City of Lights

Emi 11250 BP - 2000 BP = 9250 BP

Andy waited for Emi in the corridor outside the Master’s Elevator, the distant smell of lemon floor wax and ocean salt mixing at this hour of the day into something both sterile and nostalgic. It was early afternoon, but the sunlight from the lobby had already lost its warmth, and every surface seemed harder, more reflective. Andy was dressed for travel, in clean, pressed slacks and a fitted shirt, but the weight he carried was less visible: the residue of the Archive, of the terrace and the view, of all the things that could not be fixed.

Emi was only a few minutes late, but she arrived at a full run—her steps oddly graceful, despite the long wool coat that flared out behind her like a cape, draped over four of her arms. She paused a few steps away, caught his eye, and then scanned his whole face with a single, searching look. Her own face was open and unguarded, and her hair fell in a perfect, unstudied bob around her cheeks. Of her arms, only the topmost pair were visible, her hands tucked into the coat’s side pockets; the other four were folded tight under the coat, out of sight but not out of mind.

She said nothing at first. She just came closer, stood in his personal space, and looked up at him as if reading a printout of his thoughts. After a beat, she reached out and set her middle right hand gently on his forearm. The touch was light, but it made him feel suddenly exposed.

“You look like you’re carrying the weight of the world,” Emi said, not as a question.

Andy tried for a smile. “Is it that obvious?”

She made a small face. “To me, yes.” Her voice was low, almost a whisper, and she kept her eyes on him, as if daring him to look away.

He was about to ask if she was ready, to **** a change of subject, but Emi just shifted her grip, slid her fingers down until they covered the pulse at his wrist, and held on. “If you’re not okay,” she said, “I’d rather talk about that than do the date.”

“I’m fine,” he said, and knew it was the most unoriginal thing anyone had ever said in the history of humanity.

Emi exhaled, slow and steady. “Do you want to tell me, or do you want me to guess?”

“It’s your date,” Andy said. “I don’t want to be—”

“Don’t,” Emi said, and her face hardened, just a little. “Don’t make yourself small, just for me. I’m not a break from your real life. If something’s wrong, you tell me.”

Andy opened his mouth. Nothing came out at first. He wasn't quite used to Emi being so forceful. Emi waited, patient, the way only people who had spent years watching from the edges of other people's moments could. He looked at her, and then nodded, slow and deliberate.

He started at the edge. “It’s not you. It’s… something big. I don’t even know where to begin.”

She made a gesture—go on, I can take it—and Andy found himself telling her everything, from the morning onward: the debt owed for Laura’s resurrection, the goddess Ereshkigal waiting somewhere outside the walls of the world, the way Arabella had stood on the terrace and pointed out eleven dead islands—each a tomb for one of her siblings, the end waiting just offshore.

He told her about Claire’s research, and the way every possibility seemed to collapse into a single, inevitable line: the payment would be collected, and there was nothing he could do to protect Laura except give her up again, or watch her be taken, or watch someone else die in her stead.

He told Emi how he’d felt on the terrace, standing with Claire and Arabella, feeling the axis of the world tilt. How he knew, deep down, that when this season ended, this island would be the last dark spot on the horizon, and everyone still alive would be left inside, waiting for the silence to catch them.

Halfway through, it hit him: a pressure behind the sternum, sudden and sourceless, like a hand pressing flat against the inside of his chest. Not his. He knew the shape of his own grief well enough by now to recognize when something else was moving through it. Laura. Somewhere in the hotel, she’d felt something—or remembered something—and it was bleeding through whatever invisible thread connected them, quiet and insistent, a second heartbeat slightly out of sync with his own. It was strong. Was she thinking about the debt, too? But no, this felt more like grief. Strong, insistent. Part of him wanted to find her, find out what had happened, but he **** himself not to. But he could sense she was on the Hotel grounds, somewhere outside the main building. He didn't feel fear, or anger. He kept talking. He kept his eyes on Emi’s face and his voice level and his hands still, and he let the feeling move through him without chasing it.

When he was finished, Emi didn’t let go of his wrist. She just let the quiet settle for a bit, then nodded, once, like she’d just finished a set of mental math and confirmed the result. “Thank you,” she said. “For telling me.”

Andy tried to smile, but it didn’t really reach his face. “Sorry. I know you had something planned for today. I didn’t mean to—”

“Stop,” Emi said, and her voice was firmer now. “You’re not interrupting. This is your life. I’m going to be your wife. I want to know about it.” She looked at him, and for the first time, Andy could see the determination behind the softness: the Emi that had once run a full sprint through the school cafeteria to get him the last packet of chocolate milk, who had spent years quietly watching from the wings but never left.

She took a breath, then said, “Can I ask something, before we go?”

“Of course,” Andy said.

“Do you still want to spend the day with me, knowing all that? Or do you want to be alone?”

The question landed like a stone in a pond: simple, direct, and rippling out to the farthest banks of everything they’d ever been to each other.

Andy didn’t hesitate. “I want to be with you,” he said. “If I’m allowed to be selfish, I want to spend every minute with you. This isn’t a distraction, Emi. You’re not a break from the rest of it. You’re—” He fumbled, suddenly short of words.

She didn’t make him finish. She just squeezed his wrist, then nodded, eyes brighter. “Thank you,” she said, and this time her smile was genuine, small and off-center but completely real.

There was a pause, just long enough for the tension to finish leaving both of them. She gestured to the elevator. “Ready?” she said, in a voice so soft it almost didn’t carry.

