Strengthening Bonds

The circle came apart all at once, like a knot when somebody finally finds the right end to pull. Sam lowered her hand, and nobody needed more of a signal than that. Chloe, one arm still around Dawn from helping her up, turned her toward the hedge. Riley turned toward the lanterns. Sumiku lifted Hinode-no-Saku from where it leaned against the big tree, and before she had straightened, half the glade was drifting toward the place where the lantern path left the torn turf between its two banks of old hedge.

All three of Laura put up a hand. “Wait. Not yet. Come back a second.”

It came out louder than she meant it to, and heads turned.

She was standing at the edge of the torn ground, where the fight had peeled the grass up in long pale strips, all three of her in a loose row with barely an arm’s length between them. “Come here first. Before anyone takes a step on that path.” She found the three faces she wanted. “Emi, Claire, Dawn. You too. Stay close.”

They came back slowly. Norah was on her feet. Somewhere in the last minute she had gotten there without anybody’s hand, and she stood in the wreck of her dress with her weight set carefully on both heels, as if the ground had been unreliable lately. Emily stood at her elbow, not holding on, only close.

At the edge of the lantern-light, Mildred stood where she had stood since she came down the path, hands folded, her face giving back nothing. Nobody had asked her to stay or go.

Laura flexed her hands, all six of them inside Shar’s gauntlets at the same moment, and the leather creaked in three places.

“I’ve got something.” Laura made herself look at all of them. “I should’ve said it an hour ago. I didn’t want to think about any of this until there was a plan to use it on.” She took a breath. “I’m Andy’s Consort. What comes with it is a copy of his Gifts. All of them. Weaker, but they’re in there. And one of them is the one he uses to upgrade a transformation. One transformation, for a day.”

Nobody spoke. Norah’s eyes had narrowed to slits.

“I can do it once for each of you,” Laura said. “Now. It lasts up to a day.” Her voice thinned at the end, and she made herself finish anyway. “I’ve just never had a reason to use it.”

“That could help,” Sam said. Laura could see her already following the reasoning: with a plan in hand, it was easier to pick what to upgrade.

Sam had Thrustworthy’s point resting in the turf and both armored hands on the cross guard, and she was looking at Laura like a map that had just grown a road. “Okay. Okay. That changes some math.”

Norah shook her head. “It doesn’t fix the hole.”

Norah didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t have to. “He sends those things back up whenever he decides to. We don’t get a warning.” She lifted one hand from her side, stiffly, and counted on it. “Sam’s sword. Sumiku’s blade. My sticks. Myra’s cane. Riley’s hair. Laura’s claws. Every single thing we have that can hurt one of them is going to be standing in front of him, looking at him.” The hand dropped. “So he sends them out while we’re busy. Who’s holding them?”

“Katherine is,” Sam said. “With whoever is behind her.” She didn’t dress it up. “I don’t have anybody else to put there, and we know it.”

The quiet that followed was the kind that lets you hear the lanterns tick on their hooks.

“What if we take them?”

The question came from beside Dawn, where Chloe still had one arm around Dawn’s waist. The oatmeal sweater had slid off one shoulder. “The ones who aren’t fighting him. Instead of standing behind you in a line waiting to be needed, we take the Fourteen, and you take him.” She looked straight at Sam. “Does that work? I’m asking. Actually asking. Does it work, or is it just a nice thing to say?”

“No,” Sam said. She didn’t say it loudly. She hadn’t moved her hands from the pommel. “Chloe, look at who you’re talking about. Nobody back there has ever been in a fight before tonight. Nobody back there is carrying anything that works on them.” Her jaw tightened. “You saw what one pass did to Norah. You saw it go through Laura. Take three or four of those in a row and you don’t get up. Maybe you don’t wake up at all.”

Laura felt it again as Sam said it: the cold closing through her shoulder, in all three of her at once, like a hand reaching into water that should have been warm. She had been lucky. Norah had been less lucky, and was still pale.

“She’s right,” Laura said. “Chloe, I can’t ask you to stand in front of those. Not with nothing in your hands.”

Chloe’s face went pink and stubborn at the same time. “I know. I know that. I’m not saying it isn’t—”

“Is not fighting, what I mean.”

Liesa had stepped in beside her, hips shifting in a slow roll she couldn’t have stopped if she’d tried, and Laura watched her not try. “When I read Claire’s scroll, here, on this grass, the anger went out of their faces. I was looking right at them after. At what was left.” She touched her own breastbone. “Is not anger, under. Is pain. And something else. Like a dog on a short rope, pulling against the hand.” Her eyes went to the path, and back. “They don’t want this. Is him. Is Nergal’s hand on them, doing it through them.”

Sam’s eyes had narrowed, but she was listening.

“So maybe we don’t fight them,” Liesa said. “Maybe we find where his hand is, and we make it loose. Or we give them something to look at that is not you, while you do the rest.” She spread her hands. “Is something to start with.”

Sam was quiet for a moment. Then she looked past her.

“And if one of them doesn’t feel like being loosened,” Sam said, half to herself, “somebody back there has to be able to put a hand on it.”

Katherine stood a few paces off under the big tree with Eden pressed against her side, and Sam went to her instead of calling across. She laid one armored hand on Katherine’s bare shoulder and waited until Katherine’s eyes came around to hers.

“When you had that one by the throat,” Sam said. “Can you do it again? On purpose?”

Katherine held up both hands, palms out.

Then she brought them to her own collarbone and drew them slowly down her body, over her breasts and belly and the flare of her hips, all the way to her thighs. Then she closed both hands into fists and held them there.

Sam looked at her for a long moment.

“All of you?” Sam said. Katherine nodded, once.

“Okay.” Sam turned back to the rest of them, her hand still on Katherine’s shoulder. “Everybody get that? It isn’t just her hands. It’s her. Anywhere she gets hold of one of them, it hurts it, the same as Sumiku’s blade does. Same as anything divine.”

