Val and Abby were arguing about something called an emitter when I strolled into the engine room. Ours were broken, apparently. Something about the etherspace part of the translator engines taking some damage when that weather god hit us. Guess they’d figured out why the translator engine’s precision was so screwy, then.

The engines themselves—well, the part in realspace, anyways—were bulky monstrosities taking up the back quarter of the ship. I had no idea what all the different parts did, you’d have to ask Val or Abby for that. But I knew the general theory of how they worked. Meaning goes in, stuff comes out. Or sometimes the other way around. I knew the matter-to-ether process involved creating a specific kind of sympathetic effect and… making both planes the same somehow? Okay, you know what? I don’t know anything about this, I’m gonna stop talking.

Val’s head was buried in a small-scale etheric manipulator, the device we use for building etheric constructs on the other side of the sidereal boundary. The rest of him was reclining on a chair that looked like it belonged next to a pool. Every so often his new prosthetic leg would twitch. It was controlled remotely from his comm. Still not acclimated yet, probably. Abby was following along on a console, pulled out of the wall next to the door.

“Don’t you dare ask me for a miracle,” Val said, eliciting a frown from Abby. “You can see the damage to the rear pylons yourself. Our stored C-phase ether is likely sufficient to cover those repairs, but then how do we patch the conduit? Frankly, it’s surprising that Kives hasn’t tracked us by the leakage alone.”

“We’re not in the woods anymore,” Abby said. “Three operatives won’t cut it if we have to hit a temple. I need you back on two feet—real feet, don’t even think about saying it—and I don’t want to burn another body for it.”

“What do we sacrifice, then?” asked Val. “The Bulgurov shielding? That could do the job, until another god smites us. Then maybe we don’t have engines at all. We simply need more raw material, commander.”

“I’m not picking a fight with another angel,” said Abby. “The last one is half the reason we’re in this mess.”

“Obviously,” said Val. “Angels aren’t the only possibilities.”

“Could we steal some from a temple?” I interjected. “That fucking mold god last mission turned his main temple into a total hardpoint. Should be a ton of raw material.”

Abby looked over her shoulder. “Oh, hey, Lilith. I didn’t see you there. Did you need something?”

“Nah,” I said, entering the engine room proper and sitting on the end of Val’s lounge chair. “Just bored.”

“And you decided the engine room would solve your problem,” Val said, with just a hint of skepticism leaking into his tone. Abby gave him a warning look, which he didn’t see because he was still looking at the representation of the ether.

“I’d say ‘fuck you,’ but I don’t want to make the engines jealous,” I said happily. I was proud of that comeback; I’d come up with it on the way over here.

“Of me, surely,” Val replied. “Technically speaking, you’re the only one they haven’t been inside of.”

“I—that’s—” I spluttered.

“Enough, is what it is,” said Abby. “Lilith, it’s a good idea, but I already told you I’m not hitting a temple with three operatives. There will be too much resistance in both realities, especially at this early stage.”

“Temple’s gonna have guards, right?” I asked. “Maybe we get them to chase us? The etheric ones, I mean. It’d be a much simpler operation.”

Abby looked unconvinced. “Simpler, I’ll grant you. But it sounds like the kind of operation that blows up in your face before you clear the second step of the plan.”

“Guess we just have to catch fairies in a butterfly net, then,” I said with a sigh. “Wait, are fairies a real thing?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Abby.

“Shit. I always wanted to do the whole ‘bargaining for boons’ thing. Oh well, my life is still plenty exciting.”

“Except right now, apparently,” said Val. I stuck out my tongue at him. He carried on, oblivious. “My advice, should you ever find yourself bargaining with an etheric creature, is to shoot it.”

“Tried that,” I said, remembering the angel. “It didn’t take.” I hopped off his chair. “I’m going to take a walk or something. I’ll call you if I catch any fairies.”

“Team meeting when Markus is done with his nap,” said Abby. “I’ll defer to our paraphysicist and say we have to catch something. We should think about directing our efforts in a more theological direction.”

I didn’t respond verbally, just nodded and threw a peace sign over my head as I walked out the door. Wait, shit, was that a rude gesture? No, it wasn’t. I was just paranoid after a couple weeks of intentionally violating weird social norms to see how they worked.

Back in college, my intro psych professor gave us a homework assignment where we had to break a social norm on purpose, like standing too close to people or eating with your hands at the dining hall. I wonder what she’d say if I came back and told her I did it for a living now.

*

Repairing the engines was a priority. Injuries aside—my wrist was healing nicely, and Val was mobile if not combat-ready—we had no way to replenish our stock of backup bodies without atomic-scale output precision. Bodies are full of tiny, finicky bits. A deicide team can take on repeated suicide missions as long as they have spare bodies to come back to, but we were working with a limited supply of extra lives right now.

So the solution was to capture some kind of etheric creature and dissect its soul for raw materials. An angel would work, but if they all made us look like fucking Stormtroopers like the last one, there was no chance in hell we’d manage to catch one. That left lesser paranatural beings like the dryads. The problem with dryads was that the forest we’d landed in was quickly becoming holy ground, and the whole point was to avoid Kives’s angels. We didn’t know what else was out there, but a good place to start was local mythology.

