingertips. She shivered and squinted in the direction from which the spirits were wandering. Every moonlit night like aurorae they came, supposedly, like migratory birds searching for a warm winter. Of course, this might just be the way things are now, but no matter what, it was decidedly bad for business. It took a few tries under the oppressive humidity to light up a cigarette, and Ryuko nearly cursed it and moved on, but the moment the familiar taste soothed her tongue, a prickly bristle she hadn’t even noticed relieved itself out of her spine. She put the machete back under her belt and continued through the foliage that dissipated to smoke under her living fingers. Ryuko knew she wasn’t getting paid to fuck around in the forest, but for a moment she allowed her mind to be overtaken with the thought of experimentation. She waved her hand through the flaking bark of a rotting tree. It curled into smoke and joined the procession. When she suddenly remembered the charm in her coat, she took it from the inner pocket and held it to the tree. The Deepstone swung from the leather cord, seeming to glow with absence. Around it, the air lost its mist, the tree turned to wood and decay again, and Ryuko’s own hand lost a touch of the green hue she had taken. The hollow eyes watching her followed the slow pendulum swing.

“Do you want to hear a ghost story?” Arin whispered, only once it was sufficiently dark.

“No!” Euphrasia and Sora hissed in unison. Arin rustled under his blanket before finding his pocket torch and putting it to his chin. He flicked the light on as Sora shielded her eyes.

“It was a dark and stormy night-“ 

“Give me that, you weirdo,” demanded Sora. She lunged the little ways into his space and swiped it from his hand. “You’re not funny.”

“It’s not a scary story. It’s a story about the ninja, and they win in the end,” he protested. Euphrasia turned over in her sleeping bag.

“You’re not going to let us go to sleep until we hear your ninja story, are you?” Sora asked. Arin grinned mischievously, too mischievously for the hour of the night. Euphrasia folded her pillow around her head and pressed it against her ears.

“This is the story of the haunted temple of Airjitzu.”

The charm in Ryuko’s pocket seemed to grow heavier as the night wore on and the faces in the mist grew clearer and clearer. None of them, so far, were of people she recognised— though she saw them with such great detail that she felt as if she should have been able to pick out a face or two from the past. She continued to follow their path and reminded herself that she was only making half the progress she thought as the ghosts moved by her and seemed to keep the forest moving when she stood still to study the sky. The night was clear. She could see the faint line like spilt milk across the night where all the galaxies had crashed into each other like the scars of the time the sky split.

Then she felt the wind against her shoulder, through the leather that kept out the worst of wind and rain. She turned, though she felt herself uneasily unstartled. The hand of the ghost touching her was warm. His face was familiar. He moved his mouth, but incorporeal lips couldn’t shape breath. Ronin gestured towards Ryuko’s pocket as his form wavered. He had stepped out of the line of ghosts and his form was being pulled ever on towards the other horizon.

“Father?”

He gestured again towards Ryuko’s pocket, towards the Deepstone charm. Ryuko fished it out with numb fingers in her free hand and held it to his face. The green hue faded, and the ghostly form was freed from the pull of the sombre line.

“May I have a cigarette?” He asked. Ryuko only stared at her old man with the smile lines of a conman deep in his cheek. “May I have a cigarette?”

“Why not?” Ryuko mused to herself. She took out the pack, still nearly full. The moment the Deepstone charm left the proximity of her father, he began to fade again. His eyes were drawn into the middle distance until Ryuko handed him the cigarette and lit it. He took a breath of Ryuko’s bitter-favourite flavour and sighed. The gift in his hand tore the last of his form from the strange procession he had left. Any gap he had left was long-filled.

“I don’t think you’re here to see me,” Ronin said finally.

“No, but you can help me,” Ryuko said. She sat against a tree, half-corporeal. He seemed content to stand, but she bade him sit with her in the dirt. “What is this place?”

Ronin looked around, as if he were seeing the woods for the first time with fresh eyes— in that way he always had, masking the surprise of every twist and turn. Ryuko pursed her lips. This might save her an aimless wander.

“Beats me, kiddo.”

“I’m not a little kid anymore,” Ryuko said.

“I see that.” Ronin looked at her with the same feigned coolness. She had only ever learned to detect the falsehood of his collected gaze. She had never learned how to peel back the layers and see her real father and whatever it was that he felt. Ryuko was sure that he had feelings, somewhere. “How long has it been?”

“Four. Maybe five years.” Ryuko knew what he meant— how long had it been since she killed him under the crimson sky?

“Hm.” That was all he said. Old habits didn’t die with the man.

“Where are you all coming from?” Ryuko asked. She gestured with the faint glow at the end of the cigarette up and down the line of ghosts.

“Beats me.”

“Where are you going?”

“Beats me.”

“You’re a fat lot of help.”

Ronin looked down the path of the procession as the ground began to shake. Heavy steps shook the trees as a spectral dragon moved overhead, the sky eclipsed a moment before it continued down in the same direction as the rest of the restless wanderers.

“We’re looking for something,” Ronin muttered pensively. “Couldn’t tell you what. If you’re following where we’ve already been, you’re in the wrong direction.”

“But what?”

“Beats me, kid,” he said with a sigh. “My brain’s as hazy as my hands.”

They seemed corporeal enough to smoke.

“You look like you’ve grown a good head on your shoulders,” Ronin observed. “Deepstone, good. Didn’t ever take you for someone who would chase down ghosts, but good for you, you prepared.”

“I still don’t believe in ghosts. I’m just getting a pretty price for looking around the forest that supposedly eats people.”

Ronin laughed, a puff of smoke.

“That’s my kid.”

Euphrasia lessened the pressure on the pillow against her ears as Arin concluded his almost incoherent-with-interest tale.

“And that’s how Cole was turned into a ghost after getting stuck in the haunted temple!”

“Horrible,” Sora said. She yawned with a great exaggerated stretch of her arms that brushed the edges of the tent. “Can I go to sleep now?”

“I thought you said this had a happy ending.” Euphrasia frowned. “It sounded like Cole died.”

“Well, he got turned into a ghost. Then he could turn invisible and float!”

“Getting turned into a ghost sounds like the world’s worst euphemism for dying,” Sora said. Arin sighed.

“I wish you were a bigger ninja fan.”

Ronin shivered as the dragons passed. He looked down the line of faces passing by, towards the direction of the tell-tale glow of morning coming.

“Shit,” Ryuko muttered. She had lost track of the time entirely. She stood. She brushed the dirt from her coat, and she was no closer to finding anything that would tell her how these forests had gathered their carnivorous reputation. Ryuko watched the ghosts passing by and felt something like a wind pulling her in their direction. At least she had spent some good time in silence with her old man.

“Huh.” Ronin muttered. He was watching the part of the sky still resolutely cloaked in darkness. The dragons seemed, over the trees, to converge upon something there. At least, they strayed as Ronin had from the lines of the dead. “Never got a good look at them.”

Ryuko racked her brain.

It was as if she had to remember something that had slipped between her fingers.

The Deepstone charm in her pocket felt like a bead of lead seven times its size.

“Shit.” She swore louder now. “Shit!”

“Language,” said the old hypocrite.

“My kids are that way!”

Ronin’s eyes focused with a new clarity.

“You have kids?”