Laura felt it go around the circle—not relief, but something with a job attached to it. Under the tree, Eden turned her face into Katherine’s neck and stayed there.

“Emi,” Marissa said.

She had taken her hand off Claire’s back. She crossed the grass to where Emi stood with all six arms loosely folded, and spoke so quietly it was almost not at all. Laura had to lean in with all three of her to catch it.

“You asked for me.” Marissa’s voice didn’t rise; it never did. “For the Forest. And I said yes, and I meant it. But I’m not coming.” Her chin came up a little. “I believe in you. You won't lose yourself. And I want to be where my voice counts. I want to go up with them.”

Emi looked at her with her head tilted, and then she smiled, and two of her hands came up and took both of Marissa’s. “Okay.” Emi squeezed. “Go be loud.” A third hand patted Marissa’s knuckles. “Claire and Dawn can pull me out if I stay in too long. They’re both really bossy.”

Claire had already tucked the notebook under her arm. Her hands were moving—quick flat shapes Laura couldn’t follow, a tap at the wrist, two fingers drawn across the opposite palm—the private language she and Marissa shared. Marissa’s lips moved along with it, barely, shaping the words as they came.

“Don’t let him look at you,” Marissa breathed, reading it back. Then, she replied: “I won’t. You find him.”

Sam cleared her throat.

“Okay,” Sam said. It came out slowly, as if it cost her something. “Then that’s the new second line, and it isn’t a second line anymore.” She pointed with Thrustworthy’s hilt, one woman at a time. “Katherine. Chloe. Marissa. Liesa. Eden. You’re on the Fourteen. Katherine’s the only one who puts hands on them. The rest of you keep your distance and do the other thing. The rest of us are on him.”

Nobody argued. Katherine’s chin lifted. Chloe looked at Sam for one more second, as if checking the answer against something, and then nodded.

Laura looked at the five of them standing together in the torn grass, and found she already knew where to start. Laura turned all three of her faces to Marissa. “You first. Come here.”

Marissa came, and stopped in front of the nearest of her, close enough that Laura could see the grass-stain running along the hem of her dress and the tremor she was holding out of her hands by keeping them clasped. The other two of Laura turned toward her at the same angle, the same breath, the way they always did when nothing asked them to do otherwise.

Laura reached for the Gift, and then she stopped with it.

She had known it was in her since the Consort title settled onto her, the way you know a drawer in a new kitchen has something in it without ever pulling it open. The closest thing she knew was the dial, the small private one she used to turn down the Bond of Marriage on nights she needed her skin to herself. This was that same motion, except it turned up instead of down, and what it turned belonged to somebody else. She found Marissa’s whisper sitting in her attention like a low hum in another room. She could feel which way was up. She couldn’t feel what was on the other side of it.

Myra had said it. Andy never knew what one would turn into until it had.

“I can do it,” Laura said. “I just can’t tell you what you’ll get. He never could, either. It might come out louder. It might just make people want you more.” Her mouth twisted. “It might be no use at all against a woman who’s been dead seven thousand years.”

“I can tell.”

Emily had left Norah’s side. She crossed the grass with her hair swinging around her thighs and stopped beside Marissa, and she looked, for a moment, almost embarrassed to be there.

“My Informal Guide,” Emily said. “The one where if I touch somebody, I can tell how their transformations could go. Up, or down, or sideways. I’ve never really had a use for it that wasn’t kind of creepy.” She held out her hand, palm up. “Marissa? Can I?”

Marissa laid her hand in it. Emily’s eyes went soft and unfocused, not away from Marissa, but through her. Her thumb rested on the inside of Marissa’s wrist, where the pulse was.

“Oh. Okay.” Emily blinked. “Your voice. If Laura turns it up, you can focus on someone far away and reach them. And anybody it reaches can be put under. Almost like hypnotized. And you get to pick who it reaches, and how hard it pulls on them. Nobody else gets any of it.” She let go. “That’s what’s there. I don’t think it wants to go any other way.”

Laura looked at Marissa. “If you want it. He always asked first. I’m asking.”

“Yes.” It came out barely louder than breath, and for once she didn’t hedge it. “Yes. Please.”

Laura found the edge of the hum, reached out and… she couldn’t have said what she did, exactly. It felt like… pushing something, lifting it up. Marissa’s hand went to her own throat, fingertips light on the skin, as if something there had shifted and she was feeling for where it had gone.

• ASMR [UPGRADE] Voice Projection: Marissa's ASMR tones can be projected within her light of sight. While those near her won't hear a word, those she targets will hear her as if she were right next to them. She can put her mouth to good use by speaking in such a way that will nearly hypnotize the listener. As a side effect, she will become more skilled in oral sex.

“Oh,” Marissa breathed.

She didn’t test it on Laura. She turned, instead, toward the far side of the circle, where Emi was standing with two hands folded and four at her sides, and she drew a breath, and her mouth moved.

Laura heard nothing.

She was nearer to Marissa than anyone in the glade but Emily, nearest by half. She watched Marissa’s lips shape three or four words and then a few more, and not one breath of it reached her.

Across the grass, Emi’s head snapped up as if someone had spoken right against her ear. All six of her hands came open at once. “You’re welcome!” Emi called back. Her cheeks had gone pink in the lantern-light. “That was really nice. Also really weird. It was like you were standing right behind me. Do it again sometime when we’re not about to die.”

A laugh went around the circle, small and startled, the first one in an hour. Marissa ducked her head, and she was smiling—not the careful professional warmth she had once handed out to everyone, but something with its sleeves rolled up.

Laura looked past her. “Chloe.”

Chloe came forward with her arms already crossed under her chest. Even under the oatmeal sweater, the eye went there. Laura had stopped fighting it weeks ago. Everybody had.

Emily laid two fingers on Chloe’s forearm, just below the cuff of the sweater. It took her longer this time. Her eyebrows went up, and then up further.