Normally you can just find some religious teacher to tell you this stuff, but after the fiasco with Arguel we had to assume they were all compromised. We came up with this whole convoluted, multi-stage plan to get access to the city archives, con our way in, then grab a bunch of texts and try to decipher them and hope they had the right content. It was tenuous and risky, and it was lucky we didn’t need it: the answers came to us.

Markus spotted her while on recon: wearing the robes of a scribe, but eating at an inn that usually catered to a clientele of lower station than hers. You could tell by the skirt length, we’d realized a bit ago. Longer hems implied you didn’t need to do physical labor, so your lower class had skirts above the knees and your upper class got to cover their ankles. The scribe’s robes cut off just above her ankles, but everyone else there was at about knee-level. She wasn’t drawing that much extra attention, though. Either she didn’t know where the better inns were, or she couldn’t afford one.

Markus was already posing as someone too low-status to approach her, so the commander sent Val and I to introduce ourselves. We frizzed up my hair and wound flowers into it, selecting a set of clothing that was—we knew from experience—slightly classier than what you’d usually find in that inn, but not so much that it’d look out of place. We still weren’t sure where scribes as a profession fell on the social ladder, but we’d learned through painful experience—on Markus’s part, at least—that it was better to aim high. The culture around Elsinat had a high power distance, it seemed.

We hid Val’s prosthetic under a layer of fake skin, and made sure he got a long enough skirt that the knee joint—which didn’t really look natural, at least up close—was fully covered. Then we’d had to go back and make sure mine wasn’t shorter than his, and at the end of the process we were edging toward out-of-placeness, but better that than an advanced prosthetic we couldn’t explain. Val still walked with a bit of a limp, so we decided he’d pretend to be an ex-soldier. Me, I was a messenger. I’d wanted to be a traveling storyteller, but when I floated the idea I’d ended up letting slip that I’d been using fictional characters from Earth as cover identities. The commander chewed me out hard over that. So now I was a messenger, and I had to go by an actual Therian name instead of Lara Croft like I was planning.

Our mark was dressed in white robes, with accents of black and mahogany. The textiles here were more advanced than I’d expect from medieval Earth cultures; maybe there were technical advances in the more urbanized areas? She had brown hair, which she’d roped into a complicated mess all across her shoulders and back. Hastily, if I was any judge—the braids were chaotic, strands of hair escaping the order she’d attempted to impose. Chronically pressed for time, then. Her eyes were brown and intelligent, but currently glazing over as she stared at the mass of paperwork at her table. She reminded me of my college roommate, back before she dropped out of pre-law.

“Lady scribe,” I addressed her. My tone was maybe a bit too casual, but we can’t all be Abby. Val waited; men were introduced after the women had all had their turn. “Godsmile on you. You look like you need a break.”

She looked up at us, blinking. Val was standing the proper distance away to signal that we weren’t romantically involved—something else Markus’s poor face had bought us. “I’m not licensed. You’ll have to speak with my master if you want a contract drawn up.”

“Not at all,” I said, taking a seat. I didn’t ask, like with the pervert lady a couple weeks ago. Here, requests were made implicitly. Socially, anyways—people got blunter when trade came into the picture. “I’m Tain.” There, proper Therian name. The commander better be happy about this.

The scribe’s eyes flicked left, as though trying to place the name. “Godsmile, Tain. Ell.”

“Ell,” I said, smiling. People like happy people, and they like feeling that they make other people happy. Smiles make friends. “Ell, Hama. My traveling companion.”

“Godsmile,” she said. “You were right, I do need a break. My eyes hurt.”

“I suppose it’s no use asking what you’re working on,” said Val.

“You could guess,” she said impishly, gathering the pages into a pile and turning them over.

Val smirked at that. “And would you tell me if I guessed right?”

Ell smirked back.

I gave the paperwork an appraising look. The sheets were larger and more raspy than I expected paper to be, which was probably to be expected given the lack of industrial paper mills on Theria.

“Uh, you’re studying for your license?” I asked.

Ell raised her eyebrows at me but said nothing.

“No,” said Val, looking intently at her. “You’re not from Elsinat. You’re here on assignment, but you’re not licensed. But you won’t tell us what the assignment is, so it’s important. Too important for an unlicensed scribe, despite whatever pressure is pushing you to study until your eyes dry out.”

“Maybe I’m just very thorough,” said Ell, tilting her head and meeting his gaze.

“You must be,” Val said. “Otherwise your master, who I deduce has traveled here with you, wouldn’t have sent you off alone to do her research for her while she drinks with the rich.”

A scandalized laugh escaped her lips. “Poor me. If you’re right, that is.”

Val leaned back with a satisfied smile.

“I’ll buy us all some drinks,” I said, standing up. “We’re not rich, but I like to think we’re better company.”