“They’re not my real…” Ryuko fought for the words through rising panic before gesturing crudely between her legs. “Eh?”

“Pfft.”

“I have to fucking go,” Ryuko said, though her feet were heavy. The Deepstone weighed her down; there was no other explanation. She stumbled over incorporeal roots as Ronin picked his way through behind her. He lagged behind as if lost in thought. Ryuko knew that her father was never lost in thought, but she didn’t turn around. If he would fall behind, he’d be left behind. That was the rule they had lived by before. Ryuko had no problem flipping the script on him. She ran on with the sun at her heels as the thundering step of the dead giants grew neither louder nor fainter.

Fall behind, get left behind.

Ryuko cursed the sting of bile that rose in her throat at the thought of saying any of that nonsense to Euphrasia. Ronin wouldn’t risk his neck to turn around if his kid tripped and fell, at the very least, not the man Ryuko remembered.

For whatever stupid reason, Ryuko turned around and reached her hand back for her father. Their hands passed through each other. Which was incorporeal? Neither of them could say. The half-corporeal form Ronin could pull together for the sake of a smoke was breathless, not used to taking breath from the musty air. He swore. She looked between him and the green sunrise and the distance.

“Go,” he urged. He looked her up and down. A night of silence, unsurprisingly, left so many things unsaid. “I’ll haunt you later.”

“Y-yeah.” Ryuko mumbled. All of a sudden, she was sixteen and feigning her father’s confidence. She didn’t know what to say, but her feet wouldn’t move until she said it.

“Don’t gawk. Go do it,” Ronin ordered. All of a sudden, he was eight years old and hesitant to press the picked lock open. Ryuko nodded and forced her feet to move, one after the other over breaking twigs like delicate pins pressed and held in place.

There was a sensation like silent suffocation just as the sun overcame the horizon and Ryuko crashed through the line of charms sold to her by muttering women. She gasped for air, and by whatever protective power they offered, the wind within them filled her lungs with sweet breath. Ryuko collapsed over the hood of her car and hugged the cold metal like a drunk with the gratefulness of a poet spared from death. She searched for the lines of wandering ghosts around their little campsite as the light in the tent was flicked on from the inside. All she could see was the sunrise, in the usual warm colours, and for some reason she wasn’t all too keen to stick her head outside the Deepstone ring to see any cooler hues. Euphrasia unzipped the tent and poked her head out.

“Ryuko?”

“You’re up early,” Ryuko said breathlessly. She sat down on the ground. Her hand drifted to the charm in her own pocket to mindlessly test its weight.

“You know what they say! The early bird gets the worm,” Euphrasia responded with a smile. Arin stepped out of the tent and stretched his arms towards the sky with a yawn too cartoonish to be genuine. Sora followed him out with some small-talk starter about the sunrise or the weather or whatever. Ryuko elected to close her eyes. She covered her eyes with her elbow to give her kids the most privacy as they grinned to each other.

Whatever the other didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

“I was thinking,” Arin said in the same excited tone of voice he usually got when he was telling some far-fetched ninja story, “we should go fishing. Then I can show you how to gut a fish, and we can have it for breakfast.”

Ryuko took her arm off her face just to frown. She found Sora giving Arin the same expression.

“Ew,” Sora said. “Where I’m from, we had flavourless grain flakes that came in brown boxes. That’s what I think a good breakfast is. No fish innards.”

“We’re in the great outdoors! I’ve always wanted to try living off the land,” he protested.

“If you need me, I’ll be in the car eating cold canned beans,” Ryuko announced.

“Can I eat cold canned beans with you?” Sora asked. Arin sighed.

“We could live like the ninja on a mission! You know, they have to live off the land when they go on their long stealth missions where they can’t show up in a big flying boat. One time, they had to eat cold, half-cooked mudfish.”

“Arin, all your ninja stories are disgusting! I want to go home. I want real food.”

These damn kids.

Euphrasia shivered and crawled back into their tent. Her silhouette covered itself with the sleeping bag and put down its head.

Yep, her damn kid.

Chapter Text

Arin lifted the latest in a steady stream of cardboard boxes over the threshold of the door with a stifled grunt. He set it down with a thud as the contents, glassware, by the sound of it, rattled precariously.

“I didn’t even know we had this many things!”

“We wouldn’t, if you didn’t collect things,” Sora replied as he wiped his brow and she snapped her fingers in the search for the right word, “like… like the animal, you know? The little black bird? He collects shiny things.”

“What?”

“I know the bird, but not the name,” said Euphrasia. She picked her way lightly across the corridor piled haphazardly with moving boxes labelled for different rooms. Right now, their apartment didn’t look like much: walls the same shade of alabaster divided the place into different rooms that could have been made to be anything at all. It would have been much more poetic, if not for the heat of an autumn that refused to come and that all of their things had been stuffed into a small collection of suitcases and a mountain of identical cardboard. Sora sighed at the sight and picked another box to disappear upstairs.

“Come on. Move all this into the kitchen so we can get furniture in here,” Ryuko called. She appeared in the doorway, sans her usual coat, and Arin almost snapped to attention like a cartoon soldier.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The boxes scraped across the floor as he settled for pushing them three at a time towards the other room. Euphrasia absentmindedly meandered through the mess to get to a window. Some air wouldn’t liven up the place at all, but it wouldn’t hurt. Outside, Ryuko moved the last of these smaller boxes out of the back of a rented truck that had shaken horribly all throughout the one-way journey over. It had only been a week after Arin and Sora had begun coming over more frequently that Ryuko had announced that they would be moving across the city, to get Euphrasia off her couch, she said, and Euphrasia’s friends off her floor. Arin, of course, had been the first to enquire if there would be space for them in their new place. Ryuko had replied that they had already basically moved in with her, with a gesture around to the overnight bags that never seemed to leave the corner and the fridge suddenly stuffed with leftovers with four names on them instead of the usual two. There had been no mention of the state of Arin and Sora’s sorry little space.

They would have been happier to leave it behind, if not for Arin seeming to pull trinket after trinket out of corners and crevices that Sora hadn’t known existed. Of course, he kept them all. Now, it seemed, he would pay that price: there was a crash from the kitchen and she leapt in her skin as she descended the stairs.

“What happened?” Sora asked.

“It’s all good! Don’t worry,” Arin said, with a tone that worried her, but she had no time to investigate as Ryuko appeared again to look around the narrow entry.

“Furniture,” she said. “Come on.”

Sora groaned and followed her out to the truck. It was the early evening and the sun had begun to set over their unfamiliar horizon before they could close their door and, to passers-by, appear as if they could relax at all. 

“What’s this?”

Sora and Ryuko knelt by the small stone shrine in the garden. The moon had come and went, and Arin had a long day of unpacking ahead of him.

“It’s for offerings to ancestors,” Ryuko said, “or spirits.”

She swiped a finger through a fine layer of dirt resting on its surface as Sora looked up and down their new street. Trees shaded the road, and the sprawl of the city had moved to a different horizon. It crept towards them, still, but they had escaped its grasp another day.

“What kind of things do they want? They’re dead,” Sora said plainly.

“Beats me. I don’t think we can get away with being the only ones who don’t put something out around the holidays.”