He nodded, and she pressed the call button. As the elevator doors slid open, Emi reached out with one of her left hands and laced her fingers through his. The grip was light, almost ceremonial, and it held.

They stepped inside together. The interior was spare, with mirrored panels on three sides and the faintest whiff of some floral cleaning product. Emi let go only long enough to press the “DATE” button, then reclaimed his hand, holding it with an easy familiarity that made the rest of her arms seem secondary—an afterthought, a bonus, a grace note.

The elevator hummed and moved, but Andy was only dimly aware of it. He studied the way Emi’s coat fell, how the extra arms didn’t break the silhouette but rather filled it out, as if she’d always been meant to move through the world like this.

After a few seconds, Emi turned and looked up at him. Her expression was unreadable for a moment, then resolved into a look of pure mischief. “You know, this is the first time I’ve had more than two arms in Paris,” she said. “My parents come here during the winter, they stay in my grand-père's old place. I always thought if I came here, I’d be by myself, but normal. But now I’m not sure I ever want to be normal again.”

“Who decides what normal is, anyway?” Andy said, the old, shared banter coming back, brittle but functional. Then he smiled. “Paris, huh? Haven’t been, so far.”

Emi grinned, then let the moment fade. She was quiet for a bit, her eyes fixed on the doors. When they opened, instead of the standard HH corridor, Andy was confronted by a narrow, damp-lit stone passage, the air cool and smelling of old rain. He blinked, and the context clicked in: they were in Paris, in winter, and he could hear the faint traffic rumble and the choked-off whine of a distant siren. A thousand small differences—the irregular pattern of the paving, the faint yeasty smell of baguettes from a nearby bakery, the pale January daylight filtering down from the clouds overhead—told him this was no simulation. He was actually here.

Emi stepped out first, holding his hand, and then turned to face him. She looked up into his eyes, searching for hesitation, and when she found none she gave a small, contented sigh.

“Ready?” she asked, just above a whisper.

Andy nodded. “Absolutely.”

Emi let go of his hand with her middle right, but replaced it with her upper left, closing the coat around herself. She laughed, a little embarrassed, then untangled herself and led the way, glancing over her shoulder to make sure he was still with her.

The January sun in Paris was a wan, persistent thing, making the world look like it was being viewed through a lens smeared with cold butter. Emi led Andy across the quiet streets of the 3rd, her coat drawn tight, her stride as precise and unhesitating as if she’d mapped every block in her sleep. Andy followed, hands jammed in his own pockets, eyes always darting between her and the city, catching the slant of a café awning or the way a lone sparrow warbled from a bare branch overhead.

There was something off about Emi. Not wrong, just—different. For most of the walk, she kept her uppermost arms visible, hands crossed against her ribs in a way that looked defensive but wasn’t. The other four arms were hidden under the coat, invisible unless you watched her silhouette on the frosted shop windows. When they passed a boulangerie, the smell of baking yeast and bitter espresso made Andy’s stomach growl, but Emi didn’t even flinch. She just kept her eyes on the street ahead, mouth set in a small, determined line.

It took three blocks before she broke the silence. “Do you know what my father’s name means?” she asked, glancing back over her shoulder. “Connard?”

Andy grinned, remembering the long discussions of childhood. “It means asshole.”

Emi’s mouth quirked. “It does now, but it wasn’t always a slur. The family is old, very old. My grand-père, Louis, used to say we were descended from the Dukes of Berry, but that’s probably just one of those lies people tell themselves to feel fancy.” She picked up the pace as they rounded a corner, almost forcing Andy to jog to catch up. “The only thing I knew for sure, before meeting Grandma, was the statues.”

Andy waited for her to explain, but she didn’t, not right away. Instead, she counted the house numbers under her breath—huit, dix, douze—and stopped outside a narrow doorway with a battered metal call box beside it. She pressed her face close to the glass and peered up the spiral stairwell, as if she could see all the way to the top floor from the street.

“Just before the song Laura sang, last round, I found out that Anna left statuettes to the child she had with my ancestor Jauffre. My family kept them for centuries.”

Andy thought about this, turning it over. “Did Anna tell you that, or—?”

“Both.” Emi’s eyes sparkled with a dry, private humor. “Turns out goddesses don’t always tell the full story, but Claire’s good at finding the pieces.”

A gust of wind made the door rattle, and Emi stepped back, letting her hand linger on the call box. “When Grandpa died, my mother took one of the figures. I want to see if she still has it.”

Andy leaned in slightly, his curiosity piqued by the sudden intensity in Emi’s posture. “Is that why we’re here? You want to get it back?”

“Not get it back,” Emi said. “Just… see it. Hold it, maybe. I don’t know.” She shrugged, the motion rippling through her coat and making it twitch in a way that would have drawn stares if anyone on the street had been looking. “It’s the last one left. My father buried the rest with Grandpa. I think this might be my only chance to touch something that was meant for me, from that far away.”

There was something in her voice Andy hadn't heard since they were kids: the careful way she'd had of asking for things she wasn't sure she was allowed to want.

“Why today?” Andy asked quietly.

Emi thought about it, then answered in her own time: “Because I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about what changes, and what stays. And I want to remember both.” She looked over at him, her smile sudden but genuine. “And I want you to remember with me.”

