Not for the first time, Astra was glad for her manner of checking her gauger several times per hour. The Sieve’s organisers had undoubtedly coined some other way of informing her of the rule for the next task, but nonetheless it felt extraordinarily satisfying for the habitual diligence to pay off in some small way.

Her elation was only heightened as she read the wording of the task in question. Three team members against three.

Unity Eden was a bastard, a liar and a creep. But for all his almost unbelievably numerous faults, Astra believed wholeheartedly that he cared about winning. She’d seen the look in his eye as he spoke of what would happen to him otherwise, and though she’d never been especially skilled at reading people she was quite sure she knew what fear looked like.

And after all his talk of how dangerous team Fate’s single powerful member was, about how she alone was the reason they were a threat at all, it was revealed that they’d be battling them three on three.

It was a stroke of luck so huge, Astra found herself wondering whether one of the Sieve’s organisers had a particular vested interest in her team’s success. She dashed the thought almost as quickly as it appeared, something as illustrious as the Sieve would not have been tainted in such a way.

Then again, she’d have thought Eden to be a decent person by that same metric. If the child of the Faction Founders themselves could be so vile, was anything sacred?

In her concentration, she almost walked into a large bearded man. She stumbled out of his way just in time to avoid a collision, hurriedly spluttering an apology at his back- only for him to continue on seemingly without even hearing it.

Biting back her annoyance, Astra continued on her way to the Crux. Her steps were more rapid than they had been, each stride longer and each pair closer together. The new information giving cause for haste in place of leisure.

She’d not walked far away to begin with, and Astra had spent many hours training herself to move faster for longer. The half-mile separating her from her destination shrank rapidly at the slightest exertion on her part.

On any other day it may have been satisfying to traverse the streets so quickly, given how agonising each step had been in the more crowded ones further from the Crux. Astra felt no satisfaction though. Instead, each step she took added to a growing feeling of unease in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t until she’d halved the remaining distance that she realised what its source was.

She really wasn’t sure how to react to meeting Gemini Menza.

From the moment she’d met the girl, Astra hadn’t liked her. She’d heard the stories about her long before then. Read quotes taken from her in newspapers, seen paintings of her smiling away at the side of Gilasev Menza or Karma Alabaster. By the time Astra had actually spoken to her, she’d already built quite a vivid mental image of who she was.

And then she’d spent a few minutes actually conversing with her, promptly learning that she was an arrogant, entitled bitch with such a disregard for other people that it resembled a lack of object permanence.

It had been one of the more bracing moments of Astra’s life, barely cushioned by the genuine incandescence of Karma Alabaster. And now that same entitled bitch was lying on a bed bloodied and broken after fighting for their team.

Part of Astra hated herself for it, but she couldn’t help but evaluate the prospect of speaking to the Gemini from a purely intellectual level. No matter what, she’d lose.

If the Gemini was apologetic, Astra would feel like she’d taken advantage of her injuries to curry favour with the girl by using her own credits to pay for the treatment.

If she continued to be a bitch, Astra would feel stupid for wasting her own credits on such an ingrate- then stupid for even being surprised, and guilty for regretting helping a wounded teammate over something as petty as her attitude.

Astra imagined it spoke to some level of unreasonable paranoia that she evaluated the prospect of visiting a weakened teammate in such a way, but the truth was that the idea of placing herself in such a situation was slightly more than she could bear.

It was pathetic, and something she had no intention of allowing herself to get away with any longer. Astra planned on being one of the greatest mystics of her era, she planned on killing monsters as a Knight, or leading armies as a Unixian Viceroy. She was going to charge into the face of danger and spit in its eye, shaking in her boots at the prospect of an awkward situation was entirely unbecoming of her.

With a new dynamism born from her decision, Astra turned a corner and saw the shape of the Crux come into view- allowing herself just a moment to be impressed by it once more before she continued towards it.

By the time she stepped through the front doors, she could feel the muscles in her legs and back give off that familiar, warm energy that signified the tension and sluggishness of sleep had been banished.

As Astra made her way through the building, she couldn’t help but find her mind drifting to who exactly would be representing their team in the next task. The answer seemed quite obvious to her.

***

Crow looked into Amelia’s bottomless eyes as he spoke, finding it difficult not to lose focus as he did so- the way they seemed to eat light rather than reflect it was genuinely fascinating.

“Amelia, I’m really sorry to ask this when you went out of your way to visit me, but do you mind if we both go to my teammate’s room a few doors down? She really needs to hear about this and I don’t think I should wait to tell her.”

Her constant smile didn’t falter for even a moment.

“Of course!” She replied, sounding almost excited about the prospect- as she did about most things. It occurred to Crow that she was really quite pretty.

“Brilliant, thank you.” He hurriedly answered, turning to make his way across the room and open the door. As he stepped back from it, he felt himself collide with something behind him. Taking an instinctive, rather embarrassing, half-hop forwards on reflex, he turned to see that it had been Amelia.

How in the pits had she moved so quietly?

Mumbling an apology, he moved out into the hallway. Amelia followed behind.