“The looking thing, the Dominant Decolletage,” Emily said. “It’s the only one that could be helfpul, unless you wanted bigger breasts or more lactation. It turns into a hold. Whoever it catches can’t look away, and while it’s got them they just…” She made a small helpless gesture. “Stop. Stand there.”

“For the Fourteen,” Laura said. “Something to freeze one long enough for Katherine to get her hands on it.”

“Yes,” Chloe said, after a moment. “Okay. Yes.”

Laura pushed.

• Dominant Decolletage [UPGRADE] High Beams: Chloe's breasts draw immediate attention, and anyone who stares at them struggles to look away (the effect is weaker the stronger the target's willpower). Those who fail and stare at Chloe's breasts are mesmerized and become more susceptible to her words. The Master is immune to this effect.

She knew it had worked because she was looking at Chloe when it did, and she couldn’t stop. Her eyes caught on the curve under the sweater and stayed there, and she felt all three of her go still at once—not frozen, exactly. Held. Two seconds. Three. Then Chloe tugged the sweater higher and turned half away, and Laura’s gaze came loose like a sleeve unhooked from a nail.

Riley, at Chloe’s elbow, came loose a second after her, blinking hard.

“Okay. That’s rude.” Riley pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “That’s so rude, and I love it.”

Chloe laughed. It burst out of her, helpless, one hand over her mouth. “Oh my God. The first day I had this, I wanted to crawl under a table and live there.” There were tears standing in her eyes that had nothing to do with anything funny. “And now it’s a weapon?” Then she stopped laughing. “Laura, are you sure? That you want me doing this—using it, on purpose, on people?”

“I’m sure,” Laura said. “You get to have it work for you for once.”

Liesa didn’t wait to be called. She was already stepping forward, hips swaying whether she wanted them to or not.

“Seven thousand years,” Liesa said. “These women. Whatever they speak, is not English. Is not Flemish either. Is not anything anybody here ever heard.” She held up one finger. “If there is a way to loosen him from them, first somebody has to understand them.” She hesitated. “Cunning Linguist, maybe. It made my English a little better, once. Only a little.” She shrugged, and her hips carried the shrug on without her. “From English to seven thousand years is very far. I think is too far.”

Emily took Liesa’s hand. This time it was quick, and she looked up surprised. “It isn’t stuck on English,” Emily said. “If Laura turns it up, it’s any language. It makes you better at understanding it, not just speaking it. I don’t know if it is enough.”

“Any?” Liesa looked from Emily to Laura. “Yes. Do it.”

Laura found the thing in Liesa that had made her English easier, a slow bright current barely moving, and turned it as far as it would go.

• Cunning Linguist [UPGRADE] A Thousand Tongues: Liesa becomes better able to speak and understand any verbal language. As a side effect, her tongue becomes supernaturally dexterous, a little longer, and has an unerring sense for the most pleasurable spots to touch.

Liesa blinked several times, fast. Then she turned toward Sumiku, who stood half a step behind Katherine with Hinode-no-Saku held upright beside her, her wings folded close.

“Sumiku-san,” Liesa said. “Konban wa. Daijōbu desu ka?”

Sumiku’s wings shifted, a small startled rustle. For a long moment she only looked at Liesa, her face gone almost still. Then she bowed from the waist—not deep, but exact.

“Kono mono wa, mada tatte orimasu,” Sumiku said quietly. “Mada tatakaemasu.”

Liesa’s face split into a grin, and her voice cracked on the English. “I said good evening. I asked is she all right. And she says this one is still standing. This one can still fight.”

Eden hadn’t moved from under the tree. She stood with her shoulder against Katherine’s ribs and her long hair fallen over the front of her cocktail dress, watching Laura the way she watched everyone, steadily, waiting for them to come to her, because she couldn’t go to them any other way.

Laura went to her, all three of her together, and Emily came too. Emily touched Katherine first, two fingers on the inside of her forearm, and was quiet for a moment. Then she shook her head.

“There’s nothing in yours I’d turn, Katherine,” Emily said. “Nothing that helps up there.” Then, more gently: “And what you did to that one tonight isn’t any of them. It’s just you.”

Katherine looked down at her own hands. Then she tipped her head toward her sister.

“Eden, then,” Laura said.

Emily hesitated, then laid her palm very gently on the smooth round of Eden’s shoulder, where an arm would have been. Eden leaned into it. Emily’s breath caught. “Oh, Eden. Everything you say with how you move—people have to work at it now. Guess. If Laura does this, nobody has to. Whoever sees you gets all of it, whole.” She glanced toward the dark past the hedges. “Anybody. Anybody at all.”

Eden nodded eagerly, and let her shoulders roll, a long languid movement that went all the way down her spine and into her hips. She was sure. So Laura pushed.

• Silence is Golden [UPGRADE] Erotic Dance: Eden's ability to convey her meaning via the movements of her body is enhanced. Any who sees Eden communicate will instantly and fully know what she means to say.

For a second nothing changed. Then Eden turned. She faced the lantern path where it climbed out of the glade, and she rolled her hips toward it, once. It was a slow, unhurried motion, the kind that would have made a crowded bar go quiet.

It arrived in Laura whole. Not a guess, not a reading pieced together, but the thing itself. Where my sister goes, I go.

Laura’s breath caught. She saw it land in every face at once. Chloe’s hand went to her mouth. Riley let out a small “Oh.” Sam breathed out through her nose and nodded, once, hard. Even Mildred, at the edge of the light, lifted her head.

Katherine bent and rested her forehead against Eden’s.

They stood like that under the tree, brow to brow. Katherine’s hand lay spread on the back of Eden’s neck. Neither of them moved. Then Eden’s shoulders began to shake, and for a second Laura didn’t understand. Eden was laughing. It came up through her whole body without a sound.

Laura looked away from them, toward the path, and let them have it.