She started up the stairs, the heels of her boots making sharp, echoing contact with the stone. Andy followed. The stairwell was tight, and more than once he had to pause to let an older resident descend past them, moving slowly and eyeing Emi’s coat with a faint suspicion. The walls were palimpsests of decades-old graffiti, hearts and names and angry slogans overlaid and overwritten until even the original paint was hard to see. Andy’s gloved hand brushed the carved banister, and he tried to picture Emi’s family coming and going here, how many times her parents had walked these steps, how many memories were pressed into the walls.

By the time they reached the third floor, Emi paused at the landing, and Andy saw her close her eyes for a second, centering herself.

She unbuttoned her coat, shrugging out of it with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d gotten used to doing everything with six arms. When she shook out her sleeves, all six hands emerged together, flexing and stretching in the cold, and Andy felt a strange, unnameable pride course through him.

She looked at Andy, waiting for the flinch, the discomfort, the trace of awkwardness that had marked the first week after her transformation. But there was just Andy, watching her with a calm curiosity and something that looked a little like admiration.

“You want me to knock?” Andy asked.

Emi considered, then shook her head, her lips quirking upward. “Nope. I want to do it myself.” She flexed her six hands, holding them out in front of her, and gave a tiny, self-deprecating laugh. “Feels right.”

Emi took a long breath, then knocked, once, twice, then a third time, each with three right hands aligned like a drummer rolling on a snare.

Andy watched her hands, and for a second he saw all of them trembling, each a little different, some more confident, some more uncertain, as if every part of her was fighting the urge to run back down the stairs and disappear into the Paris street.

The pause after her knock stretched, and then, on the other side, he heard the unmistakable sounds of a lock being worked, a chain sliding, and a slow, careful unlatching that could only be Emi’s mother, always cautious even in her own home.

The door opened with a practiced, gentle motion, and Emi’s mother filled the frame, smaller than Andy remembered, her gray-streaked hair drawn back and her eyes magnified by the glasses she wore only at home. For half a second she registered only Emi’s face, and the mouth softened, ready to call her daughter’s name in a voice that could still hush a market or an argument at a dozen paces. Then she saw the six arms, and her expression shattered—she staggered back, hand flying to her mouth, the other gripping the door so hard it rattled in the frame.

Behind her, Emi’s father appeared—taller, still carrying the old weight in his shoulders. He wore a faded cardigan and the same corduroys he’d worn every winter since Emi was ten. His eyes went wide, darting from the arms to Emi’s face, then back, as if waiting for the illusion to collapse. He said nothing. The silence, so characteristic in him, seemed to charge the entire corridor.

It was then that Andy realized Emi had not bought a Reality Adjustment.

Emi spoke first, all six hands splaying out as if she could shield her parents from the sight of her own body. “Je vais bien, maman. Papa. I know this looks… impossible, but it’s me, I promise. I can explain—” Her voice caught, and she blinked, hard. “I missed you both so much.”

Her mother’s hand stayed at her mouth, but the other reached out, trembling, to touch Emi’s middle right arm—only to hesitate, hovering a centimeter above the wrist. Emi made the decision for her, taking her mother’s hand in her own, as if to say: see, I am real. The moment she did, her mother’s reserve broke. She clutched at Emi, arms rising to find purchase anywhere she could, finally latching onto Emi’s upper shoulders and pulling her in, sobbing openly in a way Emi hadn’t heard since her own childhood.

“Oh—oh my God—” her mother gasped, squeezing all she could hold, and then, when words failed entirely, she pressed her face into Emi’s shoulder and said something low and broken in Korean that Andy couldn’t follow.

Emi’s mother clutched at her daughter for a long time, refusing to believe the embrace would hold; she let herself be rocked in the thicket of six arms for as long as Emi offered it, maybe even longer. Andy watched from the threshold, hands in his pockets, and said nothing. He saw how carefully Emi held her mother, the way every arm had a different job.

The apartment was small, as Paris apartments always seemed to be, and the simple hallway was nearly impassable with four adults plus four extra arms. Emi’s father, after his initial shock, stepped neatly aside to let the two women compose themselves, then reached past the embrace and flicked on the kitchen light, the way a man might signal: even miracles are best discussed in a room with coffee.

Her mother was the first to speak, finally pulling back to look at Emi with equal parts awe and terror. She ran her hands up and down one of Emi’s upper arms, as if not trusting the solidity of it, and then, as if unable to help herself, started to count the arms aloud.

“Hana, dul…set…ne, daseot, yeoseot—six?” Her voice strained on the last word, as if the number itself were a transgression.

Emi nodded, the gesture oddly shy for someone who now occupied so much more space. “Six, Mama. They’re real. They’re mine.”

Her mother shook her head, a handful of graying hair falling loose from the knot behind her ears. She pressed Emi’s upper right hand between both of hers, then locked eyes with her daughter and, in the same breath, seemed to both demand and beg: “Imi-ya… i ge mwo ya? Where did these come from?”

Looking at her mother’s face, Emi’s composure trembled, but she held. She glanced to Andy, and Andy tried to compress a week’s worth of support into a single, silent nod. Emi drew a long breath, then gave her parents the simplified version, one she could live inside for the next ten minutes.

“I’m on a show,” Emi said, and Andy heard how the English word landed in her mother’s kitchen. “A reality show. Nothing like what’s on TV here, or anywhere. It’s… real, Mama. It’s more real than anything I’ve ever done. I'll explain. The arms—they’re permanent.”

She waited, expecting a question, maybe a challenge, but her mother just stared at her, silent. The silence lasted so long that Andy began to think about the awkwardness of standing in someone else’s foyer, coat still on, unsure whether to sit or hover or pretend to be invisible.