As Crow rapped his knuckles against the door to Xeno’s room, he steeled himself to see Gem. He remembered the state she’d been in when Xeno had treated her immediate injuries, the blood, the vomit, the fragility. It had been the better part of twenty-four hours since then, surely she’d be better?

He lost his train of thought when, rather than a raised voice giving him permission to enter, the door itself was actually opened- revealing Astra standing on the other side. Apparently Crow’s surprise was evident on his face, as his sister arched an eyebrow upon seeing him. It was the same way she always had as children when she did something to surprise him, as if to chastise him for assuming she could be so easily predicted to begin with.

“Hello Birdie,” she said. “Your timing is perfect.”

Timing? Oh, of course she’d found out about the task already. She was Astra.

As she moved further into the room, Crow stepped in after her. Amelia followed. It was only when Astra took a seat on one of the large, padded chairs near the middle of the room that her line of sight let her glimpse Amelia.

Her reaction was as instantaneous as it was predictable. A dozen emotions, surprise, bewilderment, realisation, irritation, anger, exasperation and surely more that slipped by Crow’s eye in the second it took her to cycle through them before silently settling on acceptance.

“You brought Amelia,” she half-sighed. “Of course you did.”

Crow felt an overwhelming urge to marvel at his sister’s memory, she’d met the girl only once before and had somehow picked through her recent experiences to conclude that she was the one Unity had been getting information from. Presently, however, he was preoccupied with justifying her presence.

The problem was that he could think of no way to actually do so. By the time it had occurred to him that he’d spoken to her only twice, Astra had already apparently moved on.

“No matter, I suppose it’s not that big of a problem.” She paused, then apparently as an after-thought spoke directly to Amelia. “Sorry if I seem rude, it’s just that I’m not really comfortable with having a member of the team we’ll be competing with next show up in our room the day before our task.”

Amelia’s smile didn’t falter for a second.

“It’s fine,” she beamed. “I’d be scared too if I were you.”

If Crow hadn’t known Amelia he’d have taken her words to be a threat. As things were, he realised that they were more likely than not simply another case of her speaking the unfiltered truth in the innocent, almost chaotic way she always seemed to. Much to his relief, Astra seemed to come to the same conclusion.

“Alright then.” She said, hesitating only a moment. Her eyes then gained a new focus. “Well Crow, I assume you’re here because you already know what I’d planned on telling you.”

The clearing of a throat interrupted Crow, drawing his focus to the bed in the room’s left corner. Gem lay there, head slightly propped up by its pillows but otherwise in much the same position as before. She looked better than she had, though with how she’d looked that really only meant that she didn’t seem to be on the verge of spontaneously dying.

As feeble as her body made her appear, something about Gem’s bearing diminished the appearance of weakness. She seemed a battered, crushed gauntlet wrapped about a fist of steel.

“If I’m not interrupting, I’d just like to say hello as well.”

Her voice carried the same air of amused surety it had on the night Crow had danced with her, something about that was comforting in a way he couldn’t put into words. Struck temporarily dumb, he heard Amelia speak before he did.

“Hi there!”

Glancing at the girl, Crow didn’t see even the slightest hint of distress or discomfort on her face as she took in Gem’s battered form. It made him realise how awful it must have been for her to watch him gawp at her injuries. A wave of shame broke over him.

“So then,” Gem began, either not knowing or deliberately overlooking Crow’s stare, “I suppose we should wait for the rest of the team to arrive.”

“We’ll need to.” Astra grumbled. “I checked Eden’s room before coming here, and he’s disappeared again. I didn’t run into Xeno in the Crux either, so if she’s not here then I don’t know where she could be either.”

Her features twisted with the same dull irritation she always felt at things not going according to her plan, and Crow hurriedly tried to reduce it.

“On the bright side, without something as important and secretive as another team meeting, both of you can get to know Amelia for a bit!”

He forced a smile onto himself which matched Amelia’s, though in her case he had no doubt that it was entirely natural and effortless.

Neither Gem or Astra seemed amused.

***

Xeno should have felt proud.

She’d applied her knowledge practically, used somewhat-improvised material to treat an incredibly time-sensitive injury and likely saved her teammate from either death or a crippling injury.

Magic could heal lots, but the longer a body was left to heal by itself, the more limited the arcane would be in helping it.

There had been every chance that Gem would have been forced to drop out of the Sieve in order to accept the kind of magic treatment necessary to properly repair her ribs, lest she wait until the event was over and find herself too far gone.

Somehow, though, Xeno had a hard time deriving any satisfaction from her success. Somehow. It wasn’t somehow, she was well aware of the specific “how” responsible. She didn’t forget things, not really. Least of all the words of Father.

To take pride in doing what you know you can is folly, he’d said. Such a sense of accomplishment should stem only from expanding your knowledge to encompass that which it previously didn’t.

Xeno hadn’t expanded her knowledge in helping Gem. She’d simply expended resources and invested in an asset which, in all likelihood, would not pay off.

No, she’d done the right thing. More than that, she’d done the only right thing. She’d helped someone who needed it. Helped a friend who needed it. Xeno had done a good thing, and she wouldn’t let Father poison it for her- certainly not with nothing more than a memory.