She knew that sentence. She had been living inside it since the Hall, all three of her pointed after a man her own bond kept calling right here and farther off than anything, both at once. Where he goes. She had never once said it out loud, not even to herself. She didn’t know whether it was a promise, or only a direction she kept facing because there wasn’t another one.

Emily didn’t go back to Norah. She stood where she was on the torn grass, rubbing her fingertips together as though something were still on them, and then she clasped her hands in front of her, and unclasped them, and gave up on her hands entirely.

“Can I say something?” Emily said. “It’s kind of a weird thing. Nobody’s said it all night, and I didn’t either, so.” She took a breath. “My Harem Harmony transformation. The thing I do just by being here. It makes everybody around me easier. Calmer. And it lowers…” She made a small pushing-down motion with both palms. “Whatever’s holding people back. Their brakes. It’s been doing that the whole time. All night. It doesn’t turn off. I don’t think anybody noticed, because that’s kind of the point of it.”

The glade had gone very quiet.

“Huh,” Riley said. “I did wonder why I haven’t screamed yet.”

“So here’s the thing.” Emily’s voice wobbled and came back steadier. “I wonder if I can take it to Nergal.” She said the name as if she had been practicing it. “Dinah’s message said nobody can hurt him while he’s working for the creditor. Okay. But this doesn’t hurt. It just makes it easier for him to do what he already wants to do.” She looked from Laura’s face to Marissa’s and back. “And the only thing stopping him from doing what he wants is knowing he would overreach the Law. So I want to stand as close to him as I can get, and make the Law really, really easy to forget.”

“No.” It came out of all three of Laura, flat and immediate, before she had decided on anything. “Emily, no. You’re asking me to take the one thing you’ve got and point it right at him. You’d have to be standing next to him.”

“I know,” Emily said.

“You were in the Hall. You were on the floor with two of those things on top of you—”

“I know.” Emily’s chin came up. “You’re not sending me. That’s the difference. I’m going. It’s mine. I said I’d start saying my yeses out loud, and my nos, and meaning them, and this is one of the yeses.” Her voice cracked, just once. “Please don’t make me argue with you about it. I’m really bad at arguing and I’d still win.”

Laura looked at her for a long moment, and Emily didn’t look away, and somewhere under the fear Laura understood that she wasn’t going to.

“Okay.” It came out of Laura quieter than anything else all night. “But I can’t see what it turns into. And you can’t read yourself, can you?”

“No. I tried once, in a mirror.” Emily almost laughed. “So I don’t know what it’ll be. Maybe nothing that helps. Maybe it just gets bigger, and everybody down here falls asleep.” She held out her hand. “I’m going anyway. I’d rather go with whatever it turns into.”

“And if it comes out wrong?”

“Then we find out,” Emily said. “Like he always did.”

She stepped in and took the nearest of Laura’s hands. The other two of Laura lifted their hands to the same height, in the same shape, and held them there, empty, in the air. Laura pushed.

• Harem Harmony [UPGRADE] Happy Ending: Emily can now focus her entire aura on a single person within 50 yards. That person gets the concentrated effects of her normally diffuse aura, greatly lowering their inhibitions, reducing their worries, and placating their concerns. Lasts until Emily chooses to stop it, or until the target is out of range, or until Emily is unconscious.

For a moment neither of them knew, and Emily stood very still with her head a little on one side, as though listening to her own body from the inside. Then her breath went out of her in a shaky rush.

“It’s still there,” Emily said. “All of it, the whole field, just like before. But there’s—there’s a middle now. Like I could pick it all up and put it down on one person. All of it, on just one.” Her fingers tightened. “Oh. Oh, that’s good. That’s so much better than bigger.”

Then Emily’s face changed.

Her gaze went somewhere past Laura’s collarbone and stayed there. Her thumb moved on the inside of Laura’s wrist.

“Oh,” Emily said. “Oh—and you. I never did you.” She blinked. “Have a Spare adds one more, and I don’t think it’s what we need now. The others are not useful. Lethe’s Forgetfulness is strengthened but continues to affect everyone around you. Ah, but Twice the Fun! If you did Twice the Fun, you’d go a hundred feet. All three of you. A hundred feet apart and nothing pulling. And moving them separately gets easier. Not just in bed. All the time. Not easy-easy, it’s not free, but easier than now.”

Laura stared at her.

“I looked,” Laura said. “For room. I went looking under Have a Spare, because that’s where the bodies came from, and there was a thing, but it wasn’t—” She shook her head. “Sassafras told me. Last night. She said it might be under Twice the Fun instead, and I never got to check.”

“Well,” Emily said, and let go, and smiled with her mouth wobbling. “I guess I checked for you.”

Laura left it where it was. She could feel exactly where it sat in her now, a thing to be turned last, after everyone else had theirs, and she turned instead to the others. Sam was already stepping in. “Me next. I don’t know which. You tell me.” She held out her bare wrist, the gauntlet already off. “I’m the one keeping count up there. If anything in me helps with that, that’s the one.”

Emily wrapped her fingers around the wrist and shut her eyes, and she was quiet for long enough that Sam shifted her weight from one armored foot to the other.

“There’s your strength,” Emily said. “It goes up. Andy level, no longer two Achievements behind. More than anybody here.” She frowned. “There’s the hug one—”

“Leave the hug one alone, that won't help right now,” Sam said.

“Okay. And there’s the one that feels us.” She opened her eyes. “Watchtower. That one gets sharper. You’d know where each of us is. Not just that somebody’s scared somewhere—which one, and where, and how bad. It’s going to be loud.”

Sam didn’t hesitate as long as Laura expected.

Sam let out a breath through her nose. “Watchtower. Strong’s no use if I don’t know where to put it.”

Laura pushed it, and watched it hit.

• Watchtower [UPGRADE] All Along: Sam’s sense sharpens, and allows her to discern who is distressed or aroused, where they are, and how bad (or good!) it is.