Arin, of course, knew exactly what to do— and if only he knew exactly where to find what he needed. Sora poked her head into the room that would, in theory, be theirs, though Arin had his things spread in boxes over both of their hastily-made beds and the entirety of the floor. Last night’s half-eaten takeout was still laid out on Arin’s desk, which Sora quickly scooped up before Ryuko found it and gave them both trouble for attracting bugs.

“Am I going to be able to sleep here tonight, or do I have to sleep with Euphrasia again?” Sora asked. Arin groaned and apologised profusely. Their rooms seemed to match their personalities well. Sora’s side of the room was, in her own most humble opinion, perfectly organised. She had tidied her bed— before Arin had made a mess of it with all his souvenirs and mementos of adventures past— and the few tasteful photographs on her wall had all been hung with ruler-straight precision. Her own clothes were folded neatly in boxes beneath the bed, sorted by tops and bottoms and accessories. Arin’s clothes were strewn about the room, and there were far too many of them— both civilian clothes and costumes for a ninja, though Sora had never understood why he had so many outfits and yet insisted on wearing the same one every day. His walls were covered in battered ninja posters, torn and taped from many moves before, braced for many moves to come. Down the corridor, Euphrasia’s room had been made up swiftly and neatly. It seemed a huge upgrade from Ryuko’s couch, and yet bore similarities amusing to Sora: Euphrasia had a bed, of course, and a couch with new pillows and a basket of soft blankets and plush rugs over the carpeted floor. The windows were draped in a sheer white cloth that did nothing to block out sunlight, but fluttered beautifully in front of the open window.That couch was where Sora had slept the last night, given Arin’s takeover of her side of the room. She didn’t mind it at all— having collections was just foreign and strange to her.

She hadn’t seen Ryuko’s room beyond the occasional peek through a sliver in the door. Their host seemed a rather private individual, and Sora knew better than to go around testing a generous person’s hospitality. She assumed that it was spacious, or rather, she knew that it was spacious. Sora had had a good look at the house’s floor plan while they were all crammed into the flat. She wondered if Ryuko even had enough things of her own to fill the space.

The sickly green glow came first as a shimmering aurora, which none of them would have thought to describe with such a horrible word as sickly at first. As it advanced, it changed in the eyes of its beholders only, but never in its hue. At first, it was beautiful. Sora called Arin into the garden to watch it shine. Euphrasia watched it from above as she leaned out her window on the precipice of falling. Their new neighbours, too, gathered outside and watched the strange collection of children with odd and stolen glances. It was Sora who drew a deep breath and picked her way through overgrown grass to reach out her hand and introduce herself.

Whether or not they could have gotten away with neglecting the shrine in their garden, Arin made it his own project to clean it off and dedicate it, to his parents, of course, wherever they might be. Sora and Euphrasia and Ryuko tried their hardest to let him have his air of peace whenever he returned inside, but between either awkward side glances or him simply knowing his friend too well, they couldn’t fake it: it was strange not to have any hope left for their parents. By the time he had gathered the prerequisite annoyance to tell them all off, the aurorae had nearly arrived on their doorstep. It seemed to vanish during the day, the way the stars are overwhelmed by the sun, but returned to creep ever closer by twilight.

Euphrasia noticed the windless night first. It was a stagnant, sticky sort of humid when she went to close her window, but it wasn’t warm. She shivered amid the unnerving cocktail of sensations and hugged her nightgown to herself. Sora could return to her own room by now, and so Euphrasia felt a little guilty stealing it from her, but she had to see this. After she took a blanket to wrap around her arms, equally for warmth and comfort, she knocked on the door and Sora answered it shortly after a crash preceded the sound of stumbling. She and Arin were both dressed for bed, in a t-shirt and shorts and sweatpants, respectively, though Sora was at the door and he had his head and hand out the window. 

“Yeah. We noticed, too.”

They stole quietly down the stairs even though it was barely past ten. The lights, all turned off for the night, let the eerie green glow intrude.

“Where do you three think you’re sneaking away to?” Ryuko asked. A single light illuminated the kitchen table. She closed her laptop hard enough to make Sora flinch as she pulled her headphones from one ear only to hear them out.

“It’s really bright,” Euphrasia said. “We’re going to look outside.”

Ryuko frowned and tossed her coat around her shoulders as if she had been invited on their little excursion as well.

Outside, the green glow of the sky blurred into that of the grass and the trees and the moons that seemed to vanish. Sora clung to the door with disgust playing across her lips and concern in her eyes and brow. Arin squinted in pensive silence as Euphrasia dipped her toe into the grass, which seemed to shake a misty apparition underfoot. She shuddered as she stepped firmly on that foot and took another step into the fog.

“Oh, fuck me,” Ryuko muttered. Arin swallowed loudly enough to hear in the silence as he ducked back into the apartment with a purpose. Sora continued to cling to the doorway with both arms and a knee bracing herself as if the trees would grow limbs to reach out and snatch her into the shadows. Arin returned with a glass of water, hastily filled, and he poured it from the safety of their home to the weeds growing by the foundation. They hissed and returned to their regular mundane darkness, capable of taking on shadows like all the regular inhabitants of the land of the living.

Ryuko followed Euphrasia to the edge of the garden. She slowly reached her arms into her coat and patted down her pockets on instinct.

“This isn’t normal, is it?” Euphrasia asked. She inched closer to Ryuko as the first shimmering figures came from the dark.

“Go back inside.”

“It’s ghosts,” Arin whispered. He held his cup close to his chest. It was empty, save a few drops still clinging to the sides, and it wouldn’t vanquish a thing.

“How do you know?” Ryuko asked with her usual deadpan. She couldn’t fake disbelief; she knew what she saw.

Arin was young, but the kid wasn’t naïve.

“They’re vulnerable to water.”

“What about wind?” Euphrasia hopefully asked.

“The last ghost the ninja fought could control wind,” Arin muttered. He had to say it, though it meant less than nothing in the face of the advancing masses born out of the mist.

“You three should go back inside,” Ryuko called as Sora took to the path on the highest of tip-toes.

“That sounds good to me!”

“It’s pretty, in a way,” Euphrasia observed, “if scary.”

The Departed passed silently by the road, though their wandering path could not be bothered to curl like smoke around the trees. When it became clear that Arin wasn’t persuaded to turn around, Sora swallowed her fear and braved the garden path to his side. Most passed without any suggestion that their hollow eyes saw a thing. Some turned their eyes, others their heads, but none stopped. They moved like a single flame. Euphrasia and Sora stood in the same silence. The eerie sight meant little to them. Arin, on the other hand, searched the faces of the departed. He retreated to the little shrine and his cup slipped from his hands. Ryuko, too, searched the faces of those who went by marching.

They both knew what they saw.

Some looked their way, and they got a better sense of those faces than those who went straight on their way. At first, it was just a craning neck and a squint into the distance. Then, it was determination and a step from the garden.

“Wait,” cautioned Sora, but it was as if the air refused to carry her words to Arin’s ear as he walked into the path of the passing passed. Arin searched the faces and the gaits, the tattered clothes and the limp hands of the shimmering figures as he swept himself away as if caught in a current. She didn’t think twice before plunging in behind him. Euphrasia followed her as she followed him through the crowd and the fog.

As she did, out from the crowd came a familiar ghost. It beckoned an offering from her and Ryuko obliged her father another smoke from the pack already dwindling in supply.