Suddenly eager for something to distract herself with, she stood from her makeshift seat on a low wall and began making her way through the city.

The architecture of Bermuda as a whole was not something that Xeno found particularly impressive, though her sense of scale had likely been skewed by the unnecessarily large buildings which made up much of Pangaea.

As relatively stunted as the city’s structures were, there were still a handful of things which caught her interest. Though none were present in her current location. Xeno had spent the morning wandering, finding that walking to new and unknown locations often helped relax her. This time the wandering had caused her to end up in an area that was under relacquering.

Roughly two thousand years ago, during a time of explosive population increase, a Viceroy of the Xion Faction had realised that magic was good for more than merely destroying things. She’d begun the tenuous process of experimenting with using it as a reinforcement, to strengthen a target in place of breaking it down.

Magically-created materials could be incredibly durable, and yet that same durability made them extremely difficult to work on a large scale- requiring exceptionally powerful, and rare, mystics to precisely cut rather than merely blow to pieces. However the Viceroy found a way around this- lacquering.

By creating part of a structure with regular, mundane materials and then magically strengthening it to support additional weight, buildings could be made to tower far higher than ever before- reaching hundreds of metres into the sky.

The Viceroy promptly named her discovered technique after the same methods artists used to avoid smudging charcoal drawings.

Of course there were drawbacks, like with anything. Lacquering wasn’t permanent, even after millennia of constant improvement and innovation. Most kinds needed to be reapplied to structures every five or so months, lest they gradually weaken and bring buildings crashing down under their own weight. In the case of exceptionally large buildings, far more often, or powerful, lacquering was necessary.

It seemed that Xeno had stumbled upon the lacquering of only a single building, a tall and narrow one perhaps eighty metres up. It seemed made of sandstone, the yellowish-brown walls catching the sun like the dune of a desert.

The lower layers were being treated first, from her vantage point a street away Xeno could see several figures huddled around it in a semicircle. If she stepped closer she had no doubt the faint glow of freshly-applied magic would be visible as they worked, though she felt no urge to watch from any closer.

She’d seen lacquering of far greater scale and quality in Pangaea, after all.

***

Astra had wanted to hate Amelia. The girl was an enemy, after all. And with her status as the strongest member of her own team, the particular enemy who Astra herself would surely inevitably fight. Despite all her substantial efforts, however, she just couldn’t help but like the girl.

It was bizarre, at first glance her mannerisms had been almost identical to the Gemini’s. That high-energy, giggly self confidence practically oozed from her every pore as though she could watch the entire world turn against her and reply with a self-satisfied wink. It wasn’t until she’d spent a half hour conversing among the group that Astra realised what it was that made them different.

For Amelia, it was entirely genuine, not some put-on facade to charm people already awed by her. It was real. And yet something about it felt off. Astra realised what it was, pleasant though the girl may have been, she was still a member of the enemy team. It didn’t really matter how cheery and open she was, that small amount of tension wasn’t going to go away.

Even the Gemini seemed to pick up on it, her usual lack of focus having been replaced by a poorly hidden look of suspicion and discomfort.

Unlike the tension, however, Amelia did. After at most half an hour, the girl had bid her goodbyes and walked out. As she began to open the door, Astra had quickly rushed across the room and nudged the Gemini before whispering to her.

“Now’s your chance, use that magic vision of yours and tell us what we’re dealing with here.”

The artificial had taken a bit long to respond, but jumped into action once she realised what Astra meant. Her cyan eyes had seemed to grow lighter, and after a second Astra understood that they were glowing. The pale blue light gave them an otherworldly appearance, and as she saw them locked directly on the back of Amelia she couldn’t help but feel like they might somehow hurt her.

Astra’s attention was pulled away from the dangerous-looking information gathering, however. As the door was flung open, it revealed the scrawny form of Unity Eden.

His hair was disheveled, almost tatty in how it was strewn about his head. His usually smooth skin seemed more ragged, too. Loosened ever so slightly by exhaustion or sleep deprivation, with great dark bags hanging under his eyes. Facing Amelia, he practically seemed to sneer at her as she circled around him. Astra couldn’t see the girl’s face, but she doubted it bothered her one bit.

Once Amelia was out of the way, Eden stepped into the room and closed the door behind himself. He looked around as if studying his surroundings for the first time, drinking in the sights of both Crow and Astra- his gaze lingering for a moment on the bed-ridden Gemini, only for his mouth to curl upwards into the ghost of a smirk.

“So,” he said after a few seconds of silence. “I assume you all saw your gaugers. Now we just need Warper to arrive and we can have ourselves a team meeting.”

***

Xeno hadn’t stayed to watch the lacquering process finished. Such work often took hours, and even if she hadn’t seen it a dozen times before it simply wasn’t interesting enough to warrant that much of her time. Certainly not with the cruel nip of cold the air had taken on over the last quarter-hour.

She hugged her coat tighter around herself, cursing, not for the first time, her lack of foresight. It was a particularly long walk back to the Crux from Xeno’s location, though she’d remembered each one of the turns she’d taken to get where she was. In a way the distance was a good thing.

It gave her plenty of time to think.