Sam’s eyes went wide and then narrow, and her head moved, a quick turn toward Claire, then Dawn, then Riley, then out past the hedges toward nothing Laura could see, as if a dozen people had called her name from a dozen places at once. Laura didn’t need the Watchtower to know what it was telling her. Every woman in that glade was afraid. Sam could feel every one of them now, placed and weighed, and Laura saw the moment it landed: Sam’s jaw set, her shoulders squared inside the plate, and whatever she had been carrying since the bell went back down to wherever she had been keeping it.

“Yeah.” Sam’s voice had gone hoarse. “It works. That’s… yeah. It works.”

““My turn,” Norah said. “The strength, maybe. Mine, I mean.” She didn’t look at Sam. “It’s Bearing the World Upon Her Shoulders. I bought it at the Commissary this morning, before the ceremony.”

Sam turned all the way around. “You bought mine?” she said.

“I bought a copy,” Norah said. “Yours was the one I copied.” Her mouth went flat. “So it’s somebody else’s, and I’ve had it since breakfast. For all I know there’s nothing in it to turn.”

Emily was already back at Norah’s side, her hand on Norah’s. Her eyebrows went up. “It goes up,” she said slowly. “To Sam’s. Exactly where Sam is right now.”

Laura raised it, carefully, until it sat where Sam’s did. Norah drew in a breath and straightened, all at once, a woman shrugging off a coat she hadn’t known was so heavy. She was still pale. But she stood the way Sam stood now, and for a second she looked almost startled by it.

• Bearing the World Upon Her Shoulders [UPGRADE] Titan: If the Master's strength increases afterwards, Sam's strength increases too, up to a limit two Achievements behind the Master.

Norah rolled one shoulder, testing it. “Good. Now when I fall on my face, I’ll crack the floor.”

Erin planted herself in front of Emily, arms crossed, her green skin almost black in the lantern-light. “Green Thumb. The pollen. I get one burst a day and it’s either arousal or calm, and neither one of those is what I need tonight.” She uncrossed one arm and held it out. “See if there’s anything else in there.”

Emily touched her shoulder. “There are several. But there’s one…” Her mouth pulled to one side. “It dazes people. Fogs them right out of their own heads for a while.”

Erin looked toward the path, and Laura watched her think it through the way Erin thought through everything hard, slowly at first and then all at once. “For when he can be touched,” Erin said. “If he can be touched.”

Laura found the Green Thumb transformation in her, and opened the door.

• Green Thumb [UPGRADE] Fairy Dust: Erin's pollen gains the ability to daze anyone who inhales it. The duration of the dazing depends on their VP total and their will. In addition, Erin gains the ability to release her pollen through any plants she’s in contact with.

Sumiku did not suggest anything. She held out one of her four hands to Emily and inclined her head. “This one does not know what she carries that is worth turning,” she said. “Emily-san will know better.”

Emily took the hand, and her eyebrows climbed. “Your Sun Dragon transformation,” she said. “It can carry fire. Amaterasu’s fire.”

Sumiku considered this with great seriousness. Then she bowed, exactly as deep as she had bowed to Liesa. When Laura was done, Sumiku let out one slow breath through her nose, and a thread of pale gold rose off it and was gone.

• Sun Dragon [UPGRADE] Amaterasu's Fire: Sumiku gains the ability to breathe holy fire. The fire is harmless to Sumiku’s allies, only increasing their arousal, but it burns impure souls. The same fire can manifest on her body during combat.

“This one will be careful,” Sumiku said, “where she breathes.”

Myra came next, turning her face toward the sound of Emily’s voice. “Emotion’s Map,” Myra said. “It’s the thing I use for everything.”

Emily’s hand found her arm. She was quiet, and then she shook her head. “That one’s… full. It’s been turned so many times there’s nowhere left for it to go.” Her fingers moved an inch. “Twin Tails has room. A third tail. And your illusions get stronger.”

“Illusions,” Myra said, and a startled half-laugh came out of her. “I hardly ever use them.”

“Maybe tonight,” Emily said.

Myra nodded. Laura turned it, and a third tail slid out behind Myra beside the other two, thick and soft and twitching as if it had arrived in the middle of a thought.

• Twin Tails [UPGRADE] Kitsune, Part Three: Strengthening her connection to the kitsune, Myra grows a third fox tail and her illusory powers grow stronger. She is also less likely to be deceived by illusions herself.

“Oh,” Myra whispered. She had gone almost perfectly still. “Oh, that’s… there’s more of me back there. That’s so much more of me.”

Riley was last of them. She lifted a lock of her own hair and put it in Emily’s palm. “It caught them tonight. Not for long, and not hard.” She didn’t sound hopeful. “I don’t know that there’s anything more in hair than that.”

Emily held the lock a long moment, rolling it between finger and thumb like a strand of something she was thinking of buying. “It’ll hold them. Anything without a body, as hard as it holds anything solid.”

• Gravemind Tresses [UPGRADE] Silken Chains: Riley's hair gains the ability to hold incorporeal creatures, and when it entraps someone, they suffer no damage from the entrapment itself, though their arousal steadily climbs as long as they are held.

When it was done, Riley drew the lock out of Emily’s hand and curled it slowly shut around nothing, a fist closing on air. She watched it with an expression Laura had seen on her before only when JJ did something new.

“Good,” Riley said. “I want to hold one still. Long enough to look at it.”

That left three. “Emi. Claire. Dawn,” Laura said. “Don’t think I forgot you.”

Dawn had both hands wrapped around one of Chloe’s. “We weren’t worried. Okay. I was a little worried.”

Emi was nearest. She let go of Claire’s hand and stepped forward, all six hands at rest, and tilted her head at Emily.

“Velvet Hours, maybe?” Emi said. “You know how it slows everything down, for me and whoever’s with me? Only when it’s, you know. Intimate.” Her mouth quirked. “It’s the only thing I’ve got that does anything to time. I don’t know if that helps. It might not.”

