“A demonstration,” Lily says as if to herself. I’m pretty sure it’s just performance; she’s already decided what she’s going to show me. “Of Placid, hmm?”

“Placid, A Mirror Eternal,” I say softly, hungrily.

“You’ve seen two of its uses,” Lily says in the same tone. Her body language shifts again, and I take a long, slow breath, letting it out equally slowly. “Mmm. Was she good to you?”

“Very,” I say quietly, almost inaudibly, swallowing to clear my throat. It’s absolutely uncanny, the way she can shift barely-perceptibly and invoke such a specific person’s memory. “Shoshi was… she was hungry, like she wanted to take one night here or there over a couple decades and make it count for all those years. She made me feel nervous, like I was unsafe without ever feeling less than perfectly safe. How much of that did you borrow, and how much was you?”

“Always asking questions.” Lily taps her chin with her finger, smiling faintly. “Always trying to understand. Adam, a mirror doesn’t show anything that’s not already there. All of it is mine, even what I borrow.”

“That… doesn’t follow. You’re…” I take another deep breath, aborting words that would have been offensive, searching for, if not kinder ones, more polite ones. “If you mirror me, will you get… all of this?”

“What the mirror reflects, the mirror is changed by.” She pins me with her gaze, smiling a little. “But that’s hardly the image I want to present, the Lily I want you to see.”

My flush deepens, and not for joy. “Well, that’s not a great thing to hear. What’s so awful about the image of Adam?” My eyes want to look down, or away; not just from the pressure of meeting her piercing stare, not just from the heat roiling in my body, but also from just not wanting to deal with the possibility of confrontation.

“Oh, that’s adorable. You’re adorable.” Her tail wraps itself around my knee and squeezes gently. “Do you want to see what I see?”

“Sure.” I try to keep my voice flat, and I try to keep my emotions steady. I probably fail at the first even more than I fail at the second, and that’s saying something.

Lily doesn’t say anything, doesn’t wave a hand or incant any mystical words of power. Her facial expression barely changes, and images start appearing in the air between us, dozens and dozens of them. They’re ephemeral, ever-shifting, a translucent, curving wall of, well, me. Me in predicaments, me in concentration. Dancing, singing, praying, studying; they show up and then fade, replaced by new images. Some linger longer, and some stick around, leaving me with my stomach dropping and hollow, and when I meet her eyes again, I notice that my hands are shaking.

“I like this, I think.” Lily’s smirking at me, just a little, expression hungry. “I’d like to see more of this side of you.”

“The first dance,” I manage to say, “is already claimed. So’s the second.” It’s maybe not the most distanced response, given how many of the pictures are of me dancing, always dancing follow, and always next to… other pictures. Shoshi, sweeping my legs on the dance floor, catching me as I jump and twirling, skirt flaring, next to a picture of her pushing me against a wall, one hand tangled in my hair and the other working the side-ties of my pants; Ash, Starfire and Void, Ash teaching me how to do a particular set of steps backwards, Ash with my head in her lap as she poses a puzzle to me and distracts me from solving it, every centimeter of her radiating a contentment that turned out to be a lie.

“Oh, I don’t mean tonight.” She waves her hand, and most of the images drop out and cycle again, and I take what I realize is my first breath in a few too many seconds. “It’s one thing to flirt, and another to take you; everyone has to believe, not just know, that I’ll let you die in the Tournament if it came to it, and nobody would.”

“And,” I say quietly, through the emotions and through the heat, “it’s not an option.”

“And it’s not an option, tonight.” There’s just enough concession in her voice to count, but also a self-assured confidence that barely avoids fully undermining it. She waves a hand, and most of the pictures in the air fade out again, replaced with a new set. They shiver, and most of those fade out as well, leaving only three. “Do you think she would like this, I wonder?”

“What?”

“Zhosha. Zidanya.” The three pictures hang together, shifting a little to become one image. “Do you think she’d like the triptych?”

I shake my head a little, trying to clear it, and look at the image with fresh eyes. It’s a trick, a critically important trick in my line of work, or what my line of work used to be; use some sort of trigger or practice to shunt everything you’ve learned or thought about a puzzle to the side, look at it with those fresh, new eyes that haven’t made any of the assumptions you’re stashing.