Conning hustlers didn’t pay all that well, but our cost of living was pretty low thanks to supplies on the ship. We could spend a little on making some friends. Couldn’t topple a pantheon all by ourselves, after all.

“Just one,” said Ell. “I’ll need to get back to work at some point.”

“I’ve heard contract work is easier when you’re drunk,” I heard Val say as I went to find the inn’s owner. I didn’t get her response, but his answering laugh came through over the comm. I pouted. He never laughed at my jokes.

I passed a man in the shortest skirt I’d yet seen, coming down about mid-thigh, whose torso wrap was done in a nonstandard fashion that emphasized his pectorals. He looked away when we made eye contact. I just watched, curious what he’d do next. He looked back at me a couple of times, briefly, meeting my gaze a little longer each time. On the fourth or fifth time he stopped looking away and gave me a hesitant smile.

Man, the gender relations around here were pretty messed up, but it parsed as shyness and that was definitely kind of endearing. I returned the smile. “Have a nice day!” I said, and kept looking for the innkeeper. Eventually I was on the way back with some beer made from sengua, the grain they seemed to rely on around here.

“Hey, heads up,” said Markus. “There’s some dice hustlers here.”

“Good, I just spent some cash to lubricate this scribe contact,” I subvocalized.

“No, I mean they recognized me,” said Markus. “I’m exfiltrating, but they all just got up.”

“Shit,” I said. “Val, you’re on your own, I’m gonna back Markus up.”

The commander cut in. “Good plan. I’m monitoring the situation.”

I still had the beers, dammit. I hurried through the inn and set them down on the table.

“Sorry to leave you,” I told them. “Just met a friend, I have to go handle something. Nice to meet you, Ell.”

“Thanks for the drinks,” said Ell, toasting me with her clay mug. “I’ll buy you a round someday. May we meet again.”

“Farewell!” I saluted her with an invisible mug of my own, then made for the door. “Markus, location.”

“The street with the giant naked statue.”

“Of course,” I said. “No ulterior motives, I’m sure.”

“He’s got a really attractive face, okay? Watch out, I only see two of them.”

I palmed my pulser. “Watch out for what? They don’t know I’m with you.”

“Why, good evening, gentlemen!” said Markus. They must have found him. I had to hurry. A ping from his comm put him in an alley about two streets away, so I stepped it up.

“I’m sure we can all be reasonable about this,” Markus said.

I slowed my run to a more stealthy pace. I was nearly there. It was getting dark, but not enough that night vision would be that useful. I rounded the corner: Markus was surrounded, two at his front, one at his back.

“Smooth character like you,” one of them—the only one with a shawl— was saying, “I figure you’ve got quite a purse. Now, we tried to cheat you, you cheated us, fair’s fair. But I reckon some of that’s ours now, ain’t it lads?”

There were nods and declarations of “yeah, yeah” from the other two.

“Engaging,” I subvocalized. I was behind Markus with the lone guy, whose hair wasn’t in a ponytail. I put on my most innocent face and walked forward.

“Ey, who’s she?” said one of the hustlers on Markus’s far side. The guy in front of me turned around, instinctively looking away from me. Heh. Matriarchy was fun.

“What’s all this about?” I said, like I didn’t know already. I’d seen this all the time in movies. It was only a matter of time before it erupted into a brawl. Markus could probably hold off the other two while I handled the guy in front of me.

“Just collecting a debt between men, ma’am,” said the guy who’d been doing the talking so far. “It’s beneath your notice, I’m sure.”

“Cool,” I said. “Don’t mind me, I’m just watching.”

There was an awkward pause as everyone digested that. Any moment now. The guy closest to me would come at me punching, I predicted. I could duck and go for the genitals, that might put him down long enough to make it look natural when I pulsed him.

“We don’t want trouble,” he said instead.

I nodded, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. They must be biding their time.

“This man’s a thief,” tried the guy with the green wrap.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” I said. “Skip the spiel, I know how this goes. I said not to mind me, didn’t I? Go on, do your thing.”

Shawl Guy looked uncertainly at Markus, then at his goons, then back at me. “Wait, I saw you at the Thresher’s Landing. You were talking with that Oathkeeper!”

“Might have been,” I said. “Is that a problem? What was all that about a debt?”

“I don’t like this,” he said. “Come on, boys, let’s get out of here.”

Markus and I watched them leave. Once it was just us, he gave me a high five.

“That was great!” he said. “Man, I thought we were going to have to fight them!”

I sighed. “Me too.”

“Is the situation resolved?” asked the commander.

“In spite of Lilith’s best efforts,” Markus laughed, patting me on the shoulder. Probably a dumb idea given that we were still in public, but I didn’t see anyone with direct line of sight into the alley. I punched him good-naturedly in the bicep.

“Val, are you good?” I asked.

“We may not need to use the archive plan,” he said. “Ell is quite knowledgeable. I told her I’m staying at this inn in order to prolong the conversation, so I’ll report on my findings tomorrow. In summary, we’re going fishing.”

I smiled and cracked my knuckles. Fishing sounded like a great idea.

I had unfinished business with lobsterkind.