Nod-Krai, then

Aether came back along the path with Ineffa a half-step behind him and felt the missing piece slot in before anyone spoke.

It was not that the last five days had been empty. They had been the opposite of empty. It was that the pieces had been arriving in shifts: Fontaine wrecked in a bungalow, the desert pair and the dancer and the chemist taking the morning, a machine on a porch scoring him while a witch laughed in his skull. Seeing them together again — the actual pride, the ones who had walked nations at his heel — hit him in a place the vacation sex had not bothered to touch. Heat, yes. Habit. The low animal comfort of a room that already knew where his hands went. He had not noticed how much he had missed the dynamic until it was standing in front of him in a cluster of bare skin and jewelry and unfinished drinks.

Rosaria got to him first.

Not a lunge. Not the starved grab of a woman who had been denied. She stepped in, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him like he had only gone down the hall. Warm. Lingering. The new ring a hard little fact against his shoulder blade when her hand slid there. She smelled like salt and smoke and the red stone that was no longer on a broken chain.

“You look like you tried to meditate,”
she muttered against his mouth.
“It didn’t take.”

“I had company.”

Her eyes flicked past him to Ineffa’s grey joints and the still-polite face, then back, amused.

He opened his mouth to tell them about Nod-Krai, the thinning moon, Nicole, the fact that the pause was already over.

Rosaria put two fingers on his lips.

“We know.”
She said it fond, not sharp.
“We also knew you would say yes. She talked to us first.”
A glance at the android that was almost a smirk.
“Wanted the pretty machine to walk up and beg you herself. For the theater. Ours and yours. Don’t look so betrayed. You would have done it anyway.”

Ineffa inclined her head, unbothered at being caught.

“Nicole suggested a direct petition would hold your attention. Your companions suggested I not skip them. Both instructions were compatible.”

Xilonen was already circling.

Not for a hug. For the number. She had the look she wore at the forge when a plate came out cleaner than the brief, pride she did not bother hiding because hiding it would have been a waste of good work. She stopped at Ineffa’s shoulder like a teacher checking a marksheet.

“Ninety-one,”
Xilonen said, and the yellow in her eyes warmed.
“She told me the categories last night. Control shy of ninety, endurance over, fertility a crash instead of a digit.”
Her mouth tipped.
“That last one is on you, not my lesson plan. The rest is my student.”
She tapped Aether’s chest with two fingers, casual, claiming the score the way she claimed a finished edge.
“Fifty points over her next best. I would have been insulted if you had come back average.”

“I didn’t ask her to run the protocol in front of the class,” Aether said.

“You sat in the sun and let a rating droid sit on your cock,”
Xilonen answered.
“That is a practical exam whether you named it or not.”

Around them the gathering had thinned to the people who had a reason to still be in the room.

The last of Sumeru held one corner like they had not finished arguing with each other: heat, gold, the leftover smell of oasis rules and a tincture nobody else was going to touch. Yae’s Inazuma knot had claimed the shade and the better wine, the fox looking like a woman who had already lost once this week and was in no hurry to leave the island until she decided what the loss was worth. Liyue’s remainder was money and contracts and a grin that belonged in a funeral parlor — Ningguang not even pretending the vacation had been about rest, the other two treating the aftermath like a filing that had gotten interesting.

Lynette stood off the main knot, fully nude except for a thick leather collar that sat on her throat like a receipt. Hands behind her back. Ears forward. Waiting the way a maid waited: not for affection, for a task.
The letter had clearly landed. Mora had moved. The cat who had advertised herself as an object had been allowed to become one in public, and the sweetness of that sat on her face in a way that would have been shy on anyone the House had not built.

Aether’s gaze snagged there a second longer than courtesy. Rosaria followed it and did not comment. She only hooked a finger in his belt and kept him in the circle.

“The rest already left,”
she said, quieter, for him.
“As soon as they had their turn. This place is going to have a reputation that reaches the rest of teyvat before the ship does.”

Ningguang, as if she had heard her house named, lifted her cup in a lazy salute from across the room and did not come over. She did not need to. The look said she had paid for a cat and a voyage and would pay for Nod-Krai too if he asked with his mouth instead of a scrap of notebook paper.

He had missed this.

Not the fucking — he had not been short of that. The way they occupied a space together. The way Rosaria could tell him his own decision back to him and still kiss him like he had been gone an hour. The way Xilonen took pride in a number that had crashed an android. The way a collared girl could stand in full view and make the room more honest instead of less.

“Nod-Krai, then,” he said, because saying it out loud made the porch conversation a plan.

“Nod-Krai,”
Rosaria agreed. “After you sit down and eat something that is not a person. And after you tell your new toy to behave so Shenhe does not take her head off.”

Ineffa, on cue, produced a small, polite tick of joints.

Lynette’s ears flicked toward the sound, then toward Aether, waiting for the first order that would prove the collar was not just leather.