Emily took one of Emi’s free hands in both of hers and held it a moment. Her eyes widened.

“It stops needing that,” Emily said. “The intimate part. It just sits there till you want it, anywhere. And it’s not just you and one person. It’s whoever’s with you.”

Emi went quite still. “Anywhere. So if we’re in the Forest, looking, all three of us, and I turn it on—it’s hours for us. And minutes out here.” She looked up the path, and her eyes weren’t light anymore. “You wouldn’t be holding him off for hours. You’d be holding him off for ten minutes while we take all night.”

“Yes?” Laura said.

“Yes. Please yes.”

“That’s cheating,” Dawn said, and it came out almost a laugh. “That’s the best cheating I ever heard.”

Laura found it: a warm thing in Emi, heavy and slow, like honey near the bottom of a jar, with a lid screwed down tight over it. She loosened the lid.

• Velvet Hours [UPGRADE] Any Time is a Good Time: Emi no longer needs physical intimacy to slow down time. She can do so at will, although the effort required is proportional both to the rate of slowdown, and the duration of the slowdown. Emi can't maintain a slowdown for more than an hour of external objective time.

Emi shivered from the top of her head to her feet. Then she laughed, surprised, and pressed two hands flat to her breastbone as though something had turned over under it. “Oh, that’s so strange. It’s just waiting. I could do it right now, standing on the grass. I can’t do it indefinitely, but I can do it when I want.” She beamed. “Don’t let me do it by accident.”

Ten minutes. Laura looked up the path and tried to picture it: ten minutes of standing in the open in front of him, with Myra at one shoulder and Riley at the other, while somewhere a whole night went by. She couldn’t make the picture hold still long enough to see what was in it.

Claire had her notebook open. She wrote fast, and then tore the page halfway down its edge so it would stand clear of the rest and turned it around.

Child of the Night. My eyes. If there’s anything in them that could help find him.

Emily put two fingers on the inside of Claire’s wrist. She was quiet longer than she had been for anyone.

“It goes further,” Emily said at last. “You’d see more than eyes see. I can’t tell you what. There’s something past the edge of it I can’t make out.”

Claire nodded, once, as though that were the answer she had expected. Laura found the thing in Claire that gave her the slit pupils and the faint glow and let her see in the dark like it was dusk. It was cool and bright and a little too precise, a filament. She turned it up.

• Child of the Night [UPGRADE] Ghostsight: Claire’s eyes can now see things not of this world (no, not Mildred. We care about Claire’s sanity). She perceives such objects as ghostly silhouettes superimposed on the world she inhabits. As a side effect, she gains the ability to instinctively notice erogenous zones and sensitive spots on her partner's body.

The glow in Claire’s eyes deepened. It had always been faint, the kind of glow you only caught when she looked at you from the far side of a dark room; now it was plain even in the lantern-light, two points of pale gold behind the slitted black. Her ears went straight up and then swiveled toward nothing at all, off at an angle, as if something just past the edge of the Garden had moved.

It’s like when your ears pop. Only everything looks like it’s about to. There’s something here, all around us. Like shadows. But they’re part of it. I don’t know what I’m seeing yet.

Her tail lashed once and went still. She underlined yet, closed the notebook, and didn’t open it again for a while.

Dawn had been standing half behind Chloe, her ears flattened back along her hair. Marissa had drifted to Dawn’s other side and put an arm around her waist, loose and unthinking, her thumb rubbing small circles on Dawn’s hip. Dawn let go of Chloe and stepped out from between them.

“Can I ask something first?” Dawn blurted. “The light. What I did, on the grass, when they…” She stopped. “Can your thing reach that? Because if it could be mine—if I could make it happen when I want it, instead of when I’ve completely fallen apart—then I shouldn’t be going into the Forest. I should be going up. With you. That’s where it’d be any good.”

Emily took Dawn’s hand before Laura could move. Her face fell a little, and then fell further.

“Your ears,” Emily said softly. “Your mornings. The Andy one. The sitting one. The cooking one. And the kissing one, where you feel each other and take someone else’s transformation. That’s what I’ve got, Dawn. That’s all that’s in here.”

Laura reached anyway. She found Dawn’s ears, and the sunrise that put her back together every morning, and the place in her that listened for Andy. And where the light should have been, there was nothing to take hold of—not an empty place, but a place her reach simply went through, like a hand passing through a beam of sun and closing on nothing.

“I can’t,” Laura said. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing there for me to hold. It isn’t a transformation, Dawnie. It isn’t in you like that.”

“Yeah.” Dawn laughed, a small unconvincing noise. “No, that makes sense. It never asks me first, anyway. It just goes.” She scrubbed her face with the heel of one hand, and then she looked down at Emily’s fingers, still wrapped around hers. “What about the kissing one? Staff Synergy. If Laura turned that up, maybe I could kiss one of you and take something that actually works on them. And then I could go up anyway.” Her ears dipped. “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t work like that.”

Emily’s eyes went soft and far again. Her thumb stopped on Dawn’s knuckles.

“It doesn’t need Laura,” Emily said. “It already takes whatever you copy as it is right now. Anything Laura turned up tonight, you’d get all of it, just from the kiss.” She hesitated. “But it’s only ever a copy. Anything you took off one of us, that woman is already taking up there herself.”

Dawn let out a breath. “Okay. It’s fine. The Forest. I can do the Forest.”

Chloe’s hand found the small of Dawn’s back and stayed there. Nobody said it. The light that had taken the cold out of Laura’s bones an hour ago, that had made two of those things simply stop being there, was going wherever Dawn went. Laura thought about asking her to stay, for exactly as long as it took to look at Dawn’s face, and then she didn’t.

Emily hadn’t let go. “The Andy one. Gentle Servant. It could point.”