“Children,” he croaked as the smoke animated his lungs, “huh?”

“Can’t say I didn’t warn them,” Ryuko muttered. Ronin chuckled. He coughed. She crossed her arms while he looked past her as his eyes became physical again.

“You live here?” He asked. She nodded curtly and braced herself for any snide comment he had to make. “Hm. You made it out.”

If she were a little more delusional, she would have convinced herself that she heard a little pride in her father’s voice.

“Don’t worry about them,” Ronin said. He sat by the shrine. Nothing on it was dedicated to his memory. He invited Ryuko to sit with him. She stayed on her feet as she watched the steady stream pass them by, thick enough now to obscure the other side of the road. “If you’ve raised them, they’ll be back.”

“I didn’t,” she said.

“Didn’t raise your own kids?”

“They crashed on my couch and never left,” Ryuko muttered with faux indifference, “hardly makes them my kids.”

Ronin chuckled as if Ryuko had told him a funny joke.

“Why?” Ryuko asked into the silent night.

Her father exhaled long without any sound. 

“I was preparing you for life in Styx.” If Ryuko were only a little more delusional, she would have convinced herself that she heard a little strain there. “And I did.”

“You could have been a little kinder with it,” she snapped. She drew her coat sadly around her waist.

“I did what I had to,” Ronin countered harshly. “It’s a dangerous place for a woman.”

“I knew what I was doing.”

“You had an advantage. You had a better chance. Rule one of living another day: don’t throw that shit away just because you feel like it,” he shot. Ryuko sighed incredulously.

“Took a bullet in your brain and still couldn’t knock that bullshit out of it?”

“I raised you better than that and you know it.”

He knew it. She knew it. Ronin sighed.

“But, hey, you made it out, didn’t you? Doesn’t matter anymore.”

He took another breath of the sweet and tempting smoke. Ryuko bit her tongue and clenched her fists and practiced a little bit of discipline.

“I haven’t regretted it,” Ryuko said. Her voice was small. “I haven’t regretted it a single day.”

“Good,” Ronin said.

“Do you?”

Ronin sat in silence without breathing for a very long time.

“Does it matter?”

“If you could change anything, would you?” Ryuko looked past him, to the middle distance that had become the horizon of the world. She could have been looking back towards her home and the open door, and at this distance, she would never know. It was an absentminded question. Small talk had not been high on her father’s curriculum.

“Shit. Where to start?” Ronin shook his head. “Does it matter?” 

“If you could have been anyone,” 

Ryuko sat on the ground next to her father.

“Would you have still been a man?”

Ronin sat in silence for a very long time.

“Arin!” Sora called. She cupped her hands around her mouth to shout his name into the backs of the figures that seemed to have light for shadow and wind for hair. She shrieked as a hand came from the shadows to touch her shoulder.

“It’s me,” Euphrasia reassured her. Sora pressed one hand to her racing heart.

“Prove it,” she challenged. “Prove you’re the real Euphrasia and not a ghost.”

“What?” Euphrasia asked. She shook Sora by the shoulders. “We need to find our way back.”

“We need to find Arin,” insisted Sora. “Arin!”

“It won’t do us any good to all be lost,” Euphrasia said. She clung to Sora’s shirt as she tore herself from Euphrasia’s grip and continued to wade through the flood. “We need to get back home.”

“When we find Arin, we’ll wait this out together.”

“I want to go back,” Euphrasia insisted. She pulled back on Sora’s shirt and it caught her at the throat. Sora whipped around hard enough for her hair to sting her face. “I have a bad feeling. We need to go back.”

“You go back, then!” Sora said. Her throat was tight. She felt it; she heard it. “I’m not going to give up on Arin.”

“I’m not going to give up on you,” Euphrasia retorted, hard enough to stun Sora for a moment. “What if Arin already turned around?”

“He wouldn't quit. He’s always going on about how ninja never quit,” she bitterly muttered. Euphrasia took her wrist in both hands. 

Four more dark hands emerged from the shadows.

Sora shrieked again and sent a ringing sting through Euphrasia’s ears. Ghosts around them moved their mouths in haunting silence, without even breath to give their utterances sound. Two grasped Sora’s shoulders with cold hands, four hands in total, as their hollow eyes fixed on her. 

“Get off me!” She thrashed and their hands released her. She stumbled through the stream. Euphrasia stepped between her and the spectres as their hands separated from their arms by the wrist and they went limp for a moment. She hesitated as their bodies returned to the smoke from which they had emerged, but like water re-formed their heads with parts of hands and legs with parts of hearts. Sora threw punch after practiced punch, but her fists passed through the fog as she could have foretold. Euphrasia waved her hand and called the winds to her, and as artificial breath passed through the ghosts’ breasts, their voices whispered, both at once: 

“Our Ana; our Ana?”

Sora shouted and threw another punch that sent her stumbling. When she got back her good senses, she grabbed Euphrasia by the wrist and they burst through the mist running. 

“Where are we going?” Euphrasia gasped between heavy breaths. The open air tasted stale and foul.

“Anywhere!” Sora exclaimed.

“Are you sure this is the way?”

They stumbled over grass and uneven curbs.

“I don’t know! Arin!” Arin, where are you?!” 

It seems they crashed into the only solid person in the stream of ghosts hard enough to knock the wind out of two of the three. Though fate had seemingly spared her, Euphrasia put her hands on her knees and fought for breath just as hard as Arin and Sora both.

“Have you seen them?” Arin asked the moment he could string two words together.

“It’s haunted,” Sora declared. “We need to go home.”

“Not until I find them. Not until I find my parents. I need to know,” Arin insisted. He shook his head and his back heaved with one sob that he pushed away. “We need to get home.”

“Yeah,” Euphrasia agreed. “I have a bad feeling about staying here too long.”

“Come on, Arin. If they’re not dead, they won’t be Departed, will they?” Sora said hopefully as she checked behind her back for her own personal ghosts. “Have a little hope.”

“You just want to give up and go home,” Arin snapped. Sora recoiled from the anger in his tone. He shook his head again, nearly hard enough to throw his balance away from his scraped and bare feet. “We need to get going.”

Arin nodded numbly.

Ronin nodded towards the open door as the mist began to clear in the light of the brightest moon. 

“You should get inside,” he said, though he wouldn’t look at his kid. He didn’t see Ryuko raise an eyebrow, but he knew what kind of incredulous glance he would have given himself. “There’s more of us than there were. Get lost, you join the march. Been feeling it.”

“Feeling it?”

“Don’t know. Not all of us are dead. Some just got lost out at night.”

“Shit,” Ryuko scrambled to her feet. “Where did they get to?”

Her question answered itself. 

Arin took a tumble over the same stone on the path that his foot always caught. Sora was the next to realise where she was with a sigh of relief as Arin nearly kissed the ground. Euphrasia turned her face to the sky as she filled her crying lungs.

“I’m here. I’m here. You’re here,” Sora gasped, “and you’re here.”

Euphrasia nodded in lieu of any response of a vocal nature. Arin turned over to watch the departed pass by. His eyes still searched their procession for a familiar face.