It was Emi’s father who broke the stalemate. He moved to the narrow galley kitchen, set the kettle on to boil, and pulled three mugs from the shelf. In the light of the kitchen, he looked older than Andy remembered, the lines on his face carved deeper, his every motion measured, almost mathematical.

He turned, leaned against the counter, and regarded Emi with the same grave patience he’d once used on a twelve-year-old Andy who’d toppled a vase in the next room. “You chose this?” he said, eyes flickering across the arms, the shoulders, the face.

Emi hesitated, then met his gaze. “Non,” she said. “But I’m glad it happened. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t go back.”

Her father regarded her for a long moment, the kettle hissing softly behind him, and Andy realized this was less a dialogue than a transaction of truths—each party offering what was strictly necessary, no more, no less.

Her mother, meanwhile, kept her focus on the hands, the arms, the newness of her daughter. “Do they hurt?” she asked, voice thin and high and nothing like the one Andy remembered from his own childhood.

Emi smiled, a real one this time. “No, Mama. They’re not a burden. They feel—I feel—better than I ever have. It’s just… it’s a lot to explain. But it’s good, I promise.” She raised all six hands, let them fan out in a slow, deliberate wave, and Andy saw for the first time how proud she looked, how the arms had become not only hers, but her.

The mother stared, the thumb of her right hand unconsciously rubbing a knuckle on Emi’s new wrist, as if searching for the seam between what was possible and what was not. “And this is why you haven’t visited?” she said. ”We missed you over the holidays.”

Emi didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was gentle, but fierce: “It’s complicated, Mama. But I am safe now. I’m happy.” She looked at Andy, then back at her parents. “I missed you every day.”

For a moment, Andy thought the old woman was about to start crying again. Instead, she took a step back, studied her daughter from head to toe, and then up and down again, as if conducting an inventory. She reached up, cupped Emi’s cheek, and said, “You are my daughter. All of you.” Her eyes still strayed to the arms, and Andy knew she hadn’t stopped worrying, simply hidden it, for her daughter’s sake.

Andy saw Emi’s face relax, a tension he hadn’t known was there dissolving in the kitchen light.

“Would you like tea?” the father asked, not waiting for an answer before putting a bag in each mug and filling them, one after the other, the gesture both hospitable and a way to keep his hands occupied.

Andy hovered awkwardly in the threshold, but Emi’s mother reached past her daughter and drew him in by his coat sleeve, only then seeming to see him as a person distinct from the family drama. “Andrew Cooper,” she said, and this time the name was not an accusation but a welcome. “It’s good to see you. Has it been so long?”

Andy shrugged. “I was thirteen. The last time I saw you was at the funeral.” He trailed off, but the thought needed no completion.

Emi’s mother’s face softened. “You’ve grown up very tall,” she said, and Andy blushed, because it was the sort of comment that belonged to a different era, a different family entirely.

They found their places at the tiny kitchen table, Emi’s six arms making her twice as wide as before but somehow not crowding anyone. Her father poured tea for all four, then sat down, his hands folded, waiting.

Emi’s mother took Emi’s upper right hand and wrapped both of her own around it, refusing to let it go, as if anchoring herself in this new reality.

For a while, no one spoke. The only sound was the quiet tapping of spoon against mug, and the faint whirr of the fridge cycling on and off.

When her mother finally did speak, she asked, “Is it safe? This thing that was done to you?”

Emi glanced at Andy, then back to her parents. “It’s… as safe as it can be. It was a… a show, of a sort. But I promise, I’m not in danger. Everything that’s happened to me, I chose. Or, if I didn’t choose, I accepted.”

Her father, who had not spoken since the tea, finally looked up, eyes bright behind the small rimless glasses. “And are you happy?” There was no accusation, just a pure, almost mathematical curiosity.

Emi met his gaze. “Yes. I’m happy.” She grinned, the kind of smile that couldn’t be faked, and Andy felt something in him unclench for the first time since the elevator ride.

Her mother squeezed Emi’s hand harder, then looked at Andy. “And you,” she said, her tone shifting again, “do you like the new Imi?”

Andy blinked, caught off guard. “I always liked her,” he said, and saw Emi’s face go instantly pink. “She could have ten arms, and she’d still be Emi.” It was true, and he meant it, and for a split second he saw the two parents process that statement each in their own way—the mother’s face open and hopeful, the father’s reserved, clinical, but not unkind.

The conversation drifted into less fraught territory: how long they’d been in Paris, what Andy was doing these days, what Emi remembered from her childhood in the city. Her mother asked about the American food they couldn’t get overseas, and Emi obligingly recited a list, half-joking and half-nostalgic, of Chili’s chips, Kraft mac and cheese, and the exact flavor of a 7-Eleven blueberry Slurpee. Her father listened, made a note of each, and Andy could almost see the gears turning—preparing for the next time his daughter visited, once they returned home.

The questions about the arms didn’t stop, not after the miracle of seeing daughter alive and whole, not with the kettle still steaming, not even after the second round of tea had been poured and the three of them—four, with Andy hovering—had retreated to the safety of the kitchen, the table already crowded by the geometry of Emi’s new reach.