Dawn looked up. Emily’s thumb moved over Dawn’s knuckles. “It tells you he needs help. It’s never told you where. It could.”

• Gentle Servant [UPGRADE] Master's GPS: Dawn instinctively knows not only when the Master needs help, but also where he is and what he needs.

Dawn’s head turned. Her face went up and to the left, toward the hedge, and her whole body followed, a quarter turn, the way a compass needle swings when somebody carries a magnet past it. Then her head jerked the other way, sharply, as if something had pulled her by the chin.

“Oh,” Dawn whispered. She turned in a full circle on the grass, one hand lifted in front of her as though feeling for a wall in the dark. “It’s pointing. It’s never done that. And it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Tell us,” Sam said quietly.

“It’s close.” Dawn’s voice had climbed. “It’s so close, it’s like he’s right there, I could reach out—and it’s also so far away I can’t… It’s pulling me close and pulling me far, the same pull, both at once.” She stopped, facing the dark between two lanterns. “How is it both?”

Laura didn’t answer. Her own bond had been giving her that reading since the Hall. She had thought it was the bond breaking, or, a little, that it was her. She didn’t want to be the one to guess.

“Okay.” Emi’s voice had gone very gentle. She put a hand on Dawn’s shoulder, and another, and turned her back around by them. “That’s still a bearing. That’s better than we had.”

Claire had already opened the notebook to a fresh page. She drew two lines across it at an angle to each other and tapped the place where they would cross if you ran them far enough. She showed it to Dawn. Dawn looked at it for a long moment, and swallowed, and nodded.

Emily let out a long breath and rubbed her palms together, as if her hands had gone numb from all of it. “That’s everybody.” Then, looking at the nearest of Laura: “Except you.”

Laura hesitated, then reached inside herself, and found Twice the Fun exactly where Emily had said it would be. She wasn’t sure if she could use the Gift on herself, but she had to try. She pushed it as far as it went.

• Twice the Fun (Upgrade) Splitsies: There’s less fun to be had if Laura has to stay together all the time. Now she can move her bodies farther apart from each other, although they still can’t be more than one hundred feet from each other. To help her with this, the mental effort in making each body act differently is significantly reduced at all times. In addition, her neurological restraints from As Above, So Below are loosened, so that if one of her bodies is physically restrained, the others aren’t affected.

Then she took one step with each of her bodies, in three directions.

The first of her walked toward the lantern path. The second walked across the glade toward the far hedge. The third stayed where she was. At fifteen feet she felt the old tug beginning, the one she knew better than her own pulse. At twenty she braced for it.

It didn’t come.

The first of her was forty feet up the slope toward the path, and still walking. The second had crossed nearly to the far hedge. Nothing pulled. It was harder to walk them in three directions than in one, and she could feel the cost, a pressure behind the eyes, the kind that comes from reading too long in bad light. But it held.

A hundred feet was room enough to stand in three places around a man at once. She didn’t let herself think past that.

“Oh my God,” Chloe breathed. “Look at her. She’s everywhere.”

Laura walked herself back together. It took longer than the walking out had, and when all three of her stood side by side again, she let her shoulders come down, all six of them at once, and let the bodies fall back into sync.

“Okay,” Sam said. “Everybody take what you’re carrying. Get it in your hands. We move in one minute.”

Nobody needed the minute. Sumiku was already lifting her blade. Riley’s hair was already coiling. All of them turned together, like grass under one wind, toward the lanterns and the path.

The foot of the lantern path was only forty steps from the torn grass, but it felt farther. The first lantern hung on its iron hook just where the two banks of hedge closed in, and past it the light went up in a slow line, one lantern and then the next and the next, climbing and bending away into the dark until the last of them was a point no bigger than a star. Nothing moved on it.

The rest of them came and stood in a loose knot at the foot of the hedge, with Laura, all three of her, at the front.

Emi had stopped short of the first lantern, with Claire on one side and Dawn on the other. She was looking up the path, and her face had creased.

“There’s one thing we still don’t have,” Emi said.

“What?” Riley said.

“A way in.” Emi nodded at the lanterns. “The only doors I know into the Forest are in a corridor and in the Atelier, and they both are all the way up through the Hotel from the elevator. Up there, past the Dance Hall. Past where he was, and maybe where he still is.” Her fingers tightened on Dawn’s shoulder. “We can’t walk three of us right past him and hope he doesn’t look.”

“There is a way.” It came from the edge of the lantern-light. Mildred had followed them down from the glade without anyone noticing, and she stood a little apart, hands folded, her voice as level as when she had told them the Hearth held.

“A way into the Forest of Beginnings via the doors that stay where they are put,” Mildred said. “One opens off a corridor of the Hotel. One is in the Atelier. I know them both.” Her eyes moved to Emi, and then to Claire, and then to Dawn. “I can bring these three to the Atelier’s door by the ways I walk. No flesh-being will see them go. Nor anything that is not one.”

“You’ve been standing there the whole time,” Riley said, “knowing that.”

Mildred inclined her head a quarter of an inch.

“Is true, about the Atelier.” Liesa had stepped up beside Emi, her hips swaying through the few steps it took. “Is my Atelier. Emi and I, we were standing in it one day and we both wanted the Forest to be there, next to it. And the Forest made a door.” She touched the air in front of her, as if the door were standing there. “It has the name on it, on a little plate. The Forest of Beginnings. It did not go anywhere after. It is still there.”

Claire had opened her notebook again.

She wrote something, looked at it, and crossed it out. She wrote again, more slowly. Then she carried it over herself, across the whole width of the path, and stopped in front of Mildred, and turned it around, and held it up where Mildred could read it. Would you come with us? All the way in.

And below that, in smaller letters:

You don’t have to. I’m asking. Not telling.

Mildred read it.