“In the house. Now,” Ryuko demanded, though her voice said one thing as she opened her arms for Euphrasia to throw herself into them. Sora’s gaze followed Arin’s until she, too, was numbly waiting for familiar faces or haunting hands. Ryuko scoffed as if it was the biggest bother in the world to herd the three of them back to the door. Even Euphrasia looked behind her. She looked back at the silent ghosts, then the hands that had made them whisper. Only Ryuko didn’t spare a single glance over her shoulder as she pulled the door shut behind her and sternly sent her kids up the stairs and back to bed.

Ronin watched the procession pass. It called him back, but he could wait a little longer. The silver light of the moons was like acid on the illusion of his flesh, half mortal still but certainly dead. He didn’t watch the lights behind him turn off one at a time until he was alone with the last wisps of the spirits that called him to march with them.

There was a peace in the bottom of his stomach like a stone tied to the feet of a man tossed into the harbour. 

“I don’t think I’m going to sleep tonight,” Sora muttered. Euphrasia hesitated in front of Sora’s door, as if the dark corridor would burst into hues of poison and grasping hands before she made it to her room. “You want to stay in here?”

Euphrasia nodded quickly. It was a bad time to be alone. She jumped in her skin as she heard footsteps behind them.

“Ghosts don’t have footsteps,” Ryuko said plainly as Sora caught her breath.

“Can we sleep in your room tonight?” Arin blurted out. He caught himself. “I mean- that’s, ah, what my parents would let me do whenever… this is like a bad dream.”

“You all just got your own beds,” Ryuko replied disapprovingly.

“I’m not hearing ‘no’,” Sora said carefully.

Ryuko rolled her eyes and opened the door.

Chapter Text

They kept their heads down when blue-uniformed officers came knocking at their door. Two police officers, one’s eye drifting off down the row of apartments as the other knocked intently again on the door, stood on the step. The first looked at his watch as the second gave Ryuko time to finish in the bathroom or dress herself or whatever would so occupy her as to prevent her rush to receive them.

Ryuko pulled Arin by the wrist behind the last wall between somebody moving in the house and a window facing outward. She sternly pressed a finger to her lips.

“We should see what they want,” Arin whispered. “It could be important.”

“They’re police officers. How important could it be?” Ryuko challenged. “Nobody is home. They’ll leave.”

Come the next week, Euphrasia read it out loud from the newspaper: no leads on the mysterious aurorae and no leads on those who vanished without a trace. There wasn’t even a count of the missing, she added in a pointed tone, due in part to uncooperative civilians.

“Well, it’s obviously ghosts,” Arin said. He stood in the doorway. The smell of sweet fruits and pastry baking wafted lazily on the air behind him.

“It’s inconclusive,” said Euphrasia. The paper crinkled as she turned it over.

“It’s pretty obviously to do with ghosts,” he insisted. “It’s pretty much exactly what-“

“What the ninja fought that one time?” Sora asked. “Not everything is the ninja. We don’t know enough to say that it’s one thing or the other. It’s bad science.”

“But I have a feeling. I just know it’s right.”

“That is not how science works, at all,” Sora snapped. She bounced her leg impatiently as she sat. Ever since the police officers had passed by their apartment for the next in the row, her guilty glances out the window couldn’t have been missed by a blind man.

They each had their temptations, in the end. Sora couldn’t do it: she grabbed her coat and nearly sprinted from the door. She couldn’t sit in silence with her shame: somebody ought to know what she had seen in the shimmering shadows. When she returned, her shoulders slumped as if a stiff burden had been removed from her back, though she had no reward in hand for her troubles. At least Ryuko was getting paid— or had been. It was from the benevolence of her generous heart that she called the Crossroads by her night, their evening, once the children had been sent to bed. Whatever mischievous ears overheard after that was none of Ryuko’s fault. 

“You’ve survived it twice now.” Nagako’s voice poured through the little laptop speakers. If Ryuko hadn’t been familiar with the boss of the Crossroads, she could have almost mistaken her admiration for genuine. “What’s the secret?”

“Deepstone,” Ryuko said with a shrug. Nagako tapped the golden prosthetics of her fingers to her cheeks, just at the bottom of the screen. “Only the first time, though.”

“Hmm. I could convince people that it’s Deepstone, through and through,” she mused. She grinned with a devious conviction. “You are going to make me a very wealthy woman.”

“Send a cheque my way when you’re feeling generous.”

Arin paced around their room with heavy steps as Sora pressed her pillow over her ears. Every once in a while, he would break from muttering to himself to frantically scribble a note and stick it to the wall over his bed.

“I’m so close to proving it,” he muttered. He placed the end of his pen between his teeth. Sora rolled over without even gracing his mad rambling with the effort to sit up.

“That doesn’t prove anything. That’s just a bunch of things about ghosts,” Sora muttered with as much venom as she could muster half-asleep.

“Yeah, but those are all things that we saw,” Arin insisted. “Look. They were vulnerable to water. They floated, and the mist was green. They had to have been connected to the wind, somehow-“ 

He broke mid-sentence to scribble nothing but the word wind on a card and tape it loudly to the wall.

“-since there was no wind at all,” declared Arin triumphantly. “And Morro was the elemental master of wind, and he was a ghost.”

“That makes absolutely no sense,” Sora sighed. “You can’t even prove any of those facts. These are just things that you think are right and something that you want to believe.”

“I can prove some of it. Morro was the elemental master of wind. That’s a fact.”

“Alright, fine, that one, maybe. But the absence of something isn't proof of the presence of something else. It’s just absence. It's a bad argument.”

“Do you have any ideas, then?” Arin asked. “Because you’re just saying you don’t like mine.”

“No,” replied Sora proudly, “because I don’t make guesses just because I want to think I know something. I’m a scientist, not some conspiracy theorist. Good-night, Arin.”

“Hm.”

“Turn out the light, will you?”

Amidst tense words and tenser silences, there was hardly energy to spare to notice their uninvited guest seeping formlessly from the walls. Of course, they all saw it: there would have been no way that they would have ever survived this long if something so strange could slip their notices. No: Sora ignored it on purpose. Euphrasia saw Sora ignoring it and assumed that it would be best for her to ignore it as well, and Arin saw both Euphrasia and Sora ignoring it and decided that it would be best for the fragile peace between himself and his roommate to also participate in giving the shimmering apparition the silent treatment. Ryuko had her own reasons to spite the ghost. That was her damn father.

Somehow, some way, he could never stay out of her life.

The smell of his ship and their shabby home bases was nearly out of her hair, and yet here he was.

It became almost comical how he hung by the corners of the dining room while their odd four pushed eggs and bacon around their plates while pretending that their group could ever fit the mould of the happy nuclear family minding their own business on some choked little land.

“Boo,” Ronin called, half-heartedly at best. Sora’s fork fell to her plate with a clatter and she put her head in her hands. Euphrasia sat across from her. She folded her hands quietly in her lap. Arin finally allowed himself to look up, and then his neck jerked in a double and a triple-take. Ryuko did not look; she knew what she would see. She moved on instinct and pulled the gun, a silver revolver, from inside of her coat and aimed it at the source of the sound. Ryuko aimed first and looked over her shoulder later.

Ronin held his hands up in mock surrender as Arin stammered something that wasn’t words.

“Easy, easy. I’m a ghost, remember?”