They’re… they’re very good pictures, very different pictures for all that they’re all from tonight, all with me dressed the same and made up the same. The one on my left I immediately dub Challenger, a picture of me facing down the Rue, eyes narrowed and smiling just a little bit. It’s an unsettling smile, my joy-of-combat smile, the one I use as a barometer to know when I need to back down, but I guess that barometer is broken now in this starless place; it’s honest and true and wrong. Then there’s the one on my right where I’m frowning a little, bottom lip sucked under my teeth, a finger twisting the end of my braid in a gesture I had no memory of performing. I’m leaning forward in that picture, just a little, and there’s a green-and-gray shimmer glinting across my eyes that I’m pretty sure is the Visor deployed; that has to have been when I was dealing with trying to figure out Lily’s Skills while she… distracted me, and yeah, the picture is mid-thigh up, and wow. I hold onto what little distance I can, and look at it analytically; the muscles in my legs are tensed in reaction, my back is arched, and there’s no mistaking and very little being analytical about the way my leg is a little off-center as if it’s trying to press into the just-off-image tail.

“If I called the one on my left Challenger, what would the one on my right be, do you think? Solver, I guess?”

I think she can tell that I’m filling the air as a distraction, but she doesn’t seem averse to it. “I’d have no objection to that name.”

“And the middle one?”

Her voice drops a register, and vibrates deep in my bones. “Prey.”

It takes me longer than a moment to be in a place I can use words again. It’s not a bad name for it, either; the center picture has me looking like I took a meteorite through my organic computational substrate a few moments ago and I’m still working on figuring out how I feel about that. It’s shoulders up: neck and shoulders with a mix of tension and bonelessness, eyes wide, jaw muscles somehow both slack and wire-tight.

I look like nothing I’ve ever seen in any other picture of me; like a prize being fought over, like I’m wounded and vulnerable and waiting for the next strike to land while hoping it’ll be a caress instead. I look like I’m struggling to breathe, like the atmosphere is too thick or the grav is too high, and at the same time like I’m fighting not to pant through barely-parted lips, cheeks flushed hotly.

“That’s…” I clear my throat, unclenching my hands, breathing deeply for calm. “That’s from just now, isn’t it. From when you… from when you were showing me pictures of my past. Of Ash.”

“Well?”

“Yeah,” I breathe, shakily. “That… the makeup really makes a difference, doesn’t it.”

“Larger, wider eyes, colors that enhance the Void-black of your pupils and the bare silvery cast to your whites. More contrast on the lips. A more innocent cast to the face, one with more laughter and less sorrow.” Lily counts them off with taps of her finger across her lips, then adds a second finger and blows a kiss to the air. “You might think about why.”

“Vulnerability,” I say, a little unsteadily. “Yeah, Zidanya would like this picture. These pictures, this triptych. Amber… you’re asking specifically about Zidanya.”

“I do not need to know,” Lily says with a dry hint of tartness, “the opinion of your Reca, who chose this look for you. Everything you are, she loves; the things you know about yourself, the things you still have left to discover. As long as you don’t become a person you-of-today would hate, the only questions you need to ask pertain to your other bondswomen.”

“Companions.” My correction is quiet, but it’s as firm as I can make it. “Literally not bound, in Sara’s case.”

“Which is interesting.” Lily steeples her fingers together, resting her chin on them. “How did you manage that?”

“Is that my guest-gift, as you put it?”

“No.” Lily smiles at me, response instantaneous. Her tail wraps around her hand, and she strokes its spade-like tip with her thumb. “No,” she says after a moment, more consideringly, “I think you had a gift in mind when you came here, and I’m more interested to know what it was.”

I breathe in, so deep it’s like I’m filling myself down to my toes, then let it all out. “Alright,” I say with a more normal breath. I’m still shaky, but I’ve hit a sort of plateau; my voice is steady and my hands aren’t shaking, and that’ll have to do, since Lily obviously has no intention of having me be at ease in our meeting. “Here.”

I focus on the movement of the mana, on understanding what’s going on when I use the Skill. As usual, I get no particular insight, but that’s fine, everything is fine; [Imbue Mote] flares to life, and it goes through that peculiar metamorphosis, that known and yet still secret shift to become one of my orbs, something … different, that had cost me so much and yet so little.

Lily’s eyes are wide, lips parted. She stares at the orb as I toss it gently towards her, plucking it out of the air, perceptibly radiating hunger.

Three seconds later, I dismiss the orb, smirking.