Laura was watching her face, so she saw it happen. For a moment Mildred only looked at the page. Then her mouth opened to answer, and what came out of it was not one voice. It was many—a crowd of them close together, a chord that didn’t quite settle on its pitch, all speaking the same words a hair apart.

“You are asking—”

Her eyes went wide. Far too wide, the whites showing all the way around, and the rest of her face stayed exactly where it had been, as if only the eyes had heard. When her lips drew back from whatever she had been about to say next, there were more teeth behind them than there had been a moment before. Rows of them. Small and even and white, and far too many.

Then it was gone.

Mildred’s face settled back over itself the way a pond settles after a stone, from the edges in. The teeth were ordinary. The eyes were ordinary. Her hands, which had come unfolded, folded themselves again at her waist.

“I will come,” Mildred said, in one voice. “In, and out again. The whole of the way.”

Nobody had told her to. All night the Mildred had been sent, and had come, and had stood where she was put. They had asked her for news. Nobody had asked her for herself.

Claire had not stepped back. Laura saw that and could hardly believe it. Claire had been nearest by far, near enough to count those teeth, and her ears had gone flat against her hair and her tail had puffed to twice its size behind her, and she had not moved one inch. Now she lowered the notebook, and turned to a fresh page, and wrote two words, and held them up.

Four, then.

“A door with a name on it.”

Sam said it slowly. She had her head tipped a little to one side, and she was looking not at the Mildred or at Liesa but at the dark past the hedge, like someone remembering the shape of a thing. “To somewhere that isn’t the Hotel.”

“Sam?” Laura said.

“I’ve done this.” Sam looked around at them. “Last night. Herman took the whole bachelor party down through the service corridors to a door. Plain. No sign on it. It wasn’t there.” She let out a breath. “He took us through it into somewhere that wasn’t the Hotel. Somewhere that wasn’t built for us, and knew it.”

Dawn’s ears went flat. “Oh. Great. That’s great. I love that for us.”

“He had rules.” Sam turned to face Emi, Claire and Dawn together, and gave it to them the way she’d heard it, flat and whole, no softening. “Stay together. Keep moving. And never look back at whoever’s behind you in line. Not once. Not till everybody’s reached the surface again.”

“Okay,” Emi said. She was nodding slowly. “Then I’ll go at the back. Then there’s nobody behind me to not look at.”

Sam looked at her for a second and then almost laughed. “Yeah. Okay. That’ll work.”

It was time, then. Up and down the little knot of them, women turned toward the ones who were leaving, and for a moment nobody moved, as if whoever went first would be the one who made it real.

Marissa got to Claire first. She didn’t hug her. She stood in front of her with her hands up between them and made the shapes, quick and small—a tap, a turn of the wrist, a palm drawn down—and she spoke it aloud as she signed it, so low it barely reached past the two of them. “Bring him back. And bring you back. Both.”

Claire’s hands answered, faster, a flurry of it ending with two fingers pressed briefly to the center of Marissa’s chest.

Marissa laughed, wet and startled. “Deal. Yes. Deal.”

Chloe had Dawn by both shoulders. Emily had come up on Dawn’s other side and slid her hand into Dawn’s, and she held on while Chloe talked, not saying anything herself, only holding. Laura watched the shaking in Dawn’s ears slow down while she did it. Whatever Emily carried was still going, soft and wide, and Dawn was standing right in the middle of it.

“You come back in one piece,” Chloe said. “Okay? I mean it. Every piece. Ears included. I’ll be so annoyed if you don’t.”

“I’ll be so fast,” Dawn said. Her voice was shaking. “You won’t even have time to miss me. You’ll turn around and I’ll be standing there and you’ll be like, oh, you’re back already?”

Then Dawn turned, and Laura was there, all three of her, at the front.

“Go find him, Dawnie,” Laura said. “Go find Andy.”

Dawn didn’t answer right away. She looked past Laura, up the path, at the women who were going up: Sam in her blue plate with the sword over her shoulder; Sumiku with her blade; Norah, still pale, standing straight; Erin, green and bare and grim. Her eyes went to Chloe and Marissa and Emily, and to Katherine with Eden against her side. And then they came back and stopped on the three at the very front—Laura, and Myra and Riley on either side of her—and stayed there.

“I will,” Dawn said. “And you don’t let him take you before I get back.” Her chin wobbled. “Any of you. Not one.”

Laura didn’t answer that.

Mildred turned without another word and walked off along the foot of the hedge, away from the path, and Claire went after her, and Dawn, and last of all Emi, trailing four of her hands behind her in a small wave that she didn’t turn around to see anyone return. They went perhaps ten steps. Then the dark along the hedge was a little deeper than the rest of the dark, and they were walking into it, and then there was only the hedge.

Beside her, Sam’s head had turned. Her eyes weren’t on the hedge; they were on nothing, a little above it, moving slowly after something only she could feel.

“Still got them,” Sam said. “All three. Moving. They’re fine.” Then she turned away from the hedge and faced the path. “Okay. Up. Me first. Sumiku, Norah, Erin, with me. Laura, Myra, Riley, behind us. Then Emily, Katherine, Chloe, Marissa, Liesa, Eden. Nobody straggles.”

They sorted themselves without a word. Laura stepped into her place, with Myra’s shoulder against one of her on the left and Riley’s against another on the right.

The thirteen of them started up the lantern path, into the light, one lantern and then the next.

The grass underfoot gave way to packed earth and then to flat stones set into the slope, worn smooth in the middle. Behind them the glade shrank to a pale patch of torn turf with the big tree standing over it. Ahead, the lanterns went up and up, and none of them showed anything moving at the end of the line.

Laura reached down the bond as she climbed. Alive. Afraid, still, but less than he had been. Right here, and farther off than anything, just as Dawn had said it in the glade with her hand held out in the dark.

Somewhere on the other side of the hedge, the gold light was walking away from them toward the Forest, and Laura hadn’t asked it to stay. She didn’t know yet whether that had been the right thing to do.

She climbed.