Ryuko ground her teeth and put the gun away. The kids knew better than to comment on this side of her habits. She eyed the table for anything else that might threaten the smug bastard hovering over their breakfast.

“What do you want?” She asked.

“I’m as lost as you are. I just woke up here,” Ronin said. “Honestly, I’m still getting my bearings.”

Ryuko snatched her cup of water and brandished it towards the ghost who flinched as if prodded by a red-hot iron. He retreated into the wall, literally, into the wall. Sora made a face as she cringed, but she did not say a word.

“Easy, kid!”

“Get out.”

“I’ve been trying,” Ronin said with an exasperated sigh. “You think I want to stay here?”

Ryuko scowled.

“You can’t ignore me forever. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

Arin stood quick enough to send his chair crashing to the floor behind him. He slammed his hands against the table hard enough to make the silverware rattle as he exclaimed:

“Ghosts are so real!” 

Sora’s forehead dropped to the table as she groaned for as long as she could.

When Ryuko announced that Euphrasia would be in charge for the weekend and the day after that, Sora was quick to beg her to wait five more minutes before heading out the door. Ryuko rolled her eyes but didn’t take another step towards the car, and Sora’s steps thundered up the stairs as she rushed to grab her toothbrush and a change of clothes. She slumped dramatically in the passenger seat as Ryuko wordlessly backed out of the driveway.

“I don’t understand him,” she sighed. “Arin’s my friend, but I just can’t get through to him. He keeps going on and on about ghosts and saying all these things that don’t make any sense and claiming they’re right.” 

“Ignore him.”

“I can’t! He just keeps talking. And,” she added, “he’s got this whole red-string conspiracy board all over our room. Well, it’s just on his side now, but I know he’s going to take over mine.”

“Out-science him,” Ryuko suggested plainly. “Tell him all that coding shit you’re doing all day. Bore him.”

“I don’t want to.” Sora sank deeper until the seatbelt caught under her chin. “How did you deal with people who insisted on being wrong?”

“Nothing you’d do to a friend,” Ryuko said, with the intention of saying no more about that nearly dripping off the words. Sora rested her head against the window that jostled her with every bump. “Ah, fuck.”

“What’s wrong?” Sora sat up. Ryuko gripped the steering wheel as she scanned the road ahead for any obvious way out. Bright orange traffic cones and police officers dressed in blue and black funnelled the traffic into a narrow corridor.

“Need a different way through.”

“You’ve got nothing to hide,” Sora said, as if that was reassuring at all. Ryuko did not even stop to think about disproving that statement. She tried to cut either way through the narrowing stream, but the cars pressed bumper to bumper refused to let her through. “Come on. Just look normal.”

“I don’t exactly have a drivers’ licence in my name, Sora,” Ryuko hissed.

“Then, I don’t know, say so!” Sora clutched at her shirt as if her stomach had tied itself in knots.

A uniformed police officer gestured for Ryuko to roll down her window. Ryuko held her breath, and at that slightest implication that she wouldn’t, Sora’s face paled as if she were about to roll down her own window and puke.

“I just need to ask you a few questions, ma’am,” the officer said, sounding bored and certainly not helped by the beautiful autumn day around him. He gestured around with a dark pen and a clipboard stuffed nearly to bursting. “Drivers’ license, please.”

Oh, what Ryuko put herself through for the nice quiet life and going straight. 

Euphrasia had a good time with the apartment all to herself in the morning. Arin had told her last night that he was going to leave for a walk early in the morning, before she might be awake, and not to worry. Indeed, she did catch him on his way out the door, but he needed to say nothing more to her than good morning and good-bye, and she knew that he would be back by midday. She opened every window she could and let the cool breeze settle in every corner as she made herself tea and sat in the light beneath a window with a book open on her lap.

And then Arin damn near kicked in the door.

Euphrasia leapt to her feet and forgot every one of the peaceful things there was in the world.

“Euphrasia!” He sounded too excited for something to be wrong. Her racing heart slowed a little as she rushed toward the door.

“Arin? Is something wrong?” She had to ask.

“Euphrasia, Frak. Frak, Euphrasia. My best friend,” Arin said. Euphrasia put her hand up in the formality of a wave. The orange-scaled Serpentine staring back at her did the same with a polite nod.

“Can I make you some tea?” She asked. She looked back and forth between Frak and Arin, Arin and Frak. A million questions raced in her mind, but formalities first.

“No. I don’t really like tea,” Frak said.

“Water, then? I’m sure we have something else, too…” Euphrasia looked to Arin— Frak was his guest! Where were his manners?

“I’m good, really,” he said to her before leaning over to whisper— barely whisper— to Arin: “you need to show me your theories.”

“Oh, yeah.” Arin barely stifled his excitement as he nodded to Euphrasia. “Can’t chat. Gotta run. Lots to talk about.”

Frak followed Arin as they both bound up the stairs, two at a time, to leave Euphrasia looking between where they had stood and the kitchen. There was a bowl of fruit in the middle of their table. Their real food was hidden, as if their kitchen couldn’t be something to eat. It was a strange masquerade of a normal life for them all, but it was a little fun, at least to Euphrasia, to pretend. Beyond pretending, she still felt her feet move her by obligation towards the kitchen. She was in charge of the house today, and so it was her responsibility to be a good host. 

Sora fidgeted with her zipper as she followed Ryuko to the rooftop. A cold wind blew as Ryuko took the dark bag off her shoulder and Sora wondered what kind of work, exactly, her host did for a living. She sat down with a sigh of relief as what emerged from the bag took the shape of a camera and nothing more sinister. Ryuko snapped the camera into a sturdy tripod and adjusted it without paying Sora any mind, as if she worked from a lifetime of ignoring the world around her. A heavy lens bent it towards the ground. Once she seemed pleased with the angle, she reached back into the bag and took out a small tablet and the screen buzzed to life. She sat down, heavy, and settled in to wait. Sora had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t for the perfect picture.

There was a silence to fill, and no way to ease the plunge into the conversation that had been threatening to burst from Sora. 

“Sometimes, I don’t think I’m a girl.”

“And what makes you think I’m some kind of expert?” Ryuko retorted.

“I-“ Sora started. Ryuko’s expression was unreadable from just her eyes. “I don’t think Arin would understand, and Euphrasia seems so… confident, all the time.”

Ryuko raised an eyebrow. There was no other change to her pose.

“I just wanted to ask for… a little advice,” Sora said as her voice reduced to a whisper. Ryuko sighed. Her hands went instinctively to her pockets, but she pulled them back by force.

“I can’t stop you from talking at me.”

It was like the floodgates burst. 

“Back home, where I’m from, it was really different from here. It was…”

“I know you’re from the Imperium,” Ryuko said, no differently from how she might have remarked on the weather or the traffic. “You don’t have to be like that.”

Sora’s stomach tightened.

“How do you know?”

“You’re all the same. Skittish. Can’t lie to cops. Nervous as all hell. Can’t leave a camera covered. I don’t know the first thing about what happens over there but it fucks you people up.”

“I wouldn’t say it like that,” Sora retorted. “We’re just more honest. That’s a virtue, some places.”

“Oh, yeah, go on about how you’re not a girl and how the Imperium didn’t do anything to fuck that up.” 