Her mother approached the subject from every angle: Did the other people on the reality show have arms like this? How did she sleep at night with so much of herself to keep track of? Could she really move them all separately, or did they sometimes tangle like cords behind a television set? Did the French bureaucrats try to make her register as a public monument or a biohazard or something in between? Was there a support group? Did it hurt, did it itch, did it make her more hungry than before? Did Andy—her mother’s voice dropped at this, eyes flicking to him—find it scary?

Emi fielded every question with the same gentle, practiced patience she’d used as a child when correcting her parents’ occasionally mangled English idioms, never defensive, never flustered, just letting the curiosity run its course, like a wave that needed to break before the water could be calm again. She demonstrated how she could use the lower hands to pick up a spoon and stir her tea while the upper hands gestured, or how she could rub her own shoulders when she was tired of hunching over a drawing board.

She fielded a sudden pop quiz—could she sign her name with three hands at once?—by borrowing three pens and an old envelope from the mail basket on the fridge, and in thirty seconds had signed “Emi Kim” in triplicate, each hand in a different style. Her mother watched, equal parts fascinated and unsettled, as if trying to decide whether this was a magic trick or a genetic accident or some new category of the sacred.

Andy didn’t say much, at first, content to watch the performance and the way Emi’s face changed in the presence of her parents. He recognized the expression: not quite playacting, not quite the raw self he saw in the hotel, but a careful, adaptive version of herself, as if she were translating each answer from the truth into something her family could metabolize. But it was not the sanitized version he remembered seeing in the Garden of Glass, the Emi that performed wellness so her parents wouldn’t worry, wouldn’t recognize how badly she was hurting. This Emi was open, and honest, and Andy found he had to look away for a second.

At one point, Emi’s mother grew so flustered by the sight of six hands at rest—filling their laps, cradling mugs, or simply folded atop one another—that she blurted, “But you are still my little Imi, ye? They didn’t swap your heart for someone else’s?” Her voice was only half joking. Emi grinned, and without thinking, reached out with all six hands and enfolded her mother in a careful embrace. It was gentle, almost ceremonial. The old woman gasped, then gave a shuddering laugh and pressed her face into her daughter’s collarbone, just as she’d done at the threshold. Andy saw how Emi’s arms trembled with the effort of holding her mother so delicately, and realized that this was the real feat: not the growing of extra limbs, but the precision with which she wielded them.

When Emi finally let go, her mother’s hair was mussed, and she wiped her eyes, laughing and crying at the same time. “You will have to teach me how to hug you. I have only two arms!” she said, and Emi promised to write a manual.

They sat for a while in the glow of that moment, the kettle refilled, the air steamy with jasmine and old stories. Emi’s father said little, but the way he watched his daughter—his quick, analytic glances, the way he catalogued every gesture—reminded Andy of an engineer reverse-engineering some impossible device. Eventually, the father set down his mug, pushed his glasses higher on his nose, and in the measured, unhurried English Andy remembered from childhood, asked, “What is Andrew to you now, Emi?”

The question landed with the weight of a gavel. Even Emi’s mother stopped fussing and looked to her daughter, her face suddenly careful, as if this were a test whose answer mattered more than all the others.

Emi answered in French, her voice soft but steady: “Il est celui qui a toujours compris. He is the one who always understood me, even when I did not understand myself.” She glanced at Andy, and something like static moved between them. “The show brought us back together. He has never been afraid of the arms, or what I am. He’s my anchor.” She hesitated, then met her father’s gaze. “We’re going to marry.”

The mother made a small, shocked noise—half gasp, half laugh—and clapped her hand over her mouth, then looked at Andy with an intensity that nearly knocked him back in his chair. “You love her?” she said, the words plain and unadorned. Andy felt the question pass through his skin and settle somewhere deep inside. He let the silence stretch, then said, “I do.” It wasn't borrowed from anything; it just felt true.

The father looked at Andy for a long moment, as if measuring the exact volume of his existence, then nodded, the gesture a little slower than before, but more certain. The mother reached across the table, grabbed one of Emi’s hands—middle left, Andy noted, the one that sometimes fidgeted when she was nervous—and squeezed it so tightly the knuckles paled.

The conversation, released from its final constraint, tumbled forward. Emi’s mother wanted every detail of the courtship, which Andy and Emi tried to provide without (they hoped) mortifying each other. There was a brief, awkward aside about whether this “marriage” was legal, or American, or something else entirely, and Emi said, “We haven’t figured that out yet.” Her mother laughed, the relief in her voice nearly dizzying, and promised to make a cake for whichever wedding came first, “even if you elope.” Her father accepted the news with the same stoic calm he’d brought to every shock in his life, but Andy saw that his eyes lingered on Emi’s face a little longer, as if searching for a trace of the little girl she had once been.

This led, by instinct or by inertia, to stories of Emi’s vacations in Paris, when she was little: the way Emi had chased pigeons in the Place des Vosges as a toddler, only to cry when she caught one and it squirmed in her hands; the time she’d gotten lost in the underground catacombs as a sullen teen and emerged six hours later caked in mud and grinning; her obsession with Looney Tunes and how she’d convinced all the French cousins that Wile E. Coyote was “le plus grand philosophe de notre temps,” the greatest philosopher of our times. Andy listened, sometimes interjecting with a counter-memory from Warrenville, and for a while the four of them circled through the stories that stitched together every family, the new strangeness of Emi’s arms fading into the familiar strangeness of everything else.

