Another morning in another hotel in another idyllic town on Cradle. They were all starting to blend together in Satsu’s mind. As they followed Philipe’s trail, a routine was starting to form, and in Satsu’s experience, that was a bad sign when one was on the hunt.

But that was a concern for later, after she’d had more coffee and everyone was up and ready to talk. Right now, she would enjoy the sun on her face, the slight chill in the open air, the joy of Max racing around the sprawling hotel lawn.

While Satsu wanted badly to catch up with Philipe and stop whatever he was doing before it led to people getting hurt, she couldn’t complain about the time spent on Cradle. It was good. Perhaps too good. It made her wish for things she couldn’t have.

Tafari emerged from the hotel side door, blinking in the sudden brightness of the morning sun. The nima surrounding him spoke of frustration—a familiar enough emotional state for Tafari, but rarely one he reached this early. He spotted Satsu, lifted a hand in greeting, which she returned. Taking that for the invitation it was, he wandered over in her direction.

As he got closer, she noted the bag slung over his shoulder. The shape of it was familiar. A VR kit. “You come out to get some exercise?” She asked.

His frustration flared, but he kept it well hidden behind a smile and a nod towards Max. “Seems to be the thing to do.”

Given the potential threat of demons, it was good that everyone stayed sharp. “Want a sparring partner?”

“Yes. Thank you,” he said, with a little more vehemence than the question actually warranted.

They each donned goggles and gloves. Satsu had the familiar moment of disorientation as the goggles kicked on and she was seeing the world again, this time through the slight distortion of the lenses. Tafari brought up the sim and virtual swords appeared in each of their right hands. Satsu pulled up the menu, adjusting the length and weight to match her real-world nima-blade, then settled into a ready position.

“Warm-up,” Tafari said, and they exchanged a few rounds of easy blows, getting a feel for each other. The gloves created a sense of weight and resistance, and the goggles had speakers next to her ears, so the blows felt and sounded real as their nonexistent swords clashed into each other.

This had been one of the hardest skills to master when Satsu—when Amanita—had taken this assignment. She’d been training since early childhood to be a spy, and that training had involved learning to fight, but fighting like a Serpent and fighting like a Griffon were two different things. Then once she’d arrived at the hub, she’d had to learn to fight like a Wolf, making certain that the mistakes she made there were Griffon mistakes, rather than Serpent mistakes.

Wolf trained mostly to fight demons, rather than people. The sparring she and Tafari were doing was good exercise, but no Wolf had the polish in person-to-person combat that any other clan possessed. It was important Satsu came across as someone who had been living with the Wolves for years, someone who’s skills against another person were not at their peak, but as a Serpent, as a spy, she had to be ready to defend herself at any moment, so she couldn’t actually let her swordwork decay. Just another of the complicated dances that were her life.

As they settled into more serious sparring, some of Tafari’s tension drained away, but that frustration still burned at the core of him. “Everything all right?” Satsu asked in a lull.

“Yes, of course.”

Satsu waited. She had enough sense of Tafari by now to know that was the way to draw him out. More questions would just bring more deflections, but silence created pressure, a space he wanted to fill with the truth.

“This hunt—it’s gone on too long. Nothing is right about it.”

She nodded her agreement, and continued to wait. That wasn’t it. Or at least, that wasn’t all of it.

Her patience was rewarded when, after another exchange, Tafari confessed, “I asked Valentin to join me in this. Xie’s in the front courtyard, practicing by xerself. Xie looked at me like I’d grown a second head.”

There it was. “That’s just Swans. They’re snotty about virtual work. Had you not run into that before?”

“I know. I just thought…” Tafari didn’t finish the thought, attacking Satsu with renewed vigor. Satsu let him get close, left an intentional opening, and her gloves buzzed as he scored a hit.

Meanwhile, another part of her mind was finishing Tafari’s sentence for him. He had thought Valentin might make an exception. For him. “You like Valentin.”

Tafari pulled back as they reset, tilting his head to give Satsu a brittle smile. “Such an acute observation. You empaths are truly a marvel.”

Well now, if he was going to get snarky with her. Satsu pressed her attack, more aggressive than before. “Very well. You want to know what I really see?”

Tafari shrugged. A dismissal she’d seen before. People always thought they were so opaque. “Go ahead. Dazzle me.”

“You want to know more than you want to be known. You want to crawl inside Valentin’s skin and claim xer from the inside out. Not because of anything so silly as love, but for the power of it.”

Tafari faltered and Satsu tapped her sword against his shoulder, scoring the point. “Don’t ask the question if you don’t want the answer.”

“I suppose I earned that.” And they were back in the fight.

What Satsu didn’t—couldn’t—say was that she recognized that in Tafari because it was a very Serpent kind of sentiment. Tafari wasn’t the first person she’d known who was like that.

This mission was reminding Satsu of her Serpentness. At the Hub, in the usual run of things, she could go days at a time losing herself to her cover. Here, it was different. Here she was having to use those skills, to be constantly considering what information Varya Satsu might parse against what the best-trained Oshiro could see. But despite that, even when she was feeling as Serpent as she could get, she didn’t feel what Tafari felt.

Satsu couldn’t afford to lie to herself, not when she had to lie to everyone else. She knew what she truly wanted, the desire at the very core of her that she had struggled against all her life. What Satsu wanted more than anything else was to be known. To be seen. To find someone who could understand the very depths of her.

It was a truly impossible wish. Most days, Satsu could accept that. What mattered was her duty to the clan. To the Empire. Her own dreams were insignificant against the greater canvass. She was a skilled spy with the rare gifts that made her the only person who could be in this place, fulfilling this mission.

Most days, that was enough.

For now, at least, she’d distracted Tafari enough that he was focused on the practice and that meant her mind could settle into the simplicity of muscles and speed and skill, and everything else could sink down deep inside her where she didn’t have to look at it or think about it. She could just be Satsu.

Today, that was enough.