“It’s not the Imperium’s fault.” Sora didn’t care that she raised her voice until Ryuko calmly brought one finger over her mask. She continued, quieter: “it’s just different. It was simple. I thought I was trapped in there but out here, there’s just so much of everything, all of the time. Arin always seems like he’s either got everything all figured out or he has no idea what’s going on, so I don’t want to talk to him. You seem like you at least know what you’re doing, so what’s the secret?”

The words tumbled out of her like an avalanche.

Ryuko shrugged.

“Who knows?”

“I was hoping you would.” Her voice cracked.

“I know what I’m doing. I can’t tell you jack about shit,” Ryuko said plainly, “and if someone’s telling you what to do, they’re full of shit. You need to know what you want.”

Sora sighed shakily and drew her knees to her chest. It would be a long story. Ryuko watched the street below from her tablet, all grey streets and shades of verdigris.

“Back… where I’m from, there was a right way to be, and that was all I wanted. Out here, there’s just so many options. Everywhere! And I came all this way just to be free, but now that I’m free, I don’t actually want it. Back home, there wasn’t any reason to steal. There wasn’t any reason to lie, or dress like ninjas and sneak around. Arin loves all that stuff, but I don’t want to do it.”

“There’s no shame in going straight,” Ryuko said, though the words were still acidic on her tongue, “doing it right.”

“That’s not what I want, though,” she insisted, though she struggled for the words: “I- I hate the Imperium, but I still want to be… I still want to be an Imperian. Even though it’s not right. It’s not that nobody understands that part, it’s that nobody… gets it.”

“You left friends?”

“Not really,” and she was embarrassed to admit, “I spent most of my time studying. I miss studying. I feel… lost, without it. Not just with… girl stuff, with everything.” 

“Believe it or not,” Ryuko said slowly, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Sora’s heart leapt and fell just as quickly.

“I can’t tell you what to do with your life, but I can tell you that someone telling you what not to do is fucking miserable. Finding it out yourself isn’t a walk in the park either,” Ryuko said. She sighed with irritation and poked at the screen of her tablet.

“Is that just it?” Sora asked earnestly. “It’ll just be miserable for a little while?”

Ryuko shot a glance to gauge her expression and saw a little light sparking behind her eyes.

“Oh, fuck no,” Ryuko said. And Sora would still insist that her Imperium had nothing to do with it. “It shouldn’t be miserable.”

“Did it suck for you?” Sora challenged. They both knew what she was talking about.

“Pfft. Yeah. Being miserable’s different.”

“How so?”

“Oh, here we go,” muttered Ryuko to herself. She stood and adjusted her camera, but she still addressed Sora: “here’s a story. I know a boss in the Crossroads.” 

She nodded along to what she was seeing on the street below. That seemed to be the source of her first comment.

“She doesn’t hire hands from the Imperium without sending one of her girls along with them, because the last time she made that mistake, she ended up paying them overtime to fuse half a junk car onto their convoy instead of changing a flat tyre.”

The shutter snapped and Ryuko squinted through the lens again as she nudged it just a hair to the right.

“They came back burned and scratched as if they had won something by being sweaty in the desert. Suffering isn’t enlightening. It’s just suffering. If you’re on your way and it gets miserable, yeah, I’ve been miserable, but if you think you’re doing something right by looking for the most miserable option, you’re going to be sweaty in the desert with a spare tyre right under your nose.”

“I think I understand.”

“Good. Wasn’t sure about the car story,” Ryuko muttered, “I was never a car guy.”

Sora made herself comfortable with her back to the hard concrete behind and beneath her just as Ryuko started to take down the tripod and put her things away.

“Don’t settle in.”

Euphrasia knocked carefully on the door to Arin and Sora’s room, currently just Arin, and now Frak, too. The excited conversation within didn’t seem to slow, so she knocked again, louder, and more insistent.

“We’re really busy,” Arin said apologetically. Euphrasia peeked behind him to the sprawling wall of scribbled notes and red string stretching from Arin’s side of the room to Sora’s. Frak pushed a pin into the wall over Arin’s bed.

“I just wanted to know whether Frak is going to stay for lunch and dinner,” Euphrasia said, “and… what he’d like to eat.”

Frak looked over at the sound of his name, but didn’t do much more than wave. Euphrasia swallowed hard. She knew she ought to leave them alone, but she had always been a guest and never the host. Now was her chance.

“When do you have to be back?” Arin called over his shoulder.

“Oh, geez, I should get going before dark, but we’re on to something here,” Frak said. “I’ll figure it out later.”

“We’ll figure it out later,” Arin echoed. “Uh, we’ll eat whatever. Just bring it up here.”

Arin closed the door before Euphrasia could insist on taking more of their time for polite company. Urgency rushed them forward! Red string like the cracks splitting the sky fractured his wall into shards. Somewhere, hidden among them, was the answer to everything.

“I just can’t figure out how the drone sightings fit into the whole picture,” Arin muttered. He put his marker to his lip as he thought. 

“Intelligent George is actually making an essay on that,” Frak said. “It’s coming out this weekend. We should watch it.”

“What does he think?” Arin tore another sheet of paper from his notebook and posed himself to write.

“Well, I won’t know his evidence until the video comes out, but basically he made a post saying that they’re spy cameras from,” Frak beckoned Arin to come closer so that he could whisper, “the Imperium.”

“Could it be airplanes?” Arin whispered back.

“Nuh-uh. I’ve been watching flight trackers and they’re never on there. What I think his theory is, is that the Imperium caused all of this, and now they’re spying on the effects. They’ve got their drones, and the ghost march is a cover for that because some of us are getting on to them. They need to find a way to distract us from the fact that the Imperium has spies everywhere.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Of course, that’s just my theory. There’s got to be evidence. I’ve been doing what I can, but I don’t have a car, so I can’t go out and do real research.”

“Ryuko has a car,” Arin volunteered.

“Who?”

“My other housemate. She’s away right now, doing something. I didn’t ask what.” Arin shrugged, but Frak gripped his shoulders.

“Could she be an Imperium spy?” Frak’s eyes were dead serious. A chill fell over the room.

“I- she couldn’t be. She’s… oh, no. She’s always doing something late at night, and she disappears on these work trips and never tells us where she’s going,” he muttered. The dots all clicked together in his head. “I’ve never seen her write anything. Maybe she doesn’t know our writing, because she’s…”

“Dude. You’re living with an Imperium spy,” Frak hissed. He grabbed Arin’s arm and looked around the walls as if they could collapse on them at any minute. “You’ve got to get out of here.”

“I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything to drink,” Euphrasia sighed. She sat at the head of the dining room table, empty save for one other soul. Defeated, her hands stretched out in front of her. It felt impolite to drink with a ghost at the table. “I’ve been a terrible host.”

The least she could do was stir the winds of the room to animate a little breath into the ghost’s body.

“Ah, I’ve been greeted worse,” said the ghost cheerfully. “I’m Ronin, by the way. I don’t think your housemate introduced me.”

“I was trying to think of what I could offer you before I asked for your name,” Euphrasia muttered. She hung her head. “I’m Euphrasia.”

“Charmed,” Ronin said. He breathed a sigh of relief as Euphrasia kept a gentle breeze moving from one end of the apartment to the other. It seemed that his voice would be weak otherwise, and it was the least she could do. Their moment of tranquility was shattered by footsteps thundering down the stairs.