But the tension never disappeared, not entirely. At the edges of the conversation, Andy sensed the constant recalibration: the parents searching for the old Emi in the new, Emi searching for the right balance between disclosure and preservation, and Andy himself wondering what place he could ever have in this museum of old injuries and reconciliations. There was a moment, after her mother had gone to the kitchen to fetch cookies and her father had stepped onto the tiny balcony to smoke, that the room fell almost silent. Emi sat looking at her hands—all of them—her eyes distant and slightly pained.

Andy wanted to reach for her, but instead folded his own hands, squeezing them together until the urge passed. He thought of the way the show had **** every girl to confront their pasts, to curate them for the camera, to turn each memory into a story with a beginning and an end. He wondered if Emi would ever be able to share the whole of her story with her family, or if she would always have to translate it, to remove the sharpest edges.

Emi’s mother returned, bearing a plate piled with palmiers and a tin of Dutch butter cookies as if snack volume could stand in for emotional ballast. She sat, poured tea, then fixed Emi with a sudden, piercing look.

“Imi-ya, do you still remember your grand-père’s stories?” she asked, the question so abrupt that Emi only blinked. “The ones he told you at bedtime, about the little gods and the guide, and the river and the bridge?”

Emi gave a half-smile, both fond and a little embarrassed. “I remember.” She hesitated, then added, “I think about them more now than I ever did before.”

Her mother nodded, satisfied, and looked at Andy—“She could recite them all, even before she could read. My father in law, he always said Imi would remember things other people could not.” Andy smiled, and saw that Emi looked away, her cheeks coloring.

Her mother pressed on. “Did you know he kept his little statues even after the church told him it was bad luck? Every night, he would dust them and say a prayer. We buried them with him.”

When the room was at peace, Emi said, “Maman—do you still have any of grand-père’s statues?”

Her mother’s face lit with recognition. “Yes, of course.” She smiled faintly. “I didn’t feel it was right, for all of them to follow him.”

Emi nodded, a quiet intensity behind the gesture. “I want to see one, if you still have it. I’ve been learning about them, about where they came from.” She hesitated, then added, “I think they’re connected to something real in our family’s history. I want to understand it. I want to remember.”

Her mother was quiet, then stood and left the room. Emi’s father watched her go, then looked at Emi with a new kind of appraisal, as if searching for the young woman he’d last seen a few months earlier, and finding a stranger he wanted to know.

After a few moments, her mother returned, carrying a small, cloth-wrapped bundle. She held it out with both hands, not saying a word. Emi took it and, with great care, unwrapped the cloth. Inside was a thumb-sized figure, rough and old, the features smoothed by handling. Emi turned it over in all six hands, tracing the lines of the face, the curve of the arms (there were three pairs), the angle of the legs.

She held it for a long time, then pressed it to her chest. Her mother, still standing, whispered: “It looks like you, doesn’t it, Imi-ya?”

Emi nodded, smiling. “Ye, Mama. I think it’s me.”

Her mother touched the statue, then Emi’s cheek, and said something so quiet that Andy, three feet away, couldn’t hear it. Emi re-wrapped the figure, set it carefully in her bag, and reached out to hug her mother again, then her father, who stood up to meet her embrace.

They stayed less than two hours. Emi promised a longer explanation, someday, but for now she just wanted to walk in the city. Her mother packed a sandwich and two sodas in a paper bag for her, as she had every school morning of Emi’s childhood. Her father opened the door for them, then stood in the hall, arms crossed, and watched as they disappeared down the stairs.

The light outside was more blue than gold now, and the wind cut sharper, but Emi moved down the street with a sense of lightness Andy hadn’t seen in months. She had closed the coat over her lower four arms. She glanced back at the building, then up at Andy. “Thank you,” she said, and this time it was in English, and she meant it for everything.

Andy squeezed her hand, feeling the warmth of it pulse up his arm and through his chest. “Where to next?” he asked.

She grinned. “Anywhere,” she said. “Everywhere.”

They found the café two streets over, the kind of place that survived not by pulling in tourists but by being quietly indispensable to the people who actually lived above and around it. Its windows were clouded with condensation, and the bell above the door gave a wet, apologetic clink when Emi led Andy inside. She went straight to the back, where the tables shrank to card-table size and the air was thick with the aroma of hot milk and bread. The only other customers were two elderly men playing chess and ignoring everyone, and a couple arguing in very quiet Italian at the bar.

They picked the farthest booth, its surface slick from a recent wipe-down. Emi slipped in first, choosing the side against the wall, and Andy sat across from her. It was warm, blessedly warm, and she shrugged out of her coat, folding it over her lap. The arms came with her, all six of them now visible, and she let them rest openly on the table, fingers tented, fidgeting with the sugar packets, aligning the cutlery, then folding and unfolding a napkin until it became a tiny paper swan.

Andy smiled. “Origami,” he said. “You never stop.”

Emi blushed, but left the swan standing between them. “You want coffee?” she asked.

“Sure. And maybe a croissant if you’re not still scared of carbs.”

She rolled her eyes, then flagged the waitress with a confident, two-handed wave—two of the other four already reaching to stack the sugar packets. Andy watched the waitress approach, order pad out, and then stop. Her eyes moved across Emi’s arms the way eyes do when the brain needs a second pass to confirm what it’s seeing. She recovered quickly, the way people in service jobs learn to, but her pen hovered a half-beat too long before she wrote anything down.

Once the coffee arrived—two enormous bowls, the kind you had to lift with both hands—Andy waited until Emi had taken her first sip, then leaned in a little, voice low.

“So,” he said. “The statuette. What does it mean now, after everything Anna told you?”