“Euphrasia!” Arin shouted. He shouted her name three more times. “Euphrasia! We’ve figured it out. We have to get out of here.” 

“What’s wrong?” Euphrasia said. She stood; Ronin didn’t. Whether or not it felt solid beneath him, he feigned leaning back in his chair with a relaxed pose.

“Ryuko is an Imperium spy. She’s watching all of us and if we don’t get out of here, we’ve got a target on our backs for figure it out,” Frak said. Euphrasia cocked her head.

“What?”

“It’s too much to explain here,” said Arin with a nervous glance around. He was so changed from the person who had come in cheerfully through the door with a friend. Euphrasia could nearly feel the wind around her panic with the pulses of their racing hearts. “Come on. We have to disappear before she comes back with others.”

“No! At least tell me why!” Euphrasia exclaimed firmly. She pointed harshly at the empty seats— she had had enough of being ignored as the host. “Sit.”

They nervously humoured her. Frak leaned far over the table and Arin mirrored his pose.

“We know that the Imperium caused the Merge. I mean, that’s pretty obvious,” Frak said, as if they all knew it to be true. “Afterwards, they sent spies all across the Merged realms. Ryuko fits the description of one perfectly. Got it? I’ve said it, now we’re all in danger.”

“What?” Euphrasia asked again. “How? And, more importantly, why? And, more importantly, what?”

“She’s always acting secretive on her laptop. Have you ever seen what she does? Has anyone?” Arin challenged.

“Well, she lets Sora use it sometimes.”

Frak and Arin exchanged worried glances.

“And—“ Euphrasia continued over their muttering— “she does her work stuff.”

“And what does she do for work?” Frak challenged. “Huh? Do you know that?”

“Actually,” Euphrasia said, “I do.”

She couldn’t help the hint of annoyance slipping into her voice. It was that, or anger.

“She’s a bounty hunter. She- we work for the Crossroads. We just don’t live there because it’s dangerous.” 

“And she doesn’t write. Have you ever seen her write? Or read? That has to be because she’s not from here. She’s from Imperium,” Arin insisted. “Think about it, Euphrasia!”

“There are more than two places in the entire world, Arin!” Euphrasia shouted. Arin flinched. She didn’t think she had ever raised her voice so high before, but she didn’t back down: “I’m from the Cloud Kingdom. That’s not Ninjago. Do you think I’m an Imperium spy?”

Arin stuttered and floundered for a response.

“She’s from Styx. That’s in Ninjago. And it’s weird that you’re throwing accusations around like that when she’s not even here. Even if we did run away tonight, where would we go? Are you thinking, Arin?”

He caught his breath before he squeaked out:

“I am!”

Euphrasia shot him a look with as hardened an expression as she could muster.

“There’s a bigger picture, here. Whoever, whatever caused the Merge has some reason to keep it hidden,” Arin said defiantly.

“And? What are you going to do about it?”

Euphrasia gestured around, to the kitchen, out the window, to their quiet neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city, far, far away from where the borders of realms met and reality flickered. She steeled herself against the instinct to fill the silence with an apology.

“Are you actually from the Cloud Kingdom?” Frak asked with hushed awe. “That means you’re a Writer of Destiny! That means you know!”

He pushed himself up on his hands and Euphrasia flinched away from him.

“That’s- not necessarily how that works,” she said, but her plea to slow his rambling train of thought fell useless between them. It was a half-truth, so it was as good as a whole truth to them, two halves of a whole madman as they were.

“Phew! I picked the right house to haunt,” said the ghost once the room exhaled. Euphrasia let it breathe as she realised with a start that she had been holding its breath, and therefore words, from the guest. Frak and Arin’s attention snapped to him. Arin was the first to begin to finally recognise the ghost.

“You’re-!”

Ronin grinned.

“Pleasure.”

Euphrasia’s heritage was forgotten as quickly as they had leapt on it. She sat back down, furious and stewing. If Frak or Arin were to hit their heads fainting from the thrill, she vowed to not lift a finger to help. 

Sora held on tight to her seatbelt as the Crossroads loomed in the distance. She could almost smell the air getting thicker. Destiny had drawn her to the city folded four times over itself once before. Was it calling her back now? Ryuko hadn’t said much of anything on the ride over, as seemed to be her style. Sora tried to respect her silence, but it got too heavy sometimes, at least to her.

“Are we going to the Crossroads?” She spoke up as Ryuko took a turn that Sora wouldn’t have.

“Nope. Just outside,” responded Ryuko. Sora nodded, even though she probably wasn’t watching. They pulled over and Ryuko told Sora to wait in the car as she took the camera bag from the back seat and slung it over her shoulder. “I’ll be back.”

Sora watched her pick her way across the sidewalk into a dimly-lit shop. She had nothing to do other than play with her zipper and listen to the muffled sounds of traffic. Ryuko hadn’t even left the radio on for her. She slumped against the passenger door and counted the seconds until she got bored. She did that quite a few times before Ryuko knocked on the window to wake her up. Only then did she realise that she had nodded off, too.

“Look alive,” Ryuko said. “You’re going to get my car robbed.”

“Sorry,” Sora said. She snapped her seatbelt back into place. She checked the back seat for the dark, bulky bag. It didn’t seem to have returned with Ryuko. Sora decided not to ask where it had gone, or what they had been doing with it in the first place. She rested her head against the window as they took to the road again.

“Ryuko?”

“My name. Don’t wear it out.”

“Um, when we get back, could you not tell Arin or Euphrasia that I’m from the Imperium? I don’t know if they’ve figured it out, but I… I wouldn’t want them to respond badly.”

“Sure,” Ryuko said. Sora exhaled and her shoulders gave up their built-up tension and then a little more.

“Thanks.”

She looked out the window, and the world seemed a little brighter.

“Wait.” She shot up with a purpose. Ryuko nearly slammed on the brakes.

“What?” Ryuko asked. Sora pointed out the window at little piece of the market that had spilled out onto the main road. Stalls selling little things and nonsense for a house had gotten her thinking.

“I have an idea. You know your ghost problem?”

When Ryuko knocked, Euphrasia answered the door looking tired.

“Don’t you have a key?” She asked. She sounded as exhausted as she looked.

“I’m feeling lazy,” Ryuko said. She kept her hands hidden in her coat pockets. Sora said good morning to Euphrasia as she let her in. “Where’s that damn ghost?”

Arin and Frak’s attentions were caught by the sudden conversation and they looked around the corner from the living room. Ronin took the more direct route through the apartment to come as he pleased. Sora ducked around him as she headed for the stairs.

“Not any closer,” Ryuko warned, tossing back her coat as if revealing the revolver at her hip. Ronin scoffed at the corny gesture accompanied by a warning before Ryuko drew the tiny toy water gun from her pocket. He recoiled as she pushed it towards him with a sneaky grin, and Sora, watching from the stairs, laughed as well. Arin gasped and threw himself dramatically in the path of the little squirt of water. “My place, my rules. We have to talk.”

Ronin’s shoulders slumped— what he could do when the winds didn’t align to allow him to sigh.

Upstairs, Sora shrieked and the apartment shook with her footsteps as she stormed to the top of the stairs to shout downwards:

“Arin! What the fuck did you do to our room?”