She didn’t answer at first. Instead, she cradled the coffee in four hands, leaving the top pair free to gesture as she searched for the right words. “When I was little, I thought they were monsters,” she said. “Or, maybe, something to be afraid of. Grandpa would pray to them, but he never explained why.” She hesitated. “I think now that maybe he was speaking to his ancestors. To Grandma.”

She paused, then continued, “Grandma said the family—her line—used to be called the Guides. Of what, I don’t know. Maybe just the memories.” Emi looked at the sugar swan. “I think I just want to know where I come from. The real root of it. The thing that’s older than any of us.”

Andy nodded. “Does it help? Knowing?”

She smiled, a little sad. “It helps me feel less like an accident,” she said. “Like, there’s a reason I’m not like everyone else. Maybe the arms are just a shortcut to what I was always supposed to be.”

Andy reached for his coffee, then stopped, thinking. “You could have used a Reality Adjustment,” he said. “You could have walked in, and nobody would have seen anything strange.”

Emi gave a wry half-laugh. “You noticed, didn’t you?”

He shrugged. “I noticed at your parents’ house.”

She set her cup down, then met his eyes. “The Adjustment would make the arms feel normal. Like they’d always been there, and nobody would ever think it was weird. But I want to be weird. I want people to see it. I don’t want the world to pretend it’s fine for my benefit.”

Andy let that settle in. “But you hid them under your coat.”

“That’s not the same,” Emi said, a flash of mock indignation lighting up her face. “That’s me deciding. The Adjustment isn’t a mask. It’s—” She flailed for the word, then found it. “Erasure. I’d be invisible in the worst way. I want to choose when I show people who I am. Not have it smoothed away by a purchase.”

Andy tried to picture it—what it would be like to have the world ignore something so essential, not by kindness but by decree. “That makes sense,” he said. “But it’s going to be a lot harder in the summer.”

Emi grinned. “I’ll figure it out. Maybe I’ll buy the Adjustment someday. But not for today. I wanted this date to be real.”

They let the quiet stretch, its surface rippling only with the muted clatter of chess pieces and the intermittent hiss of the espresso machine behind the bar. Conversation in the rest of the café fell into a hush of routine, and Andy watched Emi’s hands: how the uppermost pair curled elegantly around her mug, the middle set forming a cradle for her chin as she fidgeted, and the lowest two left half-forgotten in her lap, fingers absently braiding together. He had always envied the way she could inhabit silence, especially amid strangers.

Andy cleared his throat, soft as a signal, and risked a memory that had been flickering at the edge of his mind since the elevator: “Do you remember the day with the thunderstorm? Playing by the river, and the three of us trying to make it back to my garage before the sky opened up?”

Emi’s whole face lit up, the way only the best memories could make her do. “Oh my God, yes,” she said, leaning forward so fast the table nearly rocked. “Laura’s hair was so wet she looked like a mop.”

“A sea monster,” Andy corrected, and the words seemed to conjure the memory into the air. “And then she started chasing you around my dad’s car, yelling at the top of her lungs that she was a kraken.”

Emi nearly banged her head on the table, all six hands flying up to cover her mouth, then one pair dropping to slap the tabletop, her laugh tumbling over itself. “And she slipped and hit the paint cans, and they went everywhere! Every color in the universe, all over your dad’s floor.”

He could see it, vivid as a spilled rainbow: the three of them racing through his garage, Laura shrieking, Emi darting sideways, his own sneakers skidding on the concrete. The way the paint bled under the wall, the way his mother had bellowed from the kitchen door. Andy let himself laugh, and the years collapsed for a second; he was a boy again, untouchable, lungs raw from running.

“My mom was so mad at us,” Andy said.

“She yelled at all of us,” Emi added. “But you just stood there and said it was worth it.”

She looked at Andy over the rim of her cup, her laughter trailing off into a small, satisfied smile. It was the smile of someone who had survived mischief and come out the other side with a friend still intact, maybe better for the trouble. Andy grinned back, and it struck him how rare it was, even now, for either of them to let a memory land without the ache of what came after.

They let the nostalgia live in the air, an invisible third at the table. It filled the space between them, language and silence knotted up into something that felt better than either one.

Andy took another shot. “You taught me how to draw, you know. In third grade. On the blacktop at recess. Remember? You did a fox, and mine looked like a melted balloon.”

Emi shook her head, still smiling. “I thought yours was perfect.”

He looked up at her. “You said that then, too.”

She blushed, hiding her face behind two hands, then peeked through her fingers like a child. “It was true. You were the only one who ever let me be good at something.”

Andy set his cup down, letting the steam fog his vision for a second, then reached across the table and caught her lower left hand with his, palm to palm. “You’re good at a lot of things, Emi. You always were.”

She took the compliment with a shy, sideways smile, then held onto his hand, not letting go even as she reached for her cup with another set of fingers.

They sat that way for a long moment, the warmth built up between their hands and radiating up Andy’s arm. The background noise of the café receded, and all he could see was Emi: her hair, darker in the winter light; the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed; the six hands, each a different version of her nervousness and wonder.

Andy’s voice softened. “I saw your memories. In the Garden of Glass, during the Fourth Challenge.”

Emi grew still, her smile faltering.

He pressed on, gentle. “There was one where you called my mom’s number, from your apartment. You listened, but you never said anything.”

Emi’s hands stilled around her cup. For a moment she said nothing, and Andy watched the decision move through her face—whether to laugh it off, or let it be true.

“I did call,” she said finally, her voice smaller than usual. “It was—” She stopped, then started again. “I was really lonely. The kind of lonely where you can't sleep, and you start going through your head for anyone who knew you before everything got complicated." She looked down at her hands. "You were the only person I could think of who knew me before Laura died. Who remembered what I was like before all of it.” She paused. “So I called your mother's number. I don't even know what I was going to say. I just wanted to find out if there was still a door somewhere.”

Andy kept very still.

“Your mom answered. She was so warm, so exactly like I remembered her. She asked how I was, and I said fine, and then she mentioned — just in passing — that you were in Chicago now, that you had an apartment, that you seemed really happy. Living with someone.” Emi looked up. “She didn't mean it as a door closing. But that's what it felt like. I thought you'd found your person. That the hole I had, you'd already filled. So I hung up, and I didn't try again.”

“Emi—”

“I’m glad you were happy,” she said quickly, and meant it. “I just couldn’t figure out where I fit after that. I thought you didn’t need me anymore.” She looked up at him, her eyes steady but unguarded. “Or that I’d missed the window. That there was a version of this that had already closed.”

Andy squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry, Emi. I also should have kept in touch.”

She patted his hand, once, and didn’t try to say anything else. The silence that followed filled in around them like the condensation on the windows.

The café windows had fogged over entirely, turning the world outside to a blur of headlights and distant neon. The corner table was far enough from anyone else that nobody noticed when Emi, without thinking, reached across with four hands and wrapped Andy’s in hers, holding on as if she might never have another chance.

They sat there, hands clasped, the condensation on the windows slowly overtaking the outside world until it was just the two of them in the pocket of lamplight. The chess players left, and the Italian couple’s fight dissolved into laughter. Andy lost track of time, until Emi broke the spell by releasing one of his hands and tracing slow circles on the table with the tip of a pinky.

She was the one who asked it: “What do you think our life is going to look like, in the end?”

Andy was about to answer, but she overrode him with a wave—her top right hand, the decisive one. “No, wait. I want to go first.”

He nodded, settling in.

She took a deep breath, as if she was about to make a speech at the United Nations. “I want to keep making things,” she said, her voice low but clear. “Not just for the harem, but for the real world. I want to do the kind of work that ends up in books, or on walls, or in a child’s backpack. I want to draw things people remember even if they never know my name.”

Andy felt a smile start on his face.

“I want to travel with you, but not the magic way. I want to see cities, and take the train, and stay in terrible hotels, and eat the same food as everyone else, and get lost somewhere neither of us speaks the language. I want to find out how much of Paris is still left after a hundred years, and if the pizza in Naples is really that much better, or if it’s just the water.”

Andy laughed, but quietly, so as not to break the mood.

“I want to be there when the harem’s kids are born,” Emi continued. “All of them. I want to be the person they come to when they want to make something, or build something, or just need someone who will listen while they draw. I want to teach them how to fold cranes, and how to glue the wings back on if they break. And I want to cook for them, even if I’m terrible at it. I want Dawn to fix whatever I ruin, and never let her tell them it was my idea in the first place.”

She met Andy’s eyes.

“I want to wake up on mornings where nothing is required of anyone,” she said. “And still be surprising you, in two hundred years. I want to have my own children, and if it’s true—” she paused, the words sticking a little, “—that you get to choose which parts of us are passed down, I want you to make sure they all have six arms. Even if they never use them for anything special. I just—” She trailed off, then finished. “There’s a happiness in it, Andy, I can’t explain. But I want to give it to someone else.”

He squeezed her hand, gently.

“I don’t need a lot,” she said. “I just want to keep going, and know there’s always someone at the end of the day who’s happy to see me, even if it’s for the first time or the thousandth.”

Andy let the silence stretch for a moment, until he knew she was done. “That sounds,” he said, “like the best possible future. Even the part where you ruin the cooking.”

She grinned. “Especially that part.”

Andy studied her face, trying to see the edges of the girl he’d known at eight and twelve and sixteen. He found her, and also someone new—someone both softer and more relentless, and much, much happier than she’d ever allowed herself to be.

She shifted, a little self-conscious. “I used to picture it as a smaller story,” she said. “Just you and me. A house, maybe a dog, and me drawing at the kitchen table while you fixed something in the garage or watched the news. I’d make dinner, and you’d pretend to like it, and maybe we’d go to the movies sometimes. I never really let myself imagine the rest, not until now.”

She shrugged, and all six arms followed, rippling down the line like dominos. “But I like this version better. I like the harem, and the hotel, and all the weird stuff that comes with it. I like that it’s bigger than what I dreamed. I like that I get to be the version of myself that isn’t waiting for something to change. I love you, Andy, and I like that you let me say all this out loud.”

Andy smiled. “I love you, too, Emi.”

She went very still for a moment, the way she sometimes did when she was trying to decide whether to draw something or just memorize it. Then she said, quietly, “I've loved you since before I knew what it meant. I used to think that was embarrassing. Now I just think it means I knew early. Different from Laura, but mine.”

Andy didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He just held her gaze until she laughed, a small, private sound, and looked away.

She reached for her coat, shrugging it on with a practiced, six-handed efficiency, then checked the statuette in her bag. Satisfied, she stood and held out a hand for Andy.

“Time to go,” she said, as if there were a train to catch, or a sunrise worth chasing.

He followed her, into the cold, bright evening, and for the first time since the day began, he felt entirely unafraid of what came next.